2 20 144 https://www.antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/0c83abcc7b181b7f6a2ccf4330f20536.pdf 89f744a1ff89c888c8810f55b61f757a PDF Text Text Discussion Papers in environmental philosophy Philosophy Departments The Australian National University PO Box 4, Canberra, Australia 2600. NUMBER 5 WAR AND PEACE Zgt ON THE ETHICS OF LARGE-SCALE NUCLEAR WAR AND NUCLEAR DETERRENCE AND THE POLITICAL FALL-OUT < RICHARD ROUTLEY ��FOR CIRCULATION AND EVENTUAL LIBRARY DEPOSIT WAR AND PEACE. I ON THE ETHICS OF LARGE-SCALE NUCLEAR WAR AND NUCLEAR DETERRENCE AND THE POLITICAL FALL-OUT by R. Routley Number 5 Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy Department of Philosophy Australian National University 1984 ��INTRODUCTION. Virtually all the philosophical literature on nuclear war is written from either a superpower (predominantly American) or else European (mainly German, British or French) viewpoint. This article, after connecting in initial sections with Northern Catholic literature, adopts a very different Antipodean stance. Such regional perspectives, while the should not affect the morality of the matter, are highly politically relevant. Much of the philosophical literature, especially that emanating from the USA, also fails the test of morality. It is concerned only or primarily with what is good or "rational" or prudential for Americans, or for the American state, to do - whereas morality is independent of place, race, nationality and the like. This article tries to take the morality of the matter, and the resulting redistribution of moral and political obligations, seriously. It concludes, among other things, that the American and Russian states have no moral business putting nonaligned peoples at such grave risk as present nuclear arrangements involve. CONTENTS AND OUTLINE: Italicised headings §3-§8 indicate the main structure of the argument Page No §0. Introduction. Nuclear vs conventional wars, and new moral issues. Large-scale (LSN) vs limited nuclear wars, the focus on the former, but the implications for the latter. §1. How nuclear wars differ from other wars; wars and states, and the resulting limited appropriateness of older models and theories of war. War characterised. The essential role of the state. New and different features of nuclear wars. §2. The moral situation: the recent tendency of moral considerations to become entirely submerged in the context of war. The ancient distinction of morality and expediency. Strategic planning based on expediency. Arguments that war must be expediency-based refuted. Morality does not have to, and ought not to, give way to expediency. Utilitarianism and expediency distinguished. Limits to consensus: supermen and superhawks. National interest and expediency assimilated. Limits of state entitlement. §3. The initial argument to the immorality of LSN wars. One key argument, from the wrongness of killing noncombatants in mass, is presented, assessed, and criticisms met. Arguments for the premisses of the key argument elaborated. §4. Arguments from historical requirements on just wars, the important argument from convergence, and environmental arguments. Arguments from just war requirements: discrimination, proportionality, prospect of success. The detailed convergence argument, from rival moral positions. Arguments from environmental principles. §5. The shift to nuclear deterrence: arguments to its immorality. Deterrence seen as the only practical way to satisfy major desiderata: prevention of war and maintenance of prudential values. Pure deterrence not the policy. Deterrence as practiced has increased the probability of nuclear war. The first argument to immorality of deterrence, from the plausibility of probability of immorality. Further arguments through deontic connecting principles: the probability linkage. Refuting the counterargument from the success of deterrence. The way the onus of 1 2 5 11 14 17 �Page No proof falls on deterrence policy, which cannot meet evidential require­ ments. The second connecting principle: the wrongness of serious preparation for nuclear war. The general form of connecting principles; separating out those that are correct. The third connecting principle: the wrongness of serious threats of nuclear devastation. Criticism of this principle leads to further connecting principles, through intention and through commitment. Meeting counterarguments from utilitarianism. Applying the connecting principles to argue to the immorality of deterrence. Arguments from limited convergence: pro- and anti-utilitarian versions. Other reasons for deep dissatisfaction with deterrence. §6. Practical, prudential and more moral arguments from national dangers to nuclear build-up of the superstates, and the genesis of nuclear dilemmas. The arguments from nuclear blackmail and foreign domination, and from risk of nuclear destruction. The crucial argument from basic rights and fundamental values. The argument from isolated people to superstate immorality. The superstate theme, and reasons for its appeal. The much less persuasive dependent state theme. Challenging the assumptions of the underlying relatiatory model. §7. The resulting nuclear dilemmas - for aligned states and their supporters. Character of the nuclear fix. Subsidiary dilemmas: national security vs freedom and democratic arrangements; personal and role dilemmas. Features of deontic dilemmas. Deterrence presented as second-best escape from the nuclear fix. The nuclear fix a fix of states' own making. Interconnections between the nuclear fix and nation-state arrangements. §8. Ways out of nuclear dilemmas: initial political fall-out from the ethical results. The inevitability of limitations on national sovereignty. Interstate and extrastate approaches. The Way Up and the Way Down of extrastate approaches. Arguments for the Way Up, and the decisive case against it. Failure of international agreements, especially on human rights and genocide. Exclusion of nuclear deterrence under the Genocide Convention. Need for the reexamination of current political arrangements imposed by the nuclear fix. Deficiencies in present antiquated political arrange­ ments revealed by nuclear problems. Further arguments from the nuclear fix for political reassessment. The weak link: the sovereign nation­ state. Forfeiture of political obligation by many states. Alternative political arrangements vs nuclear time horizons. The multi-track Way Out of the nuclear dilemma. The main political means lie outside state governmental apparatus. Laying the spectre of ideological domination. Social restructuring and devolution of power. Graduated disarmament and transarmament, and letting state sovereignty go. Dissolving the arguments from national dangers. State resistance to loss of power. Further lines of organised action against nuclear states. Appendix 1: On the fate of mankind and the earth, according to Schell and Anders. Nuclear prophets and prophetic rubbish. The extinction assumption. Common emerging themes of Schell and Anders. The extravagant anthro­ pocentric assumption, and some of what is wrong with it. Second death dismissed. The universality of peril. The alleged universality of responsibility: the Pogo theme. The correct, but undeveloped, whole earth theme. Ultimately Schell offers little hope and superficiality. Nuclear war is war. The logic and illogic of deterrence. ii 37 43 49 �Page No Appendix 2: On matters of collective and individual responsibility and on regional strategies. Individual and state responsibility. Opt-out positions, and arguments to them. Failure of the arguments, and the impact of group cooperation. Arguments to direct obligations of individuals to the nuclear dissociation. Limitations of rival political obligations. Different policy reorganisation for different regions. Shallower and deeper goals. The important opportunity for deeper reorganisation afforded by nuclear dilemmas. Obligations of those in the Antipodes: what is required, and justified. Social and economic reorganisation in the Antipodes, and reducing costs involved. Blockages to social and political adjustment. iii 73 ��ON THE ETHICS OF LARGE-SCALE NUCLEAR WAR AND NUCLEAR DETERRENCE AND THE POLITICAL FALL-OUT Large-scale nuclear wars raise ethical questions not generated, either at or nearly so forcefully, by previous human military encounters.This is at all bottom because of their projected effects, which are often to said differ so those of even the largest conventional wars (the World Wars) as to yield a from difference in kind of war. involve, and threatened Certainly massive exchanges such as nuclear exchanges such as nuclear deterrence presupposes, are neither envisaged nor fully accommodated by traditional theories of Much wars just wars. new philosophical reflection and investigation is required, even if rather well-tested and old-fashioned moral principles will serve as initial ethical base. Although nuclear wars are, thus nonexistent objects, nuclear wars (extrapolated from a very limited varieties. In far, only a decidedly class menacing of proper have several distinctive properties nuclear experience^) and come in several particular, confined or limited nuclear wars, of which tactical or strategic are subvarieties, contrast with Idrge-scale nuclear wars (LSN wars) 1. The US Catholic Bishops in their Pastoral Letter (PL) make the point forcefully: 'Nuclear weapons ... and nuclear warfare ... are new moral issues ... There exists a capacity to do something no other age could imagine: we can threaten the created order ... We could destroy [God's] work' (PL, p.312). While the independent analysis offered in what follows has a great deal in common with the Bishop's position, it differs significantly in removing the religious backdrop and associated features and, it is hoped, in bringing out the logical structure of the argument more clearly and sharply. To illustrate the differences that emerge with removal of the religious backdrop and its the associated unity-of-evil theme, consider what happens to two examples from PL, p.323:- Firstly, peace is possible without religious enlightenment if it is possible with it: religious enlightenment is not an essential condition as there implied. Secondly, violence does not take all the forms the Bishops try to give it, e.g. sexual discrimination is hardly a form of violence, pornography can operate without it, etc. It is a serious mistake to try to heap so many diverse and independent issues together under the one heading (forms of violence) along with war as if they stood and fell together, e.g. abortion and nuclear war. Note that referencing, where not through an author's name, is by way of acronym explained in the references at the end. 2. an The isolated, and unnecessary, bombing of two Japanese cities at the very end of World War II did not render that war a genuine nuclear war. Nuclear wars proper will be very different and very much more horrifying. Nuclear wars proper, though elements of uncomfortably adjacent possible worlds, ought therefore to be confined to merely possible worlds. Enough of their features we can appreciate without their being brought to actuality. �2 A large-scale nuclear which need not however be unlimited 3. explosion war it is of large quantities of nuclear devices over a sizeable region; a function of two main parameters: distribution. war strategic) nuclear of quantities war a Such quantity markedly differs which limited, is where and explosives, (megatonnage a from targets to are and explosive) limited assumption, by the of the involves (tactical much or smaller characteristically circumscribed, for instance confined in principle to military installations in a given region. Though focus the in what follows is upon LSN wars and their prevention, limited nuclear wars are by no a separate wars to LSN wars are high (given usual reasonable assumptions second strike, since issue, a is a prerequisite, and the probabilities of escalation of such arsenal nuclear means etc.).^ Because of these of follow-up or connections, much of the case made against LSN wars transfers to more limited wars, as will become evident. §1. How nuclear wars resulting differ from other wars wars: and party and limited appropriateness of older models and theories of war. of war that has dominated much thinking, including strategic two states (or thinking, the A model is the several person) game or, as a complication of that, the clan or tribe battle3. A picture of war thus on requirements for legitimate and just wars, which technological reflection advances have traditional now theory rendered of war, emerged, inappropriate hardly and especially sometimes surprisingly, as a result inapplicable. of The made no allowance for such 3. Another dimension of variation concerns the sequence of the war, especially the type of strike involved. Though the sequence is important for the moral assessment, for example of the main actors, it in no way alters the immorality of LSN wars, as will emerge. 4. 'The overwhelming probability [is] that a nuclear exchange would have no limits' (PL, p.314). Hence a major argument against limited nuclear wars: that any such war risks, indeed renders highly probable, an unlimited war, and the risk is far too large to take. The point in fact follows by straightforward application of decision theory, multiplying the massive undesirability (moral and otherwise) of an LSN war by its probability given a limited nuclear war. Given the character of weapons development and present communication arrangements, the idea of a highly circumscribed purely nuclear exchange between the superpowers, perhaps in the European "theatre", is really a myth. 5. There was a substantial element of sport (and connected features of prowess) in traditional wars that has been eroded in modern technological wars. Nuclear wars may be not just unsporting, in that no notice is given, etc., they are also remote and impersonal, and differently unjust, in a much deeper way. �3 phenomena as mass bombing of large cities, such as with Dresden and nuclear bombing, with its many further crucial effects beyond mass And Tokyo. occurred bombing, adds further new dimensions. Yet it is important for the argument anchors, retain historical were accounted unjust war is essentially a matter of states and their control: the Oxford English Dictionary account, war is 'hostile contention armed protagonists, antagonists or players; of contention or combat; exchange is the actual experience. but other are not literal, but transferred, metaphoric, etc.8 'war' means and or wrong. to elaborate by means of forces, carried on between nations, states, or rulers, or between parties in the same nation or state' for control of the state?; noun linkages to be aware of what counted as war (the semantics of the matter^), and of when, and why, wars and military actions Firstly, to always a function of senses of the States are the forces comprising armed soldiers are the and combat or forceful and typically violent Thus wars are external or internal states or their rule. (civil), Thus too wars have grown in quantity and frequency as states have expanded, wars have changed as states have transformed, and nuclear war has emerged 'with nuclear states. theoretical way then to eliminate wars is to remove states: An obvious in short, wars are 6. There are interesting sidelights concerning even the etymology of the term 'war', which was derived from a term meaning 'confusion'. In particular, 'it is a curious fact that no Germanic nation in early historic times had in living use any word properly meaning 'war'': Oxford English Dictionary (OED) on war. 7. But of course there can be something quite analogous to war waged between clans, gangs, multinational firms, even against Nature, and still more metaphorically against poverty, etc. To this extent, a strict definition of 'war' is being insisted upon. Even so the diffusion of power structures the argument will direct us to, has to extend beyond just the break-down of nation-states . 8. Into this category (since Nature is no nation) falls the ubiquitous and unwarranted war against Nature of modern times, which features just as large in Marxism as in capitalism. As could have been guessed, someone it was James - suggested channelling all war into "war" in the metaphorical sense against that unarmed and nonaggressive "opponent", Nature. James proposed as a substitute for war proper, conscription of the youth for a war against Nature (see Wasserstrom, p.12). What it boiled down to, however, was that youth was to be channelled into all the dirty work, in that way to acquire manly virtues military activities "rightly" instil, especially discipline, but also service, devotion, physical fitness, constructive exertion, responsibility, and order. Another less diabolical substitute for wars proper (in American ecotopian literature) is through war games and other games of competitive cast. Again specious arguments enter for those bringing out the "best" in human males, etc. �4 an outcome of political and associated technological structure, and are by structure. the altering state arrangements, arrangements. be to can thus be seen as a structural problem of War from along defective) political organisation of states; they are a helps these This semantically based picture situational fix, a structural malformation. war with (otherwise removed arise Wars of explain why the radical argument against nuclear wars and deterrence argument devolves into an war-makers, against against In states. the fact (self-legitimised) on and war-declarers traditional theory, wars were the restricted to external wars, which were construed as the right or states of rulers (princes) to conduct for certain political purposes; their removed the argument was that private persons with grievances had access to the courts^, while states did not (wars were, so to speak, the international analogue of the law courts). But this is itself a very statist conception of the legitimate place of wars; the semantics is not so restrictive and permits internal wars within states, for example to end wars, injustice, etc. Let us however - to bring out what is different now - confine attention a basic and most familiar case, external wars between two states or sets (axes) of states, two-player external wars, games, competitive could be won, attentuated form for some "victors") the World Wars. agglomerations surrounding traditionally firstly for massive armed like wars, such exchanges as there may well be no winning in areas Northern the of very hemisphere countryside. Thus, and the secondly, for waste laying the point of of substantially substantially obliterated^, (exercised and most as nothing all worse off than at the outset of the "play". are huge war seen, to settle serious interstate disputes, is removed: another point of difference, the phenomenon of wars that prepared that That assumption still held good (though in With LSN wars it no longer holds; is settled with main protagonists players It was assumed An LSN war could involve destruction of all main Western metropolitan strategy. 9. to main Hence elaborately for, etc.), but which can never be pointfully fought; Thus Aquinas and Grotius for example (see Barnes, p.776, top). The argument presupposes rather a lot, including a neat public/private distinction. Put Aquinas's way, it looks as if it could be readily transferred into an argument for international government, or at least effective law-courts. Yet all Christendom was supposed at that time to be one state! �5 hence the inevitable emphasis on pure deterrence. and the other elements of gamesmenship had a role in earlier wars, but it was not pure deterrence. military to Certainly, deterrence, bluff, Lastly, traditional wars could be confined in targets and military principle This feature is fundamental as exchanges. for, as will appear, wars that spill over in gross regards just wars; ways to The special effects of uninvolved parties sacrifice any pretension to morality. nuclear explosives, especially operated in mass, mean however that large nuclear cannot wars be legitimately horrifying detail in popular sources ozone destruction, These confined. shockwaves, such effects gigantic fumigations and become entirely rapid speed include pulses, fireball or firestorm etc., etc. As a result of these of exchange, LSN wars will resemble the recent tendency submerged in the context of war. of moral and expediency. considerations to It is particularly important in the case of war to maintain a firm grasp on the ancient morality radioactivity, more than they resemble older-style wars. The moral situation: §2. the Schell) electromagnetic devastation, rogue bacteria and viruses, ... compounded as special effects (presented in distinction between What is done in war, especially for local or national advantage, may be very different from what ought morally to be done, whether the 10. There is however the degenerate idea of war as involving annihilation or extinction, and of winning a nuclear war as annihilation of the enemy while not being entirely annihilated oneself: the side that somehow "survives" sufficiently to rebuild is said to "win". But this is, at best, an extremely tenuous sense of winning, which in any case neglects the medical evidence concerning nuclear destruction. Recent talk about winning or even surviving a nuclear war must reflect a failure to appreciate a medical reality: Any nuclear war would inevitably cause death, disease and suffering of pandemonic proportions and without the possibility of effective medical intervention ... (PL, p.313). Moreover any such phoenix war is radically unjust, because of violation of the traditional requirement of proportionality, and for other reasons developed in the text. Unfortunately as documented in Scheer, significant officials who are responsible for the nuclear destiny of the USA - and so of the world think that the devastation of nuclear war can be survived by Americans and that a global nuclear war can actually be "won"! They rely, among other things, on an incredibly low, and unacceptable, redefinition of "winning". 11. In practice they often were not,they drained limited economies, they layed waste countryside (though to a minor extent compared with nuclear or chemical warfare or modern mining), impoverishing inhabitants, etc. �6 latter is determined using the codes and conventions Much not to be done in war i^ done, for one (alleged) advantage or ought that otherwise^. or war, of another, despite modern military codes and conventions and the like. we not live go a rather barbarous age: in unremarked, the if Militarily the horrors of the twentieth century will history gets written that (accurately) is. Furthermore military thinking and strategic planning tend (as Nagel explains) to induce a certain moral numbing, so that a range as such wiping rural populations, become real possibilities, included in out calculations. consequentialist characteristically based on is that strategic Each side in a military encounter reasont The expediency only disadvantages, its own gains and own its planning advantages is and losses as a result of alternative possible it ought, morally, to consider those of the other side(s) as moves: actions, excluded morally of well. In this way strategic planning displaces morality. Indeed it has been contended that war should be planned and conducted way, a no-holds barred combat fought to the maximal (local) advantage, without limits, moral or other (except insofar as technology limits the means of etc.). Such the classical through "bald an incremental limit) escalation distinct argument terms. from an that the It would And (but The externally will be broken by each player in turn for advantage. an extraordinarily narrow motivational base is assumed. the argument man" fallacy *3), that there can be no limit. assumption is that any merely selected limit (as enforced force, is the so-called "classic" view of Clausewicz, oft repeated. Clausewicz tries to argue, really this Thus too follow from idea of a limited war is some sort of contradiction in But it is not, though breaking off in the heat of war, or the of a supposedly limited nuclear exchange, may be singularly improbable. confusion Nuclear 12. For as Nagel contends (early on), there are moral restrictions on the conduct of warfare which are not legalistic only and which are neither arbitrary nor merely conventional, nor a matter of usefulness. These themes run entirely counter to the classic theory of war of Clausewicz - a theory outlined in Walzer. 13. As one less hair doos not, at any stage, distinguish a bald man from a hirsute man, there are, starting from the hirsute end, no bald men. The progressive escalation argument concerning war is an incremental argument like the technical Sorites syllogisms, formalising the type of fallacious argument which shows that one more straw never makes a heap. The fallacious escalation argument is part of the so-called "logic of war", for more on which see the conclusion of Appendix 1. �7 wars thus appear decidedly Clausewiczian. the for players Still the argument inconclusive; is can choose, at least in smaller calmer wars, not to escalate, and, for example, agree to abide by arranged practices, types of weapons, etc.^ A state engaged in war seldom sees itself as entirely bound by of morality: it is taken to be mere prudence on the part of those attacked to take account of the no-immoral-holds-barred approach they from the other side. especially constraints the question not only as to may encounter, well So each group potentially engaged in war faces ought it what do to in permissible morally situations, but also both what it ought really do, and what it can morally do in the morally flawed situations it finds itself. not, But the last question does in that case, reduce to one of expediency. There is no question, then, of morality giving or having even expediency, For it is not as if shaky considerations of involves. give bound are morality theoretical fact is that miraculously deliver us from value the theory. to Expediency fact, but that local values - of self, family, clan, class, or nation - are considerations. proper characterisation, a therefore, much universalizable more universal fairness, equitability and principles, justice. distribution value of and, And morality thereby imposes, through principles. intersubstitutivity certain requirements of general Expediency yields an unfair, inequitable value system, one that subscribers would not adhere to if differently placed \ deep theoretical unsatisfactoriness of expediency, and associated strategic thinking, also derives from this failure evaluations 14. remote By contrast, morality requires, as a matter of its resultant The takes It assumes, or what really count, and override or are to be maximized at the expense of foreign not does simply narrowly-construed local advantage or power as what is valuable. urges, crucial But the morality and* expediency fall within the same, both equally shaky or equally solid, domain of value or to to the firm ground of expediency when the chips are down, since often way enough such moral erosion does not occur in crisis situations. even to circumstances such as the prospect of LSN war extreme under way give to of interreplacement, from the same and results not holding when persons X and Y are interchanged under As Walzer argues, p.24. An historical example is the era of genuinely limited wars in Europe following the barbarism of the Thirty Years war. �8 For expediency does not elude expediency assessments^. it deontic presentation: be presented as through such popular slogans as "local might is right", can or given tight formal characterisation. The will characterisation normally that of utilitarianism, except that utilities are only assigned to, or resemble are biassed in favour of, certain individuals. However, theories of utility not have to be positions of expediency if utility is not locally confined. do Thus utilitarianism proper is not to be dismissed as considering only expediency; meet intersubstitutivity requirements of morality; can it it does not, unlike the methods of war game theory, assign different weights to the individual utility of (certain) Americans, as opposed to Russians, say. are There especially, deontologists regarding war^. which differences, between or justify, ugly strategies and practices as regards to some render to seemed enemy civilians, that deontological principles would not permit. effect and utilitarians serve to further complicate the moral picture In particular, utilitarian approaches have permissible, morally significant however utilitarians this But is would reject the description of practices permitted under their principles as 'ugly'; whereas an to already in aim what follows since partisanship, is to avoid meta-ethical meta-ethical neutrality, though of course not there is a moral partisanship, neutrality. to achieve And morally large area of consensus, or at least moral convergence, from which argument can begin. Virtually all positions agree that obliteration of several major cities in a LSN war would be wrong, indeed morally outrageous. If the there is dissension, as there may be among nuclear strategists who seem to feel no qualms when it comes to trading loss of some American cities for some Russian ones, simply increase the costs involved, up to loss of whole nations if 15. The severe limitations of those lesser "virtues", nationalism and patriotism, also come from the failure of replacement which excessive applications of nationalism easily engender. Try for example swapping a person from inside the homeland with one from outside as regards treatment. The point of, and reasons for, intersubstitutivity as a requirement of morality, is well explained in Hare, p.78ff. Hare applies the requirement to make a telling case against nationalism (a case which extends to strategic decision-theory). Nationalism, along with fanaticism, is the main cause of war, so Hare contends, p.72. 16. The case against expediency was developed in detail especially the criticism of Thrasymachus in The Republic. 17. Thus the differences between Nagel on the one side, and Brandt and Hare the other, in Cohen et al. by Plato; see on �9 then try to work down necessary, until moral repugnance ijs encountered; The again. fact remains however that in the nuclear area things have got substantially abandon tended Strategic thinking, in particular, has out of perspective, morally. to suppress moral considerations (as indeed theories of the state also or do, sometimes flamboyantly, in favour of partisan values). Naturally the fact of broad consensus as to the morality of the matter does mean that there are none who would welcome such outrageous happenings, that not total nuclear destruction of the North even, would be Consider the rising world empire. be southern (hemisphere) no advantage. one's strongman, SS, who has visions of While the superpowers of the north remain, SS's dream can realised. Thus his best strategy, having rid submarines and southern lands of US bases, is to try nuclear to exchange in the North. There be would waters southern to encourage a hardly of US all-out an point then in securing institutional arrangements so that potential SS's do not accumulate much given especially the apparent instability of crucial world arrangements. that is to anticipate: the present point is that (the fact of) moral has and its power, limitations, is an inadequate But consensus constraint without accompanying structural adjustments. national For, typically, differently to impose interest is taken hostages or override morality, even holding civilian populations as of those those of Eastern Europe. things. substitution of justification; fails in The first, expediency classes regimes, But morally national interest can do neither the overriding for morality, of morality, which the second, the alleged moral dominance of important And, killing millions in the national interest*8). unfortunately, these assumptions are not confined to more totalitarian such or irresistible ethical claims that dominate more ordinary ethical considerations (such as those concerning nuclear to is entirely national simply lacks the moral interests, of cases, including, so the argument will go, the case of LSN war. 18. As Schell bluntly puts it, 'What is being claimed is that one or two countries have the right to jeopardise all countries and their descendents in the name of certain beliefs' (p.132). However this way of putting it leaves room for ambiguity, since the beliefs may be morally grounded rather than based on national interests. �10 States may insist upon operating on a selfish national interest basis, let it not be that pretended expediency (namely, that of is it a moral basis as distinct from one of There egoism"). "group but moral special no is dispensation for governments. individuals: there is no logical difference in the pattern of justification, or analysis of obligation. Morality works in the same way for groups as for For example, what ought to be as regards X is (analysed semantically) what would happen as regards X in all ideal worlds; no whether difference is an reasons aside, just behaving as system, group or individual or individual States such as Israel (in its recent invasion organisation. extenuating X immorally of as brigands or mass Certainly there are grounds on which states or their agents conceded, special moral dispensations; been more than that and do not stand up to criticism. cannot furnish two (incompatible) claimed, have but the excuses offered are no A moralities, satisfactory a state theory moral or public one and a private or individual citizen one — state expediency and individual morality because this would lead to violations of substitutivity, neutrality, etc. instance, a state operative X could use state cover morally impermissible ways, ways ruled out (e.g. Y are permuted. special are, Lebanon) there is no moral difference. killers: or makes and it to considerations citizen * For Y in by state interests) when X and A group or organisation or person can be derivative damage 19 bound of course by in virtue of role, but these are derivative principles - good for any such institution - which fit within and answer back to general moral principles. So it is also with a state which is an institutional arrangement justified (insofar as it is) by the way it answers back to some least) of its citizens: its charter does not legitimate emergent allegedly moral principles which conveniently coincide with those of state expediency. particular, a survival. In state is not (morally) entitled to risk the lives of many of its own citizens and of other peoples and creatures for its own ends, even own (at for its Thus it is not entitled to do what both nuclear war and nuclear deterrence require, as will emerge. 19. There are also other arguments against two (or see Routley and Plumwood. multiple) morality lines: �11 §3. The initial argument pacifism yield arguments to the immorality of to the immorality of war. controversial in an area where there is no LSN for But such arguments are be to reason good Arguments wars. controversial. Pacifism can accordingly be set aside as a special case, since the immorality of LSN wars follows. All but pacifist positions concede that war in itself is not a crime. all wars are immoral, though even inoffensive wars may be pointless or inferior Among more or less admissible ways of settling political issues between states. wars who Not are the international "tournaments" of aristocratic young men or warriors volunteer as and soldiers action whose not does spill over onto noncombatants, and some early and medieval wars, where few or even no combatants were killed in war. conscription, Since the establishment press-gangs and recruitment of such of the largely ceased to take these less offensive forms; induction practices as near-destitute, wars have modern massive wars are far removed from the ideal war-tournament types (which feature now only in ecotopian portrayals, in ways that are increasingly dubious). immoral, sorts Most of wars are because of what is done to the essentially uninvolved, but few to such an extent as LSN wars. The first argument to the immorality of LSN and wars sufficiently of large-scale wars generally, takes the following form: Pl. The (deliberate) killing in mass of noncombatants is wrong. P2. LSN wars involve the killing in mass of noncombatants. P3. What involves what is wrong is wrong. - (KA) LSN wars are wrong. The particular argument given is just one representative of a set of this type. taken off killing: the on (KA) replaces But the quite 'killing sufficiently evil. creatures'. can Thus a first in mass of noncombatants' by a suitable clause concerning 'huge destruction of lifestyle of uninvolved or involved focus destruction of lifestyle of nonhumans and humans alike that an LSN war will bring is variation arguments Characteristically, in Western culture, it is thought that mass killing of humans is about the worst thing that can happen. be of not directly Other variations will emerge in the discussion (including �that where the bracketed 'deliberate' figures). but The argument is valid, attacked) on the of basis be may attacked (and of its premisses. each has in effect been Let us consider these in reverse order. The principle, P3, used in the argument, that what involves "what is wrong" is wrong, has been challenged on rather Scholastic grounds. There are, in particular, problems like those generated by Good Samaritan arguments, purport to show that some proper obligations involve wrongdoing. assisting an injured robbed person is said robbed; but, since the robbing is wrong, "involve" to providing For which instance, that person's assistance being is also wrong. But these problems derive from too slack a notion of involvement; with a tighter account of involvement the problems disappear and P3 stands. As against P2, it may legitimately directed be argued against that military nuclear targets. 20 can wars be encounters But given the character of There is nuclear weapons, LSN wars could in no way be confined to such targets. not merely the likelihood that many missiles explode off target, there are all the other effects of large-scale nuclear bombings. fallout down-wind from military people, especially in the case of targets US and For example, the radioactive will affect large concentrations of European targets, and may affect uninvolved countries such as Canada. There may be an attempt to avoid the problem of massive civilian casualties by appeal effect)21. to such dubious principles as the doctrine of double effect (or side if missiles were characteristically reliably on target, and one 20. The challenge to P3, which is often expanded to a "distribution of obligation over entailment" principle, can be removed by a tighter involvement connective, linked to a good paradox-free entailment. For details see Routley and Plumwood, where Good Samaritan problems are diagnosed. 21. According to the doctrine, which is one concerning responsibility, we are responsible only for the intended effects or consequences of our freely-chosen actions, and not for other (side) effects or consequences, even if these are foreseen and/or intimately tied to the intended consequences. Unless carefully hedged, the doctrine is pernicious, allowing those who suitably adjust their intention to escape responsibility for evil they knowingly perpetrate. Thus, for instance, a Russian supreme command which intended only to take out US military targets would, under double effect, have no responsibility for the resultant effect on American and Canadian cities! Taking the issues concerning double effect to a more satisfactory conclusion would however require a larger theory of action, which duly distinguished acts (what is done) and outcomes from attached intentions. �13 which was intended unfortunately went only off to destroy an underground unmanned course and destroyed a large city, it could be claimed that the (unintended) mass destruction is legitimised under principle. a make Nonetheless effect double the circumstances difference, for they may mitigate attitudes to those responsible for firing the missile, since it was not as if they had deliberately aimed at The double effect principle conflates [diminution of] responsibility city. the the the action would be wrong, and the Such claims should be rejected: wrongness not lessened by the given intention. could silo missile assigned for an act with the [diminution of] wrongness of the act. As against Pl, and as regards the middle term of argued that there is an important equivocation. While it will the bracketed term, 'deliberate'. killing and Pl P2, may it be The equivocation is induced by conceded be that deliberate of genuine innocents is impermissible, two challenges will be made. It will be charged firstly that noncombatants, insofar as they are distinguishable, are no means all innocent, many being directly involved in military effort, by whether just as taxpayers or as suppliers of military, e.g. farmers or goods or services bootmakers or entertainers. as innocent. The second defensible — version of premiss P2. and for other reasons, it properly point concerns a much narrower - and less Because P2 so amended is is best to leave out the less defensible, "modifier" 'deliberate'. What is important for the present purposes is the moral status of what is not a mixture that with the motives of the perpetrators. of require the qualification 'deliberate' or done, So 'deliberate' gets left out, equivocation is avoided, P2 stands, and so does Pl. not the Secondly, it will be contended that LSN wars do not involve the deliberate killing of those excluded by used For Pl does 'intentional' or the like.22 Admittedly also 'noncombatant' is a fuzzy term, but none the worse for that, and there is noserious people who are is, moreover, problem in marking out a class of notdirectly involved in the command and action no need to adopt the practice, deriving stating an initialversion of Pl in terms of innocents - 22. clear noncombatants, at chains. There from Catholicism, of least as problematic Despite Nagel's suggestion that it does (p.158). The suggestion depends upon similar mistaken assimilations, of act with intention, and wrongness with responsibility, to those of the double effect doctrine. �14 a class as that of noncombatants to try to characterize - and then endeavouring to make the difficult transition to noncombatants. Not only can arguments against the premisses of the argument be met, are arguments the for there premisses, though for the substantive moral premiss Pl they are of the characteristically nonconclusive moral sort and tend will For example, one argument for vary somewhat with the underlying ethical theory. Pl, and for objecting to the killing of noncombatants, is the Kantian one, (to seriously understate point) the doing to that fails to treat them with the so minimal respect owed to them as persons 2 3. §4. Arguments from historical requirements on just argument from convergence, and environmental arguments. wars, The conclusion that LSN wars cannot be justly waged - and accordingly are unjustified something dreamed up by contemporary "free-enterprise" capitalist state (and opponents communist important the of is America inspired, merely not or the of The etc). same conclusion falls out of various traditional requirements, worked out in medieval times, for just wars. One of the requirements gives but a variant on the first argument (KA). 2** For a necessary condition for fighting a war justly was that it not be the case that large numbers of [innocent] noncombatants are bound killed (cf. to be Barnes, p.775). A just war requires just means, that the war should be means, fought by morally which implies in particular that there is no indiscriminate killing of noncombatants. The implied principle was escapsulated in a principle legitimate of discrimination (between combatants and others) which 'prohibits all actions directly intended to take the lives of p.312) 25 . civilians and of noncombatants' (PL, LSN wars, where not only military installations are targeted, violate this requirement 2 6. 23. Of course there are counterarguments too, and not merely from the military angle in the case of small numbers of obstructive noncombatants. One favored argument is a variation on the Bald Man: there is no clear line between combatants and noncombatants. However as Nagel argues (p.20) there are distinctions between them, firstly in terms of their roles, e.g. in carrying or using arms or directing those who do, and secondly in terms of their harmfulness, the threat they offer. See also PL, p.312, where a simple and effective paradigm case argument is applied. 24. Note that throughout, the text adopts the OED equations, reflecting common usage, of just with morally right or correct, and unjust with morally �15 Overlapping the requirement of just means is that of being that of net evil to net good: proportion proportionality , 'the damage to be inflicted and costs incurred by the war must be proportionate to the good expected up arms' (PL, requirement: the damage and costs, to goods moral proportionality requirement is of the achieved nationally not that in doctrine through war. "improvement" are which way. overall consequences of war conditions way bad, (Barnes, p.782). 'a nation wages war justly the than Similarly only if the for that nation or the wronged nation it is supporting have a decent chance of being better after the fighting ends' (Wakin, p.20). no and According to the first, 'X wages war abstaining from war' improvement "puts wrongs to rights": are Entangled with the "ameliorative" of confined, justly upon Y if the overall consequences of war are better, or less the taking by p.312).2? It is not difficult to see that LSN wars violate this disproportionate criterion the satisfy LSN wars can in these conditions, as scenarios depicting the aftermath of such wars reveal. Some of the lesser requirements for a just war are also wars, for example that of infringed reasonable expectation of success. by LSN It seems that there can be no reasonable expectation of state success in an LSN war - whatever the very differently, exchanges. limited prospects of success for some whatever the prospects of success in What small strictly state limited elite, or nuclear is less clearcut is the question of whether LSN wars conflict with the requirements of just cause or due fault, and of right intention. For 25. The principle can be argued to in various ways. One (by no means conclusive) way is Nagel's way, from the requirements of directness and relevance in combat, the underlying (controversial) principle being that, 'whatever one does to another person intentionally must be aimed at him as a subject, with the intention that he receive it as a subject' (p.15). 26. The situation with strictly limited nuclear wars where the targets are essentially military ones, and noncombatants are unaccountably killed "indirectly",would be different. Such wars are not however excused by the pernicious doctrine of double effect. For such wars remain unjust on several counts, e.g. they inflict disproportionate damage, e.g. on life systems, etc. As Zuckermann says, 'It is still inevitable that were military installations rather than cities to become the objectives of nuclear attack, millions, even tens of millions of civilians would be killed ...' (quoted in Thompson and Smith, p.14, where the italics are added). 27. This is not to be confused with what is very different, the vicious ancient doctrine of proportional response - an eye for eye, tooth for tooth, and so on - recently adapted by the Americans in their latest official policy of flexible response, adjusted to the level of attack. �16 this depends on the sensitive issue of the weight assigned to what are seen as basic human rights and fundamental values, and the extent to which just wars can While the mainstream position be ideologically justified. theory medieval opposed to ideologically justified wars and "humanitarian" wars, these were was not definitively excluded by the traditional theory (cf. is of merit, little when (and issues will arise again subsequently). historical requirements are arguments not do simply not There in puzzling over dubiously effective requirements, however, when so many are decisive against LSN wars sensitive Barnes, p.778). commit arguments any from matters the underlying Finally, these arguments from prescriptive fallacy; historical authority for to the moral conclusions, but use also premisses to the effect that the requirements imposed, and sometimes applied, were justified. As they are. In the Christian tradition there were two main strands of reflection on the moral rightness justness of wars, the just war theory and a rival pacifist or strand, prominent in early Christianity, but largely submerged from Augustine on contemporary until times. Both exclude nuclear wars, one strand because they are inevitably unjust, the other because they are wars and This is the beginning of the convergence argument against nuclear wars: that is duly expediency such wars are excluded from all ethical perspectives, once removed (and even, very frequently, when it is not). however you look at it morally. consensus violence^^. involve argument; it The argument is not proceeds They are morally wrong the same as the weaker from similar results from the full sweep of genuinely ethical positions, not from massive agreement of opinion. The detailed convergence argument is an exhaustive case by case each type of moral theory. Fortunately details can be deontological and contractual theories lead back to requirements 28. one, from shortcut. For for just war These alternatives are not as far removed practically as may appear. For the aim of just war theory is not 'to legitimize war but to prevent it. The presumption is against the use of force' (PL, p.312). And most types of wars are ruled out by the theory. However not all wars or violent revolutions are excluded, and that is enough to guarantee the distinction between the alternatives. In particular, defensive wars are allowed - at least for the defending side, though from a wider viewpoint these too may be condemned 'the classic case [of the just war] ... was the use of lethal force to prevent aggression against innocent victims' (PL, p.311). Under recent international law, defence, narrowly construed, is the only legitimate basis for war; Roman law was only slightly more generous, in allowing for the restitution of goods (see Barnes, p.780). �17 which, it has already been shown, LSN wars violate. war arrived sometimes were defended through principles of such moral or at In fact conditions for just work theories, so that a good deal of the requisite argumentative been The latter point holds also as regards utilitarianism, where it has done. in effect been shown that whatever brand of utilitarianism is maximisation utility already has is finally LSN accomplished, adopted, wars however excluded are utilitarian grounds.The reason for such convergence is not far to seek; LSN such massive infliction of pain and colossal removal of pleasure, involve wars on that this dominates in assessments however they are accomplished in utilitarian Thus any genuine alternative to LSN war is better30. fashion. The arguments so moral overwhelming far case outlined against principles are derivable some from war worse substantially are of the theories just considered). These the obligation to maintain to accountable, condition than the these we violate would earth in proper shape and not degrade its systems: we exhaust not (again LSN principles include environmental ones, such as: generations, to whom do wars For there are other significant wars. such moral principles which the waging of an LSN against the the responsibility to future the world it". Such "pass "received on" not in conservative bound principles - however they are finally satisfactorily formulated - are to be violated in the event of an LSN war. §5. The shift to nuclear deterrence: support nuclear arguments to its immorality. Those arrangements have had a way of halting - and if not defeating, certainly turning and deflating - arguments from the immorality of LSN wars, engagement done is, it is claimed, quite different from is most important precisely in preventing LSN in such war: is continued, deterrence is the only practical desiderata, prevention of war and maintenance of values. way indeed wars from ever occurring, as well as in maintaining other fundamental Western values. it by What is being pointing out that there is no actual engagement in any such wars. deterrence who Indeed, of obtaining both Similar arguments are But compare Hardin. 29. For details see, e.g., Lackey, especially MM. 30. An argument of this sort is developed in more detail, complete generality, in Goodin, especially 'Disarmament'. though not in �18 advanced for all the various guises that deterrence is presented in: mutually assured destruction as formerly, flexible response as latterly, or otherwise. Such claims as to the roles and dubious, several for reasons. objectives of If it were, "sufficiency" to deter would be an adequate goal. superiority. than this, and sometimes goal. In fact there has renewed a even military drive for Pure deterrence can account neither for actual nuclear weapons nor for orthodox Western military strategy32. process decidedly A first reason is that there is much evidence, despite pronouncements, that deterrence is not the - the only - been a quest for more are deterrence Nor has deterrence set in motion the of disarmament to be expected to reduce armaments to levels appropriate f<?r deterrence. On the contrary, under "its" impulse there has been almost unlimited acceleration in building arms (to paraphrase PL p.318). Another major reason for serious doubt about what sold 31. is being under "deterrence" labels concerns the probability factor: marketed and deterrence has It is important to observe that the discussion is not restricted to one form of deterrence, such as that of mutually assured destruction (MAD), but applies to all forms of response likely to engender LSN war. This includes "flexible response", since the likely further development is massive retaliation to an initial Soviet nuclear raid. Part of the reason for this is the extreme vulnerability of the US defence systems, especially the communication systems, e.g. to early strikes and to electromagnetic pulses. In the resulting great confusion, escalation appears the likely outcome. In any case, flexible response includes massive retaliations, as part of its range and is ultimately backed by it. It is also important to observe that deterrence as practised is not confined to responses to (nuclear) attack. The threat of nuclear action has been made in cases where a rival encroaches on a zone of interest of a nuclear power. It is in part because deterrence includes nuclear responses to what is construed as serious misbehaviour of rivals that the practice of deterrence raises the probability of LSN war to the extent it does. 32. As to the first point, there is not only overkill capacity and the drive for superiority (often represented as "negotiating" strength) but the matter of counterforce weapons which are offensive weapons. As regards the second point, US policy has been decidedly expansionist with regular intervention in other nations; there have been repeated US threats to use nuclear weapons, especially to deal with revolutionary activities in the third world, but also in Europe in "limited" nuclear war; and in official military strategy no sharp line has been drawn between conventional and nuclear weapons: on these and other related points see further Lackey MM, p.l91ff., and also Thompson and Smith. The argument can be pressed further, to the alarming conclusion that deterrence is largely a front, which plays only a minor, but justificatory, role in actual US policy. Among further evidence is behavioural data: a government with a genuine deterrence policy would repeatedly emphasize its strength (even when it lacks strength), whereas the US government often parades its vulnerability and weakness in public. For other evidence see Smith, e.g. p.46ff. �19 of increased the probability type arms-race that war. LSN deterrence precisely, More of the is being practised, which involves full-scale preparation for total nuclear war, has prepared the conditions for nuclear war to occur, and has to that extent reasons also, connected with pure the last 30 years. deterrence with and (its war" "cold the probability of a LSN war has increased considerably in the setting), original For other least enhanced its prospects of occurring. at The reasons include the threatening posture called for by deterrence, the propaganda, which comes to be believed, that must be promulgated to maintain credibility overridden or with "sacrificed a for etc. many there analysts century, i.e think before 2000. real The situation has is a high There are several are interests being the dangerous and risky military objectives! state of military readiness; sober whose population now where reached been probability of an LSN war this routes to a such probability assignment.33 It would only require one incident with a 20% chance of leading to an escalating war every 8 years between 1960 and 2000. alerts, Cuban missile crisis, carry a considerably higher chance been have lucky already. In of nuclear For markedly. the years ahead it appears likely that the the danger supplicant nations resources declines. and the worsens and the extent The danger is enhanced by connected increasing chance of the lot. 33. Cox). easily as the plight extractable continuation of of crucial the arms of nuclear accident and human or technical error, none of them negligible factors as (cf. increase zones separating the superstates are increasing in size and number, with Soviet and American expansionism, and reveals the exchange. number of incidents with a real chance of engendering nuclear war will race, on side alone, have been at least as frequent, and sometimes, as with the American We Full past experience copiously Such a sketch can of course be elaborated and tidied up a Even so every substantial point involved can be contested, and many are Another route to a more than subjective assessment is to apply Delphi methods: weigh up the experts' assessments. In this regard it is worth noting that it is not only "nuclear doves" who consider the probability of nuclear war has increased in recent years. American officials have themselves admitted that the policies of realising the strategic potential of counterforce attacks and of selective and flexible responses have increased the probability of nuclear war (Ball, p.128). �20 For better contentious (though not always for good reasons). way no seems worse, or there to make such an overall probability argument particularly tight; and there are plausible arguments, from the complexity of the data concerned and the contingency of the future, that it cannot be made tight. It is bad enough however that it is decidedly plausible that it that probable LSN an war distribution principles) that it probable that century. And that is enough grossly a is immoral to decidedly morally on moral grounds, to change deterrence as policy is immoral. that plausible it highly is sequence of events will be perpetrated this evasive warrant morally to take action to avert the outcome. deterrence highly For then it follows (by occur this century. will is action. ought We That in turn implies taking steps, presently practised. Thus present That is but the first of several ways we shall arrive at that damaging conclusion for present super-state deterrence policies. The plausibility of claims as to the high or increasing probability of war has of course been disputed. * The main counterargument runs as follows: Nuclear war is unlikely, because the consequences are too horrifying. The underlying assumption is that wars and the like, with are LSN improbable. assumption. Unfortunately however horrifying outcomes, much available evidence counters this More than enough humans have not shrunk from brutal exchanges horrifying wars, or even from genocide, as human history attests (cf. Kuper). What is less assailable than the high probability claim, what the certainly have already got into since LSN thereby perhaps helping to bring it about, in the sense war, the probability. immoral of raising The more detailed underlying arguments, then,to the immorality of nuclear deterrence proceed by LSN an deterrence operates by the perverse practice of preparing for situation, against evidence seems to support, is that there is a non-negligible probability of an Thereby, through deterrence, we LSN war. and way of principles mapping war into arguments against deterrence of LSN war might appropriately be called deontic connecting principles moral arguments Such principles The first of these principles takes the following preliminary form: Cl. should If it is wrong that X should occur, then not only be probable is it wrong that it that X occur, but, more important, it is wrong to directly �21 increase the probability that X occur. Thus, for example, it since wrong is to kill large a noncombatant population in LSN war (by §4) it is also wrong to put the population at risk and wrong to increase the chance that the hostage population is wiped out, which both of For similar reasons a superstate is not morally nuclear deterrence does. entitled to impose nuclear risks upon uninvolved noncombatants, especially those of third party nonaligned states. most Like situations. defeat by example, substantive moral Unless counterexamples, X that in and of accordingly, Cl encounters to into runs require dilemma For complication. apparent trouble where clash of order to that the passenger he plane is flying sure that the troubled aircraft does not hit city make Such a defeating condition does not apply in the case of where deterrence, Consider for example the to avoid a greater evil. occurs apartment buildings 3**. nuclear Cl dilemmas are duly allowed for, Cl appears liable to pilot who increases the probability crashes, ethics, in Thus it may be argued that it is permissible to increase the principles occurs. probability part second the principles (though there explains) wrongness of a practice is not is a offset or principles, as §6 of clash removed by its role in avoiding greater evil. It can be argued that it is: argument the from previous argument deserves little perhaps from more such is part of success credence the deterrence. than the of the popular However this inductive driver's racing world As Barnett argues, argument, 'the happy accident has survived the first thirty-five years of the nuclear era is unimpressive evidence that we can avoid nuclear war 34. point a similar time base, that because he hasn't had a fatal crash yet (despite some close calls), he won't. that of the in the coming era, ...' This dilemma example was supplied by D. Johnston. There are more difficult putative counterexamples. For example, in inciting people to civil disobedience, the risk of state violence in retaliation is increased. Thus, to take C. Pigden's example, in encouraging disobedience, Gandhi increased the probability of wrongdoing by the British Raj. But surely Gandhi, unlike the Raj, did not act wrongly? It can be claimed that Gandhi did not directly increase the probability of violence. But spelling out what 'directly' means - in terms of short causal chains over which responsibility can be distributed - is not only problematic but leads on to other connecting principles. �22 (p.100). He offers familiar reasons such as the changing power increase in Russian the strength, rise the relations, of other nuclear powers, etc. (cf. similarly Cox). There are, accordingly, powerful reasons for concluding that Deterrence will not continue to work, DI. and, more important for the present argument, that Deterrence does increase the probability of LSN war. D2. The themes are of course interrelated, and the reasons for them (which are again persuasive but inconclusive) can be taken together: some respects) weaker D2 - the probability factor. proliferation, the but the focus is on the (in An initial of lesser nuclear powers. emergence reason concerns As a result there are many more ways of starting a nuclear conflagration, and so enhanced prospect it.3$ Some analysts consider that a very likely route to LSN war is the initial use of nuclear weapons by confrontation a lesser state. Moreover scarcity the growing and weapon systems, more or terror situations, deterrence power involves 36, being maintained: balance of have an exceedingly bad historical track record. increasing as the race proceeds. of With so many more Arms races, and interwoven There is substantial inductive evidence that present costs widely distributed, the probability of war through accident or error is increased. power resource A second group of reasons concerns the of cheaper supplies, etc. nuclear arms race which deterrence, as practised, is tied to. weapons for opportunities to lead on to war are increasing, with increasing world political instability, relating to third world economic decline, and of lead escalating eventually to races, arms war, with such as probability Next, deterrence depends on a certain balance if that balance is unduly disturbed, as can happen during escalation, deterrence may well fail. A related reason for supposing that deterrence practice increases the 35. It can be theoretically argued that the fewer the nations nuclear weapons, the less the chance of nuclear war: cf. p.230n. 36. The standard argument for deterrence as significantly decreasing the probability of war,would be decidedly better if the arms race were abandoned, and weapons held at the much smaller levels required just for deterrence. Of course such a probability-well assumption is only one of several things required if deterrence is to be justified. armed with Lackey, MM, �23 probability of war concerns the continuing shifts in US policy, especially the renewed quest for superiority which is increasing the incentive of both sides to resort to nuclear war, the USSR to avoid being of advantage the overwhelmed, USA to take superiority achieved.3? Recent dangerous shifts in US policy the towards war fighting are in part induced by a much increased accuracy of nuclear missiles, which both weakens the case for MAD deterrence (since military targets can be selected for strike and cities to some extent removed as thereby also weakens against case the resort to leaders, and even some nuclear shared understanding, mutual principles, and cooperation Finally, level judgement among information of and important) of soundness transmission war. nuclear deterrence requires a certain (admittedly rather minimal, yet of hostages), between It is not just that the increasing numbers of operators super-states. in a position to launch nuclear weapons must remain of "sound mind" and not, for through on delusions of one sort or another. follow instance, deterrence depends upon judgements seriously mistaken: 'each is regarding other the It is also that which side, side's is to the other' (PL, p.313). threat we But think'.38 about what the other considerable, and perhaps catastrophic, margin of evidence, that one perception of what is possible result As side thinks side error. Not thinks, there only not can be a is there side (the USA) has misjudged the other side's (the USSR's) rational, as regards limited nuclear war, of a first strike countered by massive retaliation; must now be severe doubts effectively. "convincing" There is a grain of truth in the claim that 'deterrence is primarily about what the other what be at the mercy of the other's perception of what strategy is "rational", what kind of damage is "unacceptable", how one may as to whether rational principles are with the but there operating to the last consider, to take just one example, the erroneous 37. The point is discussed in Dahlitz, e.g. p.213, where the US quest for superiority is documented. The vicissitudes of US "defence" policy - not to say its shiftiness and occasional incoherence (as in strategic forward defence) - have confused many of its supporters even. Perhaps there is some advantage in the very incomplete and limited exposure of USSR war and imperial policies: we don't see, with alarm, their incoherence and irrationality. 38. Pym, quoted in Thompson, p.19. Yet a fundamental problem Russia and the West face, it is sometimes claimed, is not merely that they do not understand one another but that 'there is a lack of a wish to understand'. This casts into doubt the psychological basis of nuclear deterrence. �idea (already alluded to, as held in high places of power in USA and in UK) that LSN war can be survived in rudimentary shelters, and also won. The supporter of deterrence connecting such principles has not defeat to only arguments Cl, but, more difficult, to field a convincing as For the onus of proof lies in showing that the costly rival case. deterrence is justified. through practice of But far from the fairly decisive case that is required (to contrast with the argument through Cl), feeble a only through case the questionable obverse of Cl, Clt. If X is wrong then it is right to reduce the probability of X, For it has to be shown that appears open. * deterrence (substantially) reduces the probability of LSN war, and strictly (this indicates part of the trouble with Clt) that * deterrence does this better (more morally) than available options. The latter uniqueness condition certainly fails, so it will be argued. reasons already given, does the probability claim. up the very conditions probability of such for a LSN an war, it So, for When nuclear deterrence sets can hardly reduced have the war, especially over the situation a mere 25 years ago when such an LSN war was not technically possible. More generally, in showing that nuclear deterrence is justified, it is refute the theme that deterrence is wrong. enough to out that deterrence is permissible, or alright. alternative permissible courses action of deterrence, which appear more morally satisfactory. uniqueness condition has to be established; to be not merely alright, but right. But It is not enough to make For there certainly seem to without not be the costs or problems of To surpass these options, a nuclear deterrence has to be shown establishing such a claim, to fear or acceptable evidential standards, is virtually impossible.39 Deterrence consists in preventing something (often some wrong) by threats including fright OED)**°. (cf. For most people, portraying the horror of LSN wars would serve adequately enough from 39. LSN wars, without all the enormous expense, trouble vivid scenarios to deter them and wastage of An analogous point will appear when it is asked whether deterrence is the way out of the nuclear fix, the thing to persist with in the circumstances. Given that there are apparently superior, less dangerous procedures, the answer has to be, No. �25 preparing to engage in them. deterrence And deterrence by such means (which in any case depends upon) is of course not immoral. military (Schell was not immoral in publishing his graphic descriptions of the nuclear destruction of New York.) But though deterrence per se is permissible, nuclear deterrence, that is deterrence by complete preparation for the object to be prevented, is not, where this object, a war, itself is not permissible. LSN The argument for this is through the principle If X is wrong then complete preparation for (carrying out) X is wrong. C2. Hence since preparation, LSN wars nuclear are wrong and nuclear deterrence deterrence of LSN wars is wrong. claimed that preparing for X is just as bad as doing X: wrong and Z (much) worse than Y. complete It is not however being Y and may Z both What is wrong is by no means uniformly evil In 1945 there would have been little doubt that LSN war was wrong. implies complete preparation be 41 for Among the three types of crime specified in Article 6 of the Charter for the International Military Tribunals (which tried the major war criminals at Nuremburg) were Crimes against peace: namely planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the following (cited in Kuper, p.21; italics added). But after many years of nuclear deterrence, the become increasingly liable to question. wrongness implied in C2 has However the doubts mainly come from 40. Deterrence also commonly includes elements of mendacity, deception, misinformation, that is elements of what are, for the most part, morally undesirable traits. 41. Nor are ordered because wrong, equally degrees of wrongness required: wrongs can simply be partially as regards relative worseness. The point requires some labouring it has been quite erroneously assumed that if Y and Z are both categorically or absolutely, then they must be equally "wrong" or evil. Thus, e.g. Williams: there is no moral difference between running a deterrent strategy on the one hand, and intentionally - indeed wantonly - starting a nuclear war on the other; so that the first is as totally evil as the second. This is because both are held to be absolutely forbidden. Not at all. The arguments from "Y and Z are both absolutely forbidden" to "So Y is as totally evil as Z" and to "Therefore Y and Z do not differ morally" are both entirely without validity. Compare: 2 is a number, and 3 is a number; so 2 is the same number as 3, or does not differ numerically from 3! �26 assuming that complete preparation includes less than it needs to or does. Complete preparation for something, such as several other LSN war, already writes in In particular, it presupposes the preparation is not features. half-hearted but is serious, is not merely for show and is not simply pretence. Observe that mere pretence, or other more psychological ploys, cannot substitute for complete preparation in nuclear deterrence. too sophisticated bluff for alone to there succeed: preparation for war accompanying the threats involved in the other has is now be serious to deterrence. But, on complete preparation does not imply that what is prepared for hand, will be attempted other than conditonally: imply attempted X. complete preparation for X does not It does however involve a conditional undertaking to proceed with what is prepared whether intelligence Military under for certain Complete conditions. preparation, for a wedding or murder or whatever, would be pointless otherwise, so a (proclaimed) commitment to proceed under given circumstances can for be taken of connecting granted. Principle C2 A principles. is part way not the in line a series principle of the same sort that is higher in the series is that if X is wrong then attempted X is wrong connecting X with attempted X: perhaps down as bad), whether X succeeds or not. But the series ends; off well before the lower limits of intensionality, contrary to various religious positions. then the contemplation consideration of of it cuts claims of For example, it does not follow that if X is wrong X is wrong carrying out X is wrong. or that mere non-action-oriented The point applies equally to sexual fantasies, power fantasies, and nuclear nightmares. nothing the (though In particular, there is wrong with contemplating nuclear war, or reflecting upon it, as we are: nuclear wars, even if their horrors don't bear thinking on, are not unthinkable, and in some senses are all too thinkable. Indeed one of the reasons why the connecting principles appeal is that each commonly involves it connects with. decidedly increased probability of the wrongdoing or outcome Accompanying the increased probability are certain reprehensible attitudes tied to the action the evil outcome involves; not those of mere passive contemplation*^. However all the sets of these are connecting �27 principles except Cl hold, where they do, even when the probability of invoked wrongdoing eventuating is not increased. One reason for this is that the means to reprehensible ends may be inefficacious, for instance intending to do chosen someone harm using witchcraft. The increased probability evil an of outcome simply makes things worse. announcement Nuclear deterrence involves not only war preparation, but this threats by accompanied and a threatening posture. For some party, the if potential enemy, has to be suitably frightened or moved, of deterrence succeed: the threat must be recognised as such and be credible. nuclear deterrence yields a further connecting principle: is to This aspect of If X is wrong then serious threatening of X under given conditions is also C3. or, in brief, If X is wrong then conditional threatening of X is wrong. wrong; The remaining connecting conditions invoked all take this general form CG. If X is wrong so is a conditional requires further some explanation. intension to is some intensional functor, threatening from Apart intentions that). C to 'the the most is the not are impossible or even remote or improbable: claim in what (specifically those involving commitment) for follows certain is that sorts there of discussed an conditions the conditions typically concern those specifying a nuclear strike by a potential fundamental credible functor: To remove complication it can be assumed henceforth that the involved which it is obligatory in propositional rather than event style: (or form a e.g. themselves, conditional intensions are conditional obligations where obligation - A conditional intension is a judgement of the form, ^(X if C), where of'.**3 X do enemy. The are intensional functors threatening, intending, and which CG holds, and that these versions suffice to demonstrate of Naturally again many the immorality 42. There is plenty of scope for further elaboration here. Passive spectatorship of evil events where one is in an appropriate position to make a difference is quite another thing, from contemplation of other worlds where evil occurs. 43. The conditional intension, ^(X if C), which is an intension, should not be confused with the provisional form, if C then^X, which is not. The Americans are threatening the Russians with retaliatory action if they strike: it is not that if the Russians strike the Americans will threaten them with retaliatory action. Such confusion has arisen because of the problems of formalising conditional obligation given usual defective theories of conditionality. nuclear deterrence. there are �28 non-action-oriented functors for which versions contemplation, thinking, dreaming, etc. GC of fail, of those e.g. There is also an interesting group of more borderline functors, those of hoping (for), expecting, the and awaiting like, for which CG is only dubiously correct. Connecting principle C3 evolved from the simpler principle, if X then threatening to do... into X is also wrong, or, as formulated by Ramsay: is wrong to threaten...'**** The reason is that practice (e.g. 'What is wrong putting if wrong is something committing rape) is wrong then so also is what goes into threatening to put that into practice, in particular the declared intent to that into practice. beginning as follows: The point can if worlds where alternatively X are happens be put argued semantically, excluded so then are adjacent worlds where X is poised to happen. The complication of the simple form is required for two reasons. only conditionally threatened, i.e. is should certain conditions nuclear war obtain. However the required conditional form can be derived through form, the following argument:- which is perfectly general, X if C. particular, by earlier arguments 44. so also is the simple Observe, furthermore that if something X is if it weren't it wouldn't (The converse route fails (of §§3-4) LSN opposition has struck, or not, and so wrong when it wrong, from substitute for X in the simple form, wrong, it is also wrong under restrictive conditions; have been wrong in the first place. Firstly, threatening X if C. war has. of course.) In is wrong whether the Hence, where X is More generally, to establish CG it is Ramsay's formulation of simplified C3 is considered in Walzer, p.272. It is this principle especially that forces Ramsay, a Protestant theologian who is a nuclear hawk, into the awkward position he ends in, which as Walzer explains, really leaves no room to move. For in virtue o simplified 03 it must be allowed that the threatened wars are permissible to carry out. Ramsay tries to limit these to military exchanges. But to be effective as a deterrent, the exchange permitted must both threaten a also in view of C3, not threaten nonmilitary targets, collateral non-combatant populations. It appears that Ramsay's position, if worked out, would be inconsistent. see Simplified principle C3 is also invoked by the US Catholic Bishops: PL p.316. They put the point both in terms of threat and of declared intent to use nuclear weapons, which they pronounce morally wrong. simplified C3 is rejected by Hare and Joynt (pp.106-7), who want to However the moral status of a threat by way of expected utility. This is assess all the objections to expected utility as a test of morality open to mentioned below. �29 enough to establish the simpler If X is wrong so is an intension to do X. CG'. The second complication in C3, modifying the threat to causes threat, Some modification appears required, because it is often trouble. more serious a contended that empty threats or bluff are warranted on occasion even where is wrong, to prevent the occurrence of something worse .**$ And in threatened is what fact one way of trying to vindicate deterrence, as morally permissible, has been by presenting deterrence as involving threats which do not involve any intention at all to proceed to action on plausible threats. it the support removes basis for of simplified C3. sense one that is not a pretence, empty or a bluff, but credible. says which intended, consider a For the challenge immoral grossly where case conduct under certain not and calls for moral double-think. the circumstances* result To bring this an from improbable intricate Either the threat is followed through, automatically (as ordered, by Doomsday Machine circuitry, etc.) or with further choice, or - somehow - not. is Principle C3 is not simplified and unqualified C3. is unconvincing, conditions, accident. is in effect that itis perfectly morally permissible to issue serious threats to undertake out this Hence the shift to serious A serious threat then, in the slightly technical open to thesame challenges as as Insofar threats. Either it is way the outcome is morally wrong, in the first case obviously, in the second case because the intermediate reconsideration makes it plain that the threat nor ought not to have been issued at all, being justifiable on neither moral more "practical" representatives Furthermore, grounds. natures, to the kinds of themselves to be (as Benn explains). insignificant their and may accept moral double attitudes, such as morally assenting to immoral threats, less corrupt agents cannot: moral states while proportion morally it would run counter to their principled agents they are or take For such agents, who may comprise a not of the electorate of a nuclear state, principles such as C3 are not in doubt. The argument against nuclear deterrence using C3 is as follows:- Either the 45. For a discussion of threats where the threatener has no intention of carrying out the threat, or incentive to do so, see Schelling, p.35ff. The question of the morality of these threats, where the item threatened is immoral, can be left open. �30 threat involved in deterrence is serious or it is not. is then by C3 deterrence wrong. The sub-argument depends on serious threats is a practical one: not is it inadequate, so deterrence is not maintained. is it then If serious But if it is serious nuclear that deterrence namely, that if the threats were not serious, but merely gave the impression that they would be followed through, then would find out, in one way or another. opposition the could not be endorsed in an open or democratic political A policy of bluff system, for example, gaining some discussion, and so giving the game away to the opposition. without Even in closed non-democratic systems maintaining a such policy weapons, especially during there the down of times would be major difficulties in chains of command involved with nuclear in change governing elites, and the opposition intelligence. But then, since the bluff could be called, deterrence would not have succeeded. There are as likely would information through escape well other arguments that the threats involved must be serious. One is that nuclear deterrence already faces a credibility problem, namely that doubts about the rationality of carrying out the big nuclear threat weaken the credibility essential to its effectiveness. To be effective then it must serious be (cf. Benn). Meeting objections to principle C3 leads on to two further versions of one centred on intention, one on commitment. CG, Principle C3 is intimately linked with, and it sometimes considered but a variant upon, the principle C4. If X is wrong then to conditionally intend to do X [knowing it is wrong] is also wrong. The principles are intimately associated because a threat is, according to dictionaries, etc.'. of 'a declaration of intent to inflict punishment, loss, injury, It is their interconnection which lies at the bottom of which deterrence, intending to go to war. principle, that turn C4 is some paradoxes on the problem of credibly threatening war without Principle 04 is justified through the simplified intending to do wrong is wrong, and so also is intending to do wrong unless favourable circumstances for one's principle some an extremely position prevail. Simplified widely assumed moral thesis,*^ perhaps for the excellent reason that it holds analytically. Its elaboration C4 can be used to �31 since proceeding to LSN war when against nuclear deterrence, as follows: argue the enemy duly misbehaves is wrong (by §§3-4), by C4, intending to go to LSN war the enemy duly misbehaves is also wrong. when Nuclear deterrence involves such Hence an intention, all the available evidence shows. deterrence nuclear is wrong. But like virtually every utilitarian themselves, principles utilitarian grounds. deontic principle, principles For it is not difficult to those except from flowing C3 and C4 can be challenged on outline strategic situations where maximum expected utility results from a policy of nuclear deterrence. But on its own this concession casts but little doubt upon C4. For it likewise is not principles difficult to outline situations where the hanging of innocent people, or other injustices, are sanctioned or enjoined by maximum expected and C3 utility. pursuit Those who appeal to utilitarian assumptions try to avoid such more obvious difficulties with reliance upon utilitarianism, scrapping the spots not by doctrine, but by hedging applications of their principles around with qualifications, which, they hope, will trouble of with utilitarianism. enable it So them evade to the worst is with Kavka, whose work nicely illustrates that whatever (little) deterrence has in its moral favour depends upon utilitarian assumptions. Kavka 'begin[s] by noting that any reasonable system of substantial utilitarian elements' (PD, p.287). Even observation were correct — it is not, depending for one consequential elements systems include must infiltrate, an with the 'assumption if thing ethics this upon must have astonishing conflating utilitarian - it would not follow that reasonable particular that assumption produces normative assumption involved is that the act Kavka thereupon tries the paradoxes of deterrence'. with maximum expected to The utility '(the most useful act) should be performed whenever a very great deal of utility 46. Kavka, who labels simplified C4 the Wrongful Intentions Principle (PD, p.289), attributes the principle to Abelard, Aquinas, Butler, Bentham, Kant, Sidgwick, Kenny and Narveson. Kavka also gives reasons as to why the principle appears 'so obviously true'. Kenny and others apply C4 to argue, like the US Catholic Bishops, that 'nuclear deterrence is immoral' (cf. Kavka p.291). It is the clash of C4 with certain utilitarian principles (especially the maximisation principle of p.287) that directly generates Kavka's first paradox of deterrence and lies behind his other "paradoxes": see PD. �32 is at stake' (p.287). objections This assumption is open to essentially the same batch utilitarianism as it is mainly a matter of increasing or itself: varying the stakes involved sufficiently in any counterexample. strategy usual of Kavka tries the weakening and fudging the normative assumption to avoid the of worst problems of distributive injustice, and the like, that maximising utility can morally enjoin. But the crucial defect in Kavka's argument lies follow normative the from overridden supposed to assumptions utilitarian by way, as if it dominated C4 (see especially p.290), what C4 is Though Kavka tends to apply the fudged normative assumptions in this (p.287).**? and what assumption however fudged, namely that 'this means other moral assumptions are that ... in when produce, situations, are moral combined situations in dilemmas. These are the cases assumption special as such not fudged deterrent one where deontic principle, that yielded by utilitarianism, overrides others, but where there are competing, even contradictory deontic principles, such as that it is right to to proceed to LSN war when the enemy misbehaves (on specious utilitarian intend grounds) and also wrong to intend to do so (by C4). that judgement is not overriden. wrong: remains Nuclear deterrence Nor does it in any way follow that C4 is in need of qualification as a result (Kavka's assumption, p.290). situations, However, there are countervailing utilitarian considerations suggesting different imperatives. For what is in these is wrong. the also case is that these in special special circumstances a greater utility can be realised by doing what However it is hardly news, but a objection, standing that utilitarianism sometimes enjoins what is wrong. Special sponsonship deterrent may appear situations, where under utilitarian to get a foot in the moral door, are very special. characterised by Kavka, they are such that the 47 deterrence deterrence is very likely As to Lackey's utilitarian approach rests on a similar fallacy, that utilitarian considerations predominate where stakes are large enough: see his argument for the approach in MM p.192. What happens is not that important consequences override moral principles, but that application of one principle with important consequences conflicts with that of another principle with less significant consequences, and in the weigh-up of what to do in the problematic circumstances the principle with important consequence prevails. �33 succeed, and nothing else is likely to succeed (see p.286), i.e. is deterrence This is very far removed from the real world lodged in a deep probability-well. situation where nuclear deterrence appears to be increasing the probability of LSN war, and where other procedures such as graduated nuclear disarmament are at least as likely to succeed as deterrence. that principles deontic Even if it were supposed mistakenly to real-life dilemmas should be qualified to subject avoid dilemmas, there is little point in qualifying working deontic principles such as C4, given the remoteness of the special deterrent situations. Instead of pulling nuclear deterrence down though the immoral intentions it involves, it can be criticized more broadly through the commitments it requires, by way of the following principle: If X is wrong then a conditional commitment to carry out X is also wrong. C5. The reason is that the commitment is a commitment and circumstances; that commitment is to act in wrongly certain Nuclear deterrence is itself wrong. however a policy which commits states to war under certain conditions. with conditional intention, that superstates and and commitment controlling to use representatives nuclear weapons. not did occur) is to enough establish have relevant the The dangerous strategy of launch-on-warning (which could, for instance, result in a that as so with conditional commitment, there is no doubt their intention And response to attacks the point, for which there is otherwise quite sufficient factual evidence. are Now the connecting principles suffice but logically, nuclear deterrence, for weighty case. instance conditional commitment to LSN war, is wrong. This one principle would By detachment from the by complete preparation for and Deterrence of this type is wrong. also reveals why the suggestion, that the morality of the whole deterrence trip depended on war itself never occurring, was so paradoxical: deterrence. itself sound when all are liable to be disputed, several defensible ones, ideally in concert, make for a principles applied: it out the connections between and not be engaged in (unless its has appeared nuclear war and nuclear Nuclear deterrence should not be practised given that should changed, e.g. left bizarre nuclear war direction can be drastically at least limited, per impossibile in the case of nuclear warfare, �34 to purely military targets). The arguments through connecting principles, can be reinforced by different sorts arguments against the moral correctness of nuclear deterrence. of There are arguments from limited convergence of ethical theories, which start from the commonplace observation that All the ethical arguments in * favour of nuclear deterrence broadly are utilitarian. In fact most of the arguments in favour of deterrence, including many that infiltrated have the ethical literature, are of those generally drawn from game theory, and primarily interested in the one player, the USA. Utilitarianism, though still looking of those expediency advantage of basically at advantages, interests and (typically individual) utilities, has to take a partisan pain of position, and forfeiting its claim to morality supported by other consider nationalities otherwise. The as well, commonplace on less observation is the fact that such qualified moral support as deterrence obtains, derives from utilitarianism. 48 There are two directions on to a general claim against deterrence, either by way of the pro-utilitarian theme * Utilitarianism properly applied also comes out against deterrence or, more strongly, by way of the anti-utilitarian theme, * Utilitarianism does not furnish satisfactory moral arguments. Then, by the anti-utilitarian theme, there are no satisfactory in favour direction: 48. of deterrence. moral arguments Naturally, it would be easy to strengthen the second after all it is widely thought that utilitarianism is a false, Thus the hedged utilitarian defences of Kavka and of Hare and Joynt, and Showing that cogent also within the broadly utilitarian range, of Gautier. ______ defences of nuclear deterrence have to take a utilitarian route would be a Though it is a reasonable conjecture that the much tougher enterprise. T' ' , much would depend on what was enterprise could be carried through, For certainly bizarre principles, e.g. obverses of the connecting principles, can be introduced, which afford deontological routes to deterrence. despite some backsliding by bishops, all other ethical positions; can A deontological made to speak against deterrence and its continuation, be 1___ — . connecting deontic case against deterrence, primarily the way of principles, has been argued in some detail. In the light of these principles, it is not difficult to see how cases from other ethical 2 go.. After all C4 has been defended from a wide range of positions would Af--- -1...... And stances, e.g. contractual, natural law, utilitarian even. <— �35 seriously astray, or even shabby ethical position. political which system depends in some utilitarian arguments for its policies. It hardly does measure for then a upon consensus, to rely on Yet with nuclear deterrence just that appears to be happening, with readily overturned arguments at that. For whether even utilitarianism supports deterrence depends essentially on: it how with applied; is which maximisation recipes; along with what other restrictive assumptions (such as those of a deep probability-well); are generous With sovereignty, national security, etc. or assumptions, different arguably (and superior) varying the guestimation methods, very different results upon The emerge, opposing deterrence and favouring unilateral nuclear disarmament. reason for this is straightforward (and like that ending §4). basic LSN war has an extremely large negative utility. deterrence out to recipes Any policy such It is that as nuclear which increases the probability of this, or even risks it, must lose feasible other of how for such things as preservation of national assignments utility and on a alternatives, consequentialist type whatever are initially applied (e.g. plausible decision Minimax, Dominance, Disaster Avoidance, Expected Value). The anti-utilitarian theme can be defended either by a full-scale criticism of utilitarianism, beginning for instance with its well-known justification of localised injustices, $0 or else utilitarianism when applied One obvious deficiency is this: by to addressing some of the inadequacies of issues like that at hand, nuclear deterrence. on standard utilitarianism, what to do, whether to proceed with deterrence, depends on the probability of its success and on the improbability of other options working. deep, utilitarianism If the deterrence probability-well is morally requires deterrence, otherwise not.$* But what is morally required, or wrong, does not fluctuate with what outcomes are probable. 49. The instability of utilitarianism is illustrated by the discussion involving Kavka, Lackey and Hardin, continued in Philosophy and Public Affairs 12(3), 1983, where, on the basis of utilitarianism, diametrically opposed conclusions are reached. (Hardin's approach tends however to expediency reasoning of the strategic type.) 50. Such wider criticisms of utilitarianism, in all its forms, as an ethical theory are too well-known to repeat. Some of the main defects are considered in another article in this series, 'An expensive repair kit for utilitarianism' . The point that utilitarianism gives no firm place to stand comes from L. Mirlin. �36 Whether deterrence is morally wrong or not, is likely work to independent it is are princip]gs Moral not through expected values, whether utilities or otherwise - though how determined bad some outcome is may be. are deterrence decidedly essentially nowhere whether If nuclear deterrence is wrong where it increases the or not. probability of war, then is it wrong, simpliciter. depend of upon firm to stand. Worse, since the expected utilities in the case uncertain, these of the results utilitarianism delivers and uncertainty measures, offers utilitarianism In contrast with the solid deontic ground of principle, utilitarianism provides only shifting sand. The objections made apply especially against act utilitarianism. form shows special interests, such as conditions security (the probability-well state, of estimation rules are pulled in). high have is deep, utilities, nation-state and special It does not yield a deterrence policy; indeed hardly yields policies at all (other than act utilitarianism itself). and certain other difficulties may be avoided by considering instead a of act most that nuclear deterrence is "wrong" according to its lights at under very it The acts.52 But the method lacks stability; These sequence different prescriptions will result depending upon how the sequence is selected, what is included and what left (as also associated probabilities depend critically on the sequence selected). No unequivocal recipe is delivered. selected out to To see this, suppose the sequence is include worst cases, for instance cases where deterrence fails and war breaks out. In this event it can hardly be argued that deterrence is the policy that maximizes utility over the sequence. Along with the arguments, there are dissatisfaction with nuclear deterrence. other conventional wars. for Firstly, the peace it has provided only nuclear peace, or rather lack of nuclear war, as there smaller-scale reasons concomitant is deep is shortage of no And the "peace" provided is at best a tenuous peace, which is not stable, but liable to upset at any stage by a range of 51. Though this is to oversimplify, the points made are not affected by the simplification. In any case the simplified picture reflects well enough the differences between Kavka and Lackey that matter in their debate (referred to in footnote 49). 52. Whether this is rule utilitarianism, or still act utilitarianism the sequence can be construed as one long act, may be left open. because �37 factors, including error, both human and technical. It does not genuine offer of the sort required for a stable international life, but only a fragile Peace, peace of a sort opportunity is enormous the cost, moral cost of deterrence, because expenditure on it excludes other urgent moral priorities. way, Marxist Secondly, there (PL, p.316). in The US Bishops put this familiar terms of 'the destructive capacity and what is for in between contradiction needed point, spent is what constructive surprisingly a for (PL, development' p.316). §6 - Practical, prudential and more moral arguments from dangers national nuclear build-up of the superstates, and the genesis of nuclear dilemmas. to While there are arguments to the immorality of nuclear war preparation, there are also counter-arguments, that have Americans), to the moral proved justifiability persuasive remarkably of nuclear war (especially preparation in to the present circumstances . The underlying style of argument is simply an elaboration, or state-uplift, of that for the escalation of weapons at the local level, for acquiring a gun or for stocking-up the neighbourhood armoury - and every bit argument from local dangers. and domination; dubious first of all second of nuclear destruction. atomic surrender and so avoid the destruction' (Walzer, p.273). preparation is supposed to guard against more than these; third element, namely, loss of basic rights there with these. blackmail of foreign appeasement In fact nuclear is a crucial of ways life This further set of elements is linked to the danger of foreign domination - which is really a separate element from risk of Though and (freedom, equality, etc.) and fundamental values (upholding of truth, human dignity, etc.) and integrated that The two go together, since if we did not fear the blackmail, we might adopt a policy or as It is that nuclear preparation, 'so we have been told, guards against the double danger: foreign as blackmail. domination need not imply the loss of most basic values it does imply the loss of at least of one, self-determination, freedom to choose various national objectives; conversely loss or erosion or infringement of basic values can occur without foreign domination, for instance, as is commonplace in the �38 "free" world, by internal change of government or governmental approach, through the increased security and control a nuclear risks, increasingly preparation state nuclear demands, But etc. what nuclear destruction, also extensive involves loss of basic rights and values, through destruction of the material of the cherished life-style.^ So nuclear preparation is hardly a clearcut base means of guaranteeing basic values.5^ In other respects too the argument from loss of lacks cogency rings and It hollow. is basic values and rights hard to avoid the feeling that the oft-appealed-to basic values often function as something of a front, like citation values at political ceremonies; religious of clean cover for economic consideration of one sort demands from of of wealth private appealed to category: in and them to having arising with do the an argument isn't, or However associations. And rights the and But not all the values commonly appealed to fall into particular nationalistic ones do not. And one of the main alleged values of deterrence, the resistance to and containment or many another, are, mostly, of the utmost importance, indeed fundamental, and worth much sacrifice. this of power. and oughtn't to be, defeated by its unsavoury values that the argument is a military-industrial complex, many concerned with foreign the domination of other lesser states, and many concentration pious "communism" of of "socialism", can hardly be accounted fundamental, any more than retention of capitalism. communism has happened What has been here with confused of (the totalitarianism, which does remove certain more freedoms (of opinion, association, is course that reality basic information, of) values, etc., (the ideal of) socialist state namely certain and so does etc.), derivatively threaten basic values. One critical question, then, is whether extensive nuclear LSN war, and indeed for rational way of preserving nuclear those holocaust, fundamenmtal preparation for is a good or effective or even values, which we have left. 53. The converse obviously does not hold. Basic values and cherished life-style can be lost without nuclear destruction, or nuclear preparation, as when a more powerful state imposes its values and way of life. 54. The argument from freedom, advanced by Jaspers and repeatedly rolled out by state representatives, is further considered early in Appendix 1. �39 arise Similar questions and domination as regards arguments the preparation depends essentially on an arrangement of hostile structure which itself is open questioned (in §8), both from the serious to question, view of point foreign of danger of the methods of extensive nuclear Justification blackmail. from and basic of states, nation a is subsequently values, such as freedom, and otherwise. But whether ultimately justified or dangers not, these national those that have been taken to morally underwrite extensive nuclear are preparation, and have They justification. been accepted outlook. moral by policy Within particular, that extensive nuclear the as affording moral arguments preparation do not such Northern conventional a It is within such a framework, in framework the moral justification holds good. however, makers fact been widely accepted, and undoubtedly form in have part of many people's others, from arguments engenders establish moral a fix. For the morality of extensive nuclear preparation, but only make a prudential case for such preparation. people face a nuclear dilemma, but, though evaluative in character, it is also not a specifically moral one. And for many others and their respective rights and freedoms, there is no serious dilemma. people who not are who again, so or as familiar with Soviet and American culture and ways of life, by impressed Such beyond live For such the "beneficial" reach of the superstates, prudential counter-arguments from national dangers carry little weight, and the moral case against deterrence is not offset but stands unchallenged. This is the genesis of the argument from isolated people who Consider some a comparatively remote area, whose freedoms are not (yet) in live people. under threat from superpower expansionism, but whose lifestyle is put at risk by nuclear (as under principle Cl). deterrence For such isolated people, who may have little interest in the preservation of nuclear states, there is no nuclear dilemma, and nuclear locations may have problems to national is wrong. dangers, People in less fortunate but in meeting these they are not entitled to impose grave risks on the uninvolved isolated problems people. as deterrence genuine In doing so immorally; and for through similar nuclear reasons deterrence, superstates the are proceeding conventional Northern framework is �40 The same conclusion can be alternatively reached impugned. argument: a put isolated person, and check the resulting substitution Russian in the position of such an or American reflective a by assessment of nuclear deterrence. it would be the same as that of a reflective isolated person, stripped of Since superstate bias, morally opposed to deterrence and not morally transfixed, the conventional framework fails to satisfy requirements of morality. The outcome of the arguments from dangers is, then,very different depending on the whether are arguments applied regards a superstate or not. as The superstate theme which emerges is, in brief, SST. Because of multiple connected dangers from other states which have nuclear weapons, a state - any state that is too large to rely upon other states - is obliged to invest in at least matching nuclear weapons. Hence, by detachment, a super-nation-state, such as USA, ought to have something in the the nuclear armoury that it has. of order meet objections concerning excess, a least at retain Or, weakening the theme to "overkill" capacity, it core of the nuclear devices it has. solid [morally] ought to For subsequent argument it can be left open whether the obligation involved is a moral one, for instance of because the character of the protected, or only (as argued above) one of to grounds supporting those against disarmament a the SS reason $5. prudential theme nuclear dangerous Northern values supposedly being on similar it can be argued that unilateral opponent would be prudentially irrational. It will be freely admitted that what is prudentially or morally required is a suboptimal strategy, like the familiar strategies of the prisoners' dilemma situations and of certain related competitive games. that like could be achieved, would agreement would be cooperative draining of For such resources, the details are well-enough known. future 55. admitted arrangements. Cooperation and be better not merely in removing the nuclear dilemma, but in a range of other respects. expensive, be strategy for nuclear adversaries, if sufficient trust and the superior a So it should arrangements would be much less risky, destructive of the environment, and so on; However for the present and the foreseeable the prospects of cooperation appear - so we are repeatedly told by state It can still, and presumably does, amount to more than mere expediency, since the 'freedom of Europe' is part of what is at issue. local �41 representatives, who are (not always wittingly) helping to make true - unfortunately rather remote: only the policies their sure insurance is extensive nuclear preparation and full preparedness to apply nuclear force. At least this is so where one is a superstate: proceed, largely unabated. nuclear preparation Where one is not a superstate, but a lesser state one must, the representatives continue, rely on a larger ally who has a arsenal, one's nuclear preparation, one under huddles and which contrasts the lack of trust displayed, and encouraged elsewhere. Does a state, one which relies for its nuclear cover on a super-ally, ground for another's But here a level of trust and cooperation is^ called for, by umbrella. dependent states, which is far from foolproof, with nuclear insurance (which is presumably not free) is obtained indirectly through some superstate's nuclear confidence in its rather super-ally strangely dependent have exchange on its territory? much that its ally's opponent? than Confidence, for instance, that its ally will not render it a target or nuclear must stage a Given the proclivity of states, especially large states, to resort to expediency, and given the recent historical record of superstates and their leaders, too much faith would.be misplaced. Thus, whatever the limited force of the argument for the superstate it does theme, not extend to the analogous theme for a dependent state, which differs from SST and ends as follows: DST. Because ..., a state without adequate (or any) nuclear weapons is obliged to rely upon a superstate ally, and within that arrangement, to accommodate the facilities and nuclear installations of the protecting ally. In part for reasons already given, principle DST is not very plausible (and same goes for more obvious variants upon it). Nor do the arguments offered for SST transpose particularly well to direct arguments strikingly illustrated by the case the for DST.56 This is more of more remote nuclear dependent states. Consider the argument from basic values, for instance, from the angle of nuclear dependent Australia. Basic values in Australia are not threatened by, or put in jeopardy through, the actions or plans of the Soviet Union. Nor are they threatened by the other superstate, the USA, the only country with 'the physical 56. As is widely known, inadmissible and usually much overrated considerations of expediency frequently enter into reasons why states allow foreign nuclear facilities upon their territories, e.g. economic considerations such as trade or local revenue and short-term jobs. �42 capacity to launch a full scale invasion of Australia', but 'clearly lack[ing] motive to do so', so far.5? Clearly the argument from basic values does not any look convincing. carries reasons For similar In weight. little the with fact, from argument little care, the present level of a economic and political domination could be much reduced. of force For there only is questionable of because danger such superstate In this way too, nuclear umbrella, and facilities superstate the that would be removed with danger non-aligned practices.$8 With less remote dependent European states these of the from danger of nuclear destruction could be nullified. argument the domination foreign sorts arguments from national dangers are only marginally more convincing, and may be defeated along analogous lines. The differences in the situations of states, and peoples, break the theme of a of situated differently This is a theme especially monolithic West. favoured by US and the West European representatives, who present the West, its freedom, as threatened by Soviet domination. undifferentiated unit. dependent states with But this leading idea, NATO designed powers, and In this the West is a single in part to align lesser to justify putting them at and nuclear risk is as much a myth as the idea of the Golden West. not The West is so monolithic, it is not so comprehensive, some of it is not so free, much of it (including the Antipodes) is not threatened by Soviet domination. Principle DST - likewise what it depends upon, SST - is now under coming attack by European disarmament groups, who challenge the core assumptions of the underlying retaliatory model that * Safety lies in weapons, * More weapons imply more securityS9. Certainly, for more isolated states, such as New Zealand, safety from nuclear attack lies not in weapons but in excluding nuclear facilities (including visits from nuclear submarines). present system is more Europeans are arguing in of a similar way, that the a risk, indeed liability, than a protection (e.g. 57. For the quoted claim, and some of the Australia's Security, p.94. 58. The issue is further pursued in Appendix 2. 59. See, for example, the last article in Thompson. argument for it, see Threats to �43 envisaged the and that without nuclear installations, Europe cannot be Thompson, p.251); theatre limited nuclear war, in the way it is now seen by US a for (but not Soviet) strategists. Once the weapons assumptions are questioned, other the assumptions of and its variants come up for examination, namely retaliatory model * Whether the proper response to danger is armament, in particular , Whether the proper response is through nuclear armament, asopposed, say, to other military responses, such as conventional arms, or, taking off from the previous point, Whether military approaches and procedures (through * are proper methods, etc.) armaments, or should be such dominant methods, of conflict resolution at the international level. It is plausibly argued, against military procedures, that at no level ordinary do we sensibly set about meeting danger or settling disputes by acquiring lethal weapons and threatening to use them - except perhaps on an out-dated, and really frontier warranted, ethics. This leads into the issue of alternative defence systems, a vital matter beginning to obtain the contemporary6° and explanation it deserves, questioning of the framework of but never one that nation-states. already While emphasis anticipates subsequent the state system is intact, force is far from exceptional and military procedures are to be expected and are likely inevitable. nation-state system': For 'force has [a] ... permanent place the in thus Ramsay (on p.xv), who uses this as part of his very orthodox case for nuclear war arrangements. §7. The resulting nuclear dilemmas for aligned states Assembling referred the to as themes the so far nuclear developed fix:- States war-deterrence, because (as argued in §3-§5) to engage in war-deterrence, at least 60. the yields both and__ their—supporter^. deontic dilemma, often ought not for prudential reasons (as conversion to such arrangements. engage in it is immoral, and also ought Alternative defence systems were considered long ago in Mohists. For contemporary work on alternative systems, see survey in Sharp. There is in fact a considerable literature and social defence arrangements, and a growing literature on i.e. to argued using China by the especially the on non-violent transarmament, �44 SST and DST). the This dilemma is no idle construction paraconsistent of virtues but logic), (concocted to demonstrate a serious real-life dilemma, the outlines of which are repeatedly encountered in texts on nuclear and war its aspects 61, as well as being virtually ubiquitous in nuclear war discussions. The nuclear fix is in part simply a more intense dilemma produced by the deontic war itself &2, or at least war which spreads beyond purely military targets, as larger wars inevitably do (since military arrangements, The main dilemma arises rail transport, typically rely on civilian ones). e.g. of version from a combination of the retaliatory model with the features of War war. is required for defence of the state and values it upholds (or pretends to uphold); but war also involves immoral acts and evil consequences. can war" under certain justified. be also seen as attempting a reconciliation by trying to show that circumstances Thus 'some these really justifications evil consequences aegis of war' (Walls, p.260). acceptable than fallacious asymptotic are morally of war aim to show that actions deemed normally forbidden by moral mandates are now permissible the The doctrine of "just But this arguments when under performed is no better or more morally for utilitarianism being as correct when the stakes are large. War and preparedness for 61. war also generate subsidiary dilemmas - for Thus Green, along with many others, 'find[s] nuclear deterrence ... the best of practical policies available to us now ... given the realities of world politics' but 'still demur[s] because of moral qualms' (p.xii). Green also represents both Morgenthau and Halle as having 'rather agonisingly presented a ... case for a deterrence strategy, even while asserting that the strategy is morally indefensible according to the traditional ethical codes' (p.252). Walzer ends in a similar dilemma (he is committed to a stronger and less qualified form of it than he sets down): '... though it [deterrence] is a bad way, there may well be no other that is practical in a world of sovereign and suspicious states' (p.274) - an indictment of the state system that Walzer does not pursue. Similarly the US Catholic Bishops dilemma; they speak of 'the dilemma of how to prevent the use Paskins and Dockrill and in Benn terms of moral dilemmas. present the situation in terms of a moral political paradox of deterrence ... the of nuclear weapons ...' (PL, p.313). In too the nuclear situation is presented in The nuclear dilemma is of course not a dilemma for everyone, for those who think they have seen the clear admissibility of deterrence, or differently for those who have seen through the arguments from national dangers. But it is a dilemma for those locked into the conventional framework. 62. Situations in war are also a major source of moral dilemmas: see Routley and Plumwood where several examples are given. A general logical account of and theory of moral dilemmas is elaborated therein. �45 authority: instance, a severe tension between freedom and difficult 'one of most the of war involves defending a free society without destroying problems p.324). the values that give it meaning and validity' (PL, The problems are greatly enhanced by modern nuclear arrangements. The nuclear fix not only intensifies and complicates other dilemmas induced by the contemporary sovereign state^^, in particular the deep tensions between national security and the operation of liberal-democratic arrangements (such individual liberty, popular control of institutions, etc). other more personal subsidiary dilemmas, as for (political) obligations to example question (the It also accentuates the extent one's of a nuclear state, and role-induced dilemmas such as one's conflicting obligations as a doctor or a nuclear researcher as of political obligations armaments and their processor or evasion is considered further in Appendix 2). At the more personal level, that of individual and group action, there several questions be disentangled - questions different from the key issue to 'What should my state be doing and influence, depending on who one is. do?', on which one may exert lives, and influences, i.e. in what little There is not only the question 'What should I do?' - a question which will have a quite different force depending one are on where sort of state, where one works, what one controls or on who one is and one's roles - but also the questions 'What sort of person do I want to be?', 'What am I prepared to answer for morally?'^" Answers to these latter character questions will feed back to influence those to action-oriented questions. Each of those questions can, in given situations, induce subsidiary dilemmas. The essential feature of a deontic dilemma is that both A and the of A are wrong (or differently, pursuing a nuclear defence policy. obligatory), negation for some suitable A, such as The place and essential role of deontic and 63. The nuclear dilemma is not alone responsible for these other dilemmas. Large-scale nuclear power generation, and other types of warfare and security arrangements, also contribute. But a conflict of ree om a authority is already an outcome of the large central state. 64. For group formulation of the questions replace 'I' by 'my group', etc. The importance of distilling out these questions, and the moral undesirability of deterrence in terms of what it does to people morally, are brought out in Benn, where however the issues are made to look somewhat more separate than they are. �46 moral dilemmas are not widely well or particularly understood, ethical in This is partly because currently dominant ethical positions like literature^^. utilitarianism cannot at all easily accommodate moral dilemmas or the data which gives to rise them then such positions do not really offer reportive but - accounts of wrong and obligation anyway. Contrary to utilitarian perceptions a dilemma does not necessarily have any moral solution, though there may be better and worse ways out. By assessments, form which contrast the with ethical such preanalytical theories, of sensitive theories, do recognise moral basis dilemmas and reflect their features. Reactions and responses that are characteristic of deontic dilemmas the from There is an unsteadiness, an uncertainty as to what to fix. nuclear do, which way to proceed, which principles in watered-down form to temporary crutch. for Thus, as way a of never exercising "morally our world'66, that is in a morally-strapped world. best" ethical Bishops who the of A similar 'strictly conditional' Deterrence has a strictly temporary role the object must and deterrence circumstances. deterrence, is "morally in a fallen acceptability' certainly one strictly wrong, is of from the conditional option as to of what nuclear the to do nevertheless the policy to fix. awkward in Thus Walzer, for example, struggles to the conclusion though "second a to be to move beyond deterrence, 'towards a world free of the threat of deterrence' (PL, p.317), out And be try to escape 'the paradox of deterrence', i.e. moral fix. but shift 'moral while acceptability, can good", responsibility moral deterrence we a (as from good to acceptable) is made by the US Catholic functor speak as grasp example, the Bishop of London contends that the possession of nuclear weapons 'while acceptable" emerge that war in the pursue circumstances (p.274).6? However as more than an immediate stepping stone to a 65. There are exceptions of course, e.g. in the Catholic educated such as Sartre; and Nagel's final example is very instructive. For a fuller theory of moral dilemmas see however Routley and Plumwood. 66. Reported in The Economist; reprinted in 1983, Weekend Magazine p.2. 67. As a response to a moral dilemma, Walzer's approach is perfectly in order logically. Those who, like Benn, 'find it neither coherent nor acceptable' The have not grasped the logic of moral dilemmas. Australian, February 12-13 �47 superior it policy, (in assembled is reasons §5-§6), of option, poor decidedly a the sort reasons for are that decisive for those, outside the conventional Northern framework, who find sufficiently already no genuine of nuclear nuclear dilemma. To make matters worse the nuclear fix is, furthermore, own making. states' a fix It is not something they blundered into, by accident. initial nuclear involvement was deliberately chosen, primarily by the the the USA and the USSR in interaction. and In these respects the situation is like people who deliberately let themselves be involved in two incompatible of relationships, and build up conflicting obligations though USA, has by and large also been deliberately chosen, again mainly by escalation that The build-up, in North America occurred on a defensive basis in response nuclear to Soviet The fact is that the USA initiated nuclear armament, and has build-up. frequently led escalation, and apparently still does. programme is to be in addition to existing resources myth, a is some currency, that adoption of nuclear weaponry, and nuclear with one It thereby. are (which agreed generally The recent (1980) United States' strategic be already in excess of to Russia's, and which always have been so) (Thompson, p.21). The present dilemma, that many people feel acutely, is then a direct outcome state policy, allies, and Naturally not the USSR policies. that indicates especially a merely route by taken advanced response to capitalist the USA and its NATO nations, Soviets (or of socialism). state would not have been feasible without complementing And independent evidence, such as Soviet-Sino confrontation, is a strong internal military dynamic in state socialist there nations. There is a two-way connection between world political arrangements nation-states the and nuclear fix. arrangements are an evident source of the nuclear situation is increasingly present world political structure. is widely promulgated arrangements: it is '... seen On the dilemma as one hand, with the these result through political that the indicating the inadequacy of the Indeed it is no longer a radical theme but that the source of the nuclear problem comes from state a world of sovereign states ... which brought the �48 world the present dangerous situation' (PL, p.313). to nuclear fix tends to lock political arrangements into On the other hand, the the statist form, into The arrangements of an increasingly authoritarian and centralist cast. statist espoused purpose of nuclear weapons may be to keep the national defend to and security, interests, reasons such as perpetuating the system state advantageous confrontation, and provide to but underneath there are other sovereign of (!), peace and states of framework the military-industrial interests, dependent state exploitation, and politically favoured inequality it supports. The emerging theme is then that the very nuclear situation arising from the statist and arrangements interrelations (economic ideologies, etc.) tends to, and is used to, lock arrangements of states and zones of interest. sovereign theme is a piecemeal practical one. where side the pattern world the conflicting rivalries, into the present The argument to this Consider first, the matter from the Soviet of national control and progressive military-economic reorientation common to all nuclear states is clearer. The threat from the West, whether it exists or not (and in Soviet perception it certainly does), has become a necessary legitimation for the power of the ruling elites, an excuse for their many economic and social failures, and an argument to isolate and silence critics within their own borders. In the West we have ... carefully controlled ... and selective release of 'official information' (Thompson, p.20). "We" in the West, especially the Americans, also integrated with state apparatus, have, in forms increasingly the military-industrial complex, which is a major beneficiary and promoter of the nuclear arms race.68 Secondly, there is evidence of entrenchment of the arrangements, by things such as the SALT negotiations; there are fixed superpowers and a (growing) nuclear club of nations all governed by a rules, partly held in place by deterrence. shown as flimsy negotiated set Connected with this, there are cases revealing the fixing of zones of interest, such as the Afghanistan example. Soviet US is 68. of The invasion is not regarded as threatening US "vital interests", and so the not overduly worried about Afghanistan and its people. What was The role of the military-industrial complex in present US escalation is sketched in Cox. Marxists, with their dogma of economic determinism, would assign even more weight to this point. As some of them would freely concede, a similar complex has figured prominently in USSR escalation. �49 different, what it was worried about and made nuclear threats adjacent Western oil supplies: were concerning, these lay within the US zone of interest (cf. the discussion in Schell, p.212). §8. initial political fall-out from the ethical Ways out of nuclear dilemmas: Virtually all the ways are ways of limitation, and they all involve in results. one way or another limitations on nuclear arms or the way they are deployed, and limitations the on thus inevitable. and more powers of states. Limitations on national sovereignty are The limitations may be reached by agreement and negotiation, less voluntarily agreed to^^, or they may be imposed, or possibly or worst of all, they may emerge from an initial war. As with other fixes produced by are there suggested the structural arrangements of states, out which do not interfere with these arrangements, ways interstate approaches, and there are ways which do seriously alter the structure and power relations extrastate approaches. of states (and, in the limit, remove them altogether), All the familiar, allegedly practical and realistic , attempts to resolve the nuclear problem, for instance disarmament by mutual arms limitations, etc., are interstate; sovereign state. The same goes (graduated) unilateral disarmament. about the nation-state; they do not tamper with that sacred cow, the for less "realistic" But in fact there is proposals, nothing or empirical fact, is it particularly a stable one. nor, and its replacement by alternative arrangements. as a We are certainly free - in more liberal states, it should be everywhere - to theorise as demise sacred it is not a particularly well justified political form; it is not even a very long-standing form of political arrangement; matter very such as to its And nuclear dilemmas should have encouraged such reflection. 69. In principle it would be relatively easy for states to agree to settlement of their disputes by less damaging and expensive contests than military ones, e.g. by contests of selected representatives, and not just through fighting in some form, but by contests of footballers, singers, dancers, lawyers, or etc. In practice, however, such more civilized alternatives are never much considered in these days of superstates. Animals, by contrast, are smart enough to settle disputes by means much more like these. Even the ancient Greeks - though they had a clear appreciation of limits, which has been lost by post-Enlightenment leaders - regarded the institution of war as final (allegedly inevitable) means of arbitration between city-states, not seeing its social, structurally-emergent, character. �50 Extrastate approaches take one of international of states. routes, the way up, to genuine power, or the way down, through fractionation or deunionisation The ways up and down are by no means one and the same; but they are Some of the important machinery, for a way up to necessarily incompatible. not two world government,is already there in the international Were law-courts. the courts assigned sufficient authority and power, the remedy, namely through legal action, that medieval theorists saw all to intrastate and T superseded by the just case of S versus T. sufficient war deterrence, though Law courts, as usually conceived, are not equivalent super—statist But if the law courts were power then their authority and efficacy would likely rely (at upon least initially) their in could be extended to interstate disputes, and the just war between states S principle given disputes, back-up equivalent for of economic perhaps not by military means. effective without police and jails or and other penalties; and the either will involve the capacity to inflict quite substantial amounts of damage on "delinquents" - which, because delinquents will be typically organisations, will also involve damage to innocent, and perhaps dissenting, participants in those organisations, as well as to other In parties. uninvolved short, such an approach does not resolve the problem but tends to repeat it. The Way Up is one more statist, legalistic, authoritarian way of trying get to grips with the nuclear though mostly in passing to be 70. to problem, and accordingly is often mentioned, dismissed in orthodox strategic texts on Americans, for example, tend to forget that their state (like the USSR) is a union, of fairly recent origin, and that a differently-oriented State of the Union message could well consider dissolution of the union. Regional movements in USA unfortunately lack much popular support at present. By contrast, there are significant separation movements, some deserving aid and encouragement, which affect most other nuclear states, especially USSR, UK and France. The USSR already has trouble in holding its (supposedly voluntarily integrated) satellite empire together; and the one recent attempted addition right on its frontier is proving extremely recalcitrant. Nor should powerful political unions under centralised state apparatus be fostered elsewhere. The same applies to state empire expansion, as illustrated in contemporary Indonesia. Most important, the reunification of Germany should be resisted; instead a more rational regional deunification than the present East-West division of post-war Germany should be sought, along with removal of nuclear weapons from the border region, and so on. 71. Thus for example, Kahn, where such a "solution" is quickly dismissed as, impractical, etc. Hardly necessary to say the Way Up has won most favour with the legal fraternity, and from more authoritarian organisations. �51 the By contrast, the Way Down, though like thermonuclear war. an appearance (a comeback) in some more radical discussions, with the Way Up (in "world order" models: combined unlike the Way Down, is considered however beginning is and more much international system'; and 'the 'towards a no sometimes sympathetically There is by those who take a moral rather than strategic viewpoint. a renewed emphasis on world order, in reaching by The Way Up, Galtung). cf. be to Up but it is making new, is scarcely mentioned in the orthodox discussions; means Way integrated morally missing element of world order today is the absence of a properly constituted political authority' (PL, p.320). A main argument for the Way Up is just repetition a that of which is commonly supposed to underpin statist arrangements in the first place, namely an argument from (generous) variations upon the Prisoners' of the Commons. Tragedy traditionally, ecological order. not as best regards problems to solutions nation-states, of superstate. of organisation, and one of the prospects is destruction of a said to be some Of course, this begins to undermine an earlier application of the "tragedy" argument, since states will lose their sovereignty and some their order—imposing correspondingly weakened. arguments role, and But all obligation political this is assume to , only sound under quite restrictive assumptions. There are, then, many problems through that states will these tragedy A further theoretical with the hitch is Way Up, that a both theoretical and the Way Up merely repeats arrangements. It is contingency, of there being no rival intelligent civilisations nearby, that the problems of interstate relations are not repeated 72. be 72 statist arrangements at a level up, by way of superstate only to of good ones in the first place, when in fact they are not, but are are practical. the public order and, more recently, as to good part of the commons by nuclear war, the solution is now sort as So with the "tragedy of nation-states", where the players are but herdsmen such It is that authority and coercion - in the form of the state * are required to ensure especially, Dilemma, See further Routley and Routley and material referred to a level therein, up and especially Griffin. The real reasons for the state are of course very different from the theoretical cover such arguments afford. Among other things, the state enables and guarantees the accumulation of power, privilege and capital. �The major practical hitch is that there is no prospect at all of getting again. such a "solution" to work in time to serve its intended purpose. In reality, we are no nearer a world government than we were a century ago, .... In fact, it is even arguable that since World War II we have moved further away from a world government than we were before World War II. The disintegration of empires has multiplied sovereignties. It is true that we have something called the United Nations, but even the United Nations has declined in power as it has grown in membership. By the beginning of the 1970's the United Nations had become, in some ways, a less powerful and even less influential organisation than it was at the end of the 1950's (Mazrui, pp.2-3). For The reasons for this Mazrui goes on to outline. future foreseeable the nuclear ideological differences between states, including especially differences as to how political arrangements should be effected, exclude any prospect of an world government or a world legal system capable of resolving nuclear operative In some ways, this is just as well. hostilities. monolithic, extremely would World would government foster economism, would entrench bureaucracy with all its damaging features, and could easily tend to totalitarianism. whatever certainly, its be (gray?) colour, political exploitative economic system which would do immense impose damage It would the world an on many remaining crucial respects, to natural systems.?3 The Way Up thus presupposes an unlikely undesirable ideological, requisite of level indeed unity political cannot be economic and paradigmatic, and, separation in some Moreover, unity. of main Northern within nuclear deadlines. expected given cultures, When not even nuclear weapons limitations can be worked out, how much less likely is more much sovereignty, could blockages agreements, sweeping and be negotiated? deadlocks in the involving genuine There an way is endless (e.g. of of state series of such state reconciliation. applies to interstate arrangements, which may make limited use that it limitations almost the the of The same Way Up negotiations or other conciliation procedures within a framework arranged through the United Nations) .?** 73. For a more detailed (but decidedly mediocre) critique of the idea of a world government, see Galtung. Naturally the objections to world government, and difficulties in the way of obtaining it, do not extend to more flexible world arrangements, such a world federation of cultures (cf. Mazrui). Such a pluralistic anarchistic Way Up can be genuinely synthesized with the Way Down. �53 There is regrettably and arrangements much also conventions are evidence frequently concerning war and human rights?$), and are sentiments smoothly not not observed (especially those worth into despicable deeds. not bode convention in great a deal: Even agreements states have openly violated. Indeed there already appears to be at least one any force, of It to which international all the major nuclear states are signatories, which would rule out LSN war and nuclear deterrence, that on genocide. includes lofty for nuclear arms limitations, should sufficient agreement well ever be reached. treaties, international are often enough disregarded, skirted around, or signed does slide that the following Genocide acts committed, in time of peace or war, with intent to destroy in whole or part a natural, ethical, racial or religious group killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to as such: the members of the group, deliberately inflicting conditions of life to bring about physical destruction direct and public shall conspiracy to commit be Persons committing genocide or any of punished, whether they are the other acts responsible rulers, private individuals or public officials.?6 it is not difficult to argue nuclear genocide, incitement to commit genocide, attempts to commit genocide, complicity in genocide. mentioned Beside genocide the in whole or in part. following associated acts are also punishable: calculated that larger a strike (such as deterrence policy requires as a back-up response) would almost certainly constitute an act of genocide, through what minority groups. to does some But then, by virtue of connecting principles like 05, nuclear deterrence stands indicted particular it conspiracy representatives of the and as involving incitement. nuclear states acts associated with genocide, in Some well-known political and military would thus appear to be liable to indictment and punishment under international law. 74. Even Dahlitz, who gives a detailed and sympathetic account of nuclear arms control attempts and lost opportunities, is by no means confident that suitable arrangements can now be achieved (see pp. 210-13). Reasons include technological advances now taking place, and the renewed American drive for strategic superiority. 75. See Brownlie, Kuper, and Amnesty International reports. in this paragraph were suggested by C. Pigden. 76. The account of genocide given is taken directly from the Genocide Convention, which is reproduced in Kuper, p.210ff. Most of the points text of the �54 The nuclear fix emerging from nation-state arrangements - combined with the impotence apparent interstate relations to alleviate the situation, indeed of with the apparent ability only to push the world further into the situation nearer to the nuclear "brink" — taken now is to contemporary angle) the inadequacy of nation-state political has given new impetus sovereignty the best-seller and to consideration of other extrastate resolutions. The the indicates the namely nuclear in The Schell's situation should reexamination of the foundations of political thought' world's political unsatisfactoriness radical of the present system of nation states has even reached stands Schell to According and book a new arrangements, thesis that the nuclear problem national (from indicate and of Fate lead to required Earth. the a full-scale to make 'the consonant with the global reality in which institutions ... they operate ...' and in 'work[ing] out the practical steps by which mankind ... can reorganise political its life' (p.219). However Schell himself tries to avoid these 'awesome urgent tasks, which, imposed on us by the political work of our age' ??. else overimpressed by the history, constitute So, not feeling the pressures of history or realities of (unstable) nation-states, do most But there is no good reason to avoid the task of political political theorists. reassessment, made so much more urgent by the nuclear situation. There is little doubt but that we live (too unthinkingly) with an antiquated system many present state arrangements, communications condition; especially, were in a of (allegedly when 17th century very different and the main outlines of the modern totalitarian state and its manifold deficiencies recognised, even earlier. 77. willingly, The features representative government, were largely fashioned in the us even of political arrangements which the nuclear impasse, among others, calls into question. best of even democratic) technology, more were the and primitive discerned, In the briefs presented A similar theme, similarly questioning 'such sacred traditions as absolute national sovereignty', was pressed by Bradley, a significant US general (see Cox, p.225). Schell (like Bradley) does not make it entirely clear whether he is thinking of the Way Up or the Way Down, but the names he drops suggest the Way Up. So does the main thrust of what he says, e.g. 'Thus the peril of extinction is the price that the world pays not for "safety" or "survival" but for its [sic!] insistence on continuing to divide itself up into sovereign nations' (p.210), as if the natural or original state were an undivided one? On Schell's position, see further Appendix 1. �55 for political arrangements such as representative government, the excessive size and complexity of modern states was not envisaged. But such systems continue to operate, insufficiently questioned, though their justificatory bases undermined. present Nuclear representative emphasized have problems political have been several other deficiencies in arrangements. particular, In they have revealed how governments can thwart popular opinion, and act against the evident will of the people on an issue, for instance in installing US missiles European Now that modern communications and information-processing countries. make it feasible to determine the mix of public positions on major case for representative procedures is dissolved. century 19th issues, a issues. The reduced power excessive back at developments, issue-regulated and large imposes complex other modern What requirements. by states government recent technological Firstly, smaller initial grouping than giant states, integration of groups by principles of federation. as it is to informed citizens of satisfactory a approximate goodwill. As there are serious deficiencies in the information in present progressive and procedure, depends control, nation-states, even and release the distribution information, channels, and so forth. acceptable the from These distortion restrictive of most liberal of them (and Again, especially with new and less But there are evidently vested interests which stand to benefit from the limited of upon nuclear problems have again made patent, systems, there is little excuse for this. information upward Secondly, democracy, insofar political related deficiencies as regards education). publicly democratic like many other social arrangements, appear to function better with procedures, flow and called for are smaller are groupings, information flow, communication and education. and major on governmental power to more participatory democratic forms, a route made possible even in expensive least of governments would, to that extent at But the route down through least, be reduced. much elected way that is thoroughly ambiguous on most issues) are not given an almost free hand on every issue, but are required to answer policy the It is past time for more issue-controlled democratic procedures, where governments once (in some in of data features in have availability major communication helped in making present deliberately fostered pattern of nation-state �56 confrontation, and in establishing the prisoner's superstates nuclear are often seen to be dilemma type the situation locked into (on which see, e.g., Hardin). A central argument, arising from the nuclear fix, for current questioning arrangements and seriously considering their adjustment (in theory at political least), takes the following shape:e Political arrangements should answer back to certain in justified terms doing of at where least are so.These requirements include such things as enabling good and meaningful and moral lives for those arrangements, and requirements (as certainly in who under operate the much of the West) the basic material conditions for such lives are met. * Because of the nuclear fix, nation-state arrangements have these requirements. For guarantee the prospect of arrangements. nation-states, good and at least in the North, can no longer meaningful to lives their yet there is a non-negligible probability that person's morality is jeopardised if the person is obliged a under those such lives may terminate, less than fulfilled, in this way. support meet A life's meaningfulness is certainly diminished if it ends before its prime in a nuclear disaster; many to ceased state to Furthermore a in acquiesce or engaged in nuclear war preparation or nuclear deterrence (cf. Benn). Therefore, nation-state arrangements have should be not all) nation-states: have their justification, and Variations on this type of argument apply to many (though amended. nation-states forfeited it is not only because of the forfeited their mandate. nuclear Political fix that some obligations to such states are correspondingly dissolved. There is enough evidence that power-brokers who control sight of, or worse have lost don't care about, the point of political arrangements, of what justifies or is supposed to justify their states. 78. states This applies both to How they answer back admits of expansion in various ways, depending on the underlying political theory. Rawls, for example, puts it in familiar contractual form: that the political order is 'a cooperative venture for mutual advantage' (p.4). Mao puts it in a standard democratic way: 'since the purpose of all political processes is nothing but to serve the people and their interests, it is the people who should control in a meaningful way, the government' (see Soo, p.68). �57 more powerful states and to lesser states, both claim popular to a put value higher on military situations: sovereignty they do on human than for copious evidence see principles the just of warfare repeatedly, as have many other principles. violated 'nuclear where Kuper). This by Israel, Vietnam and many other states in nonnuclear illustrated already some have more often, they act without it or as national survival' (Schell's conclusion, p.210; is brokers The situation has been reached against the will of the people. powers where, and mandate the where blatantly been have Such states have forfeited much of what claim they had to external respect or internal political obedience; so, on other grounds, have many other states. It could just be, of course, as is often alternatives, that have or been insinuated, though effort little but option of world government). for dismissed, As to all whether little opportunity not do to and work, appear to we Down. There working towards the weakening especially on the alternatives can be may and have given been know very little about how humans sufficient give organising and trying out alternative Way such alternatives But, operate under substantially different arrangements. accessible expended been has instance as lacking feasibility, it is difficult to be entirely sure without taking the risk of being dogmatic; deadlines no the range of alternatives or their features (except perhaps for the researching very are there But alternatives there are, no possibly better alternatives. glimpsed, that to time arrangements, even again, once very far on proceed those nuclear of the more be time to proceed a little way however, in breakdown of the larger superunions, which are the immediate problem. invalid to simply conclude that alternative political and nuclear states, Thus it would be social arrangements, theoretically feasible and certainly a longer-term goal, do not presently while offer a part of the practical response to the nuclear fix. But there is no need to insist upon a single-track Way Out of dilemma to the exclusion of all others: quite the contrary. the nuclear We can not only afford to be fairly catholic about "second best" approaches and embrace whatever seems to be working or looks like helping, within recognised ethical (and other) constraints; indeed, given the urgency, the direness of the situation, we �58 should as fairly catholic and not inflexibly committed to narrow methods, such be bogged down (and very on arms limitations negotiations should methods perservered be unrepresentative) certainly and between main nuclear states. made attempts and with, No-first-use declaration, a ban on weapons in space, etc. But even such to e.g. superstates, the from concessions significant undemocratic further wring jointly a signed The direction of most hope for progress has however come into view, a direction that is not especially The political means of the Way Out are what they have new. larger every liberal on issue that has mattered: humanitarian or been from outside state governmental apparatus by organised pressure from within or and it, characteristically Bottom-Up methods are considerations familiar alternatives self-organising furnishing by and practically virtually upon without bypass which it, Top-Down. never Such but part of the more general, and very effective, case against reliance upon states for a range of things they are now supposed to but supply, which can almost that effectively and for invariably matter be obtained, where required, more expensively less without (and them their monopolies). In the case of security it is states, with very few exceptions, imposed, or frequently The opposition to the local from have in, military solutions involving nuclear installations acquiesced and nuclear weapons. that neighbourhood and escalating groups, fix nuclear has come some of them now federated across nations (so the direction is not really interstate). These have groups been successful in blocking some nuclear installations and establishing, for the time being, against movement nuclear-free some nuclear neighbourhoods. equipment The patchwork grass-roots is strongest in Europe, which is - as the movement realised, and what gave it impetus - a leading theatre, on US strategic thinking, for a limited nuclear war not touching extremely doubtful that increasing NATO and American Europe will make it a safer place: American shores. nuclear installations removed installations in on the contrary it seems probable that Europe will become much safer if the anti-nuclear movements these It is succeed and Europe rendered nuclear-free. grossly immoral conduct will thereby also be considerably reduced. in having The chances of �59 What of the spectre of Soviet domination, military, ideological and in Except case the Europe, of other? where the inexcusable suppression of Eastern Europe all too evidently persists, this is an obvious fabrication. Does anyone expect the united Soviets to absorb China, let alone take over Canada seriously or Brasil say? And even in Western Europe the spectre is failing partly giant fashioned financially dominated and economically politically and ideologically, by the USA. ideologically, dominated propped exaggerated, up by the NATO powers' and some in and, some measure, Indeed much of the "free" world is adequately not countered military by The means. domination to which nuclear weapons are considered relevant insofar as is basic any in mode of But military. military, and associated political, domination of Western Europe by the Soviets is a problem, there are several ways other predominantly American nuclear weapons to mitigate it. only local defence arrangements - whether top-down alternative is it dominated economically, by the USA. of That is not generally considered so much of a problem (as it is?9), and case a Since the last World War, Western Europe has been military-industrial alliance. increasingly largely and much methods social — but also some on methods, or restructuring, such as social power to dispersed local more cooperation and interchange with the Soviets and much and reliance These should include not state-supplied decentralisation, regionalisation and devolution of organisations, than Eastern Europe. Part of the point of whether external or restructuring internal, so is especially situations, is to state-contrived 79. break make military any takeover, much more difficult and pointless, and the restoration of local control easier.Part of interchange, to the point of cooperation and at the level of more ordinary people, in more ordinary down conditions of hostility and distrust and to sabotage the West-East confrontations, and thereby to remove For many peoples of the world, and in its impact on the natural world, advanced corporate capitalism is an oppressive and damaging doctrine. But, in contrast with austere Marxism-Leninism which would improve the lot of some of the oppressed world while even worsening the impact on the natural world, corporate capitalism admits a certain pluralism, and recognises many more individual rights and liberties. Certainly Marxism-Leninism which appears to degenerate in practice to an authoritarian and totalitarian position is a less welcome alternative. It is fortunate, then, that we need be saddled with neither: there are superior options. �60 other expenditures.81 popular and for, motives Western support Europe, for for, long military much too adventures partial to and military adventures, should now be helping itself rather than relying on a leaky American nuclear umbrella for its defence. Moreover it ought to be, at the very least, uncomfortable about the risks of catastrophically damaging the world in the of interests its own security. extensive parts of Nor should other "nuclear dependent" states be prepared to acquiesce in this not uncharacteristic European imposition. world, what There LSN is war no risks, enormous for virtue Western in sacrificing other parts of the Europe, military-based domination to other parts of the world. which has long exported There are better options than dubious and risky nuclear shields for Europe. 80. Thus, for example, to the extent that local defence groups are integrated under more centralised direction, it would be a built-in principle that surrender of the central directing section absolved the federated groups from following suit or following further directions. That is, through devolution of power, surrender becomes structurally impossible (though individuals or basic groups may surrender). Moreover, the central section would hold only limited information about the federated units it integrated. The locally organised groups themselves, which would merge with local populations, would be trained in tactics of passive resistance, sabotage, (nonviolent) guerilla warfare, etc. The net effect (as C. Pigden, who made most of these points, argues) would be to make the cost of military conquest, occupations and exploitation prohibitively high. One reason why the Japanese Army High Command decided against invasion of Australia in March 1942 was the character of Australians and the fact that they 'would resist to the end' (Threats to Australia's Security, p.62). Yet the 1942 (war reduced) Australian population was substantially untrained and unorganised for locally—based defence. With such a defence restructuring, Australia would not only much reduce its vulnerability to military adventures, but remove standard reasons for succumbing to threats of outside military domination, blackmail, and the like. 81. In particular, with sufficient cooperation and trust, competitive prisoner's dilemma situations, which depend on the prisoners being kept separate, are removed. So too a main model supporting deterrence policy would be undercut. And the arguments from national dangers would be further corroded. In the same direction, it is important to extend cooperation between USA and USSR down below the level of state trade deals, e.g. in grain and gas, to communication and cooperation between people. For such commercial deals there is sufficient trust, even in periods of intensive confrontation: why should it not be so also at more significant people-to-people levels? Many further sorts of interrelationship are feasible, and inexpensive by military standards, e.g. sister cities, common clubs, worker exchanges, gift projects. If, for instance, 100,000 or more ordinary Americans were living, working or holidaying in USSR (and vice versa), Americans would feel less enthusiasm for hurling nuclear missiles into Russia (or vice versa). Only quite inadequate efforts have been made to build up mutual respect and trust; on the contrary, a lot of resources have been expended to encourage precisely the opposite attitudes, e.g. as part of the strategy of the "cold war". �61 What the anti-nuclear movements must press for and disarmament (and, on the more perceptive transarmament, to conversion i.e. outer of edges graduated movements, the alternative social defence arrangements). But the argument also makes it clearer how far this should go, through in in part it is what they have been pushing for, nuclear reduction broad outline: way clear accordingly is namely all the disarmament^^ to total nuclear disarmament, unilateral certainly to local disarmament across progressively larger parts of the planet's surface, including especially Europe. For once state is demoted, its the importance and the necessity of its maintenance properly downgraded and reliance on decision-making its diminished decision-making - once all that is happen), in duly of favour more localised control and for allowed not does (it need to major component in the nuclear fix is removed, namely the problem one of reduction or even loss of state sovereignty. Maintenance of that sovereignty has been assigned a mistaken importance, which in turn accounts for the mistaken weight assigned to the arguments from national dangers. What is and important worth preserving is not the sovereign state, but certain ways of life within the state. The nation-state and dangers to it, and accompanying features such as misplaced nationalism, are the weakest links in the nuclear fix situation. Once the demise of the sovereign nation-state is allowed for, the arguments from national concerning particular. dangers individual also and group rights and In freedoms, by the that nation-state. matter The are 82. to arguments liberties in for them, as smaller exclusively or nation-state is neither sufficient for are disappearing, nor community arrangements can ensure them. But arguments from individual and group dangers remain, do they not? risks are civil necessarily them, since in increasingly many states these liberties necessary place their None of these require national sovereignty or even a national life. None of the rights and freedoms guaranteed disintegrate. individuals and groups remain: To be sure, that has always been so,83 and is not The initial but important steps are at zero cost as regards deterrence. Were deterrence really the policy there would be little case for more than a fraction of present nuclear arsenals. The steps to disarmament are well-known, e.g. the scrapping of obsolete weapons, and an end to modernisation, the removal of nuclear weapons in crucial theatres such as Europe, etc. �62 being changed but only worsened in this age of mostly to want that sure be or other outsiders. People their lives will continue to run their course, ideally in a flourishing fashion, and will not be Russians nation-states. nuclear controlled Americans by or Nuclear arrangements which threaten their lives are not a rational route to these ends. In the weigh-up that should occur in charting a way as dilemmas the out of deontic such fix and its subsidiary dilemmas, there are then much nuclear more important elements than features of the nation-state, namely some of those the state is supposed to safeguard, such as individual and local welfare things and autonomy; weapons. but those things are better ensured by main reasons are familiar: The threaten the loss of basic values, such removal the nuclear of in particular, nuclear circumstances as and welfare autonomy, many for creatures and regions, and the potential loss is in general much greater than in a nuclear-free situation (even should another with example, the production of nuclear weapons reduces both local of the opportunity remain armed There are also well-known supplementary reasons; weapons). nuclear party ideological welfare for (because costs of weapons manufacture) and autonomy (because of the accompanying security measures). Thus the appropriately devices and fix nuclear resolved, it can deploy, and considerable reduction of state sovereignty. how), and since rate, any by by allowing for the But, although that is a reasonable Way Out, at little cost in the circumstances, it will be practice, at theoretically sovereignty of the state (especially as to what nuclear limiting weapons is strongly resisted in those who hold power hold it, in one way or another, under the auspices of the state. This is a main reason why people must organise and act against the state. Again the resolution also looks practical enough, since sovereignty reduction in need apply essentially only to the the production and deployment of nuclear weapons. 83. the Indeed it could in principle be obtained by negotiated It will remain so under any satisfactory political arrangements. Until human social arrangements change substantially, there is no substitute for on-going vigilance to ensure or maintain political liberty. �63 agreement (at the top levels of state). However to get this far with the superstates, the limitations of state-power will likely have to proceed further: for nuclear weaponry does not stand in splendid isolation. into both concerned. systems military and (civil) Rather it tied is industrial production of the states So, unsurprisingly, practical-looking resolutions are being solidly resisted by superstates. Accordingly more popular (bottom up) action against nuclear-involved states especially and the superstates, after all the states causing the most against serious dilemmas, will have to be taken much further. variety of organised forms. Once again it will take a These include a refusal to contribute to nuclear of war preparation, either directly or indirectly. widely, blockading of shipments of uranium, and the from such steps as the forms The action range refusal of supplies and services to sailors on nuclear ships and submarines, to withholding or redirection of taxes destined for nuclear security purposes. the They include as well the whole nuclear installations and range of nonviolent facilities protest which (methods methods against do exclude not incapacitation and decommissioning of equipment, and which do include new model resistance and defence organisations). 8** It is important to realise that petitioning of power state representatives and holders, for instance through letter campaigns, demonstrations and direct appeal, is far from a complete strategy, and may be ineffective or ignored, the results discouraging. and This is one reason why popular action should be based on a more comprehensive political strategy, which also involves withdrawing support from prevailing state arrangements, and working out and participating in alternative arrangements, especially alternative defence forms.Sufficient details as to what to do are already known, enough to make an immediate start. 84. For some impression of the range of methods, see again Sharp. 85. For much more on all these points, see e.g. further Appendix 2. Martin. As to what to do, see �64 APPENDIX 1. ON THE FATE OF MANKIND AND THE EARTH, according to Schell, and to Anders. A series of nuclear prophets has produced a series of philosophically-oriented works on nuclear war and the alleged implications of human extinction.^ The series is important for its deeper penetration into the nuclear dilemma, down to metaphysical levels; in this the series contrasts with the transient superficialities of much of the political commentary. The most widely circulated and influential text of the series is undoubtedly that of the slightest of the "prophets , Schell's The Fate of the Earth. This skillful piece of media—philosophy uncannily redeploys some of the apparently deep phenomenological themes of Anders. So, conveniently, main assumptions of Schell and Anders can often be considered together. To criticise their assumptions is not of course to belittle their work. In particular, Schell's little book, for all its political shortcomings, is having a significant and much needed effect in shifting attitudes towards nuclear arrangements. It is especially valuable for its vivid and horrifying scenarios of the aftermath of nuclear attack. Unfortunately it also exhibits, both philosophically and factually, severe defects. Some of it is simply garbage: to select one example, consider the claim that 'without ... a world-wide program of action for preserving the [human] species .... nothing else that we undertake together can make any practical or moral sense ... (p.173, rearranged). This should certainly be rejected philosophically; for there is no separate moral issue of such overwhelming importance that all other issues become morally neutral. Moral issues remain moral issues: they don't cease to be so when compared with more important moral issues (as Schell effectively acknowledges elsewhere, p.130). And the claim should also be junked on more factual grounds. Humans form a highly resilient species, like rabbits in Australia a survivor species, unlikely to be exterminated under presently arranged nuclear holocausts. 1. The distinguishing term is from Foley's Nuclear Prophets, where many of the leading prophets are assessed. One well-known prophet not so considered there is Jaspers, presumably because his main work (which might equally well have been translated as The Fate of Mankind) comes out in entirely the wrong direction. For it gives heavy philosophical attire to the better-dead-than-red abomination. A main argument against Jaspers so presented is simple. However bad being red might become (at present it is debatably worse than living under some of the totalitarian regimes the free West props up), it still gives humans a further chance for good lives, since regimes fall or can be toppled: but total annihilation removes that all-important opportunity. But Jaspers does not present his position so simply. Rather his contention is that there are circumstances where and principles for which a person or group of persons ought to sacrifice even their lives. Freedom is such: a life worth living is a free life. But the latter point can be granted without conceding that sacrifice is a possible means to it. While the sacrifice of one or a few lives may be a possible (if dubiously effective) way to free lives for others, certainly the sacrifice of all lives is not a possible route to free lives for all, since no human lives remain. To this extent Schell is right (on p.131) in accusing Jaspers of an each to__ all fallacy. Jasper's idea that "the free life that they try to save by all possible means is more than mere life or lives" breaks down when applied to all participating people. None can gain free lives by extinction of all: that is not a possible route to life even. �65 The example was selected however because it leads into, indeed presupposes, two of the major defective assumptions in the work of Schell and Anders: 51. Nuclear war will eliminate life, human life at least, on earth (the extinction assumption); and 52. In the absence of humans, very many notions, not only those of morality and value, but those of time and space for example, make no sense; or, to put it into a more sympathetic philosophical form, these notions depend for their sense on an actual human context (the extravagant anthropocentric assumption). It is applications of S2 which give Anders' and Schell's work ^ some of its apparent philosophical depth, and certainly induce much philosophical puzzlement through the paradoxical propositions generated. But the frequent applications of S2 depend essentially on SI. For without total extinction there will be humans about, to make past and future, good and evil, go on making sense! Granted the factual assumption SI is by no means ruled out as a real possibility; granted the technological means are now available to make it true, to render Homo sapiens extinct;^ granted the prospect of nuclear war does threaten leading centres of Western civilization with obliteration. Even so SI appears unlikely in the light of present - admittedly inadequate - information. Even in Canada, which lies on the polar route of Soviet missiles, human life should be able to continue in certain northern areas (according to Canadian medical studies). Schell's argument to SI is extremely flimsy. It depends, for example, on an unjustified extrapolation from the Northern to the Southern Hemisphere, but for the most part it does that very North American thing, of contracting the world to North America. (All that matters, all worthwhile civilization, is in USA, or at least, to be more charitable, in North America and Europe, which will also be wiped out, i.e. its human population will be eliminated in the nuclear holocaust.) Some of the data Schell relies upon, for example the effect of nuclear explosions on the ozone layer, is significantly out of date. Other effects than ozone destruction apparently transfer even less well from North to South. A factually superior study of nuclear disaster than Schell's, by Preddey and others, indicates that parts of the Southern Hemisphere, New Zealand and southern latitudes of Africa and Latin America could escape relatively unscathed from even most massive northern exchanges.*' Both Anders and Schell remark on the "impossibility of unlearning" the means of manufacturing nuclear bombs. It would seem that extinction, which they both foresee as at least a live possibility, would furnish a good medium for unlearning nuclear technology (something very like this emerges from van Daniken's theory of an earlier "high" technology). In virtue of S2, they would however exclude such a possibility as a case of unlearning, contending wrongly 2. For a detailed comparison of Schell and Anders' remarkably similar versions of S2, see Foley JS. 3. Thus the Last Man argument, important in environmental ethics, is no longer merely hypothetical, awaiting the remote death of the Sun, but assumes new urgency. It is this sort of argument that connects environmental ethics and nuclear ethics, at a deeper metaphysical level. The Bomb and Bulldozer are out of the same technological Pandora's box. Nuclear technology is not the only route to human extinction, nor the only Pandora's box. Biological and chemical means are perhaps even more effective, and certainly can be more selective in what gets extinguished. 4. However, new modellings and estimates, none so far very reliable, keep appearing, and amending the picture. On the basis of one recent scenario, generated by a computer modelling of a 5000 megaton nuclear exchange, the immunity of the Southern Hemisphere to the dire consequences of a northern LSN war has been questioned. In particular, Sagan, no doubt overreaching the evidence, has 'warn[ed] that the nuclear blasts would create enormous differences in temperature between south and north, shifting normal wind patterns and carrying smoke and radioactivity south' (Newsweek, November 7 1983, p.56). Some sections of the environmental and peace movements have a vested interest in exaggerating the probable effects of nuclear holocaust for life on earth, much as many statesmen have an interest in minimizing them. �66 that the notion no longer made sense. But what they seem to want to suggest with the impossibility-of-unlearning message is the inevitability of the development and eventual use of the technology - as if having learnt the means all else was determined, and manufacture and use ceased to be a matter of choice. Certainly such views have been floated $. But they are not tenable. There are many examples of technological advances that have not been taken advantage of, and there are even cases of technological developments that have been manufactured but not marketed or used. There is not something very special about nuclear apparatus that puts it beyond the scope of such generalisations. Both Schell and Anders do claim that there are very special things about nuclear weapons, in particular that they do not allow "experiments . Even if this were true - it is certainly not of smaller weapons - it would not tell against the previous argument against the inevitability of nuclear weapons. And in fact Anders and (even) Schell hedge their claims about testing, and the limits to nuclear scientific work, to large-scale weapons and independent experiments which do not interfere with the observers and those outside the "laboratories". Again they have latched onto major points: in particular, we have at present no way of testing the cumulative effects of large nuclear weapons in concert, e.g. for more holistic effects such as fireballs or firestorms, electromagnetic pulse or ozone destruction. Short of an LSN war, and likely enough with it, these crucial effects must remain largely untested and hypothetical in character. The penetration of human chauvinism, as in S2, is not something peculiar to Schell, but is a product of Western philosophy, European philosophy especially. This chauvinism is unfortunately alive and still well, Anders' version of S2 being just one striking illustration(cf. AA p.252ff.). It has also deeply penetrated Anglo-American philosophy, and has recently been extended by Wittgenstein's work, where even the necessary truths of mathematics are taken to be a product of human conventions, and would vanish with humans! Such are alleged implications of extinction; but the fact is that the truths of arithmetic are in no way dependent on the existence of humans or humanoids or of gods or giraffes. In Schell, human chauvinism is dished up in a particularly powerful and obnoxious Kantian form. Thoughts and propositions, time and tenses, history and memories, values and morality, all depend on the life-giving presence of human beings — past or future or merely potential humans are not enough, persons that are not humans are certainly not enough. Thus, according to Schell (p.140, e.g.), '... the thought "Humanity is now extinct" is an impossible one for a rational person, because as soon as tt is, we^ are not. In imagining any other event, we look ahead to a moment that is still within the stream of human time, ... '. The thought is however perfectly possible for humans; we can have it right now. Though we no doubt have it falsely, a later rational creature may well be able to have it truly. Schell erroneously denies that: there is no "later" '... outside the human tenses of past, present, and future ...' (p.140)6. Human extinction eliminates 'the creature that divides time into past, present and future': so annihilation cannot 'come to pass' (p.143). But it is simply false that the tenses are human; the tenses depend on a local time ordering (perceptible to many creatures other than humans, but not depending at all on that perceptibility for its viability) relating other times to the present, to now (also a human-independent location, evident to other creatures, and borne witness to by such sequences as the passing seasons). And annihilation may also too easily come to pass, for many humans in the North at least, as it came to pass in recent geological times that humans began to exist upon earth. Before that there was a time before there were any human beings. 5. Not merely by technological determinists of marxist persuasion. Hackworth, a former US general, argues by straight induction, that if the US military has a weapon it will use it. 6. The appalling theme that humans create past, present and future repeated elsewhere, e.g. p.173. (etc.) is �67 Anders' argument for the demise of time, that 'what has been will no longer be even what has been', is also explicitly and narrowly verificationist: 'for what would the difference be between what has only been and what has never been, if there is no one to remember the things that have been' (AA p.245). There would still remain many sorts of difference; for one, the history recorded in many other organisms would be different. Temporal themes do not lack 'legitimacy because not registered [or verified] by anyone'; truth, significance, still less meaning, are not matters of human verification. Here, as elsewhere, the human chauvinism is mixed with other distorting metaphysical assumptions of our Western heritage, in particular, verificationism and ontological assumptions (to the effect that there are severe difficulties in talking about what does not exist). Thus, for example, Schell takes over dubious metaphysics from Freud, according to whom "it is indeed impossible to imagine our own death; and whenever we attempt to do so, we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators" (p.138). The second clause goes a good distance towards refuting the first. In fact there is no great difficulty in describing counterfactual situations which undermine both Freud's claims. The same goes for Schell's extensions of human chauvinism into one of its main traditional strongholds, value theory: '... the simple and basic fact [sic!] that before there can be good or evil, service or harm, lamenting or rejoicing there must be life', human life (p.171). These are no facts, but deeply entrenched philosophical dogmas which have been exposed and criticised elsewhere?. Naturally some things will disappear with the extinction of humans: trivially there will be no more humans (unless humans re-evolve or are recreated), and thus no more human institutions, human activities, human emotions, and so forth. But it is already going too far to suggest, as Anders does, that there will accordingly be 'no thought, no love, no struggle, no pain, no hope, no comfort, no sacrifice, no image, no song For there are, and may continue to exist, other creatures than humans with emotion, struggles, songs.......... Nor will the ending of all such human ventures, if it comes to pass, show that all past human ventures have been 'all in vain', meaningless, and already so to say dead. The decay of the solar system, or the heat-death of the universe even, will not show that worthwhile human activities were not worthwhile. Several of the other notions and themes common to Schell and Anders derive from their shared assumptions SI and S2. It is these that underlie the biblical notion (in Revelations) of a Second Death, redeployed by both. 'The death of mankind', under SI, is reckoned a 'second death', because by S2 and SI remaining life is rendered meaningless and already 'seems to be dead' (AA p.244, S p.166) and is already 'overhung with death' (S p.166). Thus, too, more trivially, a person faces 'a second death', not merely one's own but in addition that greater death of the species and all future generations (S p.166, p.115). However even if nuclear extinction came to pass, the stronger notion would not be vindicated, because it depends on the fallacious inference to the meaninglessness of preceding life and on the very questionable representation of this meaninglessness as a sort of death. There is no Second Death: creatures die just once, perhaps all at about the same time. The idea of a Second Death lacks even a solid metaphysical base. From SI, together with the minor principle that extinction being an absolute doesn't differ in degree, comes the universality of peril theme that 'we are all exposed to peril in the same degree', which is accordingly 'disguised' and 'difficult to recognise', because there is no contrast (AE p.64; S p.150). This theme falls with SI. In any event, not all peoples are equally imperilled by the nuclear situation, the Indians of southern Patagonia being 7. See, e.g., 'Human chauvinism and environmental ethics', in Environmental Philosophy (edited D. Mannison and others), Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1980. 8. Anders is here (AA pp.244-5) relying upon a version of the perserverence, criticised in detail in Routley and Griffin. argument from �68 rather better placed than the Germans of northern Europe. Nor are all people equally locked into the situation or incapacitated by it; as explained, the position is different in different countries and places. Nor, likewise, are all people equally responsible, an obnoxious theme, which Schell (in contrast to Anders) repeatedly infiltrates. This is the Pogo theme, according to which S3. Responsibility for the present nuclear situation (fiasco, really) distributes onto everybody, it belongs to every human in the world. But there is also, mixed in, a weaker more plausible claim that gives lie to the stronger one, namely that we have some responsibility (the Nazi situation is compared). An especially blatant example of the Pogo themeruns as follows: '... the world's political leaders ... though they now menace the earth with nuclear weapons, do so only with our permission, and even at our bidding. At least, this is true for democracies' (pp.229-30). The theme is elaborated elsewhere: '... we are the authors of that extinction. (For the populations of the superpowers this is true in a positive sense, since we pay for extinction and support the governments that pose the threat of it, while for the peoples of the non-nuclear-armed world it is true only in the negative sense that they fail to try to do anything about the danger)' (p.152). But this is more of an argument indicting representative government, by revealing its insensitivity and unresponsiveness to many of the populace they allegedly govern, not to mention those affected by its activities who are not represented at all (namely foreigners). But Schell conveniently neglects all such points: '... we are potential mass killers. The moral cost of nuclear armaments is that it makes of all of us underwriters of the slaughter of hundreds of millions' (p.152). And again '[as] perpetrators ... we convey the steady message ... that life not only is not sacred but is worthless; that ... it had been judged acceptable for everyone to be killed' (p.153). Little of this is true. Those who campaign against nuclear arrangements, vote against nuclear-committed parties so far as is possible, and the like, are certainly not the authors of potential destruction, and responsibility for the nuclear situation does not simply distribute onto them. Nor does responsibility - or the unlikely opinions as to worth Schell illegitimately attributes to everyone - fall on those who have done less. Responsibility for decisions taken in "liberal democracies" even by representatives (in the unlikely event of this happening in the case of anything as important as defence) cannot be traced back to those represented, since among 9. An interesting converse of this theme is sometimes advanced, that no one is responsible, the whole thing is out of control. The technological version of this no-responsibility theme is discussed shortly. More satisfactory is the theme that nuclear arrangements are out of political control, but for reasons, in terms of vested interests in keeping nuclear things going, which enable responsibility to be distributed. The vested interests, which bear considerable responsibility, include the military weapons industry, and research and academic communities. Under pressures for re-election especially, politicians give in to these powerful groups, so losing control of political processes. The argument fails at its final stage. For many politicians either belong to or represent vested interests. Thus political processes tend rather to reflect vested interests than to run out of political control. 10. Another example of spreading the responsibility runs as follows: 'The self-extinction of our species is not an act that anyone describes as sane or sensible; nevertheless, it is an act that, without quite admitting it to ourselves, we plan in certain circumstances to commit' (p.186). Even for most of the planners, extinction is presumably not part of "the plan", but an unintended consequence; and most of us have little or no role in the planning, enough of us even campaign against the planning. Further 'the world ... chose the course of attempting to refashion the system of sovereignty to accommodate nuclear weapons' (p.194): the world? This connects of course with the ideological argument from defence of fundamentals, e.g. for liberty, for the (USA) nation, and against socialism. In the course of this argument yet another fallacious assumption is rolled out: 'The means to the end are not limited, for the end itself sets the limits in each case' (p.189). �69 many other things, a representative is only representative of a party which offers a complex and often ill-characterised package of policies, and a voter may vote for zero or more policies of this package. Only in the (uncommon) event of a clear single issue referendum, which is adopted, can responsibility, still of a qualified sort, be sheeted home, to those who voted for it, not to every one in the community. While S3 is false, there is an important related theme that is much more plausible; namely that the present nuclear situation generates responsibilities for every socially involved person (this theme is discussed in Appendix 2). When moreover the Pogo assumption is disentangled from accompanying themes, part of what results is decidedly along the right lines; namely S4. The controllers [not to be confused, in Schell's fashion, with all of us] have failed to change our pre-nuclear institutions. The sovereign system is out of step with the nuclear age, the one-earth system, etc. (the whole earth theme). Though Schell remains relatively clear about the serious defects of the state and the frequently immoral purposes for which the state is used, unfortunately he often loses sight of this important theme (indicated pp.187-8). Yet S4 forms part of Schell's critique of the state which is, by and large, scattered and fragmentary. As observed (in §8), Schell arrives at the conclusion that the nation-state has outlasted its usefulness, and that new political institutions more 'consonant with the global reality' are required as a matter of urgency. But he evades what he admits is the major task, making out viable alternatives. At most he makes some passing gestures, some pointing towards the Way Up. Solutions to the nuclear dilemma come, if not easily, in a similar simplistic way, from the Top Down; those who can must appeal to the Top (cf. p.230). Schell places his hope in treaties for arms reduction and limitations (such as SALT) and in world government (as with the United Nations). Given the record of these organisations and treaties, the negotiations and regulators, it is by now a pathetic faith. Nor is a serious need felt for further analysis of the nuclear situation, to investigate the origins of nuclear technology, to explore the roots of nuclear blindness, to consider effective changes to military-industrial organisation and ways of life. But some of the requisite deeper analysis of the nuclear situation and, more generally, of the roots of war can be found elsewhere.*2 The roots of the nuclear fix are not confined to the ideologically-aligned arrangements of nation-states, but penetrate also into key components of those states, their military, their controlling classes, and their supporting bureaucracies. And both within the arrangements of states, what accounts in part for the arrangements, and in key components of the states, a conspicuous and crucial feature is the drive for power and domination.^ Thus the push for [nuclear] superiority by the super-states, to be achieved through military-oriented science and technology, which involves and enables domination, in several interrelated forms. The main power-base is the large nation-state, where enough surplus product can be accumulated (from at home and from abroad, and bled from nature) to proceed with military and bureaucratic ambitions and to found the high-technology research and development means to ever more expendable power and energy. In changing the structural arrangements to eliminate the prospect of nuclear war, it is not ultimately enough just to downgrade the main power-base, it is also important to alter key components of the state, the nation-state; and, more sweepingly, to remove trouble-making patterns embedded in all these social and political arrangements, namely patterns of domination, patterns manifested not only in state political organisation, but in white-coloured relations, male-female relations, human-animal relations, human-nature relations; to remove, in short, chauvinistic relations. However not everything and especially p.227, bottom paragraph. 11. See p.225ff. 12. In Anders and elaborated in Foley, and more straightforwardly, in Martin. The incomplete list of items given above, to be investigated in a deeper analysis of the nuclear situation, paraphrases Foley JS p.164. �70 needs to be accomplished at once; and the cluster of damaging power and domination relations tied into war can be tackled separately. And there the problems can largely be narrowed to certain problems of states and certain key components of states. In what analysis he does offer of the problem with states, Schell repeats the familiar false contrast of state expediency with morality, as a contrast between "raison d'etat and the Socratic—Christian ethics. The teaching that 'the end justifies the means is the basis on which governments, in all times, have licensed themselves to commit crimes of every sort' (p.134). So 'states may do virtually anything whatever in the name of [their] survival'. Schell then argues however, that extinction nullifies end-means justification by destroying every end; but again the argument is far from sound, and depends on human chauvinism (as under S2) combined with ontological assumptions. Even if all humans were extinguished (as under SI) ends could remain, for instance for nonhumans such as animals and extraterrestrials, actual or not. The ends—means argument can however be repaired to remove such objections: instead it is 13. These motivating drives form part of a larger integrated package, comprising maximisation drives for power, knowledge, control, wealth, energy, speed, satisfaction, ..., for the "newer" Enlightenment (but Faustian) virtues. Frequently there are attempts (the human failing for excessive neatness and simplicity manifested) to reduce the package to one main component, preference—satisfaction for instance, or utility. And the type of drive is justified (especially for those who have it, but worry about it) not only as virtuous, which it is not, but also as rational, which again it is not. Rationality, the deeply entrenched myth has it, consists in maximisation, of the virtues. Maximisation of the objects of the drives runs, however, into limitation theorems and associated paradoxes. The maximisation of power, as with the Christian-Islamic God, encounters the paradox of omnipotence, the parallel maximisation of knowledge, paradoxes of omniscience. There are no consistent objects which are omnipotent or omniscient. The drive for maximum consistency, often taken to be the epitome of rationality, also leads to inconsistency in the case of more important theories, such as arithmetic and set theory (Godel's theorem and associated limitative theorems). 14. R & D, though directed by military requirements and the arms race, also drives the arms race. Its role is partly disguised by the myth of neutral science. have been attempts, not only by those committed to technological determinism, to involve technology more deeply as the main, or single, source of the nuclear fix. It is technology, the mega-machine, running out of control, that has brought us to this predicament, the nuclear abyss. Sometimes this serves to exonerate states and their key components and those who control them, for they are simply caught up by this out—of—control machine; but sometimes the state itself is seen as a machine also running out of control. But technological determinism, like other varieties of stronger (nonanalytic) determinism, is false. Nuclear technology was selected and proceeded with, after a well-known political dispute involving distinguished scientists; it was deliberated, funded and promoted, while other alternatives were not. Damaging technologies of the nuclear age were not inevitable, but deliberately chosen by certain components of the large nation-states. And much as they need not have been chosen, so they do not have to be persisted with. The fashionable inevitability/determinism themes admit not only of refutation by bringing out the many choices made in persisting with often recalcitrant technologies. They also admit of being made to look ridiculous. If the Bomb is determined, as part of human evolution, then if it functions (as it probably will, a matter also determined), it will serve as a human population control device, a matter also determined. That is, the Bomb has its fixed evolutionary place in human population regulation. �71 claimed that extinction nullifies ends-means justification by frustrating the realisation of every relevant end - meaning by 'relevant', in this context, those ends the realisation of which the state appeals to in justification of its nuclear policies.1$ An LSN-war, even without human extinction but with severe enough losses, would undoubtedly frustrate the realisation of relevant state ends. So even from an expediency perspective, superstate policies are open to severe criticism, for example as motivationally irrational. As to the part of the state and (state) sovereignty in war, Schell leaves us in no doubt. A sovereign state is virtually defined as one that enjoys the right and power to go to war in defence or pursuit of its interests (p.187). War arises from how things are; from the arrangement of political affairs via jealous nation states (p.188). Indeed there is a two-way linkage between having sovereignty and capacity to wage war. On the one side, sovereignty is, Schell contends, necessary for people to organise for war. On the other side, without war it is impossible to preserve sovereignty. Neither of these contentions is transparently clear as they stand. The first is damaged by civil war and the like, the second by the persistence of small nonmilitary states. Now that the macro-state system is entrenched, it is however easy for conservatives (in particular) to argue from the "realities" of international life, which include self-interest, aggression, fear, hatred. It is on this basis that peace arrangements are readily dismissed as unrealistic, utopian, even (amusingly) as extremist (cf. p.185). Schell's further theme that nuclear "war" is not war threatens, however, to undermine his case against the sovereign state; for example, his ends-means argument and the argument based on its nuclear war-making capacity. Fortunately the not-war theme needs much qualification, and starts out from an erroneous characterisation of war as 'a violent means employed by a nation to achieve an end' (p.189): but this is neither necessary nor sufficient for war. What is right (so it is argued in §1) is that nuclear wars are very different from earlier conventional wars. Schell goes on to claim that war requires an end which nuclear "war" does not have. But nuclear attacks can certainly have ends (even if LSN wars cannot be won in the older sense: but not all wars or games are won). It is also claimed that war depends on weakness; on one side being defeated on a decision by arms. But in nuclear "war" this doesn't happen, 'no one's strength fails until both sides have been annihilated' (p.190). But what these sorts of considerations contribute to showing is again not that nuclear wars are not wars, but that they are not wars of certain sorts, e.g., not just wars (because they fail on such criteria as reasonable prospect of success and improvement), not rational wars (in a good sense), and so on. That conventional wars have persisted into nuclear times does damage to Schell's argument that nuclear weapons have also ruined "conventional" wars, and his connected theme that the demise of war has left no means to finally settle disputes between nations, for the final court of appeal has been removed (pp.192-193). The theme depends on the mistaken proposition concerning the demise of conventional war and the mistaken proposition that war of some sort has to be the final "court of appeal" between nations (for, as observed, there are other types of contests that could serve, and there is also the possibility of more cooperative behaviour, e.g. joint referenda). The theme also imports the social-Darwinian assumption of Clausewicz (the "logic of war" theme criticised in §2) that war has to proceed to the technological limit - as if war and violence were thoroughly natural activities independent of recognised social settings (for winning, surrender, etc.) and rule-less activities. On the contrary, wars are parasitic on social organisations such as states and are governed by a range of understandings, conventions and rules. They are a social phenomenon, with a rule structure, if not a logic. Much capital has been made not merely from "the logic of war" but from what is now called "the logic of deterrence" and the "logic of nuclear [strategic] planning". The message that is usually supposed to emerge is that the massive nuclear arrangements the world is now entangled in are perfectly logical, sound, 15. This reformulation was proposed by N. Griffin, who suggested that the main qualification can be inferred from Schell's context. �72 reasonable, rational. However this represents little more than a cheap semantical trick. Logic in no way justifies the present arrangements, or anything like them, or renders them reasonable. There is a logic of decision (as presented, e.g., in Jeffrey) which can be applied in strategic planning; but it does not yield specific results without desirability measures being assigned to alternative outcomes, that is without values being pumped in, extralogically. There are various ways these value assignments may be determined, to meet moral requirements or not; but in nuclear strategic planning they have invariably been settled on the basis of expediency.In fact, 'logic of' tends to be used very generously, as a word of general commendation, to cover something like 'rational considerations entering into the policy or strategy of'. In these terms, Schell, who like others enjoys playing with the term 'logic of', should write of 'the illogic of deterrence', for he emphasizes (p.213) the disparity between the supposed rationality of threatening use of nuclear weapons and the irrationality (even from a national interest viewpoint) of actually using them should the threat fail: 7 yet the success of deterrence doctrine depends on the credibility of the threat of this unjustifiable and irrational use. Indeed Schell wants to go still further and locate a contradiction in deterrence (e.g. pp.201-2): but the argument depends on an interesting confusion of contradiction with cancellation,18 along with the assumption that deterrence involves cancellation. Nuclear deterrence may well be irrational, it is immoral, but it is not inconsistent. 16. Selecting the usual game theory setting sees to this almost automatically; for it is then assumed that each player plays to maximize his or her own advantage. Thus too the presumption in Walzer, p.277, that 'the logic of deterrence' is based on eye—for—eye and tooth—for—tooth assumptions. 17. Even the irrationality of the use has been contested, e.g. it wishfully thought that America will rise like a phoenix radioactive ashes. has been from the There is moreover a simple solution to Schell's problem of the missing motive for retaliating to a first strike (p.204), namely, not a retributive one, but an ideological one: eliminate the prospect of the future dominance of the rival ideology. 18. An analogous confusion of negation with cancellation or obliteration appears in recent US "star war" thinking, where US missiles are supposed to "negate" incoming USSR missiles. Moral paradoxes of deterrence take a different direction; although involving negation they depend upon perhaps questionable interconnexions of intensional functors. One type of paradox (considered in §5) derives from a policy of credibly threatening LSN war without however intending to proceed to LSN war, though credible threats [appear to] imply an intention to proceed. Another style derives from acclaimed intention to reduce the number of nuclear missiles when the persistent practice, which implies an intention, is to increase the number. This paradox is technically removed - how satisfactorily i& another matter - by a distinction between longer-term aims and immediate practice, a time-honoured method of removing contradictions by conveniently discerned temporal distinctions. �73 APPENDIX 2. On the Matter of Collective and Individual Responsibility and on Regional Strategies What one does depends, naturally, on where one lives and what means one has, as well as on what one should do and what sort of person one seeks to be. So too what strategy a state should adopt depends on where it is located and what sort of power it is, on national as well as on moral considerations. In present circumstances states have an evident responsibility to work out their policies. There are however some persuasive arguments that this is where all responsibility ends: these major responsibilities accrue entirely to states, and there is no individual, or (smaller scale) collective, responsibility to work out a policy or stance on such matters as nuclear arrangements and still less to act, perhaps against a state, on the basis of such a stance. While such a no-responsibility or opt-out position no doubt suits many people - many for themselves, some (especially more authoritarian power-holders) on behalf of others - it does involve inadmissibly opting out of moral responsibilities, responsibilities acquired by virtue of being a person within the framework of certain social arrangements. Now there is no doubt that individuals and groups can do this, can opt out. They can neglect their moral responsibilities; but they are not justified in doing so. Against this claim, which is based ultimately upon each person's being set in a web of responsibility-inducing social relations, whether they like it or not so long as they choose to live with others, there are some neat arguments which appear to permit, or even warrant, opting out. One influential argument takes the following lines: 1. The (ordinary) individual, or group, has no possibility of making a difference to what happens. Therefore 2. Such individuals, or groups, have no obligation to try to make a difference. Hence 3. Such individuals, or groups, are not morally responsible, for instance when things go wrong. There are two main assumptions in this argument, both of which should be resisted: firstly, in getting from 1 to 2, a variant of the "ought implies can" themel, and secondly, the assumption that individuals can't make a difference. While it is true that individuals cannot accomplish much on their own, together they can. What an individual can achieve depends on what sufficiently many other individuals do. In highly competitive communities, full of hopeful free-riders, a person may encounter a familiar impasse: that he or she acts in manner M (e.g. morally, against nuclear arrangements, rationally), at considerable personal cost, with no guarantee that others will also act M-ly. Such an impasse no longer faces so many in the West, at least as regards initial steps against nuclear arrangements. The individual can cooperate with others in ways that do make a difference. An individual is not exonerated from responsibility by the argument. While individuals can respond by joining organisations whose activities are directed at making some difference, many individuals also have the option of more individualistic action in such forms as boycotts, go slows, political disobedience. An important form of individual resistance, already adopted in Canada and north-western USA, is refusal to pay income taxes directed towards defence or various parts thereof (e.g. nuclear weapons production and deployment), or alternatively redirection of such taxes, for instance to peace funds. Evidently, however, all these more individualistic forms of political activity work more effectively if individuals integrate their activities, since the impacts aggregate (and appear after a certain stage to exponentiate). As well collective action helps in distributing the impact of retribution or punitive action by state authorities. 1. Any satisfactory deontic theory which takes moral dilemmas with due seriousness is bound to reject this theme. There are also independent grounds for jettisoning this Kantian theme: see Routley and Plumwood. �74 There are, furthermore, arguments of some weight that individuals are under some sort of moral obligation to take political action to disaffiliate themselves from what contributes to the prospects of nuclear war. What type of action this is depends on the sort of state one resides in, for instance, whether it is a nuclear power, whether it provides nuclear bases or facilities, etc., and on such complicating issues as what kind of preventive action the state is likely to take in return. (Any state seriously practising deterrence is bound to take some action against effective protest, or risk losing credibility; but there are limits to the amount of state coercion any one individual need bear.) One argument - it is one of a type that can be varied from making nuclear weapons to, for example, providing facilities for them - proceeds from the wrongness of nuclear war to the position that it is not right to be making the weapons for such war. The argument here applies connecting principles (like those of §5), while appealing to such background information as that the manufacture and deployment of such weapons increases the risk of such war. But if it is not morally right to be making such weapons then those who live in a state that is doing so ought to disaffiliate themselves from such defence production, and disaffiliation includes not paying for such production through defence taxes . The argument is not without substantive assumption, but the assumptions appear morally reasonable and defensible. Another effective argument proceeds from the question of the type of moral person one wants to be: Does one want to be, or effectively to be seen as, the kind of person who goes along with the nuclear destruction of human populations? Or with making credible a threat to do so, or the like? What follows applies primarily to people who do not want to be, or be seen as, such people. Arguments like these not only put opt-outers and do-nothingers on the spot insofar as they contribute to national objectives; they also raise questions, perhaps even dilemmas, as to political obligation for those who would take action, even limited action such as redirection of taxes 3. For are there not political obligations to the state, such as paying due taxes and supporting the national defence effort? It is usually assumed that there are. However, no dilemma occurs under a theory which, properly, takes political obligations to be regulated in some fashion by moral obligations; for in this case moral obligations override political obligations. In fact political obligations are already significantly limited by moral constraints. The nuclear situation does not so much bring out new limits on political obligation, as emphasize the respects in which those obligations are already limited, and introduce further moral considerations against sponsorship of national defence arrangements. An obligation to try ** to dissociate oneself from preparation for nuclear war or from nuclear-deterrence, for instance by not spending part of one's working life contributing indirectly to it, does not commit one to more than this: to an obligation, for example, to work for an alternative national defence policy which avoids nuclear elements. But no doubt this would be a good thing to try to contribute towards. Once again, what one attempts depends on where one lives, the level of one's commitments, e.g. to nonviolence, and so forth. For not only are different types of policy reorientation appropriate for different nations and regions, but there are more superficial and deeper reorientations that can be worked out and promoted, e.g. schemes that leave 2. An argument of this type was deployed by Bishop Hunthaussen of support of his refusal to pay defense taxes. 3. This dilemma and option is now removed in practice for most wage earners by Pay As You Earn taxation schemes - schemes apparently introduced to give the state interest on gross earnings, but obviously very effective in removing taxation power from most workers, and so in further transferring power from individuals to the state. 4. Given the power of institutions and the state one may be able to do little more than try, without giving up one's work and thereby one's ability to contribute to other deserving causes. For example, it may be virtually impossible for one to avoid contributing to a superannuation fund which is investing in projects which one opposes or ought to oppose, or both. Seattle in �75 "conventional" warfare apparatus more or less intact, schemes that change that. and deeper (ecological) The US Bishops, for example, present a rather shallow set of goals for a superpower such as the USA, which includes such objectives as preventing the development and deployment of destabilizing nuclear weapons systems and working for better control of already operational systems (see PL, p.317). The nuclear situation affords an important opportunity to press however for a much deeper set of changes in the superstates. For those whose very limited political influence is exerted in considerably less powerful states, even the shallow goals may look quite different: there are no nuclear weapons (except perhaps those of another power stationed on local territory) to redeploy or to better control. The view from the very minor powers in the Antipodes is furthermore different from that of the medium powers in Europe. There is some prospect in much of the Antipodes of avoiding the more immediate effects of an LSN war, while there is little such prospect in Europe (cf. Preddey and others). There is accordingly some obligation — an obligation little considered and not grasped by the power holders - on those in the Antipodes to make some effort to preserve there in the South elements of what is valuable in world civilization. Local and regional self-interest would also suggest substantial steps towards self-preservation that (foolishly) have not been initiated. What is broadly required in the Antipodes is not difficult to discern once Steps include withdrawal from the American alliance, the goals are glimpsed. which is in any case of questionable merit since its main advantages lie with the US and it affords no guarantee of local defence;$ closure of American bases and withdrawal of American access rights for nuclear—carrying equipment to ports, air bases and other facilities, especially so as to remove local nuclear targets; pursuit of a more evenhanded policy of nonalignment (something quite small powers elsewhere have managed to achieve). That much is easy, in principle; and justified. It is justified because local commitment to the American military operations in the region lacks a solid foundation; it is premissed primarily on the acceptance of deterrence, which, so it has been argued (in §5ff.), lacks justification. That Australian commitment to joint Australian—US facilities and to US military operations in the region is explicitly based on acceptance of deterrence emerges from several recent statements of government policy. The joint facilities are 'part of a system of deterrence'. & More difficult to ensure, at least without much preparation, is that economic and cultural collapse does not follow an LSN war in the North. Secondly, then, the building of increased socio-economic independence in the Antipodes is required. It is not enough to make the region a nuclear-free zone not worth targeting militarily: the region must also have a sustainable life of its own. For a small region, that looks a very costly exercise unless combined with other desirable objectives; for example, in Preddey and others it is estimated that a substantial portion of GDP would have to be diverted to build up New Zealand's economic independence.? For a larger region which included Australia, the costs would be less. They would compare favourably with many Northern military budgets, and have the advantage that much of the expenditure is genuinely productive. If furthermore - what seems unlikely - the structural readjustment were combined with the independently desirable aims of moving the 5. See the discussion in Ball, chapter 13, especially pp.140-1. How slight the commitments are, under the ANZUS treaty in particular, has been emphasized again in recent defence discussions between Australia and the USA. Of course, the ANZUS Treaty is only one, and a comparatively minor one, of the many military treaties that should be terminated: from a European and world viewpoint the winding down of NATO and the Warsaw Pact arrangements, and the removal of American and Russian forces from Europe (and elsewhere), are very much more important. A fuller discussion of Australia's defence philosophy will appear in a subsequent publication in this series. and alternatives, �76 whole region towards a multi-cultural conserver society and perhaps even diverting "defence" spending to connected self—management and social defence goals, the costs would be very considerably lessened. They only appear so great in the setting of a consumer-satellite society. In any case, where life and culture themselves are concerned, the costs do not appear excessive. In sum, Southern countries should be severing their military linkages with Northern nuclear powers^, and should be preparing now, socially and economically, for the time after the LSN war, the great Northern war. However there are serious blockages in the way of such things in the Antipodes, and indeed impeding any substantial attempts to lessen the impact of LSN war. Some of the blockages derive again from the fact that present nuclear arrangements favour many of the power holders and suit strong corporate interests which wield political power. But the main blockages to more popular action are sloganised in the false dichotomy: "either it won't happen or we're all dead anyway; so why bother". One reason for blockage is then the extinction assumption (SI of Appendix 1), the unwarranted adoption of which is excessively nihilistic. A more important reason is that most people, and most of their political representatives, do not believe that major repercussions of LSN war are going to befall them. These are events which, like starvation and torture, happen to other (remote) people, not them. It is not that LSN war is unthinkable: rather it is that it seems unbelievable that it should make any difference. Most people in the Antipodes really do not believe that their lives are likely to be shattered by nuclear war. Waking up and mobilising these people is a major part of the problem in 6. See the letter by R.G. Hawke, Prime Minister, replying to a symposium on consequences of nuclear war, Canberra Times, Saturday July 23, 1983. The point is also made by the Foreign Minister in his Evatt Memorial Lecture, as Hawke notes. The point is softened by representing the facilities as also having a role in verification, as well as deterrence, 'that makes arms control and reduction feasible': the known role of the facilities in war fighting is not alluded to, and nor is the fact that any verification role can be alternatively accomplished using satellites. However the matter is not in any doubt: 'successive Australian governments ... have taken the view that our primary concern should be to support the effectiveness of the United States deterrent to war itself' (D.J. Killen, Minister for Defence; quoted in Threats to Australia's Security, p.17). Government representatives (e.g. Hawke) concede that the joint facilities put Australia at nuclear risk. 'However it is the judgement of this Government that the benefits to Australia in terms of its immediate interest and global strategic consideration outweigh potential risks'. A proper decision-theoretic analysis would not support Hawke's claim: since Australia is known to be a nuclear target because of American bases (cf. Ball, pp.130-8), the potential risks given that an LSN war has a non-negligible probability far outweigh any immediate benefits. Since Australia has only a regional strategic role, the global strategic considerations are, as could be otherwise inferred, primarily those of the main user of the facilities, the USA. The Government is prepared to put Australia, its peoples and ecosystems, at what is decidedly serious risk for immediate and American interests. A worthwhile representative government does not hold its peoples hostage for such reasons. Not only is that short-sighted expediency decision making: it seems virtually certain that the details of the decision making, were they ever revealed, would not justify the policy in the longer term even on the basis of expediency, but would turn on such things as present trade advantages and short-term commercial considerations. 7. As to the economic and social problems Australia would face in the event of an LSN war, see Coombs for a preliminary assessment. 8. Ideally the removal of significant nuclear targets should take place across the whole Southern Hemisphere, because this is the zone that is relatively insulated, atmospherically, from the Northern Hemisphere. �77 achieving requisite social and political adjustment. Even those who believe that LSN war is not improbable (but may well not be totally destructive of life) do little to reorganise their lives in a way that would reflect their assessment. Richard Routley* 9. Again, for some of what to do, for some ways to reorganise, see e.g. Martin. There is also much intellectual work to be undertaken, for example, searching out details of alternative arrangements, and also discrediting establishment experts, especially economists and political scientists, who intellectually underwrite present nuclear arrangements. * The text has been much improved as a result of detailed comments by C. Pigden, R. Goodin, N. Griffin, B. Martin and L. Mirlin, and through correspondence with G. Foley. J. Norman has helped in its final organisation. The initial outlines of the paper were worked out in Victoria, Canada; and an early version was read at Simon Fraser University in 1982. �78 REFERENCES G. Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, C.H. Beck, Munchen, toasAA. G. Anders, Endzeitand Zeitenende: Gedanken zur atomaren Munchen, 1972; referred to as AE. 1956; Situation, referred C.H. Beck, I. Brownlie, ed., Basic Documents on Human Rights, Oxford, 1971. D. 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Lackey, 'Missiles and morals: a utilitarian look at nuclear deterrence', Philosophy and Public Affairs 11 (1982) 189-231; referred to as MM. D.P. Lackey, 'Disarmament revisited: A reply to Kavka and Public Affairs 12 (1983) 261-64. and Harden', Philosophy B. Martin, Grass Roots Strategy Against War, Freedom Press, Nottingham, 1984, to appear. A. A. Mazrui, A World Federation of Cultures: An African Perspective, Free Press, New York, 1976. J.C. Murray, Morality and Modern War, Affairs, New York, 1959. Council on Religion and International T. Nagel, 'War and Massacre', in Cohen et al, pp.3-24. J. Narveson, 'Violence and War', in Regan, pp.109-146. National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Committee on War and Peace, 'The challenge of peace: God's promise and our response', Origins 12 (20) (1982) 306-328; referred to as PL, for 'New Draft of Pastoral Letter'. Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford, 1971; referred to as OED. B. Paskins and M. Dockrill, The Ethics of War, Duckworth, London, 1979. G.F. Preddey and others, Future Contingencies 4. Nuclear Disasters, A Report to the Commission for the Future, Government Printer, Wellington, New Zealand, 1982. P. Ramsay, The Just War: force and political responsibility, Scribner, New York, 1968. J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass., 1971. T. Regan (ed.), Matters of Life and Death, Random House, New York, 1980. R. Routley and N. Griffin, 'Unravelling the meanings of life', Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy #3, Australian National University, Canberra, 1982. R. Routley and V. Routley, 'The Alternatives 2 (1982), 23-8. irrefutability of anarchism', Social �80 R. Routley and V. Plumwood, 'Moral dilemmas and the logic of deontic notions' in Paraconsistent Logic (ed. G. Priest, and others), Philosophia Verlag, 1984. R. Scheer, With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War, Random House, York, 1982. New J. Schell, 'Reflections (Nuclear Arms - Parts 1-111)', The New Yorker, February 1, 8, and 15, 1982, pp.47-113, 48-109, and 45-107, respectively. This series, subtitled The Fate of the Earth, has now appeared as a book with that title (Knopf, New York, 1982). References in the text are to the book. T.C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, Harvard University Press, 1980. G. Sharp, Exploring Nonviolent Alternatives, Boston, 1971. D. and R. Smith, The Economics of Militarism, Pluto, London, 1983. F. Soo, 'Mao's vision for China', in Contemporary Chinese Philosophy Adelmann) Nijhoff, The Hague, 1982, pp.62-80. T. Taylor, Nuremburg and Vietnam: An 1972. American Tragedy, Times (ed. Books, F.T. London, E. P. Thompson and D. Smith, Protest and Survive, Monthly Review Press, New York, 1981. Threats to Australia's Security. Their nature and Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1981. probability, Australian R.W. Tucker, The Just War, John Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 1960. M.M. Wakin (ed.), War, Morality and the Military Profession, Westview, Colorado. 1979. Boulder, M. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, Basic Books, New York, 1977. R. A. Wasserstrom (ed.) War and Morality, Wadsworth, Belmont, California, 1970. B. Williams, 'How to think sceptically about the bomb', New 1982). Society S. Zuckermann, Nuclear Illusion and Reality, Collins, London, 1982. (Nov. 18, �OTHER PUBLICATIONS OF THE PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT, RESEARCH SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES, AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY School Publications R. and V. Routley, The Fight 1974, Third edition 1975. for the Forests, First edition 1973, Second edition Departmental Publications M.K. Rennie, Some Uses of Type Theory in the Analysis of Language, 1974. D. Mannison, M. McRobbie and R. Routley, editors, Environmental Philosophy, 1980. R. Routley, Exploring Meinong's Jungle and Beyond, 1980. Yellow series (Research Papers of the Logic Group): 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. R.K. Meyer, Why I am not a relevantist, 1978. R.K. Meyer, Sentential constants in R, 1979. R.K. Meyer and M.A. McRobbie, Firesets and relevant implication, 1979. R.K. Meyer, A Boolean-valued semantics for R, 1979. R.K. Meyer, Almost Skolem forms for relevant (and other) logics, 1979. R.K. Meyer, A note on R matrices, 1979. R.K. Meyer and J. Slaney, Abelian logic (from A to Z), 1980. C. Mortensen, Relevant algebras and relevant model structures, 1980. R.K. Meyer, Relevantly interpolating in RM*, 1980. C. Mortensen, Paraconsistency and Ci, 1981. R.K. Meyer and J. Slaney, De Morgan monoids, 1983. R. Routley, Relevantism and the problem as to when Material Detachment can be correctly used, and N. da Costa, Essay on the foundations of logic, 1983. R. Routley and G. Priest, On Paraconsistency, 1983. R. Routley, Research in logic in Australia, New Zealand and Oceania, 1983. R.K. Meyer, S. Giambrone and R. Brady, Where gamma fails. R. Brady, R.K. Meyer, C. Mortensen and R. Routley, Algebraic analyses of relevant affixing logics, and other Polish connections, 1983. Green Series (Discussion papers in environmental philosophy) 1. R. Routley, Roles and limits of paradigms in environmental thought and action, 1982. 2. R. Routley, In defence of cannibalism I. Types of admissible and inadmissible cannibalism, 1982. 3. R. Routley and N. Griffin, Unravelling the meanings of life?, 1982. 4. R. Routley, Nihilisms, and nihilist logics, 1983. 5. R. Routley, War and peace I. On the ethics of large-scale nuclear war and nuclear-deterrence and the political fall-out, 1984. 6. R. Routley and V. Plumwood, Moral dilemmas and the logic of deontic notions. 7. R. Routley and V. Plumwood, An expensive repair-kit for utilitarianism. 8. N. Griffin, Lifeboat U.S.A., 1984. 9. R. Routley, War and peace II. On the alleged inconsistency, moral insensitivity and fanaticism of pacifism, 1983. ���n w w [j � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Self-published Papers Description An account of the resource <span>Sylvan favoured the </span><span lang="EN-GB">highly-unorthodox practice of self-publishing a vast amount of his work<span>—</span><span></span>quite literally, using his own printing press!</span> Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document Discussion Papers in environmental philosophy Philosophy Departments The Australian National University PO Box 4, Canberra, Australia 2600. NUMBER 5 WAR AND PEACE Zgt ON THE ETHICS OF LARGE-SCALE NUCLEAR WAR AND NUCLEAR DETERRENCE AND THE POLITICAL FALL-OUT < RICHARD ROUTLEY FOR CIRCULATION AND EVENTUAL LIBRARY DEPOSIT WAR AND PEACE. I ON THE ETHICS OF LARGE-SCALE NUCLEAR WAR AND NUCLEAR DETERRENCE AND THE POLITICAL FALL-OUT by R. Routley Number 5 Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy Department of Philosophy Australian National University 1984 INTRODUCTION. Virtually all the philosophical literature on nuclear war is written from either a superpower (predominantly American) or else European (mainly German, British or French) viewpoint. This article, after connecting in initial sections with Northern Catholic literature, adopts a very different Antipodean stance. Such regional perspectives, while the should not affect the morality of the matter, are highly politically relevant. Much of the philosophical literature, especially that emanating from the USA, also fails the test of morality. It is concerned only or primarily with what is good or "rational" or prudential for Americans, or for the American state, to do - whereas morality is independent of place, race, nationality and the like. This article tries to take the morality of the matter, and the resulting redistribution of moral and political obligations, seriously. It concludes, among other things, that the American and Russian states have no moral business putting nonaligned peoples at such grave risk as present nuclear arrangements involve. CONTENTS AND OUTLINE: Italicised headings §3-§8 indicate the main structure of the argument Page No §0. Introduction. Nuclear vs conventional wars, and new moral issues. Large-scale (LSN) vs limited nuclear wars, the focus on the former, but the implications for the latter. §1. How nuclear wars differ from other wars; wars and states, and the resulting limited appropriateness of older models and theories of war. War characterised. The essential role of the state. New and different features of nuclear wars. §2. The moral situation: the recent tendency of moral considerations to become entirely submerged in the context of war. The ancient distinction of morality and expediency. Strategic planning based on expediency. Arguments that war must be expediency-based refuted. Morality does not have to, and ought not to, give way to expediency. Utilitarianism and expediency distinguished. Limits to consensus: supermen and superhawks. National interest and expediency assimilated. Limits of state entitlement. §3. The initial argument to the immorality of LSN wars. One key argument, from the wrongness of killing noncombatants in mass, is presented, assessed, and criticisms met. Arguments for the premisses of the key argument elaborated. §4. Arguments from historical requirements on just wars, the important argument from convergence, and environmental arguments. Arguments from just war requirements: discrimination, proportionality, prospect of success. The detailed convergence argument, from rival moral positions. Arguments from environmental principles. §5. The shift to nuclear deterrence: arguments to its immorality. Deterrence seen as the only practical way to satisfy major desiderata: prevention of war and maintenance of prudential values. Pure deterrence not the policy. Deterrence as practiced has increased the probability of nuclear war. The first argument to immorality of deterrence, from the plausibility of probability of immorality. Further arguments through deontic connecting principles: the probability linkage. Refuting the counterargument from the success of deterrence. The way the onus of 1 2 5 11 14 17 Page No proof falls on deterrence policy, which cannot meet evidential require­ ments. The second connecting principle: the wrongness of serious preparation for nuclear war. The general form of connecting principles; separating out those that are correct. The third connecting principle: the wrongness of serious threats of nuclear devastation. Criticism of this principle leads to further connecting principles, through intention and through commitment. Meeting counterarguments from utilitarianism. Applying the connecting principles to argue to the immorality of deterrence. Arguments from limited convergence: pro- and anti-utilitarian versions. Other reasons for deep dissatisfaction with deterrence. §6. Practical, prudential and more moral arguments from national dangers to nuclear build-up of the superstates, and the genesis of nuclear dilemmas. The arguments from nuclear blackmail and foreign domination, and from risk of nuclear destruction. The crucial argument from basic rights and fundamental values. The argument from isolated people to superstate immorality. The superstate theme, and reasons for its appeal. The much less persuasive dependent state theme. Challenging the assumptions of the underlying relatiatory model. §7. The resulting nuclear dilemmas - for aligned states and their supporters. Character of the nuclear fix. Subsidiary dilemmas: national security vs freedom and democratic arrangements; personal and role dilemmas. Features of deontic dilemmas. Deterrence presented as second-best escape from the nuclear fix. The nuclear fix a fix of states' own making. Interconnections between the nuclear fix and nation-state arrangements. §8. Ways out of nuclear dilemmas: initial political fall-out from the ethical results. The inevitability of limitations on national sovereignty. Interstate and extrastate approaches. The Way Up and the Way Down of extrastate approaches. Arguments for the Way Up, and the decisive case against it. Failure of international agreements, especially on human rights and genocide. Exclusion of nuclear deterrence under the Genocide Convention. Need for the reexamination of current political arrangements imposed by the nuclear fix. Deficiencies in present antiquated political arrange­ ments revealed by nuclear problems. Further arguments from the nuclear fix for political reassessment. The weak link: the sovereign nation­ state. Forfeiture of political obligation by many states. Alternative political arrangements vs nuclear time horizons. The multi-track Way Out of the nuclear dilemma. The main political means lie outside state governmental apparatus. Laying the spectre of ideological domination. Social restructuring and devolution of power. Graduated disarmament and transarmament, and letting state sovereignty go. Dissolving the arguments from national dangers. State resistance to loss of power. Further lines of organised action against nuclear states. Appendix 1: On the fate of mankind and the earth, according to Schell and Anders. Nuclear prophets and prophetic rubbish. The extinction assumption. Common emerging themes of Schell and Anders. The extravagant anthro­ pocentric assumption, and some of what is wrong with it. Second death dismissed. The universality of peril. The alleged universality of responsibility: the Pogo theme. The correct, but undeveloped, whole earth theme. Ultimately Schell offers little hope and superficiality. Nuclear war is war. The logic and illogic of deterrence. ii 37 43 49 Page No Appendix 2: On matters of collective and individual responsibility and on regional strategies. Individual and state responsibility. Opt-out positions, and arguments to them. Failure of the arguments, and the impact of group cooperation. Arguments to direct obligations of individuals to the nuclear dissociation. Limitations of rival political obligations. Different policy reorganisation for different regions. Shallower and deeper goals. The important opportunity for deeper reorganisation afforded by nuclear dilemmas. Obligations of those in the Antipodes: what is required, and justified. Social and economic reorganisation in the Antipodes, and reducing costs involved. Blockages to social and political adjustment. iii 73 ON THE ETHICS OF LARGE-SCALE NUCLEAR WAR AND NUCLEAR DETERRENCE AND THE POLITICAL FALL-OUT Large-scale nuclear wars raise ethical questions not generated, either at or nearly so forcefully, by previous human military encounters.This is at all bottom because of their projected effects, which are often to said differ so those of even the largest conventional wars (the World Wars) as to yield a from difference in kind of war. involve, and threatened Certainly massive exchanges such as nuclear exchanges such as nuclear deterrence presupposes, are neither envisaged nor fully accommodated by traditional theories of Much wars just wars. new philosophical reflection and investigation is required, even if rather well-tested and old-fashioned moral principles will serve as initial ethical base. Although nuclear wars are, thus nonexistent objects, nuclear wars (extrapolated from a very limited varieties. In far, only a decidedly class menacing of proper have several distinctive properties nuclear experience^) and come in several particular, confined or limited nuclear wars, of which tactical or strategic are subvarieties, contrast with Idrge-scale nuclear wars (LSN wars) 1. The US Catholic Bishops in their Pastoral Letter (PL) make the point forcefully: 'Nuclear weapons ... and nuclear warfare ... are new moral issues ... There exists a capacity to do something no other age could imagine: we can threaten the created order ... We could destroy [God's] work' (PL, p.312). While the independent analysis offered in what follows has a great deal in common with the Bishop's position, it differs significantly in removing the religious backdrop and associated features and, it is hoped, in bringing out the logical structure of the argument more clearly and sharply. To illustrate the differences that emerge with removal of the religious backdrop and its the associated unity-of-evil theme, consider what happens to two examples from PL, p.323:- Firstly, peace is possible without religious enlightenment if it is possible with it: religious enlightenment is not an essential condition as there implied. Secondly, violence does not take all the forms the Bishops try to give it, e.g. sexual discrimination is hardly a form of violence, pornography can operate without it, etc. It is a serious mistake to try to heap so many diverse and independent issues together under the one heading (forms of violence) along with war as if they stood and fell together, e.g. abortion and nuclear war. Note that referencing, where not through an author's name, is by way of acronym explained in the references at the end. 2. an The isolated, and unnecessary, bombing of two Japanese cities at the very end of World War II did not render that war a genuine nuclear war. Nuclear wars proper will be very different and very much more horrifying. Nuclear wars proper, though elements of uncomfortably adjacent possible worlds, ought therefore to be confined to merely possible worlds. Enough of their features we can appreciate without their being brought to actuality. 2 A large-scale nuclear which need not however be unlimited 3. explosion war it is of large quantities of nuclear devices over a sizeable region; a function of two main parameters: distribution. war strategic) nuclear of quantities war a Such quantity markedly differs which limited, is where and explosives, (megatonnage a from targets to are and explosive) limited assumption, by the of the involves (tactical much or smaller characteristically circumscribed, for instance confined in principle to military installations in a given region. Though focus the in what follows is upon LSN wars and their prevention, limited nuclear wars are by no a separate wars to LSN wars are high (given usual reasonable assumptions second strike, since issue, a is a prerequisite, and the probabilities of escalation of such arsenal nuclear means etc.).^ Because of these of follow-up or connections, much of the case made against LSN wars transfers to more limited wars, as will become evident. §1. How nuclear wars resulting differ from other wars wars: and party and limited appropriateness of older models and theories of war. of war that has dominated much thinking, including strategic two states (or thinking, the A model is the several person) game or, as a complication of that, the clan or tribe battle3. A picture of war thus on requirements for legitimate and just wars, which technological reflection advances have traditional now theory rendered of war, emerged, inappropriate hardly and especially sometimes surprisingly, as a result inapplicable. of The made no allowance for such 3. Another dimension of variation concerns the sequence of the war, especially the type of strike involved. Though the sequence is important for the moral assessment, for example of the main actors, it in no way alters the immorality of LSN wars, as will emerge. 4. 'The overwhelming probability [is] that a nuclear exchange would have no limits' (PL, p.314). Hence a major argument against limited nuclear wars: that any such war risks, indeed renders highly probable, an unlimited war, and the risk is far too large to take. The point in fact follows by straightforward application of decision theory, multiplying the massive undesirability (moral and otherwise) of an LSN war by its probability given a limited nuclear war. Given the character of weapons development and present communication arrangements, the idea of a highly circumscribed purely nuclear exchange between the superpowers, perhaps in the European "theatre", is really a myth. 5. There was a substantial element of sport (and connected features of prowess) in traditional wars that has been eroded in modern technological wars. Nuclear wars may be not just unsporting, in that no notice is given, etc., they are also remote and impersonal, and differently unjust, in a much deeper way. 3 phenomena as mass bombing of large cities, such as with Dresden and nuclear bombing, with its many further crucial effects beyond mass And Tokyo. occurred bombing, adds further new dimensions. Yet it is important for the argument anchors, retain historical were accounted unjust war is essentially a matter of states and their control: the Oxford English Dictionary account, war is 'hostile contention armed protagonists, antagonists or players; of contention or combat; exchange is the actual experience. but other are not literal, but transferred, metaphoric, etc.8 'war' means and or wrong. to elaborate by means of forces, carried on between nations, states, or rulers, or between parties in the same nation or state' for control of the state?; noun linkages to be aware of what counted as war (the semantics of the matter^), and of when, and why, wars and military actions Firstly, to always a function of senses of the States are the forces comprising armed soldiers are the and combat or forceful and typically violent Thus wars are external or internal states or their rule. (civil), Thus too wars have grown in quantity and frequency as states have expanded, wars have changed as states have transformed, and nuclear war has emerged 'with nuclear states. theoretical way then to eliminate wars is to remove states: An obvious in short, wars are 6. There are interesting sidelights concerning even the etymology of the term 'war', which was derived from a term meaning 'confusion'. In particular, 'it is a curious fact that no Germanic nation in early historic times had in living use any word properly meaning 'war'': Oxford English Dictionary (OED) on war. 7. But of course there can be something quite analogous to war waged between clans, gangs, multinational firms, even against Nature, and still more metaphorically against poverty, etc. To this extent, a strict definition of 'war' is being insisted upon. Even so the diffusion of power structures the argument will direct us to, has to extend beyond just the break-down of nation-states . 8. Into this category (since Nature is no nation) falls the ubiquitous and unwarranted war against Nature of modern times, which features just as large in Marxism as in capitalism. As could have been guessed, someone it was James - suggested channelling all war into "war" in the metaphorical sense against that unarmed and nonaggressive "opponent", Nature. James proposed as a substitute for war proper, conscription of the youth for a war against Nature (see Wasserstrom, p.12). What it boiled down to, however, was that youth was to be channelled into all the dirty work, in that way to acquire manly virtues military activities "rightly" instil, especially discipline, but also service, devotion, physical fitness, constructive exertion, responsibility, and order. Another less diabolical substitute for wars proper (in American ecotopian literature) is through war games and other games of competitive cast. Again specious arguments enter for those bringing out the "best" in human males, etc. 4 an outcome of political and associated technological structure, and are by structure. the altering state arrangements, arrangements. be to can thus be seen as a structural problem of War from along defective) political organisation of states; they are a helps these This semantically based picture situational fix, a structural malformation. war with (otherwise removed arise Wars of explain why the radical argument against nuclear wars and deterrence argument devolves into an war-makers, against against In states. the fact (self-legitimised) on and war-declarers traditional theory, wars were the restricted to external wars, which were construed as the right or states of rulers (princes) to conduct for certain political purposes; their removed the argument was that private persons with grievances had access to the courts^, while states did not (wars were, so to speak, the international analogue of the law courts). But this is itself a very statist conception of the legitimate place of wars; the semantics is not so restrictive and permits internal wars within states, for example to end wars, injustice, etc. Let us however - to bring out what is different now - confine attention a basic and most familiar case, external wars between two states or sets (axes) of states, two-player external wars, games, competitive could be won, attentuated form for some "victors") the World Wars. agglomerations surrounding traditionally firstly for massive armed like wars, such exchanges as there may well be no winning in areas Northern the of very hemisphere countryside. Thus, and the secondly, for waste laying the point of of substantially substantially obliterated^, (exercised and most as nothing all worse off than at the outset of the "play". are huge war seen, to settle serious interstate disputes, is removed: another point of difference, the phenomenon of wars that prepared that That assumption still held good (though in With LSN wars it no longer holds; is settled with main protagonists players It was assumed An LSN war could involve destruction of all main Western metropolitan strategy. 9. to main Hence elaborately for, etc.), but which can never be pointfully fought; Thus Aquinas and Grotius for example (see Barnes, p.776, top). The argument presupposes rather a lot, including a neat public/private distinction. Put Aquinas's way, it looks as if it could be readily transferred into an argument for international government, or at least effective law-courts. Yet all Christendom was supposed at that time to be one state! 5 hence the inevitable emphasis on pure deterrence. and the other elements of gamesmenship had a role in earlier wars, but it was not pure deterrence. military to Certainly, deterrence, bluff, Lastly, traditional wars could be confined in targets and military principle This feature is fundamental as exchanges. for, as will appear, wars that spill over in gross regards just wars; ways to The special effects of uninvolved parties sacrifice any pretension to morality. nuclear explosives, especially operated in mass, mean however that large nuclear cannot wars be legitimately horrifying detail in popular sources ozone destruction, These confined. shockwaves, such effects gigantic fumigations and become entirely rapid speed include pulses, fireball or firestorm etc., etc. As a result of these of exchange, LSN wars will resemble the recent tendency submerged in the context of war. of moral and expediency. considerations to It is particularly important in the case of war to maintain a firm grasp on the ancient morality radioactivity, more than they resemble older-style wars. The moral situation: §2. the Schell) electromagnetic devastation, rogue bacteria and viruses, ... compounded as special effects (presented in distinction between What is done in war, especially for local or national advantage, may be very different from what ought morally to be done, whether the 10. There is however the degenerate idea of war as involving annihilation or extinction, and of winning a nuclear war as annihilation of the enemy while not being entirely annihilated oneself: the side that somehow "survives" sufficiently to rebuild is said to "win". But this is, at best, an extremely tenuous sense of winning, which in any case neglects the medical evidence concerning nuclear destruction. Recent talk about winning or even surviving a nuclear war must reflect a failure to appreciate a medical reality: Any nuclear war would inevitably cause death, disease and suffering of pandemonic proportions and without the possibility of effective medical intervention ... (PL, p.313). Moreover any such phoenix war is radically unjust, because of violation of the traditional requirement of proportionality, and for other reasons developed in the text. Unfortunately as documented in Scheer, significant officials who are responsible for the nuclear destiny of the USA - and so of the world think that the devastation of nuclear war can be survived by Americans and that a global nuclear war can actually be "won"! They rely, among other things, on an incredibly low, and unacceptable, redefinition of "winning". 11. In practice they often were not,they drained limited economies, they layed waste countryside (though to a minor extent compared with nuclear or chemical warfare or modern mining), impoverishing inhabitants, etc. 6 latter is determined using the codes and conventions Much not to be done in war i^ done, for one (alleged) advantage or ought that otherwise^. or war, of another, despite modern military codes and conventions and the like. we not live go a rather barbarous age: in unremarked, the if Militarily the horrors of the twentieth century will history gets written that (accurately) is. Furthermore military thinking and strategic planning tend (as Nagel explains) to induce a certain moral numbing, so that a range as such wiping rural populations, become real possibilities, included in out calculations. consequentialist characteristically based on is that strategic Each side in a military encounter reasont The expediency only disadvantages, its own gains and own its planning advantages is and losses as a result of alternative possible it ought, morally, to consider those of the other side(s) as moves: actions, excluded morally of well. In this way strategic planning displaces morality. Indeed it has been contended that war should be planned and conducted way, a no-holds barred combat fought to the maximal (local) advantage, without limits, moral or other (except insofar as technology limits the means of etc.). Such the classical through "bald an incremental limit) escalation distinct argument terms. from an that the It would And (but The externally will be broken by each player in turn for advantage. an extraordinarily narrow motivational base is assumed. the argument man" fallacy *3), that there can be no limit. assumption is that any merely selected limit (as enforced force, is the so-called "classic" view of Clausewicz, oft repeated. Clausewicz tries to argue, really this Thus too follow from idea of a limited war is some sort of contradiction in But it is not, though breaking off in the heat of war, or the of a supposedly limited nuclear exchange, may be singularly improbable. confusion Nuclear 12. For as Nagel contends (early on), there are moral restrictions on the conduct of warfare which are not legalistic only and which are neither arbitrary nor merely conventional, nor a matter of usefulness. These themes run entirely counter to the classic theory of war of Clausewicz - a theory outlined in Walzer. 13. As one less hair doos not, at any stage, distinguish a bald man from a hirsute man, there are, starting from the hirsute end, no bald men. The progressive escalation argument concerning war is an incremental argument like the technical Sorites syllogisms, formalising the type of fallacious argument which shows that one more straw never makes a heap. The fallacious escalation argument is part of the so-called "logic of war", for more on which see the conclusion of Appendix 1. 7 wars thus appear decidedly Clausewiczian. the for players Still the argument inconclusive; is can choose, at least in smaller calmer wars, not to escalate, and, for example, agree to abide by arranged practices, types of weapons, etc.^ A state engaged in war seldom sees itself as entirely bound by of morality: it is taken to be mere prudence on the part of those attacked to take account of the no-immoral-holds-barred approach they from the other side. especially constraints the question not only as to may encounter, well So each group potentially engaged in war faces ought it what do to in permissible morally situations, but also both what it ought really do, and what it can morally do in the morally flawed situations it finds itself. not, But the last question does in that case, reduce to one of expediency. There is no question, then, of morality giving or having even expediency, For it is not as if shaky considerations of involves. give bound are morality theoretical fact is that miraculously deliver us from value the theory. to Expediency fact, but that local values - of self, family, clan, class, or nation - are considerations. proper characterisation, a therefore, much universalizable more universal fairness, equitability and principles, justice. distribution value of and, And morality thereby imposes, through principles. intersubstitutivity certain requirements of general Expediency yields an unfair, inequitable value system, one that subscribers would not adhere to if differently placed \ deep theoretical unsatisfactoriness of expediency, and associated strategic thinking, also derives from this failure evaluations 14. remote By contrast, morality requires, as a matter of its resultant The takes It assumes, or what really count, and override or are to be maximized at the expense of foreign not does simply narrowly-construed local advantage or power as what is valuable. urges, crucial But the morality and* expediency fall within the same, both equally shaky or equally solid, domain of value or to to the firm ground of expediency when the chips are down, since often way enough such moral erosion does not occur in crisis situations. even to circumstances such as the prospect of LSN war extreme under way give to of interreplacement, from the same and results not holding when persons X and Y are interchanged under As Walzer argues, p.24. An historical example is the era of genuinely limited wars in Europe following the barbarism of the Thirty Years war. 8 For expediency does not elude expediency assessments^. it deontic presentation: be presented as through such popular slogans as "local might is right", can or given tight formal characterisation. The will characterisation normally that of utilitarianism, except that utilities are only assigned to, or resemble are biassed in favour of, certain individuals. However, theories of utility not have to be positions of expediency if utility is not locally confined. do Thus utilitarianism proper is not to be dismissed as considering only expediency; meet intersubstitutivity requirements of morality; can it it does not, unlike the methods of war game theory, assign different weights to the individual utility of (certain) Americans, as opposed to Russians, say. are There especially, deontologists regarding war^. which differences, between or justify, ugly strategies and practices as regards to some render to seemed enemy civilians, that deontological principles would not permit. effect and utilitarians serve to further complicate the moral picture In particular, utilitarian approaches have permissible, morally significant however utilitarians this But is would reject the description of practices permitted under their principles as 'ugly'; whereas an to already in aim what follows since partisanship, is to avoid meta-ethical meta-ethical neutrality, though of course not there is a moral partisanship, neutrality. to achieve And morally large area of consensus, or at least moral convergence, from which argument can begin. Virtually all positions agree that obliteration of several major cities in a LSN war would be wrong, indeed morally outrageous. If the there is dissension, as there may be among nuclear strategists who seem to feel no qualms when it comes to trading loss of some American cities for some Russian ones, simply increase the costs involved, up to loss of whole nations if 15. The severe limitations of those lesser "virtues", nationalism and patriotism, also come from the failure of replacement which excessive applications of nationalism easily engender. Try for example swapping a person from inside the homeland with one from outside as regards treatment. The point of, and reasons for, intersubstitutivity as a requirement of morality, is well explained in Hare, p.78ff. Hare applies the requirement to make a telling case against nationalism (a case which extends to strategic decision-theory). Nationalism, along with fanaticism, is the main cause of war, so Hare contends, p.72. 16. The case against expediency was developed in detail especially the criticism of Thrasymachus in The Republic. 17. Thus the differences between Nagel on the one side, and Brandt and Hare the other, in Cohen et al. by Plato; see on 9 then try to work down necessary, until moral repugnance ijs encountered; The again. fact remains however that in the nuclear area things have got substantially abandon tended Strategic thinking, in particular, has out of perspective, morally. to suppress moral considerations (as indeed theories of the state also or do, sometimes flamboyantly, in favour of partisan values). Naturally the fact of broad consensus as to the morality of the matter does mean that there are none who would welcome such outrageous happenings, that not total nuclear destruction of the North even, would be Consider the rising world empire. be southern (hemisphere) no advantage. one's strongman, SS, who has visions of While the superpowers of the north remain, SS's dream can realised. Thus his best strategy, having rid submarines and southern lands of US bases, is to try nuclear to exchange in the North. There be would waters southern to encourage a hardly of US all-out an point then in securing institutional arrangements so that potential SS's do not accumulate much given especially the apparent instability of crucial world arrangements. that is to anticipate: the present point is that (the fact of) moral has and its power, limitations, is an inadequate But consensus constraint without accompanying structural adjustments. national For, typically, differently to impose interest is taken hostages or override morality, even holding civilian populations as of those those of Eastern Europe. things. substitution of justification; fails in The first, expediency classes regimes, But morally national interest can do neither the overriding for morality, of morality, which the second, the alleged moral dominance of important And, killing millions in the national interest*8). unfortunately, these assumptions are not confined to more totalitarian such or irresistible ethical claims that dominate more ordinary ethical considerations (such as those concerning nuclear to is entirely national simply lacks the moral interests, of cases, including, so the argument will go, the case of LSN war. 18. As Schell bluntly puts it, 'What is being claimed is that one or two countries have the right to jeopardise all countries and their descendents in the name of certain beliefs' (p.132). However this way of putting it leaves room for ambiguity, since the beliefs may be morally grounded rather than based on national interests. 10 States may insist upon operating on a selfish national interest basis, let it not be that pretended expediency (namely, that of is it a moral basis as distinct from one of There egoism"). "group but moral special no is dispensation for governments. individuals: there is no logical difference in the pattern of justification, or analysis of obligation. Morality works in the same way for groups as for For example, what ought to be as regards X is (analysed semantically) what would happen as regards X in all ideal worlds; no whether difference is an reasons aside, just behaving as system, group or individual or individual States such as Israel (in its recent invasion organisation. extenuating X immorally of as brigands or mass Certainly there are grounds on which states or their agents conceded, special moral dispensations; been more than that and do not stand up to criticism. cannot furnish two (incompatible) claimed, have but the excuses offered are no A moralities, satisfactory a state theory moral or public one and a private or individual citizen one — state expediency and individual morality because this would lead to violations of substitutivity, neutrality, etc. instance, a state operative X could use state cover morally impermissible ways, ways ruled out (e.g. Y are permuted. special are, Lebanon) there is no moral difference. killers: or makes and it to considerations citizen * For Y in by state interests) when X and A group or organisation or person can be derivative damage 19 bound of course by in virtue of role, but these are derivative principles - good for any such institution - which fit within and answer back to general moral principles. So it is also with a state which is an institutional arrangement justified (insofar as it is) by the way it answers back to some least) of its citizens: its charter does not legitimate emergent allegedly moral principles which conveniently coincide with those of state expediency. particular, a survival. In state is not (morally) entitled to risk the lives of many of its own citizens and of other peoples and creatures for its own ends, even own (at for its Thus it is not entitled to do what both nuclear war and nuclear deterrence require, as will emerge. 19. There are also other arguments against two (or see Routley and Plumwood. multiple) morality lines: 11 §3. The initial argument pacifism yield arguments to the immorality of to the immorality of war. controversial in an area where there is no LSN for But such arguments are be to reason good Arguments wars. controversial. Pacifism can accordingly be set aside as a special case, since the immorality of LSN wars follows. All but pacifist positions concede that war in itself is not a crime. all wars are immoral, though even inoffensive wars may be pointless or inferior Among more or less admissible ways of settling political issues between states. wars who Not are the international "tournaments" of aristocratic young men or warriors volunteer as and soldiers action whose not does spill over onto noncombatants, and some early and medieval wars, where few or even no combatants were killed in war. conscription, Since the establishment press-gangs and recruitment of such of the largely ceased to take these less offensive forms; induction practices as near-destitute, wars have modern massive wars are far removed from the ideal war-tournament types (which feature now only in ecotopian portrayals, in ways that are increasingly dubious). immoral, sorts Most of wars are because of what is done to the essentially uninvolved, but few to such an extent as LSN wars. The first argument to the immorality of LSN and wars sufficiently of large-scale wars generally, takes the following form: Pl. The (deliberate) killing in mass of noncombatants is wrong. P2. LSN wars involve the killing in mass of noncombatants. P3. What involves what is wrong is wrong. - (KA) LSN wars are wrong. The particular argument given is just one representative of a set of this type. taken off killing: the on (KA) replaces But the quite 'killing sufficiently evil. creatures'. can Thus a first in mass of noncombatants' by a suitable clause concerning 'huge destruction of lifestyle of uninvolved or involved focus destruction of lifestyle of nonhumans and humans alike that an LSN war will bring is variation arguments Characteristically, in Western culture, it is thought that mass killing of humans is about the worst thing that can happen. be of not directly Other variations will emerge in the discussion (including that where the bracketed 'deliberate' figures). but The argument is valid, attacked) on the of basis be may attacked (and of its premisses. each has in effect been Let us consider these in reverse order. The principle, P3, used in the argument, that what involves "what is wrong" is wrong, has been challenged on rather Scholastic grounds. There are, in particular, problems like those generated by Good Samaritan arguments, purport to show that some proper obligations involve wrongdoing. assisting an injured robbed person is said robbed; but, since the robbing is wrong, "involve" to providing For which instance, that person's assistance being is also wrong. But these problems derive from too slack a notion of involvement; with a tighter account of involvement the problems disappear and P3 stands. As against P2, it may legitimately directed be argued against that military nuclear targets. 20 can wars be encounters But given the character of There is nuclear weapons, LSN wars could in no way be confined to such targets. not merely the likelihood that many missiles explode off target, there are all the other effects of large-scale nuclear bombings. fallout down-wind from military people, especially in the case of targets US and For example, the radioactive will affect large concentrations of European targets, and may affect uninvolved countries such as Canada. There may be an attempt to avoid the problem of massive civilian casualties by appeal effect)21. to such dubious principles as the doctrine of double effect (or side if missiles were characteristically reliably on target, and one 20. The challenge to P3, which is often expanded to a "distribution of obligation over entailment" principle, can be removed by a tighter involvement connective, linked to a good paradox-free entailment. For details see Routley and Plumwood, where Good Samaritan problems are diagnosed. 21. According to the doctrine, which is one concerning responsibility, we are responsible only for the intended effects or consequences of our freely-chosen actions, and not for other (side) effects or consequences, even if these are foreseen and/or intimately tied to the intended consequences. Unless carefully hedged, the doctrine is pernicious, allowing those who suitably adjust their intention to escape responsibility for evil they knowingly perpetrate. Thus, for instance, a Russian supreme command which intended only to take out US military targets would, under double effect, have no responsibility for the resultant effect on American and Canadian cities! Taking the issues concerning double effect to a more satisfactory conclusion would however require a larger theory of action, which duly distinguished acts (what is done) and outcomes from attached intentions. 13 which was intended unfortunately went only off to destroy an underground unmanned course and destroyed a large city, it could be claimed that the (unintended) mass destruction is legitimised under principle. a make Nonetheless effect double the circumstances difference, for they may mitigate attitudes to those responsible for firing the missile, since it was not as if they had deliberately aimed at The double effect principle conflates [diminution of] responsibility city. the the the action would be wrong, and the Such claims should be rejected: wrongness not lessened by the given intention. could silo missile assigned for an act with the [diminution of] wrongness of the act. As against Pl, and as regards the middle term of argued that there is an important equivocation. While it will the bracketed term, 'deliberate'. killing and Pl P2, may it be The equivocation is induced by conceded be that deliberate of genuine innocents is impermissible, two challenges will be made. It will be charged firstly that noncombatants, insofar as they are distinguishable, are no means all innocent, many being directly involved in military effort, by whether just as taxpayers or as suppliers of military, e.g. farmers or goods or services bootmakers or entertainers. as innocent. The second defensible — version of premiss P2. and for other reasons, it properly point concerns a much narrower - and less Because P2 so amended is is best to leave out the less defensible, "modifier" 'deliberate'. What is important for the present purposes is the moral status of what is not a mixture that with the motives of the perpetrators. of require the qualification 'deliberate' or done, So 'deliberate' gets left out, equivocation is avoided, P2 stands, and so does Pl. not the Secondly, it will be contended that LSN wars do not involve the deliberate killing of those excluded by used For Pl does 'intentional' or the like.22 Admittedly also 'noncombatant' is a fuzzy term, but none the worse for that, and there is noserious people who are is, moreover, problem in marking out a class of notdirectly involved in the command and action no need to adopt the practice, deriving stating an initialversion of Pl in terms of innocents - 22. clear noncombatants, at chains. There from Catholicism, of least as problematic Despite Nagel's suggestion that it does (p.158). The suggestion depends upon similar mistaken assimilations, of act with intention, and wrongness with responsibility, to those of the double effect doctrine. 14 a class as that of noncombatants to try to characterize - and then endeavouring to make the difficult transition to noncombatants. Not only can arguments against the premisses of the argument be met, are arguments the for there premisses, though for the substantive moral premiss Pl they are of the characteristically nonconclusive moral sort and tend will For example, one argument for vary somewhat with the underlying ethical theory. Pl, and for objecting to the killing of noncombatants, is the Kantian one, (to seriously understate point) the doing to that fails to treat them with the so minimal respect owed to them as persons 2 3. §4. Arguments from historical requirements on just argument from convergence, and environmental arguments. wars, The conclusion that LSN wars cannot be justly waged - and accordingly are unjustified something dreamed up by contemporary "free-enterprise" capitalist state (and opponents communist important the of is America inspired, merely not or the of The etc). same conclusion falls out of various traditional requirements, worked out in medieval times, for just wars. One of the requirements gives but a variant on the first argument (KA). 2** For a necessary condition for fighting a war justly was that it not be the case that large numbers of [innocent] noncombatants are bound killed (cf. to be Barnes, p.775). A just war requires just means, that the war should be means, fought by morally which implies in particular that there is no indiscriminate killing of noncombatants. The implied principle was escapsulated in a principle legitimate of discrimination (between combatants and others) which 'prohibits all actions directly intended to take the lives of p.312) 25 . civilians and of noncombatants' (PL, LSN wars, where not only military installations are targeted, violate this requirement 2 6. 23. Of course there are counterarguments too, and not merely from the military angle in the case of small numbers of obstructive noncombatants. One favored argument is a variation on the Bald Man: there is no clear line between combatants and noncombatants. However as Nagel argues (p.20) there are distinctions between them, firstly in terms of their roles, e.g. in carrying or using arms or directing those who do, and secondly in terms of their harmfulness, the threat they offer. See also PL, p.312, where a simple and effective paradigm case argument is applied. 24. Note that throughout, the text adopts the OED equations, reflecting common usage, of just with morally right or correct, and unjust with morally 15 Overlapping the requirement of just means is that of being that of net evil to net good: proportion proportionality , 'the damage to be inflicted and costs incurred by the war must be proportionate to the good expected up arms' (PL, requirement: the damage and costs, to goods moral proportionality requirement is of the achieved nationally not that in doctrine through war. "improvement" are which way. overall consequences of war conditions way bad, (Barnes, p.782). 'a nation wages war justly the than Similarly only if the for that nation or the wronged nation it is supporting have a decent chance of being better after the fighting ends' (Wakin, p.20). no and According to the first, 'X wages war abstaining from war' improvement "puts wrongs to rights": are Entangled with the "ameliorative" of confined, justly upon Y if the overall consequences of war are better, or less the taking by p.312).2? It is not difficult to see that LSN wars violate this disproportionate criterion the satisfy LSN wars can in these conditions, as scenarios depicting the aftermath of such wars reveal. Some of the lesser requirements for a just war are also wars, for example that of infringed reasonable expectation of success. by LSN It seems that there can be no reasonable expectation of state success in an LSN war - whatever the very differently, exchanges. limited prospects of success for some whatever the prospects of success in What small strictly state limited elite, or nuclear is less clearcut is the question of whether LSN wars conflict with the requirements of just cause or due fault, and of right intention. For 25. The principle can be argued to in various ways. One (by no means conclusive) way is Nagel's way, from the requirements of directness and relevance in combat, the underlying (controversial) principle being that, 'whatever one does to another person intentionally must be aimed at him as a subject, with the intention that he receive it as a subject' (p.15). 26. The situation with strictly limited nuclear wars where the targets are essentially military ones, and noncombatants are unaccountably killed "indirectly",would be different. Such wars are not however excused by the pernicious doctrine of double effect. For such wars remain unjust on several counts, e.g. they inflict disproportionate damage, e.g. on life systems, etc. As Zuckermann says, 'It is still inevitable that were military installations rather than cities to become the objectives of nuclear attack, millions, even tens of millions of civilians would be killed ...' (quoted in Thompson and Smith, p.14, where the italics are added). 27. This is not to be confused with what is very different, the vicious ancient doctrine of proportional response - an eye for eye, tooth for tooth, and so on - recently adapted by the Americans in their latest official policy of flexible response, adjusted to the level of attack. 16 this depends on the sensitive issue of the weight assigned to what are seen as basic human rights and fundamental values, and the extent to which just wars can While the mainstream position be ideologically justified. theory medieval opposed to ideologically justified wars and "humanitarian" wars, these were was not definitively excluded by the traditional theory (cf. is of merit, little when (and issues will arise again subsequently). historical requirements are arguments not do simply not There in puzzling over dubiously effective requirements, however, when so many are decisive against LSN wars sensitive Barnes, p.778). commit arguments any from matters the underlying Finally, these arguments from prescriptive fallacy; historical authority for to the moral conclusions, but use also premisses to the effect that the requirements imposed, and sometimes applied, were justified. As they are. In the Christian tradition there were two main strands of reflection on the moral rightness justness of wars, the just war theory and a rival pacifist or strand, prominent in early Christianity, but largely submerged from Augustine on contemporary until times. Both exclude nuclear wars, one strand because they are inevitably unjust, the other because they are wars and This is the beginning of the convergence argument against nuclear wars: that is duly expediency such wars are excluded from all ethical perspectives, once removed (and even, very frequently, when it is not). however you look at it morally. consensus violence^^. involve argument; it The argument is not proceeds They are morally wrong the same as the weaker from similar results from the full sweep of genuinely ethical positions, not from massive agreement of opinion. The detailed convergence argument is an exhaustive case by case each type of moral theory. Fortunately details can be deontological and contractual theories lead back to requirements 28. one, from shortcut. For for just war These alternatives are not as far removed practically as may appear. For the aim of just war theory is not 'to legitimize war but to prevent it. The presumption is against the use of force' (PL, p.312). And most types of wars are ruled out by the theory. However not all wars or violent revolutions are excluded, and that is enough to guarantee the distinction between the alternatives. In particular, defensive wars are allowed - at least for the defending side, though from a wider viewpoint these too may be condemned 'the classic case [of the just war] ... was the use of lethal force to prevent aggression against innocent victims' (PL, p.311). Under recent international law, defence, narrowly construed, is the only legitimate basis for war; Roman law was only slightly more generous, in allowing for the restitution of goods (see Barnes, p.780). 17 which, it has already been shown, LSN wars violate. war arrived sometimes were defended through principles of such moral or at In fact conditions for just work theories, so that a good deal of the requisite argumentative been The latter point holds also as regards utilitarianism, where it has done. in effect been shown that whatever brand of utilitarianism is maximisation utility already has is finally LSN accomplished, adopted, wars however excluded are utilitarian grounds.The reason for such convergence is not far to seek; LSN such massive infliction of pain and colossal removal of pleasure, involve wars on that this dominates in assessments however they are accomplished in utilitarian Thus any genuine alternative to LSN war is better30. fashion. The arguments so moral overwhelming far case outlined against principles are derivable some from war worse substantially are of the theories just considered). These the obligation to maintain to accountable, condition than the these we violate would earth in proper shape and not degrade its systems: we exhaust not (again LSN principles include environmental ones, such as: generations, to whom do wars For there are other significant wars. such moral principles which the waging of an LSN against the the responsibility to future the world it". Such "pass "received on" not in conservative bound principles - however they are finally satisfactorily formulated - are to be violated in the event of an LSN war. §5. The shift to nuclear deterrence: support nuclear arguments to its immorality. Those arrangements have had a way of halting - and if not defeating, certainly turning and deflating - arguments from the immorality of LSN wars, engagement done is, it is claimed, quite different from is most important precisely in preventing LSN in such war: is continued, deterrence is the only practical desiderata, prevention of war and maintenance of values. way indeed wars from ever occurring, as well as in maintaining other fundamental Western values. it by What is being pointing out that there is no actual engagement in any such wars. deterrence who Indeed, of obtaining both Similar arguments are But compare Hardin. 29. For details see, e.g., Lackey, especially MM. 30. An argument of this sort is developed in more detail, complete generality, in Goodin, especially 'Disarmament'. though not in 18 advanced for all the various guises that deterrence is presented in: mutually assured destruction as formerly, flexible response as latterly, or otherwise. Such claims as to the roles and dubious, several for reasons. objectives of If it were, "sufficiency" to deter would be an adequate goal. superiority. than this, and sometimes goal. In fact there has renewed a even military drive for Pure deterrence can account neither for actual nuclear weapons nor for orthodox Western military strategy32. process decidedly A first reason is that there is much evidence, despite pronouncements, that deterrence is not the - the only - been a quest for more are deterrence Nor has deterrence set in motion the of disarmament to be expected to reduce armaments to levels appropriate f<?r deterrence. On the contrary, under "its" impulse there has been almost unlimited acceleration in building arms (to paraphrase PL p.318). Another major reason for serious doubt about what sold 31. is being under "deterrence" labels concerns the probability factor: marketed and deterrence has It is important to observe that the discussion is not restricted to one form of deterrence, such as that of mutually assured destruction (MAD), but applies to all forms of response likely to engender LSN war. This includes "flexible response", since the likely further development is massive retaliation to an initial Soviet nuclear raid. Part of the reason for this is the extreme vulnerability of the US defence systems, especially the communication systems, e.g. to early strikes and to electromagnetic pulses. In the resulting great confusion, escalation appears the likely outcome. In any case, flexible response includes massive retaliations, as part of its range and is ultimately backed by it. It is also important to observe that deterrence as practised is not confined to responses to (nuclear) attack. The threat of nuclear action has been made in cases where a rival encroaches on a zone of interest of a nuclear power. It is in part because deterrence includes nuclear responses to what is construed as serious misbehaviour of rivals that the practice of deterrence raises the probability of LSN war to the extent it does. 32. As to the first point, there is not only overkill capacity and the drive for superiority (often represented as "negotiating" strength) but the matter of counterforce weapons which are offensive weapons. As regards the second point, US policy has been decidedly expansionist with regular intervention in other nations; there have been repeated US threats to use nuclear weapons, especially to deal with revolutionary activities in the third world, but also in Europe in "limited" nuclear war; and in official military strategy no sharp line has been drawn between conventional and nuclear weapons: on these and other related points see further Lackey MM, p.l91ff., and also Thompson and Smith. The argument can be pressed further, to the alarming conclusion that deterrence is largely a front, which plays only a minor, but justificatory, role in actual US policy. Among further evidence is behavioural data: a government with a genuine deterrence policy would repeatedly emphasize its strength (even when it lacks strength), whereas the US government often parades its vulnerability and weakness in public. For other evidence see Smith, e.g. p.46ff. 19 of increased the probability type arms-race that war. LSN deterrence precisely, More of the is being practised, which involves full-scale preparation for total nuclear war, has prepared the conditions for nuclear war to occur, and has to that extent reasons also, connected with pure the last 30 years. deterrence with and (its war" "cold the probability of a LSN war has increased considerably in the setting), original For other least enhanced its prospects of occurring. at The reasons include the threatening posture called for by deterrence, the propaganda, which comes to be believed, that must be promulgated to maintain credibility overridden or with "sacrificed a for etc. many there analysts century, i.e think before 2000. real The situation has is a high There are several are interests being the dangerous and risky military objectives! state of military readiness; sober whose population now where reached been probability of an LSN war this routes to a such probability assignment.33 It would only require one incident with a 20% chance of leading to an escalating war every 8 years between 1960 and 2000. alerts, Cuban missile crisis, carry a considerably higher chance been have lucky already. In of nuclear For markedly. the years ahead it appears likely that the the danger supplicant nations resources declines. and the worsens and the extent The danger is enhanced by connected increasing chance of the lot. 33. Cox). easily as the plight extractable continuation of of crucial the arms of nuclear accident and human or technical error, none of them negligible factors as (cf. increase zones separating the superstates are increasing in size and number, with Soviet and American expansionism, and reveals the exchange. number of incidents with a real chance of engendering nuclear war will race, on side alone, have been at least as frequent, and sometimes, as with the American We Full past experience copiously Such a sketch can of course be elaborated and tidied up a Even so every substantial point involved can be contested, and many are Another route to a more than subjective assessment is to apply Delphi methods: weigh up the experts' assessments. In this regard it is worth noting that it is not only "nuclear doves" who consider the probability of nuclear war has increased in recent years. American officials have themselves admitted that the policies of realising the strategic potential of counterforce attacks and of selective and flexible responses have increased the probability of nuclear war (Ball, p.128). 20 For better contentious (though not always for good reasons). way no seems worse, or there to make such an overall probability argument particularly tight; and there are plausible arguments, from the complexity of the data concerned and the contingency of the future, that it cannot be made tight. It is bad enough however that it is decidedly plausible that it that probable LSN an war distribution principles) that it probable that century. And that is enough grossly a is immoral to decidedly morally on moral grounds, to change deterrence as policy is immoral. that plausible it highly is sequence of events will be perpetrated this evasive warrant morally to take action to avert the outcome. deterrence highly For then it follows (by occur this century. will is action. ought We That in turn implies taking steps, presently practised. Thus present That is but the first of several ways we shall arrive at that damaging conclusion for present super-state deterrence policies. The plausibility of claims as to the high or increasing probability of war has of course been disputed. * The main counterargument runs as follows: Nuclear war is unlikely, because the consequences are too horrifying. The underlying assumption is that wars and the like, with are LSN improbable. assumption. Unfortunately however horrifying outcomes, much available evidence counters this More than enough humans have not shrunk from brutal exchanges horrifying wars, or even from genocide, as human history attests (cf. Kuper). What is less assailable than the high probability claim, what the certainly have already got into since LSN thereby perhaps helping to bring it about, in the sense war, the probability. immoral of raising The more detailed underlying arguments, then,to the immorality of nuclear deterrence proceed by LSN an deterrence operates by the perverse practice of preparing for situation, against evidence seems to support, is that there is a non-negligible probability of an Thereby, through deterrence, we LSN war. and way of principles mapping war into arguments against deterrence of LSN war might appropriately be called deontic connecting principles moral arguments Such principles The first of these principles takes the following preliminary form: Cl. should If it is wrong that X should occur, then not only be probable is it wrong that it that X occur, but, more important, it is wrong to directly 21 increase the probability that X occur. Thus, for example, it since wrong is to kill large a noncombatant population in LSN war (by §4) it is also wrong to put the population at risk and wrong to increase the chance that the hostage population is wiped out, which both of For similar reasons a superstate is not morally nuclear deterrence does. entitled to impose nuclear risks upon uninvolved noncombatants, especially those of third party nonaligned states. most Like situations. defeat by example, substantive moral Unless counterexamples, X that in and of accordingly, Cl encounters to into runs require dilemma For complication. apparent trouble where clash of order to that the passenger he plane is flying sure that the troubled aircraft does not hit city make Such a defeating condition does not apply in the case of where deterrence, Consider for example the to avoid a greater evil. occurs apartment buildings 3**. nuclear Cl dilemmas are duly allowed for, Cl appears liable to pilot who increases the probability crashes, ethics, in Thus it may be argued that it is permissible to increase the principles occurs. probability part second the principles (though there explains) wrongness of a practice is not is a offset or principles, as §6 of clash removed by its role in avoiding greater evil. It can be argued that it is: argument the from previous argument deserves little perhaps from more such is part of success credence the deterrence. than the of the popular However this inductive driver's racing world As Barnett argues, argument, 'the happy accident has survived the first thirty-five years of the nuclear era is unimpressive evidence that we can avoid nuclear war 34. point a similar time base, that because he hasn't had a fatal crash yet (despite some close calls), he won't. that of the in the coming era, ...' This dilemma example was supplied by D. Johnston. There are more difficult putative counterexamples. For example, in inciting people to civil disobedience, the risk of state violence in retaliation is increased. Thus, to take C. Pigden's example, in encouraging disobedience, Gandhi increased the probability of wrongdoing by the British Raj. But surely Gandhi, unlike the Raj, did not act wrongly? It can be claimed that Gandhi did not directly increase the probability of violence. But spelling out what 'directly' means - in terms of short causal chains over which responsibility can be distributed - is not only problematic but leads on to other connecting principles. 22 (p.100). He offers familiar reasons such as the changing power increase in Russian the strength, rise the relations, of other nuclear powers, etc. (cf. similarly Cox). There are, accordingly, powerful reasons for concluding that Deterrence will not continue to work, DI. and, more important for the present argument, that Deterrence does increase the probability of LSN war. D2. The themes are of course interrelated, and the reasons for them (which are again persuasive but inconclusive) can be taken together: some respects) weaker D2 - the probability factor. proliferation, the but the focus is on the (in An initial of lesser nuclear powers. emergence reason concerns As a result there are many more ways of starting a nuclear conflagration, and so enhanced prospect it.3$ Some analysts consider that a very likely route to LSN war is the initial use of nuclear weapons by confrontation a lesser state. Moreover scarcity the growing and weapon systems, more or terror situations, deterrence power involves 36, being maintained: balance of have an exceedingly bad historical track record. increasing as the race proceeds. of With so many more Arms races, and interwoven There is substantial inductive evidence that present costs widely distributed, the probability of war through accident or error is increased. power resource A second group of reasons concerns the of cheaper supplies, etc. nuclear arms race which deterrence, as practised, is tied to. weapons for opportunities to lead on to war are increasing, with increasing world political instability, relating to third world economic decline, and of lead escalating eventually to races, arms war, with such as probability Next, deterrence depends on a certain balance if that balance is unduly disturbed, as can happen during escalation, deterrence may well fail. A related reason for supposing that deterrence practice increases the 35. It can be theoretically argued that the fewer the nations nuclear weapons, the less the chance of nuclear war: cf. p.230n. 36. The standard argument for deterrence as significantly decreasing the probability of war,would be decidedly better if the arms race were abandoned, and weapons held at the much smaller levels required just for deterrence. Of course such a probability-well assumption is only one of several things required if deterrence is to be justified. armed with Lackey, MM, 23 probability of war concerns the continuing shifts in US policy, especially the renewed quest for superiority which is increasing the incentive of both sides to resort to nuclear war, the USSR to avoid being of advantage the overwhelmed, USA to take superiority achieved.3? Recent dangerous shifts in US policy the towards war fighting are in part induced by a much increased accuracy of nuclear missiles, which both weakens the case for MAD deterrence (since military targets can be selected for strike and cities to some extent removed as thereby also weakens against case the resort to leaders, and even some nuclear shared understanding, mutual principles, and cooperation Finally, level judgement among information of and important) of soundness transmission war. nuclear deterrence requires a certain (admittedly rather minimal, yet of hostages), between It is not just that the increasing numbers of operators super-states. in a position to launch nuclear weapons must remain of "sound mind" and not, for through on delusions of one sort or another. follow instance, deterrence depends upon judgements seriously mistaken: 'each is regarding other the It is also that which side, side's is to the other' (PL, p.313). threat we But think'.38 about what the other considerable, and perhaps catastrophic, margin of evidence, that one perception of what is possible result As side thinks side error. Not thinks, there only not can be a is there side (the USA) has misjudged the other side's (the USSR's) rational, as regards limited nuclear war, of a first strike countered by massive retaliation; must now be severe doubts effectively. "convincing" There is a grain of truth in the claim that 'deterrence is primarily about what the other what be at the mercy of the other's perception of what strategy is "rational", what kind of damage is "unacceptable", how one may as to whether rational principles are with the but there operating to the last consider, to take just one example, the erroneous 37. The point is discussed in Dahlitz, e.g. p.213, where the US quest for superiority is documented. The vicissitudes of US "defence" policy - not to say its shiftiness and occasional incoherence (as in strategic forward defence) - have confused many of its supporters even. Perhaps there is some advantage in the very incomplete and limited exposure of USSR war and imperial policies: we don't see, with alarm, their incoherence and irrationality. 38. Pym, quoted in Thompson, p.19. Yet a fundamental problem Russia and the West face, it is sometimes claimed, is not merely that they do not understand one another but that 'there is a lack of a wish to understand'. This casts into doubt the psychological basis of nuclear deterrence. idea (already alluded to, as held in high places of power in USA and in UK) that LSN war can be survived in rudimentary shelters, and also won. The supporter of deterrence connecting such principles has not defeat to only arguments Cl, but, more difficult, to field a convincing as For the onus of proof lies in showing that the costly rival case. deterrence is justified. through practice of But far from the fairly decisive case that is required (to contrast with the argument through Cl), feeble a only through case the questionable obverse of Cl, Clt. If X is wrong then it is right to reduce the probability of X, For it has to be shown that appears open. * deterrence (substantially) reduces the probability of LSN war, and strictly (this indicates part of the trouble with Clt) that * deterrence does this better (more morally) than available options. The latter uniqueness condition certainly fails, so it will be argued. reasons already given, does the probability claim. up the very conditions probability of such for a LSN an war, it So, for When nuclear deterrence sets can hardly reduced have the war, especially over the situation a mere 25 years ago when such an LSN war was not technically possible. More generally, in showing that nuclear deterrence is justified, it is refute the theme that deterrence is wrong. enough to out that deterrence is permissible, or alright. alternative permissible courses action of deterrence, which appear more morally satisfactory. uniqueness condition has to be established; to be not merely alright, but right. But It is not enough to make For there certainly seem to without not be the costs or problems of To surpass these options, a nuclear deterrence has to be shown establishing such a claim, to fear or acceptable evidential standards, is virtually impossible.39 Deterrence consists in preventing something (often some wrong) by threats including fright OED)**°. (cf. For most people, portraying the horror of LSN wars would serve adequately enough from 39. LSN wars, without all the enormous expense, trouble vivid scenarios to deter them and wastage of An analogous point will appear when it is asked whether deterrence is the way out of the nuclear fix, the thing to persist with in the circumstances. Given that there are apparently superior, less dangerous procedures, the answer has to be, No. 25 preparing to engage in them. deterrence And deterrence by such means (which in any case depends upon) is of course not immoral. military (Schell was not immoral in publishing his graphic descriptions of the nuclear destruction of New York.) But though deterrence per se is permissible, nuclear deterrence, that is deterrence by complete preparation for the object to be prevented, is not, where this object, a war, itself is not permissible. LSN The argument for this is through the principle If X is wrong then complete preparation for (carrying out) X is wrong. C2. Hence since preparation, LSN wars nuclear are wrong and nuclear deterrence deterrence of LSN wars is wrong. claimed that preparing for X is just as bad as doing X: wrong and Z (much) worse than Y. complete It is not however being Y and may Z both What is wrong is by no means uniformly evil In 1945 there would have been little doubt that LSN war was wrong. implies complete preparation be 41 for Among the three types of crime specified in Article 6 of the Charter for the International Military Tribunals (which tried the major war criminals at Nuremburg) were Crimes against peace: namely planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the following (cited in Kuper, p.21; italics added). But after many years of nuclear deterrence, the become increasingly liable to question. wrongness implied in C2 has However the doubts mainly come from 40. Deterrence also commonly includes elements of mendacity, deception, misinformation, that is elements of what are, for the most part, morally undesirable traits. 41. Nor are ordered because wrong, equally degrees of wrongness required: wrongs can simply be partially as regards relative worseness. The point requires some labouring it has been quite erroneously assumed that if Y and Z are both categorically or absolutely, then they must be equally "wrong" or evil. Thus, e.g. Williams: there is no moral difference between running a deterrent strategy on the one hand, and intentionally - indeed wantonly - starting a nuclear war on the other; so that the first is as totally evil as the second. This is because both are held to be absolutely forbidden. Not at all. The arguments from "Y and Z are both absolutely forbidden" to "So Y is as totally evil as Z" and to "Therefore Y and Z do not differ morally" are both entirely without validity. Compare: 2 is a number, and 3 is a number; so 2 is the same number as 3, or does not differ numerically from 3! 26 assuming that complete preparation includes less than it needs to or does. Complete preparation for something, such as several other LSN war, already writes in In particular, it presupposes the preparation is not features. half-hearted but is serious, is not merely for show and is not simply pretence. Observe that mere pretence, or other more psychological ploys, cannot substitute for complete preparation in nuclear deterrence. too sophisticated bluff for alone to there succeed: preparation for war accompanying the threats involved in the other has is now be serious to deterrence. But, on complete preparation does not imply that what is prepared for hand, will be attempted other than conditonally: imply attempted X. complete preparation for X does not It does however involve a conditional undertaking to proceed with what is prepared whether intelligence Military under for certain Complete conditions. preparation, for a wedding or murder or whatever, would be pointless otherwise, so a (proclaimed) commitment to proceed under given circumstances can for be taken of connecting granted. Principle C2 A principles. is part way not the in line a series principle of the same sort that is higher in the series is that if X is wrong then attempted X is wrong connecting X with attempted X: perhaps down as bad), whether X succeeds or not. But the series ends; off well before the lower limits of intensionality, contrary to various religious positions. then the contemplation consideration of of it cuts claims of For example, it does not follow that if X is wrong X is wrong carrying out X is wrong. or that mere non-action-oriented The point applies equally to sexual fantasies, power fantasies, and nuclear nightmares. nothing the (though In particular, there is wrong with contemplating nuclear war, or reflecting upon it, as we are: nuclear wars, even if their horrors don't bear thinking on, are not unthinkable, and in some senses are all too thinkable. Indeed one of the reasons why the connecting principles appeal is that each commonly involves it connects with. decidedly increased probability of the wrongdoing or outcome Accompanying the increased probability are certain reprehensible attitudes tied to the action the evil outcome involves; not those of mere passive contemplation*^. However all the sets of these are connecting 27 principles except Cl hold, where they do, even when the probability of invoked wrongdoing eventuating is not increased. One reason for this is that the means to reprehensible ends may be inefficacious, for instance intending to do chosen someone harm using witchcraft. The increased probability evil an of outcome simply makes things worse. announcement Nuclear deterrence involves not only war preparation, but this threats by accompanied and a threatening posture. For some party, the if potential enemy, has to be suitably frightened or moved, of deterrence succeed: the threat must be recognised as such and be credible. nuclear deterrence yields a further connecting principle: is to This aspect of If X is wrong then serious threatening of X under given conditions is also C3. or, in brief, If X is wrong then conditional threatening of X is wrong. wrong; The remaining connecting conditions invoked all take this general form CG. If X is wrong so is a conditional requires further some explanation. intension to is some intensional functor, threatening from Apart intentions that). C to 'the the most is the not are impossible or even remote or improbable: claim in what (specifically those involving commitment) for follows certain is that sorts there of discussed an conditions the conditions typically concern those specifying a nuclear strike by a potential fundamental credible functor: To remove complication it can be assumed henceforth that the involved which it is obligatory in propositional rather than event style: (or form a e.g. themselves, conditional intensions are conditional obligations where obligation - A conditional intension is a judgement of the form, ^(X if C), where of'.**3 X do enemy. The are intensional functors threatening, intending, and which CG holds, and that these versions suffice to demonstrate of Naturally again many the immorality 42. There is plenty of scope for further elaboration here. Passive spectatorship of evil events where one is in an appropriate position to make a difference is quite another thing, from contemplation of other worlds where evil occurs. 43. The conditional intension, ^(X if C), which is an intension, should not be confused with the provisional form, if C then^X, which is not. The Americans are threatening the Russians with retaliatory action if they strike: it is not that if the Russians strike the Americans will threaten them with retaliatory action. Such confusion has arisen because of the problems of formalising conditional obligation given usual defective theories of conditionality. nuclear deterrence. there are 28 non-action-oriented functors for which versions contemplation, thinking, dreaming, etc. GC of fail, of those e.g. There is also an interesting group of more borderline functors, those of hoping (for), expecting, the and awaiting like, for which CG is only dubiously correct. Connecting principle C3 evolved from the simpler principle, if X then threatening to do... into X is also wrong, or, as formulated by Ramsay: is wrong to threaten...'**** The reason is that practice (e.g. 'What is wrong putting if wrong is something committing rape) is wrong then so also is what goes into threatening to put that into practice, in particular the declared intent to that into practice. beginning as follows: The point can if worlds where alternatively X are happens be put argued semantically, excluded so then are adjacent worlds where X is poised to happen. The complication of the simple form is required for two reasons. only conditionally threatened, i.e. is should certain conditions nuclear war obtain. However the required conditional form can be derived through form, the following argument:- which is perfectly general, X if C. particular, by earlier arguments 44. so also is the simple Observe, furthermore that if something X is if it weren't it wouldn't (The converse route fails (of §§3-4) LSN opposition has struck, or not, and so wrong when it wrong, from substitute for X in the simple form, wrong, it is also wrong under restrictive conditions; have been wrong in the first place. Firstly, threatening X if C. war has. of course.) In is wrong whether the Hence, where X is More generally, to establish CG it is Ramsay's formulation of simplified C3 is considered in Walzer, p.272. It is this principle especially that forces Ramsay, a Protestant theologian who is a nuclear hawk, into the awkward position he ends in, which as Walzer explains, really leaves no room to move. For in virtue o simplified 03 it must be allowed that the threatened wars are permissible to carry out. Ramsay tries to limit these to military exchanges. But to be effective as a deterrent, the exchange permitted must both threaten a also in view of C3, not threaten nonmilitary targets, collateral non-combatant populations. It appears that Ramsay's position, if worked out, would be inconsistent. see Simplified principle C3 is also invoked by the US Catholic Bishops: PL p.316. They put the point both in terms of threat and of declared intent to use nuclear weapons, which they pronounce morally wrong. simplified C3 is rejected by Hare and Joynt (pp.106-7), who want to However the moral status of a threat by way of expected utility. This is assess all the objections to expected utility as a test of morality open to mentioned below. 29 enough to establish the simpler If X is wrong so is an intension to do X. CG'. The second complication in C3, modifying the threat to causes threat, Some modification appears required, because it is often trouble. more serious a contended that empty threats or bluff are warranted on occasion even where is wrong, to prevent the occurrence of something worse .**$ And in threatened is what fact one way of trying to vindicate deterrence, as morally permissible, has been by presenting deterrence as involving threats which do not involve any intention at all to proceed to action on plausible threats. it the support removes basis for of simplified C3. sense one that is not a pretence, empty or a bluff, but credible. says which intended, consider a For the challenge immoral grossly where case conduct under certain not and calls for moral double-think. the circumstances* result To bring this an from improbable intricate Either the threat is followed through, automatically (as ordered, by Doomsday Machine circuitry, etc.) or with further choice, or - somehow - not. is Principle C3 is not simplified and unqualified C3. is unconvincing, conditions, accident. is in effect that itis perfectly morally permissible to issue serious threats to undertake out this Hence the shift to serious A serious threat then, in the slightly technical open to thesame challenges as as Insofar threats. Either it is way the outcome is morally wrong, in the first case obviously, in the second case because the intermediate reconsideration makes it plain that the threat nor ought not to have been issued at all, being justifiable on neither moral more "practical" representatives Furthermore, grounds. natures, to the kinds of themselves to be (as Benn explains). insignificant their and may accept moral double attitudes, such as morally assenting to immoral threats, less corrupt agents cannot: moral states while proportion morally it would run counter to their principled agents they are or take For such agents, who may comprise a not of the electorate of a nuclear state, principles such as C3 are not in doubt. The argument against nuclear deterrence using C3 is as follows:- Either the 45. For a discussion of threats where the threatener has no intention of carrying out the threat, or incentive to do so, see Schelling, p.35ff. The question of the morality of these threats, where the item threatened is immoral, can be left open. 30 threat involved in deterrence is serious or it is not. is then by C3 deterrence wrong. The sub-argument depends on serious threats is a practical one: not is it inadequate, so deterrence is not maintained. is it then If serious But if it is serious nuclear that deterrence namely, that if the threats were not serious, but merely gave the impression that they would be followed through, then would find out, in one way or another. opposition the could not be endorsed in an open or democratic political A policy of bluff system, for example, gaining some discussion, and so giving the game away to the opposition. without Even in closed non-democratic systems maintaining a such policy weapons, especially during there the down of times would be major difficulties in chains of command involved with nuclear in change governing elites, and the opposition intelligence. But then, since the bluff could be called, deterrence would not have succeeded. There are as likely would information through escape well other arguments that the threats involved must be serious. One is that nuclear deterrence already faces a credibility problem, namely that doubts about the rationality of carrying out the big nuclear threat weaken the credibility essential to its effectiveness. To be effective then it must serious be (cf. Benn). Meeting objections to principle C3 leads on to two further versions of one centred on intention, one on commitment. CG, Principle C3 is intimately linked with, and it sometimes considered but a variant upon, the principle C4. If X is wrong then to conditionally intend to do X [knowing it is wrong] is also wrong. The principles are intimately associated because a threat is, according to dictionaries, etc.'. of 'a declaration of intent to inflict punishment, loss, injury, It is their interconnection which lies at the bottom of which deterrence, intending to go to war. principle, that turn C4 is some paradoxes on the problem of credibly threatening war without Principle 04 is justified through the simplified intending to do wrong is wrong, and so also is intending to do wrong unless favourable circumstances for one's principle some an extremely position prevail. Simplified widely assumed moral thesis,*^ perhaps for the excellent reason that it holds analytically. Its elaboration C4 can be used to 31 since proceeding to LSN war when against nuclear deterrence, as follows: argue the enemy duly misbehaves is wrong (by §§3-4), by C4, intending to go to LSN war the enemy duly misbehaves is also wrong. when Nuclear deterrence involves such Hence an intention, all the available evidence shows. deterrence nuclear is wrong. But like virtually every utilitarian themselves, principles utilitarian grounds. deontic principle, principles For it is not difficult to those except from flowing C3 and C4 can be challenged on outline strategic situations where maximum expected utility results from a policy of nuclear deterrence. But on its own this concession casts but little doubt upon C4. For it likewise is not principles difficult to outline situations where the hanging of innocent people, or other injustices, are sanctioned or enjoined by maximum expected and C3 utility. pursuit Those who appeal to utilitarian assumptions try to avoid such more obvious difficulties with reliance upon utilitarianism, scrapping the spots not by doctrine, but by hedging applications of their principles around with qualifications, which, they hope, will trouble of with utilitarianism. enable it So them evade to the worst is with Kavka, whose work nicely illustrates that whatever (little) deterrence has in its moral favour depends upon utilitarian assumptions. Kavka 'begin[s] by noting that any reasonable system of substantial utilitarian elements' (PD, p.287). Even observation were correct — it is not, depending for one consequential elements systems include must infiltrate, an with the 'assumption if thing ethics this upon must have astonishing conflating utilitarian - it would not follow that reasonable particular that assumption produces normative assumption involved is that the act Kavka thereupon tries the paradoxes of deterrence'. with maximum expected to The utility '(the most useful act) should be performed whenever a very great deal of utility 46. Kavka, who labels simplified C4 the Wrongful Intentions Principle (PD, p.289), attributes the principle to Abelard, Aquinas, Butler, Bentham, Kant, Sidgwick, Kenny and Narveson. Kavka also gives reasons as to why the principle appears 'so obviously true'. Kenny and others apply C4 to argue, like the US Catholic Bishops, that 'nuclear deterrence is immoral' (cf. Kavka p.291). It is the clash of C4 with certain utilitarian principles (especially the maximisation principle of p.287) that directly generates Kavka's first paradox of deterrence and lies behind his other "paradoxes": see PD. 32 is at stake' (p.287). objections This assumption is open to essentially the same batch utilitarianism as it is mainly a matter of increasing or itself: varying the stakes involved sufficiently in any counterexample. strategy usual of Kavka tries the weakening and fudging the normative assumption to avoid the of worst problems of distributive injustice, and the like, that maximising utility can morally enjoin. But the crucial defect in Kavka's argument lies follow normative the from overridden supposed to assumptions utilitarian by way, as if it dominated C4 (see especially p.290), what C4 is Though Kavka tends to apply the fudged normative assumptions in this (p.287).**? and what assumption however fudged, namely that 'this means other moral assumptions are that ... in when produce, situations, are moral combined situations in dilemmas. These are the cases assumption special as such not fudged deterrent one where deontic principle, that yielded by utilitarianism, overrides others, but where there are competing, even contradictory deontic principles, such as that it is right to to proceed to LSN war when the enemy misbehaves (on specious utilitarian intend grounds) and also wrong to intend to do so (by C4). that judgement is not overriden. wrong: remains Nuclear deterrence Nor does it in any way follow that C4 is in need of qualification as a result (Kavka's assumption, p.290). situations, However, there are countervailing utilitarian considerations suggesting different imperatives. For what is in these is wrong. the also case is that these in special special circumstances a greater utility can be realised by doing what However it is hardly news, but a objection, standing that utilitarianism sometimes enjoins what is wrong. Special sponsonship deterrent may appear situations, where under utilitarian to get a foot in the moral door, are very special. characterised by Kavka, they are such that the 47 deterrence deterrence is very likely As to Lackey's utilitarian approach rests on a similar fallacy, that utilitarian considerations predominate where stakes are large enough: see his argument for the approach in MM p.192. What happens is not that important consequences override moral principles, but that application of one principle with important consequences conflicts with that of another principle with less significant consequences, and in the weigh-up of what to do in the problematic circumstances the principle with important consequence prevails. 33 succeed, and nothing else is likely to succeed (see p.286), i.e. is deterrence This is very far removed from the real world lodged in a deep probability-well. situation where nuclear deterrence appears to be increasing the probability of LSN war, and where other procedures such as graduated nuclear disarmament are at least as likely to succeed as deterrence. that principles deontic Even if it were supposed mistakenly to real-life dilemmas should be qualified to subject avoid dilemmas, there is little point in qualifying working deontic principles such as C4, given the remoteness of the special deterrent situations. Instead of pulling nuclear deterrence down though the immoral intentions it involves, it can be criticized more broadly through the commitments it requires, by way of the following principle: If X is wrong then a conditional commitment to carry out X is also wrong. C5. The reason is that the commitment is a commitment and circumstances; that commitment is to act in wrongly certain Nuclear deterrence is itself wrong. however a policy which commits states to war under certain conditions. with conditional intention, that superstates and and commitment controlling to use representatives nuclear weapons. not did occur) is to enough establish have relevant the The dangerous strategy of launch-on-warning (which could, for instance, result in a that as so with conditional commitment, there is no doubt their intention And response to attacks the point, for which there is otherwise quite sufficient factual evidence. are Now the connecting principles suffice but logically, nuclear deterrence, for weighty case. instance conditional commitment to LSN war, is wrong. This one principle would By detachment from the by complete preparation for and Deterrence of this type is wrong. also reveals why the suggestion, that the morality of the whole deterrence trip depended on war itself never occurring, was so paradoxical: deterrence. itself sound when all are liable to be disputed, several defensible ones, ideally in concert, make for a principles applied: it out the connections between and not be engaged in (unless its has appeared nuclear war and nuclear Nuclear deterrence should not be practised given that should changed, e.g. left bizarre nuclear war direction can be drastically at least limited, per impossibile in the case of nuclear warfare, 34 to purely military targets). The arguments through connecting principles, can be reinforced by different sorts arguments against the moral correctness of nuclear deterrence. of There are arguments from limited convergence of ethical theories, which start from the commonplace observation that All the ethical arguments in * favour of nuclear deterrence broadly are utilitarian. In fact most of the arguments in favour of deterrence, including many that infiltrated have the ethical literature, are of those generally drawn from game theory, and primarily interested in the one player, the USA. Utilitarianism, though still looking of those expediency advantage of basically at advantages, interests and (typically individual) utilities, has to take a partisan pain of position, and forfeiting its claim to morality supported by other consider nationalities otherwise. The as well, commonplace on less observation is the fact that such qualified moral support as deterrence obtains, derives from utilitarianism. 48 There are two directions on to a general claim against deterrence, either by way of the pro-utilitarian theme * Utilitarianism properly applied also comes out against deterrence or, more strongly, by way of the anti-utilitarian theme, * Utilitarianism does not furnish satisfactory moral arguments. Then, by the anti-utilitarian theme, there are no satisfactory in favour direction: 48. of deterrence. moral arguments Naturally, it would be easy to strengthen the second after all it is widely thought that utilitarianism is a false, Thus the hedged utilitarian defences of Kavka and of Hare and Joynt, and Showing that cogent also within the broadly utilitarian range, of Gautier. ______ defences of nuclear deterrence have to take a utilitarian route would be a Though it is a reasonable conjecture that the much tougher enterprise. T' ' , much would depend on what was enterprise could be carried through, For certainly bizarre principles, e.g. obverses of the connecting principles, can be introduced, which afford deontological routes to deterrence. despite some backsliding by bishops, all other ethical positions; can A deontological made to speak against deterrence and its continuation, be 1___ — . connecting deontic case against deterrence, primarily the way of principles, has been argued in some detail. In the light of these principles, it is not difficult to see how cases from other ethical 2 go.. After all C4 has been defended from a wide range of positions would Af--- -1...... And stances, e.g. contractual, natural law, utilitarian even. <— 35 seriously astray, or even shabby ethical position. political which system depends in some utilitarian arguments for its policies. It hardly does measure for then a upon consensus, to rely on Yet with nuclear deterrence just that appears to be happening, with readily overturned arguments at that. For whether even utilitarianism supports deterrence depends essentially on: it how with applied; is which maximisation recipes; along with what other restrictive assumptions (such as those of a deep probability-well); are generous With sovereignty, national security, etc. or assumptions, different arguably (and superior) varying the guestimation methods, very different results upon The emerge, opposing deterrence and favouring unilateral nuclear disarmament. reason for this is straightforward (and like that ending §4). basic LSN war has an extremely large negative utility. deterrence out to recipes Any policy such It is that as nuclear which increases the probability of this, or even risks it, must lose feasible other of how for such things as preservation of national assignments utility and on a alternatives, consequentialist type whatever are initially applied (e.g. plausible decision Minimax, Dominance, Disaster Avoidance, Expected Value). The anti-utilitarian theme can be defended either by a full-scale criticism of utilitarianism, beginning for instance with its well-known justification of localised injustices, $0 or else utilitarianism when applied One obvious deficiency is this: by to addressing some of the inadequacies of issues like that at hand, nuclear deterrence. on standard utilitarianism, what to do, whether to proceed with deterrence, depends on the probability of its success and on the improbability of other options working. deep, utilitarianism If the deterrence probability-well is morally requires deterrence, otherwise not.$* But what is morally required, or wrong, does not fluctuate with what outcomes are probable. 49. The instability of utilitarianism is illustrated by the discussion involving Kavka, Lackey and Hardin, continued in Philosophy and Public Affairs 12(3), 1983, where, on the basis of utilitarianism, diametrically opposed conclusions are reached. (Hardin's approach tends however to expediency reasoning of the strategic type.) 50. Such wider criticisms of utilitarianism, in all its forms, as an ethical theory are too well-known to repeat. Some of the main defects are considered in another article in this series, 'An expensive repair kit for utilitarianism' . The point that utilitarianism gives no firm place to stand comes from L. Mirlin. 36 Whether deterrence is morally wrong or not, is likely work to independent it is are princip]gs Moral not through expected values, whether utilities or otherwise - though how determined bad some outcome is may be. are deterrence decidedly essentially nowhere whether If nuclear deterrence is wrong where it increases the or not. probability of war, then is it wrong, simpliciter. depend of upon firm to stand. Worse, since the expected utilities in the case uncertain, these of the results utilitarianism delivers and uncertainty measures, offers utilitarianism In contrast with the solid deontic ground of principle, utilitarianism provides only shifting sand. The objections made apply especially against act utilitarianism. form shows special interests, such as conditions security (the probability-well state, of estimation rules are pulled in). high have is deep, utilities, nation-state and special It does not yield a deterrence policy; indeed hardly yields policies at all (other than act utilitarianism itself). and certain other difficulties may be avoided by considering instead a of act most that nuclear deterrence is "wrong" according to its lights at under very it The acts.52 But the method lacks stability; These sequence different prescriptions will result depending upon how the sequence is selected, what is included and what left (as also associated probabilities depend critically on the sequence selected). No unequivocal recipe is delivered. selected out to To see this, suppose the sequence is include worst cases, for instance cases where deterrence fails and war breaks out. In this event it can hardly be argued that deterrence is the policy that maximizes utility over the sequence. Along with the arguments, there are dissatisfaction with nuclear deterrence. other conventional wars. for Firstly, the peace it has provided only nuclear peace, or rather lack of nuclear war, as there smaller-scale reasons concomitant is deep is shortage of no And the "peace" provided is at best a tenuous peace, which is not stable, but liable to upset at any stage by a range of 51. Though this is to oversimplify, the points made are not affected by the simplification. In any case the simplified picture reflects well enough the differences between Kavka and Lackey that matter in their debate (referred to in footnote 49). 52. Whether this is rule utilitarianism, or still act utilitarianism the sequence can be construed as one long act, may be left open. because 37 factors, including error, both human and technical. It does not genuine offer of the sort required for a stable international life, but only a fragile Peace, peace of a sort opportunity is enormous the cost, moral cost of deterrence, because expenditure on it excludes other urgent moral priorities. way, Marxist Secondly, there (PL, p.316). in The US Bishops put this familiar terms of 'the destructive capacity and what is for in between contradiction needed point, spent is what constructive surprisingly a for (PL, development' p.316). §6 - Practical, prudential and more moral arguments from dangers national nuclear build-up of the superstates, and the genesis of nuclear dilemmas. to While there are arguments to the immorality of nuclear war preparation, there are also counter-arguments, that have Americans), to the moral proved justifiability persuasive remarkably of nuclear war (especially preparation in to the present circumstances . The underlying style of argument is simply an elaboration, or state-uplift, of that for the escalation of weapons at the local level, for acquiring a gun or for stocking-up the neighbourhood armoury - and every bit argument from local dangers. and domination; dubious first of all second of nuclear destruction. atomic surrender and so avoid the destruction' (Walzer, p.273). preparation is supposed to guard against more than these; third element, namely, loss of basic rights there with these. blackmail of foreign appeasement In fact nuclear is a crucial of ways life This further set of elements is linked to the danger of foreign domination - which is really a separate element from risk of Though and (freedom, equality, etc.) and fundamental values (upholding of truth, human dignity, etc.) and integrated that The two go together, since if we did not fear the blackmail, we might adopt a policy or as It is that nuclear preparation, 'so we have been told, guards against the double danger: foreign as blackmail. domination need not imply the loss of most basic values it does imply the loss of at least of one, self-determination, freedom to choose various national objectives; conversely loss or erosion or infringement of basic values can occur without foreign domination, for instance, as is commonplace in the 38 "free" world, by internal change of government or governmental approach, through the increased security and control a nuclear risks, increasingly preparation state nuclear demands, But etc. what nuclear destruction, also extensive involves loss of basic rights and values, through destruction of the material of the cherished life-style.^ So nuclear preparation is hardly a clearcut base means of guaranteeing basic values.5^ In other respects too the argument from loss of lacks cogency rings and It hollow. is basic values and rights hard to avoid the feeling that the oft-appealed-to basic values often function as something of a front, like citation values at political ceremonies; religious of clean cover for economic consideration of one sort demands from of of wealth private appealed to category: in and them to having arising with do the an argument isn't, or However associations. And rights the and But not all the values commonly appealed to fall into particular nationalistic ones do not. And one of the main alleged values of deterrence, the resistance to and containment or many another, are, mostly, of the utmost importance, indeed fundamental, and worth much sacrifice. this of power. and oughtn't to be, defeated by its unsavoury values that the argument is a military-industrial complex, many concerned with foreign the domination of other lesser states, and many concentration pious "communism" of of "socialism", can hardly be accounted fundamental, any more than retention of capitalism. communism has happened What has been here with confused of (the totalitarianism, which does remove certain more freedoms (of opinion, association, is course that reality basic information, of) values, etc., (the ideal of) socialist state namely certain and so does etc.), derivatively threaten basic values. One critical question, then, is whether extensive nuclear LSN war, and indeed for rational way of preserving nuclear those holocaust, fundamenmtal preparation for is a good or effective or even values, which we have left. 53. The converse obviously does not hold. Basic values and cherished life-style can be lost without nuclear destruction, or nuclear preparation, as when a more powerful state imposes its values and way of life. 54. The argument from freedom, advanced by Jaspers and repeatedly rolled out by state representatives, is further considered early in Appendix 1. 39 arise Similar questions and domination as regards arguments the preparation depends essentially on an arrangement of hostile structure which itself is open questioned (in §8), both from the serious to question, view of point foreign of danger of the methods of extensive nuclear Justification blackmail. from and basic of states, nation a is subsequently values, such as freedom, and otherwise. But whether ultimately justified or dangers not, these national those that have been taken to morally underwrite extensive nuclear are preparation, and have They justification. been accepted outlook. moral by policy Within particular, that extensive nuclear the as affording moral arguments preparation do not such Northern conventional a It is within such a framework, in framework the moral justification holds good. however, makers fact been widely accepted, and undoubtedly form in have part of many people's others, from arguments engenders establish moral a fix. For the morality of extensive nuclear preparation, but only make a prudential case for such preparation. people face a nuclear dilemma, but, though evaluative in character, it is also not a specifically moral one. And for many others and their respective rights and freedoms, there is no serious dilemma. people who not are who again, so or as familiar with Soviet and American culture and ways of life, by impressed Such beyond live For such the "beneficial" reach of the superstates, prudential counter-arguments from national dangers carry little weight, and the moral case against deterrence is not offset but stands unchallenged. This is the genesis of the argument from isolated people who Consider some a comparatively remote area, whose freedoms are not (yet) in live people. under threat from superpower expansionism, but whose lifestyle is put at risk by nuclear (as under principle Cl). deterrence For such isolated people, who may have little interest in the preservation of nuclear states, there is no nuclear dilemma, and nuclear locations may have problems to national is wrong. dangers, People in less fortunate but in meeting these they are not entitled to impose grave risks on the uninvolved isolated problems people. as deterrence genuine In doing so immorally; and for through similar nuclear reasons deterrence, superstates the are proceeding conventional Northern framework is 40 The same conclusion can be alternatively reached impugned. argument: a put isolated person, and check the resulting substitution Russian in the position of such an or American reflective a by assessment of nuclear deterrence. it would be the same as that of a reflective isolated person, stripped of Since superstate bias, morally opposed to deterrence and not morally transfixed, the conventional framework fails to satisfy requirements of morality. The outcome of the arguments from dangers is, then,very different depending on the whether are arguments applied regards a superstate or not. as The superstate theme which emerges is, in brief, SST. Because of multiple connected dangers from other states which have nuclear weapons, a state - any state that is too large to rely upon other states - is obliged to invest in at least matching nuclear weapons. Hence, by detachment, a super-nation-state, such as USA, ought to have something in the the nuclear armoury that it has. of order meet objections concerning excess, a least at retain Or, weakening the theme to "overkill" capacity, it core of the nuclear devices it has. solid [morally] ought to For subsequent argument it can be left open whether the obligation involved is a moral one, for instance of because the character of the protected, or only (as argued above) one of to grounds supporting those against disarmament a the SS reason $5. prudential theme nuclear dangerous Northern values supposedly being on similar it can be argued that unilateral opponent would be prudentially irrational. It will be freely admitted that what is prudentially or morally required is a suboptimal strategy, like the familiar strategies of the prisoners' dilemma situations and of certain related competitive games. that like could be achieved, would agreement would be cooperative draining of For such resources, the details are well-enough known. future 55. admitted arrangements. Cooperation and be better not merely in removing the nuclear dilemma, but in a range of other respects. expensive, be strategy for nuclear adversaries, if sufficient trust and the superior a So it should arrangements would be much less risky, destructive of the environment, and so on; However for the present and the foreseeable the prospects of cooperation appear - so we are repeatedly told by state It can still, and presumably does, amount to more than mere expediency, since the 'freedom of Europe' is part of what is at issue. local 41 representatives, who are (not always wittingly) helping to make true - unfortunately rather remote: only the policies their sure insurance is extensive nuclear preparation and full preparedness to apply nuclear force. At least this is so where one is a superstate: proceed, largely unabated. nuclear preparation Where one is not a superstate, but a lesser state one must, the representatives continue, rely on a larger ally who has a arsenal, one's nuclear preparation, one under huddles and which contrasts the lack of trust displayed, and encouraged elsewhere. Does a state, one which relies for its nuclear cover on a super-ally, ground for another's But here a level of trust and cooperation is^ called for, by umbrella. dependent states, which is far from foolproof, with nuclear insurance (which is presumably not free) is obtained indirectly through some superstate's nuclear confidence in its rather super-ally strangely dependent have exchange on its territory? much that its ally's opponent? than Confidence, for instance, that its ally will not render it a target or nuclear must stage a Given the proclivity of states, especially large states, to resort to expediency, and given the recent historical record of superstates and their leaders, too much faith would.be misplaced. Thus, whatever the limited force of the argument for the superstate it does theme, not extend to the analogous theme for a dependent state, which differs from SST and ends as follows: DST. Because ..., a state without adequate (or any) nuclear weapons is obliged to rely upon a superstate ally, and within that arrangement, to accommodate the facilities and nuclear installations of the protecting ally. In part for reasons already given, principle DST is not very plausible (and same goes for more obvious variants upon it). Nor do the arguments offered for SST transpose particularly well to direct arguments strikingly illustrated by the case the for DST.56 This is more of more remote nuclear dependent states. Consider the argument from basic values, for instance, from the angle of nuclear dependent Australia. Basic values in Australia are not threatened by, or put in jeopardy through, the actions or plans of the Soviet Union. Nor are they threatened by the other superstate, the USA, the only country with 'the physical 56. As is widely known, inadmissible and usually much overrated considerations of expediency frequently enter into reasons why states allow foreign nuclear facilities upon their territories, e.g. economic considerations such as trade or local revenue and short-term jobs. 42 capacity to launch a full scale invasion of Australia', but 'clearly lack[ing] motive to do so', so far.5? Clearly the argument from basic values does not any look convincing. carries reasons For similar In weight. little the with fact, from argument little care, the present level of a economic and political domination could be much reduced. of force For there only is questionable of because danger such superstate In this way too, nuclear umbrella, and facilities superstate the that would be removed with danger non-aligned practices.$8 With less remote dependent European states these of the from danger of nuclear destruction could be nullified. argument the domination foreign sorts arguments from national dangers are only marginally more convincing, and may be defeated along analogous lines. The differences in the situations of states, and peoples, break the theme of a of situated differently This is a theme especially monolithic West. favoured by US and the West European representatives, who present the West, its freedom, as threatened by Soviet domination. undifferentiated unit. dependent states with But this leading idea, NATO designed powers, and In this the West is a single in part to align lesser to justify putting them at and nuclear risk is as much a myth as the idea of the Golden West. not The West is so monolithic, it is not so comprehensive, some of it is not so free, much of it (including the Antipodes) is not threatened by Soviet domination. Principle DST - likewise what it depends upon, SST - is now under coming attack by European disarmament groups, who challenge the core assumptions of the underlying retaliatory model that * Safety lies in weapons, * More weapons imply more securityS9. Certainly, for more isolated states, such as New Zealand, safety from nuclear attack lies not in weapons but in excluding nuclear facilities (including visits from nuclear submarines). present system is more Europeans are arguing in of a similar way, that the a risk, indeed liability, than a protection (e.g. 57. For the quoted claim, and some of the Australia's Security, p.94. 58. The issue is further pursued in Appendix 2. 59. See, for example, the last article in Thompson. argument for it, see Threats to 43 envisaged the and that without nuclear installations, Europe cannot be Thompson, p.251); theatre limited nuclear war, in the way it is now seen by US a for (but not Soviet) strategists. Once the weapons assumptions are questioned, other the assumptions of and its variants come up for examination, namely retaliatory model * Whether the proper response to danger is armament, in particular , Whether the proper response is through nuclear armament, asopposed, say, to other military responses, such as conventional arms, or, taking off from the previous point, Whether military approaches and procedures (through * are proper methods, etc.) armaments, or should be such dominant methods, of conflict resolution at the international level. It is plausibly argued, against military procedures, that at no level ordinary do we sensibly set about meeting danger or settling disputes by acquiring lethal weapons and threatening to use them - except perhaps on an out-dated, and really frontier warranted, ethics. This leads into the issue of alternative defence systems, a vital matter beginning to obtain the contemporary6° and explanation it deserves, questioning of the framework of but never one that nation-states. already While emphasis anticipates subsequent the state system is intact, force is far from exceptional and military procedures are to be expected and are likely inevitable. nation-state system': For 'force has [a] ... permanent place the in thus Ramsay (on p.xv), who uses this as part of his very orthodox case for nuclear war arrangements. §7. The resulting nuclear dilemmas for aligned states Assembling referred the to as themes the so far nuclear developed fix:- States war-deterrence, because (as argued in §3-§5) to engage in war-deterrence, at least 60. the yields both and__ their—supporter^. deontic dilemma, often ought not for prudential reasons (as conversion to such arrangements. engage in it is immoral, and also ought Alternative defence systems were considered long ago in Mohists. For contemporary work on alternative systems, see survey in Sharp. There is in fact a considerable literature and social defence arrangements, and a growing literature on i.e. to argued using China by the especially the on non-violent transarmament, 44 SST and DST). the This dilemma is no idle construction paraconsistent of virtues but logic), (concocted to demonstrate a serious real-life dilemma, the outlines of which are repeatedly encountered in texts on nuclear and war its aspects 61, as well as being virtually ubiquitous in nuclear war discussions. The nuclear fix is in part simply a more intense dilemma produced by the deontic war itself &2, or at least war which spreads beyond purely military targets, as larger wars inevitably do (since military arrangements, The main dilemma arises rail transport, typically rely on civilian ones). e.g. of version from a combination of the retaliatory model with the features of War war. is required for defence of the state and values it upholds (or pretends to uphold); but war also involves immoral acts and evil consequences. can war" under certain justified. be also seen as attempting a reconciliation by trying to show that circumstances Thus 'some these really justifications evil consequences aegis of war' (Walls, p.260). acceptable than fallacious asymptotic are morally of war aim to show that actions deemed normally forbidden by moral mandates are now permissible the The doctrine of "just But this arguments when under performed is no better or more morally for utilitarianism being as correct when the stakes are large. War and preparedness for 61. war also generate subsidiary dilemmas - for Thus Green, along with many others, 'find[s] nuclear deterrence ... the best of practical policies available to us now ... given the realities of world politics' but 'still demur[s] because of moral qualms' (p.xii). Green also represents both Morgenthau and Halle as having 'rather agonisingly presented a ... case for a deterrence strategy, even while asserting that the strategy is morally indefensible according to the traditional ethical codes' (p.252). Walzer ends in a similar dilemma (he is committed to a stronger and less qualified form of it than he sets down): '... though it [deterrence] is a bad way, there may well be no other that is practical in a world of sovereign and suspicious states' (p.274) - an indictment of the state system that Walzer does not pursue. Similarly the US Catholic Bishops dilemma; they speak of 'the dilemma of how to prevent the use Paskins and Dockrill and in Benn terms of moral dilemmas. present the situation in terms of a moral political paradox of deterrence ... the of nuclear weapons ...' (PL, p.313). In too the nuclear situation is presented in The nuclear dilemma is of course not a dilemma for everyone, for those who think they have seen the clear admissibility of deterrence, or differently for those who have seen through the arguments from national dangers. But it is a dilemma for those locked into the conventional framework. 62. Situations in war are also a major source of moral dilemmas: see Routley and Plumwood where several examples are given. A general logical account of and theory of moral dilemmas is elaborated therein. 45 authority: instance, a severe tension between freedom and difficult 'one of most the of war involves defending a free society without destroying problems p.324). the values that give it meaning and validity' (PL, The problems are greatly enhanced by modern nuclear arrangements. The nuclear fix not only intensifies and complicates other dilemmas induced by the contemporary sovereign state^^, in particular the deep tensions between national security and the operation of liberal-democratic arrangements (such individual liberty, popular control of institutions, etc). other more personal subsidiary dilemmas, as for (political) obligations to example question (the It also accentuates the extent one's of a nuclear state, and role-induced dilemmas such as one's conflicting obligations as a doctor or a nuclear researcher as of political obligations armaments and their processor or evasion is considered further in Appendix 2). At the more personal level, that of individual and group action, there several questions be disentangled - questions different from the key issue to 'What should my state be doing and influence, depending on who one is. do?', on which one may exert lives, and influences, i.e. in what little There is not only the question 'What should I do?' - a question which will have a quite different force depending one are on where sort of state, where one works, what one controls or on who one is and one's roles - but also the questions 'What sort of person do I want to be?', 'What am I prepared to answer for morally?'^" Answers to these latter character questions will feed back to influence those to action-oriented questions. Each of those questions can, in given situations, induce subsidiary dilemmas. The essential feature of a deontic dilemma is that both A and the of A are wrong (or differently, pursuing a nuclear defence policy. obligatory), negation for some suitable A, such as The place and essential role of deontic and 63. The nuclear dilemma is not alone responsible for these other dilemmas. Large-scale nuclear power generation, and other types of warfare and security arrangements, also contribute. But a conflict of ree om a authority is already an outcome of the large central state. 64. For group formulation of the questions replace 'I' by 'my group', etc. The importance of distilling out these questions, and the moral undesirability of deterrence in terms of what it does to people morally, are brought out in Benn, where however the issues are made to look somewhat more separate than they are. 46 moral dilemmas are not widely well or particularly understood, ethical in This is partly because currently dominant ethical positions like literature^^. utilitarianism cannot at all easily accommodate moral dilemmas or the data which gives to rise them then such positions do not really offer reportive but - accounts of wrong and obligation anyway. Contrary to utilitarian perceptions a dilemma does not necessarily have any moral solution, though there may be better and worse ways out. By assessments, form which contrast the with ethical such preanalytical theories, of sensitive theories, do recognise moral basis dilemmas and reflect their features. Reactions and responses that are characteristic of deontic dilemmas the from There is an unsteadiness, an uncertainty as to what to fix. nuclear do, which way to proceed, which principles in watered-down form to temporary crutch. for Thus, as way a of never exercising "morally our world'66, that is in a morally-strapped world. best" ethical Bishops who the of A similar 'strictly conditional' Deterrence has a strictly temporary role the object must and deterrence circumstances. deterrence, is "morally in a fallen acceptability' certainly one strictly wrong, is of from the conditional option as to of what nuclear the to do nevertheless the policy to fix. awkward in Thus Walzer, for example, struggles to the conclusion though "second a to be to move beyond deterrence, 'towards a world free of the threat of deterrence' (PL, p.317), out And be try to escape 'the paradox of deterrence', i.e. moral fix. but shift 'moral while acceptability, can good", responsibility moral deterrence we a (as from good to acceptable) is made by the US Catholic functor speak as grasp example, the Bishop of London contends that the possession of nuclear weapons 'while acceptable" emerge that war in the pursue circumstances (p.274).6? However as more than an immediate stepping stone to a 65. There are exceptions of course, e.g. in the Catholic educated such as Sartre; and Nagel's final example is very instructive. For a fuller theory of moral dilemmas see however Routley and Plumwood. 66. Reported in The Economist; reprinted in 1983, Weekend Magazine p.2. 67. As a response to a moral dilemma, Walzer's approach is perfectly in order logically. Those who, like Benn, 'find it neither coherent nor acceptable' The have not grasped the logic of moral dilemmas. Australian, February 12-13 47 superior it policy, (in assembled is reasons §5-§6), of option, poor decidedly a the sort reasons for are that decisive for those, outside the conventional Northern framework, who find sufficiently already no genuine of nuclear nuclear dilemma. To make matters worse the nuclear fix is, furthermore, own making. states' a fix It is not something they blundered into, by accident. initial nuclear involvement was deliberately chosen, primarily by the the the USA and the USSR in interaction. and In these respects the situation is like people who deliberately let themselves be involved in two incompatible of relationships, and build up conflicting obligations though USA, has by and large also been deliberately chosen, again mainly by escalation that The build-up, in North America occurred on a defensive basis in response nuclear to Soviet The fact is that the USA initiated nuclear armament, and has build-up. frequently led escalation, and apparently still does. programme is to be in addition to existing resources myth, a is some currency, that adoption of nuclear weaponry, and nuclear with one It thereby. are (which agreed generally The recent (1980) United States' strategic be already in excess of to Russia's, and which always have been so) (Thompson, p.21). The present dilemma, that many people feel acutely, is then a direct outcome state policy, allies, and Naturally not the USSR policies. that indicates especially a merely route by taken advanced response to capitalist the USA and its NATO nations, Soviets (or of socialism). state would not have been feasible without complementing And independent evidence, such as Soviet-Sino confrontation, is a strong internal military dynamic in state socialist there nations. There is a two-way connection between world political arrangements nation-states the and nuclear fix. arrangements are an evident source of the nuclear situation is increasingly present world political structure. is widely promulgated arrangements: it is '... seen On the dilemma as one hand, with the these result through political that the indicating the inadequacy of the Indeed it is no longer a radical theme but that the source of the nuclear problem comes from state a world of sovereign states ... which brought the 48 world the present dangerous situation' (PL, p.313). to nuclear fix tends to lock political arrangements into On the other hand, the the statist form, into The arrangements of an increasingly authoritarian and centralist cast. statist espoused purpose of nuclear weapons may be to keep the national defend to and security, interests, reasons such as perpetuating the system state advantageous confrontation, and provide to but underneath there are other sovereign of (!), peace and states of framework the military-industrial interests, dependent state exploitation, and politically favoured inequality it supports. The emerging theme is then that the very nuclear situation arising from the statist and arrangements interrelations (economic ideologies, etc.) tends to, and is used to, lock arrangements of states and zones of interest. sovereign theme is a piecemeal practical one. where side the pattern world the conflicting rivalries, into the present The argument to this Consider first, the matter from the Soviet of national control and progressive military-economic reorientation common to all nuclear states is clearer. The threat from the West, whether it exists or not (and in Soviet perception it certainly does), has become a necessary legitimation for the power of the ruling elites, an excuse for their many economic and social failures, and an argument to isolate and silence critics within their own borders. In the West we have ... carefully controlled ... and selective release of 'official information' (Thompson, p.20). "We" in the West, especially the Americans, also integrated with state apparatus, have, in forms increasingly the military-industrial complex, which is a major beneficiary and promoter of the nuclear arms race.68 Secondly, there is evidence of entrenchment of the arrangements, by things such as the SALT negotiations; there are fixed superpowers and a (growing) nuclear club of nations all governed by a rules, partly held in place by deterrence. shown as flimsy negotiated set Connected with this, there are cases revealing the fixing of zones of interest, such as the Afghanistan example. Soviet US is 68. of The invasion is not regarded as threatening US "vital interests", and so the not overduly worried about Afghanistan and its people. What was The role of the military-industrial complex in present US escalation is sketched in Cox. Marxists, with their dogma of economic determinism, would assign even more weight to this point. As some of them would freely concede, a similar complex has figured prominently in USSR escalation. 49 different, what it was worried about and made nuclear threats adjacent Western oil supplies: were concerning, these lay within the US zone of interest (cf. the discussion in Schell, p.212). §8. initial political fall-out from the ethical Ways out of nuclear dilemmas: Virtually all the ways are ways of limitation, and they all involve in results. one way or another limitations on nuclear arms or the way they are deployed, and limitations the on thus inevitable. and more powers of states. Limitations on national sovereignty are The limitations may be reached by agreement and negotiation, less voluntarily agreed to^^, or they may be imposed, or possibly or worst of all, they may emerge from an initial war. As with other fixes produced by are there suggested the structural arrangements of states, out which do not interfere with these arrangements, ways interstate approaches, and there are ways which do seriously alter the structure and power relations extrastate approaches. of states (and, in the limit, remove them altogether), All the familiar, allegedly practical and realistic , attempts to resolve the nuclear problem, for instance disarmament by mutual arms limitations, etc., are interstate; sovereign state. The same goes (graduated) unilateral disarmament. about the nation-state; they do not tamper with that sacred cow, the for less "realistic" But in fact there is proposals, nothing or empirical fact, is it particularly a stable one. nor, and its replacement by alternative arrangements. as a We are certainly free - in more liberal states, it should be everywhere - to theorise as demise sacred it is not a particularly well justified political form; it is not even a very long-standing form of political arrangement; matter very such as to its And nuclear dilemmas should have encouraged such reflection. 69. In principle it would be relatively easy for states to agree to settlement of their disputes by less damaging and expensive contests than military ones, e.g. by contests of selected representatives, and not just through fighting in some form, but by contests of footballers, singers, dancers, lawyers, or etc. In practice, however, such more civilized alternatives are never much considered in these days of superstates. Animals, by contrast, are smart enough to settle disputes by means much more like these. Even the ancient Greeks - though they had a clear appreciation of limits, which has been lost by post-Enlightenment leaders - regarded the institution of war as final (allegedly inevitable) means of arbitration between city-states, not seeing its social, structurally-emergent, character. 50 Extrastate approaches take one of international of states. routes, the way up, to genuine power, or the way down, through fractionation or deunionisation The ways up and down are by no means one and the same; but they are Some of the important machinery, for a way up to necessarily incompatible. not two world government,is already there in the international Were law-courts. the courts assigned sufficient authority and power, the remedy, namely through legal action, that medieval theorists saw all to intrastate and T superseded by the just case of S versus T. sufficient war deterrence, though Law courts, as usually conceived, are not equivalent super—statist But if the law courts were power then their authority and efficacy would likely rely (at upon least initially) their in could be extended to interstate disputes, and the just war between states S principle given disputes, back-up equivalent for of economic perhaps not by military means. effective without police and jails or and other penalties; and the either will involve the capacity to inflict quite substantial amounts of damage on "delinquents" - which, because delinquents will be typically organisations, will also involve damage to innocent, and perhaps dissenting, participants in those organisations, as well as to other In parties. uninvolved short, such an approach does not resolve the problem but tends to repeat it. The Way Up is one more statist, legalistic, authoritarian way of trying get to grips with the nuclear though mostly in passing to be 70. to problem, and accordingly is often mentioned, dismissed in orthodox strategic texts on Americans, for example, tend to forget that their state (like the USSR) is a union, of fairly recent origin, and that a differently-oriented State of the Union message could well consider dissolution of the union. Regional movements in USA unfortunately lack much popular support at present. By contrast, there are significant separation movements, some deserving aid and encouragement, which affect most other nuclear states, especially USSR, UK and France. The USSR already has trouble in holding its (supposedly voluntarily integrated) satellite empire together; and the one recent attempted addition right on its frontier is proving extremely recalcitrant. Nor should powerful political unions under centralised state apparatus be fostered elsewhere. The same applies to state empire expansion, as illustrated in contemporary Indonesia. Most important, the reunification of Germany should be resisted; instead a more rational regional deunification than the present East-West division of post-war Germany should be sought, along with removal of nuclear weapons from the border region, and so on. 71. Thus for example, Kahn, where such a "solution" is quickly dismissed as, impractical, etc. Hardly necessary to say the Way Up has won most favour with the legal fraternity, and from more authoritarian organisations. 51 the By contrast, the Way Down, though like thermonuclear war. an appearance (a comeback) in some more radical discussions, with the Way Up (in "world order" models: combined unlike the Way Down, is considered however beginning is and more much international system'; and 'the 'towards a no sometimes sympathetically There is by those who take a moral rather than strategic viewpoint. a renewed emphasis on world order, in reaching by The Way Up, Galtung). cf. be to Up but it is making new, is scarcely mentioned in the orthodox discussions; means Way integrated morally missing element of world order today is the absence of a properly constituted political authority' (PL, p.320). A main argument for the Way Up is just repetition a that of which is commonly supposed to underpin statist arrangements in the first place, namely an argument from (generous) variations upon the Prisoners' of the Commons. Tragedy traditionally, ecological order. not as best regards problems to solutions nation-states, of superstate. of organisation, and one of the prospects is destruction of a said to be some Of course, this begins to undermine an earlier application of the "tragedy" argument, since states will lose their sovereignty and some their order—imposing correspondingly weakened. arguments role, and But all obligation political this is assume to , only sound under quite restrictive assumptions. There are, then, many problems through that states will these tragedy A further theoretical with the hitch is Way Up, that a both theoretical and the Way Up merely repeats arrangements. It is contingency, of there being no rival intelligent civilisations nearby, that the problems of interstate relations are not repeated 72. be 72 statist arrangements at a level up, by way of superstate only to of good ones in the first place, when in fact they are not, but are are practical. the public order and, more recently, as to good part of the commons by nuclear war, the solution is now sort as So with the "tragedy of nation-states", where the players are but herdsmen such It is that authority and coercion - in the form of the state * are required to ensure especially, Dilemma, See further Routley and Routley and material referred to a level therein, up and especially Griffin. The real reasons for the state are of course very different from the theoretical cover such arguments afford. Among other things, the state enables and guarantees the accumulation of power, privilege and capital. The major practical hitch is that there is no prospect at all of getting again. such a "solution" to work in time to serve its intended purpose. In reality, we are no nearer a world government than we were a century ago, .... In fact, it is even arguable that since World War II we have moved further away from a world government than we were before World War II. The disintegration of empires has multiplied sovereignties. It is true that we have something called the United Nations, but even the United Nations has declined in power as it has grown in membership. By the beginning of the 1970's the United Nations had become, in some ways, a less powerful and even less influential organisation than it was at the end of the 1950's (Mazrui, pp.2-3). For The reasons for this Mazrui goes on to outline. future foreseeable the nuclear ideological differences between states, including especially differences as to how political arrangements should be effected, exclude any prospect of an world government or a world legal system capable of resolving nuclear operative In some ways, this is just as well. hostilities. monolithic, extremely would World would government foster economism, would entrench bureaucracy with all its damaging features, and could easily tend to totalitarianism. whatever certainly, its be (gray?) colour, political exploitative economic system which would do immense impose damage It would the world an on many remaining crucial respects, to natural systems.?3 The Way Up thus presupposes an unlikely undesirable ideological, requisite of level indeed unity political cannot be economic and paradigmatic, and, separation in some Moreover, unity. of main Northern within nuclear deadlines. expected given cultures, When not even nuclear weapons limitations can be worked out, how much less likely is more much sovereignty, could blockages agreements, sweeping and be negotiated? deadlocks in the involving genuine There an way is endless (e.g. of of state series of such state reconciliation. applies to interstate arrangements, which may make limited use that it limitations almost the the of The same Way Up negotiations or other conciliation procedures within a framework arranged through the United Nations) .?** 73. For a more detailed (but decidedly mediocre) critique of the idea of a world government, see Galtung. Naturally the objections to world government, and difficulties in the way of obtaining it, do not extend to more flexible world arrangements, such a world federation of cultures (cf. Mazrui). Such a pluralistic anarchistic Way Up can be genuinely synthesized with the Way Down. 53 There is regrettably and arrangements much also conventions are evidence frequently concerning war and human rights?$), and are sentiments smoothly not not observed (especially those worth into despicable deeds. not bode convention in great a deal: Even agreements states have openly violated. Indeed there already appears to be at least one any force, of It to which international all the major nuclear states are signatories, which would rule out LSN war and nuclear deterrence, that on genocide. includes lofty for nuclear arms limitations, should sufficient agreement well ever be reached. treaties, international are often enough disregarded, skirted around, or signed does slide that the following Genocide acts committed, in time of peace or war, with intent to destroy in whole or part a natural, ethical, racial or religious group killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to as such: the members of the group, deliberately inflicting conditions of life to bring about physical destruction direct and public shall conspiracy to commit be Persons committing genocide or any of punished, whether they are the other acts responsible rulers, private individuals or public officials.?6 it is not difficult to argue nuclear genocide, incitement to commit genocide, attempts to commit genocide, complicity in genocide. mentioned Beside genocide the in whole or in part. following associated acts are also punishable: calculated that larger a strike (such as deterrence policy requires as a back-up response) would almost certainly constitute an act of genocide, through what minority groups. to does some But then, by virtue of connecting principles like 05, nuclear deterrence stands indicted particular it conspiracy representatives of the and as involving incitement. nuclear states acts associated with genocide, in Some well-known political and military would thus appear to be liable to indictment and punishment under international law. 74. Even Dahlitz, who gives a detailed and sympathetic account of nuclear arms control attempts and lost opportunities, is by no means confident that suitable arrangements can now be achieved (see pp. 210-13). Reasons include technological advances now taking place, and the renewed American drive for strategic superiority. 75. See Brownlie, Kuper, and Amnesty International reports. in this paragraph were suggested by C. Pigden. 76. The account of genocide given is taken directly from the Genocide Convention, which is reproduced in Kuper, p.210ff. Most of the points text of the 54 The nuclear fix emerging from nation-state arrangements - combined with the impotence apparent interstate relations to alleviate the situation, indeed of with the apparent ability only to push the world further into the situation nearer to the nuclear "brink" — taken now is to contemporary angle) the inadequacy of nation-state political has given new impetus sovereignty the best-seller and to consideration of other extrastate resolutions. The the indicates the namely nuclear in The Schell's situation should reexamination of the foundations of political thought' world's political unsatisfactoriness radical of the present system of nation states has even reached stands Schell to According and book a new arrangements, thesis that the nuclear problem national (from indicate and of Fate lead to required Earth. the a full-scale to make 'the consonant with the global reality in which institutions ... they operate ...' and in 'work[ing] out the practical steps by which mankind ... can reorganise political its life' (p.219). However Schell himself tries to avoid these 'awesome urgent tasks, which, imposed on us by the political work of our age' ??. else overimpressed by the history, constitute So, not feeling the pressures of history or realities of (unstable) nation-states, do most But there is no good reason to avoid the task of political political theorists. reassessment, made so much more urgent by the nuclear situation. There is little doubt but that we live (too unthinkingly) with an antiquated system many present state arrangements, communications condition; especially, were in a of (allegedly when 17th century very different and the main outlines of the modern totalitarian state and its manifold deficiencies recognised, even earlier. 77. willingly, The features representative government, were largely fashioned in the us even of political arrangements which the nuclear impasse, among others, calls into question. best of even democratic) technology, more were the and primitive discerned, In the briefs presented A similar theme, similarly questioning 'such sacred traditions as absolute national sovereignty', was pressed by Bradley, a significant US general (see Cox, p.225). Schell (like Bradley) does not make it entirely clear whether he is thinking of the Way Up or the Way Down, but the names he drops suggest the Way Up. So does the main thrust of what he says, e.g. 'Thus the peril of extinction is the price that the world pays not for "safety" or "survival" but for its [sic!] insistence on continuing to divide itself up into sovereign nations' (p.210), as if the natural or original state were an undivided one? On Schell's position, see further Appendix 1. 55 for political arrangements such as representative government, the excessive size and complexity of modern states was not envisaged. But such systems continue to operate, insufficiently questioned, though their justificatory bases undermined. present Nuclear representative emphasized have problems political have been several other deficiencies in arrangements. particular, In they have revealed how governments can thwart popular opinion, and act against the evident will of the people on an issue, for instance in installing US missiles European Now that modern communications and information-processing countries. make it feasible to determine the mix of public positions on major case for representative procedures is dissolved. century 19th issues, a issues. The reduced power excessive back at developments, issue-regulated and large imposes complex other modern What requirements. by states government recent technological Firstly, smaller initial grouping than giant states, integration of groups by principles of federation. as it is to informed citizens of satisfactory a approximate goodwill. As there are serious deficiencies in the information in present progressive and procedure, depends control, nation-states, even and release the distribution information, channels, and so forth. acceptable the from These distortion restrictive of most liberal of them (and Again, especially with new and less But there are evidently vested interests which stand to benefit from the limited of upon nuclear problems have again made patent, systems, there is little excuse for this. information upward Secondly, democracy, insofar political related deficiencies as regards education). publicly democratic like many other social arrangements, appear to function better with procedures, flow and called for are smaller are groupings, information flow, communication and education. and major on governmental power to more participatory democratic forms, a route made possible even in expensive least of governments would, to that extent at But the route down through least, be reduced. much elected way that is thoroughly ambiguous on most issues) are not given an almost free hand on every issue, but are required to answer policy the It is past time for more issue-controlled democratic procedures, where governments once (in some in of data features in have availability major communication helped in making present deliberately fostered pattern of nation-state 56 confrontation, and in establishing the prisoner's superstates nuclear are often seen to be dilemma type the situation locked into (on which see, e.g., Hardin). A central argument, arising from the nuclear fix, for current questioning arrangements and seriously considering their adjustment (in theory at political least), takes the following shape:e Political arrangements should answer back to certain in justified terms doing of at where least are so.These requirements include such things as enabling good and meaningful and moral lives for those arrangements, and requirements (as certainly in who under operate the much of the West) the basic material conditions for such lives are met. * Because of the nuclear fix, nation-state arrangements have these requirements. For guarantee the prospect of arrangements. nation-states, good and at least in the North, can no longer meaningful to lives their yet there is a non-negligible probability that person's morality is jeopardised if the person is obliged a under those such lives may terminate, less than fulfilled, in this way. support meet A life's meaningfulness is certainly diminished if it ends before its prime in a nuclear disaster; many to ceased state to Furthermore a in acquiesce or engaged in nuclear war preparation or nuclear deterrence (cf. Benn). Therefore, nation-state arrangements have should be not all) nation-states: have their justification, and Variations on this type of argument apply to many (though amended. nation-states forfeited it is not only because of the forfeited their mandate. nuclear Political fix that some obligations to such states are correspondingly dissolved. There is enough evidence that power-brokers who control sight of, or worse have lost don't care about, the point of political arrangements, of what justifies or is supposed to justify their states. 78. states This applies both to How they answer back admits of expansion in various ways, depending on the underlying political theory. Rawls, for example, puts it in familiar contractual form: that the political order is 'a cooperative venture for mutual advantage' (p.4). Mao puts it in a standard democratic way: 'since the purpose of all political processes is nothing but to serve the people and their interests, it is the people who should control in a meaningful way, the government' (see Soo, p.68). 57 more powerful states and to lesser states, both claim popular to a put value higher on military situations: sovereignty they do on human than for copious evidence see principles the just of warfare repeatedly, as have many other principles. violated 'nuclear where Kuper). This by Israel, Vietnam and many other states in nonnuclear illustrated already some have more often, they act without it or as national survival' (Schell's conclusion, p.210; is brokers The situation has been reached against the will of the people. powers where, and mandate the where blatantly been have Such states have forfeited much of what claim they had to external respect or internal political obedience; so, on other grounds, have many other states. It could just be, of course, as is often alternatives, that have or been insinuated, though effort little but option of world government). for dismissed, As to all whether little opportunity not do to and work, appear to we Down. There working towards the weakening especially on the alternatives can be may and have given been know very little about how humans sufficient give organising and trying out alternative Way such alternatives But, operate under substantially different arrangements. accessible expended been has instance as lacking feasibility, it is difficult to be entirely sure without taking the risk of being dogmatic; deadlines no the range of alternatives or their features (except perhaps for the researching very are there But alternatives there are, no possibly better alternatives. glimpsed, that to time arrangements, even again, once very far on proceed those nuclear of the more be time to proceed a little way however, in breakdown of the larger superunions, which are the immediate problem. invalid to simply conclude that alternative political and nuclear states, Thus it would be social arrangements, theoretically feasible and certainly a longer-term goal, do not presently while offer a part of the practical response to the nuclear fix. But there is no need to insist upon a single-track Way Out of dilemma to the exclusion of all others: quite the contrary. the nuclear We can not only afford to be fairly catholic about "second best" approaches and embrace whatever seems to be working or looks like helping, within recognised ethical (and other) constraints; indeed, given the urgency, the direness of the situation, we 58 should as fairly catholic and not inflexibly committed to narrow methods, such be bogged down (and very on arms limitations negotiations should methods perservered be unrepresentative) certainly and between main nuclear states. made attempts and with, No-first-use declaration, a ban on weapons in space, etc. But even such to e.g. superstates, the from concessions significant undemocratic further wring jointly a signed The direction of most hope for progress has however come into view, a direction that is not especially The political means of the Way Out are what they have new. larger every liberal on issue that has mattered: humanitarian or been from outside state governmental apparatus by organised pressure from within or and it, characteristically Bottom-Up methods are considerations familiar alternatives self-organising furnishing by and practically virtually upon without bypass which it, Top-Down. never Such but part of the more general, and very effective, case against reliance upon states for a range of things they are now supposed to but supply, which can almost that effectively and for invariably matter be obtained, where required, more expensively less without (and them their monopolies). In the case of security it is states, with very few exceptions, imposed, or frequently The opposition to the local from have in, military solutions involving nuclear installations acquiesced and nuclear weapons. that neighbourhood and escalating groups, fix nuclear has come some of them now federated across nations (so the direction is not really interstate). These have groups been successful in blocking some nuclear installations and establishing, for the time being, against movement nuclear-free some nuclear neighbourhoods. equipment The patchwork grass-roots is strongest in Europe, which is - as the movement realised, and what gave it impetus - a leading theatre, on US strategic thinking, for a limited nuclear war not touching extremely doubtful that increasing NATO and American Europe will make it a safer place: American shores. nuclear installations removed installations in on the contrary it seems probable that Europe will become much safer if the anti-nuclear movements these It is succeed and Europe rendered nuclear-free. grossly immoral conduct will thereby also be considerably reduced. in having The chances of 59 What of the spectre of Soviet domination, military, ideological and in Except case the Europe, of other? where the inexcusable suppression of Eastern Europe all too evidently persists, this is an obvious fabrication. Does anyone expect the united Soviets to absorb China, let alone take over Canada seriously or Brasil say? And even in Western Europe the spectre is failing partly giant fashioned financially dominated and economically politically and ideologically, by the USA. ideologically, dominated propped exaggerated, up by the NATO powers' and some in and, some measure, Indeed much of the "free" world is adequately not countered military by The means. domination to which nuclear weapons are considered relevant insofar as is basic any in mode of But military. military, and associated political, domination of Western Europe by the Soviets is a problem, there are several ways other predominantly American nuclear weapons to mitigate it. only local defence arrangements - whether top-down alternative is it dominated economically, by the USA. of That is not generally considered so much of a problem (as it is?9), and case a Since the last World War, Western Europe has been military-industrial alliance. increasingly largely and much methods social — but also some on methods, or restructuring, such as social power to dispersed local more cooperation and interchange with the Soviets and much and reliance These should include not state-supplied decentralisation, regionalisation and devolution of organisations, than Eastern Europe. Part of the point of whether external or restructuring internal, so is especially situations, is to state-contrived 79. break make military any takeover, much more difficult and pointless, and the restoration of local control easier.Part of interchange, to the point of cooperation and at the level of more ordinary people, in more ordinary down conditions of hostility and distrust and to sabotage the West-East confrontations, and thereby to remove For many peoples of the world, and in its impact on the natural world, advanced corporate capitalism is an oppressive and damaging doctrine. But, in contrast with austere Marxism-Leninism which would improve the lot of some of the oppressed world while even worsening the impact on the natural world, corporate capitalism admits a certain pluralism, and recognises many more individual rights and liberties. Certainly Marxism-Leninism which appears to degenerate in practice to an authoritarian and totalitarian position is a less welcome alternative. It is fortunate, then, that we need be saddled with neither: there are superior options. 60 other expenditures.81 popular and for, motives Western support Europe, for for, long military much too adventures partial to and military adventures, should now be helping itself rather than relying on a leaky American nuclear umbrella for its defence. Moreover it ought to be, at the very least, uncomfortable about the risks of catastrophically damaging the world in the of interests its own security. extensive parts of Nor should other "nuclear dependent" states be prepared to acquiesce in this not uncharacteristic European imposition. world, what There LSN is war no risks, enormous for virtue Western in sacrificing other parts of the Europe, military-based domination to other parts of the world. which has long exported There are better options than dubious and risky nuclear shields for Europe. 80. Thus, for example, to the extent that local defence groups are integrated under more centralised direction, it would be a built-in principle that surrender of the central directing section absolved the federated groups from following suit or following further directions. That is, through devolution of power, surrender becomes structurally impossible (though individuals or basic groups may surrender). Moreover, the central section would hold only limited information about the federated units it integrated. The locally organised groups themselves, which would merge with local populations, would be trained in tactics of passive resistance, sabotage, (nonviolent) guerilla warfare, etc. The net effect (as C. Pigden, who made most of these points, argues) would be to make the cost of military conquest, occupations and exploitation prohibitively high. One reason why the Japanese Army High Command decided against invasion of Australia in March 1942 was the character of Australians and the fact that they 'would resist to the end' (Threats to Australia's Security, p.62). Yet the 1942 (war reduced) Australian population was substantially untrained and unorganised for locally—based defence. With such a defence restructuring, Australia would not only much reduce its vulnerability to military adventures, but remove standard reasons for succumbing to threats of outside military domination, blackmail, and the like. 81. In particular, with sufficient cooperation and trust, competitive prisoner's dilemma situations, which depend on the prisoners being kept separate, are removed. So too a main model supporting deterrence policy would be undercut. And the arguments from national dangers would be further corroded. In the same direction, it is important to extend cooperation between USA and USSR down below the level of state trade deals, e.g. in grain and gas, to communication and cooperation between people. For such commercial deals there is sufficient trust, even in periods of intensive confrontation: why should it not be so also at more significant people-to-people levels? Many further sorts of interrelationship are feasible, and inexpensive by military standards, e.g. sister cities, common clubs, worker exchanges, gift projects. If, for instance, 100,000 or more ordinary Americans were living, working or holidaying in USSR (and vice versa), Americans would feel less enthusiasm for hurling nuclear missiles into Russia (or vice versa). Only quite inadequate efforts have been made to build up mutual respect and trust; on the contrary, a lot of resources have been expended to encourage precisely the opposite attitudes, e.g. as part of the strategy of the "cold war". 61 What the anti-nuclear movements must press for and disarmament (and, on the more perceptive transarmament, to conversion i.e. outer of edges graduated movements, the alternative social defence arrangements). But the argument also makes it clearer how far this should go, through in in part it is what they have been pushing for, nuclear reduction broad outline: way clear accordingly is namely all the disarmament^^ to total nuclear disarmament, unilateral certainly to local disarmament across progressively larger parts of the planet's surface, including especially Europe. For once state is demoted, its the importance and the necessity of its maintenance properly downgraded and reliance on decision-making its diminished decision-making - once all that is happen), in duly of favour more localised control and for allowed not does (it need to major component in the nuclear fix is removed, namely the problem one of reduction or even loss of state sovereignty. Maintenance of that sovereignty has been assigned a mistaken importance, which in turn accounts for the mistaken weight assigned to the arguments from national dangers. What is and important worth preserving is not the sovereign state, but certain ways of life within the state. The nation-state and dangers to it, and accompanying features such as misplaced nationalism, are the weakest links in the nuclear fix situation. Once the demise of the sovereign nation-state is allowed for, the arguments from national concerning particular. dangers individual also and group rights and In freedoms, by the that nation-state. matter The are 82. to arguments liberties in for them, as smaller exclusively or nation-state is neither sufficient for are disappearing, nor community arrangements can ensure them. But arguments from individual and group dangers remain, do they not? risks are civil necessarily them, since in increasingly many states these liberties necessary place their None of these require national sovereignty or even a national life. None of the rights and freedoms guaranteed disintegrate. individuals and groups remain: To be sure, that has always been so,83 and is not The initial but important steps are at zero cost as regards deterrence. Were deterrence really the policy there would be little case for more than a fraction of present nuclear arsenals. The steps to disarmament are well-known, e.g. the scrapping of obsolete weapons, and an end to modernisation, the removal of nuclear weapons in crucial theatres such as Europe, etc. 62 being changed but only worsened in this age of mostly to want that sure be or other outsiders. People their lives will continue to run their course, ideally in a flourishing fashion, and will not be Russians nation-states. nuclear controlled Americans by or Nuclear arrangements which threaten their lives are not a rational route to these ends. In the weigh-up that should occur in charting a way as dilemmas the out of deontic such fix and its subsidiary dilemmas, there are then much nuclear more important elements than features of the nation-state, namely some of those the state is supposed to safeguard, such as individual and local welfare things and autonomy; weapons. but those things are better ensured by main reasons are familiar: The threaten the loss of basic values, such removal the nuclear of in particular, nuclear circumstances as and welfare autonomy, many for creatures and regions, and the potential loss is in general much greater than in a nuclear-free situation (even should another with example, the production of nuclear weapons reduces both local of the opportunity remain armed There are also well-known supplementary reasons; weapons). nuclear party ideological welfare for (because costs of weapons manufacture) and autonomy (because of the accompanying security measures). Thus the appropriately devices and fix nuclear resolved, it can deploy, and considerable reduction of state sovereignty. how), and since rate, any by by allowing for the But, although that is a reasonable Way Out, at little cost in the circumstances, it will be practice, at theoretically sovereignty of the state (especially as to what nuclear limiting weapons is strongly resisted in those who hold power hold it, in one way or another, under the auspices of the state. This is a main reason why people must organise and act against the state. Again the resolution also looks practical enough, since sovereignty reduction in need apply essentially only to the the production and deployment of nuclear weapons. 83. the Indeed it could in principle be obtained by negotiated It will remain so under any satisfactory political arrangements. Until human social arrangements change substantially, there is no substitute for on-going vigilance to ensure or maintain political liberty. 63 agreement (at the top levels of state). However to get this far with the superstates, the limitations of state-power will likely have to proceed further: for nuclear weaponry does not stand in splendid isolation. into both concerned. systems military and (civil) Rather it tied is industrial production of the states So, unsurprisingly, practical-looking resolutions are being solidly resisted by superstates. Accordingly more popular (bottom up) action against nuclear-involved states especially and the superstates, after all the states causing the most against serious dilemmas, will have to be taken much further. variety of organised forms. Once again it will take a These include a refusal to contribute to nuclear of war preparation, either directly or indirectly. widely, blockading of shipments of uranium, and the from such steps as the forms The action range refusal of supplies and services to sailors on nuclear ships and submarines, to withholding or redirection of taxes destined for nuclear security purposes. the They include as well the whole nuclear installations and range of nonviolent facilities protest which (methods methods against do exclude not incapacitation and decommissioning of equipment, and which do include new model resistance and defence organisations). 8** It is important to realise that petitioning of power state representatives and holders, for instance through letter campaigns, demonstrations and direct appeal, is far from a complete strategy, and may be ineffective or ignored, the results discouraging. and This is one reason why popular action should be based on a more comprehensive political strategy, which also involves withdrawing support from prevailing state arrangements, and working out and participating in alternative arrangements, especially alternative defence forms.Sufficient details as to what to do are already known, enough to make an immediate start. 84. For some impression of the range of methods, see again Sharp. 85. For much more on all these points, see e.g. further Appendix 2. Martin. As to what to do, see 64 APPENDIX 1. ON THE FATE OF MANKIND AND THE EARTH, according to Schell, and to Anders. A series of nuclear prophets has produced a series of philosophically-oriented works on nuclear war and the alleged implications of human extinction.^ The series is important for its deeper penetration into the nuclear dilemma, down to metaphysical levels; in this the series contrasts with the transient superficialities of much of the political commentary. The most widely circulated and influential text of the series is undoubtedly that of the slightest of the "prophets , Schell's The Fate of the Earth. This skillful piece of media—philosophy uncannily redeploys some of the apparently deep phenomenological themes of Anders. So, conveniently, main assumptions of Schell and Anders can often be considered together. To criticise their assumptions is not of course to belittle their work. In particular, Schell's little book, for all its political shortcomings, is having a significant and much needed effect in shifting attitudes towards nuclear arrangements. It is especially valuable for its vivid and horrifying scenarios of the aftermath of nuclear attack. Unfortunately it also exhibits, both philosophically and factually, severe defects. Some of it is simply garbage: to select one example, consider the claim that 'without ... a world-wide program of action for preserving the [human] species .... nothing else that we undertake together can make any practical or moral sense ... (p.173, rearranged). This should certainly be rejected philosophically; for there is no separate moral issue of such overwhelming importance that all other issues become morally neutral. Moral issues remain moral issues: they don't cease to be so when compared with more important moral issues (as Schell effectively acknowledges elsewhere, p.130). And the claim should also be junked on more factual grounds. Humans form a highly resilient species, like rabbits in Australia a survivor species, unlikely to be exterminated under presently arranged nuclear holocausts. 1. The distinguishing term is from Foley's Nuclear Prophets, where many of the leading prophets are assessed. One well-known prophet not so considered there is Jaspers, presumably because his main work (which might equally well have been translated as The Fate of Mankind) comes out in entirely the wrong direction. For it gives heavy philosophical attire to the better-dead-than-red abomination. A main argument against Jaspers so presented is simple. However bad being red might become (at present it is debatably worse than living under some of the totalitarian regimes the free West props up), it still gives humans a further chance for good lives, since regimes fall or can be toppled: but total annihilation removes that all-important opportunity. But Jaspers does not present his position so simply. Rather his contention is that there are circumstances where and principles for which a person or group of persons ought to sacrifice even their lives. Freedom is such: a life worth living is a free life. But the latter point can be granted without conceding that sacrifice is a possible means to it. While the sacrifice of one or a few lives may be a possible (if dubiously effective) way to free lives for others, certainly the sacrifice of all lives is not a possible route to free lives for all, since no human lives remain. To this extent Schell is right (on p.131) in accusing Jaspers of an each to__ all fallacy. Jasper's idea that "the free life that they try to save by all possible means is more than mere life or lives" breaks down when applied to all participating people. None can gain free lives by extinction of all: that is not a possible route to life even. 65 The example was selected however because it leads into, indeed presupposes, two of the major defective assumptions in the work of Schell and Anders: 51. Nuclear war will eliminate life, human life at least, on earth (the extinction assumption); and 52. In the absence of humans, very many notions, not only those of morality and value, but those of time and space for example, make no sense; or, to put it into a more sympathetic philosophical form, these notions depend for their sense on an actual human context (the extravagant anthropocentric assumption). It is applications of S2 which give Anders' and Schell's work ^ some of its apparent philosophical depth, and certainly induce much philosophical puzzlement through the paradoxical propositions generated. But the frequent applications of S2 depend essentially on SI. For without total extinction there will be humans about, to make past and future, good and evil, go on making sense! Granted the factual assumption SI is by no means ruled out as a real possibility; granted the technological means are now available to make it true, to render Homo sapiens extinct;^ granted the prospect of nuclear war does threaten leading centres of Western civilization with obliteration. Even so SI appears unlikely in the light of present - admittedly inadequate - information. Even in Canada, which lies on the polar route of Soviet missiles, human life should be able to continue in certain northern areas (according to Canadian medical studies). Schell's argument to SI is extremely flimsy. It depends, for example, on an unjustified extrapolation from the Northern to the Southern Hemisphere, but for the most part it does that very North American thing, of contracting the world to North America. (All that matters, all worthwhile civilization, is in USA, or at least, to be more charitable, in North America and Europe, which will also be wiped out, i.e. its human population will be eliminated in the nuclear holocaust.) Some of the data Schell relies upon, for example the effect of nuclear explosions on the ozone layer, is significantly out of date. Other effects than ozone destruction apparently transfer even less well from North to South. A factually superior study of nuclear disaster than Schell's, by Preddey and others, indicates that parts of the Southern Hemisphere, New Zealand and southern latitudes of Africa and Latin America could escape relatively unscathed from even most massive northern exchanges.*' Both Anders and Schell remark on the "impossibility of unlearning" the means of manufacturing nuclear bombs. It would seem that extinction, which they both foresee as at least a live possibility, would furnish a good medium for unlearning nuclear technology (something very like this emerges from van Daniken's theory of an earlier "high" technology). In virtue of S2, they would however exclude such a possibility as a case of unlearning, contending wrongly 2. For a detailed comparison of Schell and Anders' remarkably similar versions of S2, see Foley JS. 3. Thus the Last Man argument, important in environmental ethics, is no longer merely hypothetical, awaiting the remote death of the Sun, but assumes new urgency. It is this sort of argument that connects environmental ethics and nuclear ethics, at a deeper metaphysical level. The Bomb and Bulldozer are out of the same technological Pandora's box. Nuclear technology is not the only route to human extinction, nor the only Pandora's box. Biological and chemical means are perhaps even more effective, and certainly can be more selective in what gets extinguished. 4. However, new modellings and estimates, none so far very reliable, keep appearing, and amending the picture. On the basis of one recent scenario, generated by a computer modelling of a 5000 megaton nuclear exchange, the immunity of the Southern Hemisphere to the dire consequences of a northern LSN war has been questioned. In particular, Sagan, no doubt overreaching the evidence, has 'warn[ed] that the nuclear blasts would create enormous differences in temperature between south and north, shifting normal wind patterns and carrying smoke and radioactivity south' (Newsweek, November 7 1983, p.56). Some sections of the environmental and peace movements have a vested interest in exaggerating the probable effects of nuclear holocaust for life on earth, much as many statesmen have an interest in minimizing them. 66 that the notion no longer made sense. But what they seem to want to suggest with the impossibility-of-unlearning message is the inevitability of the development and eventual use of the technology - as if having learnt the means all else was determined, and manufacture and use ceased to be a matter of choice. Certainly such views have been floated $. But they are not tenable. There are many examples of technological advances that have not been taken advantage of, and there are even cases of technological developments that have been manufactured but not marketed or used. There is not something very special about nuclear apparatus that puts it beyond the scope of such generalisations. Both Schell and Anders do claim that there are very special things about nuclear weapons, in particular that they do not allow "experiments . Even if this were true - it is certainly not of smaller weapons - it would not tell against the previous argument against the inevitability of nuclear weapons. And in fact Anders and (even) Schell hedge their claims about testing, and the limits to nuclear scientific work, to large-scale weapons and independent experiments which do not interfere with the observers and those outside the "laboratories". Again they have latched onto major points: in particular, we have at present no way of testing the cumulative effects of large nuclear weapons in concert, e.g. for more holistic effects such as fireballs or firestorms, electromagnetic pulse or ozone destruction. Short of an LSN war, and likely enough with it, these crucial effects must remain largely untested and hypothetical in character. The penetration of human chauvinism, as in S2, is not something peculiar to Schell, but is a product of Western philosophy, European philosophy especially. This chauvinism is unfortunately alive and still well, Anders' version of S2 being just one striking illustration(cf. AA p.252ff.). It has also deeply penetrated Anglo-American philosophy, and has recently been extended by Wittgenstein's work, where even the necessary truths of mathematics are taken to be a product of human conventions, and would vanish with humans! Such are alleged implications of extinction; but the fact is that the truths of arithmetic are in no way dependent on the existence of humans or humanoids or of gods or giraffes. In Schell, human chauvinism is dished up in a particularly powerful and obnoxious Kantian form. Thoughts and propositions, time and tenses, history and memories, values and morality, all depend on the life-giving presence of human beings — past or future or merely potential humans are not enough, persons that are not humans are certainly not enough. Thus, according to Schell (p.140, e.g.), '... the thought "Humanity is now extinct" is an impossible one for a rational person, because as soon as tt is, we^ are not. In imagining any other event, we look ahead to a moment that is still within the stream of human time, ... '. The thought is however perfectly possible for humans; we can have it right now. Though we no doubt have it falsely, a later rational creature may well be able to have it truly. Schell erroneously denies that: there is no "later" '... outside the human tenses of past, present, and future ...' (p.140)6. Human extinction eliminates 'the creature that divides time into past, present and future': so annihilation cannot 'come to pass' (p.143). But it is simply false that the tenses are human; the tenses depend on a local time ordering (perceptible to many creatures other than humans, but not depending at all on that perceptibility for its viability) relating other times to the present, to now (also a human-independent location, evident to other creatures, and borne witness to by such sequences as the passing seasons). And annihilation may also too easily come to pass, for many humans in the North at least, as it came to pass in recent geological times that humans began to exist upon earth. Before that there was a time before there were any human beings. 5. Not merely by technological determinists of marxist persuasion. Hackworth, a former US general, argues by straight induction, that if the US military has a weapon it will use it. 6. The appalling theme that humans create past, present and future repeated elsewhere, e.g. p.173. (etc.) is 67 Anders' argument for the demise of time, that 'what has been will no longer be even what has been', is also explicitly and narrowly verificationist: 'for what would the difference be between what has only been and what has never been, if there is no one to remember the things that have been' (AA p.245). There would still remain many sorts of difference; for one, the history recorded in many other organisms would be different. Temporal themes do not lack 'legitimacy because not registered [or verified] by anyone'; truth, significance, still less meaning, are not matters of human verification. Here, as elsewhere, the human chauvinism is mixed with other distorting metaphysical assumptions of our Western heritage, in particular, verificationism and ontological assumptions (to the effect that there are severe difficulties in talking about what does not exist). Thus, for example, Schell takes over dubious metaphysics from Freud, according to whom "it is indeed impossible to imagine our own death; and whenever we attempt to do so, we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators" (p.138). The second clause goes a good distance towards refuting the first. In fact there is no great difficulty in describing counterfactual situations which undermine both Freud's claims. The same goes for Schell's extensions of human chauvinism into one of its main traditional strongholds, value theory: '... the simple and basic fact [sic!] that before there can be good or evil, service or harm, lamenting or rejoicing there must be life', human life (p.171). These are no facts, but deeply entrenched philosophical dogmas which have been exposed and criticised elsewhere?. Naturally some things will disappear with the extinction of humans: trivially there will be no more humans (unless humans re-evolve or are recreated), and thus no more human institutions, human activities, human emotions, and so forth. But it is already going too far to suggest, as Anders does, that there will accordingly be 'no thought, no love, no struggle, no pain, no hope, no comfort, no sacrifice, no image, no song For there are, and may continue to exist, other creatures than humans with emotion, struggles, songs.......... Nor will the ending of all such human ventures, if it comes to pass, show that all past human ventures have been 'all in vain', meaningless, and already so to say dead. The decay of the solar system, or the heat-death of the universe even, will not show that worthwhile human activities were not worthwhile. Several of the other notions and themes common to Schell and Anders derive from their shared assumptions SI and S2. It is these that underlie the biblical notion (in Revelations) of a Second Death, redeployed by both. 'The death of mankind', under SI, is reckoned a 'second death', because by S2 and SI remaining life is rendered meaningless and already 'seems to be dead' (AA p.244, S p.166) and is already 'overhung with death' (S p.166). Thus, too, more trivially, a person faces 'a second death', not merely one's own but in addition that greater death of the species and all future generations (S p.166, p.115). However even if nuclear extinction came to pass, the stronger notion would not be vindicated, because it depends on the fallacious inference to the meaninglessness of preceding life and on the very questionable representation of this meaninglessness as a sort of death. There is no Second Death: creatures die just once, perhaps all at about the same time. The idea of a Second Death lacks even a solid metaphysical base. From SI, together with the minor principle that extinction being an absolute doesn't differ in degree, comes the universality of peril theme that 'we are all exposed to peril in the same degree', which is accordingly 'disguised' and 'difficult to recognise', because there is no contrast (AE p.64; S p.150). This theme falls with SI. In any event, not all peoples are equally imperilled by the nuclear situation, the Indians of southern Patagonia being 7. See, e.g., 'Human chauvinism and environmental ethics', in Environmental Philosophy (edited D. Mannison and others), Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1980. 8. Anders is here (AA pp.244-5) relying upon a version of the perserverence, criticised in detail in Routley and Griffin. argument from 68 rather better placed than the Germans of northern Europe. Nor are all people equally locked into the situation or incapacitated by it; as explained, the position is different in different countries and places. Nor, likewise, are all people equally responsible, an obnoxious theme, which Schell (in contrast to Anders) repeatedly infiltrates. This is the Pogo theme, according to which S3. Responsibility for the present nuclear situation (fiasco, really) distributes onto everybody, it belongs to every human in the world. But there is also, mixed in, a weaker more plausible claim that gives lie to the stronger one, namely that we have some responsibility (the Nazi situation is compared). An especially blatant example of the Pogo themeruns as follows: '... the world's political leaders ... though they now menace the earth with nuclear weapons, do so only with our permission, and even at our bidding. At least, this is true for democracies' (pp.229-30). The theme is elaborated elsewhere: '... we are the authors of that extinction. (For the populations of the superpowers this is true in a positive sense, since we pay for extinction and support the governments that pose the threat of it, while for the peoples of the non-nuclear-armed world it is true only in the negative sense that they fail to try to do anything about the danger)' (p.152). But this is more of an argument indicting representative government, by revealing its insensitivity and unresponsiveness to many of the populace they allegedly govern, not to mention those affected by its activities who are not represented at all (namely foreigners). But Schell conveniently neglects all such points: '... we are potential mass killers. The moral cost of nuclear armaments is that it makes of all of us underwriters of the slaughter of hundreds of millions' (p.152). And again '[as] perpetrators ... we convey the steady message ... that life not only is not sacred but is worthless; that ... it had been judged acceptable for everyone to be killed' (p.153). Little of this is true. Those who campaign against nuclear arrangements, vote against nuclear-committed parties so far as is possible, and the like, are certainly not the authors of potential destruction, and responsibility for the nuclear situation does not simply distribute onto them. Nor does responsibility - or the unlikely opinions as to worth Schell illegitimately attributes to everyone - fall on those who have done less. Responsibility for decisions taken in "liberal democracies" even by representatives (in the unlikely event of this happening in the case of anything as important as defence) cannot be traced back to those represented, since among 9. An interesting converse of this theme is sometimes advanced, that no one is responsible, the whole thing is out of control. The technological version of this no-responsibility theme is discussed shortly. More satisfactory is the theme that nuclear arrangements are out of political control, but for reasons, in terms of vested interests in keeping nuclear things going, which enable responsibility to be distributed. The vested interests, which bear considerable responsibility, include the military weapons industry, and research and academic communities. Under pressures for re-election especially, politicians give in to these powerful groups, so losing control of political processes. The argument fails at its final stage. For many politicians either belong to or represent vested interests. Thus political processes tend rather to reflect vested interests than to run out of political control. 10. Another example of spreading the responsibility runs as follows: 'The self-extinction of our species is not an act that anyone describes as sane or sensible; nevertheless, it is an act that, without quite admitting it to ourselves, we plan in certain circumstances to commit' (p.186). Even for most of the planners, extinction is presumably not part of "the plan", but an unintended consequence; and most of us have little or no role in the planning, enough of us even campaign against the planning. Further 'the world ... chose the course of attempting to refashion the system of sovereignty to accommodate nuclear weapons' (p.194): the world? This connects of course with the ideological argument from defence of fundamentals, e.g. for liberty, for the (USA) nation, and against socialism. In the course of this argument yet another fallacious assumption is rolled out: 'The means to the end are not limited, for the end itself sets the limits in each case' (p.189). 69 many other things, a representative is only representative of a party which offers a complex and often ill-characterised package of policies, and a voter may vote for zero or more policies of this package. Only in the (uncommon) event of a clear single issue referendum, which is adopted, can responsibility, still of a qualified sort, be sheeted home, to those who voted for it, not to every one in the community. While S3 is false, there is an important related theme that is much more plausible; namely that the present nuclear situation generates responsibilities for every socially involved person (this theme is discussed in Appendix 2). When moreover the Pogo assumption is disentangled from accompanying themes, part of what results is decidedly along the right lines; namely S4. The controllers [not to be confused, in Schell's fashion, with all of us] have failed to change our pre-nuclear institutions. The sovereign system is out of step with the nuclear age, the one-earth system, etc. (the whole earth theme). Though Schell remains relatively clear about the serious defects of the state and the frequently immoral purposes for which the state is used, unfortunately he often loses sight of this important theme (indicated pp.187-8). Yet S4 forms part of Schell's critique of the state which is, by and large, scattered and fragmentary. As observed (in §8), Schell arrives at the conclusion that the nation-state has outlasted its usefulness, and that new political institutions more 'consonant with the global reality' are required as a matter of urgency. But he evades what he admits is the major task, making out viable alternatives. At most he makes some passing gestures, some pointing towards the Way Up. Solutions to the nuclear dilemma come, if not easily, in a similar simplistic way, from the Top Down; those who can must appeal to the Top (cf. p.230). Schell places his hope in treaties for arms reduction and limitations (such as SALT) and in world government (as with the United Nations). Given the record of these organisations and treaties, the negotiations and regulators, it is by now a pathetic faith. Nor is a serious need felt for further analysis of the nuclear situation, to investigate the origins of nuclear technology, to explore the roots of nuclear blindness, to consider effective changes to military-industrial organisation and ways of life. But some of the requisite deeper analysis of the nuclear situation and, more generally, of the roots of war can be found elsewhere.*2 The roots of the nuclear fix are not confined to the ideologically-aligned arrangements of nation-states, but penetrate also into key components of those states, their military, their controlling classes, and their supporting bureaucracies. And both within the arrangements of states, what accounts in part for the arrangements, and in key components of the states, a conspicuous and crucial feature is the drive for power and domination.^ Thus the push for [nuclear] superiority by the super-states, to be achieved through military-oriented science and technology, which involves and enables domination, in several interrelated forms. The main power-base is the large nation-state, where enough surplus product can be accumulated (from at home and from abroad, and bled from nature) to proceed with military and bureaucratic ambitions and to found the high-technology research and development means to ever more expendable power and energy. In changing the structural arrangements to eliminate the prospect of nuclear war, it is not ultimately enough just to downgrade the main power-base, it is also important to alter key components of the state, the nation-state; and, more sweepingly, to remove trouble-making patterns embedded in all these social and political arrangements, namely patterns of domination, patterns manifested not only in state political organisation, but in white-coloured relations, male-female relations, human-animal relations, human-nature relations; to remove, in short, chauvinistic relations. However not everything and especially p.227, bottom paragraph. 11. See p.225ff. 12. In Anders and elaborated in Foley, and more straightforwardly, in Martin. The incomplete list of items given above, to be investigated in a deeper analysis of the nuclear situation, paraphrases Foley JS p.164. 70 needs to be accomplished at once; and the cluster of damaging power and domination relations tied into war can be tackled separately. And there the problems can largely be narrowed to certain problems of states and certain key components of states. In what analysis he does offer of the problem with states, Schell repeats the familiar false contrast of state expediency with morality, as a contrast between "raison d'etat and the Socratic—Christian ethics. The teaching that 'the end justifies the means is the basis on which governments, in all times, have licensed themselves to commit crimes of every sort' (p.134). So 'states may do virtually anything whatever in the name of [their] survival'. Schell then argues however, that extinction nullifies end-means justification by destroying every end; but again the argument is far from sound, and depends on human chauvinism (as under S2) combined with ontological assumptions. Even if all humans were extinguished (as under SI) ends could remain, for instance for nonhumans such as animals and extraterrestrials, actual or not. The ends—means argument can however be repaired to remove such objections: instead it is 13. These motivating drives form part of a larger integrated package, comprising maximisation drives for power, knowledge, control, wealth, energy, speed, satisfaction, ..., for the "newer" Enlightenment (but Faustian) virtues. Frequently there are attempts (the human failing for excessive neatness and simplicity manifested) to reduce the package to one main component, preference—satisfaction for instance, or utility. And the type of drive is justified (especially for those who have it, but worry about it) not only as virtuous, which it is not, but also as rational, which again it is not. Rationality, the deeply entrenched myth has it, consists in maximisation, of the virtues. Maximisation of the objects of the drives runs, however, into limitation theorems and associated paradoxes. The maximisation of power, as with the Christian-Islamic God, encounters the paradox of omnipotence, the parallel maximisation of knowledge, paradoxes of omniscience. There are no consistent objects which are omnipotent or omniscient. The drive for maximum consistency, often taken to be the epitome of rationality, also leads to inconsistency in the case of more important theories, such as arithmetic and set theory (Godel's theorem and associated limitative theorems). 14. R & D, though directed by military requirements and the arms race, also drives the arms race. Its role is partly disguised by the myth of neutral science. have been attempts, not only by those committed to technological determinism, to involve technology more deeply as the main, or single, source of the nuclear fix. It is technology, the mega-machine, running out of control, that has brought us to this predicament, the nuclear abyss. Sometimes this serves to exonerate states and their key components and those who control them, for they are simply caught up by this out—of—control machine; but sometimes the state itself is seen as a machine also running out of control. But technological determinism, like other varieties of stronger (nonanalytic) determinism, is false. Nuclear technology was selected and proceeded with, after a well-known political dispute involving distinguished scientists; it was deliberated, funded and promoted, while other alternatives were not. Damaging technologies of the nuclear age were not inevitable, but deliberately chosen by certain components of the large nation-states. And much as they need not have been chosen, so they do not have to be persisted with. The fashionable inevitability/determinism themes admit not only of refutation by bringing out the many choices made in persisting with often recalcitrant technologies. They also admit of being made to look ridiculous. If the Bomb is determined, as part of human evolution, then if it functions (as it probably will, a matter also determined), it will serve as a human population control device, a matter also determined. That is, the Bomb has its fixed evolutionary place in human population regulation. 71 claimed that extinction nullifies ends-means justification by frustrating the realisation of every relevant end - meaning by 'relevant', in this context, those ends the realisation of which the state appeals to in justification of its nuclear policies.1$ An LSN-war, even without human extinction but with severe enough losses, would undoubtedly frustrate the realisation of relevant state ends. So even from an expediency perspective, superstate policies are open to severe criticism, for example as motivationally irrational. As to the part of the state and (state) sovereignty in war, Schell leaves us in no doubt. A sovereign state is virtually defined as one that enjoys the right and power to go to war in defence or pursuit of its interests (p.187). War arises from how things are; from the arrangement of political affairs via jealous nation states (p.188). Indeed there is a two-way linkage between having sovereignty and capacity to wage war. On the one side, sovereignty is, Schell contends, necessary for people to organise for war. On the other side, without war it is impossible to preserve sovereignty. Neither of these contentions is transparently clear as they stand. The first is damaged by civil war and the like, the second by the persistence of small nonmilitary states. Now that the macro-state system is entrenched, it is however easy for conservatives (in particular) to argue from the "realities" of international life, which include self-interest, aggression, fear, hatred. It is on this basis that peace arrangements are readily dismissed as unrealistic, utopian, even (amusingly) as extremist (cf. p.185). Schell's further theme that nuclear "war" is not war threatens, however, to undermine his case against the sovereign state; for example, his ends-means argument and the argument based on its nuclear war-making capacity. Fortunately the not-war theme needs much qualification, and starts out from an erroneous characterisation of war as 'a violent means employed by a nation to achieve an end' (p.189): but this is neither necessary nor sufficient for war. What is right (so it is argued in §1) is that nuclear wars are very different from earlier conventional wars. Schell goes on to claim that war requires an end which nuclear "war" does not have. But nuclear attacks can certainly have ends (even if LSN wars cannot be won in the older sense: but not all wars or games are won). It is also claimed that war depends on weakness; on one side being defeated on a decision by arms. But in nuclear "war" this doesn't happen, 'no one's strength fails until both sides have been annihilated' (p.190). But what these sorts of considerations contribute to showing is again not that nuclear wars are not wars, but that they are not wars of certain sorts, e.g., not just wars (because they fail on such criteria as reasonable prospect of success and improvement), not rational wars (in a good sense), and so on. That conventional wars have persisted into nuclear times does damage to Schell's argument that nuclear weapons have also ruined "conventional" wars, and his connected theme that the demise of war has left no means to finally settle disputes between nations, for the final court of appeal has been removed (pp.192-193). The theme depends on the mistaken proposition concerning the demise of conventional war and the mistaken proposition that war of some sort has to be the final "court of appeal" between nations (for, as observed, there are other types of contests that could serve, and there is also the possibility of more cooperative behaviour, e.g. joint referenda). The theme also imports the social-Darwinian assumption of Clausewicz (the "logic of war" theme criticised in §2) that war has to proceed to the technological limit - as if war and violence were thoroughly natural activities independent of recognised social settings (for winning, surrender, etc.) and rule-less activities. On the contrary, wars are parasitic on social organisations such as states and are governed by a range of understandings, conventions and rules. They are a social phenomenon, with a rule structure, if not a logic. Much capital has been made not merely from "the logic of war" but from what is now called "the logic of deterrence" and the "logic of nuclear [strategic] planning". The message that is usually supposed to emerge is that the massive nuclear arrangements the world is now entangled in are perfectly logical, sound, 15. This reformulation was proposed by N. Griffin, who suggested that the main qualification can be inferred from Schell's context. 72 reasonable, rational. However this represents little more than a cheap semantical trick. Logic in no way justifies the present arrangements, or anything like them, or renders them reasonable. There is a logic of decision (as presented, e.g., in Jeffrey) which can be applied in strategic planning; but it does not yield specific results without desirability measures being assigned to alternative outcomes, that is without values being pumped in, extralogically. There are various ways these value assignments may be determined, to meet moral requirements or not; but in nuclear strategic planning they have invariably been settled on the basis of expediency.In fact, 'logic of' tends to be used very generously, as a word of general commendation, to cover something like 'rational considerations entering into the policy or strategy of'. In these terms, Schell, who like others enjoys playing with the term 'logic of', should write of 'the illogic of deterrence', for he emphasizes (p.213) the disparity between the supposed rationality of threatening use of nuclear weapons and the irrationality (even from a national interest viewpoint) of actually using them should the threat fail: 7 yet the success of deterrence doctrine depends on the credibility of the threat of this unjustifiable and irrational use. Indeed Schell wants to go still further and locate a contradiction in deterrence (e.g. pp.201-2): but the argument depends on an interesting confusion of contradiction with cancellation,18 along with the assumption that deterrence involves cancellation. Nuclear deterrence may well be irrational, it is immoral, but it is not inconsistent. 16. Selecting the usual game theory setting sees to this almost automatically; for it is then assumed that each player plays to maximize his or her own advantage. Thus too the presumption in Walzer, p.277, that 'the logic of deterrence' is based on eye—for—eye and tooth—for—tooth assumptions. 17. Even the irrationality of the use has been contested, e.g. it wishfully thought that America will rise like a phoenix radioactive ashes. has been from the There is moreover a simple solution to Schell's problem of the missing motive for retaliating to a first strike (p.204), namely, not a retributive one, but an ideological one: eliminate the prospect of the future dominance of the rival ideology. 18. An analogous confusion of negation with cancellation or obliteration appears in recent US "star war" thinking, where US missiles are supposed to "negate" incoming USSR missiles. Moral paradoxes of deterrence take a different direction; although involving negation they depend upon perhaps questionable interconnexions of intensional functors. One type of paradox (considered in §5) derives from a policy of credibly threatening LSN war without however intending to proceed to LSN war, though credible threats [appear to] imply an intention to proceed. Another style derives from acclaimed intention to reduce the number of nuclear missiles when the persistent practice, which implies an intention, is to increase the number. This paradox is technically removed - how satisfactorily i& another matter - by a distinction between longer-term aims and immediate practice, a time-honoured method of removing contradictions by conveniently discerned temporal distinctions. 73 APPENDIX 2. On the Matter of Collective and Individual Responsibility and on Regional Strategies What one does depends, naturally, on where one lives and what means one has, as well as on what one should do and what sort of person one seeks to be. So too what strategy a state should adopt depends on where it is located and what sort of power it is, on national as well as on moral considerations. In present circumstances states have an evident responsibility to work out their policies. There are however some persuasive arguments that this is where all responsibility ends: these major responsibilities accrue entirely to states, and there is no individual, or (smaller scale) collective, responsibility to work out a policy or stance on such matters as nuclear arrangements and still less to act, perhaps against a state, on the basis of such a stance. While such a no-responsibility or opt-out position no doubt suits many people - many for themselves, some (especially more authoritarian power-holders) on behalf of others - it does involve inadmissibly opting out of moral responsibilities, responsibilities acquired by virtue of being a person within the framework of certain social arrangements. Now there is no doubt that individuals and groups can do this, can opt out. They can neglect their moral responsibilities; but they are not justified in doing so. Against this claim, which is based ultimately upon each person's being set in a web of responsibility-inducing social relations, whether they like it or not so long as they choose to live with others, there are some neat arguments which appear to permit, or even warrant, opting out. One influential argument takes the following lines: 1. The (ordinary) individual, or group, has no possibility of making a difference to what happens. Therefore 2. Such individuals, or groups, have no obligation to try to make a difference. Hence 3. Such individuals, or groups, are not morally responsible, for instance when things go wrong. There are two main assumptions in this argument, both of which should be resisted: firstly, in getting from 1 to 2, a variant of the "ought implies can" themel, and secondly, the assumption that individuals can't make a difference. While it is true that individuals cannot accomplish much on their own, together they can. What an individual can achieve depends on what sufficiently many other individuals do. In highly competitive communities, full of hopeful free-riders, a person may encounter a familiar impasse: that he or she acts in manner M (e.g. morally, against nuclear arrangements, rationally), at considerable personal cost, with no guarantee that others will also act M-ly. Such an impasse no longer faces so many in the West, at least as regards initial steps against nuclear arrangements. The individual can cooperate with others in ways that do make a difference. An individual is not exonerated from responsibility by the argument. While individuals can respond by joining organisations whose activities are directed at making some difference, many individuals also have the option of more individualistic action in such forms as boycotts, go slows, political disobedience. An important form of individual resistance, already adopted in Canada and north-western USA, is refusal to pay income taxes directed towards defence or various parts thereof (e.g. nuclear weapons production and deployment), or alternatively redirection of such taxes, for instance to peace funds. Evidently, however, all these more individualistic forms of political activity work more effectively if individuals integrate their activities, since the impacts aggregate (and appear after a certain stage to exponentiate). As well collective action helps in distributing the impact of retribution or punitive action by state authorities. 1. Any satisfactory deontic theory which takes moral dilemmas with due seriousness is bound to reject this theme. There are also independent grounds for jettisoning this Kantian theme: see Routley and Plumwood. 74 There are, furthermore, arguments of some weight that individuals are under some sort of moral obligation to take political action to disaffiliate themselves from what contributes to the prospects of nuclear war. What type of action this is depends on the sort of state one resides in, for instance, whether it is a nuclear power, whether it provides nuclear bases or facilities, etc., and on such complicating issues as what kind of preventive action the state is likely to take in return. (Any state seriously practising deterrence is bound to take some action against effective protest, or risk losing credibility; but there are limits to the amount of state coercion any one individual need bear.) One argument - it is one of a type that can be varied from making nuclear weapons to, for example, providing facilities for them - proceeds from the wrongness of nuclear war to the position that it is not right to be making the weapons for such war. The argument here applies connecting principles (like those of §5), while appealing to such background information as that the manufacture and deployment of such weapons increases the risk of such war. But if it is not morally right to be making such weapons then those who live in a state that is doing so ought to disaffiliate themselves from such defence production, and disaffiliation includes not paying for such production through defence taxes . The argument is not without substantive assumption, but the assumptions appear morally reasonable and defensible. Another effective argument proceeds from the question of the type of moral person one wants to be: Does one want to be, or effectively to be seen as, the kind of person who goes along with the nuclear destruction of human populations? Or with making credible a threat to do so, or the like? What follows applies primarily to people who do not want to be, or be seen as, such people. Arguments like these not only put opt-outers and do-nothingers on the spot insofar as they contribute to national objectives; they also raise questions, perhaps even dilemmas, as to political obligation for those who would take action, even limited action such as redirection of taxes 3. For are there not political obligations to the state, such as paying due taxes and supporting the national defence effort? It is usually assumed that there are. However, no dilemma occurs under a theory which, properly, takes political obligations to be regulated in some fashion by moral obligations; for in this case moral obligations override political obligations. In fact political obligations are already significantly limited by moral constraints. The nuclear situation does not so much bring out new limits on political obligation, as emphasize the respects in which those obligations are already limited, and introduce further moral considerations against sponsorship of national defence arrangements. An obligation to try ** to dissociate oneself from preparation for nuclear war or from nuclear-deterrence, for instance by not spending part of one's working life contributing indirectly to it, does not commit one to more than this: to an obligation, for example, to work for an alternative national defence policy which avoids nuclear elements. But no doubt this would be a good thing to try to contribute towards. Once again, what one attempts depends on where one lives, the level of one's commitments, e.g. to nonviolence, and so forth. For not only are different types of policy reorientation appropriate for different nations and regions, but there are more superficial and deeper reorientations that can be worked out and promoted, e.g. schemes that leave 2. An argument of this type was deployed by Bishop Hunthaussen of support of his refusal to pay defense taxes. 3. This dilemma and option is now removed in practice for most wage earners by Pay As You Earn taxation schemes - schemes apparently introduced to give the state interest on gross earnings, but obviously very effective in removing taxation power from most workers, and so in further transferring power from individuals to the state. 4. Given the power of institutions and the state one may be able to do little more than try, without giving up one's work and thereby one's ability to contribute to other deserving causes. For example, it may be virtually impossible for one to avoid contributing to a superannuation fund which is investing in projects which one opposes or ought to oppose, or both. Seattle in 75 "conventional" warfare apparatus more or less intact, schemes that change that. and deeper (ecological) The US Bishops, for example, present a rather shallow set of goals for a superpower such as the USA, which includes such objectives as preventing the development and deployment of destabilizing nuclear weapons systems and working for better control of already operational systems (see PL, p.317). The nuclear situation affords an important opportunity to press however for a much deeper set of changes in the superstates. For those whose very limited political influence is exerted in considerably less powerful states, even the shallow goals may look quite different: there are no nuclear weapons (except perhaps those of another power stationed on local territory) to redeploy or to better control. The view from the very minor powers in the Antipodes is furthermore different from that of the medium powers in Europe. There is some prospect in much of the Antipodes of avoiding the more immediate effects of an LSN war, while there is little such prospect in Europe (cf. Preddey and others). There is accordingly some obligation — an obligation little considered and not grasped by the power holders - on those in the Antipodes to make some effort to preserve there in the South elements of what is valuable in world civilization. Local and regional self-interest would also suggest substantial steps towards self-preservation that (foolishly) have not been initiated. What is broadly required in the Antipodes is not difficult to discern once Steps include withdrawal from the American alliance, the goals are glimpsed. which is in any case of questionable merit since its main advantages lie with the US and it affords no guarantee of local defence;$ closure of American bases and withdrawal of American access rights for nuclear—carrying equipment to ports, air bases and other facilities, especially so as to remove local nuclear targets; pursuit of a more evenhanded policy of nonalignment (something quite small powers elsewhere have managed to achieve). That much is easy, in principle; and justified. It is justified because local commitment to the American military operations in the region lacks a solid foundation; it is premissed primarily on the acceptance of deterrence, which, so it has been argued (in §5ff.), lacks justification. That Australian commitment to joint Australian—US facilities and to US military operations in the region is explicitly based on acceptance of deterrence emerges from several recent statements of government policy. The joint facilities are 'part of a system of deterrence'. & More difficult to ensure, at least without much preparation, is that economic and cultural collapse does not follow an LSN war in the North. Secondly, then, the building of increased socio-economic independence in the Antipodes is required. It is not enough to make the region a nuclear-free zone not worth targeting militarily: the region must also have a sustainable life of its own. For a small region, that looks a very costly exercise unless combined with other desirable objectives; for example, in Preddey and others it is estimated that a substantial portion of GDP would have to be diverted to build up New Zealand's economic independence.? For a larger region which included Australia, the costs would be less. They would compare favourably with many Northern military budgets, and have the advantage that much of the expenditure is genuinely productive. If furthermore - what seems unlikely - the structural readjustment were combined with the independently desirable aims of moving the 5. See the discussion in Ball, chapter 13, especially pp.140-1. How slight the commitments are, under the ANZUS treaty in particular, has been emphasized again in recent defence discussions between Australia and the USA. Of course, the ANZUS Treaty is only one, and a comparatively minor one, of the many military treaties that should be terminated: from a European and world viewpoint the winding down of NATO and the Warsaw Pact arrangements, and the removal of American and Russian forces from Europe (and elsewhere), are very much more important. A fuller discussion of Australia's defence philosophy will appear in a subsequent publication in this series. and alternatives, 76 whole region towards a multi-cultural conserver society and perhaps even diverting "defence" spending to connected self—management and social defence goals, the costs would be very considerably lessened. They only appear so great in the setting of a consumer-satellite society. In any case, where life and culture themselves are concerned, the costs do not appear excessive. In sum, Southern countries should be severing their military linkages with Northern nuclear powers^, and should be preparing now, socially and economically, for the time after the LSN war, the great Northern war. However there are serious blockages in the way of such things in the Antipodes, and indeed impeding any substantial attempts to lessen the impact of LSN war. Some of the blockages derive again from the fact that present nuclear arrangements favour many of the power holders and suit strong corporate interests which wield political power. But the main blockages to more popular action are sloganised in the false dichotomy: "either it won't happen or we're all dead anyway; so why bother". One reason for blockage is then the extinction assumption (SI of Appendix 1), the unwarranted adoption of which is excessively nihilistic. A more important reason is that most people, and most of their political representatives, do not believe that major repercussions of LSN war are going to befall them. These are events which, like starvation and torture, happen to other (remote) people, not them. It is not that LSN war is unthinkable: rather it is that it seems unbelievable that it should make any difference. Most people in the Antipodes really do not believe that their lives are likely to be shattered by nuclear war. Waking up and mobilising these people is a major part of the problem in 6. See the letter by R.G. Hawke, Prime Minister, replying to a symposium on consequences of nuclear war, Canberra Times, Saturday July 23, 1983. The point is also made by the Foreign Minister in his Evatt Memorial Lecture, as Hawke notes. The point is softened by representing the facilities as also having a role in verification, as well as deterrence, 'that makes arms control and reduction feasible': the known role of the facilities in war fighting is not alluded to, and nor is the fact that any verification role can be alternatively accomplished using satellites. However the matter is not in any doubt: 'successive Australian governments ... have taken the view that our primary concern should be to support the effectiveness of the United States deterrent to war itself' (D.J. Killen, Minister for Defence; quoted in Threats to Australia's Security, p.17). Government representatives (e.g. Hawke) concede that the joint facilities put Australia at nuclear risk. 'However it is the judgement of this Government that the benefits to Australia in terms of its immediate interest and global strategic consideration outweigh potential risks'. A proper decision-theoretic analysis would not support Hawke's claim: since Australia is known to be a nuclear target because of American bases (cf. Ball, pp.130-8), the potential risks given that an LSN war has a non-negligible probability far outweigh any immediate benefits. Since Australia has only a regional strategic role, the global strategic considerations are, as could be otherwise inferred, primarily those of the main user of the facilities, the USA. The Government is prepared to put Australia, its peoples and ecosystems, at what is decidedly serious risk for immediate and American interests. A worthwhile representative government does not hold its peoples hostage for such reasons. Not only is that short-sighted expediency decision making: it seems virtually certain that the details of the decision making, were they ever revealed, would not justify the policy in the longer term even on the basis of expediency, but would turn on such things as present trade advantages and short-term commercial considerations. 7. As to the economic and social problems Australia would face in the event of an LSN war, see Coombs for a preliminary assessment. 8. Ideally the removal of significant nuclear targets should take place across the whole Southern Hemisphere, because this is the zone that is relatively insulated, atmospherically, from the Northern Hemisphere. 77 achieving requisite social and political adjustment. Even those who believe that LSN war is not improbable (but may well not be totally destructive of life) do little to reorganise their lives in a way that would reflect their assessment. Richard Routley* 9. Again, for some of what to do, for some ways to reorganise, see e.g. Martin. There is also much intellectual work to be undertaken, for example, searching out details of alternative arrangements, and also discrediting establishment experts, especially economists and political scientists, who intellectually underwrite present nuclear arrangements. * The text has been much improved as a result of detailed comments by C. Pigden, R. Goodin, N. Griffin, B. Martin and L. Mirlin, and through correspondence with G. Foley. J. Norman has helped in its final organisation. The initial outlines of the paper were worked out in Victoria, Canada; and an early version was read at Simon Fraser University in 1982. 78 REFERENCES G. Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, C.H. Beck, Munchen, toasAA. G. Anders, Endzeitand Zeitenende: Gedanken zur atomaren Munchen, 1972; referred to as AE. 1956; Situation, referred C.H. Beck, I. Brownlie, ed., Basic Documents on Human Rights, Oxford, 1971. D. Ball, A suitable piece of real estate. American installations Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1980. in Australia, J. Barnes, 'The just war' in N. Kretzmann, A. Kenny and J. Pinborg (eds), The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, 1982, pp. 771-784. R. J. Barnett, Real Security, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1981. S. Benn, 'Deterrence or appeasement? Or, on trying to be rational about war', Applied Philosophy, to appear. nuclear P. Berg, Reinhabiting a Separate Country, Planet Drum, San Francisco, 1979. M. Cohen, T. Nagel and T. Scanlan Princeton, Princeton UP, 1974. (eds.), War and H. C. Coombs, 'The economic and social consequences of (September 1983) 8-9. Moral nuclear Responsibility, war', Natuni 5 A.M. Cox, Russian Roulette: the Superpower Game, Times Books, London, 1982. J. Dahlitz, Nuclear Arms Control: with McPhee Gribble, Melbourne, 1983. effective international G. Foley, 'Jonathan Schell: Genius - Philosopher - Rewrite Brisbane, 1982; referred to as JS. Man', agreements. typescript, G. Foley, Nuclear Prophets. The True and the False, typescript, Brisbane, 1983. J. Galtung, The True Worlds, Free Press, New York, 1981. D. Gautier, 'Deterrence, maximisation, and rationality', in The Security Gamble: Deterrence Dilemmas in the Nuclear Age, (ed. D. MacLean), Rowman and Littlefield, Totowa, N.J., to appear; also forthcoming in Ethics, April 1984. R.E. Goodin, 'Disarming nuclear apologists', typescript, 1982. R.E. Goodin, 'Disarmament as a moral certainty', Ethics 95 (1984), to appear. P(hilip) Green, Deadly Logic: The Theory University Press, Columbus, 1966. of Nuclear Deterrence, Ohio State N. Griffin, 'Lifeboat USA', Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy #8, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1983. Ground Zero Organisation, Nuclear War: What's In It For You? Pocket Books, New York, 1982. R. Hardin, 'Unilateral versus mutual disarmament', Philosophy and Public Affairs 12 (1983) 236-54. J.E. Hare and C.B. Joynt, Ethics and International Affairs, 1982. Macmillan, London, 79 R.M. Hare, Applications of Moral Philosophy, Macmillan, London, 1972. R. Jeffrey, The Logic of Decision, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1965. H. Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, Princeton University Press, 1960. G.S. Kavka, 'Some paradoxes of deterrence', Journal 285-302; referred to as PD. of Philosophy G.S. Kavka, 'Deterrence, utility and rational choice', Theory (1980) 41-60; referred to as RC. 75 (1978) Decision and 12 G.S. Kavka, 'Doubts about unilateral nuclear disarmament', Philosophy and Public Affairs 12 (1983) 255-60; referred to as DU. L. Kuper, Genocide: its political use in the Twentieth Century, Yale UP, 1982. D.P. Lackey, 'Ethics and nuclear deterrence', Rachels), Harper and Row, New York, 1979. in Moral Problems (ed. James D.P. Lackey, 'Missiles and morals: a utilitarian look at nuclear deterrence', Philosophy and Public Affairs 11 (1982) 189-231; referred to as MM. D.P. Lackey, 'Disarmament revisited: A reply to Kavka and Public Affairs 12 (1983) 261-64. and Harden', Philosophy B. Martin, Grass Roots Strategy Against War, Freedom Press, Nottingham, 1984, to appear. A. A. Mazrui, A World Federation of Cultures: An African Perspective, Free Press, New York, 1976. J.C. Murray, Morality and Modern War, Affairs, New York, 1959. Council on Religion and International T. Nagel, 'War and Massacre', in Cohen et al, pp.3-24. J. Narveson, 'Violence and War', in Regan, pp.109-146. National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Committee on War and Peace, 'The challenge of peace: God's promise and our response', Origins 12 (20) (1982) 306-328; referred to as PL, for 'New Draft of Pastoral Letter'. Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford, 1971; referred to as OED. B. Paskins and M. Dockrill, The Ethics of War, Duckworth, London, 1979. G.F. Preddey and others, Future Contingencies 4. Nuclear Disasters, A Report to the Commission for the Future, Government Printer, Wellington, New Zealand, 1982. P. Ramsay, The Just War: force and political responsibility, Scribner, New York, 1968. J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass., 1971. T. Regan (ed.), Matters of Life and Death, Random House, New York, 1980. R. Routley and N. Griffin, 'Unravelling the meanings of life', Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy #3, Australian National University, Canberra, 1982. R. Routley and V. Routley, 'The Alternatives 2 (1982), 23-8. irrefutability of anarchism', Social 80 R. Routley and V. Plumwood, 'Moral dilemmas and the logic of deontic notions' in Paraconsistent Logic (ed. G. Priest, and others), Philosophia Verlag, 1984. R. Scheer, With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War, Random House, York, 1982. New J. Schell, 'Reflections (Nuclear Arms - Parts 1-111)', The New Yorker, February 1, 8, and 15, 1982, pp.47-113, 48-109, and 45-107, respectively. This series, subtitled The Fate of the Earth, has now appeared as a book with that title (Knopf, New York, 1982). References in the text are to the book. T.C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, Harvard University Press, 1980. G. Sharp, Exploring Nonviolent Alternatives, Boston, 1971. D. and R. Smith, The Economics of Militarism, Pluto, London, 1983. F. Soo, 'Mao's vision for China', in Contemporary Chinese Philosophy Adelmann) Nijhoff, The Hague, 1982, pp.62-80. T. Taylor, Nuremburg and Vietnam: An 1972. American Tragedy, Times (ed. Books, F.T. London, E. P. Thompson and D. Smith, Protest and Survive, Monthly Review Press, New York, 1981. Threats to Australia's Security. Their nature and Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1981. probability, Australian R.W. Tucker, The Just War, John Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 1960. M.M. Wakin (ed.), War, Morality and the Military Profession, Westview, Colorado. 1979. Boulder, M. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, Basic Books, New York, 1977. R. A. Wasserstrom (ed.) War and Morality, Wadsworth, Belmont, California, 1970. B. Williams, 'How to think sceptically about the bomb', New 1982). Society S. Zuckermann, Nuclear Illusion and Reality, Collins, London, 1982. (Nov. 18, OTHER PUBLICATIONS OF THE PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT, RESEARCH SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES, AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY School Publications R. and V. Routley, The Fight 1974, Third edition 1975. for the Forests, First edition 1973, Second edition Departmental Publications M.K. Rennie, Some Uses of Type Theory in the Analysis of Language, 1974. D. Mannison, M. McRobbie and R. Routley, editors, Environmental Philosophy, 1980. R. Routley, Exploring Meinong's Jungle and Beyond, 1980. Yellow series (Research Papers of the Logic Group): 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. R.K. Meyer, Why I am not a relevantist, 1978. R.K. Meyer, Sentential constants in R, 1979. R.K. Meyer and M.A. McRobbie, Firesets and relevant implication, 1979. R.K. Meyer, A Boolean-valued semantics for R, 1979. R.K. Meyer, Almost Skolem forms for relevant (and other) logics, 1979. R.K. Meyer, A note on R matrices, 1979. R.K. Meyer and J. Slaney, Abelian logic (from A to Z), 1980. C. Mortensen, Relevant algebras and relevant model structures, 1980. R.K. Meyer, Relevantly interpolating in RM*, 1980. C. Mortensen, Paraconsistency and Ci, 1981. R.K. Meyer and J. Slaney, De Morgan monoids, 1983. R. Routley, Relevantism and the problem as to when Material Detachment can be correctly used, and N. da Costa, Essay on the foundations of logic, 1983. R. Routley and G. Priest, On Paraconsistency, 1983. R. Routley, Research in logic in Australia, New Zealand and Oceania, 1983. R.K. Meyer, S. Giambrone and R. Brady, Where gamma fails. R. Brady, R.K. Meyer, C. Mortensen and R. Routley, Algebraic analyses of relevant affixing logics, and other Polish connections, 1983. Green Series (Discussion papers in environmental philosophy) 1. R. Routley, Roles and limits of paradigms in environmental thought and action, 1982. 2. R. Routley, In defence of cannibalism I. Types of admissible and inadmissible cannibalism, 1982. 3. R. Routley and N. Griffin, Unravelling the meanings of life?, 1982. 4. R. Routley, Nihilisms, and nihilist logics, 1983. 5. R. Routley, War and peace I. On the ethics of large-scale nuclear war and nuclear-deterrence and the political fall-out, 1984. 6. R. Routley and V. Plumwood, Moral dilemmas and the logic of deontic notions. 7. R. Routley and V. Plumwood, An expensive repair-kit for utilitarianism. 8. N. Griffin, Lifeboat U.S.A., 1984. 9. R. Routley, War and peace II. On the alleged inconsistency, moral insensitivity and fanaticism of pacifism, 1983. n w w [j  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Box 149, Item 1: War and peace I - On the ethics of large-scale nuclear war and nuclear deterrence and the political fallout Subject The topic of the resource Series: Discussion papers in environmental philosophy ; no. 5. Published by Australian National University. Department of Philosophy. 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II ON THE ALLEGED INCONSISTENCY, MORAL INSENSITIVITY AND FANATICISM OF PACIFISM RICHARD ROUTLEY ��FOR CIRCULATION AND EVENTUAL LIBRARY DEPOSIT WAR AND PEACE. II ON THE ALLEGED INCONSISTENCY, MORAL INSENSITIVITY AND FANATICISM OF PACIFISM by R. Routley Number 9 Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy Department of Philosophy Australian National University 1983 ��ON THE ALLEGED INCONSISTENCY, MORAL INSENSITIVITY AND FANATICISM OF PACIFISM Pacifism, despite its revival limited through the nonviolent action 1 movement and as a respectable tradition within the Catholic church , continues to have a bad philosophical press. one way or another, It is commonly portrayed characteristically as inconsistent. as incoherent Even philosophical defences of pacifism are liable to be extremely defensive, conceding pacifism is in only that consistent, but insisting otherwise that it is as false as a moral 2 position can be, bizarre, and morally insensitive . What follows challenges the prevailing wisdom put out in the philosophical press, but using its own analytic methods. §1. Slide arguments to inconsistency; from rights. an In influential and and arguments from irresponsibility and widely disseminated set of articles 3 attacking pacifism , Narveson says that the pacifist's position is not only that [Tl] violence is evil but also that [T2] it is morally wrong to use force [violence] to resist, punish, or prevent violence. This further step makes pacifism a radical moral doctrine. What I shall try to establish below is that it is, in fact, more than merely radical - it is actually incoherent because self-contradictory (p.408, italics added). Subsequently (p.414) he characterises pacifism by way of T2, though it would be better characterised by the more sweeping 1. According to the US Catholic Bishops, pacifism is 'a valid Christian position', with a long tradition going back to Christ and the early Christians who were committed to a nonviolent lifestyle: see Origins 12 (1982) pp.310-311. The revival in the nonviolent action (NVA) movement is a somewhat qualified one (as will emerge), many in that movement wishing to distance themselves from traditional pacifism. 2. In particular, T. Regan 'A defence of pacifism', Canadian Journal of Philosophy 11 (1972) 73-86. Page references to this article are prefixed by R. Regan ends by saying 'To regard the pacifists' belief vaguely ludicious" is, perhaps, to put it mildly'. as "bizarre and �P2. It is morally wrong to use violence. However T2 captures the cases that orthodox opposition. separate comprehensive pacifism from main form of pacifism under investigation is called The 'comprehensive' to distinguish it from standard pacifism, in the usual is which sense narrower restricted to certain theses concerning (state) order, notably opposition to (violence in) war, which does not necessarily elsewhere. the But if violence is violence is impermissible, then it should be so what Pacifism, as a universally and not merely in war. out rule moral position, should be comprehensive. On its own showing, it is contended, proper action to preventative action commitment to prevent, what would involve, it pacifism acclaimedly in the case of pacifism. incoherence Narveson and others find in pacifism: claims Narveson's or of from taking violence; But force. genuine actively defend on them, pain Hence the initial that it cannot underwrite its of inconsistency. However location of incoherence in pacifism depends, essentially, on several connected slides, all of which the pacifist should resist - without force. initial for a moral position must allow action to back up commitment, action of a type logically excluded own prohibits, use sometimes, precluded is The slide is from the theme T2 italicised above to what results by deletion of the crucial phrase 'to use force', or as it should be 'to use violence', namely 3 J. Narveson 'Pacifism: a philosophical analysis', Ethics 75 (1968) and 'Is pacifism consistent', Ethics 78 (1968). The first article is reprinted in War and Morality (ed. R. Wasserstrom) Wadsworth, Belmont, California, 1970 pp.63-77. The first article is also rewritten and combined with part of the second in 'Pacifism: a philosophical analysis', Moral Problems (ed. J. Rachels), Third Edition, Harper & Row, New York, 1979, pp.408-425. Page references without further citation are to this latter article. Narveson's theme that pacifism is incoherent is headlined and further elaborated in his 'Violence and war', Matters of Life and Death (ed. T. Regan), Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1980, pp.109-147. Page references prefixed by 'N' are to this article. 2 �It is morally wrong to resist, punish, or prevent violence - R2. and similarly from special and related cases of T2 to special and related of R2 (e.g. It is cases from T2S, It is forbidden to use force to resist violence, to R2S, forbidden to 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 what assault on pacifism (after Narveson several clearing exploits confusions, explain the popularity of pacifism, out of the way). irresponsibility of in This his first main which he takes to argument, from the does not actually lead to contradiction, but it pacifism, does suggest that there is a serious tension between pacifism and any method of maintaining social order, so serious that pacifism is socially irresponsible: ... to hold the pacifist position as a genuine full-blooded moral principle is to hold nobody has a right to fight back when attacked ... It means that we are all mistaken in supposing that we have the right of self-protection ... It appears to mean, for instance, that we have no right to punish criminals, that all our machinery of criminal justice is, in fact, unjust. Robbers, murderers, rapists, and miscellaneous delinquents this [irresponsible] theory, to be let loose (pp.415-6). Since one can protect oneself and avoid and resist aggression back violence), (with unless a slide (tentatively) by is without fighting pacifism does not mean what Narveson claims it means, Nor does comprehensive made. theses on ought, T1 T2, and imply that pacifism, characterised we have no right to punish criminals, but simply that such punishment (or the imposition of penalties) will not apply violent methods. Nor therefore does it imply that conventional machinery of criminal justice is unjust, but only that some, good 4. deal, of that machinery is. One hardly the all or a needs to be a comprehensive Pacifism, as involving the active use of defensive methods, can be traced back as far as the Mohist philosophers of ancient China. On modern methods see especially G. Sharp, Exploring Nonviolent Alternatives, Boston, 1971. As will emerge, there is a point in distinguishing (as Narveson does not in his earlier work) force from violence; they are not equivalent. 3 �pacifist to coherently think the latter. the This provides some for confirmation key point which is that there is, so far at least, no inconsistency evident in maintaining that those who hold that violent methods are legitimate morally are mistaken. The next slide is closely connected with, and really generalises upon, initial slide. is to imbue a range of more neutral terms with the stunt The connotation of violence or at least of force which and defending are taken to imply (use of) or force use of force is taken to by implied in R2. resist cannot proceeds Hence (p.415). and violence, so to Hence the also Narveson's assumption that against attack' (pp.417-8). to and so pacifism render a much less can be resisted, without by Force can be applied, as in opening sliding out of handcuffs and running away). a jam jar or pulling a person out of danger, without violence. force, but not vice versa; and violence. things like arrest, without violence (e.g. even be But defensible position. positions can be defended, as in this paper or on the field, Things a If the stunt were got away with, it would deprive pacifism of, for instance, the general methods of nonviolent action resistance, be unwarranted "recharacterisation" of pacifism as the position that 'no one ought ever defended to Hence the conflation of T2 and excluded from among admissible pacifist methods. pacifist here Narveson Thus such activities as resisting, punishing, preventing, equate with violence. R2; the Violence implies and it is violence, not all applications of force, that comprehensive pacifists are bound to exclude. The attempt nonviolent to castrate practices, any case indefensible. development themselves compromise, and from pacifism, by of it depriving the range of is not confined to those who (want to) think pacifism in It enjoys some popularity even among those advocating expansion of nonviolent methods, who no doubt want to distance older mediation, pacifism, whose methods they see as confined to negotiation, and involving the granting of concessions. The newer (nonviolent) activists have justification; for pacifism has often by an unsympathetic opposition, as confined to passive methods oeen presented, (cf. even the Concise English Dictionary account, where it is erroneously 4 said �pacifism of 'positively, it holds that all disputes should be settled by that negotiation', and, negatively, that it is 'the hostilities added). and of total doctrine of non-resistance non-cooperation with any form of warfare': But nothing in the characterisation of pacifism, whether or standard, need so limit its admissible methods: to italics comprehensive nothing excludes resistance, uncompromising methods, and imposition of sanctions which offer no concessions. It is simply that comprehensive pacifism has not yet developed its fuller potential, especially in conflict resolution. Subsequent slides in the development of the argument against just variations qualifier. on those pacifism are given, writing violence-involving in as an internal Thus the measure of a person's opposition to something in terms of 'the amount of effort he is willing to put forth against it' is taken - somewhat perversely - to be violence-involving effort or opposition in the pacifist's 'opposition to If violence'. this slide were pacifist would be caught in an elementary inconsistency since in case of the permissible any being opposed to violence, by definition, he is prepared to use violence and so is not opposed to violence. it is Even Narveson 'cannot make too much' of this inconsistency, though not so far removed from the alleged inconsistencies he does want to make much of in his main inconsistency argument. 5. In the way Sharp, for example, has illicitly assumed in several works: see for instance the unduly narrow definition of pacifism given in his Social Power and Political Freedom, Porter Sargent Publishers, Boston, 1980, p.198. Again, however, there is some historical basis for dissociating nonviolent action from pacifism; and given the difficulties comprehensive pacifism can lead to, there are philosophical reasons as well. But even without much in the way of organised sanctions, worthwhile positive results can often be obtained, as the case of international law reveals: cf. H.L.A. Hart, The Concept of Law, Oxford University Press, 1961, p.212. 5 �A similar slide, together with a further slide, is made in the argument inconsistency based pacifism theme, P2(R). on to notion of rights, especially as it figures in the the transformed to the claim No one has a right to indulge in violence (p.418). For Narveson tries to incorporate the right to indulge in violence in notion of The right. initial move is to work in assumptions of defence from breaches of a right and of Because very the action preventative against infringement 'a right just is a status justifying preventative action ... of it. what does follow logically is that one has a right to whatever may be necessary to prevent infringements of his right' (p.419). That 'whatever may be necessary' turns out to include force, now very generously construed - here is the further slide - to such incorporate things Moreover 'it is a logical truth, as social pressure. not merely a contingent one, that what might be For these necessary the against question (p.421)! nonviolent quite indefensibly strong. him be, to to or be limited to, In any case the 'whatever may be necessary' requirement is action. entitle rights with The argument accordingly To block the argument it is enough for pacifism. associated preventative action not force' logical transformations to work, however, the notion of preventative action must have the notion of violence built into it. begs is to For example, D'Agostino's right to his umbrella does kill a person who is trying to steal the umbrella even if such action is necessary in the circumstances to prevent infringement of his right. to How the argument from rights leads inconsistency is summed thus up (p.421): SAI. 'If we have any rights at all then we have a right to use force to prevent the deprivation of the thing to which we are said to have a right'. SA2. We have, according to the pacifist's 'the right not to have violence done to us', as a consequence of the objection to avoid violence. But, therefore, we have the right to use violence, so the pacifist's position is self-contradictory, both granting and not granting the right to use violence. The argument fails because SAI is readily rejected. claiming Narveson that 'our standard concept of rights' yields SAI (cf. 6 is mistaken p.423). in That a �right can be sustained by right-supporting or right-defending require that that action is violent. action does Pacifists can provide an adequate analysis of rights - essentially the usual one - without letting themselves in by simply rejecting the Narveson not slide^. What for SAI, appears in place of SAI is something like 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., facto, give an entitlement to the use of violence. no dilemma for the pacifist. not, does ipso Without the slide there is The "pacifist's dilemma" and Narveson's slide are two aspects of the one thing. The arguments from lesser §2. violence and In evil. lesser outline the argument - which is independent of the notion of rights - is that pacifists must admit, in terms of their own principles, that there are cases where the violence those be would where Inconsistency some is morally use of immediate permissible violence by T2. and morally justified. would evil, of The cases are greater violence. More explicitly, and in (Narveson's) terms which also import the notion of evil, pacifists have lesser much prevent use to admit both that the some use of force, is admissible, in preventing greater evil, and that it is not admissible because it involves violence. An argument like this as gets summarized as follows:- It seems to me logically true, in any moral theory whatever, that [E2'J the lesser evil must be preferred to the greater. If the use of force by me, now is necessary to avoid the use of more physical force (by others, perhaps) later, then to say that physical force is the 6. Narveson, in responding to a suggestion of Armour (pp.423-4), sees nothing between (1) forceful defence of rights, with the slide to violence in, and (0) nothing really answering to rights at all, where words like 'rights' occur without stuffing. This shows a serious blindspot. What lies in between are a range of notions which do not guarantee the slide to violence. An account of rights which will serve is given in R. and V. Routley 'Human chauvinism and environmental ethics' in Environmental Philosophy (ed. D. Mannison and others), Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1980; see especially p.l75ff. 7 �supreme (kind of) evil is precisely to say that under circumstances I am committed to the use of physical force ?. these Now there are several somewhat different arguments snarled up in these sketches. It is to important them unsnagged 8, especially if a clearer view of the get ethical place of pacifism is to result. The from argument, basic lesser violence, goes as follows:Cl. There are cases where use of violence would prevent greater violence. C2. One ought to minimize violence. Therefore C3. There are cases where one ought to use violence, since in this way, in any arbitrary one of minimized. *^P2. the indicated, cases violence is Therefore It is not (always) morally wrong to use violence, contradicting the pacifist principle, P2, according to it which is morally wrong, always, to use violence. All the ingredients premisses, can be of this argument, together with pulled together from Narveson's work. support for the He not only espouses C2, but suggests two distinct arguments for it, the first of which connects the argument with the lesser evil argument:El. (Use of) violence is an evil. E2. Evil should be minimized. The second argument to C2 is simply from the pacifist premiss, varying P2, E3. One ought not to undertake violence - period; that is, the level of violence ought to be zero. 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. 8 �Neither argument is decisive; of that reference they both in fact begin easing pacifists into a frame resist, where moral absolutes are warped into should moral relatives, where obligations give way to obligations-other-things-being- In any event E3 only directs one not to get involved in violence at equal, etc. all, and says nothing about minimizing it when one compatible got E3 it. into is directives quite different from minimization where violence is with rooting it out, which may involved, e.g. has involve nonminimization strategies. Thus E3 does not entail E2, and commitment to E2 does not commit pacifists to C2 - a principle nonviolent activists usually do not accept either, being to prepared violence perpetrated against them, for example, as a means to social accept justice. Nor do El and E2 entail 02; so neither does principles like El and E2 oblige them to accept 02. by commitment violence^", evil—perpetrating Narveson's such e.g. but argument some increases well-known hypothetical cases as the slaying of an non-violent fails to For in particular, violence is not the only evil, and (so) evil may sometimes be reduced by in pacifists for dictator. similar reasons. Regan's reconstruction of Regan argues from premisses concerning the ranking of evil and a premiss like E2', specifically 3. The use of force is a substantive evil. 4. Therefore, a lesser quantity of force must quantity of force (Rp.79). The argument is invalid: be preferred to a great an ordering of evils does not induce a similar ordering force, even when force is an evil. of It is enough to observe that increasing force may still reduce evil, and so, on Regan-Narveson assumptions, be preferrable. Resort to the theme that Elt. Violence is an irredeemable evil (proposed by Regan in his by Narveson, defence" of pacifism, Rp.80, and Np.118) promises a way around the difficulty. subsequently considered An irredeemable evil is figuratively so black that no combination with grays (lesser evils) or whites (goods) 10. An argument like the argument from lesser violence itself would appear to undercut the argument from El and E2 to premiss C2 for the argument for lesser violence. 9 �will lighten its hue; now it always dominates. Elt together with E2 will yield C2, but What are the grounds for that? the problem with the argument shifts to Elt. As Narveson points out (Np.119), it is not widely acceptable, most people being prepared to countenance some small amount of violence in exchange for considerable goods. (But then, not so long ago, most people were tolerant of cruelty to animals providing it was not too Moreover, so Narveson implies, appeal to Elt does not get gross.) pacifists out of the argument from lesser violence; deeper, by indeed it seems to get It does break the argument however; underwriting C2. them in for it removes Cl and, more importantly, the corresponding premiss of the more difficult argument from lesser evil, which starts from DI. There are cas^s where the use of violence would avoid greater evil. For given, by Elt, that use of violence is irredeemably evil, evil than that tainted with violence; requires. however pacifism is no of pacifism (see (utilitarian which Rp.80ff.), into a 'bizarre and vaguely ludicrous' position (Rp.86), extreme pacifism, some of the (problematic) features of which Regan outlines But the approach greater and there are accordingly no cases such as DI This is the core of Regan's defence converts there through violence as an irredeemable evil is a . mistaken inspired) attempt to get at moral absolutes, which is what pacifism is, like other deontological positions, grounded upon. But such absolutes are adequately expressed in such commandments as, One ought not to commit violence, meaning thereby, as it says ought not, not just for the time being, or so long as reasons otherwise don't arise, or for acting other things being equal, or prima facie, but ought not 11. That is by no means the only element in Regan's torturous reformulation of Narveson's argument that can be faulted. Consider, for example, premiss '5. If any given action, A, is necessary to bring about a lesser rather than a greater quantity of qualitatively equivalent evil, then one's obligation is to do A.' While the premiss has considerable appeal as a principle of supererogation, there is little reason to accept it as one supplying obligations. 12. Extreme pacifism can be seen as taking the rule that one ought never to use violence as having priority over all other moral rules - which is indeed an extreme position even if a consistent one. Such a priority rule is an unsatisfactory way to deal with moral dilemmas: see further below. 10 �come what may, period. such pacifism as is Such old-fashioned deontological, moral absolutist positions, at collide bottom, head-on more fashionable, highly with malleable moral positions like utilitarianism, which both Narveson and Regan (at time) were working from. The reason for collision is simply that 'utilitarianism ... is incompatible with pacifism': some one who acts for the utility 'that will be brought out by may be greater than that produced by any alternative' (Np.121) violence the according to the to utilitarian-commandment maximize doing 13 So . utility may sometimes commit violence, contravening pacifist principles. On its own inconsistency with a false little: every position doctrine inconsistency suffers such with utilitarianism as very many false doctrines. Narveson does have another (small) argument to the effect that pacifism odds the with contractarianism. other ethical positions But this argument would only no deeper ecological position insidious, is however, for Firstly, as we such as pacifism. generally, have have provisional. theory-saving seen, made at also libertarianism were it and otherwise however they are not, including has which happened is more it utilitarianism, seem as climate unfavourable to incompatible There are two more specific damaging features. and consequentialist approaches more no deontic principle were firm, but all are if The theory of prima facie principles This is entirely mistaken. is a device, designed to get consequentialist positions out of difficulties such as moral dilemmas. 13. weight, is that utilitarian thinking has permeated much of the rest of ethical thought, thus helping to establish a positions What instance. presents, carry if the positions were suitably exhaustive; correct, ethical he shows Secondly, consequentialist positions tend to suggest that To show what Narveson goes on to claim that people are sometimes justified in using force rather more is required, as Regan points out, Rp. 85, n.18. It has also to be shown that there are cases of these types (as in Cl) and that agents can know that use of force will increase utility, reduce evil, etc. A pacifist, rightly sceptical of utilitarian tracing of consequences, and fond of noting that violence begets violence, could, with a small dose of scepticism also, dig in at this point and claim that because no one can be sure that use of force will reduce evil, so no one is justified in using force. This is sceptically-based pacifism. 11 �only consequentialist reasons carry argumentative weight, and so try such positions, as into pacifism, offering sometimes to rival ease incongruous consequential support for their themes. Narveson assumptions takes such procedures upon pacifists: stage a further, and utilitarian foists thus he says that the pacifist's 'objection to violence is that it produces suffering, unwanted pain, in the recipients' These (p.425). incongruous utilitarian grounds are something of a travesty of pacifists' reasons for objecting to violence, which concern rather the type of action involved and what it does - though not only or always at all in the way of suffering - to the perpetrators as well as those on whom it is inflicted. Even more astonishing, such utilitarian-style considerations are supposed to commit the pacifist to the following three statements, one of which however he must deny (!): [N]l. To will the end (as morally good) is to will the to it (at Other things being equal, the lesser evil is to be preferred to the means least prima facie). [N]2. greater. [N]3. There are no "privileged" moral persons ... (p.425)^ . 'These three principles' which feature in the summation of 'the pacifist s problem , among them imply, as far as I can see, both the commitment to force when it is necessary to prevent more violence and also the conception of a right as an entitlement to defense. And they therefore leave pacifism, as a moral doctrine, in a logically untenable position (p.425). It would take not merely logic, but a good deal of magic, to coax out of the statements given. such consequences For implications to hold the substantive terms such as 'violence' and 'right' must also figure, in one way or otherwise the implications fail just on formal grounds. another, in the implicans; The intended argument to the "commitment to force" conclusion appears however to be some sort of variant on the lesser evil argument, with N2 replacing E2' (N3 and N1 have more oblique roles , N3 to stop exceptions being made for oneself 14. and one's group, and N1 to ensure that :se may be defended on purely Narveson also wants to contend that 'all of logical or "meta-ethical" grounds'. This is likely false, especially the claim as to logical status, since some of the principles are rejected in substantive ethical theories. 12 �violence adopted or even required as a means has its full import, e.g. in Cl, in ethical an end. But, is reflected for one thing, principle Nl, which is at least dubious unless 'prima facie' is unbracketed, which as the begs bound morally to shun violent means. question pacifism, against Under pacifist reformulation Nl will give way to something more like To choose an end as morally good is to choose (only) morally Nl#. means acceptable to it. For another, without much further construction work the suggested arguments need the three principles duly adjusted; pacifists since nothing damaging emerges; worry not they hardly leave pacifism as untenable. More threatening is the argument from lesser evil itself, which has countered. This and E2 N2 or inconsistency is of evil) comprehensive to pacifism. Narveson's stock examples concern murder, one what is the moral situation here? to not (admissibility What of these are them being violence) of difficult the Indeed the example is very similar to dilemma, situation where turns on Jim shoots one of what account is given of moral dilemmas. pacifist does not do, unless he wants coherence trouble, is to utilitarian line N But ought The situation is that of a paradigmatic that of Pedro and Jim, where Pedro volunteers to call off his firing squad about to shoot several captives if everything that and cases 15? N ought to prevent mass murder, but also kill B, because that is murder and involves violence. of a moral dilemma. moral 03 N (Narveson in fact) must kill the (potential) mass-murderer B (Np.119). person be the argument from DI (cases of violence to avoid greater evil) (minimization in to yet of trying them^, almost Now What a comprehensive take the inadequate to explain moral dilemmas away, as if they didn't ever occur (at least at other than an initial intuitive level), as if all obligations were prima facie, negotiable, etc., etc. No, the conflicting obligations stand. to be done is however a very consequentialist thing, to try to determine What is the best 15. A surprising feature of Narveson's argument, also Regan's "reconstruction", is that these cases are usually nowhere in sight, as if again one got to conclusions logically out of the air, without any of the hard work the cases involve. 16. The example was first discussed in B. Williams, 'Conflict of values', reprinted in his Moral Luck, Cambridge University Press, 1981, 71-82. 13 �do thing (or a sufficiently good thing) to the In circumstances. trying N2M, that it is preferrable to minimize evil, will presumably be satisfied. the best course in the circumstances is a violent one, e.g. that B. No inconsistency in pacifism follows. evil, minimize it Suppose N had better shoot is preferable to and that in this sense (not a deontic one) evil should be minimized, On the contrary the situation N ought not to shoot B, but in the appalling circumstances, he had fix. a that Even granted it does not follow that N ought to resort to violence. remains to is the appropriate course of action principles like N2 and its mate, what determine in There is the real-life complication better do so^. of dilemma, moral a but no inconsistency through arguments like that from lesser evil. Narveson's jackpot question, entangled in his discussion of rights, can now be met. the argument The question presents a dilemma: If force is the only way to prevent violence in a given case, justified in that case? (p.420) is its use Narveson is thinking of cases where one is about to be murdered, Regan where to be raped. No, it is not deonticly justified^. and amount to making out a case. But justification on proposes is solution, back-up ambiguous, in p.423). against may dilemma a another argument, taking his proposals as evident. pacifist can simply dispute it - the jackpot question does not argument and just situation. the contrary, that enough violence for the given occasion is morally justified - it can go at least as far as killing no It is certainly not morally The response is qualified then because some force might be consequentially justified, as a second-best presents is it is not justified, in the sense of 'justified' which reflects its deontic origin in 'making right'. Narveson, one Given that such force again presupposes violence, the pacifist answer is a qualified No: obligatory, from pacifism - person but he As it is not - the lead to a decisive (though Narveson gives the impression that it does, e.g. What it can lead to is the argument from lesser evil over again. 17. This corresponds to the account of moral dilemma, given in much more technical detail in R. Routley and V. Plumwood 'Moral dilemmas and the logic of deontic notions' in Paraconsistent Logic (ed. G. Priest and others) 1983, to appear; also available in this Discussion Paper series. 18. An extreme pacifist would answer with an unqualified No. 14 �The accusation of fanaticism, and the charge of moral §3. its adherence to unexceptionable fanaticism, so Hare contends.^ principles Insofar as such Hare as manages insensitivity. P2, to Through pacifism is a form of get his remarkable accusation off the ground, he does by conflating pacifism with extreme pacifism: the pacifist ... solves the conflict of principles, not by critical thought, but by elevating one principle quite irrationally, over all the others (P.174). Comprehensive pacifism in not always resolving the conflict of principles, in letting stand, does neither of these things, and so does not fit into Hare's dilemmas moral deceptively neat two-level thought, into intuitive Nor it is the particular "critical thinking", anti-pacifist solution pacifism. himself helps moral of to, without any violence is apparently fine for countries like Israel (cf. redefinition, a Harey-fanatic, e.g. p.175). Hare's accusation turns on an extravagant redefinition of fanaticism. Hare's Hare of the requisite supporting argument, according to which pacifist principles are inappropriate in many places at the present time, on and pacifism is not, as standard pacifism is not, extreme comprehensive But critical. classification A fanatic is a person who adheres to ideals which diverge from what utilitarianism (in approved form) recommends (cf. p.170)! Since comprehensive pacifism is committed to principles and ideals of nonviolence which, as already observed, diverge from where utilitarianism (as massaged by Hare or Narveson) namely tends, towards the pacifists are Harey—fanatics. This usual whether they are sense: whether The 'bigoted'. idea that violence in many situations, such does not of course make them fanatics position comprises their of appropriateness 'wild of some of pacifist principles^. the depends on the very different matter of or extravagant opinions' or (OED) is pacifism consists of such opinions can be removed by an appeal to history:- A great many of the sages, especially Eastern thinkers, founders in fanatics, and the the world's main religions, have been pacifists, committed to But the relevant opinions hardly be, all of the condemned type. of such thinkers Whence the conclusion follows. are not, can By this simple syllogism, the accusation of fanaticism is rebutted. 19. R.M. Hare, Moral Thinking, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1981, p.173. references to Hare's work without further citation are to this text. 15 All page �Nor do comprehensive pacifists come out at fanatics under Hare's satisfactory, though seriously incomplete, account of fanaticism: is treating something that is not morally relevant, such as being as Jewish, is completed, it there^^ fanaticism wearing beads Naturally, given that using of characterising or moral hardly exclude the violence is a morally relevant can matter, so are other procedures with similar damaging results to violence: blue For however the sensitive task matter of using morally relevant. violence as morally irrelevant. relevance more earlier, those of applying this does lead to a residual problem for comprehensive pacifism (taken up at the end of §4). Does it really matter then that fanatics? it Although argument that it does. homework appears pacifists, that though not Harey-fanatics are bigots, inasmuch as had guess what, they their done the Thus, e.g. p.15: go over to Hare's As one might anticipate, Hare's argument, upon which he sets great store, 'from universal perscriptivism to utilitarianism ... 20. Harey- properly, had they performed their critical thinking adequately, they would utilitarianism). of are it does not matter in the least, Hare has an abandon the principle they are fixated upon (and, logic fanatics, concepts A. based [entirely] on involved' (p.176), is unsound, and in fact fails at several Naess, Gandhi and Group Conflict, Universitetsforlaget, ...among the generally acknowledged moral leaders from the time of ancient China and India down to present day, the principle of nonviolence has been the rule, and the condoning of violence, even in defence, the exception. 21. the R.M. Hare, Applications of Moral philosophy, Macmillan, London, 1972, p.78. Note that the elegant prototype argument Hare develops in this article on peace — from universalisation, directed against fanaticism and nationalism, there presented as the main causes of war - does not lead to utilitarianism (though the seeds of the later, more obscure, route are present, e.g. on p.79) and does not tell against pacifism. What has gone wrong in Hare's later argument to the much more sweeping conclusions just alluded to, can be seen by comparing the later argument with the clearer prototype argument developed against nationalism. 16 Oslo, �crucial points. objectionable to getting Before of feature these of some theory. The a highly Hare's procedure that deserves comment, namely the way in which the whole highly informal argument is set within the framework two-level is there details, procedure adopted is methodologically Hare's of own radically unsound because it takes for granted the adequacy of Hare's theory, a matter that is open, at the very least, to serious doubt, since it supposes a quite particular, and eminently rejectable (utilitarian) way of handling and resolving moral dilemmas, a way above.With that rejection goes a rejection of the standard deontic logic rejected Hare presupposes, which he assumes any serious opponent must adopt. which logic, already But since that Hare assumes uniquely determined, rules out any approach what, go over As one might anticipate, Hare's the question against some to Hare's utilitarianism). important opponents of utilitarianism. In his arguments Hare divides fanatics into pure and comprise intuitionists moral and pure Impure impure. fanatics who stick to their deontic deontologists, principles, who 'cling to their intuitions' (p.176), and do not advance to what calls 'critical thinking'. Hare's dismissal of "impure fanatics", such as extreme pacifists, 'because of [their] refusal clearly' Hare or inability to facts face or to think involves a quite illicit shift in the notion of critical thinking, (p.170) originally introduced to account for a particular (primarily utilitarian) fashion accommodating ff.). But cases this comprehensive bit intuitive principles conflict, of moral dilemmas (p.28 dirty-trick philosophy can where of pacifists are presumably "pure willing to think critically, but somehow survived opinions different from here be fanatics"; the ordeal those of the utilitarian' (p.171). set aside, still holding his argument is correct argument is not correct. See further, again, Routley and Plumwood, ibid. 17 moral They are in fact "pure to be According to Hare there cannot be inconsistent with utilitarianism, as we have seen. any fanatics of this type, if since for they are 'able and fanatics of the first type", since they go on holding opinions which turn out 22. of (p.171). Therefore, his �One sufficient reason for incorrectness we have already glimpsed, namely failure to consider the possibility a Harey-fanatic operates with different logical that assumptions and concepts from those of utilitarians (cf. other p.177 ff.) depends on preference reasons. substitution, preferences For which can be one, argument (e.g. Hare's requires a base class intersubstituted. Hare, chauvinistically contracts this base class representation whole of to ff.). p.176 preference-havers, in the of course There are whom among his discussion humans.Differently, certain the of moral matters by way of preferences of this type is open to familiar objection, even by utilitarians of a different cast. As to the moral insensitivity of pacifism, this is less an argument a than damaging charge: A person committed to an extreme pacifism, though he need make no logical mistake, yet lacks a fully developed moral sensitivity to the vagaries and complexities of human existence (Rp.86). The smear is not without basis. applied to avert greater Regan is envisaging where situations violence and he points to what he takes to be the evident evil; moral permissibility of a woman's using 'what physical power she has to free from an aspiring rapist' is Interestingly, (Rp.86). has Regan situation in a way which is incompatible with a pacifist stand: herself not described the there is nothing in to prevent a woman wriggling free (even in a way that involves some force) and fleeing. What is at issue is the permissibility of using violence, which implies the (perhaps wilful) that infliction death, by forceful means^ (cf. mere use of of damage, non-negligible Np.110); that is, which physical force or power (or energy). including pain, injury or involves much more than And it is by no means so evident that the woman is entitled to inflict violence from force, a pacifist can hardly be accused, in a way is duly separated violence upon the aspiring rapist. Once that can be made to stick, of crass moral insensitivity. 23. On the defectiveness of such contractions of the base Routley, op. cit., especially the concluding section. 18 class, see R. and V. �But a straightforward action violence disentangling defective It is of subcase not depend force by is means no of on violence. a tight Fortunately characterisation what indicate some done, in the way of inflicting damage. constraints Firstly, presupposed. force: is legalised force, violence, so violence, a on satisfactory violence is not applied on behalf account adequately of some of violence, where no force is applied. violence.) 24. supposed that and are which distinguished as illegitimate "legitimate authority, long as it is physically similar to acts not so legitimated. so often mistakenly of However it is important to is not removed by the imprimatur of the law.25 Secondly, violence is not of the enough, for main purposes, that violent actions are a subclass of actions by forceful means, a subclass picked out both through the forcible means through so Indeed the literature on nonviolent characterisations arguments developed in this paper do violence. a matter as may at first seem. with abounds as the is Violence threat (This only needs emphasizing because it is threats, intimidation and the like, involve Thirdly, violence can be perpetrated without intention to inflict damage. Directed against other creatures and more generally against ecological systems such as ecosystems which can be hurt. There is a difference here between live (goal-directed) systems and property, and comprehensive pacifism does not necessarily exclude wilful damage to property. Thus eco-pacifists may destroy, or at least disable, bulldozers but not harm those who use bulldozers to destroy habitat. However sensitive eco-pacifists will not condone sabotage or "violent destruction of property either: disabling of equipment may be different. It follows from the account of violence sketched that intimidation, threats of violence, and "psychological violence" are not violence, because they do not involve forcible means: violence is physical violence. Naturally, intimidation and psychological violence are open to moral criticism and censure on grounds related to those that tell against violence proper. For similar reasons, "economic violence" and "structural violence" are also not violence: such procedures are generally open to criticism on other grounds and hardly need to be covered under the blanket charge of violence. Nor is poverty, e.g., violence or violence-involving, except figuratively, in the way that war is an obscenity. Even given the warranted restriction of violence to physical force, many difficult cases remain; e.g. questions as to when usually approved surgical practices involve violence. 19 �There can be unintentional violence, e.g. the women may have applied violent Fourthly, such matters as the distance without intending to, in escaping the rapist. at which force is applied and the indirectness of military operations, are irrelevant. modern means, the means, as instance for in The submarine operator who, by causally pressing a button, fires a missile at a distant Russian city instigates violent a By contrast, an adjacent blockade of a city, which results in hardship but not act. in direct damage, may be affected by nonviolent confined to action done against persons, means. but can violence Finally, be directed not is against other life-forms, as will soon emerge. Pacifism, like most positions, has its weaknesses, and the from fact that one of them^ derives violence (like pain) is a partly quantitative matter, and that there is no sharp cut-off point at the bottom end of the scale with small amounts violence greater than zero. of Yet minute (non-foot-in-the-door) amounts do not seem to matter all that much morally, at least compared with the gross evils that confront us on most sides when we look. Morally sensitive pacifists will not focus or fixate on small quantities of violence to the undue exclusion of larger moral certainly will problems. They give it to be understood that by 'violence' in principles such as P2 they mean 'nontrivial violence'. Arguments to the moral insensitivity of pacifism, on the basis of pacifists' not taking obvious steps passivity and pacifity. to prevent evil occurrences, depend also upon a confusion of Both Regan and Narveson (e.g. p.425) assume that pacifism 25. The point is explained in more detail in G. Sharp, Social Power and Political Freedom, op.cit., p.288n. Note however that Sharp's account of 'political violence' is defective in various other respects. It is curious, but understandable, that in his major, and massive, texts on nonviolent action, Sharp never really gets to grips with the problem of characterising violence, and indeed appears tempted by such defective equations as that of violence with force and threat with use. 26. Another comes from the necessary circumscription of permissible nonviolent action, to ensure that it does not include actions worse than nontrivial violent action. 20 �This is far from true, as the variety of methods is a passive do-nothing position. or adopted by nonviolent action groups has made plain. considered Narveson correctly comprehend the real scope or possibilities of Otherwise, Narveson negative later Narveson's action. nonviolent hardly b<- able to assert, in the automatic (but carping) would way he does, that the pacifist is standing by 'not (p.425). Neither Regan nor doing assessment nonviolence' does not change the situation: for this of anything about' violence what calls 'positive positive he approach simply is nonviolence practised in an exemplary :.&y, as by Christ, in the hope that others will follow suit, and fails to recognise the potential or effectiveness of nonviolent practices. extent when assembled^, much the reduce of and training the Fuller details of these practices, the of impact nonviolent argument from social irresponsibility, which is part of what lies behind the charge of insensitivity. §4. The argument corollaries. The from radical practice political corollaries by definition. But from other awkward of pacifism would certainly tend to eliminate war. war involves violence, typically on an extensive scale. war and the position Although normally war would be excluded, Standard pacifism takes For out of comprehensive pacifism is not so clear. what of dilemma situations? War would always be counted morally impermissible, but in exceptional extenuating circumstances it might be the (second-) best thing 27. to do. A strange pacifism! Comprehensive The methods also include anticipatory action, for instance, the policemen going off to enact violence find their vehicles won't start, e.g. because components have been removed. As to variety, Sharp has distinguished 197 methods falling into 3 broad types: protest, noncooperation and intervention; op. cit. pp.32-3. Of course pacifisms and nonviolent action postions need not coincide: the interrelations are those of overlap (see. e.g. Sharp, Politics, p.68). 28. See e.g. B. Martin 'How the peace movement should be preparing for nuclear war' Bulletin of Peace Proposals 13 (1982) 149-159, and references cited therein pp.152-3, especially G. Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent Action, op.cit., (referred to as Politics) and V. Coover and others, Resource Manual for a Living Revolution, New Society Publishers, Philadelphia, 1981. 21 �pacifism thus does not include standard pacifism, in contrast to extreme pacifism. Comprehensive pacifism can of course be brought progressively closer, in practice, to If extreme pacifism through principles emphasizing the evil of violence. is given a large suitably that evil weighting then second-best choices will yield the same results as extreme pacifism does (deontically), and entirely exclude war. Now it can hardly be cogently argued as telling against pacifism that eliminate since wars, of war an as or mounted from upon rely the institutions. only obviously police and military forces but many of their institutions, most legal state arrangements, States are however desirable social institutions, typically depend on violent means. and war is a by-product of nation-state arrangements (in the case of just comprehensive implies pacifism the of inadmissibility institutions, such as police forces and states typically are; be ruled out either individuals, as directly delegates, who violence-dispensing violence effect however exclude the replacement of such forces, by nonviolent nonviolent means. state; but it substitutes, is nonviolent methods or such organisations may else because their behalf. evolved will Pacifism institutions concerned with does not public that order have Pacifism does not organisations maintain they by fully as police alternative nonviolent will be applied, where necessary, to The force of the objection should thus not entail order, sweeping charges of social irresponsibility. 22 the and are coercive actively Law and authority can still operate then in the back-up authority and "enforce" laws. overestimated. on recently which wars, A more telling objection, then, is no doubt further evils to prevent greater evils). that which violence-underpinned these of directly less institutions and a more general argument may be and nation-states particular, or arrangements social inevitability, or not without much further ado. least extensively: violence desirability, In at institution, However wars are by no means the dispense exchanges that should certainly be avoided at all nor therefore can an argument be mounted against pacifism from the reasonable costs; desirability are wars would it elimination accordingly of does Nor is it true that prominent not be social succumb to �pacifism ... would also entail anarchism, that is, the illegitimacy of government. For a purely voluntary "government" is not a government in the sense that defines a state at all (Np.127). A government or administration can certainly operate by nonviolent, noncoercive, arrangements. political arrangements not of this sort are morally impermissible. imply the absence or illegitimacy of government, political community organised under a government. state with authority and not necessarily pacifism does not entail anarchism. main implies it Accordingly, that not does or therefore of a state, of a Nor does it even that imply a certain coercive institutions may not be a second-best solution to moral dilemmas of political organisation. and only pacifism Comprehensive or (differently) objective, attained, not was Since it admits of states with frameworks of law based on the free agreements of individuals, Gandhi's practice affords a counterexample: a nonviolent Indian genuine interconnections between pacifism and nonviolent anarchism simple as derivability. Nor is comprehensive pacifism as a it was not the state; replacement of British India by a stateless or anarchist society. moral his Granted there are they are not so so ideal easily brought down by its political corollaries. Comprehensive pacifism upsets other widely accepted social practices than concerning like: external and internal state relations, such as war, civil order and the it also tells against the received treatment of example. While other species, animals for it does not entail vegetarianism, while it does not prohibit eating of meat, it does morally forbid violence to animals. 29. those At least it does this so long Both hold that the coercive state which relies upon violent methods is without moral basis or legitimacy. Both involve pretty tall orders, the replacement of violence-dispensing political organisations by alternative arrangements (on replacement in the case of anarchism, see R. Routley and V. Plumwood 'The irrefutability of anarchism', Social Alternatives, 2(3) (1982) 23-8). But they differ as to what justifies these arrangements and what means can be applied (see further Sharp, op. cit., under index headings to anarchism, especially Politics, p.67). Roughly, while pacifism pushes removal of violence to a limit, anarchism pushes removal of authority (especially state authority) and restrictions on liberty, to a limit. Naturally the interconnections did not escape Gandhi: 'The ideally nonviolent state will be an ordered anarchy' (unreferenced citation at the end of the Ecophilosophy Newsletter, #5, p.24). 23 �as what normally counts as violence, to animals, continues to rank as is humans (or persons). restriction. 30 controversial euthanasia, the category by restriction of the application of violence to from removed not There is little good basis in And, humans, of violence? At the suicide, But must creatures does not have to take overtly violent forms. simply the new "abattoirs" or hospitals a creature killing of No force need be applied: in a eats and dies painlessly and without a struggle. The or pill given is life is extinguished, are not pacifist ones, which focus on violence? technical purely arrangements pacifist will to objections in solve, eating meat worthwhile On the face of obtained. so New any rate, the disruption of at principle an Then the proper objections to such practices, for example that consent may not have been obtained, that it, there are no they risk of opening a hornet's nest, consider what examples like euthanasia may suggest, the possibility of nonviolent killing. injection several into e.g. So long as these involve violence, pacifism excludes such practices. involve chauvinistic spread corollaries killing a such indeed wherever violence plays a significant role. punishment, capital the concerning for however similar case, any areas moral and violence, practices threatened by vegetarian corollaries. But suppose now that the new technology is as the anti-neutron bomb, which selectively destroys which by further clever newly devised "weapons", such scientists, working in their accustomed military role: devices much extended property but not people, or "dissolve" people, enable "wars" to be fought without violence. just Even a pacifist who goes as far as countenancing nonviolent killing can however avoid these reaches of technological For "dissolving" people requires energy, fantasy. which (since reflecting force) can stand in for force in violence: Was (upgraded) account of that is, the new wars will still involve violence. there old-fashioned however violent anything methods wrong so such as with hunting eating meat obtained by more or raising and killing one's own? Pacifism, like vegetarianism, runs counter to "natural" iO. an behaviour of creatures to cit. See R. and V. Routley, 'Human chauvinism and environmental ethics', op. Such a restriction to persons is however imposed by Sharp, op. cit. (e.g. Politics, p.608), and it does remove the problems of vegetarianism and predation. 24 �which the principles are supposed to apply. Aggression is a fairly common feature of and human behaviour, and it sometimes (though by no means so often is as made animal out) erupts in violence. ways, various for The force of the example along these argument can however Aggression lines. is assumed to be an evolutionary adaption developed to enable creatures to be better fitted for (of their offspring) in their natural environment. and themselves ir mitigated be survival But most humans now live in rather artificial environments substantially removed from situations which evolution for gradually adapted their features (there is no way they are going to adapt in time to absorb massive doses of radiation, for instance). Much humans as have adjusted their living environment in nonevolutionary ways, so along with it they should substantially adjust their social practices - including aggressive and violent practices, now ill-adapted to their and mostly counterproductive. situation So argues the pacifist. is a residual problem, There like that of and tribal people, to be condemned as morally Sometimes, yes, Are wrong when predators involve these the violence? when the violence grossly exceeds what is required given the end to Though a way but always? can it is a rather unsatisfactory way. problem vegetarianism. creatures living in (relatively) natural conditions, such as practices be attained: confronting beaten be the around of edge this What this suggests is that nonviolence is not an absolute, but at best a qualified ideal. The arguments for nonviolence - which are mostly practical arguments which do not exclude occasional uses of violence and do not strictly apply to creatures in natural surroundings - sort of But conclusion. exclude. nonviolent what is called charge for state, is is much more investigation aimed, among other things, at This is^ to concede an of moral insensitivity against comprehensive pacifism so long as P2 remains unqualified. 31. would The further suggestion that emerges upon granting that moral sharper, more sensitive, and less blanket principles than P2. attentuated similar approaches thinking and associated principles in this area are in a pretty primitive that a the suggestion is a dangerous one, practically at least, since it opens the door a chink to other options which categorically suggest The sheer moral power of such pacifism As Singer has in the analogous case of Liberation, Jonathan Cape, London, 1975. 25 vegetarianism: is one see reason e.g., for Animal �There is no reason however why giving its adoption some pause. a genuine pacifism (making for real peace) should not be built on a modified version of P2 which permits such natural phenomena as predation. Nothing logically rules out such a genuine and more sensitive pacifism. There are other requirements the position to be worked out should meet as In particular, a rationality requirement implies that pacifists go on to oppose acts similar to those using violence: This is a requirement of otherwise they could have a case made against them. in a different sense from the pure logical consistency sense, namely that of keeping to the same story. for well. pacifism, Again there need be no deep problem so long, this time, as it is not erroneously supposed that there must be a single principle (e.g. just P2) - as distinct from a bundle of moral principles, others of which serve to oppose acts accounted similar to those involving violence.32 To meet the rationality requirement the position should, be integrated into a in larger framework of nondestructive practices, which are of a piece with nonviolent practices.33 For, except metaphorically, practices to the environment, for instance, do not involve violence, e.g. mining in a fertile valley, damaging a wild river, dumping toxic and oceans. In an does not destructive such things as strip wastes in streams extended sense, which gets beyond the confines of the property picture, all these practices are environmental vandalism. vandalism particular, cover violence But even metaphorically, against persons (and certainly not nonphysical violence such as "psychological violence"). What is sought then is an appropriate of these notions covering destructive practices; and also an accompanying synthetic term, better than the umbrella term 'vandolence'. Then P2 is superseded by synthesis an appropriately qualified P2#. It is morally wrong to use vandolence. It remains to characterise the cluster of destructive practices that count as vandolence and to try to justify the principle - no easy tasks. 32. It is important that pacifism, like other deontological positions, reject assessments of similarity simply in terms of similar damaging consequences. Features of the means deployed, for example, also matter. 33. The position has been called 'pacifism. 26 �APPENDICES § 5. from arguments The and pacifism in the real world. of impracticality impracticality reality: social the alleged_ Even if it is conceded that pacifism is a viable moral ideal, that it does not fall down as incoherent or ludicrous, still the feasibility of pacifism as a sensible practice to live by will be contested - despite, or perhaps because of, major examples such as Christ and Gandhi. to be that admitted the pacifism to severe tests. real world, with all its horror and squalor, does put But in this regard pacifism is not an exception. Nowhere is the practice of nonviolence usually thought less than in replacing war^. prepared for to likely succeed Yet nonviolent social defence methods, to replace the usual violent methods, have been described in some detail^, though they properly And it has or given a have been never The prospects for success of dress rehearsal. nonviolent defence of a region can vary significantly, depending upon whether the war convention is observed or not. If the convention is observed then pacifism stands reasonable prospects of success. The difficult cases are where the war convention perhaps unleashed, in broken, is and violence is According to Walzer, in his massive ways, on noncombatants. superficially sympathetic sketch and assessment of nonviolent defence and resistance, 'success is possible only if the invaders are committed to the war convention - ... and they won't always be' (Wp.331^^). attained - there is conventions are flouted. reasons, some got homesick. ruthless of This is presumably be never any guarantee of it, without or with war - even if some The invaders may give them irrelevant, e.g. up and depart for all sorts or they needed a quick decisive victory, they What Walzer no doubt means is something like this: invaders may Success false. that sufficiently in sufficient numbers with sufficient time and sufficient support 34. The more sweeping replacement of the state (of the main source considered in Routley and Plumwood, in Social Alternatives, op.cit 35. Again for example, in Sharp, Politics, op.cit. references given there. 36. All page references prefixed by 'W' are to Allen Lane, London, 1977. 27 See also M. Walzer, Martin, Just and of war) op.cit., Unjust is and Wars, �But that sort of thing is also true even if the lines, etc., can eventually succeed. defending to violence. resorts side The difference lies in the pattern of events; is if the defence "forces" are well-armed it invaders to easier and with start difficult more than afterwards and with costly the for civil well -prepared resistance. Walzer is nonviolent the of model the in way enslaved Jews, misleading The way.The Nazis, many like who to jump that conclusion the cannot succeed when the war convention is abandoned, in terms of defence inappropriate examples. command, however, thinking, who He is thinking of an extreme totalitarian the in state, total Nazis were in Germany, the Jews of Germany providing the the population, by The "resistance" picture is highly and large, did not resist extermination in an organised invaded never Germany, were in control the all or For infrastructure and had the cooperation (at least) of the bulk of the population. Walzer's comparison to work, there would have to be an enormous occupying army took over and managed all key Australia it is not even so clear largely united and actively With island territories such as infrastructure. that resisting this is which logistically population. Walzer's feasible against impression resistance fragmenting and the populace moving into dulled acquiscence (e.g. a of the Wp.332) might have got things the wrong way around, with disbelieving and frustrated soldiers ready to leave. Non violent resistance is however unlikely to be put to the test in any adequate No state would be prepared to risk way in 37. It has been argued, moreover, that when church leaders, Christian or Jewish, opposed the deportations, most of the Jews were saved (when country by country comparisons are made). See, for one of many treatments of this sensitive issue, R.L. Rubenstein, The Cunning of History: the Holocaust and the American Future, Harper, New York, 1978, chapter 5. 38. The argument suggested in Walzer (e.g. p.333) that nonviolent methods would increase evil, or at least its distribution, is weak. It is countered by Sharp's observation that the suffering likely to be induced is less than in comparable wars. present state-determined circumstances. 28 �training its populace different). It in would full techniques defence (civil all too easy for them to "rout" the police: be then action nonviolent is civil obedience, for example, could no longer be ensured by the customary violent means. The argument thus far §6. On the positive case for pacifism: has been largely defensive, meeting a range of objections to comprehensive pacifism. That in itself is revealing. deviations from it are initial sketchings. Pacifism is the what require rest position explanation. (inertial and state) The reason for this is simple violence is, on most ethical systems, at least a prima facie evil, so use of enough: it is what has to be justified. Positive arguments for pacifism can take advantage of and merely justified. case try privileged dispose of "exceptional cases" where violence is supposed to be to in that the defender (person or nation) is morally—excluded situation, since the attacker has overstepped moral the position The favourite exception is self-defence against a violent opponent: curious is its the in already a Still bounds. defender is not morally committed to violence whatever he does - as in a dilemma And since it is at least prima facie wrong, and he does not have situation. to use it, he should not resort to it. An elementary syllogistic argument, given by Narveson (Np.117), can be adapted to give a similar result:- Violence is (intrinsically) wrong Violence in any excepted cases (e.g. self-defence) is still violence Violence in any excepted cases is still (intrinsically) wrong. Naturally those opposed to pacifism will challenge the first premiss, and a dialectic already glimpsed will begin. None of the arguments for pacifism is conclusive, since even where arguments are deductively tight assumptions can be challenged arguments for pacifism particularly good ones. for pacifism, (as above). Nor One of the poorer positive are all the arguments for example, makes similar assumptions to those of the classic theory 29 �of war, namely that once war is embarked upon it cannot be limited, that nuclear or chemical case is overstated. hope weapons will be used selectively and restrictively is an illusion, escalation is inevitable. are bound to be overstepped. the e.g. The (moral) limits in war - whatever they are - Although the chances of escalation are real enough, the Limited exchanges and confrontation are possible. Wars are much more social arrangements and much more conventional than the classical theory allows. Wars can, for example, be started and stopped things intervene (e.g. (as support more should midstream for first the those inevitably, premiss above) for mixture a suffering and anguish of violent the methods, They nonviolence. of consideration, a range of consequentialist and practical reasons, e.g. pain, important a pollution crisis affecting other neighbouring states). The main reasons for pacifism are, include in injustice characteristically works, the futility and counterproductiveness of means-ends cost the in violence that violence within the setting of modern industrial societies, the broader popular support base obtained by avoidance of violence, the desirable social consequences of nonviolence such as more less furtive, society. open, the why of pacifism) considerable. These are None of these well-known types of reason (giving separately decisive, but their cumulative affords a model for one way of proceeding^: Mill's defence Mill's procedure works (st least As was pointed out by F. D'Agostino in discussion. 30 of liberty nonviolence, it works as well as it works for liberty). 39. is it is enough (a nonelementary exercise) to adapt Mill's consequentialist arguments for liberty to arguments for otherwise effect reasons can be put together, in various ways, to make a strong positive case for pacifism, as principled nonviolence. as a �A decisive more consequentialist data., argument, takes a but making semantical preference rankings on worlds, and these worlds modelling nonviolence Again principles. use and The data is used to arrive at route. are practical similar of then pacifism in applied is derived semantically principled as nonviolence.0 R. 40. Routley* * The details of such an esoteric defence of moral principles are outlined in R. and V. Routley, op.cit.: a fuller account may be found in their 'Semantical foundations for value theory', Nous (1983), to appear. * With thanks to R. Beehler, F. D'Agostino, B. Martin, L. Mirlin, R. Goodin, and participants in the Philosophy Seminar, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. The main outlines of the paper were drafted associate at Simon Fraser University. 31 while the author was a research �OTHER PUBLICATIONS OF THE PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT, RESEARCH SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES, AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY School publications: R. and V. Routley, The Fight for the Forests, First edition 1973, Second edition 1974, Third edition 1975. Departmental publications: M.K. Rennie, Some Uses of Type Theory in the Analysis of Language, 1974. D. Mannison, M.A. McRobbie, and R. Routley, editors, Environmental Philosophy, 1980. R. Routley, Exploring Meinong's Jungle and Beyond, 1980. Yellow series (Research Papers of the Logic Group): 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. and 13. 14. 15. R.K. Meyer, Why I am not a relevantist, 1978. R.K. Meyer, Sentential constants in R, 1979. R.K. Meyer and M.A. McRobbie, Firesets and relevant implication, 1979. R.K. Meyer, A Boolean-valued semantics for R, 1979. R.K. Meyer, Almost Skolem forms for relevant (and other) logics, 1979. R.K. Meyer, A note on R_ * matrices, 1979. R.K. Meyer and J.K. Slaney, Abelian logic (from A to Z), 1980. C. Mortensen, Relevant algebras and relevant model structures, 1980. R.K. Meyer, Relevantly interpolating in RM , 1980. C. Mortensen, Paraconsistency and C^, 1981. R.K. Meyer, De Morgan monoids, 1983. R. Routley, Relevantism and the problem as to when Material Detachment and the Disjunctive Syllogism Argument can be correctly used, N. da Costa, Essay on the foundations of logic, 1983. R. Routley and G. Priest, On Paraconsistency, 1983R. Routley, Research in logic in Australia, New Zealand and Oceania, 1983. R.K. Meyer, Where y fails, 1983. Green series (Discussion papers in environmental philosophy): 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 10. R. Routley, Roles and limits of paradigms in environmental thought and action, 1982. R. Routley, In defence of cannibalism I. Types of admissible and inadmissible cannibalism, 1982. R. Routley and N. Griffin, Unravelling the meaning$of life?, 1982. R. Routley, Nihilisms, and nihilist logics. R. Routley, War and Peace. I. On the ethics of large-scale nuclear war and war—deterrence and the political fall-out. R. Routley and V. Plumwood, Moral dilemmas and the logic of deontic notions. R. Routley and V. Plumwood, An expensive repair-kit for utilitarianism. R. Routley, Maximizing, satisficing, satisizing: the difference in rational behaviour under rival paradigms. ����/ /- ' nw^4) 4 ---------- =^A,W7/7/////7//7777 r/ )r % ./ � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Self-published Papers Description An account of the resource <span>Sylvan favoured the </span><span lang="EN-GB">highly-unorthodox practice of self-publishing a vast amount of his work<span>—</span><span></span>quite literally, using his own printing press!</span> Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document Discussion Papers in environmental philosophy Philosophy Departments The Australian National University PO Box 4, Canberra, Australia 2600 NUMBER 9 WAR AND PEACE. II ON THE ALLEGED INCONSISTENCY, MORAL INSENSITIVITY AND FANATICISM OF PACIFISM RICHARD ROUTLEY FOR CIRCULATION AND EVENTUAL LIBRARY DEPOSIT WAR AND PEACE. II ON THE ALLEGED INCONSISTENCY, MORAL INSENSITIVITY AND FANATICISM OF PACIFISM by R. Routley Number 9 Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy Department of Philosophy Australian National University 1983 ON THE ALLEGED INCONSISTENCY, MORAL INSENSITIVITY AND FANATICISM OF PACIFISM Pacifism, despite its revival limited through the nonviolent action 1 movement and as a respectable tradition within the Catholic church , continues to have a bad philosophical press. one way or another, It is commonly portrayed characteristically as inconsistent. as incoherent Even philosophical defences of pacifism are liable to be extremely defensive, conceding pacifism is in only that consistent, but insisting otherwise that it is as false as a moral 2 position can be, bizarre, and morally insensitive . What follows challenges the prevailing wisdom put out in the philosophical press, but using its own analytic methods. §1. Slide arguments to inconsistency; from rights. an In influential and and arguments from irresponsibility and widely disseminated set of articles 3 attacking pacifism , Narveson says that the pacifist's position is not only that [Tl] violence is evil but also that [T2] it is morally wrong to use force [violence] to resist, punish, or prevent violence. This further step makes pacifism a radical moral doctrine. What I shall try to establish below is that it is, in fact, more than merely radical - it is actually incoherent because self-contradictory (p.408, italics added). Subsequently (p.414) he characterises pacifism by way of T2, though it would be better characterised by the more sweeping 1. According to the US Catholic Bishops, pacifism is 'a valid Christian position', with a long tradition going back to Christ and the early Christians who were committed to a nonviolent lifestyle: see Origins 12 (1982) pp.310-311. The revival in the nonviolent action (NVA) movement is a somewhat qualified one (as will emerge), many in that movement wishing to distance themselves from traditional pacifism. 2. In particular, T. Regan 'A defence of pacifism', Canadian Journal of Philosophy 11 (1972) 73-86. Page references to this article are prefixed by R. Regan ends by saying 'To regard the pacifists' belief vaguely ludicious" is, perhaps, to put it mildly'. as "bizarre and P2. It is morally wrong to use violence. However T2 captures the cases that orthodox opposition. separate comprehensive pacifism from main form of pacifism under investigation is called The 'comprehensive' to distinguish it from standard pacifism, in the usual is which sense narrower restricted to certain theses concerning (state) order, notably opposition to (violence in) war, which does not necessarily elsewhere. the But if violence is violence is impermissible, then it should be so what Pacifism, as a universally and not merely in war. out rule moral position, should be comprehensive. On its own showing, it is contended, proper action to preventative action commitment to prevent, what would involve, it pacifism acclaimedly in the case of pacifism. incoherence Narveson and others find in pacifism: claims Narveson's or of from taking violence; But force. genuine actively defend on them, pain Hence the initial that it cannot underwrite its of inconsistency. However location of incoherence in pacifism depends, essentially, on several connected slides, all of which the pacifist should resist - without force. initial for a moral position must allow action to back up commitment, action of a type logically excluded own prohibits, use sometimes, precluded is The slide is from the theme T2 italicised above to what results by deletion of the crucial phrase 'to use force', or as it should be 'to use violence', namely 3 J. Narveson 'Pacifism: a philosophical analysis', Ethics 75 (1968) and 'Is pacifism consistent', Ethics 78 (1968). The first article is reprinted in War and Morality (ed. R. Wasserstrom) Wadsworth, Belmont, California, 1970 pp.63-77. The first article is also rewritten and combined with part of the second in 'Pacifism: a philosophical analysis', Moral Problems (ed. J. Rachels), Third Edition, Harper & Row, New York, 1979, pp.408-425. Page references without further citation are to this latter article. Narveson's theme that pacifism is incoherent is headlined and further elaborated in his 'Violence and war', Matters of Life and Death (ed. T. Regan), Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1980, pp.109-147. Page references prefixed by 'N' are to this article. 2 It is morally wrong to resist, punish, or prevent violence - R2. and similarly from special and related cases of T2 to special and related of R2 (e.g. It is cases from T2S, It is forbidden to use force to resist violence, to R2S, forbidden to 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 what assault on pacifism (after Narveson several clearing exploits confusions, explain the popularity of pacifism, out of the way). irresponsibility of in This his first main which he takes to argument, from the does not actually lead to contradiction, but it pacifism, does suggest that there is a serious tension between pacifism and any method of maintaining social order, so serious that pacifism is socially irresponsible: ... to hold the pacifist position as a genuine full-blooded moral principle is to hold nobody has a right to fight back when attacked ... It means that we are all mistaken in supposing that we have the right of self-protection ... It appears to mean, for instance, that we have no right to punish criminals, that all our machinery of criminal justice is, in fact, unjust. Robbers, murderers, rapists, and miscellaneous delinquents this [irresponsible] theory, to be let loose (pp.415-6). Since one can protect oneself and avoid and resist aggression back violence), (with unless a slide (tentatively) by is without fighting pacifism does not mean what Narveson claims it means, Nor does comprehensive made. theses on ought, T1 T2, and imply that pacifism, characterised we have no right to punish criminals, but simply that such punishment (or the imposition of penalties) will not apply violent methods. Nor therefore does it imply that conventional machinery of criminal justice is unjust, but only that some, good 4. deal, of that machinery is. One hardly the all or a needs to be a comprehensive Pacifism, as involving the active use of defensive methods, can be traced back as far as the Mohist philosophers of ancient China. On modern methods see especially G. Sharp, Exploring Nonviolent Alternatives, Boston, 1971. As will emerge, there is a point in distinguishing (as Narveson does not in his earlier work) force from violence; they are not equivalent. 3 pacifist to coherently think the latter. the This provides some for confirmation key point which is that there is, so far at least, no inconsistency evident in maintaining that those who hold that violent methods are legitimate morally are mistaken. The next slide is closely connected with, and really generalises upon, initial slide. is to imbue a range of more neutral terms with the stunt The connotation of violence or at least of force which and defending are taken to imply (use of) or force use of force is taken to by implied in R2. resist cannot proceeds Hence (p.415). and violence, so to Hence the also Narveson's assumption that against attack' (pp.417-8). to and so pacifism render a much less can be resisted, without by Force can be applied, as in opening sliding out of handcuffs and running away). a jam jar or pulling a person out of danger, without violence. force, but not vice versa; and violence. things like arrest, without violence (e.g. even be But defensible position. positions can be defended, as in this paper or on the field, Things a If the stunt were got away with, it would deprive pacifism of, for instance, the general methods of nonviolent action resistance, be unwarranted "recharacterisation" of pacifism as the position that 'no one ought ever defended to Hence the conflation of T2 and excluded from among admissible pacifist methods. pacifist here Narveson Thus such activities as resisting, punishing, preventing, equate with violence. R2; the Violence implies and it is violence, not all applications of force, that comprehensive pacifists are bound to exclude. The attempt nonviolent to castrate practices, any case indefensible. development themselves compromise, and from pacifism, by of it depriving the range of is not confined to those who (want to) think pacifism in It enjoys some popularity even among those advocating expansion of nonviolent methods, who no doubt want to distance older mediation, pacifism, whose methods they see as confined to negotiation, and involving the granting of concessions. The newer (nonviolent) activists have justification; for pacifism has often by an unsympathetic opposition, as confined to passive methods oeen presented, (cf. even the Concise English Dictionary account, where it is erroneously 4 said pacifism of 'positively, it holds that all disputes should be settled by that negotiation', and, negatively, that it is 'the hostilities added). and of total doctrine of non-resistance non-cooperation with any form of warfare': But nothing in the characterisation of pacifism, whether or standard, need so limit its admissible methods: to italics comprehensive nothing excludes resistance, uncompromising methods, and imposition of sanctions which offer no concessions. It is simply that comprehensive pacifism has not yet developed its fuller potential, especially in conflict resolution. Subsequent slides in the development of the argument against just variations qualifier. on those pacifism are given, writing violence-involving in as an internal Thus the measure of a person's opposition to something in terms of 'the amount of effort he is willing to put forth against it' is taken - somewhat perversely - to be violence-involving effort or opposition in the pacifist's 'opposition to If violence'. this slide were pacifist would be caught in an elementary inconsistency since in case of the permissible any being opposed to violence, by definition, he is prepared to use violence and so is not opposed to violence. it is Even Narveson 'cannot make too much' of this inconsistency, though not so far removed from the alleged inconsistencies he does want to make much of in his main inconsistency argument. 5. In the way Sharp, for example, has illicitly assumed in several works: see for instance the unduly narrow definition of pacifism given in his Social Power and Political Freedom, Porter Sargent Publishers, Boston, 1980, p.198. Again, however, there is some historical basis for dissociating nonviolent action from pacifism; and given the difficulties comprehensive pacifism can lead to, there are philosophical reasons as well. But even without much in the way of organised sanctions, worthwhile positive results can often be obtained, as the case of international law reveals: cf. H.L.A. Hart, The Concept of Law, Oxford University Press, 1961, p.212. 5 A similar slide, together with a further slide, is made in the argument inconsistency based pacifism theme, P2(R). on to notion of rights, especially as it figures in the the transformed to the claim No one has a right to indulge in violence (p.418). For Narveson tries to incorporate the right to indulge in violence in notion of The right. initial move is to work in assumptions of defence from breaches of a right and of Because very the action preventative against infringement 'a right just is a status justifying preventative action ... of it. what does follow logically is that one has a right to whatever may be necessary to prevent infringements of his right' (p.419). That 'whatever may be necessary' turns out to include force, now very generously construed - here is the further slide - to such incorporate things Moreover 'it is a logical truth, as social pressure. not merely a contingent one, that what might be For these necessary the against question (p.421)! nonviolent quite indefensibly strong. him be, to to or be limited to, In any case the 'whatever may be necessary' requirement is action. entitle rights with The argument accordingly To block the argument it is enough for pacifism. associated preventative action not force' logical transformations to work, however, the notion of preventative action must have the notion of violence built into it. begs is to For example, D'Agostino's right to his umbrella does kill a person who is trying to steal the umbrella even if such action is necessary in the circumstances to prevent infringement of his right. to How the argument from rights leads inconsistency is summed thus up (p.421): SAI. 'If we have any rights at all then we have a right to use force to prevent the deprivation of the thing to which we are said to have a right'. SA2. We have, according to the pacifist's 'the right not to have violence done to us', as a consequence of the objection to avoid violence. But, therefore, we have the right to use violence, so the pacifist's position is self-contradictory, both granting and not granting the right to use violence. The argument fails because SAI is readily rejected. claiming Narveson that 'our standard concept of rights' yields SAI (cf. 6 is mistaken p.423). in That a right can be sustained by right-supporting or right-defending require that that action is violent. action does Pacifists can provide an adequate analysis of rights - essentially the usual one - without letting themselves in by simply rejecting the Narveson not slide^. What for SAI, appears in place of SAI is something like 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., facto, give an entitlement to the use of violence. no dilemma for the pacifist. not, does ipso Without the slide there is The "pacifist's dilemma" and Narveson's slide are two aspects of the one thing. The arguments from lesser §2. violence and In evil. lesser outline the argument - which is independent of the notion of rights - is that pacifists must admit, in terms of their own principles, that there are cases where the violence those be would where Inconsistency some is morally use of immediate permissible violence by T2. and morally justified. would evil, of The cases are greater violence. More explicitly, and in (Narveson's) terms which also import the notion of evil, pacifists have lesser much prevent use to admit both that the some use of force, is admissible, in preventing greater evil, and that it is not admissible because it involves violence. An argument like this as gets summarized as follows:- It seems to me logically true, in any moral theory whatever, that [E2'J the lesser evil must be preferred to the greater. If the use of force by me, now is necessary to avoid the use of more physical force (by others, perhaps) later, then to say that physical force is the 6. Narveson, in responding to a suggestion of Armour (pp.423-4), sees nothing between (1) forceful defence of rights, with the slide to violence in, and (0) nothing really answering to rights at all, where words like 'rights' occur without stuffing. This shows a serious blindspot. What lies in between are a range of notions which do not guarantee the slide to violence. An account of rights which will serve is given in R. and V. Routley 'Human chauvinism and environmental ethics' in Environmental Philosophy (ed. D. Mannison and others), Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1980; see especially p.l75ff. 7 supreme (kind of) evil is precisely to say that under circumstances I am committed to the use of physical force ?. these Now there are several somewhat different arguments snarled up in these sketches. It is to important them unsnagged 8, especially if a clearer view of the get ethical place of pacifism is to result. The from argument, basic lesser violence, goes as follows:Cl. There are cases where use of violence would prevent greater violence. C2. One ought to minimize violence. Therefore C3. There are cases where one ought to use violence, since in this way, in any arbitrary one of minimized. *^P2. the indicated, cases violence is Therefore It is not (always) morally wrong to use violence, contradicting the pacifist principle, P2, according to it which is morally wrong, always, to use violence. All the ingredients premisses, can be of this argument, together with pulled together from Narveson's work. support for the He not only espouses C2, but suggests two distinct arguments for it, the first of which connects the argument with the lesser evil argument:El. (Use of) violence is an evil. E2. Evil should be minimized. The second argument to C2 is simply from the pacifist premiss, varying P2, E3. One ought not to undertake violence - period; that is, the level of violence ought to be zero. 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. 8 Neither argument is decisive; of that reference they both in fact begin easing pacifists into a frame resist, where moral absolutes are warped into should moral relatives, where obligations give way to obligations-other-things-being- In any event E3 only directs one not to get involved in violence at equal, etc. all, and says nothing about minimizing it when one compatible got E3 it. into is directives quite different from minimization where violence is with rooting it out, which may involved, e.g. has involve nonminimization strategies. Thus E3 does not entail E2, and commitment to E2 does not commit pacifists to C2 - a principle nonviolent activists usually do not accept either, being to prepared violence perpetrated against them, for example, as a means to social accept justice. Nor do El and E2 entail 02; so neither does principles like El and E2 oblige them to accept 02. by commitment violence^", evil—perpetrating Narveson's such e.g. but argument some increases well-known hypothetical cases as the slaying of an non-violent fails to For in particular, violence is not the only evil, and (so) evil may sometimes be reduced by in pacifists for dictator. similar reasons. Regan's reconstruction of Regan argues from premisses concerning the ranking of evil and a premiss like E2', specifically 3. The use of force is a substantive evil. 4. Therefore, a lesser quantity of force must quantity of force (Rp.79). The argument is invalid: be preferred to a great an ordering of evils does not induce a similar ordering force, even when force is an evil. of It is enough to observe that increasing force may still reduce evil, and so, on Regan-Narveson assumptions, be preferrable. Resort to the theme that Elt. Violence is an irredeemable evil (proposed by Regan in his by Narveson, defence" of pacifism, Rp.80, and Np.118) promises a way around the difficulty. subsequently considered An irredeemable evil is figuratively so black that no combination with grays (lesser evils) or whites (goods) 10. An argument like the argument from lesser violence itself would appear to undercut the argument from El and E2 to premiss C2 for the argument for lesser violence. 9 will lighten its hue; now it always dominates. Elt together with E2 will yield C2, but What are the grounds for that? the problem with the argument shifts to Elt. As Narveson points out (Np.119), it is not widely acceptable, most people being prepared to countenance some small amount of violence in exchange for considerable goods. (But then, not so long ago, most people were tolerant of cruelty to animals providing it was not too Moreover, so Narveson implies, appeal to Elt does not get gross.) pacifists out of the argument from lesser violence; deeper, by indeed it seems to get It does break the argument however; underwriting C2. them in for it removes Cl and, more importantly, the corresponding premiss of the more difficult argument from lesser evil, which starts from DI. There are cas^s where the use of violence would avoid greater evil. For given, by Elt, that use of violence is irredeemably evil, evil than that tainted with violence; requires. however pacifism is no of pacifism (see (utilitarian which Rp.80ff.), into a 'bizarre and vaguely ludicrous' position (Rp.86), extreme pacifism, some of the (problematic) features of which Regan outlines But the approach greater and there are accordingly no cases such as DI This is the core of Regan's defence converts there through violence as an irredeemable evil is a . mistaken inspired) attempt to get at moral absolutes, which is what pacifism is, like other deontological positions, grounded upon. But such absolutes are adequately expressed in such commandments as, One ought not to commit violence, meaning thereby, as it says ought not, not just for the time being, or so long as reasons otherwise don't arise, or for acting other things being equal, or prima facie, but ought not 11. That is by no means the only element in Regan's torturous reformulation of Narveson's argument that can be faulted. Consider, for example, premiss '5. If any given action, A, is necessary to bring about a lesser rather than a greater quantity of qualitatively equivalent evil, then one's obligation is to do A.' While the premiss has considerable appeal as a principle of supererogation, there is little reason to accept it as one supplying obligations. 12. Extreme pacifism can be seen as taking the rule that one ought never to use violence as having priority over all other moral rules - which is indeed an extreme position even if a consistent one. Such a priority rule is an unsatisfactory way to deal with moral dilemmas: see further below. 10 come what may, period. such pacifism as is Such old-fashioned deontological, moral absolutist positions, at collide bottom, head-on more fashionable, highly with malleable moral positions like utilitarianism, which both Narveson and Regan (at time) were working from. The reason for collision is simply that 'utilitarianism ... is incompatible with pacifism': some one who acts for the utility 'that will be brought out by may be greater than that produced by any alternative' (Np.121) violence the according to the to utilitarian-commandment maximize doing 13 So . utility may sometimes commit violence, contravening pacifist principles. On its own inconsistency with a false little: every position doctrine inconsistency suffers such with utilitarianism as very many false doctrines. Narveson does have another (small) argument to the effect that pacifism odds the with contractarianism. other ethical positions But this argument would only no deeper ecological position insidious, is however, for Firstly, as we such as pacifism. generally, have have provisional. theory-saving seen, made at also libertarianism were it and otherwise however they are not, including has which happened is more it utilitarianism, seem as climate unfavourable to incompatible There are two more specific damaging features. and consequentialist approaches more no deontic principle were firm, but all are if The theory of prima facie principles This is entirely mistaken. is a device, designed to get consequentialist positions out of difficulties such as moral dilemmas. 13. weight, is that utilitarian thinking has permeated much of the rest of ethical thought, thus helping to establish a positions What instance. presents, carry if the positions were suitably exhaustive; correct, ethical he shows Secondly, consequentialist positions tend to suggest that To show what Narveson goes on to claim that people are sometimes justified in using force rather more is required, as Regan points out, Rp. 85, n.18. It has also to be shown that there are cases of these types (as in Cl) and that agents can know that use of force will increase utility, reduce evil, etc. A pacifist, rightly sceptical of utilitarian tracing of consequences, and fond of noting that violence begets violence, could, with a small dose of scepticism also, dig in at this point and claim that because no one can be sure that use of force will reduce evil, so no one is justified in using force. This is sceptically-based pacifism. 11 only consequentialist reasons carry argumentative weight, and so try such positions, as into pacifism, offering sometimes to rival ease incongruous consequential support for their themes. Narveson assumptions takes such procedures upon pacifists: stage a further, and utilitarian foists thus he says that the pacifist's 'objection to violence is that it produces suffering, unwanted pain, in the recipients' These (p.425). incongruous utilitarian grounds are something of a travesty of pacifists' reasons for objecting to violence, which concern rather the type of action involved and what it does - though not only or always at all in the way of suffering - to the perpetrators as well as those on whom it is inflicted. Even more astonishing, such utilitarian-style considerations are supposed to commit the pacifist to the following three statements, one of which however he must deny (!): [N]l. To will the end (as morally good) is to will the to it (at Other things being equal, the lesser evil is to be preferred to the means least prima facie). [N]2. greater. [N]3. There are no "privileged" moral persons ... (p.425)^ . 'These three principles' which feature in the summation of 'the pacifist s problem , among them imply, as far as I can see, both the commitment to force when it is necessary to prevent more violence and also the conception of a right as an entitlement to defense. And they therefore leave pacifism, as a moral doctrine, in a logically untenable position (p.425). It would take not merely logic, but a good deal of magic, to coax out of the statements given. such consequences For implications to hold the substantive terms such as 'violence' and 'right' must also figure, in one way or otherwise the implications fail just on formal grounds. another, in the implicans; The intended argument to the "commitment to force" conclusion appears however to be some sort of variant on the lesser evil argument, with N2 replacing E2' (N3 and N1 have more oblique roles , N3 to stop exceptions being made for oneself 14. and one's group, and N1 to ensure that :se may be defended on purely Narveson also wants to contend that 'all of logical or "meta-ethical" grounds'. This is likely false, especially the claim as to logical status, since some of the principles are rejected in substantive ethical theories. 12 violence adopted or even required as a means has its full import, e.g. in Cl, in ethical an end. But, is reflected for one thing, principle Nl, which is at least dubious unless 'prima facie' is unbracketed, which as the begs bound morally to shun violent means. question pacifism, against Under pacifist reformulation Nl will give way to something more like To choose an end as morally good is to choose (only) morally Nl#. means acceptable to it. For another, without much further construction work the suggested arguments need the three principles duly adjusted; pacifists since nothing damaging emerges; worry not they hardly leave pacifism as untenable. More threatening is the argument from lesser evil itself, which has countered. This and E2 N2 or inconsistency is of evil) comprehensive to pacifism. Narveson's stock examples concern murder, one what is the moral situation here? to not (admissibility What of these are them being violence) of difficult the Indeed the example is very similar to dilemma, situation where turns on Jim shoots one of what account is given of moral dilemmas. pacifist does not do, unless he wants coherence trouble, is to utilitarian line N But ought The situation is that of a paradigmatic that of Pedro and Jim, where Pedro volunteers to call off his firing squad about to shoot several captives if everything that and cases 15? N ought to prevent mass murder, but also kill B, because that is murder and involves violence. of a moral dilemma. moral 03 N (Narveson in fact) must kill the (potential) mass-murderer B (Np.119). person be the argument from DI (cases of violence to avoid greater evil) (minimization in to yet of trying them^, almost Now What a comprehensive take the inadequate to explain moral dilemmas away, as if they didn't ever occur (at least at other than an initial intuitive level), as if all obligations were prima facie, negotiable, etc., etc. No, the conflicting obligations stand. to be done is however a very consequentialist thing, to try to determine What is the best 15. A surprising feature of Narveson's argument, also Regan's "reconstruction", is that these cases are usually nowhere in sight, as if again one got to conclusions logically out of the air, without any of the hard work the cases involve. 16. The example was first discussed in B. Williams, 'Conflict of values', reprinted in his Moral Luck, Cambridge University Press, 1981, 71-82. 13 do thing (or a sufficiently good thing) to the In circumstances. trying N2M, that it is preferrable to minimize evil, will presumably be satisfied. the best course in the circumstances is a violent one, e.g. that B. No inconsistency in pacifism follows. evil, minimize it Suppose N had better shoot is preferable to and that in this sense (not a deontic one) evil should be minimized, On the contrary the situation N ought not to shoot B, but in the appalling circumstances, he had fix. a that Even granted it does not follow that N ought to resort to violence. remains to is the appropriate course of action principles like N2 and its mate, what determine in There is the real-life complication better do so^. of dilemma, moral a but no inconsistency through arguments like that from lesser evil. Narveson's jackpot question, entangled in his discussion of rights, can now be met. the argument The question presents a dilemma: If force is the only way to prevent violence in a given case, justified in that case? (p.420) is its use Narveson is thinking of cases where one is about to be murdered, Regan where to be raped. No, it is not deonticly justified^. and amount to making out a case. But justification on proposes is solution, back-up ambiguous, in p.423). against may dilemma a another argument, taking his proposals as evident. pacifist can simply dispute it - the jackpot question does not argument and just situation. the contrary, that enough violence for the given occasion is morally justified - it can go at least as far as killing no It is certainly not morally The response is qualified then because some force might be consequentially justified, as a second-best presents is it is not justified, in the sense of 'justified' which reflects its deontic origin in 'making right'. Narveson, one Given that such force again presupposes violence, the pacifist answer is a qualified No: obligatory, from pacifism - person but he As it is not - the lead to a decisive (though Narveson gives the impression that it does, e.g. What it can lead to is the argument from lesser evil over again. 17. This corresponds to the account of moral dilemma, given in much more technical detail in R. Routley and V. Plumwood 'Moral dilemmas and the logic of deontic notions' in Paraconsistent Logic (ed. G. Priest and others) 1983, to appear; also available in this Discussion Paper series. 18. An extreme pacifist would answer with an unqualified No. 14 The accusation of fanaticism, and the charge of moral §3. its adherence to unexceptionable fanaticism, so Hare contends.^ principles Insofar as such Hare as manages insensitivity. P2, to Through pacifism is a form of get his remarkable accusation off the ground, he does by conflating pacifism with extreme pacifism: the pacifist ... solves the conflict of principles, not by critical thought, but by elevating one principle quite irrationally, over all the others (P.174). Comprehensive pacifism in not always resolving the conflict of principles, in letting stand, does neither of these things, and so does not fit into Hare's dilemmas moral deceptively neat two-level thought, into intuitive Nor it is the particular "critical thinking", anti-pacifist solution pacifism. himself helps moral of to, without any violence is apparently fine for countries like Israel (cf. redefinition, a Harey-fanatic, e.g. p.175). Hare's accusation turns on an extravagant redefinition of fanaticism. Hare's Hare of the requisite supporting argument, according to which pacifist principles are inappropriate in many places at the present time, on and pacifism is not, as standard pacifism is not, extreme comprehensive But critical. classification A fanatic is a person who adheres to ideals which diverge from what utilitarianism (in approved form) recommends (cf. p.170)! Since comprehensive pacifism is committed to principles and ideals of nonviolence which, as already observed, diverge from where utilitarianism (as massaged by Hare or Narveson) namely tends, towards the pacifists are Harey—fanatics. This usual whether they are sense: whether The 'bigoted'. idea that violence in many situations, such does not of course make them fanatics position comprises their of appropriateness 'wild of some of pacifist principles^. the depends on the very different matter of or extravagant opinions' or (OED) is pacifism consists of such opinions can be removed by an appeal to history:- A great many of the sages, especially Eastern thinkers, founders in fanatics, and the the world's main religions, have been pacifists, committed to But the relevant opinions hardly be, all of the condemned type. of such thinkers Whence the conclusion follows. are not, can By this simple syllogism, the accusation of fanaticism is rebutted. 19. R.M. Hare, Moral Thinking, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1981, p.173. references to Hare's work without further citation are to this text. 15 All page Nor do comprehensive pacifists come out at fanatics under Hare's satisfactory, though seriously incomplete, account of fanaticism: is treating something that is not morally relevant, such as being as Jewish, is completed, it there^^ fanaticism wearing beads Naturally, given that using of characterising or moral hardly exclude the violence is a morally relevant can matter, so are other procedures with similar damaging results to violence: blue For however the sensitive task matter of using morally relevant. violence as morally irrelevant. relevance more earlier, those of applying this does lead to a residual problem for comprehensive pacifism (taken up at the end of §4). Does it really matter then that fanatics? it Although argument that it does. homework appears pacifists, that though not Harey-fanatics are bigots, inasmuch as had guess what, they their done the Thus, e.g. p.15: go over to Hare's As one might anticipate, Hare's argument, upon which he sets great store, 'from universal perscriptivism to utilitarianism ... 20. Harey- properly, had they performed their critical thinking adequately, they would utilitarianism). of are it does not matter in the least, Hare has an abandon the principle they are fixated upon (and, logic fanatics, concepts A. based [entirely] on involved' (p.176), is unsound, and in fact fails at several Naess, Gandhi and Group Conflict, Universitetsforlaget, ...among the generally acknowledged moral leaders from the time of ancient China and India down to present day, the principle of nonviolence has been the rule, and the condoning of violence, even in defence, the exception. 21. the R.M. Hare, Applications of Moral philosophy, Macmillan, London, 1972, p.78. Note that the elegant prototype argument Hare develops in this article on peace — from universalisation, directed against fanaticism and nationalism, there presented as the main causes of war - does not lead to utilitarianism (though the seeds of the later, more obscure, route are present, e.g. on p.79) and does not tell against pacifism. What has gone wrong in Hare's later argument to the much more sweeping conclusions just alluded to, can be seen by comparing the later argument with the clearer prototype argument developed against nationalism. 16 Oslo, crucial points. objectionable to getting Before of feature these of some theory. The a highly Hare's procedure that deserves comment, namely the way in which the whole highly informal argument is set within the framework two-level is there details, procedure adopted is methodologically Hare's of own radically unsound because it takes for granted the adequacy of Hare's theory, a matter that is open, at the very least, to serious doubt, since it supposes a quite particular, and eminently rejectable (utilitarian) way of handling and resolving moral dilemmas, a way above.With that rejection goes a rejection of the standard deontic logic rejected Hare presupposes, which he assumes any serious opponent must adopt. which logic, already But since that Hare assumes uniquely determined, rules out any approach what, go over As one might anticipate, Hare's the question against some to Hare's utilitarianism). important opponents of utilitarianism. In his arguments Hare divides fanatics into pure and comprise intuitionists moral and pure Impure impure. fanatics who stick to their deontic deontologists, principles, who 'cling to their intuitions' (p.176), and do not advance to what calls 'critical thinking'. Hare's dismissal of "impure fanatics", such as extreme pacifists, 'because of [their] refusal clearly' Hare or inability to facts face or to think involves a quite illicit shift in the notion of critical thinking, (p.170) originally introduced to account for a particular (primarily utilitarian) fashion accommodating ff.). But cases this comprehensive bit intuitive principles conflict, of moral dilemmas (p.28 dirty-trick philosophy can where of pacifists are presumably "pure willing to think critically, but somehow survived opinions different from here be fanatics"; the ordeal those of the utilitarian' (p.171). set aside, still holding his argument is correct argument is not correct. See further, again, Routley and Plumwood, ibid. 17 moral They are in fact "pure to be According to Hare there cannot be inconsistent with utilitarianism, as we have seen. any fanatics of this type, if since for they are 'able and fanatics of the first type", since they go on holding opinions which turn out 22. of (p.171). Therefore, his One sufficient reason for incorrectness we have already glimpsed, namely failure to consider the possibility a Harey-fanatic operates with different logical that assumptions and concepts from those of utilitarians (cf. other p.177 ff.) depends on preference reasons. substitution, preferences For which can be one, argument (e.g. Hare's requires a base class intersubstituted. Hare, chauvinistically contracts this base class representation whole of to ff.). p.176 preference-havers, in the of course There are whom among his discussion humans.Differently, certain the of moral matters by way of preferences of this type is open to familiar objection, even by utilitarians of a different cast. As to the moral insensitivity of pacifism, this is less an argument a than damaging charge: A person committed to an extreme pacifism, though he need make no logical mistake, yet lacks a fully developed moral sensitivity to the vagaries and complexities of human existence (Rp.86). The smear is not without basis. applied to avert greater Regan is envisaging where situations violence and he points to what he takes to be the evident evil; moral permissibility of a woman's using 'what physical power she has to free from an aspiring rapist' is Interestingly, (Rp.86). has Regan situation in a way which is incompatible with a pacifist stand: herself not described the there is nothing in to prevent a woman wriggling free (even in a way that involves some force) and fleeing. What is at issue is the permissibility of using violence, which implies the (perhaps wilful) that infliction death, by forceful means^ (cf. mere use of of damage, non-negligible Np.110); that is, which physical force or power (or energy). including pain, injury or involves much more than And it is by no means so evident that the woman is entitled to inflict violence from force, a pacifist can hardly be accused, in a way is duly separated violence upon the aspiring rapist. Once that can be made to stick, of crass moral insensitivity. 23. On the defectiveness of such contractions of the base Routley, op. cit., especially the concluding section. 18 class, see R. and V. But a straightforward action violence disentangling defective It is of subcase not depend force by is means no of on violence. a tight Fortunately characterisation what indicate some done, in the way of inflicting damage. constraints Firstly, presupposed. force: is legalised force, violence, so violence, a on satisfactory violence is not applied on behalf account adequately of some of violence, where no force is applied. violence.) 24. supposed that and are which distinguished as illegitimate "legitimate authority, long as it is physically similar to acts not so legitimated. so often mistakenly of However it is important to is not removed by the imprimatur of the law.25 Secondly, violence is not of the enough, for main purposes, that violent actions are a subclass of actions by forceful means, a subclass picked out both through the forcible means through so Indeed the literature on nonviolent characterisations arguments developed in this paper do violence. a matter as may at first seem. with abounds as the is Violence threat (This only needs emphasizing because it is threats, intimidation and the like, involve Thirdly, violence can be perpetrated without intention to inflict damage. Directed against other creatures and more generally against ecological systems such as ecosystems which can be hurt. There is a difference here between live (goal-directed) systems and property, and comprehensive pacifism does not necessarily exclude wilful damage to property. Thus eco-pacifists may destroy, or at least disable, bulldozers but not harm those who use bulldozers to destroy habitat. However sensitive eco-pacifists will not condone sabotage or "violent destruction of property either: disabling of equipment may be different. It follows from the account of violence sketched that intimidation, threats of violence, and "psychological violence" are not violence, because they do not involve forcible means: violence is physical violence. Naturally, intimidation and psychological violence are open to moral criticism and censure on grounds related to those that tell against violence proper. For similar reasons, "economic violence" and "structural violence" are also not violence: such procedures are generally open to criticism on other grounds and hardly need to be covered under the blanket charge of violence. Nor is poverty, e.g., violence or violence-involving, except figuratively, in the way that war is an obscenity. Even given the warranted restriction of violence to physical force, many difficult cases remain; e.g. questions as to when usually approved surgical practices involve violence. 19 There can be unintentional violence, e.g. the women may have applied violent Fourthly, such matters as the distance without intending to, in escaping the rapist. at which force is applied and the indirectness of military operations, are irrelevant. modern means, the means, as instance for in The submarine operator who, by causally pressing a button, fires a missile at a distant Russian city instigates violent a By contrast, an adjacent blockade of a city, which results in hardship but not act. in direct damage, may be affected by nonviolent confined to action done against persons, means. but can violence Finally, be directed not is against other life-forms, as will soon emerge. Pacifism, like most positions, has its weaknesses, and the from fact that one of them^ derives violence (like pain) is a partly quantitative matter, and that there is no sharp cut-off point at the bottom end of the scale with small amounts violence greater than zero. of Yet minute (non-foot-in-the-door) amounts do not seem to matter all that much morally, at least compared with the gross evils that confront us on most sides when we look. Morally sensitive pacifists will not focus or fixate on small quantities of violence to the undue exclusion of larger moral certainly will problems. They give it to be understood that by 'violence' in principles such as P2 they mean 'nontrivial violence'. Arguments to the moral insensitivity of pacifism, on the basis of pacifists' not taking obvious steps passivity and pacifity. to prevent evil occurrences, depend also upon a confusion of Both Regan and Narveson (e.g. p.425) assume that pacifism 25. The point is explained in more detail in G. Sharp, Social Power and Political Freedom, op.cit., p.288n. Note however that Sharp's account of 'political violence' is defective in various other respects. It is curious, but understandable, that in his major, and massive, texts on nonviolent action, Sharp never really gets to grips with the problem of characterising violence, and indeed appears tempted by such defective equations as that of violence with force and threat with use. 26. Another comes from the necessary circumscription of permissible nonviolent action, to ensure that it does not include actions worse than nontrivial violent action. 20 This is far from true, as the variety of methods is a passive do-nothing position. or adopted by nonviolent action groups has made plain. considered Narveson correctly comprehend the real scope or possibilities of Otherwise, Narveson negative later Narveson's action. nonviolent hardly b<- able to assert, in the automatic (but carping) would way he does, that the pacifist is standing by 'not (p.425). Neither Regan nor doing assessment nonviolence' does not change the situation: for this of anything about' violence what calls 'positive positive he approach simply is nonviolence practised in an exemplary :.&y, as by Christ, in the hope that others will follow suit, and fails to recognise the potential or effectiveness of nonviolent practices. extent when assembled^, much the reduce of and training the Fuller details of these practices, the of impact nonviolent argument from social irresponsibility, which is part of what lies behind the charge of insensitivity. §4. The argument corollaries. The from radical practice political corollaries by definition. But from other awkward of pacifism would certainly tend to eliminate war. war involves violence, typically on an extensive scale. war and the position Although normally war would be excluded, Standard pacifism takes For out of comprehensive pacifism is not so clear. what of dilemma situations? War would always be counted morally impermissible, but in exceptional extenuating circumstances it might be the (second-) best thing 27. to do. A strange pacifism! Comprehensive The methods also include anticipatory action, for instance, the policemen going off to enact violence find their vehicles won't start, e.g. because components have been removed. As to variety, Sharp has distinguished 197 methods falling into 3 broad types: protest, noncooperation and intervention; op. cit. pp.32-3. Of course pacifisms and nonviolent action postions need not coincide: the interrelations are those of overlap (see. e.g. Sharp, Politics, p.68). 28. See e.g. B. Martin 'How the peace movement should be preparing for nuclear war' Bulletin of Peace Proposals 13 (1982) 149-159, and references cited therein pp.152-3, especially G. Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent Action, op.cit., (referred to as Politics) and V. Coover and others, Resource Manual for a Living Revolution, New Society Publishers, Philadelphia, 1981. 21 pacifism thus does not include standard pacifism, in contrast to extreme pacifism. Comprehensive pacifism can of course be brought progressively closer, in practice, to If extreme pacifism through principles emphasizing the evil of violence. is given a large suitably that evil weighting then second-best choices will yield the same results as extreme pacifism does (deontically), and entirely exclude war. Now it can hardly be cogently argued as telling against pacifism that eliminate since wars, of war an as or mounted from upon rely the institutions. only obviously police and military forces but many of their institutions, most legal state arrangements, States are however desirable social institutions, typically depend on violent means. and war is a by-product of nation-state arrangements (in the case of just comprehensive implies pacifism the of inadmissibility institutions, such as police forces and states typically are; be ruled out either individuals, as directly delegates, who violence-dispensing violence effect however exclude the replacement of such forces, by nonviolent nonviolent means. state; but it substitutes, is nonviolent methods or such organisations may else because their behalf. evolved will Pacifism institutions concerned with does not public that order have Pacifism does not organisations maintain they by fully as police alternative nonviolent will be applied, where necessary, to The force of the objection should thus not entail order, sweeping charges of social irresponsibility. 22 the and are coercive actively Law and authority can still operate then in the back-up authority and "enforce" laws. overestimated. on recently which wars, A more telling objection, then, is no doubt further evils to prevent greater evils). that which violence-underpinned these of directly less institutions and a more general argument may be and nation-states particular, or arrangements social inevitability, or not without much further ado. least extensively: violence desirability, In at institution, However wars are by no means the dispense exchanges that should certainly be avoided at all nor therefore can an argument be mounted against pacifism from the reasonable costs; desirability are wars would it elimination accordingly of does Nor is it true that prominent not be social succumb to pacifism ... would also entail anarchism, that is, the illegitimacy of government. For a purely voluntary "government" is not a government in the sense that defines a state at all (Np.127). A government or administration can certainly operate by nonviolent, noncoercive, arrangements. political arrangements not of this sort are morally impermissible. imply the absence or illegitimacy of government, political community organised under a government. state with authority and not necessarily pacifism does not entail anarchism. main implies it Accordingly, that not does or therefore of a state, of a Nor does it even that imply a certain coercive institutions may not be a second-best solution to moral dilemmas of political organisation. and only pacifism Comprehensive or (differently) objective, attained, not was Since it admits of states with frameworks of law based on the free agreements of individuals, Gandhi's practice affords a counterexample: a nonviolent Indian genuine interconnections between pacifism and nonviolent anarchism simple as derivability. Nor is comprehensive pacifism as a it was not the state; replacement of British India by a stateless or anarchist society. moral his Granted there are they are not so so ideal easily brought down by its political corollaries. Comprehensive pacifism upsets other widely accepted social practices than concerning like: external and internal state relations, such as war, civil order and the it also tells against the received treatment of example. While other species, animals for it does not entail vegetarianism, while it does not prohibit eating of meat, it does morally forbid violence to animals. 29. those At least it does this so long Both hold that the coercive state which relies upon violent methods is without moral basis or legitimacy. Both involve pretty tall orders, the replacement of violence-dispensing political organisations by alternative arrangements (on replacement in the case of anarchism, see R. Routley and V. Plumwood 'The irrefutability of anarchism', Social Alternatives, 2(3) (1982) 23-8). But they differ as to what justifies these arrangements and what means can be applied (see further Sharp, op. cit., under index headings to anarchism, especially Politics, p.67). Roughly, while pacifism pushes removal of violence to a limit, anarchism pushes removal of authority (especially state authority) and restrictions on liberty, to a limit. Naturally the interconnections did not escape Gandhi: 'The ideally nonviolent state will be an ordered anarchy' (unreferenced citation at the end of the Ecophilosophy Newsletter, #5, p.24). 23 as what normally counts as violence, to animals, continues to rank as is humans (or persons). restriction. 30 controversial euthanasia, the category by restriction of the application of violence to from removed not There is little good basis in And, humans, of violence? At the suicide, But must creatures does not have to take overtly violent forms. simply the new "abattoirs" or hospitals a creature killing of No force need be applied: in a eats and dies painlessly and without a struggle. The or pill given is life is extinguished, are not pacifist ones, which focus on violence? technical purely arrangements pacifist will to objections in solve, eating meat worthwhile On the face of obtained. so New any rate, the disruption of at principle an Then the proper objections to such practices, for example that consent may not have been obtained, that it, there are no they risk of opening a hornet's nest, consider what examples like euthanasia may suggest, the possibility of nonviolent killing. injection several into e.g. So long as these involve violence, pacifism excludes such practices. involve chauvinistic spread corollaries killing a such indeed wherever violence plays a significant role. punishment, capital the concerning for however similar case, any areas moral and violence, practices threatened by vegetarian corollaries. But suppose now that the new technology is as the anti-neutron bomb, which selectively destroys which by further clever newly devised "weapons", such scientists, working in their accustomed military role: devices much extended property but not people, or "dissolve" people, enable "wars" to be fought without violence. just Even a pacifist who goes as far as countenancing nonviolent killing can however avoid these reaches of technological For "dissolving" people requires energy, fantasy. which (since reflecting force) can stand in for force in violence: Was (upgraded) account of that is, the new wars will still involve violence. there old-fashioned however violent anything methods wrong so such as with hunting eating meat obtained by more or raising and killing one's own? Pacifism, like vegetarianism, runs counter to "natural" iO. an behaviour of creatures to cit. See R. and V. Routley, 'Human chauvinism and environmental ethics', op. Such a restriction to persons is however imposed by Sharp, op. cit. (e.g. Politics, p.608), and it does remove the problems of vegetarianism and predation. 24 which the principles are supposed to apply. Aggression is a fairly common feature of and human behaviour, and it sometimes (though by no means so often is as made animal out) erupts in violence. ways, various for The force of the example along these argument can however Aggression lines. is assumed to be an evolutionary adaption developed to enable creatures to be better fitted for (of their offspring) in their natural environment. and themselves ir mitigated be survival But most humans now live in rather artificial environments substantially removed from situations which evolution for gradually adapted their features (there is no way they are going to adapt in time to absorb massive doses of radiation, for instance). Much humans as have adjusted their living environment in nonevolutionary ways, so along with it they should substantially adjust their social practices - including aggressive and violent practices, now ill-adapted to their and mostly counterproductive. situation So argues the pacifist. is a residual problem, There like that of and tribal people, to be condemned as morally Sometimes, yes, Are wrong when predators involve these the violence? when the violence grossly exceeds what is required given the end to Though a way but always? can it is a rather unsatisfactory way. problem vegetarianism. creatures living in (relatively) natural conditions, such as practices be attained: confronting beaten be the around of edge this What this suggests is that nonviolence is not an absolute, but at best a qualified ideal. The arguments for nonviolence - which are mostly practical arguments which do not exclude occasional uses of violence and do not strictly apply to creatures in natural surroundings - sort of But conclusion. exclude. nonviolent what is called charge for state, is is much more investigation aimed, among other things, at This is^ to concede an of moral insensitivity against comprehensive pacifism so long as P2 remains unqualified. 31. would The further suggestion that emerges upon granting that moral sharper, more sensitive, and less blanket principles than P2. attentuated similar approaches thinking and associated principles in this area are in a pretty primitive that a the suggestion is a dangerous one, practically at least, since it opens the door a chink to other options which categorically suggest The sheer moral power of such pacifism As Singer has in the analogous case of Liberation, Jonathan Cape, London, 1975. 25 vegetarianism: is one see reason e.g., for Animal There is no reason however why giving its adoption some pause. a genuine pacifism (making for real peace) should not be built on a modified version of P2 which permits such natural phenomena as predation. Nothing logically rules out such a genuine and more sensitive pacifism. There are other requirements the position to be worked out should meet as In particular, a rationality requirement implies that pacifists go on to oppose acts similar to those using violence: This is a requirement of otherwise they could have a case made against them. in a different sense from the pure logical consistency sense, namely that of keeping to the same story. for well. pacifism, Again there need be no deep problem so long, this time, as it is not erroneously supposed that there must be a single principle (e.g. just P2) - as distinct from a bundle of moral principles, others of which serve to oppose acts accounted similar to those involving violence.32 To meet the rationality requirement the position should, be integrated into a in larger framework of nondestructive practices, which are of a piece with nonviolent practices.33 For, except metaphorically, practices to the environment, for instance, do not involve violence, e.g. mining in a fertile valley, damaging a wild river, dumping toxic and oceans. In an does not destructive such things as strip wastes in streams extended sense, which gets beyond the confines of the property picture, all these practices are environmental vandalism. vandalism particular, cover violence But even metaphorically, against persons (and certainly not nonphysical violence such as "psychological violence"). What is sought then is an appropriate of these notions covering destructive practices; and also an accompanying synthetic term, better than the umbrella term 'vandolence'. Then P2 is superseded by synthesis an appropriately qualified P2#. It is morally wrong to use vandolence. It remains to characterise the cluster of destructive practices that count as vandolence and to try to justify the principle - no easy tasks. 32. It is important that pacifism, like other deontological positions, reject assessments of similarity simply in terms of similar damaging consequences. Features of the means deployed, for example, also matter. 33. The position has been called 'pacifism. 26 APPENDICES § 5. from arguments The and pacifism in the real world. of impracticality impracticality reality: social the alleged_ Even if it is conceded that pacifism is a viable moral ideal, that it does not fall down as incoherent or ludicrous, still the feasibility of pacifism as a sensible practice to live by will be contested - despite, or perhaps because of, major examples such as Christ and Gandhi. to be that admitted the pacifism to severe tests. real world, with all its horror and squalor, does put But in this regard pacifism is not an exception. Nowhere is the practice of nonviolence usually thought less than in replacing war^. prepared for to likely succeed Yet nonviolent social defence methods, to replace the usual violent methods, have been described in some detail^, though they properly And it has or given a have been never The prospects for success of dress rehearsal. nonviolent defence of a region can vary significantly, depending upon whether the war convention is observed or not. If the convention is observed then pacifism stands reasonable prospects of success. The difficult cases are where the war convention perhaps unleashed, in broken, is and violence is According to Walzer, in his massive ways, on noncombatants. superficially sympathetic sketch and assessment of nonviolent defence and resistance, 'success is possible only if the invaders are committed to the war convention - ... and they won't always be' (Wp.331^^). attained - there is conventions are flouted. reasons, some got homesick. ruthless of This is presumably be never any guarantee of it, without or with war - even if some The invaders may give them irrelevant, e.g. up and depart for all sorts or they needed a quick decisive victory, they What Walzer no doubt means is something like this: invaders may Success false. that sufficiently in sufficient numbers with sufficient time and sufficient support 34. The more sweeping replacement of the state (of the main source considered in Routley and Plumwood, in Social Alternatives, op.cit 35. Again for example, in Sharp, Politics, op.cit. references given there. 36. All page references prefixed by 'W' are to Allen Lane, London, 1977. 27 See also M. Walzer, Martin, Just and of war) op.cit., Unjust is and Wars, But that sort of thing is also true even if the lines, etc., can eventually succeed. defending to violence. resorts side The difference lies in the pattern of events; is if the defence "forces" are well-armed it invaders to easier and with start difficult more than afterwards and with costly the for civil well -prepared resistance. Walzer is nonviolent the of model the in way enslaved Jews, misleading The way.The Nazis, many like who to jump that conclusion the cannot succeed when the war convention is abandoned, in terms of defence inappropriate examples. command, however, thinking, who He is thinking of an extreme totalitarian the in state, total Nazis were in Germany, the Jews of Germany providing the the population, by The "resistance" picture is highly and large, did not resist extermination in an organised invaded never Germany, were in control the all or For infrastructure and had the cooperation (at least) of the bulk of the population. Walzer's comparison to work, there would have to be an enormous occupying army took over and managed all key Australia it is not even so clear largely united and actively With island territories such as infrastructure. that resisting this is which logistically population. Walzer's feasible against impression resistance fragmenting and the populace moving into dulled acquiscence (e.g. a of the Wp.332) might have got things the wrong way around, with disbelieving and frustrated soldiers ready to leave. Non violent resistance is however unlikely to be put to the test in any adequate No state would be prepared to risk way in 37. It has been argued, moreover, that when church leaders, Christian or Jewish, opposed the deportations, most of the Jews were saved (when country by country comparisons are made). See, for one of many treatments of this sensitive issue, R.L. Rubenstein, The Cunning of History: the Holocaust and the American Future, Harper, New York, 1978, chapter 5. 38. The argument suggested in Walzer (e.g. p.333) that nonviolent methods would increase evil, or at least its distribution, is weak. It is countered by Sharp's observation that the suffering likely to be induced is less than in comparable wars. present state-determined circumstances. 28 training its populace different). It in would full techniques defence (civil all too easy for them to "rout" the police: be then action nonviolent is civil obedience, for example, could no longer be ensured by the customary violent means. The argument thus far §6. On the positive case for pacifism: has been largely defensive, meeting a range of objections to comprehensive pacifism. That in itself is revealing. deviations from it are initial sketchings. Pacifism is the what require rest position explanation. (inertial and state) The reason for this is simple violence is, on most ethical systems, at least a prima facie evil, so use of enough: it is what has to be justified. Positive arguments for pacifism can take advantage of and merely justified. case try privileged dispose of "exceptional cases" where violence is supposed to be to in that the defender (person or nation) is morally—excluded situation, since the attacker has overstepped moral the position The favourite exception is self-defence against a violent opponent: curious is its the in already a Still bounds. defender is not morally committed to violence whatever he does - as in a dilemma And since it is at least prima facie wrong, and he does not have situation. to use it, he should not resort to it. An elementary syllogistic argument, given by Narveson (Np.117), can be adapted to give a similar result:- Violence is (intrinsically) wrong Violence in any excepted cases (e.g. self-defence) is still violence Violence in any excepted cases is still (intrinsically) wrong. Naturally those opposed to pacifism will challenge the first premiss, and a dialectic already glimpsed will begin. None of the arguments for pacifism is conclusive, since even where arguments are deductively tight assumptions can be challenged arguments for pacifism particularly good ones. for pacifism, (as above). Nor One of the poorer positive are all the arguments for example, makes similar assumptions to those of the classic theory 29 of war, namely that once war is embarked upon it cannot be limited, that nuclear or chemical case is overstated. hope weapons will be used selectively and restrictively is an illusion, escalation is inevitable. are bound to be overstepped. the e.g. The (moral) limits in war - whatever they are - Although the chances of escalation are real enough, the Limited exchanges and confrontation are possible. Wars are much more social arrangements and much more conventional than the classical theory allows. Wars can, for example, be started and stopped things intervene (e.g. (as support more should midstream for first the those inevitably, premiss above) for mixture a suffering and anguish of violent the methods, They nonviolence. of consideration, a range of consequentialist and practical reasons, e.g. pain, important a pollution crisis affecting other neighbouring states). The main reasons for pacifism are, include in injustice characteristically works, the futility and counterproductiveness of means-ends cost the in violence that violence within the setting of modern industrial societies, the broader popular support base obtained by avoidance of violence, the desirable social consequences of nonviolence such as more less furtive, society. open, the why of pacifism) considerable. These are None of these well-known types of reason (giving separately decisive, but their cumulative affords a model for one way of proceeding^: Mill's defence Mill's procedure works (st least As was pointed out by F. D'Agostino in discussion. 30 of liberty nonviolence, it works as well as it works for liberty). 39. is it is enough (a nonelementary exercise) to adapt Mill's consequentialist arguments for liberty to arguments for otherwise effect reasons can be put together, in various ways, to make a strong positive case for pacifism, as principled nonviolence. as a A decisive more consequentialist data., argument, takes a but making semantical preference rankings on worlds, and these worlds modelling nonviolence Again principles. use and The data is used to arrive at route. are practical similar of then pacifism in applied is derived semantically principled as nonviolence.0 R. 40. Routley* * The details of such an esoteric defence of moral principles are outlined in R. and V. Routley, op.cit.: a fuller account may be found in their 'Semantical foundations for value theory', Nous (1983), to appear. * With thanks to R. Beehler, F. D'Agostino, B. Martin, L. Mirlin, R. Goodin, and participants in the Philosophy Seminar, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. The main outlines of the paper were drafted associate at Simon Fraser University. 31 while the author was a research OTHER PUBLICATIONS OF THE PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT, RESEARCH SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES, AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY School publications: R. and V. Routley, The Fight for the Forests, First edition 1973, Second edition 1974, Third edition 1975. Departmental publications: M.K. Rennie, Some Uses of Type Theory in the Analysis of Language, 1974. D. Mannison, M.A. McRobbie, and R. Routley, editors, Environmental Philosophy, 1980. R. Routley, Exploring Meinong's Jungle and Beyond, 1980. Yellow series (Research Papers of the Logic Group): 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. and 13. 14. 15. R.K. Meyer, Why I am not a relevantist, 1978. R.K. Meyer, Sentential constants in R, 1979. R.K. Meyer and M.A. McRobbie, Firesets and relevant implication, 1979. R.K. Meyer, A Boolean-valued semantics for R, 1979. R.K. Meyer, Almost Skolem forms for relevant (and other) logics, 1979. R.K. Meyer, A note on R_ * matrices, 1979. R.K. Meyer and J.K. Slaney, Abelian logic (from A to Z), 1980. C. Mortensen, Relevant algebras and relevant model structures, 1980. R.K. Meyer, Relevantly interpolating in RM , 1980. C. Mortensen, Paraconsistency and C^, 1981. R.K. Meyer, De Morgan monoids, 1983. R. Routley, Relevantism and the problem as to when Material Detachment and the Disjunctive Syllogism Argument can be correctly used, N. da Costa, Essay on the foundations of logic, 1983. R. Routley and G. Priest, On Paraconsistency, 1983R. Routley, Research in logic in Australia, New Zealand and Oceania, 1983. R.K. Meyer, Where y fails, 1983. Green series (Discussion papers in environmental philosophy): 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 10. R. Routley, Roles and limits of paradigms in environmental thought and action, 1982. R. Routley, In defence of cannibalism I. Types of admissible and inadmissible cannibalism, 1982. R. Routley and N. Griffin, Unravelling the meaning$of life?, 1982. R. Routley, Nihilisms, and nihilist logics. R. Routley, War and Peace. I. On the ethics of large-scale nuclear war and war—deterrence and the political fall-out. R. Routley and V. Plumwood, Moral dilemmas and the logic of deontic notions. R. Routley and V. Plumwood, An expensive repair-kit for utilitarianism. R. Routley, Maximizing, satisficing, satisizing: the difference in rational behaviour under rival paradigms. / /- ' nw^4) 4 ---------- =^A,W7/7/////7//7777 r/ )r % ./  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Box 149, Item 2: War and peace II : on the alleged inconsistency, moral insensitivity and fanaticism of pacifism Subject The topic of the resource Series: Discussion papers in environmental philosophy ; number 9. Published by Australian National University. Department of Philosophy. Published under Richard Sylvan's previous name Richard Routley. Description An account of the resource One of two copies in collection. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Routley</a> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 149, Item 2 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a> Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1983 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource [31] leaves; 25 cm. 58.22 MB. Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:cde8c5d">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:cde8c5d</a> Box 149: Publications (to como) https://www.antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/979159be0f3d1109bd5b22759db1f0fd.pdf 249a2a5345757b3734cdd80aed300e08 PDF Text Text WORKING DRAFT 1'l}l' T1 1,,i··) CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, AND APPROACHES TO THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT - AN AUSTRALIAN PERSPECTIVE Many of you know that Canberra was originally designed by Walter Burley 'lO Griffin. This talk is dedicated to him. You may not know that Griffin, an c111,d l,ee,tJ>,, I! a ,~cJ/2...ru/.1t-l/ '";~1/n,-,l,c1... American who migrated to Australia in 1913, was not simply an architect and A lantlscape designer_, but one of Australia's early deeper ecologists. key elements of the Western industrial paradigm, especially on making nature the servant of man', 'land to be accorded the 'concentration and discerned instead elements of a different 'consciousness' (the word is his). took the He rejected His approach was holistic, and respect he due to a highly developed and perfected living organism not to be exterminated or treated as dead material, or as a mere section of a map'. Canberra, now no mere section of map, is still, for all its deficiencies, perhaps the best approximation anywhere .eco~osic-.w, city; but it is not only removed from Griffin's original conception but far from deep ecological ideals. * * *3 * * * * The objective of the larger investigation, of which this part, is to gauge the extent to which Australian contrasted with American culture, contains developable will underpin a under which many suffers. talk sketches a culture, especially as elements (seeds) which different political framework from the bastardised capitalism people presently labour and local environment frequently It is not necessary to see the present political arrangements and the political course interested to in charted as environmentally alternative structures: socially disastrous to be it is enough, for example, to view them r ,i,v~c~ntL..:f- [.<-ol"l,-" hd<--t r7' <-.~ .::.. P,r~t- f tl. /~J 1 or J I C-IJll·A-r~u... ) ~ tn "S. �those as far from satisfactory, or very far from the of best to be interested in the prospects of turning things around somewhat, to worlds, increasing ecological resistance [negative action] against vandalism and like, and ecological construction [direct positive action]. the grounds give remarkable level of environmental activism that has the especially hope, damage, environment There are several distinctive features of Australian culture that for attainable of somehow emerged among the people. It is worth trying to pull together some of these features of the culture, to look at ways of furthering the valuable parts, and increasing the level of concern and activism. the towards practices, and attitudes different approaches, different 1 Indeed appreciation of, environment. have cultures different Without doubt practices towards, and respect for the natural environment are highly culturally dependent: and where they still survive uncorrupted still have - nonimperial cultures had much exploitative less whose North, industrial exploitation approaches to practices not vandalism and the environment merely environmental but to a marked extent depend upon such practices. control" their of local typically under the missionary, colonial or imperial domination. in But occasionally, notably retained the of those than gross permit Mostly these more benign cultures have however "lost environments, Most American Jews and American Indians. instance, for compare, sufficient autonomy the to adjacent Pacific, regional cultures 2 have slow or even halt environmental destruction. Thus, for example, rainforest damaging projects have been delayed or blocked in Melanesia largely through Melanesian attitudes to the land. One important way then to try to slow environmental degradation, especially in the South, is to foster certain both sweepingly, regional cultural autonomy; socialism and indigenous for cultural instance land rights movements. 2 differences to support and, more Melanesian For, where the cultures have �not been excessively corrupted by Northern influences, this is rapid way of paradigms. in the a cultural differences can also serve Antipodes, in particular in Australia, to at least assist in transition to different Such comparatively activating alternative paradigms to the dominant Northern social The question arises whether elsewhere a less environmentally exploitative social paradigms. transition is unlikely to occur unless it is based on the culture. Can features of the culture and the social life be used to foster and make requisite differences? In the case of Australia, a basis culture, is there both in the land and the and things appear sufficiently different from those in the cultures of the industrialised North to allow (some hope) for cultural differentiation. the need for change, at least if the natural environment is to retain some It semblance of integrity, there is little doubt. that there is, in is becoming platitudinous the longer run not much prospect for the integrity of many local natural environments and ecosystems loose Of 3 unless we in the Antipodes break from the damaging cultural assumptions and practice of the industrialised North and work destructive towards establishment of a less in some parts, rising tide war. of For despite environmental the industrialised North still appears in the grip of established forces and unlikely to budge in time - short of nuclear environmentally culture, towards a certain regional cultural autonomy. elements of regionalism in the North, despite a concern different disaster, such Though we who seek change can count on some support from minority movements in the North, nonetheless if we are to achieve changes, we must go largely alone. Nor is the Australia because as well as the location, the advantage of the ground and its southern seeds of cultural difference are already there and growing. cultivation. Such a it task of paradigm transition entirely hopeless in like most new and more fragile developments they need attention and speedy as careful But if task is rendered urgent also by other matters of 3 �environmental and human concern, not just the gathering signs but colossal biological losses through of nuclear rapid destruction of, e.g. war, tropical rainforests, indeed mounting evidence of environmental decline almost everywhere humans now establish. How does philosophy fit into the strategy of harnessing regional culture to alter approaches to the environment? As in the title of the talk it operates in the middle, not as an idle middleman, but more like and design culture. principles A working picture that the main components of the discussion together - a picture that also like most images of the more abstract distorts across organising of the dynamic linkage in a good suspension bridge, which lifts the environmental way on the ropes of regional links the is that of a suspension the gap often separating people from the natural environment. bridge There are people, and the environment, and approaches by bridges to the environment, like so:- approach ➔ Natural Environment People (Of course people may be part of the natural environment: the picture doesn't exclude that important overlap.) The connecting bridges may be of very different sorts, ranging from rustic bridges good for careful foot traffic, through the monumental suspension bridge at Middle Harbour, to modern high-tech bridges able to carry nuclear tanks and bulldozers over large spans. of But it is the structure all these types of bridges carrying the approaches that matter particularly. The spans are carried by the ropes of culture, and the pylons of culture if 4 you �will. ~ {dC"' CULTURE l (--.__ APPROACH ~ ____,___.- ·'--- So with approaches. different ------- ----- - cultures, different carrying bridges different It is better to see the link component in the middle - philosophy, but it might almost as well be sociology - not as part of the nuts and bolts and rivets of the structures. types, bridges, but rather It has its analytical computing the loads and as parts, the design looking stresses at on them; and engineering of the the components, and it also has its more holistic elements, considering the bridges themselves and of them their - the social paradigms embedded in the cultures. select substructures Philosophy, the link subject, is then the architecture and engineering of the business. Less figuratively, assumptions of a philosophy replacement, or marxist philosophies. deep ecology, asks deeper assumptions of all and and assumptions paradigms. the operative for example of free Philosophy, especially metaphysics and not deeper questions, extracting the fundamental other subjects and assembling the intellectual assumptions embodied in a culture or social way of life, i.e. social assembles culture applied in environmental practices, the assumptions, that is, to be considered for enterprise isolates In what are sometimes called the this respect philosophy - which includes much more than conceptual analysis - is first among the intellectual subjects, as logic, the science of reasoning, is the first among the sciences, investigating the form of arguments and methodology of all other sciences. philosophical investigation extracts, 5 The deeper assumptions such when put together yield a philosophy in �the more popular sense (as e.g. enterprise philosophy): in philosophy of life or again the free in any case the result will be a philosophical theory or the rudiments of a philosophical paradigm, depending on how it is done. By largely philosophical investigation then, assumptions of the techniques we try contrasted base. with operative to test apparent we trace and Northern social paradigms; the adequacy social of the organise the and by sociological assemblage, especially as alternatives with some environmental support So much has already been accomplished, in a rough and ready way, and some results are illustrated in diagram 1. Details of other positions, the old culture (as positions typically offer environmental a projected), transition alternative. are from And and new left and the counter included in the diagram because these the while the dominant it may Western appear paradigm to indeed is - a long political way from the dominant paradigm to the environmental alternative, of the intermediate taken one at a time. details steps is not so great; To illustrate the way transitions can of the first line (row) in macro-economic form. construed as representing package typically includes environment, so the in components each and the steps can, and have, been be made, consider The dominant objective is to maximize some economic package of goods and services being such as GDP, a rough way standard of living. minimal to quality of life this But the and and pollution, and perhaps with additions for non-material features excluded in dominant consciousness. this way we arrive at New Left thinking with the objective to considerable reservations, X(RR). of material goes back to Greek philosophy; 6 In growth The real break however comes with members of the counterculture, the Hippies and Yippies for example, idea the objective function to be maximized gets much complicated, with subtractions for externalities such as noise subject the though the namely, the abandonment of growth and �maximization objectives altogether, for less material nonmaximizing the macroeconomic steady-state objective or will level, for economy, something economists have so far sketched. which Daly for At the idea gets partially represented by the goal of a sustainable be goals. example though the alternative environmental much less inflexible and nationalistic than In fact the "emerging steady-state advocates, paradigm", affords only a shallow alternative to the dominant paradigm, differing only as to growth and reserves themes. But a fuller diagram of paradigms would include - among others such advanced corporate capitalism the higher-dimensional steady state position; involve would However, the higher dimensional how a better argued transition can be made; diagram essentially by combining steady-state arguments against macroeconomic growth and stocks assumptions the Left-socialist combination, which framework would a diagram, and remove the convenient ~simplification of the two dimensional left-right transition. indicates it so case does not against microeconomic themes. touch human relations, a with Even so, even with the narrower anthropocentric have been left behind, deeper environmental concern would have only began to enter. Reaching behind the dominant Western paradigm so outlined to the underlying social model takes us towards the following familiar picture: society consists of a set of individual humans of decidedly impoverished type, e.g. they are not genuinely interrelated, so they are isolated, and, though they are the only sort of items that have intensional (mental) features, they have (e.g. a certain ability to calculate). but few of these At bottom, these individuals have utilities, reflecting preferences or self-interests, which they aim to maximize; and so they are competitive (by virtue of scarcity). that they are possessive, and possess capital. The distinctive the feature means of Their other feature is production, e.g. land, of the American model is of course is that individuals can separately accumulate the means of production. 7 To ensure their �rABLI J. COMPLll NG SOC IAL l'ARAD IGMS <ENVIRONMENTALLY - OR I [ifl [D REPRESEIITAT IONJ .... RIGHT - LEFT POLITICAL ORIENTAT!Otl DOMINANT (XJ WESTERN PARADIGM CORE THEMES ECONOMIC ORGANISATIONAL POLITICAL FURTHER ENVIRONMENTAL MATERIAL (ECONOMIC) GROWTH DOMINANCE OVER NATURE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT A RESOURCE MARKET FORCES (MINIMALLY REGULATED, PRODUCTIVITY AND PROFIT MAXIMIZING) PREDOMINANTLY PRIVATE OWNERSHIP OF PRODUCTIVE MEANS I ND IV I DUALI ST I c/ COMPETITIVE ETHOS ELITIST/REWARDS FOR APPROVED ACHIEVEMENT CONSUMERISM ENCOURAGED URBAN-INDUSTRIAL COMMODITY/CULTURAL PACKAGING CENTRALISED : URBAN CENTRED LARGE-SCALE: ORDERED (POWER-) HIERARCHICAL HUMAN RELATIONS SECONDARY /OLD 1LEFT /NEW LEFT 1 I X 1X<R) X X I X IX 1X<RRl I y IX<R) I X ➔ Y 1X<Rl I X(RR) !COMMAND SYSTEM I I I I y y I y :X(Q) I y I X I X(Q) I X I X xrn> 1 IX :x-v I X X<R) I X-'>Y NATIONAL FOCUS; MILITARY DEFENCE X I I X ALTERNATIVE STRUCTURES (POWER-BROKERS AND EXPERTS PROMINENT) LAW AND ORDER; LEGAL REGULATION, POLICE BACKED X X 1X<Q> IX(Q) i X I ly(R) FAITH IN SCIENCE: HIGH TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS SEPARATION OF REASON/ EMOTION, FACT/VALUE, SCIENTIFIC/UTILITARIAN RATIONALITY; ANALYTIC REDUCTIONISTIC y ly(Q) I AMPLE RESERV~S (OR (SUBSTITUTES) [NVIRONMENTAL CONTROLLABLE! y IXCQ) I X->Y I I Y<Q> I y I I v Y X<R) y /HUMAN RELATIONS !PRIMARY 'v<Q> I X X·->Y y y 'xrn> 'x<R> y X I 1X<R) X I X X X I X IX X :x<R> y X I X y X I X I RATIONALITY I I I /REJECTED I IDEEP ECOLOGY 1DISTINGU!Sfl[D I I !GREATER VALUE ASSUMPTIOt-j /REJECTED (FOR BIOSPECIES /IMPART I ALI TY) /TRADITIONAL MARKETS WITHIN PUBLIC INTEREST / FRAMEWORK LIMITED OWNERSHIP OF / PRODUCTIVE MEANS jDECENTRALISED: I I I Y/NON OWNERSHIP COMMUNAL I I /SMALL-SCALE; FLEXIBLE NON-(POWER)HIERARCHJCAL /HUMAN RELATIONS WITHIN / ECO-COMMUN I TY REGIONAL/NEIGHBOURHOOD I FOCUS; SOCIAL (NON- /VIOLENT) DEFENCE / PARTICIPATIVE STRUCTURES l(cJTIZEN-WORKER I INVOLVEMENT) /LIBERATION; SOCIAL /REGULATION /EARTH SUPPLIES LIMITED y /NATURE DELICATELY BALANCED 1NATURE BENIGN /OTHER ANIMALS ALSO INTENTIONAL X➔Y I /COLLECTIVE ETHOS/ ,soCJAL PROVISION EGALITARIAN/INCOME NEED I RELATED / CAREFUL USE/RECYCLING ' /Y(ES SENT IAL) LOCALIS~LF-MANAGEMENT /PRODUCT/CULTURE EMPHASIS/ y y ? !ALTERNATIVE (Y) ENVIRONMENTAL PAR.4DIGM 1 / LE SS MATERIAL GOALS (E,G, SELF- REALISATION) /HARMON Y WITH NATURE /NATURAL ENVIRONMENT VALUED FOR ITSELF I y I y I I ICOUNTER 1CULTURE I I I STATE lowNERSHIP X X X NATURE HOSTILE/NEUTRAL NONHUMANS ESSENTIALLY ME CHAN I ST! C EPISTEMIC/ PHILOSOPHIC DOMINANT ISTATE I SOCIALIST ... I LIMITS TO SCIENCE: IAPPROPRIATE TECHNOLOGY ! INTEGRATION OF REASON/ EMOTION, FACT/VALUE , , , I~/J DER RATIONALITY (OR) REJECTION OF NARROWER; /HOLi ST IC IV /NATURAL AS TELEOLOGICAL I I ..• • I �entitlement to this is the initial argument, on this model, for the coercive apparatus of the (minimal) state. natural, this about self-interested Features There is nothing compulsory, or Individuals picture. competing individuals are matter of these nurture, abstract not nature. of the American economic archtype are a matter of culture, a result of training, not human nature, as a comparison where approximating particularly individuals are not like this, individuals embody rationality either: with helps other traditional show. cultures, Nor do these archtypal only a question-begging argument leads to the American model as something naturally required. The transitions to the left already go beyond the American model. certain introduces human The relations. chauvinistic (anthropocentric) but they do left not models omit are social The left still human relations: the further big step to the environmental alternative is to widen these relations to full community relations, independent value. recognising That is a creatures and nonhuman things as of bigger step, a step that no Western political institutions make requisite allowance for, and that mainstream underpinning Western value theories do not accommodate. The arguments from traditional cultures can also be illustrated paradigms and cultures such as those the of models Melanesia that and directed underlie Polynesia, them. many of against the In traditional the operative assumptions of the Northern social paradigms are, very reasonably, not accepted. Where these cultures still prevail with some measure of regional autonomy, there is good prospect of thwarting more environmentally destructive practices. Features of the local culture can be immediately harnessed. But much of the inhabited and there are already New governed and by environmentally less unscathed World peoples of predominantly European stock. distinctive features 8 observable in New World is now Although cultures, �assumptions of the dominant Northern paradigms have hardly been sufficiently questioned, let alone overthrown, especially among the manag~rial other, or even lesser, features of surprisingly leave out There are cultures significant as artistic and intellectual usually cultural industrial culture, though economically dominated accompanying other conspicuous The incomplete social paradigms outlined do not exhaust features of the accompanying rather to be icing. discerned, features. sure, This does affords European culture. This alternatives. a discrepancies. established have an somewhat as that in romanticism and a significant feature of American Indian gives *l but Northern precarious foothold for an aesthetic approach to the environment, such evidenced So the cultures will have to be invoked if change in approach is to be hastened in this way. cultural features to be considered. classes. But the basis there of are the as aesthetic well more route to important environmental omissions and In particular, the dominant American paradigm omits reference to religion; also neglected are many of the connected older and formerly more prominent values of American culture. The American search for environmentally acceptable alternatives has regularly turned to these omitted features of American culture, and religious or spiritual elements, and associated past values 4 • establish "the gospel of ecology" and displace the dominant paradigm have taken a spiritual route, a quasi-religious way. and Indeed the primary attempts to representative new environmentalism: (For example, Nash provides a sample list of the books he considers important in the rise of the virtually all that proceed beyond ecology depend on an appeal to religious elements, to divine or sacred features of natural things.) In the context of American culture the appeal something to be said for it. to religious features has For, firstly, a high proportion of the American population profess some active religious commitment; • 9 and, unlike Australia, a �substantial do proportion act response. And, secondly, religious values do clash with dominant Northern paradigm. This sort of socially that with accordance in conflict precepts the was approved of perceived, considerable puzzlement, by colonised cultures, as Lini reports in the case the with of Melanesian society (p.9): The fabric of this society, with its inherent communal discipline was torn by the arrival of European commercial practices which ••• carried with it the message of materialism, together with the creed of Both aspects were a direct contradiction enlightened self-interest. of Melanesian values and priorities. The introduction to Melanesia of Christianity added a further element of division and confusion in the While the Christian religion was widely minds of the people. compatible with the ethics and principles of Melanesian communalism, with its emphasis on mutuality, compassion and caring for one another, it was a practice that very few of the Europeans appeared to follow. and individualism of religion It ran also contrary to the self-interest, which not just (had) more important exponents, but was followed by the majority of Europeans ••• It is something a a puzzle how the assimilation of elements of the dominant paradigm with prospects of Christianity is pulled off, though achieved Northern There is it certainly is in a great many Northerners, and too many Antipodeans. a compartmentalisation. partial answer: Religion for most is a separate thing fitted into a Sunday morning box, important elements of which do not the upset standard penetrate deep. business to Thus for most believers religion does not week. Only for a minority does it directly such as human poverty: escape touch immediate matters why should we expect it to work for the Environment? Nonetheless widespread real adoption of religious perceptions within the American population, and reflected in the Administration, would presumably alter things. But even if some of the effects of a religious return would beneficial, and to nature domination highly be welcomed, it is also true that some of the effects of a narrow fundamentalism would be highly undesirable. of be were Unless moreover the position abandoned in favour of one of the lesser religious traditions the environmental effects would 10 be negative (as Watt testifies). �Religion could be more of a drawback than an asset. Religion in America has lost out to with any depth to it appears most unlikely. the There existence of God, the fallaciousness of the arguments involved, etc. no But nor is the so-called scientific front-end-in. cannot account for; it is that this perspective, a paradigm, a richer more intellectually satisfactory rivals (e.g. view). such great the incorporates There are it is far from uniquely determined. So paradigm. social dominant in view world is not just that there is much that this sort of view leaves out or It shape. is view with these sorts of weaknesses the to return to trying in virtue rival Consider, for instance, the matter of the view could explain. scientific much for world view was seriously deficient and it did not account more the case for its In part it failed deservedly: view". world scientific "the In any case such a reversal intensional scientific These rivals allow for value and wonder in natural things without taking a theological way. character quasi-religious reasons of set second There is a of some sort, for not endeavouring Christian, strongly These on turn the irreligious character of the culture, where an appeal through religion is unlikely to have much as understood a (the Australia, success. first) post-Christian it has been irreligious character the of understanding much else about the culture, society e.g. 'best is said, society, in which religion (is) barely relevant culturally'. *4 Even if that formulation is an generally a Pantheistic or Jewish, whatever, on deeper environmental approaches in Australia. impose to exaggeration the is a fact and is the key to the curious extent of the state's protrusion into Australian social life. If an approach through religion is accordingly ruled out as a main approach to hastened paradigm transition - and a related approach through mysticism or transcendentalism excluded for analogous reasons and because of 11 the earthiness �of the culture - what alternatives are open? There are other significant features of the culture running against major elements of the dominant paradigm, effectively which can perhaps applied be much quasi-religious approaches to turn matters around. more Western than To indicate the prospects of applying features of the culture to detach from dominant paradigms, consider how Australian culture contrasts with American. Australian mainstream culture transition from the dominant is already American political left has much stronger support in difficult to some culture. Australia way It along the leftward is not merely that the than USA. It is not indicate features of the Australian cultural situation which show its left-displacement from the dominant Western paradigm. some elements of the contrast:- 12 The next table lists �TABLE 2. CONTRASTING ELEMENTS IN AUSTRALIAN AND AMERICAN CULTURE SCALE OF INCREASE *2 individualistic ethos inacceptability of socialist institutions inegalitarian attitudes POSITIVE inegalitarian practices ITEMS (PER level of consumerism CAPITA maximization quest WHERE imperialist drive RELEVANT) extent of violence police and military commitment high technology involvement functional rationality environmental inactivism USA AUSTRALIA SCALE OF INCREASE level of urbanisation legal obstacles to environmental action NEGATIVE official opposition to environmental practices, such as dedication of ITEMS wilderness administrative delays in implementing environmental practices, such as pollution requirements, recycling, etc. 13 �Thus there are some offsetting negative items as well as positive items in the in the contrast. Since, however, most of these contrasting elements bear on first diagram of rival paradigms in a way favourable to Australian culture as opposed to American, it appears that prospects indeed better. themes for applying the culture are This important theme requires elaboration and confirmation. The task can profitably be combined with others: there is much work here both for environmental spectators with an empirical bent and for environmental activists. A first task is to separate out what is known, what requires and what ought to be done (ideologically). and their surrounds, distinguishing firstly theses: A weak confirmation, Let us focus on transition theses, factual and normative transition factual transition thesis, that Western (European) culture is undergoing a transition away from the dominant confirmed by several Northern sociologists (e.g. better results could be obtained in Australia; social Marsh). paradigm, has been Presumably similar or but appropriate samplings of the community have not been done, analysed and so on - environmental sociology being a neglected undoubtedly field also in Another Australia. weak factual transition thesis holds, namely that since 1960 a significant percentage of the each human community in specifiable advanced Western countries such as Australia have come to adopt main assumptions of the alternative environmental paradigm. But again comparative-figures sociological work are entirely of data to Though impressionistic tells us that environmental activism is greater in Australia than USA - indeed more intensive than piece lacking. anywhere else, an immensely build upon - we lack solid confirmation. sociogeographers to do. 14 important There is much for �Throughout, as you may have noticed, a normative transition thesis has been taken largely for granted, that Australian culture, indeed Western culture generally, ought to be undergoing a major paradigm Western paradigms and their away from dominant variations (such as those of advocated corporate capitalism and of the post-industrial society), transiting shift, and towards an environmental alternative. furthermore ought the arguments. It is also be That complex normative thesis is argued for in environmental philosophy, and fortunately there isn't repeat to time to argued against there, but, to sum up the opposition case cavalierly, unconvincingly. Given then that the transition is going on, indeed emerging are are clear doing environmental encourage enough. for it in Australia? example, directing action going be aiming swing major Preliminary against the to organisations. on, answers sources of They should increase their support bases, but not merely by membership They should be endeavouring to influence the dominant regional culture, for the potential appears to be there for a considerably greater change than has thus far been two be despoilation and the like, primarily industrial organisations and drives and environmental education. and to Not only should activists be continuing with what those supposed to regulate them, further (public) also ought ought then to be going on with greater rapidity, how is it hastened, how do environmental activists they and parts to this further practice which achieved. There are can run in tandem, a more negative and a more positive part: • More negatively, it involves cutting down and countering the flow of propaganda in favour of the dominant paradigms both locally but especially from the North. That is important in reversing the extent of Northern co-option. includes gently a range of activities some with solid bases in local culture, such as lopping anti-American It off the tall poppies pedalling and anti-Northern activities. 15 the stuff, and careful The latter practices (which should �not of course reduce merely to personally directed antagonism) fit in well other regional environmental with aims, such as independent and nonaligned defence policies. • More positively, it consists in promoting and adapting other also despised features of alternative paradigms. ambassadors, Australian It is culture that work directly towards themes of commonly are, of course, those Lawrence). like nonmaximizing making-do socialistic ones, appreciation Northern intellectuals of local natural the The features to be egalitarian, along environments. with the combines enough: cultural with promoted or anti-authoritarian, rapidly increasing Nonmaximizing, for example, is reflected in the She'll be right and It'll do approach often and and note, that are responsible for the low repute in which some of the cultural characters are held (e.g. adapted commonly taken to things, egalitarian methods as encapsulated in Fair go and Enough's consider the effects of these, decently applied, in economics, in local markets. As for mateship, sure it could use widening, a main problem being its restriction in practice to extension male relationships: to communities (including nonhumans). is there for deep cultural transformation: but why not encourage its So, to conclude, the potential we must help to realise it. FOOTNOTES 1. The term 'approaches' is intended to include both theory and both espoused ideology and behaviour. 2. They did not go under because of the weakness of their intellectual positions. At bottom their religious beliefs, for example, were no more ridiculous than those of Christianity. Typically they were much weakened by new diseases, and overwhelmed by new technology often applied in violent fashion. 3. By integrity is meant much more than retaining representative samples of this and that system or species; not representative southern sassafras, parma wallabies and Torres Strait Islanders, but sufficiently many. 16 practice, �4. Another past philosophical basis for environmental philosophy, American naturalism, seems to have been little developed, despite the promise some have seen in it. *1 The aesthetic route Highwater. is well-illustrated by the main approach in *2 Note well that it is not being claimed that Australian culture is egalitarian (in conformity with a popular myth); only that it is less inegalitarian than American. The hard data underlying the claim---ri assembled in 'Culture and the roots of political divergence'. *3 For Griffin's conception of Canberra - a much smaller Canberra, which included a rail loop - see, to start with, Birrell (still the best source on Griffin). The first quotation from Griffin is quoted in Birrell, p.178; the second is from Griffin's article in Australian Wild Life. *4 P. O'Farrell. REFERENCES J. Highwater, The Primal Mind. Vision Harper & Row, New York, 1981. J. Birrell, Walter Burley Griffin, Queensland U.P., 1964. W.B. Griffin, (,0· cc,,/' «.,PL'0"1 d I (on and Reality in Indian America, · __ ,.,.,, ja,n;~, Australian Wild Life J_ (f9Jt-f/), ty ·-J, W. Lini, Keynote Address, Australia and the South Pacific, Proceedings a Conference held at the Australian National University, 1982. P. O'Farrell, 'The cultural ambivalence of Australian religion', in Culture and the State in Australia, Australian Cultural History 1 (1982) Canberra. R. Nash, 'Rounding out the American revolution: ethical extension and the new environmentalism', typescript, University of California at Santa Barbara, 1982. A. Marsh, Protect and Political Consciousness, Sage Beverley Hills, 1977. s. Cotgrove, Catastrophe R. Routley, 'Roles and limits of paradigms action', in Elliot and Qlre, 260-293. R. Elliot and A. Gare, Environmental Philosophy. Readings, University of Queensland Press, 1983. or- aae Cornucopia, Wiley, 17 ~~J~rh , of 1982. in environmental thought A Collection and of �Job No. ................................................................................. . 7/J>/JVh SOCPAC PRINTERY Received ........................................................................... REQUEST FOR PRINTING 05471 No Research Schools of Social Sciences & Pacific Studies (/. I L tJC,;c_ )1 -1 Department ............................................................................................................................................ . rl Person Requiring Work ......... ?. 1-......... e.. . .<..t ... ./.. . . . ':l.............................. 5. . . .... . . . . ... ..... .... . . .... . . .. . .. . . .. . ... ... .. c c School ............................................................................................................................................................. . 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Please print name of Requisitioner here - .................................................. Signature ..................................................................................................................................... (REQUISITIONER/ DEPT: SECRETARY) NOTE: If papers submitted tor offset printing/photocopying contain copyright material other than Australian National University copyright Form COP-1 must accompany this request In lieu of the Declaration as above. �r r" WORKING DRAFT ·. , ' I · CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, AND APPROACHES TO THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT - AN AUSTRALIAN PERSPECTIVE Many of you know tha~ Canberra was originally Griffin. This talk is (, ,~ ,/ h (: (tJ m, , . designed by Walter Burley 'i.C to him. You may not know that Griffin, an dedicated / 1,• <, , ' ' ! I ·,/ .• r : , J,,--.T~- l, c :.... American who migrated to Australia in 1913, was not simply an architect and ,1 lantlscape designe ~ but one of Australia's early deeper ecologists. key elements of the Western industrial paradigm, especially on making nature the servant of man', 'land to be accorded the 'concentration and discerned instead elements of a different 'consciousness' (the word is his). took the He rejected His approach was holistic, and respect he due to a highly developed and perfected living organism not to be exterminated or treated as dead material, or as a mere section of a map'. Canberra, now no mere section of map, is still, ,.,i/f . ,:i:. for all its deficiencies, perhaps the best approximation anywhere ~~l-0gical city; * to * * * * * gauge the extent to which Australian contrasted with American culture, contains developable will underpin a under which many suffers. -,/ /h ,1 ;1 ~11._r talk sketches a culture, especially as elements (seeds) which different political framework from the bastardised capitalism people presently labour and local environment frequently It is not necessary to see the present political arrangements and the political course interested aeeper *3 The objective of the larger investigation, of which this is a but it is not only removed from Griffin's original conception but far from deep ecological ideals. part, to in charted as environmentally alternative structures: f) ' r ,nt 1 or socially disastrous to be it is enough, for example, to view them t__ ri __f. _________ ---1 n__ {- ,-; ,:_... --1 (. "'I n,l ._ 1 ,. (•✓ L / ~• • } ' <: l7' 1 •-rt,,,_ c, , /---5-0-J. i +- I~.,, )• I �as far from satisfactory, or very far from worlds, those of the best attainable to be interested in the prospects of turning things around somewhat, to increasing ecological resistance [negative action] against vandalism and the environment hope, damage, like, and ecological construction [direct positive action]. There are several distinctive features of Australian culture that for of especially the give grounds remarkable level of environmental activism that has somehow emerged among the people. It is worth trying to pull together some of these features of the culture, to look at ways of furthering the valuable parts, and increasing the level of concern and activism. Without doubt attitudes and different practices, cultures towards have the different environment. approaches, 1 different Indeed appreciation of, practices towards, and respect for the natural environment are highly culturally dependent: compare, for nonimperial cultures had much less North, exploitation and American Jews and American Indians. whose approaches to practices not vandalism the environment merely permit those of the environmental gross control" of their local typically under the missionary, colonial or imperial domination. But occasionally, notably retained than but to a marked extent depend upon such practices. Mostly these more benign cultures have however "lost environments, Most and where they still survive uncorrupted still have - exploitative industrial instance, sufficient in autonomy the to adjacent Pacific, regional cultures 2 have slow or even halt environmental destruction. Thus, for example, rainforest damaging projects have been delayed or blocked in Melanesia largely through Melanesian attitudes to the land. One important way then to try to slow environmental degradation, especially in the South, is to foster both certain sweepingly, regional cultural autonomy; socialism and indigenous for cultural instance land rights movements. 2 differences to support and, more Melanesian For, where the cultures have �not been excessively corrupted by Northern influences, this is rapid way of paradigms. in the a cultural differences can also serve Antipodes, in particular in Australia, to at least assist in transition to different Such comparatively activating alternative paradigms to the dominant Northern social The question arises whether elsewhere a less environmentally exploitative social paradigms. transition is unlikely to occur unless it is based on the culture. Can features of the culture and the social life be used to foster and make requisite differences? In the case of Australia, a basis culture, is there both in the land and and things appear sufficiently different from those in the cultures of the industrialised North to allow (some hope) for cultural differentiation . the need for change, at least there is, in It is becoming platitudinous the longer run not much prospect for the integrity of many local natural environments and ecosystems loose Of if the natural environment is to retain some semblance of integrity, there is little doubt. that 3 unless we in the Antipodes break from the damaging cultural assumptions and practice of the industrialised North and work destructive towards establishment of a concern in different less some parts, rising tide war. of For despite environmental the industrialised North still appears in the grip of established forces and unlikely to budge in time - short of nuclear environmentally culture, towards a certain regional cultural autonomy. elements of regionalism in the North, despite a disaster, such largely alone. Nor is the Australia because as well as the location, the as Though we who seek change can count on some support from minority movements in the North, nonetheless if we are to achieve changes, we must go advantage of the ground and its southern seeds of cultural difference are already there and growing. cultivation. Such a it task of paradigm transition entirely hopeless in like most new and more fragile developments they need attention and speedy the careful But if task is rendered urgent also by other matters of 3 �environmental and human concern, not just the gathering signs but colossal biological losses through of nuclear rapid destruction of, e.g. war, tropical rainforests, indeed mounting evidence of environmental decline almost everywhere humans now establish. How does philosophy fit into the strategy of harnessing regional culture to alter approaches to the environment? As in the title of the talk it operates in the middle, not as an idle middleman, but more like and design culture. principles A working picture that the main components of the discussion together - a picture that also like most images of the more abstract distorts across organising of the dynamic linkage in a good suspension bridge, which lifts the environmental way on the ropes of regional links the is that of a suspension the gap often separating people from the natural environment. bridge There are people, and the environment, and approaches by bridges to the environment, like so:- approach ➔ People Natural Environment (Of course people may be part of the natural environment: the picture doesn't exclude that important overlap.) The connecting bridges may be of very different sorts, ranging from rustic bridges good for careful foot traffic, through the monumental suspension bridge at Middle Harbour, to modern high-tech bridges able to carry nuclear tanks and bulldozers over large spans. of But it is the structure all these types of bridges carrying the approaches that matter particularly. The spans are carried by the ropes of culture, and the pylons of culture if 4 you �will. \ \ \ \ ) (......._ APPROACH _ .,__ _. So with approaches. different '-- --------- ---~ cultures, __,.;::;f --- different carrying bridges different It is better to see the link component in the middle - philosophy, but it might almost as well be sociology - not as part of the nuts and bolts and rivets of the structures. types, bridges, but rather It has its analytical computing the loads and as parts, the design looking stresses at on them; and engineering of the the components, and it also has its more holistic elements, considering the bridges themselves and of them their - the social paradigms embedded in the cultures. select substructures Philosophy, the link subject, is then the architecture and engineering of the business. Less figuratively, assumptions of a philosophy replacement, or marxist philosophies. deep ecology, asks deeper assumptions of all and and assumptions paradigms. the operative for example of free Philosophy, especially metaphysics and not deeper questions, extracting the fundamental other subjects and assembling the intellectual assumptions embodied in a culture or social way of life, i.e. social assembles culture applied in environmental practices, the assumptions, that is, to be considered for enterprise isolates In what are sometimes called the this respect philosophy - which includes much more than conceptual analysis - is first among the intellectual subjects, as logic, the science of reasoning, is the first among the sciences, investigating the form of arguments and methodology of all other sciences. philosophical investigation extracts, 5 The deeper assumptions such when put together yield a philosophy in �the more popular sense (as e.g. enterprise philosophy): in philosophy of life or again the free in any case the result will be a philosophical theory or the rudiments of a philosophical paradigm, depending on how it is done. By largely philosophical investigation then, assumptions of the techniques we try contrasted base. with operative to test apparent we trace and Northern social paradigms; the adequacy social of the organise the and by sociological assemblage, especially as alternatives with some environmental support So much has already been accomplished, in a rough and ready way, and some results are illustrated in diagram 1. Details of other positions, the old culture (as positions typically offer environmental a projected), transition alternative. are from And and new left and the counter included in the diagram because these the while the dominant it may Western appear paradigm to indeed is - a long political way from the dominant paradigm to the environmental alternative, of the intermediate taken one at a time. details steps is not so great; To illustrate the way transitions can of the first line (row) in macro-economic form. construed as representing package typically includes environment, so the in components be made, consider The dominant objective such as GDP, a rough way standard of living. minimal to quality of life this But the and and pollution, and perhaps with additions for non-material features excluded in dominant consciousness. this way we arrive at New Left thinking with the objective to considerable reservations, X(RR). of material goes back to Greek philosophy; 6 In growth The real break however comes with members of the counterculture, the Hippies and Yippies for example, idea the objective function to be maximized gets much complicated, with subtractions for externalities such as noise subject each and the steps can, and have, been is to maximize some economic package of goods and services being the though the namely, the abandonment of growth and �maximization objectives altogether, for less material nonmaximizing the macroeconomic steady-state objective or will level, for economy, something economists have so far sketched. which Daly for At the idea gets partially represented by the goal of a sustainable be goals. example though the alternative environmental much less inflexible and nationalistic than In fact the ''emerging steady-state advocates, paradigm", affords only a shallow alternative to the dominant paradigm, differing only as to growth and reserves But themes. a fuller diagram of paradigms would include - among others such advanced corporate capitalism the higher-dimensional steady position; state it would involve However, the higher dimensional how a better argued transition can be made; diagram essentially by combining steady-state arguments against macroeconomic growth and stocks assumptions the Left-socialist combination, which framework would a diagram, and remove the convenient oversimplification of the two dimensional left-right transition. indicates so case does not against microeconomic themes. touch human relations, a with Even so, even with the narrower anthropocentric have been left behind, deeper environmental concern would have only began to enter. Reaching behind the dominant Western paradigm so outlined to the underlying social model takes us towards the following familiar picture: society consists of a set of individual humans of decidedly impoverished type, e.g. they are not genuinely interrelated, so they are isolated, and, though they are the only sort of items that have intensional (mental) features, they have (e.g. a certain ability to calculate). but few of these At bottom, these individuals have utilities, reflecting preferences or self-interests, which they aim to maximize; and so they are competitive (by virtue of scarcity). that they are possessive, and possess capital. The distinctive the feature means of Their other feature is production, e.g. land, of the American model is of course is that individuals can separately accumulate the means of production. 7 To ensure their �T/\HLI 1. rnr·Al INCi SUC l/\L 1'/IRi\UIC,MS <lNVIRUNMINli\LLY-ORILiilrlJ REl'RESUH/\TION) "··· RIGllf - LEFT POLI T!Ci\L OHIUH/\l 10,J uo•;1NAtll m ~[STERN P/\RAD!GM LORE TII EM[ S Mr.TERIAL (ECONOMI C) GROWTH LJOMI NAN CE OVER NATURE NATUR,\L ENVIR ONM ENT A RESOURCE DOM! N/\N l ISTATE SOCI/\LI ST 1 IOLD INEW I COUNTE.R- I LffT I LEFT I CULTURE I ,X<Rl X 1 ' I X I X X X I ECONOMIC ORG.l\N[S/\T[ON/\L POLIT l CAL FURTHER ENVIRONMENTAL EPISTEMIC/ PHILOSOPHIC MARKET FORCES (MINIMALLY REGULATED, PRODU CT IVITY AN D PROFIT MAXIMIZING) PREDOMINANTLY PRIVATE OWNER SHIP OF PRODUCTIVE MEA NS [NDIVIDUALISTJC/ COMPETITIVE ETHOS EL IT IST/REWARDS FOR APPROVED ACHIEVEMENT CONSUMERISM ENCOURAGED URBAN-INDUSTRIAL co~~ODITYICULTURAL PACKAGING CENTRALISED: URBAN CE:;TRED Lr.RGE-SC ALE: ORDERED (POWER -) HIERARCHICAL HUMAr1 RE LAT I ONS SECONDARY I I y !COMMAND SYSTEM IX<Rl X<R) 1 I X<RR) y y y y y xrnJ ly(QJ X->Y X IX(Ql I I Y I Y I 1X<Q) X(Ql I 1 I I X(Q) 1X<QJ I X I X I X X I I X X<Rl X X X ly(R) NAT IONAL FOCUS; MILITARY DEFENCE X I I X ALTERN ATIVE STRUCTURES (POWER-BROKERS ANO EXPERTS PROMINENT) LAW AND ORDER; LEGAL REGULATION, POLICE BACKED X : X·➔Y I I X ➔Y X<R) X ➔Y I I Y<Q) y Y Y V IHUMAN RELATIONS jPRIMARY IY(Q) X X·->Y y y I y ITRADITIONAL MARKETS WITH IN PUBLIC INTEREST I FRAMEWORK LIMITED OWNERSHIP OF IPRODUCTIVE MEANS !DECENTRAL ISED: I COMMUNAL i 0 1REGIONALINEIGHBOURHOOD FOCUS; SOCIAL (NONIV IOLENT) DEFENCE I PARTICIPATIVE STRUCTURES J(c ITIZEN-WORKER I INVOLVEMENT) 1LIBERAT!O N; SOCIAL I IREGULATION I I X 1X<Rl I y JEARTH SUPPLIES LIMITED X I X y NATURE HOSTILE/NEUTRAL NoNHUMANS ESSENTIALLY ME CHAN l ST IC X X I X I X FAITH IN SCIENCE: HIGH TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS SEPARATION OF REASON/ EMOTION, FACT/VALUE, , , , ScIENTIF!C/UT!L!TARIAN RATIONALITY; ANALYTIC REDUCTIONISTIC X :x(R) iNATURE DELICATELY BALANCED 1NATURE BENIGN !OTHER ANIMALS ALSO INTENTIONAL y X IX y X IX I IRATIONALITY I REJECTED y X➔ Y ! 1SMALL-SCALE; FLEXIBLE NoN-(POWER)H!ERARCHJC,\L IHUMAN RELATIONS WITHIN IECO - COMMUN I TY 1 ? I o . ,:, ,u <r 4l1 n 1 lx<Rl AMPLE RESERV~S (OR (SUBSTITUTES) ENVIRONMENTAL CONTROLLABLE I I ''' ' I Y/NON OWNERSHIP I !COLLECTIVE ETHOS/ !SOCIAL PROVISION EGALITARIAN/INCOME NEED IRELATED l(AREFUL USE/RECYCLING , 1Y(ESSENTIAL) LOCAL/SELF-MANAGEMENT !PRODUCT/CULTURE EMPHASIS! X x<R> IDEEP ECOLOGY , orsT[NGU[SIIED 1LE SS MATERIAL GOALS ' (E.G. SE LF-REALISATION) ! lir.RMONY WI TH NATURE ,NATURAL ENVIRONMENT IGREATER VALUE ' VALUED FOR ITSELF ASSUMPTIOrj !REJECTED (FOR I BIOSPEC I ES I IMPARTIALITY) X--"Y I I iALTERN/\TlVE (Y) !ENVIRONMENTAL P/\R.l\D!GM y x<RR) I STATE !OWNERSHIP " I LIMITS TO SCIENCE: !APPROPRIATE TECHNOLOGY JINTEGRATION OF REASON/ EMOTION, FACT/VALUE , , , !HIDER RATIONALITY (OR REJECTION OF NARROWER); IHOLISTIC IV/NATURAL AS TELEOLOGICAL I I �entitlement to this is the initial argument, on this model, for the coercive apparatus of the (minimal) state. natural, this about self-interested Features There is nothing compulsory, or picture. competing Individuals individuals are matter of these nurture, abstract not nature. of the American economic archtype are a matter of culture, a result of training, not human nature, as a comparison where approximating particularly individuals are not like this, individuals embody rationality either: with helps other traditional cultures, Nor do these archtypal show. only a question-begging argument leads to the American model as something naturally required. The transitions to the left already go beyond the American model. introduces certain relations. human chauvinistic (anthropocentric) but they The do left not models omit are social The left still human relations: the further big step to the environmental alternative is to widen these relations to full community relations, independent value. recognising That is a creatures and nonhuman things as of bigger step, a step that no Western political institutions make requisite allowance for, and that mainstream underpinning Western value theories do not accommodate. The arguments from traditional cultures can also be illustrated paradigms cultures such as those and of the models Melanesia that and directed underlie Polynesia, them. many against the In traditional of the operative assumptions of the Northern social paradigms are, very reasonably, not accepted. Where these cultures still prevail with some measure of regional autonomy, there is good prospect of thwarting more environmentally destructive practices. Features of the local culture can be immediately harnessed. But much of the inhabited and there are already New governed and by environmentally less unscathed World peoples of predominantly European stock. distinctive features 8 observable in New World is now Although cultures, �assumptions of the dominant Northern paradigms have hardly been sufficiently questioned, let alone overthrown, especially among the managerial other, or even lesser, features of surprisingly leave There are out cultures significant as artistic and intellectual usually cultural industrial culture, though economically dominated accompanying other conspicuous The incomplete social paradigms outlined do not exhaust features of the accompanying rather to be sure, does affords European culture. This alternatives. a discrepancies. established have an somewhat as that in romanticism and a significant feature of American Indian gives *l but Northern features. This icing. discerned, precarious foothold for an aesthetic approach to the environment, such evidenced So the cultures will have to be invoked if change in approach is to be hastened in this way. cultural features to be considered. classes. But the basis there of the as are aesthetic well more route to important environmental omissions and In particular, the dominant American paradigm omits reference to religion; also neglected are many of the connected older and formerly more prominent values of American culture. The American search for environmentally acceptable alternatives has regularly turned to these omitted features of American culture, and religious or spiritual elements, and associated past values 4 • establish "the gospel of ecology" and displace the dominant paradigm have taken a spiritual route, a quasi-religious way. and Indeed the primary attempts to representative (For example, Nash provides a sample list of the books he considers important in the rise of the new environmentalis m: virtually all that proceed beyond ecology depend on an appeal to religious elements, to divine or sacred features of natural things.) In the context of American culture the appeal something to be said for it. to religious features has For, firstly, a high proportion of the American population profess some active religious commitment; 9 and, unlike Australia, a �substantial proportion do act in accordance with that response. And, secondly, religious values do clash with dominant Northern paradigm. This sort of conflict socially the precepts was approved of perceived, considerable puzzlement, by colonised cultures, as Lini reports in the case the with of Melanesian society (p.9): The fabric of this society, with its inherent communal discipline was torn by the arrival of European commercial practices which carried with it the message of materialism, together with the creed of enlightened self-int-erest. Both aspects were a direct contradiction of Melanesian values and priorities. The introduction to Melanesia of Christianity added a further element of division and confusion in the minds of the people. While the Christian religion was widely compatible with the ethics and principles of Melanesian communalism, with its emphasis on mutuality, compassion and caring for one another, it was a practice that very few of the Europeans appeared to follow. It ran also contrary to the religion of individualism and self-interest, which not just (had) more important exponents, but was followed by the majority of Europeans ••• It is something a a puzzle how the assimilation of elements of the dominant Northern paradigm with prospects of Christianity is pulled off, though achieved it certainly is in a great many Northerners, and too many Antipodeans. a partial answer: compartmentalisation. Religion for most is a separate thing fitted into a Sunday morning box, important elements of which do not upset the standard penetrate deep. business week. escape to Thus for most believers religion does not Only for a minority does it directly such as human poverty: There is touch immediate matters why should we expect it to work for the Environment? Nonetheless widespread real adoption of religious perceptions within the American population, and reflected in the Administration, would presumably alter things. But even if some of the effects of a religious return would beneficial, and to nature domination highly be welcomed, it is also true that some of the effects of a narrow fundamentalism would be highly undesirable. of be were Unless moreover the position abandoned in favour of one of the lesser relig ious traditions the environmental effects would 10 be negative (as Watt testifies). �Religion could be more of a drawback than an asset. with any depth to it appears most unlikely. "the scientific world view". In any case such a reversal Religion in America has lost out to In part it failed deservedly: world view was seriously deficient and it did not account more scientific view could explain. the case for its for much the Consider, for instance, the matter of the existence of God, the fallaciousness of the arguments involved, etc. no virtue in front-end-in. shape. It trying return to the is world view in such great is not just that there is much that this sort of view leaves out or social it is that this perspective, a paradigm, paradigm. So incorporates it is far from uniquely determined. more intellectually satisfactory rivals (e.g. view). There view with these sorts of weaknesses But nor is the so-called scientific cannot account for; dominant to rival a richer intensional the There are scientific These rivals allow for value and wonder in natural things without taking a theological way. There is a second quasi-religious set character of of reasons some sort, for not endeavouring Christian, Jewish, whatever, on deeper environmental approaches in Australia. strongly impose a Pantheistic or These turn on the irreligious character of the culture, where an appeal through religion is unlikely to have much understood as a (the success. first) Australia, post-Christian it has been irreligious character of the understanding much else about the culture, society e.g. said, is 'best society, in which religion (is) barely relevant culturally'. *4 Even if that formulation is an generally to exaggeration the is a fact and is the key to the curious extent of the state's protrusion into Australian social life. If an approach through religion is accordingly ruled out as a main approach to hastened paradigm transition - and a related approach through mysticism or transcendentali sm excluded for analogous reasons and because of 11 the earthiness �of the culture what alternative s are open? There are other significant features of the culture running against major elements of the dominant paradigm, effectively which can perhaps be much applied quasi-relig ious approaches to turn matters around. more Western than To indicate the prospects of applying features of the culture to detach from dominant paradigms, consider how Australian culture contrasts with American. Australian mainstream culture transition from the dominant is already American political left has much stronger support in difficult to some culture. Australia way It along the leftward is not merely that the than USA. It is not indicate features of the Australian cultural situation which show its left-displac ement from the dominant Western paradigm. some elements of the contrast:- 12 The next table lists �TABLE 2. CONTRASTING ELEMENTS IN AUSTRALIAN AND AMERICAN CULTURE SCALE OF INCREASE *2 individualistic ethos inacceptability of socialist institutions inegalitarian attitudes POSITIVE inegalitarian practices ITEMS (PER level of consumerism CAPITA maximization quest WHERE imperialist drive RELEVANT) extent of violence police and military commitment high technology involvement functional rationality environmental inactivism AUSTRALIA USA SCALE OF INCREASE level of urbanisation legal obstacles to environmental action NEGATIVE official opposition to environmental practices, such as dedication of ITEMS wilderness administrative delays in implementing environmental practices, such as pollution requirements, recycling, etc. 13 �Thus there are some offsetting negative items as well as positive items in the in the contrast. Since, however, most of these contrasting elements bear on first diagram of rival paradigms in a way favourable to Australian culture as opposed to American, it appears that prospects indeed better. themes for applying the culture are This important theme requires elaboration and confirmation. The task can profitably be combined with others: there is much work here both for environmental spectators with an empirical bent and for environmental activists. A first task is to separate out what is known, what requires and what ought to be done (ideologically ). and their surrounds, distinguishing firstly theses: A weak confirmation, Let us focus on transition theses, factual and normative transition factual transition thesis, that Western (European) culture is undergoing a transition away from the dominant confirmed by several Northern sociologists (e.g. better results could be obtained in Australia; social Marsh). paradigm, has been Presumably similar or but appropriate samplings of the community have not been done, analysed and so on - environmental sociology being a neglected undoubtedly field also in Australia. Another weak factual transition thesis holds, namely that since 1960 a significant percentage of the each human community in specifiable advanced Western countries such as Australia have come to adopt main assumptions of the alternative environmental paradigm. But again comparative-fig ures sociological work are entirely of data to Though impressionistic tells us that environmental activism is greater in Australia than USA - indeed more intensive than piece lacking. anywhere else, an immensely build upon - we lack solid confirmation. sociogeographer s to do. 14 important There is much for �Throughout, · as you may have noticed, a normative transition thesis has been taken largely for granted, that Australian culture, indeed Western culture generally, ought to be undergoing a major paradigm Western paradigms and their away from dominant variations (such as those of advocated corporate capitalism and of the post-indus trial society), transiting shift, and towards an environmen tal alternative . furthermore ought the arguments. It is also be That complex normative thesis is argued for in environmen tal philosophy, and fortunately there isn't repeat to time to argued against there, but, to sum up the opposition case cavalierly, unconvincin gly. Given then that the transition is going on, indeed emerging are are clear doing environmen tal encourage enough. for it in Australia? example, directing action going be aiming swing major Preliminary against the to organisatio ns. on, answers sources of They should increase their support bases, but not merely by membership They should be endeavourin g to influence the dominant regional culture, for the potential appears to be there for a considerabl y greater change than has thus far been two be despoilatio n and the like, primarily industrial organisatio ns and drives and environmen tal education. and to Not only should activists be continuing with what those supposed to regulate them, further (public) also ought ought then to be going on with greater rapidity, how is it hastened, how do environmen tal activists they and parts to this further practice which achieved. There are can run in tandem, a more negative and a more positive part: • More negatively, it involves cutting down and countering the flow of propaganda in favour of the dominant paradigms both locally but especially from the North. That is important in reversing the extent of Northern co-option. includes gently a range of activities some with solid bases in local culture, such as lopping anti-Americ an It off the tall poppies pedalling and anti-Northe rn activities. 15 the stuff, and careful The latter practices (which should �. . not of course reduce merely to personall y directed antagonism ) fit in well other regional environm ental with aims, such as independe nt and nonaligne d defence policies. • More positivel y, it consists in promoting and adapting other also despised features of alternati ve paradigms . ambassado rs, Australia n It is culture that work directly towards themes of commonly Northern intellect uals Lawrence ). adapted like are, of course, those nonmaxim izing making-do socialist ic ones, of local natural the The features to be egalitari an, along environm ents. with the combines enough: cultural with promoted or anti-auth oritarian , rapidly increasin g Nonmaxim izing, for example, is reflected in the She'll be right and It'll do approach often and and note, that are responsib le for the low repute in which some of the cultural character s are held (e.g. appreciat ion commonly taken to things, egalitari an methods as encapsula ted in Fair go and Enough's consider the effects of these, decently applied, in economics , in local markets. As for mateship, sure it could use widening, a main problem being its restrictio n in practice to extension male relations hips: to communit ies (includin g nonhuman s). is there for deep cultural transform ation: but why not encourage its So, to conclude, the potential we must help to realise it. FOOTNOTES 1. The term 'approach es' is intended to include both theory and both espoused ideology and behaviour . 2. They did not go under because of the weakness of their intellect ual positions . At bottom their religious beliefs, for example, were no more ridiculou s than those of Christian ity. Typically they were much weakened by new diseases, and overwhelm ed by new technolog y often applied in violent fashion. 3. By integrity is meant much more than retaining represent ative samples of this and that system or species; not represent ative southern sassafras , parma wallabies and Torres Strait Islanders , but sufficien tly many. 16 practice, �4. Another past philosophic al basis for environmen tal philosophy, American naturalism, seems to have been little developed, despite the promise some have seen in it. *1 The aesthetic route Highwater. *2 Note well that it is not being claimed that Australian culture is egalitarian (in conformity with a popular myth); only that it is less inegalitari an than American. The hard data underlying the claim--rs assembled in 'Culture and the roots of political divergence '. *3 For Griffin's conception of Canberra - a much smaller Canberra, which included a rail loop - see, to start with, Birrell (still the best source on Griffin). The first quotation from Griffin is quoted in Birrell, p.178; the second is from Griffin's article in Australian Wild Life. *4 P. is well-illust rated by the main approach in O'Farrell. REFERENCES J. Highwater, The Primal Mind. Vision Harper & Row, New York, 1981. J. Birrell, Walter Burley Griffin, Queensland U.P., 1964. W.B. Griffin, -. ) , '\ and ,• Reality in Indian America, Australian Wild Life W. Lini, Keynote Address, Australia and the South Pacific, Proceedings a Conference held at the Australian National University, 1982. P. O'Farrell, 'The cultural ambivalence of Australian religion', in Culture and the State in Australia, Australian Cultural History 1 (1982) Canberra. R. Nash, 'Rounding out the American revolution: ethical extension and the new environmen talism', typescript, University of California at Santa Barbara, 1982. A. Marsh, Protect and Political Consciousne ss, Sage Beverley Hills, 1977. s. Cotgrove, Catastrophe and Cornucopia, Wiley, ,\,'. ~· , ,, R. Routley, 'Roles and limits of paradigms action', in Elliot and Gare, 260-293. R. Elliot and A. Ga:re, Environmen tal Philosophy. Readings, University of Queensland Press, 1983. of c- r- 17 , 1982. in environmen tal A thought Collection and of � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Draft Papers Description An account of the resource Sylvan's literary executor encountered an archive in which “all his projects were current", since manuscripts were undated and unattributed. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document WORKING DRAFT 1'l}l' T1 1,,i··) CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, AND APPROACHES TO THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT - AN AUSTRALIAN PERSPECTIVE Many of you know that Canberra was originally designed by Walter Burley 'lO Griffin. This talk is dedicated to him. You may not know that Griffin, an c111,d l,ee,tJ>,, I! a ,~cJ/2...ru/.1t-l/ '";~1/n,-,l,c1... American who migrated to Australia in 1913, was not simply an architect and A lantlscape designer_, but one of Australia's early deeper ecologists. key elements of the Western industrial paradigm, especially on making nature the servant of man', 'land to be accorded the 'concentration and discerned instead elements of a different 'consciousness' (the word is his). took the He rejected His approach was holistic, and respect he due to a highly developed and perfected living organism not to be exterminated or treated as dead material, or as a mere section of a map'. Canberra, now no mere section of map, is still, for all its deficiencies, perhaps the best approximation anywhere .eco~osic-.w, city; but it is not only removed from Griffin's original conception but far from deep ecological ideals. * * *3 * * * * The objective of the larger investigation, of which this part, is to gauge the extent to which Australian contrasted with American culture, contains developable will underpin a under which many suffers. talk sketches a culture, especially as elements (seeds) which different political framework from the bastardised capitalism people presently labour and local environment frequently It is not necessary to see the present political arrangements and the political course interested to in charted as environmentally alternative structures: socially disastrous to be it is enough, for example, to view them r ,i,v~c~ntL..:f- [.<-ol"l,-" hd<--t r7' <-.~ .::.. P,r~t- f tl. /~J 1 or J I C-IJll·A-r~u... ) ~ tn "S. those as far from satisfactory, or very far from the of best to be interested in the prospects of turning things around somewhat, to worlds, increasing ecological resistance [negative action] against vandalism and like, and ecological construction [direct positive action]. the grounds give remarkable level of environmental activism that has the especially hope, damage, environment There are several distinctive features of Australian culture that for attainable of somehow emerged among the people. It is worth trying to pull together some of these features of the culture, to look at ways of furthering the valuable parts, and increasing the level of concern and activism. the towards practices, and attitudes different approaches, different 1 Indeed appreciation of, environment. have cultures different Without doubt practices towards, and respect for the natural environment are highly culturally dependent: and where they still survive uncorrupted still have - nonimperial cultures had much exploitative less whose North, industrial exploitation approaches to practices not vandalism and the environment merely environmental but to a marked extent depend upon such practices. control" their of local typically under the missionary, colonial or imperial domination. in But occasionally, notably retained the of those than gross permit Mostly these more benign cultures have however "lost environments, Most American Jews and American Indians. instance, for compare, sufficient autonomy the to adjacent Pacific, regional cultures 2 have slow or even halt environmental destruction. Thus, for example, rainforest damaging projects have been delayed or blocked in Melanesia largely through Melanesian attitudes to the land. One important way then to try to slow environmental degradation, especially in the South, is to foster certain both sweepingly, regional cultural autonomy; socialism and indigenous for cultural instance land rights movements. 2 differences to support and, more Melanesian For, where the cultures have not been excessively corrupted by Northern influences, this is rapid way of paradigms. in the a cultural differences can also serve Antipodes, in particular in Australia, to at least assist in transition to different Such comparatively activating alternative paradigms to the dominant Northern social The question arises whether elsewhere a less environmentally exploitative social paradigms. transition is unlikely to occur unless it is based on the culture. Can features of the culture and the social life be used to foster and make requisite differences? In the case of Australia, a basis culture, is there both in the land and the and things appear sufficiently different from those in the cultures of the industrialised North to allow (some hope) for cultural differentiation. the need for change, at least if the natural environment is to retain some It semblance of integrity, there is little doubt. that there is, in is becoming platitudinous the longer run not much prospect for the integrity of many local natural environments and ecosystems loose Of 3 unless we in the Antipodes break from the damaging cultural assumptions and practice of the industrialised North and work destructive towards establishment of a less in some parts, rising tide war. of For despite environmental the industrialised North still appears in the grip of established forces and unlikely to budge in time - short of nuclear environmentally culture, towards a certain regional cultural autonomy. elements of regionalism in the North, despite a concern different disaster, such Though we who seek change can count on some support from minority movements in the North, nonetheless if we are to achieve changes, we must go largely alone. Nor is the Australia because as well as the location, the advantage of the ground and its southern seeds of cultural difference are already there and growing. cultivation. Such a it task of paradigm transition entirely hopeless in like most new and more fragile developments they need attention and speedy as careful But if task is rendered urgent also by other matters of 3 environmental and human concern, not just the gathering signs but colossal biological losses through of nuclear rapid destruction of, e.g. war, tropical rainforests, indeed mounting evidence of environmental decline almost everywhere humans now establish. How does philosophy fit into the strategy of harnessing regional culture to alter approaches to the environment? As in the title of the talk it operates in the middle, not as an idle middleman, but more like and design culture. principles A working picture that the main components of the discussion together - a picture that also like most images of the more abstract distorts across organising of the dynamic linkage in a good suspension bridge, which lifts the environmental way on the ropes of regional links the is that of a suspension the gap often separating people from the natural environment. bridge There are people, and the environment, and approaches by bridges to the environment, like so:- approach ➔ Natural Environment People (Of course people may be part of the natural environment: the picture doesn't exclude that important overlap.) The connecting bridges may be of very different sorts, ranging from rustic bridges good for careful foot traffic, through the monumental suspension bridge at Middle Harbour, to modern high-tech bridges able to carry nuclear tanks and bulldozers over large spans. of But it is the structure all these types of bridges carrying the approaches that matter particularly. The spans are carried by the ropes of culture, and the pylons of culture if 4 you will. ~ {dC"' CULTURE l (--.__ APPROACH ~ ____,___.- ·'--- So with approaches. different ------- ----- - cultures, different carrying bridges different It is better to see the link component in the middle - philosophy, but it might almost as well be sociology - not as part of the nuts and bolts and rivets of the structures. types, bridges, but rather It has its analytical computing the loads and as parts, the design looking stresses at on them; and engineering of the the components, and it also has its more holistic elements, considering the bridges themselves and of them their - the social paradigms embedded in the cultures. select substructures Philosophy, the link subject, is then the architecture and engineering of the business. Less figuratively, assumptions of a philosophy replacement, or marxist philosophies. deep ecology, asks deeper assumptions of all and and assumptions paradigms. the operative for example of free Philosophy, especially metaphysics and not deeper questions, extracting the fundamental other subjects and assembling the intellectual assumptions embodied in a culture or social way of life, i.e. social assembles culture applied in environmental practices, the assumptions, that is, to be considered for enterprise isolates In what are sometimes called the this respect philosophy - which includes much more than conceptual analysis - is first among the intellectual subjects, as logic, the science of reasoning, is the first among the sciences, investigating the form of arguments and methodology of all other sciences. philosophical investigation extracts, 5 The deeper assumptions such when put together yield a philosophy in the more popular sense (as e.g. enterprise philosophy): in philosophy of life or again the free in any case the result will be a philosophical theory or the rudiments of a philosophical paradigm, depending on how it is done. By largely philosophical investigation then, assumptions of the techniques we try contrasted base. with operative to test apparent we trace and Northern social paradigms; the adequacy social of the organise the and by sociological assemblage, especially as alternatives with some environmental support So much has already been accomplished, in a rough and ready way, and some results are illustrated in diagram 1. Details of other positions, the old culture (as positions typically offer environmental a projected), transition alternative. are from And and new left and the counter included in the diagram because these the while the dominant it may Western appear paradigm to indeed is - a long political way from the dominant paradigm to the environmental alternative, of the intermediate taken one at a time. details steps is not so great; To illustrate the way transitions can of the first line (row) in macro-economic form. construed as representing package typically includes environment, so the in components each and the steps can, and have, been be made, consider The dominant objective is to maximize some economic package of goods and services being such as GDP, a rough way standard of living. minimal to quality of life this But the and and pollution, and perhaps with additions for non-material features excluded in dominant consciousness. this way we arrive at New Left thinking with the objective to considerable reservations, X(RR). of material goes back to Greek philosophy; 6 In growth The real break however comes with members of the counterculture, the Hippies and Yippies for example, idea the objective function to be maximized gets much complicated, with subtractions for externalities such as noise subject the though the namely, the abandonment of growth and maximization objectives altogether, for less material nonmaximizing the macroeconomic steady-state objective or will level, for economy, something economists have so far sketched. which Daly for At the idea gets partially represented by the goal of a sustainable be goals. example though the alternative environmental much less inflexible and nationalistic than In fact the "emerging steady-state advocates, paradigm", affords only a shallow alternative to the dominant paradigm, differing only as to growth and reserves themes. But a fuller diagram of paradigms would include - among others such advanced corporate capitalism the higher-dimensional steady state position; involve would However, the higher dimensional how a better argued transition can be made; diagram essentially by combining steady-state arguments against macroeconomic growth and stocks assumptions the Left-socialist combination, which framework would a diagram, and remove the convenient ~simplification of the two dimensional left-right transition. indicates it so case does not against microeconomic themes. touch human relations, a with Even so, even with the narrower anthropocentric have been left behind, deeper environmental concern would have only began to enter. Reaching behind the dominant Western paradigm so outlined to the underlying social model takes us towards the following familiar picture: society consists of a set of individual humans of decidedly impoverished type, e.g. they are not genuinely interrelated, so they are isolated, and, though they are the only sort of items that have intensional (mental) features, they have (e.g. a certain ability to calculate). but few of these At bottom, these individuals have utilities, reflecting preferences or self-interests, which they aim to maximize; and so they are competitive (by virtue of scarcity). that they are possessive, and possess capital. The distinctive the feature means of Their other feature is production, e.g. land, of the American model is of course is that individuals can separately accumulate the means of production. 7 To ensure their rABLI J. COMPLll NG SOC IAL l'ARAD IGMS <ENVIRONMENTALLY - OR I [ifl [D REPRESEIITAT IONJ .... RIGHT - LEFT POLITICAL ORIENTAT!Otl DOMINANT (XJ WESTERN PARADIGM CORE THEMES ECONOMIC ORGANISATIONAL POLITICAL FURTHER ENVIRONMENTAL MATERIAL (ECONOMIC) GROWTH DOMINANCE OVER NATURE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT A RESOURCE MARKET FORCES (MINIMALLY REGULATED, PRODUCTIVITY AND PROFIT MAXIMIZING) PREDOMINANTLY PRIVATE OWNERSHIP OF PRODUCTIVE MEANS I ND IV I DUALI ST I c/ COMPETITIVE ETHOS ELITIST/REWARDS FOR APPROVED ACHIEVEMENT CONSUMERISM ENCOURAGED URBAN-INDUSTRIAL COMMODITY/CULTURAL PACKAGING CENTRALISED : URBAN CENTRED LARGE-SCALE: ORDERED (POWER-) HIERARCHICAL HUMAN RELATIONS SECONDARY /OLD 1LEFT /NEW LEFT 1 I X 1X<R) X X I X IX 1X<RRl I y IX<R) I X ➔ Y 1X<Rl I X(RR) !COMMAND SYSTEM I I I I y y I y :X(Q) I y I X I X(Q) I X I X xrn> 1 IX :x-v I X X<R) I X-'>Y NATIONAL FOCUS; MILITARY DEFENCE X I I X ALTERNATIVE STRUCTURES (POWER-BROKERS AND EXPERTS PROMINENT) LAW AND ORDER; LEGAL REGULATION, POLICE BACKED X X 1X<Q> IX(Q) i X I ly(R) FAITH IN SCIENCE: HIGH TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS SEPARATION OF REASON/ EMOTION, FACT/VALUE, SCIENTIFIC/UTILITARIAN RATIONALITY; ANALYTIC REDUCTIONISTIC y ly(Q) I AMPLE RESERV~S (OR (SUBSTITUTES) [NVIRONMENTAL CONTROLLABLE! y IXCQ) I X->Y I I Y<Q> I y I I v Y X<R) y /HUMAN RELATIONS !PRIMARY 'v<Q> I X X·->Y y y 'xrn> 'x<R> y X I 1X<R) X I X X X I X IX X :x<R> y X I X y X I X I RATIONALITY I I I /REJECTED I IDEEP ECOLOGY 1DISTINGU!Sfl[D I I !GREATER VALUE ASSUMPTIOt-j /REJECTED (FOR BIOSPECIES /IMPART I ALI TY) /TRADITIONAL MARKETS WITHIN PUBLIC INTEREST / FRAMEWORK LIMITED OWNERSHIP OF / PRODUCTIVE MEANS jDECENTRALISED: I I I Y/NON OWNERSHIP COMMUNAL I I /SMALL-SCALE; FLEXIBLE NON-(POWER)HIERARCHJCAL /HUMAN RELATIONS WITHIN / ECO-COMMUN I TY REGIONAL/NEIGHBOURHOOD I FOCUS; SOCIAL (NON- /VIOLENT) DEFENCE / PARTICIPATIVE STRUCTURES l(cJTIZEN-WORKER I INVOLVEMENT) /LIBERATION; SOCIAL /REGULATION /EARTH SUPPLIES LIMITED y /NATURE DELICATELY BALANCED 1NATURE BENIGN /OTHER ANIMALS ALSO INTENTIONAL X➔Y I /COLLECTIVE ETHOS/ ,soCJAL PROVISION EGALITARIAN/INCOME NEED I RELATED / CAREFUL USE/RECYCLING ' /Y(ES SENT IAL) LOCALIS~LF-MANAGEMENT /PRODUCT/CULTURE EMPHASIS/ y y ? !ALTERNATIVE (Y) ENVIRONMENTAL PAR.4DIGM 1 / LE SS MATERIAL GOALS (E,G, SELF- REALISATION) /HARMON Y WITH NATURE /NATURAL ENVIRONMENT VALUED FOR ITSELF I y I y I I ICOUNTER 1CULTURE I I I STATE lowNERSHIP X X X NATURE HOSTILE/NEUTRAL NONHUMANS ESSENTIALLY ME CHAN I ST! C EPISTEMIC/ PHILOSOPHIC DOMINANT ISTATE I SOCIALIST ... I LIMITS TO SCIENCE: IAPPROPRIATE TECHNOLOGY ! INTEGRATION OF REASON/ EMOTION, FACT/VALUE , , , I~/J DER RATIONALITY (OR) REJECTION OF NARROWER; /HOLi ST IC IV /NATURAL AS TELEOLOGICAL I I ..• • I entitlement to this is the initial argument, on this model, for the coercive apparatus of the (minimal) state. natural, this about self-interested Features There is nothing compulsory, or Individuals picture. competing individuals are matter of these nurture, abstract not nature. of the American economic archtype are a matter of culture, a result of training, not human nature, as a comparison where approximating particularly individuals are not like this, individuals embody rationality either: with helps other traditional show. cultures, Nor do these archtypal only a question-begging argument leads to the American model as something naturally required. The transitions to the left already go beyond the American model. certain introduces human The relations. chauvinistic (anthropocentric) but they do left not models omit are social The left still human relations: the further big step to the environmental alternative is to widen these relations to full community relations, independent value. recognising That is a creatures and nonhuman things as of bigger step, a step that no Western political institutions make requisite allowance for, and that mainstream underpinning Western value theories do not accommodate. The arguments from traditional cultures can also be illustrated paradigms and cultures such as those the of models Melanesia that and directed underlie Polynesia, them. many of against the In traditional the operative assumptions of the Northern social paradigms are, very reasonably, not accepted. Where these cultures still prevail with some measure of regional autonomy, there is good prospect of thwarting more environmentally destructive practices. Features of the local culture can be immediately harnessed. But much of the inhabited and there are already New governed and by environmentally less unscathed World peoples of predominantly European stock. distinctive features 8 observable in New World is now Although cultures, assumptions of the dominant Northern paradigms have hardly been sufficiently questioned, let alone overthrown, especially among the manag~rial other, or even lesser, features of surprisingly leave out There are cultures significant as artistic and intellectual usually cultural industrial culture, though economically dominated accompanying other conspicuous The incomplete social paradigms outlined do not exhaust features of the accompanying rather to be icing. discerned, features. sure, This does affords European culture. This alternatives. a discrepancies. established have an somewhat as that in romanticism and a significant feature of American Indian gives *l but Northern precarious foothold for an aesthetic approach to the environment, such evidenced So the cultures will have to be invoked if change in approach is to be hastened in this way. cultural features to be considered. classes. But the basis there of are the as aesthetic well more route to important environmental omissions and In particular, the dominant American paradigm omits reference to religion; also neglected are many of the connected older and formerly more prominent values of American culture. The American search for environmentally acceptable alternatives has regularly turned to these omitted features of American culture, and religious or spiritual elements, and associated past values 4 • establish "the gospel of ecology" and displace the dominant paradigm have taken a spiritual route, a quasi-religious way. and Indeed the primary attempts to representative new environmentalism: (For example, Nash provides a sample list of the books he considers important in the rise of the virtually all that proceed beyond ecology depend on an appeal to religious elements, to divine or sacred features of natural things.) In the context of American culture the appeal something to be said for it. to religious features has For, firstly, a high proportion of the American population profess some active religious commitment; • 9 and, unlike Australia, a substantial do proportion act response. And, secondly, religious values do clash with dominant Northern paradigm. This sort of socially that with accordance in conflict precepts the was approved of perceived, considerable puzzlement, by colonised cultures, as Lini reports in the case the with of Melanesian society (p.9): The fabric of this society, with its inherent communal discipline was torn by the arrival of European commercial practices which ••• carried with it the message of materialism, together with the creed of Both aspects were a direct contradiction enlightened self-interest. of Melanesian values and priorities. The introduction to Melanesia of Christianity added a further element of division and confusion in the While the Christian religion was widely minds of the people. compatible with the ethics and principles of Melanesian communalism, with its emphasis on mutuality, compassion and caring for one another, it was a practice that very few of the Europeans appeared to follow. and individualism of religion It ran also contrary to the self-interest, which not just (had) more important exponents, but was followed by the majority of Europeans ••• It is something a a puzzle how the assimilation of elements of the dominant paradigm with prospects of Christianity is pulled off, though achieved Northern There is it certainly is in a great many Northerners, and too many Antipodeans. a compartmentalisation. partial answer: Religion for most is a separate thing fitted into a Sunday morning box, important elements of which do not the upset standard penetrate deep. business to Thus for most believers religion does not week. Only for a minority does it directly such as human poverty: escape touch immediate matters why should we expect it to work for the Environment? Nonetheless widespread real adoption of religious perceptions within the American population, and reflected in the Administration, would presumably alter things. But even if some of the effects of a religious return would beneficial, and to nature domination highly be welcomed, it is also true that some of the effects of a narrow fundamentalism would be highly undesirable. of be were Unless moreover the position abandoned in favour of one of the lesser religious traditions the environmental effects would 10 be negative (as Watt testifies). Religion could be more of a drawback than an asset. Religion in America has lost out to with any depth to it appears most unlikely. the There existence of God, the fallaciousness of the arguments involved, etc. no But nor is the so-called scientific front-end-in. cannot account for; it is that this perspective, a paradigm, a richer more intellectually satisfactory rivals (e.g. view). such great the incorporates There are it is far from uniquely determined. So paradigm. social dominant in view world is not just that there is much that this sort of view leaves out or It shape. is view with these sorts of weaknesses the to return to trying in virtue rival Consider, for instance, the matter of the view could explain. scientific much for world view was seriously deficient and it did not account more the case for its In part it failed deservedly: view". world scientific "the In any case such a reversal intensional scientific These rivals allow for value and wonder in natural things without taking a theological way. character quasi-religious reasons of set second There is a of some sort, for not endeavouring Christian, strongly These on turn the irreligious character of the culture, where an appeal through religion is unlikely to have much as understood a (the Australia, success. first) post-Christian it has been irreligious character the of understanding much else about the culture, society e.g. 'best is said, society, in which religion (is) barely relevant culturally'. *4 Even if that formulation is an generally a Pantheistic or Jewish, whatever, on deeper environmental approaches in Australia. impose to exaggeration the is a fact and is the key to the curious extent of the state's protrusion into Australian social life. If an approach through religion is accordingly ruled out as a main approach to hastened paradigm transition - and a related approach through mysticism or transcendentalism excluded for analogous reasons and because of 11 the earthiness of the culture - what alternatives are open? There are other significant features of the culture running against major elements of the dominant paradigm, effectively which can perhaps applied be much quasi-religious approaches to turn matters around. more Western than To indicate the prospects of applying features of the culture to detach from dominant paradigms, consider how Australian culture contrasts with American. Australian mainstream culture transition from the dominant is already American political left has much stronger support in difficult to some culture. Australia way It along the leftward is not merely that the than USA. It is not indicate features of the Australian cultural situation which show its left-displacement from the dominant Western paradigm. some elements of the contrast:- 12 The next table lists TABLE 2. CONTRASTING ELEMENTS IN AUSTRALIAN AND AMERICAN CULTURE SCALE OF INCREASE *2 individualistic ethos inacceptability of socialist institutions inegalitarian attitudes POSITIVE inegalitarian practices ITEMS (PER level of consumerism CAPITA maximization quest WHERE imperialist drive RELEVANT) extent of violence police and military commitment high technology involvement functional rationality environmental inactivism USA AUSTRALIA SCALE OF INCREASE level of urbanisation legal obstacles to environmental action NEGATIVE official opposition to environmental practices, such as dedication of ITEMS wilderness administrative delays in implementing environmental practices, such as pollution requirements, recycling, etc. 13 Thus there are some offsetting negative items as well as positive items in the in the contrast. Since, however, most of these contrasting elements bear on first diagram of rival paradigms in a way favourable to Australian culture as opposed to American, it appears that prospects indeed better. themes for applying the culture are This important theme requires elaboration and confirmation. The task can profitably be combined with others: there is much work here both for environmental spectators with an empirical bent and for environmental activists. A first task is to separate out what is known, what requires and what ought to be done (ideologically). and their surrounds, distinguishing firstly theses: A weak confirmation, Let us focus on transition theses, factual and normative transition factual transition thesis, that Western (European) culture is undergoing a transition away from the dominant confirmed by several Northern sociologists (e.g. better results could be obtained in Australia; social Marsh). paradigm, has been Presumably similar or but appropriate samplings of the community have not been done, analysed and so on - environmental sociology being a neglected undoubtedly field also in Another Australia. weak factual transition thesis holds, namely that since 1960 a significant percentage of the each human community in specifiable advanced Western countries such as Australia have come to adopt main assumptions of the alternative environmental paradigm. But again comparative-figures sociological work are entirely of data to Though impressionistic tells us that environmental activism is greater in Australia than USA - indeed more intensive than piece lacking. anywhere else, an immensely build upon - we lack solid confirmation. sociogeographers to do. 14 important There is much for Throughout, as you may have noticed, a normative transition thesis has been taken largely for granted, that Australian culture, indeed Western culture generally, ought to be undergoing a major paradigm Western paradigms and their away from dominant variations (such as those of advocated corporate capitalism and of the post-industrial society), transiting shift, and towards an environmental alternative. furthermore ought the arguments. It is also be That complex normative thesis is argued for in environmental philosophy, and fortunately there isn't repeat to time to argued against there, but, to sum up the opposition case cavalierly, unconvincingly. Given then that the transition is going on, indeed emerging are are clear doing environmental encourage enough. for it in Australia? example, directing action going be aiming swing major Preliminary against the to organisations. on, answers sources of They should increase their support bases, but not merely by membership They should be endeavouring to influence the dominant regional culture, for the potential appears to be there for a considerably greater change than has thus far been two be despoilation and the like, primarily industrial organisations and drives and environmental education. and to Not only should activists be continuing with what those supposed to regulate them, further (public) also ought ought then to be going on with greater rapidity, how is it hastened, how do environmental activists they and parts to this further practice which achieved. There are can run in tandem, a more negative and a more positive part: • More negatively, it involves cutting down and countering the flow of propaganda in favour of the dominant paradigms both locally but especially from the North. That is important in reversing the extent of Northern co-option. includes gently a range of activities some with solid bases in local culture, such as lopping anti-American It off the tall poppies pedalling and anti-Northern activities. 15 the stuff, and careful The latter practices (which should not of course reduce merely to personally directed antagonism) fit in well other regional environmental with aims, such as independent and nonaligned defence policies. • More positively, it consists in promoting and adapting other also despised features of alternative paradigms. ambassadors, Australian It is culture that work directly towards themes of commonly are, of course, those Lawrence). like nonmaximizing making-do socialistic ones, appreciation Northern intellectuals of local natural the The features to be egalitarian, along environments. with the combines enough: cultural with promoted or anti-authoritarian, rapidly increasing Nonmaximizing, for example, is reflected in the She'll be right and It'll do approach often and and note, that are responsible for the low repute in which some of the cultural characters are held (e.g. adapted commonly taken to things, egalitarian methods as encapsulated in Fair go and Enough's consider the effects of these, decently applied, in economics, in local markets. As for mateship, sure it could use widening, a main problem being its restriction in practice to extension male relationships: to communities (including nonhumans). is there for deep cultural transformation: but why not encourage its So, to conclude, the potential we must help to realise it. FOOTNOTES 1. The term 'approaches' is intended to include both theory and both espoused ideology and behaviour. 2. They did not go under because of the weakness of their intellectual positions. At bottom their religious beliefs, for example, were no more ridiculous than those of Christianity. Typically they were much weakened by new diseases, and overwhelmed by new technology often applied in violent fashion. 3. By integrity is meant much more than retaining representative samples of this and that system or species; not representative southern sassafras, parma wallabies and Torres Strait Islanders, but sufficiently many. 16 practice, 4. Another past philosophical basis for environmental philosophy, American naturalism, seems to have been little developed, despite the promise some have seen in it. *1 The aesthetic route Highwater. is well-illustrated by the main approach in *2 Note well that it is not being claimed that Australian culture is egalitarian (in conformity with a popular myth); only that it is less inegalitarian than American. The hard data underlying the claim---ri assembled in 'Culture and the roots of political divergence'. *3 For Griffin's conception of Canberra - a much smaller Canberra, which included a rail loop - see, to start with, Birrell (still the best source on Griffin). The first quotation from Griffin is quoted in Birrell, p.178; the second is from Griffin's article in Australian Wild Life. *4 P. O'Farrell. REFERENCES J. Highwater, The Primal Mind. Vision Harper & Row, New York, 1981. J. Birrell, Walter Burley Griffin, Queensland U.P., 1964. W.B. Griffin, (,0· cc,,/' «.,PL'0"1 d I (on and Reality in Indian America, · __ ,.,.,, ja,n;~, Australian Wild Life J_ (f9Jt-f/), ty ·-J, W. Lini, Keynote Address, Australia and the South Pacific, Proceedings a Conference held at the Australian National University, 1982. P. O'Farrell, 'The cultural ambivalence of Australian religion', in Culture and the State in Australia, Australian Cultural History 1 (1982) Canberra. R. Nash, 'Rounding out the American revolution: ethical extension and the new environmentalism', typescript, University of California at Santa Barbara, 1982. A. Marsh, Protect and Political Consciousness, Sage Beverley Hills, 1977. s. Cotgrove, Catastrophe R. Routley, 'Roles and limits of paradigms action', in Elliot and Qlre, 260-293. R. Elliot and A. Gare, Environmental Philosophy. Readings, University of Queensland Press, 1983. or- aae Cornucopia, Wiley, 17 ~~J~rh , of 1982. in environmental thought A Collection and of Job No. ................................................................................. . 7/J>/JVh SOCPAC PRINTERY Received ........................................................................... REQUEST FOR PRINTING 05471 No Research Schools of Social Sciences & Pacific Studies (/. I L tJC,;c_ )1 -1 Department ............................................................................................................................................ . rl Person Requiring Work ......... ?. 1-......... e.. . .<..t ... ./.. . . . ':l.............................. 5. . . .... . . . . ... ..... .... . . .... . . .. . .. . . .. . ... ... .. c c School ............................................................................................................................................................. . 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Please print name of Requisitioner here - .................................................. Signature ..................................................................................................................................... (REQUISITIONER/ DEPT: SECRETARY) NOTE: If papers submitted tor offset printing/photocopying contain copyright material other than Australian National University copyright Form COP-1 must accompany this request In lieu of the Declaration as above. r r" WORKING DRAFT ·. , ' I · CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, AND APPROACHES TO THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT - AN AUSTRALIAN PERSPECTIVE Many of you know tha~ Canberra was originally Griffin. This talk is (, ,~ ,/ h (: (tJ m, , . designed by Walter Burley 'i.C to him. You may not know that Griffin, an dedicated / 1,• <, , ' ' ! I ·,/ .• r : , J,,--.T~- l, c :.... American who migrated to Australia in 1913, was not simply an architect and ,1 lantlscape designe ~ but one of Australia's early deeper ecologists. key elements of the Western industrial paradigm, especially on making nature the servant of man', 'land to be accorded the 'concentration and discerned instead elements of a different 'consciousness' (the word is his). took the He rejected His approach was holistic, and respect he due to a highly developed and perfected living organism not to be exterminated or treated as dead material, or as a mere section of a map'. Canberra, now no mere section of map, is still, ,.,i/f . ,:i:. for all its deficiencies, perhaps the best approximation anywhere ~~l-0gical city; * to * * * * * gauge the extent to which Australian contrasted with American culture, contains developable will underpin a under which many suffers. -,/ /h ,1 ;1 ~11._r talk sketches a culture, especially as elements (seeds) which different political framework from the bastardised capitalism people presently labour and local environment frequently It is not necessary to see the present political arrangements and the political course interested aeeper *3 The objective of the larger investigation, of which this is a but it is not only removed from Griffin's original conception but far from deep ecological ideals. part, to in charted as environmentally alternative structures: f) ' r ,nt 1 or socially disastrous to be it is enough, for example, to view them t__ ri __f. _________ ---1 n__ {- ,-; ,:_... --1 (. "'I n,l ._ 1 ,. (•✓ L / ~• • } ' <: l7' 1 •-rt,,,_ c, , /---5-0-J. i +- I~.,, )• I as far from satisfactory, or very far from worlds, those of the best attainable to be interested in the prospects of turning things around somewhat, to increasing ecological resistance [negative action] against vandalism and the environment hope, damage, like, and ecological construction [direct positive action]. There are several distinctive features of Australian culture that for of especially the give grounds remarkable level of environmental activism that has somehow emerged among the people. It is worth trying to pull together some of these features of the culture, to look at ways of furthering the valuable parts, and increasing the level of concern and activism. Without doubt attitudes and different practices, cultures towards have the different environment. approaches, 1 different Indeed appreciation of, practices towards, and respect for the natural environment are highly culturally dependent: compare, for nonimperial cultures had much less North, exploitation and American Jews and American Indians. whose approaches to practices not vandalism the environment merely permit those of the environmental gross control" of their local typically under the missionary, colonial or imperial domination. But occasionally, notably retained than but to a marked extent depend upon such practices. Mostly these more benign cultures have however "lost environments, Most and where they still survive uncorrupted still have - exploitative industrial instance, sufficient in autonomy the to adjacent Pacific, regional cultures 2 have slow or even halt environmental destruction. Thus, for example, rainforest damaging projects have been delayed or blocked in Melanesia largely through Melanesian attitudes to the land. One important way then to try to slow environmental degradation, especially in the South, is to foster both certain sweepingly, regional cultural autonomy; socialism and indigenous for cultural instance land rights movements. 2 differences to support and, more Melanesian For, where the cultures have not been excessively corrupted by Northern influences, this is rapid way of paradigms. in the a cultural differences can also serve Antipodes, in particular in Australia, to at least assist in transition to different Such comparatively activating alternative paradigms to the dominant Northern social The question arises whether elsewhere a less environmentally exploitative social paradigms. transition is unlikely to occur unless it is based on the culture. Can features of the culture and the social life be used to foster and make requisite differences? In the case of Australia, a basis culture, is there both in the land and and things appear sufficiently different from those in the cultures of the industrialised North to allow (some hope) for cultural differentiation . the need for change, at least there is, in It is becoming platitudinous the longer run not much prospect for the integrity of many local natural environments and ecosystems loose Of if the natural environment is to retain some semblance of integrity, there is little doubt. that 3 unless we in the Antipodes break from the damaging cultural assumptions and practice of the industrialised North and work destructive towards establishment of a concern in different less some parts, rising tide war. of For despite environmental the industrialised North still appears in the grip of established forces and unlikely to budge in time - short of nuclear environmentally culture, towards a certain regional cultural autonomy. elements of regionalism in the North, despite a disaster, such largely alone. Nor is the Australia because as well as the location, the as Though we who seek change can count on some support from minority movements in the North, nonetheless if we are to achieve changes, we must go advantage of the ground and its southern seeds of cultural difference are already there and growing. cultivation. Such a it task of paradigm transition entirely hopeless in like most new and more fragile developments they need attention and speedy the careful But if task is rendered urgent also by other matters of 3 environmental and human concern, not just the gathering signs but colossal biological losses through of nuclear rapid destruction of, e.g. war, tropical rainforests, indeed mounting evidence of environmental decline almost everywhere humans now establish. How does philosophy fit into the strategy of harnessing regional culture to alter approaches to the environment? As in the title of the talk it operates in the middle, not as an idle middleman, but more like and design culture. principles A working picture that the main components of the discussion together - a picture that also like most images of the more abstract distorts across organising of the dynamic linkage in a good suspension bridge, which lifts the environmental way on the ropes of regional links the is that of a suspension the gap often separating people from the natural environment. bridge There are people, and the environment, and approaches by bridges to the environment, like so:- approach ➔ People Natural Environment (Of course people may be part of the natural environment: the picture doesn't exclude that important overlap.) The connecting bridges may be of very different sorts, ranging from rustic bridges good for careful foot traffic, through the monumental suspension bridge at Middle Harbour, to modern high-tech bridges able to carry nuclear tanks and bulldozers over large spans. of But it is the structure all these types of bridges carrying the approaches that matter particularly. The spans are carried by the ropes of culture, and the pylons of culture if 4 you will. \ \ \ \ ) (......._ APPROACH _ .,__ _. So with approaches. different '-- --------- ---~ cultures, __,.;::;f --- different carrying bridges different It is better to see the link component in the middle - philosophy, but it might almost as well be sociology - not as part of the nuts and bolts and rivets of the structures. types, bridges, but rather It has its analytical computing the loads and as parts, the design looking stresses at on them; and engineering of the the components, and it also has its more holistic elements, considering the bridges themselves and of them their - the social paradigms embedded in the cultures. select substructures Philosophy, the link subject, is then the architecture and engineering of the business. Less figuratively, assumptions of a philosophy replacement, or marxist philosophies. deep ecology, asks deeper assumptions of all and and assumptions paradigms. the operative for example of free Philosophy, especially metaphysics and not deeper questions, extracting the fundamental other subjects and assembling the intellectual assumptions embodied in a culture or social way of life, i.e. social assembles culture applied in environmental practices, the assumptions, that is, to be considered for enterprise isolates In what are sometimes called the this respect philosophy - which includes much more than conceptual analysis - is first among the intellectual subjects, as logic, the science of reasoning, is the first among the sciences, investigating the form of arguments and methodology of all other sciences. philosophical investigation extracts, 5 The deeper assumptions such when put together yield a philosophy in the more popular sense (as e.g. enterprise philosophy): in philosophy of life or again the free in any case the result will be a philosophical theory or the rudiments of a philosophical paradigm, depending on how it is done. By largely philosophical investigation then, assumptions of the techniques we try contrasted base. with operative to test apparent we trace and Northern social paradigms; the adequacy social of the organise the and by sociological assemblage, especially as alternatives with some environmental support So much has already been accomplished, in a rough and ready way, and some results are illustrated in diagram 1. Details of other positions, the old culture (as positions typically offer environmental a projected), transition alternative. are from And and new left and the counter included in the diagram because these the while the dominant it may Western appear paradigm to indeed is - a long political way from the dominant paradigm to the environmental alternative, of the intermediate taken one at a time. details steps is not so great; To illustrate the way transitions can of the first line (row) in macro-economic form. construed as representing package typically includes environment, so the in components be made, consider The dominant objective such as GDP, a rough way standard of living. minimal to quality of life this But the and and pollution, and perhaps with additions for non-material features excluded in dominant consciousness. this way we arrive at New Left thinking with the objective to considerable reservations, X(RR). of material goes back to Greek philosophy; 6 In growth The real break however comes with members of the counterculture, the Hippies and Yippies for example, idea the objective function to be maximized gets much complicated, with subtractions for externalities such as noise subject each and the steps can, and have, been is to maximize some economic package of goods and services being the though the namely, the abandonment of growth and maximization objectives altogether, for less material nonmaximizing the macroeconomic steady-state objective or will level, for economy, something economists have so far sketched. which Daly for At the idea gets partially represented by the goal of a sustainable be goals. example though the alternative environmental much less inflexible and nationalistic than In fact the ''emerging steady-state advocates, paradigm", affords only a shallow alternative to the dominant paradigm, differing only as to growth and reserves But themes. a fuller diagram of paradigms would include - among others such advanced corporate capitalism the higher-dimensional steady position; state it would involve However, the higher dimensional how a better argued transition can be made; diagram essentially by combining steady-state arguments against macroeconomic growth and stocks assumptions the Left-socialist combination, which framework would a diagram, and remove the convenient oversimplification of the two dimensional left-right transition. indicates so case does not against microeconomic themes. touch human relations, a with Even so, even with the narrower anthropocentric have been left behind, deeper environmental concern would have only began to enter. Reaching behind the dominant Western paradigm so outlined to the underlying social model takes us towards the following familiar picture: society consists of a set of individual humans of decidedly impoverished type, e.g. they are not genuinely interrelated, so they are isolated, and, though they are the only sort of items that have intensional (mental) features, they have (e.g. a certain ability to calculate). but few of these At bottom, these individuals have utilities, reflecting preferences or self-interests, which they aim to maximize; and so they are competitive (by virtue of scarcity). that they are possessive, and possess capital. The distinctive the feature means of Their other feature is production, e.g. land, of the American model is of course is that individuals can separately accumulate the means of production. 7 To ensure their T/\HLI 1. rnr·Al INCi SUC l/\L 1'/IRi\UIC,MS <lNVIRUNMINli\LLY-ORILiilrlJ REl'RESUH/\TION) "··· RIGllf - LEFT POLI T!Ci\L OHIUH/\l 10,J uo•;1NAtll m ~[STERN P/\RAD!GM LORE TII EM[ S Mr.TERIAL (ECONOMI C) GROWTH LJOMI NAN CE OVER NATURE NATUR,\L ENVIR ONM ENT A RESOURCE DOM! N/\N l ISTATE SOCI/\LI ST 1 IOLD INEW I COUNTE.R- I LffT I LEFT I CULTURE I ,X<Rl X 1 ' I X I X X X I ECONOMIC ORG.l\N[S/\T[ON/\L POLIT l CAL FURTHER ENVIRONMENTAL EPISTEMIC/ PHILOSOPHIC MARKET FORCES (MINIMALLY REGULATED, PRODU CT IVITY AN D PROFIT MAXIMIZING) PREDOMINANTLY PRIVATE OWNER SHIP OF PRODUCTIVE MEA NS [NDIVIDUALISTJC/ COMPETITIVE ETHOS EL IT IST/REWARDS FOR APPROVED ACHIEVEMENT CONSUMERISM ENCOURAGED URBAN-INDUSTRIAL co~~ODITYICULTURAL PACKAGING CENTRALISED: URBAN CE:;TRED Lr.RGE-SC ALE: ORDERED (POWER -) HIERARCHICAL HUMAr1 RE LAT I ONS SECONDARY I I y !COMMAND SYSTEM IX<Rl X<R) 1 I X<RR) y y y y y xrnJ ly(QJ X->Y X IX(Ql I I Y I Y I 1X<Q) X(Ql I 1 I I X(Q) 1X<QJ I X I X I X X I I X X<Rl X X X ly(R) NAT IONAL FOCUS; MILITARY DEFENCE X I I X ALTERN ATIVE STRUCTURES (POWER-BROKERS ANO EXPERTS PROMINENT) LAW AND ORDER; LEGAL REGULATION, POLICE BACKED X : X·➔Y I I X ➔Y X<R) X ➔Y I I Y<Q) y Y Y V IHUMAN RELATIONS jPRIMARY IY(Q) X X·->Y y y I y ITRADITIONAL MARKETS WITH IN PUBLIC INTEREST I FRAMEWORK LIMITED OWNERSHIP OF IPRODUCTIVE MEANS !DECENTRAL ISED: I COMMUNAL i 0 1REGIONALINEIGHBOURHOOD FOCUS; SOCIAL (NONIV IOLENT) DEFENCE I PARTICIPATIVE STRUCTURES J(c ITIZEN-WORKER I INVOLVEMENT) 1LIBERAT!O N; SOCIAL I IREGULATION I I X 1X<Rl I y JEARTH SUPPLIES LIMITED X I X y NATURE HOSTILE/NEUTRAL NoNHUMANS ESSENTIALLY ME CHAN l ST IC X X I X I X FAITH IN SCIENCE: HIGH TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS SEPARATION OF REASON/ EMOTION, FACT/VALUE, , , , ScIENTIF!C/UT!L!TARIAN RATIONALITY; ANALYTIC REDUCTIONISTIC X :x(R) iNATURE DELICATELY BALANCED 1NATURE BENIGN !OTHER ANIMALS ALSO INTENTIONAL y X IX y X IX I IRATIONALITY I REJECTED y X➔ Y ! 1SMALL-SCALE; FLEXIBLE NoN-(POWER)H!ERARCHJC,\L IHUMAN RELATIONS WITHIN IECO - COMMUN I TY 1 ? I o . ,:, ,u <r 4l1 n 1 lx<Rl AMPLE RESERV~S (OR (SUBSTITUTES) ENVIRONMENTAL CONTROLLABLE I I ''' ' I Y/NON OWNERSHIP I !COLLECTIVE ETHOS/ !SOCIAL PROVISION EGALITARIAN/INCOME NEED IRELATED l(AREFUL USE/RECYCLING , 1Y(ESSENTIAL) LOCAL/SELF-MANAGEMENT !PRODUCT/CULTURE EMPHASIS! X x<R> IDEEP ECOLOGY , orsT[NGU[SIIED 1LE SS MATERIAL GOALS ' (E.G. SE LF-REALISATION) ! lir.RMONY WI TH NATURE ,NATURAL ENVIRONMENT IGREATER VALUE ' VALUED FOR ITSELF ASSUMPTIOrj !REJECTED (FOR I BIOSPEC I ES I IMPARTIALITY) X--"Y I I iALTERN/\TlVE (Y) !ENVIRONMENTAL P/\R.l\D!GM y x<RR) I STATE !OWNERSHIP " I LIMITS TO SCIENCE: !APPROPRIATE TECHNOLOGY JINTEGRATION OF REASON/ EMOTION, FACT/VALUE , , , !HIDER RATIONALITY (OR REJECTION OF NARROWER); IHOLISTIC IV/NATURAL AS TELEOLOGICAL I I entitlement to this is the initial argument, on this model, for the coercive apparatus of the (minimal) state. natural, this about self-interested Features There is nothing compulsory, or picture. competing Individuals individuals are matter of these nurture, abstract not nature. of the American economic archtype are a matter of culture, a result of training, not human nature, as a comparison where approximating particularly individuals are not like this, individuals embody rationality either: with helps other traditional cultures, Nor do these archtypal show. only a question-begging argument leads to the American model as something naturally required. The transitions to the left already go beyond the American model. introduces certain relations. human chauvinistic (anthropocentric) but they The do left not models omit are social The left still human relations: the further big step to the environmental alternative is to widen these relations to full community relations, independent value. recognising That is a creatures and nonhuman things as of bigger step, a step that no Western political institutions make requisite allowance for, and that mainstream underpinning Western value theories do not accommodate. The arguments from traditional cultures can also be illustrated paradigms cultures such as those and of the models Melanesia that and directed underlie Polynesia, them. many against the In traditional of the operative assumptions of the Northern social paradigms are, very reasonably, not accepted. Where these cultures still prevail with some measure of regional autonomy, there is good prospect of thwarting more environmentally destructive practices. Features of the local culture can be immediately harnessed. But much of the inhabited and there are already New governed and by environmentally less unscathed World peoples of predominantly European stock. distinctive features 8 observable in New World is now Although cultures, assumptions of the dominant Northern paradigms have hardly been sufficiently questioned, let alone overthrown, especially among the managerial other, or even lesser, features of surprisingly leave There are out cultures significant as artistic and intellectual usually cultural industrial culture, though economically dominated accompanying other conspicuous The incomplete social paradigms outlined do not exhaust features of the accompanying rather to be sure, does affords European culture. This alternatives. a discrepancies. established have an somewhat as that in romanticism and a significant feature of American Indian gives *l but Northern features. This icing. discerned, precarious foothold for an aesthetic approach to the environment, such evidenced So the cultures will have to be invoked if change in approach is to be hastened in this way. cultural features to be considered. classes. But the basis there of the as are aesthetic well more route to important environmental omissions and In particular, the dominant American paradigm omits reference to religion; also neglected are many of the connected older and formerly more prominent values of American culture. The American search for environmentally acceptable alternatives has regularly turned to these omitted features of American culture, and religious or spiritual elements, and associated past values 4 • establish "the gospel of ecology" and displace the dominant paradigm have taken a spiritual route, a quasi-religious way. and Indeed the primary attempts to representative (For example, Nash provides a sample list of the books he considers important in the rise of the new environmentalis m: virtually all that proceed beyond ecology depend on an appeal to religious elements, to divine or sacred features of natural things.) In the context of American culture the appeal something to be said for it. to religious features has For, firstly, a high proportion of the American population profess some active religious commitment; 9 and, unlike Australia, a substantial proportion do act in accordance with that response. And, secondly, religious values do clash with dominant Northern paradigm. This sort of conflict socially the precepts was approved of perceived, considerable puzzlement, by colonised cultures, as Lini reports in the case the with of Melanesian society (p.9): The fabric of this society, with its inherent communal discipline was torn by the arrival of European commercial practices which carried with it the message of materialism, together with the creed of enlightened self-int-erest. Both aspects were a direct contradiction of Melanesian values and priorities. The introduction to Melanesia of Christianity added a further element of division and confusion in the minds of the people. While the Christian religion was widely compatible with the ethics and principles of Melanesian communalism, with its emphasis on mutuality, compassion and caring for one another, it was a practice that very few of the Europeans appeared to follow. It ran also contrary to the religion of individualism and self-interest, which not just (had) more important exponents, but was followed by the majority of Europeans ••• It is something a a puzzle how the assimilation of elements of the dominant Northern paradigm with prospects of Christianity is pulled off, though achieved it certainly is in a great many Northerners, and too many Antipodeans. a partial answer: compartmentalisation. Religion for most is a separate thing fitted into a Sunday morning box, important elements of which do not upset the standard penetrate deep. business week. escape to Thus for most believers religion does not Only for a minority does it directly such as human poverty: There is touch immediate matters why should we expect it to work for the Environment? Nonetheless widespread real adoption of religious perceptions within the American population, and reflected in the Administration, would presumably alter things. But even if some of the effects of a religious return would beneficial, and to nature domination highly be welcomed, it is also true that some of the effects of a narrow fundamentalism would be highly undesirable. of be were Unless moreover the position abandoned in favour of one of the lesser relig ious traditions the environmental effects would 10 be negative (as Watt testifies). Religion could be more of a drawback than an asset. with any depth to it appears most unlikely. "the scientific world view". In any case such a reversal Religion in America has lost out to In part it failed deservedly: world view was seriously deficient and it did not account more scientific view could explain. the case for its for much the Consider, for instance, the matter of the existence of God, the fallaciousness of the arguments involved, etc. no virtue in front-end-in. shape. It trying return to the is world view in such great is not just that there is much that this sort of view leaves out or social it is that this perspective, a paradigm, paradigm. So incorporates it is far from uniquely determined. more intellectually satisfactory rivals (e.g. view). There view with these sorts of weaknesses But nor is the so-called scientific cannot account for; dominant to rival a richer intensional the There are scientific These rivals allow for value and wonder in natural things without taking a theological way. There is a second quasi-religious set character of of reasons some sort, for not endeavouring Christian, Jewish, whatever, on deeper environmental approaches in Australia. strongly impose a Pantheistic or These turn on the irreligious character of the culture, where an appeal through religion is unlikely to have much understood as a (the success. first) Australia, post-Christian it has been irreligious character of the understanding much else about the culture, society e.g. said, is 'best society, in which religion (is) barely relevant culturally'. *4 Even if that formulation is an generally to exaggeration the is a fact and is the key to the curious extent of the state's protrusion into Australian social life. If an approach through religion is accordingly ruled out as a main approach to hastened paradigm transition - and a related approach through mysticism or transcendentali sm excluded for analogous reasons and because of 11 the earthiness of the culture what alternative s are open? There are other significant features of the culture running against major elements of the dominant paradigm, effectively which can perhaps be much applied quasi-relig ious approaches to turn matters around. more Western than To indicate the prospects of applying features of the culture to detach from dominant paradigms, consider how Australian culture contrasts with American. Australian mainstream culture transition from the dominant is already American political left has much stronger support in difficult to some culture. Australia way It along the leftward is not merely that the than USA. It is not indicate features of the Australian cultural situation which show its left-displac ement from the dominant Western paradigm. some elements of the contrast:- 12 The next table lists TABLE 2. CONTRASTING ELEMENTS IN AUSTRALIAN AND AMERICAN CULTURE SCALE OF INCREASE *2 individualistic ethos inacceptability of socialist institutions inegalitarian attitudes POSITIVE inegalitarian practices ITEMS (PER level of consumerism CAPITA maximization quest WHERE imperialist drive RELEVANT) extent of violence police and military commitment high technology involvement functional rationality environmental inactivism AUSTRALIA USA SCALE OF INCREASE level of urbanisation legal obstacles to environmental action NEGATIVE official opposition to environmental practices, such as dedication of ITEMS wilderness administrative delays in implementing environmental practices, such as pollution requirements, recycling, etc. 13 Thus there are some offsetting negative items as well as positive items in the in the contrast. Since, however, most of these contrasting elements bear on first diagram of rival paradigms in a way favourable to Australian culture as opposed to American, it appears that prospects indeed better. themes for applying the culture are This important theme requires elaboration and confirmation. The task can profitably be combined with others: there is much work here both for environmental spectators with an empirical bent and for environmental activists. A first task is to separate out what is known, what requires and what ought to be done (ideologically ). and their surrounds, distinguishing firstly theses: A weak confirmation, Let us focus on transition theses, factual and normative transition factual transition thesis, that Western (European) culture is undergoing a transition away from the dominant confirmed by several Northern sociologists (e.g. better results could be obtained in Australia; social Marsh). paradigm, has been Presumably similar or but appropriate samplings of the community have not been done, analysed and so on - environmental sociology being a neglected undoubtedly field also in Australia. Another weak factual transition thesis holds, namely that since 1960 a significant percentage of the each human community in specifiable advanced Western countries such as Australia have come to adopt main assumptions of the alternative environmental paradigm. But again comparative-fig ures sociological work are entirely of data to Though impressionistic tells us that environmental activism is greater in Australia than USA - indeed more intensive than piece lacking. anywhere else, an immensely build upon - we lack solid confirmation. sociogeographer s to do. 14 important There is much for Throughout, · as you may have noticed, a normative transition thesis has been taken largely for granted, that Australian culture, indeed Western culture generally, ought to be undergoing a major paradigm Western paradigms and their away from dominant variations (such as those of advocated corporate capitalism and of the post-indus trial society), transiting shift, and towards an environmen tal alternative . furthermore ought the arguments. It is also be That complex normative thesis is argued for in environmen tal philosophy, and fortunately there isn't repeat to time to argued against there, but, to sum up the opposition case cavalierly, unconvincin gly. Given then that the transition is going on, indeed emerging are are clear doing environmen tal encourage enough. for it in Australia? example, directing action going be aiming swing major Preliminary against the to organisatio ns. on, answers sources of They should increase their support bases, but not merely by membership They should be endeavourin g to influence the dominant regional culture, for the potential appears to be there for a considerabl y greater change than has thus far been two be despoilatio n and the like, primarily industrial organisatio ns and drives and environmen tal education. and to Not only should activists be continuing with what those supposed to regulate them, further (public) also ought ought then to be going on with greater rapidity, how is it hastened, how do environmen tal activists they and parts to this further practice which achieved. There are can run in tandem, a more negative and a more positive part: • More negatively, it involves cutting down and countering the flow of propaganda in favour of the dominant paradigms both locally but especially from the North. That is important in reversing the extent of Northern co-option. includes gently a range of activities some with solid bases in local culture, such as lopping anti-Americ an It off the tall poppies pedalling and anti-Northe rn activities. 15 the stuff, and careful The latter practices (which should . . not of course reduce merely to personall y directed antagonism ) fit in well other regional environm ental with aims, such as independe nt and nonaligne d defence policies. • More positivel y, it consists in promoting and adapting other also despised features of alternati ve paradigms . ambassado rs, Australia n It is culture that work directly towards themes of commonly Northern intellect uals Lawrence ). adapted like are, of course, those nonmaxim izing making-do socialist ic ones, of local natural the The features to be egalitari an, along environm ents. with the combines enough: cultural with promoted or anti-auth oritarian , rapidly increasin g Nonmaxim izing, for example, is reflected in the She'll be right and It'll do approach often and and note, that are responsib le for the low repute in which some of the cultural character s are held (e.g. appreciat ion commonly taken to things, egalitari an methods as encapsula ted in Fair go and Enough's consider the effects of these, decently applied, in economics , in local markets. As for mateship, sure it could use widening, a main problem being its restrictio n in practice to extension male relations hips: to communit ies (includin g nonhuman s). is there for deep cultural transform ation: but why not encourage its So, to conclude, the potential we must help to realise it. FOOTNOTES 1. The term 'approach es' is intended to include both theory and both espoused ideology and behaviour . 2. They did not go under because of the weakness of their intellect ual positions . At bottom their religious beliefs, for example, were no more ridiculou s than those of Christian ity. Typically they were much weakened by new diseases, and overwhelm ed by new technolog y often applied in violent fashion. 3. By integrity is meant much more than retaining represent ative samples of this and that system or species; not represent ative southern sassafras , parma wallabies and Torres Strait Islanders , but sufficien tly many. 16 practice, 4. Another past philosophic al basis for environmen tal philosophy, American naturalism, seems to have been little developed, despite the promise some have seen in it. *1 The aesthetic route Highwater. *2 Note well that it is not being claimed that Australian culture is egalitarian (in conformity with a popular myth); only that it is less inegalitari an than American. The hard data underlying the claim--rs assembled in 'Culture and the roots of political divergence '. *3 For Griffin's conception of Canberra - a much smaller Canberra, which included a rail loop - see, to start with, Birrell (still the best source on Griffin). The first quotation from Griffin is quoted in Birrell, p.178; the second is from Griffin's article in Australian Wild Life. *4 P. is well-illust rated by the main approach in O'Farrell. REFERENCES J. Highwater, The Primal Mind. Vision Harper & Row, New York, 1981. J. Birrell, Walter Burley Griffin, Queensland U.P., 1964. W.B. Griffin, -. ) , '\ and ,• Reality in Indian America, Australian Wild Life W. Lini, Keynote Address, Australia and the South Pacific, Proceedings a Conference held at the Australian National University, 1982. P. O'Farrell, 'The cultural ambivalence of Australian religion', in Culture and the State in Australia, Australian Cultural History 1 (1982) Canberra. R. Nash, 'Rounding out the American revolution: ethical extension and the new environmen talism', typescript, University of California at Santa Barbara, 1982. A. Marsh, Protect and Political Consciousne ss, Sage Beverley Hills, 1977. s. Cotgrove, Catastrophe and Cornucopia, Wiley, ,\,'. ~· , ,, R. Routley, 'Roles and limits of paradigms action', in Elliot and Gare, 260-293. R. Elliot and A. Ga:re, Environmen tal Philosophy. Readings, University of Queensland Press, 1983. of c- r- 17 , 1982. in environmen tal A thought Collection and of  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 24, Item 1699: Working draft of Culture, philosophy and approaches to the natural environment - an Australian perspective Subject The topic of the resource Typescript of draft, with emendations and annotation, undated. Includes photocopy of draft. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Routley</a> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 24, Item 1699 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. 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Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:f3f9764">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:f3f9764</a> Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1983 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Australian National University - Filing Cabinet 1 - Top Drawer Australian National University Office Australian National University Office > Filing Cabinet 1 > Top Drawer Box 24: Files on Articles https://www.antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/4702be7f7ad689d9b8f0976dbfea321b.pdf 8ffeeac3fdaf406e7b76aa237ecb18fe PDF Text Text �DEEP ECOLOOY AHO OREEH POLITICS Deep Ecology ts an envtronMentaL theory or pLatforM wtth poLtttcaL stgntftcant wtth pLatforM LMpLtcattons. Green PoLtttcs ts a poLtttcaL envtronMentaL LMpLtcattons. Both arose tn Large part tn reactton to prevatLtng envtronMentaL practtces; but Deep Ecology concentrates rather on theorettcaL refLectton, Green PoLtttcs on practtcaL actton. Deep and tnvesttgatton questtontng of the underLytng doMtnant attttudes, seen as the Major source of ecoLogtcaL and other probLeMs, Led to arttcuLatton of the Deep Ecology pLatforM, partly outLtned tn "slogan" forM tn the foLLowtng table. TABLE 1. DEEP ECOLOGY CONTRASTED ~ITH OOMIHAHT ATTITUDES OOMrnAtn ATT HUDES (OOMrnAtH PARADIGM] DEEP ECOLOGY [RIVAL EttV IROHMEHTAL PARADIGM] Hature a Resource; Intrtnstc Value conftned to HuMans Natural EnvtronMent Valued for ltseLt; Btocentrtc E9aLttartantsM MatertaL EconoMtc Growth a predoMtnant goaL Hon-MatertaL Goals, espectaLLy ConsuMertsM Dotng wtth Enough/RecycLtng CoMpettttve LtfestyLe Cooperattve Ltfeway CentraLtzed/ Urban Centred/ DecentraLtzed/ Btoregtonat/ · Hetghbourhood focus tia t Lona L focus SeLf-ReaLtzatton Power structure HterarchtcaL Hon-hterarchtcaL/ Grassroots DeMocracy Htgh Technology Approprtate Technology ~htLe Deep Ecology grew froM the work of one envtronMentaL phtLosopher (Haess tn 1972), Green PoLtttcs arose (tn ~est GerMany stnce 1976) froM the synthests of several MoveMents - ecology, ctttzens, aLternattve, peace and other MoveMents. The platforM of Green PoLtttcs, whtch ts butlt around four ptllars soctaL responstbtltty, grassroots deMocracy, and non-vtoLence ecology, reflects these ortgtns. The ftrst of these ptLLars, ecology, ts based on the stMpLe theMe that LtMtted ecoLogtcaL systeMs cannot sustatn unltMtted econoMtc growth, or such questtonabLe types of growth as nuclear power, wtthout sertous rtsk of daMage and degeneratton. The Green atM ts to Move to systeMs of productlon and consuMptton whtch Matntatn and restore natural processes and cycles rather than doMtnate or destroy theM - a Move towards harMony wtth nature. The second ptllar of Green Poltttcs, soctal responstbtltty, tMpLtes opposttton to the tnequaltttes tn power and doMtnatton relattonshtps of present soctety, and reMovaL of dtscrtMtnatton, econoMtc hardshtp and explottatton, both regtonaLly and as regards the Thtrd ~orld. The Green atM - to be achteved prtMartly froM below, ts to butLd stable and just soctaL through those adversely affected arrangeMents, wtth coMprehenstve deMocrattc rtghts and freedoMs (both tn GerMany -1- �and where GerMan operatLons LMpLnge Ln the ThLrd ~orLd). These changes are to be brought about by grassroots deMocracy, the thLrd pLLLar, through Lncreased reaLLsatLon of dLrect decentraLLsed deMocracy. ThLs LnvoLves organLsatLon and coordLnatLon .of decentraLLsed basLc unLts (LocaL, coMMunLty and dLstrLct) whLch are 9Lven extensLve, but not coMpLete, autonoMy, as weLL as wLde use of referenda, deLegatLon practLces, and rotatLon of offLce-hoLders. The fourth and fLnaL pLLLar, non-vLoLence, LMpLLes the reMovaL of coercLve and aLso oppressLve practLces, not MereLy by More powerfuL peopLe, but especLaLLy by socLaL groups and states, and aLso, More posLtLveLy, actLve depoLyMent of varLous Methods of socLaL protest, resLstance and defence. The coMpatLbLLLty of Means wLth ends serves here as an LMportant underLyLng prLncLpLe: that a just, non-vLoLent, huMane• end-state cannot be satLsfactorLLy achLeved by unjust, vLoLent, LnhuMane Means. 1 Green PoLLtLcs offers then a broad prograM for socLaL change, whLch LncLudes the More specLfLc and ecoLogLcaLLy focussed Deep EcoLogy pLatforM as a quLte proper part. Put dLfferentLy, Green PoLLtLcs coMbLnes a wLder pLuraLLty of MoveMents of whLch Deep EcoLogy represents one LMportant strand. The Lnter-reLatLons are shown pLctorLaLLy at the second LeveL of the foLLowLng 12 dLagraM: DIAGRAM l. DOUBLE PYRAMID, SETTING DEEP ECOLOGY IN PLACE B p 1. Deep EcoLogy fundaMentaLs; e.g. BuddhLst (B), ChrLstLan (C) and (Eco)-Phi.LosophLc (P) uLtLMate bases C I 2 Exp Lana.t Lon DLrecti.on 2. Deep Ecology platforM 2C . ReforMi.st envLronMental posi.ti.on 2+. Vague fundaMentaLs of Green platforM Der Lvat Lon Di.recti.on j 3 . . General norMs and theMes, substantLaLLy derLved froM pLatforM ~- PartLcular norMs and concrete decLsLons, applyi.ng to relevant practLcaL sLtuatLons . The ecoLogLcaL coMponent of Green PolLtLcs May not 90 very deep; Lt May onLy be based upon reforM envLronMentaLLsM (or shaLLow ecoLogy as Lt used to be • Starred notes LndLcate poLnts at whLch readLngs wLth the correspondLng nuMbers May be Lnserted or undertaken. -2- �catted), whLch aLMs to reforM soMe of the worst abuses and excesses of the doMLnant posLtLon, such as gross pottutLon, extensLve despotLatLo n of land and takes and oceans, tLttte thought for the future, MLstreatMen t of anLMals, etc. On shallow ecology, nature Ls not valued for Ltsetf, but as a resource, that Ls LnstruMent atty, for what Lt can be used for by huMans. By contrast, Deep Ecology argues (e.g. froM preMLsses of level I) that the envLronMent Ls LntrLnsLcat ty valuable, that nature Ls valuable Ln and for Ltself; and that, LntrLnsLc value Ls equally dLstrLbuted . ThLs projectLon of furtherr,ore , egatLtarLan or Lr,partLatLt y prLncLptes, usually restrLcted to huMans, to the whole of tLfe Ln the natural world, gets dLgnLfLed by the tLtte, BLocentrLc EgalLtarLanL sM. The prLncLple, not part of Green PolLtLcs, Ls perhaps the Most controversL al of the central prLncLptes of Deep Ecology; but Lt or soMe substLtute for Lt Ls requLred, granted that the natural world contaLns value beyond that accruLng to huMans and theLr features, to explaLn how value Ls dLstrLbuted . Deep Ecology accounts for the dLstrLbutLo n through what Ls ' •3 . presented as a ' core der,ocracy Ln the b~osphere . Deep Ecology grew out of a phLtosophL cal dP~penLng of the new features of the scLence of ecology, whLch served to dLstance ecology froM the standard run of reductLonLs t scLences (through such features as holLsM; gestalt propertLes; systeMs whLch are More than the sur, of theLr ator,LstLc parts; eMergent eler,ents, tLke lLfe, organLsatLo n, etc.). Deep Ecology quLckly allLed Ltself wLth the subversLve features of unco-opted ecology, Ln partLcutar, the eMphasLs on the lLMLts, and ultLMate faLture of (atoMLstLc) reductLonLsM Ln scLence and phLlosophy. ~Lth such an orLgLn, Lt Ls not surpr~s~ng that there Ls lLttle dLrectty about such r,aLn pLllars of Green PotLtLcs as socLal responsLbLl Lty and non-vLotenc e Ln the platforM of Deep Ecology. However Deep Ecology Ls cor,patLble wLth these Green pLllar prLncLptes, and Lndeed perr,Lts theLr derLvatLon. ~hat Ls supposed to result are general norMs, lLke Ho exploLtatLo n, Ho subjectLon, Ho vLolence, at level 3. (Such a derLvatLon of a non-vLolenc e prLncLple froM the Deep Ecology prLncLple of r,axLMLzLng Self-realLs atLon Ls atter,pted by Haess Ln the frar,ework of hLs systeM of Eco-phLloso phy).•~ A MaLn focus of Deep Ecology Ls on changLng huMan relatLons wLth the natural envLronMen t, away froM doMLnant exploLtatLv e practLces. The natural envLronr,ent coMprLses Lter,s of LntrLnsLc value, LncludLng hur,ans (who are not above or separate fror, Lt), and accordLngty Ls to be treated wLth the care and respect valuable Lter,s warrant, and not LrresponsLb ly. Thus Lt would be contrary whLch to Deep Ecology to treat the envLronMent or Lts valued Lter,s vLolently such (consLder however Ls what Deep Ecology contends doMLnant practLces do wLdespread phenor,ena as "rape of the envLronMen t", ·of the land", •of the forests"). SLnce hur,ans are not apart fror, or superLor to nature, Lt follows froM the Deep Ecology platforr, that natural and proper relatLons also exclude vLolence towards other hur,ans or classes of huMans. Because Lt covers a pluralLty of posLtLons, LncludLng shallow ecologLcal posLtLons, Green PolLtLcs Ls Much More ar,elLoratLv e and reforMLst Ln character than Deep Ecology, whLch Ls further rer,oved froM dor,Lnant attLtudes, More hardLLne, and r,ore radLcat. ~hereas Deep Ecology goes to fundaMenta ts, and focusses on Ldeats and theory, Green PotLtLcs tends to concentrate on practLcal poLLtLcat probler,s of an envLronr,en tat or socLat kLnd, such as acLd raLn or rLver pottutLon or MLssLte deptoyMent, and (LLke the Peace Mover,ent Ln AustralLa) Ls not so Much concerned wLth refLnLng Lts rather vague prLncLples or workLng out an envLronMen tat (or peace) phLtosophy. Because of Lts envLronMen tal depth and natural world focus, Deep Ecology Ls concerned wLth a range of natural -3- �radLcaL the envLronMent Lssues, such as wLLderness, rare specLes, and transforMatLon of agrLcuLture, whLch are onLy of passLng Lnterest to a sMaLL MLnorLty Ln Green PoLLtLcs or are beyond Lts poLLtLcaL reach. Jn Lts reforMLst styLe Green PoLLtLcs does not venture far beyond prevLous Left-LeanLng poLLtLcaL MoveMents, except, fLrstLy, Ln Lts opposLtLon to envLronMent and aMenLty daMagLng LndustrLaLLsM and, secondLy, as regards non-vLoLence and Lts coMMLtMent to attaLnLng peace. Non-vLoLence Ls the Most controversLaL of the four pLLLars. For non-vLoLence ruLes out a range of poLLtLcaL actLon, LncLudLng typLcaL protests, confrontatLon and revoLutLons. Non-vLoLence aLso LMpLLes, what Ls very dLfferent froM current MLLLtary practLces, socLaL defence. WhLLe MaLn factLons Ln the Green MoveMent support non-vLoLent Methods and socLaL defence, other Lesser factLons hoLd that force Ls necessary to brLng about varLous necessary changes and for defence purposes. The Deep EcoLogy pLatforM LncLudes severaL prLncLpLes that wouLd be recognLsed by onLy a MLnorLty of the Green MoveMent. One of these prLncLpLes (whLch however, unLLke BLocentrLc EgaLLtarLanLsM, wouLd not be wLdeLy opposed by reforMLst Greens) Ls the core prLncLpLe of SeLf-reaLLsatLon, or More exactLy of MaxLML2Ln9 SeLf-reaLLsatLon. The notLon of seLf-reaLLsatLon of varLous reLLgLous posLtLons, of the fuLL unfoLdLng and deveLopMent of the person, Ls vastLy expanded Ln Deep EcoLogy to LncLude brLngLng to fuLL fruLtLon not MereLy one's own person, but aLL that one LdentLfLes wLth, that Ls the expanded SeLf, whLch Ls taken to be not MereLy one's faMLLy or feLLows or feLLow natLonaLs, nor MereLy ~as on huManLstLc ethLcs) the whoLe huMan race, but the whoLe naturaL 1 systeM. The SeLf-reaLLsatLon prLncLpLe, sprLngLng as Lt appears froM an enLLghtened personaL seLf-Lnterest prLncLpLe, has an exceLLent phLLosophLcaL pedLgree (at Least as appLLed to huMans or neLghbourLng cLasses of huMans). Thus rather than beLng argued for, a dLffLcuLt Matter Ln the case of uLtLMate prLncLpLes, SeLfreaLLsatLon Ls LMported froM syMpathetLc phLLosophLcaL or reLLgLous posLtLons at LeveL I of the doubLe pyraMLd, froM those that heLp sustaLn Deep EcoLogy. However the expansLon LnvoLved, the derLvatLon process froM narrow seLf to coMprehensLve SeLf, severs the usuaL justLfLcatory LLnks. It Ls hard to LdentLfy one's seLf-Lnterests wLth · those of a rock or an acorn. So the supposed LdentLfLcatLon - wLth soMe or aLL MountaLns, rLvers and raLnforests Ln the wLder reMaLns, LLke the assocLated extended EgaLLtarLan SeLf, Nature personLfLed prLncLpLe, decLdedLy probLeMatLc. Because Lt Ls assuMed that SeLf-reaLLsatLon Ls dLrected to ecoLogLcaL and spLrLtuaL ends, not at MaterLaL goods or Means, SeLf-reaLLsatLon Leads to the 16 AMong the raMLfLcatLons of the sLogan sLogan, "SLMpLe Ln Means, rLch Ln ends". one uses and where one LLves technoLogy of are those concernLng what kLnd (the Matter of dweLLLng Ln sLtuatLons of Lnherent vaLue and the LLke), what and how Much one consuMes, and so on. The doMLnant attLtudes, forMed around of econoMLc growth and econoMLc routes to happLness, have MaxLML2atLon eMphasLsed both MaterLaL goaLs and MaterLaL Means, partLcuLarLy personaL consuMerLsM. But Lf MaterLaL use and pure consuMptLon are to be reduced for envLronMentaL and other reasons, what LLfestyLes are approprLate? Deep EcoLogy, LLke Lts fundaMentaL sources, poLnts to experLentLaL and spLrLtuaL ends and eMphasL2es the rLchness of non-MaterLaL ends avaLLabLe. The resuLt, of course, Ls practLces whLch are sLMpLe, voluntary sLMpLLcLty, doLng wLth enough, and, More generaLLy, practLces whLch LLe LLght on the Land and the naturaL worLd. In a properLy ecoLogLcaL way of doLng thLngs, these wLLL be Lntegrated (Ln syMbLotLc and other naturaL styLes) wLth the naturaL systeMs LnvoLved, workLng wLth rather than agaLnst the naturaL fLow. The practLces, and organLsatLonaL approprLate to regLonaL wLLL accordLngLy be ecoregLonaL arrangeMents, -4- �ecologtcal grouptngs - or btoregtonal, as they have coNe to be called. • 7 Approprtate Means tnclude, tn turn, technLques approprLate to the practLce and theory .of Deep Ecology. HLgh technologLes such as nuclear power are not approprLate, even Ln advanced LndustrLal socLetLes, but LnapproprLate because of the envLronMental and socLal costs and rLsks such technologLcal forMs LMpose. On both deep and green perceptLons, what Ls requLred are relLable careful technologLes whLch are not ecologLcally daMagLng or socLally rLsky or otherwLse undesLrable; but the technologLes adMLtted wLll dLffer accordLng to the prLncLples of the posLtLons they answer back to (e.g . farMLng technLques wLlt need to be very dLfferent froM those prevaLtLng Ln rural GerMany to Meet such prLncLptes as bLospherLc egalLtarLanLsM). In each case the practLcat use of approprLate technology falls at the bottoM, actLon level, of the double . •a pyraN~d. WhLle Deep Ecology supplLes an appeatLng blueprLnt for dLfferent socLal and lLfe-ways, the questLon reMaLns: how Ls the proMLsed land reached? A MaLn part of the answer Ls taken to be gLven through a further crucLal feature of Deep Ecology: EcologLcal ConscLousness, a notLon agaLn expandLng upon conceptLons of other older LdeologLes (e.g. of relLgLous, or of revolutLonary, conscLousness). What Ls dLfferent Ls that spLrLtual or LdeologLcal conversLon Ls agaLn broadened froM the personal and socLat to coMprehend the full envLronMental predLcaMent. In thLs explanatLon, of how people get, and are got, to grasp Deep Ecology and Lts practLces, the pyraMLd Ls ascended, froM actLon to Ldeas, to deeper explanatory prLncLples. A thorough conversLon process Lnvolves elevatLon to the top livet, spLrLtuat transcendence of the daLly econoMLc and polLtLcat actLon level. 9 It Ls assuMed that, wLth enough converts and supporters, Deep Ecology wLlt be put Ln place, lLke Green PolLtLcs, by grassroots deMocratLc procedures. LLke the fundaMental sources upon whLch Lt draws, Deep Ecology prescrLbes practLces by whLch to achLeve such a conversLon and through whLch to arrLve at EcologLcal ConscLousness. SoMe of the MaLn practLces, such as MedLtatLon and conteMptatLon, are derLved froM the fundaMental sources. But other Methods whLch extend these, soMe of theM expandLng upon ecologLcat experLence, Lnclude value reorLentatLon and wLdened value perceptLon seeLng thLngs dLfferently, and coMLng to apprecLate the worth and well-beLng of other thLngs. Connected wLth these wLdened experLentLal bases, and LnforMLng theM, goes a holLstLc shLft Ln values and perceptLon, and an expanded LdentLfLcatLon, affordLng dLrect lLnkage wLth parts and wholes of the natural world. •IO By these Methods, a person May coMe to a deep and joyous apprecLatLon of the real world, a convert to Deep Ecology , a fellow and advocate of Lts Messages and lLfe-ways . ESSAY QUESTIOHS I. To what extent do Green PolLtLcs and Deep Ecology share the saMe values and address the saMe probleMs? CrLtLcally coMpare and contrast theLr proposa l s, especLally as regards the natural and the buLlt envLronMent. 2. Deep Ecology Ls soMetLMes assLgned four, levels. Try to descrLbe these, and to explaLn carefully the LnterrelatLons aMong these levels. Uhere does Green PolLtLcs fLt Lnto thLs probleMatLc scheMe? 3 . "BLocentrLc EgalLtarLanLsM - Ln prLncLple appears as a key theMe of Deep Ecology. CrLtLcally assess Lts adequacy. Shouldn't Green PolLtLcs Lnctude such a prLncLpte? 4. Is Non-vLolence an unstated prLncLple of Deep Ecology? ExplaLn why Deep Ecology Ls coMMLtted to non-vLolence to the degree Lt Ls? In your answers . take -5- \ �account of the foLLowLng dLffLcuLtLes: L. the contradLctLons between the use of vLoLence and the defence of the envLronMent; LL. the occurrence of vloLence Ln nature; ttt. the need for coerclve Methods to preserve the natural envtronMent. 5. Uhat justlfLes expandLng _seLf-reallsatLon to SeLf-reaLlsatlon? ExpLaLn the Meanlng and LMportance of SeLf-ReaLlsatLon for Deep Ecology and dLscuss Lts adequacy. Uhy does lt not feature ln Green PolLtlcs? 6. ExpLaLn the MeanLng of the deLLberateLy vague slogan ·slMple ln Means, rlch ln ends·, or of soMe other hlgh-lMpact slogan of Deep Ecology. Indlcate how the vagueness Mlght work for and agalnst the slogan, suggest how the slogan MLght be alternatLve LnterpretatLons, and lndlcate soMe of the suggest applled, alternattves. these of raMLflcatlons 7. OutLlne btoregtonaLL3M, lndlcatlng what practlcaL envlronMental probleMs bloreglonallsM lnduces. How Ln fact Ls bloreglonallsM derlved froM Deep Ecology? Conslder to what extent bloregLonallsM fLts wLth the slogan, •Thlnk globally, act LocaLly". deeper, or to any, envLronMental probLeMs? CoMpare and contrast the vlews of Deep Ecology and Green PolLtLcs on the role of varlous types of technology. 8~ Is More hLgh technology an unprobleMatLc soLutLon to 9. Uhat Ls EcoLogLcaL ConscLousness? And what Ls Lt supposed to do Ln and for Deep Ecology? If Lt ls so LMportant, why Ls Lt not a MaLn concern for Green PoLltlcs? 10. A reLatlonaL, total-fLeLd LMage of huMan reLatLonshLps wLth nature has been quletLy oMLtted froM the orLglnal pLatforM of Deep Ecology. Is thLs gestalt pLcture needed? Is Lt defensLbLe? Should Lt be reLnstated? READINGS 1: DEEP ECOLOGY AND GREEN POLITICS The Greens consLder theMseLves the poLltLcal voLce of the cLtLzens' MoveMents, that Ls, ecology, antl-nuclear-power, peace, feMLnLst, and others. Most MeMbers of the Green party are also actLvLsts Ln one or More of those MoveMents, and thLs dLverse orLentatLon Ls reflected Ln the wLngs, or factLons, of the party: the vLslonary/hollstlc Greens, the Eco-Greens, the peace-MoveMent Greens, and the radlcal-Left Greens. A great deaL of overlapplng occurs wlth any categor~z~ng of Green LdentltLes and soMe people say there are no actual factlons, but clearly there are dtfferent prtorltLes aMong the four clusters. The More that people perceLved the LnterconnectLons aMong prLncLpLes of ecologLcaL wlsdoM, a truly secure peace, an econoMy wLth a future, and a partLcLpatory deMocracy wLth power channeled dLrectly froM the grassroots Level, the More they notLces the absence of such LdeaLs aMong the exLsttng poLLtlcaL partles. [Green] pollcLes are gutded by long-terM v~s~ons for the future and are founded on four basLc prLncLples: ecology, socLal responsLbLLLty, grassroots deMocracy, and nonvLoLence. The fLrst of the ·four pLLlars, • ecology, has several MeanLngs Ln Green poLLtLcs. Green poLLtLcs, Ls Lnherently hoLLstLc Ln theory and practLce. It Ls based on ecoLogLcal, or ·network·, thLnkLng, a terM used frequently by the Greens. EcoLogLcaL thLnkLng also Lncludes the realLzatLon that the seeMLngLy -6- �rtgtd structures we percetve Ln our envLronMent are actually ManLfestatLons of underlytng processes, of nature's contLnual dynaMLc flux. Interrelatedness and ongoLng process are the lessons the Greens take froM and apply to the ecosysteMs surroundLng us. They support •soft" energy productLon (such as solar power) that works wLth the cycles of the sun, the water, and the wLnd, and the flow of the rLvers. They call for the developMent of approprLate technology that reflects our Lnterdependence wLth the Earth. They advocate regeneratLve agrLculture that replenLshes the soLl and Lncorporates natural Means of pest control. Above all, the Greens deMand a halt to our ravagLng of natural "resources" and our poLsonLng of the bLosphere through the duMpLng of toxLc wastes, the accuMulatLon of so-called acceptable levels of radLatLon exposure, and the pollutLon of the aLr. The broader applLcatLons of ecologLcal thLnkLng lead to ·socLal ecology, the perceptton of soctetal structures and huMan Lnteracttons as an Lntrtcate web of dynaMLc systeMs that are sLMultaneously Lnterrelated parts and coMplete Ln theMselves. That eMphasLs on relatLonshLps and Lnterconnecttons Ls the basts of the Greens' ecologtcal work that focuses specLfLcally on envLronMental protectLon. TheLr prograMs Ln thts area call for huMans to ftnd our place Ln the ecosysteMs: ~e defLne ecologLcal polLtLcs as those Measures that understand huMan betngs and our envLronMent as beLng part of nature. HuMan lLfe, too, Ls eMbedded Ln the lLfe cycles of the ecosysteMs; we Lnterfere wLth our actLons and thLs, Ln turn, acts back on us. ~e Must not destroy the stabLlLty of the ecosysteMs. In partLcular, ecologtcal polLtLcs presents an all-encoMpassLng rejectLon of an econoMy of exploLtatLon and plunderLng of natural resources and raw MaterLals, as well as the destructLve LnterventLon Lnto the cycles of nature's household. The second of the four pLllars, ·soctal responsLbLlLty, • Ls understood by Most Greens to Mean socLal justLce and assurance that the poor and the workLng class wLll not get hurt by prograMs to restructure the econoMy and our consuMer socLety ecologtcally. The radLcal-left Greens, however, read sozLal as a codeword for socLalLsM, that Ls, deMocratLc MarxLsM~ SLnce that polLtLcal Model Ls specLfLcally not what the vLsLonary, lLberal and conservatLve Greens have Ln MLnd, a battle developed over establLshLng the basLc prLncLples. The MajorLty wanted the new party to stand for possLbLlLtLes other than etther socLalLsM or the capLtalLst status quo. The radLcal-left contLngent, on the other hand, LnsLsted on not only Lncludtng socLalLsM but also on excludLng nonvLolence as a guLdLng prLncLple. So one of the four pLllars, lLke so Much else Ln the Green party, has a paradoxLcal character: Lt Means soMethLng dLfferent Ln dLfferent parts of the party. All factLons of the party concur that socLal, econoMLc and ecologLcal Lssues are Lnherently lLnked. The ecologLcal and socLal spheres belong Lnseparably together: the econoMy of nature Ls ltnked to the econoMy of huMans for better or worse . The thLrd pLllar, grassroots deMocracy, was LnspLred by the ~est GerMan cLtLzens' MoveMents throughout the 1970s, whLch Ln turn were Lnfluenced by the cLvLl rLghts, ecology, consuMer, and other MoveMents ~n the Un~ted States. OLrect, or partLcLpatory, deMocracy locates a greater aMount of power and control wLth the local groups, the grassroots. ThLs orLentatLon ~nforMs the structure of the Green party. An organLzatLon structured wtth partLcLpatory deMocracy sets Lts basLc polLcy accordLng to the votLng at large asseMblLes. It allows LndLvLduals access to all party offLcLals, and Lt eschews hLerarchLcal structure. Instead of allowtng power to be concentrated Ln a few people who -7- �reMaLn at the top of a hLerarchy for years, such groups generally elect steerLng coMMLttees. The fourth pLllar, nonvLolence, Means to the Greens the cessatLon of both personal vLolence and •structural vLolence, • that Ls, vLolence and oppress Lon LMposed by the state and by LnstLtutLons. (See ReadLng 4; Green PolLtLcs, pp.3-4, 29-43) The tenets of [the Deep Ecology] MoveMent Nay perhaps be roughly forNulated as follows: (1) The well-beLng of nonhuMan lLfe on Earth has value Ln Ltself. ThLs value Ls Lndependent of any LnstruNental usefulness for LLMLted huNan purposes. (2) RLchness and dLversLty Ln lLfe forMs contrLbute to thLs value and Lnterfere Ls a further value Ln Ltself. (3) HuMans have no rLght to destructLvely wLth nonhuMan lLfe except for purposes of satLsfyLng vLtal needs. (4) Present Lnterference Ls excessLve and detrLMental. (5) Present polLcLes Must therefore be changed. (6) The necessary polLcy changes affect basLc econoMLc and LdeologLcal structures and wLll be the More drastLc the longer Lt takes before sLgnLfLcant change Ls started. (7) The LdeologLcal change Ls MaLnly that of apprecLatLng lLfe qualLty (focusLng on sLtuatLons LnvolvLng Lnherent. value). (8) Those who subscrLbe to the foregoLng poLnts have an oblLgatLon dLrectly or LndLrectly to try to LMpleMent the necessary changes. (Defence, p.266) It should be fully apprecLated that the sLgnLfLcant tenets of the Deep Ecology MoveMent are clearly and forcefully norMatLve. They express a value prLorLty systeM only Ln part based on results (or lack of results) of scLentLfLc research. Today, ecologLsts try to Lnfluence polLcy-MakLng bodLes largely resource and through threats, through predLctLons concernLng pollutants depletLon, knowLng that polLcy-Makers accept at least certaLn MLnLMUM norMs concernLng health and just dLstrLbutLon. There are polLtLcal potentLals Ln thLs MoveNent whLch should not be overlooked and whLch have lLttle to do wLth pollutLon and resource depletLon. In plottLng possLble futures, the norMs should be freely used and elaborated. (Shallow and Oeep 1 p.99) A Major dLfference between the theorLes lLes Ln the dLstrLbutLon of values. Deep ecology, lLke sLMpler utLlLtarLanLsM, offers a unLque LnLtLal dLstrLbutLon: each lLvLng thLng Ls assLgned equal value and nothLng else has LntrLnsLc value. Value Ls assessed through soMe MLx of value-NakLng characterLstLcs, LncludLng such defeasLble ecologLcal unLversals as stabLlLty, resLlLence, naturalness, rLchness, scarcLty and so forth . But there are consLderable dLversLty, constraLnts on how thLs Ls done . . . . One constraLnt, that of LMpartLalLty whLch excludes certaLn types of class chauvLnLsM, a thLng cannot be ranked as valuable or ahead or another sLMply by vLrtue of belongLng to soNe specLes (e.g. beLng huNan) or favoured bLologLcal class; such class features are not Ln theMselves value-MakLng characterLstLcs. Such an account of how value Ls assessed reNaLn however far froM specLfLc, and soMetLMes of lLttle use Ln practLce. (CrLtLque, pp.59- 60) POINTS OF UNITY 1. NATURAL PHILOSOPHY. Ue base our phLlosophy on a proper understandLng of the purposes and workLngs of nature and do not try to LNpose an Ldeology upon Lt . Ue seek to transforM socLety based upon thLs understandLng. 2. CONSENSUS DEMOCRACY. Ue conduct all our MeetLngs accordLng to the prLncLples of consensus deNocracy, eNphasLzLng unanLMous or near-unanLMous agreeMent on all decLsLons. No representatLve May Make decLsLons on behalf of the Greens wLthout the approval of the entLre NeMbershLp. Ue encourage the use of consensus deMocracy Ln all socLal, econoMLc and polLtLcal LnstLtutLons. -8- �3. NONVIOLENCE AND FREEDOM. ~e oppose the threat or use of phystcal vtolence to resolve tnternatlonat, clvll, polltlcal and personal confllcts. ~e encourage the nonvlolent enforceMent of all prlvate and publlc rules and Laws. ~e recognlEe that a nonvlolent soclety would be a very free soclety and encourage tolerance of others' vlews and actlons. ~- SOCIAL ECOLOGY. ~e eMphaslze the connectton of doMlnatlon and vlolence toward the envlronMent and toward our fellow huMans. ~e seek a nonvlolent soclety ln whlch the needs of lndlvlduals, coMMunltles and bloreglons are balanced and lntegrated and ln whlch econoMtc resources are used consclousty, deMocratlcaLLy and approprlatety to further thls end. 5. STRATEGY. ~e wlLL oppose ecologlcatty and soclatty destructlve pollcles and dlsobedlence clvll and protest practlces through nonvlolent polltlcal actlvltles. ~e wlLL proMote alternatlve projects and lnstltutlons conslstent wlth our Green phllosophy. ~e wlLL cooperate ln solldarlty wlth all groups ln substantlal agreeMent wlth these polnts of unlty as partlclpants ln the lnternatlonal Green MoveMent. (Deep Ecology, pp.36-7). 2: DEEP ECOLOGY LEVELS In dlscusslng the relatlonshlp between deep ecology and Major tradltlons such as BuddhlsM and Chrlstlanlty, Naess stresses that people can agree broadly on a set of prlnctptes and dlsagree greatly on other aspects of ldeology and other tradttlons thusly: In order to factlttate dlscusslon lt May be helpful to dlsttngutsh a coMMon platforM (baste prlnclples) of deep ecology froM the fundaMentaL features of phllosophles and rellglons froM whlch that platforM (baste prlnctples) ls derlved, lf the platforM ls forMulated as a set of norMs and hypotheses lf . verballEed, are Buddhlst, (factual assuMptlons). The fundaMentals, or phllosophlc wlth persuaslons, rettgtous other Taolst, Chrtsttan or of afftnltles to the baste vlews of Splnoza, Uhltehead, Hetdegger, or others. The fundaMentals are Mutually More or Less lncoMpattble or at Least dtfflcult to coMpare l~ terMs of cognltlve contents. The tncoMpattblltty does not affect the deep ecology prlnclples adversely. The baste prlnclples wlthln the deep ecology MoveMent are grounded ln retlglon or phllosophy. In a Loose sense, tt May be sald to be dertved froM the fundaMentals. Because these are dtfferent, the sltuatlon only reMlnds us that very slMllar or even tdenttcal conclustons May be drawn froM dlvergent preMlses. The prlnclples (or platforM) are the . saMe, the fundaMentaL preMlses dtffer. In order to clartfy the dtscusston one Must avold Looktng for one deftntte phllosophy or rellgton aMong the supporters of the deep ecologlcal MoveMent. Fortunately there ls a rlch Manlfold of klnds of consequences dertved froM the prlnclples. The dtscusston has four Levels to take lnto account: verballzed fundaMentaL phllosophlcal and rellglous ldeas and lntultlons, the deep ecology baste prlnclples, the More or Less general consequences dertved froM the platforM Llfestytes and general pollcles of every klnd - and Lastly, descrlpttons of concrete sltuatlons and declstons Made ln theM. (See DlagraM 1) Arne Naess has atteMpted to provlde a Loglcal dlagraM or systeMatlzatlon of hls own verslon of deep ecology or ecosophy whtch he calls •Ecosophy r·. He -9- �caLLs thts a norMattve systeM whtch tncLudes both norMs (or baste values) and factual hypotheses_ The Lower norMs or actton stateMents are dertved froM the top norMs tn a Loosely LogtcaL sense_ The top or Most baste norMs are arrtved at by the deep questtontng Lntutttve process_ Naess stresses that Ecosophy T Ls onLy hts verston of deep ecology, and that Many versLons need to be worked out_ SoMe people NLght be crLtLcaL that Many of the norMs of deep ecology are heLd on an tntutttve basts, but Naess potnts out aLL theortes begtn soMewhere beyond LogtcaL constructtons_ (DEEP ECOLOGY, pp-225-7) In order to factLttate dtscusston about deep ecology aMong phtLosophers tt May be heLpfuL to dtsttngutsh a coMMon pLatforM of deep ecology froM the fundaMentaL features of phtLosophtes and reLtgtons froM whtch that pLatforM Ls derLved, tf tt ts forMuLated as a set of norMs and hypotheses (factual assuMpttons)_ The terM 'pLatforM' ts preferred to 'prtncLpLe' because the Latter May be NLsunderstood to refer to the uLtLMate fundaMentaLs_ FurtherMore, the forMuLatton of a pLatforM should be short and conctse (as a synopsts), whereas the fundaMentaLs, tf verbaLtzed, are Buddhtst, Taotst, ChrLstLan or of other reLtgtous ktnds, or they are phtLosophLc wtth afftntttes to the baste vtews of SpLnoza, ~hLtehead, HeLdegger, or others_ The fundaMentaLs are MutuaLLy More or Less LncoMpatLbLe or at Least dtffLcuLt to coMpare tn terMs of cognLttve contents_ Supporters of deep ecology May have great dLfftcuLttes understandtng each other's uLtLMate vLews_ The pLatforM of the deep ecology MoveMent Ls grounded tn reLtgLon or phLLosophy tncLudtng ethLcs_ It May be saLd to be derLved froM these fundaMentaLs_ As used here the terM 'dertved' ts open to a vartety of LnterpretatLons_ If the vaLLdLty of a norM or a hypothesLs Ls justLfLed by reference to one defLnLte set of assuMptLons of a phtLosophtcaL or reLLgtous ktnd, the norM or hypothests ts Ln a sense dertved froM those assuMpttons_ The set acquLres a character of preMLses for parttcuLar concLusLons_ But cLoseLy · sLMLLar or even tdenttcaL concLustons May be drawn froM sets of LncoMpatLbLe preMLses_ ThLs expLaLns the coMbLnatLon of 'bewLLderLng' dLverstty of vLews at the deepest LeveL wtth agreeMent of vtews at the next LeveL_ In assesstng constructLve crttLctsM of deep ecology Lt Ls useful to try to ftnd out whLch LeveL Ls LnvoLved_ An exaMpLe: In the tntroductLon to hLs The EthLcs of EnvtronMentaL Concern, (Oxford: BLackweLL 1983), Robtn AttfLeLd says: Yet I do not accept, wLth the so-caLLed 'deep, Long-range ecology MoveMent', the vtew that our prLncLpaL Loyalty should be focussed not on feLLow-huMans or feLLow creatures but on the bLosphere as an organtc whole, __ _ I suppose there are soMe supporters of the deep ecology MOVeMent who propose focusstng Loyalty on the bLosphere as an organLc whole Ln the sense suggested by AttfteLd_ The conceptLon of the bLosphere as an organLc whole and of such a kLnd of Loyalty belongs to the reaLM of fundaMentaLs, that Ls LeveL one, rather than to the other Levels_ Therefore that AttfLeLd does not accept the vtew he descrtbes ts not relevant tn arguMentatton for or agatnst deep ecology- One Matn potnt tn deep ecology ts tts deep arguMentatton, that ts, arguMentatton froM uLttMate (phLLosophLcaL, reLtgtous) preMtsses, but there Ls rooM for very dLfferent sets of such preMLsses_ A supporter of deep ecology May or May not have any conceptton of a prLMary Loyalty focussed on the bLosphere as an organtc whole_ [The] dtsttnctLon of Levels Ls useful when tryLng to ptn down exactly what a crttLcLsM Ls focusstng on_ The dLagraM furnLshes onLy a ktnd of stattc ModeL_ -10- �A supporter of deep ecology wLLL norMaLLy ModLfy the sentences at the dLfferent Levels froM tLMe to tLMe. Hew LnforMatLon May change any hypotheses and therefore also change norMs whLch Ln part have been justLfLed on the basLs of the hypotheses beLng changed. Renewed ethLcaL consLderatLon or new LnforMatLon May Make the supporter change a norM. If a norM Ls changed norMally new sets of hypotheses are Lnvolved, and old ones are dLscarded. ThLs agaLn wLLl cause reverberatLons Ln a sMaLLer or greater part of the fLeld. F roM a po Ln t of v Lew of no rMa t Lve sys teMa t t·~a t Lons what goes on when changes are Made at one or More Levels Ls rather coMpLLcated. But part of Lt Ls processes of derLvatLon. OLagraM l pretends only to Lllustrate LMportant dLfferences of the Levels of derLvatLon and the specLfLc character of Level 2. It represents a condensed forMulatLon of the deepest-Level norMs and hypotheses whLch supporters of the deep ecology MoveMent can agree upon. ThLs Level Ls LLLustrated as the penultLMate (next to ultLMate) Level of arguMentatLon characterLstLc of those supporters of deep ecology who try to artLculate theLr baste vLews. At the thLrd and fourth Level dLsagreeMents May arLse. At the fLrst Level supporters May dLsagree, or fLnd each others vLews' LncoMprehensLb le, or LncoMparable as to valLdLty. Ls not a Measure of value prLorLtLes or of A 'dLrectLon of derLvatLon ethLcaL prLorLtLes. And Lt does not LMply that what Ls derLved Ls a Means Ln relatLon to what Lt Ls derLved froM. A sLMple exaMple Ls enough to clarLfy thLs. FroM 'do not kLlL huMans! ·, follows, Lf you concede 'all Mothers are huMans' the conclusLon 'do not kLLL your Mother!'. ThLs rather concrete norM Ls here derLved froM the More general and abstract one. But thLs does not LMply that huMans Ln general have a hLgher value or a kLnd of prLorLty Ln relatLon to Mothers. It does not say that Ln a norM confLLct you should be More careful not to kLLL huMans than not to kLLL your Mother. An absurd posLtLon! And Lastly, Lt Ls rather strange to refraLn froM kLllLng your Mother as a Means to a goal, · naMely not to kLLL huMans. The forMulatLons of Level 2 have the character of proposals. It May turn out that proposals wLLL dLffer substantLaLLy or show a natural dLversLty of terMLnologLcal and conceptual LdLosyncracLes . UnhappLLy Lt Ls quLte coMMon to MLx the, Ln a broad sense, LogLcal relatLon of derLvatLon wLth other relatLons. These are at Least as LMportant, but nevertheless are dLfferent. (BASIC, pp.1-5) ScheMatLcally we May represent the total vLews LMpLLed Ln the MoveMent by and norMs streaMs of derLvatLon f roM 'h Lghest', L.e. Most fundaMentaL sLtuatLons. lLfe partLcular Ln descrLptLve assuMptLon, to partLcular decLsLons Answers to the deepest questLon, L.e. hLghest norMatLve prLncLples and basLc assuMptLons about the world MLddle range answers. Lower derLvatLonaL Level derLvatLons towards decLsLons Ln partLcular LLfe sLtuatLons. Level of actLon Ln concrete partLcular sLtuatLons. The LLLustratLon reseMbles those of hypothetLco-ded uctLve systeMs. One MaLn dLfference Ls that soMe sentences at the top Level are norMatLve, expressed by LMperatLves. ThLs Makes Lt possLble to furnLsh preferably LMperatLves at the Lowest derLvatLonaL Level, sentences such as ·Turn to the Left!" ·voteforN.N. !. Just as Ln hypothetLco-ded uctLve systeM, Let us say Ln physLcs, only the two upper Levels of the pyraMLd Ls thought of as part of physLcs as a systeM, only those parts are Ln norMatLve systeMs characterLstLc of the total systeM. -11- �The sentences change. Ln the Lowest part change froM day to day as LLfe sLtuatLons The above kLnd of presentLng the derLvatLonaL structure of a totaL vLew Must not be taken too serLousLy. SoMe wLLL absoLuteLy refuse even to consLder such a way of exposLtLon. And Lt does not Ln any Manner characterLze thLnkLng wLthLn the deep ecoLogLcaL MoveMents. SoMe of us wLth a professLonaL background of scLence and anaLytLcaL phLLosophy fLnd Lt heLpfuL, however. Arne Naess's systeMatLEatLon LLLustrates the reLatLonshLp of deep ecoLogy's basLc prLncLpLes or Lts "platforM" (LeveL 2), to varLous · possLbLe and relLgLous "fundaMentaL preMLsses on the one hand (LeveL 1) and varLous possLbLe theoretLcaL and practLcaL "consequences" on the other (LeveLs 3 and~). Althou~h thLs systeMatLzatLon Ls presented Ln terMs of "fundaMentaL preMLsses, consequences", and a dLrectLon of "derLvatLon• froM LeveLs (1) to(~), thLs should not be taken to Mean that a sentence at one Level Ls held to follow by vLrtue of necessLty or probabLLLty froN sentences at a prevLous Level L.e~, Naess Ls not proposLng a deductLve or an LnductLve systeM. As he coMMents hLMself, Lt Ls only Ln a "Loose sense• that the deep ecology pLatforM "May be saLd to be derLved froM fundaMentaLs·. In other words, derLvatLon or precLseness Ls a Matter of deLLMLtLng a range of possLble LnterpretatLons. For exaNpLe, we MLght proceed froN a fundaMentaL (L.e. Level 1) reLLgLous or phLLosophLcal preMLss such as "ALL Ls One" or the SpLnozLst Ldea that "there Ls onLy one 'substance• • and, Ln the sense descrLbed, "derLve" the (More precLse) central "plank" Ln the deep ecology "pLatforM" that "there are no boundarLes Ln the bLospherLcaL fLeld", or that "aLl entLtLes are constLtuted by theLr relatLonshLps" (LeveL 2). Further precLsatLon MLght express the realLsatLon that "the sense of oneself as a skLn encapsulated ego Ls not Ln accord wLth thLs ' seaMLess web' ontoLogy• (Level 3). None of the steps Ln the above exaMpLe Ls held to foLLow by necessLty (deductLve Lnference) or probabLLLty (LnductLve Lnference) froM sentences at a prevLous LeveL. ALL we have (Ln logLcaL terMs) Ls a chaLn of precLsatLons fLowLng Ln one or Many possLble dLrectLons of LnterpretatLon. Ue could have easLLy started froM the saMe vague, general fundaMentaL preMLss and proceeded to deveLop a chaLn of precLsatLons Ln a very dLfferent dLrectLon of LnterpretatLon. Thus, the "dLrectLon of derLvatLon· shown Ln the dLagraMMatLc LLlustratLon of Naess's systeMatLsatLon shouLd be understood as referrLng to both the leveL of precLsatLon and the dLrectLon of LnterpretatLon. The greater the Level of precLsatLon the More evLdent the dLrectLon of LnterpretatLon (or what Naess has prevLousLy referred to as the "defLnLteness of LntentLon")_ Uhat Ls the vaLue of tryLng to provLde a systeMatLsatLon of deep ecology (or any other faLrLy coMprehensLve vLew) when the connectLve LLnks between fundaMentaL preMLsses (LeveL I) and practLcaL consequences (Level~) are as weak as that of "possLbLe LnterpretatLon"? An LMportant answer Must be that such a systeNatLsatLon eMphasLses the contLnuaLLy-beLng-forgotten fact that our Most sophLstLcated and precLse, non-trLvLaL (L ~e. nontautoLogLcaL) reasonLngs are aLways eMbedded or grounded Ln a very generaL "underLyLng perceptLon of the way thLngs are." ThLs eMphasLs, thLs contLnual reMLndLng, constLtutes the Most sLgnLfLcant and dLstLnctLve structural feature of deep ecologLcaL thought. (GUIDING STARS, pp.203-4) OnLy LeveL one contaLns phLLosophLes (LncLudLng MetaphysLcs, of course) and expLLcLt reLLgLous foundations. There Ls, and hopefuLLy wLLL never be, Many sLgnLfLcant COMMon characterLstLcs on Level 1. The cLeanLng of 'rubbLsh' on thLs Level Ls a hazardous undertakLng froN MY poLnt of vLew. -12- �In a coMprehensLve phLLosophy of Level l, for lnstance ln an 'ecosophy' ln MY terMlnoLogy, every key terM of the pLatforM forMuLatlon, (Level 2), would have to be .coM"ented upon and elucLdated. ThLs "ay be seen as a clearLng up operatlon. A hlgher level of preclseness Ls achLeved and eLLMLnatlon of ph~Losoph~caLLy unsuLtable rhetorLcs. (HOTES ON SYLVAN, pp.8-9) 3: ON BIOCENTRIC EGALITARIANISM The Lntultlon of blocentrlc equaLlty ls that aLL thlngs Ln the blosphere have an equal rlght to Llve and bLossoM and to reach thelr own LndLvlduaL forMs of unfoLdLng and self-reaLlzatlon wlthln the Larger SeLf-reallzatlon. Thls basLc Lntultlon Ls that aLL organLsMs and entltles Ln the ecosphere, as parts of the lnterreLated whole, are equal Ln LntrlnsLc worth. Naess suggests that bLocentrlc equaLLty as an LntuLtlon Ls true ln prLncLpLe, although ln the process of LLvLng, aLL specLes use each other as food, shelter, etc. Mutual predatlon ls a b~ologLcal fact of lLfe, and "any of the world's relLgLons have struggled wLth the spLrltuaL lMpllcatlons of thts. SoMe anlMaL llberatlonLsts who atteMpted to sLde-step thLs probLeM by advocatlng vegetarLanlsM are forced to say that the entLre plant ktngdo" LncLudLng raLn forests have no rLght to thelr own exlstence. ThLs evaslon fLles ln the face of the basLc LntuLtlon of equalLty. Aldo Leopold expressed thLs Lntultlon when sald huMans are •pLaLn cLtlzens• of the btotlc coMMunlty, not Lord and Master over all other specLes. BlocentrLc equaLlty ls lntlMateLy related to the aLL-LnclusLve SeLfreaLlzatLon ln the sense that Lf we harM the rest of Nature then we are harMLng ourselves. There are no boundarles and everythlng ls lnterreLated. But Lnsofar as we percelve thlngs as LndLvLduaL organlsMs or entLtLes, the LnsLght draws us to respect aLL huMan and nonhuMan lndLvLduals ln theLr own rLght as parts of the whole wLthout feeLLng the need to set up hlerarchLes of specles wlth huMans at the top. The practlcaL LMpLlcatlons of thLs lntultlon or norM suggest that we should LLve wlthLn MlnLMuM rather than MaxlMUM lMpact on other specLes and on the Earth ln general. Thus we see another aspect of our guldlng prLnclpLe: ·slMpLe ln Means, rLch ln ends.• (Deep EcoLog~, pp.167-9) blospherLcaL egaLltarlanlsM Ln prlnclpLe' and certaln The abstract terM slMlLar terMs whlch I have used, do perhaps More harM than good. They suggest a posLtLve doctrLne, and that ls too Much. The LMportance of the LntultLon ls but MOMentary, only perhaps the rather lts capaclty to counteract, Less seeMs what towards attltude Lordly and consequentlaL, self-congratulatory developed, Less coMplex, Less MlracuLous. A rlch varLety of acceptable Motlves can be forMuLated for belng More reluctant to Lnjure of klLL a LLvLng beLng of klnd A than a beLng of klnd B. The cultural settlng ls dLfferent for each belng Ln each culture, furtherMore there are few general norMs, only vague guLdeLLnes. One factor: felt nearness, deterMlnes Largely our capactty to ldentLfy ourselves wlth a sort of beLng, to suffer when they suffer. One cannot put forth ethLcaL rules of conduct wlthout takLng such feeltngs and our lLMlted capacLtLes serLously. If Lt Ls dLffLcuLt to avotd klLLLng A because of Lts sMalLness, whereas klLLlng B ls easlLy avolded, we tend to protect B rather than A. Indeed we Llve wLth an obvLous dLversLty of obLlgatlons. Ue have speclaL oblLgatlons towards our own chLldren: Ln Most cultures any anlMaL May be kLLLed ln order to feed one's starvLng chlLd. ObLlgatLons toward specLes that have been MeMbers of our llfe coMMunLty for Long perLods are greater than toward accldentaL vlsltors. FurtherMore, we have the -13- �relevance of sufferLng: capacLty of sufferLng? Is the sufferLng of A less than that of B? Has A the The sLMpLe thLng I try to convey here L3 that an ethLcs concernLng dLfferences between non-huMan LLvLng beLngs Ls of a coMparable level of coMpLexLty to ethLcs concernLng dLfferent people and groups wLth whoM we have to do. (lntuLtLon, p.202) Those of us who procLaLM the rLght of all LLfe forMs to LLve and bLossoM thLnk of thLs rLght as an aspect of the 'value Ln LtseLf' whLch we attrLbute to the bLosphere wLth Lts closely Lnterconnected LLfe forMs. The procLaMatLon seeMs to steM froM an LntuLtLon for whLch a graduatLon Ls soMethLng foreLgn. If there Ls such a basLc rLght, Lf Lt can be gLven a faLrly precLse MeanLng, Lt Ls the naMe for all lLfe forMs. It Ls LMportant enough to be terMed bLospherLcaL egaLLtarLanLsM. But Lt Ls perhaps the best to abstaLn froM such Labels. They LnvLte a varLety of LnterpretatLons Most of whLch May be MLsLeadLng. As to the consequences of a posLtLve answer, I thLnk we can learn froM certaLn cultures of hunters and gatherers where bLg anLMaLs are only kLLled after elaborate cereMonLes and excuses'. There Ls acknowLedgeMent of equal rLght, but also of a rLght to kLlL Ln order to Meet vLtaL needs. There Ls a 'norM conflLct' whLch Ls solved through addLtLonal norMs: the perforMance of certaLn rLtes and behavLors of other kLnds. What I thLnk we need not proclaLM Ls that we as huMans are Most or More valuable, or have a hLgher rLght. ~e need not say '1 have a hLgher rLght to LLve and bLossoM than you have, obnoxLus MosquLto, so I kLLL you!' or 'BeLng Much More valuable than you are, I kLlL you and your offsprLng, dLrty rat!' In so far as we have vLtal needs to kLlL, and Ln so far as Lt Ls LnevLtabLe Ln practLce, we May justLfy thLs through varLous norMs whLch are Ln harMony wLth general ecoLogLcal thLnkLng. Do these words solve the relevant probLeMs? Of course not. ~hat I aM drLvLng at Ls the prLorLty of MaLntaLnLng a sort of egalLtarLanLsM Ln p~LncLple. How we can LLve thLs that prLncLpLe Ls a questLon of ethLcs Ln a very general sense, proceedLng froM Many prLncLples whLch LnevLtably Lead to norM confLLcts requLrLng adjustMents froM day to day. (PhLLosophLcaL Aspects, pp.27-9) AccordLng to Naess, a bLospherLc egaLLtarLan prLncLpLe, of equal value of to the all LLfe, Ls an LntuLtLveLy clear and obvLous value axLoM', at least aLMost ecoLogLcaL fLeLd-worker' (73, p96)!. But eMpLrLcaL surveys would certaLnLy not sustaLn Haess's claLMs. The prLncLpLe seeMs generally neLther LntuLtLve nor obvLous, and Ln several ways Lt appears LncoMpatLbLe wLth the wLder deep ecology pLatforM. It Ls not even obvLous that soMethLng has value by vLrtue of havLng LLfe. On the contrary, value seeMs, lLke yellowness, to be Much More patchLLy dLstrLbuted across the unLverse. SpecLal places, for Lnstance, are especLaLLy valuable. Hor Ls value always dLstrLbuted on LLvLng thLngs, but colours toMbs of the dead; and soMetLMes Lt flakes off consteLlatLons of LLvLng thLngs, for exaMpLe thLngs Ln excess, such as Locusts or rats Ln a plague. But even Lf every LLvLng thLng were assLgned value, Lt would not follow (Ln the way soMetLMes LnvaLLdLy argued) that every thLng has Lt equally. ~hLLe Lt could be saLd that thLngs are equal Ln havLng Lt, thLs Ls rather LLke pretendLng that people are equal Ln an LnegaLLtarLan socLety where all have soMe Money - a subterfuge. Indeed proposed prLncLpLes of deep ecology LnforM us, correctly, that soMe ecoLogLcaL LteMS are More valuable than others. For Lnstance, a certaLn sort of coMpLexLty Ls a vLrtue (Naess 73, prLncLpLe (6)), so presuMabLy an LteM wLth that coMpLexLty Ls More valuable than a sLMple bLoLogLcal LteM. SLMLLarLy, dLversLty of systeM Ls a vLrtue, a prLMe ground of value (prLncLpLe (2)). The upshot appears to be that a hLghly dLverse ecosysteM Ls More valuable -14- �than a sLMpLLfLed and LMpoverLshed one_ FurtherMore, bLospherLc egaLLtarLanLsM Ls LnconsLstent wLth the hoLLstLc, antL-reducLLonL3tLc, antL-LndLvLduaLL3tLc ethos whLch deep ecoLogy LMports froM hoLLstLc ecotogy. AnaLogous concLu3Lons can be reached for •equaL rLghts• forMuLatLons_ For one thLng, equaL rLghts are characterLstLcally based on equal MerLt or equal worth_ For another, arguMents lLke those gLven can be rerun wLth rLghts suppLantLng values_ As a theoretLcaL prLncLpLe, bLospherLc egalLtarLanLsM has to be scrapped_ The LMMense dLffLcuLtLes of such a prLncLpLe Ln practLce Naess had already partLally recognLsed, qualLfyLng egalLtarLanLsM to equalLty Ln prLncLple 'because any realLstLc praxLs necessLtates soMe kLllLng, exploLtatLon, and suppressLon' (p_95). The extent of erosLon Ln equalLty thLs affords reMaLns obscure; but Lt couLd be close to total, wLth theoretLcaL equaLLty LapsLng whenever confLLct of rLghts or values LooMed_ Such egaLLtarLanLsM would be LLke a MaxLM of honesty Ln prLncLpLe, whLch appLLed Ln practLce only when Lt was not LnconvenLent; that Ls, but an eMpty MaxLM_ ~hatever Naess's Lntended qualLfLcatLon, Lt stLLL seeMs to people wLth Much practLcaL experLence on the Land or Ln gardenLng, especLaLLy Ln places where the surroundLng natural envLronMent has not been totally transforMed, that he has consLderabLy underestLMated the extent of quaLLfLcatLon needed, and that the prLncLpLe. BLospherLc strangle to begLn does quaLLfLcatLon due theLr own shelter or supply not do who egaLLtarLanLsM Ln practLce Ls for people sustenance, but pass the busLness of ecosysteM Lnterference and ModLfLcatLon on to others (as they typLcaLLy pass the butchery of theLr Meat and the LLke on to others)_ Even were Lt desLrabLe, unLversaL hunter-gatherLng Ls no Longer possLbLe or feasLbLe, wLth so Many Mostly unsuLted and LLL-adapted huMans; and a substantLaL even hunter-gatherers terMLnate the LLves of Many creatures Lnterference wLth theLr rLghts to LLve and bLossoM - and, More LMportant, and dLrectty LnterferLng substantLaLLy ModLfy theLr envLronMents, thus LndLrectly wLth enorMous nuMbers of LLvLng thLngs_ ~hatever rLghts sLMpLer LLvLng organLsMs, especLaLLy ones such as bacterLa and vLruses, have to LLve and bLossoM, they have decLdedLy quaLLfLed and Much attentuated ones. ULth bLospherLc egaLLtarLanLsM (Ln prLncLpLe) the deep ecology MoveMent has Latched onto a prLncLple whLch Ls both too powerful, and yet, Lf the ·Ln prLncLpLe" quaLLfLcatLon Ls appLLed so as to cover typLcaL LLfestyLes of deep ecoLogLsts, a prLncLpLe so rLddLed wLth exceptLons as to barely hang together. But wLthout soMe of the Lntended force of bLospherLc egaLLtarLanLsM, deep ecology Ls Ln danger of coLLapsLng (LLke Many of Lts followers) Lnto an LnterMedLate posLtLon, as no other part of the pLatforM adequately sustaLns Lts LLMLted separatLon_ Part of what Ls sought wLth the egaLLtarLan prLncLpLe Lnterference, huMan Lnterference to an extent and on a scale far below that of theMe the Ls already afforded a basLs Ln presently prevaLLLng Ls what wLth values-Ln-nature and outsLde the huMan sphere, sLnce Lnterference of value Ls (Lpso facto) LLMLted. Such a prLncLpLe of LLMLted Interference deserves, Ln any case, separate forMuLatLon (whLch Lt usually gaLns Ln deep ecology pLatforMs)_ But even so Lt hardly achLeves the requLsLte separatLon, sLnce LnterMedLate posLtLons can, and do, grant or MaLntaLn soMe such prLncLpLe of lLMLted or reduced Lnterference (thus e-g- BLrch, AttfLeLd, SLnger)_ ~hat Ls requLred Ls a posLtLve equLvaLent of the separatLng feature, of the rejectLon of the greater vaLue assuMptLon, and therewLth of the rejectLon of huMan supreMacy, of the value pLcture of huMans as always nuMber one_ What Ls needed, More generaLLy, Ls a prLncLpLe teLLLng agaLnst the favourLng of one over others sLMpLy on the basLs of specLes, a specLes - huMans Ln partLcuLar -15- �prLncLple of bLospecLes LMpartLalLty, to gLve Lt a sLMLlar grandLose tLtle. There Ls soMe reason to suspect that, as elsewhere, a requLreMent of LMparttalLty has been hardened Lnto one of egalLtarLanLsM, that faLrness, because often dLfftcult to assess, has been MLstakenly taken to Lnvolve equaltty. BLospecLes LMpartLalLty LMplLes the avoLdance of specLes chauvLnLsM, that Ls the avotdance of unfaLr treatMent of LteMs outstde the gLven specLes. Because unfaLr, the treatMent concerned lacks any sufftctent justLfLcatLon. Hence, the avotdance of spectes chauvtnLsM Lnvolved Ls effectLvely that prevLously explaLned as a specLal case of class chauvLnLsM. SLMLlarly, the requLreMent of bLospecLes LMpartLalLty Ls a specLal case of the requlreMent of class (or natural group) LMpartlallty, for whlch the arguMents are the saMe as those for the avoldance of class chauvLnLsM. The danger of specLes partLalLty, of favourLng soMe specLes, Ls Much encouraged by a specles fallacy, whLch Ls coMMonly lnvoked ln favourlng huMans. ThLs Ls the error of concludLng that because a few MeMbers of the specles have accoMplLshed soMethtng of (LMMense) value, all MeMbers of the spectes therefore are (hlghly) valuable; all MeMbers of the specles Manage to free-load for the rtde, obtatned by a few MeMbers, so to say. The arguMent, once challenged, usually falls back on an arguMent that goes by way of capacltLes: the reMaLnLng MeMbers of the specles have the capactty to achleve these sorts of thlngs also. But, fLrstly, that Ls not true: LntellLgence, skLlls, and the lLke, vary soMewhat wtthLn specLes, and froM our narrow perspectLve, vary consLderably aMong huMans, soMe of whoM have no capacLty for advanced MatheMatLcs or MusLc. a Secondly, Lt requLres More than capacLty: Lt requLres cLrcuMstances, favourable envlronMent to exercLse theM (hence, ln part, the folly of More huMans ln conspLcuously suboptLMal cLtLes), together wLth a wlll and drlve actually to follow through approprLately on capacLtLes. (CrLtLque, pp.12-16) 4. NON-VIOLENCE The fourth plllar, nonvLolence, Means to the Greens the cessatLon of both personal vLolence and -structural vlolence·, that Ls, vLolence and oppresslon LMposed by the state and by Lnstltutlons. For these reasons the Greens support the concept of self-deterMlnatLon for lndLvLduals and groups. They also advocate peace educatLon Ln the schools, whLch would teach nonvLolent Means of conflLct resolutLon and show chLldren that the cult of the soldLer Ls a cultural, not a natural condltLon. The Greens also call for an end to the vLolence and oppressLon toward woMen, chLldren, and MLnorLty groups so coMMon Ln patrLarchal socLetLes. They want to develop a nonexploLtatlve econoMlc systeM Ln whLch eMployee-owned and -controlled busLnesses replace huge operatlons dLctated by or corporate lnterests. They want to transforM our vlolent state the relatLonshLp wlth nature lnto one of balance and respect. Petra Kelly expresses the centralLty of thLs prLncLple when she says, ·NonvLolence Ls the essentLal Lngredtent ln an ecologLcal socLety. • Most of the Greens eMphatLcally eMbrace the prLncLple of Although nonvLolence, they also realLze that Lts appllcatLon Ls often probleMatLc. Roland Vogt polnted out one of the areas of confll~tlng values: What we have not yet accoMplLshed Ls to say how we show ourselves to be nonvLolent at the MOMent when we partLcLpate Ln governMental functLons, because the state Ls Ltself an LnstLtutLon of vLolence. For exaMple, how wlll a Green cLty counctl act agalnst people who don't pay thelr rent, although they really could because they recelve welfare or because they earn enough. The norMal course Ls warnLng, warnLng, evLctLon notLce, and then evLctLon by force and by polLce. We haven't solved thLs. That Ls, there are stLll no thought-out concepts of how we can reconcLle the deMands of socLal -16- �responsLbLL Lty wLth the deMands of non vLoLence. The Greens extend theLr prLncLpLe of nonvLoLence to theLr actLve resLstance agaLnst the Most MassLve and potentLaLLy deadly "anLfestatL on of structural vLoLence: the nuclear arMs race proMoted by the MLLLtary-L ndustrLaL coMpLex and the governMent. In theLr natLonaL headquarter s Ln Bonn the Greens have a poster of OandhL s adage "there Ls no way to peace; peace Ls the way• and one of Thoreau 0 Those who eMbrace nonvLoLent cLvLL dLsobedLenc e, coMMLttLng breaches of Law on the grounds of conscLence, are prepared to suffer · vLoLence or punLshMent theMseLves rather than LnfLLct vLoLence or LnjustLce on others or share responsLbLL Lty for such acts by reMaLnLng passLve. •1,, however, the Law Ls so proMuLgated that Lt of necessLty Makes you an agent of LnjustLce agaLnst another, then I say to you: Break the Law." The MajorLty of Greens strongly endorse - and lLve - the concept of actLve, nonvLoLence resLstance. However, the MarxLst-orL ented MeMbers of the party have never been fully supportLve of that prLncLpLe. They vLew Lt "ereLy as a ·MoralLstLc " tactLc that should be abandoned Ln favor of escaLatLng resLstance Lf Lt does not prove suffLcLentL y effectLve. Petra Kelly's account of the LeftLsts' attLtude on thLs Lssue was sLMLlar to what we had heard froM Many other Greens: They do not understand that nonvLolent actLon Ls an extre"ely subversLve force. They thLnk Lt's harMLess, Ls a for" of obedLence, and changes nothLng, that Lt's LLke beggLng froM the state. ·1t's just a tactLc, a toot," they say. To theM everythLng Ls to be used. But there are soMe thLngs you should never "Lsuse - or even use. They are sLMpLy LntegraL. NonvLoLence cannot be coMproMLsed. Although Many of the advocates of nonvLoLent . resLstance argued that ·such a course cannot be dLsMLssed as "Merely MoraLLstLc" sLnce Lt Ls also absolutely ratLonaL (that Ls, hLstory shows that vLoLence breeds vLolence - structural as welt as personal - so we "ust fLnd another way to effect change, especLaLLy Ln the nuclear age). For Most MeMbers of the greens the choLce was clear, as expressed wLth a cLtatLon froM MartLn Luther KLng: •~e no Longer have a choLce or nonvLoLence between vLoLence and nonvLoLence . The choLce Ls eLther nonexLsten ce." (Green PoLLtLcs, pp.~3-7) Deeply coMMLtted persons Ln the ecology Move"ent sense the vuLnerabLLL ty of natural processes to huMan LnterventLo n, and the fundaMentaL necessLty of MaLntaLnLng bLologLcal dLversLty. AffLrMatLon of the LntegrLty of ecosysteMs frequently LnvoLves a caMpaLgn to save froM developMent soMe rLver of canyon or wLLderness area. In a real sense, ecologLcaL resLstance LnvoLves beco"Lng frLends wLth another specLes or a rLver or a MountaLn, for exaMpLe. In general, the resLster takes up the burden of responsLbLl Lty, the burden of wLtnessLng for the other as Self. ThLs process of befrLendLng "ay be based on ArLstotle's crLterLa for frLendshLp: the proMotLon of the other's good for the other's own sake. Or frLendshLp can be the extensLon of self. When OandhL was asked Lf hLs good deeds Ln a vLLLage expressed hLs huManLtarLa nLsM, he repLLed he worked "to serve no • GandhL s stateMent defLned MaturLty. ALtruLsM was one else but Myself unnecessary because hLs self eMbraced the whole vLLLage. 0 There are Many dLfferent tactLcs of LndLvLduaLs and organL2atLo ns Ln save the Earth•, but or poLLtLcaL caMpaLgns whLch seek to ·save the rLver -17- �there Ls one overrLdLng or baste norM of ecoLogLcaL resLstLng: non-vLoLence. Ecology teaches us that MankLnd Ls not the center of LLfe on the planet. Ecology has taught us that the whole earth Ls part of our "body" and that we Must Learn to respect Lt as we respect ourselves. As we feel for ourselves, we Must feel for aLL forMs of LLfe - the whales, the seals, the forests, the seas. The treMendous beauty of ecoLogLcaL thought Ls that Lt shows us a pathway back to an understandLng and an apprecLatLon of LLfe LtseLf - an understandLng and apprecLatLon that Lt Ls LMperatLve to that very way or LLfe. As wLth the whales and the seals, LLfe Must be saved by nonvLoLent confrontatLons, by what the Quakers caLL "bearLng wLtness•. A person bearLng wLtness Must accept responsLbLLLty for beLng aware of an LnjustLce. The person May then choose to do soMethLng or stand by, but he May not turn away Ln Lgnorance. The Greenpeace ethLc Ls not onty to personally bear wLtness to atrocLtLes agaLnst lLfe; Lt Ls to take dLrect actLon to prevent theM. ~hLLe actLon Must be dLrect, Lt Must also be non-vLoLent. Ue Must obstruct a wrong wLthout offerLng personal vLoLence to Lts perpetrators. Ue Must know that our greatest strength Ls LLfe LtseLf, and the coMMLtMent to dLrect our lLves to prbtect others. EcoLogLcaL resLstLng could be defLned as keepLng the peace of the neLghborhood. Rarely are vandals or vLolent neLghbors welcoMe Ln the neLghborhood. Uhen the neLghbors Lnclude rLvers and MountaLns, seashores and prarLes, then the LntegrLty of the ecosysteM Ls MaLntaLned. In hLs explLcatLon of GandhL's theory of nonvLoLence, Arne several norMs of nonvLoLent potLtLcat caMpaLgns. These Lnctude: Naess lLsts l. Announce your case and the goal of your caMpaLgn explLcLtty and clearly, dLstLnguLshLng essentLaLs froM nonessentLats. 2. Seek personal contact wLth your opponent and be avaLLable to hLM. · BrLng confLLctLng groups Lnto personal contact. 3. Turn your opponent Lnto a beLLever Ln and supporter of your case, but do not coerce or expLoLt hLM. ~- You provoke your opponent Lf you deLLberateLy or carelessly destroy hLs property. of ecoLogLcaL resLstLng denounce theorLsts LeadLng nonvLoLence as tactLcs. But as Rober ALtken RoshL wrote: vLoLence versus Non-vLoLence Ls not just a tactLc for people who Make Lt a practLce ... The end Ls the Means, Ln other words. Look at poLLtLcaL hLstory or at the hLstory of any MoveMents. Uhen we work for certaLn goals, those goals tend to betray us. Ue defeated L.B. Johnson only to get RLchard NLxon. Ue got rLd of the B-1 BoMber (teMporarLLy) and the CruLse MLssLle appeared. Ue have to Make our actLon the goal. Our actLon Must LtseLf be the truth. Our actLon Must be Lts own defense, Lts own procLaMatLon, Lts own purpose. (Letter to the author, June 1982) Both on practLcaL and ethLcaL grounds, vLoLence Ls rejected as a Mode of ecotogLcal resLstance. TerrorLst attacks on nuclear plants or MLssLle sLtes could cause ·red" alerts and vLolent responses froM governMent agencLes. PLacLng one's own LLfe at rLsk, such as sLttLng Ln front of bulldozers or polLce cars at a deMonstratLon to protest destructLon of the raLn forest, May be LLLegaL but not vLoLent. And spontaneous acts such as the decoMMLssLonLng of a power generator or bulldozer May draMatLze the contLnuLng destructLon of a -18- �spectal ecosysteM. Ecologtcal reststance also Means defendtng natural dtverstty through educatLon, publLc speakLng, and use of lawsuLts; tryLng to convert publtc opLnton to the cause; and tnforMLng poltttctans and dectsLon Makers. ResLstance Ls another naMe for afftrMatLon - joyful affLrMatton of the tntegrLty of Nature, natural dLversLty, and MLnLMuM huMan LMpact on place. (Deep Ecolo9H, pp.16-17) The Deep Ecology MOVeMent and peace MoveMent. Ftfteen years ago close cooperatton between supporters of deep ecology and actLvtsts Ln the peace MoveMent was out of reach. Rather suddenly thts sttuatton Ls totally changed. SoMe of us, ltke Myself, favour unLlateral dtsarMaMent and establtshMent of MtlLtant, but unherotc, non-vtolent defence. At thts potnt Lt ts tMportant for actLvtsts to stress the dtstLnctLon between actLon, caMpaLgn and MOVeMent. They May be tllustrated by three concentrLc cLrcles. The LnnerMost coMprLse the dLrect actLons wLthLn a caMpatgn, for Lnstance, a dated deMonstratLon at a parttcular locatLon agatnst the butldtng of a daM, or the non-vtolent obstructton of the transport of the MachLnery on the way to the daM sLte. ThLs May be part of a ten year old caMpaLgn to save a rtver (LncludLng of course tts ecosysteM) froM developMent of soMe sort. Ten dLrect acttons May be fatlure, but nevertheless theLr LMpact May conflLct, contrtbute to vLctory of the caMpaLgn. (Or May polarLze the antt-actLvtsts Many what Ls That contrLbutLng to the faLlure of the caMpatgn? MaLntaLn.) The rLver caMpaLgn together wLth other analogous caMpaLgns May be seen as part of a MoveMent of greater or lesser generaltty. A MoveMent to save rtvers, or More generally a conservatton MoveMent. Many caMpatgns May be fatlures, but the MOVeMent goes on. (Hates on Poltttcs, pp.l~-JS) Gandhtan and other forMs of non-vtolence are wtdely found wLthtn the deep ecologLcal MoVeMent. There Ls a reluctance to accept destructLon of MachLnery Ln efforts to stop destructton even of holy places. There Ls soMe dtsagreeMent on thts and related subjects. I do not thtnk that the coMpletely general norMs of care and consLderatLon should be looked upon as part of the specLftc platforM of the deep ecology MoveMent . . (PhLlosophLcal Aspects, p.31) In suM, the paradtgM of deep ecology Ls revolutLonary tn tts MetaphysLcs, epLsteMology, and cosMology, but deep ecologLsts do not seek to overthrow governMents by force of arMs or to Lssue anythLng lLke a coMprehensLve, alleMbracLng polLtLcal prograM for brLngLng about the new order. The conteMporary deep ecology MoveMent seeMs to be what Robert NLsbet has called a "wLthdrawal and renewal" MoveMent such as has perLodLcally arLsen .Ln ~estern socLety sLnce the fall of the RoMan EMpLre. There ts no poltttcal party of "deep ecology,· no cadre of poltttcal revoluttonarte s. Thts ts not an approprtate approach for deep ecologtsts. No frontal confrontatLons wLth reforMLst envLronMental tsts or wLth the doMLnant socLal/polttLc al order Ls destred. It would be counter-product Lve by Maktng people More defensLve of thetr LdeologLcal posLtLon. Deep ecology Ls not an atteMpt to add one More tdeology Ln the crowded fLeld of Modern LdeologLes. Deep ecologLsts are questLng for ways to lLberate and cultLvate the ecologLcal conscLousness. FroM ecologtcal conscLousness wtll naturally flow an ecologtcal reststance. (Deep Ecology MoveMent, pp.316-17) 5: ON SELF-REALIZATION Naess: Self-realtzatLo n ts the realtzatLon of -19- the potentLaltttes of ltfe. �OrganLsMs that dLffer froM each other Ln three ways gLve us Less dLversLty than organLsMs that dLffer froM each other Ln one hundred ways. Therefore, the selfreaLLzatLon we experLence when we LdentLfy wLth the unLverse Ls heLghtened by an Lncrease Ln the nuMber of ways Ln whLch LndLvLduals, socLetLes, and even specLes and lLfe forMs realLze theMselves. The greater the dLversLty, the, the greater the self-realLzatLon. ThLs seeMLng duaLLty between LndLvLduaLs and the totalLty Ls encoMpassed by what I call the Self and the ChLnese call the Tao. Most people Ln deep ecology have had the feelLng - usually, but not always, Ln nature - that they are connected wLth soMethLng greater than theLr ego, greater than theLr naMe, theLr faMLLy, theLr specLaL attrLbutes as an LndLvLdual - a feelLng that Ls often called oceanLc because Many have Lt on the ocean. ULthout that LdentLfLcatLon, one Ls not easLLy drawn to becoMe LnvoLved Ln deep ecology. Many people have thLs feeLLng when they see a death struggle - for Lnstance tLny anLMaLs LLke fLtes or Mosquttoes fLghtLng for thetr ltves. Uhen they see anLMals sufferLng, they May LdentLfy wLth LLfe forMs they usually don't LdentLfy wLth. Such sLtuatLons offer us an opportunLty to develop a More Mature poLnt of vLew. Insofar as thLs conversLon, these deep feelLngs are reLLgLous, deep ecology has a reLLgLous coMponent, and those people who have done the Most to Make socLetLes aware of the destructLve way Ln whLch we LLve Ln reLatLon to natural settLngs have had such relLgLous feeLLngs. Rachel Carson, for exaMpLe, says that we cannot do what we do, we have no reLLgLous or ethLcaL justLfLcatLon for behavLng as we do toward nature. Her arguMent Ls not calculated or reasonable Ln the usual sense, sayLng that, Lf we contLnue poLsonLng nature, we wLLl be Less healthy, or wLLL have fewer resources, and so on. She Ls sayLng that we are sLMply not perMLtted to behave Ln that way. SoMe wLll say that nature Ls not Man's property, Lt's the property of God; others wLLL say Lt Ln other ways. The MaLn poLnt Ls that deep ecology has a reLLgLous coMponent, fundaMental LntuLtLons that everyone Must cuLtLvate Lf he or she Ls to have a LLfe based on values and not functLon LLke a coMputer. Uhereas shallow ecology, Lf taken to Lts logLcaL extreMe, Ls lLke a coMputerLzed, cost-benefLt anaLysLs for huMans. (SLMpLe tn Means, p.11) If the terM seLf-reaLLzatLon Ls applLed, Lt should be kept Ln MLnd that Me", "ego , and self have shLftLng denotatLons. NothLng Ls evLdent and •1·, LndLsputabLe. Even that we are Ls debatable Lf we Make the questLon dependent upon answertng what we are. Self-realLzatLon Ln Lts absolute MaxLMUM Ls, as I see Lt, the Mature experLence of oneness Ln dLversLty as depLcted Ln the above verse. The MLnLMUM Ls the seLf-reaLL2atLon by More of Less consLstent egotLsM - by the narrowest experLence of what constLtutes one's self and a MaxLMUM of alLentatLon. As eMpLrLcaL beLngs we dweLL soMewhere Ln between, but Lncreased MaturLty LnvoLves tncrease of the wLdeness of the self. The seLf-reaLtzatton MaxLMuM should not necessarLLy be conceLved as a MystLcal or MedLtattonaL state. ·ey MedLtatLon soMe perceLve the Self tn the self by the self; others by the path of knowledge and stLLl others by the path of work (karMa-yoga) [Gtta: Chapter 13,, verse 2~]. GandhL was a karMa-yoga, reaLLzLng hLMseLf through socLaL and poLLtLcaL actLon. The terMs MystLcal unLon and MystLcLsM are avoLded here for three reasons: Ftrst, strong Mysttcal tradLtLons stress the dtssolutLon of Lndtvtdual selves Lnto a nondLversLfLed supreMe whole. Both froM cultural and ecoLogLcaL poLnt of vtew dLversLty and LndLvtdualLty are essentLaL. Second, there Ls a strong terMLnoLogtcaL trend wtthtn sctenttftc coMMuntttes to assoctate MysttcLsM wtth MystLcs tend to agree that MysttcaL ThLrd, confuston. and vagueness conscLousness Ls rarely sustatned under norMal, everyday condLttons. But strong, -20- �w~de LdentLfLcatLon can color experLence under such condLtLons. GandhL was only MargLnally concerned wLth 'nature'. In hLs ashraM poLsonous snakes were perMLtted to tLve LnsLde and outsLde huMan dwettLngs. AntL-poLson MedLcLnes were frowned upon~ GandhL LnsLsted that trust awakens trust, and that snakes have the saMe rLght to tLve land btossoM as the huMans. (IdentLfLcatLon, pp.259-6) In keepLng wLth the spLrLtual tradLtLons of Many of the worlds s retLgLons, the deep ecology norM of setf-reatL2atLon goes beyond the Modern western self hedonLstLc whLch Ls defLned as an Lsotated ego strLvLng prLMarLly for gratLfLcatLon or for a narrow sense of LndLvLduat satvatLon Ln thLs tLfe or the next. ThLs socLatty prograMMed sense of the narrow self or socLat self dLslocates us, and leaves us prey to whatever fad or fashLon Ls prevalent Ln our socLety or socLat reference group. Ue are thus robbed of be9LnnLn9 the search for our unLque spLrLtuat/b.LologLcal personhood. SpLrLtual growth, or unfotdLng, begLns when we cease to understand or see ourselves as Lsolated and narrow coMpetLng egos and begLn to LdentLfy wLth other huMans forM our faMLly and frLends to, eventually, our specLes. But the deep ecology sense of self requLres a further MaturLty and growth, an LdentLfLcatLon whLch goes beyond huManLty to Lnclude the nonhuMan world. Ue Must see beyond our narrow conteMporary cultural assuMptLons and values, and the conventLonat wLsdoM of our tLMe and place, and thLs Ls best achLeved by the MedLtatLve deep questLonLng process. Only Ln thLs way can we hope to attaLn full Mature personhood and unLqueness. A nurturLng nondoMLnatLng socLety can help Ln the "real work" of becoMLng a whole person. The ·real work• can be suMMarLzed syMbolLcally as the realLzatLon of "self-Ln-Self- where ·setf· stands for organLc wholeness. ThLs process of the full unfoldLng of the self can also be SUMMarLzed by the phrase, •No one Ls saved untLt we are all saved,· where the phrase •one• Lncludes not only Me, an LndLvLduat huMan, but all huMans, whales, grLzzly bears, whole raLn forest ecosysteMs, MountaLns and rLvers, the tLnLest MLcrobes Ln the soLt, and so on. (Deep Ecology, pp.66-7) of norM SubscrLbLng to these prLncLples, Naess asserts, coMes froM the self-realLzatLon, that ·.~. wLth MaturLty, huMan beLngs wLtl experLence joy and sorrow when other tLfe forMs experLence sorrow. Not only wLll we feet sad when our brother or the dog or cat feels sad, but we wLll grLeve when lLvLng beLngs, LncludLng landscapes, are destroyed. In our cLvLlLzatLon, we have vast Means' of destructLon at our dLsposal but extreMely lLttle MaturLty Ln our feelLngs. Only a very narrow range of feetLngs have Lnterested Most huMan beLngs untLt now.• ThLs deepenLng of feetLngs seeMs to run counter . to the trend Ln Modern socLety toward superfLcLat relatLonshLps . . . . Arne Naess asserts that ·setfrealLzatLon cannot develop far wLthout sharLng joys and sorrows wLth others, or More fundaMentalty, wLthout the developMent of the narrow ego of the sMall chLld Lnto the coMprehensLve structure of a Self that coMprLses all huMan beLngs. The ecologLcal MoveMent -- as Many earlLer phLlosophLcat MoveMents -- takes a step further and asks for developMent such that, there Ls a deep LdentLfLcatLon of LndLvLduals wLth all lLfe." I suggest that the leaders of the ecology MoveMent devetopMent theLr ethLcs after they had Moved along thLs path of Self-reatLzatLon. (Stone/Sky, pp.6-7) But what Ls wrong wLth the wLdely applauded atteMpt, runnLng through Much LdeatLstLc and Eastern thLnkLng, to explLcate value through self-realLsatLon? FLrstly, lLke utLlLtarLan explLcatLons, such as those through happLness and satLsfactLon, Lt Ls Much too experLentLal. It renders value a feature of those -21- �who exper~ence value - roughly of valuers - rather than of what ~s valued, and bears value. It Ls lLke sayLng that colour Ls a Matter of those (huMans) who perceLve colour, not of the (coMposLtLon of) thLngs that are coloured. And reMove the experLences, those undertakLng self-realLsatLon, as Ln the days before lLfe appears and value dLsappears. And that too Ls wrong. Secondly, even Lf self-realLsatLon were always worthwhLle and never tLed to by contrast wLth lLfe - there are exaMpLes of value whLch fall beyond evLl (Ln presented often seLf-reaLLsatLon. A certaLn sort of dLrectLon Ls bLocheMLstry texts Lnterested Ln explaLnLng lLfe) as a MLnLMal condLtLon of lLfe of an organLsr1 or syster1: caLL that dLrectLon, s·eLf-dLrecti.on. Thus, deep ecology, Lnsofar as Lt values (just) LLfe, values (just) self-dLrectLon. In these terMs, the contractLon froM seLf-dLrectLon to self-realLsatLon, as Ln Ecosophy T, Looks LLke a M~stake. A s~r1LLar M~stake appears to underLLe contractLons to ecologLcal conscLousness (as Ln Devall); for self-realLsatLon Looks rer1arkabLy L~ke consc~ous seLf-d~rectLon, roughly an LntersectLon of seLf-dLrectLon wLth conscLousness. The argur1ents asser1bLed thus underMLne both of what Devall presents as the uLtLMate norMs of deep ecology', nar1eL~eLf-reaLLsatLon and bLocentrLsM. 'These are not proved but "felt"' (83, p.5). But they are not felt, at least by those who perceLve value beyond what lLves; rather they are dLsproved, by a serLes of counterexar1ples to each as uLtLr1ate norr1s. (CrLtLque, pp.2~-5) In partLcular presentatLons of a partLcular phLLosophy froM whLch the Naess-SessLon platforM Ls derLved, naMely Ecosophy r' I use a Model where 'Self-realLzaHon!' and sLr1LLar short forr1uLatLons are taken to express a top norr1 of a norr1atLve systeM. ~e r1ay artLcuLate 'r1odeLs' of a very cor1prehensLve norr1atLve syster1, and use Lt to explore the LnterrelatLons of our own vLews and those of others. I have extensLvely used a Model of a cor1prehensLve yLew I call 'Ecosophy r ·' and I use only one top norM whLch on the Most crude ser1antLcaL Level Ls expressed by a one word sentence 'seLf-realLzatLon! '. A r1aLn LnspLratLon for - the choLce cor1es froM the use of the terN by GandhL. Another MaLn LnspLratLon Ls the strong trend Ln Uestern LndustrLaL states towards an LndLvLdualLsM favourLng lLfe as a Long ego-trLp full of 'happenLngs' . In France there Ls a group of 'egologLsts' , the nar1e beLng chosen as a contrast to 'ecologLsts ' : ~hatever the reLatLons between LndLvLdual beLngs, huMan nature Ls such that the egocentred Lnterests of each of us Ls stronger than any other. To foster the kLnds of soLLdar~ty the pol~t~cal left ~s taLkLng about, or the soLLdarLty wLth other lLfe forMs wh~ch . ecologLsts (the greens) preach, w~ll therefore never succeed and ~s apt to hurt the LndLvLduaL . ' seLf-reaL~zatLon!' Ls a norM that LnLtLaLLy arLses vLvLd Lnterest aMong those who are LnfLuenced by the ego-trLp trend, but are then astonLshed and bewLLdered by the d~stLnctLons between ego, self and Self. Th~s ~s new to Most of theM and they are often Led to recons~der theLr LndLvLduaL~st posLtLon. ThLs reconsLderLng Ls for Me a confLrMatLon of the SocratLc value of the choLce of forr1ulatLon. The r1aLn poLnt Ln thLs connectLon Ls that huMans undergo a r1aturLn9 process, and only Lf thLs process coMes to a 'prer1ature' halt, LndentLfLcatLon wLth others and solLdarLty faLL to develop. If we, as I do, add the SpLnozLst (courageous) hypothes~s that the joy and equLMLndedness you exper~ence as a Mature person ~s deeper and rLcher than that you exper~ence as an ~r1r1ature grown 'reaLLzaHon of the (wLde) Self!' gets to be an ~nstructi.ve and ~nsp~rLng up, -22- �forMu l,a. The Self-realLzatLo n norM proposed by Me has been taken too serLously as Lf one, two or three world expressLons were adequate phLLosophLcaL expressLons of a hL9hest' norM. An adequate expressLon LMplLes that the LntrLcate subject ego, se Lf, Se Lf ', that Ls, b Lo Log Lea L, soe La L and Hetaphys Lea L se Lf ar·e dLstLnguLshed. Only Ln relatLon to a faLrly Large body of phLlosophLcaL analysLs we can forMulate adequate phLlosophLcal prLncLples. It has always been that way. (Notes on Sylvan, pp.17-19) HY 0 6: OH LIFESTYLE The deep ecologLcal MoveMent Ls recruLted froM people who do not look upon natural surroundLngs as a Means for recreatLon and repaLr. LLfe and work Ln natural surroundLngs Ls a vLtal concern. The rLchness of that LLfe Ls so vast, and the Means are so sLMple, that they have dLffLculty understandLng why others seeM to need Means on a level of coMplLcatLon and sophLstLcatLon that Ls unLque Ln the hLstory of [huMan]kLnd. They cannot but fLght agaLnst the acceleratLng destructLon of nature due to the MaLntaLnLng and expandLng the productLon of such Means. They do not thLnk people who serLousLy reflect upon the reLatLon between Means and ultLMate LntrLnsLc values can justLfy the present polLcLes. As an LllustratLon of dLfferent Means/end ratLos, coMpare the dLrect and LndLrect technologLcal requLreMent of a faMLly wLth MeMbers froM 8 to 80 years old lLvLng Ln a natural surroundLng and goLng cross-country skLLng together, wLth that of a faMLly doLng slaloM at a bLg fashLonable skL resort. (PhLlosophLcal. Aspects, pp.35-6) 0 RLch Ln ends, sLMple Ln Means!.' HuMan Lnterference Ln the ecosphere can only be reduced to tolerable levels Lf people, and especLally the average (or econoMLcally above average) people of the LndustrLal states adopt lLfe styles requLrLng sLMple MaterLal Means. ThLs Ls coMpatLble wLth or even favourable towards rLchness of goals. 'Increase the sensLtLvLty to and apprecLatLon of what there Ls suffLcLent of for all!' The educatLonal slogan fLghts agaLnst the confusLon of value wLth Market value and prLce. A way to MaxLMLze our abLlLty to derLve deep satLsfactLon froM the goods of whLch there stLll, Ls, or coul.d be, enough. The present lLfe style of average people Ln LndustrLal socLetLes cannot be a global lLfe style wLthout LrreversLble, colossal destructLon of condLtLons of LLfe on Earth. (Hotes on PolLtLcs, p.2) It ' s a shLft froM beLng doMLnated by Means, LnstruMents, gadgets, all the Many thLngs we thLnk wLLl gLve us pleasure or Make us happy or perfect. The shLft coMes about when we serLously ask ourselves, In what sLtuatLons do I experLence the MaxLMUM satLsfactLon of MY whole beLng? and fLnd that we need practLcally nothLng of what we are supposed to need for a rLght and fuLfLlLLng LLfe. And Lf we Make that shLft toward a LLfe sLMple Ln Means but rLch Ln goals, we are not threatened by the plans elaborated by envLronMentalL sts. For Lnstance, we can see that, Lnstead of an ene~gy cr~s~s, we have a crLsLs of consuMptLon - we have More than enough energy. There Ls no reason to contLnue LncreasLng our consuMptLon of energy or of any of the other MaterLaL aspects of lLfe. In countrLes lLke the UnLted States the crLsLs Ls rather one of LLfestyle, of our tradLtLons of thoughtlessness and confusLon, or our LnabLLLty to questLon what Ls and Ls not worthwhLLe Ln l,Lfe. ULthLn fLfty years, eLther we wLl,l, need a dLctatorshLp to save what Ls Left of the dLversLty of LLfe forMs, or we wLLl have a shLft of values, a shLft of our total vLew such that no dLctatorshLp wLLL -23- �be . needed. It Ls thoroughly natural to stop doMLnatLng and expLoLtLng and destroyLng the planet. A "sMooth" ~ay, LnvoLvLng harMonLous LLvLng wLth nature, or a "rough" way, LnvoLvLng dLctatorshLp and coercion - those are the optLdns. I tell people that, Lf they Make clear theLr fundaMentaL assuMptLons about what Ls needed for a LLfe sLMpLe Ln Means and rLch Ln ends, they wLLL necessarLLy coMe to the conctusLon that Lt Ls not tack of energy consuMptLon that Makes theM unhappy. They can then oppose nuclear power wLthout havLng read thLck books and wLthout knowLng the MyrLad facts that are used Ln newspapers and perLodLcaLs. And they Must also fLnd others who feel the saMe and forM cLrcLes of frLends who gLve one another confidence and support Ln lLvLng Ln a way that the MajorLty fLnds rLdLcuLous, naLve, stupLd, and sLMpt~stLc. But Ln order to do that, one Must already have enough seLf-confLdenc e to follow one's LntuLtLon - a quaLLty very Much LackLng Ln broad sectLons of the populace. Most people follow the trends and advertLseMents and becoMe phLLosophLcaL and ethLcaL crLpples. I thLnk that, Ln the long run, Ln order to joyfully and wholeheartedly partLcLpate Ln the deep ecology MoveMent you have to take your own LLfe very seriously. People who successfully MaLntaLn a Low MaterLaL standard of lLvLng and successfully cultLvate a deep, Lntense Lnner lLfe are Much better able to consLstentLy MaLntaLn a deep ecoLogLcat vLew and to act on behalf of Lt. As 1· sLt down and breathe deeply and just feel where I aM, I can ask Myself where and when I really enjoy MY LLfe and what would be the MLnLMuM Means necessary to MaLntaLn those enjoyable feelLngs and sLtuatLons. For exaMpLe, I Myself have too eager to go cLLMbLng Ln the HLMaLayas, whereas the pecutLar been satLsfactLon I have as a MountaLneer could be had Ln Norway . If you concentrate on what gLves you satLsfactLon, you wLLL fLnd that Lt can be obtaLned Much More easLly and sLMply than we are educated to belLeve Ln our socLety, where bL99er, More elaborate and More expensLve are always consLdered better. The deveLopMent of sensLtLvLty toward the good thLngs whLch we already have Ln suffLcLent quantLty Ls the true goal of educatLon. Not that we need to LLMLt our desLres. I'M not for the sLMple lLfe, except Ln the sense of a tLfe sLMpLe Ln Means but rLch Ln goals and values. I have treMendous aMbLtLon. Only the best Ls good enough for Me. I LLke rLchness, and I feel rLcher than the rLchest person when I'M Ln MY cottage Ln the country wLth water I've carrLed froM a certaLn well and wood I've gathered froM the forest. Uhen you take a heLLcopter to the SUMMLt of a MountaLn,° the vLew Looks LLke a postcard, and, Lf there ' s a restaurant on the top, you wLll coMplaLn that the food Ls not properly Made. ~hereas Lf you struggle up froM the bottoM, you have thLs deep feeLLng of satLsfactLon, and even sandwLches MLxed wLth skL wax and sand taste fantastLc. (SLMple Ln Means, pp . 11-12) (1) Use of s LMple Means, avoidance of unnecessary coMplLcated LnstruMents and other sorts of Means. (2) ChoLce of actLvLtLes Most dLrectLy servLng values Ln theMselves and havLng LntrLnsLc value. AvoLdance of actLvLtLes whLch are Merely auxLlLary, havLng no LntrLnsLc value , or beLng Many stages away froM fundaMentaL goals. (3) AntL-consuMerLs M . ThLs negatLve attLtude follows froM (1) and (2). (~) Endeavour to MaLntaLn and Lncrease the sensLtLvLty and apprecLatLon of goods of whLch there Ls enough for all to enjoy. ' (5) Absence or low degree of novophLLL - the love of what Ls new Merely because Lt Ls new. (6) Effort to dwell Ln sLtuatLons of LntrLnsLc value and to act rather than beLng busy . (7) ApprecLatLon of ethnLc and cultural differences aMon9 people, not feelLn9 theM as threats . (8) Concern about the sLtuatLon of the thLrd and fourth world and atteMpt to -24- �avoLd a standard of LLvLng too Much dLfferent froM and hLgher than the needy. (Global soLLdarLt y of LLfe style). (9) ApprecLat Lon of LLfe styles whLch are unLversaL LzabLe, whLch are not blatantly LMpossLbLe to sustaLn wLthout LnjustLce toward fellow huMans or other specLes. (10) To go for depth and rLchness of experLenc e rather than LntensLty . (11) To apprecLat e and choose, when possLbLe, MeanLngfuL work rather than just MakLng a LLvLng. (12) To Lead a coMpLex, not a coMpLLca ted LLfe, tryLn9 to reaLLze as Many aspects of posLtLve experLenc es as possLbLe wLthLn each tLMe-Lnte rvaL. (13) CuLtLvatL ng LLfe Ln coMMunLty (GeMeLns chaft) rather than Ln socLety (OeseLLs chaft}. sMaLL scale Ln prLMary productLo n (14) ApprecLat Lon of or partLcLpa tLon agrLcuLtu re, forestry, fLshLng. (15) Effort to satLsfy vLtaL needs rather than desLres. (Paradox, pp.57-8) In soMe Eastern tradLtLon s, the student Ls presented wLth a koan, a sLMpLe story or stateMent whLch May sound paradoxLc aL or nonsensLc aL on the surface but as the student turns and turns Lt Ln hLs or her MLnd, authentLc understan dLng eMerges. ThLs dLrect actLon · of turnLng and turnLn9, seeLn9 froM dLfferent perspectL ves and froM dLfferent depths, Ls requLred for the cuLtLvatL on of conscLou sness. The koan-LLke phrase for deep ecology, suggested by proMLnen t NorwegLan phLLosoph er Arne Naess Ls: ·sLMpLe Ln Means, rLch Ln ends.· (Deep Ecology, p.10) The LdeoLogLcaL change Ls MaLnLy that of apprecLat Lng LLfe quaLLty Ln sLtuatLon s of Lnherent value) rather than adherLng to an (dweLLLng LncreasLn gLy hLgher standard of LLvLng. There wLLL be a profound awareness of the dLfferenc e between bLg and great. SoMe econoMLs ts crLtLcLze the terM "quaLLty of LLfe" because Lt Ls supposed to be vague. But on closer LnspectLo n, what they consLder to be vague Ls actuaLLy the non-quan tLtatLve nature of the terM. One cannot quantLfy adequatel y what Ls LMportant for the quaLLty of LLfe as dLscussed here, and there Ls no need to do so. There Ls aMple rooM for dLfferent op~n~ons about prLorLtLe s: what should be done fLrst, what next? What Cs Most urgent? What Ls necessary as opposed to what Ls hL9hLy desLrabLe ? But the dLfferenc es do not exclude vLgorous cooperatL on. ~hat Ls gaLned froM tentatLve Ly forMuLatL ng basLc vLews shared today by Most or all supporter s of the deep ecology MoveMent? Hopefully Lt Makes Lt a LLttLe easLer to LocaLLze the MoveMent aMong the Many 'aLternat Lve' MoveMents. Hopefully thLs does not Lead to LsoLatLon but rather to even better cooperatL on wLth Many other aLternatL ve MoveMents. It MLght also Make soMe of us More clear about where we stand, and More clear about whLch dLsagreeM ents MLght profLtabL y be reduced and whLch ones MLght profLtabL y be sharpened . After aLL dLversLt y!' Ls a hLgh Level norM! (BasLc, p.6,9) 0 A set of platforM forMulatL on should be vague and aMbLguous enough to be capable or rather dLfferen t phLLosoph LcalLy relevant Lnterpret atLons. The prLncLpLe s of Lnterpret atLon of pLatforMs of MoveMents reseMbLe those of Lnterpret atLon of Laws. Vagueness Ls here essentLaL prLMarLLy because those appLyLng the Laws Must have soMe freedoM Ln adaptLng theM to ever changLng cLrcuMst ances, but also because the forMuLatL on Must slur over, or abstract froM MLnor dLfferenc es of relevant opLnLon aMon9 those who have supported the Lssue of the Law. On the other hand, the Lnterpret atLon of the text of a phLLosop her reseMbLes that of a testaMent ( 'wLLL' ). Exactly what the testator Lntends Ls the -25- �sole crLterLon of correctness of the LnterpretatLon . Uhether hLs or her terMLnology Ls abhorent or crazy Ls Lrrelevant. (Hates on Sylvan, pp.10-11) 7: ON BIOREGIOHALISM The central eleMent of bLoregLon Ls the LMportance gLven to natural systeMs "both as the source of physLcal nutrLtLon and as the body of Metaphors froM whLch our spLrLts draw sustenance. To understand natural systeMs Ls to begLn an understandLng of the self." A second eleMent of bLoregLon Ls setf-regulatLo n: •anarchy doesn't Mean out Lt Means out of theLr control.• Local coMMunLtLes LnspLred by a control; of shared concern for the bLoregLon, for "tettLng be• the plants and natLve anLMals of that place, ~an Make decLsLons concernLng LndLvLduat and coMMunat actLons whLc respect the LntegrLty of natural processes Ln that place. CarLng for a place Means avoLdLng exptoLtatLon. thLrd eleMent coMposLng the bLoregLonal notLon Ls spLrLt. • There Ls no sLngle relLgLous practLce for thLs sense of bLoregLonat spLrLt. It can be ChrLstLan, BuddhLst, NatLve AMerLcan or others; based on deep ecologLcal LnsLghts, Lt can be expressed Ln nuMerous ways. (Deep Ecology, pp.21-22) ·A UhLte the bLoregLonal, MLnorLty tradLtLon seeMs approprLate to us for cuttLvatLng ecotogLcal conscLousness, atlowLng for bLologLcat dLversLty wLth sLMplLcLty of Means, there are tough, practLcat decLsLons to Make. ConsLstent wLth our uttLMate norMs, Lt seeMs that one prLncLple Ls protectLon of endangered specLes of plants and anLMals as part of the general norM of unLty Ln dLversLty. Another norM Ls bLoregLonal responsLbLlLty . The local coMMunLty Ls the place for decLsLons. However, what happens when a local COMMunLty's needs conflLct wLth the norM of protectLng specLes dLversLty? Such a sLtuatLon occurred on the north slope of Alaska where natLve EskLMos were huntLng bowhead whales Ln the 1970s. The InternatLonat UhatLng Co~MLssLon ruled that thLs was an endangered specLes of whale and consLdered a total ban on the kLttLng of bowhead. However, the natLve EskLMos pleaded that Lt was part of theLr tradLtLon to kLtt whales. TheLr Myths and tLfestyle were dependent on Lt. It they dLdn't kLll whales they would be More dependent on canned Meat froM the "tower forty-eLght": gLven theM by welfare departMents. ThLs soMewhat sptLt the envLronMentalL sts . Many groups supported a total ban on the kLllLng of bowheads untLl ecologLsts deterMLned that theLr poputatLon had "suffLcLently Lncreased, • but FrLends of the Earth took the posLtLon that EskLMos be allowed to take a regulated nuMber of bowheads usLng theLr tradLtLonal Methods (no advanced technology for kLtlLng theM was allowed). Arne Haess provLdes an exaMple froM the bLoregLon ·of northern Horway where farMers and herders, through expansLon of farMs and nuMber of sheep , were rapLdty encroachLng on habLtat of wolves and bears. SoMe suggested kLllLng all bears sLnce a few bears seeMed to be eatLng soMe sheep. But others suggested LdentLfyLng the probleM More carefully. Uas a specLfLc bear becoMLng More and More Lnterested Ln sheep? Could that bear be entLced to refraLn froM eatLng sheep? Could Lt be reMoved to another tocat(on? Could the farMers agree to keep theLr sheep out of areas where bears were known to have dens or graze? Only as a last resort would the coMMunLty consLder the optLon of kLllLng that bear. ThLs approach Ls Ln great contrast wLth that favoured by soMe ranchers and such as wolves, farMers Ln the AMerLcan Uest . Uhen a •predator" Ls defLned to elLMLnate Lt, undertaken are efforts systeMLc then etc. coyotes, eagles, poLson •1oso", of spreadLng LncludLng aerLal huntLng of wolves (Ln Alaska), -26- �shootLn g eagles wLth hLgh-po wered rLfles and destroyL ng habLtat (dennLng areas, rLparLan habLtat of rats, etc.). (Deep Ecology , pp.148- 9) DasMann wrLtes about "bLoregL onalLsM " and •ecodeve lopMent " for the peoples of of AfrLca and the South PacLfLc , and refers approvL ngly to the concept Ln are ("~e House Lynn and e 6orslLn "future prLMLtL ve• develop ed by Jerry another to ve prLMLtL transLtL on froM one condLtL on of syMbLot Lc balance - the a whLch we wLll call future prLMLtLve ... a condLtL on havLng the attrLbu tes of Mature ecosyste M: stable, dLverse , Ln syMbLot Lc balance agaLn") . OasMann dLstLng uLshes between what he calls ecosyste M people and bLosphe re people: "Ecosyst eM people lLve wLthLn a sLngle ecosyste M, or at Most two or three M adjacen t and closely related ecosyste Ms. They are depende nt upon that ecosyste BLosphe re people draw theLr support , not froM the for theLr survLva l resource s of any one ecosyste M, but froM the entLre bLosphe re. BLosphe re people can exert LncredL ble pressure upon an ecosyste M they wLsh to exploLt , and create great devastat Lon - soMethL ng that would be LMpossLble or unthLnk able for people who were depende nt upon that partLcu lar ecosyste M ... BLosphe re people create a natLona l parks. Ecosyste M people have always lLved Ln the equLval ent of at natLona l park ... I propose that the future belongs to those who can regaLn, a hLgher level, the old sense of balance and belon9Ln 9 between Man and nature (ecosyst eM people) .· (SessLo ns, pp-~18- 19) A bLoregL on Ls a part of earth's surface whose rough boundar Les are deterML ned by natural rather than huMan dLctate s, dLstLng uLshable froM other and areas by attrLbu tes of flora, fauna, water, clLMate , soLls, and land-for Ms, The to. rLse the huMan settleM ents and culture s those attrLbu tes have gLven borders between such areas are usually not rLgLd - Nature works wLth More flexLbL lLty and fluLdLty than that - but the general contour s of the regLons theMselv es are not hard to LdentLfy , and Lndeed wLll probabl y be felt, and understo od, sensed, or Ln soMe way known to Many of the LnhabLt ants, , partLcu larly those rooted Ln the land, farMers , rancher s, hunters and fLshers n, AMerlca of face the across foreste rs and botanLs ts, and Most especLa lly, the trlbal Indlans, those stLll Ln touch wLth a culture that for centurl es knew earth as sacred and Lts well-beL ng as LMperat Lve. The wLdest regLon, takLng Lts charact er froM the broades t Measure s of natLve vegetatL on and soLl contour s, May be called the ecore9Lo n and wLll general ly cover several hundred thousand s of square Mlles. But wlthln these ecoregL ons Lt Ls easy to dLstLngu Lsh other coheren t terrLtor Les that defLne a theMselv es prLMarL ly by theLr surface feature s - a watersh ed, or rLver basLn, the valley, a desert, a plateau , a MountaLn range - and whLch we May all call stLll locate often can one turn, Ln 9eore9L on. And wLthLn these 9eore9L ons, sMaller areas, of perhaps several thousand square MLles dLscret e and Ldentof LfLable wLth theLr own topograp hLes and LnhabLt ants, theLr own varLatLo ns huMan culture and agrLcul ture, to whLch we May gLve the · naMe vLtaregL on. Uhether we speak of ecoregL on or 9eore9Lo n or vLtaregL on, after all, we speak of bLoregLons , and Lt Ls that essentL al archetyp e that Ls Most LMporta nt to coMprehend. For once that Ls done on any sLgnLfL cant scale then the Matter of MakLng to dLstLnc tLons and creatLn g huMan LnstLtut Lons to Match theM can be safely left best. theM the LnhabLt ants, the dweller s on the land, who wLll always know The econoMy that coMes lnto belng wlthln a charact er froM the condLtL ons, the laws of Nature. what we can be sald to know wLth soMe surety llvlng on the soLl has been cogently SUMMarLsed as be dLstLng uLshed, froM the laws of TherMod ynaMLcs . The flrst law ls that conserv atlon, bloreglo n also derlves lts Our Lgnoranc e Ls LMMense, but after these Many centurL es of the laws of EcodynaMLcs - to preserv atlon, -27- sustena nce, ls the �central goat of the natural world, hence Lts fundaMentat resLstance to largescale structural change; the second law Ls that, far froM beLng entropLc Nature Ls Lnherently stable, workLng Ln all tLMes and places toward that ecology calls a ctLMax, that Ls, a balanced, harMonLous, LntegratLve state of MaturLty whLch, once reached, Ls MaLntaLned for prolonged perLods. FroM thLs Lt follows that a bLoregLonal econoMy would seek to MaLntaLn rather than exploLt the natural world, accoMModate to the envLronMent, rather than resLst Lt; Lt would atteMpt to create condLtLons for a clLMax, a balance, for what soMe econoMLsts have recently taken to callLng a "steady state," rather than for perpetual change and contLnuat growth, Ln servLce to "progress", a false and delusory goddess Lf ever there was one. It would, Ln practLcat terMs, MLnLMLse resource use, eMphasLse conservatLon and recyclLng, avoLd poltutLon and waste. It would adopt Lts systeMs to the gLven bLoregLonal resources - energy based on wLnd, for exaMple, where Nature catted for that, or wood where that was approprLate, and food based on what the regLon Ltself - partLcularly Ln Lts natLve, pre-agrLcutturat state could grow. And thus Lt would be based, above all, on the Most eleMentat and Most elegant prLncLpte of the natural world, that of setf-suffLcLency. Just as Nature does not depend on trade, does not create elaborate networks of contLnentat for the dependency, so the bLoregLon would fLnd all Lts needed resources Lts own wLthLn luxury Manufacture, craft, energy, food, shelter, clothLng, thus beLng envLronMent. And far froM Lt beLng deprLved, far froM Lt LMpoverLshed, Lt would gaLn Ln every Measure of econoMLc health. It would be More stable, free froM booM-and-bust cycles and dLstant potLtLcat crLses; Lt would be able to plan, to allocate at the safest pace, Ln the Most ecotogLcal Manner_ It would not be at the Mercy of dLstant and uncontrollable natLonal bureaucracLes and transnatLonal governMents, and thus More self regardLng, More cohesLve, developLng a sense of place, of COMMunLty of coMradeshLp, and the prLde that coMes froM stabLlLty, control, coMpetence, and Lndependence. In one of hLs More prescLent perceptLons FrLtz SchuMacher reatLsed that the Market econoMy of twentLeth century capLtatLsM erred fundaMentatty, because Lt erred repeatedly, agaLnst Nature. "It Ls Lnherent Ln the Methodology of econoMLcs to Lgnore Man's dependence on the natural world," he wrote. "The Market represents only the surface of socLety and Lts sLgnLfLcance relates to the MOMentary sLtuatLon as Lt exLsts there and then. There Ls no probLng Lnto the depths of thLngs, Lnlo the natural or socLat facts that lLe behLnd theM. • And thLs Ls why, as he poLnts out, conventLonal econoMLcs Makes no dLstLnctLons at all between prLMary goods, "whLch Man has to wLn froM nature," and secondary goods Manufactured froM theM, or between renewable or nonrenewable resources, or the envLronMental and socLal costs of developLng one agaLnst the other. A bLothese regLonal econoMy, Ln sharpest contrast, Makes - Ln fact Ls grounded Ln vLtal dLstLnctLons. PolLtLcal prLncLples on a bLoregLonal scale are also grounded Ln the dLctates presented by Nature, Ln whLch what Ls forever valued are not the LMperatLves of gLgantLsM, centralLzatLon, hLerarchy, and MonolLthLcLty, but rather, Ln starkest contraposLtLon, those of scale, decentralLsatLon, dLvLsLon, and dLversLty. The lessons are obvLous, and suggest LMMedLately the desLgn for a bLoregLon as for a contLnent of bLoregLons. Each unLt, of the sL2e that the natural settLngs proMote, May be unLfLed and cohesLve - startLng froM the base up wLth a neLghbourhood, a coMMUnLty, a sMatl town, att tLvLng sLde-by-sLde wLth others Ln settled and Mutual pattern, together wLth coMprLsLng a vLtare9Lon; and that a vLtaregLon May have Lts own unLfLcatLon and cohesLveness, Lts own Method of governance, and yet lLve sLde-by-sLde wLth other regLons, organLsed as they May -28- �see fLt; and so on, outward, Ln selfsuffLcLent collaboratLon, unLt upon unLt, for so long as the natural boundarLes May perMLt and the natural affLnLtLes be kept Lntact. SLMLlar lessons May be derLved froM the patterns of huHan nature. Thus throughout all huMan hLstory people have tended to lLve Ln separate and Lndependent groups, a "fragMentatLon of huMan socLety· that Harold Isaccs has descrLbed as soMethLng akLn to •a pervasLve force Ln huMan affaLrs and always has been.• Even when natLons and eMpLres have arLsen, he notes, they have no stayLng power agaLnst the Lnnate huMan drLve to fragMentatLon. In a bLoregLonal socLety, the dLvLsLon between urban and rural, LndustrLal and agrLcuttural, populatLon and resources, would be replaced by an equLLLbrLuM, a syMbLosLs. On the one hand, the cLty would be necessary as a producer of certaLn kLnds of goods, as a centre of artLstLc culture, as a source of the asseMbled cLvLc vLrtues, though the cLty need not be of LMMense sLze - Lndeed, no larger than 50,000 or 100,000 people - and Ln fact Ldeally would replLcate rather than grow so that Lnstead of a sLngle MetropolLs there would be a MultLplLcLty of cLtLes of Modest sLzes scattered throughout the bLoregLon. On the other hand, the country would be necessary as the prLMe source of food and water and the HaterLals of shelter and clothLng and artLsanshLp and trade, and especLatty as the eMbodLHent of the bLoregLonal spLrLt of Gaea, whose presence should be felt daLly by the LnhabLtants of every settleMent, of whatever sLze. BLoregLonalLsM Ls no More than the Modern versLon of a very old perceptLon of the world held not Merely by the Greeks but by vLrtually every prelLterate socLety of whLch we have knowledge. (Sate, 167-72) 8: TECHNOLOGY The qualLty of huMan exLstence and huMan welfare should not be Measured of products. Technology Ls returned to Lts ancLent place as an quantLty by only approprLate tool for huMan welfare, not an end Ln Ltself. There should be a rapLd MoveMent toward "soft• energy paths and "approprLate technology~ and toward lLfestytes whLch wLll result Ln drastLc decrease Ln per capLta energy consuMptLon Ln advanced LnductrLal socLetLes whLcl LncreasLng approprLate energy Ln decentralLzed vLllages Ln so-called "thLrd world" natLons. Deep ecologLst5 are coMMLtted to rapLd MOVeMent to a •steady-state• or •conservor socLety· both froH ethLcal prLncLples of har~onLous LntegratLon of huMans wLth nature and froM apprecLatLon of ecologLcal realLtLes. IntegratLon of sophLstLcated, elegant, unobtrusLve, ecologLcalty sound, approprLate technology wLth greatly scaled down, dLversLfLed, organLc, labor-LntensLve agrLculture, huntLng, and gatherLng Ls another goal. (Deep Ecology pp.311-12) QuestLonLng technology Ls a process of dLrect actLon that anyone can develop. It Ls one of the Host serLous act Lons that can ·be taken Ln a technocratLc socLety where the assuMptLon that •technology wLll solve all probleMs• Ls so deeply held. as a systeM or as a specLfLc devLce such as a To questLon technology coMputer - can often arouse hostLlLty, defena certaLn type of vehLcle or sLveness, LrrLtatLon, and resentMent Ln lLsteners. Anyone who questLons technology can be branded a "LuddLte" or antLModernLst. A person who says ·no to any technologLcal devLce Ls often charged as beLng antLprogressLve. Yet Ls crucLat to questLon technology, Ln spLte of these crLtLcLsMs. ~e need technology whLch Ls coMpatLble wLth the growth of autonoMous, selfdeterMLnLng LndLvLduats Ln nonhLerarchLcal coMHunLtLes. ~e need prLncLples that wLll help us escape the trap of technocratLc socLety, where technology Ls the -29- �central LnstLtutLon. Technology can be crLtLcLzed and evaluated based on general prLncLples, scale or structure. The followLng questLons can be asked of any technologLcal devLce or systeM: I. Does thLs technologLcal devLce serve vLtal needs? 2. ls thLs devLce or systeM of the sort that can be LMMedLately understood by nonexperts? 3. Does Lt have a hLgh degree of flexLbLlLty and MutabLlLty or does Lt LMpose a perManent, rLgLd, LrreversLble LMprLnt on the lLves of cLtLzens? local ~- Does thLs technologLcal devLce or systeM foster greater autonoMy of coMMunLtLes or greater dependency on soMe centralLzed "authorLty"? 5. ls thLs devLce or systeM ecologLcally destructLve or conducLve to a deep ecology way of lLfe? 6. Does thLs devLce or systeM enhance the LndLvLdualLty of persons or does Lt lead to bureaucratLc hLerarchLes? 7. Does thLs devLce or systeM encourage people to behave and thLnk lLke MachLnes? A fully LnforMed, approprLate technology Ls a MeetLng ground of ethLcs , polLtLcs, MechanLcal understandLng and deep ecologLcal conscLousness. As Langdon WLnner concludes Ln AutonoMous Technology, "If one lacks a clear and knowledgeable sense of what Means are approprLate lo the cLrcuMstances at hand, one's These Means do not choLce of Means can easLly lead to excesses and danger. Lnvolve just narrow utLlLty or effLcLency of productLon or profLt Ln soMe short-terM calculatLon. Indeed, the narrow eMphasLs upon effLcLency of Means drLves us away froM the larger Lssues of envLronMental ethLcs asnd LndLvLdual responsLbLlLty for the consequences of our actLons. (Deep Ecology, pp.35-6) Shallow approach: AcceptLng LndustrLalLzatLon of the kLnd ManLfested Ln the West as the natural goal for developLng countrLes. Low estLNatLon of deep cultural dLfferences wLth sLgnLfLcant devLatLons froM Western standards. Deep approach: SocLal and cultural dLversLty of dLfferent specLes Ls an essentLal IntensLfLed Measures to part of general rLchness and varLatLon of lLfe forMs. exLstLng non-LndustrLal stLll lLMLt the LMpact of Western technology upon cultures . Defence of the fourth world agaLnst cultural foreLgn doMLnatLon. PolLtLcal and econoMLc polLcLes Ln favour of subcultures and MLnorLtLes Ln LndustrLalLzed socLetLes. Support of local and soft technologLes as a Means to MaLntaLn baste cultural assessMent of technLcal LnnovatLon. Due regard to anLMal socLetLes and cultures. SurvLval of populatLons does not ensure survLval of socLal LnstLtutLons . QuestLonLng whether so-called advanced, Modern technologLes are approprLate relatLve to levels of pollutLon, resources, populatLon and as subordLnate part of general culture. (PhLlosophLcal Aspects, pp.12-13) Technology Ls More helpless than ever because the technology beLng produced doesn ' t fulfLll baste huNan needs, such as MeanLngful work Ln a MeanLngful envLronMent . TechnLcal progress Ls shaM progress because the terM technLcal progress Ls a cultural, not a technLcal, terM . Our culture Ls the only one Ln the hLstory of MankLnd Ln whLch the culture has adjusted Ltself to the technology, rather than vLce versa. (SLMple ' Ln Means, p.11) Once the scLentLfLc probleMs have been solved, once Lt Ls understood how a partLcular forM of pollutLon arLses and Ln what Lts danger consLsts, the next probleM Ls technologLcal : to dLscover a Method of reducLng thLs LncLdence. That Lnvolves decLdLng, Ln the fLrst place, whLch of the causatLve factors Lt wLll be easLest to control . KnowLng, for exaMple, that the Los Angeles sMog Ls a joLnt product of the sLtLng of Los Angeles, Lts hours of sunlLght and the exhaust -30- �fuMes froM the LnternaL coMbustLon engLne, Lt Ls at once apparent that onLy the thLrd of these Lf controLLabLe at a toLerabLe cost. So what has to be Lnvented Ls a devLce whLch wLLL reduce the output of hydrocarbons Ln exhaust fuMes. ThLs constLtutes a technoLogLcaL probLeM, the soLutLon to whLch LLes Ln the LnventLon of a devLce whLch wouLd satLsfy partLcuLar technLcaL specLfLcatLons . (The word devLce' Ls h~re beLng used Ln a very broad sense; an LnsectLcLde Ls a devLce and so Ls the sterLLLsLng of Lnsects as a Means of bLoLogLcaL control.) 0 The Ldea of a 'technoLogLcaL soLutLon' Ls, however, a good deaL Less straLghtforward than Lt at fLrst appears to be, as the phrase I used above 'at a toLerabLe cost' aLready hLnts. It Ls very easy to thLnk up technLcaL soLutLons of ecoLogLcaL probLeMs Lf we consLder theM Ln LsoLatLon~ and Lf we defLne a technLcaL soLutLon, wLthout any reference to costs, as one whLch descrLbes a way of freeLng ourselves froM the ecoLogLcaL condLtLon whLch concerns us. Such a soLutLon Ls soMetLMes saLd to be 'practLcaL' but not 'operatLonal'. So Los AngeLes sMog could be reduced Ln LntensLty by roofLng over the entLre cLty, or by MakLng everybody use pubLLc transport, or by substLtutLng fuel-ceLls, Ln theLr present state of developMent, for Lnternal coHbustLon engLnes. But few wouLd serLousLy advance these proposals as 'solutLons', as satLsfactory ways of deaLLng wLth the sMog probleM. ~hy not? SLMply because the costs, or so Lt Ls w~deLy beLLeved, wouLd be too great, costs of varLous sorts, socLal, ecologLcal, econoMLc and poLLtLcaL. In so far as ecologLcaL probleMs can be solved only wLth the help of scLentLfLc dLscovery and technoLogLcaL LnventLon, they can be soLved only wLthLn the ~estern ratLonal tradLtLons. That Much Ls obvLous. MystLcaL conteMplatLon wLlL not reveal to the cheMLst the orLgLns of the Los Angeles sMog or enabLe the engLneer to desLgn an effectLve devLce for reducLng Lts LntensLty. But Lt Ls a enthusLasM proper crLtLcLsM of ~estern socLety that, Ln Lts - often chLldLsh for technoLogLcaL 'advance', Lt has faLled adequateLy to consLder the costs of LntroducLng new devLces and has defLned 'costs' far too narrowly. ThLs objectLon can be dLrected, even, agaLnst antL-pollutLon devLces. The Manufacture of such devLces wLLL norMaLLy create · More polLutLon. It May, by ModLfyLng the character of the poLlutant, Lntroduce new dangers - reducLng the percentage of carbon MonoxLde Ln exhaust fuMes whLle LncreasLng the percentage of the no Less dangerous nLtrogen dLoxLde. Or Lt May shLft the LncLdence of the poLLutLon froM a weaLthLer to a poorer coMMunLty - ManufacturLng sMokeless fueLs Ln an LndustrLaL town to Make the London aLr cLeaner - wLthout reducLng Lts total voLuMe. Any technoLogLcal LnnovatLon, furtherMore, LnvoLves an eleMent of ecoLoe LcaL rLsk; Lt Ls LMpossLbLe to calculate all Lts consequences Ln every possLbLe cLrcuMstance. The best the technologLst can do Ls to exclude effects whLch are already known to be dangerous and to LnvestLgate further effects whLch are suspect . That Ls why, as I saLd earLLer, caLlLng upon the technologLst to save us Ls so often equated wLth caLLLng Ln the devLL as an exorcLst. But Lt wouLd be quLte wrong to conclude that for the reasons just advanced the technologLcaL Method of overcoMLng ecoLogLcaL probleMs would be abandoned, that what ~estern socLetLes should do Ls to shut down factorLes, Let us say, rather than LnsLst on theLr reducLng, by technoLogLcal Means, theLr eMLssLon of pollutants. For econoMLc and socLaL rLsks ~ and, Ln the end, greater ecoLogLcal rLsks Lf the socLaL resentMent engendered by the closure Ls dLrected agaLnst the whoLe systeM of ecoLogLcaL controls. It, too, May do no More than shLft the LncLdence of poLLutLon froM rLcher to poorer regLons, as the factory-owner takes hLs capLtal elsewhere. To gLve up takLng any rLsks would be to gLve up actLng . Every actLon costs soMethLng, rLsks soMethLng. Uhat can properLy be deManded Ls not that Men should cease to act Ln ways whLch LnvoLve ecologLcal rLsks - there are no such ways, as Matters now stand, whatever the sLtuatLon Ln the Garden of -31- �Eden - but rather that they shouLd take More account of the ecoLogLcaL costs and benefLts of theLr actLon. And thLs Means, once agaLn, that they wLLL hav~ to Make fuLLer use of ratLonaL Western-type Methods, cost benefLt anaLyses or decLsLon-procedures. (PassMore, pp.~8-50) EcoLogLcaL resLsters do not accept that there are onLy narrow technLcaL soLutLons to narrowLy defLned socLal probLeMs (such as aLr poLLutLon). These probLeMs are seen onLy as syMptoMs of the Larger Lssues. There are three MaLn dangers to technocratLc soLutLons. FLrst Ls the danger Ln beLLevLng there Ls a coMpLete or acceptabLe soLutLon usLng Modern doMLnant LdeoLogLes and technoLogy. The second danger Ls the presentatLon of an LMpressLon that soMethLng Ls beLng done when Ln fact the reaL probLeM contLnues. reaL work". FLnaLLy, there Ls the danger of TLnkerLng dLstracts froM the assuMLng there wLLL be new experts - such as professLonaL ecoLogLsts - who wLLL provLde the soLutLon but who May Ln fact be constraLned to be pubLLc reLatLons spokespersons for the agenda of profLt or power of soMe corporatLon or agency. EcoLogLcaL resLstance Ls actLon froM centraL prLncLpLes of doLng what Ls necessary, of wLtnessLng nonvLoLentLy. It arLses froM a shLft Ln conscLouness. EcoLogLcaL resLstLng Ls deeper, soMe wouLd say More radLcaL,. than just reforMLsM. SoMe of the reforMLst actLons to MLtLgate soMe of the worse forMs of aLr and water poLLutLon (due to auto exhaust, for exaMpLe) are MotLvated by concern onLy for huMan heaLth and safety and not by the LntrLnsLc vaLues of the bLosphere. But th LLMLts of reforMLSM are by now weLL known. (Deep EcoLog~, pp.195-6) In tryLng to exaMLne technoLogy and productLon, we encounter a curLous paradox. ~e are deepLy rLven by a great sense of proMLse about technLcaL LnnovatLon, on the one hand, and by a thorough sense of dLsenchantMent wLth Lts resuLts, on the other. ThLs duaL attLtude not onLy refLects a confLLct Ln the popuLar LdeologLes concernLng technoLogy but aLso expresses strong doubts about the nature of the Modern technologLcaL LMagLnatLon LtseLf. We are puzzLed that the very LnstruMents our MLnds have conceLved and our hands have created can be so easLly turned agaLnst us, wLth dLsastrous resuLts for our weLL-beLng Lndeed, for our very survLval as a specLes. Techne, Moreover, covered a wLder scope of experLence than the Modern word technLcs. The goaL of techne Ls not restrLcted to MereLy "LLvLng weLL. or lLvLng wLthLn the lLMLt. Techne LncLudes LLvLng an ethLcaL LLfe accordLng to an orLgLnatLve and orderLng prLncLple conceLved as "potency". VLewed even Ln an LnstruMental sense, techne thus encoMpasses not MereLy raw MaterLaLs, tooLs, MachLnes, and products but aLso the producer - Ln short, a hLghly sophLstLcated subject froM whLch aLL eLse orLgLnates. To ArLstotle, the "Master-craftsMan" Ls dLstLnguLshed subjectLveLy froM hLs apprentLces or assLstants by vLrtue of honor, a sense of "why" products are created, and generaLLy a wLsdoM of thLngs ArLstotLe subject, and phenoMena. By startLng wLth the ratLonaLLty of productLon the to estabLLshes a poLnt of departure for brLngLng ratLonaLLzatLon of the object. Modern LndustrLaL productLon functLons Ln precLseLy the opposLte way. Not only Ls the Modern LMage of techne LLMLted to Mere technLcs Ln the LnstruMentaL sense of the terM, but aLso Lts goaLs are LnextrLcabLy tLed to unLLMLted Ls conceLved as LLMLtLess consuMptLon wLthLn the productLon. "LLvLng weLL fraMework of a totaLLy unethLcaL, prLvatLzed LeveL of seLf-Lnterest. TechnLcs, not the producer and hLs or her ethLcaL standards LncLudes Moreover, (proLetarLans, after aLL, servLce the Modern LndustrLal apparatus Ln totaL anonyMLty) but the product and Lts constLtuLnts. The technLcaL focus shLfts froM -32- �the subject to the object, froM the producer to the product, froM the creator to the created. Honor, a sense of •why," and any generaL wLsdoM of thLngs and phenoMena have no pLace Ln the worLd requLred by Modern Lndustry. ~hat reaLLy counts Ln technLcs Ls effLcLency, quantLty, and an LntensLfLcatLon of the Labor process. The specLous ratLonaLLty LnvoLved Ln producLng the object Ls foLsted on the ratLonaLLzatLon of the subject to a poLnt where producer's subjectLvLty Ls totally atrophLed and reduced to an object aMong objects. (BookchLn, pp.219-22) 9: ON ECOLOGICAL CONSCIOUSNESS Deep ecoLogy Ls eMergLng as a way of developLng a new balance and harMony between LndLvLduaLs, coMMunLtLes and aLl of Nature. It can potentLaLLy satsLfy our deepest yearnLngs: faLth and trust Ln our Most basLc LntuLtLons; courage to take dLrect actLon; joyous confLdence to dance wLth the sensuous harMonLes dLscovered through spontaneous, playfuL Lntercourse wLth the rhythMs of our bodLes, the rhythMs of fLowLng water, changes Ln the weather and seasons, and the overaLL processes of LLfe on Earth. The deep ecology MoveMent Lnvolves workLng on ourselves, what poetphLLosopher Gary Snyder caLls "the reaL work,• the work of reaLLy LookLng at ourselves, of becoMLng More real. ThLs Ls the work we call cultLvatLng ecoLogLcaL conscLousness. ThLs process LnvoLves becoMLng More aware of the actuaLLty of rocks, wolves, trees, and rLvers - the cultLvatLon of the LnsLght that everythLng Ls connected. CultLvatLng ecologLcal conscLousness Ls a process of learnLng apprecLate sLLence and solLtude and redLscoverLng how to lLsten. It Ls learnLng how to be More receptLve, trustLng, holLstLc Ln perceptLon, and Ls grounded Ln a vLsLon of nonexploLtLve scLence and technology. ThLs process Lnvolves beLng honest wLth ourselves and seekLng clarLty Ln our LntuLtLons, then actLng froM cLear prLncLpLes, practLcLng seLf-dLscLpLLne and workLng honestLy wLthLn our coMMunLty. It Ls sLMpLe but not easy work. Henry DavLd Thoreau, nLneteenth-century naturalLst and wrLter, adMonLshes us, ·Let your lLfe be a frLctLon agaLnst the MachLne. • CuLtLvatLng ecoLogLcal conscLousness Ls correlated wLth the cultLvatLon of conscLence. CuLtural hLstorLan Theordore Roszak suggests Ln Person/PLanet conscLousness, how LnstructLve the overLappLng and "conscLence (1978), sLMLLarLty of those two words Ls. FroM the new conscLousness we are gaLnLng of ourseLves as persons perhaps we wLLL yet create a new conscLence, one whose ethLcaL sensLtLvLty Ls at Least tuned to a sLgnLfLcant good, a sLgnLfLcant evLL. We beLLeve that huMans have a vLtaL need to cuLtLvate ecologLcaL conscLousness and that thLs need Ls related to the needs of the planet. At the saMe tLMe, huMans need dLrect contact wLth untraMMeLed wLLderness, places undoMestLcated for narrow huMan purposes. Many people sense the needs of the pLanet and the need for wLLderness preservatLon. But we need not be technLcal experts Ln order to cultLvate ecotogLcal conscLousness, as Thoreau saLd, cuLtLvatLng ecotogLcaL conscLousness requLres that "we front up to the facts and deterMLne to lLve our lLves delLberately, or not at all." We belLeve that people can clarLfy theLr own LntuLtLons, and act froM deep prLncLpLes. Deep ecology Ls a process of even-deeper questLonLng of ourselves, the assuMptLons of the doMLnant worLdvLew Ln our culture, and the MeanLng and truth Ln our realLty. We cannot change conscLousness by only lLstenLng to others, we Must Lnvolve ourselves. We Mu~t take dLrect actLon. -33- �One hopeful poLLtLcaL MoveMent wLth deep ecology as a base Ls the Uest GerMan Green poLLtLcaL party. They have as theLr slogan, "ue are neLther Left nor rLght, we are Ln front.· Green poLLtLcs Ln Uest GerMany, and to soMe extent Ln Great BrLtaLn, BeLgLuM and AustraLLa Ln the 1980s, goes beyond the conventLonaL, tLberaL defLnLtLon of a party, coMbLnLng personal work (that Ls, work on cLarLfyLng one's own character) and polLtLcal actLvLsM. The Greens present a proMLsLng poLLtLcaL strategy because they encourage the cultLvatLon of personal ecoLogLcaL conscLousness as well as address Lssues of pubLLc polLcy. If the Greens propogate the bLocentrLc perspectLve - the Lnherent worth of other specLes besLdes huMans - then they can help change the current vLew whLch says we should use Nature only to serve narrow huMan Lnterests. CuLtLvatLng ecoLogLcaL conscLousness Ln conteMporary socLetLes, however, Ls a two-edged sword. Ue Must not be MLsLed by our zeaL for change so that we are concerned only wLth the narrow self or ego. If we seek only personal redeMptLon we could becoMe soLLtary ecologLcal saLnts aMong the Masses of those we MLght cLassLfy as "sLnners" who contLnue to pollute. Change Ln persons requLres a change Ln culture and vLce versa. We cannot Lgnore the personal arena nor the socLaL, for our project Ls to enhance harMony wLth each other, the planet and ourselves. (Deep Ecology, pp.7-1~) ~e began by suggestLng a varLety of specLfLc actLons whLch people can take dLrected at reforMLng publLc polLcy, developLng bLoregLonal coMMunLtLes, and cuLtLvatLng ecoLogLcaL conscLousness. Ue return to the theMe of dLrect actLon. ~e have deMonstrated that deep ecology Ls not just a gaMe of ~bstract theorLzLng. As a perspectLve Lt Ls lLved, danced, celebrated. It has resonance. Ln part, cuLtLvatLng what CuLtLvatLng ecoLogLcaL conscLousness Means, Ls engaged Ln the LnteLLect RhapsodLc Theodore Roszak caLLs rhapsodLc LntelLect. process of LntegratLng LntelLect, body, and joyous eMotLon. Based on the LnsLghts, uLtLMate norMs, prLncLples and theorLes of deep ecology, the central practLcaL questLon Ls how do we becoMe More Mature persons, gLven the constraLnts of th~s culture? Ue suggest there Ls an LnterpLay between outward dLrect actLon and Lnward dLrect actLon, between actLng on one's self and actLng Ln the world, wLth the result of further and deeper MaturLty Ln the deep ecologLcaL sense of LdentLfLcatLon wLth alL LLfe. There Ls no sharp break between Lnward and outward. People take dLrectLon actLon froM dLrect ecoLogLcal prLncLpLes and they becoMe More Mature through dLrect actLon. The Label we use for the type of dLrect actLon Ln Lts outward forM Ls ecoLogLcaL resLstLng. (Deep Ecology, p.19~) 'Deep ecology', an envLronMental scLence broadsheet tells us, Ls Naess's expressLon for an ecologLcaL awareness or conscLousness' . SpeLLLng deep ecology out then becoMes a Matter of settLng down the types of conscLousness and awareness and recognLtLon LnvoLved, SOMethLns that Ls done Ln a thoroughly anthropocentrL c way, begLnnLng as foLLows: 'a conscLousness of the LMplLcatLons of ecology for huMan beLng'. It Ls all Ln fact done Ln terMs of huMan responses, fundaMentaLLy Ls approach the AccordLn9Ly capacLtLes and psychology. MLsconceLved. For deep ecology Ls not so anthropocentrL c, and Ls no More a Matter of envLronMentaL psychology than Ls the value theory or MetaphysLcs whLch are part of Lt. The psychoL09LcaL conversLon Ls LLke cLaLMLng that 'MarxLsM' Ls an expressLon for socLaLLst conscLousness, or 'MusLc' for MusLco-LogLcal awareness. -34- �The conversLon of deep ecology Lnto awareness psychology, Lnto a certaLn sort of exercLse Ln self-realLsatLon or 'lLberatLng ecologLcal conscLousness, or conscLousness raLsLng', Ls open to sLMLlar objectLons. Ecology, deep or shallow or systeMatLc, Ls not ego-trLppLng or a personal thLng. Granted those who do have and share certaLn attLtudes and feelLngs to natural envLronMents are "uch More lLkely to becoMe actLve supporters or followers of deep ecology or to adopt a deeper ecologLcal stance. Even so such states as self-realLsatLon or ecologLcal conscLousness are neLther necessary nor suffLcLent for thLs. Such subjectLve states are not necessary because soMeone can beco"e a supporter of deep ecology wLthout havLng attaLned, or Made any effort to attaLn, these states. Thus consLder soMeone, a dedLcated naturalLst for Lnstance, who has no deep Lnterest Ln or understandLng of huMan psychology or socLology so far as these bear on the envLronMent. Such a person Ls a deep ecologLst, but lacks ecologLcal conscLousness as Lt Ls explaLned. The case of Peter SLnger Ln the anLMal lLberatLon "oveMent Ls LnstructLve; for SLnger goes out of hLs way to explaLn hLs dLsLnterest, hLs coMparatLve lack of zoologLcal conscLousness, that he does not LdentLfy wLth anLMals and so on, yet hLs LMpact for anLMal lLberatLon has been Most sLgnLfLcant. Analogously, a Deeper SLnger need not be Ln love wLth the Earth but feel rather Lsolated froM Lt and feel rLghtly that Most of Lts LnhabLtants dLslLke hLM or are frLghtened by hLM. He May have lLttle Ldea what Lt Ls lLke to be one of theM or a MountaLn, ... ; but he "ay have the rLght values, adhere to the rLght phLlosophy and undertake the rLght sorts of actLon and lLfestyle. GenuLnely and specLfLcally deep ecologLcal conscLousness has not been well descrLbed and Ls not partLcularly well defLned. And soMe of the requLreMents LMposed upon Lt, whatever Lt aMounts to, render Lt LMpossLble. Thus Fox, echoLng others, claLMs that 'to the extent that we perceLve boundarLes, we fall short of a deep ecologLcal conscLousness'. Then we all fall short, sLnce we are regularly confronted by, and perceLve, terrLtorLal boundarLes and a wLde range of other deMarcatLon lLnes and contrasts. Indeed fallLng short Ls LnevLtable; for hence and perceptLon necessarLly Lnvolves selectLon and dLscrLMLnatLon, separatLon and boundarLes. Deep conscLousness Ls also rendered LMpossLble by soMe of the LdentLfLcatLon requLreMents, drawn froM nature MystLcLsM, whLch are LMposed upon Lt. It Ls one thLng to be Ln tune wLth the unLverse (a Metaphor that can be spelled out), quLte another, and LMpossLble, feat to be LdentLcal wLth Lt, sLnce then a proper part would be LdentLcal wLth a whole contaLnLng Lt. SoMe explLcatLon of LdentLfLcatLon (trans-specLes and other) Ls LMportant for the elaboratLon of deep ecology, but the relatLon Lnvolved (though Lt concerns shared features, such as perhaps experLences) Ls not one of LdentLty or MakLng LdentLcal, as sLMplLstLc etyMology May suggest. Other requLreMents coMMonly placed on deep conscLousness, whLle they do not exclude Lt, render Lt unduly anthropocentrLc. (CrLtLque, pp.30-2) Deep ecologLsts agree wLth BLrch and Cobb's LnsLght that "huMan beLngs are More deeply Moved by the way they experLence theLr ~orld than by the claLMs ethLcs Makes on theM." Thus, where conteMporary envLronMental phLlosophy Ls doMLna~ed by the questLon "How do we construct an adequate envLron"ental ethLc? , deep ecology asks the questLon "How do we cultLvate a deep ecologLcal conscLousness?" The forMer questLon looks to conceptual answers, the latter to experLentLal answers. In seekLng to change the way Ln whLch we experLence the world, deep ecologLsts place theLr prLMary eMphasLs upon changLng our ·underlyLng perceptLon of the way thLngs are" (L.e. changLng our ontology) rather than upon what we MLght terM the "conceptual fLx• approach of "bL99er and better" ethLcs. ThLs atteMpt to shLft the prLMary focus of envLronMental phLlosophLcal concern froM ethLcs to ontology clearly constLtutes a fundaMental or revolutLon- -35- �ary chaLLenge to norMaL envLronMentaL phLLosophy. It Ls (and should be) deep ecology's guLdLng star. (GuLdLng Stars, p.204) 10: ON HOLISM AccordLng to deep ecology: A new cosMLc/ecoLogLcaL MetaphysLcs whLch stresses the LdentLty (I/thou) of huMans wLth non-huMan nature Ls a necessary condLLons for a vLabLe approach to buLLdLng an eco-phLLosophy. In deep ecology, the wholeness and LntegrLty of a person/planet together wLth the prLncLpLe of what Arne Naess caLLs "bLoLogLcaL egaLLtarLanLsM" are the Most LMportant Ldeas. Man Ls an LntegraL part of nature, not over or apart froM nature. Man Ls a "pLaLn cLtLzen· of the bLosphere, not Lts conqueror or Manager .. There should be a "deMocracy of aLL God's creatures" accordLng to St. FrancLs; or as SpLnoza saLd, Man Ls a "teMporary and dependent Mode of the whole of God/Nature.· Man flows wLth the systeM of nature rather than atteMptLng to control aLL of the rest of nature. The hand of Man LLes LLghtLy on the Land. Man does not perfect nature, nor Ls Man's prLMary duty to Make nature More effLcLent. A new psychology Ls needed to Lntegrate the MetaphysLcs Ln the MLnd fLeLd of post-LndurtrLaL socLety. A Major paradLgM shLft results froM psychoLogLcaL changes of perceptLon. The new paradLgM requLres rejectLon of subject/object, Man/nature duaLLsMs and wLLL requLre a pervasLve awareness of total LnterMLngLLng of the planet earth. Psychotherapy seen as adjustMent to eco-orLented socLety Ls replaced by a new LdeaL of psychotherapy as spLrLtuaL deveLopMent. The new MetaphysLcs and psychology Leads LogLcaLLy to a posture of bLospherLc egaLLtarLanLsM and LLberatLon Ln the sense of autonoMy, physoLogLcaL/eMotLona L freedoM of the LndLvLduaL, spLrLtuaL deveLopMent of HoMo sapLens, and the rLght of other specLes to pursue theLr own evoLutLonary destLnLes. (Deep Ecology MoveMent, pp.310-11) RejectLon of the Man-Ln-envLronMent LMage Ln favour of the reLatLonaL, totaL-fLeLd LMage. OrganLsMs as knots Ln the bLospherLcaL net or fLeLd of LntrLnsLc reLatLons. As LntrLnsLc reLatLon between two thLngs ~ and B Ls such that the reLatLon belongs to the defLnLtLons or basLc constLtutLons of A and ~• so that wLthout a reLatLon, ~and~ are no Longer the saMe thLngs. The totaLfLeLd Model dLssoLves not only the Man-Ln-envLronMent concept, but every coMpact thLng-Ln-MLLLeu concept - except when taLkLng at a superfLcLaL or preLLMLnary Level of coMMunLcatLon. (Shallow and Deep, p.95) Shallow envLronMentaLLsM atteMpts to curb soMe of the Most gLarLng envLronMentaL abuse such as poLLutLon and resource depLetLon whLLe caLLLng for no basLc change Ln the anthropocentrLc urban-LndustrLaL socLaL paradLgM. Naess descrLbes Lts central objectLve as "the health and affluence of people Ln the developed countrLes." The Deep Ecology MoveMent, on the other hand, gathers LnspLratLon froM the fLeLd ecoLogLst and Ls a rejectLon of the Man-Ln-envLronMent LMage Ln favor of the reLatLonaL, totaL-fLeLd LMage. OrganLsMs are knots Ln the bLospherLcaL net or fLeLd of LntrLnsLc reLatLons. w (SessLons, p . 398) 0 Because they cannot conceLve Man apart' they experLence no dLffLcuLty Ln attrLbutLng LntrLnsLc value to nature. In so far as they conceLve theMseLves as havLng such value, the LnabLLLty to separate theLr selves froM nature, LnescapabLy Leads to thLnkLng of "Man" and ·envLronMent' as a whole. (Gestalt thLnkLng.) In thLs century the reactLon agaLnst conceLvLng the LndLvLduaL self as soMethLng separable froM the socLaL settLng has been Largely successful, but not the paraLLeL reactLon agaLnst the separabLLLty froM the natural settLng. (PhLLosophLcaL Aspects, p.35) By subtractLng your own self-centred and seLf-servLng -36- thoughts froM the �world you coMe to reaLLze that "the other Ls none other than yourself: that the fundaMentaL deLusLon of huManlty ls to suppose I aM here and you are out there_· ThLs understandLng perMeates the MystLcaL tradLtLons and Ls exeMpLLfLed Ln the TaoLst advLce to "LdentLfy yourself wLth non-dLstLnctLon_ • It ls now becoMlng coMMonpLace to polnt to the fundaMentaLLy slMlLar cosMoLogLes eMobdLed Ln the MystLcaL tradLtLons on the one hand and the 'new physlcs' on the other_ What Ls structurally sLMllar about these cosMoLogLes Ls that they reveal a 'seaMLess web' vLew of the unLverse_ Both the MystLcaL tradLtLons and the new physLcs' serve to generate Lnter aLLa, what we MLght now caLL 'ecoLoglcaL awareness', .that Ls, awareness of the fundaMentaL LnterreLatedne~s of aLL thLngs or, More accurately, aLL events_ The theoretlcaL physLclst Frltjof Capra has been quLte expLlcLt about thls: "1 thLnk what physLcs can do Ls help to generate ecoLogLcaL awareness_ You see, Ln MY vLew now Ln the Western versLon of MystLcaL awareness, our versLon of BuddhLsM or TaoLsM, wLLl be ecologLcal awareness_" Where the physLcLst, the Mystlc, and the deep ecologLst (as phLlosopher) dLffer Ls Ln theLr Means of arrLvLng at 'ecologLcal awareness ' ___ _ The deep ecologLst's conceptLon of unLty Ln process' need not LMpLy that, at any gLven MOMent, all 'knots' (L_e_ organLsMs) Ln the 'bLospherLcal net' are constLtuted of equally coMpLex reLatLons_ To the extent that value Lnheres Ln coMplexLty of relatLons, and to the extent that coMplexLty of reLatLons Ls evLdenced Ln the degree of an organLsM's central organLzatLon (and therefore capacLty for rLchness of experLence), then organLsMs are entLtLed to Moral consLderatLon coMMensurate wLth theLr degree of central organLzatLon (or capaclty for rlchness of experlence) for the duratlon of thelr exlstence - as transLent as that May be Ln terMs of evolutLonary tLMe_ In pursulng theLr central LntuLtLon of 'unLty' (L_e_ of no boundarLes Ln the bLospherLcal fLeLd), deep ecoLogLsts have possLbly Lost sLght of the sLgnLfaspect of theLr 'unLty Ln process' MetaphysLcs_ Lcance of the 'Ln process AttentLon to thLs Latter aspect suggests that any process contLnuousLy produces LMperManent, uneven dLstrLbutLons (L_e_, dLfferent values) of varLous attrLbutes (and Ln the process of the world these attrLbutes May be Money, LnforMatLon, coMplexLty of relatLons, and so on)_ If thLs were not so then we would have no process but a perfectly unLforM, hoMogenous and, therefore, LLfeless fLeld_ The only unLverse where value Ls spread evenly across the fLeLd Ls a dead unLverse _ RecognLsLng thLs, we should be clear that the central LntuLtLon of deep ecology does not entaLl the vLew that LntrLnsLc value Ls spread evenly across the MeMbershLp of the bLotLc coMMunLty_ Moreover, Ln sLtuatLons of genuLne value conflLct, justLce Ls better served by not subscrLbLng to the vLew of ecoLogLcal -egaLLtarLanLsM_ (Fox, pp-196-200) An arctLc Landscape May superfLcLaLly Look rather dead Ln wLnter. In sprLng Lt May Look overwheLMLngLy aLLve_ It would take a Long traLnLng to force perceptLon to dLstLnguLsh organLsM froM non-organLsMs Ln such a LLve Landscape_ Even Ln wLnter the Lover of the Landscape sees abundance of LndLvLduaL LLfe forMs and also hLgher order gestaLts_ Why Ls the gestalt ontology not MentLoned Ln the platforN forMulatLon_ A Landscape wLth organLsMs - and aLL Landscapes have organLsMs Ln MLcro-organLsMs are counted - Ls a hLgh order, natural gestalt_ The separatLon of organLsMs and non-organLsMs Ls very unnatural Ln gestalt thLnkLng and apperceptLon. But the concepts of 9estaLt-thlnkln9 are too specLaL for pLatforM forMuLatLons- Only a MLnorLty of supporters of deed ecology are acadeMLcs_ (Notes on Sylvan, p-7) -37- �BIBLIOGRAPHY Sources used 0 S. BodLan, S LMple Ln Means, rLch Ln ends: A conversatLon wLth Arne Naess', Ten DLrectLons, SuMMer/Fall, 1982, 7,10-12; referred to as SLMple Ln Means. M. BookchLn, The Ecology of FreedoM, CheshLre, Londong, 1982; referred to as F. Capra and C. Spretnak, Green PolLtLcs, HutchLnson, London, 198~; referred as Green PolLtLcs. to Bookch i,n. B. Devall, 'The Deep Ecology MoveMent', Natural Resources Journal 20, 1980, 299-322; referred to as Deep Ecology MoveMent. B. Devall, 'stone/Sky: ReflectLons on the 'Real ~ork' of Deep Ecology', paper delLvered at EnvLronMent, EthLcs and Ecology Conference, Canberra, August 1983, 20ff.; referred to as Stone/Sky . 8. Devall and G. SessLons, Deep Ecology, PeregrLne SMLth, Layton, Utah, 1985; referred to as Deep Ecology. U. Fox, Deep Ecology: A new phLlosophy 194-200; referred to as Fox. of our tLMe', EcologLst 1~, 1984, U. Fox, 'on guLdLng stars to Deep Ecology', EcologLst 14, 1984, 203-4; to as GuLdLng Stars. A. Naess, 'The shallow and the deep, long-range ecology MoveMent. InquLry 18, 1973, 95-100; referred to as Shallow and Deep. A. Naess, 'PhLlosophLcal Aspects of Deep Ecology ' , unpublLshed 1983, 35ff.; referred to as PhLlosophLcal Aspects. A. N.3 ess, • IntuLtLon, LntrLnsLc value and Deep 201-3; referred to as IntuLtLon. Ecology', referred A SUMMary. paper, EcologLst 14, Oslo, 1984, A. Naess, Notes on the PolLtLcs of the Deep Ecology MoveMent ' , unpublLshed paper, Canberra, 1984, 17ff.; referred to as PolLtLcs of the Deep Ecology MoveMent. A. Naess, 'What Ls basLc to Deep Ecology?', unpublLshed paper, 12ff . ; referred to as BasLc. A. Naess, A defence of the Deep Ecology 1984, 265-70; referred to as Defence. MoveMent', Canberra, 1984, EnvLronMental EthLcs A. Naess, 'The paradox of envLronMentalLsM' SyMposLuM ProceedLngs, (ed.), York UnLversLty, 1984, 57-60; referred to as Paradox. N. S, Everden A. Naess, 'IdentLfLcatLon as a source of Deep EcologLcal attLtudes', Deep Ecology, M. TobLas (ed.), Avant Books, San DLego, 1985, s256-70; referred to as ldentLfLcatLon. A. Naess, Notes on Professor Sylvan's crLtLque of the Deep Ecology MoveMent, unpublLshed paper, Olso, 1985, 19ff.; referred to as Notes on Sylvan. J. PassMore, Man's ResponsLb~lLty For Nature, 2nd ed., Duckworth, London, 1980; -38- �referred to as PassMore. A new way to treat the Land', EcoLogLst 14, 1984, BLoregLonaLLsM K. Sale, 167-73; referred to as Sale. the ph~Losoph~cal and Deep Ecology: A rev~ew of 'shallow G. Sess~ons, EcoLogLcaL (eds.), Hughes J.D. and Ln R.C. Schultz unfortune', UnLvers~ty Press of AMer~ca, ~ash~ngton, D.C., 1981, Consc~ousness, 391- 4 62; referred to as Sess~ons. R. Sylvan, A Cr~t~que of Deep Ecology, Research School of SocLaL AustraLLan Hat~onaL Un~vers~ty, 1985; referred to as Cr~t~que. ScLences, Further Read~ngs R.F. OasMann, Env~ronMentaL Conservat~on, 5th ed., ~LLey, New York, 1984. A. Leopold, A Sand Country ALManac, CheshLre, New York, 1966. E. PapadukLs, The Green MoveMent Ln ~est GerMany, Croon HeLM, London, 1984. -39- �DEEP ECOLOGY AHO GREEN POLITICS Deep Ecology Ls an envLronMe~tal theory or platforM wLth polLtLcal sLgnLfLcant wLth pLatforM i..MplLcatLons. Breen PoLLtLcs Ls a poLi..tLcaL envLronMentaL LMpLLcatLons. Both arose Ln Large part Ln reactLon to prevaLLLng envi..ronMentaL practLces; but Deep Ecology concentrates rather on theoretLcal reflectLon, Green PolLtLcs on practLcaL actLon . Deep and LnvestLgatLon questLoni..ng of the underlyLng doMi,nant attLtudes, seen as the Major source of ecoL09Lcal and other probLeMs, Led to artLcuLatLon of the Deep EcoLogy pLatforM, partLy outLi..ned Ln ·slogan" forM Ln the foLLowi..ng tabLe. ). TABLE 1. DEEP ECOLOGY CONTRASTED WITH DOMINANT ATT ITIJOES DOMINANT ATTITUDES [OOMIHAHT PARADIGM] DEEP ECOLOGY [RIVAL EHVIRONMEHTAL PARADIGM] OoMi..nati..on over Nature Nature a Resource; IntrLnsLc VaLue confi..ned to HuMans NaturaL EnvLronMent VaLued for Itself; Bi..ocentri..c EgaLi..tari..ani..sM AMp Le Reso1J rces/Subs t i.. tu tes Earth SuppLLes Li..MLted MaterLaL EconoMLc Growth a predoMLnant goaL Non-MaterLaL GoaLs, especLaLLy SeLf-ReaLi..zati..on ConsuMer i,sM DoLng wLth Enough/RecycLLng CoMpetLti..ve Li..festyLe Cooperati..ve Li..feway CentraLLzed/ Urban Centred/ Hati..onaL focus Decentral.i..zed/ Bi..oregi..onaL/ Nei..ghbourhood focus Power structure Hi..erarchLcaL Non-h i,erarch Lea L/ Grass roots DeMocrac!::I HLgh TechnoL09y Appropri..ate Technology Whi..Le Deep Ecol.og!::j grew froM the work of one envLronMentaL phi..Losopher (Naess Ln 1872), Green PolLtLcs arose (Ln West GerMany sLnce 1876) froM the synthesLs of several. MoveMents - ecol.09!::j, cLtLzens, aLternatLve, peace and other MoveMents. The pLatforM of Green PoLLtLcs, whLch Ls buLLt around four pLLLars socLaL responsLbLLLty, grassroots deMocracy , and non-vLoLence ecology, refLects these orLgLns. The fLrst of these pLLLars, ecoLog!::j, Ls based on the sLMpLe theMe that LLMLted ecoLogi..caL systeMs cannot sustai..n unLi..MLted econoMi..c growth, or such questi..onabLe types of growth as nucLear power, wi..thout serLous rLsk of daMage and degeneratLon. The Green aLM Ls to Move to S!::jsteMs of producti..on and consuMptLon whLch MaLntai..n and restore natural processes and C!::fCLes rather than doMLnate or destroy theM - a Move towards harMony wLth nature. The second pi..LLar of Green PoLLtLcs, socLaL responsLbLLLt!::j, LMpLLes opposi..tLon to the LnequaLLti..es i..n power and doMLnati..on reLati..onshi..ps of present soci..ety, and reMovaL of di..scri..Mi..nati..on, econoMLc hardshi..p and exploi..tati..on, both regi..onally and as regards the ThLrd ~orLd. The Green aLM - to be achi..eved pri..Mari..Ly froM below, Ls to bui..ld stable and just soci..al through those adversely affected arrangeMents, wLth coMprehensLve deMocrati..c rLghts and freedoMs (both i..n 6erMan~ -1- �and where GerMan operatLons LMpLnge Ln the ThLrd WorLd). These changes are to be brought about by grassroots deMocracy, the thLrd pLLLar, through Lncreased reaLLsatLon of dLrect decentraLLsed deMocracy. ThLs LnvoLves organLsatLon and coordLnatLon of decentraLLsed basLc unLts (Local, COMMunLty and dLstrLct) whi..ch are gLven extensLve, but not coMpLete, autonoMy, as weLL as wLde use of : referenda, deLegatLon practLces, and rotatLon of offLce-hoLders. The fourth and fLnaL pLLLar, non-vLoLence, LMpli..es the reMovaL of coercLve and aLso oppressLve practLces, not Merely by More powerful people, but especLaLLy by socLaL groups and states, and also, More posLtLveLy, acti..ve depoLyMent of varLous Methods of socLal protest, resLstance and defence . The coMpatLbLlLty of Means wLth ends serves here as an LMportant underlyLng prLncLple: that a just, non-vLolent, huMane end-state cannot be satLsfactorLLy achLeved by unjust, vi..oLent, LnhuMane Means . • l Gr een PolLtLcs offers then a broad prograM for socLal change, whLch LncLudes the More specLfLc and ecologLcalLy focussed Deep Ecology platforM as a quLte proper part. Put dLfferentLy, Green PoLLtLcs coMbLnes a wLder pLuraLLty of The strand. LMportant MoveMents of whLch Deep Ecology represents one Lnter-relatLons are shown pLctorLaLly at the second level of the foLlowLng 12 dLagraM: DIAGRAM 1. DOUBLE PYRAMID, SETTING DEEP ECOLOGY IM PLACE p B \ '\ I 2C ] ~ Oer Lva ti..on Di,recti,on 2+ ExpLanatLon Oi,recti..on 2. Deep Ecology pLatforM 2C. ReforMLst envLronMentaL 2 p1Jsi.. t i.,Qn 2+. Vague fundaMentaLs of Green pLatforM -/ //' ;/ e.g. Buddhi..st (B), ChrLstLan (C) and (Eco)-PhLLosophLc (P) ultLMate bases j / -\,r - [ 1. Deep Ecology fundaMentaLs; C \ \ \ 3. s \ General norMs and theMes , substanti,ally derLved froM pl,atforM PartLcuLar norMs and concrete decLsLons , appLyLng to reLevant practLcal sLtuatLons. The ecologLcaL coMponent of Green PolLtLcs May not go very deep; Lt May on l y be based upon reforM envLronMentalLsM (or shallow ecology as i,t used to be I Starred notes LndLcate poi..nts at wh i..ch readLngs wi..th the correspondLng nuMbers May be Lnserted or undertaken . -2- �caLLed), whLch aLM3 to reforM 30Me of the wor3t abuse3 and exces3e3 of the doMLnant posLtLon, such as gross poLLutLon, extensLve despoLLatLon of Land and Lakes and oceans, LLttLe thought for the future, MLstreatMent of anLMals, etc_ On shaLlow ecology, nature Ls not valued for Ltself, but as a resource, that Ls LnstruMentalLy, for what Lt can be used for by huMans_ By contrast, Deep Ecology argues (e_g_ froM preMLsses of Level I) that the envLronMent Ls LntrLnsLcaLLy valuable, that nature Ls valuable Ln and for Ltself; and that, furtherMore, LntrLnsLc value Ls equally dLstrLbuted_ ThLs projectLon of egsLLtarLan or LMpartLalLty prLncLpLes, usually restrLcted to huMans, to the whole of lLfe Ln the natural worLd, gets dLgnLfLed by the tLtle, BLocentrLc EgalLtarLanLsM_ The prLncLple, not part of Green PoLLtLcs, Ls perhaps the Most controversLal of the central prLncLpLes of Deep Ecology; but Lt or soMe substLtute for Lt Ls requLred, granted that the natural world contaLns value beyond that accruLng to huMans and theLr features, to expLaLn how value Ls dLstrLbuted_ Deep Ecology accounts for the dLstrLbutLon through what Ls . . presented as a core deMocracy ~n the bLosphere . _•3 Deep Ecology grew out of a phLlosophLcal deepenLng of the new features of the scLence of ecology, whLch served to dLstance ecology froM the standard run of reductLonLst scLences (through such features as holLsM; gestalt propertLes; systeMs whLch are More than the suM of theLr atoMLstLc parts; eMergent eleMents, lLke lLfe, organLsatLon, etc_ )_ Deep Ecology quLckLy aLLLed Ltself wLth the subversLve features of unco-opted ecology, Ln partLcuLar, the eMphasLs on the lLMLts, and ultLMate faLlure of (atoMLstLc) reductLonLsM Ln scLence and phLlosophy_ WLth such an orLgLn, Lt Ls not surprLsLng that there Ls lLttle dLrectLy about such MaLn pLllars of Green PolLtLcs as socLaL responsLbLLLty and non-vLoLence Ln the pLatforM of Deep Ecology- However Deep Ecology Ls coMpatLbLe wLth these Green pLlLar prLncLpLes, and Lndeed perMLts theLr derLvatLon_ ~hat Ls supposed to resuLt are generaL norMs, LLke No exploLtatLon, No subjectLon, No vLoLence, at leveL 3_ (Such a derLvatLon of a non-vLoLence prLncLpLe froM tne Deep Ecology prLncLpLe of MaxLMLzLng Self-reaLLsatLon Ls atteMpted by Naess Ln the fraMework of hLs systeM of Eco-phLLosophy)_•l A MaLn focus of Deep Ecology Ls on changLng huMan reLatLons wLth the natural envLronMent, away froM doMLnant expLoLtatLve practLces_ The naturaL envLronMent coMprLses LteMs of LntrLnsLc value, LncludLng huMans (who are not above or separate froM Lt), and accordLn9ly Ls to be treated wLth the care and respect valuable LteMs warrant, and not LrresponsLbLy_ Thus Lt would be contrary to Deep Ecology to treat the envLronMent or Lts valued LteMs vLolently whLch however Ls what Deep Ecology contends doMLnant practLces do (consLder such wLdespread phenoMena as "rape of the envLronMent", "of the Land", "of the forestsu)_ SLnce huMans are not apart froM or superLor to nature, Lt follows froM the Deep Ecology pLatforM that natural and proper relatLons also exclude vLoLence towards other huMans or classes of huMans_ Because Lt covers a pluraLLty of posLt~ons, LncludLng shaLLow ecoLogLcaL posLtLons, Green PolLtLcs Ls Much More aMelLoratLve and reforMLst Ln character than Deep Ecology, whLch Ls further reMoved froM doMLnant attLtudes, More hardLLne, and More radLcaL_ ~hereas Deep Ecology goes to fundaMentaLs, and focusses on Ldeals and theory, Green PolLtLcs tends to concentrate on practLcal polLtLcal probleMs of an envLronMental or socLal kLnd, such as acLd raLn or rLver pollutLon or MLssLle deplo8Ment, and (lLke the Peace MoveMent Ln AustralLa) Ls not so Much concerned wLth refLnLng Lts rather vague prLncLpLes or wor~Lng out an env~ronMentaL (or peace) ph~Losophy_ Because of Lts envLronMentaL depth and natural world focus, Deep Ecology Ls concerned wLth a range of natural envLronMent Lssues, such as wLlderness, rare specLes, and the radLcal -3- �transforMatLon of agrLcuLture, whLch are onLy of passLng Lnterest to a sMaLL MLnorLty Ln Green PoLLtLcs or are beyond Lts poLLtLcaL reach. Jn Lts reforMLst styLe Green PoLLtLcs does not venture far beyond prevLous Left-LeanLng poLLtLcaL MoveMents, except, fLrstLy, Ln Lts opposLtLon to envLronMent and aMenLty daMa9Ln9 LndustrLaLLsM and, secondLy, as regards non-vLolence and Lts coMMLtMent to attaLnLng peace. Non-vLoLence Ls the Most controversLaL of the four pLLLars. For non-vLoLence ruLes out a range of poLLtLcal actLon, LncLudLn9 typLcal protests, confrontatLon and revoLutLons. Non-vLolence also LMplLes, what Ls very dLfferent froM current MLLLtary pra~tLces, socLal defence. WhLLe MaLn factLons Ln the Green MoveMent support non-vLolent Methods and socLal defence, other Lesser factLons hold that force Ls necessary to brLn9 about varLous necessary changes and for defence purposes. The Deep EcoLogy platforM Lncludes severaL prLncLpLes that would be recognLsed by onLy a MLnorLty of the Green MoveMent. One of these prLncLples (whLch however, unlLke BLocentrLc EgalLtarLanLsM, would not be wLdeLy opposed by reforMLst Greens) Ls the core prLncLpLe of SeLf-reaLLsatLon, or More exactLy of MaxLMLzLng SeLf-reaLLsatLon. The notLon of self-realLsatLon of varLous relLgLous posLtLons, of the full unfoldLng and developMent of the person, Ls vastly expanded Ln Deep EcoLogy to Lnclude brLngLng to fuLl fruLtLon not MereLy one's own person, but all that one LdentLfLes wLth, that Ls the expanded Self, whLch Ls taken to be not Merely one's faMLLy or feLlows or fellow natLonals, nor Merely ~as on huManLstLc ethLcs) the whole huMan race, but the whole naturaL 1 systeM. The SeLf-realLsatLon prLncLpLe, sprLngLng as Lt appears froM an enLLghtened personal self-Lnterest prLncLple, has an excellent phLlosophLcaL pedLgree (at Least as applLed to huMans or neL9hbourLn9 classes of huMans). Thus rather than beLng argued for, a dLffLcult Matter Ln the case of ultLMate prLncLples, SeLfrealLsatLon Ls LMported froM syMpathetLc phLlosophLcal or reLLgLous posLtLons at Level 1 of the double pyraMLd, froM those that help sustaLn Deep Ecology. However the expansLon Lnvolved, the derLvatLon process froM narrow self to coMprehensLve Self, severs the usual justLfLcatory lLnks. It Ls hard to LdentLfy one's self-Lnterests wLth those of a rock or an acorn. So the supposed LdentLfLcatLon - wLth soMe or aLL MountaLns, rLvers and raLnforests Ln the wLder reMaLns, LLke the assocLated extended EgaLLtarLan Self, Nature personLfLed prLncLpLe, decLdedLy probLeMatLc. Because Lt Ls assuMed that SeLf-reaLLsatLon Ls dLrected to ecoLogLcal and spLrLtual ends, not at MaterLaL goods or Means, SeLf-reaLLsatLon Leads to the 16 AMong the raMLfLcatLons of the slogan slogan, USLMpLe Ln Means, rLch Ln endsn. are those concernLng what kLnd of technology one uses and where one lLves (the Matter of dwellLng Ln sLtuatLons of Lnherent value and the lLke), what and how Much one consuMes, and so on. The doMLnant attLtudes, forMed around of econoMLc growth and econoMLc routes to happLness, have MaxLMLzatLon eMphasLsed both MaterLal goals and MaterLal Means, partLcuLarly personal consuMerLsM. But Lf MaterLaL use and pure consuMptLon are to be reduced for envLronMentaL and other reasons, what LLfestyles are approprLate? Deep Ecology, LLke Lts fundaMentaL sources, poLnts to experLentLal and spLrLtuaL ends and eMphasLzes the rLchness of non-MaterLaL ends avaLlabLe. The result, of course, Ls practLces whLch are sLMpLe, voluntary sLMpLLcLty, do~ng wLth enough, and, More 9enerall8, practLces whLch lLe lLght on the Land and the naturaL world. In way of d0Ln9 thLngs, these wLLL be Lnte9rated (Ln ~ properly ecoLogLcaL syMbLotLc and other naturaL styles) wLth the natural systeMs LnvoLved, workLng wLth rather than agaLnst the natural fLow. The practLces, and organLsatLonaL approprLate to regLonaL wLLl accordLngly be ecoregLonaL arrangeMents, 17 to be caLLed. coMe have they as bLore9LonaL, ecoL09LcaL 9roupLn9s - or -4- �ApproprLate Means LncLude, Ln turn, technLques approprLate to the practLce and theory of Deep Ecology- HLgh technoL09Les such as nuclear power are not approprLate, even Ln advanced LndustrLaL socLetLes, but LnapproprLate because of the envLronMentaL and socLaL costs and rLsks such technoLogLcaL forMs LMpose_ On both deep and green percept i,ons, wh-3 t Ls requ Lred a re re LLab Le c-:1 ref u L technoLogLes whLch are not ecoLogLcaLLy daMa9Ln9 or socLaLLy rLsky or otherwLse undesLrabLe; but the technoLogi,es adl"li,tted wLLl dLffer accordLng to the prLncLpLes of the posLtLons they answer back to (e_g_ farMLng technLques wLLL need to be very dLfferent froM those prevaLLLng Ln rural GerMany to Meet such prLncLpLes as bLospherLc egaLLtarLanLsM )_ In each case the practLcaL use of approprLate technoLogy faLLs at the bottoM, actLon Level, of the doubLe pyral"I ,,"d _•8 WhLLe Deep Ecology suppLLes an appeaLLng bLueprLnt for dLfferent socLaL and LLfe-ways, the questLon reMaLns: how Ls the proMLsed Land reached? A MaLn part of the answer Ls taken to be gLven through a further crucLaL feature of Deep Ecology: EcoLogLcaL ConscLousness, a notLon agaLn expandLng upon conceptLons of other oLder LdeoLogLes (e_g_ of reLL9Lous, or of revoLutLonary, conscLousness)_ What Ls dLfferent Ls that spLrLtuaL or LdeoLogLcaL conversLon Ls agaLn broadened froM the personaL and socLaL to coMprehend the fuLL envLronMentaL predLcaMent_ In thLs expLanatLon, of how peopLe get, and are got, to grasp Deep Ecology and Lts practLces, the pyraMLd Ls ascended, froM actLon to Ldeas, to deeper explanatory prLncLpLes_ A thorough conversLon process LnvoLves eLevatLon to the top LiveL, spLrLtuaL transcendence of the daLLy econoMLc and poLLtLcaL actLon LeveL. 9 It Ls assuMed that, wLth enough converts and supporters, Deep Ecology wLLL be put Ln place, LLke Green PoLLtLcs, by grassroots deMocratLc procedures_ LLke the fundaMentaL sources upon whLch Lt draws, Deep Ecology prescrLbes practLces by whLch to achLeve such a conversLon and through whLch to arrLve at EcoLogLcaL ConscLousness_ SoMe of the MaLn practLces, such as MedLtatLon and conteMpLatLon, are derLved frol"I the fundaMentaL sources_ But other Methods whLch extend these, soMe of theM expandLng upon ecoLogLcaL experLence, LncLude value seeLng thLngs dLfferentLy, and reorLentatLon and wLdened value perceptLon of other thLngs - Connected wLth weLL-beLng and worth the coMLng to apprecLate goes a hoLLstLc shLft Ln theM, these wLdened experLentLaL bases, and LnforMLng vaLues and perceptLon, and an expanded LdentLfLcatLon , affordLng dLrect LLnkage wLth parts and whoLes of the natural worLd_•IO By these Methods, a person May coMe to a deep and joyous apprecLatLon of the reaL world, a convert to Deep Ecology, a feLLow and advocate of Lts Messages and LLfe-ways. ESSAY QUESTIONS }_ To what extent do Green PoLLtLcs and Deep Ecology share the saMe values and address the sal"le probLel"ls? CrLtLcaLLy coMpare and contrast theLr proposals, especLaLLy as regards the naturaL and the buLLt envLronMent_ 2_ Deep Ecology Ls soMetLMes assLgned four Levels. Try to descrLbe these, and to expLaLn carefuLLy the LnterreLatLons aMong PoLLtLcs fLt Lnto thLs probLeMatLc scheMe? these Levels. Where does Green Ln prLncLpLe" appears as a key theMe of Deep Eco~ogy. Cri.tLcaLLy assess Lts adequacy_ Shouldn't Green PoLLtLcs LncLude such a pri.nci.pLe? 3_ ·sLocentrLc EgaLLtarLanLsM - Non-vLo~ence an unstated pr~nc~p~e of Deep Ecoiog~? Expia~n why Deep Ecology Ls coMMLtted to non-vLoLence to the degree i.t Ls? In your answers take account of the foLLowLng dLffLcuLtLes: L. the contradLcti.ons between the use of I+- 1:5 -5- �vLolence and the defence of the envLronMent; LL. the occurrence of vLolence Ln nature; LLL. the need for coercLve Methods to preserve the natural envLronMent. 5. What justLfLes expandLng self-realLsatLo n to Self-realLsatLo n? ExpLaLn the MeanLng and LMportance of SeLf-ReaLLsatL on for Deep EcoLogy and dLscuss Lts adequacy. Why does Lt not feature Ln Green PolLtLcs? 6. ExplaLn the MeanLng of the delLberateLy vague slogan °SLMple Ln Means, rLch Ln ends", or of soMe other hLgh-LMpact sLogan of Deep EcoLogy. IndLcate how the vagueness MLght work for and a9aLnst the slogan, suggest how the slogan MLght be alternatLve LnterpretatLon s, and LndLcate soMe of the suggest applLed, aLternatLves. these of raMLfLcatLons 7. OutLLne bLoregLonalLsM , LndLcatLng what practLcaL envLronMentaL probLeMs bLoregLonalLsM Lnduces. How Ln fact Ls bLoregLonalLsM derLved froM Deep EcoLogy? ConsLder to what extent bLoregLonalLsM fLts wLth the sLogan, ·rhLnk globally, act locally·. 8. Is More hLgh technology an unprobLeMatLc solutLon to deeper, or to any, envLronMental probLeMs? CoMpare and contrast the vLews of Deep Ecology and Green PoLLtLcs on the role of varLous types of technoLogy. 9. What Ls Ecolo9Lcal ConscLousness? And what Ls Lt supposed to do Ln and for Deep Ec0Lo9y? If Lt Ls so LMportant, why Ls Lt not a MaLn concern for Green PoLLtLcs? A reLatLonaL, total-fLeLd LMa9e of huMan reLatLonshLps wLth nature has been quLetLy oMLtted froM the orLgLnaL pLatforM of Deep Ecology. Is thLs gestalt pLcture needed? Is Lt defensLbLe? Should Lt be reLnstated? 10. -6- � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Draft Papers Description An account of the resource Sylvan's literary executor encountered an archive in which “all his projects were current", since manuscripts were undated and unattributed. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document DEEP ECOLOOY AHO OREEH POLITICS Deep Ecology ts an envtronMentaL theory or pLatforM wtth poLtttcaL stgntftcant wtth pLatforM LMpLtcattons. Green PoLtttcs ts a poLtttcaL envtronMentaL LMpLtcattons. Both arose tn Large part tn reactton to prevatLtng envtronMentaL practtces; but Deep Ecology concentrates rather on theorettcaL refLectton, Green PoLtttcs on practtcaL actton. Deep and tnvesttgatton questtontng of the underLytng doMtnant attttudes, seen as the Major source of ecoLogtcaL and other probLeMs, Led to arttcuLatton of the Deep Ecology pLatforM, partly outLtned tn "slogan" forM tn the foLLowtng table. TABLE 1. DEEP ECOLOGY CONTRASTED ~ITH OOMIHAHT ATTITUDES OOMrnAtn ATT HUDES (OOMrnAtH PARADIGM] DEEP ECOLOGY [RIVAL EttV IROHMEHTAL PARADIGM] Hature a Resource; Intrtnstc Value conftned to HuMans Natural EnvtronMent Valued for ltseLt; Btocentrtc E9aLttartantsM MatertaL EconoMtc Growth a predoMtnant goaL Hon-MatertaL Goals, espectaLLy ConsuMertsM Dotng wtth Enough/RecycLtng CoMpettttve LtfestyLe Cooperattve Ltfeway CentraLtzed/ Urban Centred/ DecentraLtzed/ Btoregtonat/ · Hetghbourhood focus tia t Lona L focus SeLf-ReaLtzatton Power structure HterarchtcaL Hon-hterarchtcaL/ Grassroots DeMocracy Htgh Technology Approprtate Technology ~htLe Deep Ecology grew froM the work of one envtronMentaL phtLosopher (Haess tn 1972), Green PoLtttcs arose (tn ~est GerMany stnce 1976) froM the synthests of several MoveMents - ecology, ctttzens, aLternattve, peace and other MoveMents. The platforM of Green PoLtttcs, whtch ts butlt around four ptllars soctaL responstbtltty, grassroots deMocracy, and non-vtoLence ecology, reflects these ortgtns. The ftrst of these ptLLars, ecology, ts based on the stMpLe theMe that LtMtted ecoLogtcaL systeMs cannot sustatn unltMtted econoMtc growth, or such questtonabLe types of growth as nuclear power, wtthout sertous rtsk of daMage and degeneratton. The Green atM ts to Move to systeMs of productlon and consuMptton whtch Matntatn and restore natural processes and cycles rather than doMtnate or destroy theM - a Move towards harMony wtth nature. The second ptllar of Green Poltttcs, soctal responstbtltty, tMpLtes opposttton to the tnequaltttes tn power and doMtnatton relattonshtps of present soctety, and reMovaL of dtscrtMtnatton, econoMtc hardshtp and explottatton, both regtonaLly and as regards the Thtrd ~orld. The Green atM - to be achteved prtMartly froM below, ts to butLd stable and just soctaL through those adversely affected arrangeMents, wtth coMprehenstve deMocrattc rtghts and freedoMs (both tn GerMany -1- and where GerMan operatLons LMpLnge Ln the ThLrd ~orLd). These changes are to be brought about by grassroots deMocracy, the thLrd pLLLar, through Lncreased reaLLsatLon of dLrect decentraLLsed deMocracy. ThLs LnvoLves organLsatLon and coordLnatLon .of decentraLLsed basLc unLts (LocaL, coMMunLty and dLstrLct) whLch are 9Lven extensLve, but not coMpLete, autonoMy, as weLL as wLde use of referenda, deLegatLon practLces, and rotatLon of offLce-hoLders. The fourth and fLnaL pLLLar, non-vLoLence, LMpLLes the reMovaL of coercLve and aLso oppressLve practLces, not MereLy by More powerfuL peopLe, but especLaLLy by socLaL groups and states, and aLso, More posLtLveLy, actLve depoLyMent of varLous Methods of socLaL protest, resLstance and defence. The coMpatLbLLLty of Means wLth ends serves here as an LMportant underLyLng prLncLpLe: that a just, non-vLoLent, huMane• end-state cannot be satLsfactorLLy achLeved by unjust, vLoLent, LnhuMane Means. 1 Green PoLLtLcs offers then a broad prograM for socLaL change, whLch LncLudes the More specLfLc and ecoLogLcaLLy focussed Deep EcoLogy pLatforM as a quLte proper part. Put dLfferentLy, Green PoLLtLcs coMbLnes a wLder pLuraLLty of MoveMents of whLch Deep EcoLogy represents one LMportant strand. The Lnter-reLatLons are shown pLctorLaLLy at the second LeveL of the foLLowLng 12 dLagraM: DIAGRAM l. DOUBLE PYRAMID, SETTING DEEP ECOLOGY IN PLACE B p 1. Deep EcoLogy fundaMentaLs; e.g. BuddhLst (B), ChrLstLan (C) and (Eco)-Phi.LosophLc (P) uLtLMate bases C I 2 Exp Lana.t Lon DLrecti.on 2. Deep Ecology platforM 2C . ReforMi.st envLronMental posi.ti.on 2+. Vague fundaMentaLs of Green platforM Der Lvat Lon Di.recti.on j 3 . . General norMs and theMes, substantLaLLy derLved froM pLatforM ~- PartLcular norMs and concrete decLsLons, applyi.ng to relevant practLcaL sLtuatLons . The ecoLogLcaL coMponent of Green PolLtLcs May not 90 very deep; Lt May onLy be based upon reforM envLronMentaLLsM (or shaLLow ecoLogy as Lt used to be • Starred notes LndLcate poLnts at whLch readLngs wLth the correspondLng nuMbers May be Lnserted or undertaken. -2- catted), whLch aLMs to reforM soMe of the worst abuses and excesses of the doMLnant posLtLon, such as gross pottutLon, extensLve despotLatLo n of land and takes and oceans, tLttte thought for the future, MLstreatMen t of anLMals, etc. On shallow ecology, nature Ls not valued for Ltsetf, but as a resource, that Ls LnstruMent atty, for what Lt can be used for by huMans. By contrast, Deep Ecology argues (e.g. froM preMLsses of level I) that the envLronMent Ls LntrLnsLcat ty valuable, that nature Ls valuable Ln and for Ltself; and that, LntrLnsLc value Ls equally dLstrLbuted . ThLs projectLon of furtherr,ore , egatLtarLan or Lr,partLatLt y prLncLptes, usually restrLcted to huMans, to the whole of tLfe Ln the natural world, gets dLgnLfLed by the tLtte, BLocentrLc EgalLtarLanL sM. The prLncLple, not part of Green PolLtLcs, Ls perhaps the Most controversL al of the central prLncLptes of Deep Ecology; but Lt or soMe substLtute for Lt Ls requLred, granted that the natural world contaLns value beyond that accruLng to huMans and theLr features, to explaLn how value Ls dLstrLbuted . Deep Ecology accounts for the dLstrLbutLo n through what Ls ' •3 . presented as a ' core der,ocracy Ln the b~osphere . Deep Ecology grew out of a phLtosophL cal dP~penLng of the new features of the scLence of ecology, whLch served to dLstance ecology froM the standard run of reductLonLs t scLences (through such features as holLsM; gestalt propertLes; systeMs whLch are More than the sur, of theLr ator,LstLc parts; eMergent eler,ents, tLke lLfe, organLsatLo n, etc.). Deep Ecology quLckly allLed Ltself wLth the subversLve features of unco-opted ecology, Ln partLcutar, the eMphasLs on the lLMLts, and ultLMate faLture of (atoMLstLc) reductLonLsM Ln scLence and phLlosophy. ~Lth such an orLgLn, Lt Ls not surpr~s~ng that there Ls lLttle dLrectty about such r,aLn pLllars of Green PotLtLcs as socLal responsLbLl Lty and non-vLotenc e Ln the platforM of Deep Ecology. However Deep Ecology Ls cor,patLble wLth these Green pLllar prLncLptes, and Lndeed perr,Lts theLr derLvatLon. ~hat Ls supposed to result are general norMs, lLke Ho exploLtatLo n, Ho subjectLon, Ho vLolence, at level 3. (Such a derLvatLon of a non-vLolenc e prLncLple froM the Deep Ecology prLncLple of r,axLMLzLng Self-realLs atLon Ls atter,pted by Haess Ln the frar,ework of hLs systeM of Eco-phLloso phy).•~ A MaLn focus of Deep Ecology Ls on changLng huMan relatLons wLth the natural envLronMen t, away froM doMLnant exploLtatLv e practLces. The natural envLronr,ent coMprLses Lter,s of LntrLnsLc value, LncludLng hur,ans (who are not above or separate fror, Lt), and accordLngty Ls to be treated wLth the care and respect valuable Lter,s warrant, and not LrresponsLb ly. Thus Lt would be contrary whLch to Deep Ecology to treat the envLronMent or Lts valued Lter,s vLolently such (consLder however Ls what Deep Ecology contends doMLnant practLces do wLdespread phenor,ena as "rape of the envLronMen t", ·of the land", •of the forests"). SLnce hur,ans are not apart fror, or superLor to nature, Lt follows froM the Deep Ecology platforr, that natural and proper relatLons also exclude vLolence towards other hur,ans or classes of huMans. Because Lt covers a pluralLty of posLtLons, LncludLng shallow ecologLcal posLtLons, Green PolLtLcs Ls Much More ar,elLoratLv e and reforMLst Ln character than Deep Ecology, whLch Ls further rer,oved froM dor,Lnant attLtudes, More hardLLne, and r,ore radLcat. ~hereas Deep Ecology goes to fundaMenta ts, and focusses on Ldeats and theory, Green PotLtLcs tends to concentrate on practLcal poLLtLcat probler,s of an envLronr,en tat or socLat kLnd, such as acLd raLn or rLver pottutLon or MLssLte deptoyMent, and (LLke the Peace Mover,ent Ln AustralLa) Ls not so Much concerned wLth refLnLng Lts rather vague prLncLples or workLng out an envLronMen tat (or peace) phLtosophy. Because of Lts envLronMen tal depth and natural world focus, Deep Ecology Ls concerned wLth a range of natural -3- radLcaL the envLronMent Lssues, such as wLLderness, rare specLes, and transforMatLon of agrLcuLture, whLch are onLy of passLng Lnterest to a sMaLL MLnorLty Ln Green PoLLtLcs or are beyond Lts poLLtLcaL reach. Jn Lts reforMLst styLe Green PoLLtLcs does not venture far beyond prevLous Left-LeanLng poLLtLcaL MoveMents, except, fLrstLy, Ln Lts opposLtLon to envLronMent and aMenLty daMagLng LndustrLaLLsM and, secondLy, as regards non-vLoLence and Lts coMMLtMent to attaLnLng peace. Non-vLoLence Ls the Most controversLaL of the four pLLLars. For non-vLoLence ruLes out a range of poLLtLcaL actLon, LncLudLng typLcaL protests, confrontatLon and revoLutLons. Non-vLoLence aLso LMpLLes, what Ls very dLfferent froM current MLLLtary practLces, socLaL defence. WhLLe MaLn factLons Ln the Green MoveMent support non-vLoLent Methods and socLaL defence, other Lesser factLons hoLd that force Ls necessary to brLng about varLous necessary changes and for defence purposes. The Deep EcoLogy pLatforM LncLudes severaL prLncLpLes that wouLd be recognLsed by onLy a MLnorLty of the Green MoveMent. One of these prLncLpLes (whLch however, unLLke BLocentrLc EgaLLtarLanLsM, wouLd not be wLdeLy opposed by reforMLst Greens) Ls the core prLncLpLe of SeLf-reaLLsatLon, or More exactLy of MaxLML2Ln9 SeLf-reaLLsatLon. The notLon of seLf-reaLLsatLon of varLous reLLgLous posLtLons, of the fuLL unfoLdLng and deveLopMent of the person, Ls vastLy expanded Ln Deep EcoLogy to LncLude brLngLng to fuLL fruLtLon not MereLy one's own person, but aLL that one LdentLfLes wLth, that Ls the expanded SeLf, whLch Ls taken to be not MereLy one's faMLLy or feLLows or feLLow natLonaLs, nor MereLy ~as on huManLstLc ethLcs) the whoLe huMan race, but the whoLe naturaL 1 systeM. The SeLf-reaLLsatLon prLncLpLe, sprLngLng as Lt appears froM an enLLghtened personaL seLf-Lnterest prLncLpLe, has an exceLLent phLLosophLcaL pedLgree (at Least as appLLed to huMans or neLghbourLng cLasses of huMans). Thus rather than beLng argued for, a dLffLcuLt Matter Ln the case of uLtLMate prLncLpLes, SeLfreaLLsatLon Ls LMported froM syMpathetLc phLLosophLcaL or reLLgLous posLtLons at LeveL I of the doubLe pyraMLd, froM those that heLp sustaLn Deep EcoLogy. However the expansLon LnvoLved, the derLvatLon process froM narrow seLf to coMprehensLve SeLf, severs the usuaL justLfLcatory LLnks. It Ls hard to LdentLfy one's seLf-Lnterests wLth · those of a rock or an acorn. So the supposed LdentLfLcatLon - wLth soMe or aLL MountaLns, rLvers and raLnforests Ln the wLder reMaLns, LLke the assocLated extended EgaLLtarLan SeLf, Nature personLfLed prLncLpLe, decLdedLy probLeMatLc. Because Lt Ls assuMed that SeLf-reaLLsatLon Ls dLrected to ecoLogLcaL and spLrLtuaL ends, not at MaterLaL goods or Means, SeLf-reaLLsatLon Leads to the 16 AMong the raMLfLcatLons of the sLogan sLogan, "SLMpLe Ln Means, rLch Ln ends". one uses and where one LLves technoLogy of are those concernLng what kLnd (the Matter of dweLLLng Ln sLtuatLons of Lnherent vaLue and the LLke), what and how Much one consuMes, and so on. The doMLnant attLtudes, forMed around of econoMLc growth and econoMLc routes to happLness, have MaxLML2atLon eMphasLsed both MaterLaL goaLs and MaterLaL Means, partLcuLarLy personaL consuMerLsM. But Lf MaterLaL use and pure consuMptLon are to be reduced for envLronMentaL and other reasons, what LLfestyLes are approprLate? Deep EcoLogy, LLke Lts fundaMentaL sources, poLnts to experLentLaL and spLrLtuaL ends and eMphasL2es the rLchness of non-MaterLaL ends avaLLabLe. The resuLt, of course, Ls practLces whLch are sLMpLe, voluntary sLMpLLcLty, doLng wLth enough, and, More generaLLy, practLces whLch LLe LLght on the Land and the naturaL worLd. In a properLy ecoLogLcaL way of doLng thLngs, these wLLL be Lntegrated (Ln syMbLotLc and other naturaL styLes) wLth the naturaL systeMs LnvoLved, workLng wLth rather than agaLnst the naturaL fLow. The practLces, and organLsatLonaL approprLate to regLonaL wLLL accordLngLy be ecoregLonaL arrangeMents, -4- ecologtcal grouptngs - or btoregtonal, as they have coNe to be called. • 7 Approprtate Means tnclude, tn turn, technLques approprLate to the practLce and theory .of Deep Ecology. HLgh technologLes such as nuclear power are not approprLate, even Ln advanced LndustrLal socLetLes, but LnapproprLate because of the envLronMental and socLal costs and rLsks such technologLcal forMs LMpose. On both deep and green perceptLons, what Ls requLred are relLable careful technologLes whLch are not ecologLcally daMagLng or socLally rLsky or otherwLse undesLrable; but the technologLes adMLtted wLll dLffer accordLng to the prLncLples of the posLtLons they answer back to (e.g . farMLng technLques wLlt need to be very dLfferent froM those prevaLtLng Ln rural GerMany to Meet such prLncLptes as bLospherLc egalLtarLanLsM). In each case the practLcat use of approprLate technology falls at the bottoM, actLon level, of the double . •a pyraN~d. WhLle Deep Ecology supplLes an appeatLng blueprLnt for dLfferent socLal and lLfe-ways, the questLon reMaLns: how Ls the proMLsed land reached? A MaLn part of the answer Ls taken to be gLven through a further crucLal feature of Deep Ecology: EcologLcal ConscLousness, a notLon agaLn expandLng upon conceptLons of other older LdeologLes (e.g. of relLgLous, or of revolutLonary, conscLousness). What Ls dLfferent Ls that spLrLtual or LdeologLcal conversLon Ls agaLn broadened froM the personal and socLat to coMprehend the full envLronMental predLcaMent. In thLs explanatLon, of how people get, and are got, to grasp Deep Ecology and Lts practLces, the pyraMLd Ls ascended, froM actLon to Ldeas, to deeper explanatory prLncLples. A thorough conversLon process Lnvolves elevatLon to the top livet, spLrLtuat transcendence of the daLly econoMLc and polLtLcat actLon level. 9 It Ls assuMed that, wLth enough converts and supporters, Deep Ecology wLlt be put Ln place, lLke Green PolLtLcs, by grassroots deMocratLc procedures. LLke the fundaMental sources upon whLch Lt draws, Deep Ecology prescrLbes practLces by whLch to achLeve such a conversLon and through whLch to arrLve at EcologLcal ConscLousness. SoMe of the MaLn practLces, such as MedLtatLon and conteMptatLon, are derLved froM the fundaMental sources. But other Methods whLch extend these, soMe of theM expandLng upon ecologLcat experLence, Lnclude value reorLentatLon and wLdened value perceptLon seeLng thLngs dLfferently, and coMLng to apprecLate the worth and well-beLng of other thLngs. Connected wLth these wLdened experLentLal bases, and LnforMLng theM, goes a holLstLc shLft Ln values and perceptLon, and an expanded LdentLfLcatLon, affordLng dLrect lLnkage wLth parts and wholes of the natural world. •IO By these Methods, a person May coMe to a deep and joyous apprecLatLon of the real world, a convert to Deep Ecology , a fellow and advocate of Lts Messages and lLfe-ways . ESSAY QUESTIOHS I. To what extent do Green PolLtLcs and Deep Ecology share the saMe values and address the saMe probleMs? CrLtLcally coMpare and contrast theLr proposa l s, especLally as regards the natural and the buLlt envLronMent. 2. Deep Ecology Ls soMetLMes assLgned four, levels. Try to descrLbe these, and to explaLn carefully the LnterrelatLons aMong these levels. Uhere does Green PolLtLcs fLt Lnto thLs probleMatLc scheMe? 3 . "BLocentrLc EgalLtarLanLsM - Ln prLncLple appears as a key theMe of Deep Ecology. CrLtLcally assess Lts adequacy. Shouldn't Green PolLtLcs Lnctude such a prLncLpte? 4. Is Non-vLolence an unstated prLncLple of Deep Ecology? ExplaLn why Deep Ecology Ls coMMLtted to non-vLolence to the degree Lt Ls? In your answers . take -5- \ account of the foLLowLng dLffLcuLtLes: L. the contradLctLons between the use of vLoLence and the defence of the envLronMent; LL. the occurrence of vloLence Ln nature; ttt. the need for coerclve Methods to preserve the natural envtronMent. 5. Uhat justlfLes expandLng _seLf-reallsatLon to SeLf-reaLlsatlon? ExpLaLn the Meanlng and LMportance of SeLf-ReaLlsatLon for Deep Ecology and dLscuss Lts adequacy. Uhy does lt not feature ln Green PolLtlcs? 6. ExpLaLn the MeanLng of the deLLberateLy vague slogan ·slMple ln Means, rlch ln ends·, or of soMe other hlgh-lMpact slogan of Deep Ecology. Indlcate how the vagueness Mlght work for and agalnst the slogan, suggest how the slogan MLght be alternatLve LnterpretatLons, and lndlcate soMe of the suggest applled, alternattves. these of raMLflcatlons 7. OutLlne btoregtonaLL3M, lndlcatlng what practlcaL envlronMental probleMs bloreglonallsM lnduces. How Ln fact Ls bloreglonallsM derlved froM Deep Ecology? Conslder to what extent bloregLonallsM fLts wLth the slogan, •Thlnk globally, act LocaLly". deeper, or to any, envLronMental probLeMs? CoMpare and contrast the vlews of Deep Ecology and Green PolLtLcs on the role of varlous types of technology. 8~ Is More hLgh technology an unprobleMatLc soLutLon to 9. Uhat Ls EcoLogLcaL ConscLousness? And what Ls Lt supposed to do Ln and for Deep Ecology? If Lt ls so LMportant, why Ls Lt not a MaLn concern for Green PoLltlcs? 10. A reLatlonaL, total-fLeLd LMage of huMan reLatLonshLps wLth nature has been quletLy oMLtted froM the orLglnal pLatforM of Deep Ecology. Is thLs gestalt pLcture needed? Is Lt defensLbLe? Should Lt be reLnstated? READINGS 1: DEEP ECOLOGY AND GREEN POLITICS The Greens consLder theMseLves the poLltLcal voLce of the cLtLzens' MoveMents, that Ls, ecology, antl-nuclear-power, peace, feMLnLst, and others. Most MeMbers of the Green party are also actLvLsts Ln one or More of those MoveMents, and thLs dLverse orLentatLon Ls reflected Ln the wLngs, or factLons, of the party: the vLslonary/hollstlc Greens, the Eco-Greens, the peace-MoveMent Greens, and the radlcal-Left Greens. A great deaL of overlapplng occurs wlth any categor~z~ng of Green LdentltLes and soMe people say there are no actual factlons, but clearly there are dtfferent prtorltLes aMong the four clusters. The More that people perceLved the LnterconnectLons aMong prLncLpLes of ecologLcaL wlsdoM, a truly secure peace, an econoMy wLth a future, and a partLcLpatory deMocracy wLth power channeled dLrectly froM the grassroots Level, the More they notLces the absence of such LdeaLs aMong the exLsttng poLLtlcaL partles. [Green] pollcLes are gutded by long-terM v~s~ons for the future and are founded on four basLc prLncLples: ecology, socLal responsLbLLLty, grassroots deMocracy, and nonvLoLence. The fLrst of the ·four pLLlars, • ecology, has several MeanLngs Ln Green poLLtLcs. Green poLLtLcs, Ls Lnherently hoLLstLc Ln theory and practLce. It Ls based on ecoLogLcal, or ·network·, thLnkLng, a terM used frequently by the Greens. EcoLogLcaL thLnkLng also Lncludes the realLzatLon that the seeMLngLy -6- rtgtd structures we percetve Ln our envLronMent are actually ManLfestatLons of underlytng processes, of nature's contLnual dynaMLc flux. Interrelatedness and ongoLng process are the lessons the Greens take froM and apply to the ecosysteMs surroundLng us. They support •soft" energy productLon (such as solar power) that works wLth the cycles of the sun, the water, and the wLnd, and the flow of the rLvers. They call for the developMent of approprLate technology that reflects our Lnterdependence wLth the Earth. They advocate regeneratLve agrLculture that replenLshes the soLl and Lncorporates natural Means of pest control. Above all, the Greens deMand a halt to our ravagLng of natural "resources" and our poLsonLng of the bLosphere through the duMpLng of toxLc wastes, the accuMulatLon of so-called acceptable levels of radLatLon exposure, and the pollutLon of the aLr. The broader applLcatLons of ecologLcal thLnkLng lead to ·socLal ecology, the perceptton of soctetal structures and huMan Lnteracttons as an Lntrtcate web of dynaMLc systeMs that are sLMultaneously Lnterrelated parts and coMplete Ln theMselves. That eMphasLs on relatLonshLps and Lnterconnecttons Ls the basts of the Greens' ecologtcal work that focuses specLfLcally on envLronMental protectLon. TheLr prograMs Ln thts area call for huMans to ftnd our place Ln the ecosysteMs: ~e defLne ecologLcal polLtLcs as those Measures that understand huMan betngs and our envLronMent as beLng part of nature. HuMan lLfe, too, Ls eMbedded Ln the lLfe cycles of the ecosysteMs; we Lnterfere wLth our actLons and thLs, Ln turn, acts back on us. ~e Must not destroy the stabLlLty of the ecosysteMs. In partLcular, ecologtcal polLtLcs presents an all-encoMpassLng rejectLon of an econoMy of exploLtatLon and plunderLng of natural resources and raw MaterLals, as well as the destructLve LnterventLon Lnto the cycles of nature's household. The second of the four pLllars, ·soctal responsLbLlLty, • Ls understood by Most Greens to Mean socLal justLce and assurance that the poor and the workLng class wLll not get hurt by prograMs to restructure the econoMy and our consuMer socLety ecologtcally. The radLcal-left Greens, however, read sozLal as a codeword for socLalLsM, that Ls, deMocratLc MarxLsM~ SLnce that polLtLcal Model Ls specLfLcally not what the vLsLonary, lLberal and conservatLve Greens have Ln MLnd, a battle developed over establLshLng the basLc prLncLples. The MajorLty wanted the new party to stand for possLbLlLtLes other than etther socLalLsM or the capLtalLst status quo. The radLcal-left contLngent, on the other hand, LnsLsted on not only Lncludtng socLalLsM but also on excludLng nonvLolence as a guLdLng prLncLple. So one of the four pLllars, lLke so Much else Ln the Green party, has a paradoxLcal character: Lt Means soMethLng dLfferent Ln dLfferent parts of the party. All factLons of the party concur that socLal, econoMLc and ecologLcal Lssues are Lnherently lLnked. The ecologLcal and socLal spheres belong Lnseparably together: the econoMy of nature Ls ltnked to the econoMy of huMans for better or worse . The thLrd pLllar, grassroots deMocracy, was LnspLred by the ~est GerMan cLtLzens' MoveMents throughout the 1970s, whLch Ln turn were Lnfluenced by the cLvLl rLghts, ecology, consuMer, and other MoveMents ~n the Un~ted States. OLrect, or partLcLpatory, deMocracy locates a greater aMount of power and control wLth the local groups, the grassroots. ThLs orLentatLon ~nforMs the structure of the Green party. An organLzatLon structured wtth partLcLpatory deMocracy sets Lts basLc polLcy accordLng to the votLng at large asseMblLes. It allows LndLvLduals access to all party offLcLals, and Lt eschews hLerarchLcal structure. Instead of allowtng power to be concentrated Ln a few people who -7- reMaLn at the top of a hLerarchy for years, such groups generally elect steerLng coMMLttees. The fourth pLllar, nonvLolence, Means to the Greens the cessatLon of both personal vLolence and •structural vLolence, • that Ls, vLolence and oppress Lon LMposed by the state and by LnstLtutLons. (See ReadLng 4; Green PolLtLcs, pp.3-4, 29-43) The tenets of [the Deep Ecology] MoveMent Nay perhaps be roughly forNulated as follows: (1) The well-beLng of nonhuMan lLfe on Earth has value Ln Ltself. ThLs value Ls Lndependent of any LnstruNental usefulness for LLMLted huNan purposes. (2) RLchness and dLversLty Ln lLfe forMs contrLbute to thLs value and Lnterfere Ls a further value Ln Ltself. (3) HuMans have no rLght to destructLvely wLth nonhuMan lLfe except for purposes of satLsfyLng vLtal needs. (4) Present Lnterference Ls excessLve and detrLMental. (5) Present polLcLes Must therefore be changed. (6) The necessary polLcy changes affect basLc econoMLc and LdeologLcal structures and wLll be the More drastLc the longer Lt takes before sLgnLfLcant change Ls started. (7) The LdeologLcal change Ls MaLnly that of apprecLatLng lLfe qualLty (focusLng on sLtuatLons LnvolvLng Lnherent. value). (8) Those who subscrLbe to the foregoLng poLnts have an oblLgatLon dLrectly or LndLrectly to try to LMpleMent the necessary changes. (Defence, p.266) It should be fully apprecLated that the sLgnLfLcant tenets of the Deep Ecology MoveMent are clearly and forcefully norMatLve. They express a value prLorLty systeM only Ln part based on results (or lack of results) of scLentLfLc research. Today, ecologLsts try to Lnfluence polLcy-MakLng bodLes largely resource and through threats, through predLctLons concernLng pollutants depletLon, knowLng that polLcy-Makers accept at least certaLn MLnLMUM norMs concernLng health and just dLstrLbutLon. There are polLtLcal potentLals Ln thLs MoveNent whLch should not be overlooked and whLch have lLttle to do wLth pollutLon and resource depletLon. In plottLng possLble futures, the norMs should be freely used and elaborated. (Shallow and Oeep 1 p.99) A Major dLfference between the theorLes lLes Ln the dLstrLbutLon of values. Deep ecology, lLke sLMpler utLlLtarLanLsM, offers a unLque LnLtLal dLstrLbutLon: each lLvLng thLng Ls assLgned equal value and nothLng else has LntrLnsLc value. Value Ls assessed through soMe MLx of value-NakLng characterLstLcs, LncludLng such defeasLble ecologLcal unLversals as stabLlLty, resLlLence, naturalness, rLchness, scarcLty and so forth . But there are consLderable dLversLty, constraLnts on how thLs Ls done . . . . One constraLnt, that of LMpartLalLty whLch excludes certaLn types of class chauvLnLsM, a thLng cannot be ranked as valuable or ahead or another sLMply by vLrtue of belongLng to soNe specLes (e.g. beLng huNan) or favoured bLologLcal class; such class features are not Ln theMselves value-MakLng characterLstLcs. Such an account of how value Ls assessed reNaLn however far froM specLfLc, and soMetLMes of lLttle use Ln practLce. (CrLtLque, pp.59- 60) POINTS OF UNITY 1. NATURAL PHILOSOPHY. Ue base our phLlosophy on a proper understandLng of the purposes and workLngs of nature and do not try to LNpose an Ldeology upon Lt . Ue seek to transforM socLety based upon thLs understandLng. 2. CONSENSUS DEMOCRACY. Ue conduct all our MeetLngs accordLng to the prLncLples of consensus deNocracy, eNphasLzLng unanLMous or near-unanLMous agreeMent on all decLsLons. No representatLve May Make decLsLons on behalf of the Greens wLthout the approval of the entLre NeMbershLp. Ue encourage the use of consensus deMocracy Ln all socLal, econoMLc and polLtLcal LnstLtutLons. -8- 3. NONVIOLENCE AND FREEDOM. ~e oppose the threat or use of phystcal vtolence to resolve tnternatlonat, clvll, polltlcal and personal confllcts. ~e encourage the nonvlolent enforceMent of all prlvate and publlc rules and Laws. ~e recognlEe that a nonvlolent soclety would be a very free soclety and encourage tolerance of others' vlews and actlons. ~- SOCIAL ECOLOGY. ~e eMphaslze the connectton of doMlnatlon and vlolence toward the envlronMent and toward our fellow huMans. ~e seek a nonvlolent soclety ln whlch the needs of lndlvlduals, coMMunltles and bloreglons are balanced and lntegrated and ln whlch econoMtc resources are used consclousty, deMocratlcaLLy and approprlatety to further thls end. 5. STRATEGY. ~e wlLL oppose ecologlcatty and soclatty destructlve pollcles and dlsobedlence clvll and protest practlces through nonvlolent polltlcal actlvltles. ~e wlLL proMote alternatlve projects and lnstltutlons conslstent wlth our Green phllosophy. ~e wlLL cooperate ln solldarlty wlth all groups ln substantlal agreeMent wlth these polnts of unlty as partlclpants ln the lnternatlonal Green MoveMent. (Deep Ecology, pp.36-7). 2: DEEP ECOLOGY LEVELS In dlscusslng the relatlonshlp between deep ecology and Major tradltlons such as BuddhlsM and Chrlstlanlty, Naess stresses that people can agree broadly on a set of prlnctptes and dlsagree greatly on other aspects of ldeology and other tradttlons thusly: In order to factlttate dlscusslon lt May be helpful to dlsttngutsh a coMMon platforM (baste prlnclples) of deep ecology froM the fundaMentaL features of phllosophles and rellglons froM whlch that platforM (baste prlnctples) ls derlved, lf the platforM ls forMulated as a set of norMs and hypotheses lf . verballEed, are Buddhlst, (factual assuMptlons). The fundaMentals, or phllosophlc wlth persuaslons, rettgtous other Taolst, Chrtsttan or of afftnltles to the baste vlews of Splnoza, Uhltehead, Hetdegger, or others. The fundaMentals are Mutually More or Less lncoMpattble or at Least dtfflcult to coMpare l~ terMs of cognltlve contents. The tncoMpattblltty does not affect the deep ecology prlnclples adversely. The baste prlnclples wlthln the deep ecology MoveMent are grounded ln retlglon or phllosophy. In a Loose sense, tt May be sald to be dertved froM the fundaMentals. Because these are dtfferent, the sltuatlon only reMlnds us that very slMllar or even tdenttcal conclustons May be drawn froM dlvergent preMlses. The prlnclples (or platforM) are the . saMe, the fundaMentaL preMlses dtffer. In order to clartfy the dtscusston one Must avold Looktng for one deftntte phllosophy or rellgton aMong the supporters of the deep ecologlcal MoveMent. Fortunately there ls a rlch Manlfold of klnds of consequences dertved froM the prlnclples. The dtscusston has four Levels to take lnto account: verballzed fundaMentaL phllosophlcal and rellglous ldeas and lntultlons, the deep ecology baste prlnclples, the More or Less general consequences dertved froM the platforM Llfestytes and general pollcles of every klnd - and Lastly, descrlpttons of concrete sltuatlons and declstons Made ln theM. (See DlagraM 1) Arne Naess has atteMpted to provlde a Loglcal dlagraM or systeMatlzatlon of hls own verslon of deep ecology or ecosophy whtch he calls •Ecosophy r·. He -9- caLLs thts a norMattve systeM whtch tncLudes both norMs (or baste values) and factual hypotheses_ The Lower norMs or actton stateMents are dertved froM the top norMs tn a Loosely LogtcaL sense_ The top or Most baste norMs are arrtved at by the deep questtontng Lntutttve process_ Naess stresses that Ecosophy T Ls onLy hts verston of deep ecology, and that Many versLons need to be worked out_ SoMe people NLght be crLtLcaL that Many of the norMs of deep ecology are heLd on an tntutttve basts, but Naess potnts out aLL theortes begtn soMewhere beyond LogtcaL constructtons_ (DEEP ECOLOGY, pp-225-7) In order to factLttate dtscusston about deep ecology aMong phtLosophers tt May be heLpfuL to dtsttngutsh a coMMon pLatforM of deep ecology froM the fundaMentaL features of phtLosophtes and reLtgtons froM whtch that pLatforM Ls derLved, tf tt ts forMuLated as a set of norMs and hypotheses (factual assuMpttons)_ The terM 'pLatforM' ts preferred to 'prtncLpLe' because the Latter May be NLsunderstood to refer to the uLtLMate fundaMentaLs_ FurtherMore, the forMuLatton of a pLatforM should be short and conctse (as a synopsts), whereas the fundaMentaLs, tf verbaLtzed, are Buddhtst, Taotst, ChrLstLan or of other reLtgtous ktnds, or they are phtLosophLc wtth afftntttes to the baste vtews of SpLnoza, ~hLtehead, HeLdegger, or others_ The fundaMentaLs are MutuaLLy More or Less LncoMpatLbLe or at Least dtffLcuLt to coMpare tn terMs of cognLttve contents_ Supporters of deep ecology May have great dLfftcuLttes understandtng each other's uLtLMate vLews_ The pLatforM of the deep ecology MoveMent Ls grounded tn reLtgLon or phLLosophy tncLudtng ethLcs_ It May be saLd to be derLved froM these fundaMentaLs_ As used here the terM 'dertved' ts open to a vartety of LnterpretatLons_ If the vaLLdLty of a norM or a hypothesLs Ls justLfLed by reference to one defLnLte set of assuMptLons of a phtLosophtcaL or reLLgtous ktnd, the norM or hypothests ts Ln a sense dertved froM those assuMpttons_ The set acquLres a character of preMLses for parttcuLar concLusLons_ But cLoseLy · sLMLLar or even tdenttcaL concLustons May be drawn froM sets of LncoMpatLbLe preMLses_ ThLs expLaLns the coMbLnatLon of 'bewLLderLng' dLverstty of vLews at the deepest LeveL wtth agreeMent of vtews at the next LeveL_ In assesstng constructLve crttLctsM of deep ecology Lt Ls useful to try to ftnd out whLch LeveL Ls LnvoLved_ An exaMpLe: In the tntroductLon to hLs The EthLcs of EnvtronMentaL Concern, (Oxford: BLackweLL 1983), Robtn AttfLeLd says: Yet I do not accept, wLth the so-caLLed 'deep, Long-range ecology MoveMent', the vtew that our prLncLpaL Loyalty should be focussed not on feLLow-huMans or feLLow creatures but on the bLosphere as an organtc whole, __ _ I suppose there are soMe supporters of the deep ecology MOVeMent who propose focusstng Loyalty on the bLosphere as an organLc whole Ln the sense suggested by AttfteLd_ The conceptLon of the bLosphere as an organLc whole and of such a kLnd of Loyalty belongs to the reaLM of fundaMentaLs, that Ls LeveL one, rather than to the other Levels_ Therefore that AttfLeLd does not accept the vtew he descrtbes ts not relevant tn arguMentatton for or agatnst deep ecology- One Matn potnt tn deep ecology ts tts deep arguMentatton, that ts, arguMentatton froM uLttMate (phLLosophLcaL, reLtgtous) preMtsses, but there Ls rooM for very dLfferent sets of such preMLsses_ A supporter of deep ecology May or May not have any conceptton of a prLMary Loyalty focussed on the bLosphere as an organtc whole_ [The] dtsttnctLon of Levels Ls useful when tryLng to ptn down exactly what a crttLcLsM Ls focusstng on_ The dLagraM furnLshes onLy a ktnd of stattc ModeL_ -10- A supporter of deep ecology wLLL norMaLLy ModLfy the sentences at the dLfferent Levels froM tLMe to tLMe. Hew LnforMatLon May change any hypotheses and therefore also change norMs whLch Ln part have been justLfLed on the basLs of the hypotheses beLng changed. Renewed ethLcaL consLderatLon or new LnforMatLon May Make the supporter change a norM. If a norM Ls changed norMally new sets of hypotheses are Lnvolved, and old ones are dLscarded. ThLs agaLn wLLl cause reverberatLons Ln a sMaLLer or greater part of the fLeld. F roM a po Ln t of v Lew of no rMa t Lve sys teMa t t·~a t Lons what goes on when changes are Made at one or More Levels Ls rather coMpLLcated. But part of Lt Ls processes of derLvatLon. OLagraM l pretends only to Lllustrate LMportant dLfferences of the Levels of derLvatLon and the specLfLc character of Level 2. It represents a condensed forMulatLon of the deepest-Level norMs and hypotheses whLch supporters of the deep ecology MoveMent can agree upon. ThLs Level Ls LLLustrated as the penultLMate (next to ultLMate) Level of arguMentatLon characterLstLc of those supporters of deep ecology who try to artLculate theLr baste vLews. At the thLrd and fourth Level dLsagreeMents May arLse. At the fLrst Level supporters May dLsagree, or fLnd each others vLews' LncoMprehensLb le, or LncoMparable as to valLdLty. Ls not a Measure of value prLorLtLes or of A 'dLrectLon of derLvatLon ethLcaL prLorLtLes. And Lt does not LMply that what Ls derLved Ls a Means Ln relatLon to what Lt Ls derLved froM. A sLMple exaMple Ls enough to clarLfy thLs. FroM 'do not kLlL huMans! ·, follows, Lf you concede 'all Mothers are huMans' the conclusLon 'do not kLLL your Mother!'. ThLs rather concrete norM Ls here derLved froM the More general and abstract one. But thLs does not LMply that huMans Ln general have a hLgher value or a kLnd of prLorLty Ln relatLon to Mothers. It does not say that Ln a norM confLLct you should be More careful not to kLLL huMans than not to kLLL your Mother. An absurd posLtLon! And Lastly, Lt Ls rather strange to refraLn froM kLllLng your Mother as a Means to a goal, · naMely not to kLLL huMans. The forMulatLons of Level 2 have the character of proposals. It May turn out that proposals wLLL dLffer substantLaLLy or show a natural dLversLty of terMLnologLcal and conceptual LdLosyncracLes . UnhappLLy Lt Ls quLte coMMon to MLx the, Ln a broad sense, LogLcal relatLon of derLvatLon wLth other relatLons. These are at Least as LMportant, but nevertheless are dLfferent. (BASIC, pp.1-5) ScheMatLcally we May represent the total vLews LMpLLed Ln the MoveMent by and norMs streaMs of derLvatLon f roM 'h Lghest', L.e. Most fundaMentaL sLtuatLons. lLfe partLcular Ln descrLptLve assuMptLon, to partLcular decLsLons Answers to the deepest questLon, L.e. hLghest norMatLve prLncLples and basLc assuMptLons about the world MLddle range answers. Lower derLvatLonaL Level derLvatLons towards decLsLons Ln partLcular LLfe sLtuatLons. Level of actLon Ln concrete partLcular sLtuatLons. The LLLustratLon reseMbles those of hypothetLco-ded uctLve systeMs. One MaLn dLfference Ls that soMe sentences at the top Level are norMatLve, expressed by LMperatLves. ThLs Makes Lt possLble to furnLsh preferably LMperatLves at the Lowest derLvatLonaL Level, sentences such as ·Turn to the Left!" ·voteforN.N. !. Just as Ln hypothetLco-ded uctLve systeM, Let us say Ln physLcs, only the two upper Levels of the pyraMLd Ls thought of as part of physLcs as a systeM, only those parts are Ln norMatLve systeMs characterLstLc of the total systeM. -11- The sentences change. Ln the Lowest part change froM day to day as LLfe sLtuatLons The above kLnd of presentLng the derLvatLonaL structure of a totaL vLew Must not be taken too serLousLy. SoMe wLLL absoLuteLy refuse even to consLder such a way of exposLtLon. And Lt does not Ln any Manner characterLze thLnkLng wLthLn the deep ecoLogLcaL MoveMents. SoMe of us wLth a professLonaL background of scLence and anaLytLcaL phLLosophy fLnd Lt heLpfuL, however. Arne Naess's systeMatLEatLon LLLustrates the reLatLonshLp of deep ecoLogy's basLc prLncLpLes or Lts "platforM" (LeveL 2), to varLous · possLbLe and relLgLous "fundaMentaL preMLsses on the one hand (LeveL 1) and varLous possLbLe theoretLcaL and practLcaL "consequences" on the other (LeveLs 3 and~). Althou~h thLs systeMatLzatLon Ls presented Ln terMs of "fundaMentaL preMLsses, consequences", and a dLrectLon of "derLvatLon• froM LeveLs (1) to(~), thLs should not be taken to Mean that a sentence at one Level Ls held to follow by vLrtue of necessLty or probabLLLty froN sentences at a prevLous Level L.e~, Naess Ls not proposLng a deductLve or an LnductLve systeM. As he coMMents hLMself, Lt Ls only Ln a "Loose sense• that the deep ecology pLatforM "May be saLd to be derLved froM fundaMentaLs·. In other words, derLvatLon or precLseness Ls a Matter of deLLMLtLng a range of possLble LnterpretatLons. For exaNpLe, we MLght proceed froN a fundaMentaL (L.e. Level 1) reLLgLous or phLLosophLcal preMLss such as "ALL Ls One" or the SpLnozLst Ldea that "there Ls onLy one 'substance• • and, Ln the sense descrLbed, "derLve" the (More precLse) central "plank" Ln the deep ecology "pLatforM" that "there are no boundarLes Ln the bLospherLcaL fLeld", or that "aLl entLtLes are constLtuted by theLr relatLonshLps" (LeveL 2). Further precLsatLon MLght express the realLsatLon that "the sense of oneself as a skLn encapsulated ego Ls not Ln accord wLth thLs ' seaMLess web' ontoLogy• (Level 3). None of the steps Ln the above exaMpLe Ls held to foLLow by necessLty (deductLve Lnference) or probabLLLty (LnductLve Lnference) froM sentences at a prevLous LeveL. ALL we have (Ln logLcaL terMs) Ls a chaLn of precLsatLons fLowLng Ln one or Many possLble dLrectLons of LnterpretatLon. Ue could have easLLy started froM the saMe vague, general fundaMentaL preMLss and proceeded to deveLop a chaLn of precLsatLons Ln a very dLfferent dLrectLon of LnterpretatLon. Thus, the "dLrectLon of derLvatLon· shown Ln the dLagraMMatLc LLlustratLon of Naess's systeMatLsatLon shouLd be understood as referrLng to both the leveL of precLsatLon and the dLrectLon of LnterpretatLon. The greater the Level of precLsatLon the More evLdent the dLrectLon of LnterpretatLon (or what Naess has prevLousLy referred to as the "defLnLteness of LntentLon")_ Uhat Ls the vaLue of tryLng to provLde a systeMatLsatLon of deep ecology (or any other faLrLy coMprehensLve vLew) when the connectLve LLnks between fundaMentaL preMLsses (LeveL I) and practLcaL consequences (Level~) are as weak as that of "possLbLe LnterpretatLon"? An LMportant answer Must be that such a systeNatLsatLon eMphasLses the contLnuaLLy-beLng-forgotten fact that our Most sophLstLcated and precLse, non-trLvLaL (L ~e. nontautoLogLcaL) reasonLngs are aLways eMbedded or grounded Ln a very generaL "underLyLng perceptLon of the way thLngs are." ThLs eMphasLs, thLs contLnual reMLndLng, constLtutes the Most sLgnLfLcant and dLstLnctLve structural feature of deep ecologLcaL thought. (GUIDING STARS, pp.203-4) OnLy LeveL one contaLns phLLosophLes (LncLudLng MetaphysLcs, of course) and expLLcLt reLLgLous foundations. There Ls, and hopefuLLy wLLL never be, Many sLgnLfLcant COMMon characterLstLcs on Level 1. The cLeanLng of 'rubbLsh' on thLs Level Ls a hazardous undertakLng froN MY poLnt of vLew. -12- In a coMprehensLve phLLosophy of Level l, for lnstance ln an 'ecosophy' ln MY terMlnoLogy, every key terM of the pLatforM forMuLatlon, (Level 2), would have to be .coM"ented upon and elucLdated. ThLs "ay be seen as a clearLng up operatlon. A hlgher level of preclseness Ls achLeved and eLLMLnatlon of ph~Losoph~caLLy unsuLtable rhetorLcs. (HOTES ON SYLVAN, pp.8-9) 3: ON BIOCENTRIC EGALITARIANISM The Lntultlon of blocentrlc equaLlty ls that aLL thlngs Ln the blosphere have an equal rlght to Llve and bLossoM and to reach thelr own LndLvlduaL forMs of unfoLdLng and self-reaLlzatlon wlthln the Larger SeLf-reallzatlon. Thls basLc Lntultlon Ls that aLL organLsMs and entltles Ln the ecosphere, as parts of the lnterreLated whole, are equal Ln LntrlnsLc worth. Naess suggests that bLocentrlc equaLLty as an LntuLtlon Ls true ln prLncLpLe, although ln the process of LLvLng, aLL specLes use each other as food, shelter, etc. Mutual predatlon ls a b~ologLcal fact of lLfe, and "any of the world's relLgLons have struggled wLth the spLrltuaL lMpllcatlons of thts. SoMe anlMaL llberatlonLsts who atteMpted to sLde-step thLs probLeM by advocatlng vegetarLanlsM are forced to say that the entLre plant ktngdo" LncLudLng raLn forests have no rLght to thelr own exlstence. ThLs evaslon fLles ln the face of the basLc LntuLtlon of equalLty. Aldo Leopold expressed thLs Lntultlon when sald huMans are •pLaLn cLtlzens• of the btotlc coMMunlty, not Lord and Master over all other specLes. BlocentrLc equaLlty ls lntlMateLy related to the aLL-LnclusLve SeLfreaLlzatLon ln the sense that Lf we harM the rest of Nature then we are harMLng ourselves. There are no boundarles and everythlng ls lnterreLated. But Lnsofar as we percelve thlngs as LndLvLduaL organlsMs or entLtLes, the LnsLght draws us to respect aLL huMan and nonhuMan lndLvLduals ln theLr own rLght as parts of the whole wLthout feeLLng the need to set up hlerarchLes of specles wlth huMans at the top. The practlcaL LMpLlcatlons of thLs lntultlon or norM suggest that we should LLve wlthLn MlnLMuM rather than MaxlMUM lMpact on other specLes and on the Earth ln general. Thus we see another aspect of our guldlng prLnclpLe: ·slMpLe ln Means, rLch ln ends.• (Deep EcoLog~, pp.167-9) blospherLcaL egaLltarlanlsM Ln prlnclpLe' and certaln The abstract terM slMlLar terMs whlch I have used, do perhaps More harM than good. They suggest a posLtLve doctrLne, and that ls too Much. The LMportance of the LntultLon ls but MOMentary, only perhaps the rather lts capaclty to counteract, Less seeMs what towards attltude Lordly and consequentlaL, self-congratulatory developed, Less coMplex, Less MlracuLous. A rlch varLety of acceptable Motlves can be forMuLated for belng More reluctant to Lnjure of klLL a LLvLng beLng of klnd A than a beLng of klnd B. The cultural settlng ls dLfferent for each belng Ln each culture, furtherMore there are few general norMs, only vague guLdeLLnes. One factor: felt nearness, deterMlnes Largely our capactty to ldentLfy ourselves wlth a sort of beLng, to suffer when they suffer. One cannot put forth ethLcaL rules of conduct wlthout takLng such feeltngs and our lLMlted capacLtLes serLously. If Lt Ls dLffLcuLt to avotd klLLLng A because of Lts sMalLness, whereas klLLlng B ls easlLy avolded, we tend to protect B rather than A. Indeed we Llve wLth an obvLous dLversLty of obLlgatlons. Ue have speclaL oblLgatlons towards our own chLldren: Ln Most cultures any anlMaL May be kLLLed ln order to feed one's starvLng chlLd. ObLlgatLons toward specLes that have been MeMbers of our llfe coMMunLty for Long perLods are greater than toward accldentaL vlsltors. FurtherMore, we have the -13- relevance of sufferLng: capacLty of sufferLng? Is the sufferLng of A less than that of B? Has A the The sLMpLe thLng I try to convey here L3 that an ethLcs concernLng dLfferences between non-huMan LLvLng beLngs Ls of a coMparable level of coMpLexLty to ethLcs concernLng dLfferent people and groups wLth whoM we have to do. (lntuLtLon, p.202) Those of us who procLaLM the rLght of all LLfe forMs to LLve and bLossoM thLnk of thLs rLght as an aspect of the 'value Ln LtseLf' whLch we attrLbute to the bLosphere wLth Lts closely Lnterconnected LLfe forMs. The procLaMatLon seeMs to steM froM an LntuLtLon for whLch a graduatLon Ls soMethLng foreLgn. If there Ls such a basLc rLght, Lf Lt can be gLven a faLrly precLse MeanLng, Lt Ls the naMe for all lLfe forMs. It Ls LMportant enough to be terMed bLospherLcaL egaLLtarLanLsM. But Lt Ls perhaps the best to abstaLn froM such Labels. They LnvLte a varLety of LnterpretatLons Most of whLch May be MLsLeadLng. As to the consequences of a posLtLve answer, I thLnk we can learn froM certaLn cultures of hunters and gatherers where bLg anLMaLs are only kLLled after elaborate cereMonLes and excuses'. There Ls acknowLedgeMent of equal rLght, but also of a rLght to kLlL Ln order to Meet vLtaL needs. There Ls a 'norM conflLct' whLch Ls solved through addLtLonal norMs: the perforMance of certaLn rLtes and behavLors of other kLnds. What I thLnk we need not proclaLM Ls that we as huMans are Most or More valuable, or have a hLgher rLght. ~e need not say '1 have a hLgher rLght to LLve and bLossoM than you have, obnoxLus MosquLto, so I kLLL you!' or 'BeLng Much More valuable than you are, I kLlL you and your offsprLng, dLrty rat!' In so far as we have vLtal needs to kLlL, and Ln so far as Lt Ls LnevLtabLe Ln practLce, we May justLfy thLs through varLous norMs whLch are Ln harMony wLth general ecoLogLcal thLnkLng. Do these words solve the relevant probLeMs? Of course not. ~hat I aM drLvLng at Ls the prLorLty of MaLntaLnLng a sort of egalLtarLanLsM Ln p~LncLple. How we can LLve thLs that prLncLpLe Ls a questLon of ethLcs Ln a very general sense, proceedLng froM Many prLncLples whLch LnevLtably Lead to norM confLLcts requLrLng adjustMents froM day to day. (PhLLosophLcaL Aspects, pp.27-9) AccordLng to Naess, a bLospherLc egaLLtarLan prLncLpLe, of equal value of to the all LLfe, Ls an LntuLtLveLy clear and obvLous value axLoM', at least aLMost ecoLogLcaL fLeLd-worker' (73, p96)!. But eMpLrLcaL surveys would certaLnLy not sustaLn Haess's claLMs. The prLncLpLe seeMs generally neLther LntuLtLve nor obvLous, and Ln several ways Lt appears LncoMpatLbLe wLth the wLder deep ecology pLatforM. It Ls not even obvLous that soMethLng has value by vLrtue of havLng LLfe. On the contrary, value seeMs, lLke yellowness, to be Much More patchLLy dLstrLbuted across the unLverse. SpecLal places, for Lnstance, are especLaLLy valuable. Hor Ls value always dLstrLbuted on LLvLng thLngs, but colours toMbs of the dead; and soMetLMes Lt flakes off consteLlatLons of LLvLng thLngs, for exaMpLe thLngs Ln excess, such as Locusts or rats Ln a plague. But even Lf every LLvLng thLng were assLgned value, Lt would not follow (Ln the way soMetLMes LnvaLLdLy argued) that every thLng has Lt equally. ~hLLe Lt could be saLd that thLngs are equal Ln havLng Lt, thLs Ls rather LLke pretendLng that people are equal Ln an LnegaLLtarLan socLety where all have soMe Money - a subterfuge. Indeed proposed prLncLpLes of deep ecology LnforM us, correctly, that soMe ecoLogLcaL LteMS are More valuable than others. For Lnstance, a certaLn sort of coMpLexLty Ls a vLrtue (Naess 73, prLncLpLe (6)), so presuMabLy an LteM wLth that coMpLexLty Ls More valuable than a sLMple bLoLogLcal LteM. SLMLLarLy, dLversLty of systeM Ls a vLrtue, a prLMe ground of value (prLncLpLe (2)). The upshot appears to be that a hLghly dLverse ecosysteM Ls More valuable -14- than a sLMpLLfLed and LMpoverLshed one_ FurtherMore, bLospherLc egaLLtarLanLsM Ls LnconsLstent wLth the hoLLstLc, antL-reducLLonL3tLc, antL-LndLvLduaLL3tLc ethos whLch deep ecoLogy LMports froM hoLLstLc ecotogy. AnaLogous concLu3Lons can be reached for •equaL rLghts• forMuLatLons_ For one thLng, equaL rLghts are characterLstLcally based on equal MerLt or equal worth_ For another, arguMents lLke those gLven can be rerun wLth rLghts suppLantLng values_ As a theoretLcaL prLncLpLe, bLospherLc egalLtarLanLsM has to be scrapped_ The LMMense dLffLcuLtLes of such a prLncLpLe Ln practLce Naess had already partLally recognLsed, qualLfyLng egalLtarLanLsM to equalLty Ln prLncLple 'because any realLstLc praxLs necessLtates soMe kLllLng, exploLtatLon, and suppressLon' (p_95). The extent of erosLon Ln equalLty thLs affords reMaLns obscure; but Lt couLd be close to total, wLth theoretLcaL equaLLty LapsLng whenever confLLct of rLghts or values LooMed_ Such egaLLtarLanLsM would be LLke a MaxLM of honesty Ln prLncLpLe, whLch appLLed Ln practLce only when Lt was not LnconvenLent; that Ls, but an eMpty MaxLM_ ~hatever Naess's Lntended qualLfLcatLon, Lt stLLL seeMs to people wLth Much practLcaL experLence on the Land or Ln gardenLng, especLaLLy Ln places where the surroundLng natural envLronMent has not been totally transforMed, that he has consLderabLy underestLMated the extent of quaLLfLcatLon needed, and that the prLncLpLe. BLospherLc strangle to begLn does quaLLfLcatLon due theLr own shelter or supply not do who egaLLtarLanLsM Ln practLce Ls for people sustenance, but pass the busLness of ecosysteM Lnterference and ModLfLcatLon on to others (as they typLcaLLy pass the butchery of theLr Meat and the LLke on to others)_ Even were Lt desLrabLe, unLversaL hunter-gatherLng Ls no Longer possLbLe or feasLbLe, wLth so Many Mostly unsuLted and LLL-adapted huMans; and a substantLaL even hunter-gatherers terMLnate the LLves of Many creatures Lnterference wLth theLr rLghts to LLve and bLossoM - and, More LMportant, and dLrectty LnterferLng substantLaLLy ModLfy theLr envLronMents, thus LndLrectly wLth enorMous nuMbers of LLvLng thLngs_ ~hatever rLghts sLMpLer LLvLng organLsMs, especLaLLy ones such as bacterLa and vLruses, have to LLve and bLossoM, they have decLdedLy quaLLfLed and Much attentuated ones. ULth bLospherLc egaLLtarLanLsM (Ln prLncLpLe) the deep ecology MoveMent has Latched onto a prLncLple whLch Ls both too powerful, and yet, Lf the ·Ln prLncLpLe" quaLLfLcatLon Ls appLLed so as to cover typLcaL LLfestyLes of deep ecoLogLsts, a prLncLpLe so rLddLed wLth exceptLons as to barely hang together. But wLthout soMe of the Lntended force of bLospherLc egaLLtarLanLsM, deep ecology Ls Ln danger of coLLapsLng (LLke Many of Lts followers) Lnto an LnterMedLate posLtLon, as no other part of the pLatforM adequately sustaLns Lts LLMLted separatLon_ Part of what Ls sought wLth the egaLLtarLan prLncLpLe Lnterference, huMan Lnterference to an extent and on a scale far below that of theMe the Ls already afforded a basLs Ln presently prevaLLLng Ls what wLth values-Ln-nature and outsLde the huMan sphere, sLnce Lnterference of value Ls (Lpso facto) LLMLted. Such a prLncLpLe of LLMLted Interference deserves, Ln any case, separate forMuLatLon (whLch Lt usually gaLns Ln deep ecology pLatforMs)_ But even so Lt hardly achLeves the requLsLte separatLon, sLnce LnterMedLate posLtLons can, and do, grant or MaLntaLn soMe such prLncLpLe of lLMLted or reduced Lnterference (thus e-g- BLrch, AttfLeLd, SLnger)_ ~hat Ls requLred Ls a posLtLve equLvaLent of the separatLng feature, of the rejectLon of the greater vaLue assuMptLon, and therewLth of the rejectLon of huMan supreMacy, of the value pLcture of huMans as always nuMber one_ What Ls needed, More generaLLy, Ls a prLncLpLe teLLLng agaLnst the favourLng of one over others sLMpLy on the basLs of specLes, a specLes - huMans Ln partLcuLar -15- prLncLple of bLospecLes LMpartLalLty, to gLve Lt a sLMLlar grandLose tLtle. There Ls soMe reason to suspect that, as elsewhere, a requLreMent of LMparttalLty has been hardened Lnto one of egalLtarLanLsM, that faLrness, because often dLfftcult to assess, has been MLstakenly taken to Lnvolve equaltty. BLospecLes LMpartLalLty LMplLes the avoLdance of specLes chauvLnLsM, that Ls the avotdance of unfaLr treatMent of LteMs outstde the gLven specLes. Because unfaLr, the treatMent concerned lacks any sufftctent justLfLcatLon. Hence, the avotdance of spectes chauvtnLsM Lnvolved Ls effectLvely that prevLously explaLned as a specLal case of class chauvLnLsM. SLMLlarly, the requLreMent of bLospecLes LMpartLalLty Ls a specLal case of the requlreMent of class (or natural group) LMpartlallty, for whlch the arguMents are the saMe as those for the avoldance of class chauvLnLsM. The danger of specLes partLalLty, of favourLng soMe specLes, Ls Much encouraged by a specles fallacy, whLch Ls coMMonly lnvoked ln favourlng huMans. ThLs Ls the error of concludLng that because a few MeMbers of the specles have accoMplLshed soMethtng of (LMMense) value, all MeMbers of the spectes therefore are (hlghly) valuable; all MeMbers of the specles Manage to free-load for the rtde, obtatned by a few MeMbers, so to say. The arguMent, once challenged, usually falls back on an arguMent that goes by way of capacltLes: the reMaLnLng MeMbers of the specles have the capactty to achleve these sorts of thlngs also. But, fLrstly, that Ls not true: LntellLgence, skLlls, and the lLke, vary soMewhat wtthLn specLes, and froM our narrow perspectLve, vary consLderably aMong huMans, soMe of whoM have no capacLty for advanced MatheMatLcs or MusLc. a Secondly, Lt requLres More than capacLty: Lt requLres cLrcuMstances, favourable envlronMent to exercLse theM (hence, ln part, the folly of More huMans ln conspLcuously suboptLMal cLtLes), together wLth a wlll and drlve actually to follow through approprLately on capacLtLes. (CrLtLque, pp.12-16) 4. NON-VIOLENCE The fourth plllar, nonvLolence, Means to the Greens the cessatLon of both personal vLolence and -structural vlolence·, that Ls, vLolence and oppresslon LMposed by the state and by Lnstltutlons. For these reasons the Greens support the concept of self-deterMlnatLon for lndLvLduals and groups. They also advocate peace educatLon Ln the schools, whLch would teach nonvLolent Means of conflLct resolutLon and show chLldren that the cult of the soldLer Ls a cultural, not a natural condltLon. The Greens also call for an end to the vLolence and oppressLon toward woMen, chLldren, and MLnorLty groups so coMMon Ln patrLarchal socLetLes. They want to develop a nonexploLtatlve econoMlc systeM Ln whLch eMployee-owned and -controlled busLnesses replace huge operatlons dLctated by or corporate lnterests. They want to transforM our vlolent state the relatLonshLp wlth nature lnto one of balance and respect. Petra Kelly expresses the centralLty of thLs prLncLple when she says, ·NonvLolence Ls the essentLal Lngredtent ln an ecologLcal socLety. • Most of the Greens eMphatLcally eMbrace the prLncLple of Although nonvLolence, they also realLze that Lts appllcatLon Ls often probleMatLc. Roland Vogt polnted out one of the areas of confll~tlng values: What we have not yet accoMplLshed Ls to say how we show ourselves to be nonvLolent at the MOMent when we partLcLpate Ln governMental functLons, because the state Ls Ltself an LnstLtutLon of vLolence. For exaMple, how wlll a Green cLty counctl act agalnst people who don't pay thelr rent, although they really could because they recelve welfare or because they earn enough. The norMal course Ls warnLng, warnLng, evLctLon notLce, and then evLctLon by force and by polLce. We haven't solved thLs. That Ls, there are stLll no thought-out concepts of how we can reconcLle the deMands of socLal -16- responsLbLL Lty wLth the deMands of non vLoLence. The Greens extend theLr prLncLpLe of nonvLoLence to theLr actLve resLstance agaLnst the Most MassLve and potentLaLLy deadly "anLfestatL on of structural vLoLence: the nuclear arMs race proMoted by the MLLLtary-L ndustrLaL coMpLex and the governMent. In theLr natLonaL headquarter s Ln Bonn the Greens have a poster of OandhL s adage "there Ls no way to peace; peace Ls the way• and one of Thoreau 0 Those who eMbrace nonvLoLent cLvLL dLsobedLenc e, coMMLttLng breaches of Law on the grounds of conscLence, are prepared to suffer · vLoLence or punLshMent theMseLves rather than LnfLLct vLoLence or LnjustLce on others or share responsLbLL Lty for such acts by reMaLnLng passLve. •1,, however, the Law Ls so proMuLgated that Lt of necessLty Makes you an agent of LnjustLce agaLnst another, then I say to you: Break the Law." The MajorLty of Greens strongly endorse - and lLve - the concept of actLve, nonvLoLence resLstance. However, the MarxLst-orL ented MeMbers of the party have never been fully supportLve of that prLncLpLe. They vLew Lt "ereLy as a ·MoralLstLc " tactLc that should be abandoned Ln favor of escaLatLng resLstance Lf Lt does not prove suffLcLentL y effectLve. Petra Kelly's account of the LeftLsts' attLtude on thLs Lssue was sLMLlar to what we had heard froM Many other Greens: They do not understand that nonvLolent actLon Ls an extre"ely subversLve force. They thLnk Lt's harMLess, Ls a for" of obedLence, and changes nothLng, that Lt's LLke beggLng froM the state. ·1t's just a tactLc, a toot," they say. To theM everythLng Ls to be used. But there are soMe thLngs you should never "Lsuse - or even use. They are sLMpLy LntegraL. NonvLoLence cannot be coMproMLsed. Although Many of the advocates of nonvLoLent . resLstance argued that ·such a course cannot be dLsMLssed as "Merely MoraLLstLc" sLnce Lt Ls also absolutely ratLonaL (that Ls, hLstory shows that vLoLence breeds vLolence - structural as welt as personal - so we "ust fLnd another way to effect change, especLaLLy Ln the nuclear age). For Most MeMbers of the greens the choLce was clear, as expressed wLth a cLtatLon froM MartLn Luther KLng: •~e no Longer have a choLce or nonvLoLence between vLoLence and nonvLoLence . The choLce Ls eLther nonexLsten ce." (Green PoLLtLcs, pp.~3-7) Deeply coMMLtted persons Ln the ecology Move"ent sense the vuLnerabLLL ty of natural processes to huMan LnterventLo n, and the fundaMentaL necessLty of MaLntaLnLng bLologLcal dLversLty. AffLrMatLon of the LntegrLty of ecosysteMs frequently LnvoLves a caMpaLgn to save froM developMent soMe rLver of canyon or wLLderness area. In a real sense, ecologLcaL resLstance LnvoLves beco"Lng frLends wLth another specLes or a rLver or a MountaLn, for exaMpLe. In general, the resLster takes up the burden of responsLbLl Lty, the burden of wLtnessLng for the other as Self. ThLs process of befrLendLng "ay be based on ArLstotle's crLterLa for frLendshLp: the proMotLon of the other's good for the other's own sake. Or frLendshLp can be the extensLon of self. When OandhL was asked Lf hLs good deeds Ln a vLLLage expressed hLs huManLtarLa nLsM, he repLLed he worked "to serve no • GandhL s stateMent defLned MaturLty. ALtruLsM was one else but Myself unnecessary because hLs self eMbraced the whole vLLLage. 0 There are Many dLfferent tactLcs of LndLvLduaLs and organL2atLo ns Ln save the Earth•, but or poLLtLcaL caMpaLgns whLch seek to ·save the rLver -17- there Ls one overrLdLng or baste norM of ecoLogLcaL resLstLng: non-vLoLence. Ecology teaches us that MankLnd Ls not the center of LLfe on the planet. Ecology has taught us that the whole earth Ls part of our "body" and that we Must Learn to respect Lt as we respect ourselves. As we feel for ourselves, we Must feel for aLL forMs of LLfe - the whales, the seals, the forests, the seas. The treMendous beauty of ecoLogLcaL thought Ls that Lt shows us a pathway back to an understandLng and an apprecLatLon of LLfe LtseLf - an understandLng and apprecLatLon that Lt Ls LMperatLve to that very way or LLfe. As wLth the whales and the seals, LLfe Must be saved by nonvLoLent confrontatLons, by what the Quakers caLL "bearLng wLtness•. A person bearLng wLtness Must accept responsLbLLLty for beLng aware of an LnjustLce. The person May then choose to do soMethLng or stand by, but he May not turn away Ln Lgnorance. The Greenpeace ethLc Ls not onty to personally bear wLtness to atrocLtLes agaLnst lLfe; Lt Ls to take dLrect actLon to prevent theM. ~hLLe actLon Must be dLrect, Lt Must also be non-vLoLent. Ue Must obstruct a wrong wLthout offerLng personal vLoLence to Lts perpetrators. Ue Must know that our greatest strength Ls LLfe LtseLf, and the coMMLtMent to dLrect our lLves to prbtect others. EcoLogLcaL resLstLng could be defLned as keepLng the peace of the neLghborhood. Rarely are vandals or vLolent neLghbors welcoMe Ln the neLghborhood. Uhen the neLghbors Lnclude rLvers and MountaLns, seashores and prarLes, then the LntegrLty of the ecosysteM Ls MaLntaLned. In hLs explLcatLon of GandhL's theory of nonvLoLence, Arne several norMs of nonvLoLent potLtLcat caMpaLgns. These Lnctude: Naess lLsts l. Announce your case and the goal of your caMpaLgn explLcLtty and clearly, dLstLnguLshLng essentLaLs froM nonessentLats. 2. Seek personal contact wLth your opponent and be avaLLable to hLM. · BrLng confLLctLng groups Lnto personal contact. 3. Turn your opponent Lnto a beLLever Ln and supporter of your case, but do not coerce or expLoLt hLM. ~- You provoke your opponent Lf you deLLberateLy or carelessly destroy hLs property. of ecoLogLcaL resLstLng denounce theorLsts LeadLng nonvLoLence as tactLcs. But as Rober ALtken RoshL wrote: vLoLence versus Non-vLoLence Ls not just a tactLc for people who Make Lt a practLce ... The end Ls the Means, Ln other words. Look at poLLtLcaL hLstory or at the hLstory of any MoveMents. Uhen we work for certaLn goals, those goals tend to betray us. Ue defeated L.B. Johnson only to get RLchard NLxon. Ue got rLd of the B-1 BoMber (teMporarLLy) and the CruLse MLssLle appeared. Ue have to Make our actLon the goal. Our actLon Must LtseLf be the truth. Our actLon Must be Lts own defense, Lts own procLaMatLon, Lts own purpose. (Letter to the author, June 1982) Both on practLcaL and ethLcaL grounds, vLoLence Ls rejected as a Mode of ecotogLcal resLstance. TerrorLst attacks on nuclear plants or MLssLle sLtes could cause ·red" alerts and vLolent responses froM governMent agencLes. PLacLng one's own LLfe at rLsk, such as sLttLng Ln front of bulldozers or polLce cars at a deMonstratLon to protest destructLon of the raLn forest, May be LLLegaL but not vLoLent. And spontaneous acts such as the decoMMLssLonLng of a power generator or bulldozer May draMatLze the contLnuLng destructLon of a -18- spectal ecosysteM. Ecologtcal reststance also Means defendtng natural dtverstty through educatLon, publLc speakLng, and use of lawsuLts; tryLng to convert publtc opLnton to the cause; and tnforMLng poltttctans and dectsLon Makers. ResLstance Ls another naMe for afftrMatLon - joyful affLrMatton of the tntegrLty of Nature, natural dLversLty, and MLnLMuM huMan LMpact on place. (Deep Ecolo9H, pp.16-17) The Deep Ecology MOVeMent and peace MoveMent. Ftfteen years ago close cooperatton between supporters of deep ecology and actLvtsts Ln the peace MoveMent was out of reach. Rather suddenly thts sttuatton Ls totally changed. SoMe of us, ltke Myself, favour unLlateral dtsarMaMent and establtshMent of MtlLtant, but unherotc, non-vtolent defence. At thts potnt Lt ts tMportant for actLvtsts to stress the dtstLnctLon between actLon, caMpaLgn and MOVeMent. They May be tllustrated by three concentrLc cLrcles. The LnnerMost coMprLse the dLrect actLons wLthLn a caMpatgn, for Lnstance, a dated deMonstratLon at a parttcular locatLon agatnst the butldtng of a daM, or the non-vtolent obstructton of the transport of the MachLnery on the way to the daM sLte. ThLs May be part of a ten year old caMpaLgn to save a rtver (LncludLng of course tts ecosysteM) froM developMent of soMe sort. Ten dLrect acttons May be fatlure, but nevertheless theLr LMpact May conflLct, contrtbute to vLctory of the caMpaLgn. (Or May polarLze the antt-actLvtsts Many what Ls That contrLbutLng to the faLlure of the caMpatgn? MaLntaLn.) The rLver caMpaLgn together wLth other analogous caMpaLgns May be seen as part of a MoveMent of greater or lesser generaltty. A MoveMent to save rtvers, or More generally a conservatton MoveMent. Many caMpatgns May be fatlures, but the MOVeMent goes on. (Hates on Poltttcs, pp.l~-JS) Gandhtan and other forMs of non-vtolence are wtdely found wLthtn the deep ecologLcal MoVeMent. There Ls a reluctance to accept destructLon of MachLnery Ln efforts to stop destructton even of holy places. There Ls soMe dtsagreeMent on thts and related subjects. I do not thtnk that the coMpletely general norMs of care and consLderatLon should be looked upon as part of the specLftc platforM of the deep ecology MoveMent . . (PhLlosophLcal Aspects, p.31) In suM, the paradtgM of deep ecology Ls revolutLonary tn tts MetaphysLcs, epLsteMology, and cosMology, but deep ecologLsts do not seek to overthrow governMents by force of arMs or to Lssue anythLng lLke a coMprehensLve, alleMbracLng polLtLcal prograM for brLngLng about the new order. The conteMporary deep ecology MoveMent seeMs to be what Robert NLsbet has called a "wLthdrawal and renewal" MoveMent such as has perLodLcally arLsen .Ln ~estern socLety sLnce the fall of the RoMan EMpLre. There ts no poltttcal party of "deep ecology,· no cadre of poltttcal revoluttonarte s. Thts ts not an approprtate approach for deep ecologtsts. No frontal confrontatLons wLth reforMLst envLronMental tsts or wLth the doMLnant socLal/polttLc al order Ls destred. It would be counter-product Lve by Maktng people More defensLve of thetr LdeologLcal posLtLon. Deep ecology Ls not an atteMpt to add one More tdeology Ln the crowded fLeld of Modern LdeologLes. Deep ecologLsts are questLng for ways to lLberate and cultLvate the ecologLcal conscLousness. FroM ecologtcal conscLousness wtll naturally flow an ecologtcal reststance. (Deep Ecology MoveMent, pp.316-17) 5: ON SELF-REALIZATION Naess: Self-realtzatLo n ts the realtzatLon of -19- the potentLaltttes of ltfe. OrganLsMs that dLffer froM each other Ln three ways gLve us Less dLversLty than organLsMs that dLffer froM each other Ln one hundred ways. Therefore, the selfreaLLzatLon we experLence when we LdentLfy wLth the unLverse Ls heLghtened by an Lncrease Ln the nuMber of ways Ln whLch LndLvLduals, socLetLes, and even specLes and lLfe forMs realLze theMselves. The greater the dLversLty, the, the greater the self-realLzatLon. ThLs seeMLng duaLLty between LndLvLduaLs and the totalLty Ls encoMpassed by what I call the Self and the ChLnese call the Tao. Most people Ln deep ecology have had the feelLng - usually, but not always, Ln nature - that they are connected wLth soMethLng greater than theLr ego, greater than theLr naMe, theLr faMLLy, theLr specLaL attrLbutes as an LndLvLdual - a feelLng that Ls often called oceanLc because Many have Lt on the ocean. ULthout that LdentLfLcatLon, one Ls not easLLy drawn to becoMe LnvoLved Ln deep ecology. Many people have thLs feeLLng when they see a death struggle - for Lnstance tLny anLMaLs LLke fLtes or Mosquttoes fLghtLng for thetr ltves. Uhen they see anLMals sufferLng, they May LdentLfy wLth LLfe forMs they usually don't LdentLfy wLth. Such sLtuatLons offer us an opportunLty to develop a More Mature poLnt of vLew. Insofar as thLs conversLon, these deep feelLngs are reLLgLous, deep ecology has a reLLgLous coMponent, and those people who have done the Most to Make socLetLes aware of the destructLve way Ln whLch we LLve Ln reLatLon to natural settLngs have had such relLgLous feeLLngs. Rachel Carson, for exaMpLe, says that we cannot do what we do, we have no reLLgLous or ethLcaL justLfLcatLon for behavLng as we do toward nature. Her arguMent Ls not calculated or reasonable Ln the usual sense, sayLng that, Lf we contLnue poLsonLng nature, we wLLl be Less healthy, or wLLL have fewer resources, and so on. She Ls sayLng that we are sLMply not perMLtted to behave Ln that way. SoMe wLll say that nature Ls not Man's property, Lt's the property of God; others wLLL say Lt Ln other ways. The MaLn poLnt Ls that deep ecology has a reLLgLous coMponent, fundaMental LntuLtLons that everyone Must cuLtLvate Lf he or she Ls to have a LLfe based on values and not functLon LLke a coMputer. Uhereas shallow ecology, Lf taken to Lts logLcaL extreMe, Ls lLke a coMputerLzed, cost-benefLt anaLysLs for huMans. (SLMpLe tn Means, p.11) If the terM seLf-reaLLzatLon Ls applLed, Lt should be kept Ln MLnd that Me", "ego , and self have shLftLng denotatLons. NothLng Ls evLdent and •1·, LndLsputabLe. Even that we are Ls debatable Lf we Make the questLon dependent upon answertng what we are. Self-realLzatLon Ln Lts absolute MaxLMUM Ls, as I see Lt, the Mature experLence of oneness Ln dLversLty as depLcted Ln the above verse. The MLnLMUM Ls the seLf-reaLL2atLon by More of Less consLstent egotLsM - by the narrowest experLence of what constLtutes one's self and a MaxLMUM of alLentatLon. As eMpLrLcaL beLngs we dweLL soMewhere Ln between, but Lncreased MaturLty LnvoLves tncrease of the wLdeness of the self. The seLf-reaLtzatton MaxLMuM should not necessarLLy be conceLved as a MystLcal or MedLtattonaL state. ·ey MedLtatLon soMe perceLve the Self tn the self by the self; others by the path of knowledge and stLLl others by the path of work (karMa-yoga) [Gtta: Chapter 13,, verse 2~]. GandhL was a karMa-yoga, reaLLzLng hLMseLf through socLaL and poLLtLcaL actLon. The terMs MystLcal unLon and MystLcLsM are avoLded here for three reasons: Ftrst, strong Mysttcal tradLtLons stress the dtssolutLon of Lndtvtdual selves Lnto a nondLversLfLed supreMe whole. Both froM cultural and ecoLogLcaL poLnt of vtew dLversLty and LndLvtdualLty are essentLaL. Second, there Ls a strong terMLnoLogtcaL trend wtthtn sctenttftc coMMuntttes to assoctate MysttcLsM wtth MystLcs tend to agree that MysttcaL ThLrd, confuston. and vagueness conscLousness Ls rarely sustatned under norMal, everyday condLttons. But strong, -20- w~de LdentLfLcatLon can color experLence under such condLtLons. GandhL was only MargLnally concerned wLth 'nature'. In hLs ashraM poLsonous snakes were perMLtted to tLve LnsLde and outsLde huMan dwettLngs. AntL-poLson MedLcLnes were frowned upon~ GandhL LnsLsted that trust awakens trust, and that snakes have the saMe rLght to tLve land btossoM as the huMans. (IdentLfLcatLon, pp.259-6) In keepLng wLth the spLrLtual tradLtLons of Many of the worlds s retLgLons, the deep ecology norM of setf-reatL2atLon goes beyond the Modern western self hedonLstLc whLch Ls defLned as an Lsotated ego strLvLng prLMarLly for gratLfLcatLon or for a narrow sense of LndLvLduat satvatLon Ln thLs tLfe or the next. ThLs socLatty prograMMed sense of the narrow self or socLat self dLslocates us, and leaves us prey to whatever fad or fashLon Ls prevalent Ln our socLety or socLat reference group. Ue are thus robbed of be9LnnLn9 the search for our unLque spLrLtuat/b.LologLcal personhood. SpLrLtual growth, or unfotdLng, begLns when we cease to understand or see ourselves as Lsolated and narrow coMpetLng egos and begLn to LdentLfy wLth other huMans forM our faMLly and frLends to, eventually, our specLes. But the deep ecology sense of self requLres a further MaturLty and growth, an LdentLfLcatLon whLch goes beyond huManLty to Lnclude the nonhuMan world. Ue Must see beyond our narrow conteMporary cultural assuMptLons and values, and the conventLonat wLsdoM of our tLMe and place, and thLs Ls best achLeved by the MedLtatLve deep questLonLng process. Only Ln thLs way can we hope to attaLn full Mature personhood and unLqueness. A nurturLng nondoMLnatLng socLety can help Ln the "real work" of becoMLng a whole person. The ·real work• can be suMMarLzed syMbolLcally as the realLzatLon of "self-Ln-Self- where ·setf· stands for organLc wholeness. ThLs process of the full unfoldLng of the self can also be SUMMarLzed by the phrase, •No one Ls saved untLt we are all saved,· where the phrase •one• Lncludes not only Me, an LndLvLduat huMan, but all huMans, whales, grLzzly bears, whole raLn forest ecosysteMs, MountaLns and rLvers, the tLnLest MLcrobes Ln the soLt, and so on. (Deep Ecology, pp.66-7) of norM SubscrLbLng to these prLncLples, Naess asserts, coMes froM the self-realLzatLon, that ·.~. wLth MaturLty, huMan beLngs wLtl experLence joy and sorrow when other tLfe forMs experLence sorrow. Not only wLll we feet sad when our brother or the dog or cat feels sad, but we wLll grLeve when lLvLng beLngs, LncludLng landscapes, are destroyed. In our cLvLlLzatLon, we have vast Means' of destructLon at our dLsposal but extreMely lLttle MaturLty Ln our feelLngs. Only a very narrow range of feetLngs have Lnterested Most huMan beLngs untLt now.• ThLs deepenLng of feetLngs seeMs to run counter . to the trend Ln Modern socLety toward superfLcLat relatLonshLps . . . . Arne Naess asserts that ·setfrealLzatLon cannot develop far wLthout sharLng joys and sorrows wLth others, or More fundaMentalty, wLthout the developMent of the narrow ego of the sMall chLld Lnto the coMprehensLve structure of a Self that coMprLses all huMan beLngs. The ecologLcal MoveMent -- as Many earlLer phLlosophLcat MoveMents -- takes a step further and asks for developMent such that, there Ls a deep LdentLfLcatLon of LndLvLduals wLth all lLfe." I suggest that the leaders of the ecology MoveMent devetopMent theLr ethLcs after they had Moved along thLs path of Self-reatLzatLon. (Stone/Sky, pp.6-7) But what Ls wrong wLth the wLdely applauded atteMpt, runnLng through Much LdeatLstLc and Eastern thLnkLng, to explLcate value through self-realLsatLon? FLrstly, lLke utLlLtarLan explLcatLons, such as those through happLness and satLsfactLon, Lt Ls Much too experLentLal. It renders value a feature of those -21- who exper~ence value - roughly of valuers - rather than of what ~s valued, and bears value. It Ls lLke sayLng that colour Ls a Matter of those (huMans) who perceLve colour, not of the (coMposLtLon of) thLngs that are coloured. And reMove the experLences, those undertakLng self-realLsatLon, as Ln the days before lLfe appears and value dLsappears. And that too Ls wrong. Secondly, even Lf self-realLsatLon were always worthwhLle and never tLed to by contrast wLth lLfe - there are exaMpLes of value whLch fall beyond evLl (Ln presented often seLf-reaLLsatLon. A certaLn sort of dLrectLon Ls bLocheMLstry texts Lnterested Ln explaLnLng lLfe) as a MLnLMal condLtLon of lLfe of an organLsr1 or syster1: caLL that dLrectLon, s·eLf-dLrecti.on. Thus, deep ecology, Lnsofar as Lt values (just) LLfe, values (just) self-dLrectLon. In these terMs, the contractLon froM seLf-dLrectLon to self-realLsatLon, as Ln Ecosophy T, Looks LLke a M~stake. A s~r1LLar M~stake appears to underLLe contractLons to ecologLcal conscLousness (as Ln Devall); for self-realLsatLon Looks rer1arkabLy L~ke consc~ous seLf-d~rectLon, roughly an LntersectLon of seLf-dLrectLon wLth conscLousness. The argur1ents asser1bLed thus underMLne both of what Devall presents as the uLtLMate norMs of deep ecology', nar1eL~eLf-reaLLsatLon and bLocentrLsM. 'These are not proved but "felt"' (83, p.5). But they are not felt, at least by those who perceLve value beyond what lLves; rather they are dLsproved, by a serLes of counterexar1ples to each as uLtLr1ate norr1s. (CrLtLque, pp.2~-5) In partLcular presentatLons of a partLcular phLLosophy froM whLch the Naess-SessLon platforM Ls derLved, naMely Ecosophy r' I use a Model where 'Self-realLzaHon!' and sLr1LLar short forr1uLatLons are taken to express a top norr1 of a norr1atLve systeM. ~e r1ay artLcuLate 'r1odeLs' of a very cor1prehensLve norr1atLve syster1, and use Lt to explore the LnterrelatLons of our own vLews and those of others. I have extensLvely used a Model of a cor1prehensLve yLew I call 'Ecosophy r ·' and I use only one top norM whLch on the Most crude ser1antLcaL Level Ls expressed by a one word sentence 'seLf-realLzatLon! '. A r1aLn LnspLratLon for - the choLce cor1es froM the use of the terN by GandhL. Another MaLn LnspLratLon Ls the strong trend Ln Uestern LndustrLaL states towards an LndLvLdualLsM favourLng lLfe as a Long ego-trLp full of 'happenLngs' . In France there Ls a group of 'egologLsts' , the nar1e beLng chosen as a contrast to 'ecologLsts ' : ~hatever the reLatLons between LndLvLdual beLngs, huMan nature Ls such that the egocentred Lnterests of each of us Ls stronger than any other. To foster the kLnds of soLLdar~ty the pol~t~cal left ~s taLkLng about, or the soLLdarLty wLth other lLfe forMs wh~ch . ecologLsts (the greens) preach, w~ll therefore never succeed and ~s apt to hurt the LndLvLduaL . ' seLf-reaL~zatLon!' Ls a norM that LnLtLaLLy arLses vLvLd Lnterest aMong those who are LnfLuenced by the ego-trLp trend, but are then astonLshed and bewLLdered by the d~stLnctLons between ego, self and Self. Th~s ~s new to Most of theM and they are often Led to recons~der theLr LndLvLduaL~st posLtLon. ThLs reconsLderLng Ls for Me a confLrMatLon of the SocratLc value of the choLce of forr1ulatLon. The r1aLn poLnt Ln thLs connectLon Ls that huMans undergo a r1aturLn9 process, and only Lf thLs process coMes to a 'prer1ature' halt, LndentLfLcatLon wLth others and solLdarLty faLL to develop. If we, as I do, add the SpLnozLst (courageous) hypothes~s that the joy and equLMLndedness you exper~ence as a Mature person ~s deeper and rLcher than that you exper~ence as an ~r1r1ature grown 'reaLLzaHon of the (wLde) Self!' gets to be an ~nstructi.ve and ~nsp~rLng up, -22- forMu l,a. The Self-realLzatLo n norM proposed by Me has been taken too serLously as Lf one, two or three world expressLons were adequate phLLosophLcaL expressLons of a hL9hest' norM. An adequate expressLon LMplLes that the LntrLcate subject ego, se Lf, Se Lf ', that Ls, b Lo Log Lea L, soe La L and Hetaphys Lea L se Lf ar·e dLstLnguLshed. Only Ln relatLon to a faLrly Large body of phLlosophLcaL analysLs we can forMulate adequate phLlosophLcal prLncLples. It has always been that way. (Notes on Sylvan, pp.17-19) HY 0 6: OH LIFESTYLE The deep ecologLcal MoveMent Ls recruLted froM people who do not look upon natural surroundLngs as a Means for recreatLon and repaLr. LLfe and work Ln natural surroundLngs Ls a vLtal concern. The rLchness of that LLfe Ls so vast, and the Means are so sLMple, that they have dLffLculty understandLng why others seeM to need Means on a level of coMplLcatLon and sophLstLcatLon that Ls unLque Ln the hLstory of [huMan]kLnd. They cannot but fLght agaLnst the acceleratLng destructLon of nature due to the MaLntaLnLng and expandLng the productLon of such Means. They do not thLnk people who serLousLy reflect upon the reLatLon between Means and ultLMate LntrLnsLc values can justLfy the present polLcLes. As an LllustratLon of dLfferent Means/end ratLos, coMpare the dLrect and LndLrect technologLcal requLreMent of a faMLly wLth MeMbers froM 8 to 80 years old lLvLng Ln a natural surroundLng and goLng cross-country skLLng together, wLth that of a faMLly doLng slaloM at a bLg fashLonable skL resort. (PhLlosophLcal. Aspects, pp.35-6) 0 RLch Ln ends, sLMple Ln Means!.' HuMan Lnterference Ln the ecosphere can only be reduced to tolerable levels Lf people, and especLally the average (or econoMLcally above average) people of the LndustrLal states adopt lLfe styles requLrLng sLMple MaterLal Means. ThLs Ls coMpatLble wLth or even favourable towards rLchness of goals. 'Increase the sensLtLvLty to and apprecLatLon of what there Ls suffLcLent of for all!' The educatLonal slogan fLghts agaLnst the confusLon of value wLth Market value and prLce. A way to MaxLMLze our abLlLty to derLve deep satLsfactLon froM the goods of whLch there stLll, Ls, or coul.d be, enough. The present lLfe style of average people Ln LndustrLal socLetLes cannot be a global lLfe style wLthout LrreversLble, colossal destructLon of condLtLons of LLfe on Earth. (Hotes on PolLtLcs, p.2) It ' s a shLft froM beLng doMLnated by Means, LnstruMents, gadgets, all the Many thLngs we thLnk wLLl gLve us pleasure or Make us happy or perfect. The shLft coMes about when we serLously ask ourselves, In what sLtuatLons do I experLence the MaxLMUM satLsfactLon of MY whole beLng? and fLnd that we need practLcally nothLng of what we are supposed to need for a rLght and fuLfLlLLng LLfe. And Lf we Make that shLft toward a LLfe sLMple Ln Means but rLch Ln goals, we are not threatened by the plans elaborated by envLronMentalL sts. For Lnstance, we can see that, Lnstead of an ene~gy cr~s~s, we have a crLsLs of consuMptLon - we have More than enough energy. There Ls no reason to contLnue LncreasLng our consuMptLon of energy or of any of the other MaterLaL aspects of lLfe. In countrLes lLke the UnLted States the crLsLs Ls rather one of LLfestyle, of our tradLtLons of thoughtlessness and confusLon, or our LnabLLLty to questLon what Ls and Ls not worthwhLLe Ln l,Lfe. ULthLn fLfty years, eLther we wLl,l, need a dLctatorshLp to save what Ls Left of the dLversLty of LLfe forMs, or we wLLl have a shLft of values, a shLft of our total vLew such that no dLctatorshLp wLLL -23- be . needed. It Ls thoroughly natural to stop doMLnatLng and expLoLtLng and destroyLng the planet. A "sMooth" ~ay, LnvoLvLng harMonLous LLvLng wLth nature, or a "rough" way, LnvoLvLng dLctatorshLp and coercion - those are the optLdns. I tell people that, Lf they Make clear theLr fundaMentaL assuMptLons about what Ls needed for a LLfe sLMpLe Ln Means and rLch Ln ends, they wLLL necessarLLy coMe to the conctusLon that Lt Ls not tack of energy consuMptLon that Makes theM unhappy. They can then oppose nuclear power wLthout havLng read thLck books and wLthout knowLng the MyrLad facts that are used Ln newspapers and perLodLcaLs. And they Must also fLnd others who feel the saMe and forM cLrcLes of frLends who gLve one another confidence and support Ln lLvLng Ln a way that the MajorLty fLnds rLdLcuLous, naLve, stupLd, and sLMpt~stLc. But Ln order to do that, one Must already have enough seLf-confLdenc e to follow one's LntuLtLon - a quaLLty very Much LackLng Ln broad sectLons of the populace. Most people follow the trends and advertLseMents and becoMe phLLosophLcaL and ethLcaL crLpples. I thLnk that, Ln the long run, Ln order to joyfully and wholeheartedly partLcLpate Ln the deep ecology MoveMent you have to take your own LLfe very seriously. People who successfully MaLntaLn a Low MaterLaL standard of lLvLng and successfully cultLvate a deep, Lntense Lnner lLfe are Much better able to consLstentLy MaLntaLn a deep ecoLogLcat vLew and to act on behalf of Lt. As 1· sLt down and breathe deeply and just feel where I aM, I can ask Myself where and when I really enjoy MY LLfe and what would be the MLnLMuM Means necessary to MaLntaLn those enjoyable feelLngs and sLtuatLons. For exaMpLe, I Myself have too eager to go cLLMbLng Ln the HLMaLayas, whereas the pecutLar been satLsfactLon I have as a MountaLneer could be had Ln Norway . If you concentrate on what gLves you satLsfactLon, you wLLL fLnd that Lt can be obtaLned Much More easLly and sLMply than we are educated to belLeve Ln our socLety, where bL99er, More elaborate and More expensLve are always consLdered better. The deveLopMent of sensLtLvLty toward the good thLngs whLch we already have Ln suffLcLent quantLty Ls the true goal of educatLon. Not that we need to LLMLt our desLres. I'M not for the sLMple lLfe, except Ln the sense of a tLfe sLMpLe Ln Means but rLch Ln goals and values. I have treMendous aMbLtLon. Only the best Ls good enough for Me. I LLke rLchness, and I feel rLcher than the rLchest person when I'M Ln MY cottage Ln the country wLth water I've carrLed froM a certaLn well and wood I've gathered froM the forest. Uhen you take a heLLcopter to the SUMMLt of a MountaLn,° the vLew Looks LLke a postcard, and, Lf there ' s a restaurant on the top, you wLll coMplaLn that the food Ls not properly Made. ~hereas Lf you struggle up froM the bottoM, you have thLs deep feeLLng of satLsfactLon, and even sandwLches MLxed wLth skL wax and sand taste fantastLc. (SLMple Ln Means, pp . 11-12) (1) Use of s LMple Means, avoidance of unnecessary coMplLcated LnstruMents and other sorts of Means. (2) ChoLce of actLvLtLes Most dLrectLy servLng values Ln theMselves and havLng LntrLnsLc value. AvoLdance of actLvLtLes whLch are Merely auxLlLary, havLng no LntrLnsLc value , or beLng Many stages away froM fundaMentaL goals. (3) AntL-consuMerLs M . ThLs negatLve attLtude follows froM (1) and (2). (~) Endeavour to MaLntaLn and Lncrease the sensLtLvLty and apprecLatLon of goods of whLch there Ls enough for all to enjoy. ' (5) Absence or low degree of novophLLL - the love of what Ls new Merely because Lt Ls new. (6) Effort to dwell Ln sLtuatLons of LntrLnsLc value and to act rather than beLng busy . (7) ApprecLatLon of ethnLc and cultural differences aMon9 people, not feelLn9 theM as threats . (8) Concern about the sLtuatLon of the thLrd and fourth world and atteMpt to -24- avoLd a standard of LLvLng too Much dLfferent froM and hLgher than the needy. (Global soLLdarLt y of LLfe style). (9) ApprecLat Lon of LLfe styles whLch are unLversaL LzabLe, whLch are not blatantly LMpossLbLe to sustaLn wLthout LnjustLce toward fellow huMans or other specLes. (10) To go for depth and rLchness of experLenc e rather than LntensLty . (11) To apprecLat e and choose, when possLbLe, MeanLngfuL work rather than just MakLng a LLvLng. (12) To Lead a coMpLex, not a coMpLLca ted LLfe, tryLn9 to reaLLze as Many aspects of posLtLve experLenc es as possLbLe wLthLn each tLMe-Lnte rvaL. (13) CuLtLvatL ng LLfe Ln coMMunLty (GeMeLns chaft) rather than Ln socLety (OeseLLs chaft}. sMaLL scale Ln prLMary productLo n (14) ApprecLat Lon of or partLcLpa tLon agrLcuLtu re, forestry, fLshLng. (15) Effort to satLsfy vLtaL needs rather than desLres. (Paradox, pp.57-8) In soMe Eastern tradLtLon s, the student Ls presented wLth a koan, a sLMpLe story or stateMent whLch May sound paradoxLc aL or nonsensLc aL on the surface but as the student turns and turns Lt Ln hLs or her MLnd, authentLc understan dLng eMerges. ThLs dLrect actLon · of turnLng and turnLn9, seeLn9 froM dLfferent perspectL ves and froM dLfferent depths, Ls requLred for the cuLtLvatL on of conscLou sness. The koan-LLke phrase for deep ecology, suggested by proMLnen t NorwegLan phLLosoph er Arne Naess Ls: ·sLMpLe Ln Means, rLch Ln ends.· (Deep Ecology, p.10) The LdeoLogLcaL change Ls MaLnLy that of apprecLat Lng LLfe quaLLty Ln sLtuatLon s of Lnherent value) rather than adherLng to an (dweLLLng LncreasLn gLy hLgher standard of LLvLng. There wLLL be a profound awareness of the dLfferenc e between bLg and great. SoMe econoMLs ts crLtLcLze the terM "quaLLty of LLfe" because Lt Ls supposed to be vague. But on closer LnspectLo n, what they consLder to be vague Ls actuaLLy the non-quan tLtatLve nature of the terM. One cannot quantLfy adequatel y what Ls LMportant for the quaLLty of LLfe as dLscussed here, and there Ls no need to do so. There Ls aMple rooM for dLfferent op~n~ons about prLorLtLe s: what should be done fLrst, what next? What Cs Most urgent? What Ls necessary as opposed to what Ls hL9hLy desLrabLe ? But the dLfferenc es do not exclude vLgorous cooperatL on. ~hat Ls gaLned froM tentatLve Ly forMuLatL ng basLc vLews shared today by Most or all supporter s of the deep ecology MoveMent? Hopefully Lt Makes Lt a LLttLe easLer to LocaLLze the MoveMent aMong the Many 'aLternat Lve' MoveMents. Hopefully thLs does not Lead to LsoLatLon but rather to even better cooperatL on wLth Many other aLternatL ve MoveMents. It MLght also Make soMe of us More clear about where we stand, and More clear about whLch dLsagreeM ents MLght profLtabL y be reduced and whLch ones MLght profLtabL y be sharpened . After aLL dLversLt y!' Ls a hLgh Level norM! (BasLc, p.6,9) 0 A set of platforM forMulatL on should be vague and aMbLguous enough to be capable or rather dLfferen t phLLosoph LcalLy relevant Lnterpret atLons. The prLncLpLe s of Lnterpret atLon of pLatforMs of MoveMents reseMbLe those of Lnterpret atLon of Laws. Vagueness Ls here essentLaL prLMarLLy because those appLyLng the Laws Must have soMe freedoM Ln adaptLng theM to ever changLng cLrcuMst ances, but also because the forMuLatL on Must slur over, or abstract froM MLnor dLfferenc es of relevant opLnLon aMon9 those who have supported the Lssue of the Law. On the other hand, the Lnterpret atLon of the text of a phLLosop her reseMbLes that of a testaMent ( 'wLLL' ). Exactly what the testator Lntends Ls the -25- sole crLterLon of correctness of the LnterpretatLon . Uhether hLs or her terMLnology Ls abhorent or crazy Ls Lrrelevant. (Hates on Sylvan, pp.10-11) 7: ON BIOREGIOHALISM The central eleMent of bLoregLon Ls the LMportance gLven to natural systeMs "both as the source of physLcal nutrLtLon and as the body of Metaphors froM whLch our spLrLts draw sustenance. To understand natural systeMs Ls to begLn an understandLng of the self." A second eleMent of bLoregLon Ls setf-regulatLo n: •anarchy doesn't Mean out Lt Means out of theLr control.• Local coMMunLtLes LnspLred by a control; of shared concern for the bLoregLon, for "tettLng be• the plants and natLve anLMals of that place, ~an Make decLsLons concernLng LndLvLduat and coMMunat actLons whLc respect the LntegrLty of natural processes Ln that place. CarLng for a place Means avoLdLng exptoLtatLon. thLrd eleMent coMposLng the bLoregLonal notLon Ls spLrLt. • There Ls no sLngle relLgLous practLce for thLs sense of bLoregLonat spLrLt. It can be ChrLstLan, BuddhLst, NatLve AMerLcan or others; based on deep ecologLcal LnsLghts, Lt can be expressed Ln nuMerous ways. (Deep Ecology, pp.21-22) ·A UhLte the bLoregLonal, MLnorLty tradLtLon seeMs approprLate to us for cuttLvatLng ecotogLcal conscLousness, atlowLng for bLologLcat dLversLty wLth sLMplLcLty of Means, there are tough, practLcat decLsLons to Make. ConsLstent wLth our uttLMate norMs, Lt seeMs that one prLncLple Ls protectLon of endangered specLes of plants and anLMals as part of the general norM of unLty Ln dLversLty. Another norM Ls bLoregLonal responsLbLlLty . The local coMMunLty Ls the place for decLsLons. However, what happens when a local COMMunLty's needs conflLct wLth the norM of protectLng specLes dLversLty? Such a sLtuatLon occurred on the north slope of Alaska where natLve EskLMos were huntLng bowhead whales Ln the 1970s. The InternatLonat UhatLng Co~MLssLon ruled that thLs was an endangered specLes of whale and consLdered a total ban on the kLttLng of bowhead. However, the natLve EskLMos pleaded that Lt was part of theLr tradLtLon to kLtt whales. TheLr Myths and tLfestyle were dependent on Lt. It they dLdn't kLll whales they would be More dependent on canned Meat froM the "tower forty-eLght": gLven theM by welfare departMents. ThLs soMewhat sptLt the envLronMentalL sts . Many groups supported a total ban on the kLllLng of bowheads untLl ecologLsts deterMLned that theLr poputatLon had "suffLcLently Lncreased, • but FrLends of the Earth took the posLtLon that EskLMos be allowed to take a regulated nuMber of bowheads usLng theLr tradLtLonal Methods (no advanced technology for kLtlLng theM was allowed). Arne Haess provLdes an exaMple froM the bLoregLon ·of northern Horway where farMers and herders, through expansLon of farMs and nuMber of sheep , were rapLdty encroachLng on habLtat of wolves and bears. SoMe suggested kLllLng all bears sLnce a few bears seeMed to be eatLng soMe sheep. But others suggested LdentLfyLng the probleM More carefully. Uas a specLfLc bear becoMLng More and More Lnterested Ln sheep? Could that bear be entLced to refraLn froM eatLng sheep? Could Lt be reMoved to another tocat(on? Could the farMers agree to keep theLr sheep out of areas where bears were known to have dens or graze? Only as a last resort would the coMMunLty consLder the optLon of kLllLng that bear. ThLs approach Ls Ln great contrast wLth that favoured by soMe ranchers and such as wolves, farMers Ln the AMerLcan Uest . Uhen a •predator" Ls defLned to elLMLnate Lt, undertaken are efforts systeMLc then etc. coyotes, eagles, poLson •1oso", of spreadLng LncludLng aerLal huntLng of wolves (Ln Alaska), -26- shootLn g eagles wLth hLgh-po wered rLfles and destroyL ng habLtat (dennLng areas, rLparLan habLtat of rats, etc.). (Deep Ecology , pp.148- 9) DasMann wrLtes about "bLoregL onalLsM " and •ecodeve lopMent " for the peoples of of AfrLca and the South PacLfLc , and refers approvL ngly to the concept Ln are ("~e House Lynn and e 6orslLn "future prLMLtL ve• develop ed by Jerry another to ve prLMLtL transLtL on froM one condLtL on of syMbLot Lc balance - the a whLch we wLll call future prLMLtLve ... a condLtL on havLng the attrLbu tes of Mature ecosyste M: stable, dLverse , Ln syMbLot Lc balance agaLn") . OasMann dLstLng uLshes between what he calls ecosyste M people and bLosphe re people: "Ecosyst eM people lLve wLthLn a sLngle ecosyste M, or at Most two or three M adjacen t and closely related ecosyste Ms. They are depende nt upon that ecosyste BLosphe re people draw theLr support , not froM the for theLr survLva l resource s of any one ecosyste M, but froM the entLre bLosphe re. BLosphe re people can exert LncredL ble pressure upon an ecosyste M they wLsh to exploLt , and create great devastat Lon - soMethL ng that would be LMpossLble or unthLnk able for people who were depende nt upon that partLcu lar ecosyste M ... BLosphe re people create a natLona l parks. Ecosyste M people have always lLved Ln the equLval ent of at natLona l park ... I propose that the future belongs to those who can regaLn, a hLgher level, the old sense of balance and belon9Ln 9 between Man and nature (ecosyst eM people) .· (SessLo ns, pp-~18- 19) A bLoregL on Ls a part of earth's surface whose rough boundar Les are deterML ned by natural rather than huMan dLctate s, dLstLng uLshable froM other and areas by attrLbu tes of flora, fauna, water, clLMate , soLls, and land-for Ms, The to. rLse the huMan settleM ents and culture s those attrLbu tes have gLven borders between such areas are usually not rLgLd - Nature works wLth More flexLbL lLty and fluLdLty than that - but the general contour s of the regLons theMselv es are not hard to LdentLfy , and Lndeed wLll probabl y be felt, and understo od, sensed, or Ln soMe way known to Many of the LnhabLt ants, , partLcu larly those rooted Ln the land, farMers , rancher s, hunters and fLshers n, AMerlca of face the across foreste rs and botanLs ts, and Most especLa lly, the trlbal Indlans, those stLll Ln touch wLth a culture that for centurl es knew earth as sacred and Lts well-beL ng as LMperat Lve. The wLdest regLon, takLng Lts charact er froM the broades t Measure s of natLve vegetatL on and soLl contour s, May be called the ecore9Lo n and wLll general ly cover several hundred thousand s of square Mlles. But wlthln these ecoregL ons Lt Ls easy to dLstLngu Lsh other coheren t terrLtor Les that defLne a theMselv es prLMarL ly by theLr surface feature s - a watersh ed, or rLver basLn, the valley, a desert, a plateau , a MountaLn range - and whLch we May all call stLll locate often can one turn, Ln 9eore9L on. And wLthLn these 9eore9L ons, sMaller areas, of perhaps several thousand square MLles dLscret e and Ldentof LfLable wLth theLr own topograp hLes and LnhabLt ants, theLr own varLatLo ns huMan culture and agrLcul ture, to whLch we May gLve the · naMe vLtaregL on. Uhether we speak of ecoregL on or 9eore9Lo n or vLtaregL on, after all, we speak of bLoregLons , and Lt Ls that essentL al archetyp e that Ls Most LMporta nt to coMprehend. For once that Ls done on any sLgnLfL cant scale then the Matter of MakLng to dLstLnc tLons and creatLn g huMan LnstLtut Lons to Match theM can be safely left best. theM the LnhabLt ants, the dweller s on the land, who wLll always know The econoMy that coMes lnto belng wlthln a charact er froM the condLtL ons, the laws of Nature. what we can be sald to know wLth soMe surety llvlng on the soLl has been cogently SUMMarLsed as be dLstLng uLshed, froM the laws of TherMod ynaMLcs . The flrst law ls that conserv atlon, bloreglo n also derlves lts Our Lgnoranc e Ls LMMense, but after these Many centurL es of the laws of EcodynaMLcs - to preserv atlon, -27- sustena nce, ls the central goat of the natural world, hence Lts fundaMentat resLstance to largescale structural change; the second law Ls that, far froM beLng entropLc Nature Ls Lnherently stable, workLng Ln all tLMes and places toward that ecology calls a ctLMax, that Ls, a balanced, harMonLous, LntegratLve state of MaturLty whLch, once reached, Ls MaLntaLned for prolonged perLods. FroM thLs Lt follows that a bLoregLonal econoMy would seek to MaLntaLn rather than exploLt the natural world, accoMModate to the envLronMent, rather than resLst Lt; Lt would atteMpt to create condLtLons for a clLMax, a balance, for what soMe econoMLsts have recently taken to callLng a "steady state," rather than for perpetual change and contLnuat growth, Ln servLce to "progress", a false and delusory goddess Lf ever there was one. It would, Ln practLcat terMs, MLnLMLse resource use, eMphasLse conservatLon and recyclLng, avoLd poltutLon and waste. It would adopt Lts systeMs to the gLven bLoregLonal resources - energy based on wLnd, for exaMple, where Nature catted for that, or wood where that was approprLate, and food based on what the regLon Ltself - partLcularly Ln Lts natLve, pre-agrLcutturat state could grow. And thus Lt would be based, above all, on the Most eleMentat and Most elegant prLncLpte of the natural world, that of setf-suffLcLency. Just as Nature does not depend on trade, does not create elaborate networks of contLnentat for the dependency, so the bLoregLon would fLnd all Lts needed resources Lts own wLthLn luxury Manufacture, craft, energy, food, shelter, clothLng, thus beLng envLronMent. And far froM Lt beLng deprLved, far froM Lt LMpoverLshed, Lt would gaLn Ln every Measure of econoMLc health. It would be More stable, free froM booM-and-bust cycles and dLstant potLtLcat crLses; Lt would be able to plan, to allocate at the safest pace, Ln the Most ecotogLcal Manner_ It would not be at the Mercy of dLstant and uncontrollable natLonal bureaucracLes and transnatLonal governMents, and thus More self regardLng, More cohesLve, developLng a sense of place, of COMMunLty of coMradeshLp, and the prLde that coMes froM stabLlLty, control, coMpetence, and Lndependence. In one of hLs More prescLent perceptLons FrLtz SchuMacher reatLsed that the Market econoMy of twentLeth century capLtatLsM erred fundaMentatty, because Lt erred repeatedly, agaLnst Nature. "It Ls Lnherent Ln the Methodology of econoMLcs to Lgnore Man's dependence on the natural world," he wrote. "The Market represents only the surface of socLety and Lts sLgnLfLcance relates to the MOMentary sLtuatLon as Lt exLsts there and then. There Ls no probLng Lnto the depths of thLngs, Lnlo the natural or socLat facts that lLe behLnd theM. • And thLs Ls why, as he poLnts out, conventLonal econoMLcs Makes no dLstLnctLons at all between prLMary goods, "whLch Man has to wLn froM nature," and secondary goods Manufactured froM theM, or between renewable or nonrenewable resources, or the envLronMental and socLal costs of developLng one agaLnst the other. A bLothese regLonal econoMy, Ln sharpest contrast, Makes - Ln fact Ls grounded Ln vLtal dLstLnctLons. PolLtLcal prLncLples on a bLoregLonal scale are also grounded Ln the dLctates presented by Nature, Ln whLch what Ls forever valued are not the LMperatLves of gLgantLsM, centralLzatLon, hLerarchy, and MonolLthLcLty, but rather, Ln starkest contraposLtLon, those of scale, decentralLsatLon, dLvLsLon, and dLversLty. The lessons are obvLous, and suggest LMMedLately the desLgn for a bLoregLon as for a contLnent of bLoregLons. Each unLt, of the sL2e that the natural settLngs proMote, May be unLfLed and cohesLve - startLng froM the base up wLth a neLghbourhood, a coMMUnLty, a sMatl town, att tLvLng sLde-by-sLde wLth others Ln settled and Mutual pattern, together wLth coMprLsLng a vLtare9Lon; and that a vLtaregLon May have Lts own unLfLcatLon and cohesLveness, Lts own Method of governance, and yet lLve sLde-by-sLde wLth other regLons, organLsed as they May -28- see fLt; and so on, outward, Ln selfsuffLcLent collaboratLon, unLt upon unLt, for so long as the natural boundarLes May perMLt and the natural affLnLtLes be kept Lntact. SLMLlar lessons May be derLved froM the patterns of huHan nature. Thus throughout all huMan hLstory people have tended to lLve Ln separate and Lndependent groups, a "fragMentatLon of huMan socLety· that Harold Isaccs has descrLbed as soMethLng akLn to •a pervasLve force Ln huMan affaLrs and always has been.• Even when natLons and eMpLres have arLsen, he notes, they have no stayLng power agaLnst the Lnnate huMan drLve to fragMentatLon. In a bLoregLonal socLety, the dLvLsLon between urban and rural, LndustrLal and agrLcuttural, populatLon and resources, would be replaced by an equLLLbrLuM, a syMbLosLs. On the one hand, the cLty would be necessary as a producer of certaLn kLnds of goods, as a centre of artLstLc culture, as a source of the asseMbled cLvLc vLrtues, though the cLty need not be of LMMense sLze - Lndeed, no larger than 50,000 or 100,000 people - and Ln fact Ldeally would replLcate rather than grow so that Lnstead of a sLngle MetropolLs there would be a MultLplLcLty of cLtLes of Modest sLzes scattered throughout the bLoregLon. On the other hand, the country would be necessary as the prLMe source of food and water and the HaterLals of shelter and clothLng and artLsanshLp and trade, and especLatty as the eMbodLHent of the bLoregLonal spLrLt of Gaea, whose presence should be felt daLly by the LnhabLtants of every settleMent, of whatever sLze. BLoregLonalLsM Ls no More than the Modern versLon of a very old perceptLon of the world held not Merely by the Greeks but by vLrtually every prelLterate socLety of whLch we have knowledge. (Sate, 167-72) 8: TECHNOLOGY The qualLty of huMan exLstence and huMan welfare should not be Measured of products. Technology Ls returned to Lts ancLent place as an quantLty by only approprLate tool for huMan welfare, not an end Ln Ltself. There should be a rapLd MoveMent toward "soft• energy paths and "approprLate technology~ and toward lLfestytes whLch wLll result Ln drastLc decrease Ln per capLta energy consuMptLon Ln advanced LnductrLal socLetLes whLcl LncreasLng approprLate energy Ln decentralLzed vLllages Ln so-called "thLrd world" natLons. Deep ecologLst5 are coMMLtted to rapLd MOVeMent to a •steady-state• or •conservor socLety· both froH ethLcal prLncLples of har~onLous LntegratLon of huMans wLth nature and froM apprecLatLon of ecologLcal realLtLes. IntegratLon of sophLstLcated, elegant, unobtrusLve, ecologLcalty sound, approprLate technology wLth greatly scaled down, dLversLfLed, organLc, labor-LntensLve agrLculture, huntLng, and gatherLng Ls another goal. (Deep Ecology pp.311-12) QuestLonLng technology Ls a process of dLrect actLon that anyone can develop. It Ls one of the Host serLous act Lons that can ·be taken Ln a technocratLc socLety where the assuMptLon that •technology wLll solve all probleMs• Ls so deeply held. as a systeM or as a specLfLc devLce such as a To questLon technology coMputer - can often arouse hostLlLty, defena certaLn type of vehLcle or sLveness, LrrLtatLon, and resentMent Ln lLsteners. Anyone who questLons technology can be branded a "LuddLte" or antLModernLst. A person who says ·no to any technologLcal devLce Ls often charged as beLng antLprogressLve. Yet Ls crucLat to questLon technology, Ln spLte of these crLtLcLsMs. ~e need technology whLch Ls coMpatLble wLth the growth of autonoMous, selfdeterMLnLng LndLvLduats Ln nonhLerarchLcal coMHunLtLes. ~e need prLncLples that wLll help us escape the trap of technocratLc socLety, where technology Ls the -29- central LnstLtutLon. Technology can be crLtLcLzed and evaluated based on general prLncLples, scale or structure. The followLng questLons can be asked of any technologLcal devLce or systeM: I. Does thLs technologLcal devLce serve vLtal needs? 2. ls thLs devLce or systeM of the sort that can be LMMedLately understood by nonexperts? 3. Does Lt have a hLgh degree of flexLbLlLty and MutabLlLty or does Lt LMpose a perManent, rLgLd, LrreversLble LMprLnt on the lLves of cLtLzens? local ~- Does thLs technologLcal devLce or systeM foster greater autonoMy of coMMunLtLes or greater dependency on soMe centralLzed "authorLty"? 5. ls thLs devLce or systeM ecologLcally destructLve or conducLve to a deep ecology way of lLfe? 6. Does thLs devLce or systeM enhance the LndLvLdualLty of persons or does Lt lead to bureaucratLc hLerarchLes? 7. Does thLs devLce or systeM encourage people to behave and thLnk lLke MachLnes? A fully LnforMed, approprLate technology Ls a MeetLng ground of ethLcs , polLtLcs, MechanLcal understandLng and deep ecologLcal conscLousness. As Langdon WLnner concludes Ln AutonoMous Technology, "If one lacks a clear and knowledgeable sense of what Means are approprLate lo the cLrcuMstances at hand, one's These Means do not choLce of Means can easLly lead to excesses and danger. Lnvolve just narrow utLlLty or effLcLency of productLon or profLt Ln soMe short-terM calculatLon. Indeed, the narrow eMphasLs upon effLcLency of Means drLves us away froM the larger Lssues of envLronMental ethLcs asnd LndLvLdual responsLbLlLty for the consequences of our actLons. (Deep Ecology, pp.35-6) Shallow approach: AcceptLng LndustrLalLzatLon of the kLnd ManLfested Ln the West as the natural goal for developLng countrLes. Low estLNatLon of deep cultural dLfferences wLth sLgnLfLcant devLatLons froM Western standards. Deep approach: SocLal and cultural dLversLty of dLfferent specLes Ls an essentLal IntensLfLed Measures to part of general rLchness and varLatLon of lLfe forMs. exLstLng non-LndustrLal stLll lLMLt the LMpact of Western technology upon cultures . Defence of the fourth world agaLnst cultural foreLgn doMLnatLon. PolLtLcal and econoMLc polLcLes Ln favour of subcultures and MLnorLtLes Ln LndustrLalLzed socLetLes. Support of local and soft technologLes as a Means to MaLntaLn baste cultural assessMent of technLcal LnnovatLon. Due regard to anLMal socLetLes and cultures. SurvLval of populatLons does not ensure survLval of socLal LnstLtutLons . QuestLonLng whether so-called advanced, Modern technologLes are approprLate relatLve to levels of pollutLon, resources, populatLon and as subordLnate part of general culture. (PhLlosophLcal Aspects, pp.12-13) Technology Ls More helpless than ever because the technology beLng produced doesn ' t fulfLll baste huNan needs, such as MeanLngful work Ln a MeanLngful envLronMent . TechnLcal progress Ls shaM progress because the terM technLcal progress Ls a cultural, not a technLcal, terM . Our culture Ls the only one Ln the hLstory of MankLnd Ln whLch the culture has adjusted Ltself to the technology, rather than vLce versa. (SLMple ' Ln Means, p.11) Once the scLentLfLc probleMs have been solved, once Lt Ls understood how a partLcular forM of pollutLon arLses and Ln what Lts danger consLsts, the next probleM Ls technologLcal : to dLscover a Method of reducLng thLs LncLdence. That Lnvolves decLdLng, Ln the fLrst place, whLch of the causatLve factors Lt wLll be easLest to control . KnowLng, for exaMple, that the Los Angeles sMog Ls a joLnt product of the sLtLng of Los Angeles, Lts hours of sunlLght and the exhaust -30- fuMes froM the LnternaL coMbustLon engLne, Lt Ls at once apparent that onLy the thLrd of these Lf controLLabLe at a toLerabLe cost. So what has to be Lnvented Ls a devLce whLch wLLL reduce the output of hydrocarbons Ln exhaust fuMes. ThLs constLtutes a technoLogLcaL probLeM, the soLutLon to whLch LLes Ln the LnventLon of a devLce whLch wouLd satLsfy partLcuLar technLcaL specLfLcatLons . (The word devLce' Ls h~re beLng used Ln a very broad sense; an LnsectLcLde Ls a devLce and so Ls the sterLLLsLng of Lnsects as a Means of bLoLogLcaL control.) 0 The Ldea of a 'technoLogLcaL soLutLon' Ls, however, a good deaL Less straLghtforward than Lt at fLrst appears to be, as the phrase I used above 'at a toLerabLe cost' aLready hLnts. It Ls very easy to thLnk up technLcaL soLutLons of ecoLogLcaL probLeMs Lf we consLder theM Ln LsoLatLon~ and Lf we defLne a technLcaL soLutLon, wLthout any reference to costs, as one whLch descrLbes a way of freeLng ourselves froM the ecoLogLcaL condLtLon whLch concerns us. Such a soLutLon Ls soMetLMes saLd to be 'practLcaL' but not 'operatLonal'. So Los AngeLes sMog could be reduced Ln LntensLty by roofLng over the entLre cLty, or by MakLng everybody use pubLLc transport, or by substLtutLng fuel-ceLls, Ln theLr present state of developMent, for Lnternal coHbustLon engLnes. But few wouLd serLousLy advance these proposals as 'solutLons', as satLsfactory ways of deaLLng wLth the sMog probleM. ~hy not? SLMply because the costs, or so Lt Ls w~deLy beLLeved, wouLd be too great, costs of varLous sorts, socLal, ecologLcal, econoMLc and poLLtLcaL. In so far as ecologLcaL probleMs can be solved only wLth the help of scLentLfLc dLscovery and technoLogLcaL LnventLon, they can be soLved only wLthLn the ~estern ratLonal tradLtLons. That Much Ls obvLous. MystLcaL conteMplatLon wLlL not reveal to the cheMLst the orLgLns of the Los Angeles sMog or enabLe the engLneer to desLgn an effectLve devLce for reducLng Lts LntensLty. But Lt Ls a enthusLasM proper crLtLcLsM of ~estern socLety that, Ln Lts - often chLldLsh for technoLogLcaL 'advance', Lt has faLled adequateLy to consLder the costs of LntroducLng new devLces and has defLned 'costs' far too narrowly. ThLs objectLon can be dLrected, even, agaLnst antL-pollutLon devLces. The Manufacture of such devLces wLLL norMaLLy create · More polLutLon. It May, by ModLfyLng the character of the poLlutant, Lntroduce new dangers - reducLng the percentage of carbon MonoxLde Ln exhaust fuMes whLle LncreasLng the percentage of the no Less dangerous nLtrogen dLoxLde. Or Lt May shLft the LncLdence of the poLLutLon froM a weaLthLer to a poorer coMMunLty - ManufacturLng sMokeless fueLs Ln an LndustrLaL town to Make the London aLr cLeaner - wLthout reducLng Lts total voLuMe. Any technoLogLcal LnnovatLon, furtherMore, LnvoLves an eleMent of ecoLoe LcaL rLsk; Lt Ls LMpossLbLe to calculate all Lts consequences Ln every possLbLe cLrcuMstance. The best the technologLst can do Ls to exclude effects whLch are already known to be dangerous and to LnvestLgate further effects whLch are suspect . That Ls why, as I saLd earLLer, caLlLng upon the technologLst to save us Ls so often equated wLth caLLLng Ln the devLL as an exorcLst. But Lt wouLd be quLte wrong to conclude that for the reasons just advanced the technologLcaL Method of overcoMLng ecoLogLcaL probleMs would be abandoned, that what ~estern socLetLes should do Ls to shut down factorLes, Let us say, rather than LnsLst on theLr reducLng, by technoLogLcal Means, theLr eMLssLon of pollutants. For econoMLc and socLaL rLsks ~ and, Ln the end, greater ecoLogLcal rLsks Lf the socLaL resentMent engendered by the closure Ls dLrected agaLnst the whoLe systeM of ecoLogLcaL controls. It, too, May do no More than shLft the LncLdence of poLLutLon froM rLcher to poorer regLons, as the factory-owner takes hLs capLtal elsewhere. To gLve up takLng any rLsks would be to gLve up actLng . Every actLon costs soMethLng, rLsks soMethLng. Uhat can properLy be deManded Ls not that Men should cease to act Ln ways whLch LnvoLve ecologLcal rLsks - there are no such ways, as Matters now stand, whatever the sLtuatLon Ln the Garden of -31- Eden - but rather that they shouLd take More account of the ecoLogLcaL costs and benefLts of theLr actLon. And thLs Means, once agaLn, that they wLLL hav~ to Make fuLLer use of ratLonaL Western-type Methods, cost benefLt anaLyses or decLsLon-procedures. (PassMore, pp.~8-50) EcoLogLcaL resLsters do not accept that there are onLy narrow technLcaL soLutLons to narrowLy defLned socLal probLeMs (such as aLr poLLutLon). These probLeMs are seen onLy as syMptoMs of the Larger Lssues. There are three MaLn dangers to technocratLc soLutLons. FLrst Ls the danger Ln beLLevLng there Ls a coMpLete or acceptabLe soLutLon usLng Modern doMLnant LdeoLogLes and technoLogy. The second danger Ls the presentatLon of an LMpressLon that soMethLng Ls beLng done when Ln fact the reaL probLeM contLnues. reaL work". FLnaLLy, there Ls the danger of TLnkerLng dLstracts froM the assuMLng there wLLL be new experts - such as professLonaL ecoLogLsts - who wLLL provLde the soLutLon but who May Ln fact be constraLned to be pubLLc reLatLons spokespersons for the agenda of profLt or power of soMe corporatLon or agency. EcoLogLcaL resLstance Ls actLon froM centraL prLncLpLes of doLng what Ls necessary, of wLtnessLng nonvLoLentLy. It arLses froM a shLft Ln conscLouness. EcoLogLcaL resLstLng Ls deeper, soMe wouLd say More radLcaL,. than just reforMLsM. SoMe of the reforMLst actLons to MLtLgate soMe of the worse forMs of aLr and water poLLutLon (due to auto exhaust, for exaMpLe) are MotLvated by concern onLy for huMan heaLth and safety and not by the LntrLnsLc vaLues of the bLosphere. But th LLMLts of reforMLSM are by now weLL known. (Deep EcoLog~, pp.195-6) In tryLng to exaMLne technoLogy and productLon, we encounter a curLous paradox. ~e are deepLy rLven by a great sense of proMLse about technLcaL LnnovatLon, on the one hand, and by a thorough sense of dLsenchantMent wLth Lts resuLts, on the other. ThLs duaL attLtude not onLy refLects a confLLct Ln the popuLar LdeologLes concernLng technoLogy but aLso expresses strong doubts about the nature of the Modern technologLcaL LMagLnatLon LtseLf. We are puzzLed that the very LnstruMents our MLnds have conceLved and our hands have created can be so easLly turned agaLnst us, wLth dLsastrous resuLts for our weLL-beLng Lndeed, for our very survLval as a specLes. Techne, Moreover, covered a wLder scope of experLence than the Modern word technLcs. The goaL of techne Ls not restrLcted to MereLy "LLvLng weLL. or lLvLng wLthLn the lLMLt. Techne LncLudes LLvLng an ethLcaL LLfe accordLng to an orLgLnatLve and orderLng prLncLple conceLved as "potency". VLewed even Ln an LnstruMental sense, techne thus encoMpasses not MereLy raw MaterLaLs, tooLs, MachLnes, and products but aLso the producer - Ln short, a hLghly sophLstLcated subject froM whLch aLL eLse orLgLnates. To ArLstotle, the "Master-craftsMan" Ls dLstLnguLshed subjectLveLy froM hLs apprentLces or assLstants by vLrtue of honor, a sense of "why" products are created, and generaLLy a wLsdoM of thLngs ArLstotLe subject, and phenoMena. By startLng wLth the ratLonaLLty of productLon the to estabLLshes a poLnt of departure for brLngLng ratLonaLLzatLon of the object. Modern LndustrLaL productLon functLons Ln precLseLy the opposLte way. Not only Ls the Modern LMage of techne LLMLted to Mere technLcs Ln the LnstruMentaL sense of the terM, but aLso Lts goaLs are LnextrLcabLy tLed to unLLMLted Ls conceLved as LLMLtLess consuMptLon wLthLn the productLon. "LLvLng weLL fraMework of a totaLLy unethLcaL, prLvatLzed LeveL of seLf-Lnterest. TechnLcs, not the producer and hLs or her ethLcaL standards LncLudes Moreover, (proLetarLans, after aLL, servLce the Modern LndustrLal apparatus Ln totaL anonyMLty) but the product and Lts constLtuLnts. The technLcaL focus shLfts froM -32- the subject to the object, froM the producer to the product, froM the creator to the created. Honor, a sense of •why," and any generaL wLsdoM of thLngs and phenoMena have no pLace Ln the worLd requLred by Modern Lndustry. ~hat reaLLy counts Ln technLcs Ls effLcLency, quantLty, and an LntensLfLcatLon of the Labor process. The specLous ratLonaLLty LnvoLved Ln producLng the object Ls foLsted on the ratLonaLLzatLon of the subject to a poLnt where producer's subjectLvLty Ls totally atrophLed and reduced to an object aMong objects. (BookchLn, pp.219-22) 9: ON ECOLOGICAL CONSCIOUSNESS Deep ecoLogy Ls eMergLng as a way of developLng a new balance and harMony between LndLvLduaLs, coMMunLtLes and aLl of Nature. It can potentLaLLy satsLfy our deepest yearnLngs: faLth and trust Ln our Most basLc LntuLtLons; courage to take dLrect actLon; joyous confLdence to dance wLth the sensuous harMonLes dLscovered through spontaneous, playfuL Lntercourse wLth the rhythMs of our bodLes, the rhythMs of fLowLng water, changes Ln the weather and seasons, and the overaLL processes of LLfe on Earth. The deep ecology MoveMent Lnvolves workLng on ourselves, what poetphLLosopher Gary Snyder caLls "the reaL work,• the work of reaLLy LookLng at ourselves, of becoMLng More real. ThLs Ls the work we call cultLvatLng ecoLogLcaL conscLousness. ThLs process LnvoLves becoMLng More aware of the actuaLLty of rocks, wolves, trees, and rLvers - the cultLvatLon of the LnsLght that everythLng Ls connected. CultLvatLng ecologLcal conscLousness Ls a process of learnLng apprecLate sLLence and solLtude and redLscoverLng how to lLsten. It Ls learnLng how to be More receptLve, trustLng, holLstLc Ln perceptLon, and Ls grounded Ln a vLsLon of nonexploLtLve scLence and technology. ThLs process Lnvolves beLng honest wLth ourselves and seekLng clarLty Ln our LntuLtLons, then actLng froM cLear prLncLpLes, practLcLng seLf-dLscLpLLne and workLng honestLy wLthLn our coMMunLty. It Ls sLMpLe but not easy work. Henry DavLd Thoreau, nLneteenth-century naturalLst and wrLter, adMonLshes us, ·Let your lLfe be a frLctLon agaLnst the MachLne. • CuLtLvatLng ecoLogLcal conscLousness Ls correlated wLth the cultLvatLon of conscLence. CuLtural hLstorLan Theordore Roszak suggests Ln Person/PLanet conscLousness, how LnstructLve the overLappLng and "conscLence (1978), sLMLLarLty of those two words Ls. FroM the new conscLousness we are gaLnLng of ourseLves as persons perhaps we wLLL yet create a new conscLence, one whose ethLcaL sensLtLvLty Ls at Least tuned to a sLgnLfLcant good, a sLgnLfLcant evLL. We beLLeve that huMans have a vLtaL need to cuLtLvate ecologLcaL conscLousness and that thLs need Ls related to the needs of the planet. At the saMe tLMe, huMans need dLrect contact wLth untraMMeLed wLLderness, places undoMestLcated for narrow huMan purposes. Many people sense the needs of the pLanet and the need for wLLderness preservatLon. But we need not be technLcal experts Ln order to cultLvate ecotogLcal conscLousness, as Thoreau saLd, cuLtLvatLng ecotogLcaL conscLousness requLres that "we front up to the facts and deterMLne to lLve our lLves delLberately, or not at all." We belLeve that people can clarLfy theLr own LntuLtLons, and act froM deep prLncLpLes. Deep ecology Ls a process of even-deeper questLonLng of ourselves, the assuMptLons of the doMLnant worLdvLew Ln our culture, and the MeanLng and truth Ln our realLty. We cannot change conscLousness by only lLstenLng to others, we Must Lnvolve ourselves. We Mu~t take dLrect actLon. -33- One hopeful poLLtLcaL MoveMent wLth deep ecology as a base Ls the Uest GerMan Green poLLtLcaL party. They have as theLr slogan, "ue are neLther Left nor rLght, we are Ln front.· Green poLLtLcs Ln Uest GerMany, and to soMe extent Ln Great BrLtaLn, BeLgLuM and AustraLLa Ln the 1980s, goes beyond the conventLonaL, tLberaL defLnLtLon of a party, coMbLnLng personal work (that Ls, work on cLarLfyLng one's own character) and polLtLcal actLvLsM. The Greens present a proMLsLng poLLtLcaL strategy because they encourage the cultLvatLon of personal ecoLogLcaL conscLousness as well as address Lssues of pubLLc polLcy. If the Greens propogate the bLocentrLc perspectLve - the Lnherent worth of other specLes besLdes huMans - then they can help change the current vLew whLch says we should use Nature only to serve narrow huMan Lnterests. CuLtLvatLng ecoLogLcaL conscLousness Ln conteMporary socLetLes, however, Ls a two-edged sword. Ue Must not be MLsLed by our zeaL for change so that we are concerned only wLth the narrow self or ego. If we seek only personal redeMptLon we could becoMe soLLtary ecologLcal saLnts aMong the Masses of those we MLght cLassLfy as "sLnners" who contLnue to pollute. Change Ln persons requLres a change Ln culture and vLce versa. We cannot Lgnore the personal arena nor the socLaL, for our project Ls to enhance harMony wLth each other, the planet and ourselves. (Deep Ecology, pp.7-1~) ~e began by suggestLng a varLety of specLfLc actLons whLch people can take dLrected at reforMLng publLc polLcy, developLng bLoregLonal coMMunLtLes, and cuLtLvatLng ecoLogLcaL conscLousness. Ue return to the theMe of dLrect actLon. ~e have deMonstrated that deep ecology Ls not just a gaMe of ~bstract theorLzLng. As a perspectLve Lt Ls lLved, danced, celebrated. It has resonance. Ln part, cuLtLvatLng what CuLtLvatLng ecoLogLcaL conscLousness Means, Ls engaged Ln the LnteLLect RhapsodLc Theodore Roszak caLLs rhapsodLc LntelLect. process of LntegratLng LntelLect, body, and joyous eMotLon. Based on the LnsLghts, uLtLMate norMs, prLncLples and theorLes of deep ecology, the central practLcaL questLon Ls how do we becoMe More Mature persons, gLven the constraLnts of th~s culture? Ue suggest there Ls an LnterpLay between outward dLrect actLon and Lnward dLrect actLon, between actLng on one's self and actLng Ln the world, wLth the result of further and deeper MaturLty Ln the deep ecologLcaL sense of LdentLfLcatLon wLth alL LLfe. There Ls no sharp break between Lnward and outward. People take dLrectLon actLon froM dLrect ecoLogLcal prLncLpLes and they becoMe More Mature through dLrect actLon. The Label we use for the type of dLrect actLon Ln Lts outward forM Ls ecoLogLcaL resLstLng. (Deep Ecology, p.19~) 'Deep ecology', an envLronMental scLence broadsheet tells us, Ls Naess's expressLon for an ecologLcaL awareness or conscLousness' . SpeLLLng deep ecology out then becoMes a Matter of settLng down the types of conscLousness and awareness and recognLtLon LnvoLved, SOMethLns that Ls done Ln a thoroughly anthropocentrL c way, begLnnLng as foLLows: 'a conscLousness of the LMplLcatLons of ecology for huMan beLng'. It Ls all Ln fact done Ln terMs of huMan responses, fundaMentaLLy Ls approach the AccordLn9Ly capacLtLes and psychology. MLsconceLved. For deep ecology Ls not so anthropocentrL c, and Ls no More a Matter of envLronMentaL psychology than Ls the value theory or MetaphysLcs whLch are part of Lt. The psychoL09LcaL conversLon Ls LLke cLaLMLng that 'MarxLsM' Ls an expressLon for socLaLLst conscLousness, or 'MusLc' for MusLco-LogLcal awareness. -34- The conversLon of deep ecology Lnto awareness psychology, Lnto a certaLn sort of exercLse Ln self-realLsatLon or 'lLberatLng ecologLcal conscLousness, or conscLousness raLsLng', Ls open to sLMLlar objectLons. Ecology, deep or shallow or systeMatLc, Ls not ego-trLppLng or a personal thLng. Granted those who do have and share certaLn attLtudes and feelLngs to natural envLronMents are "uch More lLkely to becoMe actLve supporters or followers of deep ecology or to adopt a deeper ecologLcal stance. Even so such states as self-realLsatLon or ecologLcal conscLousness are neLther necessary nor suffLcLent for thLs. Such subjectLve states are not necessary because soMeone can beco"e a supporter of deep ecology wLthout havLng attaLned, or Made any effort to attaLn, these states. Thus consLder soMeone, a dedLcated naturalLst for Lnstance, who has no deep Lnterest Ln or understandLng of huMan psychology or socLology so far as these bear on the envLronMent. Such a person Ls a deep ecologLst, but lacks ecologLcal conscLousness as Lt Ls explaLned. The case of Peter SLnger Ln the anLMal lLberatLon "oveMent Ls LnstructLve; for SLnger goes out of hLs way to explaLn hLs dLsLnterest, hLs coMparatLve lack of zoologLcal conscLousness, that he does not LdentLfy wLth anLMals and so on, yet hLs LMpact for anLMal lLberatLon has been Most sLgnLfLcant. Analogously, a Deeper SLnger need not be Ln love wLth the Earth but feel rather Lsolated froM Lt and feel rLghtly that Most of Lts LnhabLtants dLslLke hLM or are frLghtened by hLM. He May have lLttle Ldea what Lt Ls lLke to be one of theM or a MountaLn, ... ; but he "ay have the rLght values, adhere to the rLght phLlosophy and undertake the rLght sorts of actLon and lLfestyle. GenuLnely and specLfLcally deep ecologLcal conscLousness has not been well descrLbed and Ls not partLcularly well defLned. And soMe of the requLreMents LMposed upon Lt, whatever Lt aMounts to, render Lt LMpossLble. Thus Fox, echoLng others, claLMs that 'to the extent that we perceLve boundarLes, we fall short of a deep ecologLcal conscLousness'. Then we all fall short, sLnce we are regularly confronted by, and perceLve, terrLtorLal boundarLes and a wLde range of other deMarcatLon lLnes and contrasts. Indeed fallLng short Ls LnevLtable; for hence and perceptLon necessarLly Lnvolves selectLon and dLscrLMLnatLon, separatLon and boundarLes. Deep conscLousness Ls also rendered LMpossLble by soMe of the LdentLfLcatLon requLreMents, drawn froM nature MystLcLsM, whLch are LMposed upon Lt. It Ls one thLng to be Ln tune wLth the unLverse (a Metaphor that can be spelled out), quLte another, and LMpossLble, feat to be LdentLcal wLth Lt, sLnce then a proper part would be LdentLcal wLth a whole contaLnLng Lt. SoMe explLcatLon of LdentLfLcatLon (trans-specLes and other) Ls LMportant for the elaboratLon of deep ecology, but the relatLon Lnvolved (though Lt concerns shared features, such as perhaps experLences) Ls not one of LdentLty or MakLng LdentLcal, as sLMplLstLc etyMology May suggest. Other requLreMents coMMonly placed on deep conscLousness, whLle they do not exclude Lt, render Lt unduly anthropocentrLc. (CrLtLque, pp.30-2) Deep ecologLsts agree wLth BLrch and Cobb's LnsLght that "huMan beLngs are More deeply Moved by the way they experLence theLr ~orld than by the claLMs ethLcs Makes on theM." Thus, where conteMporary envLronMental phLlosophy Ls doMLna~ed by the questLon "How do we construct an adequate envLron"ental ethLc? , deep ecology asks the questLon "How do we cultLvate a deep ecologLcal conscLousness?" The forMer questLon looks to conceptual answers, the latter to experLentLal answers. In seekLng to change the way Ln whLch we experLence the world, deep ecologLsts place theLr prLMary eMphasLs upon changLng our ·underlyLng perceptLon of the way thLngs are" (L.e. changLng our ontology) rather than upon what we MLght terM the "conceptual fLx• approach of "bL99er and better" ethLcs. ThLs atteMpt to shLft the prLMary focus of envLronMental phLlosophLcal concern froM ethLcs to ontology clearly constLtutes a fundaMental or revolutLon- -35- ary chaLLenge to norMaL envLronMentaL phLLosophy. It Ls (and should be) deep ecology's guLdLng star. (GuLdLng Stars, p.204) 10: ON HOLISM AccordLng to deep ecology: A new cosMLc/ecoLogLcaL MetaphysLcs whLch stresses the LdentLty (I/thou) of huMans wLth non-huMan nature Ls a necessary condLLons for a vLabLe approach to buLLdLng an eco-phLLosophy. In deep ecology, the wholeness and LntegrLty of a person/planet together wLth the prLncLpLe of what Arne Naess caLLs "bLoLogLcaL egaLLtarLanLsM" are the Most LMportant Ldeas. Man Ls an LntegraL part of nature, not over or apart froM nature. Man Ls a "pLaLn cLtLzen· of the bLosphere, not Lts conqueror or Manager .. There should be a "deMocracy of aLL God's creatures" accordLng to St. FrancLs; or as SpLnoza saLd, Man Ls a "teMporary and dependent Mode of the whole of God/Nature.· Man flows wLth the systeM of nature rather than atteMptLng to control aLL of the rest of nature. The hand of Man LLes LLghtLy on the Land. Man does not perfect nature, nor Ls Man's prLMary duty to Make nature More effLcLent. A new psychology Ls needed to Lntegrate the MetaphysLcs Ln the MLnd fLeLd of post-LndurtrLaL socLety. A Major paradLgM shLft results froM psychoLogLcaL changes of perceptLon. The new paradLgM requLres rejectLon of subject/object, Man/nature duaLLsMs and wLLL requLre a pervasLve awareness of total LnterMLngLLng of the planet earth. Psychotherapy seen as adjustMent to eco-orLented socLety Ls replaced by a new LdeaL of psychotherapy as spLrLtuaL deveLopMent. The new MetaphysLcs and psychology Leads LogLcaLLy to a posture of bLospherLc egaLLtarLanLsM and LLberatLon Ln the sense of autonoMy, physoLogLcaL/eMotLona L freedoM of the LndLvLduaL, spLrLtuaL deveLopMent of HoMo sapLens, and the rLght of other specLes to pursue theLr own evoLutLonary destLnLes. (Deep Ecology MoveMent, pp.310-11) RejectLon of the Man-Ln-envLronMent LMage Ln favour of the reLatLonaL, totaL-fLeLd LMage. OrganLsMs as knots Ln the bLospherLcaL net or fLeLd of LntrLnsLc reLatLons. As LntrLnsLc reLatLon between two thLngs ~ and B Ls such that the reLatLon belongs to the defLnLtLons or basLc constLtutLons of A and ~• so that wLthout a reLatLon, ~and~ are no Longer the saMe thLngs. The totaLfLeLd Model dLssoLves not only the Man-Ln-envLronMent concept, but every coMpact thLng-Ln-MLLLeu concept - except when taLkLng at a superfLcLaL or preLLMLnary Level of coMMunLcatLon. (Shallow and Deep, p.95) Shallow envLronMentaLLsM atteMpts to curb soMe of the Most gLarLng envLronMentaL abuse such as poLLutLon and resource depLetLon whLLe caLLLng for no basLc change Ln the anthropocentrLc urban-LndustrLaL socLaL paradLgM. Naess descrLbes Lts central objectLve as "the health and affluence of people Ln the developed countrLes." The Deep Ecology MoveMent, on the other hand, gathers LnspLratLon froM the fLeLd ecoLogLst and Ls a rejectLon of the Man-Ln-envLronMent LMage Ln favor of the reLatLonaL, totaL-fLeLd LMage. OrganLsMs are knots Ln the bLospherLcaL net or fLeLd of LntrLnsLc reLatLons. w (SessLons, p . 398) 0 Because they cannot conceLve Man apart' they experLence no dLffLcuLty Ln attrLbutLng LntrLnsLc value to nature. In so far as they conceLve theMseLves as havLng such value, the LnabLLLty to separate theLr selves froM nature, LnescapabLy Leads to thLnkLng of "Man" and ·envLronMent' as a whole. (Gestalt thLnkLng.) In thLs century the reactLon agaLnst conceLvLng the LndLvLduaL self as soMethLng separable froM the socLaL settLng has been Largely successful, but not the paraLLeL reactLon agaLnst the separabLLLty froM the natural settLng. (PhLLosophLcaL Aspects, p.35) By subtractLng your own self-centred and seLf-servLng -36- thoughts froM the world you coMe to reaLLze that "the other Ls none other than yourself: that the fundaMentaL deLusLon of huManlty ls to suppose I aM here and you are out there_· ThLs understandLng perMeates the MystLcaL tradLtLons and Ls exeMpLLfLed Ln the TaoLst advLce to "LdentLfy yourself wLth non-dLstLnctLon_ • It ls now becoMlng coMMonpLace to polnt to the fundaMentaLLy slMlLar cosMoLogLes eMobdLed Ln the MystLcaL tradLtLons on the one hand and the 'new physlcs' on the other_ What Ls structurally sLMllar about these cosMoLogLes Ls that they reveal a 'seaMLess web' vLew of the unLverse_ Both the MystLcaL tradLtLons and the new physLcs' serve to generate Lnter aLLa, what we MLght now caLL 'ecoLoglcaL awareness', .that Ls, awareness of the fundaMentaL LnterreLatedne~s of aLL thLngs or, More accurately, aLL events_ The theoretlcaL physLclst Frltjof Capra has been quLte expLlcLt about thls: "1 thLnk what physLcs can do Ls help to generate ecoLogLcaL awareness_ You see, Ln MY vLew now Ln the Western versLon of MystLcaL awareness, our versLon of BuddhLsM or TaoLsM, wLLl be ecologLcal awareness_" Where the physLcLst, the Mystlc, and the deep ecologLst (as phLlosopher) dLffer Ls Ln theLr Means of arrLvLng at 'ecologLcal awareness ' ___ _ The deep ecologLst's conceptLon of unLty Ln process' need not LMpLy that, at any gLven MOMent, all 'knots' (L_e_ organLsMs) Ln the 'bLospherLcal net' are constLtuted of equally coMpLex reLatLons_ To the extent that value Lnheres Ln coMplexLty of relatLons, and to the extent that coMplexLty of reLatLons Ls evLdenced Ln the degree of an organLsM's central organLzatLon (and therefore capacLty for rLchness of experLence), then organLsMs are entLtLed to Moral consLderatLon coMMensurate wLth theLr degree of central organLzatLon (or capaclty for rlchness of experlence) for the duratlon of thelr exlstence - as transLent as that May be Ln terMs of evolutLonary tLMe_ In pursulng theLr central LntuLtLon of 'unLty' (L_e_ of no boundarLes Ln the bLospherLcal fLeLd), deep ecoLogLsts have possLbly Lost sLght of the sLgnLfaspect of theLr 'unLty Ln process' MetaphysLcs_ Lcance of the 'Ln process AttentLon to thLs Latter aspect suggests that any process contLnuousLy produces LMperManent, uneven dLstrLbutLons (L_e_, dLfferent values) of varLous attrLbutes (and Ln the process of the world these attrLbutes May be Money, LnforMatLon, coMplexLty of relatLons, and so on)_ If thLs were not so then we would have no process but a perfectly unLforM, hoMogenous and, therefore, LLfeless fLeld_ The only unLverse where value Ls spread evenly across the fLeLd Ls a dead unLverse _ RecognLsLng thLs, we should be clear that the central LntuLtLon of deep ecology does not entaLl the vLew that LntrLnsLc value Ls spread evenly across the MeMbershLp of the bLotLc coMMunLty_ Moreover, Ln sLtuatLons of genuLne value conflLct, justLce Ls better served by not subscrLbLng to the vLew of ecoLogLcal -egaLLtarLanLsM_ (Fox, pp-196-200) An arctLc Landscape May superfLcLaLly Look rather dead Ln wLnter. In sprLng Lt May Look overwheLMLngLy aLLve_ It would take a Long traLnLng to force perceptLon to dLstLnguLsh organLsM froM non-organLsMs Ln such a LLve Landscape_ Even Ln wLnter the Lover of the Landscape sees abundance of LndLvLduaL LLfe forMs and also hLgher order gestaLts_ Why Ls the gestalt ontology not MentLoned Ln the platforN forMulatLon_ A Landscape wLth organLsMs - and aLL Landscapes have organLsMs Ln MLcro-organLsMs are counted - Ls a hLgh order, natural gestalt_ The separatLon of organLsMs and non-organLsMs Ls very unnatural Ln gestalt thLnkLng and apperceptLon. But the concepts of 9estaLt-thlnkln9 are too specLaL for pLatforM forMuLatLons- Only a MLnorLty of supporters of deed ecology are acadeMLcs_ (Notes on Sylvan, p-7) -37- BIBLIOGRAPHY Sources used 0 S. BodLan, S LMple Ln Means, rLch Ln ends: A conversatLon wLth Arne Naess', Ten DLrectLons, SuMMer/Fall, 1982, 7,10-12; referred to as SLMple Ln Means. M. BookchLn, The Ecology of FreedoM, CheshLre, Londong, 1982; referred to as F. Capra and C. Spretnak, Green PolLtLcs, HutchLnson, London, 198~; referred as Green PolLtLcs. to Bookch i,n. B. Devall, 'The Deep Ecology MoveMent', Natural Resources Journal 20, 1980, 299-322; referred to as Deep Ecology MoveMent. B. Devall, 'stone/Sky: ReflectLons on the 'Real ~ork' of Deep Ecology', paper delLvered at EnvLronMent, EthLcs and Ecology Conference, Canberra, August 1983, 20ff.; referred to as Stone/Sky . 8. Devall and G. SessLons, Deep Ecology, PeregrLne SMLth, Layton, Utah, 1985; referred to as Deep Ecology. U. Fox, Deep Ecology: A new phLlosophy 194-200; referred to as Fox. of our tLMe', EcologLst 1~, 1984, U. Fox, 'on guLdLng stars to Deep Ecology', EcologLst 14, 1984, 203-4; to as GuLdLng Stars. A. Naess, 'The shallow and the deep, long-range ecology MoveMent. InquLry 18, 1973, 95-100; referred to as Shallow and Deep. A. Naess, 'PhLlosophLcal Aspects of Deep Ecology ' , unpublLshed 1983, 35ff.; referred to as PhLlosophLcal Aspects. A. N.3 ess, • IntuLtLon, LntrLnsLc value and Deep 201-3; referred to as IntuLtLon. Ecology', referred A SUMMary. paper, EcologLst 14, Oslo, 1984, A. Naess, Notes on the PolLtLcs of the Deep Ecology MoveMent ' , unpublLshed paper, Canberra, 1984, 17ff.; referred to as PolLtLcs of the Deep Ecology MoveMent. A. Naess, 'What Ls basLc to Deep Ecology?', unpublLshed paper, 12ff . ; referred to as BasLc. A. Naess, A defence of the Deep Ecology 1984, 265-70; referred to as Defence. MoveMent', Canberra, 1984, EnvLronMental EthLcs A. Naess, 'The paradox of envLronMentalLsM' SyMposLuM ProceedLngs, (ed.), York UnLversLty, 1984, 57-60; referred to as Paradox. N. S, Everden A. Naess, 'IdentLfLcatLon as a source of Deep EcologLcal attLtudes', Deep Ecology, M. TobLas (ed.), Avant Books, San DLego, 1985, s256-70; referred to as ldentLfLcatLon. A. Naess, Notes on Professor Sylvan's crLtLque of the Deep Ecology MoveMent, unpublLshed paper, Olso, 1985, 19ff.; referred to as Notes on Sylvan. J. PassMore, Man's ResponsLb~lLty For Nature, 2nd ed., Duckworth, London, 1980; -38- referred to as PassMore. A new way to treat the Land', EcoLogLst 14, 1984, BLoregLonaLLsM K. Sale, 167-73; referred to as Sale. the ph~Losoph~cal and Deep Ecology: A rev~ew of 'shallow G. Sess~ons, EcoLogLcaL (eds.), Hughes J.D. and Ln R.C. Schultz unfortune', UnLvers~ty Press of AMer~ca, ~ash~ngton, D.C., 1981, Consc~ousness, 391- 4 62; referred to as Sess~ons. R. Sylvan, A Cr~t~que of Deep Ecology, Research School of SocLaL AustraLLan Hat~onaL Un~vers~ty, 1985; referred to as Cr~t~que. ScLences, Further Read~ngs R.F. OasMann, Env~ronMentaL Conservat~on, 5th ed., ~LLey, New York, 1984. A. Leopold, A Sand Country ALManac, CheshLre, New York, 1966. E. PapadukLs, The Green MoveMent Ln ~est GerMany, Croon HeLM, London, 1984. -39- DEEP ECOLOGY AHO GREEN POLITICS Deep Ecology Ls an envLronMe~tal theory or platforM wLth polLtLcal sLgnLfLcant wLth pLatforM i..MplLcatLons. Breen PoLLtLcs Ls a poLi..tLcaL envLronMentaL LMpLLcatLons. Both arose Ln Large part Ln reactLon to prevaLLLng envi..ronMentaL practLces; but Deep Ecology concentrates rather on theoretLcal reflectLon, Green PolLtLcs on practLcaL actLon . Deep and LnvestLgatLon questLoni..ng of the underlyLng doMi,nant attLtudes, seen as the Major source of ecoL09Lcal and other probLeMs, Led to artLcuLatLon of the Deep EcoLogy pLatforM, partLy outLi..ned Ln ·slogan" forM Ln the foLLowi..ng tabLe. ). TABLE 1. DEEP ECOLOGY CONTRASTED WITH DOMINANT ATT ITIJOES DOMINANT ATTITUDES [OOMIHAHT PARADIGM] DEEP ECOLOGY [RIVAL EHVIRONMEHTAL PARADIGM] OoMi..nati..on over Nature Nature a Resource; IntrLnsLc VaLue confi..ned to HuMans NaturaL EnvLronMent VaLued for Itself; Bi..ocentri..c EgaLi..tari..ani..sM AMp Le Reso1J rces/Subs t i.. tu tes Earth SuppLLes Li..MLted MaterLaL EconoMLc Growth a predoMLnant goaL Non-MaterLaL GoaLs, especLaLLy SeLf-ReaLi..zati..on ConsuMer i,sM DoLng wLth Enough/RecycLLng CoMpetLti..ve Li..festyLe Cooperati..ve Li..feway CentraLLzed/ Urban Centred/ Hati..onaL focus Decentral.i..zed/ Bi..oregi..onaL/ Nei..ghbourhood focus Power structure Hi..erarchLcaL Non-h i,erarch Lea L/ Grass roots DeMocrac!::I HLgh TechnoL09y Appropri..ate Technology Whi..Le Deep Ecol.og!::j grew froM the work of one envLronMentaL phi..Losopher (Naess Ln 1872), Green PolLtLcs arose (Ln West GerMany sLnce 1876) froM the synthesLs of several. MoveMents - ecol.09!::j, cLtLzens, aLternatLve, peace and other MoveMents. The pLatforM of Green PoLLtLcs, whLch Ls buLLt around four pLLLars socLaL responsLbLLLty, grassroots deMocracy , and non-vLoLence ecology, refLects these orLgLns. The fLrst of these pLLLars, ecoLog!::j, Ls based on the sLMpLe theMe that LLMLted ecoLogi..caL systeMs cannot sustai..n unLi..MLted econoMi..c growth, or such questi..onabLe types of growth as nucLear power, wi..thout serLous rLsk of daMage and degeneratLon. The Green aLM Ls to Move to S!::jsteMs of producti..on and consuMptLon whLch MaLntai..n and restore natural processes and C!::fCLes rather than doMLnate or destroy theM - a Move towards harMony wLth nature. The second pi..LLar of Green PoLLtLcs, socLaL responsLbLLLt!::j, LMpLLes opposi..tLon to the LnequaLLti..es i..n power and doMLnati..on reLati..onshi..ps of present soci..ety, and reMovaL of di..scri..Mi..nati..on, econoMLc hardshi..p and exploi..tati..on, both regi..onally and as regards the ThLrd ~orLd. The Green aLM - to be achi..eved pri..Mari..Ly froM below, Ls to bui..ld stable and just soci..al through those adversely affected arrangeMents, wLth coMprehensLve deMocrati..c rLghts and freedoMs (both i..n 6erMan~ -1- and where GerMan operatLons LMpLnge Ln the ThLrd WorLd). These changes are to be brought about by grassroots deMocracy, the thLrd pLLLar, through Lncreased reaLLsatLon of dLrect decentraLLsed deMocracy. ThLs LnvoLves organLsatLon and coordLnatLon of decentraLLsed basLc unLts (Local, COMMunLty and dLstrLct) whi..ch are gLven extensLve, but not coMpLete, autonoMy, as weLL as wLde use of : referenda, deLegatLon practLces, and rotatLon of offLce-hoLders. The fourth and fLnaL pLLLar, non-vLoLence, LMpli..es the reMovaL of coercLve and aLso oppressLve practLces, not Merely by More powerful people, but especLaLLy by socLaL groups and states, and also, More posLtLveLy, acti..ve depoLyMent of varLous Methods of socLal protest, resLstance and defence . The coMpatLbLlLty of Means wLth ends serves here as an LMportant underlyLng prLncLple: that a just, non-vLolent, huMane end-state cannot be satLsfactorLLy achLeved by unjust, vi..oLent, LnhuMane Means . • l Gr een PolLtLcs offers then a broad prograM for socLal change, whLch LncLudes the More specLfLc and ecologLcalLy focussed Deep Ecology platforM as a quLte proper part. Put dLfferentLy, Green PoLLtLcs coMbLnes a wLder pLuraLLty of The strand. LMportant MoveMents of whLch Deep Ecology represents one Lnter-relatLons are shown pLctorLaLly at the second level of the foLlowLng 12 dLagraM: DIAGRAM 1. DOUBLE PYRAMID, SETTING DEEP ECOLOGY IM PLACE p B \ '\ I 2C ] ~ Oer Lva ti..on Di,recti,on 2+ ExpLanatLon Oi,recti..on 2. Deep Ecology pLatforM 2C. ReforMLst envLronMentaL 2 p1Jsi.. t i.,Qn 2+. Vague fundaMentaLs of Green pLatforM -/ //' ;/ e.g. Buddhi..st (B), ChrLstLan (C) and (Eco)-PhLLosophLc (P) ultLMate bases j / -\,r - [ 1. Deep Ecology fundaMentaLs; C \ \ \ 3. s \ General norMs and theMes , substanti,ally derLved froM pl,atforM PartLcuLar norMs and concrete decLsLons , appLyLng to reLevant practLcal sLtuatLons. The ecologLcaL coMponent of Green PolLtLcs May not go very deep; Lt May on l y be based upon reforM envLronMentalLsM (or shallow ecology as i,t used to be I Starred notes LndLcate poi..nts at wh i..ch readLngs wi..th the correspondLng nuMbers May be Lnserted or undertaken . -2- caLLed), whLch aLM3 to reforM 30Me of the wor3t abuse3 and exces3e3 of the doMLnant posLtLon, such as gross poLLutLon, extensLve despoLLatLon of Land and Lakes and oceans, LLttLe thought for the future, MLstreatMent of anLMals, etc_ On shaLlow ecology, nature Ls not valued for Ltself, but as a resource, that Ls LnstruMentalLy, for what Lt can be used for by huMans_ By contrast, Deep Ecology argues (e_g_ froM preMLsses of Level I) that the envLronMent Ls LntrLnsLcaLLy valuable, that nature Ls valuable Ln and for Ltself; and that, furtherMore, LntrLnsLc value Ls equally dLstrLbuted_ ThLs projectLon of egsLLtarLan or LMpartLalLty prLncLpLes, usually restrLcted to huMans, to the whole of lLfe Ln the natural worLd, gets dLgnLfLed by the tLtle, BLocentrLc EgalLtarLanLsM_ The prLncLple, not part of Green PoLLtLcs, Ls perhaps the Most controversLal of the central prLncLpLes of Deep Ecology; but Lt or soMe substLtute for Lt Ls requLred, granted that the natural world contaLns value beyond that accruLng to huMans and theLr features, to expLaLn how value Ls dLstrLbuted_ Deep Ecology accounts for the dLstrLbutLon through what Ls . . presented as a core deMocracy ~n the bLosphere . _•3 Deep Ecology grew out of a phLlosophLcal deepenLng of the new features of the scLence of ecology, whLch served to dLstance ecology froM the standard run of reductLonLst scLences (through such features as holLsM; gestalt propertLes; systeMs whLch are More than the suM of theLr atoMLstLc parts; eMergent eleMents, lLke lLfe, organLsatLon, etc_ )_ Deep Ecology quLckLy aLLLed Ltself wLth the subversLve features of unco-opted ecology, Ln partLcuLar, the eMphasLs on the lLMLts, and ultLMate faLlure of (atoMLstLc) reductLonLsM Ln scLence and phLlosophy_ WLth such an orLgLn, Lt Ls not surprLsLng that there Ls lLttle dLrectLy about such MaLn pLllars of Green PolLtLcs as socLaL responsLbLLLty and non-vLoLence Ln the pLatforM of Deep Ecology- However Deep Ecology Ls coMpatLbLe wLth these Green pLlLar prLncLpLes, and Lndeed perMLts theLr derLvatLon_ ~hat Ls supposed to resuLt are generaL norMs, LLke No exploLtatLon, No subjectLon, No vLoLence, at leveL 3_ (Such a derLvatLon of a non-vLoLence prLncLpLe froM tne Deep Ecology prLncLpLe of MaxLMLzLng Self-reaLLsatLon Ls atteMpted by Naess Ln the fraMework of hLs systeM of Eco-phLLosophy)_•l A MaLn focus of Deep Ecology Ls on changLng huMan reLatLons wLth the natural envLronMent, away froM doMLnant expLoLtatLve practLces_ The naturaL envLronMent coMprLses LteMs of LntrLnsLc value, LncludLng huMans (who are not above or separate froM Lt), and accordLn9ly Ls to be treated wLth the care and respect valuable LteMs warrant, and not LrresponsLbLy_ Thus Lt would be contrary to Deep Ecology to treat the envLronMent or Lts valued LteMs vLolently whLch however Ls what Deep Ecology contends doMLnant practLces do (consLder such wLdespread phenoMena as "rape of the envLronMent", "of the Land", "of the forestsu)_ SLnce huMans are not apart froM or superLor to nature, Lt follows froM the Deep Ecology pLatforM that natural and proper relatLons also exclude vLoLence towards other huMans or classes of huMans_ Because Lt covers a pluraLLty of posLt~ons, LncludLng shaLLow ecoLogLcaL posLtLons, Green PolLtLcs Ls Much More aMelLoratLve and reforMLst Ln character than Deep Ecology, whLch Ls further reMoved froM doMLnant attLtudes, More hardLLne, and More radLcaL_ ~hereas Deep Ecology goes to fundaMentaLs, and focusses on Ldeals and theory, Green PolLtLcs tends to concentrate on practLcal polLtLcal probleMs of an envLronMental or socLal kLnd, such as acLd raLn or rLver pollutLon or MLssLle deplo8Ment, and (lLke the Peace MoveMent Ln AustralLa) Ls not so Much concerned wLth refLnLng Lts rather vague prLncLpLes or wor~Lng out an env~ronMentaL (or peace) ph~Losophy_ Because of Lts envLronMentaL depth and natural world focus, Deep Ecology Ls concerned wLth a range of natural envLronMent Lssues, such as wLlderness, rare specLes, and the radLcal -3- transforMatLon of agrLcuLture, whLch are onLy of passLng Lnterest to a sMaLL MLnorLty Ln Green PoLLtLcs or are beyond Lts poLLtLcaL reach. Jn Lts reforMLst styLe Green PoLLtLcs does not venture far beyond prevLous Left-LeanLng poLLtLcaL MoveMents, except, fLrstLy, Ln Lts opposLtLon to envLronMent and aMenLty daMa9Ln9 LndustrLaLLsM and, secondLy, as regards non-vLolence and Lts coMMLtMent to attaLnLng peace. Non-vLoLence Ls the Most controversLaL of the four pLLLars. For non-vLoLence ruLes out a range of poLLtLcal actLon, LncLudLn9 typLcal protests, confrontatLon and revoLutLons. Non-vLolence also LMplLes, what Ls very dLfferent froM current MLLLtary pra~tLces, socLal defence. WhLLe MaLn factLons Ln the Green MoveMent support non-vLolent Methods and socLal defence, other Lesser factLons hold that force Ls necessary to brLn9 about varLous necessary changes and for defence purposes. The Deep EcoLogy platforM Lncludes severaL prLncLpLes that would be recognLsed by onLy a MLnorLty of the Green MoveMent. One of these prLncLples (whLch however, unlLke BLocentrLc EgalLtarLanLsM, would not be wLdeLy opposed by reforMLst Greens) Ls the core prLncLpLe of SeLf-reaLLsatLon, or More exactLy of MaxLMLzLng SeLf-reaLLsatLon. The notLon of self-realLsatLon of varLous relLgLous posLtLons, of the full unfoldLng and developMent of the person, Ls vastly expanded Ln Deep EcoLogy to Lnclude brLngLng to fuLl fruLtLon not MereLy one's own person, but all that one LdentLfLes wLth, that Ls the expanded Self, whLch Ls taken to be not Merely one's faMLLy or feLlows or fellow natLonals, nor Merely ~as on huManLstLc ethLcs) the whole huMan race, but the whole naturaL 1 systeM. The SeLf-realLsatLon prLncLpLe, sprLngLng as Lt appears froM an enLLghtened personal self-Lnterest prLncLple, has an excellent phLlosophLcaL pedLgree (at Least as applLed to huMans or neL9hbourLn9 classes of huMans). Thus rather than beLng argued for, a dLffLcult Matter Ln the case of ultLMate prLncLples, SeLfrealLsatLon Ls LMported froM syMpathetLc phLlosophLcal or reLLgLous posLtLons at Level 1 of the double pyraMLd, froM those that help sustaLn Deep Ecology. However the expansLon Lnvolved, the derLvatLon process froM narrow self to coMprehensLve Self, severs the usual justLfLcatory lLnks. It Ls hard to LdentLfy one's self-Lnterests wLth those of a rock or an acorn. So the supposed LdentLfLcatLon - wLth soMe or aLL MountaLns, rLvers and raLnforests Ln the wLder reMaLns, LLke the assocLated extended EgaLLtarLan Self, Nature personLfLed prLncLpLe, decLdedLy probLeMatLc. Because Lt Ls assuMed that SeLf-reaLLsatLon Ls dLrected to ecoLogLcal and spLrLtual ends, not at MaterLaL goods or Means, SeLf-reaLLsatLon Leads to the 16 AMong the raMLfLcatLons of the slogan slogan, USLMpLe Ln Means, rLch Ln endsn. are those concernLng what kLnd of technology one uses and where one lLves (the Matter of dwellLng Ln sLtuatLons of Lnherent value and the lLke), what and how Much one consuMes, and so on. The doMLnant attLtudes, forMed around of econoMLc growth and econoMLc routes to happLness, have MaxLMLzatLon eMphasLsed both MaterLal goals and MaterLal Means, partLcuLarly personal consuMerLsM. But Lf MaterLaL use and pure consuMptLon are to be reduced for envLronMentaL and other reasons, what LLfestyles are approprLate? Deep Ecology, LLke Lts fundaMentaL sources, poLnts to experLentLal and spLrLtuaL ends and eMphasLzes the rLchness of non-MaterLaL ends avaLlabLe. The result, of course, Ls practLces whLch are sLMpLe, voluntary sLMpLLcLty, do~ng wLth enough, and, More 9enerall8, practLces whLch lLe lLght on the Land and the naturaL world. In way of d0Ln9 thLngs, these wLLL be Lnte9rated (Ln ~ properly ecoLogLcaL syMbLotLc and other naturaL styles) wLth the natural systeMs LnvoLved, workLng wLth rather than agaLnst the natural fLow. The practLces, and organLsatLonaL approprLate to regLonaL wLLl accordLngly be ecoregLonaL arrangeMents, 17 to be caLLed. coMe have they as bLore9LonaL, ecoL09LcaL 9roupLn9s - or -4- ApproprLate Means LncLude, Ln turn, technLques approprLate to the practLce and theory of Deep Ecology- HLgh technoL09Les such as nuclear power are not approprLate, even Ln advanced LndustrLaL socLetLes, but LnapproprLate because of the envLronMentaL and socLaL costs and rLsks such technoLogLcaL forMs LMpose_ On both deep and green percept i,ons, wh-3 t Ls requ Lred a re re LLab Le c-:1 ref u L technoLogLes whLch are not ecoLogLcaLLy daMa9Ln9 or socLaLLy rLsky or otherwLse undesLrabLe; but the technoLogi,es adl"li,tted wLLl dLffer accordLng to the prLncLpLes of the posLtLons they answer back to (e_g_ farMLng technLques wLLL need to be very dLfferent froM those prevaLLLng Ln rural GerMany to Meet such prLncLpLes as bLospherLc egaLLtarLanLsM )_ In each case the practLcaL use of approprLate technoLogy faLLs at the bottoM, actLon Level, of the doubLe pyral"I ,,"d _•8 WhLLe Deep Ecology suppLLes an appeaLLng bLueprLnt for dLfferent socLaL and LLfe-ways, the questLon reMaLns: how Ls the proMLsed Land reached? A MaLn part of the answer Ls taken to be gLven through a further crucLaL feature of Deep Ecology: EcoLogLcaL ConscLousness, a notLon agaLn expandLng upon conceptLons of other oLder LdeoLogLes (e_g_ of reLL9Lous, or of revoLutLonary, conscLousness)_ What Ls dLfferent Ls that spLrLtuaL or LdeoLogLcaL conversLon Ls agaLn broadened froM the personaL and socLaL to coMprehend the fuLL envLronMentaL predLcaMent_ In thLs expLanatLon, of how peopLe get, and are got, to grasp Deep Ecology and Lts practLces, the pyraMLd Ls ascended, froM actLon to Ldeas, to deeper explanatory prLncLpLes_ A thorough conversLon process LnvoLves eLevatLon to the top LiveL, spLrLtuaL transcendence of the daLLy econoMLc and poLLtLcaL actLon LeveL. 9 It Ls assuMed that, wLth enough converts and supporters, Deep Ecology wLLL be put Ln place, LLke Green PoLLtLcs, by grassroots deMocratLc procedures_ LLke the fundaMentaL sources upon whLch Lt draws, Deep Ecology prescrLbes practLces by whLch to achLeve such a conversLon and through whLch to arrLve at EcoLogLcaL ConscLousness_ SoMe of the MaLn practLces, such as MedLtatLon and conteMpLatLon, are derLved frol"I the fundaMentaL sources_ But other Methods whLch extend these, soMe of theM expandLng upon ecoLogLcaL experLence, LncLude value seeLng thLngs dLfferentLy, and reorLentatLon and wLdened value perceptLon of other thLngs - Connected wLth weLL-beLng and worth the coMLng to apprecLate goes a hoLLstLc shLft Ln theM, these wLdened experLentLaL bases, and LnforMLng vaLues and perceptLon, and an expanded LdentLfLcatLon , affordLng dLrect LLnkage wLth parts and whoLes of the natural worLd_•IO By these Methods, a person May coMe to a deep and joyous apprecLatLon of the reaL world, a convert to Deep Ecology, a feLLow and advocate of Lts Messages and LLfe-ways. ESSAY QUESTIONS }_ To what extent do Green PoLLtLcs and Deep Ecology share the saMe values and address the sal"le probLel"ls? CrLtLcaLLy coMpare and contrast theLr proposals, especLaLLy as regards the naturaL and the buLLt envLronMent_ 2_ Deep Ecology Ls soMetLMes assLgned four Levels. Try to descrLbe these, and to expLaLn carefuLLy the LnterreLatLons aMong PoLLtLcs fLt Lnto thLs probLeMatLc scheMe? these Levels. Where does Green Ln prLncLpLe" appears as a key theMe of Deep Eco~ogy. Cri.tLcaLLy assess Lts adequacy_ Shouldn't Green PoLLtLcs LncLude such a pri.nci.pLe? 3_ ·sLocentrLc EgaLLtarLanLsM - Non-vLo~ence an unstated pr~nc~p~e of Deep Ecoiog~? Expia~n why Deep Ecology Ls coMMLtted to non-vLoLence to the degree i.t Ls? In your answers take account of the foLLowLng dLffLcuLtLes: L. the contradLcti.ons between the use of I+- 1:5 -5- vLolence and the defence of the envLronMent; LL. the occurrence of vLolence Ln nature; LLL. the need for coercLve Methods to preserve the natural envLronMent. 5. What justLfLes expandLng self-realLsatLo n to Self-realLsatLo n? ExpLaLn the MeanLng and LMportance of SeLf-ReaLLsatL on for Deep EcoLogy and dLscuss Lts adequacy. Why does Lt not feature Ln Green PolLtLcs? 6. ExplaLn the MeanLng of the delLberateLy vague slogan °SLMple Ln Means, rLch Ln ends", or of soMe other hLgh-LMpact sLogan of Deep EcoLogy. IndLcate how the vagueness MLght work for and a9aLnst the slogan, suggest how the slogan MLght be alternatLve LnterpretatLon s, and LndLcate soMe of the suggest applLed, aLternatLves. these of raMLfLcatLons 7. OutLLne bLoregLonalLsM , LndLcatLng what practLcaL envLronMentaL probLeMs bLoregLonalLsM Lnduces. How Ln fact Ls bLoregLonalLsM derLved froM Deep EcoLogy? ConsLder to what extent bLoregLonalLsM fLts wLth the sLogan, ·rhLnk globally, act locally·. 8. Is More hLgh technology an unprobLeMatLc solutLon to deeper, or to any, envLronMental probLeMs? CoMpare and contrast the vLews of Deep Ecology and Green PoLLtLcs on the role of varLous types of technoLogy. 9. What Ls Ecolo9Lcal ConscLousness? And what Ls Lt supposed to do Ln and for Deep Ec0Lo9y? If Lt Ls so LMportant, why Ls Lt not a MaLn concern for Green PoLLtLcs? A reLatLonaL, total-fLeLd LMa9e of huMan reLatLonshLps wLth nature has been quLetLy oMLtted froM the orLgLnaL pLatforM of Deep Ecology. Is thLs gestalt pLcture needed? Is Lt defensLbLe? Should Lt be reLnstated? 10. -6-  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/. 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Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Routley</a> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 24, Item 1697 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. 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Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:476be48">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:476be48</a> Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Australian National University - Filing Cabinet 1 - Top Drawer Australian National University Office Australian National University Office > Filing Cabinet 1 > Top Drawer Box 24: Files on Articles https://www.antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/b1bb957eb0669c86c103b14fb224f5fb.pdf 21d1b8e5d70d2b597b1948aa633e80c2 PDF Text Text MORAL DILEMMAS AND THE LOGIC OF DEONTIC NOTIONS Richard Routley and Vai Plumwood^ The §1. paradoxes of deontic logic consistency and the and modal requirements. Especially since mid-century many systems of deontic logic have been advanced, which logic of such deontic attempt to explore the prohibition, and wrong. right all Almost which treat deontic notions as modal, notions as obligation, permission and modal not demand functors, All such systems are mistaken m a For deontic functors such as obligation and prohibition are but are more highly of degree greater a systems, i.e. as if strict or provable equivalents are intersubstitutable within them preserving truth. quite fundamental way. systems have been modal these intensional than propositional modal modal than discrimination and so functors, logics can provide. The damage caused by the mistaken treatment of deontic notions as modal shows up in various ways, but we shall be primarily concerned with only one of these, the consistency requirements and the exclusion thereby of moral dilemmas. which the modal damage appears is through a Another way in series of related paradoxes, such as, directly, the paradoxes of derived obligation, and, less directly, the paradoxes of the Robber and the Good Samaritan. The consistency requirements come out in two ways in mainstream deontic systems. consistency Firstly, a negation are requirement, - obligatory in the that usual no claim such is symbolism, Op that ~0~p, both it i.e. and its ~(0p & 0~p) — appears as a principle, frequently a postulate, in all mainstream absolute systems.21 Such absolute systems, which are variants on alethic modal systems, are characteristically obtained from corresponding alethic systems by replacing the modal axiom, that’ or ’it ought to be the case that’, or the functor ’□ ’, modal (such as logics system demands world is ’it is obligatory ’it ought to be seen to that', replaces ’it is necessary that', of alethic systems. We know of course that consistency requirement; some ~0~p - where ’O’, read Op D p, by the deontic axiom, Op the doxastic systems) the standard but it appears that the intended interpretation of deontic the consistency requirement. or encapsulates acceptable subsequently introduced, can be designed without For its semantical equivalent what is permitted (i.e. is that in symbols (Px)STx) which is surely true (for let world x be determined precisely by what is so permitted). Moreover, the second related way in which consistency escaped by a modal formulation of deontic (or doxastic) logics. figures cannot be so For it seems clear, �2 and is widely agreed, that 0 satisfies the following distribution principle: (1) Op&OqiffO(p&q). Since however 0 is modal, and p & ~p & q p&~p (i.e. - the sides are strictly equivalent), 0(p & ~p) iff 0(p & ~p & q) Thence, Op & 0~p implies 0(p & ~p), which implies 0(p & ~p & q), and (2), by (1) which implies Oq; (2) if there are cases of moral dilemmas where Op and also 0~p, i.e. then obligation spreads so that any claim is obligatory. This argument tells against all mainstream deontic logics; rock-bottom system, minimal deontic logic. for it holds in the This logic MDS, presented by von Wright and others (see e.g. Hilpinen 81, p.3 and p.5), adds to classical sentential logic CL (with rules of Material Detachment and Substitutivity duly extended) the one-place connective P, of permissibility, subject to just the conditions P(A v B) e (1’) PA v PB and Intersubstitutivity of provably equivalent CL (i.e. truth functional) wff Now define a connective - in fact the standard obligation Then, where A and B are any CL wff, 0(A & B) OA =£j£~P~A. negation and It then follows, given that (extensional) principles to De Morgan = ~(~P~A & ~P~B). follows), 0 moral claim is dilemmas obligatory, the consequence as above of the nothing functor ) * (2 - thus: OA & OB, upon applying of (1 ) * that P~(—A & —B) (or by variants thereupon that which form OA & 0~A, (extensional) i.e. any permissible. The that is OB, revealing variant argument applies the provable CL-equivalence A & -A = B & ~B to get 0(A & ~A) = 0(B & ~B). d OB & 0~B => OB. Then (in condensed notation) OA & 0~A => 0(A & ~A) => 0(B & ~B) That is, if there are any deontic moral dilemmas (of such forms as OA & 0~A) then everything is obligatory. other forms; But there are moral dilemmas, of this and and not everything is obligatory. incorrect. So too are all its extensions, and Therefore minimum deontic logic is thereby all mainstream systems. For 'most systems of deontic logic include the system’ of von Wright 'as a subsystem' (F & H, p.13). There is little appreciation of the involve in the ethical Hare, having set up a force of these arguments or of what they literature. But one prominent example will dilemma, and rejected one logical have to suffice. route out, proceeds to pronounce that 'it is not very helpful to try to sort out these difficulties by some relatively minor tinkering with the calculus of deontic logic. The linguistic and logical intuitions which give rise to them are all right so far as they go' (82, �3 intuitions behind the mainstream systems are not alright, but lead to The p.28). deontic collapse and to a heap of paradoxes; and a bit of '’tinkering" is enough to remove the worst difficulties.5 (2’) and The trouble lies we shall argue, just with the modal requirement (i.e. its usual extension to all wff). that not everything is obligatory, evident For while it is This leaves much to be defended. on no more than the strength of a few examples (such as that it is not obligatory that everyone visit the tallest eucalypt every day), none of the other assertions is so uncontroversial. Given that there are such moral dilemmas, as will be argued at length, and given that sentential logic CL is admissible when applied to consistent situations (which are all that are elsewhere (in arguments: required RLR in especially), modal the namely, the arguments there are a claim that has been argued above), two only and requirement, one fault the which to points at half of the distributivity principle, specifically r (O-adjunction). OA & OB -> 0(A & B) But it is bizarre to have to fail O-adjunction in order OA & 0~A =5 B has quite especially when OB to stand, 0(A & ~A) to be correctly foundation. And obligation. For, not it contemplated among in the things, is a irrelevant mates 7 desperate measure , systems since it intended role and mainstream against entirely other is conceded that its Faulting O-adjunction rejected. goes it to allow the paradox O-adjunction can be argued is without meaning for from of the semantics of 0, along these lines:- Roughly OA is true iff A holds in all acceptable situations. But if A holds in all such situations and B does also then so does A & B, validating O-adjunction. Accordingly, the trouble must be located in the modality requirements. This can be seen from another angle also. obligation, which also underlies O-adjunction, An important logical feature of is its transmissibility, that what is tightly entailed by what is obligatory is also obligatory; in symbolic form, A ■+ B -o OA -> OB But now, (0-transmission). if entailment is erroneously construed as strict implication, which is what the modal requirement would have us do, then 0(A & ~A) -> OB, since by a paradox of strict implication A & ~A B. If there are moral dilemmas of the form 0(A & ~A), as will be contended, then this result is sufficiently damaging on its own, and focusses the trouble on the modal requirement. properly maligned OA & 0~A ->0B. Otherwise apply O-adjunction, to obtain the �4 the Both and consistency requirements should modality be challenged then by anyone who claims that, for some p, both Op and 0~p (and that such judgements are not merely prima facie, vanishing upon further reflection). Many have argued that such cases do occur, indeed are central examples of value conflict, and are of fundamental importance in ethics.$ We want to go even further and claim, firstly, that such cases occur quite frequently, as cases of conflicting obligations, conflicting rights, and genuine moral dilemmas - so in particular there are many cases where both p and ~p ought to be the case - and secondly, that adequate logical treatment of such cases requires an underlying logic of a distinctively paraconsistent kind. we shall cases has, argue, with many important arguments and cases. many of logic rendered deontic Neglecting such incapable of dealing adequately The matter is particularly serious since fiercely debated moral cases are cases of moral dilemmas, lthe most e.g. limited resources, nuclear war, permissible war tactics. While our initial argument will overlap previous work,9 it goes beyond it by adding a semantical treatment and moral of explanation semantical dilemmas, and in setting adequate deontic logics within the framework of paraconsistent logic. simple The §2. resolution relevant epicycling. classical versus The relevant It has already been indicated. solution to the base problem is disarmingly simple. Abandon the modal assumption, that obligation, permissibility, and so on, are modal This blocks logical equivalents. functors allowing replacement of modal from OCA & ~A), or from OA & 0~A, to 0(B & ~B) and thence to OB. giving up intersubstitutivity are replacement coentailment, not simply just more in contexts; deontic rigorous than lax strict equivalence. intimately - the Spread with What ones. is permitting required is While A & ~A and B & ~B are strictly equivalent, they do not coentail one another. connected modal It does not involve conditions the the move law, That is as much of a fallacy as - one A that would have that a & ~A -> B, contradiction such as A & ~A entails any statement whatsoever. An alternative satisfactory distinctive implciation deontic way then logic of should explaining be in particular of relevant paraconsistent, feature of relevant logics, their and the is solution, simply and through why the a most rejection of the paradoxes of strict Spread. For, as remarked, one logical characteristic of deontic notions such as obligation is their transmissibility; i.e. where A entails B then OA is logically sufficient for OB.10 Then were entailment strict implication it would follow at once by Spread that 0(A & ~A) -> OB, whence by O-adjunction, OA & 0~A -> OB. basis of interpretations straightforwardly on RLR II). of Transmissibility may be independently argued for on the entailment (e.g. as content inclusion), and follows the semantical analysis of obligation to be advanced (cf. also �5 A good deal of effort has already been expended in trying to save mainstream deontic theory from the worst of the difficulties and consistency requirements. Most of through its modal it encounters, the repairs however attempted amount to epicycling: trying to tack theory-saving devices onto the initial theory, rather than questioning any fundamental features of it. Intractable exposed. problems is called What the with so-called minimal the standard system of deontic system already have been logic is in an even worse position than the minimal system, because it adds to the minimal system as an axiom 12 Then any standard system including a moral dilemma, 0(p^ & ~p ), is 13 o o simply inconsistent. For Op => Pp, hence Pp^ & ~Pp-j where p1 is pQ & ~pQ. ~p(p & ~p). Main marketed deontic logics are epicyclic variations on (i) standard deontic logic, being modal attempts to repair defects in earlier prototypes. They include (ii) reductions of systems of type (i) to alethic logics by introduction of a constant ’o’ read, for example, ’the world will be worse off’ or 'punishment ought to cr is the moral sanction or some bad state of affairs. follow’: is defined Then *0' EK-A^cr); i.e. A is obligatory iff the negation of A (non-fulfilment of A, it OA is said) necessitates the sanction. It is usually postulated: -0^. Such reductive frameworks, since they include minimal deontic logic, repeat its defects. (iii) relativistic systems which attempt axiomatise to circumstances, c', conditional of reads ’p is obligatory given, or permission and conditional obligation; thus ’0(p/c) * in notions underlying model being that of conditional the probability. These systems were designed chiefly to avoid the paradoxes of derived obligation to which systems of type really in (as and (i) probability (ii) theory) lead. to But the new operator, /, compensate for implicational connective in the modal framework assumed. so-called "logics of conditional e.g., van Fraassen, p.438 ’... obligation" still lack the is introduced of an adequate So, not surprisingly, these exclude moral dilemmas (thus, it would be more apt to say that we have here a logic of obligation that remains after obligational conflicts are resolved'). (iv) systems which conditional d, such include a modal conditional functor superior to the material­ as a Stalnaker-Lewis-style conditional, conditional deontic notions like those of (iii) can be defined. in terms of which But these systems, since modal, do not escape modal limitations and problems (see further RLR). (v) systems based on a logic of change or action. These systems turn out to be reducible to a combination of absolute systems with tense logics, i.e. 14 to multiply modal systems and so repeat the problems of modal systems. None of these modal types are satisfactory, none can be made so, they amount because of �6 What is at modal assumptions, like consistency requirements, that they all involve. fault is not merely types of systems of this sort, which confine the framework to a worlds possible defect enough, one thereby and but the write in conditions, consistency that is though sweeping consistency interpretation of deontic more logic, that ’principles of deontic logics are conditions of consistency for normative systems’.^ The consistency interpretation - which is deeply entrenched in much ethical theory (especially making no adequate allowance from Kant) deriving that for what is essential fundamentally mistaken, - is moral dilemmas and to morality, the familiar inconsistency of normative systems. Documenting moral dilemmas. Cases of moral dilemmas are, perhaps unfortunately, §3. both familiar and inevitable. perhaps not, and logic theory deontic (including is unfortunate It such for standard deontic approximations rough as utilitarianism) since they have ultimately to be dismissed as inadequate to account for the data. is also often extremely On the other dilemmas. awkward who those for such dilemmas hand, probity, and are a main source of moral change. A moral dilemma occurs when considerations, for instance cannot T situation in act (where such a of which shape cannot, or precisely as way afford real tests of moral worth and 16 is confronted with moral perhaps not directly inconsistent, factual the probably cannot, facts satisfy to principles, binding obtain); principles that is, one so as to or although be satisfied Then the situation T cannot but induce a moral fix. considerations. in moral (but not only when) one the in themselves enmeshed find It in the (probably) meet moral This can come about in two ways, either because of the logical limitations supposedly satisfied by T, in particular its consistency feature (that, whatever p, does not) or through certain contingent features if p holds in T then ~p of T. In what follows we shall concentrate on a major subclass of what are commonly accounted moral dilemmas, those of (paraconsistent) logical interest where what is given or derived are pairs such as OA and OB, WA and WB (i.e. A is wrong and so is B), or the like, where A and B are And incompatible. of particular logical importance are cases where deontically incompatible pairs such as Op and 0~p, Wp and W~p, or the like are guaranteed. The examples of moral dilemmas we consider provide only a small selection from the rich variety of such dilemmas, but hopefully they illustrate that variety. Several of the examples involve more than one moral principle: however some commonly- adopted moral principles generate dilemmas, of one sort or another, their own. pretty much on Consider for instance first principles of the following type: Situations involving the (indiscriminate) killing of numbers of (uninvolved) people should be avoided, should not happen, are wrong - principle at very first approximation of the form (p)(p satisfies condition C + Wp). Applying such a principle, a dilemma results �7 where and occurs a large number of people will be killed, if p obtains or if ~p obtains a large number of people will also be killed. War situations provide obvious examples, with the V(ietnam) dilemma typical. 17 For example, people have described the situation in Vietnam as follows (not that it really is this way): If the Americans withdraw from Vietnam, a large number of people If the Americans stay in (do not withdraw from) Vietnam, will be killed. number of people will withdraw from C. Hence under be killed. Vietnam', Hence, condition satisfies p where p is C 'the Americans withdraw from ~p and the principle both p and ~p are wrong, similar is the company commander's dilemma. of his troops will be killed. a large also i.e. satisfies condition 18 Wp and W~p. Rather If he invades the hamlet, a large number If he does not invade the hamlet the prisoners held Taking p as 'he invades the hamlet', p satisfies C and therein will be killed, etc. ~p satisfies C. Therefore, Wp & W~p. Both p and-not p are wrong; neither would occur The killing does not however have to be of large numbers in an acceptable situation. of people to induce moral dilemmas. variants on the commander's dilemma Favourite regularly wheeled out concern murdering a potential murderer to prevent him killing several other presented people and with the related constrained option killing of some choice situations smaller special person is where a group of people (or creatures) in order to avoid the certain killing of a larger or less favoured group 1Q of creatures. 7 The pacifist's (or differently seen, patriot's) dilemma, which Lemmon draws from on Sartre, concerns the proposition p^: Z goes to war. If Z does not go to war, he help his friends and fails to fellow countrymen when they are in desperate need. Thus ~p-j is wrong, W-p-j , on the principle that so failing to help one's friends and fellow countrymen is wrong. If Z goes to war, he will be involved in killing people he has nothing morally or otherwise against; whence Wp^, on the principle that things which involve such killing are wrong. Therefore again Wp^ and W~pp A different sort of example, again however involving the taking of life in one way or another is the abortion dilemma (as conceived by Anglicans, say). presented as a clash between conflicting rights. to life (i.e. (on that the one part of the should not foetus); have one's In one corner, there is the right in the other, the right to bodily integrity body used against one's detriment for someone else’s benefit) on the part of the mother. where a particular state of affairs is an instance of both so (~p) and will principles. Hence Wp. would deny the mother's right to bodily integrity. Whence adjoining, Wp & W~p. to one's A dilemma results performance of an abortion (p) would deny the foetal right to life. not doing This can be The But Hence W~p. �8 Not so far removed from these examples, particularly when omission is conflated with commission, are environmentally-oriented examples involving sacrifice (broadly construed), for resources. Suppose that we have a duly qualified principle to the effect that things which lead to the feeding of starving people should happen. example the is a dilemma of limited three cases:- First following Suppose also that we have limited resources, and have decided to distribute these as follows: If the coin comes down heads (p), then group A of starving people will be fed. But if the coin does not come down heads (~p) then group B of starving people will be fed. Plainly in an ideal situation both p and ~p will occur, that is the coin will come down heads and it will not come down heads, so that both groups of people will be fed. And if the moral principle cited is correctly applied then a case of Op and 0~p results. course minor Of involved leads to conclusions of the form adjustment of the principle W~p and W—p, whence Wp. For an analogous conservationist * s (or humanitarian * s) dilemma consider the case forest where it ought to happen that the is chopped down, the benefit of the for presently starving (or etc.), and it ought to happen that the forest is preserved by positive action and Op dilemma for the benefit of coming generations (or etc.). 0~p emerges the from of application distinct In this case the The principles. society dilemma, concerns the reform of primitive societies so that they primitive Consider the dilemma of a feminist environmentalist as conform to outside standards. regards Aboriginal On the women. other hand, suppression of women in Aboriginal society should be opposed; on the other hand major western interference in Aboriginal affairs should be avoided; but changing the position of women would constitute major interference. Different examples involving public institution) dilemma, which following:- On the one hand, the be restricted and the funds will principle being the concerns preposition p2: the University The Vice-Chancellor, or rather his advisor on logic, argues opposes the government. both separate principles are the Vice-Chancellor * s (or formulated Wp2, p2 is wrong, students and accordingly). On because the University’s learning in general will suffer the other hand, W~p2, ~p2 (the is wrong because #p# will strengthen the present iniquitous status quo (the principle being states that of affairs which strengthen the present status quo be philosophers, is iniquitous avoided). Therefore, conjoining Wp2 & W~p2» A signifi ant source of moral dilemmas, long observed by afforded by a relatively unrestricted institution of promising, and more generally by parallel institutional arrangements for entering perhaps worth distinguishing two classes of cases. situations, Z is under an obligation into (moral) Firstly, contracts. It is in purely contractual p, because of a contract or promise, and also �9 under an obligation q, because of a (likely different) contract, where q entails or In the second sort of case, Z has promised to do ~p, and hence commits one to ~p. But p also satisfies conditions C, 0~p. it emerges, and Z adheres to the principle (q)(Cq ->0q), whence Op. As an example of the second type consider Lemmon’s simple and dated example, adapted from Plato: A friend leaves me with his gun saying he will be back for it in the evening, and I promise to return it when he calls. He arrives in a distraught condition, demands his gun, and announces he is going to shoot his wife because she has been unfaithful. I ought to return the gun, since I promised to do so - a case of obligation. And yet I ought not to do so, since to do so would be to be indirectly responsible for a murder, and my moral principles are such that I regard this as wrong. I am in an extremely straightforward moral dilemma, evidently resolved by not returning the gun (62, p.148). According to Lemmon the outcome is both Op, where p is ’I return the gun’, and also The 0~p. namely, for first an inference concerning promise-keeping; every q, that q is a genuine promise entails Oq (for genuine promises follows engender obligations), from and p is a immediate genuine promise. inference of the following sort: for every q, The second follows that q really contributes to a murder implies Wq, and that p really contributes to a murder; and moreover, -> 0~q. using an for every q, Wq Even if this last principle is repudiated a dilemma remains: for both Op and Wp, i.e. I ought to return the gun and it is wrong that I return the gun. that the initial principle sustains the conclusion 0~q as well. (It may be In any case, it is not difficult to amend Lemmon’s example so that it does, or more important, so as to render the ensuing dilemma more convincing.) Other dilemmas recur in variant form with contracts and promises. For instance, limited resources dilemmas reappear as follows: we promise all our surplus to a group of poor only to have even poorer people turn up. where one's deception, employment calls or participation in for activities Similarly work and role dilemmas, which are the production of nuclear morally repugnant (such as or chemical weapons), may arise either contractually, e.g. one signed up for the position, or from duty, e.g. to provide for one's family. Some of the moral dilemmas we have made look more determinate than perhaps they should, or than they would be if the circumstances were filled out, or got filled out slightly differently. Then we should find that some of the dilemmas take the form of Lemmon's more complex class, namely those where rather than OA and 0~A, what one has is Prob OA and Prob 0~A, where Prob is the probability functor ’it is probable that'. Lemmon describes this class of "fully dilemmatic situations" in these terms: ’there �10 is some, but not conclusive, evidence that one ought to do something, and there is some, but not conclusive, evidence that one ought not to do that thing’ (pp.152-3). sort of dilemma is again drawn from Sartre: in A real-life working example of this brief, Sartre’s pupil is under some (sort of) obligation to stay with his mother, but he also probably under is an obligation, felt only ambiguously, to join the Free French in England (for a fuller description see Lemmon, pp.153-4). Lemmon suggests that this class of dilemmas is, and perhaps should stay beyond deontic formalisation: however the dilemmas are now within the scope of formalisation of a sort by multiple functor intensional logics of a type not different represent such principles as ’’ought implies can”.22 those already from needed to Though we have presented a wide variety of dilemmas, some of them in some detail - to the dispel that dilemmas common prejudice are a rare phenomena that can be safely set aside or that need not be taken seriously in an ethical theory - we have by no means exhausted the range and wealth of such dilemmas. the extent of analogues practical of these Nor have we indicated the dilemmas; fact is that similar dilemmas are frequent in economics, over budgeting, devaluation (we ought to devalue because ... and we ought not to devalue because ...), and so on. Nor have we brought out the political significance of the dilemmas; but the fact also is that some of the deeper problems in moral and political theory revolve around dilemmas. Familiar examples are issues of (permitting permissiveness interests possibly harming or licence individuals to pursue offending others) and freedom (restricting freedom as regards actions which infringe others * freedom), of paternalism and state authority versus civil liberties, and of democracy as against minority interests. A assortment varied accounts of the where sources of examples is source of moral dilemmas, for moral claims conflict, contractual obligations. Lemmon also in particular and promises, is attracted principles as those morally simplistic that they generally arise greatest (p.150). But he fact that one and the same conflicting directives requiring type, since principle may conflict with or duties, may conflict with one another principle can deliver such removing by an account of this latter underestimates the extent of conflict, and neglects the contract or in e.g. duty with principles, principles with while realising that it will not always suffice, principle important (e.g. double maximization happiness of the greatest number). As well a sufficient variety of tough examples helps remove the illusion that moral dilemmas can one and all be escaped. Admittedly, fortunately, there are ways around some of the dilemmas we have outlined, especially those we have borrowed. with perhaps further around the dilemmas), artifice in setting up the cases (to exclude But lateral moves some of the dilemmas stand: from them (as is further argued in �11 residue ’To insist that there is in every case a solution without is no escape. § 6) there false is the to moral facts’ p.132), Marcus (Barcan a theme she well illustrates with the abortion dilemma. §4. deontic Paraconsistent logic cannot be modal makes it modal treatment the relevant development. logic: An adequate deontic have to be paraconsistent. but will For a modal treatment to accommodate moral dilemmas - which are hard data impossible it makes as dilemmas treat dilemmas impossible to (§3)• A without proper catastrophic collapse (as shown in §1). The of principles standard deontic logic are, however, as added to readily various paraconsistent logics as they are to modal or classical logic - at least this (e.g. OP), in (da Costa negation-weakened namely logic and now distinguished style) logic paraconsistent and For Jaskowski-style discussive logics there are some difficulties; relevant logics. in styles of paraconsistent two of the main for is true particular, the given of rejection can principles, adjunction such logics satisfactorily include O-adjunction, OA & OB -> 0(A & B), which reflects adjunction in for the possible-worlds sentential framework It would seem not; acceptable worlds? logic offers no way of handling of Jaskowski-style the form 0(C & ~C) that result by O-adjunction. properly accommodate dilemmas, for dilemmas concerning obligation, where such as moral clearly principles difficulties; For these require impossible worlds Generally, Jaskowski-style logics are in deep trouble trying to where C & ~C holds. adjunctive full-strength moral dilemmas of logics Negation—weakened hold. they cannot deliver expected deontic also are interconnections, e.g. in the deontic ’’square of opposition”, presented shortly, which depends crucially on normal principles. negation In difficulties. Relevant brief, deontic the reasons types of paraconsistent logics logics can both avoid choosing relevant logics over for (the substantial sets these of other main reasons for which are given in OP) are accentuated still farther as soon as applications, such as to deontic logic, are Accordingly we will assume a relevant logical base, and a relevant semantical made. in what follows. framework, Even so, much of what we say and do can be adapted to other logical bases, e.g. negation-weakened or positive-plus bases. Often a combined syntactical-semantical is approach more fruitful and illuminating than either a syntactical-axiomatic or a semantical approach carried out separately. Each enriches and controls the other.23 Such is the case with relevant logical theory, logic. Even analogue of and so it is with relevant deontic logic, which builds on relevant so, a standard syntactical deontic standard superstructure, relevant logic. beginning logic we normally added can is easier. simply add For an to obtain exact a analogue relevant of the to classical logic, to (what supersedes CL) �12 For minimal relevant deontic logic, MD, the one-place functor 0 - of obligation, as usual read (e.g. ’It ought suitable some to be extending system that’ - is added (the case) B system basic the to some relevant logic of RLR conforms to the usual formation rule: where A is a wff so is OA. however are options at Functor, F read ’It is forbidden that’, is defined thus: ’It is permissible that’, is defined : PA =Df~FA. FA =Df 0~A (cf. OED); and P, read There this stage (as at e.g. stages), can morality, be argued, from directions several other F could oh introduced independently. But this leads to complications that are unnecessary. It 0 The other familiar functors of deontic logic, F and P, are defined in the usual way. ’It is wrong that’ or, less satisfactorily, Functor I). (e.g. from the rationality be of from the meaning or semantics of obligation, from the idea of commitment), that 0 satisfies at least the following requirements:[RM] A -> B -> OA -> OB, i.e. where A + B is a theorem so is OA -> OB. That is to say, where A entails B is provable so is OA entails OB, obligation transmits over provable entailment. Hence the claim that this principle (R7 of RLR II) is a transmission principle. [K] OA & OB regards the i.e. -> 0(A & B), conjunction; or, a conjunction of obligations entails obligation as to adjunction (principle G of RLR II). These two important it put 25 principles, entailment and adjunction, make 0 a a little differently 0 is closed which ensure that 0 is closed under under provable systemic functor (in the sense of RLR II), and ensure that it has a relational (i.e. first order) semantical analysis. The postulates which correspondingly minimally characterise deontic functions F and P now follow by relevant logic upon applying the definitions. They are as follows:For wrongness: A For permissibility : With the A + B -*> functor further B —f> FByFA Q, FA & FB P(A v BH, PAv PA + PB defined F(A v B) QA =Df ~0A, a reduced pb deontic square of opposition follows: 0Ax ...............FA PA^ .............. .QA The opposites are dotted peripheral opposed, as modally, relations of the modal in the way the solid lines show. But the square are bound to be the lost given the �13 the modal (on fact of deontic dilemmas square Prior 62 p.220). see is worth It observing, however, that the peripheral relations can be reinstated through adoption of the so-called consistency scheme OA -> ~FA, i.e. OA + ~0~A; [D] and that the relevant deontic logic that results still excludes the rubbish brought in along deontic standard necessary truths, Nordamericano of that course not (though paradoxes, essentially because paradoxical etc.), deontic obligatoriness the of spread principles are not whereas triviality), incorporate dilemmas. the as degenerate dilemma-permitting The problem with deontic logics which include [D] also cannot they well as logic, Antipodean form we are advocating. is deontic In short, relevant theory can deliver a clean-cut, clean-living, dilemma- available. free (e.g. logic include relevant moral dilemmas systems without without can [D] inconsistency consistently These various logical claims, as to the modal rubbish that is not brought along, can all be made good by application of the semantical theory. The semantics shows what does not hold, as well as further explaining why the principles that hold do. Semantics for MD result upon adding to modellings for relevant logic a two-place relation S, on worlds, which is subject to the following condition W. b and Sbc then Sac, Where a i.e. where world a precedes b (indeed canonically a is contained in b) and world c is accepted vis-a-vis b then c is accepted vis-a-vis a. Given that a is a subworld of b this is evident enough. Distinctive features of the underlying semantical modellings for relevant logic - consisting of structures of the form <T, K, 0, R, *, be sufficiently and, well-known any in are case, explained v> - should elsewhere. These structures differ from the best of those for modal logics, the nonnormal structures <T, K, N, R, v> for the Lewis systems S2 and S3, in the following ways:- The class K of worlds, to which the factual (base) world T belongs, is expanded to include a much more comprehensive class of inconsistent and incomplete worlds; the class N of normal worlds K is in adjusted theorems hold; relation R, to a three-place the class to v(p, sentential a) relation = parameter 1) regular worlds, i.e. worlds; on then and wff. I(A, b) = 1, where all on is subject to a constraint where I is the so that Specifically, where a < b and p holds in a p holds in b, p. Conditions v for every world a and b modelling structures are hereditariness condition extends to all wff; i.e. in symbols, where a 1 then those used in modelling implication, is relaxed from a two-place inclusion of worlds is duly reflected. (written 0 of in K and every such that this b & I(A, a) = interpretation function which extends v to all Inclusion, <, can be added as an extra component of the model structures, but in fact it can be defined thus: a < b =Df (Px 0)Rxab. Finally relevant modellings �14 add to modal modellings a new function, *, in terms of which negation is evaluated, 27 which facilitates the inclusion of inconsistent and incomplete worlds. same role and interpretation as in standard relation S has the The semantical It is employed in the semantical evaluation of obligation functor 0, deontic theory. which is given by the following rule: I(0a, a) = 1 iff, for every world b such that Sab, I(A, b) = 1, i.e. OA holds at world a iff, for each world b accepted vis-avis a, A holds at b.28 The rule is a world relativisation of the idea that what is obligatory is what holds in all accepted worlds. (morally) It is thus an evident adaption of Leibnitzian prescriptions, given the linkages between obligation or moral binding and moral "musts” or imperatives, on the one side, and morally possible and or acceptable accepted worlds, the on other. The for motivation unrelativised connections can be forged at base world T; for there A is (morally) required, I(0A, T) = 1, iff for every b for which Mb I(A, b) = 1 (where Mb =Df STb), i.e. That is, what is required is iff A holds in every (morally) accepted world. what holds in all accepted or received worlds. Other construals of the semantical apparatus are of course open. tempting ideal, temptation (a succumbed to initially) regard the accepted worlds as and Sab as ’b is ideal as seen from c’. to read Mb as 'b is ideal’ i.e. to It is a little But that is like requiring supererogation in cases where the meeting of commitments or obligations is enough: the worlds do not need to be that good but simply to pass, to meet required standards. is worlds. acceptable through A perhaps easier construal than by way of accepted worlds construal That is alright provided the term ’’acceptable” is deployed, as it often is, nonevaluatively : for it is important in the semantical assessment to prescriptions for be able to make an evaluative step—down, to give meaning evaluative expressions nonevaluative terms. in Naturally this does not imply that evaluative notions are naturalistically eliminated, any more than familiar terms, extensional reductions, semantical extensional analysis of intensional implies that intensionality is removed: both are merely pushed down into the not-further-explained apparatus of worlds. Obligation is construed by way of what goes on in acceptable or accepted worlds, not what happens in permissible or permitted directly with the construal of permissibility. one another, but in worlds, because this latter Given modal muddles the two reduce to the more subtle relevant setting star shift is involved in the transfer from accepted to permitted worlds. The (derived) semantical rule for P is this: KPA, a) = ties 1 iff for some b such that Uab I(A, b) = 1, where Uab . b * Sa �15 at base Thus, A is permissible, world T, i.e. I(PA, = 1) iff A holds at some 1, permitted world b; what is permissible is worldwise what is somewhere permitted. modal equation of relations U and S further axioms, deontic the (where namely if Sab (in effect, condition then Sa ) b * (Pb)Sab The corresponds to e.g. guaranteed, is modally by ~0(P & ~p)) by the scheme OA ^PA. Now modal-strength deontic logics typically do include an axiom scheme of the form [D’J OA -> ~PA, i.e. from (alethic) is obligatory is not that permissible, under modal is, Indeed this used to be considered what distinguished deontic ~0~A. assumptions, OA logics what modal on logics the one side, which include a stronger principle analogous to OA -*■ A, and epistemic logics on the other, which were weaker in that [D’J failed. However [D’J, like [D], is deontically incorrect because it rules out consistent inclusion of moral dilemmas; or, to turn matters around, cases where OA & 0~A, [D’]» which or OA & FA, hold counterexample [D]. may seem a little more plausible transform of it on usual deontic definitions. than Similarly these cases refute [D], but is a definitional For what is obligatory is not ipso facto permissible where the obligatory item is also wrong, as in dilemmatic cases. To distance relevant deontic logic from modal analogues, while at the same time demonstrating that relevant theory can encompass moral dilemmas unproblematically , we next assume that some moral dilemmas hold, that is that for some p, both Op and Fp. Since however propositional quantifiers much complicate the semantical apparatus we shall introduce constants into the syntax, and let p^ be the first constant for which a dilemma ensues. That is, a new axiom, extending the logic, is [DD] 0p1 & Fpp i.e. p1 is dilemmatic.3° The modelling condition for [DD], is wd. For each a in 0, for some world x, Sax and v(ppx) = 1= v(ppX ). * This condition, which does not involve T, does not impose nonclassical conditions on normal worlds. Accordingly [DD] is only a weakly paraconsistent requirement; it does not imply that inconsistency protrudes into the factual or regular worlds. Indeed one advantage of the semantics is that it enable proof that dilemmatic judgements can be included without inconsistency. By contrast, modal theories cannot include even one half of [DD] do) without automatically excluding dilemmatic judgements. consideration has a thesis 0p2 for some (either will Suppose the logic under Then for every x in 0 there is some y such that Sxy with p2 set to hold at y. But modally this is enough to guarantee that [D] holds materially, More explicitly, so ~(0A & 0~A) generally, suppose otherwise that in i.e. there can be no such dilemmas. some model the material form of [D] �failed; I(OA, then = T) 1 = I(A~O, T), which impossibility at y since I(A, y) = 1 i I(A, y). syntactical problems earlier in 1). even for Although [DD] implies Op^, very weak obligatory is conjured from the fact some for STy yields y This is a semantical analogue of the deontic logics (considered type of modal it does not say, nor does it follow, that OT for any Such modal stupidity as that every necessary and every tautology T (e.g. C v ~C). truth is since automatically removed that relevant in the relevant wash. can be This theory removes such paradoxes as p1 from which 0(A v ~A) would follow modally by 0—distribution (i.e. A v ~A, Again the [RM]). semantics can be applied to establish the point in proper detail. primitive principles of minimal relevant logic are open to challenge, Both the and [K] * Jennings has been disputed by Schotch (in Jennings and 81). The main Schotch- arguments against [K] — which induces what they call ’paradoxes of complete * aggregation essentially turn — automatically avoided on modal deontic by relevant and assumptions, Their theory. accordingly are (p.152, also main point p.154) is that [K] obliterates the distinction between [D] (i.e. Op ~0~p) and [Con] ~0 , i.e. in effect ~0(r & ~r). Their argument depends on construing implication in [D] as material-implication and on strict replacement. ~0~p iff ~(0p & 0~p), i.e. iff ~0(p & ~p) using [K] Then Op and its provable converse, i.e. iff ~0(r & ~r) using p & ~p - . r & ~r and strict According to the relevant approach the trouble is not with [K] but with replacement. the modal assumptions, which are independently objectionable (see 1). Their further argument begins from the premiss that ’we should certainly want to include among our deontic principles the law of moral consistency [Con] across cuts all different things. moral theories’ (pp.153-6). The ... because that principle premiss appears to conflate What cuts across all moral theories is the theme that some things, such as a sufficiently evil state of affairs, are not obligatory, whence ~0s. does cut across all theories is the assumption that there are no moral dilemmas of the form 0(A & ~A), which is what [Con], with not just that there What are theories like properly defined, would imply. those of Lemmon and Sartre It is which include contradictory obligations; it is also that some theorists would want to insist that there is something logically wrong with principles like [Con], e.g. that it doesn’t make sense to talk of the nonobligatoriness of absurdity. Schotch and Jennings do contend that we should allow for moral conflict of the form OA & OB where A and B are inconsistent. their assumptions there [K] stops rejection of are moral dilemmas that yielding Since then B -> ~A, of the 0(A & -A). it follows that on form OA & 0~A. Yet as they Certainly only themselves have reported, the consensus view is that there are (in the end) no dilemmas of the form �OA & O~A: insofar, all theories’, ’cuts across then, rejection of dilemmas of the form 0(A & ~[~]A) so, near enough, does rejection of those of the form OA & 0~A. What certainly does not emerge is that there can [K]. The be no deontic logic which takes as a primitive law the principle be can that best if done, subscribe to [K], we is to formalise ethical theories - namely those which do not allow moral certain particular conflicts (p. 156). logics provide decisive counterexamples to this contention. Relevant deontic They can take [K] as primitive: they allow for moral conflict; but they do so by allowing, like Lemmon, for moral inconsistency.31 disconcerting More from flowing the than fundamental difficulties deriving principles, transmission [K] from are allegedly those difficulties include which well-advertised paradoxes of deontic logic. § 5. Resultant on impact other relevant paraconsistent shift. and puzzles of paradoxes deontic theory of the Often cleaning up one logical puzzle in due technical detail has a beneficial effect on surrounding puzzles and on associated problems in the area. Light is cast on, and So it turns out also in the case of moral dilemmas. Among them sometimes solutions are delivered for, a number of other linked problems. are the following puzzles generated by theorems of (relevant) deontic logic. are, the ’’paradoxes of commitment”. Where material implciation => is in first place, defined as usual, e.g. T1. There ~A v ~B, it is a theorem that A ° B 0(B => A), whence if OA then 0(B 25 A), OA sometimes read: A if is then obligatory anything one commits to A, or: ’Doing anything commits us to doing what is obligatory’; T2. FA OCA => B), if 0~A then 0(A = B), sometimes read: if A is forbidden then doing A commits one to doing anything at all, or: ’Doing what is not permitted commits us to doing anything whatever’ readings are proceed from Prior from there interpretation of paradoxes symbols, the The claims read off are paradoxical. 62, p.224). to little justification - reading ’0(A commits one to doing B’. the in and (the quoted in logic this case B)’ as depends, always, depends crucially on - But to on the what has as a commitment relation, e.g. as ’doing A Such a reading which presupposes that material implication is a satisfactory conditional can in no way be sustained (see RLR), and that is the end of the problem. that A then paradoxical guises; and it If, ought to for example, T1 be features disappear. these commitment the case is simply read: if it ought to be the case that either not B or A, then the alleged However puzzles have a tendency to reappear in new puzzles are no exception. Even with conditional �18 terms of obligation applied to a properly defined in obligation conditional, the puzzles in reemerge new forms, example, for genuine (relevant) in is what called ’’Ross’s paradox”, and in related transmission problems. It has been claimed that the principle, OA -> 0(A v B), yielding if OA then 0(A v B) T3. is which T1, to equivalent is Ross paradox principle), - paradoxical to do either A or B, it may be More generally, given OA, obligatory to read a letter but not to read or burn it. there is an obligation example, for because, where the content of B may be totally do to established. (The comment goes beyond what T3 supplies, but that is not material). the in circumstance which obligation the to is set inappropriate A or A similar objection is made to the analogous permissibility principle PA ■> P(A v B), T4. Ross’s paradox, on the alleged grounds that there are examples where A is permissible but A For example, be. not the following it is permissible that to post a takes based on some one application of T4 is said to the paradoxical: letter false proposition the distance implies that it is permissible to post a The assumption that there is some sort of paradox here is letter or kill one’s aunt. however B may the towards that the permissibility of of permissibility killing the consequent one’s The aunt. proposition itself seems to be based on an application, never articulated and quite inadmissible, of Disjunctive Syllogism, distribution, P(~A &. A For PB. (A v b) ■+ B, and what results from P- it may certainly be permissible not to post However it is assuming more than standard deontic logics will grant to the letter. go on ) ~A & to the permissibility of not posting the letter and letter or killing disjunction. one’s aunt, especially given the also either derivation of posting the latter the Still going on remains tempting (and would presumably be warranted by a Lukasiewicz deontic logic analogous to his 4-valued modal logic). But so going on is to no avail in a duly relevant setting, where Disjunctive Syllogism fails: there is no admissible route here to the permissibility of killing aunt, one’s however desirable the act might otherwise be. main The transmission conditional obligation, strict implication, as problems in found also modally derived. an adequate deontic logic are, like those of They come from reliance on material or representation of implication. The worst manifestation of this is that already discussed, deontic trivialisation leading from Op^ and 0~p.| to OB, for any B, in virtue of the provability of p^ & ~p^ => B. But there are variety of lesser manifestations of the same underlying problem, of which the following example (adapted from recent discussion) is just one sort: p4. We have an obligation to feed the starving poor D. There exist starving poor. Therefore, since starving poor, it ought to be by O-transmission, the case it ought that we meet our obligation to feed the to be that there exist starving poor, a �19 that is far from obviously true. deontic logic, for the simple reason presupposition relation, conclusion of transmission problems of modal the that the cannot p4 Such analyses do not entailment. an to rather or implication, (material-) upgraded be plague relevant The many systems all enamate from excessive O-distribution on basis of implications will not them, support in the as following transmission principles typical of orthodox deontic logics, all of which should be rejected: OCA D B) D. OA 3 OB A D B -> OA 3 OB A => B =>. OA => OB. With their rejection a thorny tangle of modally-derived paradoxes is also rejected. There appears however to be an immense temptation to try to impose excessively strong transmission principles; and the same phenomenon to be seen at work in modal contexts can also be observed when a proper entailment is introduced.3^ This occurs, particular, in attempts in to ’’normalise” [RM], to strengthen it a from rule connection to an entailment, for instance, to (the characteristic S3 form) [OT] A + B +. OA + OB; it occurs with analogous changes thereon, and e.g. A-> B. PA PB and A FB + FA, as well with as imported forms of these principles, e.g. OA & (A and (A -> B) & FB As an example of the FA. B B) OB type of puzzles that [OT] produces consider p5. Grannie killed the vicar. Grannie repented for having killed the vicar The problem with putative entailments such as p5 is that, while we are ordinarily (with the context duly flashed out) inclined to agree that Grannie ought to repent, we don’t want to agree to have killed the vicar. that Grannie ought The problem turns essentially however on the availability of [OT] in place of [RM], for p5 is not a provable entailment of the underlying logical theory (and there is little case for it one), trying to make sc [RM] does not apply to p5, in contrast with awkwardness [OT] appears to require, of having somehow entailment, is thereby straightforwardly avoided.33 Most the of paradoxes falling paradoxes and Robber paradoxes can be paradoxes and usual forms of these resolution. one’s According helping a man under such to deny descriptions as similarly resolved or avoided. variations upon [OT]. The is that p5 Good Samaritan an The original them certainly succumb to such to the Robber’s paradox if robbing a man is forbidden then The Good Samaritan whom one has robbed is also forbidden. paradox is a further turn on this paradox: not only the robber’s helping a man he has robbed is wrong, so is someone else’s, a good Samaritan’s, helping the robbed man (see Prior 58). - be It is undoubtedly paradoxical that it should - especially as a matter of logic wrong to help a man who has been robbed: but do any fundamental deontic �20 principles commit us to such a thing, for appropriate substitutions on variables? No, These puzzles all take the following form: B, which describes something they do not. admittedly wrong, gets in or implied as part of the description of something larger, A, arising as a result of the situation in B; however A is not wrong but perhaps even Nothing required. theory; and in none of shows this the however that A B literature can examples in the the provable in is it There be. logical is another important feature, commonly neglected however, which is that A does not assert B. If it did, then A, since amounting to A & B, would appear to be wrong also, as B is. This points to a difficulty also for the usual assumption that A entails B; for then A (certainly modally) coentails A & B, whence the wrongness of A coincides with that of A & B, the wrongness of which would seem to be guaranteed by B. If however A only involves B in a weaker sense, [OT] is exonerated.3^ The paradoxes can be pushed another way, to contest this data, and bear against systems as minimal as MD. For MD yields theorems like the following: T5. FB T6. 0( F(A & B), whence if FB then F(A & B). OB, whence if 0(A & B) then OB. &B) theses, Such minimal it is now suggested, are paradoxical in the same way as the Robber. This is not so: only gross confusion of decidedly distinct syntactical forms - a practice formalisation can unfortunately encourage - could support such a suggestion. If it is wrong to rob a man then it is wrong to rob him and help him;35 but it is not thereby wrong to help him, indeed to help him who has been robbed. But the relative and the tense shift are both important; and the whole relative clause in no way reduces to a conjunction conjoining robbing the man. The positivistic objection that the paradoxes of deontic logic show that there is really no ’’logic of norms” has come even from a modern founder of deontic logic, von Wright. This he now contends that There is no such thing as an "entailment” between a norm Op and a norm 0(p q) - and Ross’s paradox makes us aware of the absurdity of talking as though it existed. ... Ross was right when he offered his paradox as a proof that, properly understood, there could not be such a thing as a logic of norms (82, p.15, rearranged, emphasis suggested in text). And he ’essentially (p.14). (also also But mistakenly) of variations given that one regards and the von Wright contains such normative tautologies Op are inevitable. Thus while ’’paradoxes’* the same, viz. wants also the of deontic so-called to supply logic as Ross’s Paradox’ a deontic logic, which 0(p q), some subtle and dubious distinctions Op & ~0(p q) is normatively inconsistent, inconsistent; while Op can be thus said to ’’normatively entail” 0(p q) it is not it does not; and while Op comes rational commitment to Op, it does not carry logical commitment to �it. the Unlike said are connections associated to and entailment (p.15). no paradoxes induce other But normative these relations, what is said go to for normative entailment can be said as well as regards entailment, that one (e.g. a law giver) is Op adopts who rationally to 0(p q) going on to endorse the entailment of 0(p q) by Op. for a oitrary addition away there is no puzzle in associations are cleared once mistaken modal q. Indeed committed The ’’paradoxes” of deontic logic are not a reflection of the illusory notion of a logic of norms but rather a product of a modal logic of norm. However von Wright has other significant reasons for insisting that (in a sense) ’norms have no logic or that normative discourse is ’’alogical”’ from noncognitivism, that symbolising norms, formulas’, ’prescriptive standard a on One derives (p.4). interpretation deontic ’do not express true and false propositions. It makes no sense to speak of relations of contradiction or entailment between formulas when thus interpreted ’ hold nontruthvalued regards as semantical This is not so: (p.4). theory relevant as such discourse, for sketched logical relations such as inconsistency logic deontic carries no commitment to the position that normative discourse is truthvalued. 0 interpreted In imperatives. fact ineradicable The values 1 and by way of holding are not intended to be tied to truth and falsity, except at the factual world T (see RLR1); and that exception is readily removed. judgements, instead normative received, logic the both (the point requirements e.g. Otherwise the etc.). adjustments the and of the form Fp, semantical can be said to be in theory its ’’semantical” is developed, For force (or is as before. With such minor theory conform to noncognitivist to meet von Wright’s argument, in Morscher, pp.97-8). Von Wright’s other reason for coming out against a logic of norms is but grist It is that ’there cannot be a logic of norms because a for the paraconsistent nill. could enjoin contradictory legislator (at ’’relative least serves" Morscher, ...) dilemmas. it but p.98). to the is normal not states of affairs. This might be irrational purpose which the institution of giving orders logically excluded, it is not alogical’ (cited in That is, a legislator can set up (usually unintentionally) deontic This is certainly not triviality, by modal-strength indictment, not of deontic deontic logic, It impossible. but logics. of a is simply excluded, Once again the on criticism certain modally-dominated pain of is an approach to it.36 §6. Upsetting the moral consensus: unrealisable obligations, and inevitable wrongs. The theme that there are moral dilemmas, like those cited, which stand, which do not dissolve upon rational reflection, philosophers, 3? and apparently runs agains the consensus among moral certainly upsets dominant positions in ethical theory, notably �22 broadly Kantian positions (built into much contemporary British moral philosophy) and utilitarian positions (which pervade Anglo-American and theory value thinking, especially outside narrowly philosophical circles). Kantian positions suppose that morality is above all a rational procedure of a certain sort (which we tentatively grant), and that rationality requires consistency. Or put differently, but for instance, must be consistent. Thus what is obligatory, equivalent given modal assumptions, ought implies can, OA -> OA, for every A and some Wherever an agent appears to be in a moral dilemma suitable possibility functor 0. this is a matter of appearance only, a moral illusion which will (and must) vanish on further rational reflection.^ This Kantian assumption should be rejected: moral dilemmas are part of the data and no illusion, and no amount of reflection need budge them. By insistence upon consistency requirements, and through failure, consequently, to recognise intractable moral dilemmas, deontological theories have been forced to jump through a variety of different hoops and to weaken considerably their positions. In particular, temporary and moral firm principles are almost invariably weakened to something much more provisional. is experience While important, some revisability of principles in the light of such wholesale weakening of principles is decidedly There is a point then in trying to undesirable, on both logical and moral grounds. expose some of the tangled assumptions on which the weakening is based, and to loosen their grip. The assumptions involved on a Kantian approach include these: H1. Moral principles - in those concerning justice, particular more fairness and the basic principles of obligation, such as like - are to be explained at bottom as principles of rationality, or rational behaviour for persons. H2. Rationality is a matter of consistency; certainly it implies it. H3. Consistency reduces to, or can be accounted for, through possibility. Put together these assumptions yield the theme H4. What is obligatory must be possible - ought-implies-can , for short. So if that gives, so do some of the assumptions. but on moral dilemmas, It does give, not just because of So also then independent grounds. should the assumptions give; and they fail not just on the grounds that they lead to themes like H4. The deeper trouble is that they are based on a super-modal view of things which combines modal assumptions with rational strong The assumptions. combination is important, for once the modal assumptions are rejected, it becomes fairly transparent that the rationality assumptions, whatever their merit, cannot such things as moral framework or system or course of action. rational case, systems: removing much more modal is required assumptions - a than rationality main present uniquely determine Rather there are rival for uniqueness. exercise - In any destroys such �rationality route to ought-implies-can. Finally consistency is neither necessary nor That it is not sufficient is indicated by a variety of sufficient for rationality. consistent worlds which do not conform to minimal rationality requirements. is converse relevant refuted which conform inconsistent worlds by meet rationality requirements (see further RLR and OP). H3 fails, paradoxes induces ~0A -> ~(A ° B), generally is not just that the Modality removed. of paradoxes with entailment, e.g. anything all. from isolated transmitted to are inconsistent is arguments Not only H2 (as a necessary assumptions parallelling proposition impossible inconsistency It modal when consistency of an fails, also is not 40 this indiscriminate way. However to rationality to sufficient reason and the like), and by dialethic theories which standards (e.g. condition) The more impossibility in collapse; ought-implies-can at there are distinct from those supplied by moral dilemmas. counterexamples to the theme, The counterexamples concern obligations (or oughts) which are impossible, in some sense, to realise, counterexamples Op & ~0p) But wrongdoings. most the of possibility Derivatively then (substituting ~p for unrealisable obligations. that wrongs are inescapable, there are many determinates of possibility examples than concern also mere involve, in their logical possibility necessitated (and necessity), and less anemic notions of correspondingly broader notions of original (and p in setting, necessity than a narrow logical necessity). perhaps strained, adaption, and, in any case, they serve to undermine the point and Nonetheless they sometimes admit of, force of the ought-implies-can dictum (which is to link obligation to freedom to do otherwise), and These examples all arise nature, circumstances, its effective use against moral dilemmas. seriously weaken thereby because agents are constrained in one way or another - by fate, the Gods, their past actions - but are not thereby released from their obligations or exonerated from wrong-doing. Consider first very down-to-earth types of counterexample to ought-implies-can, before turning to more high-flown but not altogether dissimilar examples from our barbaric past. ’Suppose that I say "I ought to go and see him, but I can’t because I don’t know where he is”. There need be nothing inconsistent in such a remark; and, yet there would be if "ought” always implied ’’can'” (Hare 63, p.52). same with situation ”’I where ought I've to return driven the this car I’ve car so far borrowed, away that returning it in time to keep a promise’ (Thomason, p.175). but I It is much the can’t”, there is said no chance in a of my Likewise the claim of the person who cannot swim that she ought to rescue the child caught in the current but can't. One traditionally important class of counterexamples derives from the Catholic doctrine of perplexity secundum quid.^ Donegan, in defending what he calls 'the 24 �Hebrew-Christian tradition’, contends that once one has sinned one May be faced with situations from which one cannot escape without further wrong-doing (77, p.152). That ♦ is, one may be so placed (through one’s own fault) that one ought not to perform any of the available actions though one cannot do otherwise. So it is necessary that one act in a way that is forbidden. Protestant thinkers, particular Luther, appear to have considered the human race involved in one grand secundum quid on account of original sin. ’God punished justly sinners who not could otherwise do Luther believed that than sin’ that God and ’provided men with a law they were unable to keep and then righteously damned them for failing to keep it’. 242 The Calvinists also were committed - but through their doctrine of predestination predestined to sin, unpalatable conclusion - to rather they cannot but by suggesting Because conclusions. similar humans are However Calvin attempted to escape this sin. that in some suitable sense are not sinners compelled, that it is somehow possible for them to do otherwise than they do. J Given however the theme of predestination this attempt to escape looks unconvincing. Any stronger determinism that does not also obliterate morality is in a similar Creatures will have obligations which they cannot fulfil because they predicament. are determined and will to do otherwise, sometimes be bound to do wrong. Plainly where this becomes a general and automatic matter, a serious erosion of moral notions such as responsibility, normally linked to obligation, is bound to set in. However isolated cases analogous to those of determinism can occur without such erosion of moral notions (as indeed with moral dilemmas themselves). rigidifying personality and ossifying character are of this gets older Cases of A person as she sort. may build up a personality so rigid that she cannot escape from it. At some point it becomes impossible (at least psychologically) for her to act other than she does, yet on some occasions she ought not to act in the way she does. outcome resembles that with original sin though the route taken Yet even if we grant that the person ought not to have got still we are entitled to our moral judgements; modern morality * The is very different. into such a position, as Pigden puts it, ’an enlightened can allow such violations of ought-implies-can. Classical Greek morality certainly seems to have allowed for such violations. In Homeric ethics a man could be blamed for failings he could not avoid, unavoidable wrong-doing. and so for Subsequently it was taken for granted that impossible moral requirements could be placed upon a hero, yet he could be blamed for failing to meet them. Thus the situation of Agamemnon and of Oedipus, both despite their struggles, despite their awareness of their predicaments and their anguish, were bound, indeed, fated, to act wrongly, and were duly blamed for their wrong-doing. 25 �There have been various attempts to salvage the ought-implies-can theme, through a residual Kantianism. presupposes-can Thus Hare proposes, but does not really work out, an ought- a with theme weaker relation presupposition logical replacing implication (53, p.54); and both Barcan Marcus and Morscher suggest a model theoretic connection: essentially that for OA to hold true A must be satisfiable in some world, and so, modally, A is consistent. But within a relevant setting, the satisfiability is hardly a requirement and does not ensure consistency. constraint, Once again, consistency is only obtained at the cost of other more important connections, such as Nor does Hare’s comparison with presupposition (on p.54) succeed. O-adjunction. the analogy such situations the worked implies-can. as practical question those and dilemmas moral But (pace Hare, p.55) as to what to do not would counterexamples affording If arise in ought- to the question most certainly does arise in many cases. §7. Resolving proceed, in moral any dilemmas, dilemma so far situation be. as can easily are Recipes for what provided, enough decidedly poor recipes have been much canvassed in the literature. how to to, indeed several Among these are deontic ranking recipes, which would have us impose some type of priority ordering on deontic principles, so that consistency is maintained and in every situation there is a dominant rule; defeasibility recipes, which would have us weaken all deontic rules to merely prima facie or other-things-being—equal principles and operate, when things look would going like have wrong, utilitarian by and assessment; pure-chance recipes, which situationally but arbitrarily by such methods as us determine outcomes coin toss. Such recipes fail to meet important conditions of adequacy upon any account of the way resolution is effected, if and when it can be, namely: A1. The account should sufficiently resemble what rational choosers do when they find themselves in a moral dilemma. Many human choosers have moral principles, have not rigorously ordered in such which, as against ranking recipes, a way as to exclude dilemma they situations, and which, as against thorough-going defeasibility recipes, they are not prepared to give Thus, in addition, away or modify when they encounter snags. A2. The principles induce which moral dilemmas are not generally abandoned or qualified, but very often stand. Naturally sometimes moral dilemmas, especially development and revision of principles. if they recur, do lead to moral But the logic of dilemma situations does not force changes or adjustment and none may be made; and typically none will be made, where dilemmas are resolved, resolve dilemmas which they may not be. The assumption that we must is probably a hangover from consistency assumptions, that deontic inconsistency must be removed - whereas all we have to do is act, or do nothing, in 26 �the face of them. Part of what is wrong with the idea of a predetermined ordering of principles, the conflict, and also the they remove is that as with utilitarianism procedures, felt tension, and often anguish, that goes with it. Even if the appeal to priority succeed in some cases, it does not in fact work, and 45 general. For with Lemmon’s complex dilemmas where ordering of principles does not could succeed, in uncertainties enter be can there preassigned no solution moral to the in dilemma virtue of higher-order principles or a given ordering of one’s duties and obligations and the like, because part of the very dilemma is just one’s uncertainty as to one’s actual situation (p.153). In any event dilemmas do not go away as they should if the conflicting obligations were merely prima facie. Very often someone in a moral dilemma is in a fix and feels it^^; and doesn’t say ”My God there isn’t a problem, I must simply look up the book principles are ranked and what’s to be done’, to see how these not having been so prepared. in which we, as it were, merely .... dilemmas in which we morally prepared, have to look up the solution in our private ethical code, are rare ... and in case any of little practical Of interest. are those importance greater dilemmas in this class where some decision of a moral character is required Our predicament is here so described that, whatever we do, even if we do ... nothing at that might mean), we are doing all (whatever something which we ought not to do, and so can be called upon to justify either our activity or our inactivity (Lemmon, p.151). The usual deontological positions, which deontic weaken principles to provisional or prima facie principles to avoid problems with dilemmas, also play into utilitarian hands. reflecting things that of in often is which only are to act overriding requirement character utilitarians want For the for such to represent most a way disguised (a sc part as to of obligation statements concerning distributed, e.g. are the taken coherent way as derivative; net utilities position from would their own the deontic make this Deontic principles such as reduce somehow distributed type of action which tends to maximize utility. accounts typically rule out moral dilemmas: both apart or to tend complex to be an action is obligatory when it maximizes (expected) utility and it is of a recognised cannot they ar . - principles as deontic maximize utility, maximisation principle so only for the most part also). those all maximise utility, and indeed 27 Such reductive for example, an action and its opposite if an action increases utility then its �opposite characteristically diminishes it. if all moral injunctions More generally, answer back ultimately to just one standard, maximum utility, then there can be no real conflict (but etc.). for these It is apparent conflict through failure to calculate correctly, sorts of reasons that the considerable data now accumulated regarding moral try to explain away, to utilitarians deny that there can be So they are in the awkward position of having to dispute, dilemmas. genuine moral and only dilemmas. But how, when stuck in moral dilemmas, do we proceed to reach a decision? For a 47 decision is called for: those in dilemma situations still often have to act. The intuitive procedure in such dilemma situations is not difficult to grasp. terminology is regularly employed, and is instructive. to those the in - dilemmas weighed assessed, are The same Alternatives - outcomes open up, the balance. put in The familiar scales picture, with the scale sensitive to evaluative weights, is helpful - except it that can suggest, weighed against another, whereas there may be as with of justice where one thing is two competing principles or just that there are several. scales the options, In the light of such a weighing up of alternatives, those in dilemmas then determine what they should do, what is best, or satisfactory, ’If ... we are to act here in good faith,we shall recognise in the circumstances . that the dilemma is what it is and make the best decision we can * There is an attempt to then intuitive apply (Lemmon 62, p.151). methods, decision consist which in assessing and weighing the alternative outcomes open, and maximizing or satisizing on these This outcomes. already very looks consequentialist decision theory, which is what, a like preanalytic account of in a qualified way, we shall reach It is in a qualified way for several reasons; not only may no best (or even towards. sufficiently good) outcome be determinable - there is nothing approaching a decision procedure here - but the further decision theory methods apply within moral dilemmas, so they supply, at best, a second best resolution, a first best result requiring removal of moral dilemma constraints and so being ruled out. Those in dilemma unworkable (and situations usually do not resort to anything as mostly arbitrary and often ineffective) utilitarian as complex and assessment procedures. Nor do they surrender to pure chance procedures. A3. The account should not give way to irrationalism, but should adhere to rational decision procedures, which are not necessarily, however, effective. This requirement rules out pure chance methods, which are only appropriate where it is a matter of indifference which way the decision, if any, Even where some resort to methods can give a worse outcome than might be obtained. tie-breaking devices is appropriate, that may dilemma, but rather to some component of the not be situation. Otherwise such goes. to the final Envisage, outcome of a for instance, a decision-tree for an issue where a tie-breaking device such as a coin toss is applied to a high branch and that proves sufficient for rational decision methods to resolve 28 �Then it would be irrational to try to resolve the whole issue the issue concerned. by coin toss. Nonetheless A4. The account should be appropriately situational. That is, the account should be applicable to each situation on its own merits, taking It should not simply be a rule­ detailed account of the features of that situation. for in dilemma cases the rules have ceased to yield a resolution and based account, into a are locked be will fix position. situational, it will not that of situational be involve resort to pure—chance methods. by situation, situational most part, by example) or example by virtue of A3 and A4, though the account Thus, procedures ethics where such ethics Nor is a situational ethics (ethics situation For the of a broader type being recommended. into operation where a moral only go dilemma is reached; in general, deontic rule-based procedures apply. The broad outlines of a satisfactory account are beginning to emerge. Before we consider apply rational decision methods to each given dilemma situation. is how this to be so as account, to be said about the needs For to meet apparent objections. insensitive those accomplished more to in switches language, both FA and A, some options, and yet that, also F~A, that it ought also be that so B, very idea of it should be that B, where B entails We do not however go on to one of A and -A, so that not both A and ~A are ruled out. claim the is both A and ~A are ruled out as moral that situations, in certain in For are we not only claiming that decision-theoretic resolution of moral dilemmas. for structure of the things, there is, to among other contradiction a It should that not both A and ~A ruled are out morally.49 What is being claimed that B, or an adequate thing, is the best thing to do in the constrained circumstances, that B should be done in that sense, net that B is lifted to status obligation enough in the circumstances, by looking at you does not the can B is In brief, <»B, "second-best obligation"). determined (though imply OB. acceptable worlds worlds where B holds which fail to be acceptable. say, if you like, that it is a the best that can be done or good is not going to be When <£>B holds where B When holds, because there are holds is not going to be settled in general by falling back on deontic rules, because in the interesting cases the rules are jammed. But such deontic rules dees not being beyond imply being beyond rational procedures, indeed procedures that may be represented by way of rules (though not controlled by deontic rules). The rational procedures in question are essentially those of decision theory. What is required is a decision as to what can be done in the circumstances; and this can be determined by relevant alternatives. be of something weighing up the expected outcomes and selecting among The selectiin may be of the best in the circumstance; satisfactory in the circumstances. The approach adopted pluralistic, allowing for both maximizing and satisizing procedures. 29 the it may can be Maximizers will �of course argue that it would be irrational to select anything but the best among the alternatives (given that it was conceded to be the best); But satisizers will resist arguments.what such elaborates is what upon we a under do decision done normally this:- Set out the relevant alternatives, action courses of alternative. to us open Select a best, i.e. way - is - merely which in outline the results that the different list to. analysis intuitive more i.e. lead will a in theory Determine the of each likely value with maximum likely value, an alternative or a The basic procedure is childishly simple, but filling sufficiently good alternative. out the details may be extremely difficult or even impossible in a satisfactory way. The in problems, normally order increasing alternatives open, establishing their probability, rankings to them. things these cases, favourable more delineating the assigning values or desirability techniques from decision theory however for doing all There are in are: difficulty, of and in less circumstances favourable guestimates can be made or resort had to fuzzy methods. To descend to concrete applications (where procedures may be clearer than at the theoretical level), consider again the Platonic dilemma discussed by Lemmon, where I ought to return my friend’s gun and also ought not to do so. The alternatives are to return the gun and have the wife shot, or to return the gun avoiding a shooting but thereby breaking an undertaking. the alternative first wife It is certain, in the circumstances, that under the will be shot, highly a undesirable outweighing the lesser undesirability of the second alternative. the value of second Since the expected first, exceeds that of the alternative considerably much outcome, the best thing in the circumstances is to return the gun. However undertaking goes Lemmon to seriously the return ’to gun suggesting that one sacrifices one’s astray in utilitarian considerations’ No doubt (p.152). utilitarian considerations would bring out (could be massaged to bring out, rather) a But the fact is that no consideration (or interpersonal comparisons) similar result. of the utilities pleasures and pains contemplated. ’’critical involves an (whoever Lemmon utilitarian ones. the everybody of (involved they confuses are), the in is made, consequentialist universe, or or even needs whatever), to considerations with be their remotely much narrower Similarly the recipe Hare suggests for resolving moral dilemmas at level”, namely illegitimate resort to assimilation act-utilitarianism of (see, consequentialist e.g. 82, considerations p.43), under utilitarianisms. In certain respects Lemmon’s Platonic dilemma is not a good example of a moral dilemma; tougher in particular, dilemmas, the it is too easily resolved, and so characteristic features of pain, emerge, moral dilemmas can anguish, indecision, get omitted. As thus begins to be divided roughly into two types, easy and hard. 30 Easy �dilemmas are those that are comparatively easy to find a way through eventually, and But hard ones are those that leave people caught in the dilemma so are resolvable. at least uncomfortable irresolvable. they whatever to choose and do, are so in a good sense Though a way-through or a way-out may be charted by decision methods, it is a way that leaves those involved morally uneasy, dissatisfied, or worse. For at the far hard end of the spectrum lie those dilemmas of tragic dimensions. Although consequential decision rationally within moral dilemma theory provides a for model how proceed to situations, by no means everyone confronted with a moral dilemma will apply such procedures in an intuitive way, even though many will. For one thing, there is plenty of scope for bad faith, irrationality and and more generally, for non-rational procedures; and severe moral dilemmas often enough induce non-rational and even paralytic or self-destructive modes in those who are caught in them. another, For there are indirect ways of obtaining the effects of decision theory, analogue decision theory so to say. Counselling, whether through a friend or a professional counsellor, is an important analogue: there the discussive mode helps to bring out eludicating of and assemble alternatives, undesirability of each. the and elements the of the advantages decision and approach, the desirability and theory drawbacks, Alternatively, or as well, these elements may be bought out by reflecting on a range of similar situations and experience there using these cases as some sort of precedent, in particular, for determining value rankings of alternatives open. Moral dilemmas have corollaries for moral ways of doing things. is that perfectibility of the moral scheme of things is impossible. One corollary Any sufficiently rich set of rules risks inconsistency, and will be inconsistent if completed. dilemmas are thus inevitable be; in the larger scheme of things. Moral This is as it should for it is in this way especially that moral development occurs and moral stature is obtained. 31 �^A much earlier version of this paper was presented by the second author at the Australian National University in 1975. Subsequently much of the paper was lost; what survived is largely incorporated in the first three sections, especially §3. However the new version takes over the leading ideas of the initial version. The authors are much indebted for comments and criticism to C. Pigden, R. Goodin and G. Priest. was ^This even true Maliy’s of pioneering system of 1926 which permitted replacement of logical equivalents within the scope of obligation function 0 (see F & Von Wright’s seminal work H p.3). (in 51), which set the pattern for mainstream deontic logic, was explicitly based on the modal comparison of deontic functors with modal functors, and built modal that break the modal systems, exceptional assumptions in at the bottom of the theory. The connection, are deontic systems based on relevant logics on such systems see RLR, chapter 8. ^These paradoxes are explained, obligation, paradoxes of derived and their see modal bases exposed, On the for some of the p.224; and Prior 62, further in §5. considerable literature on paradoxes like those of the Robber and Good Samaritan, see anthologies and the Hilpinen A detailed uniform treatment of especially Vermazen. all these and other deontic paradoxes in the framework of relevant logic is given in RLR II. 4In its equivalent form, Op => ~Fp, i.e. what is obligatory is not forbidden, it is the dubbed ’’Bentham’s Law” by von Wright 81, p.2. 5In a way, furthermore, avoids that the , problems Hare’s and complexities attempt to transfer a levels-resolution to deontic paradoxes would lead to if worked out paradoxes. the compare properly: any In counterintuitively, case, that problems of semantical if we were even ’ought’ is ambiguous levels say, to as to Hare as levels, avoid to some semantical proposes, but tinkering would still be required to fix up a deontic calculus at each level. Moreover, there are good grounds for doubting that the so far ill-characterised and artificial distinction of levels that Hare wants to impose can be satisfactorily made out. For one thing, critical hardly the holds up; level for separation intuitive of the paradoxes intuitive are from the typical of rational or act utilitarian assessments at the upper level, and we can be rational and critical, and ask for why- explanations, at both levels. ^There are various different form, OA, OB -> ^It is this principle can take, e.g. also a rule 0(A & B), and a rather useless material form, OA & OB =>. 0(A & B). tried criticised below. forms however by Schotch and Jennings, p.152; their argument is It is also suggested by Barcan Marcus, p.134., and toyed with by 32 �Williams o In particular Lemmon, taking off from Sartre, has argued this in two important papers, neglected in mere recent philosophical literature on moral dilemmas and moral conflict. earlier Recent British work, in literature that it could logical further the next note). on conflict of values has particular, profitably have taken into ignored account (see Such an uninformed approach is however not uncharacteristic of British philosophy. ^Especially Lemmon’s work 62 and 65. But although Lemmon suggests (in 62, e.g. p.150) that there are no logical problems in accommodating moral dilemmas, including those of the form 0(A & ~A), none of the systems of deontic logic he presents (e.g. in 65), not even the very weak systems, can do so without trivialising. The reasons for collapse are the modal ones already explained. Apart from the work of Lemmon and a few who follow him, work which at least suggests the need for a bridge even if it does not offer so much as good working plans for one, the literature on moral dilemmas tends to bifurcate - into purely philosophical material which does not address the logical issues, and largely logical material which characteristically avoids the crucial moral issue of dilemmas, which the logics espoused cannot handle (and maybe because of that: otherwise the logical literature On the regrettable lack of interaction between deontic logicians disputes the data). and ethicists, the latter being the worse offenders, see also Thomason’s notes. 10 In fact the latter implication of O-transmission could be much weakened for the purpose of the arguments, e.g. the form A B - > OA D OB would serve to make the point. 11 Gumanski 80 affords a good example of the complication resulting, complication readily removed by relevant logic relocation. 12 The argument thoroughtly for this fallacious. ’principle of deontic contingency’ Either an in F & H, p.13, is illegitimate quantificational conversion (from some to all) or a modal confusion (from p & ~p to q & ~q) is used to get from P(p & ~p) for some p - which is all the denial of deontic contingency gives - to Pq, that is, to ’everything is permitted’. 1^For see axiom, (D1) Op =>~0~p, of the standard systems as formulated in F & H, p.13, and use the interdefinability of P and 0, e.g. PB 4 1 ~0~B. There would be little point in presenting features of the epicycling systems of types (iii)-(v) in any detail since all will be quickly dismissed. In any event, details can be found in the Hilpinen surveys 33 (71 and 81), texts which are ir fact �restricted to epicycling positions within the dominant modal paradigm for deontic Even Schotch and Jennings, who do question some minimal principles, remain logics. staunchly the within modal sphere, their as possible worlds and semantics their substitutivity principles reveal. 15 F & H, p.8, in support p.16. This consistency interpretation appears to have extensive Scandinavia. Of course if consistency were meant in a different sense (that of regularity), it would be different. But it is not: see the development in F & H, p.l6ff. 16 Cf. Lemmon: philosophers that ’It ... does the not to seem adoption of have been new morality a associated with the confrontation of a moral dilemma. much by observed an agent ethical by is frequently Indeed, it is hard to see what else would be likely to bring about a change of moral outlook other than having to make a difficult moral decision’ (62, p155). not settled without so to speak Similarly Barcan Marcus (p.12): ’although idealistically, a source of moral motion. dilemmas are is, Moral inconsistency residue, the recognition of their reality has a dynamic force. 17 In 1975 when the paper was first drafted and presented this example was still topical. However at most times in modern human history there are many candidates to substitute for variable V. 18 In the narrow scheme of standard deontic logic, these would be recast in terms of the forbidden functor F, defined as 0~. However in relevant logic settings, it is a further question, not settled by the framework whether W reduces to 0~. * ^Williams 20 are Jim-Pedro example (in 81) is of this type. As there are other war dilemmas, and especially nuclear war dilemmas, so there other violence. pacifist dilemmas, e.g. the problem of violence to prevent greater On nuclear war dilemmas, and on the main pacifist dilemma, see the War and Peace series. 21 For many of the contractual arrangements, isomorphism, known moral dilemmas we consider, especially those there are analogous legal dilemmas. preserving very many important logical generated by For there is a wellfeatures between moral obligations and rights and wrongs and corresponding legal obligations and rights and wrongs. The complexity of legal frameworks, the relatively independent design of using �parts and divine numerous lack of design control legal of likelihood the dilemmas and sources decidedly complexity to high. analogous An is dilemmas moral for consistency, or checks argument considered in render the fjrom the McConnell, p.275ff. pp Lemmon’s final treatment, but (fifth) type of ’’moral dilemma” does so far resist more formal is that the mainly because class concerned description and lacks even clear working examples. so far These are, defies adequate roughly, situations ‘in which an agent has to make a decision of a recognisably moral character though he is completely unprepared ... by his present moral outlook’ and has somehow to fashion a new moral outlook. is There so far of here nothing especial paraconsistent concern. By no means all the types of situations falling under Lemmon’s ’classification of moral dilemmas’ (62, classifying types of first class and p.156) are dilemmas. situation’, ‘moral the classification starts out is nothing dilemmatic about there and which Lemmon about the second, little Indeed the ‘does not wish to call ... moral dilemmas, because [as with the first] in all the cases our moral situation is perfectly clear’ (p.143). The main types of moral dilemmas Lemmon discerns, the third and fourth classes, are precisely those treated in the text. The concurrence even of several different, 23()f course the control is limited. perhaps apparently independent, logical approaches is no sure guide to correctness of an explication or has to answer back satisfactorily to The matter still account. preanalytic principles. 22* In dilemmas, the initial version of this paper three into types (0, 0~; complication was based on a mistake, collapse. are F, a rather F~; and artificial classification of 0,F) was proposed. But this that equation of 0~A and FA would lead to modal And, apparently a more natural and simpler theory does emerge if 0~ and F equated. Naturally definitional than coentailment. More highly equation intensional in this context does not differences between the imply more notions, which there are, remain unaffected. What holds for F does not automatically transfer independently. ^The labels and Jennings. [RM] and [K], convenient to P. Perhaps P should be treated in what follows, are taken from Schotch Note that although symbolically virtually the same as the originals, they symbolize different determinate principles. ^See as well as RLR I, Routley 72, Routley and Meyer 73 and OP. 35 �the 2?Under four-valued American plan for relevant logic * can be semantics, avoided. But here the superior two-valued Australian plan is followed. 2&Though here we simply take the rule over from standard deontic semantics, it can be argued in several ways, explained (though usually for the analogous necessity functor) as in RLR. class of such A, b One way is this:- in situation a, where OA holds, consider the i.e. {C: I(OC, a) = 1}. This gives an initially acceptable set up with respect to a; and indeed would yield the sought rule (with S improved to a but for 1-1 relation) fail, conditions the fact that bo may not be a world because required closure conspicuously We primeness. can however extend though not ba, uniquely, so that world requirements are met. The picture looks like this: S is the composition of the function (from a to b ) and the extension (to the b-’s). The b.’s are the accepted worlds vis-a-vis a. ^The point and role of evaluative step-down is explained in Routley 83. 3°The strategy resembles that earlier in Routley and Meyer 75 in Plainly there is room for other postulates, formulating explicitly dialethic logic. e.g. exploited In virtue of the model theorem Ot, where 0p2 where p2 is not dilemmatic, etc. t is any tautology, such a postulate is guaranteed in standard deontic logic, but it is rightly left as an option in relevant deontic logic, and also in Barcan Marcus. third 31A type of argument for rejecting [KJ is implicit in Schotch and and also in Barcan Marcus, namely that without [K] both moral conflict and Jennings, the Kantian ought-implies-can principle can be retained. That supposes of course that the Kantian principle is a desirable one, worth going considerably out of one’s logical way disaster to retain. [KJ But the is not from the combination of Kantian only in principle involved theory with moral dilemmas: reaching other equally solid and respectable principles than [KJ could be considered for rejection. ^2At this logic and point we do detour analyses of moral beyond our dilemmas, to look critique of modalisation of deontic at some separate puzzles in deontic logic - which have also been used against the idea of a formal treatment of ethics. And the approach we take to these further 36 puzzles - by limiting transmission �in the fashion of weaker, and deeper logics - is largely independent of principles, the reaminder IN short, we could have taken a different approach to paper. of the these transmission puzzles, without varying the rest of the paper. 33 Of course it can be argued that one is storing up problems for (much) later on when the logical theory repenting have fuller a better developed, is much more fully developed, and predicates like those of logical role. so also will be presumably when But the logical theory is the distinctions between types of predicates and those sustaining transmission. 34 It is common practice indict deontic logic by so stating the deontic ’'paradox" that they smuggle in much more than a satisfactory entailment relation could warrant and more even than a modal relation would grant. paradoxes will be presented as arguments Here is an example. These [deontic] against Consider the Good Samaritan paradoxes formulated the "standard" as follows: deontic logics. 1) A is obligated to help an injured criminal 2) If A is obligated to do B then A is obligated to do whatever B entails. (This is a principle of the standard deontic logics.) 3) There could not be an injured criminal if someone did not commit a crime. So 4) A is obligated to bring it about that someone commit a crime. (From 1- 3 by the standard deontic logics.) The So 5) logics are standard deontic (For flawed. 4) is outrageous, though its premisses are not.) Entailment principles do not justify the importing of 'bringing about' in clause 4). 35 And wrong to rob him and not rob him, and so on. Conjunction is not here connexive with one conjunct undercutting another - though connexive deontic logic is what some seem to be seeking. ^Accordingly Morscher's retreat to "rational norms" and "rational legislating" is But unnecessary. presupposed again that a deontic Morscher the grasps key point, that von Wright has logic must contain certain consistency-type principles, and that 'this presupposition need not be fulfilled' (p.98). 37 Schotch and Jennings, community of moral philosophers' philosophy, analysis. where claim 'widespread support for (a) among the (a) is the theme 'that cases of real moral Most likely this claim, like most such sociological claims conflict cannot occur'. in (pp.152-3) is merely impressionistic, and not based on any sort of survey or But we expect further investigation would tend to confirm it. no J Thus, to take just one example: there appears to be a conflict 'One may be in a situation of course in which of principles each of which appears categorically 37 �binding - but natural reflection will ultimately show that one or other must prevail’ Benn (p.5). But examples abound. The reason reflection removes inconsistency is that obligations do not collide. We have it from Kant himself Because however duty and obligation are in general concepts that express the objective practical necessity of certian actions, ... it follows that a conflict of duties and obligations is inconceivable (obligationes non colliduntor). (Metaphysis of Morals, cited in Barcan Marcus, p.323.) But does it world the (merely) practical follow not of without action However necessity. sweeping a but the worlds concering consistency assumption picked out by function not of objective these worlds are, moral dilemmas certainly appear to show, sometimes inconcistent. There are depending what is the explanation can go, various different ways and contractual arrangements a route like that of Hobbes through Rawls will be followed. Given less, taken e.g. granted. for only grounded example, For or preferences given choice individual behaviour, interests a semantical route might be And so on. tried. 110 The inadequacy of modal accounts of inconsistency is explained in detail in RLR, chapter 5. ji -1 These examples and most of those that follow were suggested by C. Pigden, who also supplied the references. HO The first quote is from Kenny, p.75, the second from Skinner, p.7, both of which furnish additional details. 4^Cf. Kenny, p.78. 24/4 According to MacIntyre 66. The situation of Agamemnon and Oedipus are remarked upon in Williams 81, p.80. There there are is not a substantial and cannot literature be general arguing, not entirely universally applicable principles in all circumstances of their application. conclusively, rules for that ranking of Thus, for example, Ross, p.41, also discussed in Barcan Marcus, p.124, Barcan Marcus, p.135, Hare 82, pp.32-4. It seems that such a result would be proved, as regards effective rules, by methods of reversion theory. 38 �^The relevant; points Hare makes concerning anguish remorse and (82, pp.29-30) are they apply also against his own proposal to treat all principles as prima facie. But points concerning anguish and guilt are not decisive; account of how these attitudes arise can be given from for one thing, an modal a angle (cf. the discussion in Barcan Marcus, p.127). ^By no means all dilemmas require resolution, e.g. those of no practical import such as purely theoretical dilemmas of freedom, etc. liberty, These can, in principle, just stand. 48 As Lemmon explains (in 62), really following Sartre, there is considerable scope for bad faith and opting out of our responsibilities here, e.g. pretending that no decision is called for, or that another has preempted the decision, or that the decision is otherwise determined or out of our own control. 49No doubt we could tough it out dialectically, but the basis for doing so is Any lacking. adherence contradictions to calles for especially rigorous justification 500n satisizing decision theory, and the dialectic between maximizers and satisizers, see MS. Fuzzy decision theory is however only in the initial stages of development at present. 5^This is just one of several reasons why Hare’s grand synthesis (in 82) of Kant and the utilitarians, initially appealing in its two level tidiness and simplicity, goes down the philosophical drain. A main reason is that the synthesis is built upon, and incorporates, consistency and modal assumptions, and so is inadequate moral data to be accounted for theoretically (see further War and Peace II). to the �REFERENCES R. Barcan Marcus, 121-136. Journal of Philospohy 77 (1980) ’Moral dilemmas and consistency , * S. I. Benn, ’Public and private morality: clean living and dirty hands’ in Public and Private in Social Life (ed. S.I. Benn and G.F. Gaus), Croom Helm, London & Canberra, 1983, 155-182. A. Donegan, The Theory of Morality, Chigago University Press, Chicago, 1977. D. Follesdal and R. Hilpinen, ’Deontic pp.1-35; referred to as F & H. B. C. logic: van Fraassen, ’The logic of conditional Logic 1 (1972) 417-38. an introduction’ Hilpinen in obligation’. Journal 1971, of Philospohical L. Gumanski, ’On deontic logic’, Studia Logica 39 (1980) 63-75. S. Hampshire (ed), Public and Private Morality, Cambridge University Press, 1978. R.M. Hare, Freedom and Reason, Clarendon, Oxford, 1963. R.M. Hare, Moral Thinking, Conflicts’). Clarendon, Oxford, 1982 (see especially chapter 2 ’Moral R. Harrison, Rational Action, Cambridge University Press, 1979. R. Hilpinen (ed). Deontic Dordrecht, 1971. Logic: Introductory and Systematic Readings, Reide1, R. Hilpinen (ed), New Studies in Deontic Logic, Reidel, Dordrecht, 1981. A. Kenny, The God of the Philosophers, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1979. E.J. Lemmon, ’Moral dilemmas’, Philosophical Review 71 (1962) 139-58. E.J. Lemmon,’ Deontic (1965) 39-71. Logic and the T. McConnell, ’Moral dilemmas and Philosophy 8 (1978) 269-87. logic of imperatives’, consistency in ethics’, Logique et Canadian Analyse 8 Journal A. MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1966. of �39 A. A. Martino (ed.), Deotnic Logic, Computational Systems, North Holland, Amsterdam, 1982. Linguistics and Legal Information E. Morscher, ’Antinomies and incompatibilities within normative languages’ in Martino 82, pp.83-102. Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, 1971; hereafter OED. G. Priest and R. Routley, On Paraconsistency, Research Australian National University, 1983; hereafter OP. in Papers Logic, #13, A.N. Prior, Formal Logic, Second edition, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1962. A.N. Prior, ’Escapism: the logical basis of ethics' (ed. A.I. Melden), Seattle, 1958. in Essays in Moral Philosophy, W.D. Ross, The Right and the Good, Oxford University Press, New York, 1930. R. Routley, ’War and Peace I. On the ethics of large-scale nuclear war and war­ deterrence, and the political fall-out’, Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy, #5, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1983. R. Routley, ’On the alleged inconsistency and moral insensitivity and fanaticism of pacifism’, Inquiry 26 (1984) , ; also War and Peace II. R. Routley, ’Maximizing, satisficing, satisizing: the difference in real and rational behaviour under rival paradigms’, Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy, #10, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1984; hereafter MS. R. and V. Routley, ’The semantics of first degree entailment’, Nous 6 (1972) 335-59. R. and V. Routley, ’Semantical foundations of value theory’, Nous (1983) 441—56. R. Routley and R.k. Meyer, ’The semantics of entailment I’, in Truth, Syntax, and Modality (ed. H. Leblanc) North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1973» pp.199-243. R. Routley and R.K. Meyer, ’Dialectical logic, classical logic, and the consistency of the world’, Studies in Soviet Thought 16 (1976) 1-25. R. Routley and others, Relevant Logics and Their Rivals, Ridgeview, California, Part I (1982) and Part II (1984); referred to as RLR I and RLR II respectively. A. Ryan, The Idea of Freedom, Oxford, 1970. P. Schotch and pp.149-62. R.E. Jennings, ’Non-Kripkean deontic logic’, in Hilpinen 81, �40 Q. Skinner, The Foundations of Modern University Press, Cambridge, 1978. Political Thought, Volume 11, Cambridge R. M. Thomason, ’Deontic logic as founded on tense logic’, in Hilpinen 81, pp.165-175. B. Vermazen, 'The (1977) 1-71. logic of practical 'ought’-sentences’, Philosophical Studies 32 B. Williams, Moral Luck, Cambridge United Press, 1981. B. Williams, 'Conflict of values' in Williams 81, pp.71-82; also in Ryan 79. G.H. von Wright, An Essay in Modal Logic, North Holland, Amsterdam, 1951. G.H. von Wright, ’On the logic of norms/ and actions’, M. Hilpinen 81, pp.3-35. G.H. ven Wright, ’Norms, truth and logic’ in Martino 82, pp.3-20. �TYRANT MOPE ON NOPAL DILEMMAS 1. ethics. 2. Revolutionising Possible heading, why the failure to comprehend moral dilemmas. All these Reading force^'^^e off in other directions. Undoubtedly a great deal of ethics has been messed up by a failure to understand moral dilemmas. ' ... The failure is often reported; for instance human since justifiable claims ... and are rights claims, they be outweighed by other As in all conflicts of moral principles, human rights reasons must be weighed other moral can against one another by an as yet poorly understood and ill-defined process' (Rajfles, p.42). The failure shows up on the apparent clash between doing ethics by way of principles and doing ethics consistency reasons, principles. vor principles break down, through examples. or dilemmatic And examples. examples it is thought for air^. thought to refute A proper approach to dilemmas removes the tension between examples and principles and allows a synthesis to be achieved. 3. Moral rectitude. Now is notion this to be unpacked0 mhere are competing explanations, e.g. 1) in terms of obligation and deontics; 2) by way of consequentialist rectitude decisive. assessment. Pettit to make moral mhen it requires assessment thus 3) Method 1) unless dilemma; otherwise method 2\ rectitude so it is absolute in terms of O. 4. wants This is impossible. Mcjlly's system has no moral dilemmas, since ~fu For it proves trivial deontically. But he also wants to run 0~u^ - at least intentionally. Aquinas denies certain moral dilemmas, e.g. Np & F~p, in the doctrine concerning perplexus simpliciter F & N p.12. 5. Investigate further the connection of permitted and accepted worlds, and commission? This 'possibly permitted' does not involve discussed in NNL. the fallacy of reducing permission * 'permissible to It does tie with the suggested connection of commission and omission through the * function. ��2 6. Is problem of the individual in society, of a person in politics, an organisation or a company of this type i.e. dilemma of freedom? Of. a dilemma that can just stand, like the theoretical also Machiavellian a problem: person in public must (morally?) act evilly sometimes. 7. of PUBLIC distinction The moralities. VS MORALITIES PRIVATE implies that there are two The BASE ARGUMENT against is this: But there are not two. if we acknowledge this conception of morality as requiring some action as the thing to do, how, logically speaking, could there be two moralities0 the thing to do when they conflict? overriding reason for action?^ How could morality then What is provide an Similarly &n utilitarianism single maximisation recipe and results. (/? DOEBN'01 REQUIRE KANTIANISM.) However A can to be subject conflicting public and private claims. Seen this way ^public vs private just generates.heap of further moral dilemmas, and the 2 moralities ^is just shoddy attempt to escape these dilemmas, expedient (i.e. would become n shoves morality out as in the Hinduism resolution dilemmas. of often in a way that’s politically of the way for expediency'1. The 2 moralities * int if pursued this distinction-making attempt at / Something special about public/private case0 Or differently, why are arguments from expedience so much more acceptable in public sphere0 Be^n gives r interest some reasons, but these oughtn't to justify a difference. | public interest DIRTY HANDS PROBLEM (PARADOX) is like GOOD SAM? behalf of the statecommitting murder. Sometimes it is right get one's hands dirty. E.g. Doing such and such on OR just a straight dilemma? to try to succeed, and then it must also be right to But one's hands get dirty from doing what it is wrong to do. And how can it be wrong to do what is right? Or how can we get our hands dirty by doing what we ought to do9 Z M. Walzer, Philosophy and Public Affairs, moral 2, 10°^, dilemma. 164. Op Walzer sees this as a tragic dilemma: p-> q Oq, but 0~q. Example: but really a torturing captured terrorist to extract information to save innocent lives. The problems start from questions of relations between two different moralities. �Conclusion: 8. Conflict conscience 'that, the public to at its most liberal, loyalty, overriding moral liberalism in end. to a On between will stand the individual, tried committed concern for its collective interest, the one hand the individual as a relate this ambiguous model of the a individual and as an autonomous, citadel, on the other, the overriding perverse, wilful obstacles in the way of the general will. to with no gainsaying, and the claims of possessed of liberties that only he himself can waive, by consent; State, equipped society, not T have only to liberal conceptions of what belongs to the private and what to the public, but also to the tension between a morality of principles and one of valued outcomes, which, in my view, is very closely connected with the ambiguity of the model . * ("Renn? 9. Argument for weak paraconsistent position. Morality is a guide to action. Action is consistent. So have to r?l consistencize. ^Inconclusive"1. Like law one consistencizes (e.g. for action^ alright. But that confirms that it is inconsistent in the first place. 10. The difference. fought distinction is, it It hands the opposition its case. is objected, a Simply not so. distinction without a �The following have been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. • • • • • Letter, unidentified author to Richard, 27 Jul 1984 re Moral dilemmas. (2 pages (1 leaf)) Reference card and handwritten paper, ? Alchourron and Bulygin (1 reference card + 5 leaves) Letter, Charles to Richard, undated re New Studies in Deontic Logic and Castañeda's proposed deontic logic. (2 pages) Cuttings from unidentified publication, The paradoxes of deontic by Hector-Neri Castañeda (page 46-47), and Some main problems of deontic by Jaakko Hintikka 9page 94-96. (2 leaves) Letter, unidentified author to Richard, with annotations by Sylvan?, undated, re Moral dilemmas. (7 leaves) �Ml Although the sorts of examples we have described seem familiar enough, it might well be disputed that they are correctly described as cases of Op and 0~p, or in the alternative representation as cases of Fp & F~p. The main ground for this is the belief that �19. in any such case one of the parties to the conflict is less wrong, and that this one can be claimed to be not really wrong at all. There are however several objections to this move to neutralise the dilemmas (1) First, wrong party. there is no guarantee that there always is a less Both parties may be equally wrong, no way of deciding which is less wrong. Vietnam example; To take and there may be our hypothetical if we withdraw half a million people will die; but if we do not withdraw the war will continue and half a million people will die; clearly the example may be elaborated. There may be no grounds for choice. (2) The fact that one party is less wrong than the alternative is no grounds for saying that it is not wrong at all. In fact the case would normally be described as one of choice between " two evils", two wrong aciwsese©; if one chooses the lesser of two evils, then one still chooses an evil. ing One is simply not justified in claim1 that, where p involves killing 10 people, p is not wrong simply on the grounds that ~p involves killing 15 people, any more than one is in the case of preference theory justified in saying that p, which brings a gift of $10, is not a good thing simply on the grounds that ~p brings a gift of $11. things; (3) They are both good and in our moral case, both are wrong. If we do say this, plainly it will be very difficult to find any moral principles which can be asserted with any confidence universally. In fact it will probably be possible to find hypothetical counterexamples to any statement of the form "All actions of type x are wrong", just by producing a case where p is an action of type x, but ~p is an even worse action. that p, although an action of type x, is not wrong, It will follow so we will have �However, a counterexample. it seems to be important that we should be able to assert such general principles, and doing so gives us an essential way of assessing, morally, (4) Finally, types of actions. the proposed redescription of the case as involving only one wrong element, the one which is more wrong, leaves out an essential feature of such a case, that it is a dilemma, case where one cannot but act wrongly. If we omit this element the case is not properly described, it is falsified; a we may as a result find ourselves unable to explain many resulting features of the situation which result from the conflict, e.g. human behavioural features >n such a situation involving hesitation, doubt, inaction, perhaps anguish and guilt. All these will appear quite irrational. (5) Assigning a priority to our moral rules itself does nothing to resolve the logical problem raised by the dilemmas, (although it may solve the practical problem of how best to act). % For this logical problem iX the problem of how to arrange our logic so as to be able to describe such cases adequately and without falsification or incon-sisteney. Arranging a priority, so that A one alternative can be claimed to be less wrong, does not solve the logical problem, which is that whatever happens will be wrong, that T cannot be identical with I. The consequence that whatever happens is wrong cannot be removed unless as well as a priority assignment one also adopts the principle that what is less wrong is not wrong at all. But this principle leads to inconsistency for then the less wrong action is both wrong and not wrong. To be consistent this method must introduce a new concept of wrong in addition to the old one, say "wrong2" , and the less wrong action can be said to be not "wrong2". But now the original problem is �21. still not eliminated, because the problem was not that whatever be is . happened would /'wrong2" (although this/now false), but that whatever happened would be wrong, which is still true. sort of priority - dominated concept cannot replace, may supplement, the original concept. And this although it �Sf- The problem of classifying these dilemmas. z mainly using the term ’wrong’. We have stated our dilemmas However, it may seem that this is ambiguous, and that it is possible, or desirable, to make a further distinction, between pi inciples which are obligatory and principles which are prohibitory. For wrongs can be due to two very different causes - om^iission or commission. The distinction between obligation and prohibition principles can be explained initially as follows: an obligation principle of the form Op read ’it ought to be the case that p’,Qt is �f ? L ' r jT f'.Jlz.f:? /t/tjyJ /4-< 'it ought to come about that p'. This says that something, p, ought to should happen that p'A, r, happen, an ideal situation I. that is^ that it is a member of & A situation^satisfies Op, Op if p is not in it then, if p is In it ( p eaJ;and violates p's presence satisfies Op, whereas (pZ S?) • £ ["Obligation" Z7 —:----- is ’ being used here its omission or absence violates it. in a somewhat unusual sense, 4 for Lemmon seems to be right in urging that obligations are usually contractual in nature. and contracts may be contracts to do something or to refrain from However, we doing something - hence both positive and negative. must press 'obligation' and 'obligatory' and adjective corresponding to it * into service as a noun ought to be the case that' in order to avoid clumsiness and for lack of any other suitable words. The other class of principles, hand, we shall write prohibitive principles, on the other 'Ep' and read 'it is forbidden that p'. These principles claim that p is the sort of action which should p is not a member of the ideal situation I. be avoided satisfies Fp, situation a such that p Z such that pea violates it. a situation a whereas p's omission or absence satisfies Fp, whereas pSoccurrence or presence violates it. is paralleled on the obligations) The distinction action level by the distinction between action and by that between and inaction, A 'sins of omission' and 'sins of commision' A (which violate (which violate prohibitions). 'I have done those things which I ought not to have done' violating a prohibition but also, and not equivalently, not done those things which I ought to have done', thus 'I have thus violating An obligation is satisfied by doing something, an obligation. a prohibition by failing to do something, by avoiding something. It is important not to confuse 0~p, which says that should happen' or 'that ~p 'It is wrong that p', with Fp which says ’that p should not happen', or it * should not happen that p'. This �distinction is clear, as a scope distinction, in the English reading However the two are continually confused in modal treatments of But deontic logic, since given Modal Muddle p / I = ~p g I. that to say/p should happen is not to say anything about what should not happen but leaves the issue as to whether ~p should or should And to say that p should not happen is not say and 0~p tells anything about ~p,/whether it should happen or not. not happen open. aj us that ~p is a member of I, where.Fp tells us that p is not a member of 1.^ Dilemmas then seem to fall into three classes depending upon whether the principles which lead to them are obligation or prohibition principles^or both. Fp and F~p, Thus we obtain Op and 0~p, and Op and Fp from our examples depending upon how the principles involved are construed^ a<Tprohibitory or obligatory. (A): Dilemmas obtained from prohibition principles, Fp, % F~p1. i.e. cases of We obtain cases of this sort given principles of the * form. — (1) Whenever P satisfies condition C, (Action form: (2) it shouldn't happen that p. action of type x are wrong) it shouldn't happen that p. A Whenever p satisfies condition C', The dilemma is obtained where p satisfies condition C, ~p satisfies condition C'. Jo O F and - ■L Give the semantical reading of 0 and F?and the examples with 'wrong' . Then mention the necessity for distinction between 0~p and Fp. (1) Wrongs divide into sins of omission and sins of commission. (2) These are semantically different. (3) Unless one distinguishes these concepts semantically have the consistency assumption again. Give the readings. one will �10. Examples can also be obtained from two distinct prohibitory These are cases where the state of affairs described principles. (for reasons given by the first by p is really indescribable principle) (for different reasons given by the second principle). able, * (tndesir For/(B) and the state of affairs described by ~p is m^-ally The second category of dilemmas are dilemmas obtained from obligation principles i.e. cases of Op & O~p, for some p. We obtain cases of this sort given principles of the form:(1) Whenever p satisfies condition C, (2) Whenever p satisfies condition C', it should happen that p it should happen that p. The dilemma is obtained when for a given p, p satisfies condition C and ~p satisfies condition C': (C) Finally, so Op and O~p. examples derived from conflicting but not inconsistent moral principles, which urge both that p should occur and that it should not occur i.e. and prohibited. cases of Op and Fp, where p is both enjoined These cases come about where are principles of the following sort: (1) Whenever p satisfies condition C, p should happen. (2) Whenever p satisfies condition C', p should not happen. The dilemma results because one can find cases one and the same state of affairs C and condition C'? e.g. (p) (in T) where satisfies both condition as^our example derived from Lemmon's uAcrw-tt bolew, x gives back the gun and helping a murderer. (p) is a case both of keeping a promise But promises must be kept, so Op holds. However actions which help murderers are forbidden and should not occur; examples, hence Fp also holds. unlike the previous kind, It seems that these sorts of cannot be generated by a single moral principle, but requires two principles which come into conflict. �With a certain degree of artifice we can arrange our examples into these categories, with f A) groups being prohibitions the (fe)groups obligations, and the (C) groups mixed. �It is necessary then to avoid the modal treatment and to But though 0 principles and F principles distinguish 0~ and F. are distinct, 0 and F provide alternatives bases for (semantically) The O-principles correspond semantically to deontic system. inclusion principles,the F formulated principles to exclusion Thus e.g. principles. TRfH 5® where iff iff TROH * , (UH) (TRfH oX(p,H) = f) In contrast, I(Fp,T) = t iff (UH) TROH d Kp,H) Thus the modellingswill mirror f) . one another, with R Rf For the representation of principles then we can work satisfactorily with an O-basis, or with an F-basis, but not with a mixed basis which uses both 0 and F principles. Failure to distinguish 0~p and Fp will provide a ground for the mistaken consistency assumption: iff p i H. for it will follow from evaluation rules �12. The cases described satisfy the characterisation of moral For the principles involved are not inconsistent, yet dilemmas. they are not satisfiable in T. In the case of the first set of leading to Fp and F~p, dilemmas, the principles could not be satisfied unless neither p nor ~p occurred. necessarily complete, But since T is they cannot be satisfied in T. of the second set of examples, Op and 0~p, In the case the principles could only be satisfied if both p and ~p occur, hence since T is con­ sistent, they cannot be satisfied in T. different. The third case is very Here it cannot be satisfied because one and the same proposition satisfies both conditions for occurring and conditions for not occurring? this proposition, hence our principles direct, with respect to that it should occur and that it should not occur. This also cannot be satisfied in T, since p is either a member of T, or not a member of T. The principles involved are not however inconsistent ones; for in each case a finite proposition modelling of the principles can be provided. In the third case, directives, despite the fact there are inconsistent given a contingent proposition p^, which satisfies the antecedent conditions, no inconsistency need result because such a proposition p^ may not occur. In other words, though the principles together with p^ form an inconsistent set, p-^ is essential and can be deleted from the set since contingent; and the set without p1 as the principles on their own are satisfactory is consistent, where no antecedents satisfy both, a po£S»4ta- case. ■ v r • The principles ** (a. though inconsistent in application are not inconsistent^ i In the first two cases(they are T consistent?) also it is a contingent matter that the principles come i ... into^ cannot be satisfied in T; r; for detachment of a contingent truth is made, viz that the given ? proposition satisfies the conditions. �13. since they constantly arise““without sacrificing the generality of moral principles. For unless carefully treated dilemmas will/ as we shall see, provide counterexamples to moral principles. Our moral dilemmas result from judgements which cannot be satisfied in T, so that whatever happens will be wrong. Howe is there/still quite a crucial difference between the first two classes and the third class of dilemma. In the third case the result of the dilemma on detachment of a contingent premiss that p satisfies c and c' simultaneously is an inconsistency, cannot both belong and not belong to the ideal set-up I. since p Although the principles upon which the judgement Op and Fp was based were not themselves mutually inconsistent, moral judgerent they do result in a inconsistent that p both ought to happen and ought not to happen is prohibited from happening. Given that p has both properties, the moral principles concerned are in conflict. This is brought out by the fact that if p does satisfy these conditions, cannot be any situation, T-like or not, there in which the principles are satisfied. Furthermore here we have a case where each moral judgement provides a counterexample to the other. If Op and Fp both obtained, both the principles from which they were derived would be false; principle for Op would provide a counterexample to the prohibitory (p) (if p satisfies c’ then Fp) since Op ~Fp; while Fp would provide a counterexample to the obligatory principle (if p satisfies c then Op). (p) �J \ 14. In view of these points it seems that a moral code which resulted in this sort of conflicting judgement is defective; the principles involved should either be restricted by tightening one or other of conditionsc and c', or else restated by reformulating one or other of the principles, (p) (Cp => F~p) replaced by (p) (C'p => 0~p) . or i.e. either (p) (C'p => Fp) (p) (Cp => Op) is is replaced by the case is reduced to one of the first In short, two cases. In this case the dilemma arises because the principles In the first two cases however involved come into conflict. the difficulty does not arise from conflicting principles, but is simply a case where our not v/ judgements cannot both be satisfied in T, because they are conflicting, but because of the peculiar Where Op and 0~p both hold, nature of T. (or Fp and F~p) what- ever happens will be wrong, because p & ~p cannot both hold in T, The dilemma is however simply explained nor p & ~p fail to hold. and the judg.ements accepted once it is understood that I, situation, action, is not T-like. The dilemma may produce a conflict in because given the logical structure of T and the limitations it imposes upon action, both judgements. it is impossible to act in accordance with But this does not effect the judgements themselves; as moral judgenents, assessments of the moral worth of p of affairs) conflict. (a state of ~p^jthey are quite compatible and there is no To say that p is wrong and that ~p is also wrong is in no way to be inconsistent, true. the ideal and both judgements may very well be The absence of conflict also explains the fact that such cases can be produced from single moral principles, such as 'Killing is wrong', which in no way inhibit internal conflict. �15. Judgements such as 'p is wrong of action or states of affairs; as to how to act in T. alternative in T, Hence Op does not compare p with its ~p. Such judgements are implicitly comparative, not to ~p's worth, but to the Thus if we reach situations as to moral worth of its absence. (using moral criteria for selection), if for every situation H, H+p is worse than H-p. in a situation assess types and do not simply give directions but p's worth is assessed relative, desirability & ~p is wrong' p is wrong If p's presence makes the situation morally worse than it would be if p were absent, then p is wrong. But now it is a straightforward matter to claim that p is wrong and that ~p is also wrong; one is aHL simply claiming that situations without p^orally preferable to the that (should be chosen^etc.); same situations with p * and also situations without ~p are morally preferable to that same situation with ~p in it. These judgements in no way conflict, and if we were in a position to choose a situation with neither of them in, we could satisfy both judgements simultaneously. is the choice must be regarded as a hypothetical one, As it and the judgements as representing a kind of thought experiment, rather than in giving directions as to how to behave in T. The choice embodied in such a judgement is one between two hypothetical situations and not between alternative versions of T. It is just for this reason that this type of moral judgement is adequate for assessing morally different types of actions or sorts of states of affairs. Because we are concerned with choosing between hypothetical situations, we can opine that all actions of a certain specifiable type and states of affairs satisfying a certain condition are wrong (not wrongyetc.), without risking * In the case of Op & 0~p. In the case of Fp & F~p one ismaking a slightly different claim, that a situation from which p's absent is morally better than some in which it is present. Note that the difference between 0 and F can be to the difference in directionthe rankings. �16. falsification because of the contingent features of T. Finally, in such a judgement one is concerned with assessing the action or state of affairs in itself rather than passing judgement about the best way to act in a particular situation. Dilemmas of this sort then, as opposed to dilemmas of the conflict sort first discussed, are not the result of defective moral codes or principles and do not require any readjustment or resolution (beyond psychological acceptance of the fact that it is sometimes inevitable that what happens is wrong and that perfectibility is impossible). They do not provide counterexamples to general In contrast moral principles based on contingent features of T. codes containing the conflict type of dilemma are defective. Any code containing two principles of the form 'wherever p satisfies Cl, Op' and ’Whenever p satisfies C2, Fp’ where C1 and C2 are not inconsistent, will be defective because there is a possible situation (a hypothetical case) with a p^ which satisfies both C1 Whence the inconsistent pair Fp, potentially inconsistent. & Op,. and C2. Any such code is at least This sort of defectiveness of a moral code might be excusable if it were inevitable. But it is not. can be avoided if we adopt either 0 or F as primitive, and state our judgements in terms of one or other of them, but not both. alternative, terms, conflicting is intolerable. moral It The principles stated in No principle could be asserted with any confidence, because they would hold or fail just according to whether or not a suitable proposition with conflicting properties appeared in T and provided a counterexample. And since this is contingent whether such principles hold or not would be entirely a matter of good or bad luck. Moral judgements on the other hand ought to apply beyond T to possible situations, ought to be non-empirical and apply to hypothetical cases, matter of accident. and ought not to hold just as a �4 C ‘S’ -X f * �univeralisa'blemoral principle was a judgement The general ‘ 7^' about types of action or states of affairs and compared p's presence in a situation with its absence from the same situation on a scale of moral desirability. This concept of wrongness is essential to be able to state general moral judgements. But as well as this concept we can distinguish another important concept which is designed to assess not types of action but what is the best course of action in a given situation. This is obtained by comparing p's presence in a situation not with its absence but with the presence of its rivals in a given situation, e.g. ~p in the case of T. p will be said to be ’the best course of action' ~p are both wrong) if a situation Thus (even where p and (usually T), with p in, ranks higher morally then the same one with ~p in. A more practical - concept still can be obtained by comparing p and its practical rivals, say will be the best course of action practical alternative q) f Y r if a situation (as compared with its (usually T) (morally) when p is in it than when q is in it. between alternative ways of extending will rank higher One chooses T. It is important as Lemmon points out to distinguish this concept clearly from the more general concept earlier explained. Lemmon is wrong in suggesting that this is not a moral concept at all and does not give rise to moral judgements but to judgements of expedience. The judgements involved in this case are still moral in the sense that the criteria for ranking situations are �22 specifically moral ones and not based simply, say, on aesthetic considerations or desirability considerations. clear that this distinction Yet it is (which we shall call the distinction between differential obligation and intrinsic obligation) must be ignored and eliminated if obligation is treated as a modal functor For give/} the principle of Modal Muddle (H) (p e H = ~p e H) semantical recipes we have given will be identical. p's presence in H with p's absence (p / H) comparing p in H with ~p's being in H. the To compare will be the same as It is essential however to distinguish this notion of 'best course of action' (differential basic notion we have discussed, because it has quite different properties. * It cannot replace although it can supplement, The reasons are as follows other notion. 02 does not allow for (1) the moral dilemmas. p with its practical alternative in T, e.g. For since we compare ~p, to say that Op & 0~p is to say that a situation H such p e H is morally better than a situation H such that ~p e H, and also to say that a situation H such that ~p e H is better than one such that p e H. This is a (Similar results will ensue when F is taken as a contradiction. basis). (2) 02 cannot allow for general moral judgements of the form "All actions (states of affairs) counterexample. of type x are wrong" without fear of For no matter how compelling our principle and how repugnant the type of action described, we can almost always find a case where the only alternative action is worse. however repugnant p may be, Hence, it will not in this case be wrong, a counterexample to one general judgement will be provided. new notion then cannot do the same job as the old; —----------------------------------------- . and Our it should be , We u^e such as 'the best thing in the circumstances' 'the right thing', 'the correct course all in all' to capture differential obligations . �23. regarded as parasitic, because it can be alternatively represented as admitting the wrongness of the alternatives, but going on to weigh up the alternatives to obtain a recipe for practical action. (3) implies can" slogan It is to this notion that the "ought applies. O2P o locjically possible p, because one has selected p as the best course of action from logically possible alternatives in T. Indeed ’02p’ can be made to imply ‘p is physically possible' (or even physically possible to the person being exhorted) by comparing p with its physically possible alternatives in ranked situations. In a similar way, the concept of blame attaches to failure to follow the best course of action,i.e. if p is better as a course of action than its and one fails to do it. action.* (practical) alternatives, One is not blameworthy for doing p merely only as good as, because p is no better than, i.e. alternatives, one is blameworthy its remaining it has to be worse than some alternative course of It is important to note that blame attaches to this second differential concept of obligation, rather than the first intrinsic notion, for the possibility and obvious unfairness of someone's being blamed for doing wrong where both Op and 0~p hold and he has no alternative which is not wrong would otherwise be a powerful objection to cases of moral dilemmas. (5) Finally, differential obligation makes a basically different type of judgement from the intrinsic notion. not of a type of action or state It is an assessment or of affairs, the action/state of affairs in itself, but of the situation in which it occurs, action in this situation. This is reflected in such phrases as "the best thing in the circumstances" "the right thing to do the conditions obtained at the time)", etc. * Oh well, you cannot be blamed. circumstances . the (given Hence it is not You did the best thing in the �universalisable , and does not try to be. It “results in a recipe for action, and is closely allied to advice or exhortation/orders , persuasion, recommendation or other directed activities. Intrinsic obligation however/ frafc^s no account of possible action and does not need to; it assesses action-types regardless of how they occur in a given situation. This last point is important in connection with argument about moral dilemmas. For the confusion between our two concepts has a disastrous effect on argument, particularly those hotly disputed arguments which occur in the case of moral dilemmas. The following sort of argument, due to confusion between Oi and O2 is all too common in such cases. Actions of type x are wrong (1') (if p satisfies c then Oi~p). (p) This must be Oj because it represents a general and exceptionless (2) p is an action (3) ~ 02 i.e. ~p: (state of affairs) judgement about a type. of type x. p should not be done. Therefore do not do p. The argument is plainly unsatisfactory because the fact that Oi~p holds is not sufficient to establish that 02~p To holds. do this one would have to show that the alternative, p, was not worse or even just as good. not be so. And in cases of dilemmas this may very well To establish 02~p one needs to show not merely that p is wrong but that there is some better course of action. The fallacy derives from trying to base a recipe for action on the intrinsic obligation notion, Oi. �s 25. A closely related confusion holds that it is inconsistent to claim that p is a wrong type of action, that it should be done nonetheless the best course of action. August 6 197 x (e.g. is repugnant etc., but - because it is nevertheless Canberra Times Editorial, on abortion reads as follows: "It is significant, and inconsistent with its official stand that the s ynod should have qualified its recommendation to family doctors with the words "however regrettable we feel this to be"." to be inconsistentthen, one states to be What is being claimed is that one should recommend a course of action (morally) there is no inconsistency. regrettable or repugnant. But of course One is simply saying that ~p is wrong, "Oi-p", but that it is nevertheless the best thing to do given the circumstances because the alternatives are worse?i.e. "O2P"• The distinction between differential and intrinsic obligation, then, seems to be an important factor in assessing the validity of argument where moral dilemmas are concerned. �/, �2 �ft I z^z/ / rt&jZy 7-, I � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Draft Papers Description An account of the resource Sylvan's literary executor encountered an archive in which “all his projects were current", since manuscripts were undated and unattributed. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document MORAL DILEMMAS AND THE LOGIC OF DEONTIC NOTIONS Richard Routley and Vai Plumwood^ The §1. paradoxes of deontic logic consistency and the and modal requirements. Especially since mid-century many systems of deontic logic have been advanced, which logic of such deontic attempt to explore the prohibition, and wrong. right all Almost which treat deontic notions as modal, notions as obligation, permission and modal not demand functors, All such systems are mistaken m a For deontic functors such as obligation and prohibition are but are more highly of degree greater a systems, i.e. as if strict or provable equivalents are intersubstitutable within them preserving truth. quite fundamental way. systems have been modal these intensional than propositional modal modal than discrimination and so functors, logics can provide. The damage caused by the mistaken treatment of deontic notions as modal shows up in various ways, but we shall be primarily concerned with only one of these, the consistency requirements and the exclusion thereby of moral dilemmas. which the modal damage appears is through a Another way in series of related paradoxes, such as, directly, the paradoxes of derived obligation, and, less directly, the paradoxes of the Robber and the Good Samaritan. The consistency requirements come out in two ways in mainstream deontic systems. consistency Firstly, a negation are requirement, - obligatory in the that usual no claim such is symbolism, Op that ~0~p, both it i.e. and its ~(0p & 0~p) — appears as a principle, frequently a postulate, in all mainstream absolute systems.21 Such absolute systems, which are variants on alethic modal systems, are characteristically obtained from corresponding alethic systems by replacing the modal axiom, that’ or ’it ought to be the case that’, or the functor ’□ ’, modal (such as logics system demands world is ’it is obligatory ’it ought to be seen to that', replaces ’it is necessary that', of alethic systems. We know of course that consistency requirement; some ~0~p - where ’O’, read Op D p, by the deontic axiom, Op the doxastic systems) the standard but it appears that the intended interpretation of deontic the consistency requirement. or encapsulates acceptable subsequently introduced, can be designed without For its semantical equivalent what is permitted (i.e. is that in symbols (Px)STx) which is surely true (for let world x be determined precisely by what is so permitted). Moreover, the second related way in which consistency escaped by a modal formulation of deontic (or doxastic) logics. figures cannot be so For it seems clear, 2 and is widely agreed, that 0 satisfies the following distribution principle: (1) Op&OqiffO(p&q). Since however 0 is modal, and p & ~p & q p&~p (i.e. - the sides are strictly equivalent), 0(p & ~p) iff 0(p & ~p & q) Thence, Op & 0~p implies 0(p & ~p), which implies 0(p & ~p & q), and (2), by (1) which implies Oq; (2) if there are cases of moral dilemmas where Op and also 0~p, i.e. then obligation spreads so that any claim is obligatory. This argument tells against all mainstream deontic logics; rock-bottom system, minimal deontic logic. for it holds in the This logic MDS, presented by von Wright and others (see e.g. Hilpinen 81, p.3 and p.5), adds to classical sentential logic CL (with rules of Material Detachment and Substitutivity duly extended) the one-place connective P, of permissibility, subject to just the conditions P(A v B) e (1’) PA v PB and Intersubstitutivity of provably equivalent CL (i.e. truth functional) wff Now define a connective - in fact the standard obligation Then, where A and B are any CL wff, 0(A & B) OA =£j£~P~A. negation and It then follows, given that (extensional) principles to De Morgan = ~(~P~A & ~P~B). follows), 0 moral claim is dilemmas obligatory, the consequence as above of the nothing functor ) * (2 - thus: OA & OB, upon applying of (1 ) * that P~(—A & —B) (or by variants thereupon that which form OA & 0~A, (extensional) i.e. any permissible. The that is OB, revealing variant argument applies the provable CL-equivalence A & -A = B & ~B to get 0(A & ~A) = 0(B & ~B). d OB & 0~B => OB. Then (in condensed notation) OA & 0~A => 0(A & ~A) => 0(B & ~B) That is, if there are any deontic moral dilemmas (of such forms as OA & 0~A) then everything is obligatory. other forms; But there are moral dilemmas, of this and and not everything is obligatory. incorrect. So too are all its extensions, and Therefore minimum deontic logic is thereby all mainstream systems. For 'most systems of deontic logic include the system’ of von Wright 'as a subsystem' (F & H, p.13). There is little appreciation of the involve in the ethical Hare, having set up a force of these arguments or of what they literature. But one prominent example will dilemma, and rejected one logical have to suffice. route out, proceeds to pronounce that 'it is not very helpful to try to sort out these difficulties by some relatively minor tinkering with the calculus of deontic logic. The linguistic and logical intuitions which give rise to them are all right so far as they go' (82, 3 intuitions behind the mainstream systems are not alright, but lead to The p.28). deontic collapse and to a heap of paradoxes; and a bit of '’tinkering" is enough to remove the worst difficulties.5 (2’) and The trouble lies we shall argue, just with the modal requirement (i.e. its usual extension to all wff). that not everything is obligatory, evident For while it is This leaves much to be defended. on no more than the strength of a few examples (such as that it is not obligatory that everyone visit the tallest eucalypt every day), none of the other assertions is so uncontroversial. Given that there are such moral dilemmas, as will be argued at length, and given that sentential logic CL is admissible when applied to consistent situations (which are all that are elsewhere (in arguments: required RLR in especially), modal the namely, the arguments there are a claim that has been argued above), two only and requirement, one fault the which to points at half of the distributivity principle, specifically r (O-adjunction). OA & OB -> 0(A & B) But it is bizarre to have to fail O-adjunction in order OA & 0~A =5 B has quite especially when OB to stand, 0(A & ~A) to be correctly foundation. And obligation. For, not it contemplated among in the things, is a irrelevant mates 7 desperate measure , systems since it intended role and mainstream against entirely other is conceded that its Faulting O-adjunction rejected. goes it to allow the paradox O-adjunction can be argued is without meaning for from of the semantics of 0, along these lines:- Roughly OA is true iff A holds in all acceptable situations. But if A holds in all such situations and B does also then so does A & B, validating O-adjunction. Accordingly, the trouble must be located in the modality requirements. This can be seen from another angle also. obligation, which also underlies O-adjunction, An important logical feature of is its transmissibility, that what is tightly entailed by what is obligatory is also obligatory; in symbolic form, A ■+ B -o OA -> OB But now, (0-transmission). if entailment is erroneously construed as strict implication, which is what the modal requirement would have us do, then 0(A & ~A) -> OB, since by a paradox of strict implication A & ~A B. If there are moral dilemmas of the form 0(A & ~A), as will be contended, then this result is sufficiently damaging on its own, and focusses the trouble on the modal requirement. properly maligned OA & 0~A ->0B. Otherwise apply O-adjunction, to obtain the 4 the Both and consistency requirements should modality be challenged then by anyone who claims that, for some p, both Op and 0~p (and that such judgements are not merely prima facie, vanishing upon further reflection). Many have argued that such cases do occur, indeed are central examples of value conflict, and are of fundamental importance in ethics.$ We want to go even further and claim, firstly, that such cases occur quite frequently, as cases of conflicting obligations, conflicting rights, and genuine moral dilemmas - so in particular there are many cases where both p and ~p ought to be the case - and secondly, that adequate logical treatment of such cases requires an underlying logic of a distinctively paraconsistent kind. we shall cases has, argue, with many important arguments and cases. many of logic rendered deontic Neglecting such incapable of dealing adequately The matter is particularly serious since fiercely debated moral cases are cases of moral dilemmas, lthe most e.g. limited resources, nuclear war, permissible war tactics. While our initial argument will overlap previous work,9 it goes beyond it by adding a semantical treatment and moral of explanation semantical dilemmas, and in setting adequate deontic logics within the framework of paraconsistent logic. simple The §2. resolution relevant epicycling. classical versus The relevant It has already been indicated. solution to the base problem is disarmingly simple. Abandon the modal assumption, that obligation, permissibility, and so on, are modal This blocks logical equivalents. functors allowing replacement of modal from OCA & ~A), or from OA & 0~A, to 0(B & ~B) and thence to OB. giving up intersubstitutivity are replacement coentailment, not simply just more in contexts; deontic rigorous than lax strict equivalence. intimately - the Spread with What ones. is permitting required is While A & ~A and B & ~B are strictly equivalent, they do not coentail one another. connected modal It does not involve conditions the the move law, That is as much of a fallacy as - one A that would have that a & ~A -> B, contradiction such as A & ~A entails any statement whatsoever. An alternative satisfactory distinctive implciation deontic way then logic of should explaining be in particular of relevant paraconsistent, feature of relevant logics, their and the is solution, simply and through why the a most rejection of the paradoxes of strict Spread. For, as remarked, one logical characteristic of deontic notions such as obligation is their transmissibility; i.e. where A entails B then OA is logically sufficient for OB.10 Then were entailment strict implication it would follow at once by Spread that 0(A & ~A) -> OB, whence by O-adjunction, OA & 0~A -> OB. basis of interpretations straightforwardly on RLR II). of Transmissibility may be independently argued for on the entailment (e.g. as content inclusion), and follows the semantical analysis of obligation to be advanced (cf. also 5 A good deal of effort has already been expended in trying to save mainstream deontic theory from the worst of the difficulties and consistency requirements. Most of through its modal it encounters, the repairs however attempted amount to epicycling: trying to tack theory-saving devices onto the initial theory, rather than questioning any fundamental features of it. Intractable exposed. problems is called What the with so-called minimal the standard system of deontic system already have been logic is in an even worse position than the minimal system, because it adds to the minimal system as an axiom 12 Then any standard system including a moral dilemma, 0(p^ & ~p ), is 13 o o simply inconsistent. For Op => Pp, hence Pp^ & ~Pp-j where p1 is pQ & ~pQ. ~p(p & ~p). Main marketed deontic logics are epicyclic variations on (i) standard deontic logic, being modal attempts to repair defects in earlier prototypes. They include (ii) reductions of systems of type (i) to alethic logics by introduction of a constant ’o’ read, for example, ’the world will be worse off’ or 'punishment ought to cr is the moral sanction or some bad state of affairs. follow’: is defined Then *0' EK-A^cr); i.e. A is obligatory iff the negation of A (non-fulfilment of A, it OA is said) necessitates the sanction. It is usually postulated: -0^. Such reductive frameworks, since they include minimal deontic logic, repeat its defects. (iii) relativistic systems which attempt axiomatise to circumstances, c', conditional of reads ’p is obligatory given, or permission and conditional obligation; thus ’0(p/c) * in notions underlying model being that of conditional the probability. These systems were designed chiefly to avoid the paradoxes of derived obligation to which systems of type really in (as and (i) probability (ii) theory) lead. to But the new operator, /, compensate for implicational connective in the modal framework assumed. so-called "logics of conditional e.g., van Fraassen, p.438 ’... obligation" still lack the is introduced of an adequate So, not surprisingly, these exclude moral dilemmas (thus, it would be more apt to say that we have here a logic of obligation that remains after obligational conflicts are resolved'). (iv) systems which conditional d, such include a modal conditional functor superior to the material­ as a Stalnaker-Lewis-style conditional, conditional deontic notions like those of (iii) can be defined. in terms of which But these systems, since modal, do not escape modal limitations and problems (see further RLR). (v) systems based on a logic of change or action. These systems turn out to be reducible to a combination of absolute systems with tense logics, i.e. 14 to multiply modal systems and so repeat the problems of modal systems. None of these modal types are satisfactory, none can be made so, they amount because of 6 What is at modal assumptions, like consistency requirements, that they all involve. fault is not merely types of systems of this sort, which confine the framework to a worlds possible defect enough, one thereby and but the write in conditions, consistency that is though sweeping consistency interpretation of deontic more logic, that ’principles of deontic logics are conditions of consistency for normative systems’.^ The consistency interpretation - which is deeply entrenched in much ethical theory (especially making no adequate allowance from Kant) deriving that for what is essential fundamentally mistaken, - is moral dilemmas and to morality, the familiar inconsistency of normative systems. Documenting moral dilemmas. Cases of moral dilemmas are, perhaps unfortunately, §3. both familiar and inevitable. perhaps not, and logic theory deontic (including is unfortunate It such for standard deontic approximations rough as utilitarianism) since they have ultimately to be dismissed as inadequate to account for the data. is also often extremely On the other dilemmas. awkward who those for such dilemmas hand, probity, and are a main source of moral change. A moral dilemma occurs when considerations, for instance cannot T situation in act (where such a of which shape cannot, or precisely as way afford real tests of moral worth and 16 is confronted with moral perhaps not directly inconsistent, factual the probably cannot, facts satisfy to principles, binding obtain); principles that is, one so as to or although be satisfied Then the situation T cannot but induce a moral fix. considerations. in moral (but not only when) one the in themselves enmeshed find It in the (probably) meet moral This can come about in two ways, either because of the logical limitations supposedly satisfied by T, in particular its consistency feature (that, whatever p, does not) or through certain contingent features if p holds in T then ~p of T. In what follows we shall concentrate on a major subclass of what are commonly accounted moral dilemmas, those of (paraconsistent) logical interest where what is given or derived are pairs such as OA and OB, WA and WB (i.e. A is wrong and so is B), or the like, where A and B are And incompatible. of particular logical importance are cases where deontically incompatible pairs such as Op and 0~p, Wp and W~p, or the like are guaranteed. The examples of moral dilemmas we consider provide only a small selection from the rich variety of such dilemmas, but hopefully they illustrate that variety. Several of the examples involve more than one moral principle: however some commonly- adopted moral principles generate dilemmas, of one sort or another, their own. pretty much on Consider for instance first principles of the following type: Situations involving the (indiscriminate) killing of numbers of (uninvolved) people should be avoided, should not happen, are wrong - principle at very first approximation of the form (p)(p satisfies condition C + Wp). Applying such a principle, a dilemma results 7 where and occurs a large number of people will be killed, if p obtains or if ~p obtains a large number of people will also be killed. War situations provide obvious examples, with the V(ietnam) dilemma typical. 17 For example, people have described the situation in Vietnam as follows (not that it really is this way): If the Americans withdraw from Vietnam, a large number of people If the Americans stay in (do not withdraw from) Vietnam, will be killed. number of people will withdraw from C. Hence under be killed. Vietnam', Hence, condition satisfies p where p is C 'the Americans withdraw from ~p and the principle both p and ~p are wrong, similar is the company commander's dilemma. of his troops will be killed. a large also i.e. satisfies condition 18 Wp and W~p. Rather If he invades the hamlet, a large number If he does not invade the hamlet the prisoners held Taking p as 'he invades the hamlet', p satisfies C and therein will be killed, etc. ~p satisfies C. Therefore, Wp & W~p. Both p and-not p are wrong; neither would occur The killing does not however have to be of large numbers in an acceptable situation. of people to induce moral dilemmas. variants on the commander's dilemma Favourite regularly wheeled out concern murdering a potential murderer to prevent him killing several other presented people and with the related constrained option killing of some choice situations smaller special person is where a group of people (or creatures) in order to avoid the certain killing of a larger or less favoured group 1Q of creatures. 7 The pacifist's (or differently seen, patriot's) dilemma, which Lemmon draws from on Sartre, concerns the proposition p^: Z goes to war. If Z does not go to war, he help his friends and fails to fellow countrymen when they are in desperate need. Thus ~p-j is wrong, W-p-j , on the principle that so failing to help one's friends and fellow countrymen is wrong. If Z goes to war, he will be involved in killing people he has nothing morally or otherwise against; whence Wp^, on the principle that things which involve such killing are wrong. Therefore again Wp^ and W~pp A different sort of example, again however involving the taking of life in one way or another is the abortion dilemma (as conceived by Anglicans, say). presented as a clash between conflicting rights. to life (i.e. (on that the one part of the should not foetus); have one's In one corner, there is the right in the other, the right to bodily integrity body used against one's detriment for someone else’s benefit) on the part of the mother. where a particular state of affairs is an instance of both so (~p) and will principles. Hence Wp. would deny the mother's right to bodily integrity. Whence adjoining, Wp & W~p. to one's A dilemma results performance of an abortion (p) would deny the foetal right to life. not doing This can be The But Hence W~p. 8 Not so far removed from these examples, particularly when omission is conflated with commission, are environmentally-oriented examples involving sacrifice (broadly construed), for resources. Suppose that we have a duly qualified principle to the effect that things which lead to the feeding of starving people should happen. example the is a dilemma of limited three cases:- First following Suppose also that we have limited resources, and have decided to distribute these as follows: If the coin comes down heads (p), then group A of starving people will be fed. But if the coin does not come down heads (~p) then group B of starving people will be fed. Plainly in an ideal situation both p and ~p will occur, that is the coin will come down heads and it will not come down heads, so that both groups of people will be fed. And if the moral principle cited is correctly applied then a case of Op and 0~p results. course minor Of involved leads to conclusions of the form adjustment of the principle W~p and W—p, whence Wp. For an analogous conservationist * s (or humanitarian * s) dilemma consider the case forest where it ought to happen that the is chopped down, the benefit of the for presently starving (or etc.), and it ought to happen that the forest is preserved by positive action and Op dilemma for the benefit of coming generations (or etc.). 0~p emerges the from of application distinct In this case the The principles. society dilemma, concerns the reform of primitive societies so that they primitive Consider the dilemma of a feminist environmentalist as conform to outside standards. regards Aboriginal On the women. other hand, suppression of women in Aboriginal society should be opposed; on the other hand major western interference in Aboriginal affairs should be avoided; but changing the position of women would constitute major interference. Different examples involving public institution) dilemma, which following:- On the one hand, the be restricted and the funds will principle being the concerns preposition p2: the University The Vice-Chancellor, or rather his advisor on logic, argues opposes the government. both separate principles are the Vice-Chancellor * s (or formulated Wp2, p2 is wrong, students and accordingly). On because the University’s learning in general will suffer the other hand, W~p2, ~p2 (the is wrong because #p# will strengthen the present iniquitous status quo (the principle being states that of affairs which strengthen the present status quo be philosophers, is iniquitous avoided). Therefore, conjoining Wp2 & W~p2» A signifi ant source of moral dilemmas, long observed by afforded by a relatively unrestricted institution of promising, and more generally by parallel institutional arrangements for entering perhaps worth distinguishing two classes of cases. situations, Z is under an obligation into (moral) Firstly, contracts. It is in purely contractual p, because of a contract or promise, and also 9 under an obligation q, because of a (likely different) contract, where q entails or In the second sort of case, Z has promised to do ~p, and hence commits one to ~p. But p also satisfies conditions C, 0~p. it emerges, and Z adheres to the principle (q)(Cq ->0q), whence Op. As an example of the second type consider Lemmon’s simple and dated example, adapted from Plato: A friend leaves me with his gun saying he will be back for it in the evening, and I promise to return it when he calls. He arrives in a distraught condition, demands his gun, and announces he is going to shoot his wife because she has been unfaithful. I ought to return the gun, since I promised to do so - a case of obligation. And yet I ought not to do so, since to do so would be to be indirectly responsible for a murder, and my moral principles are such that I regard this as wrong. I am in an extremely straightforward moral dilemma, evidently resolved by not returning the gun (62, p.148). According to Lemmon the outcome is both Op, where p is ’I return the gun’, and also The 0~p. namely, for first an inference concerning promise-keeping; every q, that q is a genuine promise entails Oq (for genuine promises follows engender obligations), from and p is a immediate genuine promise. inference of the following sort: for every q, The second follows that q really contributes to a murder implies Wq, and that p really contributes to a murder; and moreover, -> 0~q. using an for every q, Wq Even if this last principle is repudiated a dilemma remains: for both Op and Wp, i.e. I ought to return the gun and it is wrong that I return the gun. that the initial principle sustains the conclusion 0~q as well. (It may be In any case, it is not difficult to amend Lemmon’s example so that it does, or more important, so as to render the ensuing dilemma more convincing.) Other dilemmas recur in variant form with contracts and promises. For instance, limited resources dilemmas reappear as follows: we promise all our surplus to a group of poor only to have even poorer people turn up. where one's deception, employment calls or participation in for activities Similarly work and role dilemmas, which are the production of nuclear morally repugnant (such as or chemical weapons), may arise either contractually, e.g. one signed up for the position, or from duty, e.g. to provide for one's family. Some of the moral dilemmas we have made look more determinate than perhaps they should, or than they would be if the circumstances were filled out, or got filled out slightly differently. Then we should find that some of the dilemmas take the form of Lemmon's more complex class, namely those where rather than OA and 0~A, what one has is Prob OA and Prob 0~A, where Prob is the probability functor ’it is probable that'. Lemmon describes this class of "fully dilemmatic situations" in these terms: ’there 10 is some, but not conclusive, evidence that one ought to do something, and there is some, but not conclusive, evidence that one ought not to do that thing’ (pp.152-3). sort of dilemma is again drawn from Sartre: in A real-life working example of this brief, Sartre’s pupil is under some (sort of) obligation to stay with his mother, but he also probably under is an obligation, felt only ambiguously, to join the Free French in England (for a fuller description see Lemmon, pp.153-4). Lemmon suggests that this class of dilemmas is, and perhaps should stay beyond deontic formalisation: however the dilemmas are now within the scope of formalisation of a sort by multiple functor intensional logics of a type not different represent such principles as ’’ought implies can”.22 those already from needed to Though we have presented a wide variety of dilemmas, some of them in some detail - to the dispel that dilemmas common prejudice are a rare phenomena that can be safely set aside or that need not be taken seriously in an ethical theory - we have by no means exhausted the range and wealth of such dilemmas. the extent of analogues practical of these Nor have we indicated the dilemmas; fact is that similar dilemmas are frequent in economics, over budgeting, devaluation (we ought to devalue because ... and we ought not to devalue because ...), and so on. Nor have we brought out the political significance of the dilemmas; but the fact also is that some of the deeper problems in moral and political theory revolve around dilemmas. Familiar examples are issues of (permitting permissiveness interests possibly harming or licence individuals to pursue offending others) and freedom (restricting freedom as regards actions which infringe others * freedom), of paternalism and state authority versus civil liberties, and of democracy as against minority interests. A assortment varied accounts of the where sources of examples is source of moral dilemmas, for moral claims conflict, contractual obligations. Lemmon also in particular and promises, is attracted principles as those morally simplistic that they generally arise greatest (p.150). But he fact that one and the same conflicting directives requiring type, since principle may conflict with or duties, may conflict with one another principle can deliver such removing by an account of this latter underestimates the extent of conflict, and neglects the contract or in e.g. duty with principles, principles with while realising that it will not always suffice, principle important (e.g. double maximization happiness of the greatest number). As well a sufficient variety of tough examples helps remove the illusion that moral dilemmas can one and all be escaped. Admittedly, fortunately, there are ways around some of the dilemmas we have outlined, especially those we have borrowed. with perhaps further around the dilemmas), artifice in setting up the cases (to exclude But lateral moves some of the dilemmas stand: from them (as is further argued in 11 residue ’To insist that there is in every case a solution without is no escape. § 6) there false is the to moral facts’ p.132), Marcus (Barcan a theme she well illustrates with the abortion dilemma. §4. deontic Paraconsistent logic cannot be modal makes it modal treatment the relevant development. logic: An adequate deontic have to be paraconsistent. but will For a modal treatment to accommodate moral dilemmas - which are hard data impossible it makes as dilemmas treat dilemmas impossible to (§3)• A without proper catastrophic collapse (as shown in §1). The of principles standard deontic logic are, however, as added to readily various paraconsistent logics as they are to modal or classical logic - at least this (e.g. OP), in (da Costa negation-weakened namely logic and now distinguished style) logic paraconsistent and For Jaskowski-style discussive logics there are some difficulties; relevant logics. in styles of paraconsistent two of the main for is true particular, the given of rejection can principles, adjunction such logics satisfactorily include O-adjunction, OA & OB -> 0(A & B), which reflects adjunction in for the possible-worlds sentential framework It would seem not; acceptable worlds? logic offers no way of handling of Jaskowski-style the form 0(C & ~C) that result by O-adjunction. properly accommodate dilemmas, for dilemmas concerning obligation, where such as moral clearly principles difficulties; For these require impossible worlds Generally, Jaskowski-style logics are in deep trouble trying to where C & ~C holds. adjunctive full-strength moral dilemmas of logics Negation—weakened hold. they cannot deliver expected deontic also are interconnections, e.g. in the deontic ’’square of opposition”, presented shortly, which depends crucially on normal principles. negation In difficulties. Relevant brief, deontic the reasons types of paraconsistent logics logics can both avoid choosing relevant logics over for (the substantial sets these of other main reasons for which are given in OP) are accentuated still farther as soon as applications, such as to deontic logic, are Accordingly we will assume a relevant logical base, and a relevant semantical made. in what follows. framework, Even so, much of what we say and do can be adapted to other logical bases, e.g. negation-weakened or positive-plus bases. Often a combined syntactical-semantical is approach more fruitful and illuminating than either a syntactical-axiomatic or a semantical approach carried out separately. Each enriches and controls the other.23 Such is the case with relevant logical theory, logic. Even analogue of and so it is with relevant deontic logic, which builds on relevant so, a standard syntactical deontic standard superstructure, relevant logic. beginning logic we normally added can is easier. simply add For an to obtain exact a analogue relevant of the to classical logic, to (what supersedes CL) 12 For minimal relevant deontic logic, MD, the one-place functor 0 - of obligation, as usual read (e.g. ’It ought suitable some to be extending system that’ - is added (the case) B system basic the to some relevant logic of RLR conforms to the usual formation rule: where A is a wff so is OA. however are options at Functor, F read ’It is forbidden that’, is defined thus: ’It is permissible that’, is defined : PA =Df~FA. FA =Df 0~A (cf. OED); and P, read There this stage (as at e.g. stages), can morality, be argued, from directions several other F could oh introduced independently. But this leads to complications that are unnecessary. It 0 The other familiar functors of deontic logic, F and P, are defined in the usual way. ’It is wrong that’ or, less satisfactorily, Functor I). (e.g. from the rationality be of from the meaning or semantics of obligation, from the idea of commitment), that 0 satisfies at least the following requirements:[RM] A -> B -> OA -> OB, i.e. where A + B is a theorem so is OA -> OB. That is to say, where A entails B is provable so is OA entails OB, obligation transmits over provable entailment. Hence the claim that this principle (R7 of RLR II) is a transmission principle. [K] OA & OB regards the i.e. -> 0(A & B), conjunction; or, a conjunction of obligations entails obligation as to adjunction (principle G of RLR II). These two important it put 25 principles, entailment and adjunction, make 0 a a little differently 0 is closed which ensure that 0 is closed under under provable systemic functor (in the sense of RLR II), and ensure that it has a relational (i.e. first order) semantical analysis. The postulates which correspondingly minimally characterise deontic functions F and P now follow by relevant logic upon applying the definitions. They are as follows:For wrongness: A For permissibility : With the A + B -*> functor further B —f> FByFA Q, FA & FB P(A v BH, PAv PA + PB defined F(A v B) QA =Df ~0A, a reduced pb deontic square of opposition follows: 0Ax ...............FA PA^ .............. .QA The opposites are dotted peripheral opposed, as modally, relations of the modal in the way the solid lines show. But the square are bound to be the lost given the 13 the modal (on fact of deontic dilemmas square Prior 62 p.220). see is worth It observing, however, that the peripheral relations can be reinstated through adoption of the so-called consistency scheme OA -> ~FA, i.e. OA + ~0~A; [D] and that the relevant deontic logic that results still excludes the rubbish brought in along deontic standard necessary truths, Nordamericano of that course not (though paradoxes, essentially because paradoxical etc.), deontic obligatoriness the of spread principles are not whereas triviality), incorporate dilemmas. the as degenerate dilemma-permitting The problem with deontic logics which include [D] also cannot they well as logic, Antipodean form we are advocating. is deontic In short, relevant theory can deliver a clean-cut, clean-living, dilemma- available. free (e.g. logic include relevant moral dilemmas systems without without can [D] inconsistency consistently These various logical claims, as to the modal rubbish that is not brought along, can all be made good by application of the semantical theory. The semantics shows what does not hold, as well as further explaining why the principles that hold do. Semantics for MD result upon adding to modellings for relevant logic a two-place relation S, on worlds, which is subject to the following condition W. b and Sbc then Sac, Where a i.e. where world a precedes b (indeed canonically a is contained in b) and world c is accepted vis-a-vis b then c is accepted vis-a-vis a. Given that a is a subworld of b this is evident enough. Distinctive features of the underlying semantical modellings for relevant logic - consisting of structures of the form <T, K, 0, R, *, be sufficiently and, well-known any in are case, explained v> - should elsewhere. These structures differ from the best of those for modal logics, the nonnormal structures <T, K, N, R, v> for the Lewis systems S2 and S3, in the following ways:- The class K of worlds, to which the factual (base) world T belongs, is expanded to include a much more comprehensive class of inconsistent and incomplete worlds; the class N of normal worlds K is in adjusted theorems hold; relation R, to a three-place the class to v(p, sentential a) relation = parameter 1) regular worlds, i.e. worlds; on then and wff. I(A, b) = 1, where all on is subject to a constraint where I is the so that Specifically, where a < b and p holds in a p holds in b, p. Conditions v for every world a and b modelling structures are hereditariness condition extends to all wff; i.e. in symbols, where a 1 then those used in modelling implication, is relaxed from a two-place inclusion of worlds is duly reflected. (written 0 of in K and every such that this b & I(A, a) = interpretation function which extends v to all Inclusion, <, can be added as an extra component of the model structures, but in fact it can be defined thus: a < b =Df (Px 0)Rxab. Finally relevant modellings 14 add to modal modellings a new function, *, in terms of which negation is evaluated, 27 which facilitates the inclusion of inconsistent and incomplete worlds. same role and interpretation as in standard relation S has the The semantical It is employed in the semantical evaluation of obligation functor 0, deontic theory. which is given by the following rule: I(0a, a) = 1 iff, for every world b such that Sab, I(A, b) = 1, i.e. OA holds at world a iff, for each world b accepted vis-avis a, A holds at b.28 The rule is a world relativisation of the idea that what is obligatory is what holds in all accepted worlds. (morally) It is thus an evident adaption of Leibnitzian prescriptions, given the linkages between obligation or moral binding and moral "musts” or imperatives, on the one side, and morally possible and or acceptable accepted worlds, the on other. The for motivation unrelativised connections can be forged at base world T; for there A is (morally) required, I(0A, T) = 1, iff for every b for which Mb I(A, b) = 1 (where Mb =Df STb), i.e. That is, what is required is iff A holds in every (morally) accepted world. what holds in all accepted or received worlds. Other construals of the semantical apparatus are of course open. tempting ideal, temptation (a succumbed to initially) regard the accepted worlds as and Sab as ’b is ideal as seen from c’. to read Mb as 'b is ideal’ i.e. to It is a little But that is like requiring supererogation in cases where the meeting of commitments or obligations is enough: the worlds do not need to be that good but simply to pass, to meet required standards. is worlds. acceptable through A perhaps easier construal than by way of accepted worlds construal That is alright provided the term ’’acceptable” is deployed, as it often is, nonevaluatively : for it is important in the semantical assessment to prescriptions for be able to make an evaluative step—down, to give meaning evaluative expressions nonevaluative terms. in Naturally this does not imply that evaluative notions are naturalistically eliminated, any more than familiar terms, extensional reductions, semantical extensional analysis of intensional implies that intensionality is removed: both are merely pushed down into the not-further-explained apparatus of worlds. Obligation is construed by way of what goes on in acceptable or accepted worlds, not what happens in permissible or permitted directly with the construal of permissibility. one another, but in worlds, because this latter Given modal muddles the two reduce to the more subtle relevant setting star shift is involved in the transfer from accepted to permitted worlds. The (derived) semantical rule for P is this: KPA, a) = ties 1 iff for some b such that Uab I(A, b) = 1, where Uab . b * Sa 15 at base Thus, A is permissible, world T, i.e. I(PA, = 1) iff A holds at some 1, permitted world b; what is permissible is worldwise what is somewhere permitted. modal equation of relations U and S further axioms, deontic the (where namely if Sab (in effect, condition then Sa ) b * (Pb)Sab The corresponds to e.g. guaranteed, is modally by ~0(P & ~p)) by the scheme OA ^PA. Now modal-strength deontic logics typically do include an axiom scheme of the form [D’J OA -> ~PA, i.e. from (alethic) is obligatory is not that permissible, under modal is, Indeed this used to be considered what distinguished deontic ~0~A. assumptions, OA logics what modal on logics the one side, which include a stronger principle analogous to OA -*■ A, and epistemic logics on the other, which were weaker in that [D’J failed. However [D’J, like [D], is deontically incorrect because it rules out consistent inclusion of moral dilemmas; or, to turn matters around, cases where OA & 0~A, [D’]» which or OA & FA, hold counterexample [D]. may seem a little more plausible transform of it on usual deontic definitions. than Similarly these cases refute [D], but is a definitional For what is obligatory is not ipso facto permissible where the obligatory item is also wrong, as in dilemmatic cases. To distance relevant deontic logic from modal analogues, while at the same time demonstrating that relevant theory can encompass moral dilemmas unproblematically , we next assume that some moral dilemmas hold, that is that for some p, both Op and Fp. Since however propositional quantifiers much complicate the semantical apparatus we shall introduce constants into the syntax, and let p^ be the first constant for which a dilemma ensues. That is, a new axiom, extending the logic, is [DD] 0p1 & Fpp i.e. p1 is dilemmatic.3° The modelling condition for [DD], is wd. For each a in 0, for some world x, Sax and v(ppx) = 1= v(ppX ). * This condition, which does not involve T, does not impose nonclassical conditions on normal worlds. Accordingly [DD] is only a weakly paraconsistent requirement; it does not imply that inconsistency protrudes into the factual or regular worlds. Indeed one advantage of the semantics is that it enable proof that dilemmatic judgements can be included without inconsistency. By contrast, modal theories cannot include even one half of [DD] do) without automatically excluding dilemmatic judgements. consideration has a thesis 0p2 for some (either will Suppose the logic under Then for every x in 0 there is some y such that Sxy with p2 set to hold at y. But modally this is enough to guarantee that [D] holds materially, More explicitly, so ~(0A & 0~A) generally, suppose otherwise that in i.e. there can be no such dilemmas. some model the material form of [D] failed; I(OA, then = T) 1 = I(A~O, T), which impossibility at y since I(A, y) = 1 i I(A, y). syntactical problems earlier in 1). even for Although [DD] implies Op^, very weak obligatory is conjured from the fact some for STy yields y This is a semantical analogue of the deontic logics (considered type of modal it does not say, nor does it follow, that OT for any Such modal stupidity as that every necessary and every tautology T (e.g. C v ~C). truth is since automatically removed that relevant in the relevant wash. can be This theory removes such paradoxes as p1 from which 0(A v ~A) would follow modally by 0—distribution (i.e. A v ~A, Again the [RM]). semantics can be applied to establish the point in proper detail. primitive principles of minimal relevant logic are open to challenge, Both the and [K] * Jennings has been disputed by Schotch (in Jennings and 81). The main Schotch- arguments against [K] — which induces what they call ’paradoxes of complete * aggregation essentially turn — automatically avoided on modal deontic by relevant and assumptions, Their theory. accordingly are (p.152, also main point p.154) is that [K] obliterates the distinction between [D] (i.e. Op ~0~p) and [Con] ~0 , i.e. in effect ~0(r & ~r). Their argument depends on construing implication in [D] as material-implication and on strict replacement. ~0~p iff ~(0p & 0~p), i.e. iff ~0(p & ~p) using [K] Then Op and its provable converse, i.e. iff ~0(r & ~r) using p & ~p - . r & ~r and strict According to the relevant approach the trouble is not with [K] but with replacement. the modal assumptions, which are independently objectionable (see 1). Their further argument begins from the premiss that ’we should certainly want to include among our deontic principles the law of moral consistency [Con] across cuts all different things. moral theories’ (pp.153-6). The ... because that principle premiss appears to conflate What cuts across all moral theories is the theme that some things, such as a sufficiently evil state of affairs, are not obligatory, whence ~0s. does cut across all theories is the assumption that there are no moral dilemmas of the form 0(A & ~A), which is what [Con], with not just that there What are theories like properly defined, would imply. those of Lemmon and Sartre It is which include contradictory obligations; it is also that some theorists would want to insist that there is something logically wrong with principles like [Con], e.g. that it doesn’t make sense to talk of the nonobligatoriness of absurdity. Schotch and Jennings do contend that we should allow for moral conflict of the form OA & OB where A and B are inconsistent. their assumptions there [K] stops rejection of are moral dilemmas that yielding Since then B -> ~A, of the 0(A & -A). it follows that on form OA & 0~A. Yet as they Certainly only themselves have reported, the consensus view is that there are (in the end) no dilemmas of the form OA & O~A: insofar, all theories’, ’cuts across then, rejection of dilemmas of the form 0(A & ~[~]A) so, near enough, does rejection of those of the form OA & 0~A. What certainly does not emerge is that there can [K]. The be no deontic logic which takes as a primitive law the principle be can that best if done, subscribe to [K], we is to formalise ethical theories - namely those which do not allow moral certain particular conflicts (p. 156). logics provide decisive counterexamples to this contention. Relevant deontic They can take [K] as primitive: they allow for moral conflict; but they do so by allowing, like Lemmon, for moral inconsistency.31 disconcerting More from flowing the than fundamental difficulties deriving principles, transmission [K] from are allegedly those difficulties include which well-advertised paradoxes of deontic logic. § 5. Resultant on impact other relevant paraconsistent shift. and puzzles of paradoxes deontic theory of the Often cleaning up one logical puzzle in due technical detail has a beneficial effect on surrounding puzzles and on associated problems in the area. Light is cast on, and So it turns out also in the case of moral dilemmas. Among them sometimes solutions are delivered for, a number of other linked problems. are the following puzzles generated by theorems of (relevant) deontic logic. are, the ’’paradoxes of commitment”. Where material implciation => is in first place, defined as usual, e.g. T1. There ~A v ~B, it is a theorem that A ° B 0(B => A), whence if OA then 0(B 25 A), OA sometimes read: A if is then obligatory anything one commits to A, or: ’Doing anything commits us to doing what is obligatory’; T2. FA OCA => B), if 0~A then 0(A = B), sometimes read: if A is forbidden then doing A commits one to doing anything at all, or: ’Doing what is not permitted commits us to doing anything whatever’ readings are proceed from Prior from there interpretation of paradoxes symbols, the The claims read off are paradoxical. 62, p.224). to little justification - reading ’0(A commits one to doing B’. the in and (the quoted in logic this case B)’ as depends, always, depends crucially on - But to on the what has as a commitment relation, e.g. as ’doing A Such a reading which presupposes that material implication is a satisfactory conditional can in no way be sustained (see RLR), and that is the end of the problem. that A then paradoxical guises; and it If, ought to for example, T1 be features disappear. these commitment the case is simply read: if it ought to be the case that either not B or A, then the alleged However puzzles have a tendency to reappear in new puzzles are no exception. Even with conditional 18 terms of obligation applied to a properly defined in obligation conditional, the puzzles in reemerge new forms, example, for genuine (relevant) in is what called ’’Ross’s paradox”, and in related transmission problems. It has been claimed that the principle, OA -> 0(A v B), yielding if OA then 0(A v B) T3. is which T1, to equivalent is Ross paradox principle), - paradoxical to do either A or B, it may be More generally, given OA, obligatory to read a letter but not to read or burn it. there is an obligation example, for because, where the content of B may be totally do to established. (The comment goes beyond what T3 supplies, but that is not material). the in circumstance which obligation the to is set inappropriate A or A similar objection is made to the analogous permissibility principle PA ■> P(A v B), T4. Ross’s paradox, on the alleged grounds that there are examples where A is permissible but A For example, be. not the following it is permissible that to post a takes based on some one application of T4 is said to the paradoxical: letter false proposition the distance implies that it is permissible to post a The assumption that there is some sort of paradox here is letter or kill one’s aunt. however B may the towards that the permissibility of of permissibility killing the consequent one’s The aunt. proposition itself seems to be based on an application, never articulated and quite inadmissible, of Disjunctive Syllogism, distribution, P(~A &. A For PB. (A v b) ■+ B, and what results from P- it may certainly be permissible not to post However it is assuming more than standard deontic logics will grant to the letter. go on ) ~A & to the permissibility of not posting the letter and letter or killing disjunction. one’s aunt, especially given the also either derivation of posting the latter the Still going on remains tempting (and would presumably be warranted by a Lukasiewicz deontic logic analogous to his 4-valued modal logic). But so going on is to no avail in a duly relevant setting, where Disjunctive Syllogism fails: there is no admissible route here to the permissibility of killing aunt, one’s however desirable the act might otherwise be. main The transmission conditional obligation, strict implication, as problems in found also modally derived. an adequate deontic logic are, like those of They come from reliance on material or representation of implication. The worst manifestation of this is that already discussed, deontic trivialisation leading from Op^ and 0~p.| to OB, for any B, in virtue of the provability of p^ & ~p^ => B. But there are variety of lesser manifestations of the same underlying problem, of which the following example (adapted from recent discussion) is just one sort: p4. We have an obligation to feed the starving poor D. There exist starving poor. Therefore, since starving poor, it ought to be by O-transmission, the case it ought that we meet our obligation to feed the to be that there exist starving poor, a 19 that is far from obviously true. deontic logic, for the simple reason presupposition relation, conclusion of transmission problems of modal the that the cannot p4 Such analyses do not entailment. an to rather or implication, (material-) upgraded be plague relevant The many systems all enamate from excessive O-distribution on basis of implications will not them, support in the as following transmission principles typical of orthodox deontic logics, all of which should be rejected: OCA D B) D. OA 3 OB A D B -> OA 3 OB A => B =>. OA => OB. With their rejection a thorny tangle of modally-derived paradoxes is also rejected. There appears however to be an immense temptation to try to impose excessively strong transmission principles; and the same phenomenon to be seen at work in modal contexts can also be observed when a proper entailment is introduced.3^ This occurs, particular, in attempts in to ’’normalise” [RM], to strengthen it a from rule connection to an entailment, for instance, to (the characteristic S3 form) [OT] A + B +. OA + OB; it occurs with analogous changes thereon, and e.g. A-> B. PA PB and A FB + FA, as well with as imported forms of these principles, e.g. OA & (A and (A -> B) & FB As an example of the FA. B B) OB type of puzzles that [OT] produces consider p5. Grannie killed the vicar. Grannie repented for having killed the vicar The problem with putative entailments such as p5 is that, while we are ordinarily (with the context duly flashed out) inclined to agree that Grannie ought to repent, we don’t want to agree to have killed the vicar. that Grannie ought The problem turns essentially however on the availability of [OT] in place of [RM], for p5 is not a provable entailment of the underlying logical theory (and there is little case for it one), trying to make sc [RM] does not apply to p5, in contrast with awkwardness [OT] appears to require, of having somehow entailment, is thereby straightforwardly avoided.33 Most the of paradoxes falling paradoxes and Robber paradoxes can be paradoxes and usual forms of these resolution. one’s According helping a man under such to deny descriptions as similarly resolved or avoided. variations upon [OT]. The is that p5 Good Samaritan an The original them certainly succumb to such to the Robber’s paradox if robbing a man is forbidden then The Good Samaritan whom one has robbed is also forbidden. paradox is a further turn on this paradox: not only the robber’s helping a man he has robbed is wrong, so is someone else’s, a good Samaritan’s, helping the robbed man (see Prior 58). - be It is undoubtedly paradoxical that it should - especially as a matter of logic wrong to help a man who has been robbed: but do any fundamental deontic 20 principles commit us to such a thing, for appropriate substitutions on variables? No, These puzzles all take the following form: B, which describes something they do not. admittedly wrong, gets in or implied as part of the description of something larger, A, arising as a result of the situation in B; however A is not wrong but perhaps even Nothing required. theory; and in none of shows this the however that A B literature can examples in the the provable in is it There be. logical is another important feature, commonly neglected however, which is that A does not assert B. If it did, then A, since amounting to A & B, would appear to be wrong also, as B is. This points to a difficulty also for the usual assumption that A entails B; for then A (certainly modally) coentails A & B, whence the wrongness of A coincides with that of A & B, the wrongness of which would seem to be guaranteed by B. If however A only involves B in a weaker sense, [OT] is exonerated.3^ The paradoxes can be pushed another way, to contest this data, and bear against systems as minimal as MD. For MD yields theorems like the following: T5. FB T6. 0( F(A & B), whence if FB then F(A & B). OB, whence if 0(A & B) then OB. &B) theses, Such minimal it is now suggested, are paradoxical in the same way as the Robber. This is not so: only gross confusion of decidedly distinct syntactical forms - a practice formalisation can unfortunately encourage - could support such a suggestion. If it is wrong to rob a man then it is wrong to rob him and help him;35 but it is not thereby wrong to help him, indeed to help him who has been robbed. But the relative and the tense shift are both important; and the whole relative clause in no way reduces to a conjunction conjoining robbing the man. The positivistic objection that the paradoxes of deontic logic show that there is really no ’’logic of norms” has come even from a modern founder of deontic logic, von Wright. This he now contends that There is no such thing as an "entailment” between a norm Op and a norm 0(p q) - and Ross’s paradox makes us aware of the absurdity of talking as though it existed. ... Ross was right when he offered his paradox as a proof that, properly understood, there could not be such a thing as a logic of norms (82, p.15, rearranged, emphasis suggested in text). And he ’essentially (p.14). (also also But mistakenly) of variations given that one regards and the von Wright contains such normative tautologies Op are inevitable. Thus while ’’paradoxes’* the same, viz. wants also the of deontic so-called to supply logic as Ross’s Paradox’ a deontic logic, which 0(p q), some subtle and dubious distinctions Op & ~0(p q) is normatively inconsistent, inconsistent; while Op can be thus said to ’’normatively entail” 0(p q) it is not it does not; and while Op comes rational commitment to Op, it does not carry logical commitment to it. the Unlike said are connections associated to and entailment (p.15). no paradoxes induce other But normative these relations, what is said go to for normative entailment can be said as well as regards entailment, that one (e.g. a law giver) is Op adopts who rationally to 0(p q) going on to endorse the entailment of 0(p q) by Op. for a oitrary addition away there is no puzzle in associations are cleared once mistaken modal q. Indeed committed The ’’paradoxes” of deontic logic are not a reflection of the illusory notion of a logic of norms but rather a product of a modal logic of norm. However von Wright has other significant reasons for insisting that (in a sense) ’norms have no logic or that normative discourse is ’’alogical”’ from noncognitivism, that symbolising norms, formulas’, ’prescriptive standard a on One derives (p.4). interpretation deontic ’do not express true and false propositions. It makes no sense to speak of relations of contradiction or entailment between formulas when thus interpreted ’ hold nontruthvalued regards as semantical This is not so: (p.4). theory relevant as such discourse, for sketched logical relations such as inconsistency logic deontic carries no commitment to the position that normative discourse is truthvalued. 0 interpreted In imperatives. fact ineradicable The values 1 and by way of holding are not intended to be tied to truth and falsity, except at the factual world T (see RLR1); and that exception is readily removed. judgements, instead normative received, logic the both (the point requirements e.g. Otherwise the etc.). adjustments the and of the form Fp, semantical can be said to be in theory its ’’semantical” is developed, For force (or is as before. With such minor theory conform to noncognitivist to meet von Wright’s argument, in Morscher, pp.97-8). Von Wright’s other reason for coming out against a logic of norms is but grist It is that ’there cannot be a logic of norms because a for the paraconsistent nill. could enjoin contradictory legislator (at ’’relative least serves" Morscher, ...) dilemmas. it but p.98). to the is normal not states of affairs. This might be irrational purpose which the institution of giving orders logically excluded, it is not alogical’ (cited in That is, a legislator can set up (usually unintentionally) deontic This is certainly not triviality, by modal-strength indictment, not of deontic deontic logic, It impossible. but logics. of a is simply excluded, Once again the on criticism certain modally-dominated pain of is an approach to it.36 §6. Upsetting the moral consensus: unrealisable obligations, and inevitable wrongs. The theme that there are moral dilemmas, like those cited, which stand, which do not dissolve upon rational reflection, philosophers, 3? and apparently runs agains the consensus among moral certainly upsets dominant positions in ethical theory, notably 22 broadly Kantian positions (built into much contemporary British moral philosophy) and utilitarian positions (which pervade Anglo-American and theory value thinking, especially outside narrowly philosophical circles). Kantian positions suppose that morality is above all a rational procedure of a certain sort (which we tentatively grant), and that rationality requires consistency. Or put differently, but for instance, must be consistent. Thus what is obligatory, equivalent given modal assumptions, ought implies can, OA -> OA, for every A and some Wherever an agent appears to be in a moral dilemma suitable possibility functor 0. this is a matter of appearance only, a moral illusion which will (and must) vanish on further rational reflection.^ This Kantian assumption should be rejected: moral dilemmas are part of the data and no illusion, and no amount of reflection need budge them. By insistence upon consistency requirements, and through failure, consequently, to recognise intractable moral dilemmas, deontological theories have been forced to jump through a variety of different hoops and to weaken considerably their positions. In particular, temporary and moral firm principles are almost invariably weakened to something much more provisional. is experience While important, some revisability of principles in the light of such wholesale weakening of principles is decidedly There is a point then in trying to undesirable, on both logical and moral grounds. expose some of the tangled assumptions on which the weakening is based, and to loosen their grip. The assumptions involved on a Kantian approach include these: H1. Moral principles - in those concerning justice, particular more fairness and the basic principles of obligation, such as like - are to be explained at bottom as principles of rationality, or rational behaviour for persons. H2. Rationality is a matter of consistency; certainly it implies it. H3. Consistency reduces to, or can be accounted for, through possibility. Put together these assumptions yield the theme H4. What is obligatory must be possible - ought-implies-can , for short. So if that gives, so do some of the assumptions. but on moral dilemmas, It does give, not just because of So also then independent grounds. should the assumptions give; and they fail not just on the grounds that they lead to themes like H4. The deeper trouble is that they are based on a super-modal view of things which combines modal assumptions with rational strong The assumptions. combination is important, for once the modal assumptions are rejected, it becomes fairly transparent that the rationality assumptions, whatever their merit, cannot such things as moral framework or system or course of action. rational case, systems: removing much more modal is required assumptions - a than rationality main present uniquely determine Rather there are rival for uniqueness. exercise - In any destroys such rationality route to ought-implies-can. Finally consistency is neither necessary nor That it is not sufficient is indicated by a variety of sufficient for rationality. consistent worlds which do not conform to minimal rationality requirements. is converse relevant refuted which conform inconsistent worlds by meet rationality requirements (see further RLR and OP). H3 fails, paradoxes induces ~0A -> ~(A ° B), generally is not just that the Modality removed. of paradoxes with entailment, e.g. anything all. from isolated transmitted to are inconsistent is arguments Not only H2 (as a necessary assumptions parallelling proposition impossible inconsistency It modal when consistency of an fails, also is not 40 this indiscriminate way. However to rationality to sufficient reason and the like), and by dialethic theories which standards (e.g. condition) The more impossibility in collapse; ought-implies-can at there are distinct from those supplied by moral dilemmas. counterexamples to the theme, The counterexamples concern obligations (or oughts) which are impossible, in some sense, to realise, counterexamples Op & ~0p) But wrongdoings. most the of possibility Derivatively then (substituting ~p for unrealisable obligations. that wrongs are inescapable, there are many determinates of possibility examples than concern also mere involve, in their logical possibility necessitated (and necessity), and less anemic notions of correspondingly broader notions of original (and p in setting, necessity than a narrow logical necessity). perhaps strained, adaption, and, in any case, they serve to undermine the point and Nonetheless they sometimes admit of, force of the ought-implies-can dictum (which is to link obligation to freedom to do otherwise), and These examples all arise nature, circumstances, its effective use against moral dilemmas. seriously weaken thereby because agents are constrained in one way or another - by fate, the Gods, their past actions - but are not thereby released from their obligations or exonerated from wrong-doing. Consider first very down-to-earth types of counterexample to ought-implies-can, before turning to more high-flown but not altogether dissimilar examples from our barbaric past. ’Suppose that I say "I ought to go and see him, but I can’t because I don’t know where he is”. There need be nothing inconsistent in such a remark; and, yet there would be if "ought” always implied ’’can'” (Hare 63, p.52). same with situation ”’I where ought I've to return driven the this car I’ve car so far borrowed, away that returning it in time to keep a promise’ (Thomason, p.175). but I It is much the can’t”, there is said no chance in a of my Likewise the claim of the person who cannot swim that she ought to rescue the child caught in the current but can't. One traditionally important class of counterexamples derives from the Catholic doctrine of perplexity secundum quid.^ Donegan, in defending what he calls 'the 24 Hebrew-Christian tradition’, contends that once one has sinned one May be faced with situations from which one cannot escape without further wrong-doing (77, p.152). That ♦ is, one may be so placed (through one’s own fault) that one ought not to perform any of the available actions though one cannot do otherwise. So it is necessary that one act in a way that is forbidden. Protestant thinkers, particular Luther, appear to have considered the human race involved in one grand secundum quid on account of original sin. ’God punished justly sinners who not could otherwise do Luther believed that than sin’ that God and ’provided men with a law they were unable to keep and then righteously damned them for failing to keep it’. 242 The Calvinists also were committed - but through their doctrine of predestination predestined to sin, unpalatable conclusion - to rather they cannot but by suggesting Because conclusions. similar humans are However Calvin attempted to escape this sin. that in some suitable sense are not sinners compelled, that it is somehow possible for them to do otherwise than they do. J Given however the theme of predestination this attempt to escape looks unconvincing. Any stronger determinism that does not also obliterate morality is in a similar Creatures will have obligations which they cannot fulfil because they predicament. are determined and will to do otherwise, sometimes be bound to do wrong. Plainly where this becomes a general and automatic matter, a serious erosion of moral notions such as responsibility, normally linked to obligation, is bound to set in. However isolated cases analogous to those of determinism can occur without such erosion of moral notions (as indeed with moral dilemmas themselves). rigidifying personality and ossifying character are of this gets older Cases of A person as she sort. may build up a personality so rigid that she cannot escape from it. At some point it becomes impossible (at least psychologically) for her to act other than she does, yet on some occasions she ought not to act in the way she does. outcome resembles that with original sin though the route taken Yet even if we grant that the person ought not to have got still we are entitled to our moral judgements; modern morality * The is very different. into such a position, as Pigden puts it, ’an enlightened can allow such violations of ought-implies-can. Classical Greek morality certainly seems to have allowed for such violations. In Homeric ethics a man could be blamed for failings he could not avoid, unavoidable wrong-doing. and so for Subsequently it was taken for granted that impossible moral requirements could be placed upon a hero, yet he could be blamed for failing to meet them. Thus the situation of Agamemnon and of Oedipus, both despite their struggles, despite their awareness of their predicaments and their anguish, were bound, indeed, fated, to act wrongly, and were duly blamed for their wrong-doing. 25 There have been various attempts to salvage the ought-implies-can theme, through a residual Kantianism. presupposes-can Thus Hare proposes, but does not really work out, an ought- a with theme weaker relation presupposition logical replacing implication (53, p.54); and both Barcan Marcus and Morscher suggest a model theoretic connection: essentially that for OA to hold true A must be satisfiable in some world, and so, modally, A is consistent. But within a relevant setting, the satisfiability is hardly a requirement and does not ensure consistency. constraint, Once again, consistency is only obtained at the cost of other more important connections, such as Nor does Hare’s comparison with presupposition (on p.54) succeed. O-adjunction. the analogy such situations the worked implies-can. as practical question those and dilemmas moral But (pace Hare, p.55) as to what to do not would counterexamples affording If arise in ought- to the question most certainly does arise in many cases. §7. Resolving proceed, in moral any dilemmas, dilemma so far situation be. as can easily are Recipes for what provided, enough decidedly poor recipes have been much canvassed in the literature. how to to, indeed several Among these are deontic ranking recipes, which would have us impose some type of priority ordering on deontic principles, so that consistency is maintained and in every situation there is a dominant rule; defeasibility recipes, which would have us weaken all deontic rules to merely prima facie or other-things-being—equal principles and operate, when things look would going like have wrong, utilitarian by and assessment; pure-chance recipes, which situationally but arbitrarily by such methods as us determine outcomes coin toss. Such recipes fail to meet important conditions of adequacy upon any account of the way resolution is effected, if and when it can be, namely: A1. The account should sufficiently resemble what rational choosers do when they find themselves in a moral dilemma. Many human choosers have moral principles, have not rigorously ordered in such which, as against ranking recipes, a way as to exclude dilemma they situations, and which, as against thorough-going defeasibility recipes, they are not prepared to give Thus, in addition, away or modify when they encounter snags. A2. The principles induce which moral dilemmas are not generally abandoned or qualified, but very often stand. Naturally sometimes moral dilemmas, especially development and revision of principles. if they recur, do lead to moral But the logic of dilemma situations does not force changes or adjustment and none may be made; and typically none will be made, where dilemmas are resolved, resolve dilemmas which they may not be. The assumption that we must is probably a hangover from consistency assumptions, that deontic inconsistency must be removed - whereas all we have to do is act, or do nothing, in 26 the face of them. Part of what is wrong with the idea of a predetermined ordering of principles, the conflict, and also the they remove is that as with utilitarianism procedures, felt tension, and often anguish, that goes with it. Even if the appeal to priority succeed in some cases, it does not in fact work, and 45 general. For with Lemmon’s complex dilemmas where ordering of principles does not could succeed, in uncertainties enter be can there preassigned no solution moral to the in dilemma virtue of higher-order principles or a given ordering of one’s duties and obligations and the like, because part of the very dilemma is just one’s uncertainty as to one’s actual situation (p.153). In any event dilemmas do not go away as they should if the conflicting obligations were merely prima facie. Very often someone in a moral dilemma is in a fix and feels it^^; and doesn’t say ”My God there isn’t a problem, I must simply look up the book principles are ranked and what’s to be done’, to see how these not having been so prepared. in which we, as it were, merely .... dilemmas in which we morally prepared, have to look up the solution in our private ethical code, are rare ... and in case any of little practical Of interest. are those importance greater dilemmas in this class where some decision of a moral character is required Our predicament is here so described that, whatever we do, even if we do ... nothing at that might mean), we are doing all (whatever something which we ought not to do, and so can be called upon to justify either our activity or our inactivity (Lemmon, p.151). The usual deontological positions, which deontic weaken principles to provisional or prima facie principles to avoid problems with dilemmas, also play into utilitarian hands. reflecting things that of in often is which only are to act overriding requirement character utilitarians want For the for such to represent most a way disguised (a sc part as to of obligation statements concerning distributed, e.g. are the taken coherent way as derivative; net utilities position from would their own the deontic make this Deontic principles such as reduce somehow distributed type of action which tends to maximize utility. accounts typically rule out moral dilemmas: both apart or to tend complex to be an action is obligatory when it maximizes (expected) utility and it is of a recognised cannot they ar . - principles as deontic maximize utility, maximisation principle so only for the most part also). those all maximise utility, and indeed 27 Such reductive for example, an action and its opposite if an action increases utility then its opposite characteristically diminishes it. if all moral injunctions More generally, answer back ultimately to just one standard, maximum utility, then there can be no real conflict (but etc.). for these It is apparent conflict through failure to calculate correctly, sorts of reasons that the considerable data now accumulated regarding moral try to explain away, to utilitarians deny that there can be So they are in the awkward position of having to dispute, dilemmas. genuine moral and only dilemmas. But how, when stuck in moral dilemmas, do we proceed to reach a decision? For a 47 decision is called for: those in dilemma situations still often have to act. The intuitive procedure in such dilemma situations is not difficult to grasp. terminology is regularly employed, and is instructive. to those the in - dilemmas weighed assessed, are The same Alternatives - outcomes open up, the balance. put in The familiar scales picture, with the scale sensitive to evaluative weights, is helpful - except it that can suggest, weighed against another, whereas there may be as with of justice where one thing is two competing principles or just that there are several. scales the options, In the light of such a weighing up of alternatives, those in dilemmas then determine what they should do, what is best, or satisfactory, ’If ... we are to act here in good faith,we shall recognise in the circumstances . that the dilemma is what it is and make the best decision we can * There is an attempt to then intuitive apply (Lemmon 62, p.151). methods, decision consist which in assessing and weighing the alternative outcomes open, and maximizing or satisizing on these This outcomes. already very looks consequentialist decision theory, which is what, a like preanalytic account of in a qualified way, we shall reach It is in a qualified way for several reasons; not only may no best (or even towards. sufficiently good) outcome be determinable - there is nothing approaching a decision procedure here - but the further decision theory methods apply within moral dilemmas, so they supply, at best, a second best resolution, a first best result requiring removal of moral dilemma constraints and so being ruled out. Those in dilemma unworkable (and situations usually do not resort to anything as mostly arbitrary and often ineffective) utilitarian as complex and assessment procedures. Nor do they surrender to pure chance procedures. A3. The account should not give way to irrationalism, but should adhere to rational decision procedures, which are not necessarily, however, effective. This requirement rules out pure chance methods, which are only appropriate where it is a matter of indifference which way the decision, if any, Even where some resort to methods can give a worse outcome than might be obtained. tie-breaking devices is appropriate, that may dilemma, but rather to some component of the not be situation. Otherwise such goes. to the final Envisage, outcome of a for instance, a decision-tree for an issue where a tie-breaking device such as a coin toss is applied to a high branch and that proves sufficient for rational decision methods to resolve 28 Then it would be irrational to try to resolve the whole issue the issue concerned. by coin toss. Nonetheless A4. The account should be appropriately situational. That is, the account should be applicable to each situation on its own merits, taking It should not simply be a rule­ detailed account of the features of that situation. for in dilemma cases the rules have ceased to yield a resolution and based account, into a are locked be will fix position. situational, it will not that of situational be involve resort to pure—chance methods. by situation, situational most part, by example) or example by virtue of A3 and A4, though the account Thus, procedures ethics where such ethics Nor is a situational ethics (ethics situation For the of a broader type being recommended. into operation where a moral only go dilemma is reached; in general, deontic rule-based procedures apply. The broad outlines of a satisfactory account are beginning to emerge. Before we consider apply rational decision methods to each given dilemma situation. is how this to be so as account, to be said about the needs For to meet apparent objections. insensitive those accomplished more to in switches language, both FA and A, some options, and yet that, also F~A, that it ought also be that so B, very idea of it should be that B, where B entails We do not however go on to one of A and -A, so that not both A and ~A are ruled out. claim the is both A and ~A are ruled out as moral that situations, in certain in For are we not only claiming that decision-theoretic resolution of moral dilemmas. for structure of the things, there is, to among other contradiction a It should that not both A and ~A ruled are out morally.49 What is being claimed that B, or an adequate thing, is the best thing to do in the constrained circumstances, that B should be done in that sense, net that B is lifted to status obligation enough in the circumstances, by looking at you does not the can B is In brief, <»B, "second-best obligation"). determined (though imply OB. acceptable worlds worlds where B holds which fail to be acceptable. say, if you like, that it is a the best that can be done or good is not going to be When <£>B holds where B When holds, because there are holds is not going to be settled in general by falling back on deontic rules, because in the interesting cases the rules are jammed. But such deontic rules dees not being beyond imply being beyond rational procedures, indeed procedures that may be represented by way of rules (though not controlled by deontic rules). The rational procedures in question are essentially those of decision theory. What is required is a decision as to what can be done in the circumstances; and this can be determined by relevant alternatives. be of something weighing up the expected outcomes and selecting among The selectiin may be of the best in the circumstance; satisfactory in the circumstances. The approach adopted pluralistic, allowing for both maximizing and satisizing procedures. 29 the it may can be Maximizers will of course argue that it would be irrational to select anything but the best among the alternatives (given that it was conceded to be the best); But satisizers will resist arguments.what such elaborates is what upon we a under do decision done normally this:- Set out the relevant alternatives, action courses of alternative. to us open Select a best, i.e. way - is - merely which in outline the results that the different list to. analysis intuitive more i.e. lead will a in theory Determine the of each likely value with maximum likely value, an alternative or a The basic procedure is childishly simple, but filling sufficiently good alternative. out the details may be extremely difficult or even impossible in a satisfactory way. The in problems, normally order increasing alternatives open, establishing their probability, rankings to them. things these cases, favourable more delineating the assigning values or desirability techniques from decision theory however for doing all There are in are: difficulty, of and in less circumstances favourable guestimates can be made or resort had to fuzzy methods. To descend to concrete applications (where procedures may be clearer than at the theoretical level), consider again the Platonic dilemma discussed by Lemmon, where I ought to return my friend’s gun and also ought not to do so. The alternatives are to return the gun and have the wife shot, or to return the gun avoiding a shooting but thereby breaking an undertaking. the alternative first wife It is certain, in the circumstances, that under the will be shot, highly a undesirable outweighing the lesser undesirability of the second alternative. the value of second Since the expected first, exceeds that of the alternative considerably much outcome, the best thing in the circumstances is to return the gun. However undertaking goes Lemmon to seriously the return ’to gun suggesting that one sacrifices one’s astray in utilitarian considerations’ No doubt (p.152). utilitarian considerations would bring out (could be massaged to bring out, rather) a But the fact is that no consideration (or interpersonal comparisons) similar result. of the utilities pleasures and pains contemplated. ’’critical involves an (whoever Lemmon utilitarian ones. the everybody of (involved they confuses are), the in is made, consequentialist universe, or or even needs whatever), to considerations with be their remotely much narrower Similarly the recipe Hare suggests for resolving moral dilemmas at level”, namely illegitimate resort to assimilation act-utilitarianism of (see, consequentialist e.g. 82, considerations p.43), under utilitarianisms. In certain respects Lemmon’s Platonic dilemma is not a good example of a moral dilemma; tougher in particular, dilemmas, the it is too easily resolved, and so characteristic features of pain, emerge, moral dilemmas can anguish, indecision, get omitted. As thus begins to be divided roughly into two types, easy and hard. 30 Easy dilemmas are those that are comparatively easy to find a way through eventually, and But hard ones are those that leave people caught in the dilemma so are resolvable. at least uncomfortable irresolvable. they whatever to choose and do, are so in a good sense Though a way-through or a way-out may be charted by decision methods, it is a way that leaves those involved morally uneasy, dissatisfied, or worse. For at the far hard end of the spectrum lie those dilemmas of tragic dimensions. Although consequential decision rationally within moral dilemma theory provides a for model how proceed to situations, by no means everyone confronted with a moral dilemma will apply such procedures in an intuitive way, even though many will. For one thing, there is plenty of scope for bad faith, irrationality and and more generally, for non-rational procedures; and severe moral dilemmas often enough induce non-rational and even paralytic or self-destructive modes in those who are caught in them. another, For there are indirect ways of obtaining the effects of decision theory, analogue decision theory so to say. Counselling, whether through a friend or a professional counsellor, is an important analogue: there the discussive mode helps to bring out eludicating of and assemble alternatives, undesirability of each. the and elements the of the advantages decision and approach, the desirability and theory drawbacks, Alternatively, or as well, these elements may be bought out by reflecting on a range of similar situations and experience there using these cases as some sort of precedent, in particular, for determining value rankings of alternatives open. Moral dilemmas have corollaries for moral ways of doing things. is that perfectibility of the moral scheme of things is impossible. One corollary Any sufficiently rich set of rules risks inconsistency, and will be inconsistent if completed. dilemmas are thus inevitable be; in the larger scheme of things. Moral This is as it should for it is in this way especially that moral development occurs and moral stature is obtained. 31 ^A much earlier version of this paper was presented by the second author at the Australian National University in 1975. Subsequently much of the paper was lost; what survived is largely incorporated in the first three sections, especially §3. However the new version takes over the leading ideas of the initial version. The authors are much indebted for comments and criticism to C. Pigden, R. Goodin and G. Priest. was ^This even true Maliy’s of pioneering system of 1926 which permitted replacement of logical equivalents within the scope of obligation function 0 (see F & Von Wright’s seminal work H p.3). (in 51), which set the pattern for mainstream deontic logic, was explicitly based on the modal comparison of deontic functors with modal functors, and built modal that break the modal systems, exceptional assumptions in at the bottom of the theory. The connection, are deontic systems based on relevant logics on such systems see RLR, chapter 8. ^These paradoxes are explained, obligation, paradoxes of derived and their see modal bases exposed, On the for some of the p.224; and Prior 62, further in §5. considerable literature on paradoxes like those of the Robber and Good Samaritan, see anthologies and the Hilpinen A detailed uniform treatment of especially Vermazen. all these and other deontic paradoxes in the framework of relevant logic is given in RLR II. 4In its equivalent form, Op => ~Fp, i.e. what is obligatory is not forbidden, it is the dubbed ’’Bentham’s Law” by von Wright 81, p.2. 5In a way, furthermore, avoids that the , problems Hare’s and complexities attempt to transfer a levels-resolution to deontic paradoxes would lead to if worked out paradoxes. the compare properly: any In counterintuitively, case, that problems of semantical if we were even ’ought’ is ambiguous levels say, to as to Hare as levels, avoid to some semantical proposes, but tinkering would still be required to fix up a deontic calculus at each level. Moreover, there are good grounds for doubting that the so far ill-characterised and artificial distinction of levels that Hare wants to impose can be satisfactorily made out. For one thing, critical hardly the holds up; level for separation intuitive of the paradoxes intuitive are from the typical of rational or act utilitarian assessments at the upper level, and we can be rational and critical, and ask for why- explanations, at both levels. ^There are various different form, OA, OB -> ^It is this principle can take, e.g. also a rule 0(A & B), and a rather useless material form, OA & OB =>. 0(A & B). tried criticised below. forms however by Schotch and Jennings, p.152; their argument is It is also suggested by Barcan Marcus, p.134., and toyed with by 32 Williams o In particular Lemmon, taking off from Sartre, has argued this in two important papers, neglected in mere recent philosophical literature on moral dilemmas and moral conflict. earlier Recent British work, in literature that it could logical further the next note). on conflict of values has particular, profitably have taken into ignored account (see Such an uninformed approach is however not uncharacteristic of British philosophy. ^Especially Lemmon’s work 62 and 65. But although Lemmon suggests (in 62, e.g. p.150) that there are no logical problems in accommodating moral dilemmas, including those of the form 0(A & ~A), none of the systems of deontic logic he presents (e.g. in 65), not even the very weak systems, can do so without trivialising. The reasons for collapse are the modal ones already explained. Apart from the work of Lemmon and a few who follow him, work which at least suggests the need for a bridge even if it does not offer so much as good working plans for one, the literature on moral dilemmas tends to bifurcate - into purely philosophical material which does not address the logical issues, and largely logical material which characteristically avoids the crucial moral issue of dilemmas, which the logics espoused cannot handle (and maybe because of that: otherwise the logical literature On the regrettable lack of interaction between deontic logicians disputes the data). and ethicists, the latter being the worse offenders, see also Thomason’s notes. 10 In fact the latter implication of O-transmission could be much weakened for the purpose of the arguments, e.g. the form A B - > OA D OB would serve to make the point. 11 Gumanski 80 affords a good example of the complication resulting, complication readily removed by relevant logic relocation. 12 The argument thoroughtly for this fallacious. ’principle of deontic contingency’ Either an in F & H, p.13, is illegitimate quantificational conversion (from some to all) or a modal confusion (from p & ~p to q & ~q) is used to get from P(p & ~p) for some p - which is all the denial of deontic contingency gives - to Pq, that is, to ’everything is permitted’. 1^For see axiom, (D1) Op =>~0~p, of the standard systems as formulated in F & H, p.13, and use the interdefinability of P and 0, e.g. PB 4 1 ~0~B. There would be little point in presenting features of the epicycling systems of types (iii)-(v) in any detail since all will be quickly dismissed. In any event, details can be found in the Hilpinen surveys 33 (71 and 81), texts which are ir fact restricted to epicycling positions within the dominant modal paradigm for deontic Even Schotch and Jennings, who do question some minimal principles, remain logics. staunchly the within modal sphere, their as possible worlds and semantics their substitutivity principles reveal. 15 F & H, p.8, in support p.16. This consistency interpretation appears to have extensive Scandinavia. Of course if consistency were meant in a different sense (that of regularity), it would be different. But it is not: see the development in F & H, p.l6ff. 16 Cf. Lemmon: philosophers that ’It ... does the not to seem adoption of have been new morality a associated with the confrontation of a moral dilemma. much by observed an agent ethical by is frequently Indeed, it is hard to see what else would be likely to bring about a change of moral outlook other than having to make a difficult moral decision’ (62, p155). not settled without so to speak Similarly Barcan Marcus (p.12): ’although idealistically, a source of moral motion. dilemmas are is, Moral inconsistency residue, the recognition of their reality has a dynamic force. 17 In 1975 when the paper was first drafted and presented this example was still topical. However at most times in modern human history there are many candidates to substitute for variable V. 18 In the narrow scheme of standard deontic logic, these would be recast in terms of the forbidden functor F, defined as 0~. However in relevant logic settings, it is a further question, not settled by the framework whether W reduces to 0~. * ^Williams 20 are Jim-Pedro example (in 81) is of this type. As there are other war dilemmas, and especially nuclear war dilemmas, so there other violence. pacifist dilemmas, e.g. the problem of violence to prevent greater On nuclear war dilemmas, and on the main pacifist dilemma, see the War and Peace series. 21 For many of the contractual arrangements, isomorphism, known moral dilemmas we consider, especially those there are analogous legal dilemmas. preserving very many important logical generated by For there is a wellfeatures between moral obligations and rights and wrongs and corresponding legal obligations and rights and wrongs. The complexity of legal frameworks, the relatively independent design of using parts and divine numerous lack of design control legal of likelihood the dilemmas and sources decidedly complexity to high. analogous An is dilemmas moral for consistency, or checks argument considered in render the fjrom the McConnell, p.275ff. pp Lemmon’s final treatment, but (fifth) type of ’’moral dilemma” does so far resist more formal is that the mainly because class concerned description and lacks even clear working examples. so far These are, defies adequate roughly, situations ‘in which an agent has to make a decision of a recognisably moral character though he is completely unprepared ... by his present moral outlook’ and has somehow to fashion a new moral outlook. is There so far of here nothing especial paraconsistent concern. By no means all the types of situations falling under Lemmon’s ’classification of moral dilemmas’ (62, classifying types of first class and p.156) are dilemmas. situation’, ‘moral the classification starts out is nothing dilemmatic about there and which Lemmon about the second, little Indeed the ‘does not wish to call ... moral dilemmas, because [as with the first] in all the cases our moral situation is perfectly clear’ (p.143). The main types of moral dilemmas Lemmon discerns, the third and fourth classes, are precisely those treated in the text. The concurrence even of several different, 23()f course the control is limited. perhaps apparently independent, logical approaches is no sure guide to correctness of an explication or has to answer back satisfactorily to The matter still account. preanalytic principles. 22* In dilemmas, the initial version of this paper three into types (0, 0~; complication was based on a mistake, collapse. are F, a rather F~; and artificial classification of 0,F) was proposed. But this that equation of 0~A and FA would lead to modal And, apparently a more natural and simpler theory does emerge if 0~ and F equated. Naturally definitional than coentailment. More highly equation intensional in this context does not differences between the imply more notions, which there are, remain unaffected. What holds for F does not automatically transfer independently. ^The labels and Jennings. [RM] and [K], convenient to P. Perhaps P should be treated in what follows, are taken from Schotch Note that although symbolically virtually the same as the originals, they symbolize different determinate principles. ^See as well as RLR I, Routley 72, Routley and Meyer 73 and OP. 35 the 2?Under four-valued American plan for relevant logic * can be semantics, avoided. But here the superior two-valued Australian plan is followed. 2&Though here we simply take the rule over from standard deontic semantics, it can be argued in several ways, explained (though usually for the analogous necessity functor) as in RLR. class of such A, b One way is this:- in situation a, where OA holds, consider the i.e. {C: I(OC, a) = 1}. This gives an initially acceptable set up with respect to a; and indeed would yield the sought rule (with S improved to a but for 1-1 relation) fail, conditions the fact that bo may not be a world because required closure conspicuously We primeness. can however extend though not ba, uniquely, so that world requirements are met. The picture looks like this: S is the composition of the function (from a to b ) and the extension (to the b-’s). The b.’s are the accepted worlds vis-a-vis a. ^The point and role of evaluative step-down is explained in Routley 83. 3°The strategy resembles that earlier in Routley and Meyer 75 in Plainly there is room for other postulates, formulating explicitly dialethic logic. e.g. exploited In virtue of the model theorem Ot, where 0p2 where p2 is not dilemmatic, etc. t is any tautology, such a postulate is guaranteed in standard deontic logic, but it is rightly left as an option in relevant deontic logic, and also in Barcan Marcus. third 31A type of argument for rejecting [KJ is implicit in Schotch and and also in Barcan Marcus, namely that without [K] both moral conflict and Jennings, the Kantian ought-implies-can principle can be retained. That supposes of course that the Kantian principle is a desirable one, worth going considerably out of one’s logical way disaster to retain. [KJ But the is not from the combination of Kantian only in principle involved theory with moral dilemmas: reaching other equally solid and respectable principles than [KJ could be considered for rejection. ^2At this logic and point we do detour analyses of moral beyond our dilemmas, to look critique of modalisation of deontic at some separate puzzles in deontic logic - which have also been used against the idea of a formal treatment of ethics. And the approach we take to these further 36 puzzles - by limiting transmission in the fashion of weaker, and deeper logics - is largely independent of principles, the reaminder IN short, we could have taken a different approach to paper. of the these transmission puzzles, without varying the rest of the paper. 33 Of course it can be argued that one is storing up problems for (much) later on when the logical theory repenting have fuller a better developed, is much more fully developed, and predicates like those of logical role. so also will be presumably when But the logical theory is the distinctions between types of predicates and those sustaining transmission. 34 It is common practice indict deontic logic by so stating the deontic ’'paradox" that they smuggle in much more than a satisfactory entailment relation could warrant and more even than a modal relation would grant. paradoxes will be presented as arguments Here is an example. These [deontic] against Consider the Good Samaritan paradoxes formulated the "standard" as follows: deontic logics. 1) A is obligated to help an injured criminal 2) If A is obligated to do B then A is obligated to do whatever B entails. (This is a principle of the standard deontic logics.) 3) There could not be an injured criminal if someone did not commit a crime. So 4) A is obligated to bring it about that someone commit a crime. (From 1- 3 by the standard deontic logics.) The So 5) logics are standard deontic (For flawed. 4) is outrageous, though its premisses are not.) Entailment principles do not justify the importing of 'bringing about' in clause 4). 35 And wrong to rob him and not rob him, and so on. Conjunction is not here connexive with one conjunct undercutting another - though connexive deontic logic is what some seem to be seeking. ^Accordingly Morscher's retreat to "rational norms" and "rational legislating" is But unnecessary. presupposed again that a deontic Morscher the grasps key point, that von Wright has logic must contain certain consistency-type principles, and that 'this presupposition need not be fulfilled' (p.98). 37 Schotch and Jennings, community of moral philosophers' philosophy, analysis. where claim 'widespread support for (a) among the (a) is the theme 'that cases of real moral Most likely this claim, like most such sociological claims conflict cannot occur'. in (pp.152-3) is merely impressionistic, and not based on any sort of survey or But we expect further investigation would tend to confirm it. no J Thus, to take just one example: there appears to be a conflict 'One may be in a situation of course in which of principles each of which appears categorically 37 binding - but natural reflection will ultimately show that one or other must prevail’ Benn (p.5). But examples abound. The reason reflection removes inconsistency is that obligations do not collide. We have it from Kant himself Because however duty and obligation are in general concepts that express the objective practical necessity of certian actions, ... it follows that a conflict of duties and obligations is inconceivable (obligationes non colliduntor). (Metaphysis of Morals, cited in Barcan Marcus, p.323.) But does it world the (merely) practical follow not of without action However necessity. sweeping a but the worlds concering consistency assumption picked out by function not of objective these worlds are, moral dilemmas certainly appear to show, sometimes inconcistent. There are depending what is the explanation can go, various different ways and contractual arrangements a route like that of Hobbes through Rawls will be followed. Given less, taken e.g. granted. for only grounded example, For or preferences given choice individual behaviour, interests a semantical route might be And so on. tried. 110 The inadequacy of modal accounts of inconsistency is explained in detail in RLR, chapter 5. ji -1 These examples and most of those that follow were suggested by C. Pigden, who also supplied the references. HO The first quote is from Kenny, p.75, the second from Skinner, p.7, both of which furnish additional details. 4^Cf. Kenny, p.78. 24/4 According to MacIntyre 66. The situation of Agamemnon and Oedipus are remarked upon in Williams 81, p.80. There there are is not a substantial and cannot literature be general arguing, not entirely universally applicable principles in all circumstances of their application. conclusively, rules for that ranking of Thus, for example, Ross, p.41, also discussed in Barcan Marcus, p.124, Barcan Marcus, p.135, Hare 82, pp.32-4. It seems that such a result would be proved, as regards effective rules, by methods of reversion theory. 38 ^The relevant; points Hare makes concerning anguish remorse and (82, pp.29-30) are they apply also against his own proposal to treat all principles as prima facie. But points concerning anguish and guilt are not decisive; account of how these attitudes arise can be given from for one thing, an modal a angle (cf. the discussion in Barcan Marcus, p.127). ^By no means all dilemmas require resolution, e.g. those of no practical import such as purely theoretical dilemmas of freedom, etc. liberty, These can, in principle, just stand. 48 As Lemmon explains (in 62), really following Sartre, there is considerable scope for bad faith and opting out of our responsibilities here, e.g. pretending that no decision is called for, or that another has preempted the decision, or that the decision is otherwise determined or out of our own control. 49No doubt we could tough it out dialectically, but the basis for doing so is Any lacking. adherence contradictions to calles for especially rigorous justification 500n satisizing decision theory, and the dialectic between maximizers and satisizers, see MS. Fuzzy decision theory is however only in the initial stages of development at present. 5^This is just one of several reasons why Hare’s grand synthesis (in 82) of Kant and the utilitarians, initially appealing in its two level tidiness and simplicity, goes down the philosophical drain. A main reason is that the synthesis is built upon, and incorporates, consistency and modal assumptions, and so is inadequate moral data to be accounted for theoretically (see further War and Peace II). to the REFERENCES R. Barcan Marcus, 121-136. Journal of Philospohy 77 (1980) ’Moral dilemmas and consistency , * S. I. Benn, ’Public and private morality: clean living and dirty hands’ in Public and Private in Social Life (ed. S.I. Benn and G.F. Gaus), Croom Helm, London & Canberra, 1983, 155-182. A. Donegan, The Theory of Morality, Chigago University Press, Chicago, 1977. D. Follesdal and R. Hilpinen, ’Deontic pp.1-35; referred to as F & H. B. C. logic: van Fraassen, ’The logic of conditional Logic 1 (1972) 417-38. an introduction’ Hilpinen in obligation’. Journal 1971, of Philospohical L. Gumanski, ’On deontic logic’, Studia Logica 39 (1980) 63-75. S. Hampshire (ed), Public and Private Morality, Cambridge University Press, 1978. R.M. Hare, Freedom and Reason, Clarendon, Oxford, 1963. R.M. Hare, Moral Thinking, Conflicts’). Clarendon, Oxford, 1982 (see especially chapter 2 ’Moral R. Harrison, Rational Action, Cambridge University Press, 1979. R. Hilpinen (ed). Deontic Dordrecht, 1971. Logic: Introductory and Systematic Readings, Reide1, R. Hilpinen (ed), New Studies in Deontic Logic, Reidel, Dordrecht, 1981. A. Kenny, The God of the Philosophers, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1979. E.J. Lemmon, ’Moral dilemmas’, Philosophical Review 71 (1962) 139-58. E.J. Lemmon,’ Deontic (1965) 39-71. Logic and the T. McConnell, ’Moral dilemmas and Philosophy 8 (1978) 269-87. logic of imperatives’, consistency in ethics’, Logique et Canadian Analyse 8 Journal A. MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1966. of 39 A. A. Martino (ed.), Deotnic Logic, Computational Systems, North Holland, Amsterdam, 1982. Linguistics and Legal Information E. Morscher, ’Antinomies and incompatibilities within normative languages’ in Martino 82, pp.83-102. Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, 1971; hereafter OED. G. Priest and R. Routley, On Paraconsistency, Research Australian National University, 1983; hereafter OP. in Papers Logic, #13, A.N. Prior, Formal Logic, Second edition, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1962. A.N. Prior, ’Escapism: the logical basis of ethics' (ed. A.I. Melden), Seattle, 1958. in Essays in Moral Philosophy, W.D. Ross, The Right and the Good, Oxford University Press, New York, 1930. R. Routley, ’War and Peace I. On the ethics of large-scale nuclear war and war­ deterrence, and the political fall-out’, Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy, #5, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1983. R. Routley, ’On the alleged inconsistency and moral insensitivity and fanaticism of pacifism’, Inquiry 26 (1984) , ; also War and Peace II. R. Routley, ’Maximizing, satisficing, satisizing: the difference in real and rational behaviour under rival paradigms’, Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy, #10, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1984; hereafter MS. R. and V. Routley, ’The semantics of first degree entailment’, Nous 6 (1972) 335-59. R. and V. Routley, ’Semantical foundations of value theory’, Nous (1983) 441—56. R. Routley and R.k. Meyer, ’The semantics of entailment I’, in Truth, Syntax, and Modality (ed. H. Leblanc) North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1973» pp.199-243. R. Routley and R.K. Meyer, ’Dialectical logic, classical logic, and the consistency of the world’, Studies in Soviet Thought 16 (1976) 1-25. R. Routley and others, Relevant Logics and Their Rivals, Ridgeview, California, Part I (1982) and Part II (1984); referred to as RLR I and RLR II respectively. A. Ryan, The Idea of Freedom, Oxford, 1970. P. Schotch and pp.149-62. R.E. Jennings, ’Non-Kripkean deontic logic’, in Hilpinen 81, 40 Q. Skinner, The Foundations of Modern University Press, Cambridge, 1978. Political Thought, Volume 11, Cambridge R. M. Thomason, ’Deontic logic as founded on tense logic’, in Hilpinen 81, pp.165-175. B. Vermazen, 'The (1977) 1-71. logic of practical 'ought’-sentences’, Philosophical Studies 32 B. Williams, Moral Luck, Cambridge United Press, 1981. B. Williams, 'Conflict of values' in Williams 81, pp.71-82; also in Ryan 79. G.H. von Wright, An Essay in Modal Logic, North Holland, Amsterdam, 1951. G.H. von Wright, ’On the logic of norms/ and actions’, M. Hilpinen 81, pp.3-35. G.H. ven Wright, ’Norms, truth and logic’ in Martino 82, pp.3-20. TYRANT MOPE ON NOPAL DILEMMAS 1. ethics. 2. Revolutionising Possible heading, why the failure to comprehend moral dilemmas. All these Reading force^'^^e off in other directions. Undoubtedly a great deal of ethics has been messed up by a failure to understand moral dilemmas. ' ... The failure is often reported; for instance human since justifiable claims ... and are rights claims, they be outweighed by other As in all conflicts of moral principles, human rights reasons must be weighed other moral can against one another by an as yet poorly understood and ill-defined process' (Rajfles, p.42). The failure shows up on the apparent clash between doing ethics by way of principles and doing ethics consistency reasons, principles. vor principles break down, through examples. or dilemmatic And examples. examples it is thought for air^. thought to refute A proper approach to dilemmas removes the tension between examples and principles and allows a synthesis to be achieved. 3. Moral rectitude. Now is notion this to be unpacked0 mhere are competing explanations, e.g. 1) in terms of obligation and deontics; 2) by way of consequentialist rectitude decisive. assessment. Pettit to make moral mhen it requires assessment thus 3) Method 1) unless dilemma; otherwise method 2\ rectitude so it is absolute in terms of O. 4. wants This is impossible. Mcjlly's system has no moral dilemmas, since ~fu For it proves trivial deontically. But he also wants to run 0~u^ - at least intentionally. Aquinas denies certain moral dilemmas, e.g. Np & F~p, in the doctrine concerning perplexus simpliciter F & N p.12. 5. Investigate further the connection of permitted and accepted worlds, and commission? This 'possibly permitted' does not involve discussed in NNL. the fallacy of reducing permission * 'permissible to It does tie with the suggested connection of commission and omission through the * function. 2 6. Is problem of the individual in society, of a person in politics, an organisation or a company of this type i.e. dilemma of freedom? Of. a dilemma that can just stand, like the theoretical also Machiavellian a problem: person in public must (morally?) act evilly sometimes. 7. of PUBLIC distinction The moralities. VS MORALITIES PRIVATE implies that there are two The BASE ARGUMENT against is this: But there are not two. if we acknowledge this conception of morality as requiring some action as the thing to do, how, logically speaking, could there be two moralities0 the thing to do when they conflict? overriding reason for action?^ How could morality then What is provide an Similarly &n utilitarianism single maximisation recipe and results. (/? DOEBN'01 REQUIRE KANTIANISM.) However A can to be subject conflicting public and private claims. Seen this way ^public vs private just generates.heap of further moral dilemmas, and the 2 moralities ^is just shoddy attempt to escape these dilemmas, expedient (i.e. would become n shoves morality out as in the Hinduism resolution dilemmas. of often in a way that’s politically of the way for expediency'1. The 2 moralities * int if pursued this distinction-making attempt at / Something special about public/private case0 Or differently, why are arguments from expedience so much more acceptable in public sphere0 Be^n gives r interest some reasons, but these oughtn't to justify a difference. | public interest DIRTY HANDS PROBLEM (PARADOX) is like GOOD SAM? behalf of the statecommitting murder. Sometimes it is right get one's hands dirty. E.g. Doing such and such on OR just a straight dilemma? to try to succeed, and then it must also be right to But one's hands get dirty from doing what it is wrong to do. And how can it be wrong to do what is right? Or how can we get our hands dirty by doing what we ought to do9 Z M. Walzer, Philosophy and Public Affairs, moral 2, 10°^, dilemma. 164. Op Walzer sees this as a tragic dilemma: p-> q Oq, but 0~q. Example: but really a torturing captured terrorist to extract information to save innocent lives. The problems start from questions of relations between two different moralities. Conclusion: 8. Conflict conscience 'that, the public to at its most liberal, loyalty, overriding moral liberalism in end. to a On between will stand the individual, tried committed concern for its collective interest, the one hand the individual as a relate this ambiguous model of the a individual and as an autonomous, citadel, on the other, the overriding perverse, wilful obstacles in the way of the general will. to with no gainsaying, and the claims of possessed of liberties that only he himself can waive, by consent; State, equipped society, not T have only to liberal conceptions of what belongs to the private and what to the public, but also to the tension between a morality of principles and one of valued outcomes, which, in my view, is very closely connected with the ambiguity of the model . * ("Renn? 9. Argument for weak paraconsistent position. Morality is a guide to action. Action is consistent. So have to r?l consistencize. ^Inconclusive"1. Like law one consistencizes (e.g. for action^ alright. But that confirms that it is inconsistent in the first place. 10. The difference. fought distinction is, it It hands the opposition its case. is objected, a Simply not so. distinction without a The following have been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. • • • • • Letter, unidentified author to Richard, 27 Jul 1984 re Moral dilemmas. (2 pages (1 leaf)) Reference card and handwritten paper, ? Alchourron and Bulygin (1 reference card + 5 leaves) Letter, Charles to Richard, undated re New Studies in Deontic Logic and Castañeda's proposed deontic logic. (2 pages) Cuttings from unidentified publication, The paradoxes of deontic by Hector-Neri Castañeda (page 46-47), and Some main problems of deontic by Jaakko Hintikka 9page 94-96. (2 leaves) Letter, unidentified author to Richard, with annotations by Sylvan?, undated, re Moral dilemmas. (7 leaves) Ml Although the sorts of examples we have described seem familiar enough, it might well be disputed that they are correctly described as cases of Op and 0~p, or in the alternative representation as cases of Fp & F~p. The main ground for this is the belief that 19. in any such case one of the parties to the conflict is less wrong, and that this one can be claimed to be not really wrong at all. There are however several objections to this move to neutralise the dilemmas (1) First, wrong party. there is no guarantee that there always is a less Both parties may be equally wrong, no way of deciding which is less wrong. Vietnam example; To take and there may be our hypothetical if we withdraw half a million people will die; but if we do not withdraw the war will continue and half a million people will die; clearly the example may be elaborated. There may be no grounds for choice. (2) The fact that one party is less wrong than the alternative is no grounds for saying that it is not wrong at all. In fact the case would normally be described as one of choice between " two evils", two wrong aciwsese©; if one chooses the lesser of two evils, then one still chooses an evil. ing One is simply not justified in claim1 that, where p involves killing 10 people, p is not wrong simply on the grounds that ~p involves killing 15 people, any more than one is in the case of preference theory justified in saying that p, which brings a gift of $10, is not a good thing simply on the grounds that ~p brings a gift of $11. things; (3) They are both good and in our moral case, both are wrong. If we do say this, plainly it will be very difficult to find any moral principles which can be asserted with any confidence universally. In fact it will probably be possible to find hypothetical counterexamples to any statement of the form "All actions of type x are wrong", just by producing a case where p is an action of type x, but ~p is an even worse action. that p, although an action of type x, is not wrong, It will follow so we will have However, a counterexample. it seems to be important that we should be able to assert such general principles, and doing so gives us an essential way of assessing, morally, (4) Finally, types of actions. the proposed redescription of the case as involving only one wrong element, the one which is more wrong, leaves out an essential feature of such a case, that it is a dilemma, case where one cannot but act wrongly. If we omit this element the case is not properly described, it is falsified; a we may as a result find ourselves unable to explain many resulting features of the situation which result from the conflict, e.g. human behavioural features >n such a situation involving hesitation, doubt, inaction, perhaps anguish and guilt. All these will appear quite irrational. (5) Assigning a priority to our moral rules itself does nothing to resolve the logical problem raised by the dilemmas, (although it may solve the practical problem of how best to act). % For this logical problem iX the problem of how to arrange our logic so as to be able to describe such cases adequately and without falsification or incon-sisteney. Arranging a priority, so that A one alternative can be claimed to be less wrong, does not solve the logical problem, which is that whatever happens will be wrong, that T cannot be identical with I. The consequence that whatever happens is wrong cannot be removed unless as well as a priority assignment one also adopts the principle that what is less wrong is not wrong at all. But this principle leads to inconsistency for then the less wrong action is both wrong and not wrong. To be consistent this method must introduce a new concept of wrong in addition to the old one, say "wrong2" , and the less wrong action can be said to be not "wrong2". But now the original problem is 21. still not eliminated, because the problem was not that whatever be is . happened would /'wrong2" (although this/now false), but that whatever happened would be wrong, which is still true. sort of priority - dominated concept cannot replace, may supplement, the original concept. And this although it Sf- The problem of classifying these dilemmas. z mainly using the term ’wrong’. We have stated our dilemmas However, it may seem that this is ambiguous, and that it is possible, or desirable, to make a further distinction, between pi inciples which are obligatory and principles which are prohibitory. For wrongs can be due to two very different causes - om^iission or commission. The distinction between obligation and prohibition principles can be explained initially as follows: an obligation principle of the form Op read ’it ought to be the case that p’,Qt is f ? L ' r jT f'.Jlz.f:? /t/tjyJ /4-< 'it ought to come about that p'. This says that something, p, ought to should happen that p'A, r, happen, an ideal situation I. that is^ that it is a member of & A situation^satisfies Op, Op if p is not in it then, if p is In it ( p eaJ;and violates p's presence satisfies Op, whereas (pZ S?) • £ ["Obligation" Z7 —:----- is ’ being used here its omission or absence violates it. in a somewhat unusual sense, 4 for Lemmon seems to be right in urging that obligations are usually contractual in nature. and contracts may be contracts to do something or to refrain from However, we doing something - hence both positive and negative. must press 'obligation' and 'obligatory' and adjective corresponding to it * into service as a noun ought to be the case that' in order to avoid clumsiness and for lack of any other suitable words. The other class of principles, hand, we shall write prohibitive principles, on the other 'Ep' and read 'it is forbidden that p'. These principles claim that p is the sort of action which should p is not a member of the ideal situation I. be avoided satisfies Fp, situation a such that p Z such that pea violates it. a situation a whereas p's omission or absence satisfies Fp, whereas pSoccurrence or presence violates it. is paralleled on the obligations) The distinction action level by the distinction between action and by that between and inaction, A 'sins of omission' and 'sins of commision' A (which violate (which violate prohibitions). 'I have done those things which I ought not to have done' violating a prohibition but also, and not equivalently, not done those things which I ought to have done', thus 'I have thus violating An obligation is satisfied by doing something, an obligation. a prohibition by failing to do something, by avoiding something. It is important not to confuse 0~p, which says that should happen' or 'that ~p 'It is wrong that p', with Fp which says ’that p should not happen', or it * should not happen that p'. This distinction is clear, as a scope distinction, in the English reading However the two are continually confused in modal treatments of But deontic logic, since given Modal Muddle p / I = ~p g I. that to say/p should happen is not to say anything about what should not happen but leaves the issue as to whether ~p should or should And to say that p should not happen is not say and 0~p tells anything about ~p,/whether it should happen or not. not happen open. aj us that ~p is a member of I, where.Fp tells us that p is not a member of 1.^ Dilemmas then seem to fall into three classes depending upon whether the principles which lead to them are obligation or prohibition principles^or both. Fp and F~p, Thus we obtain Op and 0~p, and Op and Fp from our examples depending upon how the principles involved are construed^ a<Tprohibitory or obligatory. (A): Dilemmas obtained from prohibition principles, Fp, % F~p1. i.e. cases of We obtain cases of this sort given principles of the * form. — (1) Whenever P satisfies condition C, (Action form: (2) it shouldn't happen that p. action of type x are wrong) it shouldn't happen that p. A Whenever p satisfies condition C', The dilemma is obtained where p satisfies condition C, ~p satisfies condition C'. Jo O F and - ■L Give the semantical reading of 0 and F?and the examples with 'wrong' . Then mention the necessity for distinction between 0~p and Fp. (1) Wrongs divide into sins of omission and sins of commission. (2) These are semantically different. (3) Unless one distinguishes these concepts semantically have the consistency assumption again. Give the readings. one will 10. Examples can also be obtained from two distinct prohibitory These are cases where the state of affairs described principles. (for reasons given by the first by p is really indescribable principle) (for different reasons given by the second principle). able, * (tndesir For/(B) and the state of affairs described by ~p is m^-ally The second category of dilemmas are dilemmas obtained from obligation principles i.e. cases of Op & O~p, for some p. We obtain cases of this sort given principles of the form:(1) Whenever p satisfies condition C, (2) Whenever p satisfies condition C', it should happen that p it should happen that p. The dilemma is obtained when for a given p, p satisfies condition C and ~p satisfies condition C': (C) Finally, so Op and O~p. examples derived from conflicting but not inconsistent moral principles, which urge both that p should occur and that it should not occur i.e. and prohibited. cases of Op and Fp, where p is both enjoined These cases come about where are principles of the following sort: (1) Whenever p satisfies condition C, p should happen. (2) Whenever p satisfies condition C', p should not happen. The dilemma results because one can find cases one and the same state of affairs C and condition C'? e.g. (p) (in T) where satisfies both condition as^our example derived from Lemmon's uAcrw-tt bolew, x gives back the gun and helping a murderer. (p) is a case both of keeping a promise But promises must be kept, so Op holds. However actions which help murderers are forbidden and should not occur; examples, hence Fp also holds. unlike the previous kind, It seems that these sorts of cannot be generated by a single moral principle, but requires two principles which come into conflict. With a certain degree of artifice we can arrange our examples into these categories, with f A) groups being prohibitions the (fe)groups obligations, and the (C) groups mixed. It is necessary then to avoid the modal treatment and to But though 0 principles and F principles distinguish 0~ and F. are distinct, 0 and F provide alternatives bases for (semantically) The O-principles correspond semantically to deontic system. inclusion principles,the F formulated principles to exclusion Thus e.g. principles. TRfH 5® where iff iff TROH * , (UH) (TRfH oX(p,H) = f) In contrast, I(Fp,T) = t iff (UH) TROH d Kp,H) Thus the modellingswill mirror f) . one another, with R Rf For the representation of principles then we can work satisfactorily with an O-basis, or with an F-basis, but not with a mixed basis which uses both 0 and F principles. Failure to distinguish 0~p and Fp will provide a ground for the mistaken consistency assumption: iff p i H. for it will follow from evaluation rules 12. The cases described satisfy the characterisation of moral For the principles involved are not inconsistent, yet dilemmas. they are not satisfiable in T. In the case of the first set of leading to Fp and F~p, dilemmas, the principles could not be satisfied unless neither p nor ~p occurred. necessarily complete, But since T is they cannot be satisfied in T. of the second set of examples, Op and 0~p, In the case the principles could only be satisfied if both p and ~p occur, hence since T is con­ sistent, they cannot be satisfied in T. different. The third case is very Here it cannot be satisfied because one and the same proposition satisfies both conditions for occurring and conditions for not occurring? this proposition, hence our principles direct, with respect to that it should occur and that it should not occur. This also cannot be satisfied in T, since p is either a member of T, or not a member of T. The principles involved are not however inconsistent ones; for in each case a finite proposition modelling of the principles can be provided. In the third case, directives, despite the fact there are inconsistent given a contingent proposition p^, which satisfies the antecedent conditions, no inconsistency need result because such a proposition p^ may not occur. In other words, though the principles together with p^ form an inconsistent set, p-^ is essential and can be deleted from the set since contingent; and the set without p1 as the principles on their own are satisfactory is consistent, where no antecedents satisfy both, a po£S»4ta- case. ■ v r • The principles ** (a. though inconsistent in application are not inconsistent^ i In the first two cases(they are T consistent?) also it is a contingent matter that the principles come i ... into^ cannot be satisfied in T; r; for detachment of a contingent truth is made, viz that the given ? proposition satisfies the conditions. 13. since they constantly arise““without sacrificing the generality of moral principles. For unless carefully treated dilemmas will/ as we shall see, provide counterexamples to moral principles. Our moral dilemmas result from judgements which cannot be satisfied in T, so that whatever happens will be wrong. Howe is there/still quite a crucial difference between the first two classes and the third class of dilemma. In the third case the result of the dilemma on detachment of a contingent premiss that p satisfies c and c' simultaneously is an inconsistency, cannot both belong and not belong to the ideal set-up I. since p Although the principles upon which the judgement Op and Fp was based were not themselves mutually inconsistent, moral judgerent they do result in a inconsistent that p both ought to happen and ought not to happen is prohibited from happening. Given that p has both properties, the moral principles concerned are in conflict. This is brought out by the fact that if p does satisfy these conditions, cannot be any situation, T-like or not, there in which the principles are satisfied. Furthermore here we have a case where each moral judgement provides a counterexample to the other. If Op and Fp both obtained, both the principles from which they were derived would be false; principle for Op would provide a counterexample to the prohibitory (p) (if p satisfies c’ then Fp) since Op ~Fp; while Fp would provide a counterexample to the obligatory principle (if p satisfies c then Op). (p) J \ 14. In view of these points it seems that a moral code which resulted in this sort of conflicting judgement is defective; the principles involved should either be restricted by tightening one or other of conditionsc and c', or else restated by reformulating one or other of the principles, (p) (Cp => F~p) replaced by (p) (C'p => 0~p) . or i.e. either (p) (C'p => Fp) (p) (Cp => Op) is is replaced by the case is reduced to one of the first In short, two cases. In this case the dilemma arises because the principles In the first two cases however involved come into conflict. the difficulty does not arise from conflicting principles, but is simply a case where our not v/ judgements cannot both be satisfied in T, because they are conflicting, but because of the peculiar Where Op and 0~p both hold, nature of T. (or Fp and F~p) what- ever happens will be wrong, because p & ~p cannot both hold in T, The dilemma is however simply explained nor p & ~p fail to hold. and the judg.ements accepted once it is understood that I, situation, action, is not T-like. The dilemma may produce a conflict in because given the logical structure of T and the limitations it imposes upon action, both judgements. it is impossible to act in accordance with But this does not effect the judgements themselves; as moral judgenents, assessments of the moral worth of p of affairs) conflict. (a state of ~p^jthey are quite compatible and there is no To say that p is wrong and that ~p is also wrong is in no way to be inconsistent, true. the ideal and both judgements may very well be The absence of conflict also explains the fact that such cases can be produced from single moral principles, such as 'Killing is wrong', which in no way inhibit internal conflict. 15. Judgements such as 'p is wrong of action or states of affairs; as to how to act in T. alternative in T, Hence Op does not compare p with its ~p. Such judgements are implicitly comparative, not to ~p's worth, but to the Thus if we reach situations as to moral worth of its absence. (using moral criteria for selection), if for every situation H, H+p is worse than H-p. in a situation assess types and do not simply give directions but p's worth is assessed relative, desirability & ~p is wrong' p is wrong If p's presence makes the situation morally worse than it would be if p were absent, then p is wrong. But now it is a straightforward matter to claim that p is wrong and that ~p is also wrong; one is aHL simply claiming that situations without p^orally preferable to the that (should be chosen^etc.); same situations with p * and also situations without ~p are morally preferable to that same situation with ~p in it. These judgements in no way conflict, and if we were in a position to choose a situation with neither of them in, we could satisfy both judgements simultaneously. is the choice must be regarded as a hypothetical one, As it and the judgements as representing a kind of thought experiment, rather than in giving directions as to how to behave in T. The choice embodied in such a judgement is one between two hypothetical situations and not between alternative versions of T. It is just for this reason that this type of moral judgement is adequate for assessing morally different types of actions or sorts of states of affairs. Because we are concerned with choosing between hypothetical situations, we can opine that all actions of a certain specifiable type and states of affairs satisfying a certain condition are wrong (not wrongyetc.), without risking * In the case of Op & 0~p. In the case of Fp & F~p one ismaking a slightly different claim, that a situation from which p's absent is morally better than some in which it is present. Note that the difference between 0 and F can be to the difference in directionthe rankings. 16. falsification because of the contingent features of T. Finally, in such a judgement one is concerned with assessing the action or state of affairs in itself rather than passing judgement about the best way to act in a particular situation. Dilemmas of this sort then, as opposed to dilemmas of the conflict sort first discussed, are not the result of defective moral codes or principles and do not require any readjustment or resolution (beyond psychological acceptance of the fact that it is sometimes inevitable that what happens is wrong and that perfectibility is impossible). They do not provide counterexamples to general In contrast moral principles based on contingent features of T. codes containing the conflict type of dilemma are defective. Any code containing two principles of the form 'wherever p satisfies Cl, Op' and ’Whenever p satisfies C2, Fp’ where C1 and C2 are not inconsistent, will be defective because there is a possible situation (a hypothetical case) with a p^ which satisfies both C1 Whence the inconsistent pair Fp, potentially inconsistent. & Op,. and C2. Any such code is at least This sort of defectiveness of a moral code might be excusable if it were inevitable. But it is not. can be avoided if we adopt either 0 or F as primitive, and state our judgements in terms of one or other of them, but not both. alternative, terms, conflicting is intolerable. moral It The principles stated in No principle could be asserted with any confidence, because they would hold or fail just according to whether or not a suitable proposition with conflicting properties appeared in T and provided a counterexample. And since this is contingent whether such principles hold or not would be entirely a matter of good or bad luck. Moral judgements on the other hand ought to apply beyond T to possible situations, ought to be non-empirical and apply to hypothetical cases, matter of accident. and ought not to hold just as a 4 C ‘S’ -X f * univeralisa'blemoral principle was a judgement The general ‘ 7^' about types of action or states of affairs and compared p's presence in a situation with its absence from the same situation on a scale of moral desirability. This concept of wrongness is essential to be able to state general moral judgements. But as well as this concept we can distinguish another important concept which is designed to assess not types of action but what is the best course of action in a given situation. This is obtained by comparing p's presence in a situation not with its absence but with the presence of its rivals in a given situation, e.g. ~p in the case of T. p will be said to be ’the best course of action' ~p are both wrong) if a situation Thus (even where p and (usually T), with p in, ranks higher morally then the same one with ~p in. A more practical - concept still can be obtained by comparing p and its practical rivals, say will be the best course of action practical alternative q) f Y r if a situation (as compared with its (usually T) (morally) when p is in it than when q is in it. between alternative ways of extending will rank higher One chooses T. It is important as Lemmon points out to distinguish this concept clearly from the more general concept earlier explained. Lemmon is wrong in suggesting that this is not a moral concept at all and does not give rise to moral judgements but to judgements of expedience. The judgements involved in this case are still moral in the sense that the criteria for ranking situations are 22 specifically moral ones and not based simply, say, on aesthetic considerations or desirability considerations. clear that this distinction Yet it is (which we shall call the distinction between differential obligation and intrinsic obligation) must be ignored and eliminated if obligation is treated as a modal functor For give/} the principle of Modal Muddle (H) (p e H = ~p e H) semantical recipes we have given will be identical. p's presence in H with p's absence (p / H) comparing p in H with ~p's being in H. the To compare will be the same as It is essential however to distinguish this notion of 'best course of action' (differential basic notion we have discussed, because it has quite different properties. * It cannot replace although it can supplement, The reasons are as follows other notion. 02 does not allow for (1) the moral dilemmas. p with its practical alternative in T, e.g. For since we compare ~p, to say that Op & 0~p is to say that a situation H such p e H is morally better than a situation H such that ~p e H, and also to say that a situation H such that ~p e H is better than one such that p e H. This is a (Similar results will ensue when F is taken as a contradiction. basis). (2) 02 cannot allow for general moral judgements of the form "All actions (states of affairs) counterexample. of type x are wrong" without fear of For no matter how compelling our principle and how repugnant the type of action described, we can almost always find a case where the only alternative action is worse. however repugnant p may be, Hence, it will not in this case be wrong, a counterexample to one general judgement will be provided. new notion then cannot do the same job as the old; —----------------------------------------- . and Our it should be , We u^e such as 'the best thing in the circumstances' 'the right thing', 'the correct course all in all' to capture differential obligations . 23. regarded as parasitic, because it can be alternatively represented as admitting the wrongness of the alternatives, but going on to weigh up the alternatives to obtain a recipe for practical action. (3) implies can" slogan It is to this notion that the "ought applies. O2P o locjically possible p, because one has selected p as the best course of action from logically possible alternatives in T. Indeed ’02p’ can be made to imply ‘p is physically possible' (or even physically possible to the person being exhorted) by comparing p with its physically possible alternatives in ranked situations. In a similar way, the concept of blame attaches to failure to follow the best course of action,i.e. if p is better as a course of action than its and one fails to do it. action.* (practical) alternatives, One is not blameworthy for doing p merely only as good as, because p is no better than, i.e. alternatives, one is blameworthy its remaining it has to be worse than some alternative course of It is important to note that blame attaches to this second differential concept of obligation, rather than the first intrinsic notion, for the possibility and obvious unfairness of someone's being blamed for doing wrong where both Op and 0~p hold and he has no alternative which is not wrong would otherwise be a powerful objection to cases of moral dilemmas. (5) Finally, differential obligation makes a basically different type of judgement from the intrinsic notion. not of a type of action or state It is an assessment or of affairs, the action/state of affairs in itself, but of the situation in which it occurs, action in this situation. This is reflected in such phrases as "the best thing in the circumstances" "the right thing to do the conditions obtained at the time)", etc. * Oh well, you cannot be blamed. circumstances . the (given Hence it is not You did the best thing in the universalisable , and does not try to be. It “results in a recipe for action, and is closely allied to advice or exhortation/orders , persuasion, recommendation or other directed activities. Intrinsic obligation however/ frafc^s no account of possible action and does not need to; it assesses action-types regardless of how they occur in a given situation. This last point is important in connection with argument about moral dilemmas. For the confusion between our two concepts has a disastrous effect on argument, particularly those hotly disputed arguments which occur in the case of moral dilemmas. The following sort of argument, due to confusion between Oi and O2 is all too common in such cases. Actions of type x are wrong (1') (if p satisfies c then Oi~p). (p) This must be Oj because it represents a general and exceptionless (2) p is an action (3) ~ 02 i.e. ~p: (state of affairs) judgement about a type. of type x. p should not be done. Therefore do not do p. The argument is plainly unsatisfactory because the fact that Oi~p holds is not sufficient to establish that 02~p To holds. do this one would have to show that the alternative, p, was not worse or even just as good. not be so. And in cases of dilemmas this may very well To establish 02~p one needs to show not merely that p is wrong but that there is some better course of action. The fallacy derives from trying to base a recipe for action on the intrinsic obligation notion, Oi. s 25. A closely related confusion holds that it is inconsistent to claim that p is a wrong type of action, that it should be done nonetheless the best course of action. August 6 197 x (e.g. is repugnant etc., but - because it is nevertheless Canberra Times Editorial, on abortion reads as follows: "It is significant, and inconsistent with its official stand that the s ynod should have qualified its recommendation to family doctors with the words "however regrettable we feel this to be"." to be inconsistentthen, one states to be What is being claimed is that one should recommend a course of action (morally) there is no inconsistency. regrettable or repugnant. But of course One is simply saying that ~p is wrong, "Oi-p", but that it is nevertheless the best thing to do given the circumstances because the alternatives are worse?i.e. "O2P"• The distinction between differential and intrinsic obligation, then, seems to be an important factor in assessing the validity of argument where moral dilemmas are concerned. /, 2 ft I z^z/ / rt&jZy 7-, I  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Box 140, Item 1: Draft of Moral dilemmas and the logic of deontic notions ; Draft of Moral dilemmas ; Notes, correspondence and cutting on moral dilemmas and deontic logic Subject The topic of the resource Typescript of drafts of two papers, undated. Second paper with handwritten emendations, and first paper published, Routley R and Plumwood V (1984) 'Moral dilemmas and the logic of deontic notions', Discussion papers in environmental philosophy, 6. Dept. of Philosophy, Australian National University. Includes three letters addressed to Richard: 27 July 1984 (handwritten, 1 leaf (2 pages)), author unidentified re Moral dilemmas; Undated (handwritten, 2 pages), from Charles re New Studies in Deontic Logic and Castaneda's proposed deontic logic; Undated (handwritten, 7 leaves with annotations by Sylvan?), author unidentified re Moral dilemmas; and one letter from Richard Sylvan? to Philip, undated (handwritten (photocopy), 3 pages), re feedback on a paper. Includes incomplete draft paper, Other attempts to neutralise moral dilemmas (21 leaves), with handwritten emendations, undated. Description An account of the resource Letters and cuttings redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. Unnumbered paper from collection, item number assigned by library staff. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Routley</a> <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Val+Plumwood&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Val Plumwood</a> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 140, Item 1 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource [87] leaves. 64.35 MB. Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:ba641e1">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:ba641e1</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy Box 140: File Cabinet 1 Draw 2 https://www.antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/b08be37f733215f4391cf73d1099d47f.pdf c97a08e871aaec69f2c5b022a3b51edf PDF Text Text Richard and Vai Routley 1. » NUCLEAR POWER - SOME ETHICAL AND SOCIAL DIMENSIONS1 One hardly needs initiation into the dark mysteries of nuclear physics to contribute usefully to the debate now widely ranging over nuclear power. While many important empirical questions are still unresolved, these do not really lie at the centre of the controversy. Instead, it is a debate about values... many of the questions which arise are social and ethical ones.2 I. THE TRAIN PARABLE AND THE NUCLEAR WASTE PROBLEM. train has just pulled out. passengers and freight. The train which is A long distance country crowded carries both At an early stop in the journey someone consigns as freight, to a far distant destination, a package which contains a highly toxic and explosive gas. This is packed in a very thin container which, as the consigner is aware, may well 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 the train should be derailed or involved in a collision, or if some passenger should interfere inadvertently or deliberately with the freight, perhaps trying to steal some of it. of these sorts of things have happened on some previous journeys. All 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 poisoned or sooner or later incur serious diseases. Most of us would roundly 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, or that the world needs his product and it is his duty to supply it, or that in any case he is not or the people on it. responsible for the train These sorts of excuses however would normally be seen as ludicrous when set in this context. Unfortunately, similar excuses are not also seen when the consigner, again a (responsible) businessman,puts his workers' health or other peoples’ welfare at risk. Suppose he says that it is his own and others’p ressing needs which justify his action. The company he controls, which produces the material as a by-product, is in bad financial 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 the whole company town, through loss of spending, will be worse off. The poor and unemployed of the town, whom he would otherwise have been able to help, will suffer especially. Few people would accept such grounds as justification. �2. Even where there are serious risks and costs to oneself or some group for whom one is concerned one is usually considered not to be entitled to simply transfer the heavy burden of those risks and costs onto other uninvolved parties, especially where they arise from one’s own, or one’s group’s chosen life-style. The matter of nuclear waste has many moral features which resemble the train case. How fitting the analogy is will become apparent as the argument progresses. There is no known proven safe way to package the highly toxic wastes generated by the nuclear plants that will be spread around the world as large-scale nuclear development goes ahead. The waste problem will be much more serious than that generated by the 50 or so reactors in use at present, with 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 toxic. For example, a millionth of a gramme of plutonium is enough to induce a lung cancer. A leak of even a part of the waste material could involve much loss of life, widespread disease and genetic damage, and contamination of immense areas of land. Wastes will include the reactors themselves, which will have to be abandoned after their expected life times of perhaps 40 years, and which, some have estimated, may require 1^ million years to reach safe levels of radioactivity. Nuclear wastes must be kept suitably isolated from the environment for their entire active lifetime. For fission products the required storage period averages a thousand years or so, and for 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. Short-term methods of storage require continued human intervention, while proposed longer term methods are subject to both human inter­ ference 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 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 formations or in salt mines, are largely speculative and relatively untested, and have already proved 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 result in multilayered metal containers before rock deposit, simulation models �3. reveal that radioactive material may not remain suitably isolated from human environments.1^ In short, the best present storage proposals carry very real 3 possibilities of irradiating future people and damaging their environment. Given the heavy costs which could be involved for the future, and given the known limits of technology, it is methodologically 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 not only have I present proposals, and subject to the same inadequacies. For instance,^none of the proposed methods for safe storage has been properly tested, but they may well prove to involve unforeseen difficulties and risks when an attempt is made to put them into practice on a commercial scale. Only a method that could provide a rigorous guarantee of safety over the storage period, that placed safety beyond reasonable doubt, would be acceptable. It is difficult to see how such rigorous guarantees could be given concerning either the geological or future human factors. But even if an economically viable, rigorously safe long term storage method could be devised, there is the problem of guaranteeing that it would be universally and invariably used. The assumption that it would be (especially if, as appears likely, such a method proved expensive economically and politically) seems to presuppose a level of efficiency, perfection, and concern for the future which has not previously been encountered in human affairs, and has certainly not been conspicuous in the nuclear industry. The risks imposed on the future by proceeding with nuclear development are, then, significant. to bear Perhaps 40,000 generations of future people could be forced significant risks resulting from the provision of the (extravagant) energy use of only a small proportion of the people of 10 generations. Nor is the risk of direct harm from the escape or misuse of radioactive materials the only burden the nuclear solution imposes on the future. Because the energy provided by nuclear fission is merely a stop gap, it seems probable that in due course the same problem, that of making a 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. Their world will most likely be a world which is seriously depleted of non-renewable resources, and in which such renewable resources as forests and soils as remain, resources which inevitably form an important part of the basis of life, are run-down or destroyed. Such points tell against the idea that future people must be, if not direct beneficiaries of energy from nuclear fission, at least indirect beneficiaries. �4. The "solution” then is to buy time for contemporary society at a price which not only creates serious problems for future people but which reduces their ability to cope with these problems. Like the consigner in the train parable, contemporary industrial society proposes, in order to get itself out of a mess arising from its own life-style - the creation of economies dependent on an abundance of non-re newable 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 in the lifetime of those now living and their immediate descendants, just as the consigner's action avoids uncomfortable changes for him and those in 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. If we apply to the nuclear situation the standards of behaviour and moral principles generally acknowledged (in principle, if not so often in fact) in the contemporary world, it is not easy to avoid the conclusion that nuclear development involves injustice with respect to the future on a grand scale. There appear to be only two plausible ways of trying to avoid such a conclusion. First, it might be argued that the moral principles and obligations which we acknowledge for the contemporary world and perhaps the immediate future do not apply to those 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 to imply that there are no circumstances in which such an action might be justifiable. As in the case of the consigner of the package there is a need to consider what these justifying circumstances might be, and whether they apply in the present case. We consider these possible escape routes for the proponent of nuclear development in turn. II.OBLIGATIONS TO THE (DISTANT) FUTURE. A The especially problematic area is that of the distant (i.e. non-immediate) future, the future 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 obligations 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 (democratic and other) institutions which do not take due account of the interests of future creatures. �5. Moral philosophers have, predictably, differed on questions of obligations to distant future creatures. 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. Others 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 there are no moral obligations to the future beyond those perhaps 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 effect of our actions on future people. from the Of those philosophers who say, or whose views imply that we do not have obligations to the (non-immediate) future, many have based this view on accounts of moral obligation which are built on relations which presuppose some degree of temporal or spatial contiguity. Thus, moral obligation is seen as presupposing various relations which could not hold between people widely separated in time (or sometimes in space). Let us call the position that we have no obligations to (distant) future people the No­ constraints position. Among suggested bases or grounds of moral obligation for the position, which would rule out obligations to the non-immediate future, are these. Firstly, there are those accounts which require that someone to whom a moral obligation is held be able to claim his rights or entitlement. People in the distant future will not be able to claim rights and entitlements against us, and of course they can do nothing to enforce any claims they might have against us. Secondly, there are those accounts which base moral obligations on social or legal convention, for example a convention which would require punishment of offenders or at least some kind of social enforcement. But plainly these and other conventions will not be invariant over change in society and amendment of legal conventions; hence they will not be invariant over time. Also future people have no way of enforcing their interests or punishing offending predecessors. �6. The No-constraints view is a very difficult one to sustain. 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 the earth in the distant future would be wiped out as a direct and predictable result of the action. The no-constraints position clearly implies that this is an acceptable moral enterprise, that whatever else we might legitimately criticize in the scientists’ experiment (perhaps its being over-expensive or badly designed) we cannot lodge a moral protest about the damage it will do to future people. The no-constraints position also endorses as morally acceptable the following sorts of policy:- A firm discovers it can make a handsome profit from mining, processing and manufacturing a new type of material which, although it causes no problem for present people or their immediate descendants, will over a period of hundreds of years decay into a substance which will cause an enormous epidemic of cancer among the inhabitants of the earth at that time. According to the no-constraints view the firm is free to act in its own interests, without any consideration for the harm it does remote future people. Such counterexamples to the No-constraints position, which are easily varied and multiplied, might seem childlishly obvious. Yet this view is far from being a straw man; not only have several philosophers endorsed this position, but it is a clear implication 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 No-constraints position have not considered such examples, despite their being clearly implied by their position. We suspect that (we certainly hope that) when it is brought out that their position admits such counterexamples, that without any constraints we are free to cause pointless harm for example, most of those who opted for this position would want to assert that it was not what they intended. What many of those who have put forward the No-constraints position seem to have had in mind (in denying moral obligation) is rather that future people can look after themselves, that we are not responsible for their lives. The 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, in the counterexample 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, most notably the obligation to take account in �7. 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 resposible 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. In just the same way, the fact that one does not have or has not acquired an obligation to some stranger with whom one has never been involved does not imply that one is free to do what one likes with respect to him, for example to rob him or to seriously harm him when this could be avoided. These difficulties for the No-constraints position result in part because of a failure to make an important distinction. Some of our obligations to others arise because we have voluntarily entered into some agreement with them - for example, we have made a promise. Other obligations, however, such as our duty not to damage or harm someone, do not assume that an agreement has been struck between us. former kind acquired obligations Let us call obligations of the and those of the latter unacquired obligations. There is a considerable difference in the type of responsibility associated with each. In the case of acquired obligations responsibility arises because one should do something which one can fail to do, e.g. keep a promise. In the case of unacquired duties responsibility arises as a result of being a causal agent who is aware of the consequences or consequences of his action, a responsibility that is not dependent on one’s having performed some act in the past (e.g., made a promise). Our obligations to future people clearly are of unacquired, not acquired obligations, a fact the No-constraints position simply fails to take into account. These obligations arise as a result of our ability to produce causal effects of a reasonably predictable nature, whether on our contemporaries or on those in the distant future. Thus, to return to the train parable, the consigner cannot argue in justification of his action that he has, for example, never assumed or acquired responsibility for the passengers, that he does not know them and therefore has no love or sympathy for them and that they are not part of his moral community; in short, that he has acquired no obligation, and has no special obligations to help them. All that �8. one needs to argue concerning the train, and in the nuclear case, is that there z are moral obligations against imposing harm for instance which are not specially o thQ distant acquired. Nor can this claim be rebutted by the pretence ure involve heroic self sacrifice, something ’’above and beyond” what is normally required. 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 shipping the dangerous package on the train. III. ATTEMPTS TO REDUCE OBLIGATIONS TO THE FUTURE. In evading these difficulties the No—constraints position may be qualified rather than wholly abandoned. According to the Qualified position we are not entirely unconstrained There are obligations, even to distant future with respect to the distant future. people, 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 costs and benefits (and so of future interests) is obtained by application over time of a discount rate, so discounting costs and risks to future people. The attempt to apply economics as a moral theory, something that is becoming increasingly common, can lead thei to the Qualified position. What is objectionable in such an approach is that economics must operate within the bounds of acknowledged non-acquired moral constraints, just as in practice it operates within legal constraints. What economics cannot legitimately do is determine what these constraints are. There are, moreover, alternative economic theories and simply to adopt, without further ado, one which discounts the future, giving much less importance to the interests of future people, is to beg all the questions at issue. Among the arguments that economists offer for generally discounting the future, the most threadbare is based on the Rosy-future assumption, that future generations will be better off than present ones (and so better placed to handle the waste problem). generations may well not Since there is mounting evidence that future be better off then present ones, especially in things that matter, no argument for discounting the interests of future generations on this basis can carry much weight. For the waste problem to be handed �9. to the future generations, 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 that they can (easily) carry and control the nuclear freight. A more plausible argument for discounting, the Opportunity-cost argument, ^builds directly on the notion of opportunity cost. It is argued from the fact that a dollar gained now is worth much more than a dollar received in the nonimmediate future (because the first dollar could meanwhile be invested at compound interest), that discounting is required to obtain equivalent monetary values. This same line of reasoning is then applied to the allocation of resources. Thus, compensation - which is what the waste problem is taken to come _ to economically - costs much less now than later, e.g. a few pennies set aside /(e.g. in a trust fund) in the future, if need be, will suffice to compensate eventually for any victims of remote radioactive waste leakage. beset this approach. Two problems First, there are, presently at least, insurmountable practical difficulties about applying such discounting. how to determine appropriate future discount rates. that the argument depends on a false assumption. We simply do not know A more serious objection is It is not true that value, or damages, can always be converted into monetary equivalents. There is no clear ’’monetary compensation" for a variety of damages, including cancer, loss of life, a lost species. The discounting theme, however argued for, is inadequate, because it leads back in practice to the No-constraints position. discounting imposes an ” economic horizon" The reason is that beyond which nothing need be considered, since any costs or benefit which might arise are, when discounted back to the present, negligible. A different argument for the Qualified position, the Probabilities argument, avoids the objections from cases of certain damage through appeal to probability considerations. The distant future, it is argued, is much more uncertain than the present and immediate future, so that probabilities are consequently lower, perhaps even approaching or coinciding with zero for any hypothesis concerning the distant future. Thus, the argument continues, the interests of future people must (apart from exceptional cases where there is an unusually high degree of certainty) count for (very much) less than those of present and neighbouring people where (much) higher probabilities 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 future against a much lower probability of indeterminate costs to an indeterminate number of �iisfcsrs”'.... . • 10. distant future people, the issue would normally be decided in favour of the present assuming anything like similar costs and benefits were involved. is however The argument Firstly, probabilities involving distant badly flawed. future situations are not always less than those concerning the immediate future in the way the argument supposes. problems often Moreover the outcomes of some moral do not depend on a high level of probability. In many 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. Nor, /of course, VitTcar) 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, i»n e>rd^f -Lt? 'fc-C I in the shape of the opportunity to continue (unnecessarily) high energy use. z the costs and benefits were comparable or evenly weighted, such And even, if an argument would be defective, since an analogous argument would show that the consigner’s action in the train parable, is acceptable provided the benefit (e.g. the profit the company stood to gain from imposing significant risks on other people) was sufficiently large. Such a cost-benefit approach to moral and decision problems, with or is quite inadequate when different parties without the probability frills, are involved or when cases of conflict of interest involving moral obligations are at issue. permissible 5 For example, such a cost-benefit approach would imply that it is for a company to injure, or very likely injure, some innocent party provided only that the company stands to make a sufficiently large gain from it, that costs to some group are more than larger benefits to another group. transferred in any morally compensated for by But costs or benefits are not legitimately simple way from one group to another. The often appealed to maxim "If you (or your group) want the benefits you have to accept the costs" is one thing, but the maxim "If I (or my group) 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 moral principle that one is not, in general, entitled to simply transfer costs of a significant kind arising from an activity which benefits oneself onto other parties who are not involved in the activity and are not beneficiaries.This Transfer-limiting principle is especially clear in cases of which a thalidomide manufacturing and marketing company is one, where the significant costs include an effect on life or health or a risk thereof, and where the benefit to the benefitting party is of a noncrucial or dispensible nature. The principle is of fundamental importance in the nuclear debate, and appears again and again : it applies not merely to the waste problem but as regards several other liabilities of nuclear development, e.g. the risk of nuclear war, the matter / 9 'of reactor meltdown. In particular, the principle invalidates the comparison, heavily relied on in building a case for the acceptability of the nuclear risks, 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 overwhelming extent, those who bear the serious health costs and risks involved. In contrast the users and supposed beneficiearies of nuclear energy will be risking not only, or even primarily, their own lives and health, but also that of others who may not be beneficiaries at all who may be just the opposite! More generally, the distribution of costs and damage in such a fashion, i.e. on to non-beneficiaries, is a characteristic of certain serious forms of pollution, and is among its morally objectionable features. / j Large-scale energy y»ss// /production, from nuclear or foe-itc fuel sources, can cause or lead to serious !pollution. Thus from the Transfer-limiting t>fe principle emerges an important necessary condition for energy options: To be morally acceptable k -era, OE£12^ should not involve the transfer of s.igif leant costs or risks of harm onto parties who are not involved, who do not use or do not benefit correspondingly from the energy source. Included in the scope of �12. this condition, which nuclear development violates , are future people, i.e. not merely people living at the present time but also future generations (those Principle, that we should not hand the world we have so exploited on to our successors in substantially worse shape than we ’'received” it. For if we did then that would be a significant transfer of costs. The Transfer-limiting principle can be derived from certain ethical theories (e.g. those of a deontic cast such as Kant's and Ra and from common precepts (such as the Golden Rule), where one seriously considers putting oneself in another’s position. But the principle is perhaps best defended, on a broader basis, inductively, by way of examples. embroider the train parable, the company town decides to Suppose, to solve its disposal problem by shipping its noxious waste to another town down the line, which (like future towns) lacks the means to ship it back or to register due protest. The inhabitants of this town are then forced to face the problem either of undertaking the expensive and difficult disposal process or of sus­ taining risks to their own lives and health. Most of us would regard this kind of transfer of costs as morally unacceptable, however much the consigner’s company town flourishes. / /IV. c UNCERTAINTY AND INDETERMINACY ARGUMENTS FOR REDUCED RESPONSIBILITY. 7 /Many of the arguments designed to show that we cannot be ed to take too much account of the effects of our actions on the distant future appeal to uncertain/y. There are two main components to the argument, capable of separation, but frequently tangled up. Both arguments are mistaken, the first, an argument from ignorance, on a priori second on a posteriori grounds. follows:- grounds, the The Argument from ignorance concerned runs as In contrast to the exact information we can obtain about the present, the information we can obtain about the effects of our actions on the distant future is unreliable, woolly and highly speculative. But we cannot base assessments of how we should act on information of this kind, especially when �accurate information is obtainable about the present which would indicate Therefore we must regretfully ignore the different action. our actions on the distant future. ignorance uncertain effects of A striking example of the argument from at work is afforded by official US analyses favouring nuclear development, which ignore (the extensive) costs of waste control on the 7 grounds of uncertainty. the argument concerned is this: More formally and crudely (%)£/only has obligations to the future if these obligations are based on reliable information. distant future. There is no reliable information at present as regards the Therefore one has no obligations to the distant future. This argument is essentially a variant on a sceptical argument concerning * our knowledge of the future (formally, replace ’obligations in the crude statement of the argument above). by ’knowledge’ 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 , such do act on the basis of^"unreliable" information, which the sceptic as regards the future conveniently labels "uncertainty". In moral situations in the present, assessments of what to do often take account of risk and probability, even quite low probabilities. Consider again the train parable. 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. that there is a significant risk of harm It is enough in this sort of case. It does not matter if the decreased well-being of the consigner is certain and that the �14. prospects of the passengers quite uncertain. It is wrong to ship the gas. But if we do not require certainty of action to apply moral constraints in contemporary affairs, why should we require a much higher standard of certainty in the future? The unwarranted insistence on certainty as a necessary condition before moral consideration can be given to the distant future, then, amounts to a flagrant double standard. According to the second argument, the Practical-uncertainty argument, even if in theory we have obligations to the future, we cannot in practice take the interests of future people into account because uncertainty about the distant future is so gross that we cannot determine what the likely consequences of actions on it will be. Therefore, however good our intentions to the people of the distant future are, in practice we have no choice but to ignore their interests. Given that moral principles are characteristically of universal implicational form, e.g. of forms such as "if x has character then x is wrong, for every (action) sharply thus: x", h the argument may be stated more We can never obtain the information about future actions which would enable us to detach the antecedent of the implication. Therefore, even if in theory moral principles do extend to future people, in practice they cannot be applied to obtain clear conclusions. It is true that if the distant future really were so grossly uncertain . that in every case it was impossible to determine in any way better than chance what the effects of present action would be, and whether any given action would help or hinder future people, then moral principles, although applicable in theory to the future, would not in practice yield any clear conclusions about how to act. In this event the distant future would 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 argument has to assume. There are some areas where uncertainty is �15. not so great as to exclude constraints on action. For example, we may have little idea what the fashions will be in a hundred years or, to take another morally^irrelevant^factor, what brands of ice 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 genetic defects, by the destruction of resources, or the elimination from the face of the earth of that wonderful variety of non-human life which at present makes it such a rich and interesting place. 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. For this sort of reason, the practical uncertainty argument should be rejected. Through the defects of the preceding arguments, we can see the defects in a number of widely employed uncertainty arguments used to write off probably harm to future people as outside the scope of proper consideration. Most of these popular moves employ both of the uncertainty arguments as suits the case, switching from one to the other. For example, we may be told that we cannot really take account of future people because we cannot be sure that they will exist or that their tastes and wants will not be completely different from our own, to the point where they will not suffer from our exhaustion of resources or from the things that would affect us. 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 to whom we are morally committed. 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 �16. is again a mere outside possibility. 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. 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. Closely related to uncertainty arguments are arguments premissed on the indeterminacy of the future. For example, according to the Indeterminacy argument, the indeterminacy of the number and exact character of people at future times will prevent the interest of future people being taken into account where there is a conflict with the present. Since their numbers are indeterminate and their interests unknown how, 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 raised particularly by problems of sharing fixed quantities of resources among present and future people, for example oil, when the numbers of the latter are indeterminate. Such problems are indeed difficult, but they are not resolved by ignoring the claims of the future. Nor are distributional problems involving non-renewable resources as large and representative a class of moral problems concerning the future as the tendency to focus on them would suggest. It can be freely admitted, that there will be cases where the indeterminacy of aspects of the future will make conflicts very difficult to resolve or indeed irresoluble - no realistic ethical theory can give a precise answer to every ethical question. But, as the train parable again illustrates, /there are cases where such difficulties do not hinder resolution, and .anci cases of conflict which are not properly approached 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 case of nuclear power is like that. The failure of these various arguments reveals, what c^e^| ^^^men^does nc argued from the universalisability features of moral principles, that/ disqualify future people from full moral consideration or reduce their claims below the claims of present people. That is, we have the same general obligations �to future people as to the present; thus there is the same obligation to take account of them and their interests in what we do, to be careful in our actions, to take account of the probability (and not just the certainty) of our actions causing harm or damage, and to see, other things being equal, that we do not act so as to rob them of what is necessary for the chance of a good life. Uncertainty and indeterminacy do not relieve us of these obligations. V. PROBLEMS OF SAFE NUCLEAR OPERATION : REACTOR EMISSIONS AND CORE MELTDOWN. The ethical problems with nuclear power are by no means confined to waste storage and future creatures. entitlement Just as remoteness in time does not erode obligations or to just treatment, neither does location in space, or a particular and arguments like those already arrived at in considering the waste problem ^apply. For example, if one group (social uriit^ or state) decides to dump its radioactive wastes in the territory or region of another group, or not to prevent its (radioactive) pollution entering the territory of another group, then it imposes risks and costs on presently existing people of the second group, in much the way that present nuclear developments impose costs and risks on future people. There are differences however : spatially distant people cannot be discounted in quite the way that future people can be, though their interests and objectives can be ignored or overridden. People living in the vicinity of a nuclear reactor are subject to special costs and risks. One is radioactive pollution, because reactors routinely discharj radioactive materials into the air and Emission problem. water near the plant : hence the Such ’’normal" emission during plant operation of low level radiation carries carcinogenic and mutagenic costs. While there are undoubtedly costs, the number of cancers and the precise extent of genetic damage induced by exposure to such radiation are both uncertain. If our permitted free transfer of costs and risks from one person to another, the ethical issue directly raised by nuclear emissions would be : what extent of �18. cancer and genetic damage, if any, is permissibly traded for the advantages of nuclear power, and under what conditions? Since, however, risks and benefits are NOT (morally) transferable this way - recall the Transfer-limiting I principle - such a cost-benefit approach to the risks nuclear emission poses for those who live near a reactor cannot with justice be approached in this fashio, these risks are In the USA, people who live within 50 miles oMmclear real! power plant bear a risk of cancer and genetic damage of as much as 50 times that borne by the population at large. And children living in this region are even more vulnerable, since they and several times more likely to contract cancer through exposure than normal adults. The serious costs to these people cannot be J us tit led by the alleged benefits for others, expecially when these benefits could be obtained without these costs. a pity about Thus it is not just complacent to say 'It’s Aunt Ethel dying of cancer, but the new make life comfortable’. airconditioners For such benefits to some as airconditioners provide, which can be alternatively obtained, for example by modification of buildings, can in no way compensate for what others suffer. Among the other strategies used in trying to persuade us that the imposition of radiation on minorities - most of whom have no genuine voice in the. location of reactors in their environment and cannot move away without serious losses - is really quite alright is the Doubling argument. Accord to the US Atomic Energy Commission, who deployed this trick, it is permissable to double, through nuclear technology, the level of (natural) radiation that a population have received with apparently negligible consequences, the argument being that the additional amount (being equivalent to the "natural” level) is also likely to have negligible consequences. The increased amounts of radiation - with their large man-made component - are then accounted normal, and, it is claimed, 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, �19. 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 very strict standards by comparison with most other countries with planned nuclear reactors, permits radiation emissions very substantially in excess of the standards laid down; so the emission situation is much worse than what consideration of the standards would disclose. Furthermore, the monitoring of the standards ’’imposed'’ is entrusted to the nuclear operators themselves, scarcely disinterested parties. Thus public policy is determined not so as to guarantee public health, but rather to serve as a public pacifier” while publicly-subsidized private nuclear operations proceed relatively unhampered? While radioactive emissions are an ordinary feature of reactor operation, reactor breakdown is, hopefully, not: official reports even try to make an accident of magnitude, as a matter of definition, an ’extraordinary nuclear occurrence . But "definitions” notwithstanding, such accidents can happen, and almost have on several occasions (the most notorious being Three Mile Island): hence the Core-meltdown problem. If the cooling and emergency core cooling systems fail in American (light water) reactors, then the core melts and ’containment failure’ is likely, the result that an area of 40,000 square miles could be radioactively 10 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 the size of Pennsylvania would be destroyed. Modern nuclear reactors are about five times the size of the reactor for which these conservative US (still the best available from official sources) are given : the consequences of a similar accident with a modern reactor would accordingly be much greater. The consigner who risks the lives and well-being of passengers on the O ^train acts in^admissibly. A government or government-endorsed utility appears to act in a way that does not differ in morally significant respects in �20. siting a nuclear reactor in a community, in planting such a dangerous package on the ’’community train”. More directly, the location of a nuclear reactor in a community, even if it should happen to receive a favourable benefit-cost as the Transfer-limiting principle. The advocates of nuclear power have, in effect, endeavoured to avoid questions of cost-transfer and equity, by shifting the dispute out of the extraordinary reactor malfunction. They have argued, in particular, what contrasts with the train parable, that there is no real possibility of a catastrophic nuclear accident. Indeed in the 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. However, the mathematical models relied upon in this report, variously called "fault tree analysis” and "reliability estimating techniques", are unsound, because, among other things, they exclude as "not credible" possibilities that may well happen in the real world. that the It is not surprising, then i methodology and data of the report have been soundly and decisively criticised, or that official support for the report has now been withdrawn. 12 Moreover, use of alternative methods and data indicates that there is a real possibility, a non-negligible probability of a serious accident. In response it is contended that, even if there is a non-negligible probability of a reactor accident, still that is 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 decision 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 otpions, which settles their �21. ethical status. The following assumptions are encountered in risk assessment as applied to energy options: Ai. If option a imposes (comparable) costs on fewer people than option b then option a is preferable to option Aii. b ; 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 alreay^ accepted; therefore option a is acceptable. 3 These assumptions are then applied as follows. be killed Since the number likely to eventuall by nuclear power station catastrophe is less than the likely number killed by cigarette smoking, and since the risks of cigarette smoking are accepted; it follows that the risks of huclear power are acceptable. A little reflection reveals that this sort of risk assessment argument grossly violates the Transfer­ limiting principle. In order to obtain a proper ethical assessment we need a much fuller picture, and we need to know at least these things:- costs and benefits go to the same parties; Do the and is the person who voluntarily the risks also the person who primarily receives the benefits, as in undertakes driving or cigarette smoking, or are the costs imposed not benefit? on other parties who do It is only if the parties are the same in the case of the options compared, and there are no such distributional problems, a basis would be soundly based. that a comparison on such This is rarely the case, and it is not so in the case of risk assessments of energy options. VI. OTHER SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL RISKS AND COSTS OF NUCLEAR DEVELOPMENT, ESPECIALLY NUCLEAR WAR. The problems already discussed by no means exhaust the environmental, health and safety 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 transportation of materials. Several of these stages involve hazards. risks in the nuclear cycle Unlike the special - of sabotage of plants, of theft of fissionable material, and of the further proliferation of nuclear armaments - these hazards �22. have parallels, if not exact equivalents, in other highly polluting methods of generating power, e.g. ’workers in the uranium mining industry sustain ’’the same u 14 risk" of fatal and nonfatal injury as workers in the coal industry’. The problems are not really produced by nuclear development. Other social and environmental problems endemic where dangerous large-scale industry operates in societies that are highly inegalitarian and include sectors that are far from affluent - are more intimately linked with the J nuclear power cycle. Though pollution is a common and generally undesirable component of large-scale industrial operation, radioactive pollution ,such as uranium mining for instance produces, is especially a legacy of nuclear development, and a specially undesirable one, as rectification costs for dead radioactive lands and waterways reveal. Though sabotage is a threat to many large industries, sabotage of a nuclear reactor can have dire consequences, of a different order of magnitude from most industrial sabotage (where core meltdown is not a possibility). Though theft of material from more dubious enterprises such as munitions works can pose threats to populations at large and can assist terrorism, no thefts for allegedly peaceful enterprises pose problems of the same order as theft of fissionable material. No other industry produces materials which so readily permit fabrication into such massive explosives. No other industry is, to sum it up, so vulnerable on so many fronts. In part to reduce its vulnerability, in part because of its long and continuing association with military activities, the nuclear industry is subject to, and encourages, several practices which (given their scale) run counter to basic features of free and open societies, crucial features such as personal These practices include secrecy, restriction of information, formation of special police and guard forces, espionage, curtailment of civil liberties. Already operators of nuclear installations are given extraordinary powers, in vetting employees, to investigate the background and activities not only of employees but also of their families and sometimes even of their friends. The installations themselves become armed camps, which especially offends British sensibilities. The U.K. Atomic Energy (Special Constables) Act of 1976 created a special armed force to guard nuclear installations and- made it answerable ... to the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority. �..iwu- 23. These developments, and worse ones in West Germany and elsewhere,presage along with nuclear development increasingly authoritarian and anti-democratic societies. That nuclear development appears to force such political <— i ' (consequences tells heavily against it. Nuclear development is further indicated politically by the direct connection of nuclear power with nuclear war. It is true that ethical questions concerning nuclear war - for example, whether a nuclear war is justified, or just, under any circumstances, and if so what circumstances - are distinguishable from those concerning nuclear power. Undoubtedly, however, the spread of nuclear power is substantially increasing the technical means for engaging in nuclear war and so, to that extent, the opportunity for, and chances of, nuclear engagement. \ /jL Since nuclear wars are /nevei/ accountable- positive goods, but are at best the lesser of major evils, nuclear wars are always highly ethically undesirable. The spread of nuclear power accordingly expands the opportunity for, and chances of, highly undesirable consequences. 0^!/\ Finally the latter, so increasing these chances and opportunities, is itself undesirable, and therefore what le^jtds to it, nuclear development^ is undesirable. This is, in outline, the argument from nuclear wa£ against large-scale nuclear development. VII. CONFLICT ARGUMENTS, AND BEGINNING ON NUCLEAR DEVELOPMENT. UNCOVERING THE IDEOLOGICAL BASES OF Much as with nuclear war, so given the cumulative case against nuclear development, only one justificatory that of appeal to overriding circumstances. route remains open, That appeal, to be ethically acceptable, must go beyond merely economic considerations. For, as observed, the consigner’s action, in the train parable, cannot be justified by purely I ^conomistic arguments, such as that his profits would rise, the company or the town would be more prosperous, or by appealing to the fact that some possibly uncomfortable changes would otherwise be needed. case: a Transfer-limiting principle applies. So it is also in the nuclear But suppose now the consigner argues that his action is justified because unless it is taken the town will die. It is �24. by no means clear that even such a justification as this would be sufficient, especially where the risk to the passengers is high, since the case still /amount s^one of transfer of costs and risks onto others. But such a conflict situation, where a given course of action, though normally undesirable, is alleged to be the lesser of two evils in a given case, is morally more problemthan cases atical/frhere Transfer-limiting principle is clearly violated. Nuclear develop­ ment is often defended in this way, through Conflict arguments, to the effect that even though nuclear development does have undesirable features, nevertheless the alternatives are worse. Some of the arguments advanced to demonstrate conflict are based on competing commitments to present people, and others on competing obligations to future people, both of which are taken to override the obligations not to impose on the future significant risk of serious harm. The success of such /conflict arguments require^the presentation of a genuine and exhaustive set of alternatives (or at least practical alternatives) and showing that the only alternatives to admittedly morally undesirable actions are even more undesirable ones. If some practical alternative which is not morally worse than the action to be justified is overlooked, suppressed, or neglected in the argument (for example, if in the train parable it turns out that the town has another option to starving or to shipping the parcel, namely earning a living in some other way), then the argument is defective and cannot readily be patched. Just such a suppression of practicable alternatives, we shall argue, has occurred in the argument designed to show that the alternatives to the nuclear option are even worse than the option itself. 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 indus­ trialised countries. Failure to develop nuclear energy, it is often claimed, would amount to denying them the opportunity to reach the standard of affluence we currently enjoy and would create unemployment and poverty in the industrialisec nations. And this would be worse - a greater evil - than such things as violating the Transfer-limiting principle through nuclear development. The 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 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 tends to reduce available jobs through encouraging substitution of energy use for labour use. The argument that nuclear energy is needed for the third world is even less convincing. Nuclear energy is both politically and economically inappropriate for the third world, since it requires massive amounts of capital, requires numbers of imported scientists and engineers, �25. WT creates negligible local employment, and depends for its feasibility upon largely non-existent utility systems - e.g. established electricity transmission systems and back-up facilities, and sufficient electrical appliances to plug into the system. Politically it increases foreign dependence, adds to centralised entrenched power and reduces the chance for 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 (often for military purposes) by, their rulers, the westernised and often military elites in whose interests the economies of these countries are usually organised. than what it is: But that does not make the poverty argument anything other a fraud. There are well-known energy-conserving alternatives and the practical option of developing further alternative energy sources, alternatives some of which offer far better prospects for helping the poor, both in the third world and in industrial countries: coal and other fossil fuels, geothermal, and a range of solar options (including as well as narrowly solar sources, wind, water and tidal power). Another major argument advanced to show conflict, the Lights-goingout argument, pppeals to a set of supposedly overriding and competing obligations to future people. We have, it is said, a duty to pass on the immensely valuable things and institutions which our culture has developed. Unless our high-technology, high-energy industrial society is continued and fostered, our valuable institutions and traditions will fall into decay or be swept away. The argument is essentially that without nuclear power, without the continued level of material wealth it alone is assumed to make possible, the lights of our civilization will go out. Future people will be the losers. The argument does raise important questions about what is valuable in But for our society and what characteristics are necessary for a good society. the most part these large questions can be by-passed. The reason is that the argument adopts an extremely uncritical attitude to present high-technology societies, apparently assuming that they are uniformly and uniquely valuable. $I I it assuine</ that technological society is unmodifiable, that^cannot be changed in ' the direction of energy conservation or alternative (perhaps high technology) energy sources without collapse. These assumptions are all hard to accept. The assumption that technological society’s energy patterns are unmodifiable is especially so; after all, it has survived events such as world wars which required major social and technological restructuring and consumption modification. If western society’s demands for energy were (contrary to the evidence) totally unmodifiable without collapse, not only would it be committed to a program of increasing destruction, but much of its culture would be of dubious value to �26. future people, who would very likely, as a consequence of this destruction, lack the resource base which the argument assumes to be essential in the case of contemporary society. The uniformity assumption should certainly be challenged. Since high- technology societies appear not to be uniformly valuable, the central question is, what is necessary to maintain what is valuable in such a society? While it may be easy to argue that high energy consumption centrally controlled is necessary to maintain the political and economic status quo of such a society, it is not so easy to argue that it is essential to maintain what is valuable, and it is what is valuable, presumably that we have a duty to pass on to the future. The evidence from history is that no very high level of material affluence or energy consumption is needed to maintain what is valuable. There is good reason in fact to believe that a society with much lower energy and resource^ consumption would better foster what is valuable than our own. But even if a radical change in these directions is independently desirable, it is unnecessary to presuppose such a change in order to see that the assumptions of the Lights-going-out argument are wrong. The consumption of less energy than at present/ need involve no reduction of well-being; and certainly a large increase over present levels of consumption assumed trr the usual economic case for nuclear energy, is quite unnecessary. then What the nuclear strategy is really designed to do is not to prevent the lights going out in western civilisation, but to enable the lights to go on burning all the time - to maintain and even increase the wattage output of the Energy Extravaganza . In fact there is good reason to think that, far from the high energy consumption society fostering what is valuable, it will, especially if energy is obtained by means of nuclear fission, be positively inimical to it. A society which has become heavily dependent upon a^ highly centralised, controlled and garrisoned md expertise-intensive energy source, must be one which is highly susceptible to entrenchment of power, and one in which the forces which control this energy source, whether capitalist or bureaucratic, can exert enormous power over the political system and over people’s lives, even more then they do at present. Such a society would/' almost inevitably tend to become authoritatian and increasingly anti-democratic, as an outcome, among other things, of its response to the threat posed by dissident groups in the nuclear situation. 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 authoritarianism - while many valuable aspects, such as the degree of political freedom and those opportunities for personal and collective autonomy which exist, would be lost or diminished: political freedom �27. for example, is a high price to pay for consumerism and and energy extravagence. Again, as in the case of the poverty arguments, clear alternatives, alternative social and political choices, which do not involve such unacceptable consequences, are available. The alternative to the high technology-nuclear option is not a return to the cave, the loss of all that is valuable, but either the adoption of an available alternative such as coal for power or, better, 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 argument, as a moral conflict argument, accordingly fails. Thus the further escape route, the appeal to conflict, is, like the appeal to futurity, 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-scale nuclear development is a crime against the future is inevitable. Closed also, in the much same way, are the escape routes to other arguments (from reactor meltdown, radiation emissions, etc.) for concluding that nuclear development is unacceptable. Tn sum, nuclear development is morally unacceptable on several grounds. VIII. SOCIAL OPTIONS : SHALLOW AND DEEP ALTERNATIVES. The future 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 associated phenomena such as acid rain and atmospheric heating, not to mention the despoliation caused by extensive strip mining, all of which will result from its use in meeting very Such an option would, moreover, also violate high projected consumption figures. the Transfer-limiting principle : for it would impose widespread costs on nonbeneficiaries for some concentrated benefits to some profit takers and to some users who do not pay the full costs of production and replacement. To these main conventional options a third is often added which emphasizes softer and more benign technologies, such as those of solar energy and hydroelectricity. Such softer options — if suitably combined with energy conservation measures (for there are solar ways, as well as nuclear ways, of energy extravagance and of producing unnecessary trivia which answer to no genuine needs) - can avoid the ethical objectives to nuclear power. choice is not however technological, The deeper nor merely^individual^ 1 bUL Social, and involves the restructuring of production away from energy intensive uses and, at a more basic level, a change to nonconsumeristic, less consumptive life­ styles and social arrangements’!:6 These more fundamental choices between social alternatives, conventional technologically-oriented discussion of energy options tends to obscure. It is not just a matter of deciding in which way to meet the �unexamined goals nuclear development aspires to meet, but also a matter of examining the goals themselves. That is, we are not merely faced with the question of comparing different technologies for meeting some fixed or given demand or level of consumption, and of trying to see how best to meet these; we are also faced, and primarily, with the matter of examining those alleged needs and the cost of a society that creates them. It is doubtful that any technology, however benign in principle, will be likely to leave a tolerable world for the future if it is expected to meet unbounded and uncontrolled energy consumption and demands. Even more benign technologies may well be used in a way which creates costs for future people and ^are?which^ /them. ^likely to result in a deteriorated world being handed on to In short, even more benign technologies may le/id to violation of the Transmission JjteQu^-remen^• Consider, to illustrate, the effect on the world s forests, commonly counted as a solar resource, should they be extensively used for production of methanol or of electricity by woodchipping. While few would object to the use of genuine waste material for energy production, 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 forests. The effects of such additional demands on the maintenance of the forests are often dismissed by the simple expedient of waving around the label "renewable resources”. Many forests are in 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 imminent, It certainly has begun in many regions, and many forest types, especially rain17 ^/forest types^ are now, and rapidly, being lost for the future. The addition of y/a maj^r further and not readily limitable demand pressure for energy on top /of /the present demands is one which anyone with both a realistic appreciation of the conduct of forestry operations and a concern for the 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 much of Europe at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, again for energy purposes, could be extensive and devastating erosion in steeper lands and tropical areas, desertification in more arid regions, possible climatic change, and massive impoverishment of natural ecosystems, including enormous loss of natural species. Some of us do not want to pass on, and by the Transmission principles 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 �29. products or polluted by coal products. illustrates, a mere switch to In short, as the forest situation more benign technologies - important though this is - without any more basic structural and social change,is inadequate. The deeper social option involves challenging and beginning to alter a social structure which promotes consumerism, consumption far beyond genuine needs and an economic structure which encourages increasing use of highly energy-intensi modes of production. The social change option tends to be obscured in most discussions of energy options and of how to meet energy needs, in part because it does question underlying values of current social arrangements. The conventional discussion proceeds by taking alleged demand (often conflated with wants or needs) 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 and 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 want deep freezers, air conditions, power gadgets, .... authoritarian to prevent them from satisfying these wants. from created wants It would be Such an argument conveniently ignores the social framework in which such needs and wants arise or are produced. To point to the determination of many such wants at the framework level is not however to assume that they are entirely determined at the framework level (e.g. by industrial organisation) and there is no such thing as individual choice or determination at all. It is to see the social framework as a major factor in determining certain kinds of choices, such as those for travel, and kinds of infrastructure, and to see apparently individual choices made in such matters as being channelled and directed by a social framework determined largely in the interests of corporate and private profit and advantage. The social change option is a hard option, insofar as it will be difficult to implement politically; but it is ultimately the only way of avoiding the passing on of serious costs to future people. reasons than such ethical ones for taking it: And there are other sorts of it is the main, indeed the only sort of option,open to those who adopt what is now called a deep ecological perspective, as contrasted with a shallow ecological outlook which regards the natural world and its nonhuman denizens as not worthwhile in themselves but only of value in as much as they answer back to human interests. The deep ecological perspective is an integral part of the Alternative Ecological Paradigm and is incompatible with central theses of the Dominant Social Paradigm (which is essentially the ideology of classical and neoclassical economics) �30. and its variants (roughly, what are called State Socialism, and Democratic 18 Socialism). It is incompatible with such assumptions as that the natural environment is of value only as a resource, is by and large hostile, but is controllable in human interests,and with the further domination over nature themes of the Dominant Paradigm and its variants. The conflict between Alternative and Dominant Paradigms, which is fast increasing, extends of course far beyond attitudes to the natural world, since core values of the Dominant Paradigm such as the merits of unimpeded economic growth and material progress are at stake; the conflict involves fundamental differences over the whole front of economical, political and social arrangements. The conflict underlies much of the nuclear debate, insofar as it is not specifically limited to questions of technological fixes, but takes up the 19 basic ethical issues and the social questions to which they lead. The ethical requirements already defended and applied bring us out, when followed through, on the Alternative side of the paradigm conflict, and accordingly lead to the difficult social change option. The social changes that the deep alternative requires will be strongly resisted because they mean changes in current social organisation and power 'structure. To the extenj? that the option represents some kind of threat to parts of present political and economic arrangements, it is not surprising that official energy option discussion proceeds by misrepresenting and often obscuring it. But difficult as it is to suitably alter "the system,” especially one with such far-reaching effects on the prevailing power structure, it is imperative to try: we are all on the nuclear train. �FOOTNOTES This paper is a condensation of an early version of our ’Nuclear 1. power - ethical, social, and political dimensions * (ESP for short, available from the authors), which in turn grew out of Routley (i.e. the work so referred to in the reference list). For help with the condensation we are very considerably indebted to the editors. In the condensation, we simplify the structure of the argument and suppress underlying political and ideological dimensions (for example, the large measure of responsibility of the USA for spreading nuclear reactors around the world, and thereby in enhancing the chances of nuclear disasters, including nuclear war). We also considerably reduce a heavy load of footnotes and references designed and needed to help make good many of our claims. Further, in order to contain references to a modest length, reference to primary sources has often been replaced by reference through secondary sources. Little difficulty should be encountered however in tracing fuller references through secondary sources or in filling out much Important background material from work cited herein. For example, virtually all the data cited in sections, and VII is referenced in Routley. At worst ESP can always be consulted. All but the last line of the quote is drawn from Goodin, p. 417; 2. 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 # (lightwater) reactors, much more information is required. For many assessment purposes however, some knowledge of economic fallacies and decision theory is at least as important as knowledge of nuclear technology. 3. Naturally the effect on humans is not the only factor that has to be taken into account in arriving at moral assessments. Nuclear radiation, 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 example, can hardly improve its case, it suffices if the case against it can be made out solely in terms of its effects on human life in the conventional way. �For reference to and a brief discussion of (human-oriented) ^simulation models see Gooding, 428. The Opportunity-cost 4. respects. argument is also defective in other It presupposes not merely the (mistaken) reductions involved in the contraction of the ethical domain to the economic; it also presupposes that the /proper methods for decision which ^ffect the choice, apply discounting. future, such as that of energy But, as Goodin argues, more appropriate decision rules do not allow discounting. This is one of the reasons why expected utility theory, 5. roughly cost-benefit analysis with probability frills, is inadequate as a decision method in such contexts. Apparent exceptions to the principle such as taxation (and 6. redistribution of income generally) vanish when wealth is construed (as it has to be if taxation is to be properly justified) as at least partly a social asset unfairly monopolised by a minority of the population. Examples such as that of motoring dangerously do not constitute counterexamples to the principle; for one is not morally entitled to so motor. / 7. For details, and as to how the official analyses become arguments against nuclear development when some attempt is made to take the ignored costs into account, see Shrader-Frechette, p. 55 ff. See Routley, p. 160. /\ the preceding two para£ I graphs, see Shrader-Frechette, p. 35 ff.; and also Nader and Abbotts. For much further discussion of the points of [10. Most of the reactors^Ln the world are of this type; see Gyorgy. 11. See Shrader-Frechette, chapter 4. 12. See Shrader-Frechette. / shortcomings A worthwhile initial view of the of the Rass^ftussen report may be reached by combining ' /the critique in Shrader-Frechette with that in Nader and Abbotts. 13. There are variations on Ai against numbers such as probabilities. and Aii which multiply costs In this way risks, construed as probable costs, can be taken into account in the assessment. risks may be assessed (Alternatively, through such familiar methods as insurance). �A principle varying Aii’. a Aii, and formulated as follows: is ethically acceptable if (for some b) a includes no more risks than b and b is socially accepted. Aii’. was the basic ethical principle in terms of which the Cluff Lake Board of Inquiry recently decided that nuclear power development see Cluff Lake Board of Inquiry in Saskatchewan is ethically acceptable: Department of Environment, Government of Saskatchewan, 1978, Final Report, p. 305 and p. 288. In this report, a is nuclear power and b is either activities clearly accepted by society as alternative power sources. other applications b In has been taken as cigarette smoking, motoring, mining and even the Vietnam war (!). The points made in the text do not exhaust the objections to principles Ai - Aii’. The principles are certainly ethically substantive, since an ethical consequence cannot be deduced from nonethical premisses, but they have an inadmissible conventional origin of b ; b character. For look at the may be socially accepted though it is no longer socially acceptable, or though its social acceptibility is no longer so clearcut 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 Aii’, for instance, for the argument to begin to look convincing is that ’ethically acceptable’ rather than ’socially accepted’. b is But even with the amendments the principles are invalid, for the reasons given in the text, and others. It is not disconcerting that principles of this type do not work. It would be sad to see yet another area lost to the experts, ethics to actuaries. 14. See Shrader-Frechette, p. 15. 15. Goodin 16. The argument is elaborated in ESP. 17. For some of the more philosophically important material p. 433. 'alternative Mannlaon ~ Asocial arrangements and lifestyles, see work cited in V. and R. Routley, ’Social theories, self management and environmental problems’ in al, where a beginning is made on working out one set of alternatives, those of a pluralistic anarchism. �The parlous 18. situation of the world’s tropical rainforests is explained in, for instance, Myers; the reasons are untangled in R. and V. Routley ’World rainforest destruction - the social causes’ (available from the authors). 19. > rival, For a fuller account of the Dominant Social Paradigm and its Paradigm, see Cot^royfe and Duff, especially the Alternative Environmental the assumptions the table on p. 341 which /of the paradigms; compare also Cotton and Dunljzfp, especially p. 34. Contemporary varients in the Dominant Social Paradigm were considered in ESP. The shallow/deep contrast as applied to ecological positions, which A s /is an important component of the paradigm conflict, was introduced by Naess. // S /For further explanation of the contract and of the larger array of ecological positions into which it fits, see R. and V. Routley, ’ in Mannison environmental ethics ___ ’Human chauvinism and et al, and the references there cited, ^especially to R^d man’s work. 20. The more elaborate argument of ESP sets the nuclear debate in the context of paradigm conflict. But it is also argued that, even within assumptions framework of the Dominant Social Paradigm and its variants, Ti. Nuclear development is not the rational choice among energy options. The main argument put up for nuclear development within the framework of the dominant paradigm is an Economic growth argument. It is the following version of the Lights-going-out argument (with economic growth duly standing Nuclear power is in for material wealth, and for what is valuable!^ necessary to sustain economic growth. Economic growth is desirable (for all the usual reasons, e.g. to increase the size of the pie, to postpone redistribution problems, etc.). k Therefore nuclear power is desirable. / /The first premiss is part of US energy policy (see Shrader-Frechette, p.lll), 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 (not without growth but) selective X //"growth, which economic the heavy social and environmental costs carried by unqualified economic growth. More to the point, since the second premiss is an assumption of the Dominant Paradigm, the first premiss (or rather an appropriate and less vulnerable restatement of it) Paradigm standards. fails even by Dominant For of course nuclear power is not necessary that there are other, perhaps costlier alternatives. defended is some elaboration of the premiss : given The premiss usually Nuclear power is the economically best way to sustain economic growth, ’economically best’ �being filled out as ’most efficient’, ’cheapest’, benefit-cost ratio’, etc. ’having the most favourable Unfortunately for the argument, and for nuclear development schemes, nuclear power is none of these things decisively (unless a good deal of economic cheating - easy to do - is done). Tii. On proper Dominant Paradigjfi accounting, nuclear choices should generally be rejected, both as private utility investments and as public choices. Nuclear development is not economically viable but has been kept going, not by clear economic viability, but by massive subsidization of several types Gyorgy and Nader alrd Abbotts). discussed in Shrader-Frechette, ZU Even on variants of the Dominant Paradigm, nuclear development is //not justified, oi consideration of decision theory methods will reveal: Tiii. Whatever reasonable decision rule is adopted, the nuclear choice is rejected^Jas the arguments op Goodin on alternative decision rules help to show. |l*^ What sustains the nuclear juggernaut is not the Dominant Paradigm or its variants, but contemporary corporate capitalism (or its state enterprise image) and associated third world imperialism, as the historical details of nuclear X ^development both in developed countries and in less developed countries (for main details, see Gyorgy p. 307 ff.). Are the practices of contemporary corporate capitalism and associated imperialism are not acceptable by the standards of either of the Paradigms or their variants : not ethically acceptable. they are certainly � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Draft Papers Description An account of the resource Sylvan's literary executor encountered an archive in which “all his projects were current", since manuscripts were undated and unattributed. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document Richard and Vai Routley 1. » NUCLEAR POWER - SOME ETHICAL AND SOCIAL DIMENSIONS1 One hardly needs initiation into the dark mysteries of nuclear physics to contribute usefully to the debate now widely ranging over nuclear power. While many important empirical questions are still unresolved, these do not really lie at the centre of the controversy. Instead, it is a debate about values... many of the questions which arise are social and ethical ones.2 I. THE TRAIN PARABLE AND THE NUCLEAR WASTE PROBLEM. train has just pulled out. passengers and freight. The train which is A long distance country crowded carries both At an early stop in the journey someone consigns as freight, to a far distant destination, a package which contains a highly toxic and explosive gas. This is packed in a very thin container which, as the consigner is aware, may well 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 the train should be derailed or involved in a collision, or if some passenger should interfere inadvertently or deliberately with the freight, perhaps trying to steal some of it. of these sorts of things have happened on some previous journeys. All 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 poisoned or sooner or later incur serious diseases. Most of us would roundly 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, or that the world needs his product and it is his duty to supply it, or that in any case he is not or the people on it. responsible for the train These sorts of excuses however would normally be seen as ludicrous when set in this context. Unfortunately, similar excuses are not also seen when the consigner, again a (responsible) businessman,puts his workers' health or other peoples’ welfare at risk. Suppose he says that it is his own and others’p ressing needs which justify his action. The company he controls, which produces the material as a by-product, is in bad financial 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 the whole company town, through loss of spending, will be worse off. The poor and unemployed of the town, whom he would otherwise have been able to help, will suffer especially. Few people would accept such grounds as justification. 2. Even where there are serious risks and costs to oneself or some group for whom one is concerned one is usually considered not to be entitled to simply transfer the heavy burden of those risks and costs onto other uninvolved parties, especially where they arise from one’s own, or one’s group’s chosen life-style. The matter of nuclear waste has many moral features which resemble the train case. How fitting the analogy is will become apparent as the argument progresses. There is no known proven safe way to package the highly toxic wastes generated by the nuclear plants that will be spread around the world as large-scale nuclear development goes ahead. The waste problem will be much more serious than that generated by the 50 or so reactors in use at present, with 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 toxic. For example, a millionth of a gramme of plutonium is enough to induce a lung cancer. A leak of even a part of the waste material could involve much loss of life, widespread disease and genetic damage, and contamination of immense areas of land. Wastes will include the reactors themselves, which will have to be abandoned after their expected life times of perhaps 40 years, and which, some have estimated, may require 1^ million years to reach safe levels of radioactivity. Nuclear wastes must be kept suitably isolated from the environment for their entire active lifetime. For fission products the required storage period averages a thousand years or so, and for 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. Short-term methods of storage require continued human intervention, while proposed longer term methods are subject to both human inter­ ference 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 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 formations or in salt mines, are largely speculative and relatively untested, and have already proved 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 result in multilayered metal containers before rock deposit, simulation models 3. reveal that radioactive material may not remain suitably isolated from human environments.1^ In short, the best present storage proposals carry very real 3 possibilities of irradiating future people and damaging their environment. Given the heavy costs which could be involved for the future, and given the known limits of technology, it is methodologically 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 not only have I present proposals, and subject to the same inadequacies. For instance,^none of the proposed methods for safe storage has been properly tested, but they may well prove to involve unforeseen difficulties and risks when an attempt is made to put them into practice on a commercial scale. Only a method that could provide a rigorous guarantee of safety over the storage period, that placed safety beyond reasonable doubt, would be acceptable. It is difficult to see how such rigorous guarantees could be given concerning either the geological or future human factors. But even if an economically viable, rigorously safe long term storage method could be devised, there is the problem of guaranteeing that it would be universally and invariably used. The assumption that it would be (especially if, as appears likely, such a method proved expensive economically and politically) seems to presuppose a level of efficiency, perfection, and concern for the future which has not previously been encountered in human affairs, and has certainly not been conspicuous in the nuclear industry. The risks imposed on the future by proceeding with nuclear development are, then, significant. to bear Perhaps 40,000 generations of future people could be forced significant risks resulting from the provision of the (extravagant) energy use of only a small proportion of the people of 10 generations. Nor is the risk of direct harm from the escape or misuse of radioactive materials the only burden the nuclear solution imposes on the future. Because the energy provided by nuclear fission is merely a stop gap, it seems probable that in due course the same problem, that of making a 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. Their world will most likely be a world which is seriously depleted of non-renewable resources, and in which such renewable resources as forests and soils as remain, resources which inevitably form an important part of the basis of life, are run-down or destroyed. Such points tell against the idea that future people must be, if not direct beneficiaries of energy from nuclear fission, at least indirect beneficiaries. 4. The "solution” then is to buy time for contemporary society at a price which not only creates serious problems for future people but which reduces their ability to cope with these problems. Like the consigner in the train parable, contemporary industrial society proposes, in order to get itself out of a mess arising from its own life-style - the creation of economies dependent on an abundance of non-re newable 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 in the lifetime of those now living and their immediate descendants, just as the consigner's action avoids uncomfortable changes for him and those in 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. If we apply to the nuclear situation the standards of behaviour and moral principles generally acknowledged (in principle, if not so often in fact) in the contemporary world, it is not easy to avoid the conclusion that nuclear development involves injustice with respect to the future on a grand scale. There appear to be only two plausible ways of trying to avoid such a conclusion. First, it might be argued that the moral principles and obligations which we acknowledge for the contemporary world and perhaps the immediate future do not apply to those 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 to imply that there are no circumstances in which such an action might be justifiable. As in the case of the consigner of the package there is a need to consider what these justifying circumstances might be, and whether they apply in the present case. We consider these possible escape routes for the proponent of nuclear development in turn. II.OBLIGATIONS TO THE (DISTANT) FUTURE. A The especially problematic area is that of the distant (i.e. non-immediate) future, the future 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 obligations 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 (democratic and other) institutions which do not take due account of the interests of future creatures. 5. Moral philosophers have, predictably, differed on questions of obligations to distant future creatures. 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. Others 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 there are no moral obligations to the future beyond those perhaps 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 effect of our actions on future people. from the Of those philosophers who say, or whose views imply that we do not have obligations to the (non-immediate) future, many have based this view on accounts of moral obligation which are built on relations which presuppose some degree of temporal or spatial contiguity. Thus, moral obligation is seen as presupposing various relations which could not hold between people widely separated in time (or sometimes in space). Let us call the position that we have no obligations to (distant) future people the No­ constraints position. Among suggested bases or grounds of moral obligation for the position, which would rule out obligations to the non-immediate future, are these. Firstly, there are those accounts which require that someone to whom a moral obligation is held be able to claim his rights or entitlement. People in the distant future will not be able to claim rights and entitlements against us, and of course they can do nothing to enforce any claims they might have against us. Secondly, there are those accounts which base moral obligations on social or legal convention, for example a convention which would require punishment of offenders or at least some kind of social enforcement. But plainly these and other conventions will not be invariant over change in society and amendment of legal conventions; hence they will not be invariant over time. Also future people have no way of enforcing their interests or punishing offending predecessors. 6. The No-constraints view is a very difficult one to sustain. 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 the earth in the distant future would be wiped out as a direct and predictable result of the action. The no-constraints position clearly implies that this is an acceptable moral enterprise, that whatever else we might legitimately criticize in the scientists’ experiment (perhaps its being over-expensive or badly designed) we cannot lodge a moral protest about the damage it will do to future people. The no-constraints position also endorses as morally acceptable the following sorts of policy:- A firm discovers it can make a handsome profit from mining, processing and manufacturing a new type of material which, although it causes no problem for present people or their immediate descendants, will over a period of hundreds of years decay into a substance which will cause an enormous epidemic of cancer among the inhabitants of the earth at that time. According to the no-constraints view the firm is free to act in its own interests, without any consideration for the harm it does remote future people. Such counterexamples to the No-constraints position, which are easily varied and multiplied, might seem childlishly obvious. Yet this view is far from being a straw man; not only have several philosophers endorsed this position, but it is a clear implication 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 No-constraints position have not considered such examples, despite their being clearly implied by their position. We suspect that (we certainly hope that) when it is brought out that their position admits such counterexamples, that without any constraints we are free to cause pointless harm for example, most of those who opted for this position would want to assert that it was not what they intended. What many of those who have put forward the No-constraints position seem to have had in mind (in denying moral obligation) is rather that future people can look after themselves, that we are not responsible for their lives. The 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, in the counterexample 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, most notably the obligation to take account in 7. 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 resposible 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. In just the same way, the fact that one does not have or has not acquired an obligation to some stranger with whom one has never been involved does not imply that one is free to do what one likes with respect to him, for example to rob him or to seriously harm him when this could be avoided. These difficulties for the No-constraints position result in part because of a failure to make an important distinction. Some of our obligations to others arise because we have voluntarily entered into some agreement with them - for example, we have made a promise. Other obligations, however, such as our duty not to damage or harm someone, do not assume that an agreement has been struck between us. former kind acquired obligations Let us call obligations of the and those of the latter unacquired obligations. There is a considerable difference in the type of responsibility associated with each. In the case of acquired obligations responsibility arises because one should do something which one can fail to do, e.g. keep a promise. In the case of unacquired duties responsibility arises as a result of being a causal agent who is aware of the consequences or consequences of his action, a responsibility that is not dependent on one’s having performed some act in the past (e.g., made a promise). Our obligations to future people clearly are of unacquired, not acquired obligations, a fact the No-constraints position simply fails to take into account. These obligations arise as a result of our ability to produce causal effects of a reasonably predictable nature, whether on our contemporaries or on those in the distant future. Thus, to return to the train parable, the consigner cannot argue in justification of his action that he has, for example, never assumed or acquired responsibility for the passengers, that he does not know them and therefore has no love or sympathy for them and that they are not part of his moral community; in short, that he has acquired no obligation, and has no special obligations to help them. All that 8. one needs to argue concerning the train, and in the nuclear case, is that there z are moral obligations against imposing harm for instance which are not specially o thQ distant acquired. Nor can this claim be rebutted by the pretence ure involve heroic self sacrifice, something ’’above and beyond” what is normally required. 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 shipping the dangerous package on the train. III. ATTEMPTS TO REDUCE OBLIGATIONS TO THE FUTURE. In evading these difficulties the No—constraints position may be qualified rather than wholly abandoned. According to the Qualified position we are not entirely unconstrained There are obligations, even to distant future with respect to the distant future. people, 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 costs and benefits (and so of future interests) is obtained by application over time of a discount rate, so discounting costs and risks to future people. The attempt to apply economics as a moral theory, something that is becoming increasingly common, can lead thei to the Qualified position. What is objectionable in such an approach is that economics must operate within the bounds of acknowledged non-acquired moral constraints, just as in practice it operates within legal constraints. What economics cannot legitimately do is determine what these constraints are. There are, moreover, alternative economic theories and simply to adopt, without further ado, one which discounts the future, giving much less importance to the interests of future people, is to beg all the questions at issue. Among the arguments that economists offer for generally discounting the future, the most threadbare is based on the Rosy-future assumption, that future generations will be better off than present ones (and so better placed to handle the waste problem). generations may well not Since there is mounting evidence that future be better off then present ones, especially in things that matter, no argument for discounting the interests of future generations on this basis can carry much weight. For the waste problem to be handed 9. to the future generations, 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 that they can (easily) carry and control the nuclear freight. A more plausible argument for discounting, the Opportunity-cost argument, ^builds directly on the notion of opportunity cost. It is argued from the fact that a dollar gained now is worth much more than a dollar received in the nonimmediate future (because the first dollar could meanwhile be invested at compound interest), that discounting is required to obtain equivalent monetary values. This same line of reasoning is then applied to the allocation of resources. Thus, compensation - which is what the waste problem is taken to come _ to economically - costs much less now than later, e.g. a few pennies set aside /(e.g. in a trust fund) in the future, if need be, will suffice to compensate eventually for any victims of remote radioactive waste leakage. beset this approach. Two problems First, there are, presently at least, insurmountable practical difficulties about applying such discounting. how to determine appropriate future discount rates. that the argument depends on a false assumption. We simply do not know A more serious objection is It is not true that value, or damages, can always be converted into monetary equivalents. There is no clear ’’monetary compensation" for a variety of damages, including cancer, loss of life, a lost species. The discounting theme, however argued for, is inadequate, because it leads back in practice to the No-constraints position. discounting imposes an ” economic horizon" The reason is that beyond which nothing need be considered, since any costs or benefit which might arise are, when discounted back to the present, negligible. A different argument for the Qualified position, the Probabilities argument, avoids the objections from cases of certain damage through appeal to probability considerations. The distant future, it is argued, is much more uncertain than the present and immediate future, so that probabilities are consequently lower, perhaps even approaching or coinciding with zero for any hypothesis concerning the distant future. Thus, the argument continues, the interests of future people must (apart from exceptional cases where there is an unusually high degree of certainty) count for (very much) less than those of present and neighbouring people where (much) higher probabilities 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 future against a much lower probability of indeterminate costs to an indeterminate number of iisfcsrs”'.... . • 10. distant future people, the issue would normally be decided in favour of the present assuming anything like similar costs and benefits were involved. is however The argument Firstly, probabilities involving distant badly flawed. future situations are not always less than those concerning the immediate future in the way the argument supposes. problems often Moreover the outcomes of some moral do not depend on a high level of probability. In many 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. Nor, /of course, VitTcar) 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, i»n e>rd^f -Lt? 'fc-C I in the shape of the opportunity to continue (unnecessarily) high energy use. z the costs and benefits were comparable or evenly weighted, such And even, if an argument would be defective, since an analogous argument would show that the consigner’s action in the train parable, is acceptable provided the benefit (e.g. the profit the company stood to gain from imposing significant risks on other people) was sufficiently large. Such a cost-benefit approach to moral and decision problems, with or is quite inadequate when different parties without the probability frills, are involved or when cases of conflict of interest involving moral obligations are at issue. permissible 5 For example, such a cost-benefit approach would imply that it is for a company to injure, or very likely injure, some innocent party provided only that the company stands to make a sufficiently large gain from it, that costs to some group are more than larger benefits to another group. transferred in any morally compensated for by But costs or benefits are not legitimately simple way from one group to another. The often appealed to maxim "If you (or your group) want the benefits you have to accept the costs" is one thing, but the maxim "If I (or my group) 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 moral principle that one is not, in general, entitled to simply transfer costs of a significant kind arising from an activity which benefits oneself onto other parties who are not involved in the activity and are not beneficiaries.This Transfer-limiting principle is especially clear in cases of which a thalidomide manufacturing and marketing company is one, where the significant costs include an effect on life or health or a risk thereof, and where the benefit to the benefitting party is of a noncrucial or dispensible nature. The principle is of fundamental importance in the nuclear debate, and appears again and again : it applies not merely to the waste problem but as regards several other liabilities of nuclear development, e.g. the risk of nuclear war, the matter / 9 'of reactor meltdown. In particular, the principle invalidates the comparison, heavily relied on in building a case for the acceptability of the nuclear risks, 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 overwhelming extent, those who bear the serious health costs and risks involved. In contrast the users and supposed beneficiearies of nuclear energy will be risking not only, or even primarily, their own lives and health, but also that of others who may not be beneficiaries at all who may be just the opposite! More generally, the distribution of costs and damage in such a fashion, i.e. on to non-beneficiaries, is a characteristic of certain serious forms of pollution, and is among its morally objectionable features. / j Large-scale energy y»ss// /production, from nuclear or foe-itc fuel sources, can cause or lead to serious !pollution. Thus from the Transfer-limiting t>fe principle emerges an important necessary condition for energy options: To be morally acceptable k -era, OE£12^ should not involve the transfer of s.igif leant costs or risks of harm onto parties who are not involved, who do not use or do not benefit correspondingly from the energy source. Included in the scope of 12. this condition, which nuclear development violates , are future people, i.e. not merely people living at the present time but also future generations (those Principle, that we should not hand the world we have so exploited on to our successors in substantially worse shape than we ’'received” it. For if we did then that would be a significant transfer of costs. The Transfer-limiting principle can be derived from certain ethical theories (e.g. those of a deontic cast such as Kant's and Ra and from common precepts (such as the Golden Rule), where one seriously considers putting oneself in another’s position. But the principle is perhaps best defended, on a broader basis, inductively, by way of examples. embroider the train parable, the company town decides to Suppose, to solve its disposal problem by shipping its noxious waste to another town down the line, which (like future towns) lacks the means to ship it back or to register due protest. The inhabitants of this town are then forced to face the problem either of undertaking the expensive and difficult disposal process or of sus­ taining risks to their own lives and health. Most of us would regard this kind of transfer of costs as morally unacceptable, however much the consigner’s company town flourishes. / /IV. c UNCERTAINTY AND INDETERMINACY ARGUMENTS FOR REDUCED RESPONSIBILITY. 7 /Many of the arguments designed to show that we cannot be ed to take too much account of the effects of our actions on the distant future appeal to uncertain/y. There are two main components to the argument, capable of separation, but frequently tangled up. Both arguments are mistaken, the first, an argument from ignorance, on a priori second on a posteriori grounds. follows:- grounds, the The Argument from ignorance concerned runs as In contrast to the exact information we can obtain about the present, the information we can obtain about the effects of our actions on the distant future is unreliable, woolly and highly speculative. But we cannot base assessments of how we should act on information of this kind, especially when accurate information is obtainable about the present which would indicate Therefore we must regretfully ignore the different action. our actions on the distant future. ignorance uncertain effects of A striking example of the argument from at work is afforded by official US analyses favouring nuclear development, which ignore (the extensive) costs of waste control on the 7 grounds of uncertainty. the argument concerned is this: More formally and crudely (%)£/only has obligations to the future if these obligations are based on reliable information. distant future. There is no reliable information at present as regards the Therefore one has no obligations to the distant future. This argument is essentially a variant on a sceptical argument concerning * our knowledge of the future (formally, replace ’obligations in the crude statement of the argument above). by ’knowledge’ 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 , such do act on the basis of^"unreliable" information, which the sceptic as regards the future conveniently labels "uncertainty". In moral situations in the present, assessments of what to do often take account of risk and probability, even quite low probabilities. Consider again the train parable. 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. that there is a significant risk of harm It is enough in this sort of case. It does not matter if the decreased well-being of the consigner is certain and that the 14. prospects of the passengers quite uncertain. It is wrong to ship the gas. But if we do not require certainty of action to apply moral constraints in contemporary affairs, why should we require a much higher standard of certainty in the future? The unwarranted insistence on certainty as a necessary condition before moral consideration can be given to the distant future, then, amounts to a flagrant double standard. According to the second argument, the Practical-uncertainty argument, even if in theory we have obligations to the future, we cannot in practice take the interests of future people into account because uncertainty about the distant future is so gross that we cannot determine what the likely consequences of actions on it will be. Therefore, however good our intentions to the people of the distant future are, in practice we have no choice but to ignore their interests. Given that moral principles are characteristically of universal implicational form, e.g. of forms such as "if x has character then x is wrong, for every (action) sharply thus: x", h the argument may be stated more We can never obtain the information about future actions which would enable us to detach the antecedent of the implication. Therefore, even if in theory moral principles do extend to future people, in practice they cannot be applied to obtain clear conclusions. It is true that if the distant future really were so grossly uncertain . that in every case it was impossible to determine in any way better than chance what the effects of present action would be, and whether any given action would help or hinder future people, then moral principles, although applicable in theory to the future, would not in practice yield any clear conclusions about how to act. In this event the distant future would 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 argument has to assume. There are some areas where uncertainty is 15. not so great as to exclude constraints on action. For example, we may have little idea what the fashions will be in a hundred years or, to take another morally^irrelevant^factor, what brands of ice 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 genetic defects, by the destruction of resources, or the elimination from the face of the earth of that wonderful variety of non-human life which at present makes it such a rich and interesting place. 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. For this sort of reason, the practical uncertainty argument should be rejected. Through the defects of the preceding arguments, we can see the defects in a number of widely employed uncertainty arguments used to write off probably harm to future people as outside the scope of proper consideration. Most of these popular moves employ both of the uncertainty arguments as suits the case, switching from one to the other. For example, we may be told that we cannot really take account of future people because we cannot be sure that they will exist or that their tastes and wants will not be completely different from our own, to the point where they will not suffer from our exhaustion of resources or from the things that would affect us. 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 to whom we are morally committed. 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 16. is again a mere outside possibility. 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. 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. Closely related to uncertainty arguments are arguments premissed on the indeterminacy of the future. For example, according to the Indeterminacy argument, the indeterminacy of the number and exact character of people at future times will prevent the interest of future people being taken into account where there is a conflict with the present. Since their numbers are indeterminate and their interests unknown how, 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 raised particularly by problems of sharing fixed quantities of resources among present and future people, for example oil, when the numbers of the latter are indeterminate. Such problems are indeed difficult, but they are not resolved by ignoring the claims of the future. Nor are distributional problems involving non-renewable resources as large and representative a class of moral problems concerning the future as the tendency to focus on them would suggest. It can be freely admitted, that there will be cases where the indeterminacy of aspects of the future will make conflicts very difficult to resolve or indeed irresoluble - no realistic ethical theory can give a precise answer to every ethical question. But, as the train parable again illustrates, /there are cases where such difficulties do not hinder resolution, and .anci cases of conflict which are not properly approached 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 case of nuclear power is like that. The failure of these various arguments reveals, what c^e^| ^^^men^does nc argued from the universalisability features of moral principles, that/ disqualify future people from full moral consideration or reduce their claims below the claims of present people. That is, we have the same general obligations to future people as to the present; thus there is the same obligation to take account of them and their interests in what we do, to be careful in our actions, to take account of the probability (and not just the certainty) of our actions causing harm or damage, and to see, other things being equal, that we do not act so as to rob them of what is necessary for the chance of a good life. Uncertainty and indeterminacy do not relieve us of these obligations. V. PROBLEMS OF SAFE NUCLEAR OPERATION : REACTOR EMISSIONS AND CORE MELTDOWN. The ethical problems with nuclear power are by no means confined to waste storage and future creatures. entitlement Just as remoteness in time does not erode obligations or to just treatment, neither does location in space, or a particular and arguments like those already arrived at in considering the waste problem ^apply. For example, if one group (social uriit^ or state) decides to dump its radioactive wastes in the territory or region of another group, or not to prevent its (radioactive) pollution entering the territory of another group, then it imposes risks and costs on presently existing people of the second group, in much the way that present nuclear developments impose costs and risks on future people. There are differences however : spatially distant people cannot be discounted in quite the way that future people can be, though their interests and objectives can be ignored or overridden. People living in the vicinity of a nuclear reactor are subject to special costs and risks. One is radioactive pollution, because reactors routinely discharj radioactive materials into the air and Emission problem. water near the plant : hence the Such ’’normal" emission during plant operation of low level radiation carries carcinogenic and mutagenic costs. While there are undoubtedly costs, the number of cancers and the precise extent of genetic damage induced by exposure to such radiation are both uncertain. If our permitted free transfer of costs and risks from one person to another, the ethical issue directly raised by nuclear emissions would be : what extent of 18. cancer and genetic damage, if any, is permissibly traded for the advantages of nuclear power, and under what conditions? Since, however, risks and benefits are NOT (morally) transferable this way - recall the Transfer-limiting I principle - such a cost-benefit approach to the risks nuclear emission poses for those who live near a reactor cannot with justice be approached in this fashio, these risks are In the USA, people who live within 50 miles oMmclear real! power plant bear a risk of cancer and genetic damage of as much as 50 times that borne by the population at large. And children living in this region are even more vulnerable, since they and several times more likely to contract cancer through exposure than normal adults. The serious costs to these people cannot be J us tit led by the alleged benefits for others, expecially when these benefits could be obtained without these costs. a pity about Thus it is not just complacent to say 'It’s Aunt Ethel dying of cancer, but the new make life comfortable’. airconditioners For such benefits to some as airconditioners provide, which can be alternatively obtained, for example by modification of buildings, can in no way compensate for what others suffer. Among the other strategies used in trying to persuade us that the imposition of radiation on minorities - most of whom have no genuine voice in the. location of reactors in their environment and cannot move away without serious losses - is really quite alright is the Doubling argument. Accord to the US Atomic Energy Commission, who deployed this trick, it is permissable to double, through nuclear technology, the level of (natural) radiation that a population have received with apparently negligible consequences, the argument being that the additional amount (being equivalent to the "natural” level) is also likely to have negligible consequences. The increased amounts of radiation - with their large man-made component - are then accounted normal, and, it is claimed, 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, 19. 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 very strict standards by comparison with most other countries with planned nuclear reactors, permits radiation emissions very substantially in excess of the standards laid down; so the emission situation is much worse than what consideration of the standards would disclose. Furthermore, the monitoring of the standards ’’imposed'’ is entrusted to the nuclear operators themselves, scarcely disinterested parties. Thus public policy is determined not so as to guarantee public health, but rather to serve as a public pacifier” while publicly-subsidized private nuclear operations proceed relatively unhampered? While radioactive emissions are an ordinary feature of reactor operation, reactor breakdown is, hopefully, not: official reports even try to make an accident of magnitude, as a matter of definition, an ’extraordinary nuclear occurrence . But "definitions” notwithstanding, such accidents can happen, and almost have on several occasions (the most notorious being Three Mile Island): hence the Core-meltdown problem. If the cooling and emergency core cooling systems fail in American (light water) reactors, then the core melts and ’containment failure’ is likely, the result that an area of 40,000 square miles could be radioactively 10 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 the size of Pennsylvania would be destroyed. Modern nuclear reactors are about five times the size of the reactor for which these conservative US (still the best available from official sources) are given : the consequences of a similar accident with a modern reactor would accordingly be much greater. The consigner who risks the lives and well-being of passengers on the O ^train acts in^admissibly. A government or government-endorsed utility appears to act in a way that does not differ in morally significant respects in 20. siting a nuclear reactor in a community, in planting such a dangerous package on the ’’community train”. More directly, the location of a nuclear reactor in a community, even if it should happen to receive a favourable benefit-cost as the Transfer-limiting principle. The advocates of nuclear power have, in effect, endeavoured to avoid questions of cost-transfer and equity, by shifting the dispute out of the extraordinary reactor malfunction. They have argued, in particular, what contrasts with the train parable, that there is no real possibility of a catastrophic nuclear accident. Indeed in the 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. However, the mathematical models relied upon in this report, variously called "fault tree analysis” and "reliability estimating techniques", are unsound, because, among other things, they exclude as "not credible" possibilities that may well happen in the real world. that the It is not surprising, then i methodology and data of the report have been soundly and decisively criticised, or that official support for the report has now been withdrawn. 12 Moreover, use of alternative methods and data indicates that there is a real possibility, a non-negligible probability of a serious accident. In response it is contended that, even if there is a non-negligible probability of a reactor accident, still that is 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 decision 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 otpions, which settles their 21. ethical status. The following assumptions are encountered in risk assessment as applied to energy options: Ai. If option a imposes (comparable) costs on fewer people than option b then option a is preferable to option Aii. b ; 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 alreay^ accepted; therefore option a is acceptable. 3 These assumptions are then applied as follows. be killed Since the number likely to eventuall by nuclear power station catastrophe is less than the likely number killed by cigarette smoking, and since the risks of cigarette smoking are accepted; it follows that the risks of huclear power are acceptable. A little reflection reveals that this sort of risk assessment argument grossly violates the Transfer­ limiting principle. In order to obtain a proper ethical assessment we need a much fuller picture, and we need to know at least these things:- costs and benefits go to the same parties; Do the and is the person who voluntarily the risks also the person who primarily receives the benefits, as in undertakes driving or cigarette smoking, or are the costs imposed not benefit? on other parties who do It is only if the parties are the same in the case of the options compared, and there are no such distributional problems, a basis would be soundly based. that a comparison on such This is rarely the case, and it is not so in the case of risk assessments of energy options. VI. OTHER SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL RISKS AND COSTS OF NUCLEAR DEVELOPMENT, ESPECIALLY NUCLEAR WAR. The problems already discussed by no means exhaust the environmental, health and safety 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 transportation of materials. Several of these stages involve hazards. risks in the nuclear cycle Unlike the special - of sabotage of plants, of theft of fissionable material, and of the further proliferation of nuclear armaments - these hazards 22. have parallels, if not exact equivalents, in other highly polluting methods of generating power, e.g. ’workers in the uranium mining industry sustain ’’the same u 14 risk" of fatal and nonfatal injury as workers in the coal industry’. The problems are not really produced by nuclear development. Other social and environmental problems endemic where dangerous large-scale industry operates in societies that are highly inegalitarian and include sectors that are far from affluent - are more intimately linked with the J nuclear power cycle. Though pollution is a common and generally undesirable component of large-scale industrial operation, radioactive pollution ,such as uranium mining for instance produces, is especially a legacy of nuclear development, and a specially undesirable one, as rectification costs for dead radioactive lands and waterways reveal. Though sabotage is a threat to many large industries, sabotage of a nuclear reactor can have dire consequences, of a different order of magnitude from most industrial sabotage (where core meltdown is not a possibility). Though theft of material from more dubious enterprises such as munitions works can pose threats to populations at large and can assist terrorism, no thefts for allegedly peaceful enterprises pose problems of the same order as theft of fissionable material. No other industry produces materials which so readily permit fabrication into such massive explosives. No other industry is, to sum it up, so vulnerable on so many fronts. In part to reduce its vulnerability, in part because of its long and continuing association with military activities, the nuclear industry is subject to, and encourages, several practices which (given their scale) run counter to basic features of free and open societies, crucial features such as personal These practices include secrecy, restriction of information, formation of special police and guard forces, espionage, curtailment of civil liberties. Already operators of nuclear installations are given extraordinary powers, in vetting employees, to investigate the background and activities not only of employees but also of their families and sometimes even of their friends. The installations themselves become armed camps, which especially offends British sensibilities. The U.K. Atomic Energy (Special Constables) Act of 1976 created a special armed force to guard nuclear installations and- made it answerable ... to the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority. ..iwu- 23. These developments, and worse ones in West Germany and elsewhere,presage along with nuclear development increasingly authoritarian and anti-democratic societies. That nuclear development appears to force such political <— i ' (consequences tells heavily against it. Nuclear development is further indicated politically by the direct connection of nuclear power with nuclear war. It is true that ethical questions concerning nuclear war - for example, whether a nuclear war is justified, or just, under any circumstances, and if so what circumstances - are distinguishable from those concerning nuclear power. Undoubtedly, however, the spread of nuclear power is substantially increasing the technical means for engaging in nuclear war and so, to that extent, the opportunity for, and chances of, nuclear engagement. \ /jL Since nuclear wars are /nevei/ accountable- positive goods, but are at best the lesser of major evils, nuclear wars are always highly ethically undesirable. The spread of nuclear power accordingly expands the opportunity for, and chances of, highly undesirable consequences. 0^!/\ Finally the latter, so increasing these chances and opportunities, is itself undesirable, and therefore what le^jtds to it, nuclear development^ is undesirable. This is, in outline, the argument from nuclear wa£ against large-scale nuclear development. VII. CONFLICT ARGUMENTS, AND BEGINNING ON NUCLEAR DEVELOPMENT. UNCOVERING THE IDEOLOGICAL BASES OF Much as with nuclear war, so given the cumulative case against nuclear development, only one justificatory that of appeal to overriding circumstances. route remains open, That appeal, to be ethically acceptable, must go beyond merely economic considerations. For, as observed, the consigner’s action, in the train parable, cannot be justified by purely I ^conomistic arguments, such as that his profits would rise, the company or the town would be more prosperous, or by appealing to the fact that some possibly uncomfortable changes would otherwise be needed. case: a Transfer-limiting principle applies. So it is also in the nuclear But suppose now the consigner argues that his action is justified because unless it is taken the town will die. It is 24. by no means clear that even such a justification as this would be sufficient, especially where the risk to the passengers is high, since the case still /amount s^one of transfer of costs and risks onto others. But such a conflict situation, where a given course of action, though normally undesirable, is alleged to be the lesser of two evils in a given case, is morally more problemthan cases atical/frhere Transfer-limiting principle is clearly violated. Nuclear develop­ ment is often defended in this way, through Conflict arguments, to the effect that even though nuclear development does have undesirable features, nevertheless the alternatives are worse. Some of the arguments advanced to demonstrate conflict are based on competing commitments to present people, and others on competing obligations to future people, both of which are taken to override the obligations not to impose on the future significant risk of serious harm. The success of such /conflict arguments require^the presentation of a genuine and exhaustive set of alternatives (or at least practical alternatives) and showing that the only alternatives to admittedly morally undesirable actions are even more undesirable ones. If some practical alternative which is not morally worse than the action to be justified is overlooked, suppressed, or neglected in the argument (for example, if in the train parable it turns out that the town has another option to starving or to shipping the parcel, namely earning a living in some other way), then the argument is defective and cannot readily be patched. Just such a suppression of practicable alternatives, we shall argue, has occurred in the argument designed to show that the alternatives to the nuclear option are even worse than the option itself. 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 indus­ trialised countries. Failure to develop nuclear energy, it is often claimed, would amount to denying them the opportunity to reach the standard of affluence we currently enjoy and would create unemployment and poverty in the industrialisec nations. And this would be worse - a greater evil - than such things as violating the Transfer-limiting principle through nuclear development. The 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 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 tends to reduce available jobs through encouraging substitution of energy use for labour use. The argument that nuclear energy is needed for the third world is even less convincing. Nuclear energy is both politically and economically inappropriate for the third world, since it requires massive amounts of capital, requires numbers of imported scientists and engineers, 25. WT creates negligible local employment, and depends for its feasibility upon largely non-existent utility systems - e.g. established electricity transmission systems and back-up facilities, and sufficient electrical appliances to plug into the system. Politically it increases foreign dependence, adds to centralised entrenched power and reduces the chance for 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 (often for military purposes) by, their rulers, the westernised and often military elites in whose interests the economies of these countries are usually organised. than what it is: But that does not make the poverty argument anything other a fraud. There are well-known energy-conserving alternatives and the practical option of developing further alternative energy sources, alternatives some of which offer far better prospects for helping the poor, both in the third world and in industrial countries: coal and other fossil fuels, geothermal, and a range of solar options (including as well as narrowly solar sources, wind, water and tidal power). Another major argument advanced to show conflict, the Lights-goingout argument, pppeals to a set of supposedly overriding and competing obligations to future people. We have, it is said, a duty to pass on the immensely valuable things and institutions which our culture has developed. Unless our high-technology, high-energy industrial society is continued and fostered, our valuable institutions and traditions will fall into decay or be swept away. The argument is essentially that without nuclear power, without the continued level of material wealth it alone is assumed to make possible, the lights of our civilization will go out. Future people will be the losers. The argument does raise important questions about what is valuable in But for our society and what characteristics are necessary for a good society. the most part these large questions can be by-passed. The reason is that the argument adopts an extremely uncritical attitude to present high-technology societies, apparently assuming that they are uniformly and uniquely valuable. $I I it assuine</ that technological society is unmodifiable, that^cannot be changed in ' the direction of energy conservation or alternative (perhaps high technology) energy sources without collapse. These assumptions are all hard to accept. The assumption that technological society’s energy patterns are unmodifiable is especially so; after all, it has survived events such as world wars which required major social and technological restructuring and consumption modification. If western society’s demands for energy were (contrary to the evidence) totally unmodifiable without collapse, not only would it be committed to a program of increasing destruction, but much of its culture would be of dubious value to 26. future people, who would very likely, as a consequence of this destruction, lack the resource base which the argument assumes to be essential in the case of contemporary society. The uniformity assumption should certainly be challenged. Since high- technology societies appear not to be uniformly valuable, the central question is, what is necessary to maintain what is valuable in such a society? While it may be easy to argue that high energy consumption centrally controlled is necessary to maintain the political and economic status quo of such a society, it is not so easy to argue that it is essential to maintain what is valuable, and it is what is valuable, presumably that we have a duty to pass on to the future. The evidence from history is that no very high level of material affluence or energy consumption is needed to maintain what is valuable. There is good reason in fact to believe that a society with much lower energy and resource^ consumption would better foster what is valuable than our own. But even if a radical change in these directions is independently desirable, it is unnecessary to presuppose such a change in order to see that the assumptions of the Lights-going-out argument are wrong. The consumption of less energy than at present/ need involve no reduction of well-being; and certainly a large increase over present levels of consumption assumed trr the usual economic case for nuclear energy, is quite unnecessary. then What the nuclear strategy is really designed to do is not to prevent the lights going out in western civilisation, but to enable the lights to go on burning all the time - to maintain and even increase the wattage output of the Energy Extravaganza . In fact there is good reason to think that, far from the high energy consumption society fostering what is valuable, it will, especially if energy is obtained by means of nuclear fission, be positively inimical to it. A society which has become heavily dependent upon a^ highly centralised, controlled and garrisoned md expertise-intensive energy source, must be one which is highly susceptible to entrenchment of power, and one in which the forces which control this energy source, whether capitalist or bureaucratic, can exert enormous power over the political system and over people’s lives, even more then they do at present. Such a society would/' almost inevitably tend to become authoritatian and increasingly anti-democratic, as an outcome, among other things, of its response to the threat posed by dissident groups in the nuclear situation. 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 authoritarianism - while many valuable aspects, such as the degree of political freedom and those opportunities for personal and collective autonomy which exist, would be lost or diminished: political freedom 27. for example, is a high price to pay for consumerism and and energy extravagence. Again, as in the case of the poverty arguments, clear alternatives, alternative social and political choices, which do not involve such unacceptable consequences, are available. The alternative to the high technology-nuclear option is not a return to the cave, the loss of all that is valuable, but either the adoption of an available alternative such as coal for power or, better, 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 argument, as a moral conflict argument, accordingly fails. Thus the further escape route, the appeal to conflict, is, like the appeal to futurity, 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-scale nuclear development is a crime against the future is inevitable. Closed also, in the much same way, are the escape routes to other arguments (from reactor meltdown, radiation emissions, etc.) for concluding that nuclear development is unacceptable. Tn sum, nuclear development is morally unacceptable on several grounds. VIII. SOCIAL OPTIONS : SHALLOW AND DEEP ALTERNATIVES. The future 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 associated phenomena such as acid rain and atmospheric heating, not to mention the despoliation caused by extensive strip mining, all of which will result from its use in meeting very Such an option would, moreover, also violate high projected consumption figures. the Transfer-limiting principle : for it would impose widespread costs on nonbeneficiaries for some concentrated benefits to some profit takers and to some users who do not pay the full costs of production and replacement. To these main conventional options a third is often added which emphasizes softer and more benign technologies, such as those of solar energy and hydroelectricity. Such softer options — if suitably combined with energy conservation measures (for there are solar ways, as well as nuclear ways, of energy extravagance and of producing unnecessary trivia which answer to no genuine needs) - can avoid the ethical objectives to nuclear power. choice is not however technological, The deeper nor merely^individual^ 1 bUL Social, and involves the restructuring of production away from energy intensive uses and, at a more basic level, a change to nonconsumeristic, less consumptive life­ styles and social arrangements’!:6 These more fundamental choices between social alternatives, conventional technologically-oriented discussion of energy options tends to obscure. It is not just a matter of deciding in which way to meet the unexamined goals nuclear development aspires to meet, but also a matter of examining the goals themselves. That is, we are not merely faced with the question of comparing different technologies for meeting some fixed or given demand or level of consumption, and of trying to see how best to meet these; we are also faced, and primarily, with the matter of examining those alleged needs and the cost of a society that creates them. It is doubtful that any technology, however benign in principle, will be likely to leave a tolerable world for the future if it is expected to meet unbounded and uncontrolled energy consumption and demands. Even more benign technologies may well be used in a way which creates costs for future people and ^are?which^ /them. ^likely to result in a deteriorated world being handed on to In short, even more benign technologies may le/id to violation of the Transmission JjteQu^-remen^• Consider, to illustrate, the effect on the world s forests, commonly counted as a solar resource, should they be extensively used for production of methanol or of electricity by woodchipping. While few would object to the use of genuine waste material for energy production, 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 forests. The effects of such additional demands on the maintenance of the forests are often dismissed by the simple expedient of waving around the label "renewable resources”. Many forests are in 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 imminent, It certainly has begun in many regions, and many forest types, especially rain17 ^/forest types^ are now, and rapidly, being lost for the future. The addition of y/a maj^r further and not readily limitable demand pressure for energy on top /of /the present demands is one which anyone with both a realistic appreciation of the conduct of forestry operations and a concern for the 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 much of Europe at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, again for energy purposes, could be extensive and devastating erosion in steeper lands and tropical areas, desertification in more arid regions, possible climatic change, and massive impoverishment of natural ecosystems, including enormous loss of natural species. Some of us do not want to pass on, and by the Transmission principles 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 29. products or polluted by coal products. illustrates, a mere switch to In short, as the forest situation more benign technologies - important though this is - without any more basic structural and social change,is inadequate. The deeper social option involves challenging and beginning to alter a social structure which promotes consumerism, consumption far beyond genuine needs and an economic structure which encourages increasing use of highly energy-intensi modes of production. The social change option tends to be obscured in most discussions of energy options and of how to meet energy needs, in part because it does question underlying values of current social arrangements. The conventional discussion proceeds by taking alleged demand (often conflated with wants or needs) 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 and 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 want deep freezers, air conditions, power gadgets, .... authoritarian to prevent them from satisfying these wants. from created wants It would be Such an argument conveniently ignores the social framework in which such needs and wants arise or are produced. To point to the determination of many such wants at the framework level is not however to assume that they are entirely determined at the framework level (e.g. by industrial organisation) and there is no such thing as individual choice or determination at all. It is to see the social framework as a major factor in determining certain kinds of choices, such as those for travel, and kinds of infrastructure, and to see apparently individual choices made in such matters as being channelled and directed by a social framework determined largely in the interests of corporate and private profit and advantage. The social change option is a hard option, insofar as it will be difficult to implement politically; but it is ultimately the only way of avoiding the passing on of serious costs to future people. reasons than such ethical ones for taking it: And there are other sorts of it is the main, indeed the only sort of option,open to those who adopt what is now called a deep ecological perspective, as contrasted with a shallow ecological outlook which regards the natural world and its nonhuman denizens as not worthwhile in themselves but only of value in as much as they answer back to human interests. The deep ecological perspective is an integral part of the Alternative Ecological Paradigm and is incompatible with central theses of the Dominant Social Paradigm (which is essentially the ideology of classical and neoclassical economics) 30. and its variants (roughly, what are called State Socialism, and Democratic 18 Socialism). It is incompatible with such assumptions as that the natural environment is of value only as a resource, is by and large hostile, but is controllable in human interests,and with the further domination over nature themes of the Dominant Paradigm and its variants. The conflict between Alternative and Dominant Paradigms, which is fast increasing, extends of course far beyond attitudes to the natural world, since core values of the Dominant Paradigm such as the merits of unimpeded economic growth and material progress are at stake; the conflict involves fundamental differences over the whole front of economical, political and social arrangements. The conflict underlies much of the nuclear debate, insofar as it is not specifically limited to questions of technological fixes, but takes up the 19 basic ethical issues and the social questions to which they lead. The ethical requirements already defended and applied bring us out, when followed through, on the Alternative side of the paradigm conflict, and accordingly lead to the difficult social change option. The social changes that the deep alternative requires will be strongly resisted because they mean changes in current social organisation and power 'structure. To the extenj? that the option represents some kind of threat to parts of present political and economic arrangements, it is not surprising that official energy option discussion proceeds by misrepresenting and often obscuring it. But difficult as it is to suitably alter "the system,” especially one with such far-reaching effects on the prevailing power structure, it is imperative to try: we are all on the nuclear train. FOOTNOTES This paper is a condensation of an early version of our ’Nuclear 1. power - ethical, social, and political dimensions * (ESP for short, available from the authors), which in turn grew out of Routley (i.e. the work so referred to in the reference list). For help with the condensation we are very considerably indebted to the editors. In the condensation, we simplify the structure of the argument and suppress underlying political and ideological dimensions (for example, the large measure of responsibility of the USA for spreading nuclear reactors around the world, and thereby in enhancing the chances of nuclear disasters, including nuclear war). We also considerably reduce a heavy load of footnotes and references designed and needed to help make good many of our claims. Further, in order to contain references to a modest length, reference to primary sources has often been replaced by reference through secondary sources. Little difficulty should be encountered however in tracing fuller references through secondary sources or in filling out much Important background material from work cited herein. For example, virtually all the data cited in sections, and VII is referenced in Routley. At worst ESP can always be consulted. All but the last line of the quote is drawn from Goodin, p. 417; 2. 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 # (lightwater) reactors, much more information is required. For many assessment purposes however, some knowledge of economic fallacies and decision theory is at least as important as knowledge of nuclear technology. 3. Naturally the effect on humans is not the only factor that has to be taken into account in arriving at moral assessments. Nuclear radiation, 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 example, can hardly improve its case, it suffices if the case against it can be made out solely in terms of its effects on human life in the conventional way. For reference to and a brief discussion of (human-oriented) ^simulation models see Gooding, 428. The Opportunity-cost 4. respects. argument is also defective in other It presupposes not merely the (mistaken) reductions involved in the contraction of the ethical domain to the economic; it also presupposes that the /proper methods for decision which ^ffect the choice, apply discounting. future, such as that of energy But, as Goodin argues, more appropriate decision rules do not allow discounting. This is one of the reasons why expected utility theory, 5. roughly cost-benefit analysis with probability frills, is inadequate as a decision method in such contexts. Apparent exceptions to the principle such as taxation (and 6. redistribution of income generally) vanish when wealth is construed (as it has to be if taxation is to be properly justified) as at least partly a social asset unfairly monopolised by a minority of the population. Examples such as that of motoring dangerously do not constitute counterexamples to the principle; for one is not morally entitled to so motor. / 7. For details, and as to how the official analyses become arguments against nuclear development when some attempt is made to take the ignored costs into account, see Shrader-Frechette, p. 55 ff. See Routley, p. 160. /\ the preceding two para£ I graphs, see Shrader-Frechette, p. 35 ff.; and also Nader and Abbotts. For much further discussion of the points of [10. Most of the reactors^Ln the world are of this type; see Gyorgy. 11. See Shrader-Frechette, chapter 4. 12. See Shrader-Frechette. / shortcomings A worthwhile initial view of the of the Rass^ftussen report may be reached by combining ' /the critique in Shrader-Frechette with that in Nader and Abbotts. 13. There are variations on Ai against numbers such as probabilities. and Aii which multiply costs In this way risks, construed as probable costs, can be taken into account in the assessment. risks may be assessed (Alternatively, through such familiar methods as insurance). A principle varying Aii’. a Aii, and formulated as follows: is ethically acceptable if (for some b) a includes no more risks than b and b is socially accepted. Aii’. was the basic ethical principle in terms of which the Cluff Lake Board of Inquiry recently decided that nuclear power development see Cluff Lake Board of Inquiry in Saskatchewan is ethically acceptable: Department of Environment, Government of Saskatchewan, 1978, Final Report, p. 305 and p. 288. In this report, a is nuclear power and b is either activities clearly accepted by society as alternative power sources. other applications b In has been taken as cigarette smoking, motoring, mining and even the Vietnam war (!). The points made in the text do not exhaust the objections to principles Ai - Aii’. The principles are certainly ethically substantive, since an ethical consequence cannot be deduced from nonethical premisses, but they have an inadmissible conventional origin of b ; b character. For look at the may be socially accepted though it is no longer socially acceptable, or though its social acceptibility is no longer so clearcut 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 Aii’, for instance, for the argument to begin to look convincing is that ’ethically acceptable’ rather than ’socially accepted’. b is But even with the amendments the principles are invalid, for the reasons given in the text, and others. It is not disconcerting that principles of this type do not work. It would be sad to see yet another area lost to the experts, ethics to actuaries. 14. See Shrader-Frechette, p. 15. 15. Goodin 16. The argument is elaborated in ESP. 17. For some of the more philosophically important material p. 433. 'alternative Mannlaon ~ Asocial arrangements and lifestyles, see work cited in V. and R. Routley, ’Social theories, self management and environmental problems’ in al, where a beginning is made on working out one set of alternatives, those of a pluralistic anarchism. The parlous 18. situation of the world’s tropical rainforests is explained in, for instance, Myers; the reasons are untangled in R. and V. Routley ’World rainforest destruction - the social causes’ (available from the authors). 19. > rival, For a fuller account of the Dominant Social Paradigm and its Paradigm, see Cot^royfe and Duff, especially the Alternative Environmental the assumptions the table on p. 341 which /of the paradigms; compare also Cotton and Dunljzfp, especially p. 34. Contemporary varients in the Dominant Social Paradigm were considered in ESP. The shallow/deep contrast as applied to ecological positions, which A s /is an important component of the paradigm conflict, was introduced by Naess. // S /For further explanation of the contract and of the larger array of ecological positions into which it fits, see R. and V. Routley, ’ in Mannison environmental ethics ___ ’Human chauvinism and et al, and the references there cited, ^especially to R^d man’s work. 20. The more elaborate argument of ESP sets the nuclear debate in the context of paradigm conflict. But it is also argued that, even within assumptions framework of the Dominant Social Paradigm and its variants, Ti. Nuclear development is not the rational choice among energy options. The main argument put up for nuclear development within the framework of the dominant paradigm is an Economic growth argument. It is the following version of the Lights-going-out argument (with economic growth duly standing Nuclear power is in for material wealth, and for what is valuable!^ necessary to sustain economic growth. Economic growth is desirable (for all the usual reasons, e.g. to increase the size of the pie, to postpone redistribution problems, etc.). k Therefore nuclear power is desirable. / /The first premiss is part of US energy policy (see Shrader-Frechette, p.lll), 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 (not without growth but) selective X //"growth, which economic the heavy social and environmental costs carried by unqualified economic growth. More to the point, since the second premiss is an assumption of the Dominant Paradigm, the first premiss (or rather an appropriate and less vulnerable restatement of it) Paradigm standards. fails even by Dominant For of course nuclear power is not necessary that there are other, perhaps costlier alternatives. defended is some elaboration of the premiss : given The premiss usually Nuclear power is the economically best way to sustain economic growth, ’economically best’ being filled out as ’most efficient’, ’cheapest’, benefit-cost ratio’, etc. ’having the most favourable Unfortunately for the argument, and for nuclear development schemes, nuclear power is none of these things decisively (unless a good deal of economic cheating - easy to do - is done). Tii. On proper Dominant Paradigjfi accounting, nuclear choices should generally be rejected, both as private utility investments and as public choices. Nuclear development is not economically viable but has been kept going, not by clear economic viability, but by massive subsidization of several types Gyorgy and Nader alrd Abbotts). discussed in Shrader-Frechette, ZU Even on variants of the Dominant Paradigm, nuclear development is //not justified, oi consideration of decision theory methods will reveal: Tiii. Whatever reasonable decision rule is adopted, the nuclear choice is rejected^Jas the arguments op Goodin on alternative decision rules help to show. |l*^ What sustains the nuclear juggernaut is not the Dominant Paradigm or its variants, but contemporary corporate capitalism (or its state enterprise image) and associated third world imperialism, as the historical details of nuclear X ^development both in developed countries and in less developed countries (for main details, see Gyorgy p. 307 ff.). Are the practices of contemporary corporate capitalism and associated imperialism are not acceptable by the standards of either of the Paradigms or their variants : not ethically acceptable. they are certainly  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 97, Item 5: Draft of Nuclear power - some ethical and social dimensions Subject The topic of the resource Typescript (photocopy) of draft, with handwritten, 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. Description An account of the resource Unnumbered paper from collection, item number assigned by library staff. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Routley</a> <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=val+routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Val Routley</a> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 97, Item 5 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource [35] leaves. 27.24 MB. Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:1f45be4">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:1f45be4</a> Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1982-01-01 Box 97: Paper - Extracts - Articles and Chapters by Richard Sylvan https://www.antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/f22b23a78d228312ce7b43ed0d6346d7.pdf 9946e551f830c3d4b028b52364266c19 PDF Text Text ' i ' Vai Routley Richa/ 1. NUCLEAR POWER - SOME ETHICAL AND SOCIAL DIMENSIONS1 One hardly needs initiation into the dark mysteries of nuclear physics to contribute usefully to the debate now widely ragging over nuclear power. While many important empirical questions are still unresolved, these do not really lie at the centre of the controversy. Instead, it is a debate about values... many of the questions which arise are social and ethical ones. I. THE TRAIN PARABLE AND THE NUCLEAR WASTE PROBLEM. train has just pulled out. passengers and freight. The train which is A long distance country crowded carries both At an early stop in the journey someone consigns as freight, to a far distant destination, a package which contains a highly toxic and explosive gas. This is packed in a very thin container which, as the consigner is aware, may well 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 the train should be derailed or involved in a collision, or if some passenger should interfere inadvertently or deliberately with the freight, perhaps trying to steal some of it. of these sorts of things have happened on some previous journeys. All 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 poisoned or sooner or later incur serious diseases. Most of us would roundly 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, or that the world needs his product and it is his duty to supply it, or that in any case he is not or the people on it. X responsible for the train These sorts of excuses however would normally be seen /as ludicrous when set in this context. Unfortunately, similar excuses are not -aiso seen when the consigner, again a (responsible) businessman,puts his workers’ health or other peoples’ welfare at risk. Suppose he says that it is his own and others’p ressing needs which justify his action. The company he controls, which produces the material as a by-product, is in bad financial 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 the whole company town, through loss of spending, will be worse off. The poor and unemployed of the town, whom he would otherwise have been able to help, will suffer especially. Few people would accept such grounds as justification. �Even where there are serious risks and costs to oneself or some group for whom one is concerned one is usually considered not to be entitled to simply transfer the heavy burden of those risks and costs onto other uninvolved parties, especially wheie they arise from one’s own, or one’s group’s chosen life-style. The matter of nuclear waste has many moral features which resemble the train case. How fitting the analogy is will become apparent as the argument progresses. There is no known proven safe way to package the highly toxic wastes generated by the nuclear plants that will be spread around the world as large-scale nuclear development goes ahead. The waste problem will be much more serious than that generated by the 50 or so reactors in use at present, with 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 toxic. For example, a millionth of a gramme of plutonium is enough to induce a lung cancer. A leak of even a part of the waste material could involve much loss of life, widespread disease and genetic damage, and contamination of immense areas of land. Wastes will include the reactors themselves, which will have to be abandoned after their expected life times of perhaps 40 years, and which, some have estimated, may require 1% million years to reach safe levels of radioactivity. Nuclear wastes must be kept suitably isolated from the environment for their entire active lifetime. For fission products the required storage period averages a thousand years or so, and for 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 I the last twenty years. Short-term methods of storage require continued human intervention, while proposed longer term methods are subject to both human inter­ ference 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 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 formations or in salt mines, are largely speculative and relatively untested, and have already proved 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 result in multilayered metal containers before rock deposit, simulation models �3. reveal that radioactive material may not remain suitably isolated from human 10 environments. In short, the best present storage proposals carry very real possibilities of irradiating future people and damaging their environmentP Given the heavy costs which could be involved for the future, and given the known limits of technology, it is methodologically 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 not only have present proposals, and subject to the same inadequacies. For instance,y none of the proposed methods for safe storage has been properly tested, but they may well prove to involve unforeseen difficulties and risks when an attempt is made to put them into practice on a commercial scale. Only a method that could provide a rigorous guarantee of safety over the storage period, that placed safety beyond reasonable doubt, would be acceptable. It is difficult to see how such rigorous guarantees could be given concerning either the geological or future human factors. But even if an economically viable, rigorously safe long term storage method could be devised, there is the problem of guaranteeing that it would be universally and invariably used. The assumption that it would be (especially if, as appears likely, such a method proved expensive economically and politically) seems to presuppose a level of efficiency, perfection, and concern for the future which has not previously been encountered in human affairs, and has certainly not been conspicuous in the nuclear industry. The risks imposed on the future by proceeding with nuclear development are, then, significant. to bear Perhaps 40,000 generations of future people could be forced significant risks resulting from the provision of the (extravagant) energy use of only a small proportion of the people of 10 generations. Nor is the risk of direct harm from the escape or misuse of radioactive materials the only burden the nuclear solution imposes on the future. Because the energy provided by nuclear fission is merely a stop gap, it seems probable that in due course the same problem, that of making a 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. Their world will most likely be a world which is seriously depleted of non-renewable resources, and in which such renewable resources as forests and soils as remain, resources which inevitably form an important part of the basis of life, are run-down or destroyed. Such points tell against the idea that future people must be, if not direct beneficiaries of energy from nuclear fission, at least indirect beneficiaries. �The "solution” then is to buy time for contemporary society at a price which not only creates serious problems for future people but which reduces their ability to cope with these problems. Like the consigner in the train parable, contemporary industrial society proposes, in order to get itself out of a mess arising from its own life-style - the creation of economies dependent on an abundance of non-rerewable 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 in the lifetime of those now living and their immediate descendants, just as the consigner’s action avoids uncomfortable changes for him and those in 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. If we apply to the nuclear situation the standards of behaviour and moral principles generally acknowledged (in principle, if not so often in fact) in the contemporary world, it is not easy to avoid the conclusion that nuclear development involves injustice with respect to the future on a grand scale. There appear to be only two plausible ways of trying to avoid such a conclusion. First, it might be argued that the moral principles and obligations which we acknowledge for the contemporary world and perhaps the immediate future do not apply to those 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 to imply that there are no circumstances in which such an action might be justifiable. As in the case of the consigner of the package there is a need to consider what these justifying circumstances might be, and whether they apply in the present case. We consider these possible escape routes for the proponent of nuclear development in turn. II. OBLIGATIONS TO THE (DISTANT) FUTURE. The especially problematic area is that of the distant (i.e. non-immediate) future, the future 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 obligations 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 (democratic and other) institutions which do not take due account of the interests of future creatures. �5. Moral philosophers have, predictably, differed on questions of obligations to distant future creatures. 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. Others 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 there are no moral obligations to the future beyond those perhaps 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 effect of our actions on future people. from the Of those philosophers who say, or whose views imply that we do not have obligations to the (non-immediate) future, many have based this view on accounts of moral obligation which are built on relations which presuppose some degree of temporal or spatial contiguity. Thus, moral obligation is seen as presupposing various relations which could not hold between people widely separated in time (or sometimes in space). Let us call the position that we have no obligations to (distant) future people the constraints position. ' -*■ ■■■--------- ----- No­ , Among suggested bases or grounds of moral obligation for the position, which would rule out obligations to the non-immediate future, are these. Firstly, there are those accounts which require that someone to whom a moral obligation is held be able to claim his rights or entitlement. People in the distant future will not be able to claim rights and entitlements against us, and of course they can do nothing to enforce any claims they might have against us. Secondly, there are those accounts which base moral obligations on social or legal convention, for example a convention which would require punishment of offenders or at least some kind of social enforcement. But plainly these and other conventions will not be invariant over change in society and amendment of legal conventions; hence they will not be invariant over time. Also future people have no way of enforcing their interests or punishing offending predecessors. �The No-constraints view is a very difficult one to sustain. 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 the earth in the distant future would be wiped out as a direct and predictable result of the action. The no—constraints position clearly implies that this is an acceptable moral enterprise, that whatever else we might legitimately criticize in the scientists’ experiment (perhaps its being over-expensive or badly designed) we cannot lodge a moral protest about the damage it will do to future people. The no-constraints position also endorses as morally acceptable the following sorts of policy A firm discovers it can make a handsome profit from mining, processing and manufacturing a new type of material which, although it causes no problem for present people or their immediate descendants, will over a period of hundreds of years decay into a substance which will cause an enormous epidemic of cancer among the inhabitants of the earth at that time. According to the no-constraints view the firm is free to act in its own interests, without any consideration for the harm it does remote future people. Such counterexamples to the No-constraints position, which are easily varied and multiplied, might seem childlishly obvious. Yet this view is far from being a straw man; not only have several philosophers endorsed this position, but it is a clear implication 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 No-constraints position have not considered such examples, despite their being clearly implied by their position. We suspect that (we certainly hope that) when it is brought out that their position admits such counterexamples, that without any constraints we are free to cause pointless harm for example, most of those who opted for this position would want to assert that it was not what they intended. What many of those who have put forward the No-constraints position seem to have had in mind (in denying moral obligation) is rather that future people can look after themselves, that we are not responsible for their lives. The 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, in the counterexample 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, most notably the obligation to take account in �7. 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 resposible 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. In just the same way, the fact that one does not have or has not acquired an obligation to some stranger with whom one has never been involved does not imply that one is free to do what one likes with respect to him, for example to rob him or to seriously harm him when this could be avoided. These difficulties for the No-constraints position result in part because of a failure to make an important distinction. Some of our obligations to others arise because we have voluntarily entered into some agreement with them - for example, we have made a promise. Other obligations, however, such as our duty not to damage or harm someone, do not assume that an agreement has been struck between us. former kind acquired obligations Let us call obligations of the and those of the latter unacquired obligations. There is a considerable difference in the type of responsibility associated with each. In the case of acquired obligations responsibility arises because one should do something which one can fail to do, e.g. keep a promise. In the case of unacquired duties responsibility arises as a result of being a causal agent who is aware of the consequences or probable consequences of his action, a responsibility that is not dependent on one’s having performed some act in the past (e.g., made a promise). Our obligations to future people clearly are of unacquired, not acquired obligations, a fact the No-constraints position simply fails to take into account. These obligations arise as a result of our ability to produce causal effects of a reasonably predictable nature, whether on our contemporaries or on those in the distant future. Thus, to return to the train parable, the consigner cannot argue in justification of his action that he has, for example, never assumed or acquired responsibility for the passengers, that he does not know them and therefore has no love or sympathy for them and that they are not part of his moral community; in short, that he has acquired no obligation, and has no special obligations to help them. All that �8. one needs to argue concerning the train, and in the nuclear case, is that there are moral obligations against imposing harm for instance which are not specially ions, to the distant acquired. Nor can this claim be rebutted by the pretence' .at/future involve heroic self sacrifice, something ’’above and beyond" what is normally required. 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 shipping the dangerous package on the train. III. ATTEMPTS TO REDUCE OBLIGATIONS TO THE FUTURE. In evading these difficulties the No-constraints position may be qualified rather than wholly abandoned. According to the Qualified position we are not entirely unconstrained There are obligations, even to distant future with respect to the distant future. people, 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 costs and benefits (and so of future interests) is obtained by application over time of a discount rate, so discounting costs and risks to future people. The attempt to apply economics as a moral theory, something that is becoming increasingly common, can lead theft to the Qualified position. What is objectionable in such an approach is that economics must operate within the bounds of acknowledged non-acquired moral constraints, just as in practice it operates within legal constraints. What economics cannot legitimately do is determine what these constraints are. There are, moreover, alternative economic theories and simply to adopt, without further ado, one which discounts the future, giving much less importance to the interests of future people, is to beg all the questions at issue. Among the arguments that economists offer for generally discounting the future, the most threadbare is based on the Rosy-future assumption, that future generations will be better off than present ones (and so better placed to handle the waste problem). generations may well not Since there is mounting evidence that future be better off then present ones, especially in things that matter, no argument for discounting the interests of future generations on this basis can carry much weight. For the waste problem to be handed down �9. to the future generations, 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 that they can (easily) carry and control the nuclear freight. A more plausible argument for discounting, the Opportunity-cost argument, builds directly It is argued from the fact on the notion of opportunity cost. 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. This same line of reasoning is then applied to the allocation of resources. Thus, compensation - which is what the waste problem is taken to come to economically - costs much less now than later, e.g. a few pennies set aside (e.g. in a trust fund) in the future, if need be, will suffice to compensate eventually for any victims of remote radioactive waste leakage. beset this approach. Two problems First, there are, presently at least, insurmountable practical difficulties about applying such discounting. how to determine appropriate future discount rates. that the argument depends on a false assumption. We simply do not know A more serious objection is It is not true that value, or damages, can always be converted into monetary equivalents. There is no clear ’’monetary compensation” for a variety of damages, including cancer, loss of life, a lost species. The discounting theme, however argued for, is inadequate, because it leads back in practice to the No-constraints position. discounting imposes an ” economic horizon” The reason is that beyond which nothing need be considered, since any costs or benefit which might arise are, when discounted back to the present, negligible. » A different argument for the Qualified position, the Probabilities argument, avoids the objections from cases of certain damage through appeal to probability considerations. The distant future, it is argued, is much more uncertain than the present and immediate future, so that probabilities are consequently lower, perhaps even approaching or coinciding with zero for any hypothesis concerning the distant future. Thus, the argument continues, the interests of future people must (apart from exceptional cases where there is an unusually high degree of certainty) count for (very much) less than those of present and neighbouring people where (much) higher probabilities 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 future against a much lower probability of indeterminate costs to an indeterminate number of �10. distant future people, the issue would normally be decided in favour of the present, assuming anything like similar costs and benefits were involved. is however The argument Firstly, probabilities involving distant badly flawed. future situations are not always less than those concerning the immediate future in the way the argument supposes. problems often Moreover the outcomes of some moral do not depend on a high level of probability. In many 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. Nor, of course, can it be assumed that anything like similarly weighted costs and benefits are involved in the nuclear case, especially if it is a question of risking poisoning some of the earth for half a million or so years, with consequent risk of serious harm to thousands of generations of future people, in order to obtain quite doubtful, or even trivial, benefits for some present people, ^in the shape of the opportunity to continue (unnecessarily) high energy use. And even the costs and benefits were comparable or evenly weighted, such if an argument would be defective, since an analogous argument would show that the consigner's action in the train parable, is acceptable provided the benefit (e.g. the profit the company stood to gain from imposing significant risks on other people) was sufficiently large. Such a cost-benefit approach to moral and decision, problems, with or is quite inadequate when different parties without the probability frills, are involved or when cases of conflict of interest involving moral obligations are at issue. permissible 5 For example, such a cost-benefit approach would imply that it is for a company to injure, or very likely injure, some innocent party provided only that the company stands to make a sufficiently large gain from it, that costs to some group are more than morally larger benefits to another group. transferred in any compensated for by But costs or benefits are not legitimately simple way from one group to another. The often appealed to maxim "If you (or your group) want the benefits you have to accept the costs" is one thing, but the maxim "If I (or my group) want the benefits then you have to accept the costs (or some of them at least)" is another and �i very different thing. I 11. It is a widely accepted moral principle that one is not, in general, entitled to simply transfer costs of a significant kind arising from an activity which benefits oneself onto other parties who are not involved g in the activity and are not beneficiaries. This Transfer-limiting principle is especially clear in cases of which a thalidomide manufacturing and marketing company is one, where the significant costs include an effect on life or health or a risk thereof, and where the benefit to the benefitting party is of a noncrucial or dispensible nature. The principle is of fundamental importance in the nuclear debate, and appears again and again : it applies not merely to the waste problem but as regards several other liabilities of nuclear development, e.g. the risk of nuclear war, the matter of reactor meltdown. In particular, the principle, invalidates the comparison, heavily relied on in building a case for the acceptability of the nuclear risks, 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 overwhelming extent, those who bear the serious health costs and risks involved. In contrast the users and supposed beneficiearies of nuclear energy will be risking not only, or even primarily, their own lives and health, but also that of others who may not be beneficiaries at all— who may be just the opposite! , More generally, the distribution of costs and damage in such a fashion, i.e. on to non-beneficiaries, is a characteristic of certain serious forms of pollution, and is among its morally objectionable features. production, from nuclear or fossil pollution. fuel sources, can cause or lead to serious Thus from the Transfer-limiting important necessary condition for energy options: an energy option Large-scale energy principle emerges an To be morally acceptable should not involve the transfer of significant costs or risks of harm onto parties who are not involved, who do not use or do not benefit correspondingly from the energy source. Included in the scope of �12. this condition, which nuclear development violates , are future people, i.e. not merely people living at the present time but also future generations (those of the next towns). A further corollary of the principle is the Transmission Principle, that we should not hand the world we have so exploited on to our successors in substantially worse shape than we "received” it. For if we did then that would be a significant transfer of costs. The Transfer-limiting principle can be derived from certain ethical theories (e.g. those of a deontic cast such as Kant’s and Rawls’) and from common precepts (such as the Golden Rule), where one seriously considers putting oneself in another’s position. But the principle is perhaps best defended, on a broader basis, inductively, by way of examples. embroider the train parable, the company town decides to Suppose, to solve its disposal problem by shipping its noxious waste to another town down the line, which (like future towns) lacks the means to ship it back or to register due protest. The inhabitants of this town are then forced to face the problem either of undertaking the expensive and difficult disposal process or of sus­ taining risks to their own lives and health. Most of us would regard this kind of transfer of costs as morally unacceptable, however much the consigner’s company town flourishes. IV. UNCERTAINTY AND INDETERMINACY ARGUMENTS FOR REDUCED RESPONSIBILITY. Many of the arguments designed to show that we cannot be expected to take too much account of the effects of our actions on the distant future appeal to uncertainty. There are two main components to the General Uncertainty argument, capable of separation, but frequently tangled up. Both arguments are mistaken, the first, an argument from ignorance, on a priori second on a posteriori grounds. follows:- grounds, the The Argument from ignorance concerned runs as In contrast to the exact information we can obtain about the present, the information we can obtain about the effects of our actions on the distant future is unreliable, woolly and highly speculative. But we cannot base assessments of how we should act on information of this kind, especially when �13. accurate information is obtainable about the present which would indicate Therefore we must regretfully ignore the uncertain effects of different action. our actions on the distant future. ignorance A striking example of the argument from at work is afforded by official US analyses favouring nuclear development, which ignore (the extensive) costs of grounds of uncertainty. More formally and crudely waste control on the the argument concerned is this- One only has obligations to the future if these obligations are based on reliable information. distant future. There is no reliable information at present as regards the Therefore one has no obligations to the distant future. This argument is essentially a variant on a sceptical argument concerning our knowledge of the future (formally, replace obligations in the crude statement of the argument above). The main ploy is to considerably overestimate and overstate the degree of certainty available by knowledge 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. do act on the basis We can and constantly such f/"unreliable” information, which the sceptic as regards the future conveniently labels "uncertainty". In moral situations in the present, assessments of what to do often take account of risk and probability, even quite low probabilities. Consider again the train parable. We do not need to know for certain that the container will break and the lethal gas escape. In lact 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. that there is a significant risk of harm It is enough in this sort of case. It does not matter if the decreased well-being of the consigner is certain and that the �14. prospects of the passengers quite uncertain. It is wrong to ship the gas. But if we do not require certainty of action to apply moral constraints in contemporary affairs, why should we require a much higher standard of certainty in the future? The unwarranted insistence on certainty as a necessary condition before moral consideration can be given to the distant future, then, amounts to a flagrant double standard. According to the second argument, the Practical-uncertainty argument, even if in theory we have obligations to the future, we cannot in practice take the interests of future people into account because uncertainty about the distant future is so gross that we cannot determine what the likely consequences of actions on it will be. Therefore, however good our intentions to the people of the distant future are, in practice we have no choice but to ignore their interests. Given that moral principles are characteristically of universal implicational form, e.g. of forms such as "if x has character then x is wrong, for every (action) sharply thus: x", h the argument may be stated more We can never obtain the information about future actions which would enable us to detach the antecedent of the implication. Therefore, even if in theory moral principles do extend to future people, in practice they cannot be applied to obtain clear conclusions. It is true that if the distant future really were so grossly uncertain . that in every case it was impossible to determine in any way better than chance what the effects of present action would be, and whether any given action would help or hinder future people, then moral principles, although applicable in theory to the future, would not in practice yield any clear conclusions about how to act. In this event the distant future would 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 argument has to assume. There are some areas where uncertainty is �15. not so great as to exclude constraints on action. For example, we may have little idea what the fashions will be in a hundred years or, to take another morally-irrelevant factor, what brands of ice 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 the face of the earth of that wonderful variety of non-human life which at present makes it such a rich and interesting place. 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. For this sort of reason, the Practical uncertainty argument should be rejected. Through the defects of the preceding arguments, we can see the defects in a number of widely employed uncertainty arguments used to write off probable harm to future people as outside the scope of proper consideration. Most of these popular moves employ both of the uncertainty arguments as suits the case, switching from one to the other. For example, we may be told that we cannot really take account of future people because we cannot be sure that they will exist or that their tastes and wants will not be completely different from our own, to the point where they will not suffer from our exhaustion of resources or from the things that would affect us. 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 to whom we are morally committed. 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 �16. is again a mere outside possibility. 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. 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. Closely related to uncertainty arguments are arguments premissed on the indeterminacy of the future. For example, according to the Indeterminacy argument,_ the indeterminacy of the number and exact character of people at future times will prevent the interest of future people being taken into account where there is a conflict with the present. Since their numbers are indeterminate and their interests unknown how, 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 raised particularly by problems of sharing fixed quantities of resources among present and future people, for example oil, when the numbers of the latter are indeterminate. Such problems are indeed difficult, but they are not resolved by ignoring the claims of the future. Nor are distributional problems involving non-renewable resources as large and representative a class of moral problems concerning the future as the tendency to focus on them would suggest. It can be freely admitted, that there will be cases where the indeterminacy of aspects of the future will make conflicts very difficult to resolve or indeed irresoluble - no realistic ethical theory can give a precise answer to every ethical question. But, as the train parable again illustrates, there are cases where such difficulties do not hinder resolution, and cases of conflict which are not properly approached 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 case of nuclear power is like that. The failure of these various arguments reveals, what caiji^e independently^ argued from the universalisability features of moral principles, thata disqualify future people from full moral consideration or reduce their claims below the claims of present people. That is, we have the same general obligations �17. to future people as to the present; thus there is the same obligation to take account of them and their interests in what we do, to be careful in our actions, to take account of the probability (and not just the certainty) of our actions causing harm or damage, and to see, other things being equal, that we do not act so as to rob them of what is necessary for the chance of a good life. Uncertainty and indeterminacy do not relieve us of these obligations. V. PROBLEMS OF SAFE NUCLEAR OPERATION : REACTOR EMISSIONS AND CORE MELTDOWN. The ethical problems with nuclear power are by no means confined to waste storage Just as remoteness in time does not erode obligations or and future creatures. entitlement to just treatment, neither does location in space, or a particular geographical position. Hence several further problems arise, to which principles and arguments like those already arrived at in considering the waste problem apply. For example, if one group (social unit, or state) decides to dump its radioactive wastes in the territory or region of another group, or not to prevent its (radioactive) pollution entering the territory of another group, then it imposes risks and costs on presently existing people of the second group, in much the way that present nuclear developments impose costs and risks on future people. There are differences however : distant people spatially cannot be discounted in quite the way that future people can be, though their interests and objectives can be ignored or overridden. People living in the vicinity of a nuclear reactor are subject to special costs and risks. One is radioactive pollution, because reactors routinely discharge radioactive materials into the air and Emission problem. water near the plant : hence the Such "normal" emission during plant operation of low level radiation carries carcinogenic and mutagenic costs. While there are undoubtedly costs, the number of cancers and the precise extent of genetic damage induced by exposure to such radiation are both uncertain. If our ethical principles permitted free transfer of costs and risks from one person to another, the ethical issue directly raised by nuclear emissions would be : what extent of �18. cancer and genetic damage, if any, is permissibly traded for the advantages of nuclear power, and under what conditions? Since, however, risks and benefits are NOT (morally) transferable this way - recall the Transfer-limiting principle - such a cost-benefit approach to the risks nuclear emission poses for those who live near a reactor cannot with justice be approached in this fashion And these risks are real.’ In the USA, people who live within 50 miles of a nuclear power plant bear a risk of cancer and genetic damage of as much as 50 times that borne by the population at large. And children living in this region are even more vulnerable, since they are several times more likely to contract cancer through exposure than normal adults. The serious costs to these people cannot be justified by the alleged benefits for others, especially when these benefits could be obtained without these costs. Thus it is not just complacent to say It s a pity about Aunt Ethel dying of cancer, but the new airconditioners make life comfortable’. For such benefits to some as airconditioners provide, which can be alternatively obtained, for example by modification of buildings, can in no way compensate for what others suffer. Among the other strategies used in trying to persuade us that the imposition of radiation on minorities - most of whom have no genuine voice in the location of reactors in their environment and cannot move away without serious losses - is really quite alright is the Doubling argument. According I to the US Atomic Energy Commission, who deployed this trick, it is permissable to double, through nuclear technology, the level of (natural) radiation that a population ha^ received with apparently negligible consequences, the argument being that the additional amount (being equivalent is also likely to have negligible consequences. to the "natural” level) The increased amounts of radiation - with their large man-made component - are then accounted normal, and, it si claimed, 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, no t be. Finally, what is or has become normal, �19. 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 very strict standards by comparison with most other countries with planned nuclear reactors, permits radiation emissions very substantially in excess of the standards laid down; so the emission situation is much worse than what consideration of the standards would disclose. Furthermore, the monitoring of the standards ’'imposed” is entrusted to the nuclear operators themselves, scarcely disinterested parties. Thus public policy is determined not so as to guarantee public health, but rather to serve as a ’’public pacifier” while publicly-subsidized private nuclear operations q proceed relatively unhamperedT While radioactive emissions are an ordinary feature of reactor operation, reactor breakdown is, hopefully, not: official reports even try to make an accident of magnitude, as a matter of definition, an ’extraordinary nuclear occurrence’. But "definitions” notwithstanding, such accidents can happen, and almost have on several occasions (the most notorious being Three Mile Island): hence the Core-meltdown problem. If the cooling and emergency core cooling systems fail in American (light water) reactors, then the core melts and ’containment failure’ is likely, with the result that an area of 40,000 square miles could be radioactively 10 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 the size of Pennsylvania would be destroyed. Modern nuclear reactors are about five times the size of the reactor for which these conservative US (still the best available from A . 11 official sources' are given : the consequences of a similar accident with a modern reactor would accordingly be much greater. The consigner who risks the lives and well-being of passengers on the train acts inadmissibly. a government or government-endorsed utility appears to act in a way that does not differ in morally significant respects in �20. siting a nuclear reactor in a community, in planting such a dangerous package on the "community train". More directly, the location of a nuclear reactor in a community, even if it should happen to receive a favourable benefit-cost analysis and other economic appraisal, would violate such ethical requirements as the Transfer-limiting principle. The advocates of nuclear power have, in effect, endeavoured to avoid questions of cost-transfer and equity, by shifting the dispute out of the extraordinary improbability ethical arena and into a technological dispute about about the/ of reactor malfunction. They have argued, in particular, what contrasts with the train parable, that there is no real possibility of a catastrophic nuclear accident. Indeed in the 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. However, the mathematical models relied upon in this report, variously called "fault tree analysis" and "reliability estimating techniques", are unsound, because, among other things, they exclude as "not credible" possibilities that may well happen in the real world. that the It is not surprising, then,^ methodology and data of the report have been soundly and decisively criticised, or that official support for the report has now'been withdrawn.. 12 Moreover, use of alternative methods and data indicates that there is a real possibility, a non-negligible probability of a serious accident. In response it is contended that, even if there is a non-negligible probability of a reactor accident, still that is 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 decision 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 otpions, which settles their �1 21. ethical status. The following assumptions are encountered in risk assessment as applied to energy options: ( Ai. If option a imposes (comparable) costs on fewer people than option b then option a is preferable to option Aii. b ; 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 /3 accepted; therefore option a is acceptable. These assumptions are then applied as follows. be killed Since the number likely to eventually by nuclear power station catastrophe is less than the likely number killed by cigarette smoking, and since the risks of cigarette smoking are accepted; it follows that the risks of nuclear power are acceptable. A little reflection reveals that this sort of risk assessment argument grossly violates the Transfer­ limiting principle. In order to obtain a proper ethical assessment we need a much fuller picture, and we need to know at least these things:- costs and benefits go to the same parties; Do the and is the person who voluntarily the risks also the person who primarily receives the benefits, as in undertakes driving or cigarette smoking, or are the costs imposed not benefit? on other parties who do It is only if the parties are the same in the case of the options compared, and there are no such distributional problems, a basis would be soundly based. that a comparison on such This is rarely 'the case, and it is not so in the case of risk assessments of energy options. VI. OTHER SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL RISKS AND COSTS OF NUCLEAR DEVELOPMENT, ESPECIALLY NUCLEAR WAR. The problems already discussed by no means exhaust the environmental, health and safety 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 transportation of materials. Several of these stages involve hazards. risks in the nuclear cycle Unlike the special - of sabotage of plants, of theft of fissionable material, and of the further proliferation of nuclear armaments - these hazards �22. have parallels, if not exact equivalents, in other highly polluting methods of generating power, e.g. ’workers in the uranium mining industry sustain ’’the same 14 risk” of fatal and nonfatal injury as workers in the coal industry’. The A problems are not produced—by nuclear development. Other social and environmental problems - though endemic where dangerous large-scale industry operates in societies that are highly inegalitarian 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 large-scale industrial operation, radioactive pollution , such as uranium mining for instance produces, is especially a legacy of nuclear development, and a specially undesirable one, as rectification costs for dead radioactive lands and waterways reveal. Though sabotage is a threat to many large industries, sabotage of a nuclear reactor can have dire consequences, of a different order of magnitude from most industrial sabotage (where core meltdown is not a possibility). Though theft of material from more dubious enterprises such as munitions works can pose threats to populations at large and can assist terrorism, no thefts for allegedly peaceful enterprises pose problems of the same order as theft of fissionable material. No other industry produces materials which so readily permit fabrication into such massive explosives. No other industry is, to sum it up,,so vulnerable on so many fronts. In part to reduce its vulnerability, in part because of its long and continuing association with military activities, the nuclear industry is subject to, and encourages, several practices which (given their scale) run counter to basic features of free and open societies, crucial features such as personal liberty, freedom of association and of expression,and free access to information. These practices include secrecy, restriction of information, formation of special police and guard forces, espionage, curtailment of civil liberties. Already operators of nuclear installations are given extraordinary powers, in vetting employees, to investigate the background and activities not only of employees but also of their families and sometimes even of their friends. The installations themselves become armed camps, which especially offends British sensibilities. The U.K. Atomic Energy (Special Constables) Act of 1976 created a special armed force to guard nuclear installations ami made it answerable ... to the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority. �23. These developments, and worse ones in West Germany and elsewhere,presage along with nuclear development increasingly authoritarian and anti-democratic That nuclear development appears to force such political societies. consequences tells heavily against it. Nuclear development is further indicted politically by the direct connection of nuclear power with nuclear war. It is true that ethical questions concerning nuclear war - for example, whether a nuclear war is justified, or just, under any circumstances, and if so what circumstances - are distinguishable from those concerning nuclear power. Undoubtedly, however, the spread of nuclear power is substantially increasing the technical means for engaging in nuclear war and so, to that extent, the opportunity for, and chances of, nuclear engagement. never accounted Since nuclear wars are positive goods, but are at best the lesser of major evils, nuclear wars are always highly ethically undesirable. The spread of nuclear power accordingly expands the opportunity for, and chances of, highly undesirable consequences. Finally the latter, so increasing these chances and opportunities, is itself undesirable, and therefore what leads to it, nuclear development is undesirable. This is, in outline, the argument from nuclear war against large-scale nuclear development. VII. CONFLICT ARGUMENTS, AND BEGINNING ON NUCLEAR DEVELOPMENT. UNCOVERING THE IDEOLOGICAL BASES OF Much as with nuclear war, so given the cumulative case against nuclear development, only one justificatory that of appeal to overriding circumstances. route remains open, That appeal, to be ethically acceptable, must go beyond merely economic considerations. For, as observed, the consigner’s action, in the train parable, cannot be justified by purely economistic arguments, such as that his profits would rise, the company or the town would be more prosperous, or by appealing to the fact that some possibly uncomfortable changes would otherwise be needed. case: a Transfer-limiting principle applies. So it is also in the nuclear But suppose now the consigner argues that his action is justified because unless it is taken the town will die. 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, since the case still to amounts^one of transfer of costs and risks onto others. But such a conflict situation, where a given course of action, though normally undesirable, is alleged to be the lesser of two evils in a given case, is morally more problemthan cases atical^where Transfer-limiting principle is clearly violated,. Nuclear develop­ ment is often defended in this way, through Conflict arguments, to the effect that even though nuclear development does have undesirable features, nevertheless the alternatives are worse. Some of the arguments advanced to demonstrate conflict are based on competing commitments to present people, and others on competing obligations to future people, both of which are taken to override the obligations not to impose on the future significant risk of serious harm. The success of such conflict arguments requires the presentation of a genuine and exhaustive set of alternatives (or at least practical alternatives) and showing that the only alternatives to admittedly morally undesirable actions are even more undesirable ones. If some practical alternative which is not morally worse than the action to be justified is overlooked, suppressed, or neglected in the argument (for example, if in the train parable it turns out that the town has another option to starving or to shipping the parcel, namely earning a living in some other way), then the argument is defective and cannot readily be patched. Just such a suppression of practicable alternatives, we shall argue, has occurred in the argument designed to show that the alternatives to the nuclear option are even worse than the option itself. 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 Indus» trialised countries. Failure to develop nuclear energy, it is often claimed, would amount to denying them the opportunity to reach the standard of affluence we currently enjoy and would create unemployment and poverty in the industrialised nations. And this would be worse - a greater evil - than such things as violating the Transfer-limiting principle through nuclear development. The 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 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 tends to reduce available jobs through encouraging substitution of energy use for labour use. The argument that nuclear energy is needed for the third world is even less convincing. Nuclear energy is both politically and economically inappropriate for the third world, since it requires massive amounts of capital, requires numbers of imported scientists and engineers, �25. —.creates negligible local employment, and depends for its feasibility upon largely non-existent utility systems - e.g. established electricity transmission systems and back-up facilities, and sufficient electrical appliances to plug into the system. Politically it increases foreign dependence, adds to centralised entrenched power and reduces the chance for 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 (often for military purposes) by, their rulers, the westernised and often military elites in whose interests the economies of these countries are usually organised. than what it is: But that does not make the poverty argument anything other a fraud. There are well-known energy-conserving alternatives and the practical option of developing further alternative energy sources, alternatives some of which offer far better prospects for helping the poor, both in the third world and in industrial countries: coal and other fossil fuels, geothermal, and a range of solar options (including as well as narrowly solar sources, wind, water and tidal power). Another major argument advanced to show conflict, the Lights-goingout argument, pppeals to a set of supposedly overriding and competing obligations to future people. We have, it is said, a duty to pass on the immensely valuable things and institutions which our culture has developed. Unless our high-technology, high-energy industrial society is continued and fostered, our valuable institutions and traditions will fall into decay or be swept away. The argument is essentially that without nuclear power, without the continued level of material wealth it alone is assumed to make possible, the lights of our civilization will go out. Future people will be the losers. > The argument does raise important questions about what is valuable in our society and what characteristics are necessary for a good society. the most part these large questions can be by-passed. But for The reason is that the argument adopts an extremely uncritical attitude to present high-technology societies, apparently assuming that they are uniformly and uniquely valuable. . it It assumes that technological society is unmodifiable, that/cannot be changed in the direction of energy conservation or alternative (perhaps high technology) energy sources without collapse. These assumptions are all hard to accept. The assumption that technological society’s energy patterns are unmodifiable is especially so; after all, it has survived events such as world wars which required major social and technological restructuring and consumption modification. If western society’s demands for energy were (contrary to the evidence) totally unmodifiable without collapse, not only would it be committed to a program of increasing destruction, but much of its culture would be of dubious value to �future people, who would very likely, as a consequence of this destruction, lack the resource base which the argument assumes to be essential in the case of contemporary society. The uniformity assumption should certainly be challenged. Since high- technology societies appear not to be uniformly valuable, the central question is, what is necessary to maintain what is valuable in such a society? While it may be easy to argue that high energy consumption centrally controlled is necessary to maintain the political and economic status quo of such a society, it is not so easy to argue that it is essential to maintain what is valuable, and it is what is valuable, presumably, that we have a duty to pass on to the future. The evidence from history is that no very high level of material affluence or energy consumption is needed to maintain what is valuable. There is good reason in fact to believe that a society with much lower energy and resource consumption would better foster what is valuable than our own. But even if a radical change in these directions is independently desirable, it is unnecessary to presuppose such a change in order to see that the assumptions of the Lights-going-out argument are wrong. present The consumption of less energy than at need involve no reduction of well-being;and certainly a large increase over present levels of consumption assumed in the usual economic case for nuclear energy, is quite unnecessary. then What the nuclear strategy is really designed to do is not to prevent the lights going out in western civilisation, but to enable the lights to go on burning all the time - to maintain and even increase the wattage output of the Energy Extravaganza . In fact there is good reason to think that, far from the high energy consumption society fostering what is valuable, it will, especially if energy is obtained by means of nuclear fission,be positively inimical to it. which has become heavily dependent upon a A society highly centralised, controlled and garrisoned, capital- and expertise-intensive energy source, must be one which is highly susceptible to entrenchment of power, and one in which the forces which control this energy source, whether capitalist or bureaucratic, can exert enormous power over the political system and over people’s lives, even more then they do at present. Such a society would almost inevitably tend to become authoritarian and increasingly anti-democratic, as an outcome, among other things, of its response to the threat posed by dissident groups in the nuclear situation. 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 authoritarianism - while many valuable aspects, such as the degree of political freedom and those opportunities for personal and collective autonomy which exist, would be lost or diminished: political freedom �27. for example, is a high price to pay for consumerism and and energy extravagence. Again, as in the case of the poverty arguments, clear alternatives, alternative social and political choices, which do not involve such unacceptable consequences, are available. The alternative to the high technology-nuclear option is not a return to the cave, the loss of all that is valuable, but either the adoption of an available alternative such as coal for power or, better,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 argument, as a moral conflict argument, accordingly fails. Thus the further escape route, the appeal to conflict, is, like the appeal to futurity, 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-scale nuclear development is a crime against the future is inevitable. Closed also, in the much same way, are the escape routes to other arguments (from reactor meltdown, radiation emissions, etc.) for concluding that nuclear development is unacceptable. In sum, nuclear development is morally unacceptable on several grounds. VIII. SOCIAL OPTIONS : SHALLOW AND DEEP ALTERNATIVES. The future 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 associated phenomena such as acid rain and atmospheric heating, not to mention the despoliation caused by extensive strip mining, all of which will result from its use in meeting very high projected consumption figures. the Transfer-limiting principle : Such an option would, moreover, also violate for it would impose widespread costs on nonbeneficiaries for some concentrated benefits to some profit takers and to some users who do not pay the full costs of production and replacement. To these main conventional options a third is often added which emphasizes softer and more benign technologies, such as those of solar energy and hydroelectricity. Such softer options — if suitably combined with energy conservation measures (for there are solar ways, as well as nuclear ways, of energy extravagance and of producing unnecessary trivia which answer to no genuine needs) - can avoid the ethical objections to nuclear power, The deeper choice is not however technological, nor merely^individual^, £u£ Social , and involves the restructuring of production away from energy intensive uses and, at a more basic level, a change to nonconsumeristic, less consumptive life­ styles and social arrangements^6 These more fundamental choices between social alternatives, conventional technologically-oriented discussion of energy options tends to obscure. It is not just a matter of deciding in which way to meet the �28. unexamined goals nuclear development aspires to meet, but also a matter of examining the goals themselves. That is, we are not merely faced with the question of comparing different technologies for meeting some fixed or given demand or level of consumption, and of trying to see how best to meet these; we are also faced, and primarily, with the matter of examining those alleged needs and the cost of a society that creates them. It is doubtful that any technology, however benign in principle, will be likely to leave a tolerable world for the future if it is expected to meet unbounded and uncontrolled energy consumption and demands. Even more benign technologies may well be used in a way which creates costs for future people and which are^5" them. "2?likely to result in a deteriorated world being handed on to In short, even more benign technologies may lead to violation of the Transmission ^2 2,1^g q u i rement. Consider, to illustrate, the effect on the world s forests, commonly counted as a solar resource, should they be extensively used for production of methanol or of electricity by woodchipping. While few would object to the use of genuine waste material for energy production, 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 forests. The effects of such additional demands on the maintenance of the forests are often dismissed by the simple expedient of waving around the label "renewable resources". Many forests are in 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 imminent. It certainly has begun in many regions, and many forest types, especially rain forest types, are now, and rapidly, being lost for the future. The addition of a ma|nr^ f ur ther and not readily limitable demand pressure for energy on top of ^the present demands is one which anyone with both a realistic appreciation of the conduct of forestry operations and a concern for the 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 much of Europe at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, again for energy purposes, could be extensive and devastating erosion in steeper lands and tropical areas, desertification in more arid regions, possible climatic change, and massive impoverishment of natural ecosystems, including enormous loss of natural species. Some of us do not want to pass on, and by the Transmission principles 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 �29. products or polluted by coal products. illustrates, a mere switch to In short, as the forest situation more benign technologies - important though this is - without any more basic structural and social change, is inadequate. The deeper social option involves challenging and beginning to alter a social structure which promotes consumerism, consumption far beyond genuine needs, and an economic structure which encourages increasing use of highly energy-intensive modes of production. The social change option tends to be obscured in most discussions of energy options and of how to meet energy needs, in part because it does question underlying values of current social arrangements. The conventional discussion proceeds by taking alleged demand (often conflated with wants or needs) 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 and 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 want deep freezers, air conditions, power gadgets, .... authoritarian to prevent them from satisfying these wants. from created wants It would be Such an argument conveniently ignores the social framework in which such needs and wants arise or are produced. To point to the determination of many such wants at the framework level is not however to assume that they are entirely determined at the framework level (e.g. by industrial organisation) and there is no such thing as individual choice or determination at all. It is to see the social framework as a major factor in determining certain kinds of choices, such as those for travel, and kinds, of infrastructure, and to see apparently individual choices made in such matters as being channelled and directed by a social framework determined largely in the interests of corporate and private profit and advantage. The social change option is a hard option, insofar as it will be difficult to implement politically; but it is ultimately the only way of avoiding the passing on of serious costs to future people. reasons than such ethical ones for taking it: And there are other sorts of it is the main, indeed the only sort of option,open to those who adopt what is now called a deep ecological perspective, as contrasted with a shallow ecological outlook which regards the natural world and its nonhuman denizens as not worthwhile in themselves but only of value in as much as they answer back to human interests. The deep ecological perspective is an Integral part of the Alternative Ecological Paradigm and is incompatible with central theses of the Dominant Social Paradigm (which is essentially the ideology of classical and neoclassical economics) �30. and its variants (roughly, what are called State Socialism, and Democratic 18 Socialism). It is incompatible with such assumptions as that the natural environment is of value only as a resource, is by and large hostile, but is controllable in human interests,and with the further domination over nature themes of the Dominant Paradigm and its variants. The conflict between Alternative and Dominant Paradigms, which is fast increasing, extends of course far beyond attitudes to the natural world, since core values of the Dominant Paradigm such as the merits of unimpeded economic growth and material progress are at stake; the conflict involves fundamental differences over the whole front of economical, political and social arrangements. The conflict underlies much of the nuclear debate, insofar as it is not specifically limited to questions of technological fixes, but takes up the 19 basic ethical issues and the social questions to which they lead. The ethical requirements already defended and applied bring us out, when followed through, on the Alternative side of the paradigm conflict, and accordingly lead to the difficult social change option. The social changes that the deep alternative requires will be strongly resisted because they mean changes in current social organisation and power structure. To the extent that the option represents some kind of threat to parts of present political and economic arrangements, it is not surprising that official energy option discussion proceeds by misrepresenting and often obscuring it. But difficult as it is to suitably alter "the system," especially one with such far-reaching effects on the prevailing power structure, it is imperative to try: we are all on the nuclear train. �FOOTNOTES This paper is a condensation of an early version of our ’Nuclear 1. power - ethical, social, and political dimensions’ (ESP for short, available from the authors), which in turn grew out of Routley (i.e. the work so referred to in the reference list). For help with the condensation we are very considerably indebted to the editors. In the condensation, we simplify the structure of the argument and suppress underlying political and ideological dimensions (for example, the large measure of responsibility of the USA for spreading nuclear reactors around the world, and thereby in enhancing the chances of nuclear disasters, including nuclear war). We also considerably reduce a heavy load of footnotes and references designed and needed to help make good many of our claims. Further, in order to contain references to a modest length, reference to primary sources has often been replaced by reference through secondary sources. Little difficulty should be encountered however in tracing fuller references through secondary sources or in filling out much important background material from work cited herein. For example, virtually all the data cited in sections^ and VII is referenced in Routley. At worst ESP can always be consulted. All but the last line of the quote is drawn from Goodin, p. 417; 2. 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. The basics are presented in many texts, e.g. Nader Of course in order to assess fully reports as to such I important background and stage-setting matters as the likelihood of a & Abbotts, Gyorgy. core meltdown of (lightwater) reactors, much more information is required. For many assessment purposes however, some knowledge of economic fallacies and decision theory is at least as important as knowledge of nuclear technology. 3. Naturally the effect on humans is not the only factor that has to be taken into account in arriving at moral assessments. Nuclear radiation, 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 example, can hardly improve its case, it suffices if the case against it can be made out solely in terms of its effects on human life in the conventional way. �For reference to and a brief discussion of (human-oriented) simulation models p.428. The Opportunity-cost 4. respects. see Goodin, argument is also defective in other It presupposes not merely the (mistaken) reductions involved in the contraction of the ethical domain to the economic; it also presupposes that the proper methods for decision which affect the choice, apply discounting. future, such as that of energy But, as Goodin argues, more appropriate decision rules do not allow discounting. This is one of the reasons why expected utility theory, 5. roughly cost-benefit analysis with probability frills, is inadequate as a decision method in such contexts. Apparent exceptions to the principle such as taxation (and 6. redistribution of income generally) vanish when wealth is construed (as it has to be if taxation is to be properly justified) as at least partly a social asset unfairly monopolised by a minority of the population. Examples such as that of motoring dangerously do not constitute counterexamples to the principle; for one is not morally entitled to so motor. 7. For details, and as to how the official analyses become arguments against nuclear development when some attempt is made to take the ignored costs into account, see Shrader-Frechette, p. 55 ff. 8. See Routley, p. 160. 9. For much further discussion of the points of the preceding two para- » graphs, see Shrader-Frechette, p. 35 ff.; and also Nader 10. & Abbotts. Most of the reactors in the world are of this type; see Gyorgy. 11. See Shrader-Frechette, chapter 4. 12. See Shrader-Frechette. shortcomings A worthwhile initial view of the of the Rassmussen report may be reached by combining the critique in Shrader-Frechette with that in Nader 13. There are variations on Ai against numbers such as probabilities. and Aii & Abbotts. which multiply costs In this way risks, construed as probable costs, can be taken into account in the assessment. risks may be assessed (Alternatively, through such familiar methods as insurance). �A principle varying . * Aii a Aii, and formulated as follows: is ethically acceptable if (for some b) a includes no more risks than b and b is socially accepted. was the basic ethical principle in terms of which the Cluff Lake Board of Inquiry recently decided that nuclear power development see Cluff Lake Board of Inquiry in Saskatchewan is ethically acceptable: Department of Environment, Government of Saskatchewan, 1978, Final Report, p. 305 and p. 288. In this report, a is nuclear power and b is either activities clearly accepted by society as alternative power sources. other applications b In has been taken as cigarette smoking, motoring, mining and even the Vietnam war () . The points made in the text do not exhaust the objections to principles Ai - Aii’. The principles are certainly ethically substantive, since an ethical consequence cannot be deduced from nonethical premisses, but they have an inadmissible conventional origin of b : b character. For look at the may be socially accepted though it is no longer socially acceptable, or though its social acceptibility is no longer so clearcut 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 Aii’, for instance, for the argument to begin to look convincing is that ’ethically acceptable’ rather than ’socially accepted'. b is But even with the amendments the principles are invalid, for the reasons given in the text, and others. It is not disconcerting that principles of this type do not work. It would be sad to see yet another area lost to the experts, ethics to actuaries. 14. See Shrader-Frechette, p. 15. 15. Goodin 16. The argument is elaborated in ESP. 17. For some of the more philosophically important material on p. 433. alternative nonconsumeristic .social arrangements and lifestyles, see work cited in V. and R. Routley, 'Social theories, self management and environmental problems’ in Mannison et al, where a beginning is made on working out one set of alternatives, those of a pluralistic anarchism. �The parlous 18. situation of the world’s tropical rainforests is explained in, for instance, Myers; the reasons are untangled in R. and V. Routley ’World rainforest destruction - the social causes’ (available from the authors). For a fuller account of the Dominant Social Paradigm and its 19. rival, the Alternative Environmental Paradigm, see Cotgrove and Duff, especially _ the main the table on p. 341 which encapsulates of the assumptions paradigms; compare also Catton and Dunlap, especially p. 34. Contemporary variants ^.n the Dominant Social Paradigm wer-e considered in ESP. -X The shallow/deep contrast as applied to ecological positions, which is an important component of the paradigm conflict, was introduced by Naess. For further explanation of the contrast and of the larger array of ecological positions into which it fits, see R. and V. Routley, environmental ethics' in Mannison especially to Rodman’s 20. ’Human chauvinism and et al, and the references there cited, work. The more elaborate argument of ESP sets the nuclear debate in the context of paradigm conflict. But it is also argued that, even within assumptions framework of the Dominant Social Paradigm and its variants, Ti. Nuclear development is not the rational choice among energy options. The main argument put up for nuclear development within the framework of the dominant paradigm is an Economic growth argument. It is the following version of the Lights-going-out argument (with economic growth duly standing in for material wealth, and for what is valuable.’ necessary to sustain economic growth. Nuclear power is Economic: growth is desirable (for all the usual reasons, e.g. to increase the size of the pie, to postpone redistribution problems, etc.). Therefore nuclear power is desirable. The first premiss is part of US energy policy (see Shrader-Frechette, p.lll), 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 (not without growth but) selective growth, which jettisons economic the heavy social and environmental costs carried by unqualified economic growth. More to the point, since the second premiss is an assumption of the Dominant Paradigm, the first premiss (or rather an fails even by Dominant appropriate and less vulnerable restatement of it) Paradigm standards. For of course nuclear power is not necessary that there are other, perhaps costlier alternatives. defended is some elaboration of the premiss : given The premiss usually Nuclear power is the economically best way to sustain economic growth, ’economically best’ �being filled out as ’most efficient’, ’cheapest’, benefit-cost ratio’, etc. ’having the most favourable Unfortunately for the argument, and for nuclear development schemes, nuclear power is none of these things decisively (unless a good deal of economic cheating - easy to do - is done). Tii- On proper Dominant Paradigm accounting, nuclear choices should generally be rejected, both as private utility investments and as public choices. Nuclear development is not economically viable but has been kept going, not by clear economic viability, but by massive subsidization of several types (discussed in Shrader-Flechette, Gyorgy and Nader & Abbotts). Even on variants of the Dominant Paradigm, nuclear development is not justified, as consideration of decision theory methods will reveal: Tiii. Whatever reasonable decision rule is adopted, the nuclear choice is rej ected f as the arguments of Goodin on ^Alternative decision rules help to show. What sustains the nuclear juggernaut is not the Dominant Paradigm or its variants, but contemporary corporate capitalism (or its state enterprise image) and associated third world imperialism, as the historical details of nuclear development both in developed countries and in less developed countries makes plain (for main details, see Gyorgy p. 307 ff.). the practices of contemporary Ayi corporate capitalism and associated imperialism are not acceptable by the standards of either of the Paradigms or their variants : not ethically acceptable. , they are certainly �<0 O to REFERENCES USED Works especially useful for further investigation of the ethical issues raised by nuclear development are indicated with an asterisk (* ). S. C^yove. and A. Duff, ’’Environmentalism, middle-class radicalism and politics’, Sociological Review 28(2) (1980), 333-51. W. R. Catton, Jr., and R. E. Dunlap, ’A new ecological paradigm for post exuberant sociology’ American Behavioral Scientist 24 (1980). 15-47. For Report : Ranger Uranium Environmental Inquiry First Report, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1977. *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. *D. Mannison, M. McRobbie and R. Routley (editors), Environmental Philosophy, RSSS, Australian National University, 1980. N. Myers, The Sinking Ark, Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1979. R. Nader and J. Abbotts, The Menace of Atomic Energy, Outback Press, Melbourne, 1977. *K. S. Shrader-Frechette, Nuclear Power and Public Policy, Reidel, Dordrecht, 1980.preferred Lo as SF)T~" R. and V. Routley, ’Nuclear energy and obligations to the future’, Inquiry 21 (1978), 133-79. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Draft Papers Description An account of the resource Sylvan's literary executor encountered an archive in which “all his projects were current", since manuscripts were undated and unattributed. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document ' i ' Vai Routley Richa/ 1. NUCLEAR POWER - SOME ETHICAL AND SOCIAL DIMENSIONS1 One hardly needs initiation into the dark mysteries of nuclear physics to contribute usefully to the debate now widely ragging over nuclear power. While many important empirical questions are still unresolved, these do not really lie at the centre of the controversy. Instead, it is a debate about values... many of the questions which arise are social and ethical ones. I. THE TRAIN PARABLE AND THE NUCLEAR WASTE PROBLEM. train has just pulled out. passengers and freight. The train which is A long distance country crowded carries both At an early stop in the journey someone consigns as freight, to a far distant destination, a package which contains a highly toxic and explosive gas. This is packed in a very thin container which, as the consigner is aware, may well 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 the train should be derailed or involved in a collision, or if some passenger should interfere inadvertently or deliberately with the freight, perhaps trying to steal some of it. of these sorts of things have happened on some previous journeys. All 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 poisoned or sooner or later incur serious diseases. Most of us would roundly 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, or that the world needs his product and it is his duty to supply it, or that in any case he is not or the people on it. X responsible for the train These sorts of excuses however would normally be seen /as ludicrous when set in this context. Unfortunately, similar excuses are not -aiso seen when the consigner, again a (responsible) businessman,puts his workers’ health or other peoples’ welfare at risk. Suppose he says that it is his own and others’p ressing needs which justify his action. The company he controls, which produces the material as a by-product, is in bad financial 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 the whole company town, through loss of spending, will be worse off. The poor and unemployed of the town, whom he would otherwise have been able to help, will suffer especially. Few people would accept such grounds as justification. Even where there are serious risks and costs to oneself or some group for whom one is concerned one is usually considered not to be entitled to simply transfer the heavy burden of those risks and costs onto other uninvolved parties, especially wheie they arise from one’s own, or one’s group’s chosen life-style. The matter of nuclear waste has many moral features which resemble the train case. How fitting the analogy is will become apparent as the argument progresses. There is no known proven safe way to package the highly toxic wastes generated by the nuclear plants that will be spread around the world as large-scale nuclear development goes ahead. The waste problem will be much more serious than that generated by the 50 or so reactors in use at present, with 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 toxic. For example, a millionth of a gramme of plutonium is enough to induce a lung cancer. A leak of even a part of the waste material could involve much loss of life, widespread disease and genetic damage, and contamination of immense areas of land. Wastes will include the reactors themselves, which will have to be abandoned after their expected life times of perhaps 40 years, and which, some have estimated, may require 1% million years to reach safe levels of radioactivity. Nuclear wastes must be kept suitably isolated from the environment for their entire active lifetime. For fission products the required storage period averages a thousand years or so, and for 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 I the last twenty years. Short-term methods of storage require continued human intervention, while proposed longer term methods are subject to both human inter­ ference 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 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 formations or in salt mines, are largely speculative and relatively untested, and have already proved 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 result in multilayered metal containers before rock deposit, simulation models 3. reveal that radioactive material may not remain suitably isolated from human 10 environments. In short, the best present storage proposals carry very real possibilities of irradiating future people and damaging their environmentP Given the heavy costs which could be involved for the future, and given the known limits of technology, it is methodologically 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 not only have present proposals, and subject to the same inadequacies. For instance,y none of the proposed methods for safe storage has been properly tested, but they may well prove to involve unforeseen difficulties and risks when an attempt is made to put them into practice on a commercial scale. Only a method that could provide a rigorous guarantee of safety over the storage period, that placed safety beyond reasonable doubt, would be acceptable. It is difficult to see how such rigorous guarantees could be given concerning either the geological or future human factors. But even if an economically viable, rigorously safe long term storage method could be devised, there is the problem of guaranteeing that it would be universally and invariably used. The assumption that it would be (especially if, as appears likely, such a method proved expensive economically and politically) seems to presuppose a level of efficiency, perfection, and concern for the future which has not previously been encountered in human affairs, and has certainly not been conspicuous in the nuclear industry. The risks imposed on the future by proceeding with nuclear development are, then, significant. to bear Perhaps 40,000 generations of future people could be forced significant risks resulting from the provision of the (extravagant) energy use of only a small proportion of the people of 10 generations. Nor is the risk of direct harm from the escape or misuse of radioactive materials the only burden the nuclear solution imposes on the future. Because the energy provided by nuclear fission is merely a stop gap, it seems probable that in due course the same problem, that of making a 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. Their world will most likely be a world which is seriously depleted of non-renewable resources, and in which such renewable resources as forests and soils as remain, resources which inevitably form an important part of the basis of life, are run-down or destroyed. Such points tell against the idea that future people must be, if not direct beneficiaries of energy from nuclear fission, at least indirect beneficiaries. The "solution” then is to buy time for contemporary society at a price which not only creates serious problems for future people but which reduces their ability to cope with these problems. Like the consigner in the train parable, contemporary industrial society proposes, in order to get itself out of a mess arising from its own life-style - the creation of economies dependent on an abundance of non-rerewable 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 in the lifetime of those now living and their immediate descendants, just as the consigner’s action avoids uncomfortable changes for him and those in 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. If we apply to the nuclear situation the standards of behaviour and moral principles generally acknowledged (in principle, if not so often in fact) in the contemporary world, it is not easy to avoid the conclusion that nuclear development involves injustice with respect to the future on a grand scale. There appear to be only two plausible ways of trying to avoid such a conclusion. First, it might be argued that the moral principles and obligations which we acknowledge for the contemporary world and perhaps the immediate future do not apply to those 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 to imply that there are no circumstances in which such an action might be justifiable. As in the case of the consigner of the package there is a need to consider what these justifying circumstances might be, and whether they apply in the present case. We consider these possible escape routes for the proponent of nuclear development in turn. II. OBLIGATIONS TO THE (DISTANT) FUTURE. The especially problematic area is that of the distant (i.e. non-immediate) future, the future 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 obligations 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 (democratic and other) institutions which do not take due account of the interests of future creatures. 5. Moral philosophers have, predictably, differed on questions of obligations to distant future creatures. 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. Others 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 there are no moral obligations to the future beyond those perhaps 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 effect of our actions on future people. from the Of those philosophers who say, or whose views imply that we do not have obligations to the (non-immediate) future, many have based this view on accounts of moral obligation which are built on relations which presuppose some degree of temporal or spatial contiguity. Thus, moral obligation is seen as presupposing various relations which could not hold between people widely separated in time (or sometimes in space). Let us call the position that we have no obligations to (distant) future people the constraints position. ' -*■ ■■■--------- ----- No­ , Among suggested bases or grounds of moral obligation for the position, which would rule out obligations to the non-immediate future, are these. Firstly, there are those accounts which require that someone to whom a moral obligation is held be able to claim his rights or entitlement. People in the distant future will not be able to claim rights and entitlements against us, and of course they can do nothing to enforce any claims they might have against us. Secondly, there are those accounts which base moral obligations on social or legal convention, for example a convention which would require punishment of offenders or at least some kind of social enforcement. But plainly these and other conventions will not be invariant over change in society and amendment of legal conventions; hence they will not be invariant over time. Also future people have no way of enforcing their interests or punishing offending predecessors. The No-constraints view is a very difficult one to sustain. 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 the earth in the distant future would be wiped out as a direct and predictable result of the action. The no—constraints position clearly implies that this is an acceptable moral enterprise, that whatever else we might legitimately criticize in the scientists’ experiment (perhaps its being over-expensive or badly designed) we cannot lodge a moral protest about the damage it will do to future people. The no-constraints position also endorses as morally acceptable the following sorts of policy A firm discovers it can make a handsome profit from mining, processing and manufacturing a new type of material which, although it causes no problem for present people or their immediate descendants, will over a period of hundreds of years decay into a substance which will cause an enormous epidemic of cancer among the inhabitants of the earth at that time. According to the no-constraints view the firm is free to act in its own interests, without any consideration for the harm it does remote future people. Such counterexamples to the No-constraints position, which are easily varied and multiplied, might seem childlishly obvious. Yet this view is far from being a straw man; not only have several philosophers endorsed this position, but it is a clear implication 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 No-constraints position have not considered such examples, despite their being clearly implied by their position. We suspect that (we certainly hope that) when it is brought out that their position admits such counterexamples, that without any constraints we are free to cause pointless harm for example, most of those who opted for this position would want to assert that it was not what they intended. What many of those who have put forward the No-constraints position seem to have had in mind (in denying moral obligation) is rather that future people can look after themselves, that we are not responsible for their lives. The 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, in the counterexample 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, most notably the obligation to take account in 7. 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 resposible 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. In just the same way, the fact that one does not have or has not acquired an obligation to some stranger with whom one has never been involved does not imply that one is free to do what one likes with respect to him, for example to rob him or to seriously harm him when this could be avoided. These difficulties for the No-constraints position result in part because of a failure to make an important distinction. Some of our obligations to others arise because we have voluntarily entered into some agreement with them - for example, we have made a promise. Other obligations, however, such as our duty not to damage or harm someone, do not assume that an agreement has been struck between us. former kind acquired obligations Let us call obligations of the and those of the latter unacquired obligations. There is a considerable difference in the type of responsibility associated with each. In the case of acquired obligations responsibility arises because one should do something which one can fail to do, e.g. keep a promise. In the case of unacquired duties responsibility arises as a result of being a causal agent who is aware of the consequences or probable consequences of his action, a responsibility that is not dependent on one’s having performed some act in the past (e.g., made a promise). Our obligations to future people clearly are of unacquired, not acquired obligations, a fact the No-constraints position simply fails to take into account. These obligations arise as a result of our ability to produce causal effects of a reasonably predictable nature, whether on our contemporaries or on those in the distant future. Thus, to return to the train parable, the consigner cannot argue in justification of his action that he has, for example, never assumed or acquired responsibility for the passengers, that he does not know them and therefore has no love or sympathy for them and that they are not part of his moral community; in short, that he has acquired no obligation, and has no special obligations to help them. All that 8. one needs to argue concerning the train, and in the nuclear case, is that there are moral obligations against imposing harm for instance which are not specially ions, to the distant acquired. Nor can this claim be rebutted by the pretence' .at/future involve heroic self sacrifice, something ’’above and beyond" what is normally required. 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 shipping the dangerous package on the train. III. ATTEMPTS TO REDUCE OBLIGATIONS TO THE FUTURE. In evading these difficulties the No-constraints position may be qualified rather than wholly abandoned. According to the Qualified position we are not entirely unconstrained There are obligations, even to distant future with respect to the distant future. people, 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 costs and benefits (and so of future interests) is obtained by application over time of a discount rate, so discounting costs and risks to future people. The attempt to apply economics as a moral theory, something that is becoming increasingly common, can lead theft to the Qualified position. What is objectionable in such an approach is that economics must operate within the bounds of acknowledged non-acquired moral constraints, just as in practice it operates within legal constraints. What economics cannot legitimately do is determine what these constraints are. There are, moreover, alternative economic theories and simply to adopt, without further ado, one which discounts the future, giving much less importance to the interests of future people, is to beg all the questions at issue. Among the arguments that economists offer for generally discounting the future, the most threadbare is based on the Rosy-future assumption, that future generations will be better off than present ones (and so better placed to handle the waste problem). generations may well not Since there is mounting evidence that future be better off then present ones, especially in things that matter, no argument for discounting the interests of future generations on this basis can carry much weight. For the waste problem to be handed down 9. to the future generations, 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 that they can (easily) carry and control the nuclear freight. A more plausible argument for discounting, the Opportunity-cost argument, builds directly It is argued from the fact on the notion of opportunity cost. 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. This same line of reasoning is then applied to the allocation of resources. Thus, compensation - which is what the waste problem is taken to come to economically - costs much less now than later, e.g. a few pennies set aside (e.g. in a trust fund) in the future, if need be, will suffice to compensate eventually for any victims of remote radioactive waste leakage. beset this approach. Two problems First, there are, presently at least, insurmountable practical difficulties about applying such discounting. how to determine appropriate future discount rates. that the argument depends on a false assumption. We simply do not know A more serious objection is It is not true that value, or damages, can always be converted into monetary equivalents. There is no clear ’’monetary compensation” for a variety of damages, including cancer, loss of life, a lost species. The discounting theme, however argued for, is inadequate, because it leads back in practice to the No-constraints position. discounting imposes an ” economic horizon” The reason is that beyond which nothing need be considered, since any costs or benefit which might arise are, when discounted back to the present, negligible. » A different argument for the Qualified position, the Probabilities argument, avoids the objections from cases of certain damage through appeal to probability considerations. The distant future, it is argued, is much more uncertain than the present and immediate future, so that probabilities are consequently lower, perhaps even approaching or coinciding with zero for any hypothesis concerning the distant future. Thus, the argument continues, the interests of future people must (apart from exceptional cases where there is an unusually high degree of certainty) count for (very much) less than those of present and neighbouring people where (much) higher probabilities 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 future against a much lower probability of indeterminate costs to an indeterminate number of 10. distant future people, the issue would normally be decided in favour of the present, assuming anything like similar costs and benefits were involved. is however The argument Firstly, probabilities involving distant badly flawed. future situations are not always less than those concerning the immediate future in the way the argument supposes. problems often Moreover the outcomes of some moral do not depend on a high level of probability. In many 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. Nor, of course, can it be assumed that anything like similarly weighted costs and benefits are involved in the nuclear case, especially if it is a question of risking poisoning some of the earth for half a million or so years, with consequent risk of serious harm to thousands of generations of future people, in order to obtain quite doubtful, or even trivial, benefits for some present people, ^in the shape of the opportunity to continue (unnecessarily) high energy use. And even the costs and benefits were comparable or evenly weighted, such if an argument would be defective, since an analogous argument would show that the consigner's action in the train parable, is acceptable provided the benefit (e.g. the profit the company stood to gain from imposing significant risks on other people) was sufficiently large. Such a cost-benefit approach to moral and decision, problems, with or is quite inadequate when different parties without the probability frills, are involved or when cases of conflict of interest involving moral obligations are at issue. permissible 5 For example, such a cost-benefit approach would imply that it is for a company to injure, or very likely injure, some innocent party provided only that the company stands to make a sufficiently large gain from it, that costs to some group are more than morally larger benefits to another group. transferred in any compensated for by But costs or benefits are not legitimately simple way from one group to another. The often appealed to maxim "If you (or your group) want the benefits you have to accept the costs" is one thing, but the maxim "If I (or my group) want the benefits then you have to accept the costs (or some of them at least)" is another and i very different thing. I 11. It is a widely accepted moral principle that one is not, in general, entitled to simply transfer costs of a significant kind arising from an activity which benefits oneself onto other parties who are not involved g in the activity and are not beneficiaries. This Transfer-limiting principle is especially clear in cases of which a thalidomide manufacturing and marketing company is one, where the significant costs include an effect on life or health or a risk thereof, and where the benefit to the benefitting party is of a noncrucial or dispensible nature. The principle is of fundamental importance in the nuclear debate, and appears again and again : it applies not merely to the waste problem but as regards several other liabilities of nuclear development, e.g. the risk of nuclear war, the matter of reactor meltdown. In particular, the principle, invalidates the comparison, heavily relied on in building a case for the acceptability of the nuclear risks, 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 overwhelming extent, those who bear the serious health costs and risks involved. In contrast the users and supposed beneficiearies of nuclear energy will be risking not only, or even primarily, their own lives and health, but also that of others who may not be beneficiaries at all— who may be just the opposite! , More generally, the distribution of costs and damage in such a fashion, i.e. on to non-beneficiaries, is a characteristic of certain serious forms of pollution, and is among its morally objectionable features. production, from nuclear or fossil pollution. fuel sources, can cause or lead to serious Thus from the Transfer-limiting important necessary condition for energy options: an energy option Large-scale energy principle emerges an To be morally acceptable should not involve the transfer of significant costs or risks of harm onto parties who are not involved, who do not use or do not benefit correspondingly from the energy source. Included in the scope of 12. this condition, which nuclear development violates , are future people, i.e. not merely people living at the present time but also future generations (those of the next towns). A further corollary of the principle is the Transmission Principle, that we should not hand the world we have so exploited on to our successors in substantially worse shape than we "received” it. For if we did then that would be a significant transfer of costs. The Transfer-limiting principle can be derived from certain ethical theories (e.g. those of a deontic cast such as Kant’s and Rawls’) and from common precepts (such as the Golden Rule), where one seriously considers putting oneself in another’s position. But the principle is perhaps best defended, on a broader basis, inductively, by way of examples. embroider the train parable, the company town decides to Suppose, to solve its disposal problem by shipping its noxious waste to another town down the line, which (like future towns) lacks the means to ship it back or to register due protest. The inhabitants of this town are then forced to face the problem either of undertaking the expensive and difficult disposal process or of sus­ taining risks to their own lives and health. Most of us would regard this kind of transfer of costs as morally unacceptable, however much the consigner’s company town flourishes. IV. UNCERTAINTY AND INDETERMINACY ARGUMENTS FOR REDUCED RESPONSIBILITY. Many of the arguments designed to show that we cannot be expected to take too much account of the effects of our actions on the distant future appeal to uncertainty. There are two main components to the General Uncertainty argument, capable of separation, but frequently tangled up. Both arguments are mistaken, the first, an argument from ignorance, on a priori second on a posteriori grounds. follows:- grounds, the The Argument from ignorance concerned runs as In contrast to the exact information we can obtain about the present, the information we can obtain about the effects of our actions on the distant future is unreliable, woolly and highly speculative. But we cannot base assessments of how we should act on information of this kind, especially when 13. accurate information is obtainable about the present which would indicate Therefore we must regretfully ignore the uncertain effects of different action. our actions on the distant future. ignorance A striking example of the argument from at work is afforded by official US analyses favouring nuclear development, which ignore (the extensive) costs of grounds of uncertainty. More formally and crudely waste control on the the argument concerned is this- One only has obligations to the future if these obligations are based on reliable information. distant future. There is no reliable information at present as regards the Therefore one has no obligations to the distant future. This argument is essentially a variant on a sceptical argument concerning our knowledge of the future (formally, replace obligations in the crude statement of the argument above). The main ploy is to considerably overestimate and overstate the degree of certainty available by knowledge 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. do act on the basis We can and constantly such f/"unreliable” information, which the sceptic as regards the future conveniently labels "uncertainty". In moral situations in the present, assessments of what to do often take account of risk and probability, even quite low probabilities. Consider again the train parable. We do not need to know for certain that the container will break and the lethal gas escape. In lact 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. that there is a significant risk of harm It is enough in this sort of case. It does not matter if the decreased well-being of the consigner is certain and that the 14. prospects of the passengers quite uncertain. It is wrong to ship the gas. But if we do not require certainty of action to apply moral constraints in contemporary affairs, why should we require a much higher standard of certainty in the future? The unwarranted insistence on certainty as a necessary condition before moral consideration can be given to the distant future, then, amounts to a flagrant double standard. According to the second argument, the Practical-uncertainty argument, even if in theory we have obligations to the future, we cannot in practice take the interests of future people into account because uncertainty about the distant future is so gross that we cannot determine what the likely consequences of actions on it will be. Therefore, however good our intentions to the people of the distant future are, in practice we have no choice but to ignore their interests. Given that moral principles are characteristically of universal implicational form, e.g. of forms such as "if x has character then x is wrong, for every (action) sharply thus: x", h the argument may be stated more We can never obtain the information about future actions which would enable us to detach the antecedent of the implication. Therefore, even if in theory moral principles do extend to future people, in practice they cannot be applied to obtain clear conclusions. It is true that if the distant future really were so grossly uncertain . that in every case it was impossible to determine in any way better than chance what the effects of present action would be, and whether any given action would help or hinder future people, then moral principles, although applicable in theory to the future, would not in practice yield any clear conclusions about how to act. In this event the distant future would 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 argument has to assume. There are some areas where uncertainty is 15. not so great as to exclude constraints on action. For example, we may have little idea what the fashions will be in a hundred years or, to take another morally-irrelevant factor, what brands of ice 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 the face of the earth of that wonderful variety of non-human life which at present makes it such a rich and interesting place. 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. For this sort of reason, the Practical uncertainty argument should be rejected. Through the defects of the preceding arguments, we can see the defects in a number of widely employed uncertainty arguments used to write off probable harm to future people as outside the scope of proper consideration. Most of these popular moves employ both of the uncertainty arguments as suits the case, switching from one to the other. For example, we may be told that we cannot really take account of future people because we cannot be sure that they will exist or that their tastes and wants will not be completely different from our own, to the point where they will not suffer from our exhaustion of resources or from the things that would affect us. 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 to whom we are morally committed. 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 16. is again a mere outside possibility. 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. 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. Closely related to uncertainty arguments are arguments premissed on the indeterminacy of the future. For example, according to the Indeterminacy argument,_ the indeterminacy of the number and exact character of people at future times will prevent the interest of future people being taken into account where there is a conflict with the present. Since their numbers are indeterminate and their interests unknown how, 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 raised particularly by problems of sharing fixed quantities of resources among present and future people, for example oil, when the numbers of the latter are indeterminate. Such problems are indeed difficult, but they are not resolved by ignoring the claims of the future. Nor are distributional problems involving non-renewable resources as large and representative a class of moral problems concerning the future as the tendency to focus on them would suggest. It can be freely admitted, that there will be cases where the indeterminacy of aspects of the future will make conflicts very difficult to resolve or indeed irresoluble - no realistic ethical theory can give a precise answer to every ethical question. But, as the train parable again illustrates, there are cases where such difficulties do not hinder resolution, and cases of conflict which are not properly approached 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 case of nuclear power is like that. The failure of these various arguments reveals, what caiji^e independently^ argued from the universalisability features of moral principles, thata disqualify future people from full moral consideration or reduce their claims below the claims of present people. That is, we have the same general obligations 17. to future people as to the present; thus there is the same obligation to take account of them and their interests in what we do, to be careful in our actions, to take account of the probability (and not just the certainty) of our actions causing harm or damage, and to see, other things being equal, that we do not act so as to rob them of what is necessary for the chance of a good life. Uncertainty and indeterminacy do not relieve us of these obligations. V. PROBLEMS OF SAFE NUCLEAR OPERATION : REACTOR EMISSIONS AND CORE MELTDOWN. The ethical problems with nuclear power are by no means confined to waste storage Just as remoteness in time does not erode obligations or and future creatures. entitlement to just treatment, neither does location in space, or a particular geographical position. Hence several further problems arise, to which principles and arguments like those already arrived at in considering the waste problem apply. For example, if one group (social unit, or state) decides to dump its radioactive wastes in the territory or region of another group, or not to prevent its (radioactive) pollution entering the territory of another group, then it imposes risks and costs on presently existing people of the second group, in much the way that present nuclear developments impose costs and risks on future people. There are differences however : distant people spatially cannot be discounted in quite the way that future people can be, though their interests and objectives can be ignored or overridden. People living in the vicinity of a nuclear reactor are subject to special costs and risks. One is radioactive pollution, because reactors routinely discharge radioactive materials into the air and Emission problem. water near the plant : hence the Such "normal" emission during plant operation of low level radiation carries carcinogenic and mutagenic costs. While there are undoubtedly costs, the number of cancers and the precise extent of genetic damage induced by exposure to such radiation are both uncertain. If our ethical principles permitted free transfer of costs and risks from one person to another, the ethical issue directly raised by nuclear emissions would be : what extent of 18. cancer and genetic damage, if any, is permissibly traded for the advantages of nuclear power, and under what conditions? Since, however, risks and benefits are NOT (morally) transferable this way - recall the Transfer-limiting principle - such a cost-benefit approach to the risks nuclear emission poses for those who live near a reactor cannot with justice be approached in this fashion And these risks are real.’ In the USA, people who live within 50 miles of a nuclear power plant bear a risk of cancer and genetic damage of as much as 50 times that borne by the population at large. And children living in this region are even more vulnerable, since they are several times more likely to contract cancer through exposure than normal adults. The serious costs to these people cannot be justified by the alleged benefits for others, especially when these benefits could be obtained without these costs. Thus it is not just complacent to say It s a pity about Aunt Ethel dying of cancer, but the new airconditioners make life comfortable’. For such benefits to some as airconditioners provide, which can be alternatively obtained, for example by modification of buildings, can in no way compensate for what others suffer. Among the other strategies used in trying to persuade us that the imposition of radiation on minorities - most of whom have no genuine voice in the location of reactors in their environment and cannot move away without serious losses - is really quite alright is the Doubling argument. According I to the US Atomic Energy Commission, who deployed this trick, it is permissable to double, through nuclear technology, the level of (natural) radiation that a population ha^ received with apparently negligible consequences, the argument being that the additional amount (being equivalent is also likely to have negligible consequences. to the "natural” level) The increased amounts of radiation - with their large man-made component - are then accounted normal, and, it si claimed, 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, no t be. Finally, what is or has become normal, 19. 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 very strict standards by comparison with most other countries with planned nuclear reactors, permits radiation emissions very substantially in excess of the standards laid down; so the emission situation is much worse than what consideration of the standards would disclose. Furthermore, the monitoring of the standards ’'imposed” is entrusted to the nuclear operators themselves, scarcely disinterested parties. Thus public policy is determined not so as to guarantee public health, but rather to serve as a ’’public pacifier” while publicly-subsidized private nuclear operations q proceed relatively unhamperedT While radioactive emissions are an ordinary feature of reactor operation, reactor breakdown is, hopefully, not: official reports even try to make an accident of magnitude, as a matter of definition, an ’extraordinary nuclear occurrence’. But "definitions” notwithstanding, such accidents can happen, and almost have on several occasions (the most notorious being Three Mile Island): hence the Core-meltdown problem. If the cooling and emergency core cooling systems fail in American (light water) reactors, then the core melts and ’containment failure’ is likely, with the result that an area of 40,000 square miles could be radioactively 10 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 the size of Pennsylvania would be destroyed. Modern nuclear reactors are about five times the size of the reactor for which these conservative US (still the best available from A . 11 official sources' are given : the consequences of a similar accident with a modern reactor would accordingly be much greater. The consigner who risks the lives and well-being of passengers on the train acts inadmissibly. a government or government-endorsed utility appears to act in a way that does not differ in morally significant respects in 20. siting a nuclear reactor in a community, in planting such a dangerous package on the "community train". More directly, the location of a nuclear reactor in a community, even if it should happen to receive a favourable benefit-cost analysis and other economic appraisal, would violate such ethical requirements as the Transfer-limiting principle. The advocates of nuclear power have, in effect, endeavoured to avoid questions of cost-transfer and equity, by shifting the dispute out of the extraordinary improbability ethical arena and into a technological dispute about about the/ of reactor malfunction. They have argued, in particular, what contrasts with the train parable, that there is no real possibility of a catastrophic nuclear accident. Indeed in the 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. However, the mathematical models relied upon in this report, variously called "fault tree analysis" and "reliability estimating techniques", are unsound, because, among other things, they exclude as "not credible" possibilities that may well happen in the real world. that the It is not surprising, then,^ methodology and data of the report have been soundly and decisively criticised, or that official support for the report has now'been withdrawn.. 12 Moreover, use of alternative methods and data indicates that there is a real possibility, a non-negligible probability of a serious accident. In response it is contended that, even if there is a non-negligible probability of a reactor accident, still that is 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 decision 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 otpions, which settles their 1 21. ethical status. The following assumptions are encountered in risk assessment as applied to energy options: ( Ai. If option a imposes (comparable) costs on fewer people than option b then option a is preferable to option Aii. b ; 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 /3 accepted; therefore option a is acceptable. These assumptions are then applied as follows. be killed Since the number likely to eventually by nuclear power station catastrophe is less than the likely number killed by cigarette smoking, and since the risks of cigarette smoking are accepted; it follows that the risks of nuclear power are acceptable. A little reflection reveals that this sort of risk assessment argument grossly violates the Transfer­ limiting principle. In order to obtain a proper ethical assessment we need a much fuller picture, and we need to know at least these things:- costs and benefits go to the same parties; Do the and is the person who voluntarily the risks also the person who primarily receives the benefits, as in undertakes driving or cigarette smoking, or are the costs imposed not benefit? on other parties who do It is only if the parties are the same in the case of the options compared, and there are no such distributional problems, a basis would be soundly based. that a comparison on such This is rarely 'the case, and it is not so in the case of risk assessments of energy options. VI. OTHER SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL RISKS AND COSTS OF NUCLEAR DEVELOPMENT, ESPECIALLY NUCLEAR WAR. The problems already discussed by no means exhaust the environmental, health and safety 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 transportation of materials. Several of these stages involve hazards. risks in the nuclear cycle Unlike the special - of sabotage of plants, of theft of fissionable material, and of the further proliferation of nuclear armaments - these hazards 22. have parallels, if not exact equivalents, in other highly polluting methods of generating power, e.g. ’workers in the uranium mining industry sustain ’’the same 14 risk” of fatal and nonfatal injury as workers in the coal industry’. The A problems are not produced—by nuclear development. Other social and environmental problems - though endemic where dangerous large-scale industry operates in societies that are highly inegalitarian 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 large-scale industrial operation, radioactive pollution , such as uranium mining for instance produces, is especially a legacy of nuclear development, and a specially undesirable one, as rectification costs for dead radioactive lands and waterways reveal. Though sabotage is a threat to many large industries, sabotage of a nuclear reactor can have dire consequences, of a different order of magnitude from most industrial sabotage (where core meltdown is not a possibility). Though theft of material from more dubious enterprises such as munitions works can pose threats to populations at large and can assist terrorism, no thefts for allegedly peaceful enterprises pose problems of the same order as theft of fissionable material. No other industry produces materials which so readily permit fabrication into such massive explosives. No other industry is, to sum it up,,so vulnerable on so many fronts. In part to reduce its vulnerability, in part because of its long and continuing association with military activities, the nuclear industry is subject to, and encourages, several practices which (given their scale) run counter to basic features of free and open societies, crucial features such as personal liberty, freedom of association and of expression,and free access to information. These practices include secrecy, restriction of information, formation of special police and guard forces, espionage, curtailment of civil liberties. Already operators of nuclear installations are given extraordinary powers, in vetting employees, to investigate the background and activities not only of employees but also of their families and sometimes even of their friends. The installations themselves become armed camps, which especially offends British sensibilities. The U.K. Atomic Energy (Special Constables) Act of 1976 created a special armed force to guard nuclear installations ami made it answerable ... to the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority. 23. These developments, and worse ones in West Germany and elsewhere,presage along with nuclear development increasingly authoritarian and anti-democratic That nuclear development appears to force such political societies. consequences tells heavily against it. Nuclear development is further indicted politically by the direct connection of nuclear power with nuclear war. It is true that ethical questions concerning nuclear war - for example, whether a nuclear war is justified, or just, under any circumstances, and if so what circumstances - are distinguishable from those concerning nuclear power. Undoubtedly, however, the spread of nuclear power is substantially increasing the technical means for engaging in nuclear war and so, to that extent, the opportunity for, and chances of, nuclear engagement. never accounted Since nuclear wars are positive goods, but are at best the lesser of major evils, nuclear wars are always highly ethically undesirable. The spread of nuclear power accordingly expands the opportunity for, and chances of, highly undesirable consequences. Finally the latter, so increasing these chances and opportunities, is itself undesirable, and therefore what leads to it, nuclear development is undesirable. This is, in outline, the argument from nuclear war against large-scale nuclear development. VII. CONFLICT ARGUMENTS, AND BEGINNING ON NUCLEAR DEVELOPMENT. UNCOVERING THE IDEOLOGICAL BASES OF Much as with nuclear war, so given the cumulative case against nuclear development, only one justificatory that of appeal to overriding circumstances. route remains open, That appeal, to be ethically acceptable, must go beyond merely economic considerations. For, as observed, the consigner’s action, in the train parable, cannot be justified by purely economistic arguments, such as that his profits would rise, the company or the town would be more prosperous, or by appealing to the fact that some possibly uncomfortable changes would otherwise be needed. case: a Transfer-limiting principle applies. So it is also in the nuclear But suppose now the consigner argues that his action is justified because unless it is taken the town will die. 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, since the case still to amounts^one of transfer of costs and risks onto others. But such a conflict situation, where a given course of action, though normally undesirable, is alleged to be the lesser of two evils in a given case, is morally more problemthan cases atical^where Transfer-limiting principle is clearly violated,. Nuclear develop­ ment is often defended in this way, through Conflict arguments, to the effect that even though nuclear development does have undesirable features, nevertheless the alternatives are worse. Some of the arguments advanced to demonstrate conflict are based on competing commitments to present people, and others on competing obligations to future people, both of which are taken to override the obligations not to impose on the future significant risk of serious harm. The success of such conflict arguments requires the presentation of a genuine and exhaustive set of alternatives (or at least practical alternatives) and showing that the only alternatives to admittedly morally undesirable actions are even more undesirable ones. If some practical alternative which is not morally worse than the action to be justified is overlooked, suppressed, or neglected in the argument (for example, if in the train parable it turns out that the town has another option to starving or to shipping the parcel, namely earning a living in some other way), then the argument is defective and cannot readily be patched. Just such a suppression of practicable alternatives, we shall argue, has occurred in the argument designed to show that the alternatives to the nuclear option are even worse than the option itself. 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 Indus» trialised countries. Failure to develop nuclear energy, it is often claimed, would amount to denying them the opportunity to reach the standard of affluence we currently enjoy and would create unemployment and poverty in the industrialised nations. And this would be worse - a greater evil - than such things as violating the Transfer-limiting principle through nuclear development. The 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 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 tends to reduce available jobs through encouraging substitution of energy use for labour use. The argument that nuclear energy is needed for the third world is even less convincing. Nuclear energy is both politically and economically inappropriate for the third world, since it requires massive amounts of capital, requires numbers of imported scientists and engineers, 25. —.creates negligible local employment, and depends for its feasibility upon largely non-existent utility systems - e.g. established electricity transmission systems and back-up facilities, and sufficient electrical appliances to plug into the system. Politically it increases foreign dependence, adds to centralised entrenched power and reduces the chance for 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 (often for military purposes) by, their rulers, the westernised and often military elites in whose interests the economies of these countries are usually organised. than what it is: But that does not make the poverty argument anything other a fraud. There are well-known energy-conserving alternatives and the practical option of developing further alternative energy sources, alternatives some of which offer far better prospects for helping the poor, both in the third world and in industrial countries: coal and other fossil fuels, geothermal, and a range of solar options (including as well as narrowly solar sources, wind, water and tidal power). Another major argument advanced to show conflict, the Lights-goingout argument, pppeals to a set of supposedly overriding and competing obligations to future people. We have, it is said, a duty to pass on the immensely valuable things and institutions which our culture has developed. Unless our high-technology, high-energy industrial society is continued and fostered, our valuable institutions and traditions will fall into decay or be swept away. The argument is essentially that without nuclear power, without the continued level of material wealth it alone is assumed to make possible, the lights of our civilization will go out. Future people will be the losers. > The argument does raise important questions about what is valuable in our society and what characteristics are necessary for a good society. the most part these large questions can be by-passed. But for The reason is that the argument adopts an extremely uncritical attitude to present high-technology societies, apparently assuming that they are uniformly and uniquely valuable. . it It assumes that technological society is unmodifiable, that/cannot be changed in the direction of energy conservation or alternative (perhaps high technology) energy sources without collapse. These assumptions are all hard to accept. The assumption that technological society’s energy patterns are unmodifiable is especially so; after all, it has survived events such as world wars which required major social and technological restructuring and consumption modification. If western society’s demands for energy were (contrary to the evidence) totally unmodifiable without collapse, not only would it be committed to a program of increasing destruction, but much of its culture would be of dubious value to future people, who would very likely, as a consequence of this destruction, lack the resource base which the argument assumes to be essential in the case of contemporary society. The uniformity assumption should certainly be challenged. Since high- technology societies appear not to be uniformly valuable, the central question is, what is necessary to maintain what is valuable in such a society? While it may be easy to argue that high energy consumption centrally controlled is necessary to maintain the political and economic status quo of such a society, it is not so easy to argue that it is essential to maintain what is valuable, and it is what is valuable, presumably, that we have a duty to pass on to the future. The evidence from history is that no very high level of material affluence or energy consumption is needed to maintain what is valuable. There is good reason in fact to believe that a society with much lower energy and resource consumption would better foster what is valuable than our own. But even if a radical change in these directions is independently desirable, it is unnecessary to presuppose such a change in order to see that the assumptions of the Lights-going-out argument are wrong. present The consumption of less energy than at need involve no reduction of well-being;and certainly a large increase over present levels of consumption assumed in the usual economic case for nuclear energy, is quite unnecessary. then What the nuclear strategy is really designed to do is not to prevent the lights going out in western civilisation, but to enable the lights to go on burning all the time - to maintain and even increase the wattage output of the Energy Extravaganza . In fact there is good reason to think that, far from the high energy consumption society fostering what is valuable, it will, especially if energy is obtained by means of nuclear fission,be positively inimical to it. which has become heavily dependent upon a A society highly centralised, controlled and garrisoned, capital- and expertise-intensive energy source, must be one which is highly susceptible to entrenchment of power, and one in which the forces which control this energy source, whether capitalist or bureaucratic, can exert enormous power over the political system and over people’s lives, even more then they do at present. Such a society would almost inevitably tend to become authoritarian and increasingly anti-democratic, as an outcome, among other things, of its response to the threat posed by dissident groups in the nuclear situation. 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 authoritarianism - while many valuable aspects, such as the degree of political freedom and those opportunities for personal and collective autonomy which exist, would be lost or diminished: political freedom 27. for example, is a high price to pay for consumerism and and energy extravagence. Again, as in the case of the poverty arguments, clear alternatives, alternative social and political choices, which do not involve such unacceptable consequences, are available. The alternative to the high technology-nuclear option is not a return to the cave, the loss of all that is valuable, but either the adoption of an available alternative such as coal for power or, better,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 argument, as a moral conflict argument, accordingly fails. Thus the further escape route, the appeal to conflict, is, like the appeal to futurity, 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-scale nuclear development is a crime against the future is inevitable. Closed also, in the much same way, are the escape routes to other arguments (from reactor meltdown, radiation emissions, etc.) for concluding that nuclear development is unacceptable. In sum, nuclear development is morally unacceptable on several grounds. VIII. SOCIAL OPTIONS : SHALLOW AND DEEP ALTERNATIVES. The future 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 associated phenomena such as acid rain and atmospheric heating, not to mention the despoliation caused by extensive strip mining, all of which will result from its use in meeting very high projected consumption figures. the Transfer-limiting principle : Such an option would, moreover, also violate for it would impose widespread costs on nonbeneficiaries for some concentrated benefits to some profit takers and to some users who do not pay the full costs of production and replacement. To these main conventional options a third is often added which emphasizes softer and more benign technologies, such as those of solar energy and hydroelectricity. Such softer options — if suitably combined with energy conservation measures (for there are solar ways, as well as nuclear ways, of energy extravagance and of producing unnecessary trivia which answer to no genuine needs) - can avoid the ethical objections to nuclear power, The deeper choice is not however technological, nor merely^individual^, £u£ Social , and involves the restructuring of production away from energy intensive uses and, at a more basic level, a change to nonconsumeristic, less consumptive life­ styles and social arrangements^6 These more fundamental choices between social alternatives, conventional technologically-oriented discussion of energy options tends to obscure. It is not just a matter of deciding in which way to meet the 28. unexamined goals nuclear development aspires to meet, but also a matter of examining the goals themselves. That is, we are not merely faced with the question of comparing different technologies for meeting some fixed or given demand or level of consumption, and of trying to see how best to meet these; we are also faced, and primarily, with the matter of examining those alleged needs and the cost of a society that creates them. It is doubtful that any technology, however benign in principle, will be likely to leave a tolerable world for the future if it is expected to meet unbounded and uncontrolled energy consumption and demands. Even more benign technologies may well be used in a way which creates costs for future people and which are^5" them. "2?likely to result in a deteriorated world being handed on to In short, even more benign technologies may lead to violation of the Transmission ^2 2,1^g q u i rement. Consider, to illustrate, the effect on the world s forests, commonly counted as a solar resource, should they be extensively used for production of methanol or of electricity by woodchipping. While few would object to the use of genuine waste material for energy production, 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 forests. The effects of such additional demands on the maintenance of the forests are often dismissed by the simple expedient of waving around the label "renewable resources". Many forests are in 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 imminent. It certainly has begun in many regions, and many forest types, especially rain forest types, are now, and rapidly, being lost for the future. The addition of a ma|nr^ f ur ther and not readily limitable demand pressure for energy on top of ^the present demands is one which anyone with both a realistic appreciation of the conduct of forestry operations and a concern for the 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 much of Europe at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, again for energy purposes, could be extensive and devastating erosion in steeper lands and tropical areas, desertification in more arid regions, possible climatic change, and massive impoverishment of natural ecosystems, including enormous loss of natural species. Some of us do not want to pass on, and by the Transmission principles 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 29. products or polluted by coal products. illustrates, a mere switch to In short, as the forest situation more benign technologies - important though this is - without any more basic structural and social change, is inadequate. The deeper social option involves challenging and beginning to alter a social structure which promotes consumerism, consumption far beyond genuine needs, and an economic structure which encourages increasing use of highly energy-intensive modes of production. The social change option tends to be obscured in most discussions of energy options and of how to meet energy needs, in part because it does question underlying values of current social arrangements. The conventional discussion proceeds by taking alleged demand (often conflated with wants or needs) 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 and 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 want deep freezers, air conditions, power gadgets, .... authoritarian to prevent them from satisfying these wants. from created wants It would be Such an argument conveniently ignores the social framework in which such needs and wants arise or are produced. To point to the determination of many such wants at the framework level is not however to assume that they are entirely determined at the framework level (e.g. by industrial organisation) and there is no such thing as individual choice or determination at all. It is to see the social framework as a major factor in determining certain kinds of choices, such as those for travel, and kinds, of infrastructure, and to see apparently individual choices made in such matters as being channelled and directed by a social framework determined largely in the interests of corporate and private profit and advantage. The social change option is a hard option, insofar as it will be difficult to implement politically; but it is ultimately the only way of avoiding the passing on of serious costs to future people. reasons than such ethical ones for taking it: And there are other sorts of it is the main, indeed the only sort of option,open to those who adopt what is now called a deep ecological perspective, as contrasted with a shallow ecological outlook which regards the natural world and its nonhuman denizens as not worthwhile in themselves but only of value in as much as they answer back to human interests. The deep ecological perspective is an Integral part of the Alternative Ecological Paradigm and is incompatible with central theses of the Dominant Social Paradigm (which is essentially the ideology of classical and neoclassical economics) 30. and its variants (roughly, what are called State Socialism, and Democratic 18 Socialism). It is incompatible with such assumptions as that the natural environment is of value only as a resource, is by and large hostile, but is controllable in human interests,and with the further domination over nature themes of the Dominant Paradigm and its variants. The conflict between Alternative and Dominant Paradigms, which is fast increasing, extends of course far beyond attitudes to the natural world, since core values of the Dominant Paradigm such as the merits of unimpeded economic growth and material progress are at stake; the conflict involves fundamental differences over the whole front of economical, political and social arrangements. The conflict underlies much of the nuclear debate, insofar as it is not specifically limited to questions of technological fixes, but takes up the 19 basic ethical issues and the social questions to which they lead. The ethical requirements already defended and applied bring us out, when followed through, on the Alternative side of the paradigm conflict, and accordingly lead to the difficult social change option. The social changes that the deep alternative requires will be strongly resisted because they mean changes in current social organisation and power structure. To the extent that the option represents some kind of threat to parts of present political and economic arrangements, it is not surprising that official energy option discussion proceeds by misrepresenting and often obscuring it. But difficult as it is to suitably alter "the system," especially one with such far-reaching effects on the prevailing power structure, it is imperative to try: we are all on the nuclear train. FOOTNOTES This paper is a condensation of an early version of our ’Nuclear 1. power - ethical, social, and political dimensions’ (ESP for short, available from the authors), which in turn grew out of Routley (i.e. the work so referred to in the reference list). For help with the condensation we are very considerably indebted to the editors. In the condensation, we simplify the structure of the argument and suppress underlying political and ideological dimensions (for example, the large measure of responsibility of the USA for spreading nuclear reactors around the world, and thereby in enhancing the chances of nuclear disasters, including nuclear war). We also considerably reduce a heavy load of footnotes and references designed and needed to help make good many of our claims. Further, in order to contain references to a modest length, reference to primary sources has often been replaced by reference through secondary sources. Little difficulty should be encountered however in tracing fuller references through secondary sources or in filling out much important background material from work cited herein. For example, virtually all the data cited in sections^ and VII is referenced in Routley. At worst ESP can always be consulted. All but the last line of the quote is drawn from Goodin, p. 417; 2. 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. The basics are presented in many texts, e.g. Nader Of course in order to assess fully reports as to such I important background and stage-setting matters as the likelihood of a & Abbotts, Gyorgy. core meltdown of (lightwater) reactors, much more information is required. For many assessment purposes however, some knowledge of economic fallacies and decision theory is at least as important as knowledge of nuclear technology. 3. Naturally the effect on humans is not the only factor that has to be taken into account in arriving at moral assessments. Nuclear radiation, 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 example, can hardly improve its case, it suffices if the case against it can be made out solely in terms of its effects on human life in the conventional way. For reference to and a brief discussion of (human-oriented) simulation models p.428. The Opportunity-cost 4. respects. see Goodin, argument is also defective in other It presupposes not merely the (mistaken) reductions involved in the contraction of the ethical domain to the economic; it also presupposes that the proper methods for decision which affect the choice, apply discounting. future, such as that of energy But, as Goodin argues, more appropriate decision rules do not allow discounting. This is one of the reasons why expected utility theory, 5. roughly cost-benefit analysis with probability frills, is inadequate as a decision method in such contexts. Apparent exceptions to the principle such as taxation (and 6. redistribution of income generally) vanish when wealth is construed (as it has to be if taxation is to be properly justified) as at least partly a social asset unfairly monopolised by a minority of the population. Examples such as that of motoring dangerously do not constitute counterexamples to the principle; for one is not morally entitled to so motor. 7. For details, and as to how the official analyses become arguments against nuclear development when some attempt is made to take the ignored costs into account, see Shrader-Frechette, p. 55 ff. 8. See Routley, p. 160. 9. For much further discussion of the points of the preceding two para- » graphs, see Shrader-Frechette, p. 35 ff.; and also Nader 10. & Abbotts. Most of the reactors in the world are of this type; see Gyorgy. 11. See Shrader-Frechette, chapter 4. 12. See Shrader-Frechette. shortcomings A worthwhile initial view of the of the Rassmussen report may be reached by combining the critique in Shrader-Frechette with that in Nader 13. There are variations on Ai against numbers such as probabilities. and Aii & Abbotts. which multiply costs In this way risks, construed as probable costs, can be taken into account in the assessment. risks may be assessed (Alternatively, through such familiar methods as insurance). A principle varying . * Aii a Aii, and formulated as follows: is ethically acceptable if (for some b) a includes no more risks than b and b is socially accepted. was the basic ethical principle in terms of which the Cluff Lake Board of Inquiry recently decided that nuclear power development see Cluff Lake Board of Inquiry in Saskatchewan is ethically acceptable: Department of Environment, Government of Saskatchewan, 1978, Final Report, p. 305 and p. 288. In this report, a is nuclear power and b is either activities clearly accepted by society as alternative power sources. other applications b In has been taken as cigarette smoking, motoring, mining and even the Vietnam war () . The points made in the text do not exhaust the objections to principles Ai - Aii’. The principles are certainly ethically substantive, since an ethical consequence cannot be deduced from nonethical premisses, but they have an inadmissible conventional origin of b : b character. For look at the may be socially accepted though it is no longer socially acceptable, or though its social acceptibility is no longer so clearcut 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 Aii’, for instance, for the argument to begin to look convincing is that ’ethically acceptable’ rather than ’socially accepted'. b is But even with the amendments the principles are invalid, for the reasons given in the text, and others. It is not disconcerting that principles of this type do not work. It would be sad to see yet another area lost to the experts, ethics to actuaries. 14. See Shrader-Frechette, p. 15. 15. Goodin 16. The argument is elaborated in ESP. 17. For some of the more philosophically important material on p. 433. alternative nonconsumeristic .social arrangements and lifestyles, see work cited in V. and R. Routley, 'Social theories, self management and environmental problems’ in Mannison et al, where a beginning is made on working out one set of alternatives, those of a pluralistic anarchism. The parlous 18. situation of the world’s tropical rainforests is explained in, for instance, Myers; the reasons are untangled in R. and V. Routley ’World rainforest destruction - the social causes’ (available from the authors). For a fuller account of the Dominant Social Paradigm and its 19. rival, the Alternative Environmental Paradigm, see Cotgrove and Duff, especially _ the main the table on p. 341 which encapsulates of the assumptions paradigms; compare also Catton and Dunlap, especially p. 34. Contemporary variants ^.n the Dominant Social Paradigm wer-e considered in ESP. -X The shallow/deep contrast as applied to ecological positions, which is an important component of the paradigm conflict, was introduced by Naess. For further explanation of the contrast and of the larger array of ecological positions into which it fits, see R. and V. Routley, environmental ethics' in Mannison especially to Rodman’s 20. ’Human chauvinism and et al, and the references there cited, work. The more elaborate argument of ESP sets the nuclear debate in the context of paradigm conflict. But it is also argued that, even within assumptions framework of the Dominant Social Paradigm and its variants, Ti. Nuclear development is not the rational choice among energy options. The main argument put up for nuclear development within the framework of the dominant paradigm is an Economic growth argument. It is the following version of the Lights-going-out argument (with economic growth duly standing in for material wealth, and for what is valuable.’ necessary to sustain economic growth. Nuclear power is Economic: growth is desirable (for all the usual reasons, e.g. to increase the size of the pie, to postpone redistribution problems, etc.). Therefore nuclear power is desirable. The first premiss is part of US energy policy (see Shrader-Frechette, p.lll), 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 (not without growth but) selective growth, which jettisons economic the heavy social and environmental costs carried by unqualified economic growth. More to the point, since the second premiss is an assumption of the Dominant Paradigm, the first premiss (or rather an fails even by Dominant appropriate and less vulnerable restatement of it) Paradigm standards. For of course nuclear power is not necessary that there are other, perhaps costlier alternatives. defended is some elaboration of the premiss : given The premiss usually Nuclear power is the economically best way to sustain economic growth, ’economically best’ being filled out as ’most efficient’, ’cheapest’, benefit-cost ratio’, etc. ’having the most favourable Unfortunately for the argument, and for nuclear development schemes, nuclear power is none of these things decisively (unless a good deal of economic cheating - easy to do - is done). Tii- On proper Dominant Paradigm accounting, nuclear choices should generally be rejected, both as private utility investments and as public choices. Nuclear development is not economically viable but has been kept going, not by clear economic viability, but by massive subsidization of several types (discussed in Shrader-Flechette, Gyorgy and Nader & Abbotts). Even on variants of the Dominant Paradigm, nuclear development is not justified, as consideration of decision theory methods will reveal: Tiii. Whatever reasonable decision rule is adopted, the nuclear choice is rej ected f as the arguments of Goodin on ^Alternative decision rules help to show. What sustains the nuclear juggernaut is not the Dominant Paradigm or its variants, but contemporary corporate capitalism (or its state enterprise image) and associated third world imperialism, as the historical details of nuclear development both in developed countries and in less developed countries makes plain (for main details, see Gyorgy p. 307 ff.). the practices of contemporary Ayi corporate capitalism and associated imperialism are not acceptable by the standards of either of the Paradigms or their variants : not ethically acceptable. , they are certainly <0 O to REFERENCES USED Works especially useful for further investigation of the ethical issues raised by nuclear development are indicated with an asterisk (* ). S. C^yove. and A. Duff, ’’Environmentalism, middle-class radicalism and politics’, Sociological Review 28(2) (1980), 333-51. W. R. Catton, Jr., and R. E. Dunlap, ’A new ecological paradigm for post exuberant sociology’ American Behavioral Scientist 24 (1980). 15-47. For Report : Ranger Uranium Environmental Inquiry First Report, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1977. *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. *D. Mannison, M. McRobbie and R. Routley (editors), Environmental Philosophy, RSSS, Australian National University, 1980. N. Myers, The Sinking Ark, Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1979. R. Nader and J. Abbotts, The Menace of Atomic Energy, Outback Press, Melbourne, 1977. *K. S. Shrader-Frechette, Nuclear Power and Public Policy, Reidel, Dordrecht, 1980.preferred Lo as SF)T~" R. and V. Routley, ’Nuclear energy and obligations to the future’, Inquiry 21 (1978), 133-79.  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 97, Item 4: Draft of Nuclear power - some ethical and social dimensions Subject The topic of the resource Typescript (photocopy) of draft, with handwritten emendations and corrections with whiteout, 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. Description An account of the resource Unnumbered paper from collection, item number assigned by library staff. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Routley</a> <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=val+routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Val Routley</a> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 97, Item 4 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource [36] leaves. 27.13 MB. Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:623c64a">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:623c64a</a> Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1982-01-01 Box 97: Paper - Extracts - Articles and Chapters by Richard Sylvan https://www.antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/3d6f700c4d63dddd9b3a3db43b54391a.pdf 024f4bf0f001d601f9aa58840b75c425 PDF Text Text Richard and Vai Routley 1. NUCLEAR POWER - SOME ETHICAL AND SOCIAL DIMENSIONS 1 One hardly needs initiation into the dark mysteries of nuclear physics to contribute usefully to the debate now widely raging over nuclear power. While many important empirical questions are still unresolved, these do not really lie at the centre of the controversy. Instead, it is a debate about values... many of the questions which arise are social and ethical ones. I. THE TRAIN PARABLE AND THE NUCLEAR WASTE PROBLEM. train has just pulled out. passengers and freight. The train which is A long distance country crowded carries both At an early stop in the journey someone consigns as freight, to a far distant destination, a package which contains a highly toxic and explosive gas. This is packed in a very thin container which, as the consigner is aware, may well 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 the train should be derailed or involved in a collision, or if some passenger should interfere inadvertently or deliberately with the freight, perhaps trying to steal some of it. of these sorts of things have happened on some previous journeys. All 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 poisoned or sooner or later incur serious diseases. Most of us would roundly 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, or that the world needs his product and it is his duty to supply it, or that in any case he is not or the people on it. These sorts of excuses however would normally be seen as ludicrous when set in this context. not responsible for the train Unfortunately, similar excuses are often so seen when the consigner, again a (responsible) businessman,puts his workers1 health or other peoples’ welfare at risk. Suppose he says that it is his own and others’p ressing needs which justify his action. The company he controls, which produces the material as a by-product, is in bad financial 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 the whole company town, through loss of spending, will be worse off. The poor and unemployed of the town, whom he would otherwise have been able to help, will suffer especially. Few people would accept such grounds as justification. �2. Even where there are serious risks and costs to oneself or some group for whom one is concerned one is usually considered not to be entitled to simply transfer the heavy burden of those risks and costs onto other uninvolved parties, especially where they arise from one’s own, or one’s group’s chosen life-style. The matter of nuclear waste has many moral features which resemble the train case. How fitting the analogy is will become apparent as the argument progresses. There is no known proven safe way to package the highly toxic wastes generated by the nuclear plants that will be spread around the world as large-scale nuclear development goes ahead. The waste problem will be much more serious than that generated by the 50 or so reactors in use at present, with 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 toxic. For example, a millionth of a gramme of plutonium is enough to induce a lung cancer. A leak of even a part of the waste material could involve much loss of life, widespread disease and genetic damage, and contamination of immense areas of land. Wastes will include the reactors themselves, which will have to be abandoned after their expected life times of perhaps 40 years, and which, some have estimated, may require 1-1 million years to reach safe levels of radioactivity. Nuclear wastes must be kept suitably isolated from the environment for their entire active lifetime. For fission products the required storage period averages a thousand years or so, and for 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. Short-term methods of storage require continued human intervention, while proposed longer term methods are subject to both human inter­ ference 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 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 formations or in salt mines, are largely speculative and relatively untested, and have already proved 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 result in multilayered metal containers before rock deposit, simulation models �3. reveal that radioactive material may not remain suitably isolated from human environments.10 In short, the best present storage proposals carry very real possibilities of irradiating future people and damaging their environment. Given the 3 heavy costs which could be involved for the future, and given the known limits of technology, it is methodologically 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 r not only have present proposals, and subject to the same inadequacies. For instance,^/none of the proposed methods for safe storage has been properly tested, but they may well prove to involve unforeseen difficulties and risks when an attempt is made to put them into practice on a commercial scale. Only a method that could provide a rigorous guarantee of safety over the storage period, that placed safety beyond reasonable doubt, would be acceptable. It is difficult to see how such rigorous guarantees could be given concerning either the geological or future human factors. But even if an economically viable, rigorously safe long term storage method could be devised, there is the problem of guaranteeing that it would be universally and invariably used. The assumption that it would be (especially if, as appears likely, such a method proved expensive economically and politically) seems to presuppose a level of efficiency, perfection, and concern for the future which has not previously been encountered in human affairs, and has certainly not been conspicuous in the nuclear industry. The risks imposed on the future by proceeding with nuclear development are, then, significant. to bear Perhaps 40,000 generations of future people could be forced significant risks resulting from the provision of the (extravagant) energy use of only a small proportion of the people of 10 generations. Nor is the risk of direct harm from the escape or misuse of radioactive materials the only burden the nuclear solution imposes on the future. Because the energy provided by nuclear fission is merely a stop gap, it seems probable that in due course the same problem, that of making a 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. Their world will most likely be a world which is seriously depleted of non-renewable resources, and in which such renewable resources as forests and soils as remain, resources which inevitably form an important part of the basis of life, are run-down or destroyed. Such points tell against the idea that future people must be, if not direct beneficiaries of energy from nuclear fission, at least indirect beneficiaries. �The "solution" then is to buy time for contemporary society at a price which not only creates serious problems for future people but which reduces their ability to cope with these problems. Like the consigner in the train parable, contemporary industrial society proposes, in order to get itself out of a mess arising from its own life-style - the creation of economies dependent on an abundance of non-rerewable 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 in the lifetime of those now living and their immediate descendants, just as the consigner’s action avoids uncomfortable changes for him and those in 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. If we apply to the nuclear situation the standards of behaviour and moral principles generally acknowledged (in principle, if not so often in fact) in the contemporary world, it is not easy to avoid the conclusion that nuclear development involves injustice with respect to the future on a grand scale. There appear to be only two plausible ways of trying to avoid such a conclusion. First, it might be argued that the moral principles and obligations which we acknowledge for the contemporary world and perhaps the immediate future do not apply to those 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 to imply that there are no circumstances in which such an action might be justifiable. As in the case of the consigner of the package there is a need to consider what these justifying circumstances might be, and whether they apply in the present case. We consider these possible escape routes for the proponent of nuclear development in turn. I II. OBLIGATIONS TO THE (DISTANT) FUTURE. The especially problematic area is that of the distant (i.e. non-immediate) future, the future 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 obligations 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 (democratic and other) institutions which do not take due account of the interests of future creatures. �5. Moral philosophers have, predictably, differed on questions of obligations to distant future creatures. 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. Others 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 there are no moral obligations to the future beyond those perhaps 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 effect of our actions on future people. from the Of those philosophers who say, or whose views imply that we do not have obligations to the (non-immediate) future, many have based this view on accounts of moral obligation which are built on relations which presuppose some degree of temporal or spatial contiguity. Thus, moral obligation is seen as presupposing various relations which could not hold between people widely separated in time (or sometimes in space). Let us call the position that we have no obligations to (distant) future people the No­ constraints position. Among suggested bases or grounds of moral obligation for the position, which would rule out obligations to the non-immediate future, are these. Firstly, there are those accounts which require that someone to whom a moral obligation is held be able to claim his rights or entitlement. People in the distant future will not be able to claim rights and entitlements against us, and of course they can do nothing to enforce any claims they might have against us. Secondly, there are those accounts which base moral obligations on social or legal convention, for example a convention which would require punishment of offenders or at least some kind of social enforcement. But plainly these and other conventions will not be invariant over change in society and amendment of legal conventions; hence they will not be invariant over time. Also future people have no way of enforcing their interests or punishing offending predecessors. �6. The No-constraints view is a very difficult one to sustain. 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 the earth in the distant future would be wiped out as a direct and predictable result of the action. The no-constraints position clearly implies that this is an acceptable moral enterprise, that whatever else we might legitimately criticize in the scientists’ experiment (perhaps its being over-expensive or badly designed) we cannot lodge a moral protest about the damage it will do to future people. The no-constraints position also endorses as morally acceptable the following sorts of policy:A firm discovers it can make a handsome profit from mining, processing and manufacturing a new type of material which, although it causes no problem for present people or their immediate descendants, will over a period of hundreds of years decay into a substance which will cause an enormous epidemic of cancer among the inhabitants of the earth at that time. According to the no-constraints view the firm is free to act in its own interests, without any consideration for the harm it does remote future people. Such counterexamples to the No-constraints position, which are easily varied and multiplied, might seem childlishly obvious. Yet this view is far from being a straw man; not only have several philosophers endorsed this position, but it is a clear implication 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 No-constraints position have not considered such examples, despite their being clearly implied by their position. We suspect that (we certainly hope that) when it is brought out that their position admits such counterexamples, that without any constraints we are free to cause pointless harm for example, most of those who opted for this position would want to assert that it was not what they intended. What many of those who have put forward the No-constraints position seem to have had in mind (in denying moral obligation) is rather that future people can look after themselves, that we are not responsible for their lives. The 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, in the counterexample 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, most notably the obligation to take account in �7. 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 resposible 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. In just the same way, the fact that one does not have or has not acquired an obligation to some stranger with whom one has never been involved does not imply that one is free to do what one likes with respect to him, for example to rob him or to seriously harm him when this could be avoided. These difficulties for the No-constraints position result in part because of a failure to make an important distinction. Some of our obligations to others arise because we have voluntarily entered into some agreement with them - for example, we have made a promise. Other obligations, however, such as our duty not to damage or harm someone, do not assume that an agreement has been struck between us. former kind acquired obligations Let us call obligations of the and those of the latter unacquired obligations. There is a considerable difference in the type of responsibility associated with each. In the case of acquired obligations responsibility arises because one should do something which one can fail to do, e.g. keep a promise. In the case of unacquired duties responsibility arises as a result of being a causal agent who is aware of the consequences or probable consequences of his action, a responsibility that is not dependent on one’s having performed some act in the past (e.g., made a promise). Our obligations to future people clearly are of unacquired, not acquired obligations, a fact the No-constraints position simply fails to take into account. These obligations arise as a result of our ability to produce causal effects of a reasonably predictable nature, whether on our contemporaries or on those in the distant future. Thus, to return to the train parable, the consigner cannot argue in justification of his action that he has, for example, never assumed or acquired responsibility for the passengers, that he does not know them and therefore has no love or sympathy for them and that they are not part of his moral community; in short, that he has acquired no obligation, and has no special obligations to help them. All that �8. one needs to argue concerning the train, and in the nuclear case, is that there are moral obligations against imposing harm for instance which are not specially , , . , , , , , all obligat to the distant acquired. Nor can this claim be rebutted by the pretence th uture involve heroic self sacrifice, something "above and beyond" what is normally required. 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 III. ATTEMPTS TO REDUCE OBLIGATIONS TO THE FUTURE. In evading these difficulties the No-constraints position may be qualified rather than wholly abandoned. According to the Qualified position we are not entirely unconstrained There are obligations, even to distant future with respect to the distant future. people, 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 costs and benefits (and so of future interests) is obtained by application over time of a discount rate, so discounting costs and risks to future people. The attempt to apply economics as a moral theory, something that is becoming increasingly common, can lead then to the Qualified position. What is objectionable in such an approach is that economics must operate within the bounds of acknowledged non-acquired moral constraints, just as in practice it operates within legal constraints. What economics cannot legitimately do is determine what these constraints are. There are, moreover, alternative economic theories and simply to adopt, without further ado, one which discounts the future, giving much less importance to the interests of future people, is to beg all the questions at issue. Among the arguments that economists offer for generally discounting the future, the most threadbare is based on the Rosy-future assumption, that future generations will be better off than present ones (and so better placed to handle the waste problem). generations may well not Since there is mounting evidence that future be better off then present ones, especially in things that matter, no argument for discounting the interests of future generations on this basis can carry much weight. For the waste problem to be handed down �9. to the future generations, 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 that they can (easily) carry and control the nuclear freight. A more plausible argument for discounting, the Opportunity-cost argument, builds directly It is argued from the fact on the notion of opportunity cost. that a dollar gained now is worth much more than a dollar received in the nonimmediate future (because the first dollar could meanwhile be invested at compound interest), that discounting is required to obtain equivalent monetary values. This same line of reasoning is then applied to the allocation of resources. Thus, compensation - which is what the waste problem is taken to come to economically - costs much less now than later, e.g. a few pennies set aside (e.g. in a trust fund) in the future, if need be, will suffice to compensate eventually for any victims of remote radioactive waste leakage. beset this approach. Two problems First, there are, presently at least, insurmountable practical difficulties about applying such discounting. how to determine appropriate future discount rates. that the argument depends on a false assumption. We simply do not know A more serious objection is It is not true that value, or damages, can always be converted into monetary equivalents. There is no clear "monetary compensation" for a variety of damages, including cancer, loss of life, a lost species. The discounting theme, however argued for, is inadequate, because it leads back in practice to the No-constraints position. discounting imposes an " economic horizon" The reason is that beyond which nothing need be considered, since any costs or benefit which might arise are, when discounted back to the present, negligible. A different argument for the Qualified position, the Probabilities argument, avoids the objections from cases of certain damage through appeal to probability considerations. The distant future, it is argued, is much more uncertain than the present and immediate future, so that probabilities are consequently lower, perhaps even approaching or coinciding with zero for any hypothesis concerning the distant future. Thus, the argument continues, the interests of future people must (apart from exceptional cases where there is an unusually high degree of certainty) count for (very much) less than those of present and neighbouring people where (much) higher probabilities 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 future against a much lower probability of indeterminate costs to an indeterminate number of �10. distant future people, the issue would normally be decided in favour of the present, assuming anything like similar costs and benefits were involved. Firstly, probabilities involving distant badly flawed. is however The argument future situations are not always less than those concerning the immediate future in the way the argument supposes. problems often Moreover the outcomes of some moral do not depend on a high level of probability. In many 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. Nor, of course, can it be assumed that anything like similarly weighted costs and benefits are involved in the nuclear case, especially if it is a question of risking poisoning some of the earth for half a million or so years, with consequent risk of serious harm to thousands of generations of future people, in order to obtain quite doubtful, or even trivial, benefits for some present people, fin the shape of the opportunity to continue (unnecessarily) high energy use. And even the costs and benefits were comparable or evenly weighted, such if an argument would be defective, since an analogous argument would show that the consigner’s action in the train parable, is acceptable provided the benefit (e.g. the profit the company stood to gain from imposing significant risks on < other people) was sufficiently large. Such a cost-benefit approach to moral and decision, problems, with or is quite inadequate when different parties without the probability frills, are involved or when cases of conflict of interest involving moral obligations are at issue. permissible 5 For example, such a cost-benefit approach would imply that it is for a company to injure, or very likely injure, some innocent party provided only that the company stands to make a sufficiently large gain from it, that costs to some group are more than morally larger benefits to another group. transferred in any compensated for by But costs or benefits are not legitimately simple way from one group to another. The often appealed to maxim "If you (or your group) want the benefits you have to accept the costs” is one thing, but the maxim "If I (or my group) want the benefits then you have to accept the costs (or some of them at least)" is another and �11. very different thing. It is a widely accepted moral principle that one is not, in general, entitled to simply transfer costs of a significant kind arising from an activity which benefits oneself onto other parties who are not involved £ in the activity and are not beneficiaries. This Transfer-limiting principle is especially clear in cases of which a thalidomide manufacturing and marketing company is one, where the significant costs include an effect on life or health or a risk thereof, and where the benefit to the benefitting party is of a noncrucial or dispensible nature. The principle is of fundamental importance in the nuclear debate, and appears again and again : it applies not merely to the waste problem but as regards several other liabilities of nuclear development, e.g. the risk of nuclear war, the matter of reactor meltdown. In particular, the principle invalidates the comparison, heavily relied on in building a case for the acceptability of the nuclear risks, 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 overwhelming extent, those who bear the serious health costs and risks involved. In contrast the users and supposed beneficiearies of nuclear energy will be risking not only, or even primarily, their own lives and health, but also that of others who may not be beneficiaries at all— who may be just the opposite! More generally, the distribution of costs and damage in such a fashion, i.e. on to non-beneficiaries, is a characteristic of certain serious forms of pollution, and is among its morally objectionable features. production, from nuclear or fossil pollution. fuel sources, can cause or lead to serious Thus from the Transfer-limiting important necessary condition for energy options: an energy option Large-scale energy principle emerges an To be morally acceptable should not involve the transfer of significant costs or risks of harm onto parties who are not involved, who do not use or do not benefit correspondingly from the energy source. Included in the scope of �12. this condition, which nuclear development violates , are future people, i.e. not merely people living at the present time but also future generations (those of the next towns). A further corollary of the principle is the Transmission Principle, that we should not hand the world we have so exploited on to our successors in substantially worse shape than we "received” it. For if we did then that would be a significant transfer of costs. The Transfer-limiting principle can be derived from certain ethical theories (e.g. those of a deontic cast such as Kant’s and Rawls’) and from common precepts (such as the Golden Rule), where one seriously considers putting oneself in another’s position. But the principle is perhaps best defended, on a broader basis, inductively, by way of examples. embroider the train parable, the company town decides to Suppose, to solve its disposal problem by shipping its noxious waste to another town down the line, which (like future towns) lacks the means to ship it back or to register due protest. The inhabitants of this town are then forced to face the problem either of undertaking the expensive and difficult disposal process or of sus­ taining risks to their own lives and health. Most of us would regard this kind of transfer of costs as morally unacceptable, however much the consigner’s company town flourishes. IV. UNCERTAINTY AND INDETERMINACY ARGUMENTS FOR REDUCED RESPONSIBILITY. Many of the arguments designed to show that we cannot be expected to take too much account of the effects of our actions on the distant future appeal to uncertainty. There are two main components to the General Uncertainty argument, capable of separation, but frequently tangled up. Both arguments are mistaken, the first, an argument from ignorance, on ai priori second on a posteriori grounds. follows:- grounds, the The Argument from ignorance concerned runs as In contrast to the exact information we can obtain about the present, the information we can obtain about the effects of our actions on the distant future is unreliable, woolly and highly speculative. But we cannot base assessments of how we should act on information of this kind, especially when �13. accurate information is obtainable about the present which would indicate Therefore we must regretfully ignore the uncertain effects of different action. our actions on the distant future. ignorance A striking example of the argument from at work is afforded by official US analyses favouring nuclear development, which ignore (the extensive) costs of waste control on the 7 grounds of uncertainty. the argument concerned is this J- More formally and crudely One only has obligations to the future if these obligations are based on reliable information. distant future. There is no reliable information at present as regards the Therefore one has no obligations to the distant future. This argument is essentially a variant on a sceptical argument 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 such do act on the basis of^"unreliable" information, which the sceptic as regards the future conveniently labels "uncertainty". In moral situations in the present, assessments of what to do often take account of risk and probability, even quite low probabilities. Consider again the train parable. 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. that there is a significant risk of harm It is enough in this sort of case. It does not matter if the decreased well-being of the consigner is certain and that the �14. prospects of the passengers quite uncertain. It is wrong to ship the gas. But if we do not require certainty of action to apply moral constraints in contemporary affairs, why should we require a much higher standard of certainty in the future? The unwarranted insistence on certainty as a necessary condition before moral consideration can be given to the distant future, then, amounts to a flagrant double standard. According to the second argument, the Practical-uncertainty argument, even if in theory we have obligations to the future, we cannot in practice take the interests of future people into account because uncertainty about the distant future is so gross that we cannot determine what the likely consequences of actions on it will be. Therefore, however good our intentions to the people of the distant future are, in practice we have no choice but to ignore their interests. Given that moral principles are characteristically of universal implicational form, e.g. of forms such as "if x has character then x is wrong, for every (action) sharply thus: x”, h the argument may be stated more We can never obtain the information about future actions which would enable us to detach the antecedent of the implication. Therefore, even if in theory moral principles do extend to future people, in practice they cannot be applied to obtain clear conclusions. It is true that if the distant future really were so grossly uncertain , that in every case it was impossible to determine in any way better than chance what the effects of present action would be, and whether any given action would help or hinder future people, then moral principles, although applicable in theory to the future, would not in practice yield any clear conclusions about how to act. In this event the distant future would 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 argument has to assume. There are some areas where uncertainty is �15. not so great as to exclude constraints on action. For example, we may have little idea what the fashions will be in a hundred years or, to take another morally-irrelevant factor, what brands of ice 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 the face of the earth of that wonderful variety of non-human life which at present makes it such a rich and interesting place. 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. For this sort of reason, the Practical uncertainty argument should be rejected. Through the defects of the preceding arguments, we can see the defects in a number of widely employed uncertainty arguments used to write off pxQhabLe. harm to future people as outside the scope of proper consideration. Most of these popular moves employ both of the uncertainty arguments as suits the case, switching from one to the other. For example, we may be told that we cannot really take account of future people because we cannot be sure that they will exist or that their tastes and wants will not be completely different from our own, to the point where they will not suffer from our exhaustion of resources or from the things that would affect us. 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 to whom we are morally committed. 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 �16. is again a mere outside possibility. 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. 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. Closely related to uncertainty arguments are arguments premissed on the indeterminacy of the future. For example, according to the Indeterminacy argument, the indeterminacy of the number and exact character of people at future times will prevent the interest of future people being taken into account where there is a conflict with the present. Since their numbers are indeterminate and their interests unknown how, 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 raised particularly by problems of sharing fixed quantities of resources among present and future people, for example oil, when the numbers of the latter are indeterminate. Such problems are indeed difficult, but they are not resolved by ignoring the claims Nor are distributional of the future. problems involving non-renewable resources as large and representative a class of moral problems concerning the future as the tendency to focus on them would suggest. It can be freely admitted, that there will be cases where the indeterminacy of aspects of the future will make conflicts very difficult to resolve or indeed irresoluble - no realistic ethical theory can give a precise answer to every ethical question. But, as the train parable again illustrates, there are cases where such difficulties do not hinder resolution, and cases of conflict which are not properly approached 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 case of nuclear power is like that. The failure of these various arguments reveals, what ca^e independentlys • argued from the universalisability features of • 1 moral principles, 8 K / thatA disqualify future people from full moral consideration or reduce their claims below the claims of present people. That is, we have the same general obligations �17. to future people as to the present; thus there is the same obligation to take account of them and their interests in what we do, to be careful in our actions, to take account of the probability (and not just the certainty) of our actions causing harm or damage, and to see, other things being equal, that we do not act so as to rob them of what is necessary for the chance of a good life. Uncertainty and indeterminacy do not relieve us of these obligations. V. PROBLEMS OF SAFE NUCLEAR OPERATION : REACTOR EMISSIONS AND CORE MELTDOWN. The ethical problems with nuclear power are by no means confined to waste storage Just as remoteness in time does not erode obligations or and future creatures. entitlement to just treatment, neither does location in space, or a particular geographical position. Hence several further problems arise, to which principles and arguments like those already arrived at in considering the waste problem apply. For example, if one group (social unit, or state) decides to dump its radioactive wastes in the territory or region of another group, or not to prevent its (radioactive) pollution entering the territory of another group, then it imposes risks and costs on presently existing people of the second group, in much the way that present nuclear developments impose costs and risks on future people. There are differences however : distant people spatially cannot be discounted in quite the way that future people can be, though their interests and objectives can be ignored or overridden. People living in the vicinity of a nuclear reactor are subject to special costs and risks. One is radioactive pollution, because reactors routinely discharge radioactive materials into the air and water near Emission problem. the plant : hence the Such ’’normal” emission during plant operation of low level radiation carries carcinogenic and mutagenic costs. While there are undoubtedly costs, the number of cancers and the precise extent of genetic damage induced by exposure to such radiation are both uncertain. If our ethical principles permitted free transfer of costs and risks from one person to another, the ethical issue directly raised by nuclear emissions would be : what extent of �18. cancer and genetic damage, if any, is permissibly traded for the advantages of nuclear power, and under what conditions? Since, however, risks and benefits are NOT (morally) transferable this way - recall the Transfer-limiting principle - such a cost-benefit approach to the risks nuclear emission poses for those who live near a reactor cannot with justice be approached in this fashion And these risks are real! In the USA, people who live within 50 miles of a nuclear power plant bear a risk of cancer and genetic damage of as much as 50 times that borne by the population at large. And children living in this region are even more vulnerable, since they are several times more likely to contract cancer through exposure than normal adults. The serious costs to these people cannot be justified by the alleged benefits for others, especially when these benefits could be obtained without these costs. Thus it is not just complacent to say It s a pity about Aunt Ethel dying of cancer, but the new airconditioners make life comfortable’. For such benefits to some as airconditioners provide, which can be alternatively obtained, for example by modification of buildings, can in no way compensate for what others suffer. Among the other strategies used in trying to persuade us that the imposition of radiation on minorities - most of whom have no genuine voice in the location of reactors in their environment and cannot move away without serious losses — is really quite alright is the Doubling argument. According to the US Atomic Energy Commission, who deployed this trick, it is permissable to double, through nuclear technology, the level of (natural) radiation that a population has received with apparently negligible consequences, the argument being that the additional amount (being equivalent is also likely to have negligible consequences. to the "natural" level) The increased amounts of radiation — with their large man-made component — are then accounted normal, and, it si claimed, 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, �19. 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 very strict standards by comparison with most other countries with planned nuclear reactors, permits radiation emissions very substantially in excess of the standards laid down; so the emission situation is much worse than what consideration of the standards would disclose. Furthermore, the monitoring of the standards "imposed" is entrusted to the nuclear operators themselves, scarcely disinterested parties. Thus public policy is determined not so as to guarantee public health, but rather to serve as a "public pacifier" while publicly-subsidized private nuclear operations a proceed relatively unhamperedi While radioactive emissions are an ordinary feature of reactor operation, reactor breakdown is, hopefully, not: official reports even try to make an accident of magnitude, as a matter of definition, an ’extraordinary nuclear occurrence’. But "definitions" notwithstanding, such accidents can happen, and almost have on several occasions (the most notorious being Three Mile Island): hence the Core-meltdown problem. If the cooling and emergency core cooling systems fail in American (light water) reactors, then the core melts and ’containment failure’ is likely, with the result that an area of 40,000 square miles could be radioactively 10 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 the size of Pennsylvania would be destroyed. Modern nuclear reactors are about five times the size of the reactor for which these conservative US figures (still the best available from official sources7 are given : the consequences of a similar accident with a modern reactor would accordingly be much greater. The consigner who risks the lives and well-being of passengers on the train acts inadmissibly. a government or government-endorsed utility appears to act in a way that does not differ in morally significant respects in �20. siting a nuclear reactor in a community, in planting such a dangerous package on the ’’community train”. More directly, the location of a nuclear reactor in a community, even if it should happen to receive a favourable benefit-cost analysis and other economic appraisal, would violate such ethical requirements as the Transfer-limiting principle. The advocates of nuclear power have, in effect, endeavoured to avoid questions of cost-transfer and equity, by shifting the dispute out of the extraordinary improbability ethical arena and into a technological dispute about about the^ of reactor malfunction. They have argued, in particular, what contrasts with the train parable, that there is no real possibility of a catastrophic nuclear accident. indeed in the 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. However, the mathematical models relied upon in this report, variously called "fault tree analysis" and "reliability estimating techniques", are unsound, because, among other things, they exclude as "not credible" possibilities that may well happen in the real world. that the It is not surprising, then,y methodology and data of the report have been soundly and decisively criticised, or that official support for the report has now been withdrawn. 12 Moreover, use of alternative methods and data indicates that there is a real possibility, a non-negligible probability of a serious accident. In response it is contended that, even if there is a non-negligible probability of a reactor accident, still that is 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 decision 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 otpions, which settles their �21. ethical status. The following assumptions are encountered in risk assessment as applied to energy options: Ai. If option a imposes (comparable) costs on fewer people than option b then option a is preferable to option Aii. b ; 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 13 accepted; therefore option a is acceptable. These assumptions are then applied as follows. be killed Since the number likely to eventually by nuclear power station catastrophe is less than the likely number killed by cigarette smoking, and since the risks of cigarette smoking are accepted; it follows that the risks of ntaclear power are acceptable. A little reflection reveals that this sort of risk assessment argument grossly violates the Transfer­ limiting principle. In order to obtain a proper ethical assessment we need a much fuller picture, and we need to know at least these things:costs and benefits go to the same parties; undertakes and is the person who voluntarily the risks also the person who primarily receives the benefits, as in driving or cigarette smoking, or are the costs imposed not benefit? Do the on other parties who do It is only if the parties are the same in the case of the options compared, and there are no such distributional problems, a basis would be soundly based. that a comparison on such This is rarely the case, and it is not so in the case of risk assessments of energy options. VI. OTHER SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL RISKS AND COSTS OF NUCLEAR DEVELOPMENT, ESPECIALLY NUCLEAR WAR. The problems already discussed by no means exhaust the environmental, health and safety 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 transportation of materials. Several of these stages involve hazards. risks in the nuclear cycle Unlike the special - of sabotage of plants, of theft of fissionable material, and of the further proliferation of nuclear armaments - these hazards �22. have parallels, if not exact equivalents, in other highly polluting methods of generating power, e.g. ’workers in the uranium mining industry sustain "the same 14 risk" of fatal and nonfatal injury as workers in the coal industry’. The problems are not unique to nuclear development. Other social and environmental problems - though endemic where dangerous large-scale industry operates in societies that are highly inegalitarian 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 large-scale industrial operation, radioactive pollution , such as uranium mining for instance produces, is especially a legacy of nuclear development, and a specially undesirable one, as rectification costs for dead radioactive lands and waterways reveal. Though sabotage is a threat to many large industries, sabotage of a nuclear reactor can have dire consequences, of a different order of magnitude from most industrial sabotage (where core A meltdown is not a possibility). Though theft of material from more dubious enterprises such as munitions works can pose threats to populations at large and can assist terrorism, no thefts for allegedly peaceful enterprises pose problems of the same order as theft of fissionable material. No other industry produces materials which so readily permit fabrication into such massive explosives. No other industry is, to sum it up, so vulnerable on so many fronts. In part to reduce its vulnerability, in part because of its long and continuing association with military activities, the nuclear industry is subject to, and encourages, several practices which (given their scale) run counter to basic features of free and open societies, crucial features such as personal liberty, freedom of association and of expression,and free access to information. These practices include secrecy, restriction of information, formation of special police and guard forces, espionage, curtailment of civil liberties. Already operators of nuclear installations are given extraordinary powers, in vetting employees, to investigate the background and activities not only of employees but also of their families and sometimes even of their friends. The installations themselves become armed camps, which especially offends British sensibilities. The U.K. Atomic Energy (Special Constables) Act of 1976 created a special armed force to guard nuclear installations ancl made it answerable ... to the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority. �23. These developments, and worse ones in West Germany and elsewhere,presage along with nuclear development increasingly authoritarian and anti-democratic That nuclear development appears to force such political societies. consequences tells heavily against it. Nuclear development is further indicted politically by the direct connection of nuclear power with nuclear war. It is true that ethical questions concerning nuclear war - for example, whether a nuclear war is justified, or just, under any circumstances, and if so what circumstances - are distinguishable from those concerning nuclear power. Undoubtedly, however, the spread of nuclear power is substantially increasing the technical means for engaging in nuclear war and so, to that extent, the opportunity for, and chances of, nuclear engagement. never accounted Since nuclear wars are positive goods, but are at best the lesser of major evils, nuclear wars are always highly ethically undesirable. The spread of nuclear power accordingly expands the opportunity for, and chances of, highly undesirable consequences. Finally the latter, so increasing these chances and opportunities, is itself undesirable, and therefore what leads to it, nuclear development is undesirable. This is, in outline, the argument from nuclear war against large-scale nuclear development. VII. 16 CONFLICT ARGUMENTS, AND BEGINNING QN NUCLEAR DEVELOPMENT. UNCOVERING THE IDEOLOGICAL BASES OF Much as with nuclear war, so given the cumulative case against nuclear development, only one justificatory that of appeal to overriding circumstances. route remains open, That appeal, to be ethically acceptable, must go beyond merely economic considerations. For, as observed, the consigner’s action, in the train parable, cannot be justified by purely economistic arguments, such as that his profits would rise, the company or the town would be more prosperous, or by appealing to the fact that some possibly uncomfortable changes would otherwise be needed. case: a Transfer-limiting principle applies. So it is also in the nuclear But suppose now the consigner argues that his action is justified because unless it is taken the town will die. 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, since the case still amountsjjone of transfer of costs and risks onto others. But such a conflict situation, where a given course of action, though normally undesirable, is alleged to be the lesser of two evils in a given case, is morally more problemthan cases aticaJVwhere Transfer-limiting principle is clearly violated,. Nuclear develop­ ment is often defended in this way, through Conflict arguments, to the effect that even though nuclear development does have undesirable features, nevertheless the alternatives are worse. Some of the arguments advanced to demonstrate conflict are based on competing commitments to present people, and others on competing obligations to future people, both of which are taken to override the obligations not to impose on the future significant risk of serious harm. The success of such conflict arguments requires the presentation of a genuine and exhaustive set of alternatives (or at least practical alternatives) and showing that the only alternatives to admittedly morally undesirable actions are even more undesirable ones. If some practical alternative which is not morally worse than the action to be justified is overlooked, suppressed, or neglected in the argument (for example, if in the train parable it turns out that the town has another option to starving or to shipping the parcel, namely earning a living in some other way), then the argument is defective and cannot readily be patched. Just such a suppression of practicable alternatives, we shall argue, has occurred in the argument designed to show that the alternatives to the nuclear option are even worse than the option itself. 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 indus­ trialised countries. Failure to develop nuclear energy, it is often claimed, would amount to denying them the opportunity to reach the standard of affluence we currently enjoy and would create unemployment and poverty in the industrialised nations. And this would be worse - a greater evil - than such things as violating the Transfer-limiting principle through nuclear development. The 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 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 tends to reduce available jobs through encouraging substitution of energy use for labour use. The argument that nuclear energy is needed for the third world is even less convincing. Nuclear energy is both politically and economically inappropriate for the third world, since it requires massive amounts of capital, requires numbers of imported scientists and engineers, �25. —-creates negligible local employment, and depends for its feasibility upon largely non-existent utility systems - e.g. established electricity transmission systems and back-up facilities, and sufficient electrical appliances to plug into the system. Politically it increases foreign dependence, adds to centralised entrenched power and reduces the chance for 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 (often for military purposes) by, their rulers, the westernised and often military elites in whose interests the economies of these countries are usually organised. than what it is: But that does not make the poverty argument anything other a fraud. There are well-known energy-conserving alternatives and the practical option of developing further alternative energy sources, alternatives some of which offer far better prospects for helping the poor, both in the third world and in industrial countries: coal and other fossil fuels, geothermal, and a range of solar options (including as well as narrowly solar sources, wind, water and tidal power). Another major argument advanced to show conflict, the Lights-going- out argument, pppeals to a set of supposedly overriding and competing obligations to future people. We have, it is said, a duty to pass on the immensely valuable things and institutions which our culture has developed. Unless our high-technology, high-energy industrial society is continued and fostered, our valuable institutions and traditions will fall into decay or be swept away. The argument is essentially that without nuclear power, without the continued level of material wealth it alone is assumed to make possible, the lights of our civilization will go out. Future people will be the losers. The argument does raise important questions about what is valuable in our society and what characteristics are necessary for a good society. the most part these large questions can be by-passed. But for The reason is that the argument adopts an extremely uncritical attitude to present high-technology societies, apparently assuming that they are uniformly and uniquely valuable. / it: It assumes that technological society is unmodifiable, that/cannot be changed in the direction of energy conservation or alternative (perhaps high technology) energy sources without collapse. These assumptions are all hard to accept. The assumption that technological society’s energy patterns are unmodifiable is especially so; after all, it has survived events such as world wars which required major social and technological restructuring and consumption modification. If western society’s demands for energy were (contrary to the evidence) totally unmodifiable without collapse, not only would it be committed to a program of increasing destruction, but much of its culture would be of dubious value to �26. future people, who would very likely, as a consequence of this destruction, lack the resource base which the argument assumes to be essential in the case of contemporary society. Since high- The uniformity assumption should certainly be challenged. technology societies appear not to be uniformly valuable, the central question is, what is necessary to maintain what is valuable in such a society? While it may be easy to argue that high energy consumption centrally controlled is necessary to maintain the political and economic status quo of such a society, it is not so easy to argue that it is essential to maintain what is valuable, and it is what is valuable, presumably,that we have a duty to pass on to the future. The evidence from history is that no very high level of material affluence There is good or energy consumption is needed to maintain what is valuable. reason in fact to believe that a society with much lower energy and resource consumption would better foster what is valuable than our own. But even if a radical change in these directions is independently desirable, it is unnecessary to presuppose such a change in order to see that the assumptions of the Lights-going-out argument are wrong. present The consumption of less energy than at need involve no reduction of well-being * and certainly a large increase over present levels of consumption assumed in the usual economic case for nuclear energy, is quite unnecessary. then What the nuclear strategy is really designed to do is not to prevent the lights going out in western civilisation, but to enable the lights to go on burning all the time - to maintain and even increase the wattage output of the Energy Extravaganza . In fact there is good reason to think that, far from the high energy consumption society fostering what is valuable, it will, especially if energy is obtained by means of nuclear fission, be positively inimical to it. which has become heavily dependent upon a A society highly centralised, controlled and garrisoned, capital- and expertise-intensive energy source, must be one which is highly susceptible to entrenchment of power, and one in which the forces which control this energy source, whether capitalist or bureaucratic, can exert enormous power over the political system and over people’s lives, even more then they do at present. Such a society would almost inevitably tend to become authoritatian and increasingly anti-democratic, as an outcome, among other things, of its response to the threat posed by dissident groups in the nuclear situation. 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 authoritarianism - while many valuable aspects, such as the degree of political freedom and those opportunities for personal and collective autonomy which exist, would be lost or diminished: political freedom �27. for example, is a high price to pay for consumerism and and energy extravagence. Again, as in the case of the poverty arguments, clear alternatives, alternative social and political choices, which do not involve such unacceptable consequences, are available. The alternative to the high technology-nuclear option is not a return to the cave, the loss of all that is valuable, but either the adoption of an available alternative such as coal for power or, better,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 argument, as a moral conflict argument, accordingly fails. Thus the further escape route, the appeal to conflict, is, like the appeal to futurity, 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-scale nuclear development is a crime against the future is inevitable. Closed also, in the much same way, are the escape routes to other arguments (from reactor meltdown, radiation emissions, etc.) for concluding that nuclear development is unacceptable. In sum, nuclear development is morally unacceptable on several grounds. VIII. SOCIAL OPTIONS : SHALLOW AND DEEP ALTERNATIVES. The future 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 associated phenomena such as acid rain and atmospheric heating, not to mention the despoliation caused by extensive strip mining, all of which will result from its use in meeting very high projected consumption figures. the Transfer-limiting principle : Such an option would, moreover, also violate for it would impose widespread costs on nonbeneficiaries for some concentrated benefits to some profit takers and to some users who do not pay the full costs of production and replacement. To these main conventional options a third is often added which emphasizes softer and more benign technologies, such as those of solar energy and hydroelectricity. Such softer options - if suitably combined with energy conservation measures (for there are solar ways, as well as nuclear ways, of energy extravagance and of producing unnecessary trivia which answer to no genuine needs) - can avoid the ethical objections to nuclear power. choice is not however technological, The deeper nor merely/individual/ but Social, and involves the restructuring of production away from energy intensive uses and, at a more basic level, a change to nonconsumeristic, less consumptive life­ styles and social arrangements^ These more fundamental choices between social alternatives, conventional technologically-oriented discussion of energy options tends to obscure. It is not just a matter of deciding in which way to meet the �28. unexamined goals nuclear development aspires to meet, but also a matter of examining the goals themselves. That is, we are not merely faced with the question of comparing different technologies for meeting some fixed or given demand or level of consumption, and of trying to see how best to meet these; we are also faced, and primarily, with the matter of examining those alleged needs and the cost of a society that creates them. It is doubtful that any technology, however benign in principle, will be likely to leave a tolerable world for the future if it is expected to meet unbounded and uncontrolled energy consumption and demands. Even more benign technologies may well be used in a way which creates costs for future people and which are^' them. ^likely to result in a deteriorated world being handed on to In short, even more benign technologies may lead to violation of the Transmission ^Requirement. Consider, to illustrate, the effect on the world s forests, commonly counted as a solar resource, should they be extensively used for production of methanol or of electricity by woodchipping. While few would object to the use of genuine waste material for energy production, 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 forests. The effects of such additional demands on the maintenance of the forests are often dismissed by the simple expedient of waving around the label "renewable resources". Many forests are in 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 imminent. It certainly has begun in many regions, and many forest types, especially rain- forest types, are now, and rapidly, being lost for the future. The addition of a major further and not readily limitable demand pressure for energy on top of the present demands is one which anyone with both a realistic appreciation of the conduct of forestry operations and a concern for the 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 much of Europe at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, again for energy purposes, could be extensive and devastating erosion in steeper lands and tropical areas, desertification in more arid regions, possible climatic change, and massive impoverishment of natural ecosystems, including enormous loss of natural species. Some of us do not want to pass on, and by the Transmission principles 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 �29. products or polluted by coal products. illustrates, a mere switch to In short, as the forest situation more benign technologies - important though this is - without any more basic structural and social change, is inadequate. The deeper social option involves challenging and beginning to alter a social structure which promotes consumerism, consumption far beyond genuine needs, and an economic structure which encourages increasing use of highly energy-intensive modes of production. The social change option tends to be obscured in most discussions of energy options and of how to meet energy needs, in part because it does question underlying values of current social arrangements. The conventional discussion proceeds by taking alleged demand (often conflated with wants or needs) 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 and 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 want deep freezers, air conditions, power gadgets, .... authoritarian to prevent them from satisfying these wants. from created wants It would be Such an argument conveniently ignores the social framework in which such needs and wants arise or are produced. To point to the determination of many such wants at the framework level is not however to assume that they are entirely determined at the framework level (e.g. by industrial organisation) and there is no such thing as individual choice or determination at all. It is to see the social framework as a major factor in determining certain kinds of choices, such as those for travel, and kinds of infrastructure, and to see apparently individual choices made in such matters as being channelled and directed by a social framework determined largely in the interests of corporate and private profit and advantage. The social change option is a hard option, insofar as it will be difficult to implement politically; but it is ultimately the only way of avoiding the passing on of serious costs to future people. reasons than such ethical ones for taking it: And there are other sorts of it is the main, indeed the only sort of option,open to those who adopt what is now called a deep ecological perspective, as contrasted with a shallow ecological outlook which regards the natural world and its nonhuman denizens as not worthwhile in themselves but only of value in as much as they answer back to human interests. The deep ecological perspective is an integral part of the Alternative Ecological Paradigm and is incompatible with central theses of the Dominant Social Paradigm (which is essentially the ideology of classical and neoclassical economics) �30. and its variants (roughly, what are called State Socialism, and Democratic Socialism)^ It is incompatible with such assumptions as that the natural environment is of value only as a resource, is by and large hostile, but is controllable in human interests,and with the further domination over nature themes of the Dominant Paradigm and its variants. The conflict between Alternative and Dominant Paradigms, which is fast increasing, extends of course far beyond attitudes to the natural world, since core values of the Dominant Paradigm such as the merits of unimpeded economic growth and material progress are at stake; the conflict involves fundamental differences over the whole front of economical, political and social arrangements. The conflict underlies much of the nuclear debate, insofar as it is not specifically limited to questions of technological fixes, but takes up the 20 basic ethical issues and the social questions to which they lead. The ethical requirements already defended and applied bring us out, when followed through, on the Alternative side of the paradigm conflict, and accordingly lead to the difficult social change option. The social changes that the deep alternative requires will be strongly resisted because they mean changes in current social organisation and power structure. To the extent that the option represents some kind of threat to parts of present political and economic arrangements, it is not surprising that official energy option discussion proceeds by misrepresenting and often obscuring it. But difficult as it is to suitably alter "the system,” especially one with such far-reaching effects on the prevailing power structure, it is imperative to try: we are all on the nuclear train. �FOOTNOTES This paper is a condensation of an early version of our ’Nuclear 1. power - ethical, social, and political dimensions’ (ESP for short, available from the authors), which in turn grew out of Routley (i.e. the work so referred For help with the condensation we are very to in the reference list). considerably indebted to the editors. In the condensation, we simplify the structure of the argument and suppress underlying political and ideological dimensions (for example, the large measure of responsibility of the USA for spreading nuclear reactors around the world, and thereby in enhancing the chances of nuclear disasters, including nuclear war). We also considerably reduce a heavy load of footnotes and references designed and needed to help make good many of our claims. Further, in order to contain references to a modest length, reference to primary sources has often been replaced by reference through secondary sources. Little difficulty should be encountered however in tracing fuller references through secondary sources or in filling out much important background material from work cited herein. For example, virtually all the data cited in sections I and VII is referenced in Routley. 2. At worst ESP can always be consulted. 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-setting matters as the likelihood of a core meltdown of (lightwater) reactors, much more information is required. For many assessment purposes however, some knowledge of economic fallacies and decision theory is at least as important as knowledge of nuclear technology. 3. Naturally the effect on humans is not the only factor that has to be taken into account in arriving at moral assessments. Nuclear radiation, 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 example, can hardly improve its case, it suffices if the case against it can be made out solely in terms of its effects on human life in the conventional way. �For reference to and a brief discussion of (human-oriented) simulation models 4. respects. see Goodin, p.428. The Opportunity-cost argument is also defective in other It presupposes not merely the (mistaken) reductions involved in the contraction of the ethical domain to the economic; it also presupposes that the proper methods for decision which affect, the choice, apply discounting. future, such as that of energy But, as Goodin argues, more appropriate decision rules do not allow discounting. 5. This is one of the reasons why expected utility theory, roughly cost-benefit analysis with probability frills, is inadequate as a decision method in such contexts. 6. Apparent exceptions to the principle such as taxation (and redistribution of income generally) vanish when wealth is construed (as it has to be if taxation is to be properly justified) as at least partly a social asset unfairly monopolised by a minority of the population. Examples such as that of motoring dangerously do not constitute counterexamples to the principle; for one is not morally entitled to so motor. 7. For details, and as to how the official analyses become arguments against nuclear development when some attempt is made to take the ignored costs into account, see Shrader-Frechette, p. 55 ff. 8. See Routley, p. 160. 9. For much further discussion of the points of the preceding two para­ graphs, see Shrader-Frechette, p. 35 ff.; and also Nader 10. & Abbotts. Most of the reactors in the world are of this type; see Gyorgy. 11. See Shrader-Frechette, chapter 4. 12. See Shrader-Frechette. shortcomings A worthwhile initial view of the of the Rassmussen report may be reached by combining the critique in Shrader-Frechette with that in Nader 13. There are variations on Ai against numbers such as probabilities. and Aii & Abbotts. which multiply costs In this way risks, construed as probable costs, can be taken into account in the assessment. risks may be assessed (Alternatively, through such familiar methods as insurance). �A principle varying Aii’. a Aii, and formulated as follows: is ethically acceptable if (for some b) a includes no more risks than b and b is socially accepted, was the basic ethical principle in terms of which the Cluff Lake Board of Inquiry recently decided that nuclear power development in Saskatchewan is ethically acceptable: see Cluff Lake Board of Inquiry Department of Environment, Government of Saskatchewan, 1978, Final Report, p. 305 and p. 288. In this report, a is nuclear power and b is either activities clearly accepted by society as alternative power sources. other applications b In has been taken as cigarette smoking, motoring, mining and even the Vietnam war (.’ ) . The points made in the text do not exhaust the objections to principles Ai - Aii1. The principles are certainly ethically substantive, since an ethical consequence cannot be deduced from nonethical premisses, but they have an inadmissible conventional origin of b ; b character. For look at the may be socially accepted though it is no longer socially acceptable, or though its social acceptibility is no longer so clearcut 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 Aii', for instance, for the argument to begin to look convincing is that 'ethically acceptable' rather than 'socially accepted'. b is But even with the amendments the principles are invalid, for the reasons given in the text, and others. It is not disconcerting that principles of this type do not work. It would be sad to see yet another area lost to the experts, ethics to actuaries. 14. See Shrader-Frechette, p. 15. 15. Goodin 16. The argument is elaborated in ESP. 17. For some of the more philosophically important material on p. 433. alternative nonconsumeristic work cited in V. and R. Routley, .social arrangements and lifestyles, see 'Social theories, self management and environmental problems’ in Mannison et al, where a beginning is made on working out one set of alternatives, those of a pluralistic anarchism. �18. The parlous situation of the world’s tropical rainforests is explained in, for instance, Myers; the reasons are untangled in R. and V. Routley ’World rainforest destruction - the social causes’ (available from the authors). For a fuller account of the Dominant Social Paradigm and its 19. rival, the Alternative Environmental Paradigm, see "1 the main the table on p. 341 which encapsulates J" of the respective paradigms; Cotgrove and Duff, especially assumptions compare also Catton and Dunlap, especially p.33. Contemporary variants on the Dominant Social Paradigm are considered in ESP. The shallow/deep contrast as applied to ecological positions, which is an important component of the paradigm conflict, was introduced by Naess. For further explanation of the contrast and of the larger array of ecological positions into which it fits, see R. and V. Routley, ’Human chauvinism and environmental ethics’ in Mannison ^~^,et al, and the references there cited, especially to Rodman’s 20. work. The more elaborate argument of ESP sets the nuclear debate in the context of paradigm conflict. But it is also argued that, even within assumptions framework of the Dominant Social Paradigm and its variants, Ti. Nuclear development is not the rational choice among energy options. The main argument put up for nuclear development within the framework of the dominant paradigm is an Economic growth argument. It is the following version of the Lights-going-out argument (with economic growth duly standing in for material wealth, and for what is valuable.’ ) necessary to sustain economic growth. Nuclear power is Economic growth is desirable (for all the usual reasons, e.g. to increase the size of the pie, to postpone redistribution problems, etc.). Therefore nuclear power is desirable. The first premiss is part of US energy policy (see Shrader-Frechette, p.lll), But both and the second premiss is supplied by standard economics textbooks. premisses are defective, the second because what is valuable in economic growth can be achieved by (not without growth but) selective growth, which jettisons economic the heavy social and environmental costs carried by unqualified economic growth. More to the point, since the second premiss is an assumption of the Dominant Paradigm, the first premiss (or rather an appropriate and less vulnerable restatement of it) Paradigm standards. fails even by Dominant For of course nuclear power is not necessary that there are other, perhaps costlier alternatives. defended is some elaboration of the premiss : given The premiss usually Nuclear power is the economically best way to sustain economic growth, ’economically best’ �being filled out as ’most efficient’, ’cheapest’, ’having the most favourable benefit-cost ratio’, etc. Unfortunately for the argument, and for nuclear development schemes, nuclear power is none of these things decisively (unless a good deal of economic cheating - easy to do - is done). Tii. On proper Dominant Paradigm accounting, nuclear choices should generally be rejected, both as private utility investments and as public choices. Nuclear development is not economically viable but has been kept going, not by clear economic viability, but by massive subsidization of several types (discussed in Shrader-Flechette, Gyorgy and Nader & Abbotts). Even on variants of the Dominant Paradigm, nuclear development is not justified, as consideration of decision theory methods will reveal: Tiii. Whatever reasonable decision rule is adopted, the nuclear choice is rejected, as the arguments of Goodin on alternative decision rules help to show. What sustains the nuclear juggernaut is not the Dominant Paradigm or its variants, but contemporary corporate capitalism (or its state enterprise image) and associated third world imperialism, as the historical details of nuclear development both in developed countries and in less developed countries makes plain (for main details, see Gyorgy p. 307 ff.). And the practices of contemporary corporate capitalism and associated imperialism are not acceptable by the standards of either of the Paradigms or their variants : not ethically acceptable. they are certainly �REFERENCES USED Works especially useful for further investigation of the ethical issues raised by nuclear development are indicated with an asterisk (* ). S. Cotgrove and A. Duff, "Environmentalism, middle-class radicalism and politics’, Sociological Review W. R. Catton, Jr., and R. E. Dunlap, 28(2) (1980), 333-51. ’A new ecological paradigm for post exuberant sociology’ American Behavioral Scientist 24 (1980). 15-47. For Report : Ranger Uranium Environmental Inquiry First Report, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1977. *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. *D. Mannison, M. McRobbie and R. Routley (editors), Environmental Philosophy, RSSS, Australian National University, 1980. N. Myers, The Sinking Ark, Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1979. R. Nader and J. Abbotts, The Menace of Atomic Energy, Outback Press, Melbourne, 1977. *K. S. Shrader-Frechette, Nuclear Power and Public Policy, Reidel, Dordrecht, 1980. R. and V. Routley, ’Nuclear energy and obligations to the future’, Inquiry 21 (1978), 133-79. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Draft Papers Description An account of the resource Sylvan's literary executor encountered an archive in which “all his projects were current", since manuscripts were undated and unattributed. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document Richard and Vai Routley 1. NUCLEAR POWER - SOME ETHICAL AND SOCIAL DIMENSIONS 1 One hardly needs initiation into the dark mysteries of nuclear physics to contribute usefully to the debate now widely raging over nuclear power. While many important empirical questions are still unresolved, these do not really lie at the centre of the controversy. Instead, it is a debate about values... many of the questions which arise are social and ethical ones. I. THE TRAIN PARABLE AND THE NUCLEAR WASTE PROBLEM. train has just pulled out. passengers and freight. The train which is A long distance country crowded carries both At an early stop in the journey someone consigns as freight, to a far distant destination, a package which contains a highly toxic and explosive gas. This is packed in a very thin container which, as the consigner is aware, may well 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 the train should be derailed or involved in a collision, or if some passenger should interfere inadvertently or deliberately with the freight, perhaps trying to steal some of it. of these sorts of things have happened on some previous journeys. All 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 poisoned or sooner or later incur serious diseases. Most of us would roundly 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, or that the world needs his product and it is his duty to supply it, or that in any case he is not or the people on it. These sorts of excuses however would normally be seen as ludicrous when set in this context. not responsible for the train Unfortunately, similar excuses are often so seen when the consigner, again a (responsible) businessman,puts his workers1 health or other peoples’ welfare at risk. Suppose he says that it is his own and others’p ressing needs which justify his action. The company he controls, which produces the material as a by-product, is in bad financial 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 the whole company town, through loss of spending, will be worse off. The poor and unemployed of the town, whom he would otherwise have been able to help, will suffer especially. Few people would accept such grounds as justification. 2. Even where there are serious risks and costs to oneself or some group for whom one is concerned one is usually considered not to be entitled to simply transfer the heavy burden of those risks and costs onto other uninvolved parties, especially where they arise from one’s own, or one’s group’s chosen life-style. The matter of nuclear waste has many moral features which resemble the train case. How fitting the analogy is will become apparent as the argument progresses. There is no known proven safe way to package the highly toxic wastes generated by the nuclear plants that will be spread around the world as large-scale nuclear development goes ahead. The waste problem will be much more serious than that generated by the 50 or so reactors in use at present, with 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 toxic. For example, a millionth of a gramme of plutonium is enough to induce a lung cancer. A leak of even a part of the waste material could involve much loss of life, widespread disease and genetic damage, and contamination of immense areas of land. Wastes will include the reactors themselves, which will have to be abandoned after their expected life times of perhaps 40 years, and which, some have estimated, may require 1-1 million years to reach safe levels of radioactivity. Nuclear wastes must be kept suitably isolated from the environment for their entire active lifetime. For fission products the required storage period averages a thousand years or so, and for 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. Short-term methods of storage require continued human intervention, while proposed longer term methods are subject to both human inter­ ference 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 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 formations or in salt mines, are largely speculative and relatively untested, and have already proved 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 result in multilayered metal containers before rock deposit, simulation models 3. reveal that radioactive material may not remain suitably isolated from human environments.10 In short, the best present storage proposals carry very real possibilities of irradiating future people and damaging their environment. Given the 3 heavy costs which could be involved for the future, and given the known limits of technology, it is methodologically 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 r not only have present proposals, and subject to the same inadequacies. For instance,^/none of the proposed methods for safe storage has been properly tested, but they may well prove to involve unforeseen difficulties and risks when an attempt is made to put them into practice on a commercial scale. Only a method that could provide a rigorous guarantee of safety over the storage period, that placed safety beyond reasonable doubt, would be acceptable. It is difficult to see how such rigorous guarantees could be given concerning either the geological or future human factors. But even if an economically viable, rigorously safe long term storage method could be devised, there is the problem of guaranteeing that it would be universally and invariably used. The assumption that it would be (especially if, as appears likely, such a method proved expensive economically and politically) seems to presuppose a level of efficiency, perfection, and concern for the future which has not previously been encountered in human affairs, and has certainly not been conspicuous in the nuclear industry. The risks imposed on the future by proceeding with nuclear development are, then, significant. to bear Perhaps 40,000 generations of future people could be forced significant risks resulting from the provision of the (extravagant) energy use of only a small proportion of the people of 10 generations. Nor is the risk of direct harm from the escape or misuse of radioactive materials the only burden the nuclear solution imposes on the future. Because the energy provided by nuclear fission is merely a stop gap, it seems probable that in due course the same problem, that of making a 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. Their world will most likely be a world which is seriously depleted of non-renewable resources, and in which such renewable resources as forests and soils as remain, resources which inevitably form an important part of the basis of life, are run-down or destroyed. Such points tell against the idea that future people must be, if not direct beneficiaries of energy from nuclear fission, at least indirect beneficiaries. The "solution" then is to buy time for contemporary society at a price which not only creates serious problems for future people but which reduces their ability to cope with these problems. Like the consigner in the train parable, contemporary industrial society proposes, in order to get itself out of a mess arising from its own life-style - the creation of economies dependent on an abundance of non-rerewable 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 in the lifetime of those now living and their immediate descendants, just as the consigner’s action avoids uncomfortable changes for him and those in 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. If we apply to the nuclear situation the standards of behaviour and moral principles generally acknowledged (in principle, if not so often in fact) in the contemporary world, it is not easy to avoid the conclusion that nuclear development involves injustice with respect to the future on a grand scale. There appear to be only two plausible ways of trying to avoid such a conclusion. First, it might be argued that the moral principles and obligations which we acknowledge for the contemporary world and perhaps the immediate future do not apply to those 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 to imply that there are no circumstances in which such an action might be justifiable. As in the case of the consigner of the package there is a need to consider what these justifying circumstances might be, and whether they apply in the present case. We consider these possible escape routes for the proponent of nuclear development in turn. I II. OBLIGATIONS TO THE (DISTANT) FUTURE. The especially problematic area is that of the distant (i.e. non-immediate) future, the future 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 obligations 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 (democratic and other) institutions which do not take due account of the interests of future creatures. 5. Moral philosophers have, predictably, differed on questions of obligations to distant future creatures. 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. Others 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 there are no moral obligations to the future beyond those perhaps 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 effect of our actions on future people. from the Of those philosophers who say, or whose views imply that we do not have obligations to the (non-immediate) future, many have based this view on accounts of moral obligation which are built on relations which presuppose some degree of temporal or spatial contiguity. Thus, moral obligation is seen as presupposing various relations which could not hold between people widely separated in time (or sometimes in space). Let us call the position that we have no obligations to (distant) future people the No­ constraints position. Among suggested bases or grounds of moral obligation for the position, which would rule out obligations to the non-immediate future, are these. Firstly, there are those accounts which require that someone to whom a moral obligation is held be able to claim his rights or entitlement. People in the distant future will not be able to claim rights and entitlements against us, and of course they can do nothing to enforce any claims they might have against us. Secondly, there are those accounts which base moral obligations on social or legal convention, for example a convention which would require punishment of offenders or at least some kind of social enforcement. But plainly these and other conventions will not be invariant over change in society and amendment of legal conventions; hence they will not be invariant over time. Also future people have no way of enforcing their interests or punishing offending predecessors. 6. The No-constraints view is a very difficult one to sustain. 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 the earth in the distant future would be wiped out as a direct and predictable result of the action. The no-constraints position clearly implies that this is an acceptable moral enterprise, that whatever else we might legitimately criticize in the scientists’ experiment (perhaps its being over-expensive or badly designed) we cannot lodge a moral protest about the damage it will do to future people. The no-constraints position also endorses as morally acceptable the following sorts of policy:A firm discovers it can make a handsome profit from mining, processing and manufacturing a new type of material which, although it causes no problem for present people or their immediate descendants, will over a period of hundreds of years decay into a substance which will cause an enormous epidemic of cancer among the inhabitants of the earth at that time. According to the no-constraints view the firm is free to act in its own interests, without any consideration for the harm it does remote future people. Such counterexamples to the No-constraints position, which are easily varied and multiplied, might seem childlishly obvious. Yet this view is far from being a straw man; not only have several philosophers endorsed this position, but it is a clear implication 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 No-constraints position have not considered such examples, despite their being clearly implied by their position. We suspect that (we certainly hope that) when it is brought out that their position admits such counterexamples, that without any constraints we are free to cause pointless harm for example, most of those who opted for this position would want to assert that it was not what they intended. What many of those who have put forward the No-constraints position seem to have had in mind (in denying moral obligation) is rather that future people can look after themselves, that we are not responsible for their lives. The 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, in the counterexample 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, most notably the obligation to take account in 7. 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 resposible 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. In just the same way, the fact that one does not have or has not acquired an obligation to some stranger with whom one has never been involved does not imply that one is free to do what one likes with respect to him, for example to rob him or to seriously harm him when this could be avoided. These difficulties for the No-constraints position result in part because of a failure to make an important distinction. Some of our obligations to others arise because we have voluntarily entered into some agreement with them - for example, we have made a promise. Other obligations, however, such as our duty not to damage or harm someone, do not assume that an agreement has been struck between us. former kind acquired obligations Let us call obligations of the and those of the latter unacquired obligations. There is a considerable difference in the type of responsibility associated with each. In the case of acquired obligations responsibility arises because one should do something which one can fail to do, e.g. keep a promise. In the case of unacquired duties responsibility arises as a result of being a causal agent who is aware of the consequences or probable consequences of his action, a responsibility that is not dependent on one’s having performed some act in the past (e.g., made a promise). Our obligations to future people clearly are of unacquired, not acquired obligations, a fact the No-constraints position simply fails to take into account. These obligations arise as a result of our ability to produce causal effects of a reasonably predictable nature, whether on our contemporaries or on those in the distant future. Thus, to return to the train parable, the consigner cannot argue in justification of his action that he has, for example, never assumed or acquired responsibility for the passengers, that he does not know them and therefore has no love or sympathy for them and that they are not part of his moral community; in short, that he has acquired no obligation, and has no special obligations to help them. All that 8. one needs to argue concerning the train, and in the nuclear case, is that there are moral obligations against imposing harm for instance which are not specially , , . , , , , , all obligat to the distant acquired. Nor can this claim be rebutted by the pretence th uture involve heroic self sacrifice, something "above and beyond" what is normally required. 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 III. ATTEMPTS TO REDUCE OBLIGATIONS TO THE FUTURE. In evading these difficulties the No-constraints position may be qualified rather than wholly abandoned. According to the Qualified position we are not entirely unconstrained There are obligations, even to distant future with respect to the distant future. people, 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 costs and benefits (and so of future interests) is obtained by application over time of a discount rate, so discounting costs and risks to future people. The attempt to apply economics as a moral theory, something that is becoming increasingly common, can lead then to the Qualified position. What is objectionable in such an approach is that economics must operate within the bounds of acknowledged non-acquired moral constraints, just as in practice it operates within legal constraints. What economics cannot legitimately do is determine what these constraints are. There are, moreover, alternative economic theories and simply to adopt, without further ado, one which discounts the future, giving much less importance to the interests of future people, is to beg all the questions at issue. Among the arguments that economists offer for generally discounting the future, the most threadbare is based on the Rosy-future assumption, that future generations will be better off than present ones (and so better placed to handle the waste problem). generations may well not Since there is mounting evidence that future be better off then present ones, especially in things that matter, no argument for discounting the interests of future generations on this basis can carry much weight. For the waste problem to be handed down 9. to the future generations, 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 that they can (easily) carry and control the nuclear freight. A more plausible argument for discounting, the Opportunity-cost argument, builds directly It is argued from the fact on the notion of opportunity cost. that a dollar gained now is worth much more than a dollar received in the nonimmediate future (because the first dollar could meanwhile be invested at compound interest), that discounting is required to obtain equivalent monetary values. This same line of reasoning is then applied to the allocation of resources. Thus, compensation - which is what the waste problem is taken to come to economically - costs much less now than later, e.g. a few pennies set aside (e.g. in a trust fund) in the future, if need be, will suffice to compensate eventually for any victims of remote radioactive waste leakage. beset this approach. Two problems First, there are, presently at least, insurmountable practical difficulties about applying such discounting. how to determine appropriate future discount rates. that the argument depends on a false assumption. We simply do not know A more serious objection is It is not true that value, or damages, can always be converted into monetary equivalents. There is no clear "monetary compensation" for a variety of damages, including cancer, loss of life, a lost species. The discounting theme, however argued for, is inadequate, because it leads back in practice to the No-constraints position. discounting imposes an " economic horizon" The reason is that beyond which nothing need be considered, since any costs or benefit which might arise are, when discounted back to the present, negligible. A different argument for the Qualified position, the Probabilities argument, avoids the objections from cases of certain damage through appeal to probability considerations. The distant future, it is argued, is much more uncertain than the present and immediate future, so that probabilities are consequently lower, perhaps even approaching or coinciding with zero for any hypothesis concerning the distant future. Thus, the argument continues, the interests of future people must (apart from exceptional cases where there is an unusually high degree of certainty) count for (very much) less than those of present and neighbouring people where (much) higher probabilities 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 future against a much lower probability of indeterminate costs to an indeterminate number of 10. distant future people, the issue would normally be decided in favour of the present, assuming anything like similar costs and benefits were involved. Firstly, probabilities involving distant badly flawed. is however The argument future situations are not always less than those concerning the immediate future in the way the argument supposes. problems often Moreover the outcomes of some moral do not depend on a high level of probability. In many 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. Nor, of course, can it be assumed that anything like similarly weighted costs and benefits are involved in the nuclear case, especially if it is a question of risking poisoning some of the earth for half a million or so years, with consequent risk of serious harm to thousands of generations of future people, in order to obtain quite doubtful, or even trivial, benefits for some present people, fin the shape of the opportunity to continue (unnecessarily) high energy use. And even the costs and benefits were comparable or evenly weighted, such if an argument would be defective, since an analogous argument would show that the consigner’s action in the train parable, is acceptable provided the benefit (e.g. the profit the company stood to gain from imposing significant risks on < other people) was sufficiently large. Such a cost-benefit approach to moral and decision, problems, with or is quite inadequate when different parties without the probability frills, are involved or when cases of conflict of interest involving moral obligations are at issue. permissible 5 For example, such a cost-benefit approach would imply that it is for a company to injure, or very likely injure, some innocent party provided only that the company stands to make a sufficiently large gain from it, that costs to some group are more than morally larger benefits to another group. transferred in any compensated for by But costs or benefits are not legitimately simple way from one group to another. The often appealed to maxim "If you (or your group) want the benefits you have to accept the costs” is one thing, but the maxim "If I (or my group) want the benefits then you have to accept the costs (or some of them at least)" is another and 11. very different thing. It is a widely accepted moral principle that one is not, in general, entitled to simply transfer costs of a significant kind arising from an activity which benefits oneself onto other parties who are not involved £ in the activity and are not beneficiaries. This Transfer-limiting principle is especially clear in cases of which a thalidomide manufacturing and marketing company is one, where the significant costs include an effect on life or health or a risk thereof, and where the benefit to the benefitting party is of a noncrucial or dispensible nature. The principle is of fundamental importance in the nuclear debate, and appears again and again : it applies not merely to the waste problem but as regards several other liabilities of nuclear development, e.g. the risk of nuclear war, the matter of reactor meltdown. In particular, the principle invalidates the comparison, heavily relied on in building a case for the acceptability of the nuclear risks, 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 overwhelming extent, those who bear the serious health costs and risks involved. In contrast the users and supposed beneficiearies of nuclear energy will be risking not only, or even primarily, their own lives and health, but also that of others who may not be beneficiaries at all— who may be just the opposite! More generally, the distribution of costs and damage in such a fashion, i.e. on to non-beneficiaries, is a characteristic of certain serious forms of pollution, and is among its morally objectionable features. production, from nuclear or fossil pollution. fuel sources, can cause or lead to serious Thus from the Transfer-limiting important necessary condition for energy options: an energy option Large-scale energy principle emerges an To be morally acceptable should not involve the transfer of significant costs or risks of harm onto parties who are not involved, who do not use or do not benefit correspondingly from the energy source. Included in the scope of 12. this condition, which nuclear development violates , are future people, i.e. not merely people living at the present time but also future generations (those of the next towns). A further corollary of the principle is the Transmission Principle, that we should not hand the world we have so exploited on to our successors in substantially worse shape than we "received” it. For if we did then that would be a significant transfer of costs. The Transfer-limiting principle can be derived from certain ethical theories (e.g. those of a deontic cast such as Kant’s and Rawls’) and from common precepts (such as the Golden Rule), where one seriously considers putting oneself in another’s position. But the principle is perhaps best defended, on a broader basis, inductively, by way of examples. embroider the train parable, the company town decides to Suppose, to solve its disposal problem by shipping its noxious waste to another town down the line, which (like future towns) lacks the means to ship it back or to register due protest. The inhabitants of this town are then forced to face the problem either of undertaking the expensive and difficult disposal process or of sus­ taining risks to their own lives and health. Most of us would regard this kind of transfer of costs as morally unacceptable, however much the consigner’s company town flourishes. IV. UNCERTAINTY AND INDETERMINACY ARGUMENTS FOR REDUCED RESPONSIBILITY. Many of the arguments designed to show that we cannot be expected to take too much account of the effects of our actions on the distant future appeal to uncertainty. There are two main components to the General Uncertainty argument, capable of separation, but frequently tangled up. Both arguments are mistaken, the first, an argument from ignorance, on ai priori second on a posteriori grounds. follows:- grounds, the The Argument from ignorance concerned runs as In contrast to the exact information we can obtain about the present, the information we can obtain about the effects of our actions on the distant future is unreliable, woolly and highly speculative. But we cannot base assessments of how we should act on information of this kind, especially when 13. accurate information is obtainable about the present which would indicate Therefore we must regretfully ignore the uncertain effects of different action. our actions on the distant future. ignorance A striking example of the argument from at work is afforded by official US analyses favouring nuclear development, which ignore (the extensive) costs of waste control on the 7 grounds of uncertainty. the argument concerned is this J- More formally and crudely One only has obligations to the future if these obligations are based on reliable information. distant future. There is no reliable information at present as regards the Therefore one has no obligations to the distant future. This argument is essentially a variant on a sceptical argument 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 such do act on the basis of^"unreliable" information, which the sceptic as regards the future conveniently labels "uncertainty". In moral situations in the present, assessments of what to do often take account of risk and probability, even quite low probabilities. Consider again the train parable. 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. that there is a significant risk of harm It is enough in this sort of case. It does not matter if the decreased well-being of the consigner is certain and that the 14. prospects of the passengers quite uncertain. It is wrong to ship the gas. But if we do not require certainty of action to apply moral constraints in contemporary affairs, why should we require a much higher standard of certainty in the future? The unwarranted insistence on certainty as a necessary condition before moral consideration can be given to the distant future, then, amounts to a flagrant double standard. According to the second argument, the Practical-uncertainty argument, even if in theory we have obligations to the future, we cannot in practice take the interests of future people into account because uncertainty about the distant future is so gross that we cannot determine what the likely consequences of actions on it will be. Therefore, however good our intentions to the people of the distant future are, in practice we have no choice but to ignore their interests. Given that moral principles are characteristically of universal implicational form, e.g. of forms such as "if x has character then x is wrong, for every (action) sharply thus: x”, h the argument may be stated more We can never obtain the information about future actions which would enable us to detach the antecedent of the implication. Therefore, even if in theory moral principles do extend to future people, in practice they cannot be applied to obtain clear conclusions. It is true that if the distant future really were so grossly uncertain , that in every case it was impossible to determine in any way better than chance what the effects of present action would be, and whether any given action would help or hinder future people, then moral principles, although applicable in theory to the future, would not in practice yield any clear conclusions about how to act. In this event the distant future would 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 argument has to assume. There are some areas where uncertainty is 15. not so great as to exclude constraints on action. For example, we may have little idea what the fashions will be in a hundred years or, to take another morally-irrelevant factor, what brands of ice 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 the face of the earth of that wonderful variety of non-human life which at present makes it such a rich and interesting place. 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. For this sort of reason, the Practical uncertainty argument should be rejected. Through the defects of the preceding arguments, we can see the defects in a number of widely employed uncertainty arguments used to write off pxQhabLe. harm to future people as outside the scope of proper consideration. Most of these popular moves employ both of the uncertainty arguments as suits the case, switching from one to the other. For example, we may be told that we cannot really take account of future people because we cannot be sure that they will exist or that their tastes and wants will not be completely different from our own, to the point where they will not suffer from our exhaustion of resources or from the things that would affect us. 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 to whom we are morally committed. 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 16. is again a mere outside possibility. 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. 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. Closely related to uncertainty arguments are arguments premissed on the indeterminacy of the future. For example, according to the Indeterminacy argument, the indeterminacy of the number and exact character of people at future times will prevent the interest of future people being taken into account where there is a conflict with the present. Since their numbers are indeterminate and their interests unknown how, 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 raised particularly by problems of sharing fixed quantities of resources among present and future people, for example oil, when the numbers of the latter are indeterminate. Such problems are indeed difficult, but they are not resolved by ignoring the claims Nor are distributional of the future. problems involving non-renewable resources as large and representative a class of moral problems concerning the future as the tendency to focus on them would suggest. It can be freely admitted, that there will be cases where the indeterminacy of aspects of the future will make conflicts very difficult to resolve or indeed irresoluble - no realistic ethical theory can give a precise answer to every ethical question. But, as the train parable again illustrates, there are cases where such difficulties do not hinder resolution, and cases of conflict which are not properly approached 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 case of nuclear power is like that. The failure of these various arguments reveals, what ca^e independentlys • argued from the universalisability features of • 1 moral principles, 8 K / thatA disqualify future people from full moral consideration or reduce their claims below the claims of present people. That is, we have the same general obligations 17. to future people as to the present; thus there is the same obligation to take account of them and their interests in what we do, to be careful in our actions, to take account of the probability (and not just the certainty) of our actions causing harm or damage, and to see, other things being equal, that we do not act so as to rob them of what is necessary for the chance of a good life. Uncertainty and indeterminacy do not relieve us of these obligations. V. PROBLEMS OF SAFE NUCLEAR OPERATION : REACTOR EMISSIONS AND CORE MELTDOWN. The ethical problems with nuclear power are by no means confined to waste storage Just as remoteness in time does not erode obligations or and future creatures. entitlement to just treatment, neither does location in space, or a particular geographical position. Hence several further problems arise, to which principles and arguments like those already arrived at in considering the waste problem apply. For example, if one group (social unit, or state) decides to dump its radioactive wastes in the territory or region of another group, or not to prevent its (radioactive) pollution entering the territory of another group, then it imposes risks and costs on presently existing people of the second group, in much the way that present nuclear developments impose costs and risks on future people. There are differences however : distant people spatially cannot be discounted in quite the way that future people can be, though their interests and objectives can be ignored or overridden. People living in the vicinity of a nuclear reactor are subject to special costs and risks. One is radioactive pollution, because reactors routinely discharge radioactive materials into the air and water near Emission problem. the plant : hence the Such ’’normal” emission during plant operation of low level radiation carries carcinogenic and mutagenic costs. While there are undoubtedly costs, the number of cancers and the precise extent of genetic damage induced by exposure to such radiation are both uncertain. If our ethical principles permitted free transfer of costs and risks from one person to another, the ethical issue directly raised by nuclear emissions would be : what extent of 18. cancer and genetic damage, if any, is permissibly traded for the advantages of nuclear power, and under what conditions? Since, however, risks and benefits are NOT (morally) transferable this way - recall the Transfer-limiting principle - such a cost-benefit approach to the risks nuclear emission poses for those who live near a reactor cannot with justice be approached in this fashion And these risks are real! In the USA, people who live within 50 miles of a nuclear power plant bear a risk of cancer and genetic damage of as much as 50 times that borne by the population at large. And children living in this region are even more vulnerable, since they are several times more likely to contract cancer through exposure than normal adults. The serious costs to these people cannot be justified by the alleged benefits for others, especially when these benefits could be obtained without these costs. Thus it is not just complacent to say It s a pity about Aunt Ethel dying of cancer, but the new airconditioners make life comfortable’. For such benefits to some as airconditioners provide, which can be alternatively obtained, for example by modification of buildings, can in no way compensate for what others suffer. Among the other strategies used in trying to persuade us that the imposition of radiation on minorities - most of whom have no genuine voice in the location of reactors in their environment and cannot move away without serious losses — is really quite alright is the Doubling argument. According to the US Atomic Energy Commission, who deployed this trick, it is permissable to double, through nuclear technology, the level of (natural) radiation that a population has received with apparently negligible consequences, the argument being that the additional amount (being equivalent is also likely to have negligible consequences. to the "natural" level) The increased amounts of radiation — with their large man-made component — are then accounted normal, and, it si claimed, 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, 19. 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 very strict standards by comparison with most other countries with planned nuclear reactors, permits radiation emissions very substantially in excess of the standards laid down; so the emission situation is much worse than what consideration of the standards would disclose. Furthermore, the monitoring of the standards "imposed" is entrusted to the nuclear operators themselves, scarcely disinterested parties. Thus public policy is determined not so as to guarantee public health, but rather to serve as a "public pacifier" while publicly-subsidized private nuclear operations a proceed relatively unhamperedi While radioactive emissions are an ordinary feature of reactor operation, reactor breakdown is, hopefully, not: official reports even try to make an accident of magnitude, as a matter of definition, an ’extraordinary nuclear occurrence’. But "definitions" notwithstanding, such accidents can happen, and almost have on several occasions (the most notorious being Three Mile Island): hence the Core-meltdown problem. If the cooling and emergency core cooling systems fail in American (light water) reactors, then the core melts and ’containment failure’ is likely, with the result that an area of 40,000 square miles could be radioactively 10 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 the size of Pennsylvania would be destroyed. Modern nuclear reactors are about five times the size of the reactor for which these conservative US figures (still the best available from official sources7 are given : the consequences of a similar accident with a modern reactor would accordingly be much greater. The consigner who risks the lives and well-being of passengers on the train acts inadmissibly. a government or government-endorsed utility appears to act in a way that does not differ in morally significant respects in 20. siting a nuclear reactor in a community, in planting such a dangerous package on the ’’community train”. More directly, the location of a nuclear reactor in a community, even if it should happen to receive a favourable benefit-cost analysis and other economic appraisal, would violate such ethical requirements as the Transfer-limiting principle. The advocates of nuclear power have, in effect, endeavoured to avoid questions of cost-transfer and equity, by shifting the dispute out of the extraordinary improbability ethical arena and into a technological dispute about about the^ of reactor malfunction. They have argued, in particular, what contrasts with the train parable, that there is no real possibility of a catastrophic nuclear accident. indeed in the 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. However, the mathematical models relied upon in this report, variously called "fault tree analysis" and "reliability estimating techniques", are unsound, because, among other things, they exclude as "not credible" possibilities that may well happen in the real world. that the It is not surprising, then,y methodology and data of the report have been soundly and decisively criticised, or that official support for the report has now been withdrawn. 12 Moreover, use of alternative methods and data indicates that there is a real possibility, a non-negligible probability of a serious accident. In response it is contended that, even if there is a non-negligible probability of a reactor accident, still that is 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 decision 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 otpions, which settles their 21. ethical status. The following assumptions are encountered in risk assessment as applied to energy options: Ai. If option a imposes (comparable) costs on fewer people than option b then option a is preferable to option Aii. b ; 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 13 accepted; therefore option a is acceptable. These assumptions are then applied as follows. be killed Since the number likely to eventually by nuclear power station catastrophe is less than the likely number killed by cigarette smoking, and since the risks of cigarette smoking are accepted; it follows that the risks of ntaclear power are acceptable. A little reflection reveals that this sort of risk assessment argument grossly violates the Transfer­ limiting principle. In order to obtain a proper ethical assessment we need a much fuller picture, and we need to know at least these things:costs and benefits go to the same parties; undertakes and is the person who voluntarily the risks also the person who primarily receives the benefits, as in driving or cigarette smoking, or are the costs imposed not benefit? Do the on other parties who do It is only if the parties are the same in the case of the options compared, and there are no such distributional problems, a basis would be soundly based. that a comparison on such This is rarely the case, and it is not so in the case of risk assessments of energy options. VI. OTHER SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL RISKS AND COSTS OF NUCLEAR DEVELOPMENT, ESPECIALLY NUCLEAR WAR. The problems already discussed by no means exhaust the environmental, health and safety 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 transportation of materials. Several of these stages involve hazards. risks in the nuclear cycle Unlike the special - of sabotage of plants, of theft of fissionable material, and of the further proliferation of nuclear armaments - these hazards 22. have parallels, if not exact equivalents, in other highly polluting methods of generating power, e.g. ’workers in the uranium mining industry sustain "the same 14 risk" of fatal and nonfatal injury as workers in the coal industry’. The problems are not unique to nuclear development. Other social and environmental problems - though endemic where dangerous large-scale industry operates in societies that are highly inegalitarian 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 large-scale industrial operation, radioactive pollution , such as uranium mining for instance produces, is especially a legacy of nuclear development, and a specially undesirable one, as rectification costs for dead radioactive lands and waterways reveal. Though sabotage is a threat to many large industries, sabotage of a nuclear reactor can have dire consequences, of a different order of magnitude from most industrial sabotage (where core A meltdown is not a possibility). Though theft of material from more dubious enterprises such as munitions works can pose threats to populations at large and can assist terrorism, no thefts for allegedly peaceful enterprises pose problems of the same order as theft of fissionable material. No other industry produces materials which so readily permit fabrication into such massive explosives. No other industry is, to sum it up, so vulnerable on so many fronts. In part to reduce its vulnerability, in part because of its long and continuing association with military activities, the nuclear industry is subject to, and encourages, several practices which (given their scale) run counter to basic features of free and open societies, crucial features such as personal liberty, freedom of association and of expression,and free access to information. These practices include secrecy, restriction of information, formation of special police and guard forces, espionage, curtailment of civil liberties. Already operators of nuclear installations are given extraordinary powers, in vetting employees, to investigate the background and activities not only of employees but also of their families and sometimes even of their friends. The installations themselves become armed camps, which especially offends British sensibilities. The U.K. Atomic Energy (Special Constables) Act of 1976 created a special armed force to guard nuclear installations ancl made it answerable ... to the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority. 23. These developments, and worse ones in West Germany and elsewhere,presage along with nuclear development increasingly authoritarian and anti-democratic That nuclear development appears to force such political societies. consequences tells heavily against it. Nuclear development is further indicted politically by the direct connection of nuclear power with nuclear war. It is true that ethical questions concerning nuclear war - for example, whether a nuclear war is justified, or just, under any circumstances, and if so what circumstances - are distinguishable from those concerning nuclear power. Undoubtedly, however, the spread of nuclear power is substantially increasing the technical means for engaging in nuclear war and so, to that extent, the opportunity for, and chances of, nuclear engagement. never accounted Since nuclear wars are positive goods, but are at best the lesser of major evils, nuclear wars are always highly ethically undesirable. The spread of nuclear power accordingly expands the opportunity for, and chances of, highly undesirable consequences. Finally the latter, so increasing these chances and opportunities, is itself undesirable, and therefore what leads to it, nuclear development is undesirable. This is, in outline, the argument from nuclear war against large-scale nuclear development. VII. 16 CONFLICT ARGUMENTS, AND BEGINNING QN NUCLEAR DEVELOPMENT. UNCOVERING THE IDEOLOGICAL BASES OF Much as with nuclear war, so given the cumulative case against nuclear development, only one justificatory that of appeal to overriding circumstances. route remains open, That appeal, to be ethically acceptable, must go beyond merely economic considerations. For, as observed, the consigner’s action, in the train parable, cannot be justified by purely economistic arguments, such as that his profits would rise, the company or the town would be more prosperous, or by appealing to the fact that some possibly uncomfortable changes would otherwise be needed. case: a Transfer-limiting principle applies. So it is also in the nuclear But suppose now the consigner argues that his action is justified because unless it is taken the town will die. 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, since the case still amountsjjone of transfer of costs and risks onto others. But such a conflict situation, where a given course of action, though normally undesirable, is alleged to be the lesser of two evils in a given case, is morally more problemthan cases aticaJVwhere Transfer-limiting principle is clearly violated,. Nuclear develop­ ment is often defended in this way, through Conflict arguments, to the effect that even though nuclear development does have undesirable features, nevertheless the alternatives are worse. Some of the arguments advanced to demonstrate conflict are based on competing commitments to present people, and others on competing obligations to future people, both of which are taken to override the obligations not to impose on the future significant risk of serious harm. The success of such conflict arguments requires the presentation of a genuine and exhaustive set of alternatives (or at least practical alternatives) and showing that the only alternatives to admittedly morally undesirable actions are even more undesirable ones. If some practical alternative which is not morally worse than the action to be justified is overlooked, suppressed, or neglected in the argument (for example, if in the train parable it turns out that the town has another option to starving or to shipping the parcel, namely earning a living in some other way), then the argument is defective and cannot readily be patched. Just such a suppression of practicable alternatives, we shall argue, has occurred in the argument designed to show that the alternatives to the nuclear option are even worse than the option itself. 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 indus­ trialised countries. Failure to develop nuclear energy, it is often claimed, would amount to denying them the opportunity to reach the standard of affluence we currently enjoy and would create unemployment and poverty in the industrialised nations. And this would be worse - a greater evil - than such things as violating the Transfer-limiting principle through nuclear development. The 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 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 tends to reduce available jobs through encouraging substitution of energy use for labour use. The argument that nuclear energy is needed for the third world is even less convincing. Nuclear energy is both politically and economically inappropriate for the third world, since it requires massive amounts of capital, requires numbers of imported scientists and engineers, 25. —-creates negligible local employment, and depends for its feasibility upon largely non-existent utility systems - e.g. established electricity transmission systems and back-up facilities, and sufficient electrical appliances to plug into the system. Politically it increases foreign dependence, adds to centralised entrenched power and reduces the chance for 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 (often for military purposes) by, their rulers, the westernised and often military elites in whose interests the economies of these countries are usually organised. than what it is: But that does not make the poverty argument anything other a fraud. There are well-known energy-conserving alternatives and the practical option of developing further alternative energy sources, alternatives some of which offer far better prospects for helping the poor, both in the third world and in industrial countries: coal and other fossil fuels, geothermal, and a range of solar options (including as well as narrowly solar sources, wind, water and tidal power). Another major argument advanced to show conflict, the Lights-going- out argument, pppeals to a set of supposedly overriding and competing obligations to future people. We have, it is said, a duty to pass on the immensely valuable things and institutions which our culture has developed. Unless our high-technology, high-energy industrial society is continued and fostered, our valuable institutions and traditions will fall into decay or be swept away. The argument is essentially that without nuclear power, without the continued level of material wealth it alone is assumed to make possible, the lights of our civilization will go out. Future people will be the losers. The argument does raise important questions about what is valuable in our society and what characteristics are necessary for a good society. the most part these large questions can be by-passed. But for The reason is that the argument adopts an extremely uncritical attitude to present high-technology societies, apparently assuming that they are uniformly and uniquely valuable. / it: It assumes that technological society is unmodifiable, that/cannot be changed in the direction of energy conservation or alternative (perhaps high technology) energy sources without collapse. These assumptions are all hard to accept. The assumption that technological society’s energy patterns are unmodifiable is especially so; after all, it has survived events such as world wars which required major social and technological restructuring and consumption modification. If western society’s demands for energy were (contrary to the evidence) totally unmodifiable without collapse, not only would it be committed to a program of increasing destruction, but much of its culture would be of dubious value to 26. future people, who would very likely, as a consequence of this destruction, lack the resource base which the argument assumes to be essential in the case of contemporary society. Since high- The uniformity assumption should certainly be challenged. technology societies appear not to be uniformly valuable, the central question is, what is necessary to maintain what is valuable in such a society? While it may be easy to argue that high energy consumption centrally controlled is necessary to maintain the political and economic status quo of such a society, it is not so easy to argue that it is essential to maintain what is valuable, and it is what is valuable, presumably,that we have a duty to pass on to the future. The evidence from history is that no very high level of material affluence There is good or energy consumption is needed to maintain what is valuable. reason in fact to believe that a society with much lower energy and resource consumption would better foster what is valuable than our own. But even if a radical change in these directions is independently desirable, it is unnecessary to presuppose such a change in order to see that the assumptions of the Lights-going-out argument are wrong. present The consumption of less energy than at need involve no reduction of well-being * and certainly a large increase over present levels of consumption assumed in the usual economic case for nuclear energy, is quite unnecessary. then What the nuclear strategy is really designed to do is not to prevent the lights going out in western civilisation, but to enable the lights to go on burning all the time - to maintain and even increase the wattage output of the Energy Extravaganza . In fact there is good reason to think that, far from the high energy consumption society fostering what is valuable, it will, especially if energy is obtained by means of nuclear fission, be positively inimical to it. which has become heavily dependent upon a A society highly centralised, controlled and garrisoned, capital- and expertise-intensive energy source, must be one which is highly susceptible to entrenchment of power, and one in which the forces which control this energy source, whether capitalist or bureaucratic, can exert enormous power over the political system and over people’s lives, even more then they do at present. Such a society would almost inevitably tend to become authoritatian and increasingly anti-democratic, as an outcome, among other things, of its response to the threat posed by dissident groups in the nuclear situation. 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 authoritarianism - while many valuable aspects, such as the degree of political freedom and those opportunities for personal and collective autonomy which exist, would be lost or diminished: political freedom 27. for example, is a high price to pay for consumerism and and energy extravagence. Again, as in the case of the poverty arguments, clear alternatives, alternative social and political choices, which do not involve such unacceptable consequences, are available. The alternative to the high technology-nuclear option is not a return to the cave, the loss of all that is valuable, but either the adoption of an available alternative such as coal for power or, better,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 argument, as a moral conflict argument, accordingly fails. Thus the further escape route, the appeal to conflict, is, like the appeal to futurity, 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-scale nuclear development is a crime against the future is inevitable. Closed also, in the much same way, are the escape routes to other arguments (from reactor meltdown, radiation emissions, etc.) for concluding that nuclear development is unacceptable. In sum, nuclear development is morally unacceptable on several grounds. VIII. SOCIAL OPTIONS : SHALLOW AND DEEP ALTERNATIVES. The future 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 associated phenomena such as acid rain and atmospheric heating, not to mention the despoliation caused by extensive strip mining, all of which will result from its use in meeting very high projected consumption figures. the Transfer-limiting principle : Such an option would, moreover, also violate for it would impose widespread costs on nonbeneficiaries for some concentrated benefits to some profit takers and to some users who do not pay the full costs of production and replacement. To these main conventional options a third is often added which emphasizes softer and more benign technologies, such as those of solar energy and hydroelectricity. Such softer options - if suitably combined with energy conservation measures (for there are solar ways, as well as nuclear ways, of energy extravagance and of producing unnecessary trivia which answer to no genuine needs) - can avoid the ethical objections to nuclear power. choice is not however technological, The deeper nor merely/individual/ but Social, and involves the restructuring of production away from energy intensive uses and, at a more basic level, a change to nonconsumeristic, less consumptive life­ styles and social arrangements^ These more fundamental choices between social alternatives, conventional technologically-oriented discussion of energy options tends to obscure. It is not just a matter of deciding in which way to meet the 28. unexamined goals nuclear development aspires to meet, but also a matter of examining the goals themselves. That is, we are not merely faced with the question of comparing different technologies for meeting some fixed or given demand or level of consumption, and of trying to see how best to meet these; we are also faced, and primarily, with the matter of examining those alleged needs and the cost of a society that creates them. It is doubtful that any technology, however benign in principle, will be likely to leave a tolerable world for the future if it is expected to meet unbounded and uncontrolled energy consumption and demands. Even more benign technologies may well be used in a way which creates costs for future people and which are^' them. ^likely to result in a deteriorated world being handed on to In short, even more benign technologies may lead to violation of the Transmission ^Requirement. Consider, to illustrate, the effect on the world s forests, commonly counted as a solar resource, should they be extensively used for production of methanol or of electricity by woodchipping. While few would object to the use of genuine waste material for energy production, 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 forests. The effects of such additional demands on the maintenance of the forests are often dismissed by the simple expedient of waving around the label "renewable resources". Many forests are in 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 imminent. It certainly has begun in many regions, and many forest types, especially rain- forest types, are now, and rapidly, being lost for the future. The addition of a major further and not readily limitable demand pressure for energy on top of the present demands is one which anyone with both a realistic appreciation of the conduct of forestry operations and a concern for the 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 much of Europe at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, again for energy purposes, could be extensive and devastating erosion in steeper lands and tropical areas, desertification in more arid regions, possible climatic change, and massive impoverishment of natural ecosystems, including enormous loss of natural species. Some of us do not want to pass on, and by the Transmission principles 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 29. products or polluted by coal products. illustrates, a mere switch to In short, as the forest situation more benign technologies - important though this is - without any more basic structural and social change, is inadequate. The deeper social option involves challenging and beginning to alter a social structure which promotes consumerism, consumption far beyond genuine needs, and an economic structure which encourages increasing use of highly energy-intensive modes of production. The social change option tends to be obscured in most discussions of energy options and of how to meet energy needs, in part because it does question underlying values of current social arrangements. The conventional discussion proceeds by taking alleged demand (often conflated with wants or needs) 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 and 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 want deep freezers, air conditions, power gadgets, .... authoritarian to prevent them from satisfying these wants. from created wants It would be Such an argument conveniently ignores the social framework in which such needs and wants arise or are produced. To point to the determination of many such wants at the framework level is not however to assume that they are entirely determined at the framework level (e.g. by industrial organisation) and there is no such thing as individual choice or determination at all. It is to see the social framework as a major factor in determining certain kinds of choices, such as those for travel, and kinds of infrastructure, and to see apparently individual choices made in such matters as being channelled and directed by a social framework determined largely in the interests of corporate and private profit and advantage. The social change option is a hard option, insofar as it will be difficult to implement politically; but it is ultimately the only way of avoiding the passing on of serious costs to future people. reasons than such ethical ones for taking it: And there are other sorts of it is the main, indeed the only sort of option,open to those who adopt what is now called a deep ecological perspective, as contrasted with a shallow ecological outlook which regards the natural world and its nonhuman denizens as not worthwhile in themselves but only of value in as much as they answer back to human interests. The deep ecological perspective is an integral part of the Alternative Ecological Paradigm and is incompatible with central theses of the Dominant Social Paradigm (which is essentially the ideology of classical and neoclassical economics) 30. and its variants (roughly, what are called State Socialism, and Democratic Socialism)^ It is incompatible with such assumptions as that the natural environment is of value only as a resource, is by and large hostile, but is controllable in human interests,and with the further domination over nature themes of the Dominant Paradigm and its variants. The conflict between Alternative and Dominant Paradigms, which is fast increasing, extends of course far beyond attitudes to the natural world, since core values of the Dominant Paradigm such as the merits of unimpeded economic growth and material progress are at stake; the conflict involves fundamental differences over the whole front of economical, political and social arrangements. The conflict underlies much of the nuclear debate, insofar as it is not specifically limited to questions of technological fixes, but takes up the 20 basic ethical issues and the social questions to which they lead. The ethical requirements already defended and applied bring us out, when followed through, on the Alternative side of the paradigm conflict, and accordingly lead to the difficult social change option. The social changes that the deep alternative requires will be strongly resisted because they mean changes in current social organisation and power structure. To the extent that the option represents some kind of threat to parts of present political and economic arrangements, it is not surprising that official energy option discussion proceeds by misrepresenting and often obscuring it. But difficult as it is to suitably alter "the system,” especially one with such far-reaching effects on the prevailing power structure, it is imperative to try: we are all on the nuclear train. FOOTNOTES This paper is a condensation of an early version of our ’Nuclear 1. power - ethical, social, and political dimensions’ (ESP for short, available from the authors), which in turn grew out of Routley (i.e. the work so referred For help with the condensation we are very to in the reference list). considerably indebted to the editors. In the condensation, we simplify the structure of the argument and suppress underlying political and ideological dimensions (for example, the large measure of responsibility of the USA for spreading nuclear reactors around the world, and thereby in enhancing the chances of nuclear disasters, including nuclear war). We also considerably reduce a heavy load of footnotes and references designed and needed to help make good many of our claims. Further, in order to contain references to a modest length, reference to primary sources has often been replaced by reference through secondary sources. Little difficulty should be encountered however in tracing fuller references through secondary sources or in filling out much important background material from work cited herein. For example, virtually all the data cited in sections I and VII is referenced in Routley. 2. At worst ESP can always be consulted. 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-setting matters as the likelihood of a core meltdown of (lightwater) reactors, much more information is required. For many assessment purposes however, some knowledge of economic fallacies and decision theory is at least as important as knowledge of nuclear technology. 3. Naturally the effect on humans is not the only factor that has to be taken into account in arriving at moral assessments. Nuclear radiation, 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 example, can hardly improve its case, it suffices if the case against it can be made out solely in terms of its effects on human life in the conventional way. For reference to and a brief discussion of (human-oriented) simulation models 4. respects. see Goodin, p.428. The Opportunity-cost argument is also defective in other It presupposes not merely the (mistaken) reductions involved in the contraction of the ethical domain to the economic; it also presupposes that the proper methods for decision which affect, the choice, apply discounting. future, such as that of energy But, as Goodin argues, more appropriate decision rules do not allow discounting. 5. This is one of the reasons why expected utility theory, roughly cost-benefit analysis with probability frills, is inadequate as a decision method in such contexts. 6. Apparent exceptions to the principle such as taxation (and redistribution of income generally) vanish when wealth is construed (as it has to be if taxation is to be properly justified) as at least partly a social asset unfairly monopolised by a minority of the population. Examples such as that of motoring dangerously do not constitute counterexamples to the principle; for one is not morally entitled to so motor. 7. For details, and as to how the official analyses become arguments against nuclear development when some attempt is made to take the ignored costs into account, see Shrader-Frechette, p. 55 ff. 8. See Routley, p. 160. 9. For much further discussion of the points of the preceding two para­ graphs, see Shrader-Frechette, p. 35 ff.; and also Nader 10. & Abbotts. Most of the reactors in the world are of this type; see Gyorgy. 11. See Shrader-Frechette, chapter 4. 12. See Shrader-Frechette. shortcomings A worthwhile initial view of the of the Rassmussen report may be reached by combining the critique in Shrader-Frechette with that in Nader 13. There are variations on Ai against numbers such as probabilities. and Aii & Abbotts. which multiply costs In this way risks, construed as probable costs, can be taken into account in the assessment. risks may be assessed (Alternatively, through such familiar methods as insurance). A principle varying Aii’. a Aii, and formulated as follows: is ethically acceptable if (for some b) a includes no more risks than b and b is socially accepted, was the basic ethical principle in terms of which the Cluff Lake Board of Inquiry recently decided that nuclear power development in Saskatchewan is ethically acceptable: see Cluff Lake Board of Inquiry Department of Environment, Government of Saskatchewan, 1978, Final Report, p. 305 and p. 288. In this report, a is nuclear power and b is either activities clearly accepted by society as alternative power sources. other applications b In has been taken as cigarette smoking, motoring, mining and even the Vietnam war (.’ ) . The points made in the text do not exhaust the objections to principles Ai - Aii1. The principles are certainly ethically substantive, since an ethical consequence cannot be deduced from nonethical premisses, but they have an inadmissible conventional origin of b ; b character. For look at the may be socially accepted though it is no longer socially acceptable, or though its social acceptibility is no longer so clearcut 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 Aii', for instance, for the argument to begin to look convincing is that 'ethically acceptable' rather than 'socially accepted'. b is But even with the amendments the principles are invalid, for the reasons given in the text, and others. It is not disconcerting that principles of this type do not work. It would be sad to see yet another area lost to the experts, ethics to actuaries. 14. See Shrader-Frechette, p. 15. 15. Goodin 16. The argument is elaborated in ESP. 17. For some of the more philosophically important material on p. 433. alternative nonconsumeristic work cited in V. and R. Routley, .social arrangements and lifestyles, see 'Social theories, self management and environmental problems’ in Mannison et al, where a beginning is made on working out one set of alternatives, those of a pluralistic anarchism. 18. The parlous situation of the world’s tropical rainforests is explained in, for instance, Myers; the reasons are untangled in R. and V. Routley ’World rainforest destruction - the social causes’ (available from the authors). For a fuller account of the Dominant Social Paradigm and its 19. rival, the Alternative Environmental Paradigm, see "1 the main the table on p. 341 which encapsulates J" of the respective paradigms; Cotgrove and Duff, especially assumptions compare also Catton and Dunlap, especially p.33. Contemporary variants on the Dominant Social Paradigm are considered in ESP. The shallow/deep contrast as applied to ecological positions, which is an important component of the paradigm conflict, was introduced by Naess. For further explanation of the contrast and of the larger array of ecological positions into which it fits, see R. and V. Routley, ’Human chauvinism and environmental ethics’ in Mannison ^~^,et al, and the references there cited, especially to Rodman’s 20. work. The more elaborate argument of ESP sets the nuclear debate in the context of paradigm conflict. But it is also argued that, even within assumptions framework of the Dominant Social Paradigm and its variants, Ti. Nuclear development is not the rational choice among energy options. The main argument put up for nuclear development within the framework of the dominant paradigm is an Economic growth argument. It is the following version of the Lights-going-out argument (with economic growth duly standing in for material wealth, and for what is valuable.’ ) necessary to sustain economic growth. Nuclear power is Economic growth is desirable (for all the usual reasons, e.g. to increase the size of the pie, to postpone redistribution problems, etc.). Therefore nuclear power is desirable. The first premiss is part of US energy policy (see Shrader-Frechette, p.lll), But both and the second premiss is supplied by standard economics textbooks. premisses are defective, the second because what is valuable in economic growth can be achieved by (not without growth but) selective growth, which jettisons economic the heavy social and environmental costs carried by unqualified economic growth. More to the point, since the second premiss is an assumption of the Dominant Paradigm, the first premiss (or rather an appropriate and less vulnerable restatement of it) Paradigm standards. fails even by Dominant For of course nuclear power is not necessary that there are other, perhaps costlier alternatives. defended is some elaboration of the premiss : given The premiss usually Nuclear power is the economically best way to sustain economic growth, ’economically best’ being filled out as ’most efficient’, ’cheapest’, ’having the most favourable benefit-cost ratio’, etc. Unfortunately for the argument, and for nuclear development schemes, nuclear power is none of these things decisively (unless a good deal of economic cheating - easy to do - is done). Tii. On proper Dominant Paradigm accounting, nuclear choices should generally be rejected, both as private utility investments and as public choices. Nuclear development is not economically viable but has been kept going, not by clear economic viability, but by massive subsidization of several types (discussed in Shrader-Flechette, Gyorgy and Nader & Abbotts). Even on variants of the Dominant Paradigm, nuclear development is not justified, as consideration of decision theory methods will reveal: Tiii. Whatever reasonable decision rule is adopted, the nuclear choice is rejected, as the arguments of Goodin on alternative decision rules help to show. What sustains the nuclear juggernaut is not the Dominant Paradigm or its variants, but contemporary corporate capitalism (or its state enterprise image) and associated third world imperialism, as the historical details of nuclear development both in developed countries and in less developed countries makes plain (for main details, see Gyorgy p. 307 ff.). And the practices of contemporary corporate capitalism and associated imperialism are not acceptable by the standards of either of the Paradigms or their variants : not ethically acceptable. they are certainly REFERENCES USED Works especially useful for further investigation of the ethical issues raised by nuclear development are indicated with an asterisk (* ). S. Cotgrove and A. Duff, "Environmentalism, middle-class radicalism and politics’, Sociological Review W. R. Catton, Jr., and R. E. Dunlap, 28(2) (1980), 333-51. ’A new ecological paradigm for post exuberant sociology’ American Behavioral Scientist 24 (1980). 15-47. For Report : Ranger Uranium Environmental Inquiry First Report, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1977. *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. *D. Mannison, M. McRobbie and R. Routley (editors), Environmental Philosophy, RSSS, Australian National University, 1980. N. Myers, The Sinking Ark, Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1979. R. Nader and J. Abbotts, The Menace of Atomic Energy, Outback Press, Melbourne, 1977. *K. S. Shrader-Frechette, Nuclear Power and Public Policy, Reidel, Dordrecht, 1980. R. and V. Routley, ’Nuclear energy and obligations to the future’, Inquiry 21 (1978), 133-79.  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 97, Item 3: Draft of Nuclear power - some ethical and social dimensions Subject The topic of the resource Typescript of draft, with handwritten emendations and corrections with whiteout, 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. Description An account of the resource Unnumbered paper from collection, item number assigned by library staff. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Routley</a> <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=val+routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Val Routley</a> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 97, Item 3 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource [36] leaves. 31.39 MB. Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:a81ed37">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:a81ed37</a> Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1982-01-01 Box 97: Paper - Extracts - Articles and Chapters by Richard Sylvan https://www.antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/d6dee996e4a826a5364ced17efb8e381.pdf 2a7c91dab4b339049ea5f589ef30ee7e PDF Text Text SOCIAL AND POLITICAL DIMENSIONS PETING PARADIGMS AND THE NUCLEAR DEBATE. One hardly needs initiation into the dark mysteries of nuclear physics to contribute usefully to the debate now widely ranging over nuclear power. While many important empirical questions are still unresolved, these do not really lie at the centre of the controversy. Instead, it is a debate about values ... many of the questions which arise are social and ethical ones. Sociological investigations have confirmed that the nuclear debate is primarily one over what is worth having or pursuing and over what we are entitled to do A, to others. They have also confirmed that the debate is polarised along the 'ij^nes of competing paradigms." According to the entrenched paradigm discerned, that constellation of values, attitudes and beliefs often called the Dominant Social Paradigm (hereafter the Old Paradigm), economic criteria become the benchmark by which a wide range of individual and social action is judged ahd evaluated. And belief in the market and market mechanisms is quite central. Clustering around this core belief is the conviction that enterprise flourishes best in a system of risks and rewards, that differentials are necessary ..., and in the necessity for some form of division of labour, and a hierarchy of skills and expertise. In particular, there is a belief in the competence of experts in general and of scientists in particular. ... there is an emphasis on quantification. The rival world view, sometimes called the Alternative Environmental Paradigm (the New Paradigm) differs on almost every point, and, according to sociologists, 4 in ways summarised in the following table �Dominant Social Paradigm^ Alternative Env'i ronmen tal Paradigm CORE VALUES Material (economic growth, progress and development) Natural environment valued as resource Domination over nature Non-material (self­ realisation) Natural environment intrinsically valued Harmony with nature * ECONOMY Market forces Risk and reward Towards for achievement Differentials Individual self-help Public interest Safety Incomes related to need Egalitarian Collective/social provision I POLITY Authoritative structures (experts influential) Hierarchical ----.Law and order ^Action through official institutions) ——Centralized ---------Large-scale Associational Ordered Participative structures (citizen/worker involvement) ^■Non-hierarchical Liberation Direct action /Decentralised" * Small-scale Communal Flexible NATURE Ample reserves Nature hostile/neutral Environment controllable Earth’s resources limited Nature benign Nature delicately balanced KNOWLEDGE Confidence in science and technology Rationality of means (only) Limits to science Rationality of ends * ^tate socialism, as practiced in most of the "Eastern bloc", differs from the Old Paradigm really only as to economic organisation, the market in particular being replaced by central planning (a market system by a command system). But since there is virtually no debate over a nuclear future within the confines of state socialism,that minor variant on the Old Paradigm need not be delineated here. �No doubt the competing paradigm picture is a trifle simple ^and subsequently it is important to disentangle a Modified Old Paradigm, which softens the old economic assumptions with social welfare requirements’^: and really ^instead of a New Paradigm there are rather counterparadigms, a cluster of not very well worked out positions that diverge from the cluster marked out as the Old Paradigm). Nonetheless it is empirically investigable, and, most important, it enables the nuclear debate to be focussed. 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 Paradigm. Indeed to introduce ethical and social dimensions into the assessment of nuclear power, instead of or in addition to merely economic factors such as cost and efficiency, is already to move somewhat beyond the received paradigm. For under the Old Paradigm, strictly construed, the nuclear debate is confined to the terms of the narrow utilitarianism 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) irrational. Furthermore, nuclear 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 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 ultimately fails, unless the free enterprise economic assumptions are replaced by the 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. There are two main parts'^?:- It is argued, firstly, 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. costs of project development and state subsidization with market independence and criteria 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 the Old Paradigm are but very rarely applied in contemporary political practice, �3 the place of pure (or mixed) capitalism having been usurped by corporate capitalism. It is because the nuclear debate can be carried on within the 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 roptions within a predetermined framework of values. ^In this corner belong, as explained in section VIII, most decision theory arguments, arguments often considered as encompassing all the nuclear debate is ethically about, best utilitarian means to predetermined ends.) For another leading characteristic of the nuclear debate is the attempt, under the dominant paradigm to remove it from the ethical and social sphere, and to divert it into specialist issues whether over minutiae and contingencies of present technology or over medical g or legal or mathematical details. The double approach can be applied as regards each of the main problems nuclear development poses. There are many interrelated problems, and the argument is further structured in terms of these. For in the advancement and promotion of nuclear power we encounter a remarkable combination of factors, never ^before assembled^: establishment, on a. massive scale, of an industry which involves at each stage of its processing serious risks and at some stages of production possible catastrophe, which delivers as a by-product radioactive wastes which require up to a million years’ storage but for which no sound and economic storage methods are known, which grew up as part of the war industry and which is easily subverted to deliver nuclear weapons, which requires for its operation considerable secrecy, limitations on the flow of information and restrictions on civil liberties, which depends for its economics, and in order to generate expected profits, on substantial state subsidization, support, and intervention. with problems. It is, in short, a very high techological development, beset A first important problem, which serves also to exemplify ethical issues and principles involved in other nuclear power questions, is the unresolved 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 passengers and freight. The train which is At an early stop in the journey someone consigns as freight, to a far distant destination, a package which contains a highly toxic and explosive gas. This is packaged in a very thin container which, as the consigner is aware, may not contain the gas for the �4 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 interefere inadvertently or deliberately with the freight, perhaps trying to steal some of it. All of these sorts of contingencies have occurred on some previous journeys. 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 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 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 would normally be seen as ludicrous when set in this context. What is worth remarking is that similar excuses are not always so seen when the consigner, again a "responsible” businessman, puts his workers' health or other peoples' welfare at risk. Suppose he ways that it is his own and others1pressing needs which justify his action. The company he controls, which produces the material as a by-product, is in bad financial 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 the whole company town, through loss of spending and the cancellation of the Multiplier Effect, will be worse off. The poor and unemployed of the town, whom he would otherwise have been able to help, will suffer especially. Few people would accept such a story, even if correct, as justification. Even where there are serious risks and costs to oneself or some group for whom one is concerned one is usually considered not to be entitled to simply transfer the heavy burden of those risks and costs onto other uninvolved parties, especially where they arise 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. /progresses. How fitting the a^gwaent is will become apparent as the argument There is no known proven safe way tjfi package the highly toxic wastes generated by the nuclear plants that will be spread around the world as 9 large-scale nuclear development goes ahead. 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 toxic. 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 their expected life times of perhaps 40 years, and which, some have estimated, may require 1^ million years to reach safe levels of radioactivity. Nuclear wastes must be kept suitably isolated from the environment for their entire active lifetime. For fission products the required storage period averages a thousand years or so, and for transuranic elements, which include plutonium, there is a half 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.10 Short-term methods of storage require continued human inter­ vention, while proposed longer term methods are subject to both human inter­ ference 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 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 formations or in salt mines, are largely speculative and relatively untested, and have already proved 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 result in multilayered metal containers before rock deposit, simulation models reveal that radioactive material may not remain suitably isolated from human environment. In short, the best present storage proposals carry very real possibilities of irradiating future people and 1 la damaging their environment. Given the heavy costs which could be involved for the future, and given the known limits of technology, it is methodologically 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 tested, and they may �6. well prove to involve unforeseen difficulties and risks when an attempt is made to put them into practice on a commercial scale. provide a rigorous guarantee of Only a method that could 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 human factors. But even if an economically viable, rigorously safe long term storage method could be devised, there is the problem of guaranteeing that it would be universally and invariably used. The assumption that it would be (especially if, as appears likely, such a method proved expensive economically and politically) seems to presuppose a level of efficiency, perfection and concern for the future which has not previously been encountered in human affairs, and has certainly not been conspicuous in the nuclear industry. Again, unless we assume continuous and faultless guarding of long term storage sites through perhaps a million years of possible future human activity, weapons- grade radioactive material will be accessible, over much of the million year storage period, to any party who is in a position to retrieve it. (L The assumption that a way will nonetheless be found, before 2000, / e. 'which gets around the wast^ storage problem (no longer a nere disposal problem) is accordingly not rationally based, but is rather like many assumptions of ways, / /'n /an article of faith. It is an assumption supplied by the Old Paradigm, a no limitations assumption, that there are really no (development) problems that cannot be solved technologically (if not in a fashion that is always immediately economically feasible). The assumption has played an important part in development plans and practice. It has not only encouraged an unwarranted 13 technological optimism (not to say hubris ), that there are no limits to what humans can accomplish, especially through science; it has led to the embarcation on projects before crucial problems have been satisfactorily solved or a solution is even in 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 14 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 likelihood of reactor accidents is a relevant example, discussed below). The original nuclear technology dream was that nuclear fission would provide unlimited energy (a ’clean unlimited supply of power’). shattered. and nuclear That dream soon The nuclear industry apparently remains a net consumer of power, fission will be but a quite short-term supplier of power. �7. The risks imposed on the future by proceeding with nuclear development are, then, significant. 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 lives could be seriously affected by the wastes. Thus perhaps 40,000 generations of future people could be forced to bear significant risks resulting from the provision of the (extravagant) energy use of only a small proportion of the people of 10 generations. Nor is the risk of direct harm from the escape or misuse of radioactive materials the only burden the nuclear solution imposes on the future. Because the energy provided by nuclear fission is merely a stop gap, it seems probable that in due course the same problem, that of making a 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 For they may well have to face the change to renewable resources in an with it. 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 ^pf the global population will have become dependent on high energy consumption and associated technology and heavy resource use and will have lost or reduced its ability to survive without it. It will, moreover, probably be a world which is largely depleted of non-renewable resources, and in which such renewable resources as forests and soils as remain, resources which will have to form a very important part of the basis of life, 15a are in a run-down condition. Such points tell against the idea that future people muelF be, if not direct beneficiaries of nuclear fission energy, at least indirect beneficiaries. It is for such reasons that the train parable cannot be turned around to work in favour of nuclear power, with for example, the nuclear train bringing relief as well as wastes to a remote town powered (only) 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 get itself out of a mess arising from its chosen 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 �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. I Industrial society has - under each paradigm, so it will be argued - clear 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 often not in fact) in the contemporary world, it is not easy to avoid the conclusion that nuclear development involves gross injustice with respect to the 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 parcel are in the non-immediate future. Secondly, an attempt might be made to appeal to overriding circumstances, for to reject the consigner’s action in the circum­ stances outlined is not of course to imply that there are no circumstances in which such an action might be justifiable, or at least where the matter is less clearcut. It is the same with the nuclear case. 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 they apply in the present case. We consider these possible escape routes for the proponent of nuclear development in turn, beginning with the question of our obligations to the future. Resolution of this question casts light on other ethical questions concerning nuclear develop­ ment. It is only when these have been considered that the matter of whether there are overriding circumstances is taken up again (in section VII). Ill OBLIGATIONS TO THE (DISTANT) FUTURE. The especially problematic area is that of the distant (i.e. non-immediate) future, the future 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 obligations 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 (democratic and other) institutions which do not take due. account of the interests of future creatures. �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 there are no moral obligations to the future beyond perhaps those to the next generation. According to the most extreme of these positions against moral obligations to the future, our behaviour with respect to the future is morally unconstrained, there are no moral restrictions on acting or failing to act deriving from the effect of our actions on future people. Of those philosophers who say, or whose views imply that we 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. Thus moral obligation is seen as grounded on or as presupposing various relations which could not hold between people widely separated in time (or sometimes in space). For example, obligation is seen as grounded in relations which are proximate or of short duration and also non-transitive. Among such suggested bases or grounds of moral obligation, or requirements 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 rights or entitlement. People in the distant future will not be able to claim rights and entitlements as against us, and of course they can do nothing effective to enforce any claims they might have for their rights Secondly, there are those accounts which base moral obligations on social or legal convention, for example a convention which would require punishment of offenders or at least some kind of social enforcement. But plainly these and other conventions will not hold 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 could be no guarantee that any contemporary institutions would do it for them. �10. Both the view that moral obligation requires the context of a moral community and the view that it is contractually based appear to rule out the distant future as a field of moral obligation as they not only require a commonality or some sort of common basis which cannot be guaranteed in the case of the distant future, but also a possibility of interchange or reciprocity of action which cannot apply to the future. Where the basis of moral obligation is seen as mutual exchange the interests of future people must be set aside because they cannot change the past and cannot be parties to any mutual contract. The exclusion of moral obligations to the distant future also follows from those views which attempt to ground moral obligations in non-transitive relations of short duration such as sympathy and love. As well there are difficulties about love and sympathy for (non-existent) people in the far distant future about whose personal qualities and characteristics one must know very little and who may well be committed to a life-style for which one. has little or no sympathy. On the current showing in the case of nuclear energy it would be easy to conclude that contemporary society lacks both love and sympathy for future people; and it would appear to follow from this that contemporary 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 something acquired, either individually or institutionally, something which is conditional on doing something or failing to do something (e.g. participating in the moral community, contracting), or having some characteristic one can fail to have (e.g. love, sympathy, empathy).^ 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 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, 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 result of the action. direct and predictable The unconstrained position clearly implies that this is an acceptable moral enterprise, that whatever else we might legitimately criticize in the scientists’ experiment, perhaps its being over-expensive or badly designed, we cannot lodge a moral protest about the damage it will do to future people. The unconstrained position also endorses as morally acceptable the following sort^ of policy:- A firm discovers it can make a handsome profit from mining, processing and manufacturing a new type of material which, although it causes no problem for present people or their immediate descendants, will over a period of hundreds of years decay into a substance which will cause an enormous epidemic of cancer among the inhabitants of the earth at that time. According to the unconstrained view the firm is free to act in its own interests, without any consideration for the harm it does remote 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 only have several philosophers endorsed this position, but it is a clear implication 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, despite their being clearly implied by their position. We suspect that - we would certainly hope that - when it is brought out that the unconstrained position admits such counterexamples, that being free to act implies among other things being free to inflict pointless harm for example, most of those who opted for the unconstrained position would want to assert that it was not what they intended. What many of those who have put forward the unconstrained position seem to have had in /mind^denying moral obligation is rather that future people can look after themselves, that we are not responsible for their lives. The popular view that the future can take care of itself also seems to assume a future causally But it is not. It is not as if, 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 ^Jf 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. �12. 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 acquired an obligation to some stranger with whom one has never been involved, that one has no responsibility for his life, does not imply that one is free to do what one likes with respect to him, for example to rob him or to pursue some course of action of advantage to oneself which could seriously harm him. These difficulties for the unconstrained position arise in part from the (sometimes deliberate) failure to make an important distinction between acquired or assumed obligation 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. There is a considerable difference in the level and kind of responsibility involved. In the first case one must do something or be something which one can fail to do or be, e.g. In the second case responsibility arises I have loves, sympathy, be contracted. 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 (yet) exist. While it may perhaps be the case that there would need to be an acquired or assumed obligation in order for it to be claimed that contemporary people must make special sacrifices for future people of an heroic kind, or even to help them especially, only moral constraints are needed in order for us to be constrained from harming them. Thus, to return to the train parable, the consigner cannot argue in justification of his action that he has never assumed or acquired responsibility for the passengers, that he does not know them and therefore has no love or sympathy for them and that they are not part of his moral community, in short that he has no special obligations to help them. All that one needs to argue 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 �13. 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 then direct harm than the consigner resorting to heroic self-sacrifice in refraining from placing his dangerous package on the train. The conflation of moral restraints 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 has to be assumed or required. The conflation is encouraged by reductionist positions which, in attempting to account for obligation in general, mistakenly endeavour to collapse all obligations. Hence the equation, and some main roots * of the unconstrained position, of the erroneous belief that there are no moral constraints concerning the distant future. The unconstrained view tends to give way, under the weight of counter­ examples, 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 condition, and that is all;17 there are in practice 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. account. There are at least three objections to this chain First, it is inadequate to treat constraints concerning the future as if they applied only between generations, as if there were no question of constraints on individuals as opposed to whole generations, since individuals can create causal effects, e.g. harm, on the future in a way which may create individual responsibility, and which often cannot be sheeted home to an entire generation. Nuclear power and its wastes, for example, are strictly the responsibility of small groups of power-holders, not a generational responsibility. 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. �14. Thirdly, improvements for immediate successors may be achieved at the expense of disadvantages to people of the more distant future. Improving the world for immediate successors is quite compatible with, and may even in some circumstances be most easily achieved by, ruining it for less immediate successors. Such cases can hardly be written off as ’’never-never land" examples since many cases of environmental exploitation might be. seen as of just this type. e.g. not just the nuclear case but also the exhaustion of non-renewable resources and the long-term depletion of renewable resources such as soils and forests through overuse. If then such obvious injustices to future people arising from the favouring or exclusive concern with immediate successors are to be avoided, obligations to the future will have to be seen as in some way fairly distributed over time, and not merely as accruing to particular generations in the way the chain picture suggests. IV. ATTEMPTS TO QUALIFY OBLIGATIONS TO THE FUTURE : ECQNQMISTIC UNCERTAINTY AND INDETERMINACY ARGUMENTS. While there are grave difficulties for the unconstrained position, qualification leads to a more defensible position. According to the main 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 costs and benefits (and so of future interests) is obtained by application over time of a discount rate, so discounting costs and risks to future people. The attempt to apply economics as a moral theory, something that is becoming increasingly common, can lead then to the qualified position. objectionable in such an approach is that What is economics should operate within the bounds of moral (deontic) constraints, just as in practice it operates within legal constraints, not determine 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 18 the waste problem. Since there is mounting evidence that future generations may well not be better off than present ones, especially in things that matter, no argument for discounting the interests of future generations on this basis can carry much weight. Nor is that all that is wrong with the argument. For it depends at base on the assumption that poorer contemporaries would be making sacrifices to richer successors in foregoing such (allegedly beneficial) developments as nuclear power. sacrifice argument. That is, it depends on the already scotched In any case, for the waste disposal problem to be legitimately bequeathed to the future generations, 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-immediate 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 equalization of monetary value, that compensation - which is what the waste problem is taken to come to economically - costs much less now than 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, insurmountable practical difficulties about applying such discounting, e.g. how to determine appropriate future discount rates. A more serious objection is that applied generally, the argument presupposes, what is false, that compensation, like value, can always be converted into monetary equivalents, that people (including those outside market frameworks) can be monetarily compensated for a variety of damages, including cancer and loss of life. There is no compensating a dead man, or for a lost species. In fact the argument presupposes a double reduction neither part of which can succeed: it is not just that value cannot in general be represented at all adequately 19 monetarily, but (as against utilitarianism, for example) that constraints and obligations can not be somehow reduced to matters of value. It is also presupposed that all decision methods, suitable for requisite nuclear choices, �16. are bound to apply discounting. This is far from so : indeed Goodin argues that, on the contrary, more appropriate decision rules do not allow discounting, and discounting only works in practice with expected utility rules (such as underlie cost-benefit and benefit-risk analyses), which are, he contends strictly inapplicable for nuclear choices (since not all outcomes can be duly determined x 20 and assigned probabilities, in the way that application of the rules requires.). As the preceding arguments reveal, the discounting move often has the same result as the unconstrained position. If, for instance, we consider the cancer example and reduce costs to payable compensation, it is evident that over a sufficiently long period of time discounting at current prices would lead to the conclusion that there are no recoverable damages and so, in economic terms, no constraints. In short, even certain damage to future people could be written off. One way to achieve the bias against future people is by the application of discount rates which are set in accord with the current economic horizons of no 21 more than about 15 years, and application of such rates would simply beg the question against the interests and rights of future people. Where there is certain future damage of a morally forbidden type, for example, the whole method of discounting is simply inapplicable, and its use would violate moral constraints. Another argument for the qualified position, which avoids the objections from cases of certain damage, comes from probability considerations. The distant future, it is argued, is much more uncertain than the present and immediate future, so that probabilities are consequently lower, perhaps even approaching or coinciding with zero for any hypothesis concerning the distant future. But then if we take account of probabilities in the obvious way, by simply multiplying them against costs and benefits, it is evident that the interests of future people, except in cases where there is an unusually high degree of certainty, must count for (very much) less than those of present and neighbouring people where (much) higher probabilities 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 future against a much lower probability of indeterminate 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 doubtful benefits for some present people, in the shape of the opportunity to maintain corporation profitability or to continue unnecessarily high energy use. And even if the costs and benefits were comparable or unevenly 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 sufficiently large. Such a cost-benefit or risk-benefit approach 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. For example, it would follow on such principles that it is permissible for a firm to injure, or very likely injure, some innocent party provided the firm stands to make a sufficiently large gain from it. But the costs and benefits involved are not transferable in any simple or general way from one party to another . Transfers of this kind, of costs and benefits involving different parties, commonly raise moral issues - e.g. is x entitled to benefit himself by imposing costs on y - which are not susceptible to a simple cost-benefit 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 transfer 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 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 temporally removed, and these risks will not be in any direct way related to a person’s extent of use. The transfer objection is essentially the same as that to the utilitarian’s (happiness) sums as a way of solving moral conflict between different parties, and the introduction of probability considerations - as in utilitarian decision 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 probabilities involving distant future situations are not always less than those concerning the immediate future in the wa/ the argument supposes, and that the outcomes of some moral problems 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. 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 taj^ke serious account of the effects of our actions on the distant future. There are two strands to the uncertainty argument, capable of separation, but frequently tangled up. Both arguments are mistaken, the first on a priori 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 about the effects of our actions on the distant future is unreliable, fuzzy and highly speculative. But we cannot base assessments of how we should act on information of this kind, especially when accurate information is obtain­ able about the present which would indicate different action. Therefore we must regretfully ignore the uncertain effects of our actions on the distant future. More formally and crudely: One only has obligations to the future if these obligations are based on reliable information at present as regards the distant future. 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 with respect to the present Associated with this is the attempt to suggest and with respect to the future. 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. risk of harm in this sort of case. It is enough that there is a significant 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 of the so-called "speculative" and "unreliable". But if we do not require certainty of action to apply moral constraints in contemporary affairs, why �19. should we require a much higher standard of certainty in the future? Why should we require for the future, epistemic 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 eipstemic double standard. But such an epistemic double standard, proposed in explaining the difference between the present and the future and to justify ignoring future peoples' interests, in fact cannot itself provide an explanation of the differences, since it already presupposes different standards of certainty appropriate to each class, which difference is in turn in need of justification. The second uncertainty argument is a practical uncertainty argument, that whatever our theoretical obligations to the future, we cannot in practice take the interests of future people into account because uncertainty about the distant future is so gross that we canmot 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. this way:- The second uncertainty argument 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 every (action) x", 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 obtain clear conclusions or directions concerning contemporary action action of the "It is wrong to do x" type. Many of the assumptions of the second argument can 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. 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 uncertainty is not so great as 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 Again there is considerable some cases is the creation of a significant risk. uncertainty about many factors which are not highly, or at all, morally relevant, but this does not extend to many factors which are of much greater importance to moral issues. For example, we may not have any idea what the fashions will be in a hundred years in names or footwear, or what flavours of ice 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 the earth of that wonderful variety of non-human life which at present makes it such a rich and interesting place. For this sort of reason, the second uncertainty argument should be rejected. 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 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 proper consideration. Most of these popular moves employ both of the uncertainty arguments as suits the case, switching from one to the other in a way that is again reminiscent of sceptical moves. For example, we may be told that we cannot really take account of future people because we cannot be sure that they will exist or that their tastes and wants will not be completely different from our own, to the point where they will not suffer from our exhaustion of resources or from the �21. things that would affect 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 morally committed to. Again we may be told that there is no guarantee that future people will be worthy of any efforts on our part, because they may be r I morons o^ forever plugged into enjoyment of other machines. /prepared to accent the elitist approach presupposed p Even if one is 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 opposed 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. p The possibilities just considered in these uncertainty arguments of /sceptical character are not ^feal possibilities. Another argument which may consider a real possibility, but still does not succeed in showing that it is acceptable to proceed with an action which would appear to be harmful to future people, is often introduced in the nuclear waste case. This is the argument that future people may discover a rigorously safe and permanent storage method for nuclear wastes before they are damaged by escaped waste material. Let us grant for the sake of the argument that this is a real possibility (though physical arguments may show that it is not). This still does not affect the fact that there is a significant risk of serious damage and that the creation of a significant risk is enough to rule out an action of this type as morally impermissible. In just the same way, future people may discover a cure for cancer: that this appears to be a live possibility, and not merely a logical 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 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 �22. be considered 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 themselves. 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 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 The 'that they are any more than that^ that is they are not live possibilities. 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 yis so great as to preclude the consigner’s taking 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 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 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 indeterminate 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 raised particularly by problems of sharing fixed quantities of resources among present and future people, for example oil, when the numbers of the latter are indeterminate. Such problems are indeed difficult, but they are not resolved by ignoring the claims of the future, any more than the problems raised by the need to take account in decision-making of factors difficult to quantify are resolved by �23. ignoring such factors. Nor are distributional problems as large and representative of a class of moral problems concerning the future as the tendency to focus on them would suggest. It can be conceded that there will be cases where the indeterminacy 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 other conflict cases where the level of indeterminacy does not hinder resolution of the issue, n e.g. the train example which is a conflict case of a type. In particular, there will be many cases which are not solved by weighing numbers, numbers of interests, or whatever, cases for which one needs to know only the most general probable characteristics of future people. The crucial question which emerges is then?: are there any features of future people which would disqualify them from full moral consideration or reduce their claims to such below those of present people? principle None. The answer is?: in Prima facie, 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 dealing satisfactorily with the present?: in other words, a theory that did not allow properly for the future would be found to have defects as regards the present, to deal unjustly or unfairly with some present people, e.g. those remotely located, those outside some select subgroup, such as (white­ skinned) humans, etc. The only candidates for characteristics that would fairly rule out future people are the logical features we have been looking at, such as uncertainty and indeterminacy; but, as we have argued, 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 ol * present information). practical course of action given only 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 affect his entitlement to just and fair treatment, to full moral 7/ consideration; inversely, that it is without basis to discriminate morally against a person in virtue of his temporal position. As a result of this �23a. universalizability, there are the same general obligations to future people as to the present; and thus there is the same obligation to take account of them and their interests in what we do, to be careful in our actions, to take account of the probability (and not just the certainty) of our actions causing harm or damage, and to see, other things being equal, that we do not act so as to rob them of what is necessary for the chance of a good life. and indeterminacy do not relieve us of these obligations. Uncertainty If in a closely comparable case concerning the present the creation of a significant risk is enough to rule out an action as immoral, and there are no independent grounds for requiring greater certainty of �harm in the future case under consideration, then futurity alone will not provide adequate grounds for proceeding with the action, thus discriminating against future people. Accordingly we cannot escape, through appeal to futurity, the conclusion 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. The 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^e, or a particular geographical position. First of all, the problem of nuclear waste disposal raises serious questions of distributive justice not only across time,1 across generations, but also across space. Is one state or region entitled to dump its radioactive pollution in I another state’s or region’s (or waters^ yar<^ 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 underpinning the answer, are both like those already given in arguing to the tentative conclusion concerning the injustice of imposing radioactive wastes upon future people. But the cases are not exactly the same: USA and Japan cannot endeavour to discount peoples of the Pacific in whose regions they propose to drop some of their radioactive pollution in quite the same way they can discount people of two centuries hence. (But what this consideration really reveals is yet another flaw in the idea that entitlement to just treatment can (be discounted over time)L Ethical issues of distributive justice, as to equity, concern not only the spatio-temporal location of nuclear waste, but also arise elsewhere in the assessment of nuclear development; in particular, as regards the treatment of f kood' those in the neighbouij/ of reactors, and, differently, as regards the distribution of (alleged) benefits and costs from nuclear power across nations. People living or working in the vicinity of a nuclear reactor are subject to special costs and risks: firstly, radioactive pollution, due to the fact that reactors discharge radioactive materials into the air and water near the plant, �25. and secondly catastrophic accidents, such as (steam) explosion of a reactor. An immediate question is whether such costs and risks can be imposed, with any ethical 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 other largescale 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” emission, during plant operation, of low level radiation (A 'carries carcinogenic and mutagenic costs. While there are undoubtedly costs, there remains, however, substantial disagreement over the likely number 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 (illegitimately) permits free transfer of costs and risks from one person to another, the ethical issue directly raised is said to be: what extent of cancer and genetic damage, if any, is permissibly traded for the advantages of nuclear power, and under what conditions? Under the Old Paradigm the issue is then translated into decision-theoretic questions, such as to ’how to employ risk/benefit analysis as a prelude to government regulation’ and ’how to determine what is an 26 acceptable level of risk/safety for the public. 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 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 27 compensate for the agony of cancer. The point is that the costs to one party are not justified, especially when such benefits to other parties can be alternatively obtained without such awful costs, and morally indefensible, 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. particularly 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 large. A non-negligible percentage (in excess of 3% of those exposed for 30 years) of people in the area will die, allegedly for the sake of the majority who are benefitted by nuclear power production (allegedly, for the real reasons for nuclear development do not concern this silent majority). Whatever i-ktr charm the 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 on minorities, most of whom have little or no genuine voice in the location of reactors in their environment and cannot move away without serious losses, is quite (morally) acceptable. One cheaper trick, deployed by the US 28 Atomic Energy Commission,” is to suppose that it is permissible to double, through nuclear technology, the level of (natural) radiation that a population received with apparently negligible consequences, the argument being that the additional amount (being equivalent to the ’’natural” level) is also likely to have negligible consequences. The increased amounts of radiation - with their large man-made component - are then accounted normal, and, of course, so it is then claimed, 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 radiation emissions very substantially in excess of the standards laid down; so the emission situation is worse than mere consideration of the standards would disclose. Furthermore, the monitoring of the standards ’’imposed” is entrusted to the nuclear operators themselves, scarcely disinterested parties. Public policy is determined not so as to guarantee public health, but rather to serve as a ’public pacifier' while 29 private nuclear operations proceed relatively unhampered. �27. 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). 30 If the cooling and emergency core cooling systems fail in American (light water) 30a reactors, then the core melts and ’containment failure’ is likely, with the result that an area of 40,000 square miles could be radioactively contaminated. In the event of the worst type of accident ini a very small reactor, a steam explosion in the reactor vessel, about 45,000l 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 the sizei of Pennsylvania would be destroyed, Modern nuclear reactors are about five times the size of the reactor for which 31 -k the consequences ofr a these conservative US government figures are given : similar accident with a modern reactor would accordingly be much greater still. V The consigner in risking the li^es, well-being and property of the / passengers on the train has acted inadmissibly. Does a government-sponsored private utility act in a way 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 irrespon- The proponents of nuclear power have in effect argued to the contrary, & (while at the same time endeavouring to shift the dispute out if the ethical arena / and into a technological dispute as to means (in accordance with the Old Paradigm). sible. 0 It has been contended, firstly, what contrasts with the train example, that Indeed in the there is no real possibility of a catastrophic nuclear accident. 32 influential Rassmussen report - which was extensively used to support public confidence in US nuclear fission technology - an even stronger, an incredibly CO jstrong, imp?yjbability 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 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 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 limitatioms and human error, of waste leakage and reactor incidents and quite possibly accidents, not in an ideal world far removed from the actual, a technological dream world where there is no real possibility of a nuclear �28. catastrophe. In such an ideal nuclear world, where waste disposal were fool-proof and reactors were accident-proof, things would no doubt be morally different. But we do not live in such a world. According to the Rasmussen report its calculation of extremely low accident probabilities is based upon reasonable mathematical and technological assumptions and is methodologically sound. This is very far from being the case. The under­ lying mathematical methods, variously called "fault tree analysis" and "reliability estimating techniques", are unsound, because they exclude as "not credible" possibilities or as "not significant" branches that are real possibilities, which may well be realised in the real world. It is the In fact the methodology and data of the report 33 has been soundly and decisively criticized. And it has been shown that there eliminations that are otherworldly. is a real possibility, a non-negligible probability, of a serious accident. It is contended, secondly, that even if there is a non-negligible probability of a reactor accident, still it is 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 a risk assessment 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; rV\ (ii) option a involves a total net cost in ter^s of cost to people (e.g. deaths, injuries, etc.) which is less than that of option b, which is already accepted; 34 therefore option a is acceptable. For example, the number lively to be killed by nuclear power stations is less than k the likely number killed by cigarette smoking or in road accidents, which are < 'accepted: so nuclear power stations are acceptable.^ little reflection reveals that this sort of risk assessment argument involves the same kind of fallacy as transaction models. 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 is the person who undertakes the risks also the person who receives the benefits or �29. primarily, as in driving or cigarette smoking, or are the costs imposed on other parties who do not benefit? It is only if the parties are the same in the case of the options compared, and there are no such distributional problems, that a 35 comparison on such a basis would be valid. This is rarely the case, and it is not so in the case of risk assessments of energy options. Secondly, does the person incur the risk as a result of an activity which he knowingly undertakes in a situation where he has a reasonable choice, knowing it entails the risk, etc., and is the level of risk in proportion to the level of 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? A risk that is ethically acceptable for a serious reason may not be ethically acceptable for a trivial reason. Both the arguments (i) and (ii) are often 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 or nuclear sense are cumulative, and already high if not, some say, too high. 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 moral principle, already argued for by way of examples and already invoked, that one is not, in general, entitled to simply transfer costs of a significant kind arising fron an activity which benefits oneself onto other 37 parties who are not involved in the activity and are not beneficiaries. This transfer principle is especially clear in cases where the significant costs include an effect on life or health or a risk thereof, and where the benefit to the benefitting party is of a noncrucial or dispensible nature, because, e.g. it can be substituted for or done without. Thus, for instance, one is not usually entitled to harm, or risk harming, another in the process of benefitting oneself. Suppose, for another example, we consider a village which produces, as a result of an industrial process by which it lives , a noxious waste material which J !is expensive and difficult to dispose of and yet creates a risk to life and health 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 service, on the train, to the next village. The inhabitants of this village are then forced to face the problem either of undertaking the expensive and difficult disposal process oor of sustaining risks to their own lives and health or else leaving the village and their livelihoods. transfer of costs as morally unacceptable. Most of us would see this kind of �30. 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 condition are not only future people and future generations (those of the next villages) but neighbours of nuclear reactors, especially, as in third world countries, neighbours who are not nuclear power users. The distribution of costs and damage in such a fashion, i.e. on to non-beneficiaries is a characteristic of certain widespread and serious forms of pollution, and is one of its most objectionable moral features. It is a corollary of the condition that we should not hand the world on to our successors in substantially worse shape than we received it - the tramsmission principle. For if we did then that would be a significant transfer of costs. (The corollary can be independently argued for on the basis of certain ethical theories). VI. OTHER SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL RISKS AND COSTS OF NUCLEAR DEVELOPMENT, ESPECIALLY NUCLEAR WAR. The problems already discussed by no means exhaust the ^environmental, health and safety risks and costs in^or arising from the * fuel cycle. nuclear 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 transportation of , 5 materials. Several of these stageyf involve hazards. Unlike the special risks in the nuclear cycle - of sabotage of plants, of theft of fissionable material, and of the further proliferation of nuclear armaments - these hazards have parallels, 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 38 ffatal and nonfatal injury as workers in the coal industry^. Furthermore, the Various (often serious) hazards encountered in working in some sectoj^ 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 occupational relocation), and many types of hazards incurred in working with radioactive material are now known in advance of choice of such an occupation: 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 ’’fact" of location cannot be. The social issue of arrangements that contract occupational choices and opportunities 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, is not an issue newly produced by nuclear associated occupations. �Other social and environmental problems - though endemic where large-scale industry operates in societies that are highly inegalitarian 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 large-scale industrial operation, radioactive pollution, such as uranium mining for instance produces, is especially a legacy of nuclear development, and a specially undesirable one, as enormous rectification estimates for dead radio­ active lands and waterways reveal. Though sabotage is a threat to many large industries, so that modern factory complexes are often guarded like concentration camps (but from us on the outside), sabotage of a nuclear reactor can have dire consequences, of a different order of magnitude from most industrial sabotage (consider again the effects of core meltdown), Though theft of material from more dubious enterprises such as munitions works can pose threats to populations at large and can assist terrorism, no thefts for allegedly peaceful enterprises pose problems of the same order as theft of fissionable material. No other industry produces materials which so readily permit of fabrication into such /massive explosives/ No other industry is, to sum it up, so vulnerable on so many fronts. / / 5 In part to reduce it/ vulnerability, in part because of its long and continuing association with military activities, the nuclear industry is subject to, and encourages, 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 association and of expression, and free access to information. These practices include secrecy, restriction of information, formation of special police and guard forces, espionage, curtailment of civil liberties. Already operators of nuclear installations are given extraordinary powers, in vetting employees, to investigate the background and activities not only of employees but also of their families and sometimes even of their friends. The installations themselves become armed camps, which especially offends British sensibilities. The U.K. Atomic Energy (Special Constables) Act of 1976 created a special armed force to guard nuclear installations and made it ^nswerable ... to the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority.^9 developments the Uni-ted Kingdom; and worse i-R Weot Germany presage along with nuclear development increasingly authoritarian and anti-democratic societies. That nuclear development appears to force such political consequences tells heavily against it. /•fS j2a?c bEHmR - - *. i » /> . . Bvhi nd what mirt bv one of the most impregnable fortifications this side of the East-West German border, work has just begun on building West Gerpianv’s latest nuclear power station.- Much of the perimeter of the 75-acre site, at Brokdorf m the marshlands of the lower Elbe, is screened by a concrete wall io feet high, surmounted by coils of barbed wire. I he rest, regarded as ‘strategic ally observable.' is girdled by a ditch io feet wide and fill ed with water. Approach roads to the site arc patrolled by dozens of policemen and the compound itself is guarded by 6oo men from a private security organization and b\ jg dogs. '* -4? �32. Nuclear development is further indicted politically by the direct connection of nuclear power with nuclear war. It is fortunately true that ethical questions concerning nuclear war - for example, whether a nuclear war is justified, or just, under any circumstances, and if so what circumstances are distinguishable from those concerning nuclear power. Undoubtedly, however, the spread of nuclear power is substantially increasing the technical means for engaging in nuclear war and so, to that extent, the opportunity for, and chances of, nuclear engagement. Since nuclear wars are never accountable positive goods, but are at best the lesser of major evils, nuclear wars are always highly ethically undesirable. The spread of nuclear power accordingly expands the opportunity for, and chances of, highly undesirable consequences. Finally the latter, so increasing these chances and opportunities, is itself undesirable, and therefore what leads to it, nuclear development, is also undesirable. The details and considerations that fill out this argument, from nuclear war against nuclear development, are many. They are firstly technical, that it is a relatively straightforward and inexpensive matter to make nuclear explosives given access to, a nuclear power plant, secondly' political, A that nuclear engagements once instituted likely to escalate and that those A who control (or differently are likely to force access to) nuclear power plants do not shrink from nuclear confrontation and are certainly prepared to toy with A nuclear engagement (up to "strategic nuclear strikes” at least), and thirdly ** , $ A /ethical, that warj( invariably have immoral consequences, such as massive 5 damage to involved parties, however high sounding their justification is. Nuclear wars are certain to be considerably worse as regards damage inflicted than 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 irreversibility of any such confrontations. The supporting considerations are, fourthly, drawn from decision theory, and yare designed to show that the chances of such undesirable outcomes is itself y undesirable. The core argument is in brief this (the argument will be elaborated in section VIII):- Energy choice between alternative options is O . 27 ya case of decision making under uncertainty, because in particular /f the gross uncertainties involved in nuclear development. In cases of this type the appropriate rational procedure is to compare worst consequences of each alternative, to reject those alternatives with the worst of these worst 5 / consequence^ (this is a pretty un con troversial part of the maxim'nw rule which enjoins selection of the alternative with the best worst consequences). The nuclear alternative has, in particular because of the real possibility of a nuclear war, the worst worst consequences and is accordingly a particularly undesirable alternative. �33. /VII. CONFLICT ARGUMENTS^ AND UNCOVERING THE IDEOLOGICAL BASES OF NUCLEAR I DEVELOPMENT♦ As with nuclear war, so given the cumulative case against nuclear development, only one justificatory route remains open, that of appeal to important overriding circumstances. That appeal, to be ethically acceptable, must go far beyond merely economic considerations. For, as already observed, the consigner’s action cannot be justified by purely economistic arguments, such as that his profits would rise, the firm or the village would be more prosperous, or by appealing to the fact that some possibly uncomfortable changes would otherwise be needed. The transfer principle on which this assessment was based, that one was not usually entitled to create a serious risk to others for these sorts of reasons, applied more generally and, in particular, applied to the nuclear case. For this reason the economistic arguments which are those most commonly advanced under the Old Paradigm to promote nuclear development - e.g. cheapness, efficiency, profitability for electricity utilities, and the need otherwise for uncomfortable changes such as restructuring of employment, investment and consumption - do not even begin to show that the nuclear alternative is an acceptable one. Even if these economistic assumptions about benefits to present people were correct - it will be contended that most of them are not - the arguments would fail because economics (like the utilitarianism from which it characteristically derives) has to 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 prima facie unacceptable (nuclear) alternative is taken, some even more unacceptable alternative is the only possible outcome, and will ensue. For example, in the train parable, the consigner may argue that his action is justified because unless it is taken 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 clearcut, and one would perhaps hesitate to condemn any action taken in such circumstances. Some, of the arguments advanced to show moral conflict are based on / /competing^to present people, and others on competing obligations to future people, both of which are taken to override the obligations not to impose on the future o I significant risk ^f serious harm. The structure of such moral conflict arguments is based crucially on the presentation of a genuine and exhaustive set of alternatives (or at least practical alternatives) and upon showing that the only alternatives to admittedly morally undesirable actions are even more undesirable ones. If some practical alternative which is not morally worse than the action to be justified is overlooked, suppressed, or neglected in the argument - for example, if in the village case it turns out that the villagers have another option �34. I to starving or to the sending off of the parcel, namely earning a living i/' some other way - then the argument is defective and cannot readily be patched. Just such a suppression of practicable alternatives has occurred in the argument designed to show that the alternatives to the nuclear option are even worse than the option itself, and that there are other factual defects in these arguments In short, the arguments depend essentially on the presentation of as well. 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 industrialised countries. Failure to develop nuclear energy, it is often claimed, would amount to denying them the opportunity to reach the standard of affluence we currently enjoy and would create unemployment and poverty in the industrialised nations. The unemployment and poverty argument does not stand up to examination either for the poor of the industrial countries or for those of the third world. There is good evidence that large-scale nuclear energy will help to increase unemployment and poverty in the industrial world, through the 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 40 encouraging substitution of energy use for labour use. The argument that nuclear energy is needed for the third world is even less convincing. Nuclear energy is both politically and economically inappropriate for the third world, since it requires massive amounts of capital, requires numbers of imported scientists and engineers, 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 foreign dependence, adds to centralised entrenched power and reduces the chance for change in the oppressive political 41 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. �35. The poverty argument is then a fraud. help the poor. Nuclear energy will not be used to Both for the third world and for the industrialised countries there are well-known energy-conserving alternatives and the 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 to solar or perhaps fusion development. And there are various alternatives: coal and other fossil fuels, geothermal, and a range of solar options (including as well as narrowly solar, wind, water, tidal and plant power), 42 each possibly in combination with conservation measures; Despite the availability 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). Such an assumption really underlies part of the poverty argument, which thus amounts to an elaboration of the trickle- down argument (much favoured within the Old Paradigm setting). runs:- For the argument Nuclear development is necessary for (continuing and increasing) affluence. Affluence inevitably trickles down to the poor. Therefore nuclear First, the argument does not on its own show development benefits the poor. anything specific about nuclear power: for it works equally well if ’energy’ is substituted for ’nuclear’. It has also to be shown, what the next major argument will try to claim, that nuclear development is unique among energy alternatives in increasing affluence. The second assumption, that affluence inevitably trickles down, has now been roundly refuted, both by recent historical data, which show increasing affluence (e.g. in terms of GNP averaged per capita) coupled with increasing poverty in several countries, both developing and developed, and through economic models which reveal how "affluence" can increase without redistribution occurring. Another major argument advanced to show moral conflict appeals to a set of supposedly overriding and competing obligations to future people. We have, it is said, a duty to pass on the immensely valuable things and institutions which our culture has developed. Unless our high-technology, high energy industrial society is continued and fostered, our valuable institutions and traditions will fall into decay or be swept away. The argument is essentially that without nuclear power, without the continued level of material wealth it alone is assumed to make possible, the lights of our civilization will go out. Future people will be the losers. 4 �36. The lights-going-out argument does raise questions as to what is valuable in our society, and of what characteristics are necessary for a good society. But for the most part these large questions, which deserve much fuller examination, can be avoided. The reason is that the argument adopts an extremely uncritical position with respect to present high-technology societies, apparently assuming that they are uniformly and uniquely valuable. It assumes that technological society is unmodifiable, that it cannot be changed in the direction of energy conservation or alternative (perhaps high technology) energy sources without collapse. 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 furnish - are essential to maintain this whole. These assumptions are hard to accept. Xz The assumption that technological ^soc^ety's energy patterns are unmodifiable is especially so - after all it has survived events such as world wars which have required major social and technological restructuring and consumption modification. If western society’s demands for energy are totally unmodifiable without collapse, not only would it be committed to a program of increasing destruction, but one might ask what use its culture could be to future people who would very likely, as a consequence of this destruction, lack the resource base which the argument assumes to be essential in the case of contemporary society. There is also difficulty with the assumption of uniform valuableness; but if this is rejected the question becomes not: what is necessary to maintain existing high-technological society and its political institutions, but rather: what is necessary to maintain what is valuable in that society and the political institutions which are needed to maintain those valuable things. While it may be easy to argue that high energy consumption centrally controlled is necessary to maintain the political and economic status quo, it is not so easy to argue that it is essential to maintain what is valuable, and it is what is valuable, presumably that we have a duty to pass on to the future. The evidence, 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 reason in fact to believe that a society with much lower energy and resource consumption would better foster what is valuable than our own. But even if a radical change in these directions is independently desirable, as we should argue, it is not necessary to presuppose such a change, in the short term at least, in order to see that the assumptions of the lights-going-out argument are wrong. No enormous reduction of well-being is required to consume less energy than at �37. present, and certainly far less than the large increase over present levels of /assumption which 44 is assumed in the usual economic case for nuclear energy, 6©' What the nuclear strategy is really designed to do then is not to prevent the lights going out in western civilisation, but to enable the lights to go on burning all the time to maintain and even increase the wattage output of the Energy Extravaganza. In fact there is good reason to think that, far from the high energy consumption society fostering what is valuable, it will, especially if energy 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 garrisoned, capital- and expertise-intensive energy source, must be one which is highly susceptible to entrenchment of power, and one in which the forces which control this energy source, whether capitalist or bureaucratic, can exert enormous power over the political system and over people’s lives, even more than they do at present. Such a society would, almost inevitably tend to become authoritarian and increasingly anti-democratic, as an outcome, among other thingsJof its response to the threat posed by dissident groups in the nuclear ' 45 situation. 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 authoritarianism - while many valuable aspects, such as the degree of political freedom and those opportunities for personal and collective autonomy which exist, would be lost or diminished: political freedom, for example, is a high price to pay for consumerism 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 technology- nuclear 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, rather, 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 argument, 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 If then we apply - as we have argued we should - appeal to futurity, closed. the same standards of morality to the future as we ought to acknowledge for the present, the conclusion that large-scale nuclear development is a crime against the future is inevitable. Closed also, in the same way, are the escape routes to other arguments - 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 argument thus far, to anti-nuclear conclusions, has relied upon, and defended premisses that would be rejected under the Old Paradigm; for example, such theses as that the interests and utilities of future people are not discounted (in contrast to the temporally-limited utilitarianism of market- centred 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 case, 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 nuclear development 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 alternatives to given economic ends. Admittedly so much capital has already been invested in nuclear fission ^research and development, in marke^T 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 ^(out), and which are, in accordance with Old Paradigm p^gcepts, publicly economic (in that they are approved for public consumption), and the real reasons, 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 increase the size of the pie, to avoid or postpone redistribution problems, and connected social Therefore nuclear power is desirable. The first premiss is 46 part of US energy policy, and the second premiss is supplied by standard unrest, etc.). 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 environmental costs carried by unqualified 47 economic growth. More to the point, since the second premiss is an assumption of the dominant paradigm, the first premiss (or rather an appropriate and less vulnerable restatement of it) fails even on Old Paradigm standards. For of course nuclear power is not necessary given that there are other, perhaps costlier alternatives. The premiss usually defended is some elaboration of the premiss : Nuclear power is the economically best way to sustain economic growth, 'economically best’ being filled out as ’most efficient’, ’cheapest’, ’having most favourable benefit-cost ratio', etc. Unfortunately for the argument, and for nuclear ^development schemes, nuclear power is none of these things a good deal of economic cheating (easy to do) is done. decisively, unless Much data, beginning with /the cancellation of nuclear plant orders, can\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 be permitted at all, and evidently true premissiFve** /f the argument is to be decisive. The data to be summarised splits into two parts, public (governmental) analyses, and private (utility) assessments. Virtually all available data /concerns the USA; in Euro^ _e, West and East, true costs of uniformly "publicly/controlled” nuclear power are generally not divulged. / A Firstly, the capital costs of nuclear plants, which have been rising much more rapidly than inflation, now exceed those of coal-fired plants. Ka-emanoff has estimated that capital costs of a nuclear generator (of optimal capacity) 49 will exceed comparable costs of a coal-fired unit by about 26% in 1985. And I 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 electricity they were designed to produce, and that when Atomic Energy Commission estimates of relative fcosts of nuclear and coal/, which assumed that both operated at 80% of design capacity, were adjusted accordingly, nuclear generated power proved to be far more �40. expensive than estimated.The discrepancy between actual and estimated ‘ capacity is especially important because a plant with an actual1/factor of 55% produced electricity at a cost about 25% higher than if the plant had performed at the manufacturers’ projected capacity rate of 70-75%. y The low reliability / of nuclear plants (per kilowatt output) as compared with the coal-fired plants adds to the case, on conventional economic /reliability of y /grounds of efficiency and product production costs, against nucleai/'. / These unfavourable assessments are from a private (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 /kct^S, in enrichment, and in waste management, It has been estimated that charging such costs to the electricity consumer would increase electricity bills for nuclear power by at least 25% (and probably much more). When official US cost/benefit analyses favouring nuclear power over coal are examined, it is found that they inadmissibly omit several of the public costs involved in producing nuclear power, For example, the analyses ignore waste costs on the quite inadmissible ground that it is not known currently what the costs involved are. o 4 But even using actual waste handling costs (while /wastes await storage) is enough to show that coa ljjis preferable to nuclear. When further public costs, such as insurance against accident and for radiation damage, are duly taken into account, the balance is swung still further in ✓ y / ^ / favo ur of alternatives to nuclear and against nucleaj/. In short,, even on p/per 'r Q1& Paradigm accounting, the nuclear alternative should be j ze- Nuclear development is not economical, it certainly seems; it has been /kept going not through its clear economic viability, but by massive public subsidization, of several types. In USA, to take a main example where information is available, nuclear development is publicly supported through s heavily subsidized or sometimes free research and development, ■through the ^Price-Anderson Act/ which sharply limits both private and public liability, i.e. which in effect provided the insurance subsidy making corporate nuclear development economically feasible, and through government agreement to handle all radioactive wastes. While the Old Paradigm strictly construed cannot support uneconomical developments, contemporary liberalisation of the Paradigm does allow for uneconomic projects, seen as operated in the public interest, in such fields as /social welfare. Duly admitting social welfare and some principles �41. 6t / /in the distribution of wealth (not necessarily of pollution) leads/the modern //version of the Old Paradigm, called the Modified Old Paradigm. The main /changes from the Old Paradigm are (as with state socialism) a^emphasis of economic factors, e.g. individual self-help is down-played, wealth is to a small extent redistributed, e.g. through taxation, market forces are regulated or displaced (not in principle eliminated, as with state socialism). Now it has been contended - outrageous though it should now seem - that nuclear power ll« is in the public interest as a means to various sought public ends , for example, As (j&lj 45 • from those already mentioned such as energy for growth and cheap e, ./electricity, and such as plentiful power for heating and cooking and appliance /use, avoidance of shortages, rationing, C2 -outs and the like. Since /alternative power sources, such as coal, could serve ends given power was /supplied with suitable extravagance, the d^eement has again to show that the choice of nuclear power over other alternatives is best in the requisite respects, in serving the public interest. Such an argument is a matter for decision theory, under which head cost-benefit analyses which rank alternatives also fall as special cases. Decision theory purports to cover theoretically the field of choice between alternatives; it is presented as the theory which ’deals with the 53 problem of choosing one course of action among several possible courses’. Thus the choice of alternati’ve modes of energy production, the energy choice ^problem, becomes an exercise -arrrd decision theory; and the nuclear choice is of ten ’5 us tified" in Old Paradigm terms through appeal to decision theory. But though decision theory is in principle comprehensive, as soon as it is put to work in such practical cases as energy choice, it is very considerably contracted in scope, several major assumptions are surreptitiously imported, and what one is confronted with is theory drastically /pruned down to conform with the narrow utilitarianism of mainstream economic theory. The extent of reduction can be glimpsed by comparing, to take one important example, a general optimisation model for decision (where uncertainty is not gross) with comparable decision theory methods, such as the 5 expected utility model. The general model for best choice among alternatives /specified maximisation of expected value subject to constraints, which may include ethical constraints excluding certain alternatives under given /conditions. models demote value to utility, assuming thereby measurability and transference properties that may not obtain, and eliminate constraints altogether (absorbing what is forbidden, for example, as having a high disutility, but one that can be compensated for nonetheless). Thus, in �particular, ethical constraints against nuclear development are replaced, in Old Paradigm fashion, by allowance in principle for compensation 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 (neo-classical) economic assumptions made in the theory, for example as to the assessment of everything to be taken into account through utility (which comes down to monetary terms : everything w^Lth account^n^/has a price), and as to the legitimacy of transferring with limited compensation 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 uncertainty. It is not a case of decision under risk (and so expected utility models are not applicable), because some possible outcomes are so uncertain that, in contrast to the case of risk, no (suitably objective) quantifiable probabilities can be assigned to them, Items that are so uncertain are taken to include nuclear 1war and core meltdown 54 [of a reactor, possible outcomes of nuclear development/ widespread radio active pollution is, by contrast, not uncertain. The correct rule for decision under uncertainty is, in the case of energy /choice, maximum, to maximize the minimum payoff, so it is sometimes contended. In fact, once again, it is unnecessary for present purposes to decide which energy option is selected, but only whether the nuclear option is rejected. f Since competing selection rules tend to deliver the same for options early rejected as the nuclear options, a convergence in the rejection of the nuclear option can be effected. All rational roads lead, not to Rome, but to rejection of the nuclear option. t z A further convergence can be effected also, L'tbecause ci LiO Lthe best possible (economic) outcomes of such leading options as Ci .r D l/ j, [coal and^hydroO Celectric mix are very roughly of the same order as the nuclear option (so Elster contends, and his argument can be elaborated). Under these conditions complex decision rules (^such as the Arrow-H^^wicz rule) which take £ /account of both best possible and /reduce to the maxim^in rule. possible outcomes under wfk *ch option^ Whichever energy option is selected under the /maximwffi rule, the nuclear option is certainly rejected since/(eere options where worst outcomes are than that of the nuclear option (just consider the scenario if the nuclear nightmare, not the nuclear dream, is realised). Further application of the rejection rule will reject the fossil fuel (predominantly coal) option, on the basis of estimated effects on the earth's climate from burning massive quantities of such fuels. �HHHB 43. Although the rejection rule coupled with enjoys a privileged several rivals to maximise for decision under uncertainty have been of which has associated rejection rules. proposed, rules, such as the risk- AdkW Some of these reasoning criticised by Goodin (pp.507-8), the riskiness of a policy in terms of the increment of which ’ risk it adds to those pre-existing in the status quo, rather than in terms of the absolute value of the risk associated with the policy’ are decidedly decision procedure appears to and rather than offering a dubious, afford protection of the (nuclear) status quo. What will be argued, or rather what Goodin has in effect argued for us, is that wherever one of these rules is applicable. and not dubious, it leads to rejection of the nuclear option. For example, the keep-options-open or allow-for-reversibility rule (not an entirely unquestionable rule/ ’of strictly limited applicability’) excludes the nuclear option because ’nuclear plants and their by-products have a nuclear reactor ran air of irreversibility ... "One cannot pimply a coal-fired plant'” (p.506). The compare-the /alternatives rule, in ordinary application, leads back to the cost-benefit assessments, which, as already observed, tell decisively against a nuclear option when costing is done properly. The maximise-sustainable-benefits rule, which 'directs us to opt for the policy producing the highest level of net benefits which can be sustained indefinitely’, ’decisively favours renewable 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 ie framework ^arm-avoidance and protecting-the- vulnerable^also yieldj/ the same nuclear-excluding results. Harm-avoidance, in particular, points ’decisively in favour of "alternative" and "renewable" energy sources ... combined with strenuous efforts at energy conservation’ The upshot is evident: whatever reasonable decision rule is adopted (p.442). 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-benefit analyses, with probabilities duly multiplied in, and the is as before from cost-benefit considerations, against a nuclear choice. The Old Paradigm does not, it thus appears, sustain the nuclear juggernaut: nor does its Modification. 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, sufficiently evident that contemporary economic behaviour does not accord with Old Paradigm percepts, practice does not accord with neo-classical, economic �/theory nor, to consider the main modification, with social 1 theory. 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 keen to realise returns on capital already invested. There are also typical self-interest reasons for 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 political affairs, and as a spin-off profits accrue to others, and so on. There are just as important, ideological reasons, such as a belief in the control of both political and physical power by technocratic-entreprenial elite, a belief in social control from above, control which nuclear power offers far more than alternatives, some of which (vaguely) threaten to alter the power base, a faith in the unlimitedness of 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. Within contemporary corporate capitalism, these sorts of reasons for nuclear development are intimately linked, because those whose types of enterprise benefit substantially from nuclear development are commonly those who hold the requisite beliefs. It is then, contemporary corporate capitals^m, along with its state enterprise image, that fuels the nuclear juggernaut. To be sure, corporate capitalism, which is the political economy largely thrust upon us in western nations, is not necessary for a nuclear future; a totalitarian state of the type 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. This diagnosis can be /split into two main cases, the national development of nuclear power in the /US^ and the international spread of nuclear technology for which the US has been largely responsible. By comparison with the West, nuclear power production in /the Eastern bloc is which had in 1977 only nuclear plants. II and is largely confined to the Soviet Union oneCj-5^ -** the wattage output of U/ 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 else­ where to any great extent. American technology has. �45. The 60s were, because of the growth in electricity demand, a period of great expansion of the electrical utilities in the US. These companies were encouraged to build nuclear plants, rather than coal or oil burning plants, for several state controlled or influenced reasons:- Firstly, owing to governmental regulation procedures the utilities could (it then seemed) earn a higher rate of profit on a nuclear plant than a fossil fuel one. Secondly, the US government arranged to meet crucial costs and risks of nuclear operation, and in this way, and more directly through its federal agencies, actively encouraged a nuclear choice and nuclear development. In particular, state limitation of liability and shouldering of part of insurance for nuclear accidents and state arrangements to handle nuclear wastes were what made profitable private utility operation appear feasible and resulting in nuclear 4 /investment. In the 70s, though the state subsidization picture changed : continued, the private ’high costs of construction combined with low capacity //factors and poor reliability have wiped out the advantage that nuclear/ had enjoyed in the US. Much as the domestic nuclear market in the US is controlled by a few corporations, so the world market is dominated by a few countries, predominantly and first of all the US, which through its two leading nuclear companies, Westinghouse and General Electric, has been the major exporter of nuclear technology. " These companies were enabled to gain entry into European and subsequently world markets by US foreign policies, basically the "Atoms for Peace" program supplemented by bilateral agreements providing for US technology, /research, enriched uranium and financial capital. (The US offered a jstate /subsidized) nuclear package that Europe could not refuse and with which the ' British could not compete’. In the 70s the picture of US domination of Common Market nuclear technology had given way to subtler influence: American companies /held dcadSjig with relevant governments) substantial interests in European and Japanese nuclear companies and held licences on the technology which remained largely American. Meanwhile in the 60s and 70s the US entered into bilateral agreements for civilian use of atomic energy with many other countries, for X example, Argentina, Brasil, Columbia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Israel, / Pakistan, Philippines, South Korea, Portugal, South Africa, , /Taiwan, Turkey, Venezuela, South Vietnam. The US proceeded?in their way, to ship nuclear technology and nuclear materials in great quantities round the world. It also proceeded to spread nuclear technology through the International Atomic Energy Agency, originally designed to control and safeguard nuclear operations, but most of whose * budget activities’. and activities ... have gone to promote nuclear �A main reason for the promotion and sales pressure on Third World countries has been the failure of US domestic market and industrial world Less developed countries markets for reactors. 2 offer a new frontier where reactors can be built with easy public financing, where health and safety regulations are loose and enforcement rare, where public opposition is not permitted and where weak and corrupt regimes offer / easy sales. fForJ ... the US has considerable leverage with many of these countries. We know from painful experience that many of the worst dictatorships in the planet . would not be able to stand without overt and covert US support. ' Many of those are now^ y?ocrinithe nuclear path, for all the worst reasons. ' J It is evident from this sketch of the ways and means of reactor proliferation that not only have practices departed far from the framework of the Old Paradigm and social Modification, but that the practices (of corporate capitalism and associated third world imperialism) involve much that is ethically unacceptable, by o^rfer, modified, or alternative percepts;^ for principles such as assembled. viyxAi/r and self-determination are grossly violated. IX. SOCIAL OPTIONS : SHALLOWER AND DEEPER ALTERNATIVES. The future 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 ii carries with it the likelihood of serious (air) pollution and associated phenomena such as acid rain and atmospheric heating, not to mention the despoliation caused by extensive strip mining, all of which result from its use 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 nonbeneficiaries for some concentrated benefits to some profit takers and to some users who do not pay the full costs of production 1 58 and replacement. To these conventional main options a third is often added which emphasizes softer and more benign technologies, such as those of solar energy and, in Northern Europe, hydroelectricity. The deeper choice, which even softer paths tend to neglect, is not technological but social, and involves both conservation measures and the restructuring of production away from energy intensive uses: at a more basic level there is a choice between consumeristic and nonconsumeristic futures. These more fundamental choices between social alternatives, conventional technologically-oriented discussion of energy options tends to be obscure. It is not just a matter of deciding in which way to meet �47. given and unexamined goals (as the Old Paradigm would imply), but also a matter of examining the goals. That is, we are not merely faced with the question 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 matter of examining those alleged needs and the cost of a society that creates them. It is not just a question of devising less damaging ways to meet these I alleged needs conceived of ps inevitable and unchangeable. (Hence there are solar ways of producing unnecessary trivia no one really wants, as opposed to nuclear ways.) Naturally this is not to deny that these softer options are superior because of the ethically unacceptable features of the harder options. But it is doubtful that any technology, however benign in principle, will be likely to leave a tolerable world for the future if it is expected to meet unbounded and uncontrolled energy 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, for example, the effect on the world’s forests, which are commonly counted as a solar resource, of use for production of methanol or of electricity by woodchipping (as already planned by forest authorities and contemplated by many other energy organisations). While few would object to the use of genuine waste material for energy production, 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 forests. The effects of such additional demands on the maintenance of the forests are often dismissed, even by soft technologicalists, by the simple expedient of waving around the label ’renewable resources’. Many forests are in 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 59 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 imminent if not already well advanced. It certainly has begun in many regions, and for many forest types (such as rainforest 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 appreciation of the conduct of contemporary forestry 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, �48. resembling the deforestation of England at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, again for energy purposes, would be extensive and devastating erosion in steeper lands and tropical areas, 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 - important though this is - without any more basic structural and social change is inadequate. Nor is such a simple technological switch likely to be achieved. It is not as if political pressure could oblige the US government to stop its nuclear program (and that of the countries it influences, much of the world), in the to succeed in halting the Vietnam war. way pressure appeared While without doubt it would be good if this could be accomplished, it is very unlikely given the integration of political powerholders with those sponsorinanuclear , . , 60 development. The deeper social options involve challenging and trying to change a social structure which promotes consumerism, consumption far beyond genuine needs, and an 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 satisfaction in work and in social relations and other activities, is virtually bound to be one which generates a vast amount of unnecessary consumption. (A production system that produces goods not to meet genuine 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 implementing the New Paradigm, the move away from consumerism is for example part of the more general shift from materialism and materialist values. The social change option tends to be obscured in most discussions of energy options and of how to meet energy needs, in part because it does question underlying values of current social arrangements. The conventional discussion proceeds by taking alleged demand (often conflated with wants or needs ^) as unchallengeable, and the issue to be one of which technology can �49. 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 and unchangeable. I /'of The point is readily illustrated. such industries as f transportation It is commonly argued by representatives and petroleum, as for example by McGrowth of the XS Consumption Co., that people want deep freezers, air conditioners, power boats, ... It would be authoritarian to prevent them from satisfying these wants. Such an argument conveniently ignores the social framework in which such needs and wants arise or are produced. To point to the determination of many such wants at the framework level is not however to accept a Marxist approach according to which they are entirely determined at the framework level (e.g. by industrial organisation) and there is no such thing as individual choice or determination at all. It is to see the social framework as a major factor in determining certain kinds of choices, such as those for travel, and to see apparently individual choices made in such matters as being channelled and directed by a social framework determined largely in the interests of corporate and private profit and advantage. The social change option is a hard option - at least it will be difficult to obtain politically - but it is the only way, so it has been argued, of avoiding passing on serious costs to the future. And there are other sorts of reasons than such ethical ones for taking it: it is the main, indeed the only sort of option open to those who take a deeper ecological perspective0 , a perspective integral with the New Paradigm but not essential to radical departure from the dominant paradigm. The ethical transmission requirement defended accordingly requires, hardly surprisingly, social and political adjustment. The social and political changes that the deeper alternative requires will be strongly resisted because they and power structure. mean changes in current social organisation To the extent that the option represents some kind of threat to parts of present political and economic arrangements it is not surprising that official energy option discussion proceeds by misrepresenting and often obscuring it. But difficult though a change will be, especially one with such far-reaching effects on the prevailing power structure, is to obtain, it is imperative to try : we are all on the nuclear 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-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 fallacies and decision theory is at least as important as knowledge of nuclear technology. 2. As to the first, see references cited in Goodin, 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 Dunlap, especially p. 34. 5. 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-)nuclear 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 what, suits them. 9. This is a conclusion of several governmental inquiries and is conceded by some leading proponents of nuclear development; for requisite details up to 1977 see Routley (a). The same conclusion has been reached in some, but not all, more recent official reports, see, e.g., �2 10. z For some details see Gyorgy, p. 60 ff. 11a. Naturally the effect on humans is not the only factor that has to be taken into account in arriving at moral assessments. Nuclear radiation, 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 example, can hardly improve its case, it suffices if the case against it can be made out solely in terms of its effects on human life in the conventional (Old Paradigm) way. 11. See the papers, and simulations, discussed in Goodin, p. 42^? 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. Back of thus Humanity Unlimited assumption is the idea of Man 13. replacing God. First God had unlimited power, e.g. over nature, then when during the Enlightenment Man replaced God, Man was to have unlimited Science and technology were the tools which were to put Man into the power. position of unlimitedness. More recently nuclear power is seen as providing man at least with unlimited physical power, power obtained through technology, [ability to manage technology r&a/esents the past] On such limitation 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 voting "paradoxes" on the other. Other different limitation results are presented in Routley 81. It follows that there are many problems that have no solution and much that is necessarily unknowable. Limitative results put a serious dent in the progress picture. According the Dominant Western Worldview, / the his histo^ 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' T- re (Barry, p.243). re~ a nuclear future contravenes requirements of justice. �3 16. For examples, and for some details of the history of philosophers' positions on obligations to the future, see Routley (a). 17. Passmore, p. 91. Passmore’s position is ambivalent and, to all appearances, inconsistent. It is considered in detail in Routley (a), as also is Rawls’ position. 18. For related criticisms of the economists’ arguments for discounting, and for citation of the often eminent economists who sponsor them, see Goodin, 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 What he claims is that we cannot list all the satisfactory fashion. possible outcomes in the way that such rules as expected utility maximization presupposes, 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 p). For example, outcomes Goodin says cannot be listed, can be comprehended along such lines as "plant breakdown through human error”. Furthermore the different I mote rules Goodin subsequently considers also require listing of ' "possible" outcomes. Goodin's point can be alternatively stated however. are really two points. The first trouble is that such There alternative^ cannot in general be assigned required quantitative probabilities, and it is at that point that applications of the models breaks down. The breakdown is just what separates decision making under uncertainty from decision making under risk. Secondly, many influential Applications of decision theory methods, I the Rasmussen Report is a good example, do, illegitimately, delete possible X /alternatives from their 21. Discount, or bank, rates in the economists’ sense are usually set to follow the market, cf. P.A. Samuelson, TfoCTZCWWS., 7th Edition, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1967, p.351. 22. 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 mere logical possibility. �4 24. Such a principle is explicit both in classical utilitarianism (e.g. Sidgwick p. 414), and in a range of contract and other theories from Kant and •-jtA? >v / Rousseau to Rawls (p. 293). How the principle is will depend ' heavily, however, on the underlying theory; and we do not want to make our use depend heavily on particular ethical theories. 25. The latter question is taken up in section VII; see especially, the Poverty argument. 26. SF, p. 27. Shrader-Frechette is herself somewhat crritical of the /carte blanche adoption of these methods, suggesting that^whoever affirm^ denies the desirability of ... [such] standards is, to some degree, /symbollically assenting to a number of American value patterns and culture / * (p. 28). 27. The example parallels the sorts of utilitarianism, e.g. the admissible »unterexamples often advanced to I of an innocent person because of pleasure given to the large lynching party. For the more general case against utilitarianism, see ... 28. US Atomic Energy Commission, Comparative Risk-Cost-Benefit Study of Alternative sources of Electrical Energy (WASH-1224), US Government Printing Office, Washington, 29. , December 1974, p.4-7 and p. 1-16. As SF points out, p.37-44., in some detail. As she remarks, ... since standards need not be met, so long as the NRC [Nuclear Regulatory commission] judges that the licence shows ’a reasonable effort’ at meeting them, current policy allows government regulators to trade .■ human health and welfare for the [apparent] good. E^j/ch] / intentions of the promotors of technology. / good intentions have never been known to be sufficient for the morality of an act (p. 39). The failure of state regulation, even where the standards are as mostly not very X /demanding, and the alliance of regulators with they are supposed to be regulating, are conspicuous features of modern environmental control, not just of (nuclear) pollution control. 30. �The figures are those from the original Brookhaven Report: 31. possibilities and consequences of major ’Theoretical accidents in large nuclear plants’, USAEC Report WASH-740, Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1957. This report was requested in the first place because the ^n Atomic Energy wanted positive safety conclusions "to reassure the private insurance companies" so that they would provide coverage for the nuclear industry. Since even the conservative statistics of the report were alarming it was suppressed and its data were not made public until almost 20 years later, after a suit was brought as a result of the Freedom of Information Act (Shrader-Frechette, pp. 78-9). Atomic Energy Commission, Reactor Safety Study: An Assessment of 32. Accident Risks in US Commercial. Nuclear Power Plants, Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1975. This report, the only allegedly complete study, concluded that fission reactors presented only a minimal health risk to the public. Early in 1979, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (the relevant organisation that superseded the troubled Atomic Energy Commission) withdrew its support for the report, with the result that there is now no comprehensive analysis of nuclear power approved by the US Government. 32a. Most present and planned reactors are of this type: see Gyorgy. 33. 34. Even then relevant environment factors may have been neglected. 35. There are variations on (i) and (ii) which multiply costs against numbers such as probabilities. In this way risks, construed as probable costs, can be taken into account in the assessment. (Alternatively, risks may be assessed through such familiar methods as msuranc^Ly A principle varying (ii), and formulated as follows: a is ethically acceptable if (for some b) a includes no more risks than b and b is socially accepted, was the basic ethical principle in terms of which the Cluff Lake Board of Inquiry recently decided that nuclear power development �in Saskatchewan is ethically acceptable: see Cluff Lake Board of Inquiry Final- Report , Department of Environment, Government of Saskatchewan, 1978, p. 305 and p. 288. In this report, a is nuclear power and b is either activities clearly accepted by society as alternative power sources, In other applications b has been taken as cigarette smoking, motoring, mining and even the Vietnam War (!) 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 inadmissible conventional character. For look at the origin of b: b may be socially accepted though it is no longer socially acceptable, or though its social acceptibility is no longer so clearcut and it would not have been socially ^accepted if as much as is nc^ 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 the amendments the principles are invalid, for the reasons given in the text. It is not disconcerting that these arguments do not work. It would be sad to see yet another area lost to the experts, namely ethics to actuaries. 36. A main part of the troub|le/with the models is that they are narrowly utilitarian, and like utilitarianism they neglect distributional features, involve naturalistic fallacies, etc. Really they try to treat as an uncon- strained optimisation what is a deontically constrained optimisation: see R. and V. Routley 'An expensive repair kit for utilitarianism’. 37. Apparent exceptions to the principle such as taxation (and redistribution of income generally) vanish when wealth is construed (as it has to be taxation is to be properly justified) as at least partly a social asset unfairly monopolised by a minority of the population. Examples such as that of motoring dangerously do not constitute counterexamples 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 Energy3 Environmentalists for Full Employment, Washington DC, 1977, pp.1-7, the details supplied in substantiating the interesting case of Commoner-, well the absorption off available capital by the nuclear industry, see as e-'/ On the mployment issues, see too idd, p. 149. A Z|. K-ola&Az, -fl '(La. j>o/'-bics d �A more fundamental challenge to the poverty argument appears in I. Illicit, Energy and Equality, Calden and Boyars, London 1974, where it is argued that the sort of development nuclear energy represents is exactly the opposite of what the poor need. For much more detail on the inappropriateness see E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, Blond, and Briggs, London, 19 73. o As_to the capital and <o other requirements, see/£2J, p. 48, and also For an illuminating look at the sort o technology will tend to promote in the so-called underdeveloped countries see the paper of Waiko and other papers in The Melanesian Environment (edited J.H. Winslow), ^usp/alian National University Press, Canberra, 1977. 42. A useful survey is given in A. Lovins, Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken, Friends of the Earth Australia, 1977 (reprinted from Foreign Affairs, October 19 76); see alsod^tT'J,p. 233«r-ff^ and Schumacher, op. cit. 43. An argument like this is suggested in Passmore, Chapters 4 and 7, with respect to the question saving resources. In Passmore this argument for the overriding importance of passing on contemporary culture is underpinned fl by what appears to be a future-directed ethical version of the Hidden Hand argument of economics that, by a coincidence which if correct would indeed fortunate, the best way to take care of the future (and perhaps even the only way to do so, since do-good intervention is almost certain to go wrong) is to take proper care of the present and immediate future. The argument has all the defects of the related Chain Argument discussed above and others. cK See Nader and Abbotts, p. 66, p. 191, and also Commor^. Very persuasive arguments to this effect have been advanced by civil liberties groups and others in a number of countries: see especially M. Flood and R. Grove-White, Nuclear Prospects. A comment on the individual^ the State and Nuclear Power, Friends of the Earth, Council for the Protection of Rural England and National Council for Civil Liberties, London, 1976. 46. ’US energy policy, fo^ example, since the passage of the 1954 Atomic / Energy Act, has been that/nuclear power is necessary to provide "an economical /and reliable basis" r^te'ded "to sustain economic growth" (SF, p.lll, and references there cited). �7 47. There are now a great many criticisms of the second premiss in the literature. n X For our criticism, and a reformulation of the premiss in terms of selective economic growth (which would exclude nuclear development), see - ■ — '■ Routley (b) , and alsoj'Berkley and Seckier. To simple-mindedly contrast economic growth with no-growth, in the fashion lZ-lof soiief discussions of nuciear power, c,f/ Elster, is to leave out crucial X /alternatives; the of course much simplifies the otherwise faulty case for unalleged growth. 48. In UK and USSR nuclear development is explicitly in the public domain, in such countries as France and West Germany the government has very substantial interests in main nuclear involved companies. Even as regards nuclear plant operation in the US, / I it is difficult to obtain comprehensive Estimates of cost very dramtically according to the samp 1p of plants chosen and the assumptions made concerning the measurement of plant performance (Gyorgy, p. 173). 49. See Kalmanoff, p. 50. See Comey. 51. Ref. to what it has to say about Price 52. Full ref to ^F from ignorance etc. 53. These e.g. Elster, p. 377. On decision theory see also, I f54. A recent theme iyymuch economic literature is that theory and risk analysis can be universally applied. The theme is upset as soon as one steps outside of select Old Paradigm confines. y £ /within these confines there is no decision In any case, even at all on, and few (and ^widely diverging) figures for> the probability of a reactor core meltdown, and no reliable estimates as to the likelihood of a nuclear confrontation, Thus Goodin argues (in 78) that ’such uncertainties plague energy theories’ utility calculations impossible”. as to ’ 55. For details see Gyorgy, P. 398 ff., from which presentation of the international story is adapted. �Gyorgy, p. 307, and p. 308. 56. For elaboration of some of the important points, see Chesrmsky and Hermann. Whatever one thinks of the ethical principles underlying the Old 57. Paradigm or its Modification - and they do form a coherent set that many J people respect - these are not the principles underlying contemporary corporate capitalism and associated third-world imperialism. Certainly practical transitional programs may involve temporary and 58. ^v\ limited use of unacceptable long ter^ commodities such as 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 of such measures as environmental (or replacement) pricing of energy i.e. so that the price of some energy unit includes the full cost of replacing it by an equivalent unit taking account of environmental cost of production. Other (sometimes cooptive) strategies towards more satisfactory alternatives should also, of course, be adopted, in particular the removal of institutional barriers to energy conservation and alternative technology (e.g. local government regulations blocking these), and the removal of state assistance to fuel and power industries. Symptomatic of the fact that it is not treated as renewable is that 59. forest economics do not generally allow for full renewability - if they did the losses and deficits on forestry operations would be much more striking than they already are often enough. It is doubtful, furthermore, that energy cropping of forests can be a fully renewable operation if net energy production is to be worthwhile; see, e.g. the argument in L.R.B. Mann ’Some difficulties with energy farming for portable fuels’ 9 60. and add in the costs of ecosystem maintenance. For an outline and explanation of this phenomena see Gyorgy, and also . The requisite distinction is made in several places, e.g. Routley (b), and and (to take one example from the real Marxist literature), 61. V Gyorgy-.' 62. by The distinction between shallow and deep ecology was first emphasised For its environmental importance see Routley (c) (where further references are cited). �/references. primary General the For t the reader ca ext that over er...ref^ences wilt—unS'"by consulting the latter ■ S. Cotgrove and A. Duff, ’Environmentalism, middle-class radicalism and politics’, Sociological Review 2$ (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 Atomic Energy, Outback Press, Melbourne, 1977. R. and V. Routley, ’Nuclear energy and obligations to the future’, Inquiry 21 (1978), 133-79 (cited as Routley (a)). Fox Report: Ranger Uranium Environmental Inquiry First Report, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1977. K.S. Schrader-Frechette, Nuclear Power and Public Policy, Reidel, Dordrecht, 1980 (referred to as SF). W.R. Catton, Jr., and R.E. Dunlap, ’A new ecological paradigm for post-exuberant sociology’, American Behavioral Scientist 24 (1980) 15-47. United States Interagency Review group on Nuclear Waste Management, Report to the President, Washington. (Dept, of Energy) 1979. (Ref. No. El. 28. TID- 29442) (cited as US(a)). L, A.B. Covins and J.H. Price, Non-Nuclear Futures: The Case for an Ethical Energy Strategy, Friends of the Earth International, San Francisco, 1975. R. Routley, ’On the impossibility of an orthodox social theory and of an orthodox solution to environmental problems’, Logique et Analyje, , 23 (1980), 145-66. R. Routley, ’Necessary limits for knowledge: unknowable truths’, in Essays in honour of Paul Weing^T^^ (ed. E. 'tforsc^er) , Salzberg, 1980. J. Passmore, Man’s Responsibility for Nature, D^ckwairth, London, 1974. Passmore, �2. R. and V. Routley, The Fight for the Forests, Third Edition, RSSS, Australian National University, 1975 (cited as Routley (b)). J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., J) 3fid ^/s^ckler o i/i_ t~ot^/c\ l * _ J. Elster, 'Risk, uncertainty and nuclear power’, Social Science Information 18 (3) (1979) 371-400. £, £ J. Robinson, Economic Heresies, Basic Books, New York, 1971. / Barry, ’Circumstances of Justice and future generations' in Obligations to Future Generations (ed. ^ .1. * Si^rrj^and B. Barry), Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 19 78. /f £< c Zy c>~f . - ) yT —f. f / 1 /f4. c~~tt\A c j < / /7Z , (X KT , // / /{. fi)o^S $ ; } //67- Zy? z77G_ /6 6z7 3)?r * 6 /V4 ■ C rr * /f / <^ch_^ /_ z?73. . \Jol.jJZ �o 0 Hh Z CL 3 TO o p. 3 3 Z 3 o z co rt O rt TO B z f Z CL TO 3 3 O Hi 3 3 3 3 PO □ 3 Z Prt pj £rt O Z O 00 *< *3 3 3 O '•s rt Z CL 'C 3 3 "o' 3 3 co o 3 3 fb 3 i-h O >< P- O rt (0 z 3 3 rt PO 0 (b z o w O a P M § o B rt rt 3 3 O' 3 Z 3 3 3 3 CL CL 3 Z Z 3 3 rt 3 Z L<J z 3 rt 3 3 3 prt 3 CL B Z Z z w 3 3 rt 3 a rt 3 S' 3 TO O' 3 3 3 3 P- TO 00 O 5 C 3 3 3 TO O' Z Z 3 3 3 rt rt O Z Z 3 3 * < rt •3 Z 3 Z 3 3 3 O 3 rt * 3 3 3 O CD to 3 3 rt rt 3 Z < O Z 3 O 3 CO M z > 3 3 > H g s M Z P1 3 X PO' Z 3 >3 g 3 3 Z n o P' P> 1 tn 3 3 * p 3 O > f rf CO 3 CL CD rf 3 O 00 3 O 3 3 P- 1 CL 3 3 rt O Z 3 O Z 3 3 3 * p 3 3 rt 3 3 * P PTO 3 CL 3 3 O 3 3 rt rf 3 Z Z TO 3 CL n O Z w A t< O <Z> * H O s cn rt H» rt C rt B co * H H« CD F—* n Hl Hl H« :r o > z o 5 1 S' P3 3 3 3 3 S' P3 3 P- Z 3 rf 3 H O S' PO 3 Z t-1 a o 3 Ft s: H« O 3 3 3 CL rt P" O H 3 O CL c 3 0Q 3 P3 <S n O rt C O 3 Z 3 3 Z 3 3 rt P. 3 Pz 3 rt * P < 3 rt P3 * p 3 3 C rt> p * 3 Z z—\ 3 M X) 3 3 rt co 3 3 tn C CD rt 3 c n rt > C rt * 3 O 3 Prt 3 rt Z < 3 f Z A A Z o z 3 «! 3 3 CL CO Z 2 z 3 O < Pco p> o 3 TO O 3 P3 Z 3 o p> P1 3 3 rt P< 3 M 00 3 Z p. rt 3 3 Z 3 3 3 3 3 CL rt O 3 3 Z 3 rt 3 CL H 3 3 O 3 3 TO rt 3 tn p rti 3 rt 3 rt 3 3 3 TO rt P‘ Z 3 O' z p3 H- 3 CD 3 z Z 3 3 3 3 CL rh 3 3 rt rt> 0 Z H- O 3 3 CD 3 $ O Si 3 CD H1 3 CD 3 3 CD 3 3 Z t-h S' CL 1 PS' 3 < 3 Z 3 B >3 3 Hi Hi fl) H fl) * 3 H pf o CL Z < PCL X- W n o z o J3j z 3 rt C 3 3 Z C 3 S P3 rt 3 P3 CD Pn 3 3 CD CD rt p. o 9 fl) CD rt) H Hi 1 z-s 1 3 jb rt rt) K * H CD z O 3 5 rt g CL 3 < 3 Z O Z 3 Z TO 3 O 3 00 3 3 CO 3 O CD C CD 3 3 3 3 3 CL 5 2 z-s 3 O O 3 ? 3 rt 3 3 Z (u Z B 3 3 P3 O rt 00 < 3 3 O Z « C rt 3 S' CL • 3 3 < P3 O 2 3 rt C 3 3 pi < 3 Z c 3 P- 3 0 rt CL < S' P3 O 3 3 g rt 3 3 3 rt 3 o 5 B SS 3 3 3 3 3 3 rt 3 O < 3 3 3 3 rt Z O 3 p- o B e W cz> n o Z w <3 > r c z 3 3 3 CL Z 00 B Z 3 3 3 CL P00 B cn o o p3 Z rt 3 3 5 z O O B Alternative Environmental �Dominant Social Paradigm Alternative Environmental Paradigm Domination over nature Non-material (self-realisation) Natural environment intrinsically valued Harmony with nature * ECONOMY Market forces Risk and reward Rewards for achievement Differentials Individual self-help Public interest Safety Incomes related to need Egalitarian Collective/social provision POLITY Authoritative structures (experts influential) Hierarchical Law and order Action through official institutions Participative structures (citizen/ worker involvement) Non-hierar chical Liberation Direct action SOCIETY Centralised Large-scale Associational Ordered Decentralised Small-scale Communal Flexible NATURE Ample reserves Nature hostile/neutral Environment controllable Earth’s resources limited Nature benign Nature delicately balanced KNOWLEDGE Confidence in science and technology Rationality of means (only) Limits to science Rationality of ends CORE VALUES Material (economic growth, progress and development) Natural environment valued as resource State socialism, as practised in most of the "Eastern bloc", differs as to economic organisation, the market in particular being replaced system by a command system).$ But since there is virtually no debate confines of state socialism, that minor variant on the Old Paradigm from the Old Paradigm really only by central planning (a market over a nuclear future within the need not be delineated here. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Draft Papers Description An account of the resource Sylvan's literary executor encountered an archive in which “all his projects were current", since manuscripts were undated and unattributed. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document SOCIAL AND POLITICAL DIMENSIONS PETING PARADIGMS AND THE NUCLEAR DEBATE. One hardly needs initiation into the dark mysteries of nuclear physics to contribute usefully to the debate now widely ranging over nuclear power. While many important empirical questions are still unresolved, these do not really lie at the centre of the controversy. Instead, it is a debate about values ... many of the questions which arise are social and ethical ones. Sociological investigations have confirmed that the nuclear debate is primarily one over what is worth having or pursuing and over what we are entitled to do A, to others. They have also confirmed that the debate is polarised along the 'ij^nes of competing paradigms." According to the entrenched paradigm discerned, that constellation of values, attitudes and beliefs often called the Dominant Social Paradigm (hereafter the Old Paradigm), economic criteria become the benchmark by which a wide range of individual and social action is judged ahd evaluated. And belief in the market and market mechanisms is quite central. Clustering around this core belief is the conviction that enterprise flourishes best in a system of risks and rewards, that differentials are necessary ..., and in the necessity for some form of division of labour, and a hierarchy of skills and expertise. In particular, there is a belief in the competence of experts in general and of scientists in particular. ... there is an emphasis on quantification. The rival world view, sometimes called the Alternative Environmental Paradigm (the New Paradigm) differs on almost every point, and, according to sociologists, 4 in ways summarised in the following table Dominant Social Paradigm^ Alternative Env'i ronmen tal Paradigm CORE VALUES Material (economic growth, progress and development) Natural environment valued as resource Domination over nature Non-material (self­ realisation) Natural environment intrinsically valued Harmony with nature * ECONOMY Market forces Risk and reward Towards for achievement Differentials Individual self-help Public interest Safety Incomes related to need Egalitarian Collective/social provision I POLITY Authoritative structures (experts influential) Hierarchical ----.Law and order ^Action through official institutions) ——Centralized ---------Large-scale Associational Ordered Participative structures (citizen/worker involvement) ^■Non-hierarchical Liberation Direct action /Decentralised" * Small-scale Communal Flexible NATURE Ample reserves Nature hostile/neutral Environment controllable Earth’s resources limited Nature benign Nature delicately balanced KNOWLEDGE Confidence in science and technology Rationality of means (only) Limits to science Rationality of ends * ^tate socialism, as practiced in most of the "Eastern bloc", differs from the Old Paradigm really only as to economic organisation, the market in particular being replaced by central planning (a market system by a command system). But since there is virtually no debate over a nuclear future within the confines of state socialism,that minor variant on the Old Paradigm need not be delineated here. No doubt the competing paradigm picture is a trifle simple ^and subsequently it is important to disentangle a Modified Old Paradigm, which softens the old economic assumptions with social welfare requirements’^: and really ^instead of a New Paradigm there are rather counterparadigms, a cluster of not very well worked out positions that diverge from the cluster marked out as the Old Paradigm). Nonetheless it is empirically investigable, and, most important, it enables the nuclear debate to be focussed. 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 Paradigm. Indeed to introduce ethical and social dimensions into the assessment of nuclear power, instead of or in addition to merely economic factors such as cost and efficiency, is already to move somewhat beyond the received paradigm. For under the Old Paradigm, strictly construed, the nuclear debate is confined to the terms of the narrow utilitarianism 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) irrational. Furthermore, nuclear 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 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 ultimately fails, unless the free enterprise economic assumptions are replaced by the 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. There are two main parts'^?:- It is argued, firstly, 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. costs of project development and state subsidization with market independence and criteria 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 the Old Paradigm are but very rarely applied in contemporary political practice, 3 the place of pure (or mixed) capitalism having been usurped by corporate capitalism. It is because the nuclear debate can be carried on within the 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 roptions within a predetermined framework of values. ^In this corner belong, as explained in section VIII, most decision theory arguments, arguments often considered as encompassing all the nuclear debate is ethically about, best utilitarian means to predetermined ends.) For another leading characteristic of the nuclear debate is the attempt, under the dominant paradigm to remove it from the ethical and social sphere, and to divert it into specialist issues whether over minutiae and contingencies of present technology or over medical g or legal or mathematical details. The double approach can be applied as regards each of the main problems nuclear development poses. There are many interrelated problems, and the argument is further structured in terms of these. For in the advancement and promotion of nuclear power we encounter a remarkable combination of factors, never ^before assembled^: establishment, on a. massive scale, of an industry which involves at each stage of its processing serious risks and at some stages of production possible catastrophe, which delivers as a by-product radioactive wastes which require up to a million years’ storage but for which no sound and economic storage methods are known, which grew up as part of the war industry and which is easily subverted to deliver nuclear weapons, which requires for its operation considerable secrecy, limitations on the flow of information and restrictions on civil liberties, which depends for its economics, and in order to generate expected profits, on substantial state subsidization, support, and intervention. with problems. It is, in short, a very high techological development, beset A first important problem, which serves also to exemplify ethical issues and principles involved in other nuclear power questions, is the unresolved 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 passengers and freight. The train which is At an early stop in the journey someone consigns as freight, to a far distant destination, a package which contains a highly toxic and explosive gas. This is packaged in a very thin container which, as the consigner is aware, may not contain the gas for the 4 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 interefere inadvertently or deliberately with the freight, perhaps trying to steal some of it. All of these sorts of contingencies have occurred on some previous journeys. 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 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 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 would normally be seen as ludicrous when set in this context. What is worth remarking is that similar excuses are not always so seen when the consigner, again a "responsible” businessman, puts his workers' health or other peoples' welfare at risk. Suppose he ways that it is his own and others1pressing needs which justify his action. The company he controls, which produces the material as a by-product, is in bad financial 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 the whole company town, through loss of spending and the cancellation of the Multiplier Effect, will be worse off. The poor and unemployed of the town, whom he would otherwise have been able to help, will suffer especially. Few people would accept such a story, even if correct, as justification. Even where there are serious risks and costs to oneself or some group for whom one is concerned one is usually considered not to be entitled to simply transfer the heavy burden of those risks and costs onto other uninvolved parties, especially where they arise 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. /progresses. How fitting the a^gwaent is will become apparent as the argument There is no known proven safe way tjfi package the highly toxic wastes generated by the nuclear plants that will be spread around the world as 9 large-scale nuclear development goes ahead. 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 toxic. 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 their expected life times of perhaps 40 years, and which, some have estimated, may require 1^ million years to reach safe levels of radioactivity. Nuclear wastes must be kept suitably isolated from the environment for their entire active lifetime. For fission products the required storage period averages a thousand years or so, and for transuranic elements, which include plutonium, there is a half 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.10 Short-term methods of storage require continued human inter­ vention, while proposed longer term methods are subject to both human inter­ ference 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 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 formations or in salt mines, are largely speculative and relatively untested, and have already proved 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 result in multilayered metal containers before rock deposit, simulation models reveal that radioactive material may not remain suitably isolated from human environment. In short, the best present storage proposals carry very real possibilities of irradiating future people and 1 la damaging their environment. Given the heavy costs which could be involved for the future, and given the known limits of technology, it is methodologically 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 tested, and they may 6. well prove to involve unforeseen difficulties and risks when an attempt is made to put them into practice on a commercial scale. provide a rigorous guarantee of Only a method that could 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 human factors. But even if an economically viable, rigorously safe long term storage method could be devised, there is the problem of guaranteeing that it would be universally and invariably used. The assumption that it would be (especially if, as appears likely, such a method proved expensive economically and politically) seems to presuppose a level of efficiency, perfection and concern for the future which has not previously been encountered in human affairs, and has certainly not been conspicuous in the nuclear industry. Again, unless we assume continuous and faultless guarding of long term storage sites through perhaps a million years of possible future human activity, weapons- grade radioactive material will be accessible, over much of the million year storage period, to any party who is in a position to retrieve it. (L The assumption that a way will nonetheless be found, before 2000, / e. 'which gets around the wast^ storage problem (no longer a nere disposal problem) is accordingly not rationally based, but is rather like many assumptions of ways, / /'n /an article of faith. It is an assumption supplied by the Old Paradigm, a no limitations assumption, that there are really no (development) problems that cannot be solved technologically (if not in a fashion that is always immediately economically feasible). The assumption has played an important part in development plans and practice. It has not only encouraged an unwarranted 13 technological optimism (not to say hubris ), that there are no limits to what humans can accomplish, especially through science; it has led to the embarcation on projects before crucial problems have been satisfactorily solved or a solution is even in 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 14 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 likelihood of reactor accidents is a relevant example, discussed below). The original nuclear technology dream was that nuclear fission would provide unlimited energy (a ’clean unlimited supply of power’). shattered. and nuclear That dream soon The nuclear industry apparently remains a net consumer of power, fission will be but a quite short-term supplier of power. 7. The risks imposed on the future by proceeding with nuclear development are, then, significant. 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 lives could be seriously affected by the wastes. Thus perhaps 40,000 generations of future people could be forced to bear significant risks resulting from the provision of the (extravagant) energy use of only a small proportion of the people of 10 generations. Nor is the risk of direct harm from the escape or misuse of radioactive materials the only burden the nuclear solution imposes on the future. Because the energy provided by nuclear fission is merely a stop gap, it seems probable that in due course the same problem, that of making a 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 For they may well have to face the change to renewable resources in an with it. 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 ^pf the global population will have become dependent on high energy consumption and associated technology and heavy resource use and will have lost or reduced its ability to survive without it. It will, moreover, probably be a world which is largely depleted of non-renewable resources, and in which such renewable resources as forests and soils as remain, resources which will have to form a very important part of the basis of life, 15a are in a run-down condition. Such points tell against the idea that future people muelF be, if not direct beneficiaries of nuclear fission energy, at least indirect beneficiaries. It is for such reasons that the train parable cannot be turned around to work in favour of nuclear power, with for example, the nuclear train bringing relief as well as wastes to a remote town powered (only) 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 get itself out of a mess arising from its chosen 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 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. I Industrial society has - under each paradigm, so it will be argued - clear 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 often not in fact) in the contemporary world, it is not easy to avoid the conclusion that nuclear development involves gross injustice with respect to the 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 parcel are in the non-immediate future. Secondly, an attempt might be made to appeal to overriding circumstances, for to reject the consigner’s action in the circum­ stances outlined is not of course to imply that there are no circumstances in which such an action might be justifiable, or at least where the matter is less clearcut. It is the same with the nuclear case. 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 they apply in the present case. We consider these possible escape routes for the proponent of nuclear development in turn, beginning with the question of our obligations to the future. Resolution of this question casts light on other ethical questions concerning nuclear develop­ ment. It is only when these have been considered that the matter of whether there are overriding circumstances is taken up again (in section VII). Ill OBLIGATIONS TO THE (DISTANT) FUTURE. The especially problematic area is that of the distant (i.e. non-immediate) future, the future 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 obligations 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 (democratic and other) institutions which do not take due. account of the interests of future creatures. 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 there are no moral obligations to the future beyond perhaps those to the next generation. According to the most extreme of these positions against moral obligations to the future, our behaviour with respect to the future is morally unconstrained, there are no moral restrictions on acting or failing to act deriving from the effect of our actions on future people. Of those philosophers who say, or whose views imply that we 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. Thus moral obligation is seen as grounded on or as presupposing various relations which could not hold between people widely separated in time (or sometimes in space). For example, obligation is seen as grounded in relations which are proximate or of short duration and also non-transitive. Among such suggested bases or grounds of moral obligation, or requirements 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 rights or entitlement. People in the distant future will not be able to claim rights and entitlements as against us, and of course they can do nothing effective to enforce any claims they might have for their rights Secondly, there are those accounts which base moral obligations on social or legal convention, for example a convention which would require punishment of offenders or at least some kind of social enforcement. But plainly these and other conventions will not hold 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 could be no guarantee that any contemporary institutions would do it for them. 10. Both the view that moral obligation requires the context of a moral community and the view that it is contractually based appear to rule out the distant future as a field of moral obligation as they not only require a commonality or some sort of common basis which cannot be guaranteed in the case of the distant future, but also a possibility of interchange or reciprocity of action which cannot apply to the future. Where the basis of moral obligation is seen as mutual exchange the interests of future people must be set aside because they cannot change the past and cannot be parties to any mutual contract. The exclusion of moral obligations to the distant future also follows from those views which attempt to ground moral obligations in non-transitive relations of short duration such as sympathy and love. As well there are difficulties about love and sympathy for (non-existent) people in the far distant future about whose personal qualities and characteristics one must know very little and who may well be committed to a life-style for which one. has little or no sympathy. On the current showing in the case of nuclear energy it would be easy to conclude that contemporary society lacks both love and sympathy for future people; and it would appear to follow from this that contemporary 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 something acquired, either individually or institutionally, something which is conditional on doing something or failing to do something (e.g. participating in the moral community, contracting), or having some characteristic one can fail to have (e.g. love, sympathy, empathy).^ 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 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, 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 result of the action. direct and predictable The unconstrained position clearly implies that this is an acceptable moral enterprise, that whatever else we might legitimately criticize in the scientists’ experiment, perhaps its being over-expensive or badly designed, we cannot lodge a moral protest about the damage it will do to future people. The unconstrained position also endorses as morally acceptable the following sort^ of policy:- A firm discovers it can make a handsome profit from mining, processing and manufacturing a new type of material which, although it causes no problem for present people or their immediate descendants, will over a period of hundreds of years decay into a substance which will cause an enormous epidemic of cancer among the inhabitants of the earth at that time. According to the unconstrained view the firm is free to act in its own interests, without any consideration for the harm it does remote 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 only have several philosophers endorsed this position, but it is a clear implication 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, despite their being clearly implied by their position. We suspect that - we would certainly hope that - when it is brought out that the unconstrained position admits such counterexamples, that being free to act implies among other things being free to inflict pointless harm for example, most of those who opted for the unconstrained position would want to assert that it was not what they intended. What many of those who have put forward the unconstrained position seem to have had in /mind^denying moral obligation is rather that future people can look after themselves, that we are not responsible for their lives. The popular view that the future can take care of itself also seems to assume a future causally But it is not. It is not as if, 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 ^Jf 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. 12. 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 acquired an obligation to some stranger with whom one has never been involved, that one has no responsibility for his life, does not imply that one is free to do what one likes with respect to him, for example to rob him or to pursue some course of action of advantage to oneself which could seriously harm him. These difficulties for the unconstrained position arise in part from the (sometimes deliberate) failure to make an important distinction between acquired or assumed obligation 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. There is a considerable difference in the level and kind of responsibility involved. In the first case one must do something or be something which one can fail to do or be, e.g. In the second case responsibility arises I have loves, sympathy, be contracted. 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 (yet) exist. While it may perhaps be the case that there would need to be an acquired or assumed obligation in order for it to be claimed that contemporary people must make special sacrifices for future people of an heroic kind, or even to help them especially, only moral constraints are needed in order for us to be constrained from harming them. Thus, to return to the train parable, the consigner cannot argue in justification of his action that he has never assumed or acquired responsibility for the passengers, that he does not know them and therefore has no love or sympathy for them and that they are not part of his moral community, in short that he has no special obligations to help them. All that one needs to argue 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 13. 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 then direct harm than the consigner resorting to heroic self-sacrifice in refraining from placing his dangerous package on the train. The conflation of moral restraints 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 has to be assumed or required. The conflation is encouraged by reductionist positions which, in attempting to account for obligation in general, mistakenly endeavour to collapse all obligations. Hence the equation, and some main roots * of the unconstrained position, of the erroneous belief that there are no moral constraints concerning the distant future. The unconstrained view tends to give way, under the weight of counter­ examples, 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 condition, and that is all;17 there are in practice 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. account. There are at least three objections to this chain First, it is inadequate to treat constraints concerning the future as if they applied only between generations, as if there were no question of constraints on individuals as opposed to whole generations, since individuals can create causal effects, e.g. harm, on the future in a way which may create individual responsibility, and which often cannot be sheeted home to an entire generation. Nuclear power and its wastes, for example, are strictly the responsibility of small groups of power-holders, not a generational responsibility. 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. 14. Thirdly, improvements for immediate successors may be achieved at the expense of disadvantages to people of the more distant future. Improving the world for immediate successors is quite compatible with, and may even in some circumstances be most easily achieved by, ruining it for less immediate successors. Such cases can hardly be written off as ’’never-never land" examples since many cases of environmental exploitation might be. seen as of just this type. e.g. not just the nuclear case but also the exhaustion of non-renewable resources and the long-term depletion of renewable resources such as soils and forests through overuse. If then such obvious injustices to future people arising from the favouring or exclusive concern with immediate successors are to be avoided, obligations to the future will have to be seen as in some way fairly distributed over time, and not merely as accruing to particular generations in the way the chain picture suggests. IV. ATTEMPTS TO QUALIFY OBLIGATIONS TO THE FUTURE : ECQNQMISTIC UNCERTAINTY AND INDETERMINACY ARGUMENTS. While there are grave difficulties for the unconstrained position, qualification leads to a more defensible position. According to the main 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 costs and benefits (and so of future interests) is obtained by application over time of a discount rate, so discounting costs and risks to future people. The attempt to apply economics as a moral theory, something that is becoming increasingly common, can lead then to the qualified position. objectionable in such an approach is that What is economics should operate within the bounds of moral (deontic) constraints, just as in practice it operates within legal constraints, not determine 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 18 the waste problem. Since there is mounting evidence that future generations may well not be better off than present ones, especially in things that matter, no argument for discounting the interests of future generations on this basis can carry much weight. Nor is that all that is wrong with the argument. For it depends at base on the assumption that poorer contemporaries would be making sacrifices to richer successors in foregoing such (allegedly beneficial) developments as nuclear power. sacrifice argument. That is, it depends on the already scotched In any case, for the waste disposal problem to be legitimately bequeathed to the future generations, 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-immediate 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 equalization of monetary value, that compensation - which is what the waste problem is taken to come to economically - costs much less now than 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, insurmountable practical difficulties about applying such discounting, e.g. how to determine appropriate future discount rates. A more serious objection is that applied generally, the argument presupposes, what is false, that compensation, like value, can always be converted into monetary equivalents, that people (including those outside market frameworks) can be monetarily compensated for a variety of damages, including cancer and loss of life. There is no compensating a dead man, or for a lost species. In fact the argument presupposes a double reduction neither part of which can succeed: it is not just that value cannot in general be represented at all adequately 19 monetarily, but (as against utilitarianism, for example) that constraints and obligations can not be somehow reduced to matters of value. It is also presupposed that all decision methods, suitable for requisite nuclear choices, 16. are bound to apply discounting. This is far from so : indeed Goodin argues that, on the contrary, more appropriate decision rules do not allow discounting, and discounting only works in practice with expected utility rules (such as underlie cost-benefit and benefit-risk analyses), which are, he contends strictly inapplicable for nuclear choices (since not all outcomes can be duly determined x 20 and assigned probabilities, in the way that application of the rules requires.). As the preceding arguments reveal, the discounting move often has the same result as the unconstrained position. If, for instance, we consider the cancer example and reduce costs to payable compensation, it is evident that over a sufficiently long period of time discounting at current prices would lead to the conclusion that there are no recoverable damages and so, in economic terms, no constraints. In short, even certain damage to future people could be written off. One way to achieve the bias against future people is by the application of discount rates which are set in accord with the current economic horizons of no 21 more than about 15 years, and application of such rates would simply beg the question against the interests and rights of future people. Where there is certain future damage of a morally forbidden type, for example, the whole method of discounting is simply inapplicable, and its use would violate moral constraints. Another argument for the qualified position, which avoids the objections from cases of certain damage, comes from probability considerations. The distant future, it is argued, is much more uncertain than the present and immediate future, so that probabilities are consequently lower, perhaps even approaching or coinciding with zero for any hypothesis concerning the distant future. But then if we take account of probabilities in the obvious way, by simply multiplying them against costs and benefits, it is evident that the interests of future people, except in cases where there is an unusually high degree of certainty, must count for (very much) less than those of present and neighbouring people where (much) higher probabilities 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 future against a much lower probability of indeterminate 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 doubtful benefits for some present people, in the shape of the opportunity to maintain corporation profitability or to continue unnecessarily high energy use. And even if the costs and benefits were comparable or unevenly 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 sufficiently large. Such a cost-benefit or risk-benefit approach 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. For example, it would follow on such principles that it is permissible for a firm to injure, or very likely injure, some innocent party provided the firm stands to make a sufficiently large gain from it. But the costs and benefits involved are not transferable in any simple or general way from one party to another . Transfers of this kind, of costs and benefits involving different parties, commonly raise moral issues - e.g. is x entitled to benefit himself by imposing costs on y - which are not susceptible to a simple cost-benefit 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 transfer 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 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 temporally removed, and these risks will not be in any direct way related to a person’s extent of use. The transfer objection is essentially the same as that to the utilitarian’s (happiness) sums as a way of solving moral conflict between different parties, and the introduction of probability considerations - as in utilitarian decision 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 probabilities involving distant future situations are not always less than those concerning the immediate future in the wa/ the argument supposes, and that the outcomes of some moral problems 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. 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 taj^ke serious account of the effects of our actions on the distant future. There are two strands to the uncertainty argument, capable of separation, but frequently tangled up. Both arguments are mistaken, the first on a priori 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 about the effects of our actions on the distant future is unreliable, fuzzy and highly speculative. But we cannot base assessments of how we should act on information of this kind, especially when accurate information is obtain­ able about the present which would indicate different action. Therefore we must regretfully ignore the uncertain effects of our actions on the distant future. More formally and crudely: One only has obligations to the future if these obligations are based on reliable information at present as regards the distant future. 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 with respect to the present Associated with this is the attempt to suggest and with respect to the future. 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. risk of harm in this sort of case. It is enough that there is a significant 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 of the so-called "speculative" and "unreliable". But if we do not require certainty of action to apply moral constraints in contemporary affairs, why 19. should we require a much higher standard of certainty in the future? Why should we require for the future, epistemic 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 eipstemic double standard. But such an epistemic double standard, proposed in explaining the difference between the present and the future and to justify ignoring future peoples' interests, in fact cannot itself provide an explanation of the differences, since it already presupposes different standards of certainty appropriate to each class, which difference is in turn in need of justification. The second uncertainty argument is a practical uncertainty argument, that whatever our theoretical obligations to the future, we cannot in practice take the interests of future people into account because uncertainty about the distant future is so gross that we canmot 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. this way:- The second uncertainty argument 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 every (action) x", 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 obtain clear conclusions or directions concerning contemporary action action of the "It is wrong to do x" type. Many of the assumptions of the second argument can 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. 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 uncertainty is not so great as 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 Again there is considerable some cases is the creation of a significant risk. uncertainty about many factors which are not highly, or at all, morally relevant, but this does not extend to many factors which are of much greater importance to moral issues. For example, we may not have any idea what the fashions will be in a hundred years in names or footwear, or what flavours of ice 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 the earth of that wonderful variety of non-human life which at present makes it such a rich and interesting place. For this sort of reason, the second uncertainty argument should be rejected. 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 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 proper consideration. Most of these popular moves employ both of the uncertainty arguments as suits the case, switching from one to the other in a way that is again reminiscent of sceptical moves. For example, we may be told that we cannot really take account of future people because we cannot be sure that they will exist or that their tastes and wants will not be completely different from our own, to the point where they will not suffer from our exhaustion of resources or from the 21. things that would affect 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 morally committed to. Again we may be told that there is no guarantee that future people will be worthy of any efforts on our part, because they may be r I morons o^ forever plugged into enjoyment of other machines. /prepared to accent the elitist approach presupposed p Even if one is 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 opposed 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. p The possibilities just considered in these uncertainty arguments of /sceptical character are not ^feal possibilities. Another argument which may consider a real possibility, but still does not succeed in showing that it is acceptable to proceed with an action which would appear to be harmful to future people, is often introduced in the nuclear waste case. This is the argument that future people may discover a rigorously safe and permanent storage method for nuclear wastes before they are damaged by escaped waste material. Let us grant for the sake of the argument that this is a real possibility (though physical arguments may show that it is not). This still does not affect the fact that there is a significant risk of serious damage and that the creation of a significant risk is enough to rule out an action of this type as morally impermissible. In just the same way, future people may discover a cure for cancer: that this appears to be a live possibility, and not merely a logical 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 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 22. be considered 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 themselves. 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 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 The 'that they are any more than that^ that is they are not live possibilities. 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 yis so great as to preclude the consigner’s taking 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 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 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 indeterminate 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 raised particularly by problems of sharing fixed quantities of resources among present and future people, for example oil, when the numbers of the latter are indeterminate. Such problems are indeed difficult, but they are not resolved by ignoring the claims of the future, any more than the problems raised by the need to take account in decision-making of factors difficult to quantify are resolved by 23. ignoring such factors. Nor are distributional problems as large and representative of a class of moral problems concerning the future as the tendency to focus on them would suggest. It can be conceded that there will be cases where the indeterminacy 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 other conflict cases where the level of indeterminacy does not hinder resolution of the issue, n e.g. the train example which is a conflict case of a type. In particular, there will be many cases which are not solved by weighing numbers, numbers of interests, or whatever, cases for which one needs to know only the most general probable characteristics of future people. The crucial question which emerges is then?: are there any features of future people which would disqualify them from full moral consideration or reduce their claims to such below those of present people? principle None. The answer is?: in Prima facie, 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 dealing satisfactorily with the present?: in other words, a theory that did not allow properly for the future would be found to have defects as regards the present, to deal unjustly or unfairly with some present people, e.g. those remotely located, those outside some select subgroup, such as (white­ skinned) humans, etc. The only candidates for characteristics that would fairly rule out future people are the logical features we have been looking at, such as uncertainty and indeterminacy; but, as we have argued, 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 ol * present information). practical course of action given only 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 affect his entitlement to just and fair treatment, to full moral 7/ consideration; inversely, that it is without basis to discriminate morally against a person in virtue of his temporal position. As a result of this 23a. universalizability, there are the same general obligations to future people as to the present; and thus there is the same obligation to take account of them and their interests in what we do, to be careful in our actions, to take account of the probability (and not just the certainty) of our actions causing harm or damage, and to see, other things being equal, that we do not act so as to rob them of what is necessary for the chance of a good life. and indeterminacy do not relieve us of these obligations. Uncertainty If in a closely comparable case concerning the present the creation of a significant risk is enough to rule out an action as immoral, and there are no independent grounds for requiring greater certainty of harm in the future case under consideration, then futurity alone will not provide adequate grounds for proceeding with the action, thus discriminating against future people. Accordingly we cannot escape, through appeal to futurity, the conclusion 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. The 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^e, or a particular geographical position. First of all, the problem of nuclear waste disposal raises serious questions of distributive justice not only across time,1 across generations, but also across space. Is one state or region entitled to dump its radioactive pollution in I another state’s or region’s (or waters^ yar<^ 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 underpinning the answer, are both like those already given in arguing to the tentative conclusion concerning the injustice of imposing radioactive wastes upon future people. But the cases are not exactly the same: USA and Japan cannot endeavour to discount peoples of the Pacific in whose regions they propose to drop some of their radioactive pollution in quite the same way they can discount people of two centuries hence. (But what this consideration really reveals is yet another flaw in the idea that entitlement to just treatment can (be discounted over time)L Ethical issues of distributive justice, as to equity, concern not only the spatio-temporal location of nuclear waste, but also arise elsewhere in the assessment of nuclear development; in particular, as regards the treatment of f kood' those in the neighbouij/ of reactors, and, differently, as regards the distribution of (alleged) benefits and costs from nuclear power across nations. People living or working in the vicinity of a nuclear reactor are subject to special costs and risks: firstly, radioactive pollution, due to the fact that reactors discharge radioactive materials into the air and water near the plant, 25. and secondly catastrophic accidents, such as (steam) explosion of a reactor. An immediate question is whether such costs and risks can be imposed, with any ethical 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 other largescale 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” emission, during plant operation, of low level radiation (A 'carries carcinogenic and mutagenic costs. While there are undoubtedly costs, there remains, however, substantial disagreement over the likely number 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 (illegitimately) permits free transfer of costs and risks from one person to another, the ethical issue directly raised is said to be: what extent of cancer and genetic damage, if any, is permissibly traded for the advantages of nuclear power, and under what conditions? Under the Old Paradigm the issue is then translated into decision-theoretic questions, such as to ’how to employ risk/benefit analysis as a prelude to government regulation’ and ’how to determine what is an 26 acceptable level of risk/safety for the public. 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 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 27 compensate for the agony of cancer. The point is that the costs to one party are not justified, especially when such benefits to other parties can be alternatively obtained without such awful costs, and morally indefensible, 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. particularly 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 large. A non-negligible percentage (in excess of 3% of those exposed for 30 years) of people in the area will die, allegedly for the sake of the majority who are benefitted by nuclear power production (allegedly, for the real reasons for nuclear development do not concern this silent majority). Whatever i-ktr charm the 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 on minorities, most of whom have little or no genuine voice in the location of reactors in their environment and cannot move away without serious losses, is quite (morally) acceptable. One cheaper trick, deployed by the US 28 Atomic Energy Commission,” is to suppose that it is permissible to double, through nuclear technology, the level of (natural) radiation that a population received with apparently negligible consequences, the argument being that the additional amount (being equivalent to the ’’natural” level) is also likely to have negligible consequences. The increased amounts of radiation - with their large man-made component - are then accounted normal, and, of course, so it is then claimed, 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 radiation emissions very substantially in excess of the standards laid down; so the emission situation is worse than mere consideration of the standards would disclose. Furthermore, the monitoring of the standards ’’imposed” is entrusted to the nuclear operators themselves, scarcely disinterested parties. Public policy is determined not so as to guarantee public health, but rather to serve as a ’public pacifier' while 29 private nuclear operations proceed relatively unhampered. 27. 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). 30 If the cooling and emergency core cooling systems fail in American (light water) 30a reactors, then the core melts and ’containment failure’ is likely, with the result that an area of 40,000 square miles could be radioactively contaminated. In the event of the worst type of accident ini a very small reactor, a steam explosion in the reactor vessel, about 45,000l 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 the sizei of Pennsylvania would be destroyed, Modern nuclear reactors are about five times the size of the reactor for which 31 -k the consequences ofr a these conservative US government figures are given : similar accident with a modern reactor would accordingly be much greater still. V The consigner in risking the li^es, well-being and property of the / passengers on the train has acted inadmissibly. Does a government-sponsored private utility act in a way 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 irrespon- The proponents of nuclear power have in effect argued to the contrary, & (while at the same time endeavouring to shift the dispute out if the ethical arena / and into a technological dispute as to means (in accordance with the Old Paradigm). sible. 0 It has been contended, firstly, what contrasts with the train example, that Indeed in the there is no real possibility of a catastrophic nuclear accident. 32 influential Rassmussen report - which was extensively used to support public confidence in US nuclear fission technology - an even stronger, an incredibly CO jstrong, imp?yjbability 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 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 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 limitatioms and human error, of waste leakage and reactor incidents and quite possibly accidents, not in an ideal world far removed from the actual, a technological dream world where there is no real possibility of a nuclear 28. catastrophe. In such an ideal nuclear world, where waste disposal were fool-proof and reactors were accident-proof, things would no doubt be morally different. But we do not live in such a world. According to the Rasmussen report its calculation of extremely low accident probabilities is based upon reasonable mathematical and technological assumptions and is methodologically sound. This is very far from being the case. The under­ lying mathematical methods, variously called "fault tree analysis" and "reliability estimating techniques", are unsound, because they exclude as "not credible" possibilities or as "not significant" branches that are real possibilities, which may well be realised in the real world. It is the In fact the methodology and data of the report 33 has been soundly and decisively criticized. And it has been shown that there eliminations that are otherworldly. is a real possibility, a non-negligible probability, of a serious accident. It is contended, secondly, that even if there is a non-negligible probability of a reactor accident, still it is 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 a risk assessment 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; rV\ (ii) option a involves a total net cost in ter^s of cost to people (e.g. deaths, injuries, etc.) which is less than that of option b, which is already accepted; 34 therefore option a is acceptable. For example, the number lively to be killed by nuclear power stations is less than k the likely number killed by cigarette smoking or in road accidents, which are < 'accepted: so nuclear power stations are acceptable.^ little reflection reveals that this sort of risk assessment argument involves the same kind of fallacy as transaction models. 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 is the person who undertakes the risks also the person who receives the benefits or 29. primarily, as in driving or cigarette smoking, or are the costs imposed on other parties who do not benefit? It is only if the parties are the same in the case of the options compared, and there are no such distributional problems, that a 35 comparison on such a basis would be valid. This is rarely the case, and it is not so in the case of risk assessments of energy options. Secondly, does the person incur the risk as a result of an activity which he knowingly undertakes in a situation where he has a reasonable choice, knowing it entails the risk, etc., and is the level of risk in proportion to the level of 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? A risk that is ethically acceptable for a serious reason may not be ethically acceptable for a trivial reason. Both the arguments (i) and (ii) are often 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 or nuclear sense are cumulative, and already high if not, some say, too high. 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 moral principle, already argued for by way of examples and already invoked, that one is not, in general, entitled to simply transfer costs of a significant kind arising fron an activity which benefits oneself onto other 37 parties who are not involved in the activity and are not beneficiaries. This transfer principle is especially clear in cases where the significant costs include an effect on life or health or a risk thereof, and where the benefit to the benefitting party is of a noncrucial or dispensible nature, because, e.g. it can be substituted for or done without. Thus, for instance, one is not usually entitled to harm, or risk harming, another in the process of benefitting oneself. Suppose, for another example, we consider a village which produces, as a result of an industrial process by which it lives , a noxious waste material which J !is expensive and difficult to dispose of and yet creates a risk to life and health 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 service, on the train, to the next village. The inhabitants of this village are then forced to face the problem either of undertaking the expensive and difficult disposal process oor of sustaining risks to their own lives and health or else leaving the village and their livelihoods. transfer of costs as morally unacceptable. Most of us would see this kind of 30. 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 condition are not only future people and future generations (those of the next villages) but neighbours of nuclear reactors, especially, as in third world countries, neighbours who are not nuclear power users. The distribution of costs and damage in such a fashion, i.e. on to non-beneficiaries is a characteristic of certain widespread and serious forms of pollution, and is one of its most objectionable moral features. It is a corollary of the condition that we should not hand the world on to our successors in substantially worse shape than we received it - the tramsmission principle. For if we did then that would be a significant transfer of costs. (The corollary can be independently argued for on the basis of certain ethical theories). VI. OTHER SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL RISKS AND COSTS OF NUCLEAR DEVELOPMENT, ESPECIALLY NUCLEAR WAR. The problems already discussed by no means exhaust the ^environmental, health and safety risks and costs in^or arising from the * fuel cycle. nuclear 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 transportation of , 5 materials. Several of these stageyf involve hazards. Unlike the special risks in the nuclear cycle - of sabotage of plants, of theft of fissionable material, and of the further proliferation of nuclear armaments - these hazards have parallels, 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 38 ffatal and nonfatal injury as workers in the coal industry^. Furthermore, the Various (often serious) hazards encountered in working in some sectoj^ 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 occupational relocation), and many types of hazards incurred in working with radioactive material are now known in advance of choice of such an occupation: 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 ’’fact" of location cannot be. The social issue of arrangements that contract occupational choices and opportunities 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, is not an issue newly produced by nuclear associated occupations. Other social and environmental problems - though endemic where large-scale industry operates in societies that are highly inegalitarian 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 large-scale industrial operation, radioactive pollution, such as uranium mining for instance produces, is especially a legacy of nuclear development, and a specially undesirable one, as enormous rectification estimates for dead radio­ active lands and waterways reveal. Though sabotage is a threat to many large industries, so that modern factory complexes are often guarded like concentration camps (but from us on the outside), sabotage of a nuclear reactor can have dire consequences, of a different order of magnitude from most industrial sabotage (consider again the effects of core meltdown), Though theft of material from more dubious enterprises such as munitions works can pose threats to populations at large and can assist terrorism, no thefts for allegedly peaceful enterprises pose problems of the same order as theft of fissionable material. No other industry produces materials which so readily permit of fabrication into such /massive explosives/ No other industry is, to sum it up, so vulnerable on so many fronts. / / 5 In part to reduce it/ vulnerability, in part because of its long and continuing association with military activities, the nuclear industry is subject to, and encourages, 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 association and of expression, and free access to information. These practices include secrecy, restriction of information, formation of special police and guard forces, espionage, curtailment of civil liberties. Already operators of nuclear installations are given extraordinary powers, in vetting employees, to investigate the background and activities not only of employees but also of their families and sometimes even of their friends. The installations themselves become armed camps, which especially offends British sensibilities. The U.K. Atomic Energy (Special Constables) Act of 1976 created a special armed force to guard nuclear installations and made it ^nswerable ... to the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority.^9 developments the Uni-ted Kingdom; and worse i-R Weot Germany presage along with nuclear development increasingly authoritarian and anti-democratic societies. That nuclear development appears to force such political consequences tells heavily against it. /•fS j2a?c bEHmR - - *. i » /> . . Bvhi nd what mirt bv one of the most impregnable fortifications this side of the East-West German border, work has just begun on building West Gerpianv’s latest nuclear power station.- Much of the perimeter of the 75-acre site, at Brokdorf m the marshlands of the lower Elbe, is screened by a concrete wall io feet high, surmounted by coils of barbed wire. I he rest, regarded as ‘strategic ally observable.' is girdled by a ditch io feet wide and fill ed with water. Approach roads to the site arc patrolled by dozens of policemen and the compound itself is guarded by 6oo men from a private security organization and b\ jg dogs. '* -4? 32. Nuclear development is further indicted politically by the direct connection of nuclear power with nuclear war. It is fortunately true that ethical questions concerning nuclear war - for example, whether a nuclear war is justified, or just, under any circumstances, and if so what circumstances are distinguishable from those concerning nuclear power. Undoubtedly, however, the spread of nuclear power is substantially increasing the technical means for engaging in nuclear war and so, to that extent, the opportunity for, and chances of, nuclear engagement. Since nuclear wars are never accountable positive goods, but are at best the lesser of major evils, nuclear wars are always highly ethically undesirable. The spread of nuclear power accordingly expands the opportunity for, and chances of, highly undesirable consequences. Finally the latter, so increasing these chances and opportunities, is itself undesirable, and therefore what leads to it, nuclear development, is also undesirable. The details and considerations that fill out this argument, from nuclear war against nuclear development, are many. They are firstly technical, that it is a relatively straightforward and inexpensive matter to make nuclear explosives given access to, a nuclear power plant, secondly' political, A that nuclear engagements once instituted likely to escalate and that those A who control (or differently are likely to force access to) nuclear power plants do not shrink from nuclear confrontation and are certainly prepared to toy with A nuclear engagement (up to "strategic nuclear strikes” at least), and thirdly ** , $ A /ethical, that warj( invariably have immoral consequences, such as massive 5 damage to involved parties, however high sounding their justification is. Nuclear wars are certain to be considerably worse as regards damage inflicted than 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 irreversibility of any such confrontations. The supporting considerations are, fourthly, drawn from decision theory, and yare designed to show that the chances of such undesirable outcomes is itself y undesirable. The core argument is in brief this (the argument will be elaborated in section VIII):- Energy choice between alternative options is O . 27 ya case of decision making under uncertainty, because in particular /f the gross uncertainties involved in nuclear development. In cases of this type the appropriate rational procedure is to compare worst consequences of each alternative, to reject those alternatives with the worst of these worst 5 / consequence^ (this is a pretty un con troversial part of the maxim'nw rule which enjoins selection of the alternative with the best worst consequences). The nuclear alternative has, in particular because of the real possibility of a nuclear war, the worst worst consequences and is accordingly a particularly undesirable alternative. 33. /VII. CONFLICT ARGUMENTS^ AND UNCOVERING THE IDEOLOGICAL BASES OF NUCLEAR I DEVELOPMENT♦ As with nuclear war, so given the cumulative case against nuclear development, only one justificatory route remains open, that of appeal to important overriding circumstances. That appeal, to be ethically acceptable, must go far beyond merely economic considerations. For, as already observed, the consigner’s action cannot be justified by purely economistic arguments, such as that his profits would rise, the firm or the village would be more prosperous, or by appealing to the fact that some possibly uncomfortable changes would otherwise be needed. The transfer principle on which this assessment was based, that one was not usually entitled to create a serious risk to others for these sorts of reasons, applied more generally and, in particular, applied to the nuclear case. For this reason the economistic arguments which are those most commonly advanced under the Old Paradigm to promote nuclear development - e.g. cheapness, efficiency, profitability for electricity utilities, and the need otherwise for uncomfortable changes such as restructuring of employment, investment and consumption - do not even begin to show that the nuclear alternative is an acceptable one. Even if these economistic assumptions about benefits to present people were correct - it will be contended that most of them are not - the arguments would fail because economics (like the utilitarianism from which it characteristically derives) has to 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 prima facie unacceptable (nuclear) alternative is taken, some even more unacceptable alternative is the only possible outcome, and will ensue. For example, in the train parable, the consigner may argue that his action is justified because unless it is taken 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 clearcut, and one would perhaps hesitate to condemn any action taken in such circumstances. Some, of the arguments advanced to show moral conflict are based on / /competing^to present people, and others on competing obligations to future people, both of which are taken to override the obligations not to impose on the future o I significant risk ^f serious harm. The structure of such moral conflict arguments is based crucially on the presentation of a genuine and exhaustive set of alternatives (or at least practical alternatives) and upon showing that the only alternatives to admittedly morally undesirable actions are even more undesirable ones. If some practical alternative which is not morally worse than the action to be justified is overlooked, suppressed, or neglected in the argument - for example, if in the village case it turns out that the villagers have another option 34. I to starving or to the sending off of the parcel, namely earning a living i/' some other way - then the argument is defective and cannot readily be patched. Just such a suppression of practicable alternatives has occurred in the argument designed to show that the alternatives to the nuclear option are even worse than the option itself, and that there are other factual defects in these arguments In short, the arguments depend essentially on the presentation of as well. 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 industrialised countries. Failure to develop nuclear energy, it is often claimed, would amount to denying them the opportunity to reach the standard of affluence we currently enjoy and would create unemployment and poverty in the industrialised nations. The unemployment and poverty argument does not stand up to examination either for the poor of the industrial countries or for those of the third world. There is good evidence that large-scale nuclear energy will help to increase unemployment and poverty in the industrial world, through the 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 40 encouraging substitution of energy use for labour use. The argument that nuclear energy is needed for the third world is even less convincing. Nuclear energy is both politically and economically inappropriate for the third world, since it requires massive amounts of capital, requires numbers of imported scientists and engineers, 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 foreign dependence, adds to centralised entrenched power and reduces the chance for change in the oppressive political 41 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. 35. The poverty argument is then a fraud. help the poor. Nuclear energy will not be used to Both for the third world and for the industrialised countries there are well-known energy-conserving alternatives and the 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 to solar or perhaps fusion development. And there are various alternatives: coal and other fossil fuels, geothermal, and a range of solar options (including as well as narrowly solar, wind, water, tidal and plant power), 42 each possibly in combination with conservation measures; Despite the availability 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). Such an assumption really underlies part of the poverty argument, which thus amounts to an elaboration of the trickle- down argument (much favoured within the Old Paradigm setting). runs:- For the argument Nuclear development is necessary for (continuing and increasing) affluence. Affluence inevitably trickles down to the poor. Therefore nuclear First, the argument does not on its own show development benefits the poor. anything specific about nuclear power: for it works equally well if ’energy’ is substituted for ’nuclear’. It has also to be shown, what the next major argument will try to claim, that nuclear development is unique among energy alternatives in increasing affluence. The second assumption, that affluence inevitably trickles down, has now been roundly refuted, both by recent historical data, which show increasing affluence (e.g. in terms of GNP averaged per capita) coupled with increasing poverty in several countries, both developing and developed, and through economic models which reveal how "affluence" can increase without redistribution occurring. Another major argument advanced to show moral conflict appeals to a set of supposedly overriding and competing obligations to future people. We have, it is said, a duty to pass on the immensely valuable things and institutions which our culture has developed. Unless our high-technology, high energy industrial society is continued and fostered, our valuable institutions and traditions will fall into decay or be swept away. The argument is essentially that without nuclear power, without the continued level of material wealth it alone is assumed to make possible, the lights of our civilization will go out. Future people will be the losers. 4 36. The lights-going-out argument does raise questions as to what is valuable in our society, and of what characteristics are necessary for a good society. But for the most part these large questions, which deserve much fuller examination, can be avoided. The reason is that the argument adopts an extremely uncritical position with respect to present high-technology societies, apparently assuming that they are uniformly and uniquely valuable. It assumes that technological society is unmodifiable, that it cannot be changed in the direction of energy conservation or alternative (perhaps high technology) energy sources without collapse. 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 furnish - are essential to maintain this whole. These assumptions are hard to accept. Xz The assumption that technological ^soc^ety's energy patterns are unmodifiable is especially so - after all it has survived events such as world wars which have required major social and technological restructuring and consumption modification. If western society’s demands for energy are totally unmodifiable without collapse, not only would it be committed to a program of increasing destruction, but one might ask what use its culture could be to future people who would very likely, as a consequence of this destruction, lack the resource base which the argument assumes to be essential in the case of contemporary society. There is also difficulty with the assumption of uniform valuableness; but if this is rejected the question becomes not: what is necessary to maintain existing high-technological society and its political institutions, but rather: what is necessary to maintain what is valuable in that society and the political institutions which are needed to maintain those valuable things. While it may be easy to argue that high energy consumption centrally controlled is necessary to maintain the political and economic status quo, it is not so easy to argue that it is essential to maintain what is valuable, and it is what is valuable, presumably that we have a duty to pass on to the future. The evidence, 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 reason in fact to believe that a society with much lower energy and resource consumption would better foster what is valuable than our own. But even if a radical change in these directions is independently desirable, as we should argue, it is not necessary to presuppose such a change, in the short term at least, in order to see that the assumptions of the lights-going-out argument are wrong. No enormous reduction of well-being is required to consume less energy than at 37. present, and certainly far less than the large increase over present levels of /assumption which 44 is assumed in the usual economic case for nuclear energy, 6©' What the nuclear strategy is really designed to do then is not to prevent the lights going out in western civilisation, but to enable the lights to go on burning all the time to maintain and even increase the wattage output of the Energy Extravaganza. In fact there is good reason to think that, far from the high energy consumption society fostering what is valuable, it will, especially if energy 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 garrisoned, capital- and expertise-intensive energy source, must be one which is highly susceptible to entrenchment of power, and one in which the forces which control this energy source, whether capitalist or bureaucratic, can exert enormous power over the political system and over people’s lives, even more than they do at present. Such a society would, almost inevitably tend to become authoritarian and increasingly anti-democratic, as an outcome, among other thingsJof its response to the threat posed by dissident groups in the nuclear ' 45 situation. 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 authoritarianism - while many valuable aspects, such as the degree of political freedom and those opportunities for personal and collective autonomy which exist, would be lost or diminished: political freedom, for example, is a high price to pay for consumerism 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 technology- nuclear 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, rather, 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 argument, 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 If then we apply - as we have argued we should - appeal to futurity, closed. the same standards of morality to the future as we ought to acknowledge for the present, the conclusion that large-scale nuclear development is a crime against the future is inevitable. Closed also, in the same way, are the escape routes to other arguments - 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 argument thus far, to anti-nuclear conclusions, has relied upon, and defended premisses that would be rejected under the Old Paradigm; for example, such theses as that the interests and utilities of future people are not discounted (in contrast to the temporally-limited utilitarianism of market- centred 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 case, 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 nuclear development 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 alternatives to given economic ends. Admittedly so much capital has already been invested in nuclear fission ^research and development, in marke^T 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 ^(out), and which are, in accordance with Old Paradigm p^gcepts, publicly economic (in that they are approved for public consumption), and the real reasons, 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 increase the size of the pie, to avoid or postpone redistribution problems, and connected social Therefore nuclear power is desirable. The first premiss is 46 part of US energy policy, and the second premiss is supplied by standard unrest, etc.). 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 environmental costs carried by unqualified 47 economic growth. More to the point, since the second premiss is an assumption of the dominant paradigm, the first premiss (or rather an appropriate and less vulnerable restatement of it) fails even on Old Paradigm standards. For of course nuclear power is not necessary given that there are other, perhaps costlier alternatives. The premiss usually defended is some elaboration of the premiss : Nuclear power is the economically best way to sustain economic growth, 'economically best’ being filled out as ’most efficient’, ’cheapest’, ’having most favourable benefit-cost ratio', etc. Unfortunately for the argument, and for nuclear ^development schemes, nuclear power is none of these things a good deal of economic cheating (easy to do) is done. decisively, unless Much data, beginning with /the cancellation of nuclear plant orders, can\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 be permitted at all, and evidently true premissiFve** /f the argument is to be decisive. The data to be summarised splits into two parts, public (governmental) analyses, and private (utility) assessments. Virtually all available data /concerns the USA; in Euro^ _e, West and East, true costs of uniformly "publicly/controlled” nuclear power are generally not divulged. / A Firstly, the capital costs of nuclear plants, which have been rising much more rapidly than inflation, now exceed those of coal-fired plants. Ka-emanoff has estimated that capital costs of a nuclear generator (of optimal capacity) 49 will exceed comparable costs of a coal-fired unit by about 26% in 1985. And I 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 electricity they were designed to produce, and that when Atomic Energy Commission estimates of relative fcosts of nuclear and coal/, which assumed that both operated at 80% of design capacity, were adjusted accordingly, nuclear generated power proved to be far more 40. expensive than estimated.The discrepancy between actual and estimated ‘ capacity is especially important because a plant with an actual1/factor of 55% produced electricity at a cost about 25% higher than if the plant had performed at the manufacturers’ projected capacity rate of 70-75%. y The low reliability / of nuclear plants (per kilowatt output) as compared with the coal-fired plants adds to the case, on conventional economic /reliability of y /grounds of efficiency and product production costs, against nucleai/'. / These unfavourable assessments are from a private (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 /kct^S, in enrichment, and in waste management, It has been estimated that charging such costs to the electricity consumer would increase electricity bills for nuclear power by at least 25% (and probably much more). When official US cost/benefit analyses favouring nuclear power over coal are examined, it is found that they inadmissibly omit several of the public costs involved in producing nuclear power, For example, the analyses ignore waste costs on the quite inadmissible ground that it is not known currently what the costs involved are. o 4 But even using actual waste handling costs (while /wastes await storage) is enough to show that coa ljjis preferable to nuclear. When further public costs, such as insurance against accident and for radiation damage, are duly taken into account, the balance is swung still further in ✓ y / ^ / favo ur of alternatives to nuclear and against nucleaj/. In short,, even on p/per 'r Q1& Paradigm accounting, the nuclear alternative should be j ze- Nuclear development is not economical, it certainly seems; it has been /kept going not through its clear economic viability, but by massive public subsidization, of several types. In USA, to take a main example where information is available, nuclear development is publicly supported through s heavily subsidized or sometimes free research and development, ■through the ^Price-Anderson Act/ which sharply limits both private and public liability, i.e. which in effect provided the insurance subsidy making corporate nuclear development economically feasible, and through government agreement to handle all radioactive wastes. While the Old Paradigm strictly construed cannot support uneconomical developments, contemporary liberalisation of the Paradigm does allow for uneconomic projects, seen as operated in the public interest, in such fields as /social welfare. Duly admitting social welfare and some principles 41. 6t / /in the distribution of wealth (not necessarily of pollution) leads/the modern //version of the Old Paradigm, called the Modified Old Paradigm. The main /changes from the Old Paradigm are (as with state socialism) a^emphasis of economic factors, e.g. individual self-help is down-played, wealth is to a small extent redistributed, e.g. through taxation, market forces are regulated or displaced (not in principle eliminated, as with state socialism). Now it has been contended - outrageous though it should now seem - that nuclear power ll« is in the public interest as a means to various sought public ends , for example, As (j&lj 45 • from those already mentioned such as energy for growth and cheap e, ./electricity, and such as plentiful power for heating and cooking and appliance /use, avoidance of shortages, rationing, C2 -outs and the like. Since /alternative power sources, such as coal, could serve ends given power was /supplied with suitable extravagance, the d^eement has again to show that the choice of nuclear power over other alternatives is best in the requisite respects, in serving the public interest. Such an argument is a matter for decision theory, under which head cost-benefit analyses which rank alternatives also fall as special cases. Decision theory purports to cover theoretically the field of choice between alternatives; it is presented as the theory which ’deals with the 53 problem of choosing one course of action among several possible courses’. Thus the choice of alternati’ve modes of energy production, the energy choice ^problem, becomes an exercise -arrrd decision theory; and the nuclear choice is of ten ’5 us tified" in Old Paradigm terms through appeal to decision theory. But though decision theory is in principle comprehensive, as soon as it is put to work in such practical cases as energy choice, it is very considerably contracted in scope, several major assumptions are surreptitiously imported, and what one is confronted with is theory drastically /pruned down to conform with the narrow utilitarianism of mainstream economic theory. The extent of reduction can be glimpsed by comparing, to take one important example, a general optimisation model for decision (where uncertainty is not gross) with comparable decision theory methods, such as the 5 expected utility model. The general model for best choice among alternatives /specified maximisation of expected value subject to constraints, which may include ethical constraints excluding certain alternatives under given /conditions. models demote value to utility, assuming thereby measurability and transference properties that may not obtain, and eliminate constraints altogether (absorbing what is forbidden, for example, as having a high disutility, but one that can be compensated for nonetheless). Thus, in particular, ethical constraints against nuclear development are replaced, in Old Paradigm fashion, by allowance in principle for compensation 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 (neo-classical) economic assumptions made in the theory, for example as to the assessment of everything to be taken into account through utility (which comes down to monetary terms : everything w^Lth account^n^/has a price), and as to the legitimacy of transferring with limited compensation 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 uncertainty. It is not a case of decision under risk (and so expected utility models are not applicable), because some possible outcomes are so uncertain that, in contrast to the case of risk, no (suitably objective) quantifiable probabilities can be assigned to them, Items that are so uncertain are taken to include nuclear 1war and core meltdown 54 [of a reactor, possible outcomes of nuclear development/ widespread radio active pollution is, by contrast, not uncertain. The correct rule for decision under uncertainty is, in the case of energy /choice, maximum, to maximize the minimum payoff, so it is sometimes contended. In fact, once again, it is unnecessary for present purposes to decide which energy option is selected, but only whether the nuclear option is rejected. f Since competing selection rules tend to deliver the same for options early rejected as the nuclear options, a convergence in the rejection of the nuclear option can be effected. All rational roads lead, not to Rome, but to rejection of the nuclear option. t z A further convergence can be effected also, L'tbecause ci LiO Lthe best possible (economic) outcomes of such leading options as Ci .r D l/ j, [coal and^hydroO Celectric mix are very roughly of the same order as the nuclear option (so Elster contends, and his argument can be elaborated). Under these conditions complex decision rules (^such as the Arrow-H^^wicz rule) which take £ /account of both best possible and /reduce to the maxim^in rule. possible outcomes under wfk *ch option^ Whichever energy option is selected under the /maximwffi rule, the nuclear option is certainly rejected since/(eere options where worst outcomes are than that of the nuclear option (just consider the scenario if the nuclear nightmare, not the nuclear dream, is realised). Further application of the rejection rule will reject the fossil fuel (predominantly coal) option, on the basis of estimated effects on the earth's climate from burning massive quantities of such fuels. HHHB 43. Although the rejection rule coupled with enjoys a privileged several rivals to maximise for decision under uncertainty have been of which has associated rejection rules. proposed, rules, such as the risk- AdkW Some of these reasoning criticised by Goodin (pp.507-8), the riskiness of a policy in terms of the increment of which ’ risk it adds to those pre-existing in the status quo, rather than in terms of the absolute value of the risk associated with the policy’ are decidedly decision procedure appears to and rather than offering a dubious, afford protection of the (nuclear) status quo. What will be argued, or rather what Goodin has in effect argued for us, is that wherever one of these rules is applicable. and not dubious, it leads to rejection of the nuclear option. For example, the keep-options-open or allow-for-reversibility rule (not an entirely unquestionable rule/ ’of strictly limited applicability’) excludes the nuclear option because ’nuclear plants and their by-products have a nuclear reactor ran air of irreversibility ... "One cannot pimply a coal-fired plant'” (p.506). The compare-the /alternatives rule, in ordinary application, leads back to the cost-benefit assessments, which, as already observed, tell decisively against a nuclear option when costing is done properly. The maximise-sustainable-benefits rule, which 'directs us to opt for the policy producing the highest level of net benefits which can be sustained indefinitely’, ’decisively favours renewable 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 ie framework ^arm-avoidance and protecting-the- vulnerable^also yieldj/ the same nuclear-excluding results. Harm-avoidance, in particular, points ’decisively in favour of "alternative" and "renewable" energy sources ... combined with strenuous efforts at energy conservation’ The upshot is evident: whatever reasonable decision rule is adopted (p.442). 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-benefit analyses, with probabilities duly multiplied in, and the is as before from cost-benefit considerations, against a nuclear choice. The Old Paradigm does not, it thus appears, sustain the nuclear juggernaut: nor does its Modification. 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, sufficiently evident that contemporary economic behaviour does not accord with Old Paradigm percepts, practice does not accord with neo-classical, economic /theory nor, to consider the main modification, with social 1 theory. 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 keen to realise returns on capital already invested. There are also typical self-interest reasons for 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 political affairs, and as a spin-off profits accrue to others, and so on. There are just as important, ideological reasons, such as a belief in the control of both political and physical power by technocratic-entreprenial elite, a belief in social control from above, control which nuclear power offers far more than alternatives, some of which (vaguely) threaten to alter the power base, a faith in the unlimitedness of 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. Within contemporary corporate capitalism, these sorts of reasons for nuclear development are intimately linked, because those whose types of enterprise benefit substantially from nuclear development are commonly those who hold the requisite beliefs. It is then, contemporary corporate capitals^m, along with its state enterprise image, that fuels the nuclear juggernaut. To be sure, corporate capitalism, which is the political economy largely thrust upon us in western nations, is not necessary for a nuclear future; a totalitarian state of the type 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. This diagnosis can be /split into two main cases, the national development of nuclear power in the /US^ and the international spread of nuclear technology for which the US has been largely responsible. By comparison with the West, nuclear power production in /the Eastern bloc is which had in 1977 only nuclear plants. II and is largely confined to the Soviet Union oneCj-5^ -** the wattage output of U/ 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 else­ where to any great extent. American technology has. 45. The 60s were, because of the growth in electricity demand, a period of great expansion of the electrical utilities in the US. These companies were encouraged to build nuclear plants, rather than coal or oil burning plants, for several state controlled or influenced reasons:- Firstly, owing to governmental regulation procedures the utilities could (it then seemed) earn a higher rate of profit on a nuclear plant than a fossil fuel one. Secondly, the US government arranged to meet crucial costs and risks of nuclear operation, and in this way, and more directly through its federal agencies, actively encouraged a nuclear choice and nuclear development. In particular, state limitation of liability and shouldering of part of insurance for nuclear accidents and state arrangements to handle nuclear wastes were what made profitable private utility operation appear feasible and resulting in nuclear 4 /investment. In the 70s, though the state subsidization picture changed : continued, the private ’high costs of construction combined with low capacity //factors and poor reliability have wiped out the advantage that nuclear/ had enjoyed in the US. Much as the domestic nuclear market in the US is controlled by a few corporations, so the world market is dominated by a few countries, predominantly and first of all the US, which through its two leading nuclear companies, Westinghouse and General Electric, has been the major exporter of nuclear technology. " These companies were enabled to gain entry into European and subsequently world markets by US foreign policies, basically the "Atoms for Peace" program supplemented by bilateral agreements providing for US technology, /research, enriched uranium and financial capital. (The US offered a jstate /subsidized) nuclear package that Europe could not refuse and with which the ' British could not compete’. In the 70s the picture of US domination of Common Market nuclear technology had given way to subtler influence: American companies /held dcadSjig with relevant governments) substantial interests in European and Japanese nuclear companies and held licences on the technology which remained largely American. Meanwhile in the 60s and 70s the US entered into bilateral agreements for civilian use of atomic energy with many other countries, for X example, Argentina, Brasil, Columbia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Israel, / Pakistan, Philippines, South Korea, Portugal, South Africa, , /Taiwan, Turkey, Venezuela, South Vietnam. The US proceeded?in their way, to ship nuclear technology and nuclear materials in great quantities round the world. It also proceeded to spread nuclear technology through the International Atomic Energy Agency, originally designed to control and safeguard nuclear operations, but most of whose * budget activities’. and activities ... have gone to promote nuclear A main reason for the promotion and sales pressure on Third World countries has been the failure of US domestic market and industrial world Less developed countries markets for reactors. 2 offer a new frontier where reactors can be built with easy public financing, where health and safety regulations are loose and enforcement rare, where public opposition is not permitted and where weak and corrupt regimes offer / easy sales. fForJ ... the US has considerable leverage with many of these countries. We know from painful experience that many of the worst dictatorships in the planet . would not be able to stand without overt and covert US support. ' Many of those are now^ y?ocrinithe nuclear path, for all the worst reasons. ' J It is evident from this sketch of the ways and means of reactor proliferation that not only have practices departed far from the framework of the Old Paradigm and social Modification, but that the practices (of corporate capitalism and associated third world imperialism) involve much that is ethically unacceptable, by o^rfer, modified, or alternative percepts;^ for principles such as assembled. viyxAi/r and self-determination are grossly violated. IX. SOCIAL OPTIONS : SHALLOWER AND DEEPER ALTERNATIVES. The future 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 ii carries with it the likelihood of serious (air) pollution and associated phenomena such as acid rain and atmospheric heating, not to mention the despoliation caused by extensive strip mining, all of which result from its use 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 nonbeneficiaries for some concentrated benefits to some profit takers and to some users who do not pay the full costs of production 1 58 and replacement. To these conventional main options a third is often added which emphasizes softer and more benign technologies, such as those of solar energy and, in Northern Europe, hydroelectricity. The deeper choice, which even softer paths tend to neglect, is not technological but social, and involves both conservation measures and the restructuring of production away from energy intensive uses: at a more basic level there is a choice between consumeristic and nonconsumeristic futures. These more fundamental choices between social alternatives, conventional technologically-oriented discussion of energy options tends to be obscure. It is not just a matter of deciding in which way to meet 47. given and unexamined goals (as the Old Paradigm would imply), but also a matter of examining the goals. That is, we are not merely faced with the question 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 matter of examining those alleged needs and the cost of a society that creates them. It is not just a question of devising less damaging ways to meet these I alleged needs conceived of ps inevitable and unchangeable. (Hence there are solar ways of producing unnecessary trivia no one really wants, as opposed to nuclear ways.) Naturally this is not to deny that these softer options are superior because of the ethically unacceptable features of the harder options. But it is doubtful that any technology, however benign in principle, will be likely to leave a tolerable world for the future if it is expected to meet unbounded and uncontrolled energy 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, for example, the effect on the world’s forests, which are commonly counted as a solar resource, of use for production of methanol or of electricity by woodchipping (as already planned by forest authorities and contemplated by many other energy organisations). While few would object to the use of genuine waste material for energy production, 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 forests. The effects of such additional demands on the maintenance of the forests are often dismissed, even by soft technologicalists, by the simple expedient of waving around the label ’renewable resources’. Many forests are in 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 59 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 imminent if not already well advanced. It certainly has begun in many regions, and for many forest types (such as rainforest 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 appreciation of the conduct of contemporary forestry 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, 48. resembling the deforestation of England at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, again for energy purposes, would be extensive and devastating erosion in steeper lands and tropical areas, 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 - important though this is - without any more basic structural and social change is inadequate. Nor is such a simple technological switch likely to be achieved. It is not as if political pressure could oblige the US government to stop its nuclear program (and that of the countries it influences, much of the world), in the to succeed in halting the Vietnam war. way pressure appeared While without doubt it would be good if this could be accomplished, it is very unlikely given the integration of political powerholders with those sponsorinanuclear , . , 60 development. The deeper social options involve challenging and trying to change a social structure which promotes consumerism, consumption far beyond genuine needs, and an 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 satisfaction in work and in social relations and other activities, is virtually bound to be one which generates a vast amount of unnecessary consumption. (A production system that produces goods not to meet genuine 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 implementing the New Paradigm, the move away from consumerism is for example part of the more general shift from materialism and materialist values. The social change option tends to be obscured in most discussions of energy options and of how to meet energy needs, in part because it does question underlying values of current social arrangements. The conventional discussion proceeds by taking alleged demand (often conflated with wants or needs ^) as unchallengeable, and the issue to be one of which technology can 49. 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 and unchangeable. I /'of The point is readily illustrated. such industries as f transportation It is commonly argued by representatives and petroleum, as for example by McGrowth of the XS Consumption Co., that people want deep freezers, air conditioners, power boats, ... It would be authoritarian to prevent them from satisfying these wants. Such an argument conveniently ignores the social framework in which such needs and wants arise or are produced. To point to the determination of many such wants at the framework level is not however to accept a Marxist approach according to which they are entirely determined at the framework level (e.g. by industrial organisation) and there is no such thing as individual choice or determination at all. It is to see the social framework as a major factor in determining certain kinds of choices, such as those for travel, and to see apparently individual choices made in such matters as being channelled and directed by a social framework determined largely in the interests of corporate and private profit and advantage. The social change option is a hard option - at least it will be difficult to obtain politically - but it is the only way, so it has been argued, of avoiding passing on serious costs to the future. And there are other sorts of reasons than such ethical ones for taking it: it is the main, indeed the only sort of option open to those who take a deeper ecological perspective0 , a perspective integral with the New Paradigm but not essential to radical departure from the dominant paradigm. The ethical transmission requirement defended accordingly requires, hardly surprisingly, social and political adjustment. The social and political changes that the deeper alternative requires will be strongly resisted because they and power structure. mean changes in current social organisation To the extent that the option represents some kind of threat to parts of present political and economic arrangements it is not surprising that official energy option discussion proceeds by misrepresenting and often obscuring it. But difficult though a change will be, especially one with such far-reaching effects on the prevailing power structure, is to obtain, it is imperative to try : we are all on the nuclear 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-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 fallacies and decision theory is at least as important as knowledge of nuclear technology. 2. As to the first, see references cited in Goodin, 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 Dunlap, especially p. 34. 5. 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-)nuclear 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 what, suits them. 9. This is a conclusion of several governmental inquiries and is conceded by some leading proponents of nuclear development; for requisite details up to 1977 see Routley (a). The same conclusion has been reached in some, but not all, more recent official reports, see, e.g., 2 10. z For some details see Gyorgy, p. 60 ff. 11a. Naturally the effect on humans is not the only factor that has to be taken into account in arriving at moral assessments. Nuclear radiation, 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 example, can hardly improve its case, it suffices if the case against it can be made out solely in terms of its effects on human life in the conventional (Old Paradigm) way. 11. See the papers, and simulations, discussed in Goodin, p. 42^? 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. Back of thus Humanity Unlimited assumption is the idea of Man 13. replacing God. First God had unlimited power, e.g. over nature, then when during the Enlightenment Man replaced God, Man was to have unlimited Science and technology were the tools which were to put Man into the power. position of unlimitedness. More recently nuclear power is seen as providing man at least with unlimited physical power, power obtained through technology, [ability to manage technology r&a/esents the past] On such limitation 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 voting "paradoxes" on the other. Other different limitation results are presented in Routley 81. It follows that there are many problems that have no solution and much that is necessarily unknowable. Limitative results put a serious dent in the progress picture. According the Dominant Western Worldview, / the his histo^ 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' T- re (Barry, p.243). re~ a nuclear future contravenes requirements of justice. 3 16. For examples, and for some details of the history of philosophers' positions on obligations to the future, see Routley (a). 17. Passmore, p. 91. Passmore’s position is ambivalent and, to all appearances, inconsistent. It is considered in detail in Routley (a), as also is Rawls’ position. 18. For related criticisms of the economists’ arguments for discounting, and for citation of the often eminent economists who sponsor them, see Goodin, 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 What he claims is that we cannot list all the satisfactory fashion. possible outcomes in the way that such rules as expected utility maximization presupposes, 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 p). For example, outcomes Goodin says cannot be listed, can be comprehended along such lines as "plant breakdown through human error”. Furthermore the different I mote rules Goodin subsequently considers also require listing of ' "possible" outcomes. Goodin's point can be alternatively stated however. are really two points. The first trouble is that such There alternative^ cannot in general be assigned required quantitative probabilities, and it is at that point that applications of the models breaks down. The breakdown is just what separates decision making under uncertainty from decision making under risk. Secondly, many influential Applications of decision theory methods, I the Rasmussen Report is a good example, do, illegitimately, delete possible X /alternatives from their 21. Discount, or bank, rates in the economists’ sense are usually set to follow the market, cf. P.A. Samuelson, TfoCTZCWWS., 7th Edition, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1967, p.351. 22. 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 mere logical possibility. 4 24. Such a principle is explicit both in classical utilitarianism (e.g. Sidgwick p. 414), and in a range of contract and other theories from Kant and •-jtA? >v / Rousseau to Rawls (p. 293). How the principle is will depend ' heavily, however, on the underlying theory; and we do not want to make our use depend heavily on particular ethical theories. 25. The latter question is taken up in section VII; see especially, the Poverty argument. 26. SF, p. 27. Shrader-Frechette is herself somewhat crritical of the /carte blanche adoption of these methods, suggesting that^whoever affirm^ denies the desirability of ... [such] standards is, to some degree, /symbollically assenting to a number of American value patterns and culture / * (p. 28). 27. The example parallels the sorts of utilitarianism, e.g. the admissible »unterexamples often advanced to I of an innocent person because of pleasure given to the large lynching party. For the more general case against utilitarianism, see ... 28. US Atomic Energy Commission, Comparative Risk-Cost-Benefit Study of Alternative sources of Electrical Energy (WASH-1224), US Government Printing Office, Washington, 29. , December 1974, p.4-7 and p. 1-16. As SF points out, p.37-44., in some detail. As she remarks, ... since standards need not be met, so long as the NRC [Nuclear Regulatory commission] judges that the licence shows ’a reasonable effort’ at meeting them, current policy allows government regulators to trade .■ human health and welfare for the [apparent] good. E^j/ch] / intentions of the promotors of technology. / good intentions have never been known to be sufficient for the morality of an act (p. 39). The failure of state regulation, even where the standards are as mostly not very X /demanding, and the alliance of regulators with they are supposed to be regulating, are conspicuous features of modern environmental control, not just of (nuclear) pollution control. 30. The figures are those from the original Brookhaven Report: 31. possibilities and consequences of major ’Theoretical accidents in large nuclear plants’, USAEC Report WASH-740, Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1957. This report was requested in the first place because the ^n Atomic Energy wanted positive safety conclusions "to reassure the private insurance companies" so that they would provide coverage for the nuclear industry. Since even the conservative statistics of the report were alarming it was suppressed and its data were not made public until almost 20 years later, after a suit was brought as a result of the Freedom of Information Act (Shrader-Frechette, pp. 78-9). Atomic Energy Commission, Reactor Safety Study: An Assessment of 32. Accident Risks in US Commercial. Nuclear Power Plants, Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1975. This report, the only allegedly complete study, concluded that fission reactors presented only a minimal health risk to the public. Early in 1979, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (the relevant organisation that superseded the troubled Atomic Energy Commission) withdrew its support for the report, with the result that there is now no comprehensive analysis of nuclear power approved by the US Government. 32a. Most present and planned reactors are of this type: see Gyorgy. 33. 34. Even then relevant environment factors may have been neglected. 35. There are variations on (i) and (ii) which multiply costs against numbers such as probabilities. In this way risks, construed as probable costs, can be taken into account in the assessment. (Alternatively, risks may be assessed through such familiar methods as msuranc^Ly A principle varying (ii), and formulated as follows: a is ethically acceptable if (for some b) a includes no more risks than b and b is socially accepted, was the basic ethical principle in terms of which the Cluff Lake Board of Inquiry recently decided that nuclear power development in Saskatchewan is ethically acceptable: see Cluff Lake Board of Inquiry Final- Report , Department of Environment, Government of Saskatchewan, 1978, p. 305 and p. 288. In this report, a is nuclear power and b is either activities clearly accepted by society as alternative power sources, In other applications b has been taken as cigarette smoking, motoring, mining and even the Vietnam War (!) 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 inadmissible conventional character. For look at the origin of b: b may be socially accepted though it is no longer socially acceptable, or though its social acceptibility is no longer so clearcut and it would not have been socially ^accepted if as much as is nc^ 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 the amendments the principles are invalid, for the reasons given in the text. It is not disconcerting that these arguments do not work. It would be sad to see yet another area lost to the experts, namely ethics to actuaries. 36. A main part of the troub|le/with the models is that they are narrowly utilitarian, and like utilitarianism they neglect distributional features, involve naturalistic fallacies, etc. Really they try to treat as an uncon- strained optimisation what is a deontically constrained optimisation: see R. and V. Routley 'An expensive repair kit for utilitarianism’. 37. Apparent exceptions to the principle such as taxation (and redistribution of income generally) vanish when wealth is construed (as it has to be taxation is to be properly justified) as at least partly a social asset unfairly monopolised by a minority of the population. Examples such as that of motoring dangerously do not constitute counterexamples 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 Energy3 Environmentalists for Full Employment, Washington DC, 1977, pp.1-7, the details supplied in substantiating the interesting case of Commoner-, well the absorption off available capital by the nuclear industry, see as e-'/ On the mployment issues, see too idd, p. 149. A Z|. K-ola&Az, -fl '(La. j>o/'-bics d A more fundamental challenge to the poverty argument appears in I. Illicit, Energy and Equality, Calden and Boyars, London 1974, where it is argued that the sort of development nuclear energy represents is exactly the opposite of what the poor need. For much more detail on the inappropriateness see E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, Blond, and Briggs, London, 19 73. o As_to the capital and <o other requirements, see/£2J, p. 48, and also For an illuminating look at the sort o technology will tend to promote in the so-called underdeveloped countries see the paper of Waiko and other papers in The Melanesian Environment (edited J.H. Winslow), ^usp/alian National University Press, Canberra, 1977. 42. A useful survey is given in A. Lovins, Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken, Friends of the Earth Australia, 1977 (reprinted from Foreign Affairs, October 19 76); see alsod^tT'J,p. 233«r-ff^ and Schumacher, op. cit. 43. An argument like this is suggested in Passmore, Chapters 4 and 7, with respect to the question saving resources. In Passmore this argument for the overriding importance of passing on contemporary culture is underpinned fl by what appears to be a future-directed ethical version of the Hidden Hand argument of economics that, by a coincidence which if correct would indeed fortunate, the best way to take care of the future (and perhaps even the only way to do so, since do-good intervention is almost certain to go wrong) is to take proper care of the present and immediate future. The argument has all the defects of the related Chain Argument discussed above and others. cK See Nader and Abbotts, p. 66, p. 191, and also Commor^. Very persuasive arguments to this effect have been advanced by civil liberties groups and others in a number of countries: see especially M. Flood and R. Grove-White, Nuclear Prospects. A comment on the individual^ the State and Nuclear Power, Friends of the Earth, Council for the Protection of Rural England and National Council for Civil Liberties, London, 1976. 46. ’US energy policy, fo^ example, since the passage of the 1954 Atomic / Energy Act, has been that/nuclear power is necessary to provide "an economical /and reliable basis" r^te'ded "to sustain economic growth" (SF, p.lll, and references there cited). 7 47. There are now a great many criticisms of the second premiss in the literature. n X For our criticism, and a reformulation of the premiss in terms of selective economic growth (which would exclude nuclear development), see - ■ — '■ Routley (b) , and alsoj'Berkley and Seckier. To simple-mindedly contrast economic growth with no-growth, in the fashion lZ-lof soiief discussions of nuciear power, c,f/ Elster, is to leave out crucial X /alternatives; the of course much simplifies the otherwise faulty case for unalleged growth. 48. In UK and USSR nuclear development is explicitly in the public domain, in such countries as France and West Germany the government has very substantial interests in main nuclear involved companies. Even as regards nuclear plant operation in the US, / I it is difficult to obtain comprehensive Estimates of cost very dramtically according to the samp 1p of plants chosen and the assumptions made concerning the measurement of plant performance (Gyorgy, p. 173). 49. See Kalmanoff, p. 50. See Comey. 51. Ref. to what it has to say about Price 52. Full ref to ^F from ignorance etc. 53. These e.g. Elster, p. 377. On decision theory see also, I f54. A recent theme iyymuch economic literature is that theory and risk analysis can be universally applied. The theme is upset as soon as one steps outside of select Old Paradigm confines. y £ /within these confines there is no decision In any case, even at all on, and few (and ^widely diverging) figures for> the probability of a reactor core meltdown, and no reliable estimates as to the likelihood of a nuclear confrontation, Thus Goodin argues (in 78) that ’such uncertainties plague energy theories’ utility calculations impossible”. as to ’ 55. For details see Gyorgy, P. 398 ff., from which presentation of the international story is adapted. Gyorgy, p. 307, and p. 308. 56. For elaboration of some of the important points, see Chesrmsky and Hermann. Whatever one thinks of the ethical principles underlying the Old 57. Paradigm or its Modification - and they do form a coherent set that many J people respect - these are not the principles underlying contemporary corporate capitalism and associated third-world imperialism. Certainly practical transitional programs may involve temporary and 58. ^v\ limited use of unacceptable long ter^ commodities such as 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 of such measures as environmental (or replacement) pricing of energy i.e. so that the price of some energy unit includes the full cost of replacing it by an equivalent unit taking account of environmental cost of production. Other (sometimes cooptive) strategies towards more satisfactory alternatives should also, of course, be adopted, in particular the removal of institutional barriers to energy conservation and alternative technology (e.g. local government regulations blocking these), and the removal of state assistance to fuel and power industries. Symptomatic of the fact that it is not treated as renewable is that 59. forest economics do not generally allow for full renewability - if they did the losses and deficits on forestry operations would be much more striking than they already are often enough. It is doubtful, furthermore, that energy cropping of forests can be a fully renewable operation if net energy production is to be worthwhile; see, e.g. the argument in L.R.B. Mann ’Some difficulties with energy farming for portable fuels’ 9 60. and add in the costs of ecosystem maintenance. For an outline and explanation of this phenomena see Gyorgy, and also . The requisite distinction is made in several places, e.g. Routley (b), and and (to take one example from the real Marxist literature), 61. V Gyorgy-.' 62. by The distinction between shallow and deep ecology was first emphasised For its environmental importance see Routley (c) (where further references are cited). /references. primary General the For t the reader ca ext that over er...ref^ences wilt—unS'"by consulting the latter ■ S. Cotgrove and A. Duff, ’Environmentalism, middle-class radicalism and politics’, Sociological Review 2$ (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 Atomic Energy, Outback Press, Melbourne, 1977. R. and V. Routley, ’Nuclear energy and obligations to the future’, Inquiry 21 (1978), 133-79 (cited as Routley (a)). Fox Report: Ranger Uranium Environmental Inquiry First Report, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1977. K.S. Schrader-Frechette, Nuclear Power and Public Policy, Reidel, Dordrecht, 1980 (referred to as SF). W.R. Catton, Jr., and R.E. Dunlap, ’A new ecological paradigm for post-exuberant sociology’, American Behavioral Scientist 24 (1980) 15-47. United States Interagency Review group on Nuclear Waste Management, Report to the President, Washington. (Dept, of Energy) 1979. (Ref. No. El. 28. TID- 29442) (cited as US(a)). L, A.B. Covins and J.H. Price, Non-Nuclear Futures: The Case for an Ethical Energy Strategy, Friends of the Earth International, San Francisco, 1975. R. Routley, ’On the impossibility of an orthodox social theory and of an orthodox solution to environmental problems’, Logique et Analyje, , 23 (1980), 145-66. R. Routley, ’Necessary limits for knowledge: unknowable truths’, in Essays in honour of Paul Weing^T^^ (ed. E. 'tforsc^er) , Salzberg, 1980. J. Passmore, Man’s Responsibility for Nature, D^ckwairth, London, 1974. Passmore, 2. R. and V. Routley, The Fight for the Forests, Third Edition, RSSS, Australian National University, 1975 (cited as Routley (b)). J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., J) 3fid ^/s^ckler o i/i_ t~ot^/c\ l * _ J. Elster, 'Risk, uncertainty and nuclear power’, Social Science Information 18 (3) (1979) 371-400. £, £ J. Robinson, Economic Heresies, Basic Books, New York, 1971. / Barry, ’Circumstances of Justice and future generations' in Obligations to Future Generations (ed. ^ .1. * Si^rrj^and B. Barry), Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 19 78. /f £< c Zy c>~f . - ) yT —f. f / 1 /f4. c~~tt\A c j < / /7Z , (X KT , // / /{. fi)o^S $ ; } //67- Zy? z77G_ /6 6z7 3)?r * 6 /V4 ■ C rr * /f / <^ch_^ /_ z?73. . \Jol.jJZ o 0 Hh Z CL 3 TO o p. 3 3 Z 3 o z co rt O rt TO B z f Z CL TO 3 3 O Hi 3 3 3 3 PO □ 3 Z Prt pj £rt O Z O 00 *< *3 3 3 O '•s rt Z CL 'C 3 3 "o' 3 3 co o 3 3 fb 3 i-h O >< P- O rt (0 z 3 3 rt PO 0 (b z o w O a P M § o B rt rt 3 3 O' 3 Z 3 3 3 3 CL CL 3 Z Z 3 3 rt 3 Z L<J z 3 rt 3 3 3 prt 3 CL B Z Z z w 3 3 rt 3 a rt 3 S' 3 TO O' 3 3 3 3 P- TO 00 O 5 C 3 3 3 TO O' Z Z 3 3 3 rt rt O Z Z 3 3 * < rt •3 Z 3 Z 3 3 3 O 3 rt * 3 3 3 O CD to 3 3 rt rt 3 Z < O Z 3 O 3 CO M z > 3 3 > H g s M Z P1 3 X PO' Z 3 >3 g 3 3 Z n o P' P> 1 tn 3 3 * p 3 O > f rf CO 3 CL CD rf 3 O 00 3 O 3 3 P- 1 CL 3 3 rt O Z 3 O Z 3 3 3 * p 3 3 rt 3 3 * P PTO 3 CL 3 3 O 3 3 rt rf 3 Z Z TO 3 CL n O Z w A t< O <Z> * H O s cn rt H» rt C rt B co * H H« CD F—* n Hl Hl H« :r o > z o 5 1 S' P3 3 3 3 3 S' P3 3 P- Z 3 rf 3 H O S' PO 3 Z t-1 a o 3 Ft s: H« O 3 3 3 CL rt P" O H 3 O CL c 3 0Q 3 P3 <S n O rt C O 3 Z 3 3 Z 3 3 rt P. 3 Pz 3 rt * P < 3 rt P3 * p 3 3 C rt> p * 3 Z z—\ 3 M X) 3 3 rt co 3 3 tn C CD rt 3 c n rt > C rt * 3 O 3 Prt 3 rt Z < 3 f Z A A Z o z 3 «! 3 3 CL CO Z 2 z 3 O < Pco p> o 3 TO O 3 P3 Z 3 o p> P1 3 3 rt P< 3 M 00 3 Z p. rt 3 3 Z 3 3 3 3 3 CL rt O 3 3 Z 3 rt 3 CL H 3 3 O 3 3 TO rt 3 tn p rti 3 rt 3 rt 3 3 3 TO rt P‘ Z 3 O' z p3 H- 3 CD 3 z Z 3 3 3 3 CL rh 3 3 rt rt> 0 Z H- O 3 3 CD 3 $ O Si 3 CD H1 3 CD 3 3 CD 3 3 Z t-h S' CL 1 PS' 3 < 3 Z 3 B >3 3 Hi Hi fl) H fl) * 3 H pf o CL Z < PCL X- W n o z o J3j z 3 rt C 3 3 Z C 3 S P3 rt 3 P3 CD Pn 3 3 CD CD rt p. o 9 fl) CD rt) H Hi 1 z-s 1 3 jb rt rt) K * H CD z O 3 5 rt g CL 3 < 3 Z O Z 3 Z TO 3 O 3 00 3 3 CO 3 O CD C CD 3 3 3 3 3 CL 5 2 z-s 3 O O 3 ? 3 rt 3 3 Z (u Z B 3 3 P3 O rt 00 < 3 3 O Z « C rt 3 S' CL • 3 3 < P3 O 2 3 rt C 3 3 pi < 3 Z c 3 P- 3 0 rt CL < S' P3 O 3 3 g rt 3 3 3 rt 3 o 5 B SS 3 3 3 3 3 3 rt 3 O < 3 3 3 3 rt Z O 3 p- o B e W cz> n o Z w <3 > r c z 3 3 3 CL Z 00 B Z 3 3 3 CL P00 B cn o o p3 Z rt 3 3 5 z O O B Alternative Environmental Dominant Social Paradigm Alternative Environmental Paradigm Domination over nature Non-material (self-realisation) Natural environment intrinsically valued Harmony with nature * ECONOMY Market forces Risk and reward Rewards for achievement Differentials Individual self-help Public interest Safety Incomes related to need Egalitarian Collective/social provision POLITY Authoritative structures (experts influential) Hierarchical Law and order Action through official institutions Participative structures (citizen/ worker involvement) Non-hierar chical Liberation Direct action SOCIETY Centralised Large-scale Associational Ordered Decentralised Small-scale Communal Flexible NATURE Ample reserves Nature hostile/neutral Environment controllable Earth’s resources limited Nature benign Nature delicately balanced KNOWLEDGE Confidence in science and technology Rationality of means (only) Limits to science Rationality of ends CORE VALUES Material (economic growth, progress and development) Natural environment valued as resource State socialism, as practised in most of the "Eastern bloc", differs as to economic organisation, the market in particular being replaced system by a command system).$ But since there is virtually no debate confines of state socialism, that minor variant on the Old Paradigm from the Old Paradigm really only by central planning (a market over a nuclear future within the need not be delineated here.  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 97, Item 2: Draft of Nuclear power - ethical, social and political dimensions Subject The topic of the resource Typescript of draft, with handwritten emendations and corrections with whiteout, 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. Description An account of the resource Unnumbered paper from collection, item number assigned by library staff. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Routley</a> <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=val+routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Val Routley</a> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 97, Item 2 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource [64] leaves.48.16 MB. Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:78dac39">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:78dac39</a> Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1982-01-01 Box 97: Paper - Extracts - Articles and Chapters by Richard Sylvan https://www.antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/dd9d3643c6fef8d9b42bd99891f3504d.pdf 59d1d3200dc67ec37105255ec1b23c13 PDF Text Text Richa rd and Val Rout ley 1. NUCLEAR POWER - SOME ETHICAL AND SOCIAL DIMENSIONS 1 One hardl y needs initi ation into the dark myst eries of nucle ar phys ics to cont ribut e usefu lly to the deba te now wide ly ragin g over nucle ar powe r. While many impo rtant empi rical ques tions are still unres olved , these do not reall y lie at the centr e of the contr over sy. Inste ad, it is a deba te abou t value s .•. many of the ques tions which arise are socia l and ethic al ones .2 I. THE TRAIN PARABLE AND THE NUCLEAR WASTE PROBLEM. A long dista nce coun try trai n has just pulle d out. The train which is crowd ed carri es both passe ngers and freig ht. At an early stop in the journ ey someone consi gns as fr e ight, to a far dista nt desti natio n, a packa ge which conta ins a highl y toxic an d explo sive gas. This is packe d in a very thin conta iner which , as t he consi gner is awar e, may well not conta in the gas for the full dista nce f or whi ch it is consi gned , and certa inly will not do so if the train shou ld s t r i ke any real troub le, for exam ple, if the train shou ld be dera iled or i nvo l ved in a colli sion , or if some passe nger sh:>u ld inter fere inad verte ntly or de liber ately with the freig ht, perha ps tryin g to stea l some of it. All o f these sorts of thing s have happe ned on some previ ous journ eys~ If the co ntain er shoul d break the resu lting disa ster would proba bly kill at least some of the peop le on the train in adjac ent carri ages , while othe rs could be maimed ~or poiso ned or soon er or later incur serio us disea ses. Most of us would round ly condemn such an actio n. What migh t the cons igner of the parc el say to try to justi fy it? He migh t say that it is not certa in that the gas will escap e, or that the world needs his prod uct and it is his duty to supp ly it, or that in any case he is not respo nsibl e for the train or the peop le on it. These sorts of ~xcu ses howe ver would norm ally be seen as ludic rous when set in this conte xt. Unfo rtuna tely, simi lar excu ses are o ;,...:'. ~ f'\ o t- s " 99• ole~~ seen when the cons igner , again a (resp onsib le) busin essm an.pu ts his wor kers' healt h or other peop les' welf are at risk. Suppo se he says that it is his own and othe rapr essin g needs which justi fy his actio n. The company he cont rols, which produ ces the mate rial as a by-p rodu ct, i s in bad finan cial stra its, and could not affor d to produ ce a bette r cont ainer even if it knew how to make one. If the company fails , he and his famil y wi ll suffe r, his empl oyees will lose their jobs and have to look for othe rs, aP.d the whole company town, throu gh loss of spend ing, will be worse off. The poor and unem ploye d of the town, whom he would other wise have been able to help , will suffe r espe ciall y. Few peop le would acce pt such groun da as justi ficat ion. �Even where there are serio us risks and costs to ones elf or some group for whom one is conce rned one is usua lly cons idere d not to be entit led to simp ly trans fer the heavy burde n of those risks and costs onto othe r uninv olved parti es, espe ciall y where they arise from one's own, or one's grou p's chose n life- style . The matte r of nucle ar waste has many mora l featu res which resem ble the train case. How fitti ng the analo gy is will becom e appa rent as the argum ent prog resse s. There is no known prove n safe way to packa ge the high ly toxic waste s gene rated by the nucle ar plan ts that will be sprea d aroun d the world as large -scal e nucle ar devel opme nt goes ahead . The waste probl em will be much more serio us than that gene rated by the 50 or so react ors in use at prese nt, with each one of the 2000 or so react ors envis aged by the end of the centu ry produ cing, on avera ge, annu al waste s conta ining 1000 times the radio activ ity of the Hiros hima bomb. Much of this waste is extre mely toxic . For exam ple, a milli onth of a gramme of pluto nium is enoug h to induc e a lung canc er. A leak of even a part of the waste mate rial could invol ve much loss of life, wide sprea d disea se and gene tic dama ge, and conta mina tion of innnense areas of land. Wast es will inclu de the react ors them selve s, which will have to be aband oned after their expe cted life times of perha ps 40 year s, and whic h, some have estim ated, may requ ire U~ milli on y~ars to reach safe leve ls of radio activ ity. Nucl ear waste s must be kept suita bly isola ted from the envir onme nt for their entir e activ e lifet ime. For fissi on prod ucts the requ ired stora ge perio d avera ges a thous and years or so, and for trans uran ic elem ents, which inclu de . pluto nium, there is a half milli on to a milli on year stora ge probl em. Serio us probl ems have arise n with both shor t-term and propo sed long- term metho ds of stora ge , even with the comp arativ ely ~mal l quan tities of waste produ ced over th last twent y years . Shor t-term metho ds of stora ge requ ire conti nued human inter vent ion, while propo sed longe r term metho ds are subje ct to both human inter feren ce and risk of leaka ge throu gh non-human facto rs. No one with even a sligh t know ledge of the geolo gical and clim atic histo ry of the earth over the last milli on year s, a perio d whose fluct uatio ns in clim ate we are only just begin ning to guage and which has seen four Ice Ages , could be confi dent that a rigor ous guara ntee of safe stora ge could be provi ded for the vast perio d of time invol ved. Nor does the histo ry of human affa irs over the last 3000 years give groun d for confi denc e in safe stora ge by metho ds requ iring human inter vent ion over perha ps a milli on year s. Propo sed long- term stora ge meth ods such as stora ge in gran ite form ation s or in salt mine s, are large ly spec ulati ve and relat ively unte sted, and have alrea dy prove d to invol ve diffi culti es with attem pts made to put them into prac tice. Even as regar ds expe nsive recen t prop osals for first embe dding conc entra ted wast es in glass and enca psula ting the resu lt in mult ilaye red meta l conta iner• befor e rock depo sit, aimu latio n mode l• , �J, 3. revea l that radio activ e mate rial may not remai n suita bly isola ted from human envir onm ents. - In short , the best prese nt stora ge propo sals carry very real poss ibilit ies of irrad iatin g futur e peopl e and damaging their enviro nmen t. 3 Given the heavy costs which could be invol ved for the futur e, and given the known limit s of techn ology , it is metho dolog ically unsou nd to bet, as nucle ar natio ns have, on the disco very of safe proce dures for stora ge of waste s. Any new proce dures (requ ired befor e 2000) will proba bly be but varia tions on not. only have prese nt propo sals, and subje ct to the same inade quaci_e s. For insta nce,/ none of the propo sed metho ds for safe stor age~ been prope rly teste d, but they may well prove to invol ve unfor eseen diffi culti es and risks when an attem pt is made to put them into pract ice on a comm ercial scale . Only a method that could provi de a rigor ous guara ntee of safet y over the stora ge perio d, that place d safet y beyond reaso nable doubt , would be accep table . It is diffi cult to see how -such rigor ous guara ntees could be given conce rning eithe r the geolo gical or futur e human facto rs. But even if an econo mical ly viabl e, rigor ously safe long term stora ge met~ d could be devis ed, there is the proble m of guara nteein g that it would be unive rsally and invar iably used. The assum ption that it would be (espe cially if, as appea rs likel y, such a method prove d expen sive econo mical ly and polit icall y) seems to presu ppose a level of effic iency , perfe ction , and conce rn for the futur e which has not previ ously been encou ntered in human affai rs, and has certa inly not been consp icuou s in the nucle ar indus try. The risks imposed on the futur e by proce eding with nucle ar devel opme nt are, then, signi fican t. Perha ps 40,00 0 gener ation s of futur e peopl e could be force d to bear signi fican t risks resul ting from the provi sion of the (extra vagan t) energ y use of only a small propo rtion of the peopl e of 10 gener ation s. Nor is the risk of direc t harm from the escap e or misus e of radio activ e mate rials the only burde n the nucle ar solut ion impos es on the futur e. Becau se the energ y provi ded by nucle ar fissio n is merel y a etop gap, it seems proba ble that in due cours e the same proble m, that of making a trans ition to renew able sourc es of energ y, will have to be faced again by a futur e popu lation which will proba bly, again as a resul t of our actio ns, be very much worse place d to cope with it. Their world will most likel y be a world which is serio usly deple ted of non-r enewa ble resou rces, and in which such renew able resou rces as fores ts and soils as remai n, resou rces which inevi tably form an impo rtant part of the basis of life, are run-down or destr oyed. Such point s tell again st the idea that futur e peopl e must be, if not direc t bene ficiar ies of energ y from nucle ar fissio n, at least indir ect bene ficiar ies. �( The "solu tion" then is to buy time for conte mpora ry socie ty at a price .which not only creat es serio us proble ms for futur e peopl e but which reduc es their abili ty to cope with these probl ems. Like the consi gner in the train parab le, conte mpora ry indus trial socie ty propo ses, in order to get itsel f out of a mess arisin g from its own life- style - the creat ion of econo mies depen dent on an abund ance of non-r emwa ble energ y, which is limit ed in suppl y to pass on costs and risks of serio us harm to other s who will obtai n no corre spond ing bene fits. The "solu tion" may enabl e the avoid ance of some uncom fortab le chang es in the lifeti me of those now livin g and their imme diate desce ndant s, just as the consi gner• • actio n avoid s uncom foriab le chang es for him and those in his imme diate surro undin gs, but at the expen se of passi ng heavy burde ns to other uninv olved parti es whose oppo rtunit y to lead decen t lives may be serio usly jeopa rdise d. If we apply to the nucle ar situa tion the stand ards of behav iour and moral princ iples gener ally ackno wledg ed (in princ iple, if not so often in fact) in the ·conte mpora ry world , it is not easy to avoid the concl usion that nucle ar devel opme nt invol ves injus tice with respe ct to the futur e on a grand scale . There appea r to be only two plaus ible ways of tryin g to avoid such a concl usion . First , it might be argue d that the moral princ iples and oblig ation s which we ackno wledg e for the conte mpora ry world and perha ps the imme diate futur e do not apply to those in the non-im media te futur e. Secon dly, an attem pt might be made to appea l to overr iding circu mstan ces; for to rejec t the consi gner' s actio n in the circum stanc es outlin ed is not to imply that there are no circum stanc es in which such an actio n might be justi fiabl e. As in the case of the consi gner .of the packa ge there is a need to consi der what these justif ying circum stanc es might be, and wheth er they apply in the prese nt case. We consi der these possi ble escap e route s for the propo nent of nucle ar develo pmen t in turn. l II. OBLIGATIONS TO THE (DISTANT) FUTURE. ./ I I The espec ially probl emati c area is that of the dista nt (i.e. non-im media te) futur e, the futur e with which peopl e alive today will have no direc t conta ct; by comp arison , the imme diate futur e gives fewer proble ms for most ethic al theor ies. In fact the quest ion of oblig ation s to futur e peopl e prese nts tests which a number of ethic al theor ies fail to pass, and also has serio us reper cussi ons in polit ical philo sophy as regar ds the adequ acy of accep ted (demo cratic and other ) insti tutio ns which do not take due accou nt of the inter est• of futur e creat ures. \ r �Moral phil osop hers have , pred icta bly, diff ered on ques tion s of obli gati ons to dist ant futu re crea ture s. A good many of the phil osop hers who have exp lici tly cons ider ed the ques tion have come down in favo ur of the same cons ider atio n bein g give n to the righ ts and inte rest s of futu re peop le as to thos e of cont emp orary or imm edia tely futu re peop le. Othe rs fall into thre e cate gori es: thos e who ackn owle dge obli gati ons to the futu re but who do not take them seri ousl y or who assi gn them a less er weig ht, thos e who deny , or who are com mitte d by thei r gene ral mora l posi tion to deny ing, that ther e are mor al obli gati ons beyond the imm edia te futu re, and thos e who come down, with adm irab le phil osop hica l caut ion, on both side s of the issu e, but with the weig ht of the argu men t favo urin g the view unde rlyin g prev ailin g economic and poli tica l inst itut ions , that ther e are no mora l obli gati ons to the futu re beyond thos e perh aps to the next gene ratio n. Acco rdin g to the most extre me of thes e posi tion s agai nst mora l obli gati ons to the futu re, our beha viou r with resp ect to the futu re is mor ally unco nstra ined ~ ther e are no mora l rest rict ions on acti ng or fail ing to act deri ving from the effe ct of our acti ons on futu re peop le. Of thos e phil osop hers who say, or whose view s impl y that we do not have obli gati ons to the (non -imm edia te) futu re, many have base d this view on acco unts of mora l obli gati on which are buil t on rela tion s which pres uppo se some degr ee of temp oral or spa tial con tigu ity. Thus , mora l obli gati on is seen as pres uppo sing vari ous rela tion s whic h coul d not hold betw een peop le wide ly sepa rate d in time (or some time s in spac e). Let us call the posi tion that we have no obli gati ons to (dis tant ) futu re peop le the Nocon stra ints posi tion . Among sugg este d base s or grou nds of mora l obli gati on for the pos itio n, which would rule out obli gati ons to the nonimm edia te futu re, are thes e. Firs tly. ther e are thos e acco unts whic h requ ire that someone to whom a mora l obli gati on is held be able to claim his righ ts or enti tlem ent. Peop le in the dist ant futu re will not be able to claim righ ts and enti tlem ents agai nst us, and of cour se they can do noth ing to enfo rce any claim s they migh t have agai nst us. Seco ndly , ther e are thos e acco unts whic h base mora l obli gati ons on soci al or lega l conv enti on, for exam ple a conv entio n whic h would requ ire puni shm ent of offe nder s or at leas t some kind of soci al enfo rcem ent. But plai nly thes e and othe r conv entio ns will not be inva rian t over chan ge in soci ety and amendment of lega l conv enti ons; henc e they will not be inva rian t over time . Also futu re peop le have no way of enforcin & thei r inte rest s or puni shin g off~ ndin g pred eces aora . \ I i _L �The No-cons traints view is a very difficu lt one to sustain . Conside r, for example , a scienti fic group which, for no particu lar reason other than to test a particu lar piece of technolo gy, places in orbit a cobalt bomb set off by a triggeri ng device designed to go off several hundred years from the time of its despatch . No present ly living person and none of their immedia te descend ants would be affected , but the populat ion of the earth in the distant future would be wiped out as a direct and predicta ble result of the action. The ·Ho-con straints position clearly implies that this is an accepta ble moral enterpr ise, that whateve r else we might legitim ately criticiz e in the scienti sts' experim ent (perhaps its being over-ex pensive or badly designed ) we cannot lodge a moral protest about the damage it will do to future people. The no-cons traints position also endorse s as morally accepta ble the followin g sorts of policy: I A firm discove rs it can make a handsome profit from mining, process ing and manufac turing a new type of materia l which, although it ca~ses no problem for present people or their immedia te descend ants, will over a period of hundred s of years decay into a substan ce which will cause an enormous epidemi c of cancer among the inhabita nts of the earth at that time. Accordi ng to the Ko-con straints view the firm is free to act in its own interes ts, without any conside ration for the harm it does remote future people. Such countere xamples to the NQ-con straints position , which are easily varied and multipl ied, might seem childlis hly obvious . Yet this view is far from being a straw man; not only have several philosop hers endorsed this position , but it is a clear implica tion of many current ly popular views of the basis of moral obligat ion, as ~eli as of prevaili ng economic theory. It seems that those who opt for the No-con straints position have not conside red such example s, despite their being clearly implied by their position . We suspect that {we certain ly hope that) when it is brought out that their position admits such countere xamples , that without any constra ints we are free to cause pointles s harm for example , most of those who opted for this position would want to assert that it was not what they intended . What many of those who have put forward the No-con straints posit ion~ to have had in mind (in denying moral obligat ion) is rather that future people can look after themsel ves, that we are not respons ible for their lives. The popular view that the future can take care of itself also seems to assume a future causally indepen dent of the present . But it is not. It is not as if, in the countere xample cases or in the nuclear case, the future is simply being left alone to take care of itself. Present people are influenc ing it, and in doing so thereby acquire many of the same sorts of moral respons ibilitie s as they do in causally affectin g the present and immediate future, a.oat notably the obligat ion to take account in �7. 'what they do of peop le affec ted and their inter ests, to be care ful in their ac tions , to take accou nt of the genu ine prob abili ty of their actio ns causi ng harm, and to sec that they do not act so as to rob futur e peop le of the chnnc c of a good life. Furth ermo re, to say that we are not resp !~ibl e for the lives of futur e peop le does not amount to the same thing as sayin g that we are free to do as we like with respe ct to them. In just the same way, the fact that one does not have or has not acqu ired an oblig ation to some stran ger with whom one has neve r been invol ved does not imply that one is free to do what one likes with respe ct to him, for example to rob him or to serio usly harm him when this could be avoid ed. V These diffi culti es for the No-c onstr aints posi tion resu lt in part becau se of a failu re to make an impo rtant disti nctio n. Some of our oblig ation s to othe rs arise becau se we have volu ntari ly enter ed into some a greem ent with them - for exam ple, we have made a prom ise. Othe r oblig ation s, howe ver, such as our duty not to damage or harm some one, do not assume that an agree ment has been struc k betwe en us. Let us call oblig ation s of the f ormer kind acqu ired oblig ation s and those of the latte r unac quire d oblig ation s. There is a cons idera ble diffe renc e in the type of resp onsi bilit y asso ciate d with each. In the case of acqu ired oblig ation s resp onsi bilit y arise s becau se one s hould do some thing which one can fail to do, e.g. keep a prom ise. In the case of unac quire d dutie s resp onsi bilit y arise s as a resu lt of being a caus al ag ent who is aware of the conse quen ces or prob able conse quen ces of his actio n, a resp onsi bilit y that is not depen dent on one's havin g perfo rmed some act in the past (e.g. , made a prom ise). Our oblig ation s to futur e peop le clear ly are ,una cqui red. not acqu ired oblig ation s, a fact the No-c onstr aints posi tion ~ simpl y fails to take into acco unt. These oblig ation s arise as a resu lt of our abili ty to produ ce caus al effec ts of a reaso nably pred ictab le natu re, whet her on our cont emp orar ies~ on those in the dista nt futur e. Thus , to retur n to the train para ble, the cons igner cann ot argue in justi ficat ion of his actio n that he has. for exam ple, neve r assumed or acqu ired resp onsi bilit y for the passe ngers . that he does not know them and there fore has no love or symp athy for them and that they are not part of his mora l comm unity; in shor t, that he has acqu ired no oblig ation , and baa no apec ial oblig ation • to help them. All that v t ' r . �". one needs to argue conce rning the train , and in the nucle ar case, is that there are moral oblig ation s again st impos ing harm ~ ~ ~·~ which are not speci ally oblig atiq9 s to the dista nt acqui red. Nor can this claim be rebut ted by the all prete nce tha:,( tutur e i~vo1 ve heroi c self sacri fice, somet hing "abov e and beyon d" what is norm ally requi red. One is no more engag ing in heroi c self sacri fice by not forcin g futur e peopl e into an unvia ble life posit ion or by refra ining from causi ng them direc t harm than the consi gner is resor ting to heroi c self sacri fice in refra ining from shipp ing the dange rous packa ge on the train . V III. ATTEMPTS TO REDUCE OBLIGATIONS TO THE FUTURE. In evadi ng these diffi culti es the No-c onstr aints posit ion may be quali fied rathe r than wholl y aband oned. Accor ding to the Quali fied posit ion we are not entir ely uncon strain ed wi th respe ct to the dista nt futur e. There are oblig ation s, even to dista nt futur e peopl e, but these are not so impor tant as those to the prese nt, and the inter ests of dista nt futur e peopl e canno t weigh very much in the scale again st those of the prese nt and imme diate futur e. The inter ests of futur e peopl e then, excep t in unusu al cases , count for very much less than the inter ests of prese nt peopl e. Hence such thing s aa nucle ar devel opme nt and vario us explo itativ e activ ities which bene fit prese nt peopl e shoul d proce ed, even if peopl e of the dista nt futur e are (somewhat) disad vanta ged by them. The Quali fied posit ion appea rs to be widel y held and is impli cit in preva iling economic theor ies, where the posit ion of a decre ase in weigh t of futur e costs and bene fits (and so of futur e inter ests) is obtai ned by appli catio n over time of a disco unt rate, so disco untin g costs and risks to . aM- a...-pi~ ~ \ -4 . futur e peopl e. The attem pt to apply econo mics as a moral theor y, -eeme th'-t that is becoming incre asing ly common, can lead the~ to the Quali fied posit ion. What is objec tiona ble in such an appro ach is that econo mics must opera te withi n the bounds of ackno wledg ed non-a cquir ed moral cons train ts, just as in pract ice it opera tes withi n legal const raint s. What econo mics canno t legiti mate ly do is determ ine what these const raint s are. There are, moreo ver, alter nativ e econo mic theor ies and simpl y to adopt . witho ut furth er ado, one which disco unts the futur e, givin g much less impor tance to the inter ests of futur e peopl e, is to beg all the quest ions at issue . Among the argum ents that econo mists offer for gener ally disco untin g the futur e, the most threa dbare is based on the Rosy -futur e assum ption , that futur e gener ation s will be bette r off than prese nt ones (and so bette r place d to handl e the waste probl em). Since there is moun ting evide nce that futur e gener ation s may wel l~ be bette r off th,Z prese nt ones, espec ially in thing s that matte r, no argum ent for disco untin g the inter ests of futur e gener ation s on this basis can carry much weigh t. For the waste proble m to be hande d dovn V I �to the futur e gener ation s, it would have to be shown, what recen t economic progr ess hardl y justi fies, that futur e gener ation s will be not just bette r off but so much bette r off that they can (easi ly)ca rry and contr ol the nucle ar freig ht. A more plaus ible argum ent for disco untin g, the Oppo rtunit y-cos t argum ent, build s direc tly on the notio n of oppo rtunit y cost. It is argue d from the fact that a dolla r gaine d now is worth much more than a dolla r receiv ed in the nonimme diate futur e (beca use the first dolla r could meanw hile be inves ted at compound inter est}, that disco untin g is requi red to obtai n equiv alent mone tary value s. This same line of reaso ning is then appli ed to the alloc ation of re sourc es. Thus, comp ensati on - which,___1s what the waste proble m is taken to come to econo mical ly - cost~ much less now than later , e.g. a few penni es set aside 1-1:>V (e.g. in a trust fund ).the futur e, if need be, will suffi ce to comp ensate event ually for any ~ctim s of remot e radio activ e waste leaka ge. Two proble ms ~ First , there are, beset this appro ach. prese ntly at least , insurm ounta ble pract ical diffi culti es about apply ing such disco untin g. We simpl y do not know how to determ ine appro priate futur e disco unt rates . A more serio us objec tion is that the argum ent depen ds on a false assum ption. It is not true that value , or damages, can alway s be conve rted into mone tary equiv alent s. There is no clear "mon etary comp ensati on" for a varie ty of damag es, inclu ding cance r, loss of life, a lost speci es. The disco untin g theme , however argue d for, is inade quate , becau se it leads back in pract ice to the No-c onstr aints posit ion. The reaso n is that disco untin g impos es an" economic horiz on" beyond which nothi ng need be consi dered , since any costs or bene fit which might arise are, when disco unted back to the prese nt, negli gible . A diffe rent argum ent fot the Quali fied posit io~. the Prob abilit ies argum ent, avoid s the objec tions from cases of certa in damage throu gh appea l to proba bility consi derat ions. The dista nt futur e, it is argue d, is much more uncer tain than the prese nt and imme diate futur e, so that prob abili ties are conse quent ly lower , perha ps even appro achin g or coinc iding with zero for any hypot hesis conce rning the dista nt futur e. Thus, the argum ent conti nues, the -inter ests of futur e peopl e must (apar t from excep tiona l cases where there is an unusu ally high degre e of certa inty} count for (very much) less than those of prese nt and neigh bouri ng peopl e where (much') highe r prob abili ties are attac hed. So in the case of confl ict betwe en the prese nt and the futur e, where it is a quest ion of weigh ing certa in bene fits to the peopl e of the prese nt and the imme diate futur e again st a much lower proba bility of indet ermin ate coats to an indet ermin ate number of V �assuming anything like similar costs and benefit s were involve d. is however badly flawed. The argumen t Firstly , probab ilities involvin g distant future situatio ns are not always less than those concern ing the immedia te '"'tt..N ~ ~ -~ -q Nat l'-.Now wJ~a..+. ~,NA. «f ~~e J~N f2.(;.~ ~L of. ~~ft.. - ~ t~( _d-'z..,ve.. , ~ 1t:e.. future in the way the argumen t suppose s.AMor eove)th e outcome s of some moral problem s often do not depend on a high level of probabi lity. . In many cases it is enough, as the train parable reveals , that a signific ant risk is created ; such cases do not depend critica lly on high probabi lity assignm ents. Nor, of course, can it be assumed that anything like similar ly weighte d costs and benefits are involved in the nuclear case, especia lly if it is a question of risking poisonin g some of the earth for half a million or so years, with consequ ent risk of serious harm to· thousand s of generat ions of future people, in order to obtain quite doubtfu l, or even trivial , benefit for some present peopl jin the shape of the opportu nity to continu e (unnece ssarily) shigh energy use. And even if the costs and benefit s were compara ble or evenly weighte d, such an argumen t would be defectiv e, since an analogo us argumen t would show that the consign er's action in the train parable , is accepta ble provided the benefit (e.g. the profit the company stood to gain from imposin g signific ant risks on · other people) was sufficie ntly large. Such a cost-be nefit approac h to moral and decisio n problem s, with or without the probabi lity frills, is quite inadequ ate when differe nt parties are involved or when cases of conflic t of interes t involvin g moral obligat ions are at issue. permiss ible s For example , such a cost-be nefit approac h would imply that it is for a company to injure, or very likely injure, some innocen t party provided only that the company stands to make a sufficie ntly large gain from it, that costs to some group are more than morally larger benefit s to another group. compens ated for by But costs or benefit s are not legitim ately transfer red in any simple way from one group to another . The often appealed to maxim "If you (or your group) want the benefit s . you have to accept the costs" is one thing, but the maxim "If I (or my group) want the benefit • then~ have to accept the coat• (or aome of theDJ at leaat)" i• another an_d_ _ __ �// very different thing. It is a widely accepted moral principle that one is not, in general, entitled to simply transfer costs of a significa nt kind arising fro~ an activity which benefits oneself onto other parties whQ are not involved in the activity and are not beneficia ries. 6 This Transfer -limiting principle is especiall y clear in cases of whiea e thalidomide rnaoufact u~ias and mark.eti.Ag eompany J:9 or.a.,.. where the significa nt costs include an effect on life or health or a risk thereof, and where the benefit to the benefitti qg - e. -1, J -tt.. e ~ ~ "" { party is of a noncrucia l or dispensib le nature/\ The principle is of o ~f'(.,v,._{ ,~ fundamen tal importanc e in the nuclear debate, and appears again and again ~ c. ta it applies not merely to the waste problem but as regards several other liabiliti es of nuclear developm ent, e.g. the risk of nuclear war, the matter of reactor meltdown. ln particula r, the principle invalidat es the compariso n, heavily relied on in building a case for the ~cceptab ility of the nuclear risks, \ between nuclear risks and those from such activitie s as airplane travel or cigarette smoking. In the latter case those who supposedl y benefit from the activity are also, to an overwhelm ing extent, those who bear the serious health costs and risks involved. In contrast the users and supposed beneficie aries of nuclear energy will be risking not only, or even primarily , their own lives and health, but also that of others who may not be beneficia ries at allwho may be just the opposite! More generally , the distribut ion of costs and damage in such a fashion, i.e. on to non-bene ficiaries, is a characte ristic of certain serious forms of po llution, and is among its morally objection able features. productio n, from nuclear or fossil pollution . i mportant necessary condition for energy options: ~ energy option risks of harm Large-sca le energy fuel sources, can cause or lead to serious Thus from the Transfer -limiting principle emerges an To be morally acceptab le should not involve the transfer of significa nt costs or ~ parties who .!!!. ~ involved, benefit correspon dingly from!!!.!, energy source. ~ do ~ ~ ~ do n_ ~ ~ ~ t::.-L-~ ~ Included in the acope of c~ @. �this cond ition , which nucl ear deve lopm ent viol ates , are futu re peop le, i.e. not mere ly peop le livin g at the pres ent time but also futu re gene ratio ns (tho se of the next town s). A furth er coro llary of the prin cipl e is the Tran smis sion Prin ciple , that we shou ld not hand the worl d we have so expl oited on to our succ esso rs in subs tant ially wors e shap e than we "rec eive d" it. For if we did then that would be a sign ifica nt tran sfer of cost s. The Tran sfer- limi ting prin cipl e can be deriv ed from cert ain ethi cal theo ries (e.g . thos e of a deon tic cast such as Kan t's and Raw ls') and from common prec epts (such as the Golden Rule ), where one serio usly cons iders putt ing ones elf in anot her's posi tion . But the prin cipl e is perh aps best defe nded , on a broa der basi s, indu ctive ly, by way of exam ples. Supp ose, to embr oider the train para ble, the company town deci des to solv e its disp osal prob lem by ship ping its noxi ous wast e to anot her town down the line , which (like futu re towns) lack s the means to ship it back or to regi ster due prot est. The inha bitan ts of this town are then force d to face the prob lem eith er of unde rtaki ng the expe nsive and diff icul t disp osal proc ess or of sustaini ng risk s to thei r own live s and heal th. Most of us would rega rd this kind of tran sfer of cost s as mora lly una~ cept able , however much the cons igne r's company town flou rish es. IV. UNCERTAINTY AND INDETERMINACY ARGUMENTS FOR REDUCED RESPONSI BILITY. Many of the argu ment s desig ned to show that we cann ot be expe cted to take too much acco unt of the effe cts of our actio ns on the dist ant futu re appe al to unce rtain ty. Ther e are two main components to the Gene ral Unc ertai nty argu ment , capa ble of sepa ratio n, but freq uent ly tang led up. Both argu ment s are mist aken , the firs t, an argum ent from igno ranc e, on.! prio ri grou nds, the seco nd on a post erio ri grou nds. The Argument from igno ranc e conc erned runs as foll ows :/ In cont rast to the exac t info rmat ion we can obta in abou t the pr;s ent, the infor mati on we can obta in abou t the effe cts of our actio ns on the dist ant futu re is unre liab le, wool ly and high ly spec ulati ve. But we cann ot base asse ssme nts of how we shou ld act on info rmat ion of this kind , espe ciall y when �IE accurate informati on is obtainabl e about the present which would indicate different action. Therefore we must regretful ly ignore the · uncertain effects of our actions on the distant future. ignorance A striking example of the argument from at work is afforded by official US analyses favouring nuclear developm ent, which ignore (the extensive ) costs of 7 grounds of uncertain ty. More formally and crudely waste control on the the argument concerned is this: One only has obligatio rts to the future if these obligatio ns are based on reliable informati on. distant future. There is no reliable informati on at present as regards the Therefore one has no obligatio ns to the distant future. This argument is essential ly a variant on a sceptical argument concernin g our knowledge of the future (formally , replace 'obligati ons' by 'knowledg e' in the crude statement of the argument above). The main ploy is to considera bly overestim ate 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 considera tion both with respect to the present and with respect to the future. Associate d 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 constrain ts. We can an~ constantl y such do act on the basis ofj"unre liable" informati on, which the sceptic as regards the future convenien tly labels "uncerta inl,,'. In moral situation s in the present, assessmen ts of what to do often take account of risk and probabil ity, even quite low probabil ities. Consider again the train parable. 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 consigne r's action. that there is a significa nt risk of harm . It is enough in this sort of case. It does not matter if the decreased well-bein g of the consigner ia certain and that the �...... prospects of the passenger s quite uncertain . It is wrong to ship the gas. But if we do not require certainty of action to apply moral constrain ts in contempo rary affairs, why should we require a much higher standard of certainty in the future? The unwarrant ed insistenc e on certainty as a ·necessary condition before moral considera tion can be given to the distant future, then, amounts to a flagrant double standard. According to the second argument, the Practical -uncertai nty argument. even if in theory we have obligatio ns to the future, we cannot in practice take the interests of future peopl~ into account because uncertain ty about . the distant future is so gross that we cannot determine what the likely consequen ces of actions on it will be. Therefore , however good our intention s to the people of the distant future are, in practice we have no choice but to ignore their interests . Given that moral principle s are characte ristically of universal implicati onal form, e.g. of forms such as "if x has character then x is wrong, for every (action) sharply thus: x", h the argument may be stated more We can never obtain the informati on about future actions whicl\. ~ t-~ ,< tt a.s c t..tu._ a.. ~~ h J• would enable us to iea ■ Jh the anteceden t of the implicati on/\ Therefore , even r.r; c if in theory moral principle s do extend to future people, in practice they cannot be applied to obtain clear conclusio ns. It is true that if the distant future really were so grossly uncertain that in every case it was impossibl e to determine in any way better than chance what the effects of present action would be, and whether any given action would help or hinder future people, then moral principle s, although applicab le in theory to the future, would not in practice yield any clear conclusio ns about how to act. In this event the distant future would impose no practica l . moral constrain ts on action. ~ However. the argument is factually incorrect in as s uming that the future always is ao grossly uncertain or indeterm inate. Admittedl y -there is often a high degree of uncertain ty concernin g the distant future, but as a matter of (continge nt) fact it is not always so gross or sweeping •• the argument ha• to •••um•. There are aome areas where uncertain ty ia - �not so great as to exclud e const raints on action . For examp le, we may have little id ea what the fashio ns will be in a hundre d years or, to take anothe r morally -irrel evant factor , what brands of ice cream people will be eating , if any, but we do have excel lent reason to believ e, espec ially if we consid er 3000 years of histor y, that what people there are in a hundre d years are likely to have mater ial and psych ic needs not entire ly unlike our own, that they will need a health y biosph ere for a good life; that like us they will not be immune to radiat ion; that their welfa re will not be enhanc ed by a high incide nce of cancer or geneti c defec ts, by the destru ction of resou rces, or the elimin ation from the face of the earth of that wonde rful variet y of non-human life which at presen t makes it such a rich and intere sting place. The case of nuclea r waste storag e, and of uncer tainty of the effec ts of it on future people , is onearea where uncer tainty in moral ly releva nt ~espe cts is not so great as to preclu de moral const raints on action . For this sort of reason , the Pract ical uncer tainty argum ent should be reject ed. Through the defec ts of the prec~d ing argum ents, we can see the defec ts in a number of widely employed uncer tainty argum ents used to write off proba ble harm to future people as outsid e the scope of prope r consid eratio n. Most of these popula r moves employ both of the uncer tainty argum ents as suits the case, switch ing from one to the other. For examp le, we may be told that we canno t really take accou nt of future people becaus e we canno t be sure that they will exist or that their tastes and wants will not be compl etely differ ent from our own, to the point where t.hey will not suffer from our exhau stion of reso\l rces or from the things that _would affec t us. But this is to insist upon compl ete - certai nty of a sort beyond what is requir ed for the presen t and immed iate future , where there is also commonly no guaran tee that some disas ter will not overta ke those to whom we are moral ly comm itted. Again we may be told that there is no guaran tee that future people will be worthy o( any effort s on our part, becau se ,a- MOc-CJ. , Ne,,.,i ~v -fl~ ,v- they may be morons o/ foreve r plugge d into/\Emjoyment., _/-- ef othe ·, ±-ultiR ea Even if one is prepar ed to accep t the elitis t approa ch presup posed - accord ing to which only those who meet certai n prope rly civili zed or intell ectua l standa rds are l eligib le for moral consid eratio n - what we are being handed in such argum ents V �... ..,. i s again a mere outside possibility. . 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. 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. Closely related to uncertainty arguments are arguments premissed on the indeterminacy of the future. For example, according to the tndeterminacy argument, the indeterminacy of the number and exact character of people at future times will prevent the interest of future peopie being taken into account where there is a conflict with the present. Since their numbers are indeterminate 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 raised particularly by problems of sharing fixed quantities of resources among present and future people, for example oil, when the numbers of the latter are indeterminate. Such problems are indeed difficult, but they are not resolved by ignoring the claims of the future. Nor are distributional problems involving non-renewable resources as large and representative a class of moral problems concerning the future as the tendency to focus on them would suggest. It can be freely admitted, that there will be cases where the - indeterminacy of aspects of the future will make conflicts very difficult to resolve or indeed irresoluble - no realistic ethical theory can give a precise answer to every ethical question. But, as the train parable again illustrates, there are cases where such difficulties do not hinder resolution, and cases of conflict which are not properly approached 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 case of nuclear power is like that. The failure of these various arguments reveals, what can be iodependently -+- '-" thelr placement . does noL ar gued from the universalisability features of moral principles, 8 thatf disqualify future people from full moral consideration or reduce their claimsr , tllUU' ,.., ') \trt2r / below the claima of present people. That ia, we hav, "tbe ••m• ions V �/1 to future people as to the presen t; 1 thus there is the same obliga tion to take accoun t of them and their intere sts in what we do, to be carefu l in our action s, to take accoun t of the probab ility (and not just the certain ty) of our action s causing harm or damage, and to see, other things being equal, that we do not act so as to rob them of what is necessa ry for the chance of _a good life. Uncert ainty _,, and indeter minacy do not relieve us of these obliga tions. v. PROBLEMS OF SAFE NUCLEAR OPERATION REACTOR EMISSIONS AND CORE MELTDOWN. The ethica l problem s with nuclea r power are by no means confine d to waste storag e and future creatu res. entitle ment Just as remote ness in. time does not er~de obliga tions or to just treatm ent, neithe r does locatio n in space, or a partic ular geogra phical positio n. Hence severa l furthe r problem s arise, to which princip les and argume nts like those already arrived at in consid ering the waste problem apply. For exampl e, if one group (socia l unit, or state) decide s to dump its radioa ctive wastes in the territo ry or region of anothe r group, or not to preven t its (radioa ctive) polluti on enterin g the territo ry of anothe r group, then it impose s risks and costs on presen tly existin g people of the second group, in much the way that presen t nuclea r develop ments impose costs and risks on future people . There are differe nces howev er: spatia lly distan t people cannot be discou nted in quite the way that future people can be, though their Jiie ~~~ o·F-tu ~t..+ . intere sts and objecti ves/\Nt ?Wlc ignored or overrid den. People living in the vicini ty of a nuclea r reacto r are subjec t to specia l costs and risks. One is radioa ctive pollut ion, becaus e reacto rs routin ely dischar 1 radioa ctive materi als into the air and water near Emissio n problem . the plant : hence the Such "norma l" emissio n during plant operat ion of low level radiati on carrie s carcino genic and mutage nic costs. While there are undoub tedly costs, the number of cancer s and the precis e extent of geneti c damage induced by exposu re to such radiati on are both uncert ain. If our ethica l princi ples permit ted free transfe r of coata and riaka from one person to anothe r, the ethica l iaaue direct ly raised by nuclea r ••miaa ion•wo uld be: what extent of Q__ .......- �..... cancer and genetic damage, if any, is permissibly traded for the advantages of nuclear power, and unde{ what conditions? Since, however, risks and benefits are NOT {morally) transferable this way - recall the Transfer-limit ing principle - such a cost-benefit approach to the risks nuclear emission poses - for those who live near a reactor cannot with justice be approached in this fashion~ > And these risks are real! v In the USA, people who live within 50 miles of a nuclea · power plant bear a risk of cancer and genetic damage/as much as 50 times that borne by the population at large. ✓ And children living in this region are even more vulnerable, since they ar~ several times more likely to contract cancer through exposure than normal adults. The serious costs to these people cannot be justified by the alleged benefits for others, especially when these benefits could be obtained without these costs. Thus it is not just complacent to say 'It's a pity about Aunt Ethel dying of cancer, but the new airconditioner s ' make life comfprtable'. ~~e+,~ For such benefits to some as airconditioner~ provide,~which can be alternatively obtained, for example by modification of buildings, can in no way compensate for what others suffer. Among the other strategies used in trying to persuade us that the +£«-0:sc w~ \,14 e close ~ Nu<.. (e..a.,R,. pt~~ imposition of radiation ~ d i H - most of whom have no genuine voice in the location of reactors in their environment and cannot move away without ~\ \ serious losses - is really quite ,'right is the Doubling argument. ~ccording I to the US Atomic Energy Commission, "ho dcployud dU.&i nr• it is pennissfble to double, through nuclear technology, the level of (natural) radiation that a population ha$ received with apparently negligible consequences, the argument bei ng that the additional amount (being equivalent is also likely to have negligible consequences. to the "natural" level) The increased amounts of radiation - with their large man-made component - are then accounted normal, and, its; claimed, what is normal is morally acceptable. ;-tTb1s ::J ,"6r argument is sound. I, ~er.c of eh@ seeps Drinking one bottle of wine a day may have no ill-effects, whereas drinking two a day certainly may affect a person'• well-being; and while the smaller intake may have become norm.al for the person, the larger one will, under euch conditiona, not be. Finally, what ia or has become norcna_l_, _ _ _~ . �e.g. two murders or twenty canc ers a day in a give n city , may be far from acce ptab le. / IJ \ In fact , even the USA, which has very stri ct stan dard s by compar_ison with most othe r cou ntrie s with planned nucl ear reac tors , perm its radi atio n emis sion s very sub stan tiall y in exce ss of the stan dard s laid down; so the emis sion situ atio n is much worse than what cons ider atio n of the stan dard s would disc lose . Furt herm ore, the mon itori ng of the stan dard s "imp osed " is entr uste d to the nucl ear oper ator s them selv es, scar cely disi nter este d part ies. Thus pub lic poli cy is dete rmin ed not so as to guar ante e pub lic hea lth, but rath er to serv e as a "pub lic pac ifie r" whil e pub licly -sub sidi zed priv ate nucl ear oper atio ns proc eed rela tive ly unhampered? · While radi oact ive emis sion s are an ordi nary feat ure of reac tor ope ratio n, reac tor breakdown is, hop eful ly, not: offi cial repo rts even try to make an acci dent of mag nitud e, as a mat ter of defi niti on, an 'ext raor dina ry nucl ear occu rren ce'. But "def init ions " notw iths tand ing, such acci dent s can happ en, and almo st have on seve ral occa sion s (the most noto riou s bein g Thre e Mile Isla nd): henc e the Core-meltdown prob lem. If the cool ing and emergency core cool ing syst ems fail in American (lig ht wate r) reac tors , then the core melt s and 'con tain men t fail ure' is like ly, with the resu lt that an area of 40,0 00 squa re mile s coul d be radi oact ivel y 10 cont amin ated . In the even t of the wors t type of acci dent in a very sma ll reac tor, a steam expl osio n in the reac tor vess el, abou t 45,0 00 peop le would be kill ed inst antl y and at leas t 100, 000 would die as a resu lt of the acci den t, prop erty damages would exce ed $17 bill ion and an area the size of Penn sylv ania would be dest roye d. Modern nucl ear reac tors are abou t five time s the size of the reac tor for which thes e cons erva tive US figu res (sti ll the best avai labl e from 11 offi cial sour ces) are give n: the cons eque nces of a sim ilar acci dent with a modern reac tor would acco rdin gly be much grea ter. The cons igne r who risk s the live s and well -bei ng of pass enge rs on the trai n acts .i nadm issib ly. A government or gove rnm ent- endo rsed util ity appe ars to act in a way that doe• not diff er in mor all;y aign ifica nt resp ect• in -------~ �siti ng a nuc lear rea cto r in a commun ity, in pla ntin g such a dan gero us pac kag e on the "community trai n". More dir ect ly, the loc atio n of a nuc lear rea cto r in a community, even if it sho uld hap pen to rec eiv e a fav our able ben efit -co st ana lysi s and oth er economic app rais al, would vio late such eth ica l requ irem ents ~ as the Tra nsf er-l imi ting prin cip le. The adv oca tes of nuc lear power hav e, in eff ect , end eav oure d to avo id que stio ns of cos t-tr ans fer and equ ity, by shi ftin g the disp ute out of the extr aor din ary imp rob abil it't, , V e thic al aren a and into a tech nol ogi cal disp ute abo ut eaau~ theJ of · 0 r eac tor mal fun ctio n. They hav e argu ed, in par ticu lar, what con tras ts with the trai n par able , tha t the re is no rea l pos sib ilit y of a cata stro phi c nuc lear v acc iden t. Inde ed in the infl uen tial Rassmussen rep ort - which was ext ens ive ly used to sup por t pub lic con fide nce in US nuc lear fiss ion tech nolo gy - an even stro nge r, an inc red ibly stro ng, imp rob abil ity clai m was stat ed: nam ely, the ' like liho od of a cata stro phi c nuc lear acc iden t is so rem ote as to be (alm ost) imp ossi ble. However, the mat hem atic al models reli ed upon in this rep ort, var iou sly call ed "fa ult tree ana lysi s" and "re liab ilit y esti mat ing tech niq ues ". are unso und , bec aus e, among oth er thin gs, they exc lude as "no t cre dib le" tha t the pos sib ilit ies tha t may wel l happen in the rea l wor ld. It is not sur pris ing , the n,/ methodology and dat a of the rep ort hav e bee n sou ndly and dec isiv ely crit icis ed, or tha t off icia l sup por t for the rep ort has now been with draw n.12 Mor eov er, use of alte rna tive methods and data ind icat es tha t the re is a rea l pos sib ilit y, a non -ne glig ible pro bab ility of a · seri ous acc ide nt. In resp ons e it is con tend ed tha t, even if the re is a non -ne glig ible \ pro bab ility of a rea cto r acc ide nt. sti ll tha t is acc epta ble, bein g of no gre ater ord er than risk s of acc iden ts tha t are alre ady soc iall y acc epte d. Here we enc oun ter aga in tha t insi dio us eng inee ring app roac h to mor alit y bui lt into dec isio n models of an economic cas t, e.g . ben efit -co st bala nce she ets, risk asse ssm ent mod els, etc . Ris k asse ssm ent, a sop his tica tion of tran sac tion or trad e-o ff mod els, pur por ts to pro vide a com pari son betw een the rela tive riak a atta che d to diff ere nt opt ion s, ••I• ene rgy otp ion a, whi ch aet tlea the ir �eth ica l stat us. The foll owi ng assu mpt ions are enc oun tere d in risk asse ssm ent as app lied to ene rgy opt ion s: A · If o~io n'.J t_im pos es (co mpa rab le)B osts B on few er peo ple than op tio n~ then opt ion ,i_ pre fera ble to opt ion . ; AL is ,,_....,_,, . AH. Op tion iinv olv es a tota l net cos t in term s of cos t to peo ple (e.g . t3J dea ths, inju ries , etc .) which is less than tha t of opt ion .wh ich is •~re ady acc epte d; the refo re opt ion ~is acc ept abl ef 3 These assu mpt ions are then app lied as foll ows . \....--" Sin ce 't he number like ly to eve ntu all' i' by nuc lear power sta tion cata stro phe is less !ha n the like ly number I kill ed by cig are tte smoking, and sinc e the risk s of cig are tte smoking are acc epte d; it foll ows tha t the risk s of nuc lear power are acc epta ble. A litt le refl ect ion rev eals tha t this sor t of risk asse ssm ent argument gro ssly vio late s the Tra nsfe r~ lim itin g prin cip le. In ord er to obt ain a pro per eth ica l asse ssm ent we need be kill ed J a much full er pic ture , and we need to know at lea st thes e thin gs: / Do the cos ts and ben efit s go to the same par ties ; and is the pers on who vol unt aril y und erta kes the risk s also the pers on who prim aril y rece ives the ben efit s, as in driv ing or cig are tte smoking, or are the cos ts imposed on oth er par ties who do not ben efit ? It is only if the par ties are the same in the cas e of the opt ion s l S vC-t... compared, and the re are no ~d ist rib uti on al prob lem s, tha t a com pari son 8ft •-•h ~ would be sou ndly bas ed. Thi s is rare ly the cas e, and it is not ao in the case of risk asse ssm ents of ene rgy opt ion s. VI. OTHER SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL RISKS AND COSTS OF NUCLEAR DEVELOPMENT, ESPECIALLY NUCLEAR WAR. The prob lem s alre ady disc uss ed by no means exh aus t the env iron men tal, hea lth and safe ty risk s and cos ts in, or aris ing from , the nuc lear fue l cyc le. The ful l fue l cyc le incl ude s many stag es both bef ore and afte r rea ct or ope rati on, apa rt from was te disp osa l, nam ely, min ing, mil ling , con ver sion , enri chm ent and pre par atio n, rep roc essi ng spe nt fue l, and tran spo rtat ion of materia ls. Sev eral of thes e stag es inv olv e haz ard s. Unl ike the spe cial " risk s in the nuc lear cyc le - of sab otag e of pla nts , of the ft of fiss ion abl e mat eria l, and of the furt her pro life rati on of nuc lear armaments - thes e haz ards µ �have para llels . if not exac t equi vale nts, in othe r high ly poll utin g methods of gene ratin g powe r. e.g. 'wor kers in the uran ium mini ng indu stry sust ain "the same risk" of fata l and nonf atal inju ry as work ers in the coal indu stry '.14 The prob lems are not uniq ue to nucl ear deve lopm ent. Othe r soci al and envi ronm enta l prob lems - thou gh endemic wher e dang erou s larg e-sc ale indu stry oper ates in soci etie s that are high ly ineg alita rian and inclu de sect ors that are far from afflu ent - are more intim ately linke d with the nucl ear power cycl e. Though poll utio n is a comm on and gene rally unde sirab le component of larg e-sc ale indu stria l oper ation , rad~ oact ive poll utio n .suc h as urani um mini ng for insta nce prod uces . is espe ciall y a lega cy of nucl ear deve lopm ent. and a spec ially unde sirab le one, as rect ifica tion cost s for dead radi oact ive land s and wate rway s reve al. Though sabo tage is a thre at to many larg e indu strie s, sabo tage of a nucl ear reac tor can have dire cons eque nces , of a diffe rent orde r of magn itude from most indu stria l sabo tage (where core meltdown is not a poss ibili ty). Though thef t of mate rial from more dubi ous ente rpris es such as mun ition s works can pose thre ats to popu latio ns at larg e and can assi st terro rism , no thef ts for alleg edly peac eful ente rpris es pose prob lems of the same orde r as thef t of fissi onab le mate rial. No othe r indu stry prod uces mate rials which so read ily perm it fabr icati on into such mass ive expl osiv es. No othe r indu stry is, to sum it up, so vuln erab le on so many fron ts. In part to redu ce its vuln erab ility , in part beca use of its long and cont inuin g asso ciati on with mili tary acti viti es, the nucl ear indu stry is subj ect to, and enco urag es, seve ral prac tices whic h (give n thei r scal e) run coun ter to basi c featu res of free and open soci etie s, cruc ial featu res such as pers onal libe rty, freedom of asso ciati on and of expr essio n,an d free acce ss to info rmat ion. Thes e prac tices inclu de secr ecy, rest ricti on of info rmat ion, form ation of spec ial poli ce and guar d forc es, espio nage , curt ailm ent of civi l libe rtie s. Alre ady oper ators of nucl ear inst alla tion s are give n extr aord inar y powe rs, in vett ing empl oyee s, to inve stiga te the back grou nd and acti vitie s not only of empl oyee s but also of thei r fami lies and sometimes even of thei r frien ds. The inst alla tion s them selve s become armed camps, whic h espe ciall y offe nds Brit ish sens ibili ties . The U.K. Atomic Energy (Spe cial Con stab les) Act of 1976 crea ted a spec ial armed forc e to guar nucl ear inst alla tion s aud..made it answ erab le • • • to the U.K. .. dAtom ic En• · ~ ' �These devel opme nts, and worse ones in West Germany and elsew here, presa ge along with nucle ar devel opme nt incre asing ly auth orita rian and anti- demo crati c soci eties . That nucle ar devel opme nt appe ars to force such poli tical conse quen ces tells heav ily again st it. Nucl ear devel opme nt is furth er indic ted poli tical ly by the direc t conn ectio n of nucle ar powe r with nucle ar war. It ia true that ethic al ques tions conc ernin g nucle ar war - for exam ple, whet her a nucle ar war is justi fied , or just, unde r any circu msta nces, and if so what circu msta nces - are disti ngui shab le from those conc ernin g nucle ar power. Undo ubted ly, however, the sprea d of nucle ar power is subs tanti ally incre asing the techn ical means for engag ing in nucle ar war and so, to that exte nt, the oppo rtuni ty for, and chanc es of, nuc~ ear engagement. Since nucle ar wars are neve r accou nted posi tive good s, but are at best the lesse r of majo r evils , nucle ar wars are alway s high ly ethic ally unde sirab le. The sprea d of nucle ar power acco rding ly expan ds the oppo rtuni ty for, and chanc es of, high ly unde sirab le conse quen ces. .,.fina l:½) the lac cet, sb irlete a&In g r.huuw cbancac i'itid Opt111c I Oil I I te:::s, is Heal f unda sha~ h, ■Rd 'lber efore )wha t . leads to it;nu clea r devel opme ntA is unde sirab le. This is, in outli ne, the argum ent from nucle ar war again st large -scal e nucle ar devel opme nt. 16 t5 F ·~ , ~ ATl" VII. ,\CONFLICT ARGUMENTS~ JND R5Ila ff!f~ ~1 JN C~ THE IDEOLOGICAL BASES OF NUCLEAR DEVELOPMENT. Much as with _nucle ar war, so given the cumu lative caTe again st nucle ar deve lop~e nt, only one justi ficat ory route rema ins open , that of appe al to over ridin g circu msta nces. That appe al, to be ethic ally acce ptabl e; must go beyond mere ly economic cons idera tions . For, as obse rved, the cons igne r's actio n, in the train para ble, cann ot be juati fied by pure ly econ omis tic . argum ents, such as that his prof its would rise, the company or the town would be more prosp erous , or by appe aling to the fact that some poss ibly unco mfor table chang es would other wise be neede d. So it is also in the nucle ar ½-12., case: ./Tra nsfe r-lim iting princ iple appl ies. But suppo se now the cons igner argue s that his actio n ia justi fied becau ae unlea a it 1• taken the town will die. It ia ✓ i l �by no means clear that even such a justification as this would be sufficient, especia lly where the risK5 to the passengers is high, since the case still to A amo~ntsione of transfer of costs and risks onto others. But such a conflict situation, where a given course of action, though normally undesirable, is alleged to be the lesser of two evils in a given case, is morally more problemthan c~ses atica;(where v~fer-limitin g principle is clearly violated. Nuclear development is often defended in this way, through Conflict arguments, to the effect that even though nuclear development does have undesirable features, nevertheless the alternatives are worse. Some of the arguments advanced to demonstrate conflict are based on competing commitments to present people, and others on competing obligations to future people, both of which are taken to override the obligations not to i mpose on the future significant risk of serious harm. The success of such conflict arguments requirESthe presentation of a genuine and exhaustive set of alternatives (or at least practical alternatives) and showing that the only al ternatives to admittedly morally undesirable actions are even more undesirable ones. If some practical alternative which is not morally worse than the action to be justified is overlooked, suppressed, or neglected in the argument (for example, if in the train parable it turns out that the town has another option to starving or to shipping the parcel, namely earning a living in some other way), then the argument is defective and cannot readily be patched. Just such a suppression of practicable alternatives, we shall argue, has occurred in the argument designed to show that the alternatives to the nuclear option are even worse than the option itself. 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 industrialised countries. Failure to develop nuclear energy, it is often claimer, would amount to denying them the opportunity to reach the standard of affluence we currently enjoy and would create unemployment and poverty in the industrialised nations. And this would be worse - a greater evil - than such things as violating the Transfer-limit ing principle through nuclear development. The 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 evid ence that large-scale nuclear energy will help 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 tends to reduce available jobs through encouraging substitution of energy use for labour use. The argument that nuclear energy is needed for the third world is even less convincing. Nuclear energy is both politically and economically inappropriate for the third world, since it requires massive amounts of capital, require• number• of imported acientiata and en2ineera. --------- �~cr eate s negl igibl e loca l employment, and depen ds for its feas ibili ty upon large ly non- exist ent utili ty syste ms - e.g. estab lishe d elec trici ty trans miss ion syste ms and back- up faci litie s, and suffi cien t elec trica l appli ance s to plug into the syste m. Poli tical ly it incre ases forei gn depen dence , adds to cent ralis ed entre nche d power and reduc es the chanc e for chang e in the oppr essiv e poli tical struc tures which are a large part of the probl em. The fact that nucle ar energ y is not in the inter ests of the peop le of the third world does not of cours e mean that it is not in the inter ests of, and wante d (ofte n for milit ary purpo ses) by, their ruler s, the west ernis ed and often milit ary elite s in whose inter ests the econo mies of these coun tries are usua lly organ ised. But that does not make the pove rty argum ent anyth ing othe r than what it is: a fraud . There are well- know n energ y-con servi ng alter nativ es and the prac tical optio n of deve lopin g furth er alter nativ e energ y sourc es, alter nativ es some of which offe r far bette r prosp ects for helpi ng the poor , both in the third world and in indu stria l coun tries : coal and othe r foss il fuels , geoth erma l, and a range of solar optio ns (incl udin g as well as narro wly sola r sourc es, wind , wate r and tidal powe r). Anot her majo r argum ent advan ced to show conf lict, the Ligh ts-go ingout argum ent, pppe als to a set of supp osedl y over ridin g and comp eting oblig ation s to futur e peop le. We have , it is said, a duty to pass on the immensely valua ble thing s and insti tutio ns which our cultu re has devel oP,ed . Unle ss our high- techn ology , high- energ y indu stria l socie ty is conti nued and foste red, our valua ble insti tutio ns and tradi tions will fall into decay or be swep t away. The argum ent is esse ntial ly that witho ut nucle ar powe r, witho ut the conti nued level of mate rial weal th it alone is assumed to make poss ible, the light s of our civil izati on will go out. Futu re peop le will be the loser s. The argum ent does raise impo rtant ques tions abou t what is valua ble in our socie ty and what char acte risti cs are nece ssary for a good socie ty. But for the most part these large ques tions can be by-p assed . The reaso n is that the argum ent adop ts an extre mely uncr itica l attit ude to prese nt high- techn ology soci eties , appa rentl y assum ing that they are unifo rmly and uniqu ely valu able. it It assum es that techn olog ical socie ty is unmo difia ble, thaic anno t be chang ed in the direc tion of energ y cons ervat ion or alter nativ e.(pe rhap s high techn ology ) energ y sourc es witho ut colla pse. These assum ption s are all hard to acce pt. The assum ption that techn olog ical soci ety's energ y patte rns are unmo difia ble is espe ciall y so; after all, it has survi ved even ts such as world wars which requ ired majo r socia l and techn olog ical restr uctu ring and consu mptio n modi ficat ion. If west ern soci ety's demands for energ y were (con trary to the evide nce) total ly unmo difia ble witho ut colla pse, not only would it be comm itted to a progr am of incre asing destr uctio n, but much of ita cultu re would be of dubio us value to �future people, who would very likely, as a consequence of this destruction , lack the resource base which the argument assumes to be essential in the case of contemporar y society. The uniformity assumption should certainly be challenged. Since hightechnology societies appear not to be uniformly valuable, the central question is, what is necessary to maintain what is valuable in such a society? While it may be easy to argue that high energy consumption centrally controlled is necessary to maintain the political and economic status quo of such a society, it is not so easy to argue that it is essential to maintain what is valuable, and it is what is valuable, presumably ,that we have a duty to pass on to the future. The evidence from history is that no very high level of material affluence or energy consumption is needed to maintain what is valuable. There is good reason in fact to believe that a society with much lower energy and resource consumption would better foster what is valuable than our own. But even if a radical change in these directions is independen tly desirable, it is unnecessary to presuppose such a change in order to see that the assumptions of the Lights-goin g-out argument are wrong. The consumption of less energy than at present need involve no reduction of well-being: and certainly a large increase over present levels of consumption assumed in the usual economic case for nuclear energy, is quite unnecessary . What the nuclear 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 Extravagan za. ~ In fact there is good reason to think that, far from~hig h energy consumption society fostering what is valuable, it will, especially if energy is obtained by means of nuclear fission,be positively inimical to it. A society which has become heavily dependent upon a highly centralised , controlled and garrisoned, capital- and expertise-i ntensive e~ergy 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 enormous power over the political system and over people's lives, even more then they do at present. Such a society would almost inevitably tend to become authoritati 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. 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 degree of political freedom and those opportuniti es for personal and collective autonomy which exist, would be loat or diminished: political fr eedqp �for example, is a high price to pay for consumerism and.#ener gy extravagenc e. Again, as in the case of the poverty arguments, clear alternative s, a lternative social and political choices, which do not involve such unacceptabl e consequence s, are available. The alternative to _the high technology- nuclear option is not a return to the cave, the loss of all that is valuable, but either the adoption of an available alternative such as coal for power or, better,the development of alternative technologie s 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 Li ghts-going -out~umen t, as a moral conflict argument, accordingly fails. Thus the fttrther escape route, the appeal to conflict, is, like the appeal t ~ futurity, closed. If tbea we apply, as we have argued we should, the ~ 1, t. same standards ef ■eral1t¥ to the future as we ought to acknowledge for the ;present, the conclusion that large-scale nuclear development is a crime against the future is inevitable. Closed also, in the much same way, are the escape routes to other arguments (from reactor meltdown, radiation emissions, etc.) for concluding that nuclear development is unacceptab le. In sum, nuclear development is morally unacceptabl e on several grounds. SOCIAL OPTIONS: SHALLOW AND DEEP ALTERNATIVES. The future 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 VIII. the likelihood of serious (air) pollution, and associated phenomena such as acid rain and atmospheric heating, not to mention the despoliatio n caused by extensive strip mining, all of which will result from its use in meeting very high projected consumption figures. Such an option would,more over, also violate the Transfer-li miting principle: for 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 and replacemen t. To these main conventiona l options a third is often added which emphasizes softer and more benign technologie s, such as those of solar energy and hydroelec tricity. Such softer options - if suitably combined with energy conservatio n measures (for there are solar ways, as well as nuclear ways, of energy extravaganc e and of producing unnecessary trivia which answer to no genuine needs) - can avoid the ethical objections to nuclear power. The deeper 8 choice is not however technolo~ic al, nor merel~Jindi vidua1}' 6fifrtocial, and involves the restructuri ng of production away from energy intensive uses and, v at a more basic level, a change to nonconsum eristic, less consumptive lifestyles and social arrangem~n ts} 7 Thes.e iore fundamental choices between social +"f? "'- •• t tt ti, fll ~ ~ t- e ,, ., , ~ f'I t- ~l.al t e rna t 1v e s,""convent i ona 1 technologic a~ly-orient ed discussion of energy options, ~ teod• to e&acur•. It ie not juet • utter of decidina in which way to meet the v 1 �unexamined goals nuclear development aspires to meet, but also a matter of examining the goals themselves. That is, we are not merely faced with the question of comparing different technologie s for meeting some fixed or given demand or level of consumption , and of trying to see how best to meet these; we are also faced, and primarily, with the matter of examining those alleged needs and the cost of a society that creates them. It is doubtful that any technology, however benign in principle, will be likely to leave a tolerable world for the future if it is expected to meet unbounded and uncontrolle d energy consumption and demands. Even more benign technologie s may well be used in a way which creates costs for future people and ~ ,~hich are....., __, likely to result in a deteriorate d world being handed on to them. In short, even more benign technologie s may lead to violation of the Transmissio n ~equirem ent. Consider, to illustrate, the effect on the world's forests, commonly counted as a solar resource, should they be extensively used for production of methanol or of electricity by woodchippin g. While few would object to the use of genuine waste material for energy production, the unrestricte d exploitatio n 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-presse d natural forests. The effects of such additional demands on the maintenance of the forests are often dismissed by the simple expedient of waving around the label "renewable resources". Many forests are in principle renewable, it is a true, given a certain (low) rate and kind of exploitatio n, but in fact there are now very few forestry operations anywh~re 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 exploitatio n which would enable renewal has already been exceeded, so that a total decline is widely thought to be imminent. It certainly has begun in many regions, and many forest types, especially rainforest types,are now, and rapidly, being lost for the future;s The addition of a major further and not readily !imitable demand pressure for energy on top of the present demands is one which anyone with both a realistic appreciatio n of the conduct of forestry operations and a concern for the long-term conservatio n of the forests and remaining natural conununities must regard with alarm. The result of massive deforestati on for energy purposes, resembling the deforestati on of much of Europe at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, again for energy purposes, could be extensive and devastating erosion in steeper lands and tropical areas, desertifica tion in more arid regions, possible climatic change, and massive impoverishm ent of natural ecosys~ems, including enormous loss of natural species. Some of us do not want to pass on, and by the Transmissio n principles 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 �29. produ cts or pollu ted by coal prod ucts. In abor t, as the fores t situa tion illus trate s, a mere switc h to more benig n techn olog ies - impo rtant thoug h this is - witho ut any more basic struc tural and soci al chang e1 is inade quate . The deep er socia l optio n invol ves chall engin g and ·begi nning to alter a socia l .stru cture which prom ote, consu meris m, consu mptio n far beyond genu ine needs and an economic struc ture which enco urage s incre asing use of high ly ener gy-in tensi ~e_ modes of prod uctio n. The socia l chang e optio n tends to be obscu red in most dis cussi ons of energ y optio ns and of how to meet energ y ~eed s, in part becau se it does ques tion unde rlyin g value s of curre nt socia l arran geme nts. The conv entip nal discu ssion proce eds by takin g alleg ed demand (ofte n conf lated with e ::s<.)..,..J1.~ f,. ~ants or need s) as unch allen geab le, and the issue to be one ,',If which techn ology V can be most prof itabl y employed to meet.llhetft. This effec tivel y prese nts a ( "'"tt--~ ~ cJL.t ~ J.. ....~4'-- l~..,, wL., c v .~ ~.:i.4~ - <e ---4(\ 1 >-..~ wt:S,;....,..1~ ,.s l r N Cl'-'~ r false choic e. M\-d is the reett l-~-ef -t-ald'--:rigC. needs and=' CQRt ext IJl.h-.-t'f-- '"ft~ so that d'etnamt=-n--bek-i ftt-a- &&&, i-a.J- ~ . the.--ao,Q,:l:-a-1- ·etrt:t et·ttr-e,--wMeh-p-tt&titte-ee--the-, ,:nead&---i&- •&im-i-l&r-l-y-· t aken as unch allen geab le and unch angea ble. The poin t is read ily illus trate d. I t is commonly argue d by repre senta tives of such indu strie s as trans porta tion and petro leum , as for exam ple by McGrowth of the XS Consumption Co., that peop le want deep freez ers, air cond ition s, power gadg ets, •••• It would be auth orita rian to preve nt them from satis fyin g these want s. Such an argum ent from creat ed wants conv enien tly ignor es the socia l framew-0rk in which ~uch \ " N ~c..;'2,... f -t1,.Q. ~ft:. plA,.i--1~<' needs and wan~ arise or are produ ced. 'I:..+To pe~ n~ . th ~ dat.e i;m-~ &~ ~:::,... t >-.irl "'(At.J c" .... c..!,,..~, (IC . ~N t\ f1..,e_ ~~ ' f''-'l ~~t'. ...~ tN tu 9A-( C2..... o!&n,-J ma"n¥- sueh-warrt s· a c rhe "'fl"'~Trnrk- ieve-1-- ia.:. no,.t....,.,.•how e\t~t o., assum e .,tha.t, ...-t,h&y-. ~ c l-«:i , c...12.o ,J'!:', ~-ft. -.<./ t..-f 4'}. c.. ,._ 1.1 ..+ e. bF. ~t" 1£~ ~ :i~ ~ ~ ~:~ ~~ :;;; ;a : : h se ~ -.,~ft~ .....__ ~-~; ,.; ;~ 2 ~eval.-<a--e--~ l ~' tdal _w;g_ ;!_nf, _!!_at ~ ~hing as ·-tndi~ .tl!u arcir o-i-e ~••t~ i.nat io.n -at.._jl_ll... ~ t .. is 1Te--- ao£ ial framework as a majo r facto r in deter mini ng~c e~tai n kinds ................ .,,....,.....,.... ,•• of choic es, such as those -.. ·fo.t_ _~rav el, and k.inds ---~ f . ,...:1-nf-r·a struc ture, and to see appa rentl y indiv idua l choic es ~~:i°~') .n :,.'8uch':·;;~; ers as being chan nelle d and direc ted by a soci al fr,amework deter mine d large ly "' 1n ·· th&.-. .inter ests of corp orate ...,, and priva te prpf~-t" -~nd adva ntage . The soci al chang e optio n ia a hard optio n, inso far as it will be diffi cult to imple ment poli tical ly; but it ia ultim ately the only way of avoid ing the passi ng on of serio us costs to futur e peop le. And there are othe r sorts of reaso ns than such ethic al ones for takin g it: it is the main , indee d the only sort of optio n,ope n to those who adop t what is now calle d a deep ecolo gical persp ectiv e, as cont raste d with _a shall ow ecolo gical outlo ok which regar ds the natu ral world and its nonhuinan deniz ens as not worth while in them selve s but only of value in as much as ther answ er back to human inter ests. The .deep ecolo gical persp ectiv e is an integ ral part of the Alte rnati ve Ecol ogica l Parad igm and is incom patib le wi;~h cent ral these s of the Dominant Soci al Parad igm (whic h is esse ntial ly the ideol pgy of claa aica l and neoc lassi cal econo mics) _·-~ . ,.....,,, ,......... ,.... •, • c..-,.t. ... , �• 30. and its vari ants (rou ghly , what are calle d Stat e Soci alism , and Dem ocrat ic \/,-tu JtN,k Soci alism ).19 It is inco mpa tible with &w&h . a&Fhmptiafts as •h•• the n~tu ral l( N ~0.S k.Mlt- JL,.. a..~ °'M.A ~ " " Co.. I ~ ~ envir onme nt '" "' va'1u,e .9nly as a reso urce , ~b y And la~ hos tile /\~. .> ~ vM~ ~ .s -to ' t«. A~ ~~ o :r 9'\ d 11\.J , ~ -tt. «... o-t\...va... ~ u~ le ee11 tnlla hle :f:n ht1 11a ~a, e 1 a,ul uhAl ~ · r t h e • A.do mina tion- over wkt ,~ '-'4.. /2.42.A .... '' natu re themes ~th e Dominant Parad igm and its vari ants . The conf lict betw een Alte rnat ive and Dominant Para digm s, which is fast incr easi ng, exte nds of cour se far beyond attit udes to the natu ral worl d, sinc e core valu es of the Dominant Par,~digm such as the meri ts of unimpeded economic growth and mate rial prog ress ar ~ at stak e; the conf lict invo lves fund amen tal 1 diffe renc es over the whole fron t of econ omic al, poli tica l and soci al arra ngem ents. The conf lict unde rlies much of ;the nucl ear deba te, inso far as it is not spec ifica lly limi ted to questio1~s of tech nolo gica l fixe s, but take s up the basi c ethi cal issu es and the so ~ial ques tions to which they lead .20 The 1 ethi cal requ irem ents alrea dy de1fended and appl ied brin g us out, when follo wed throu gh, on the Alte rnat ive sid1~ of the parad igm conf lict, and acco rdin gly lead to the diff icul t soci al ch1nge optio n. The soci al chan ges that the deep alte rnat ive requ ires will be stron gly resis ted beca use they mean chan ges in curr ent soci al orga nisa tion and power stru ctur e. To the exte nt that the optio n repr esen ts some kind of thre at to part s of pres ent poli tica l and economic arran gem ents, it is not surp risin g that offi cial ener gy ppti on disc ussi on proc eeds by misr epre sent ing and ofte n obsc uring it. But diff icul t as it is to suita bly alte r "the syste m," espe ciall y one with such far-r each ing effe cts on the prev ailin g power stru ctur e, it is impe rativ e to try: we are all on the nucl ear train . w �• FOOTNOTES 1. This paper is a condens ation of an early version of our 'Nuclea r power - ethical , social, and politic al dimensi ons' (ESP for short, availab le from the authors ), which in turn grew out of Routley (i.e. the work so referred to in the referenc e list). For help with the condens ation we are very conside rably indebted to the e~itors . In the condens ation, we simplify the structu re of the argument and suppres s underly ing politic al ~1nd ideolog ical dimensi ons (for example , the large measure of respons ibilit~r of the USA for spreadin g nuclear reactor s around the world, and thereby in enhancin g the chances of nuclear disaste rs, includin g nuclear war). We also considet ·ably reduce a heavy load of footnote s and referenc es designed and needed to help make good many of our claims. · Further , in order to contain referenc es to a modest length, referenc e to primary sources has often been replaced by referenc e through seconda ry sources . Little difficu lty should be encount ered however in tracing fuller referenc es through seconda ry sources or in filling out much importa nt backgrou nd materia l from work cited herein. For example , virtual ly all the data cited in section s I and VII is referenc ed in Routley . At worst ESP can always be consulte d. 2. 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 unneces sary to know much about the nuclear fuel cycle in order to conside r ethical and social dimensio ns of nuclear power, it helps to know a little. The b~~sics are presente d in many texts, e.g. Nader & Abbotts , Gyorgy. Of course ~~n order to assess fully reports as to such importa nt backgrou nd and stage~,s etting matters as the likeliho od of a core meltdown of (lightw ater)1 reactor s, much more informa tion is require d. For many assessm ent purpose s h~,wever, some knowledge of economic fallacie s and decision theory is at least as importa nt aa knowledge of nuclear technolo gy. 3. Natural ly the effect on humans is not the only factor that has to be taken into account in arrivln g at moral assessm ents. Nuclear radiatio n, unlike most ethical theorie s. does not confine its scope to human life and welfare . But since the ham nuclear developm ent may afflict on nonhuman life, for example , can hardly improve its case, it suffice s if the case against it can be made out solely in term• of its effects on human life in the convent ional way. �.For refe ren ce to apd a brie f disc uss ion of (hu man -ori ente d) sim ulat ion models see Goodin, p.42 8. 4. The Opp ortu nity -co st . argument is also def ecti ve in oth er resp ects . It pres upp ose s not mer ely the (mi stak en) red ucti ons invo lved in the con trac tion of the eth ica l domain to the economic; it also pres upp ose s tha t the pro per methods for dec isio n which affe ct. the futu re, such as tha t of ene rgy cho ice, app ly disc oun ting . But , as Goo din arg ues , more app rop riat e dec isio n rule s do not allo w disc oun ting . 5. Thi s is one of the reas ons why exp ecte d uti lity theo ry, roug hly cos t-be nef it ana lysi s wit h pro bab ility fril ls, is inad equ ate as a dec isio n method in such con tex ts. 6. App aren t exc epti on~ to the prin cip le such as tax atio n (and red istr ibu tion of income gen era, lly) van ish when wea lth is con stru ed (as it has to be if tax atio n is to be pro per ly jus tifi ed) as at lea st par tly a soc ial ass et unf airl y mon opo lise d by a min orit y of the pop ulat ion . Examples such as tha t of mot orin g dan gero usly do not con stit ute cou nter exa mpl es to the prin cip le; for one is not mor ally ent itle d to so mot or. 7. For det ails , and as to how the off icia l ana lys~ s become argu men ts aga inst nuc lear dev elop men t whe.p some atte mpt is made to tak e the -ign ored cos ts into acc oun t, see Shr ade r-Fr ech ette , p. 55 ff. 8. See Rou tley , p. 160 . 9. For much furt her disc uss ion of the poi nts of the prec edin g two par agrap hs, see Shr ade r-F rec het te, p. 35 ff.; and also Nader & Abbott&. 10. Gyorgy. Most of the rea cto rs in the wor ld are of this typ e; 11. See Shr ade r-Fr ech ette , cha pter 4. see 12. See Shr ade r-Fr ech ette . A wor thw hile ini tia l view of the sho rtco min gs of the RassmutJsen rep ort may be reac hed by com bini ng the crit iqu e in Shr ade r-Fr ech et~e wit h tha t in Nader & Abb otts . 13. The re are var iati on$ on Ai and Aii which mul tipl y cos ts aga inst numbers such as pro bab ilit ies. In this way risk s, con stru ed as pro bab le cos ts, can be take n into acc oun t in the asse ssm ent. (Al tern ativ ely . risk .a may be aaaeaaed thro ugh •~e h fam ilia r aeth oda •• inau ran ce). �• A princ iple varyi ng Aii, and formu lated as follow s: Aii'. a is ethic ally accep table if {for some b) a inclu des no more risks than band bis socia lly accep ted, was the basic ethic al princ iple in terms of which the Cluff Lake Board of . Inqui ry recen tly decid ed that nucle ar power devel opme nt in Saska tchew an is ethic ally accep table : see Cluff Lake Board of Inqui ry Final Repo rt, Department of Envir onme nt, Government of Saska tchew an, 1978, p. 305 and p. 288. In this repor t, a is nucle ar power and b is eithe r activ ities clear ly accep ted by socie ty as alter nativ e power sourc es. In other appli catio ns b has b•en taken as cigar ette smoki ng, motor ing, minin g and even the Vietnam ~ar (!). The point s made in the text do not exhau st the objec tions to princ iples Ai - Aii'. The princ iples are certa inly ethic ally subst antiv e, since an ethic al conse quenc e canno t be deduced from nonet hical prem isses, but they have an inadm issibl e conve ntion al chara cter. For look at the origi n of b b may be socia lly accep ted thoug h it is no longe r socia lly accep table , or thoug h its socia l accep tibili ty is no longe r so clear cut and it would not have been socia lly accep ted if as much as is now known had been known when it was introd uced. What is requi red in Aii', for insta nce, for the argument tQ begin to look convi ncing is that b is 'ethic ally accep table ' rath, r than 'soci ally accep ted'. But even with the amendments the princ iples are inval id, for the reaso ns given in the text, and other s. It is not disco neert ing that princ iples of this type do not work. It would be sad to see yet anoth er area lost to the expe rts, ethic s to actua ries. 14. See Shrad er-Fr echet te, p. 15. 15. Goodin . p. 433. 16. The argum ent is elabo rated in ESP. 17. For some of the more philo sophi cally impor tant mate rial on alter nativ e nonco nsum eristi c $OCi al arran geme nts and lifes tyles , see work cited in V. and R. Routl ey, 'Soci al theor ies, self manag ement and envir onme ntal probl ems' in M,nni son et al, where a begin ning ia made on worki ng out ~ of alter nativ ••• thoaa of a plura listic anarchism. ••t �flA-t fn 18. l ·.:. The~ situa tion of the world 's tropi cal rainf orest s is expla ined in, for insta nce, My~ra; the reaso ns are untan gled in R. and V. Routl ey 'World rainf orest destr uctio n - the socia l cause s' (avai lable from the autho rs). 19·. For a fulle r accou nt of the Dominant Socia l Parad igm and its rival , the Alter nativ e Envir onme ntal Parad igm, see Cotgr ovean d Duff, espec ially the table on p. 341 which encap sulate s ' ' the main assum ption s of the respe ctive parad igms; compare also Catto n and Dunla p, espec ially p. 33. Contemporary varia nts on the Dominant Socia l Parad igm are consi dered in ESP • .., The shallo w/dee p contr ast as appli ed to ecolo gical posit ions, which is an impor tant component of the parad igm conf lict, was introd uced by Naess . For furth er expla natio n of the contr ast and of the large r array of ecolo gical posit ions into which it fits, see R. and V. Routl ey, 'Huma n chauv inism and ~ envir onme ntal ethic s' in Mannison '------'"'et al, and the refer ences there cited , espec ially to Rodman's work. 20. The more elabo rate afgum ent of ESP sets the nucle ar debat e in the conte xt of parad igm confl ict. But it is also argue d that, even withi n assum ptions framework of the ~,min ant Socia l Parad igm and its varia nts, Ti. Nucle ar develo pmen t is no,~ the ratio nal choic e among energ y optio ns. The main argument put up for n\Jcle ar devel opme nt withi n the framework of the dominant parad igm is an Ec~,nomic growth argum ent. It is the follow ing I' versi on of the Light s-goin g-ou~; argument (with economic growt h duly stand ing in for mate rial wealt h, and fo~r what is valua ble!) :- Nucle ar power is neces sary to susta in economic $rowt h. Economic growt h is desir able (for all the usual reaso ns, e.g. to incre ase the size of the pie, to postp one redis tribu tion probl ems, etc.) . There fore nucle ar power is desir able. The first premi ss is part of US energ y polic y (see Shrad er-Fr echet te, p.111 ), and the secon d prem iss ia suppl ied by stand ard economics textb ooks. But both premi sses are defec tive, the secon d becau se what is valua ble in economic growth can be achie ved by (not witho ut growt h but) selec tive economic growt h, which jettis ons the heavy socia l and envir onme ntal costs carri ed by unqu alifie d economic growt h. More to the point , since the secon d premi ss is an assum ption of the Dominant Parad igm, the first premi ss (or rathe r an appro priate and less vulne rable restat emen t of it) fails even by Dominant Paradigm stand ards. For of cours e nucle ar power is not neces sary given that there are other , perha ps costl ier alter nativ es. The premi ss usual ly defen doJ is some elabo ration of the prem iae: Nucle ar power is the econo mical ly beat way to auata in economic arowth. 'econ omica lly beat' �be ing fill ed out as 'mo at eff icie nt', 'che ape st', 'hav ing the most favo urab le ben efit -co st rat io', etc~ Unf oitu nate ly for the argu men t, and for nuc lear development sche mes , nuc lear power is none of thes e thin gs dec isiv ely (un less a good dea l of economic che atin g - easy to do - is don e). Tii . ' pro per Dominant Para digm acc oun ting , nuc lear cho ices sho uld gen era l ly be reje cte d, both as priv ate uti lity inve stm ents and as pub lic cho ices . On Nuc lea r dev elop men t is not eco nom ical ly via ble but has bee n kep t goin g, not by cle ar economic via bili ty, butr by mas sive sub sidi zati on of sev era l typ es (dis cus sed in Shr ade r-Fl ech ette ~, Gyorgy and Nader & Abb otts ). Even on var ian ts of ~;he Dominant Para digm , nuc lear dev elop men t is not jus tifi ed, as con side rati on of dec isio n theo ry methods wil l rev eal: Til i. rej cted , Whatever reas ona ble 4ec iaio n rule is ado pted , the nuc lear cho ice is as the argu men ts of Goodin on alte rna tive dec isio n rule s help to show. What sus tain s the nuc lear jug ger nau t is not the Dominant Para digm ~r i ts var ian ts, but con tem pora ry cor por ate cap ital ism (or its sta te ent erp rise image ) and as soc iate d thir d wor ld imp eria lism , aa the his tor ica l det ails of nuc lear <lev elopmen t both in dev elop ed cou ntri es and in less dev elop ed cou ntri es mak es pla i . (for main det ails , see Gyorgy p. 307 ff.) . And the pra ctic es of con tem pora ry corp ora te cap ital ism and ass oci ated imp eria liam are not acc epta ble by the sta nda rds of eith er of the Paradigms or the ir var ian t&: they are cer tain ly no t eth ica lly acc epta ble. �• .• . ·• REFERENCES USED Works esp eci ally use ful for fur the r inv est iga tion of the e.th ica l issu ea rais ed by nuc lea r dev elop men t are ind ica t_ed wit h an ast eri sk (*) . S. Cot gro ve and A. Duf f, "En viro nme ntal ism , mid dle -cla ss rad ica lism and po liti cs' , Soc iolo gic al Review 28( 2) (1980), 333 -51 . W.R . Cat ton , Jr. , and R. E. Dun lap, 'A new eco log ica l par adig m for pos t exu ber ant soc iolo gy' American Beh avi ora l Sci ent ist 24 (19 80) . 15- 47. For Rep ort : Ranger Uranium Env iron men tal Inq uiry Fir st Rep ort, Au stra lian Government Pub lish ing Ser vic e, Can ber ra, 1977. *R. E. Goodin, "No moral nuk es', Eth ics 90 (19 80) , 417-49. *A. Gyorgy and fri' end s, No Nukes : eve ryo ne's gui de to nuc lea r pow er, Sou th End Pre ss, Bos ton , Ma ss., 197 9. *n . Mannison, M. McRobbie and R. Rou tley (ed ito rs) , Env iron men tal Phi los~ phy , RSSS, Au stra lian Nat ion al Un ive rsit y, 198 0. N. Myers, The Sin kin g Ark, Pergamon Pre ss, Oxf ord , 1979. R. Nader and J. Abb otta , The Menace of Atomic Ene rgy , Me lbou rne, 1977. Outback Pre ss, *K. S. Shr ade r-F rec het te, Nuclear Power and Pub lic Pol icy , 1980. Rei del , Dor dre cht , R. and V. Rou tley , 'Nu clea r energy and obl igat ion tJ to the fut ure ', Inq uiry 21 (19 78) , 133-79. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Draft Papers Description An account of the resource Sylvan's literary executor encountered an archive in which “all his projects were current", since manuscripts were undated and unattributed. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document Richa rd and Val Rout ley 1. NUCLEAR POWER - SOME ETHICAL AND SOCIAL DIMENSIONS 1 One hardl y needs initi ation into the dark myst eries of nucle ar phys ics to cont ribut e usefu lly to the deba te now wide ly ragin g over nucle ar powe r. While many impo rtant empi rical ques tions are still unres olved , these do not reall y lie at the centr e of the contr over sy. Inste ad, it is a deba te abou t value s .•. many of the ques tions which arise are socia l and ethic al ones .2 I. THE TRAIN PARABLE AND THE NUCLEAR WASTE PROBLEM. A long dista nce coun try trai n has just pulle d out. The train which is crowd ed carri es both passe ngers and freig ht. At an early stop in the journ ey someone consi gns as fr e ight, to a far dista nt desti natio n, a packa ge which conta ins a highl y toxic an d explo sive gas. This is packe d in a very thin conta iner which , as t he consi gner is awar e, may well not conta in the gas for the full dista nce f or whi ch it is consi gned , and certa inly will not do so if the train shou ld s t r i ke any real troub le, for exam ple, if the train shou ld be dera iled or i nvo l ved in a colli sion , or if some passe nger sh:>u ld inter fere inad verte ntly or de liber ately with the freig ht, perha ps tryin g to stea l some of it. All o f these sorts of thing s have happe ned on some previ ous journ eys~ If the co ntain er shoul d break the resu lting disa ster would proba bly kill at least some of the peop le on the train in adjac ent carri ages , while othe rs could be maimed ~or poiso ned or soon er or later incur serio us disea ses. Most of us would round ly condemn such an actio n. What migh t the cons igner of the parc el say to try to justi fy it? He migh t say that it is not certa in that the gas will escap e, or that the world needs his prod uct and it is his duty to supp ly it, or that in any case he is not respo nsibl e for the train or the peop le on it. These sorts of ~xcu ses howe ver would norm ally be seen as ludic rous when set in this conte xt. Unfo rtuna tely, simi lar excu ses are o ;,...:'. ~ f'\ o t- s " 99• ole~~ seen when the cons igner , again a (resp onsib le) busin essm an.pu ts his wor kers' healt h or other peop les' welf are at risk. Suppo se he says that it is his own and othe rapr essin g needs which justi fy his actio n. The company he cont rols, which produ ces the mate rial as a by-p rodu ct, i s in bad finan cial stra its, and could not affor d to produ ce a bette r cont ainer even if it knew how to make one. If the company fails , he and his famil y wi ll suffe r, his empl oyees will lose their jobs and have to look for othe rs, aP.d the whole company town, throu gh loss of spend ing, will be worse off. The poor and unem ploye d of the town, whom he would other wise have been able to help , will suffe r espe ciall y. Few peop le would acce pt such groun da as justi ficat ion. Even where there are serio us risks and costs to ones elf or some group for whom one is conce rned one is usua lly cons idere d not to be entit led to simp ly trans fer the heavy burde n of those risks and costs onto othe r uninv olved parti es, espe ciall y where they arise from one's own, or one's grou p's chose n life- style . The matte r of nucle ar waste has many mora l featu res which resem ble the train case. How fitti ng the analo gy is will becom e appa rent as the argum ent prog resse s. There is no known prove n safe way to packa ge the high ly toxic waste s gene rated by the nucle ar plan ts that will be sprea d aroun d the world as large -scal e nucle ar devel opme nt goes ahead . The waste probl em will be much more serio us than that gene rated by the 50 or so react ors in use at prese nt, with each one of the 2000 or so react ors envis aged by the end of the centu ry produ cing, on avera ge, annu al waste s conta ining 1000 times the radio activ ity of the Hiros hima bomb. Much of this waste is extre mely toxic . For exam ple, a milli onth of a gramme of pluto nium is enoug h to induc e a lung canc er. A leak of even a part of the waste mate rial could invol ve much loss of life, wide sprea d disea se and gene tic dama ge, and conta mina tion of innnense areas of land. Wast es will inclu de the react ors them selve s, which will have to be aband oned after their expe cted life times of perha ps 40 year s, and whic h, some have estim ated, may requ ire U~ milli on y~ars to reach safe leve ls of radio activ ity. Nucl ear waste s must be kept suita bly isola ted from the envir onme nt for their entir e activ e lifet ime. For fissi on prod ucts the requ ired stora ge perio d avera ges a thous and years or so, and for trans uran ic elem ents, which inclu de . pluto nium, there is a half milli on to a milli on year stora ge probl em. Serio us probl ems have arise n with both shor t-term and propo sed long- term metho ds of stora ge , even with the comp arativ ely ~mal l quan tities of waste produ ced over th last twent y years . Shor t-term metho ds of stora ge requ ire conti nued human inter vent ion, while propo sed longe r term metho ds are subje ct to both human inter feren ce and risk of leaka ge throu gh non-human facto rs. No one with even a sligh t know ledge of the geolo gical and clim atic histo ry of the earth over the last milli on year s, a perio d whose fluct uatio ns in clim ate we are only just begin ning to guage and which has seen four Ice Ages , could be confi dent that a rigor ous guara ntee of safe stora ge could be provi ded for the vast perio d of time invol ved. Nor does the histo ry of human affa irs over the last 3000 years give groun d for confi denc e in safe stora ge by metho ds requ iring human inter vent ion over perha ps a milli on year s. Propo sed long- term stora ge meth ods such as stora ge in gran ite form ation s or in salt mine s, are large ly spec ulati ve and relat ively unte sted, and have alrea dy prove d to invol ve diffi culti es with attem pts made to put them into prac tice. Even as regar ds expe nsive recen t prop osals for first embe dding conc entra ted wast es in glass and enca psula ting the resu lt in mult ilaye red meta l conta iner• befor e rock depo sit, aimu latio n mode l• , J, 3. revea l that radio activ e mate rial may not remai n suita bly isola ted from human envir onm ents. - In short , the best prese nt stora ge propo sals carry very real poss ibilit ies of irrad iatin g futur e peopl e and damaging their enviro nmen t. 3 Given the heavy costs which could be invol ved for the futur e, and given the known limit s of techn ology , it is metho dolog ically unsou nd to bet, as nucle ar natio ns have, on the disco very of safe proce dures for stora ge of waste s. Any new proce dures (requ ired befor e 2000) will proba bly be but varia tions on not. only have prese nt propo sals, and subje ct to the same inade quaci_e s. For insta nce,/ none of the propo sed metho ds for safe stor age~ been prope rly teste d, but they may well prove to invol ve unfor eseen diffi culti es and risks when an attem pt is made to put them into pract ice on a comm ercial scale . Only a method that could provi de a rigor ous guara ntee of safet y over the stora ge perio d, that place d safet y beyond reaso nable doubt , would be accep table . It is diffi cult to see how -such rigor ous guara ntees could be given conce rning eithe r the geolo gical or futur e human facto rs. But even if an econo mical ly viabl e, rigor ously safe long term stora ge met~ d could be devis ed, there is the proble m of guara nteein g that it would be unive rsally and invar iably used. The assum ption that it would be (espe cially if, as appea rs likel y, such a method prove d expen sive econo mical ly and polit icall y) seems to presu ppose a level of effic iency , perfe ction , and conce rn for the futur e which has not previ ously been encou ntered in human affai rs, and has certa inly not been consp icuou s in the nucle ar indus try. The risks imposed on the futur e by proce eding with nucle ar devel opme nt are, then, signi fican t. Perha ps 40,00 0 gener ation s of futur e peopl e could be force d to bear signi fican t risks resul ting from the provi sion of the (extra vagan t) energ y use of only a small propo rtion of the peopl e of 10 gener ation s. Nor is the risk of direc t harm from the escap e or misus e of radio activ e mate rials the only burde n the nucle ar solut ion impos es on the futur e. Becau se the energ y provi ded by nucle ar fissio n is merel y a etop gap, it seems proba ble that in due cours e the same proble m, that of making a trans ition to renew able sourc es of energ y, will have to be faced again by a futur e popu lation which will proba bly, again as a resul t of our actio ns, be very much worse place d to cope with it. Their world will most likel y be a world which is serio usly deple ted of non-r enewa ble resou rces, and in which such renew able resou rces as fores ts and soils as remai n, resou rces which inevi tably form an impo rtant part of the basis of life, are run-down or destr oyed. Such point s tell again st the idea that futur e peopl e must be, if not direc t bene ficiar ies of energ y from nucle ar fissio n, at least indir ect bene ficiar ies. ( The "solu tion" then is to buy time for conte mpora ry socie ty at a price .which not only creat es serio us proble ms for futur e peopl e but which reduc es their abili ty to cope with these probl ems. Like the consi gner in the train parab le, conte mpora ry indus trial socie ty propo ses, in order to get itsel f out of a mess arisin g from its own life- style - the creat ion of econo mies depen dent on an abund ance of non-r emwa ble energ y, which is limit ed in suppl y to pass on costs and risks of serio us harm to other s who will obtai n no corre spond ing bene fits. The "solu tion" may enabl e the avoid ance of some uncom fortab le chang es in the lifeti me of those now livin g and their imme diate desce ndant s, just as the consi gner• • actio n avoid s uncom foriab le chang es for him and those in his imme diate surro undin gs, but at the expen se of passi ng heavy burde ns to other uninv olved parti es whose oppo rtunit y to lead decen t lives may be serio usly jeopa rdise d. If we apply to the nucle ar situa tion the stand ards of behav iour and moral princ iples gener ally ackno wledg ed (in princ iple, if not so often in fact) in the ·conte mpora ry world , it is not easy to avoid the concl usion that nucle ar devel opme nt invol ves injus tice with respe ct to the futur e on a grand scale . There appea r to be only two plaus ible ways of tryin g to avoid such a concl usion . First , it might be argue d that the moral princ iples and oblig ation s which we ackno wledg e for the conte mpora ry world and perha ps the imme diate futur e do not apply to those in the non-im media te futur e. Secon dly, an attem pt might be made to appea l to overr iding circu mstan ces; for to rejec t the consi gner' s actio n in the circum stanc es outlin ed is not to imply that there are no circum stanc es in which such an actio n might be justi fiabl e. As in the case of the consi gner .of the packa ge there is a need to consi der what these justif ying circum stanc es might be, and wheth er they apply in the prese nt case. We consi der these possi ble escap e route s for the propo nent of nucle ar develo pmen t in turn. l II. OBLIGATIONS TO THE (DISTANT) FUTURE. ./ I I The espec ially probl emati c area is that of the dista nt (i.e. non-im media te) futur e, the futur e with which peopl e alive today will have no direc t conta ct; by comp arison , the imme diate futur e gives fewer proble ms for most ethic al theor ies. In fact the quest ion of oblig ation s to futur e peopl e prese nts tests which a number of ethic al theor ies fail to pass, and also has serio us reper cussi ons in polit ical philo sophy as regar ds the adequ acy of accep ted (demo cratic and other ) insti tutio ns which do not take due accou nt of the inter est• of futur e creat ures. \ r Moral phil osop hers have , pred icta bly, diff ered on ques tion s of obli gati ons to dist ant futu re crea ture s. A good many of the phil osop hers who have exp lici tly cons ider ed the ques tion have come down in favo ur of the same cons ider atio n bein g give n to the righ ts and inte rest s of futu re peop le as to thos e of cont emp orary or imm edia tely futu re peop le. Othe rs fall into thre e cate gori es: thos e who ackn owle dge obli gati ons to the futu re but who do not take them seri ousl y or who assi gn them a less er weig ht, thos e who deny , or who are com mitte d by thei r gene ral mora l posi tion to deny ing, that ther e are mor al obli gati ons beyond the imm edia te futu re, and thos e who come down, with adm irab le phil osop hica l caut ion, on both side s of the issu e, but with the weig ht of the argu men t favo urin g the view unde rlyin g prev ailin g economic and poli tica l inst itut ions , that ther e are no mora l obli gati ons to the futu re beyond thos e perh aps to the next gene ratio n. Acco rdin g to the most extre me of thes e posi tion s agai nst mora l obli gati ons to the futu re, our beha viou r with resp ect to the futu re is mor ally unco nstra ined ~ ther e are no mora l rest rict ions on acti ng or fail ing to act deri ving from the effe ct of our acti ons on futu re peop le. Of thos e phil osop hers who say, or whose view s impl y that we do not have obli gati ons to the (non -imm edia te) futu re, many have base d this view on acco unts of mora l obli gati on which are buil t on rela tion s which pres uppo se some degr ee of temp oral or spa tial con tigu ity. Thus , mora l obli gati on is seen as pres uppo sing vari ous rela tion s whic h coul d not hold betw een peop le wide ly sepa rate d in time (or some time s in spac e). Let us call the posi tion that we have no obli gati ons to (dis tant ) futu re peop le the Nocon stra ints posi tion . Among sugg este d base s or grou nds of mora l obli gati on for the pos itio n, which would rule out obli gati ons to the nonimm edia te futu re, are thes e. Firs tly. ther e are thos e acco unts whic h requ ire that someone to whom a mora l obli gati on is held be able to claim his righ ts or enti tlem ent. Peop le in the dist ant futu re will not be able to claim righ ts and enti tlem ents agai nst us, and of cour se they can do noth ing to enfo rce any claim s they migh t have agai nst us. Seco ndly , ther e are thos e acco unts whic h base mora l obli gati ons on soci al or lega l conv enti on, for exam ple a conv entio n whic h would requ ire puni shm ent of offe nder s or at leas t some kind of soci al enfo rcem ent. But plai nly thes e and othe r conv entio ns will not be inva rian t over chan ge in soci ety and amendment of lega l conv enti ons; henc e they will not be inva rian t over time . Also futu re peop le have no way of enforcin & thei r inte rest s or puni shin g off~ ndin g pred eces aora . \ I i _L The No-cons traints view is a very difficu lt one to sustain . Conside r, for example , a scienti fic group which, for no particu lar reason other than to test a particu lar piece of technolo gy, places in orbit a cobalt bomb set off by a triggeri ng device designed to go off several hundred years from the time of its despatch . No present ly living person and none of their immedia te descend ants would be affected , but the populat ion of the earth in the distant future would be wiped out as a direct and predicta ble result of the action. The ·Ho-con straints position clearly implies that this is an accepta ble moral enterpr ise, that whateve r else we might legitim ately criticiz e in the scienti sts' experim ent (perhaps its being over-ex pensive or badly designed ) we cannot lodge a moral protest about the damage it will do to future people. The no-cons traints position also endorse s as morally accepta ble the followin g sorts of policy: I A firm discove rs it can make a handsome profit from mining, process ing and manufac turing a new type of materia l which, although it ca~ses no problem for present people or their immedia te descend ants, will over a period of hundred s of years decay into a substan ce which will cause an enormous epidemi c of cancer among the inhabita nts of the earth at that time. Accordi ng to the Ko-con straints view the firm is free to act in its own interes ts, without any conside ration for the harm it does remote future people. Such countere xamples to the NQ-con straints position , which are easily varied and multipl ied, might seem childlis hly obvious . Yet this view is far from being a straw man; not only have several philosop hers endorsed this position , but it is a clear implica tion of many current ly popular views of the basis of moral obligat ion, as ~eli as of prevaili ng economic theory. It seems that those who opt for the No-con straints position have not conside red such example s, despite their being clearly implied by their position . We suspect that {we certain ly hope that) when it is brought out that their position admits such countere xamples , that without any constra ints we are free to cause pointles s harm for example , most of those who opted for this position would want to assert that it was not what they intended . What many of those who have put forward the No-con straints posit ion~ to have had in mind (in denying moral obligat ion) is rather that future people can look after themsel ves, that we are not respons ible for their lives. The popular view that the future can take care of itself also seems to assume a future causally indepen dent of the present . But it is not. It is not as if, in the countere xample cases or in the nuclear case, the future is simply being left alone to take care of itself. Present people are influenc ing it, and in doing so thereby acquire many of the same sorts of moral respons ibilitie s as they do in causally affectin g the present and immediate future, a.oat notably the obligat ion to take account in 7. 'what they do of peop le affec ted and their inter ests, to be care ful in their ac tions , to take accou nt of the genu ine prob abili ty of their actio ns causi ng harm, and to sec that they do not act so as to rob futur e peop le of the chnnc c of a good life. Furth ermo re, to say that we are not resp !~ibl e for the lives of futur e peop le does not amount to the same thing as sayin g that we are free to do as we like with respe ct to them. In just the same way, the fact that one does not have or has not acqu ired an oblig ation to some stran ger with whom one has neve r been invol ved does not imply that one is free to do what one likes with respe ct to him, for example to rob him or to serio usly harm him when this could be avoid ed. V These diffi culti es for the No-c onstr aints posi tion resu lt in part becau se of a failu re to make an impo rtant disti nctio n. Some of our oblig ation s to othe rs arise becau se we have volu ntari ly enter ed into some a greem ent with them - for exam ple, we have made a prom ise. Othe r oblig ation s, howe ver, such as our duty not to damage or harm some one, do not assume that an agree ment has been struc k betwe en us. Let us call oblig ation s of the f ormer kind acqu ired oblig ation s and those of the latte r unac quire d oblig ation s. There is a cons idera ble diffe renc e in the type of resp onsi bilit y asso ciate d with each. In the case of acqu ired oblig ation s resp onsi bilit y arise s becau se one s hould do some thing which one can fail to do, e.g. keep a prom ise. In the case of unac quire d dutie s resp onsi bilit y arise s as a resu lt of being a caus al ag ent who is aware of the conse quen ces or prob able conse quen ces of his actio n, a resp onsi bilit y that is not depen dent on one's havin g perfo rmed some act in the past (e.g. , made a prom ise). Our oblig ation s to futur e peop le clear ly are ,una cqui red. not acqu ired oblig ation s, a fact the No-c onstr aints posi tion ~ simpl y fails to take into acco unt. These oblig ation s arise as a resu lt of our abili ty to produ ce caus al effec ts of a reaso nably pred ictab le natu re, whet her on our cont emp orar ies~ on those in the dista nt futur e. Thus , to retur n to the train para ble, the cons igner cann ot argue in justi ficat ion of his actio n that he has. for exam ple, neve r assumed or acqu ired resp onsi bilit y for the passe ngers . that he does not know them and there fore has no love or symp athy for them and that they are not part of his mora l comm unity; in shor t, that he has acqu ired no oblig ation , and baa no apec ial oblig ation • to help them. All that v t ' r . ". one needs to argue conce rning the train , and in the nucle ar case, is that there are moral oblig ation s again st impos ing harm ~ ~ ~·~ which are not speci ally oblig atiq9 s to the dista nt acqui red. Nor can this claim be rebut ted by the all prete nce tha:,( tutur e i~vo1 ve heroi c self sacri fice, somet hing "abov e and beyon d" what is norm ally requi red. One is no more engag ing in heroi c self sacri fice by not forcin g futur e peopl e into an unvia ble life posit ion or by refra ining from causi ng them direc t harm than the consi gner is resor ting to heroi c self sacri fice in refra ining from shipp ing the dange rous packa ge on the train . V III. ATTEMPTS TO REDUCE OBLIGATIONS TO THE FUTURE. In evadi ng these diffi culti es the No-c onstr aints posit ion may be quali fied rathe r than wholl y aband oned. Accor ding to the Quali fied posit ion we are not entir ely uncon strain ed wi th respe ct to the dista nt futur e. There are oblig ation s, even to dista nt futur e peopl e, but these are not so impor tant as those to the prese nt, and the inter ests of dista nt futur e peopl e canno t weigh very much in the scale again st those of the prese nt and imme diate futur e. The inter ests of futur e peopl e then, excep t in unusu al cases , count for very much less than the inter ests of prese nt peopl e. Hence such thing s aa nucle ar devel opme nt and vario us explo itativ e activ ities which bene fit prese nt peopl e shoul d proce ed, even if peopl e of the dista nt futur e are (somewhat) disad vanta ged by them. The Quali fied posit ion appea rs to be widel y held and is impli cit in preva iling economic theor ies, where the posit ion of a decre ase in weigh t of futur e costs and bene fits (and so of futur e inter ests) is obtai ned by appli catio n over time of a disco unt rate, so disco untin g costs and risks to . aM- a...-pi~ ~ \ -4 . futur e peopl e. The attem pt to apply econo mics as a moral theor y, -eeme th'-t that is becoming incre asing ly common, can lead the~ to the Quali fied posit ion. What is objec tiona ble in such an appro ach is that econo mics must opera te withi n the bounds of ackno wledg ed non-a cquir ed moral cons train ts, just as in pract ice it opera tes withi n legal const raint s. What econo mics canno t legiti mate ly do is determ ine what these const raint s are. There are, moreo ver, alter nativ e econo mic theor ies and simpl y to adopt . witho ut furth er ado, one which disco unts the futur e, givin g much less impor tance to the inter ests of futur e peopl e, is to beg all the quest ions at issue . Among the argum ents that econo mists offer for gener ally disco untin g the futur e, the most threa dbare is based on the Rosy -futur e assum ption , that futur e gener ation s will be bette r off than prese nt ones (and so bette r place d to handl e the waste probl em). Since there is moun ting evide nce that futur e gener ation s may wel l~ be bette r off th,Z prese nt ones, espec ially in thing s that matte r, no argum ent for disco untin g the inter ests of futur e gener ation s on this basis can carry much weigh t. For the waste proble m to be hande d dovn V I to the futur e gener ation s, it would have to be shown, what recen t economic progr ess hardl y justi fies, that futur e gener ation s will be not just bette r off but so much bette r off that they can (easi ly)ca rry and contr ol the nucle ar freig ht. A more plaus ible argum ent for disco untin g, the Oppo rtunit y-cos t argum ent, build s direc tly on the notio n of oppo rtunit y cost. It is argue d from the fact that a dolla r gaine d now is worth much more than a dolla r receiv ed in the nonimme diate futur e (beca use the first dolla r could meanw hile be inves ted at compound inter est}, that disco untin g is requi red to obtai n equiv alent mone tary value s. This same line of reaso ning is then appli ed to the alloc ation of re sourc es. Thus, comp ensati on - which,___1s what the waste proble m is taken to come to econo mical ly - cost~ much less now than later , e.g. a few penni es set aside 1-1:>V (e.g. in a trust fund ).the futur e, if need be, will suffi ce to comp ensate event ually for any ~ctim s of remot e radio activ e waste leaka ge. Two proble ms ~ First , there are, beset this appro ach. prese ntly at least , insurm ounta ble pract ical diffi culti es about apply ing such disco untin g. We simpl y do not know how to determ ine appro priate futur e disco unt rates . A more serio us objec tion is that the argum ent depen ds on a false assum ption. It is not true that value , or damages, can alway s be conve rted into mone tary equiv alent s. There is no clear "mon etary comp ensati on" for a varie ty of damag es, inclu ding cance r, loss of life, a lost speci es. The disco untin g theme , however argue d for, is inade quate , becau se it leads back in pract ice to the No-c onstr aints posit ion. The reaso n is that disco untin g impos es an" economic horiz on" beyond which nothi ng need be consi dered , since any costs or bene fit which might arise are, when disco unted back to the prese nt, negli gible . A diffe rent argum ent fot the Quali fied posit io~. the Prob abilit ies argum ent, avoid s the objec tions from cases of certa in damage throu gh appea l to proba bility consi derat ions. The dista nt futur e, it is argue d, is much more uncer tain than the prese nt and imme diate futur e, so that prob abili ties are conse quent ly lower , perha ps even appro achin g or coinc iding with zero for any hypot hesis conce rning the dista nt futur e. Thus, the argum ent conti nues, the -inter ests of futur e peopl e must (apar t from excep tiona l cases where there is an unusu ally high degre e of certa inty} count for (very much) less than those of prese nt and neigh bouri ng peopl e where (much') highe r prob abili ties are attac hed. So in the case of confl ict betwe en the prese nt and the futur e, where it is a quest ion of weigh ing certa in bene fits to the peopl e of the prese nt and the imme diate futur e again st a much lower proba bility of indet ermin ate coats to an indet ermin ate number of V assuming anything like similar costs and benefit s were involve d. is however badly flawed. The argumen t Firstly , probab ilities involvin g distant future situatio ns are not always less than those concern ing the immedia te '"'tt..N ~ ~ -~ -q Nat l'-.Now wJ~a..+. ~,NA. «f ~~e J~N f2.(;.~ ~L of. ~~ft.. - ~ t~( _d-'z..,ve.. , ~ 1t:e.. future in the way the argumen t suppose s.AMor eove)th e outcome s of some moral problem s often do not depend on a high level of probabi lity. . In many cases it is enough, as the train parable reveals , that a signific ant risk is created ; such cases do not depend critica lly on high probabi lity assignm ents. Nor, of course, can it be assumed that anything like similar ly weighte d costs and benefits are involved in the nuclear case, especia lly if it is a question of risking poisonin g some of the earth for half a million or so years, with consequ ent risk of serious harm to· thousand s of generat ions of future people, in order to obtain quite doubtfu l, or even trivial , benefit for some present peopl jin the shape of the opportu nity to continu e (unnece ssarily) shigh energy use. And even if the costs and benefit s were compara ble or evenly weighte d, such an argumen t would be defectiv e, since an analogo us argumen t would show that the consign er's action in the train parable , is accepta ble provided the benefit (e.g. the profit the company stood to gain from imposin g signific ant risks on · other people) was sufficie ntly large. Such a cost-be nefit approac h to moral and decisio n problem s, with or without the probabi lity frills, is quite inadequ ate when differe nt parties are involved or when cases of conflic t of interes t involvin g moral obligat ions are at issue. permiss ible s For example , such a cost-be nefit approac h would imply that it is for a company to injure, or very likely injure, some innocen t party provided only that the company stands to make a sufficie ntly large gain from it, that costs to some group are more than morally larger benefit s to another group. compens ated for by But costs or benefit s are not legitim ately transfer red in any simple way from one group to another . The often appealed to maxim "If you (or your group) want the benefit s . you have to accept the costs" is one thing, but the maxim "If I (or my group) want the benefit • then~ have to accept the coat• (or aome of theDJ at leaat)" i• another an_d_ _ __ // very different thing. It is a widely accepted moral principle that one is not, in general, entitled to simply transfer costs of a significa nt kind arising fro~ an activity which benefits oneself onto other parties whQ are not involved in the activity and are not beneficia ries. 6 This Transfer -limiting principle is especiall y clear in cases of whiea e thalidomide rnaoufact u~ias and mark.eti.Ag eompany J:9 or.a.,.. where the significa nt costs include an effect on life or health or a risk thereof, and where the benefit to the benefitti qg - e. -1, J -tt.. e ~ ~ "" { party is of a noncrucia l or dispensib le nature/\ The principle is of o ~f'(.,v,._{ ,~ fundamen tal importanc e in the nuclear debate, and appears again and again ~ c. ta it applies not merely to the waste problem but as regards several other liabiliti es of nuclear developm ent, e.g. the risk of nuclear war, the matter of reactor meltdown. ln particula r, the principle invalidat es the compariso n, heavily relied on in building a case for the ~cceptab ility of the nuclear risks, \ between nuclear risks and those from such activitie s as airplane travel or cigarette smoking. In the latter case those who supposedl y benefit from the activity are also, to an overwhelm ing extent, those who bear the serious health costs and risks involved. In contrast the users and supposed beneficie aries of nuclear energy will be risking not only, or even primarily , their own lives and health, but also that of others who may not be beneficia ries at allwho may be just the opposite! More generally , the distribut ion of costs and damage in such a fashion, i.e. on to non-bene ficiaries, is a characte ristic of certain serious forms of po llution, and is among its morally objection able features. productio n, from nuclear or fossil pollution . i mportant necessary condition for energy options: ~ energy option risks of harm Large-sca le energy fuel sources, can cause or lead to serious Thus from the Transfer -limiting principle emerges an To be morally acceptab le should not involve the transfer of significa nt costs or ~ parties who .!!!. ~ involved, benefit correspon dingly from!!!.!, energy source. ~ do ~ ~ ~ do n_ ~ ~ ~ t::.-L-~ ~ Included in the acope of c~ @. this cond ition , which nucl ear deve lopm ent viol ates , are futu re peop le, i.e. not mere ly peop le livin g at the pres ent time but also futu re gene ratio ns (tho se of the next town s). A furth er coro llary of the prin cipl e is the Tran smis sion Prin ciple , that we shou ld not hand the worl d we have so expl oited on to our succ esso rs in subs tant ially wors e shap e than we "rec eive d" it. For if we did then that would be a sign ifica nt tran sfer of cost s. The Tran sfer- limi ting prin cipl e can be deriv ed from cert ain ethi cal theo ries (e.g . thos e of a deon tic cast such as Kan t's and Raw ls') and from common prec epts (such as the Golden Rule ), where one serio usly cons iders putt ing ones elf in anot her's posi tion . But the prin cipl e is perh aps best defe nded , on a broa der basi s, indu ctive ly, by way of exam ples. Supp ose, to embr oider the train para ble, the company town deci des to solv e its disp osal prob lem by ship ping its noxi ous wast e to anot her town down the line , which (like futu re towns) lack s the means to ship it back or to regi ster due prot est. The inha bitan ts of this town are then force d to face the prob lem eith er of unde rtaki ng the expe nsive and diff icul t disp osal proc ess or of sustaini ng risk s to thei r own live s and heal th. Most of us would rega rd this kind of tran sfer of cost s as mora lly una~ cept able , however much the cons igne r's company town flou rish es. IV. UNCERTAINTY AND INDETERMINACY ARGUMENTS FOR REDUCED RESPONSI BILITY. Many of the argu ment s desig ned to show that we cann ot be expe cted to take too much acco unt of the effe cts of our actio ns on the dist ant futu re appe al to unce rtain ty. Ther e are two main components to the Gene ral Unc ertai nty argu ment , capa ble of sepa ratio n, but freq uent ly tang led up. Both argu ment s are mist aken , the firs t, an argum ent from igno ranc e, on.! prio ri grou nds, the seco nd on a post erio ri grou nds. The Argument from igno ranc e conc erned runs as foll ows :/ In cont rast to the exac t info rmat ion we can obta in abou t the pr;s ent, the infor mati on we can obta in abou t the effe cts of our actio ns on the dist ant futu re is unre liab le, wool ly and high ly spec ulati ve. But we cann ot base asse ssme nts of how we shou ld act on info rmat ion of this kind , espe ciall y when IE accurate informati on is obtainabl e about the present which would indicate different action. Therefore we must regretful ly ignore the · uncertain effects of our actions on the distant future. ignorance A striking example of the argument from at work is afforded by official US analyses favouring nuclear developm ent, which ignore (the extensive ) costs of 7 grounds of uncertain ty. More formally and crudely waste control on the the argument concerned is this: One only has obligatio rts to the future if these obligatio ns are based on reliable informati on. distant future. There is no reliable informati on at present as regards the Therefore one has no obligatio ns to the distant future. This argument is essential ly a variant on a sceptical argument concernin g our knowledge of the future (formally , replace 'obligati ons' by 'knowledg e' in the crude statement of the argument above). The main ploy is to considera bly overestim ate 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 considera tion both with respect to the present and with respect to the future. Associate d 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 constrain ts. We can an~ constantl y such do act on the basis ofj"unre liable" informati on, which the sceptic as regards the future convenien tly labels "uncerta inl,,'. In moral situation s in the present, assessmen ts of what to do often take account of risk and probabil ity, even quite low probabil ities. Consider again the train parable. 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 consigne r's action. that there is a significa nt risk of harm . It is enough in this sort of case. It does not matter if the decreased well-bein g of the consigner ia certain and that the ...... prospects of the passenger s quite uncertain . It is wrong to ship the gas. But if we do not require certainty of action to apply moral constrain ts in contempo rary affairs, why should we require a much higher standard of certainty in the future? The unwarrant ed insistenc e on certainty as a ·necessary condition before moral considera tion can be given to the distant future, then, amounts to a flagrant double standard. According to the second argument, the Practical -uncertai nty argument. even if in theory we have obligatio ns to the future, we cannot in practice take the interests of future peopl~ into account because uncertain ty about . the distant future is so gross that we cannot determine what the likely consequen ces of actions on it will be. Therefore , however good our intention s to the people of the distant future are, in practice we have no choice but to ignore their interests . Given that moral principle s are characte ristically of universal implicati onal form, e.g. of forms such as "if x has character then x is wrong, for every (action) sharply thus: x", h the argument may be stated more We can never obtain the informati on about future actions whicl\. ~ t-~ ,< tt a.s c t..tu._ a.. ~~ h J• would enable us to iea ■ Jh the anteceden t of the implicati on/\ Therefore , even r.r; c if in theory moral principle s do extend to future people, in practice they cannot be applied to obtain clear conclusio ns. It is true that if the distant future really were so grossly uncertain that in every case it was impossibl e to determine in any way better than chance what the effects of present action would be, and whether any given action would help or hinder future people, then moral principle s, although applicab le in theory to the future, would not in practice yield any clear conclusio ns about how to act. In this event the distant future would impose no practica l . moral constrain ts on action. ~ However. the argument is factually incorrect in as s uming that the future always is ao grossly uncertain or indeterm inate. Admittedl y -there is often a high degree of uncertain ty concernin g the distant future, but as a matter of (continge nt) fact it is not always so gross or sweeping •• the argument ha• to •••um•. There are aome areas where uncertain ty ia - not so great as to exclud e const raints on action . For examp le, we may have little id ea what the fashio ns will be in a hundre d years or, to take anothe r morally -irrel evant factor , what brands of ice cream people will be eating , if any, but we do have excel lent reason to believ e, espec ially if we consid er 3000 years of histor y, that what people there are in a hundre d years are likely to have mater ial and psych ic needs not entire ly unlike our own, that they will need a health y biosph ere for a good life; that like us they will not be immune to radiat ion; that their welfa re will not be enhanc ed by a high incide nce of cancer or geneti c defec ts, by the destru ction of resou rces, or the elimin ation from the face of the earth of that wonde rful variet y of non-human life which at presen t makes it such a rich and intere sting place. The case of nuclea r waste storag e, and of uncer tainty of the effec ts of it on future people , is onearea where uncer tainty in moral ly releva nt ~espe cts is not so great as to preclu de moral const raints on action . For this sort of reason , the Pract ical uncer tainty argum ent should be reject ed. Through the defec ts of the prec~d ing argum ents, we can see the defec ts in a number of widely employed uncer tainty argum ents used to write off proba ble harm to future people as outsid e the scope of prope r consid eratio n. Most of these popula r moves employ both of the uncer tainty argum ents as suits the case, switch ing from one to the other. For examp le, we may be told that we canno t really take accou nt of future people becaus e we canno t be sure that they will exist or that their tastes and wants will not be compl etely differ ent from our own, to the point where t.hey will not suffer from our exhau stion of reso\l rces or from the things that _would affec t us. But this is to insist upon compl ete - certai nty of a sort beyond what is requir ed for the presen t and immed iate future , where there is also commonly no guaran tee that some disas ter will not overta ke those to whom we are moral ly comm itted. Again we may be told that there is no guaran tee that future people will be worthy o( any effort s on our part, becau se ,a- MOc-CJ. , Ne,,.,i ~v -fl~ ,v- they may be morons o/ foreve r plugge d into/\Emjoyment., _/-- ef othe ·, ±-ultiR ea Even if one is prepar ed to accep t the elitis t approa ch presup posed - accord ing to which only those who meet certai n prope rly civili zed or intell ectua l standa rds are l eligib le for moral consid eratio n - what we are being handed in such argum ents V ... ..,. i s again a mere outside possibility. . 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. 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. Closely related to uncertainty arguments are arguments premissed on the indeterminacy of the future. For example, according to the tndeterminacy argument, the indeterminacy of the number and exact character of people at future times will prevent the interest of future peopie being taken into account where there is a conflict with the present. Since their numbers are indeterminate 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 raised particularly by problems of sharing fixed quantities of resources among present and future people, for example oil, when the numbers of the latter are indeterminate. Such problems are indeed difficult, but they are not resolved by ignoring the claims of the future. Nor are distributional problems involving non-renewable resources as large and representative a class of moral problems concerning the future as the tendency to focus on them would suggest. It can be freely admitted, that there will be cases where the - indeterminacy of aspects of the future will make conflicts very difficult to resolve or indeed irresoluble - no realistic ethical theory can give a precise answer to every ethical question. But, as the train parable again illustrates, there are cases where such difficulties do not hinder resolution, and cases of conflict which are not properly approached 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 case of nuclear power is like that. The failure of these various arguments reveals, what can be iodependently -+- '-" thelr placement . does noL ar gued from the universalisability features of moral principles, 8 thatf disqualify future people from full moral consideration or reduce their claimsr , tllUU' ,.., ') \trt2r / below the claima of present people. That ia, we hav, "tbe ••m• ions V /1 to future people as to the presen t; 1 thus there is the same obliga tion to take accoun t of them and their intere sts in what we do, to be carefu l in our action s, to take accoun t of the probab ility (and not just the certain ty) of our action s causing harm or damage, and to see, other things being equal, that we do not act so as to rob them of what is necessa ry for the chance of _a good life. Uncert ainty _,, and indeter minacy do not relieve us of these obliga tions. v. PROBLEMS OF SAFE NUCLEAR OPERATION REACTOR EMISSIONS AND CORE MELTDOWN. The ethica l problem s with nuclea r power are by no means confine d to waste storag e and future creatu res. entitle ment Just as remote ness in. time does not er~de obliga tions or to just treatm ent, neithe r does locatio n in space, or a partic ular geogra phical positio n. Hence severa l furthe r problem s arise, to which princip les and argume nts like those already arrived at in consid ering the waste problem apply. For exampl e, if one group (socia l unit, or state) decide s to dump its radioa ctive wastes in the territo ry or region of anothe r group, or not to preven t its (radioa ctive) polluti on enterin g the territo ry of anothe r group, then it impose s risks and costs on presen tly existin g people of the second group, in much the way that presen t nuclea r develop ments impose costs and risks on future people . There are differe nces howev er: spatia lly distan t people cannot be discou nted in quite the way that future people can be, though their Jiie ~~~ o·F-tu ~t..+ . intere sts and objecti ves/\Nt ?Wlc ignored or overrid den. People living in the vicini ty of a nuclea r reacto r are subjec t to specia l costs and risks. One is radioa ctive pollut ion, becaus e reacto rs routin ely dischar 1 radioa ctive materi als into the air and water near Emissio n problem . the plant : hence the Such "norma l" emissio n during plant operat ion of low level radiati on carrie s carcino genic and mutage nic costs. While there are undoub tedly costs, the number of cancer s and the precis e extent of geneti c damage induced by exposu re to such radiati on are both uncert ain. If our ethica l princi ples permit ted free transfe r of coata and riaka from one person to anothe r, the ethica l iaaue direct ly raised by nuclea r ••miaa ion•wo uld be: what extent of Q__ .......- ..... cancer and genetic damage, if any, is permissibly traded for the advantages of nuclear power, and unde{ what conditions? Since, however, risks and benefits are NOT {morally) transferable this way - recall the Transfer-limit ing principle - such a cost-benefit approach to the risks nuclear emission poses - for those who live near a reactor cannot with justice be approached in this fashion~ > And these risks are real! v In the USA, people who live within 50 miles of a nuclea · power plant bear a risk of cancer and genetic damage/as much as 50 times that borne by the population at large. ✓ And children living in this region are even more vulnerable, since they ar~ several times more likely to contract cancer through exposure than normal adults. The serious costs to these people cannot be justified by the alleged benefits for others, especially when these benefits could be obtained without these costs. Thus it is not just complacent to say 'It's a pity about Aunt Ethel dying of cancer, but the new airconditioner s ' make life comfprtable'. ~~e+,~ For such benefits to some as airconditioner~ provide,~which can be alternatively obtained, for example by modification of buildings, can in no way compensate for what others suffer. Among the other strategies used in trying to persuade us that the +£«-0:sc w~ \,14 e close ~ Nu<.. (e..a.,R,. pt~~ imposition of radiation ~ d i H - most of whom have no genuine voice in the location of reactors in their environment and cannot move away without ~\ \ serious losses - is really quite ,'right is the Doubling argument. ~ccording I to the US Atomic Energy Commission, "ho dcployud dU.&i nr• it is pennissfble to double, through nuclear technology, the level of (natural) radiation that a population ha$ received with apparently negligible consequences, the argument bei ng that the additional amount (being equivalent is also likely to have negligible consequences. to the "natural" level) The increased amounts of radiation - with their large man-made component - are then accounted normal, and, its; claimed, what is normal is morally acceptable. ;-tTb1s ::J ,"6r argument is sound. I, ~er.c of eh@ seeps Drinking one bottle of wine a day may have no ill-effects, whereas drinking two a day certainly may affect a person'• well-being; and while the smaller intake may have become norm.al for the person, the larger one will, under euch conditiona, not be. Finally, what ia or has become norcna_l_, _ _ _~ . e.g. two murders or twenty canc ers a day in a give n city , may be far from acce ptab le. / IJ \ In fact , even the USA, which has very stri ct stan dard s by compar_ison with most othe r cou ntrie s with planned nucl ear reac tors , perm its radi atio n emis sion s very sub stan tiall y in exce ss of the stan dard s laid down; so the emis sion situ atio n is much worse than what cons ider atio n of the stan dard s would disc lose . Furt herm ore, the mon itori ng of the stan dard s "imp osed " is entr uste d to the nucl ear oper ator s them selv es, scar cely disi nter este d part ies. Thus pub lic poli cy is dete rmin ed not so as to guar ante e pub lic hea lth, but rath er to serv e as a "pub lic pac ifie r" whil e pub licly -sub sidi zed priv ate nucl ear oper atio ns proc eed rela tive ly unhampered? · While radi oact ive emis sion s are an ordi nary feat ure of reac tor ope ratio n, reac tor breakdown is, hop eful ly, not: offi cial repo rts even try to make an acci dent of mag nitud e, as a mat ter of defi niti on, an 'ext raor dina ry nucl ear occu rren ce'. But "def init ions " notw iths tand ing, such acci dent s can happ en, and almo st have on seve ral occa sion s (the most noto riou s bein g Thre e Mile Isla nd): henc e the Core-meltdown prob lem. If the cool ing and emergency core cool ing syst ems fail in American (lig ht wate r) reac tors , then the core melt s and 'con tain men t fail ure' is like ly, with the resu lt that an area of 40,0 00 squa re mile s coul d be radi oact ivel y 10 cont amin ated . In the even t of the wors t type of acci dent in a very sma ll reac tor, a steam expl osio n in the reac tor vess el, abou t 45,0 00 peop le would be kill ed inst antl y and at leas t 100, 000 would die as a resu lt of the acci den t, prop erty damages would exce ed $17 bill ion and an area the size of Penn sylv ania would be dest roye d. Modern nucl ear reac tors are abou t five time s the size of the reac tor for which thes e cons erva tive US figu res (sti ll the best avai labl e from 11 offi cial sour ces) are give n: the cons eque nces of a sim ilar acci dent with a modern reac tor would acco rdin gly be much grea ter. The cons igne r who risk s the live s and well -bei ng of pass enge rs on the trai n acts .i nadm issib ly. A government or gove rnm ent- endo rsed util ity appe ars to act in a way that doe• not diff er in mor all;y aign ifica nt resp ect• in -------~ siti ng a nuc lear rea cto r in a commun ity, in pla ntin g such a dan gero us pac kag e on the "community trai n". More dir ect ly, the loc atio n of a nuc lear rea cto r in a community, even if it sho uld hap pen to rec eiv e a fav our able ben efit -co st ana lysi s and oth er economic app rais al, would vio late such eth ica l requ irem ents ~ as the Tra nsf er-l imi ting prin cip le. The adv oca tes of nuc lear power hav e, in eff ect , end eav oure d to avo id que stio ns of cos t-tr ans fer and equ ity, by shi ftin g the disp ute out of the extr aor din ary imp rob abil it't, , V e thic al aren a and into a tech nol ogi cal disp ute abo ut eaau~ theJ of · 0 r eac tor mal fun ctio n. They hav e argu ed, in par ticu lar, what con tras ts with the trai n par able , tha t the re is no rea l pos sib ilit y of a cata stro phi c nuc lear v acc iden t. Inde ed in the infl uen tial Rassmussen rep ort - which was ext ens ive ly used to sup por t pub lic con fide nce in US nuc lear fiss ion tech nolo gy - an even stro nge r, an inc red ibly stro ng, imp rob abil ity clai m was stat ed: nam ely, the ' like liho od of a cata stro phi c nuc lear acc iden t is so rem ote as to be (alm ost) imp ossi ble. However, the mat hem atic al models reli ed upon in this rep ort, var iou sly call ed "fa ult tree ana lysi s" and "re liab ilit y esti mat ing tech niq ues ". are unso und , bec aus e, among oth er thin gs, they exc lude as "no t cre dib le" tha t the pos sib ilit ies tha t may wel l happen in the rea l wor ld. It is not sur pris ing , the n,/ methodology and dat a of the rep ort hav e bee n sou ndly and dec isiv ely crit icis ed, or tha t off icia l sup por t for the rep ort has now been with draw n.12 Mor eov er, use of alte rna tive methods and data ind icat es tha t the re is a rea l pos sib ilit y, a non -ne glig ible pro bab ility of a · seri ous acc ide nt. In resp ons e it is con tend ed tha t, even if the re is a non -ne glig ible \ pro bab ility of a rea cto r acc ide nt. sti ll tha t is acc epta ble, bein g of no gre ater ord er than risk s of acc iden ts tha t are alre ady soc iall y acc epte d. Here we enc oun ter aga in tha t insi dio us eng inee ring app roac h to mor alit y bui lt into dec isio n models of an economic cas t, e.g . ben efit -co st bala nce she ets, risk asse ssm ent mod els, etc . Ris k asse ssm ent, a sop his tica tion of tran sac tion or trad e-o ff mod els, pur por ts to pro vide a com pari son betw een the rela tive riak a atta che d to diff ere nt opt ion s, ••I• ene rgy otp ion a, whi ch aet tlea the ir eth ica l stat us. The foll owi ng assu mpt ions are enc oun tere d in risk asse ssm ent as app lied to ene rgy opt ion s: A · If o~io n'.J t_im pos es (co mpa rab le)B osts B on few er peo ple than op tio n~ then opt ion ,i_ pre fera ble to opt ion . ; AL is ,,_....,_,, . AH. Op tion iinv olv es a tota l net cos t in term s of cos t to peo ple (e.g . t3J dea ths, inju ries , etc .) which is less than tha t of opt ion .wh ich is •~re ady acc epte d; the refo re opt ion ~is acc ept abl ef 3 These assu mpt ions are then app lied as foll ows . \....--" Sin ce 't he number like ly to eve ntu all' i' by nuc lear power sta tion cata stro phe is less !ha n the like ly number I kill ed by cig are tte smoking, and sinc e the risk s of cig are tte smoking are acc epte d; it foll ows tha t the risk s of nuc lear power are acc epta ble. A litt le refl ect ion rev eals tha t this sor t of risk asse ssm ent argument gro ssly vio late s the Tra nsfe r~ lim itin g prin cip le. In ord er to obt ain a pro per eth ica l asse ssm ent we need be kill ed J a much full er pic ture , and we need to know at lea st thes e thin gs: / Do the cos ts and ben efit s go to the same par ties ; and is the pers on who vol unt aril y und erta kes the risk s also the pers on who prim aril y rece ives the ben efit s, as in driv ing or cig are tte smoking, or are the cos ts imposed on oth er par ties who do not ben efit ? It is only if the par ties are the same in the cas e of the opt ion s l S vC-t... compared, and the re are no ~d ist rib uti on al prob lem s, tha t a com pari son 8ft •-•h ~ would be sou ndly bas ed. Thi s is rare ly the cas e, and it is not ao in the case of risk asse ssm ents of ene rgy opt ion s. VI. OTHER SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL RISKS AND COSTS OF NUCLEAR DEVELOPMENT, ESPECIALLY NUCLEAR WAR. The prob lem s alre ady disc uss ed by no means exh aus t the env iron men tal, hea lth and safe ty risk s and cos ts in, or aris ing from , the nuc lear fue l cyc le. The ful l fue l cyc le incl ude s many stag es both bef ore and afte r rea ct or ope rati on, apa rt from was te disp osa l, nam ely, min ing, mil ling , con ver sion , enri chm ent and pre par atio n, rep roc essi ng spe nt fue l, and tran spo rtat ion of materia ls. Sev eral of thes e stag es inv olv e haz ard s. Unl ike the spe cial " risk s in the nuc lear cyc le - of sab otag e of pla nts , of the ft of fiss ion abl e mat eria l, and of the furt her pro life rati on of nuc lear armaments - thes e haz ards µ have para llels . if not exac t equi vale nts, in othe r high ly poll utin g methods of gene ratin g powe r. e.g. 'wor kers in the uran ium mini ng indu stry sust ain "the same risk" of fata l and nonf atal inju ry as work ers in the coal indu stry '.14 The prob lems are not uniq ue to nucl ear deve lopm ent. Othe r soci al and envi ronm enta l prob lems - thou gh endemic wher e dang erou s larg e-sc ale indu stry oper ates in soci etie s that are high ly ineg alita rian and inclu de sect ors that are far from afflu ent - are more intim ately linke d with the nucl ear power cycl e. Though poll utio n is a comm on and gene rally unde sirab le component of larg e-sc ale indu stria l oper ation , rad~ oact ive poll utio n .suc h as urani um mini ng for insta nce prod uces . is espe ciall y a lega cy of nucl ear deve lopm ent. and a spec ially unde sirab le one, as rect ifica tion cost s for dead radi oact ive land s and wate rway s reve al. Though sabo tage is a thre at to many larg e indu strie s, sabo tage of a nucl ear reac tor can have dire cons eque nces , of a diffe rent orde r of magn itude from most indu stria l sabo tage (where core meltdown is not a poss ibili ty). Though thef t of mate rial from more dubi ous ente rpris es such as mun ition s works can pose thre ats to popu latio ns at larg e and can assi st terro rism , no thef ts for alleg edly peac eful ente rpris es pose prob lems of the same orde r as thef t of fissi onab le mate rial. No othe r indu stry prod uces mate rials which so read ily perm it fabr icati on into such mass ive expl osiv es. No othe r indu stry is, to sum it up, so vuln erab le on so many fron ts. In part to redu ce its vuln erab ility , in part beca use of its long and cont inuin g asso ciati on with mili tary acti viti es, the nucl ear indu stry is subj ect to, and enco urag es, seve ral prac tices whic h (give n thei r scal e) run coun ter to basi c featu res of free and open soci etie s, cruc ial featu res such as pers onal libe rty, freedom of asso ciati on and of expr essio n,an d free acce ss to info rmat ion. Thes e prac tices inclu de secr ecy, rest ricti on of info rmat ion, form ation of spec ial poli ce and guar d forc es, espio nage , curt ailm ent of civi l libe rtie s. Alre ady oper ators of nucl ear inst alla tion s are give n extr aord inar y powe rs, in vett ing empl oyee s, to inve stiga te the back grou nd and acti vitie s not only of empl oyee s but also of thei r fami lies and sometimes even of thei r frien ds. The inst alla tion s them selve s become armed camps, whic h espe ciall y offe nds Brit ish sens ibili ties . The U.K. Atomic Energy (Spe cial Con stab les) Act of 1976 crea ted a spec ial armed forc e to guar nucl ear inst alla tion s aud..made it answ erab le • • • to the U.K. .. dAtom ic En• · ~ ' These devel opme nts, and worse ones in West Germany and elsew here, presa ge along with nucle ar devel opme nt incre asing ly auth orita rian and anti- demo crati c soci eties . That nucle ar devel opme nt appe ars to force such poli tical conse quen ces tells heav ily again st it. Nucl ear devel opme nt is furth er indic ted poli tical ly by the direc t conn ectio n of nucle ar powe r with nucle ar war. It ia true that ethic al ques tions conc ernin g nucle ar war - for exam ple, whet her a nucle ar war is justi fied , or just, unde r any circu msta nces, and if so what circu msta nces - are disti ngui shab le from those conc ernin g nucle ar power. Undo ubted ly, however, the sprea d of nucle ar power is subs tanti ally incre asing the techn ical means for engag ing in nucle ar war and so, to that exte nt, the oppo rtuni ty for, and chanc es of, nuc~ ear engagement. Since nucle ar wars are neve r accou nted posi tive good s, but are at best the lesse r of majo r evils , nucle ar wars are alway s high ly ethic ally unde sirab le. The sprea d of nucle ar power acco rding ly expan ds the oppo rtuni ty for, and chanc es of, high ly unde sirab le conse quen ces. .,.fina l:½) the lac cet, sb irlete a&In g r.huuw cbancac i'itid Opt111c I Oil I I te:::s, is Heal f unda sha~ h, ■Rd 'lber efore )wha t . leads to it;nu clea r devel opme ntA is unde sirab le. This is, in outli ne, the argum ent from nucle ar war again st large -scal e nucle ar devel opme nt. 16 t5 F ·~ , ~ ATl" VII. ,\CONFLICT ARGUMENTS~ JND R5Ila ff!f~ ~1 JN C~ THE IDEOLOGICAL BASES OF NUCLEAR DEVELOPMENT. Much as with _nucle ar war, so given the cumu lative caTe again st nucle ar deve lop~e nt, only one justi ficat ory route rema ins open , that of appe al to over ridin g circu msta nces. That appe al, to be ethic ally acce ptabl e; must go beyond mere ly economic cons idera tions . For, as obse rved, the cons igne r's actio n, in the train para ble, cann ot be juati fied by pure ly econ omis tic . argum ents, such as that his prof its would rise, the company or the town would be more prosp erous , or by appe aling to the fact that some poss ibly unco mfor table chang es would other wise be neede d. So it is also in the nucle ar ½-12., case: ./Tra nsfe r-lim iting princ iple appl ies. But suppo se now the cons igner argue s that his actio n ia justi fied becau ae unlea a it 1• taken the town will die. It ia ✓ i l by no means clear that even such a justification as this would be sufficient, especia lly where the risK5 to the passengers is high, since the case still to A amo~ntsione of transfer of costs and risks onto others. But such a conflict situation, where a given course of action, though normally undesirable, is alleged to be the lesser of two evils in a given case, is morally more problemthan c~ses atica;(where v~fer-limitin g principle is clearly violated. Nuclear development is often defended in this way, through Conflict arguments, to the effect that even though nuclear development does have undesirable features, nevertheless the alternatives are worse. Some of the arguments advanced to demonstrate conflict are based on competing commitments to present people, and others on competing obligations to future people, both of which are taken to override the obligations not to i mpose on the future significant risk of serious harm. The success of such conflict arguments requirESthe presentation of a genuine and exhaustive set of alternatives (or at least practical alternatives) and showing that the only al ternatives to admittedly morally undesirable actions are even more undesirable ones. If some practical alternative which is not morally worse than the action to be justified is overlooked, suppressed, or neglected in the argument (for example, if in the train parable it turns out that the town has another option to starving or to shipping the parcel, namely earning a living in some other way), then the argument is defective and cannot readily be patched. Just such a suppression of practicable alternatives, we shall argue, has occurred in the argument designed to show that the alternatives to the nuclear option are even worse than the option itself. 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 industrialised countries. Failure to develop nuclear energy, it is often claimer, would amount to denying them the opportunity to reach the standard of affluence we currently enjoy and would create unemployment and poverty in the industrialised nations. And this would be worse - a greater evil - than such things as violating the Transfer-limit ing principle through nuclear development. The 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 evid ence that large-scale nuclear energy will help 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 tends to reduce available jobs through encouraging substitution of energy use for labour use. The argument that nuclear energy is needed for the third world is even less convincing. Nuclear energy is both politically and economically inappropriate for the third world, since it requires massive amounts of capital, require• number• of imported acientiata and en2ineera. --------- ~cr eate s negl igibl e loca l employment, and depen ds for its feas ibili ty upon large ly non- exist ent utili ty syste ms - e.g. estab lishe d elec trici ty trans miss ion syste ms and back- up faci litie s, and suffi cien t elec trica l appli ance s to plug into the syste m. Poli tical ly it incre ases forei gn depen dence , adds to cent ralis ed entre nche d power and reduc es the chanc e for chang e in the oppr essiv e poli tical struc tures which are a large part of the probl em. The fact that nucle ar energ y is not in the inter ests of the peop le of the third world does not of cours e mean that it is not in the inter ests of, and wante d (ofte n for milit ary purpo ses) by, their ruler s, the west ernis ed and often milit ary elite s in whose inter ests the econo mies of these coun tries are usua lly organ ised. But that does not make the pove rty argum ent anyth ing othe r than what it is: a fraud . There are well- know n energ y-con servi ng alter nativ es and the prac tical optio n of deve lopin g furth er alter nativ e energ y sourc es, alter nativ es some of which offe r far bette r prosp ects for helpi ng the poor , both in the third world and in indu stria l coun tries : coal and othe r foss il fuels , geoth erma l, and a range of solar optio ns (incl udin g as well as narro wly sola r sourc es, wind , wate r and tidal powe r). Anot her majo r argum ent advan ced to show conf lict, the Ligh ts-go ingout argum ent, pppe als to a set of supp osedl y over ridin g and comp eting oblig ation s to futur e peop le. We have , it is said, a duty to pass on the immensely valua ble thing s and insti tutio ns which our cultu re has devel oP,ed . Unle ss our high- techn ology , high- energ y indu stria l socie ty is conti nued and foste red, our valua ble insti tutio ns and tradi tions will fall into decay or be swep t away. The argum ent is esse ntial ly that witho ut nucle ar powe r, witho ut the conti nued level of mate rial weal th it alone is assumed to make poss ible, the light s of our civil izati on will go out. Futu re peop le will be the loser s. The argum ent does raise impo rtant ques tions abou t what is valua ble in our socie ty and what char acte risti cs are nece ssary for a good socie ty. But for the most part these large ques tions can be by-p assed . The reaso n is that the argum ent adop ts an extre mely uncr itica l attit ude to prese nt high- techn ology soci eties , appa rentl y assum ing that they are unifo rmly and uniqu ely valu able. it It assum es that techn olog ical socie ty is unmo difia ble, thaic anno t be chang ed in the direc tion of energ y cons ervat ion or alter nativ e.(pe rhap s high techn ology ) energ y sourc es witho ut colla pse. These assum ption s are all hard to acce pt. The assum ption that techn olog ical soci ety's energ y patte rns are unmo difia ble is espe ciall y so; after all, it has survi ved even ts such as world wars which requ ired majo r socia l and techn olog ical restr uctu ring and consu mptio n modi ficat ion. If west ern soci ety's demands for energ y were (con trary to the evide nce) total ly unmo difia ble witho ut colla pse, not only would it be comm itted to a progr am of incre asing destr uctio n, but much of ita cultu re would be of dubio us value to future people, who would very likely, as a consequence of this destruction , lack the resource base which the argument assumes to be essential in the case of contemporar y society. The uniformity assumption should certainly be challenged. Since hightechnology societies appear not to be uniformly valuable, the central question is, what is necessary to maintain what is valuable in such a society? While it may be easy to argue that high energy consumption centrally controlled is necessary to maintain the political and economic status quo of such a society, it is not so easy to argue that it is essential to maintain what is valuable, and it is what is valuable, presumably ,that we have a duty to pass on to the future. The evidence from history is that no very high level of material affluence or energy consumption is needed to maintain what is valuable. There is good reason in fact to believe that a society with much lower energy and resource consumption would better foster what is valuable than our own. But even if a radical change in these directions is independen tly desirable, it is unnecessary to presuppose such a change in order to see that the assumptions of the Lights-goin g-out argument are wrong. The consumption of less energy than at present need involve no reduction of well-being: and certainly a large increase over present levels of consumption assumed in the usual economic case for nuclear energy, is quite unnecessary . What the nuclear 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 Extravagan za. ~ In fact there is good reason to think that, far from~hig h energy consumption society fostering what is valuable, it will, especially if energy is obtained by means of nuclear fission,be positively inimical to it. A society which has become heavily dependent upon a highly centralised , controlled and garrisoned, capital- and expertise-i ntensive e~ergy 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 enormous power over the political system and over people's lives, even more then they do at present. Such a society would almost inevitably tend to become authoritati 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. 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 degree of political freedom and those opportuniti es for personal and collective autonomy which exist, would be loat or diminished: political fr eedqp for example, is a high price to pay for consumerism and.#ener gy extravagenc e. Again, as in the case of the poverty arguments, clear alternative s, a lternative social and political choices, which do not involve such unacceptabl e consequence s, are available. The alternative to _the high technology- nuclear option is not a return to the cave, the loss of all that is valuable, but either the adoption of an available alternative such as coal for power or, better,the development of alternative technologie s 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 Li ghts-going -out~umen t, as a moral conflict argument, accordingly fails. Thus the fttrther escape route, the appeal to conflict, is, like the appeal t ~ futurity, closed. If tbea we apply, as we have argued we should, the ~ 1, t. same standards ef ■eral1t¥ to the future as we ought to acknowledge for the ;present, the conclusion that large-scale nuclear development is a crime against the future is inevitable. Closed also, in the much same way, are the escape routes to other arguments (from reactor meltdown, radiation emissions, etc.) for concluding that nuclear development is unacceptab le. In sum, nuclear development is morally unacceptabl e on several grounds. SOCIAL OPTIONS: SHALLOW AND DEEP ALTERNATIVES. The future 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 VIII. the likelihood of serious (air) pollution, and associated phenomena such as acid rain and atmospheric heating, not to mention the despoliatio n caused by extensive strip mining, all of which will result from its use in meeting very high projected consumption figures. Such an option would,more over, also violate the Transfer-li miting principle: for 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 and replacemen t. To these main conventiona l options a third is often added which emphasizes softer and more benign technologie s, such as those of solar energy and hydroelec tricity. Such softer options - if suitably combined with energy conservatio n measures (for there are solar ways, as well as nuclear ways, of energy extravaganc e and of producing unnecessary trivia which answer to no genuine needs) - can avoid the ethical objections to nuclear power. The deeper 8 choice is not however technolo~ic al, nor merel~Jindi vidua1}' 6fifrtocial, and involves the restructuri ng of production away from energy intensive uses and, v at a more basic level, a change to nonconsum eristic, less consumptive lifestyles and social arrangem~n ts} 7 Thes.e iore fundamental choices between social +"f? "'- •• t tt ti, fll ~ ~ t- e ,, ., , ~ f'I t- ~l.al t e rna t 1v e s,""convent i ona 1 technologic a~ly-orient ed discussion of energy options, ~ teod• to e&acur•. It ie not juet • utter of decidina in which way to meet the v 1 unexamined goals nuclear development aspires to meet, but also a matter of examining the goals themselves. That is, we are not merely faced with the question of comparing different technologie s for meeting some fixed or given demand or level of consumption , and of trying to see how best to meet these; we are also faced, and primarily, with the matter of examining those alleged needs and the cost of a society that creates them. It is doubtful that any technology, however benign in principle, will be likely to leave a tolerable world for the future if it is expected to meet unbounded and uncontrolle d energy consumption and demands. Even more benign technologie s may well be used in a way which creates costs for future people and ~ ,~hich are....., __, likely to result in a deteriorate d world being handed on to them. In short, even more benign technologie s may lead to violation of the Transmissio n ~equirem ent. Consider, to illustrate, the effect on the world's forests, commonly counted as a solar resource, should they be extensively used for production of methanol or of electricity by woodchippin g. While few would object to the use of genuine waste material for energy production, the unrestricte d exploitatio n 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-presse d natural forests. The effects of such additional demands on the maintenance of the forests are often dismissed by the simple expedient of waving around the label "renewable resources". Many forests are in principle renewable, it is a true, given a certain (low) rate and kind of exploitatio n, but in fact there are now very few forestry operations anywh~re 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 exploitatio n which would enable renewal has already been exceeded, so that a total decline is widely thought to be imminent. It certainly has begun in many regions, and many forest types, especially rainforest types,are now, and rapidly, being lost for the future;s The addition of a major further and not readily !imitable demand pressure for energy on top of the present demands is one which anyone with both a realistic appreciatio n of the conduct of forestry operations and a concern for the long-term conservatio n of the forests and remaining natural conununities must regard with alarm. The result of massive deforestati on for energy purposes, resembling the deforestati on of much of Europe at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, again for energy purposes, could be extensive and devastating erosion in steeper lands and tropical areas, desertifica tion in more arid regions, possible climatic change, and massive impoverishm ent of natural ecosys~ems, including enormous loss of natural species. Some of us do not want to pass on, and by the Transmissio n principles 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 29. produ cts or pollu ted by coal prod ucts. In abor t, as the fores t situa tion illus trate s, a mere switc h to more benig n techn olog ies - impo rtant thoug h this is - witho ut any more basic struc tural and soci al chang e1 is inade quate . The deep er socia l optio n invol ves chall engin g and ·begi nning to alter a socia l .stru cture which prom ote, consu meris m, consu mptio n far beyond genu ine needs and an economic struc ture which enco urage s incre asing use of high ly ener gy-in tensi ~e_ modes of prod uctio n. The socia l chang e optio n tends to be obscu red in most dis cussi ons of energ y optio ns and of how to meet energ y ~eed s, in part becau se it does ques tion unde rlyin g value s of curre nt socia l arran geme nts. The conv entip nal discu ssion proce eds by takin g alleg ed demand (ofte n conf lated with e ::s<.)..,..J1.~ f,. ~ants or need s) as unch allen geab le, and the issue to be one ,',If which techn ology V can be most prof itabl y employed to meet.llhetft. This effec tivel y prese nts a ( "'"tt--~ ~ cJL.t ~ J.. ....~4'-- l~..,, wL., c v .~ ~.:i.4~ - <e ---4(\ 1 >-..~ wt:S,;....,..1~ ,.s l r N Cl'-'~ r false choic e. M\-d is the reett l-~-ef -t-ald'--:rigC. needs and=' CQRt ext IJl.h-.-t'f-- '"ft~ so that d'etnamt=-n--bek-i ftt-a- &&&, i-a.J- ~ . the.--ao,Q,:l:-a-1- ·etrt:t et·ttr-e,--wMeh-p-tt&titte-ee--the-, ,:nead&---i&- •&im-i-l&r-l-y-· t aken as unch allen geab le and unch angea ble. The poin t is read ily illus trate d. I t is commonly argue d by repre senta tives of such indu strie s as trans porta tion and petro leum , as for exam ple by McGrowth of the XS Consumption Co., that peop le want deep freez ers, air cond ition s, power gadg ets, •••• It would be auth orita rian to preve nt them from satis fyin g these want s. Such an argum ent from creat ed wants conv enien tly ignor es the socia l framew-0rk in which ~uch \ " N ~c..;'2,... f -t1,.Q. ~ft:. plA,.i--1~<' needs and wan~ arise or are produ ced. 'I:..+To pe~ n~ . th ~ dat.e i;m-~ &~ ~:::,... t >-.irl "'(At.J c" .... c..!,,..~, (IC . ~N t\ f1..,e_ ~~ ' f''-'l ~~t'. ...~ tN tu 9A-( C2..... o!&n,-J ma"n¥- sueh-warrt s· a c rhe "'fl"'~Trnrk- ieve-1-- ia.:. no,.t....,.,.•how e\t~t o., assum e .,tha.t, ...-t,h&y-. ~ c l-«:i , c...12.o ,J'!:', ~-ft. -.<./ t..-f 4'}. c.. ,._ 1.1 ..+ e. bF. ~t" 1£~ ~ :i~ ~ ~ ~:~ ~~ :;;; ;a : : h se ~ -.,~ft~ .....__ ~-~; ,.; ;~ 2 ~eval.-<a--e--~ l ~' tdal _w;g_ ;!_nf, _!!_at ~ ~hing as ·-tndi~ .tl!u arcir o-i-e ~••t~ i.nat io.n -at.._jl_ll... ~ t .. is 1Te--- ao£ ial framework as a majo r facto r in deter mini ng~c e~tai n kinds ................ .,,....,.....,.... ,•• of choic es, such as those -.. ·fo.t_ _~rav el, and k.inds ---~ f . ,...:1-nf-r·a struc ture, and to see appa rentl y indiv idua l choic es ~~:i°~') .n :,.'8uch':·;;~; ers as being chan nelle d and direc ted by a soci al fr,amework deter mine d large ly "' 1n ·· th&.-. .inter ests of corp orate ...,, and priva te prpf~-t" -~nd adva ntage . The soci al chang e optio n ia a hard optio n, inso far as it will be diffi cult to imple ment poli tical ly; but it ia ultim ately the only way of avoid ing the passi ng on of serio us costs to futur e peop le. And there are othe r sorts of reaso ns than such ethic al ones for takin g it: it is the main , indee d the only sort of optio n,ope n to those who adop t what is now calle d a deep ecolo gical persp ectiv e, as cont raste d with _a shall ow ecolo gical outlo ok which regar ds the natu ral world and its nonhuinan deniz ens as not worth while in them selve s but only of value in as much as ther answ er back to human inter ests. The .deep ecolo gical persp ectiv e is an integ ral part of the Alte rnati ve Ecol ogica l Parad igm and is incom patib le wi;~h cent ral these s of the Dominant Soci al Parad igm (whic h is esse ntial ly the ideol pgy of claa aica l and neoc lassi cal econo mics) _·-~ . ,.....,,, ,......... ,.... •, • c..-,.t. ... , • 30. and its vari ants (rou ghly , what are calle d Stat e Soci alism , and Dem ocrat ic \/,-tu JtN,k Soci alism ).19 It is inco mpa tible with &w&h . a&Fhmptiafts as •h•• the n~tu ral l( N ~0.S k.Mlt- JL,.. a..~ °'M.A ~ " " Co.. I ~ ~ envir onme nt '" "' va'1u,e .9nly as a reso urce , ~b y And la~ hos tile /\~. .> ~ vM~ ~ .s -to ' t«. A~ ~~ o :r 9'\ d 11\.J , ~ -tt. «... o-t\...va... ~ u~ le ee11 tnlla hle :f:n ht1 11a ~a, e 1 a,ul uhAl ~ · r t h e • A.do mina tion- over wkt ,~ '-'4.. /2.42.A .... '' natu re themes ~th e Dominant Parad igm and its vari ants . The conf lict betw een Alte rnat ive and Dominant Para digm s, which is fast incr easi ng, exte nds of cour se far beyond attit udes to the natu ral worl d, sinc e core valu es of the Dominant Par,~digm such as the meri ts of unimpeded economic growth and mate rial prog ress ar ~ at stak e; the conf lict invo lves fund amen tal 1 diffe renc es over the whole fron t of econ omic al, poli tica l and soci al arra ngem ents. The conf lict unde rlies much of ;the nucl ear deba te, inso far as it is not spec ifica lly limi ted to questio1~s of tech nolo gica l fixe s, but take s up the basi c ethi cal issu es and the so ~ial ques tions to which they lead .20 The 1 ethi cal requ irem ents alrea dy de1fended and appl ied brin g us out, when follo wed throu gh, on the Alte rnat ive sid1~ of the parad igm conf lict, and acco rdin gly lead to the diff icul t soci al ch1nge optio n. The soci al chan ges that the deep alte rnat ive requ ires will be stron gly resis ted beca use they mean chan ges in curr ent soci al orga nisa tion and power stru ctur e. To the exte nt that the optio n repr esen ts some kind of thre at to part s of pres ent poli tica l and economic arran gem ents, it is not surp risin g that offi cial ener gy ppti on disc ussi on proc eeds by misr epre sent ing and ofte n obsc uring it. But diff icul t as it is to suita bly alte r "the syste m," espe ciall y one with such far-r each ing effe cts on the prev ailin g power stru ctur e, it is impe rativ e to try: we are all on the nucl ear train . w • FOOTNOTES 1. This paper is a condens ation of an early version of our 'Nuclea r power - ethical , social, and politic al dimensi ons' (ESP for short, availab le from the authors ), which in turn grew out of Routley (i.e. the work so referred to in the referenc e list). For help with the condens ation we are very conside rably indebted to the e~itors . In the condens ation, we simplify the structu re of the argument and suppres s underly ing politic al ~1nd ideolog ical dimensi ons (for example , the large measure of respons ibilit~r of the USA for spreadin g nuclear reactor s around the world, and thereby in enhancin g the chances of nuclear disaste rs, includin g nuclear war). We also considet ·ably reduce a heavy load of footnote s and referenc es designed and needed to help make good many of our claims. · Further , in order to contain referenc es to a modest length, referenc e to primary sources has often been replaced by referenc e through seconda ry sources . Little difficu lty should be encount ered however in tracing fuller referenc es through seconda ry sources or in filling out much importa nt backgrou nd materia l from work cited herein. For example , virtual ly all the data cited in section s I and VII is referenc ed in Routley . At worst ESP can always be consulte d. 2. 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 unneces sary to know much about the nuclear fuel cycle in order to conside r ethical and social dimensio ns of nuclear power, it helps to know a little. The b~~sics are presente d in many texts, e.g. Nader & Abbotts , Gyorgy. Of course ~~n order to assess fully reports as to such importa nt backgrou nd and stage~,s etting matters as the likeliho od of a core meltdown of (lightw ater)1 reactor s, much more informa tion is require d. For many assessm ent purpose s h~,wever, some knowledge of economic fallacie s and decision theory is at least as importa nt aa knowledge of nuclear technolo gy. 3. Natural ly the effect on humans is not the only factor that has to be taken into account in arrivln g at moral assessm ents. Nuclear radiatio n, unlike most ethical theorie s. does not confine its scope to human life and welfare . But since the ham nuclear developm ent may afflict on nonhuman life, for example , can hardly improve its case, it suffice s if the case against it can be made out solely in term• of its effects on human life in the convent ional way. .For refe ren ce to apd a brie f disc uss ion of (hu man -ori ente d) sim ulat ion models see Goodin, p.42 8. 4. The Opp ortu nity -co st . argument is also def ecti ve in oth er resp ects . It pres upp ose s not mer ely the (mi stak en) red ucti ons invo lved in the con trac tion of the eth ica l domain to the economic; it also pres upp ose s tha t the pro per methods for dec isio n which affe ct. the futu re, such as tha t of ene rgy cho ice, app ly disc oun ting . But , as Goo din arg ues , more app rop riat e dec isio n rule s do not allo w disc oun ting . 5. Thi s is one of the reas ons why exp ecte d uti lity theo ry, roug hly cos t-be nef it ana lysi s wit h pro bab ility fril ls, is inad equ ate as a dec isio n method in such con tex ts. 6. App aren t exc epti on~ to the prin cip le such as tax atio n (and red istr ibu tion of income gen era, lly) van ish when wea lth is con stru ed (as it has to be if tax atio n is to be pro per ly jus tifi ed) as at lea st par tly a soc ial ass et unf airl y mon opo lise d by a min orit y of the pop ulat ion . Examples such as tha t of mot orin g dan gero usly do not con stit ute cou nter exa mpl es to the prin cip le; for one is not mor ally ent itle d to so mot or. 7. For det ails , and as to how the off icia l ana lys~ s become argu men ts aga inst nuc lear dev elop men t whe.p some atte mpt is made to tak e the -ign ored cos ts into acc oun t, see Shr ade r-Fr ech ette , p. 55 ff. 8. See Rou tley , p. 160 . 9. For much furt her disc uss ion of the poi nts of the prec edin g two par agrap hs, see Shr ade r-F rec het te, p. 35 ff.; and also Nader & Abbott&. 10. Gyorgy. Most of the rea cto rs in the wor ld are of this typ e; 11. See Shr ade r-Fr ech ette , cha pter 4. see 12. See Shr ade r-Fr ech ette . A wor thw hile ini tia l view of the sho rtco min gs of the RassmutJsen rep ort may be reac hed by com bini ng the crit iqu e in Shr ade r-Fr ech et~e wit h tha t in Nader & Abb otts . 13. The re are var iati on$ on Ai and Aii which mul tipl y cos ts aga inst numbers such as pro bab ilit ies. In this way risk s, con stru ed as pro bab le cos ts, can be take n into acc oun t in the asse ssm ent. (Al tern ativ ely . risk .a may be aaaeaaed thro ugh •~e h fam ilia r aeth oda •• inau ran ce). • A princ iple varyi ng Aii, and formu lated as follow s: Aii'. a is ethic ally accep table if {for some b) a inclu des no more risks than band bis socia lly accep ted, was the basic ethic al princ iple in terms of which the Cluff Lake Board of . Inqui ry recen tly decid ed that nucle ar power devel opme nt in Saska tchew an is ethic ally accep table : see Cluff Lake Board of Inqui ry Final Repo rt, Department of Envir onme nt, Government of Saska tchew an, 1978, p. 305 and p. 288. In this repor t, a is nucle ar power and b is eithe r activ ities clear ly accep ted by socie ty as alter nativ e power sourc es. In other appli catio ns b has b•en taken as cigar ette smoki ng, motor ing, minin g and even the Vietnam ~ar (!). The point s made in the text do not exhau st the objec tions to princ iples Ai - Aii'. The princ iples are certa inly ethic ally subst antiv e, since an ethic al conse quenc e canno t be deduced from nonet hical prem isses, but they have an inadm issibl e conve ntion al chara cter. For look at the origi n of b b may be socia lly accep ted thoug h it is no longe r socia lly accep table , or thoug h its socia l accep tibili ty is no longe r so clear cut and it would not have been socia lly accep ted if as much as is now known had been known when it was introd uced. What is requi red in Aii', for insta nce, for the argument tQ begin to look convi ncing is that b is 'ethic ally accep table ' rath, r than 'soci ally accep ted'. But even with the amendments the princ iples are inval id, for the reaso ns given in the text, and other s. It is not disco neert ing that princ iples of this type do not work. It would be sad to see yet anoth er area lost to the expe rts, ethic s to actua ries. 14. See Shrad er-Fr echet te, p. 15. 15. Goodin . p. 433. 16. The argum ent is elabo rated in ESP. 17. For some of the more philo sophi cally impor tant mate rial on alter nativ e nonco nsum eristi c $OCi al arran geme nts and lifes tyles , see work cited in V. and R. Routl ey, 'Soci al theor ies, self manag ement and envir onme ntal probl ems' in M,nni son et al, where a begin ning ia made on worki ng out ~ of alter nativ ••• thoaa of a plura listic anarchism. ••t flA-t fn 18. l ·.:. The~ situa tion of the world 's tropi cal rainf orest s is expla ined in, for insta nce, My~ra; the reaso ns are untan gled in R. and V. Routl ey 'World rainf orest destr uctio n - the socia l cause s' (avai lable from the autho rs). 19·. For a fulle r accou nt of the Dominant Socia l Parad igm and its rival , the Alter nativ e Envir onme ntal Parad igm, see Cotgr ovean d Duff, espec ially the table on p. 341 which encap sulate s ' ' the main assum ption s of the respe ctive parad igms; compare also Catto n and Dunla p, espec ially p. 33. Contemporary varia nts on the Dominant Socia l Parad igm are consi dered in ESP • .., The shallo w/dee p contr ast as appli ed to ecolo gical posit ions, which is an impor tant component of the parad igm conf lict, was introd uced by Naess . For furth er expla natio n of the contr ast and of the large r array of ecolo gical posit ions into which it fits, see R. and V. Routl ey, 'Huma n chauv inism and ~ envir onme ntal ethic s' in Mannison '------'"'et al, and the refer ences there cited , espec ially to Rodman's work. 20. The more elabo rate afgum ent of ESP sets the nucle ar debat e in the conte xt of parad igm confl ict. But it is also argue d that, even withi n assum ptions framework of the ~,min ant Socia l Parad igm and its varia nts, Ti. Nucle ar develo pmen t is no,~ the ratio nal choic e among energ y optio ns. The main argument put up for n\Jcle ar devel opme nt withi n the framework of the dominant parad igm is an Ec~,nomic growth argum ent. It is the follow ing I' versi on of the Light s-goin g-ou~; argument (with economic growt h duly stand ing in for mate rial wealt h, and fo~r what is valua ble!) :- Nucle ar power is neces sary to susta in economic $rowt h. Economic growt h is desir able (for all the usual reaso ns, e.g. to incre ase the size of the pie, to postp one redis tribu tion probl ems, etc.) . There fore nucle ar power is desir able. The first premi ss is part of US energ y polic y (see Shrad er-Fr echet te, p.111 ), and the secon d prem iss ia suppl ied by stand ard economics textb ooks. But both premi sses are defec tive, the secon d becau se what is valua ble in economic growth can be achie ved by (not witho ut growt h but) selec tive economic growt h, which jettis ons the heavy socia l and envir onme ntal costs carri ed by unqu alifie d economic growt h. More to the point , since the secon d premi ss is an assum ption of the Dominant Parad igm, the first premi ss (or rathe r an appro priate and less vulne rable restat emen t of it) fails even by Dominant Paradigm stand ards. For of cours e nucle ar power is not neces sary given that there are other , perha ps costl ier alter nativ es. The premi ss usual ly defen doJ is some elabo ration of the prem iae: Nucle ar power is the econo mical ly beat way to auata in economic arowth. 'econ omica lly beat' be ing fill ed out as 'mo at eff icie nt', 'che ape st', 'hav ing the most favo urab le ben efit -co st rat io', etc~ Unf oitu nate ly for the argu men t, and for nuc lear development sche mes , nuc lear power is none of thes e thin gs dec isiv ely (un less a good dea l of economic che atin g - easy to do - is don e). Tii . ' pro per Dominant Para digm acc oun ting , nuc lear cho ices sho uld gen era l ly be reje cte d, both as priv ate uti lity inve stm ents and as pub lic cho ices . On Nuc lea r dev elop men t is not eco nom ical ly via ble but has bee n kep t goin g, not by cle ar economic via bili ty, butr by mas sive sub sidi zati on of sev era l typ es (dis cus sed in Shr ade r-Fl ech ette ~, Gyorgy and Nader & Abb otts ). Even on var ian ts of ~;he Dominant Para digm , nuc lear dev elop men t is not jus tifi ed, as con side rati on of dec isio n theo ry methods wil l rev eal: Til i. rej cted , Whatever reas ona ble 4ec iaio n rule is ado pted , the nuc lear cho ice is as the argu men ts of Goodin on alte rna tive dec isio n rule s help to show. What sus tain s the nuc lear jug ger nau t is not the Dominant Para digm ~r i ts var ian ts, but con tem pora ry cor por ate cap ital ism (or its sta te ent erp rise image ) and as soc iate d thir d wor ld imp eria lism , aa the his tor ica l det ails of nuc lear <lev elopmen t both in dev elop ed cou ntri es and in less dev elop ed cou ntri es mak es pla i . (for main det ails , see Gyorgy p. 307 ff.) . And the pra ctic es of con tem pora ry corp ora te cap ital ism and ass oci ated imp eria liam are not acc epta ble by the sta nda rds of eith er of the Paradigms or the ir var ian t&: they are cer tain ly no t eth ica lly acc epta ble. • .• . ·• REFERENCES USED Works esp eci ally use ful for fur the r inv est iga tion of the e.th ica l issu ea rais ed by nuc lea r dev elop men t are ind ica t_ed wit h an ast eri sk (*) . S. Cot gro ve and A. Duf f, "En viro nme ntal ism , mid dle -cla ss rad ica lism and po liti cs' , Soc iolo gic al Review 28( 2) (1980), 333 -51 . W.R . Cat ton , Jr. , and R. E. Dun lap, 'A new eco log ica l par adig m for pos t exu ber ant soc iolo gy' American Beh avi ora l Sci ent ist 24 (19 80) . 15- 47. For Rep ort : Ranger Uranium Env iron men tal Inq uiry Fir st Rep ort, Au stra lian Government Pub lish ing Ser vic e, Can ber ra, 1977. *R. E. Goodin, "No moral nuk es', Eth ics 90 (19 80) , 417-49. *A. Gyorgy and fri' end s, No Nukes : eve ryo ne's gui de to nuc lea r pow er, Sou th End Pre ss, Bos ton , Ma ss., 197 9. *n . Mannison, M. McRobbie and R. Rou tley (ed ito rs) , Env iron men tal Phi los~ phy , RSSS, Au stra lian Nat ion al Un ive rsit y, 198 0. N. Myers, The Sin kin g Ark, Pergamon Pre ss, Oxf ord , 1979. R. Nader and J. Abb otta , The Menace of Atomic Ene rgy , Me lbou rne, 1977. Outback Pre ss, *K. S. Shr ade r-F rec het te, Nuclear Power and Pub lic Pol icy , 1980. Rei del , Dor dre cht , R. and V. Rou tley , 'Nu clea r energy and obl igat ion tJ to the fut ure ', Inq uiry 21 (19 78) , 133-79.  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 74, Item 2049: Draft of Nuclear power - some ethical and social dimensions Subject The topic of the resource Typescript (photocopy) of draft, with handwritten emendations and annotations, undated. Handwritten above title: Almost final version. 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. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Routley</a> <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=val+routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Val Routley</a> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 74, Item 2049 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. 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Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:a4e917c">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:a4e917c</a> Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1982-01-01 Australian National University Office Australian National University Office > Filing Cabinet 5 > Top Box 74: Unlisted and Untitled https://www.antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/0b17d50e19500ff0b2b32520f6a252ed.pdf 89d18b08b7b801165a65380cf512aeec PDF Text Text AGAINST THE INEVITABILITY OF HUMAN CHAUVINISM In our enlightened times, when most forms of chauvinism have been abandoned at least in theory by those who consider themselves progressive, western ethics still appears to retain, at its very heart, a fundamental form of chauvinism, namely, human chauvinism. ethical theories For both popular western thought and most western assume that both value and morality can ultimately be reduced to matters of interest or concern to the class of humans. Class chauvinism, in the relevant sense, is substantially differential, discriminatory, and inferior treatment (characteristically, but not necessarily, by members of the privileged class) of items outside the class, for which there is not sufficient justification. Human chauvinism, like other varieties of chauvinism, can take stronger and weaker forms; an example of the weaker form is the Greater Value Thesis, the invariable allocation of greater value or preference, on the basis of species, to humans, while not however entirely excluding non-humans from moral consideration and claims. We will be concerned primarily with strong forms of human chauvinism, which see value and morality as ultimately concerned entirely with humans, and non-human items as having value or creating constraints on human action only insofar as these items serve human interests or purposes. In recent years, since the rise of the 'environmental consciousness', there has been increasing, if still tentative, questioning of this exclusive concern with, or at least heavy bias towards, human interests; and indeed, at a time when human beings are rapidly accelerating their impact on the natural world, the question as to the validity of this basic assumption is not merely an abstract one, but is of immediate and practical concern in its implications for This thesis has, among other unacceptable outcomes, the consequence that, if there is only room in one's boat for one and one must choose between saving Adolf Hitler and a wombat which has lived a decent and kindly life and never harmed a living creature, one is morally obligated to choose the former. That would not be the choice of the authors. �2. human action. In reply to this questioning (which appears to originate largely from people with environmental interests), modern moral philosophers - fulfilling their now established function of providing a theoretical superstructure to explain and justify contemporary moral sensibilities, questioning fundamental assumptions - tend to argue that the bias towards human interests, which is an integral part of going ethical theories, is not just another form of class chauvinism which it is both possible and desirable to eliminate, but rather a restriction dictated by the logic of evaluative and moral concepts, and that there is no coherent, possible or viable alternative to the "human chauvinism" of standard ethical theories. series of In this paper we want to consider and reject a arguments in the theory of value designed to show that this is so, and thereby to advance the cause of an alternative, non-chauvinistic, environmental ethic. The orthodox defence of human chauvinism argues that it is inevitable that humans should be taken as the exclusive subjects of value and morality. Humans are uniquely and exclusively qualified for moral consideration and attributions of value, according to this defence either because the human species alone does, as a matter of fact, possess properties which are a pre­ condition for such ascriptions or because, as a matter of the definition or the logic or the significance of moral concepts in natural language, such considerations are restricted, as a matter of logic, to the human species. In the first case the restriction of morality and value to the human species will be taken as contingent, in the second necessary. In either case, if the argument is correct, the bias in favour of humans in current theories is inescapable, so that, depending on one's definition of chauvinism, either human chauvinism itself is inevitable, or human bias is, because justifiable, not a real chauvinism at all. We shall consider the logical or definitional approach first. According to the definitional approach, moral and evaluative terms are, as a matter of their definitions, restricted in their application to members of the human species; only in a secondary way at best do such terms find a �3. wider application, according as evaluated items are instrumental to human interests. The thesis is often backed up by the production of definitions which are so restricted, for example, 'the value of a thing is its capacity to confer a benefit on someone, to make a favourable difference to his life' (Baier, in [13], p. 40), where in the intended context 'someone' is obviously restricted to humans. The attempt to preserve human chauvinism in an unchallengeable form through definitions involves the fallacy of taking definitions to be self­ validating and unchallengeable, and appears to be based on the confusion of abbreviative definitions with those involving or presupposing substantive claims, such as creative definitions, which may be accepted or rejected. Such definitions as those above, cannot be merely abbreviative because they attempt to characterise or explicate already understood terms, such as 'moral' or 'value'. Worse still, they do so in a way which is not dictated by prevailing usage - which does not require that moral and value terms be restricted in range to human:in order that they continue to apply to humans in the ordinary way. Alternative definitions which do not so restrict the range of application may be supplied, they can in fact be found by looking up dictionaries, and these alternatives quite properly do not close off genuine issues which natural language itself leaves open. The fallacy of the definitional move is that of believing that by converting the substantive evaluative theses of human chauvinism to matters of definition they become somehow exempt from challenge or need for justification. This is comparable to justifying discriminatory membership for a club by referring to the rules, similarly conceived as self-validating and exempt from question or justification. Since a similar move could obviously be employed to limit membership of the Moral Club to say, white male humans in place of humans, it is plain that such a definitional argument does far too much, and is capable of use to produce completely unacceptable conclusions. But of course substantive theses involved in definitions, like club rules, are not exempt from challenge and may be arbitrary, undesirable, restrictive, c/ �4. and in need of justification. Once this is grasped the definitional move can be seen as entirely question-begging, since the question of the acceptability and inevitability of human chauvinism is simply transformed into the question of the acceptability and inevitability of the definition. The production of such human chauvinist definitions has done nothing to advance the case of human chauvinism, other than to throw a spurious air of unchallangeability and over the highly challengeable and arbitrary substantive theses they embody. The attempt to settle substantive issues 'by definition' is both philosophically facile and methodologically unsound, and is especially so when there are clearly alternative definitions which would not settle the issue in the same way. What, however, of the substantive claim presupposed by the definitional move, namely that as a matter of natural language usage, or the logic of moral and evaluative concepts, the meaning of moral and value terms, it is logically necessary that direct, non-instrumental, application of such terms be restricted to the human (a claim made at least in the case of rights by Ritchie [4], p. 107, and subsequently by Passmore [5] and [9]^,p. 116, 189, Ay and,others). But usually, when it is asserted that non-humans cannot have rights, obligations and such like, what sort of 'cannot' is involved is not specified - whether it is a 'cannot' of logical impossibility, or of non-significance or absurdity, or something else again (the point is nicely illustrated by Feinberg's discussion of McCloskey, McCloskey [11] itself). in p. 195 , and by In any case, however, the thesis appears to be mistaken, for it rules out as logically impossible or absurd a number of positions and theses which are very plainly neither and which it may even, in some circumstances, be important to consider. For example, it is surely neither impossible nor absurd to consider moral questions concerning conduct of humans towards other species, e.g. to a race of sensitive and intelligent extraterrestrial beings, and similarly moral questions arising from their conduct towards or concerning humans, indeed science fiction writ .ers do this commonly without producing nonsense or contradicting themselves. Not only does the proposed restriction appear quite �5. mistaken given current usage, but there seems indeed to be something logically unsound about the attempt to place a logical restriction to a particular species on such terms, just as there would be in restricting membership of the Moral Club to people with blue eyes and blond hair who are over 6 feet tall. The accident of being a zoological human, defined in terms of various physical characteristics, cannot be morally relevant. It is impossible to restrict moral terms to particular species, when species distinctions are defined in terms of physical characteristics which are not morally relevant. More generally, any attempt to derive a logically necessary connection between humanity itself and the applicability of morality is bound to fail. For creatures anatomically and zoologically distinct from humans which are identical with humans in terms of all morally relevant features are logically possible, upsetting any logical linkage. tie between humanity But attempts to establish a logical and morality through features which all and only humans possess and which are themselves linked logically to morality, would, of course, involve a modal fallacy, namely that of substituting a contingent equivalence within an opaque modal conte t of logical necessity. In order for such an argument to be val? d, it would have to be logically necessary that non­ humans do not possess such features, not merely a contingent fact that they do not; but this assumption must be incorrect for morally relevant characteristics. The only proposal which has ac/n/tce of succeeding, then, is the factual one which makes the selection of just humans for the Moral Club a contingent matter, the claim being that as a matter of contingent fact all and only humans possess a certain set of characteristics, which characteristics themselves are logically tied with qualification for moral consideration and for direct attribution of value to the possessor. What this contingent form of human chauvinism has to produce then, in order to establish its case, is a set of characteristics which satisfy the following conditions of adequacy: �6. 1. The set of characteristics must be possessed by at least all properly functioning humans, since to omit any significant category usually considered subject to moral consideration, such as infants, young children, primitive tribesmen etc., and to allow that it was permissible to treat these gro^J^L^ in the way it is considered permissible to treat non-humans, ^s mere instruments, would certainly be repuguant to modern moral sensibilities, and would offend common intuitions as to the brotherhood of man, the view that all humans are possessors of inalienable rights. Thus human chauvinism, if it is to produce a coherent theory which does not unacceptably rule out some groups of humans must find some set of features common to the most diverse members of humankind, from Rio Tinto executives to hunter-gatherer tribes of Amazonian Indians, from those who engage in highly abstract activities such as logic and mathematics to those who cannot, from the literate and cultured to the illiterate and uncouth, from the poet and professor to the infant. This alone will be no easy task. 2. In order for human chauvinism to be justified this set of characteristics must not be possessed by any non-human. 3. The set of characteristics must not merely be morally relevant,but sufficient to justify, in a non-circular way, the cut-off of moral consideration at exactly the right point. If human chauvinism is to avoid the charge of arbitrariness and unjustifiability, and demonstrate its inevitability and the impossibility of alternatives, it must emerge from the characteristicj why items not having may be used as mere instruments to serve the interests of those which do possess There must be some explanatory logical connection between the set of characteristics and membership of the Moral Club. Chauvinists aie. fc stress distinguishing points between the privileged class and those outside it - and there is no lack of characteristics which distinguish humans from non-humans, at least functioning healthy adult ones. The point is that these distinctions usually do not warrant the sort of radically inferior treatment for which they are �7. proposed as a rationale. On the basis of the characteristics then the proposed radical difference in treatment between the privileged and non­ privileged class and the purely instrumental treatment of the non-privileged class, must be warranted, that is, the distinguishing characteristics must be able to carry the moral superstructure placed upon them. A large and exceedingly disparate collection of features has been suggested as distinguishing humans from non-humans and justifying human chauvinism. But it turns out that every one of these, on examination, either fails to pick out the desired privileged class of humans in an unequivchcal fashion, that is, it applies to some non-humans or excludes some humans who should not be excluded, or, when it does select the desired class, fails on condition 3, and does not warrant the exclusive claim to moral consideration of the privileged class. Many suggested criteria in fact fail on more than one count. The traditional distinction between humans and the rest in terms of rationality illustrates the point. Once the theological doctrines of the exclusively human soul on which the distinction once rested are abandoned, it is not so easy to see what is meant by this term. Indeed it often appears to function as little more than a self-congratulatory predicate applied exclusively to humans, with no other clear function at all. clarifications are sometimes offered. However various For example rationality may be said to be the ability to reason, this being tested by such basically linguistic performances as the ability to do lo^ic, to prove theorems, to draw conclusions from arguments and to engage in inductive and deductive linguistic behaviour. But such stringent and linguistically-loaded criteria will eliminate far too many members of the human species who cannot perform these tasks. If, however, behavioural criteria for rationality are adopted, or the ability to solve problems and to fit attion to individual goals becomes the test - that is, practical reasoning is the test - it is obvious that many non-human admission to the Moral Club, rather than the ability to perform some other �tasks or meet some other set of standards, such as orienteering ability,the ability to mix concrete (the use of concrete being, afte^all, a far more conspicuous feature of modern human society than the use of reason). One senses also in the appeal to such criteria (andespecially to linguistic criteria) the overvaluation of the things in which the privileged class typically excells and the undervaluation of the skills - not obviously^ in any non—circular way inferior - of the non-privileged class, which is such a typical feature of chauvinism. We list some of the suggested characteristics supposedly justifying human chauvinism, and indicate in brackets after each some of the conditions they fail: using tools (fails 1, 2, 3), altering the environment (1, 2, 3), the ability to communicate (1, 2, 3), the ability to use and learn language (1, 2, 3), the ability to use and learn English (1, 3), possession of consciousness (2, 3), self-consciousness or self-awareness (1, 2?, 3), having a conscience (1, 2?, 3), having a sense of shame (1, 2?, 3), being aware of oneself as an agent or initiator (1, 2, 3), having awareness (2, 3), being aware of one's existence (1, 2?, 3), being aware of the inevitability of one's own death (1, 2?, 3), being capable of self-deception (1, 3), being able to ask questions about moral issues such as human chauvinism (1, 3), having a mental life (2, 3), being able to play games (1, 2, 3), being able to laugh (1, 3), to laugh at oneself (1, 3), being able to make jokes (1, 3), having interests (2, 3), having projects (1, 2, 3), being able to assess some of one's performances as successful or not (1, 2, 3), enjoying freedom of action (2, 3), being able to vary one's behaviour outside a narrow range of insttnctu al behaviour (1, 2, 3), belonging to a social community (1, 2, 3), being morally responsible for one's actions (1), being able to love (1, 2), being capable of altruism (1, 2), being capable of being a Christian, or capable of religious faith (1, 3), being able to produce the items of (human) civilisation grid, culture * (1, 3). * This feature typifies a number of rather circular distinguishing characteristics, or at least ones which raise serious theob^. tical problems for human chauvinism, because they attempt to explain the unique value of humans in terms of their ability to produce items which are taken to be independently valuable, thus contradicting human chauvinism (see the discussion in [10],/?.;77/, �It appears that none of these criteria meet the conditions of adequacy; furthermore it seems most unlikely that any other characteristic or any cowbinlation of the^characteristics does so. Thus we conclude that these contingent direct arguments for human & chauvinism^not establish its inevitability, and that indeed the position rests on a shaky base and so f^r lacks a coherent theoretical justification. Human chauvinism cannot be restored by a detour through the concept of a person, that is by linking perso/JnoocL with membership of the /* foral (lub, and identifying the class of persons contingently with the class of humans. For then the same problem as above arises with different terminology even if the of person since, can be specified in such a way as to justify the restriction of moral privileges to persons, the class of persons will then not conicin the way human chauvinism requires^ with the class of humans, but will either include a great many non-humans or exclude a good many humans^morally considered. Attempts to enlarge the privileged class, for example to persons (broadly specified), or to sentient or preference having creatures, may avoid many of the problems of arbitrariness and justification which face the strong form of human chauvinism, but, as we shall argue, face a set of problems of coherence and consistency common to all instrumentalist theories of value and morality. ******* There are a number of indirect arguments for human chauvinism based on features of value and morality. argument We turn now to consider these. One abstract which is supposed to establish that values are, or must, be determined through the interests of humans or persons - a central argument underlying chauvinism - takes the following form:- �10. A. Values are determined through the preference rankings of valuers. (The no detachable values assumption). B. Valuers' preference rankings are determined through valuers' interests. (The preference reduction thesis). C. Valuers are humans [persons]. (The species assumption). Therefore: D. Values are determined through human interests [through the interests of persons]. Hence, it is sometimes concluded, not only is it perfectly acceptable for humans to reduce matters of value and morality to matters of human interest, there is no rational or possible alternative to doing so: any alternative is simply incoherent. Although th{$ argument does not, so far as we are aware, appear anywhere with its premisses explicitly stated, it does seem to reflect the sorts of considerations those who claim that there is no rational or coherent alternative to organising everything in human interests usually have in mind. Of course once the premisses are exposed, it is easier to see that this initially persuasive argument, like others in the area, rests on fallacious assumptions. y<2^ — We shall claim that although the argument to conclusion D is formally^given only some quite conventional assumptions such as that the relation of determin­ ation or functionality is appropriately transitive and the principle of replacement of necessary identicals - not all the premisses should be accepted. The argument can be treated as the major representative of a family of similar arguments. For there are many variations that can be made on the argument with a view to amending it, tightening it, varying or strengthening its conclusion, and so on. Our criticisms of the argument will, for the most part, transfer to the variations. qualifies the determining relation; A first group of variations replaces or for example, 'determined through' or 'determined by' may be replaced by 'answer back to', of', 'can be reduced to', or 'are a function of'. 'reflect', 'are a matter (The latter functional form makes it plain that 'determined' has to mean 'exactly determined', which �11. ensures that no extraneous factors enter into the chauvinistic determination: mere partial determination would be quite compatible with the rejection of human chauvinism.) Alternatively, 'determined' may be modally upgraded to 'have to be determined', in order to reveal the sheer necessity of conclusion D. (In this case it is essential that premiss C be of modal strength, and not merely contingent as it would be if the original form were retained; other­ wise the argument would contain a modal fallacy.). Another familiar, and appealing, variation we have already bracketed into the form of the argument given; class by persons. namely the replacement of humans as base This straightaway increases the cogency of premiss C, which otherwise - while better than, say, 'Valuers are white (North American) humans' - would at best be contingently true (which is not good enough for the argument and in fact appears false, since some valuers may not be human; and certainly not all humans are valuers), while at worst it is simply a circular way of reintroducing the logical version of human chauvinism by rest^cting the class of valuers a priori to humans. That all valuers are persons may be made analytic on the sense of 'person' - given a redefinition of 'person' away from its normal English usage, which philosophical English appears to almost tolerate - thus shielding premiss C from criticism. Other base classes than persons can replace humans in premiss C, for example animals, thus leading to the conclusion, of animal chauvinism, that values are determined through the interests (considerations and concerns) of animals, sentient creatures, or whatever. In the end, of course premiss C could be absorbed (as: Valuers are valuers or valuing creatures) and accordingly omitted, leaving the conclusion: Values are determined in the interests of valuers. However even the analytic form of premiss C does not, as we shall see, save the argument. Much the same applies in the case of premiss A. The premiss is certainly not unobjectionable in the usual sense of 'determined'; but there are ways of repairing it so that the argument still works in a sufficiently damaging form, and one way goes as follows:— What is true, analytically, if sufficiently many valuers are taken into account, is that values are deter­ �12. mined through the value rankings of valuers. Value rankings cannot however be cashed in for preference rankings since, as is well-known, preference rankings and value rankings can diverge: value and can value what is not preferred. a valuer can prefer what has less Let us amend the argument then - so that we can locate the real cause of damage - by replacing premiss A by the following premiss: A^. Values are determined through the value rankings of (appropriate) valuers. Correspondingly B will be adjusted to B^ in which 'value' replaces 'preference'. The really objectionable premiss in the central argument is neither premiss A nor premiss C, but premiss B - or, more exactly, where A is repaired, premiss B^. Suspicion of premiss B may be aroused by noticing that it plays an exactly parallel role in the class chauvinism argument to that the critical premiss BE. One's preferences of choices are always determined through self-interest, plays in familiar arguments for egoism, that whatever course of action one adopts, it is always really adopted in one's own selfish interests. The argument for egoism runs along the following, parallel, lines:- AE. Individual persons [agents) always act (in freely chosen cases) in the way they prefer or choose, i.e. in accordance with their preference rankings. BE. Individual preference rankings are always determined through ^reflect) self­ interest. Therefore: There is nonetheless an esoteric, semantical, sense of 'determined' in which premiss A is demonstrably true, and so a sense in which it is analytically true that value rankings are semantically determined by the preference rankings of situations by a class of valuers. The details of these semantical foundations for values are set out in 131. But while premiss A can be corrected by replacing 'determined' by 'semantically determined' and giving this an appropriate construal, such a move would do nothing to restore the intended argument: for it would either invalidate the argument, through change in the key middle term 'determined', or, alternatively, if 'determined' is systematically replaced throughout the argument, drastically alter the intended conclusion D - so that looking at the interests that humans in fact have would no longer provide a guide to values (instead the interests of hypothetical valuers with respect to worlds that never exist or could exist would have to be gathered). �13. DE. Individual persons ^agents] always act in ways determined by self interest [that reflect their own interests^. Thereafter follows the slide from in their own interests^ to to their own advantage, or for their own uses or purposes. The final conclusion of egoism again parallelling the class chauvinism case, is not only that the egoistic position is perfectly in order and thoroughly rational but that there are no alternatives, that there is, or at least ought to be, no other way of acting, 'that men can only choose to do what is in their own interests or that it is only rational to do this' ([2], p. 140). Thus human chauvinism, as based on the central argument, stands revealed as a form of group selfishness, group egoism one might almost say. Likewise the criticisms of the Group Selfishness argument, as we shall now call the central argument, parallel those of egoism, in particular premiss B (B ) succumbs to similar objections to those that defeat premiss BE (BE^). Group selfishness is no more acceptable than egoism, since it depends on exactly the same set of confusions between values and advantages, and slides on such terms as 'interests', as the arguments on which egoism rests. Nowell-Smith's very appealing critique of egoism ([2], p. 140-144) may, by simple paraphrase, be converted into a critique of group selfishness. recast B^ and BE" *" This is obvious once we and set them side by side: BE^. Individual value rankings are determined through (individual) self­ interest; and B^. Valuers' [groups'] value rankings are determined through valuers' (group) interests [joint interests of groups]. Because, however, one sets up or selects one's own preference or value rankings, it does not follow that they are set up or selected in one's own interests; similarly in group cases, because a group determines its own rankings, it does not follow that it determines them in its own interests. Just as BE^ is, prima facie at least, refuted by a range of examples where �value, and also preference, rankings run counter to self-interest, e.g. cases of altruism, so prima facie at least, B is refuted by examples where value, and also overall preference rankings, vary from group interests, e.g. cases of In the case group altruism. of limited groups examples are easy to locate, e.g. resistance movements, environmental action groups, and so on; case, however, of the larger human group in the are bound to be more controversial (since B^ unlike BE^ is a live thesis), but are still easy to find, especially if future humans are discounted, e.g. it is in humans' selfish interests to have plentiful supplies of this and that, electricity from uranium, oil, Me were Sy/Z/ey whalemeat, fish, etc., right now rather than^which would result from restraint, but altruistic value rankings would rank the latter above the former. It is often in selfish human interests (no less selfish because pertaining to a group) to open up and develop the wilderness, strip mine the earth, exploit animals, and so on, but environmentalists who advocate not doing so, in many cases not merely because of future humans, are apparently acting not just out of their own or human group interests. But, just as BE^ is not demolished by such counterexamples of apparently altruistic action, neither is B : in each case it can be made out that further selfish interests are involved, e.g., in the case of B , that an agent did what he did, an altruistic action, because he liked doing it. As Nowell-Smith explains in the egoism case, interest is written in as an internal accusative, thereby rendering such theses as BE^ true at the cost, however, of trivialising them. More generally, valuing something gets written in as a further sort of "interest"; whatever valuers value that does not seem to be in their interests is said to provide a further interest, either the value itself or an invented value surrogate; for example^the environmentalist who works to retain a wilderness he never expects to see may be said to be so acting because he has an interest in or derives benefit or advantage from just knowing it exists, just as he would be in the egoist case. theses can be retained; By such strategies the for then a valued item really is in valuers interests, in the extended sense, even if they are in obvious ways seriously inconvenienced �15. by it, i.e. even if it is not in their interests in the customary sense. ', * Thus.BE' like 4^', is preserved by stretching the elastic term 'interests', in a way that it too readily admits, to include values, or value surrogates, among interests. Then however the conclusion of the &roup Selfishness argument loses its intended force, and becomes the platitude that values are determined through valuers' values , just as egoism, under the extension a which makes us all covert egoists,loses its sting and becomes,platitude. It can be seen that human chauvinism in this form, like egoism, derives its plausibility from vacillation in the sense of 'interests', with a resulting fluctuation between a strong false thesis - the face of^chauvinism usually presented - and a trivial analytic thesis,between paradox and platitude.-^ To sum up the dilemma for the argument then:- when 'interest' is used in its weaker sense premiss B may be accepted but the argument does not establish its intended conclusion or in any way support human chauvinism. intended effect of the argument, in the crude form is this: values it is enough to look at human advantage: For the in determining nothing else counts. If the argument were correct, then one could assess values by checking out the local (selfish) advantage of humans, or, more generally, the advantage of the base class somehow assembled. If, on the other hand, 'interest' is used in its strong sense, the conclusion would lice^'hce a form of human chauvinism, but premiss B now fails. Most philosphers think they know how to discredit the egoist arguments. It is curious indeed then, that an argument which is regarded as so unsatisfactory in the individual case - that for egoism - remains unchallenged and is still considered so convincing in a precisely parallel group case - that for human chauvinism. ******** The technique of rescuing philosphical theses by natural extensions and accompanying redefinitions of terms, including the thesis "We're all selfish really", is delightfully explained in Wisdom [7], chapter 1. �16. The Group Selfishness argument is often employed in another way, as the presentation for a choice between the conclusion D, that value is determined by or reducible to a matter of human interests, and the denial of premiss A, which denial is seen as entailing a commitment to a detached,intrinsic or naturalistic theory of value. Thus, it may be said either one accepts the conclusion, with its consequent instrumentalist account of value, or one is committed to an intrinsic or detached value theory which takes values to be completely independent of valuers, and no way determined by them. But, it is assumed, the latter theory is well known as untenable, and may even be seen as involving mysticism or as irrational ^e.g. by Passmore [9], chapter 7). Thus it may be concluded, there is no real coherent alternative to such an instrumental account of value, and hence no real alternative to human chauvinism. The form of the argument then, is essentially: *^A v D, but A,therefore D, or, if a stronger connection, of intensional disjunction, is intended: but A, therefore D. It can be seen that the main premiss, -A v D, has resulted from the exportation and suppression of premisses B and C of the Group argument. ^A, Selfishness This suppression does nothing to improve the standing of the premisses although it does have the (possibly advantageous) effect of making it more difficult to see the fallacious assumptions on which it is based. For of course the choice a false one, and for precisely the same reasons that led us to say that premiss B was false. To reject the instrumentalist conclusion D is by no means to be committed to ^A, or to the view that the valuer's and their preference rankings play no role in determining values and that values are a further set of mysterious independent items in the world somehow perceived by valuers through a special (even mystical and non—rational) moral sense. Valuers' ; * preference rankings may be admitted to play an important role in evaluation are still not committed to D unless we assume - what amounts to premiss B these preference rankings reflect, or can be reduced to, valuers' interests. * on page 16a we that �16a Value rankings can be semantically analysed in terms of preference or interest rankings, as in [3]; but this does not offer a reduction of values to preferences or interests, as [8] explains. The semantical foundations, while conceding nothing to subjectivism or instrumentalism, make it easy to concede main points of the case (attributed to Dewey) against detached values, against the view that there are values somehow out there (in Meinong's aussersein), purely naturalistic values completely detached from all valuers, or from all preference rankings of valuers. Put differently, there are no values that do not somehow answer back to preference rankings of valuers, and so no values that are entirely detached from valuers and valuational activity such as preference-ranking of situations. But the answering back is made explicit and precise by the semantical analysis, not by any syntactical reduction or translation of value statements into statements about valuers' preference or interest rankings; and the valuers of the analysis are, like the situations introduced, ideal and need in no way exist. As a result then, valuations may be independent of the aggregated preference rankings of all actual humans or, for that matter, of all persons over all time. Thus too the semantical analysis makes it easy to navigate a course between the alternatives of two influential false dichotomies, to the effect that values are either instrumental or else detached, or that values are either subjective or else detached. For though a semantical analysis can be given, upsetting the detached value thesis, no translation or syntactical reduction of the sort subjectivism assumes is thereby effected. �17. The dichotomy frequently presented between instrumentalist accounts of value, on the one hand, and detached theories (or what are mistakenly taken to be the same, intrinsic theories) is, for the same reason, a false one. Instrumental theories are those which attempt to reduce value to what is instrumental to^contribute$to a stated goal. Typically such theories take the goal to be the furtherance of the interest of a privileged class; for example the goal may be taken to be determined in terms of the interests, concerns, advantage or welfare of the class of humans, or of persons, or of sentient creatures, depending on the type of chauvinism. In particular, human chauvinist theories are, characteristically, instrumentalist theories. In contrast,an item is valued intrinsically where it is valued for its own sake, and not merely as a means to something further; and an intrinsic value theory allows that some items are intrinsically valuable. Intrinsic theories then, instrumental contrast with Z. theories, and what 'intrinsic' tells us is no more than that the item taken as intrinsically valuable is not valued merely as a means to some goal, i.e. is not merely instrumentally valued. Accordingly detached value theories, since disjoint from instrumental theories, are a subclass of intrinsic value theories; be detached: and they are a proper subclass since intrinsic values need not something may be valuable in itself without its value being detached from all valuing experience. It is evident, furthermore, that the identification of intrinsic and detached value theories presupposed in the argument is no more than a restatement of the false dichotomy -^A v D, or ^A, The assumption i.e. non-instrumental, therefore detached^that if preference or value rankings are involved at all the resulting assignments must be instrumental is either false or or is variation of the fallacious premiss B which plays a crucial role in the Group Selfishness and Egoist arguments; the variation is that if value or preference rankings are involved they must reflect valuers' interests, therefore such values are instrumental, because the items valued are valued according as they reflect valuers interest, therefore according as they are a means to the end of satisfying the valuers' interest. It follows that intrinsic value theories �18. may allow for a third way between instrumental and detached theories, because of the possibility of value rankings (and also preference rankings) which are not themselves set up in a purely instrumentalist way, that is attributing value to aiitem only according as it is a means to some goal. The argument that there is no coherent alternative to instrumentalism does not however rely just on misrepresenting alternative intrinsic accounts as logically incoherent by assimilating them to detached accounts. It also trades on a contemporary insensitivity to the serious logical and epistemological problems of instrumental accounts of value, problems which were well known to classical philosophers (see e.g., Aristotle Metaphysics, 994b9-16) It does not appear to be widely realised that the classical arguments apply not just to a few especially shaky instrumentalist theories which adopt questionable goals but to instrumentalism in general, since they assume only quite general features of the instrumentalist position. Instrumentalist positions take as valuable (or in the moral case, as creating moral constraints) just what contributes to a stated end. which comes to mind is utilitarianism. An obvious example However in the more general case we are concerned with, of instrumentalist forms of human chauvinism, there may be a set of goalnot just a single goal such as that of maximising net happiness of humans; the human chauvinist assumption is that the values (indeed constraints) are goal-reducible, and that all goals reduce in some way to human goals, or at least can be assessed in terms of human concerns and interests. Human chauvinist positions are not necessarily instrumental, but those that are not (e.g. the position that just humans and nothing else are intrinsically valuable) tend to make the arbitrary chauvinistic nature of their assumptions unwisely explicit - most successful contempory chauvinisms being covert ones. Problems for instrumentalism arise (as Aristotle observed) when questions are asked about the status of the goal itself. Instrumentalism relies entirely for its plausibility upon selecting a set of goats which are widely accepted and are, in �19. It relies at bottom on an implicit the theory, implicitly treated as valuable. valuation which cannot itself be explained in purely instrumental terms. Of course a value assumption is not eliminated on this fashion: the general consensus it is merely hidden under that such a goal is appropriate, that such an end is valuable. But the strategy of successful instrumentalism is to avoid recognition of the fact that the goal is, and indeed must be, implicitly treated as valuable, by selecting a set of goals so much part of the framework of comtemporary thought, so entrenched and habitual 3s a valued item by humans that the value attached to the goal becomes virtually invisible, at least to those the framework. Thus it is with the assumption of human chauvinist instrumentalism that goals are exclusively determinable in terms of human interest. The basic, convincing and self-evident character of this assumption rests on nothing more than the shared beliefs of the privileged class of humans concerning the paramount and exclusive importance of their own interests and concerns, on a valuational assumption or goal which is ^'self-evident'" because it is advantageous and is habitual. The consensus features, of which instrumentalists make so much, are nothing more than the consensus of the privileged class about the goal of maintaining consensus of interests. their own privilege, i.e. a This sort of agreement of course shows very little about the well-grountiness of the position. Unless the goals set are widely accepted as valuable, the account will be unconvincing to those who do not share the goal and even to those who appreciate that it is possible to reject the goal. In order for instrumentalism to work logically however, the goal must be implicitly treated within the theory as valuable, for otherwise the proposed analysis loses explanatory and justificatory power and lacks compulsion. For how can the value of an item be explained and justified in terms of its contribution to an end not itself considered valuable! Serious problems also arise about the nature of value statements under the instrumentalist analysis unless the goal is treated as valuable. For if the goals themselves are not so treated within the theory, but are taken simply as unevaluated facts, then a valuational statement 'x is valuable' becomes, under the proposed analysis, �20. simply the statement that x tends to produce a certain result, to contribute to certain human states, a statement whose logical status, openness to verification, allowance for disagreement, and so on, does not substantially differ from that statement that x tends to producejoxide, to contribute to the rusting of human products. Such an account of value statements is open to the same sort of objections as other naturalistic reductions of value, for example, Mill's account the desirable in terms of the desired. of The special logical and epistemological character of value statements then, especially with respect to verification and disagreement,must be supplied in instrumentalism, if it is to be supplied at all, by the implicit treatment of the goal itself as valuable. The fact that the goaL of an instrumental account must be taken as itself valuable, gives rise to two choices. In the first, the goal is taken as itself instrumentally valuable, which creates an infinite regress. For if the end, reason or assignment for which other items are intrumentally valuable is itself only instrumentally valuable then there must in turn be some other end, reason or assignment in terms of which it is valuable (by definition of instrumental). A regress is thus begun, and if this regress is not to be viciously infinite, it must terminate in some end or feature which is taken as valuable just in itself, that is, with intrinsic values. On the alternative option the goal is not taken to be instrumentally valuable but is admitted to be valuable in some other way. Unless an 'except' clause is , so that all values are held to be account instrumental with the exception of the goal, the will of course be contextually added to the original instrumentalist inconsistent, since it is inconsistent when contextually supplied assumptions are added. For these include the assuption that the goal itself is valuable, but not in the way that the instrumentalist thesis claims is the only way possible. the goal is taken to be both valuable and not valuable. If, on the other hand, an'except^ clause is added, this amounts to an admission that the goal is taken to be non-instrumentally valuable. Thus the account may be able to retain consistency, but does so at the expense of Thus �21 explicitly admitting a value, that of the goal, which cannot be accounted for in purely instrumental terms, in short, that the gcdl is taken as intrinsically valuable. To sum up, the dilemma for the instrumentalist can be put as follows: Consider the desirability of the goal of the instrumental theory: it must implicitly be judged to be desirable, for otherwise nothing could be justified by reduction to it. or not? Ask: Is this goal also instrumentally desirable (valuable) If it is, i.e. it is only desirable as a means to a further goal, then either a regress is initiated or the same issue arises with respect to the new goal. But if it is not, then the instrumental theory is again refuted, since the goal is desirable though not desirable according to the test of the theory because it is not instrumental to the goal. Whichever ho rn of the dilemma is taken^ then> the outcome is the same: the instrumentalist must rely on treating the goal itself as implicitly valuable in a way not purely instrumental, that is, as intrinsically valuable. Thus the instrumentalist is, at bottom, guilty of precisely the same crime of which he accuses the adherent of a intrinsic account, with the added delinquency of failing to admit and face up to his basic assumptions. The logical and epistemological position of such an instrumental account is certainly no better than that of an intrinsic account, since there is logically no difference between the recognition of one intrinsic value (or one set in the case where gcals are multiple) and the recognition of many of them, ancf^lxtgical and epistemological status of the instrumentalist's account is no better than that of the goal to which his values are taken as instrumental. Since the instrumentalist has implicitly admitted the legitimacy of an intrinsic value assignment in setting up his account, he cannot claim any superiority over a more general intrinsic theory which allows for many intrinsic values, since what is legitimate in the case of one value assignment must be equally legitimate in the multiple case. �22, This abstract dilemma for human chauvinist instrumentalism is illustrated in a concrete case by Passmore's procedure in [9]; for Passmore (1) wishes to say that there is no coherent alternative to instrumental values, that an item is valuable insofar as it serves human interest, and (2) wants to explain the unique value attributed to humans in terms of their production of valuable civilised and cultural But (2) involves the admission of values, that items. of civilised items, which cannot be valuable in the way (1) states, and indeed (2) amounts to the admission of non-instrumental values. The proposed account is inconsistent because if intrinsic values are admissible in the case of civilised items, they cannot be logically ^oherent in the way (1) claims. The sort of problem faced by Passmore is however not a readily avoidable one for the instrumentalist; for if the charge of arbitary and unjustifiable human chauvinism is to be avoided by those who opt for (1), and humans are not themselves to be awarded intrinsic values,, thus conceding the logical legitimacy of intrinsic values generally, and hence the avoidability of human chauvinist accounts of value, some explanation must be provided for the exclusive value attributed to humans. But only explanation capable of justifying this valuation in a non-arbitray and non-chauvinistic way would have to refer to properties of humans, and would have to say something like: 'Humans are uniquely valuable because they alone have valuable properties x,y,z,... or produce valuable items A, B, C...'. distinguishing The list of proposed features already considered on page 8 are usually those that will be employed here. But this is to admit intrinsic value for the properties which explain the exclusive value of humans. The dilemma for the human chauvinist is that he must either take the exclusive human value assumption (the goal) as ultimate—laying him open to the charge of arbitrary chauvinism and of attributing intrinsic values to humans-or attempt to explain it* in which case he will again end by concedingly non-instrumental values. Thus the case for the inevitability of human chauvinism, that alternatives to it must be based on an incoherent and logically and epistemically defective account of values, namely a non-instrumental account, has not been established by these arguments. & * &&&& ** **& �23. Egoism, not group selfishness, is one of the assumptions underlying the next The leading ideas of the representative series of abstract defences of chauvinism. argument we first consider are essentially those of social contract theories. This argument takes the following form (the bracketed paramaeters X and Z are filled out in the representative argument respectively by: and: J. justification of moral principles, enter into contracts): The only justification of moral principles [only X] is a contractual one, i.e. the entry into contracts of agents [Zry]. K. Agents only enter into contracts [only Z] if it serves their own interests. (The egoist assumption) L. Humans [persons] are the only agents that enter into contracts [that Z]. Therefore, by K and L, M. Humans [persons] only enter into contracts [only Z] if it serves their own interests Therefore, from J and M, N. The only justification for moral principles [only X] is the (selfish) interests of humans [persons]. * The argument can be varied by different choices of parameters, X and Z. example, X could be filled out by replaced by 'community-based' For 'determination of value judgments', and 'contractual' (i.e. Z is filled out by 'are community-based' or some such) yielding in place of J the familiar premiss that the only justification of value judgments is a community-based one, and leading to a conclusion, analytically linked to D above, that all value judgments are determined by human self-interest. Alternatively just one of X or Z may be so replaced, leaving the other as in the original example . Another variation of the argument that has figured prominently in the discussion of animal rights fills out X and Z respectively by 'determination of rights' and 'belong to human society'. Under this assignment the parametric premiss The logical transitions in the argument take on more evidently valid form upon analytic transformation of the premisses, to those now illustrated:J'. All justifications of moral principles are cases of (justified by) the entry into contracts of agents. K'. All cases of the entry into contracts are cases of self-interests of agents. And so on for L' through M'. �24. J becomes essentially that commonly adopted (e.g. [4] and [5] again), but already criticised above, that 'rights are determined solely by reference to human society'. As the arguments are in each case valid, the issue of the correctness of the conclusions devolves on that of the correctness of the premisses. In each case too the arguments could be made rather more plausible by replacing 'humans' by 'persons' (and correspondingly 'human society' by 'society of persons', etc.); for otherwise premisses such as L and its variations are suspect, since there is nothing, legally or morally, to prevent consortia, organisations and other non-humans from entering into contracts (and these items are appropriately counted as persons in the larger legal sense). Given that that amendment deals with premiss L, the correctness of the arguments turns on the correctness of premisses J and K. But both these premisses are false, and premiss J imports the very chauvinism that is at issue in the conclusion. Though the representative contract argument is only one of several important variations that can be made on the general parametric argument, it is often regarded as having special appeal, because the contract model appears to explain the origin of obligation, and offer a justification for it, in a way that no other model does, and thus to provide a bulwark against moral, and political, scepticism. That the appearance is illusory, because the obligation to honour contracts is assumed at bottom, is well enough known and not our concern here. What is of concern is the correctness of representative premisses J and K. The egoist assumption K is faulted on the same grounds as egoism itself. For agents sometimes enter into contracts that are not in their own interests but are in the interests of other persons or creatures, or are undertaken on behalf of, for instance to protect, other items that do not have interests at all, e.g. rivers, buildings, forests. The attempt to represent all these undertakings as in human interests, because done in the "selfish interests" of the agents is the same as in the egoist arguments, and the resolution of the problem is the same, namely to distinguish acting, valuing, and so on, clearly from acting in one's own selfish (or in group) interests. However even if premiss K were amended to admit that agents may enter into �25. contracts on behalf of non-human items, it would still result in a form of human chauvinism given familiar assumptions, since non—human items will still be unable to create moral obligations except through a human sponsor or patron, who will, presumably, be able to choose whether or not to protect them. Natural items will generate no moral constraints unless humans freely choose to allow them to do so; since the obligatory features of moral obligation thus disappear, no genuine moral obligations can be created by natural items under such an amended account. Thus the amended premiss assumes the question at issue. Premiss J, the view that moral obligations are generated solely by contracts undertaken by moral agents, is then the crucial assumption for this argument for human chauvinism. J however has serious difficulties, for there are many recognised moral principles which apparently cannot be explained as contractually based, at least if "contract" is to be taken seriously. There is no actual contract underlying the principle that one ought not to be cruel to animals, children and others not in a position to contract. Adherents of a social contract view of moral obligation are of course inclined to withhold recognition of those moral principles that cannot be con­ tractually based, so that the contract thesis becomes not so much explanatory as pre­ scriptive. But even allowing for this, the thesis has many unacceptable consequences just concerning humans, and if the notion of contract plays a serious role, it is difficult to reconcile with the view of all humans a possessing rights. A crucial feature of contracts is that they are freely undertaken by responsible parties. If they can be freely undertaken there must be a choice with respect to them the choice of not so contracting. But then we are left with the conclusion that it is permissible to treat those who do choose not to contract as mere instruments of those who do, in the way that the non-human world is presently treated; these contractual dropouts, like those outside society, can have no rights and there can be no moral constraints on behaviour concerning them,whatever their capacity for suffering. A similar conclusion emerges if humans who are not morally responsible are considered, for although we are normally considered to have quite substantial obligations to such �26. humans, e.g. babies, young children, those who are considered mentally ill or as having diminished responsibility, they cannot themselves be free and responsible parties to a contract, and will, on the social contract view, presumably have to depend for their rights on others freely choosing to contract on their behalf. If^this does not^for some reason^) occur we will be left with a similarly unacceptable con- elusion as in the case of the contractual dropouts. Obviously then, moral obligations do not require morally equal, freehand responsible contracting parties, in the way the social contract account presupposes. Worse, the argument would appear, with but little adaptation, to justify the practices of such groups as death squads, multi­ rr nationals, and the Mafia, it! If these unacceptable conclusions are to be avoided, all humans will have to be somehow, in virtue of simply being human, subject to some mysterious, fictional, social contract which they did not freely choose to enter into, cannot get out of, and which can never exclude any member of the human species. So the unacceptable con- sequences are avoided only if crucial features of the notion of contract such as freedom and responsibility are dropped, and the notion^and premiss J so seriously weakened as to become virtually without conditions. For the argument to work the residue has to be mere common humanity, and the "contract" little more than the convention of morally considering just other members of the human species. convention differs little however from a restatement of human chauvinism; Such a the pro­ ferred explanation is really no explanation, for such a convention can neither justify human chauvinism nor, since different conventions could be arranged, explain why it is inevitable. The social contract account of moral obligation is defective because it implies that moral obligations can really only hold between responsible moral agents, and attempts to account for all moral obligation as based on contract. But of course the account is correct as an account of the origin of some types of moral obligation; there are moral obligations of a type that can only hold between free and responsible agents, and others which only apply within a social and political context. Yet other types of obligation, such as the obligation not to cause suffering, can arise only with respect to sentient or preference-having creatures - who are not necessarily morally �27. responsible — and could not significantly arise with respect to a non—sentient item such as a tree or a rock. What emerges is a picture of types of moral obligation as associated with a nest of rings or annular boundary classes, with the innermost class, consisting of highjyintelligent, social, sentient creatures, having the full range of moral obligations applicable to them, and outer classes^ such non—sentient items as rocks having only a much more restricted range of moral obliga­ trees and tions significantly applicable to them. between the rings. In some cases there is no sharp division But there is no single uniform privileged class of items, no one base class, to which all and only moral principles directly apply, and moreover the zoological class of humans is not one of the really significant boundary classes. The recognition that some types of moral obligation can only apply within the context of a particular sort of society or through contract does nothing to support the case of human chauvinism. The failure of the contract theory nevertheless leaves the issue as to whether there is some logical or categorial restriction on what can be the object of moral obligations, which would reinstate human chauvinism or animal chauvinism. There is however no such restriction on the object place of the obligation relation to humans or sentient creatures. Even if the special locution 'Y has an obligation towards X' requires that X is at least a preference-having creature, there are other locutions which are not so restricted, and one can perfectly well speak of having duties toward land and of having obligations concerning or with respect to such items as mountains and rivers, and without necessarily implying that such moral constraints arise only in an indirect fashion. Thus neither natural language nor the logic of moral concepts rules out the possibility of non-sentient items creating direct moral constraints. There is then, given this point and the annular model, no need to opt for the position of Leopold [12] as the only alternative to human (or animal) chauvinism, that is for a position which simply transfers to natural items the full set of rights and obligations applicable to humans, leading to such non-significance as that rocks have obligations to mountains. Distinctions between the moral constraints appropriate to different types of items can be recognised without leading back to human chauvinism. The point is an important one since many objections to allowing moral obligations to �28. extend beyond the sphere of humans, or in some cases the sphere of sentient creatures, depend on ignoring such distinctions, on assuming that it is a question of transferring the full set of rights and obligations appropriate to intelligent social creatures to such items as trees and rivers - that the alternative to chauvinism is therefore an irrational and mystical animism concerning nature (cf. Passmore [9], p. 187 ff.). ***** * * The ecological restatement of the strong version of human chauvinism, according to which items outside the privileged human class have zero intrinsic value, is the Dominion thesis, the view that the earth and all its non-human contents exist or are available for man's benefit and to serve his interests, and hence that man is entitled to manipulate the world and its systems as he wants, that is^ in his interests. The thesis indeed follows, given fairly uncontroversial, analytic, assumptions, from the conclusions of the main chauvinistic arguments examined, notably D, that values are determined through human interests. The earth and all its non-human contents thus have no intrinsic value, at best instrumental value, and so can create no direct moral constraints on human action. For what has only instrumental value is already written down, in this framework, as serving human interests. And since what has no instru­ mental value cannot be abused or have its value diminished, it is permissible for humans to treat it as they will in accord with their interests. thesis. Ergo the Dominion Conversely, if non-human items are available for man's use, interests and benefits, they can have no value except insofar as they answer his interests. Other­ wise there would be restrictions on his behaviour with respect to them, since not any sort of behaviour is permissible as regards independently valuable items. value is determined through man's interests, i.e. D holds. is strictly equivalent to D. implies human chauvinism. Accordingly Thus the Dominion thesis It follows that the Dominion thesis, like D, strictly Conversely, the strong version of human chauvinism strictly implies D, and so the Dominion thesis, completing the sketch of the equivalence argument. Since the positions are equivalent what counts against one also counts against the others. In particular, then, the Dominion thesis is no more inevitable This view encompasses what Passmore [9] has isolated as the Western environmental ideologies, both the dominant view and the lesser traditions: see [10]. �29. than, and just as unsatisfactory as, strong human chauvinism. The upshot is that the dominant ethical systems of our times, those clustered as the western ethic, and other kindred human chauvinistic systems, are far less defensible, and less satisfactory, than has been commonly assumed, and lack an adequate, and non-arbitrary, basis. Furthermore alternative theories are far less incoherent than is commonly claimed, especially by philosophers. are viable alternatives to the Dominion thesis, Yet although there the natural world is rapidly being preempted in favour of human chauvinism - and of what it ideologically underwrites, the modern economic-industrial superstructure - by the elimination or over-exploitation of those things that are not considered of sufficient instrumental value for human beings. Witness the of the non-human world, the assaults being made on tropical rainforests, surviving temperate wildernesses, wild animals, the oceans, to list only a few of the victims of man's assault on the natural world. Observe also the associated measures to bring primitive or recalcitrant peoples into the Western consumer society and the spread of human chauvinist value systems. The time is fast approaching when questions raised by an environmental ethic will cease to involve live options. As things stand at present however, the ethical issues generated by the preemptions - especially given the weakness and inadequacy of the ideological and value—theoretical basis on which the damaging chauvinistic transformation of the world is premissed, and the viability of alternative environmental ethics - are not merely of theoretical interest, but are among the most important and urgent questions of our times, perhaps, that human beings, whose individual or group self-interest is the source of most environmental problems, have ever asked themselves. R. and V. Routley Plumwood Mountain Braidwood Australia 2622 �References [1] R. and V. Routley, 'Human chauvinism and environmental ethics', mimeographed, privately circulated, 1974. [2] P.H. Nowell-Smith, Ethics, Penguin, London, 1954. [3] R. and V. Routley, 'Semantical foundations for value theory', Nous (forthcoming) [4] D.G. Ritchie, Natural Rights, Allen and Unwin, London, 1894. [5] J. Passmore, 'The treatment of animals', Journal of the History of Ideas, _36 (1975), 195-218. [6] T. Regan and P. Singer (editors), Animal Rights and Human Obligations, Prentice- Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1976. [7] J. Wisdom, Other Minds, Blackwell, Oxford, 1952. [8] R. Routley, 'The semantical metamorphosis of metaphysics', Australasian Journal of Philosophy^5A (1976),157. [9] [10] J. Passmore, Man's Responsibility for Nature, Duckworth, London, 1974. V. Routley, Critical Notice of [9], Australasian Journal of Philosophy 53. (1975) 171-185. [11] H.J. McCloskey, 'Rights', Philosophical Quarterly, 15 (1965), 115-127. [12] A. Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, with other essays on conservation from Round River, Ballantine, New York, 1966. [13] K. Baier and N. Rescher (editors), Values and the Future, the impact of techno­ logical change on American values, The Free Press, New York, 1969. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Draft Papers Description An account of the resource Sylvan's literary executor encountered an archive in which “all his projects were current", since manuscripts were undated and unattributed. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document AGAINST THE INEVITABILITY OF HUMAN CHAUVINISM In our enlightened times, when most forms of chauvinism have been abandoned at least in theory by those who consider themselves progressive, western ethics still appears to retain, at its very heart, a fundamental form of chauvinism, namely, human chauvinism. ethical theories For both popular western thought and most western assume that both value and morality can ultimately be reduced to matters of interest or concern to the class of humans. Class chauvinism, in the relevant sense, is substantially differential, discriminatory, and inferior treatment (characteristically, but not necessarily, by members of the privileged class) of items outside the class, for which there is not sufficient justification. Human chauvinism, like other varieties of chauvinism, can take stronger and weaker forms; an example of the weaker form is the Greater Value Thesis, the invariable allocation of greater value or preference, on the basis of species, to humans, while not however entirely excluding non-humans from moral consideration and claims. We will be concerned primarily with strong forms of human chauvinism, which see value and morality as ultimately concerned entirely with humans, and non-human items as having value or creating constraints on human action only insofar as these items serve human interests or purposes. In recent years, since the rise of the 'environmental consciousness', there has been increasing, if still tentative, questioning of this exclusive concern with, or at least heavy bias towards, human interests; and indeed, at a time when human beings are rapidly accelerating their impact on the natural world, the question as to the validity of this basic assumption is not merely an abstract one, but is of immediate and practical concern in its implications for This thesis has, among other unacceptable outcomes, the consequence that, if there is only room in one's boat for one and one must choose between saving Adolf Hitler and a wombat which has lived a decent and kindly life and never harmed a living creature, one is morally obligated to choose the former. That would not be the choice of the authors. 2. human action. In reply to this questioning (which appears to originate largely from people with environmental interests), modern moral philosophers - fulfilling their now established function of providing a theoretical superstructure to explain and justify contemporary moral sensibilities, questioning fundamental assumptions - tend to argue that the bias towards human interests, which is an integral part of going ethical theories, is not just another form of class chauvinism which it is both possible and desirable to eliminate, but rather a restriction dictated by the logic of evaluative and moral concepts, and that there is no coherent, possible or viable alternative to the "human chauvinism" of standard ethical theories. series of In this paper we want to consider and reject a arguments in the theory of value designed to show that this is so, and thereby to advance the cause of an alternative, non-chauvinistic, environmental ethic. The orthodox defence of human chauvinism argues that it is inevitable that humans should be taken as the exclusive subjects of value and morality. Humans are uniquely and exclusively qualified for moral consideration and attributions of value, according to this defence either because the human species alone does, as a matter of fact, possess properties which are a pre­ condition for such ascriptions or because, as a matter of the definition or the logic or the significance of moral concepts in natural language, such considerations are restricted, as a matter of logic, to the human species. In the first case the restriction of morality and value to the human species will be taken as contingent, in the second necessary. In either case, if the argument is correct, the bias in favour of humans in current theories is inescapable, so that, depending on one's definition of chauvinism, either human chauvinism itself is inevitable, or human bias is, because justifiable, not a real chauvinism at all. We shall consider the logical or definitional approach first. According to the definitional approach, moral and evaluative terms are, as a matter of their definitions, restricted in their application to members of the human species; only in a secondary way at best do such terms find a 3. wider application, according as evaluated items are instrumental to human interests. The thesis is often backed up by the production of definitions which are so restricted, for example, 'the value of a thing is its capacity to confer a benefit on someone, to make a favourable difference to his life' (Baier, in [13], p. 40), where in the intended context 'someone' is obviously restricted to humans. The attempt to preserve human chauvinism in an unchallengeable form through definitions involves the fallacy of taking definitions to be self­ validating and unchallengeable, and appears to be based on the confusion of abbreviative definitions with those involving or presupposing substantive claims, such as creative definitions, which may be accepted or rejected. Such definitions as those above, cannot be merely abbreviative because they attempt to characterise or explicate already understood terms, such as 'moral' or 'value'. Worse still, they do so in a way which is not dictated by prevailing usage - which does not require that moral and value terms be restricted in range to human:in order that they continue to apply to humans in the ordinary way. Alternative definitions which do not so restrict the range of application may be supplied, they can in fact be found by looking up dictionaries, and these alternatives quite properly do not close off genuine issues which natural language itself leaves open. The fallacy of the definitional move is that of believing that by converting the substantive evaluative theses of human chauvinism to matters of definition they become somehow exempt from challenge or need for justification. This is comparable to justifying discriminatory membership for a club by referring to the rules, similarly conceived as self-validating and exempt from question or justification. Since a similar move could obviously be employed to limit membership of the Moral Club to say, white male humans in place of humans, it is plain that such a definitional argument does far too much, and is capable of use to produce completely unacceptable conclusions. But of course substantive theses involved in definitions, like club rules, are not exempt from challenge and may be arbitrary, undesirable, restrictive, c/ 4. and in need of justification. Once this is grasped the definitional move can be seen as entirely question-begging, since the question of the acceptability and inevitability of human chauvinism is simply transformed into the question of the acceptability and inevitability of the definition. The production of such human chauvinist definitions has done nothing to advance the case of human chauvinism, other than to throw a spurious air of unchallangeability and over the highly challengeable and arbitrary substantive theses they embody. The attempt to settle substantive issues 'by definition' is both philosophically facile and methodologically unsound, and is especially so when there are clearly alternative definitions which would not settle the issue in the same way. What, however, of the substantive claim presupposed by the definitional move, namely that as a matter of natural language usage, or the logic of moral and evaluative concepts, the meaning of moral and value terms, it is logically necessary that direct, non-instrumental, application of such terms be restricted to the human (a claim made at least in the case of rights by Ritchie [4], p. 107, and subsequently by Passmore [5] and [9]^,p. 116, 189, Ay and,others). But usually, when it is asserted that non-humans cannot have rights, obligations and such like, what sort of 'cannot' is involved is not specified - whether it is a 'cannot' of logical impossibility, or of non-significance or absurdity, or something else again (the point is nicely illustrated by Feinberg's discussion of McCloskey, McCloskey [11] itself). in p. 195 , and by In any case, however, the thesis appears to be mistaken, for it rules out as logically impossible or absurd a number of positions and theses which are very plainly neither and which it may even, in some circumstances, be important to consider. For example, it is surely neither impossible nor absurd to consider moral questions concerning conduct of humans towards other species, e.g. to a race of sensitive and intelligent extraterrestrial beings, and similarly moral questions arising from their conduct towards or concerning humans, indeed science fiction writ .ers do this commonly without producing nonsense or contradicting themselves. Not only does the proposed restriction appear quite 5. mistaken given current usage, but there seems indeed to be something logically unsound about the attempt to place a logical restriction to a particular species on such terms, just as there would be in restricting membership of the Moral Club to people with blue eyes and blond hair who are over 6 feet tall. The accident of being a zoological human, defined in terms of various physical characteristics, cannot be morally relevant. It is impossible to restrict moral terms to particular species, when species distinctions are defined in terms of physical characteristics which are not morally relevant. More generally, any attempt to derive a logically necessary connection between humanity itself and the applicability of morality is bound to fail. For creatures anatomically and zoologically distinct from humans which are identical with humans in terms of all morally relevant features are logically possible, upsetting any logical linkage. tie between humanity But attempts to establish a logical and morality through features which all and only humans possess and which are themselves linked logically to morality, would, of course, involve a modal fallacy, namely that of substituting a contingent equivalence within an opaque modal conte t of logical necessity. In order for such an argument to be val? d, it would have to be logically necessary that non­ humans do not possess such features, not merely a contingent fact that they do not; but this assumption must be incorrect for morally relevant characteristics. The only proposal which has ac/n/tce of succeeding, then, is the factual one which makes the selection of just humans for the Moral Club a contingent matter, the claim being that as a matter of contingent fact all and only humans possess a certain set of characteristics, which characteristics themselves are logically tied with qualification for moral consideration and for direct attribution of value to the possessor. What this contingent form of human chauvinism has to produce then, in order to establish its case, is a set of characteristics which satisfy the following conditions of adequacy: 6. 1. The set of characteristics must be possessed by at least all properly functioning humans, since to omit any significant category usually considered subject to moral consideration, such as infants, young children, primitive tribesmen etc., and to allow that it was permissible to treat these gro^J^L^ in the way it is considered permissible to treat non-humans, ^s mere instruments, would certainly be repuguant to modern moral sensibilities, and would offend common intuitions as to the brotherhood of man, the view that all humans are possessors of inalienable rights. Thus human chauvinism, if it is to produce a coherent theory which does not unacceptably rule out some groups of humans must find some set of features common to the most diverse members of humankind, from Rio Tinto executives to hunter-gatherer tribes of Amazonian Indians, from those who engage in highly abstract activities such as logic and mathematics to those who cannot, from the literate and cultured to the illiterate and uncouth, from the poet and professor to the infant. This alone will be no easy task. 2. In order for human chauvinism to be justified this set of characteristics must not be possessed by any non-human. 3. The set of characteristics must not merely be morally relevant,but sufficient to justify, in a non-circular way, the cut-off of moral consideration at exactly the right point. If human chauvinism is to avoid the charge of arbitrariness and unjustifiability, and demonstrate its inevitability and the impossibility of alternatives, it must emerge from the characteristicj why items not having may be used as mere instruments to serve the interests of those which do possess There must be some explanatory logical connection between the set of characteristics and membership of the Moral Club. Chauvinists aie. fc stress distinguishing points between the privileged class and those outside it - and there is no lack of characteristics which distinguish humans from non-humans, at least functioning healthy adult ones. The point is that these distinctions usually do not warrant the sort of radically inferior treatment for which they are 7. proposed as a rationale. On the basis of the characteristics then the proposed radical difference in treatment between the privileged and non­ privileged class and the purely instrumental treatment of the non-privileged class, must be warranted, that is, the distinguishing characteristics must be able to carry the moral superstructure placed upon them. A large and exceedingly disparate collection of features has been suggested as distinguishing humans from non-humans and justifying human chauvinism. But it turns out that every one of these, on examination, either fails to pick out the desired privileged class of humans in an unequivchcal fashion, that is, it applies to some non-humans or excludes some humans who should not be excluded, or, when it does select the desired class, fails on condition 3, and does not warrant the exclusive claim to moral consideration of the privileged class. Many suggested criteria in fact fail on more than one count. The traditional distinction between humans and the rest in terms of rationality illustrates the point. Once the theological doctrines of the exclusively human soul on which the distinction once rested are abandoned, it is not so easy to see what is meant by this term. Indeed it often appears to function as little more than a self-congratulatory predicate applied exclusively to humans, with no other clear function at all. clarifications are sometimes offered. However various For example rationality may be said to be the ability to reason, this being tested by such basically linguistic performances as the ability to do lo^ic, to prove theorems, to draw conclusions from arguments and to engage in inductive and deductive linguistic behaviour. But such stringent and linguistically-loaded criteria will eliminate far too many members of the human species who cannot perform these tasks. If, however, behavioural criteria for rationality are adopted, or the ability to solve problems and to fit attion to individual goals becomes the test - that is, practical reasoning is the test - it is obvious that many non-human admission to the Moral Club, rather than the ability to perform some other tasks or meet some other set of standards, such as orienteering ability,the ability to mix concrete (the use of concrete being, afte^all, a far more conspicuous feature of modern human society than the use of reason). One senses also in the appeal to such criteria (andespecially to linguistic criteria) the overvaluation of the things in which the privileged class typically excells and the undervaluation of the skills - not obviously^ in any non—circular way inferior - of the non-privileged class, which is such a typical feature of chauvinism. We list some of the suggested characteristics supposedly justifying human chauvinism, and indicate in brackets after each some of the conditions they fail: using tools (fails 1, 2, 3), altering the environment (1, 2, 3), the ability to communicate (1, 2, 3), the ability to use and learn language (1, 2, 3), the ability to use and learn English (1, 3), possession of consciousness (2, 3), self-consciousness or self-awareness (1, 2?, 3), having a conscience (1, 2?, 3), having a sense of shame (1, 2?, 3), being aware of oneself as an agent or initiator (1, 2, 3), having awareness (2, 3), being aware of one's existence (1, 2?, 3), being aware of the inevitability of one's own death (1, 2?, 3), being capable of self-deception (1, 3), being able to ask questions about moral issues such as human chauvinism (1, 3), having a mental life (2, 3), being able to play games (1, 2, 3), being able to laugh (1, 3), to laugh at oneself (1, 3), being able to make jokes (1, 3), having interests (2, 3), having projects (1, 2, 3), being able to assess some of one's performances as successful or not (1, 2, 3), enjoying freedom of action (2, 3), being able to vary one's behaviour outside a narrow range of insttnctu al behaviour (1, 2, 3), belonging to a social community (1, 2, 3), being morally responsible for one's actions (1), being able to love (1, 2), being capable of altruism (1, 2), being capable of being a Christian, or capable of religious faith (1, 3), being able to produce the items of (human) civilisation grid, culture * (1, 3). * This feature typifies a number of rather circular distinguishing characteristics, or at least ones which raise serious theob^. tical problems for human chauvinism, because they attempt to explain the unique value of humans in terms of their ability to produce items which are taken to be independently valuable, thus contradicting human chauvinism (see the discussion in [10],/?.;77/, It appears that none of these criteria meet the conditions of adequacy; furthermore it seems most unlikely that any other characteristic or any cowbinlation of the^characteristics does so. Thus we conclude that these contingent direct arguments for human & chauvinism^not establish its inevitability, and that indeed the position rests on a shaky base and so f^r lacks a coherent theoretical justification. Human chauvinism cannot be restored by a detour through the concept of a person, that is by linking perso/JnoocL with membership of the /* foral (lub, and identifying the class of persons contingently with the class of humans. For then the same problem as above arises with different terminology even if the of person since, can be specified in such a way as to justify the restriction of moral privileges to persons, the class of persons will then not conicin the way human chauvinism requires^ with the class of humans, but will either include a great many non-humans or exclude a good many humans^morally considered. Attempts to enlarge the privileged class, for example to persons (broadly specified), or to sentient or preference having creatures, may avoid many of the problems of arbitrariness and justification which face the strong form of human chauvinism, but, as we shall argue, face a set of problems of coherence and consistency common to all instrumentalist theories of value and morality. ******* There are a number of indirect arguments for human chauvinism based on features of value and morality. argument We turn now to consider these. One abstract which is supposed to establish that values are, or must, be determined through the interests of humans or persons - a central argument underlying chauvinism - takes the following form:- 10. A. Values are determined through the preference rankings of valuers. (The no detachable values assumption). B. Valuers' preference rankings are determined through valuers' interests. (The preference reduction thesis). C. Valuers are humans [persons]. (The species assumption). Therefore: D. Values are determined through human interests [through the interests of persons]. Hence, it is sometimes concluded, not only is it perfectly acceptable for humans to reduce matters of value and morality to matters of human interest, there is no rational or possible alternative to doing so: any alternative is simply incoherent. Although th{$ argument does not, so far as we are aware, appear anywhere with its premisses explicitly stated, it does seem to reflect the sorts of considerations those who claim that there is no rational or coherent alternative to organising everything in human interests usually have in mind. Of course once the premisses are exposed, it is easier to see that this initially persuasive argument, like others in the area, rests on fallacious assumptions. y<2^ — We shall claim that although the argument to conclusion D is formally^given only some quite conventional assumptions such as that the relation of determin­ ation or functionality is appropriately transitive and the principle of replacement of necessary identicals - not all the premisses should be accepted. The argument can be treated as the major representative of a family of similar arguments. For there are many variations that can be made on the argument with a view to amending it, tightening it, varying or strengthening its conclusion, and so on. Our criticisms of the argument will, for the most part, transfer to the variations. qualifies the determining relation; A first group of variations replaces or for example, 'determined through' or 'determined by' may be replaced by 'answer back to', of', 'can be reduced to', or 'are a function of'. 'reflect', 'are a matter (The latter functional form makes it plain that 'determined' has to mean 'exactly determined', which 11. ensures that no extraneous factors enter into the chauvinistic determination: mere partial determination would be quite compatible with the rejection of human chauvinism.) Alternatively, 'determined' may be modally upgraded to 'have to be determined', in order to reveal the sheer necessity of conclusion D. (In this case it is essential that premiss C be of modal strength, and not merely contingent as it would be if the original form were retained; other­ wise the argument would contain a modal fallacy.). Another familiar, and appealing, variation we have already bracketed into the form of the argument given; class by persons. namely the replacement of humans as base This straightaway increases the cogency of premiss C, which otherwise - while better than, say, 'Valuers are white (North American) humans' - would at best be contingently true (which is not good enough for the argument and in fact appears false, since some valuers may not be human; and certainly not all humans are valuers), while at worst it is simply a circular way of reintroducing the logical version of human chauvinism by rest^cting the class of valuers a priori to humans. That all valuers are persons may be made analytic on the sense of 'person' - given a redefinition of 'person' away from its normal English usage, which philosophical English appears to almost tolerate - thus shielding premiss C from criticism. Other base classes than persons can replace humans in premiss C, for example animals, thus leading to the conclusion, of animal chauvinism, that values are determined through the interests (considerations and concerns) of animals, sentient creatures, or whatever. In the end, of course premiss C could be absorbed (as: Valuers are valuers or valuing creatures) and accordingly omitted, leaving the conclusion: Values are determined in the interests of valuers. However even the analytic form of premiss C does not, as we shall see, save the argument. Much the same applies in the case of premiss A. The premiss is certainly not unobjectionable in the usual sense of 'determined'; but there are ways of repairing it so that the argument still works in a sufficiently damaging form, and one way goes as follows:— What is true, analytically, if sufficiently many valuers are taken into account, is that values are deter­ 12. mined through the value rankings of valuers. Value rankings cannot however be cashed in for preference rankings since, as is well-known, preference rankings and value rankings can diverge: value and can value what is not preferred. a valuer can prefer what has less Let us amend the argument then - so that we can locate the real cause of damage - by replacing premiss A by the following premiss: A^. Values are determined through the value rankings of (appropriate) valuers. Correspondingly B will be adjusted to B^ in which 'value' replaces 'preference'. The really objectionable premiss in the central argument is neither premiss A nor premiss C, but premiss B - or, more exactly, where A is repaired, premiss B^. Suspicion of premiss B may be aroused by noticing that it plays an exactly parallel role in the class chauvinism argument to that the critical premiss BE. One's preferences of choices are always determined through self-interest, plays in familiar arguments for egoism, that whatever course of action one adopts, it is always really adopted in one's own selfish interests. The argument for egoism runs along the following, parallel, lines:- AE. Individual persons [agents) always act (in freely chosen cases) in the way they prefer or choose, i.e. in accordance with their preference rankings. BE. Individual preference rankings are always determined through ^reflect) self­ interest. Therefore: There is nonetheless an esoteric, semantical, sense of 'determined' in which premiss A is demonstrably true, and so a sense in which it is analytically true that value rankings are semantically determined by the preference rankings of situations by a class of valuers. The details of these semantical foundations for values are set out in 131. But while premiss A can be corrected by replacing 'determined' by 'semantically determined' and giving this an appropriate construal, such a move would do nothing to restore the intended argument: for it would either invalidate the argument, through change in the key middle term 'determined', or, alternatively, if 'determined' is systematically replaced throughout the argument, drastically alter the intended conclusion D - so that looking at the interests that humans in fact have would no longer provide a guide to values (instead the interests of hypothetical valuers with respect to worlds that never exist or could exist would have to be gathered). 13. DE. Individual persons ^agents] always act in ways determined by self interest [that reflect their own interests^. Thereafter follows the slide from in their own interests^ to to their own advantage, or for their own uses or purposes. The final conclusion of egoism again parallelling the class chauvinism case, is not only that the egoistic position is perfectly in order and thoroughly rational but that there are no alternatives, that there is, or at least ought to be, no other way of acting, 'that men can only choose to do what is in their own interests or that it is only rational to do this' ([2], p. 140). Thus human chauvinism, as based on the central argument, stands revealed as a form of group selfishness, group egoism one might almost say. Likewise the criticisms of the Group Selfishness argument, as we shall now call the central argument, parallel those of egoism, in particular premiss B (B ) succumbs to similar objections to those that defeat premiss BE (BE^). Group selfishness is no more acceptable than egoism, since it depends on exactly the same set of confusions between values and advantages, and slides on such terms as 'interests', as the arguments on which egoism rests. Nowell-Smith's very appealing critique of egoism ([2], p. 140-144) may, by simple paraphrase, be converted into a critique of group selfishness. recast B^ and BE" *" This is obvious once we and set them side by side: BE^. Individual value rankings are determined through (individual) self­ interest; and B^. Valuers' [groups'] value rankings are determined through valuers' (group) interests [joint interests of groups]. Because, however, one sets up or selects one's own preference or value rankings, it does not follow that they are set up or selected in one's own interests; similarly in group cases, because a group determines its own rankings, it does not follow that it determines them in its own interests. Just as BE^ is, prima facie at least, refuted by a range of examples where value, and also preference, rankings run counter to self-interest, e.g. cases of altruism, so prima facie at least, B is refuted by examples where value, and also overall preference rankings, vary from group interests, e.g. cases of In the case group altruism. of limited groups examples are easy to locate, e.g. resistance movements, environmental action groups, and so on; case, however, of the larger human group in the are bound to be more controversial (since B^ unlike BE^ is a live thesis), but are still easy to find, especially if future humans are discounted, e.g. it is in humans' selfish interests to have plentiful supplies of this and that, electricity from uranium, oil, Me were Sy/Z/ey whalemeat, fish, etc., right now rather than^which would result from restraint, but altruistic value rankings would rank the latter above the former. It is often in selfish human interests (no less selfish because pertaining to a group) to open up and develop the wilderness, strip mine the earth, exploit animals, and so on, but environmentalists who advocate not doing so, in many cases not merely because of future humans, are apparently acting not just out of their own or human group interests. But, just as BE^ is not demolished by such counterexamples of apparently altruistic action, neither is B : in each case it can be made out that further selfish interests are involved, e.g., in the case of B , that an agent did what he did, an altruistic action, because he liked doing it. As Nowell-Smith explains in the egoism case, interest is written in as an internal accusative, thereby rendering such theses as BE^ true at the cost, however, of trivialising them. More generally, valuing something gets written in as a further sort of "interest"; whatever valuers value that does not seem to be in their interests is said to provide a further interest, either the value itself or an invented value surrogate; for example^the environmentalist who works to retain a wilderness he never expects to see may be said to be so acting because he has an interest in or derives benefit or advantage from just knowing it exists, just as he would be in the egoist case. theses can be retained; By such strategies the for then a valued item really is in valuers interests, in the extended sense, even if they are in obvious ways seriously inconvenienced 15. by it, i.e. even if it is not in their interests in the customary sense. ', * Thus.BE' like 4^', is preserved by stretching the elastic term 'interests', in a way that it too readily admits, to include values, or value surrogates, among interests. Then however the conclusion of the &roup Selfishness argument loses its intended force, and becomes the platitude that values are determined through valuers' values , just as egoism, under the extension a which makes us all covert egoists,loses its sting and becomes,platitude. It can be seen that human chauvinism in this form, like egoism, derives its plausibility from vacillation in the sense of 'interests', with a resulting fluctuation between a strong false thesis - the face of^chauvinism usually presented - and a trivial analytic thesis,between paradox and platitude.-^ To sum up the dilemma for the argument then:- when 'interest' is used in its weaker sense premiss B may be accepted but the argument does not establish its intended conclusion or in any way support human chauvinism. intended effect of the argument, in the crude form is this: values it is enough to look at human advantage: For the in determining nothing else counts. If the argument were correct, then one could assess values by checking out the local (selfish) advantage of humans, or, more generally, the advantage of the base class somehow assembled. If, on the other hand, 'interest' is used in its strong sense, the conclusion would lice^'hce a form of human chauvinism, but premiss B now fails. Most philosphers think they know how to discredit the egoist arguments. It is curious indeed then, that an argument which is regarded as so unsatisfactory in the individual case - that for egoism - remains unchallenged and is still considered so convincing in a precisely parallel group case - that for human chauvinism. ******** The technique of rescuing philosphical theses by natural extensions and accompanying redefinitions of terms, including the thesis "We're all selfish really", is delightfully explained in Wisdom [7], chapter 1. 16. The Group Selfishness argument is often employed in another way, as the presentation for a choice between the conclusion D, that value is determined by or reducible to a matter of human interests, and the denial of premiss A, which denial is seen as entailing a commitment to a detached,intrinsic or naturalistic theory of value. Thus, it may be said either one accepts the conclusion, with its consequent instrumentalist account of value, or one is committed to an intrinsic or detached value theory which takes values to be completely independent of valuers, and no way determined by them. But, it is assumed, the latter theory is well known as untenable, and may even be seen as involving mysticism or as irrational ^e.g. by Passmore [9], chapter 7). Thus it may be concluded, there is no real coherent alternative to such an instrumental account of value, and hence no real alternative to human chauvinism. The form of the argument then, is essentially: *^A v D, but A,therefore D, or, if a stronger connection, of intensional disjunction, is intended: but A, therefore D. It can be seen that the main premiss, -A v D, has resulted from the exportation and suppression of premisses B and C of the Group argument. ^A, Selfishness This suppression does nothing to improve the standing of the premisses although it does have the (possibly advantageous) effect of making it more difficult to see the fallacious assumptions on which it is based. For of course the choice a false one, and for precisely the same reasons that led us to say that premiss B was false. To reject the instrumentalist conclusion D is by no means to be committed to ^A, or to the view that the valuer's and their preference rankings play no role in determining values and that values are a further set of mysterious independent items in the world somehow perceived by valuers through a special (even mystical and non—rational) moral sense. Valuers' ; * preference rankings may be admitted to play an important role in evaluation are still not committed to D unless we assume - what amounts to premiss B these preference rankings reflect, or can be reduced to, valuers' interests. * on page 16a we that 16a Value rankings can be semantically analysed in terms of preference or interest rankings, as in [3]; but this does not offer a reduction of values to preferences or interests, as [8] explains. The semantical foundations, while conceding nothing to subjectivism or instrumentalism, make it easy to concede main points of the case (attributed to Dewey) against detached values, against the view that there are values somehow out there (in Meinong's aussersein), purely naturalistic values completely detached from all valuers, or from all preference rankings of valuers. Put differently, there are no values that do not somehow answer back to preference rankings of valuers, and so no values that are entirely detached from valuers and valuational activity such as preference-ranking of situations. But the answering back is made explicit and precise by the semantical analysis, not by any syntactical reduction or translation of value statements into statements about valuers' preference or interest rankings; and the valuers of the analysis are, like the situations introduced, ideal and need in no way exist. As a result then, valuations may be independent of the aggregated preference rankings of all actual humans or, for that matter, of all persons over all time. Thus too the semantical analysis makes it easy to navigate a course between the alternatives of two influential false dichotomies, to the effect that values are either instrumental or else detached, or that values are either subjective or else detached. For though a semantical analysis can be given, upsetting the detached value thesis, no translation or syntactical reduction of the sort subjectivism assumes is thereby effected. 17. The dichotomy frequently presented between instrumentalist accounts of value, on the one hand, and detached theories (or what are mistakenly taken to be the same, intrinsic theories) is, for the same reason, a false one. Instrumental theories are those which attempt to reduce value to what is instrumental to^contribute$to a stated goal. Typically such theories take the goal to be the furtherance of the interest of a privileged class; for example the goal may be taken to be determined in terms of the interests, concerns, advantage or welfare of the class of humans, or of persons, or of sentient creatures, depending on the type of chauvinism. In particular, human chauvinist theories are, characteristically, instrumentalist theories. In contrast,an item is valued intrinsically where it is valued for its own sake, and not merely as a means to something further; and an intrinsic value theory allows that some items are intrinsically valuable. Intrinsic theories then, instrumental contrast with Z. theories, and what 'intrinsic' tells us is no more than that the item taken as intrinsically valuable is not valued merely as a means to some goal, i.e. is not merely instrumentally valued. Accordingly detached value theories, since disjoint from instrumental theories, are a subclass of intrinsic value theories; be detached: and they are a proper subclass since intrinsic values need not something may be valuable in itself without its value being detached from all valuing experience. It is evident, furthermore, that the identification of intrinsic and detached value theories presupposed in the argument is no more than a restatement of the false dichotomy -^A v D, or ^A, The assumption i.e. non-instrumental, therefore detached^that if preference or value rankings are involved at all the resulting assignments must be instrumental is either false or or is variation of the fallacious premiss B which plays a crucial role in the Group Selfishness and Egoist arguments; the variation is that if value or preference rankings are involved they must reflect valuers' interests, therefore such values are instrumental, because the items valued are valued according as they reflect valuers interest, therefore according as they are a means to the end of satisfying the valuers' interest. It follows that intrinsic value theories 18. may allow for a third way between instrumental and detached theories, because of the possibility of value rankings (and also preference rankings) which are not themselves set up in a purely instrumentalist way, that is attributing value to aiitem only according as it is a means to some goal. The argument that there is no coherent alternative to instrumentalism does not however rely just on misrepresenting alternative intrinsic accounts as logically incoherent by assimilating them to detached accounts. It also trades on a contemporary insensitivity to the serious logical and epistemological problems of instrumental accounts of value, problems which were well known to classical philosophers (see e.g., Aristotle Metaphysics, 994b9-16) It does not appear to be widely realised that the classical arguments apply not just to a few especially shaky instrumentalist theories which adopt questionable goals but to instrumentalism in general, since they assume only quite general features of the instrumentalist position. Instrumentalist positions take as valuable (or in the moral case, as creating moral constraints) just what contributes to a stated end. which comes to mind is utilitarianism. An obvious example However in the more general case we are concerned with, of instrumentalist forms of human chauvinism, there may be a set of goalnot just a single goal such as that of maximising net happiness of humans; the human chauvinist assumption is that the values (indeed constraints) are goal-reducible, and that all goals reduce in some way to human goals, or at least can be assessed in terms of human concerns and interests. Human chauvinist positions are not necessarily instrumental, but those that are not (e.g. the position that just humans and nothing else are intrinsically valuable) tend to make the arbitrary chauvinistic nature of their assumptions unwisely explicit - most successful contempory chauvinisms being covert ones. Problems for instrumentalism arise (as Aristotle observed) when questions are asked about the status of the goal itself. Instrumentalism relies entirely for its plausibility upon selecting a set of goats which are widely accepted and are, in 19. It relies at bottom on an implicit the theory, implicitly treated as valuable. valuation which cannot itself be explained in purely instrumental terms. Of course a value assumption is not eliminated on this fashion: the general consensus it is merely hidden under that such a goal is appropriate, that such an end is valuable. But the strategy of successful instrumentalism is to avoid recognition of the fact that the goal is, and indeed must be, implicitly treated as valuable, by selecting a set of goals so much part of the framework of comtemporary thought, so entrenched and habitual 3s a valued item by humans that the value attached to the goal becomes virtually invisible, at least to those the framework. Thus it is with the assumption of human chauvinist instrumentalism that goals are exclusively determinable in terms of human interest. The basic, convincing and self-evident character of this assumption rests on nothing more than the shared beliefs of the privileged class of humans concerning the paramount and exclusive importance of their own interests and concerns, on a valuational assumption or goal which is ^'self-evident'" because it is advantageous and is habitual. The consensus features, of which instrumentalists make so much, are nothing more than the consensus of the privileged class about the goal of maintaining consensus of interests. their own privilege, i.e. a This sort of agreement of course shows very little about the well-grountiness of the position. Unless the goals set are widely accepted as valuable, the account will be unconvincing to those who do not share the goal and even to those who appreciate that it is possible to reject the goal. In order for instrumentalism to work logically however, the goal must be implicitly treated within the theory as valuable, for otherwise the proposed analysis loses explanatory and justificatory power and lacks compulsion. For how can the value of an item be explained and justified in terms of its contribution to an end not itself considered valuable! Serious problems also arise about the nature of value statements under the instrumentalist analysis unless the goal is treated as valuable. For if the goals themselves are not so treated within the theory, but are taken simply as unevaluated facts, then a valuational statement 'x is valuable' becomes, under the proposed analysis, 20. simply the statement that x tends to produce a certain result, to contribute to certain human states, a statement whose logical status, openness to verification, allowance for disagreement, and so on, does not substantially differ from that statement that x tends to producejoxide, to contribute to the rusting of human products. Such an account of value statements is open to the same sort of objections as other naturalistic reductions of value, for example, Mill's account the desirable in terms of the desired. of The special logical and epistemological character of value statements then, especially with respect to verification and disagreement,must be supplied in instrumentalism, if it is to be supplied at all, by the implicit treatment of the goal itself as valuable. The fact that the goaL of an instrumental account must be taken as itself valuable, gives rise to two choices. In the first, the goal is taken as itself instrumentally valuable, which creates an infinite regress. For if the end, reason or assignment for which other items are intrumentally valuable is itself only instrumentally valuable then there must in turn be some other end, reason or assignment in terms of which it is valuable (by definition of instrumental). A regress is thus begun, and if this regress is not to be viciously infinite, it must terminate in some end or feature which is taken as valuable just in itself, that is, with intrinsic values. On the alternative option the goal is not taken to be instrumentally valuable but is admitted to be valuable in some other way. Unless an 'except' clause is , so that all values are held to be account instrumental with the exception of the goal, the will of course be contextually added to the original instrumentalist inconsistent, since it is inconsistent when contextually supplied assumptions are added. For these include the assuption that the goal itself is valuable, but not in the way that the instrumentalist thesis claims is the only way possible. the goal is taken to be both valuable and not valuable. If, on the other hand, an'except^ clause is added, this amounts to an admission that the goal is taken to be non-instrumentally valuable. Thus the account may be able to retain consistency, but does so at the expense of Thus 21 explicitly admitting a value, that of the goal, which cannot be accounted for in purely instrumental terms, in short, that the gcdl is taken as intrinsically valuable. To sum up, the dilemma for the instrumentalist can be put as follows: Consider the desirability of the goal of the instrumental theory: it must implicitly be judged to be desirable, for otherwise nothing could be justified by reduction to it. or not? Ask: Is this goal also instrumentally desirable (valuable) If it is, i.e. it is only desirable as a means to a further goal, then either a regress is initiated or the same issue arises with respect to the new goal. But if it is not, then the instrumental theory is again refuted, since the goal is desirable though not desirable according to the test of the theory because it is not instrumental to the goal. Whichever ho rn of the dilemma is taken^ then> the outcome is the same: the instrumentalist must rely on treating the goal itself as implicitly valuable in a way not purely instrumental, that is, as intrinsically valuable. Thus the instrumentalist is, at bottom, guilty of precisely the same crime of which he accuses the adherent of a intrinsic account, with the added delinquency of failing to admit and face up to his basic assumptions. The logical and epistemological position of such an instrumental account is certainly no better than that of an intrinsic account, since there is logically no difference between the recognition of one intrinsic value (or one set in the case where gcals are multiple) and the recognition of many of them, ancf^lxtgical and epistemological status of the instrumentalist's account is no better than that of the goal to which his values are taken as instrumental. Since the instrumentalist has implicitly admitted the legitimacy of an intrinsic value assignment in setting up his account, he cannot claim any superiority over a more general intrinsic theory which allows for many intrinsic values, since what is legitimate in the case of one value assignment must be equally legitimate in the multiple case. 22, This abstract dilemma for human chauvinist instrumentalism is illustrated in a concrete case by Passmore's procedure in [9]; for Passmore (1) wishes to say that there is no coherent alternative to instrumental values, that an item is valuable insofar as it serves human interest, and (2) wants to explain the unique value attributed to humans in terms of their production of valuable civilised and cultural But (2) involves the admission of values, that items. of civilised items, which cannot be valuable in the way (1) states, and indeed (2) amounts to the admission of non-instrumental values. The proposed account is inconsistent because if intrinsic values are admissible in the case of civilised items, they cannot be logically ^oherent in the way (1) claims. The sort of problem faced by Passmore is however not a readily avoidable one for the instrumentalist; for if the charge of arbitary and unjustifiable human chauvinism is to be avoided by those who opt for (1), and humans are not themselves to be awarded intrinsic values,, thus conceding the logical legitimacy of intrinsic values generally, and hence the avoidability of human chauvinist accounts of value, some explanation must be provided for the exclusive value attributed to humans. But only explanation capable of justifying this valuation in a non-arbitray and non-chauvinistic way would have to refer to properties of humans, and would have to say something like: 'Humans are uniquely valuable because they alone have valuable properties x,y,z,... or produce valuable items A, B, C...'. distinguishing The list of proposed features already considered on page 8 are usually those that will be employed here. But this is to admit intrinsic value for the properties which explain the exclusive value of humans. The dilemma for the human chauvinist is that he must either take the exclusive human value assumption (the goal) as ultimate—laying him open to the charge of arbitrary chauvinism and of attributing intrinsic values to humans-or attempt to explain it* in which case he will again end by concedingly non-instrumental values. Thus the case for the inevitability of human chauvinism, that alternatives to it must be based on an incoherent and logically and epistemically defective account of values, namely a non-instrumental account, has not been established by these arguments. & * &&&& ** **& 23. Egoism, not group selfishness, is one of the assumptions underlying the next The leading ideas of the representative series of abstract defences of chauvinism. argument we first consider are essentially those of social contract theories. This argument takes the following form (the bracketed paramaeters X and Z are filled out in the representative argument respectively by: and: J. justification of moral principles, enter into contracts): The only justification of moral principles [only X] is a contractual one, i.e. the entry into contracts of agents [Zry]. K. Agents only enter into contracts [only Z] if it serves their own interests. (The egoist assumption) L. Humans [persons] are the only agents that enter into contracts [that Z]. Therefore, by K and L, M. Humans [persons] only enter into contracts [only Z] if it serves their own interests Therefore, from J and M, N. The only justification for moral principles [only X] is the (selfish) interests of humans [persons]. * The argument can be varied by different choices of parameters, X and Z. example, X could be filled out by replaced by 'community-based' For 'determination of value judgments', and 'contractual' (i.e. Z is filled out by 'are community-based' or some such) yielding in place of J the familiar premiss that the only justification of value judgments is a community-based one, and leading to a conclusion, analytically linked to D above, that all value judgments are determined by human self-interest. Alternatively just one of X or Z may be so replaced, leaving the other as in the original example . Another variation of the argument that has figured prominently in the discussion of animal rights fills out X and Z respectively by 'determination of rights' and 'belong to human society'. Under this assignment the parametric premiss The logical transitions in the argument take on more evidently valid form upon analytic transformation of the premisses, to those now illustrated:J'. All justifications of moral principles are cases of (justified by) the entry into contracts of agents. K'. All cases of the entry into contracts are cases of self-interests of agents. And so on for L' through M'. 24. J becomes essentially that commonly adopted (e.g. [4] and [5] again), but already criticised above, that 'rights are determined solely by reference to human society'. As the arguments are in each case valid, the issue of the correctness of the conclusions devolves on that of the correctness of the premisses. In each case too the arguments could be made rather more plausible by replacing 'humans' by 'persons' (and correspondingly 'human society' by 'society of persons', etc.); for otherwise premisses such as L and its variations are suspect, since there is nothing, legally or morally, to prevent consortia, organisations and other non-humans from entering into contracts (and these items are appropriately counted as persons in the larger legal sense). Given that that amendment deals with premiss L, the correctness of the arguments turns on the correctness of premisses J and K. But both these premisses are false, and premiss J imports the very chauvinism that is at issue in the conclusion. Though the representative contract argument is only one of several important variations that can be made on the general parametric argument, it is often regarded as having special appeal, because the contract model appears to explain the origin of obligation, and offer a justification for it, in a way that no other model does, and thus to provide a bulwark against moral, and political, scepticism. That the appearance is illusory, because the obligation to honour contracts is assumed at bottom, is well enough known and not our concern here. What is of concern is the correctness of representative premisses J and K. The egoist assumption K is faulted on the same grounds as egoism itself. For agents sometimes enter into contracts that are not in their own interests but are in the interests of other persons or creatures, or are undertaken on behalf of, for instance to protect, other items that do not have interests at all, e.g. rivers, buildings, forests. The attempt to represent all these undertakings as in human interests, because done in the "selfish interests" of the agents is the same as in the egoist arguments, and the resolution of the problem is the same, namely to distinguish acting, valuing, and so on, clearly from acting in one's own selfish (or in group) interests. However even if premiss K were amended to admit that agents may enter into 25. contracts on behalf of non-human items, it would still result in a form of human chauvinism given familiar assumptions, since non—human items will still be unable to create moral obligations except through a human sponsor or patron, who will, presumably, be able to choose whether or not to protect them. Natural items will generate no moral constraints unless humans freely choose to allow them to do so; since the obligatory features of moral obligation thus disappear, no genuine moral obligations can be created by natural items under such an amended account. Thus the amended premiss assumes the question at issue. Premiss J, the view that moral obligations are generated solely by contracts undertaken by moral agents, is then the crucial assumption for this argument for human chauvinism. J however has serious difficulties, for there are many recognised moral principles which apparently cannot be explained as contractually based, at least if "contract" is to be taken seriously. There is no actual contract underlying the principle that one ought not to be cruel to animals, children and others not in a position to contract. Adherents of a social contract view of moral obligation are of course inclined to withhold recognition of those moral principles that cannot be con­ tractually based, so that the contract thesis becomes not so much explanatory as pre­ scriptive. But even allowing for this, the thesis has many unacceptable consequences just concerning humans, and if the notion of contract plays a serious role, it is difficult to reconcile with the view of all humans a possessing rights. A crucial feature of contracts is that they are freely undertaken by responsible parties. If they can be freely undertaken there must be a choice with respect to them the choice of not so contracting. But then we are left with the conclusion that it is permissible to treat those who do choose not to contract as mere instruments of those who do, in the way that the non-human world is presently treated; these contractual dropouts, like those outside society, can have no rights and there can be no moral constraints on behaviour concerning them,whatever their capacity for suffering. A similar conclusion emerges if humans who are not morally responsible are considered, for although we are normally considered to have quite substantial obligations to such 26. humans, e.g. babies, young children, those who are considered mentally ill or as having diminished responsibility, they cannot themselves be free and responsible parties to a contract, and will, on the social contract view, presumably have to depend for their rights on others freely choosing to contract on their behalf. If^this does not^for some reason^) occur we will be left with a similarly unacceptable con- elusion as in the case of the contractual dropouts. Obviously then, moral obligations do not require morally equal, freehand responsible contracting parties, in the way the social contract account presupposes. Worse, the argument would appear, with but little adaptation, to justify the practices of such groups as death squads, multi­ rr nationals, and the Mafia, it! If these unacceptable conclusions are to be avoided, all humans will have to be somehow, in virtue of simply being human, subject to some mysterious, fictional, social contract which they did not freely choose to enter into, cannot get out of, and which can never exclude any member of the human species. So the unacceptable con- sequences are avoided only if crucial features of the notion of contract such as freedom and responsibility are dropped, and the notion^and premiss J so seriously weakened as to become virtually without conditions. For the argument to work the residue has to be mere common humanity, and the "contract" little more than the convention of morally considering just other members of the human species. convention differs little however from a restatement of human chauvinism; Such a the pro­ ferred explanation is really no explanation, for such a convention can neither justify human chauvinism nor, since different conventions could be arranged, explain why it is inevitable. The social contract account of moral obligation is defective because it implies that moral obligations can really only hold between responsible moral agents, and attempts to account for all moral obligation as based on contract. But of course the account is correct as an account of the origin of some types of moral obligation; there are moral obligations of a type that can only hold between free and responsible agents, and others which only apply within a social and political context. Yet other types of obligation, such as the obligation not to cause suffering, can arise only with respect to sentient or preference-having creatures - who are not necessarily morally 27. responsible — and could not significantly arise with respect to a non—sentient item such as a tree or a rock. What emerges is a picture of types of moral obligation as associated with a nest of rings or annular boundary classes, with the innermost class, consisting of highjyintelligent, social, sentient creatures, having the full range of moral obligations applicable to them, and outer classes^ such non—sentient items as rocks having only a much more restricted range of moral obliga­ trees and tions significantly applicable to them. between the rings. In some cases there is no sharp division But there is no single uniform privileged class of items, no one base class, to which all and only moral principles directly apply, and moreover the zoological class of humans is not one of the really significant boundary classes. The recognition that some types of moral obligation can only apply within the context of a particular sort of society or through contract does nothing to support the case of human chauvinism. The failure of the contract theory nevertheless leaves the issue as to whether there is some logical or categorial restriction on what can be the object of moral obligations, which would reinstate human chauvinism or animal chauvinism. There is however no such restriction on the object place of the obligation relation to humans or sentient creatures. Even if the special locution 'Y has an obligation towards X' requires that X is at least a preference-having creature, there are other locutions which are not so restricted, and one can perfectly well speak of having duties toward land and of having obligations concerning or with respect to such items as mountains and rivers, and without necessarily implying that such moral constraints arise only in an indirect fashion. Thus neither natural language nor the logic of moral concepts rules out the possibility of non-sentient items creating direct moral constraints. There is then, given this point and the annular model, no need to opt for the position of Leopold [12] as the only alternative to human (or animal) chauvinism, that is for a position which simply transfers to natural items the full set of rights and obligations applicable to humans, leading to such non-significance as that rocks have obligations to mountains. Distinctions between the moral constraints appropriate to different types of items can be recognised without leading back to human chauvinism. The point is an important one since many objections to allowing moral obligations to 28. extend beyond the sphere of humans, or in some cases the sphere of sentient creatures, depend on ignoring such distinctions, on assuming that it is a question of transferring the full set of rights and obligations appropriate to intelligent social creatures to such items as trees and rivers - that the alternative to chauvinism is therefore an irrational and mystical animism concerning nature (cf. Passmore [9], p. 187 ff.). ***** * * The ecological restatement of the strong version of human chauvinism, according to which items outside the privileged human class have zero intrinsic value, is the Dominion thesis, the view that the earth and all its non-human contents exist or are available for man's benefit and to serve his interests, and hence that man is entitled to manipulate the world and its systems as he wants, that is^ in his interests. The thesis indeed follows, given fairly uncontroversial, analytic, assumptions, from the conclusions of the main chauvinistic arguments examined, notably D, that values are determined through human interests. The earth and all its non-human contents thus have no intrinsic value, at best instrumental value, and so can create no direct moral constraints on human action. For what has only instrumental value is already written down, in this framework, as serving human interests. And since what has no instru­ mental value cannot be abused or have its value diminished, it is permissible for humans to treat it as they will in accord with their interests. thesis. Ergo the Dominion Conversely, if non-human items are available for man's use, interests and benefits, they can have no value except insofar as they answer his interests. Other­ wise there would be restrictions on his behaviour with respect to them, since not any sort of behaviour is permissible as regards independently valuable items. value is determined through man's interests, i.e. D holds. is strictly equivalent to D. implies human chauvinism. Accordingly Thus the Dominion thesis It follows that the Dominion thesis, like D, strictly Conversely, the strong version of human chauvinism strictly implies D, and so the Dominion thesis, completing the sketch of the equivalence argument. Since the positions are equivalent what counts against one also counts against the others. In particular, then, the Dominion thesis is no more inevitable This view encompasses what Passmore [9] has isolated as the Western environmental ideologies, both the dominant view and the lesser traditions: see [10]. 29. than, and just as unsatisfactory as, strong human chauvinism. The upshot is that the dominant ethical systems of our times, those clustered as the western ethic, and other kindred human chauvinistic systems, are far less defensible, and less satisfactory, than has been commonly assumed, and lack an adequate, and non-arbitrary, basis. Furthermore alternative theories are far less incoherent than is commonly claimed, especially by philosophers. are viable alternatives to the Dominion thesis, Yet although there the natural world is rapidly being preempted in favour of human chauvinism - and of what it ideologically underwrites, the modern economic-industrial superstructure - by the elimination or over-exploitation of those things that are not considered of sufficient instrumental value for human beings. Witness the of the non-human world, the assaults being made on tropical rainforests, surviving temperate wildernesses, wild animals, the oceans, to list only a few of the victims of man's assault on the natural world. Observe also the associated measures to bring primitive or recalcitrant peoples into the Western consumer society and the spread of human chauvinist value systems. The time is fast approaching when questions raised by an environmental ethic will cease to involve live options. As things stand at present however, the ethical issues generated by the preemptions - especially given the weakness and inadequacy of the ideological and value—theoretical basis on which the damaging chauvinistic transformation of the world is premissed, and the viability of alternative environmental ethics - are not merely of theoretical interest, but are among the most important and urgent questions of our times, perhaps, that human beings, whose individual or group self-interest is the source of most environmental problems, have ever asked themselves. R. and V. Routley Plumwood Mountain Braidwood Australia 2622 References [1] R. and V. Routley, 'Human chauvinism and environmental ethics', mimeographed, privately circulated, 1974. [2] P.H. Nowell-Smith, Ethics, Penguin, London, 1954. [3] R. and V. Routley, 'Semantical foundations for value theory', Nous (forthcoming) [4] D.G. Ritchie, Natural Rights, Allen and Unwin, London, 1894. [5] J. Passmore, 'The treatment of animals', Journal of the History of Ideas, _36 (1975), 195-218. [6] T. Regan and P. Singer (editors), Animal Rights and Human Obligations, Prentice- Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1976. [7] J. Wisdom, Other Minds, Blackwell, Oxford, 1952. [8] R. Routley, 'The semantical metamorphosis of metaphysics', Australasian Journal of Philosophy^5A (1976),157. [9] [10] J. Passmore, Man's Responsibility for Nature, Duckworth, London, 1974. V. Routley, Critical Notice of [9], Australasian Journal of Philosophy 53. (1975) 171-185. [11] H.J. McCloskey, 'Rights', Philosophical Quarterly, 15 (1965), 115-127. [12] A. Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, with other essays on conservation from Round River, Ballantine, New York, 1966. [13] K. Baier and N. Rescher (editors), Values and the Future, the impact of techno­ logical change on American values, The Free Press, New York, 1969.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Box 72, Item 1: Draft of Against the inevitability of human chauvinism Subject The topic of the resource Typescript of draft, with handwritten emendations and corrections with whiteout, undated. Paper published, Routley R and Routley V (1979) 'Against the inevitability of human chauvinism' in Goodpaster KE and Sayre KM (eds), Ethics and the problems of the 21st century, Notre Dame University Press. Description An account of the resource Unnumbered paper from collection, item number assigned by library staff. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Routley</a> <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=val+routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Val Routley</a> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 72, Item 1 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource [31] leaves. 84.59 MB. Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:8fdfb47">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:8fdfb47</a> Box 72: Unlisted and Untitled Boxes https://www.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. �(p) !Pa {csfuP~ c C--?\ Ce/>'\ r.,--,._ ( .__:.. '7 1 </{_:_, rh~, t ✓~ ~ I d04r7 A ~ /'{,I(~ ~ ~ UL-117 KL- #- "d c ...... /~,::;., , ~7 (~ ' a-r ,,:ZZ-: :.,.,/ ~ 7 ka.-~ ,,.,;,{,,;,,, j ~ ~ ~ cf~~c-r 77~ 7W{~ ' £--) 11-/'l,,._,r ,/~ £e..-r<- ~ ~7~ ~~ t, .r \t Y/1 ) . 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 =&, 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/ 7 r ;Z_ cbhJ,1 04-r/ u.--, ,..<. .M/~ ; ➔/~) 1~ a~(/ -- -- -- -- ! - - -- -- -,77,._, ~ ~ t,-m k~/e ~~~ LIIL :I'., ~ 70-...___/- 1 /4tY'..-r ,,. ,,"/2._v ,,,_,,o,µ;..~&_ I' ~ll ~ <~~ '- / --/_ ~ I -~ ~~ / ~ 4--t'/o ~c../ C..IY'C- I'-..,._ ~ ....w./ C1-j, ~ / ~~~ W-r C-L- r•l~~ «./c; ,_ di../-<_ ~ ........,, ~/., _ / c-.b To ~ ~,, ~ ~ C.,-1,,, __- r ;, , �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 ~ ~ d,.'£1/ ~d~ .JIM,;,,_ 1 d:L 6e-fC w_"o/- r,?t/7/UI~~). «-/~~ / n.:.__.. W✓ ~ �I tPI.Ccn/4.J~ :.::n:::.t. :. 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= · _a_r_g_u_m_e_n__t_~,,.....a.:. :n.:. ;d:,4-i ~,-JV_I_I_.__C_o_n_f_l_i_c_t_ ~ ~~ ~) r Jct ,,MCkv ~ ~ , ~ .~~ ✓/4.- ~ ~ : ; ; ~ ~ r' ~ 7~ , v--0"~7 7 ~~~/, r ou7,fdL{_ , ,,_,,.,,~/,,_ /-c,-?"" ) As /.,,,_. /7~7 ~ 7 1 ~ ~ 7Zr p-'&.-4, 7-/ ~ ¼ A<L ~ '"-;fo- .,_,~=-.:.__ ~ 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- '1 /'t~ /&J 7~ / t:1/1). ... "'--.f 11<11f4.., /4-:J~vf_/J _/ l ~ f.,..,._r), q /l~ ~~,:as;-~ /<ff"" /J~ (~~6t;..._ ) /'~a.. o.u~•~,._•~/.c~ -~ ~k / I ~-.:..,,Lc.1 ,-•.A-e/ 1/ tL/t,.,.f ~ d, ,Af'.._:,:! .,>V°L / ~~ ( _J ~~ /4.l()~J/ > ~ ~k ;_ r/~ / ~C--, /nrv-7 ~ ,..~~,,._~ .- ('c;.. rr.;-/ trv/4.,;_/ wt~ o/ ...-? ' ~ a/~ ~4-t.d ,, <~CU'~ /CJ-u_J,./ ~ ~. �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 (U_ - - J L u.LJ/~/~ 7!d. .,,('°7 O</?'V 0d U,#\.r/Jo./ (2..-<~~c...·c-- I/ f-7 __ -~ '2-?·e--rt.-,hL' c./~ ~ c..... /e_/ ~ ~A;-,..,,rc.-,,..~ -I' CUI/I ~o(_ ,.KtL- 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.. ~t:.e;nOMfCtf :A //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. - .,,/ ~ L, / / ~~t,.L( U~l-r-u- &w /1~~&-1 ~ pu.u.. Ya,1 q(v ~ G-?'d ~ / /I(!/) 1 ~ c_ ~/c.-,1\1 IP~ _ ,,1 / / .. . ~ <t~ ~/Mf?.--7 . / ';;!C.,,,-17 I ...u. ·~ <AJ7?4; e:,r<,- ,Y?/·.u.//u-{ ~ p/C4t.-,t✓// .A'./ , C-tt.../lt..?-Vc~ Yo t'/~ ~~-,,e: d-::;F ,;,er~ ,_._.l.<-//4....:.. 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But even using actual waste handling costs (while wastes await storage) is enough to show that /~'-" /./t,.,. v-< re-.elll.,t-t ~ /t4--i4- I!:. is preferable to nuclear. ~'-"'"' c~h , ,~L 7,.-~;.__1/ *;7'_..c ,4---.1,____ . _:__ ro ~ ~1-if!' coal i~ C:,,,,(A /--0v-r~ 1 ~rew- - /~ ,1,0; ,,.,w-!£~ u,/k-,~-/2~ r «--, ,;.., G.•~ C/',._1- / ~ d;<--.n,-d '"'--:•~ a ~/ ( > ~ , b ~ /:V~ e~....._._7"',~ ~ rc: ~ - ·-~ J~1/?/ ,·Ut" ,i...-r~7 a-~'r ------/_7·--- r?/4 /~~ ~ ;L/~ /4 71.J~' ~/e--1, ~ I -~/ �dA,,ri,/,f""'-•J>~t grsm is ~Nuclear rAA,{,~_f.u not economical_,it ll.l'0'ud:tl see111lr it has been ~ c..lQ.N"" "' going ~ t through its ebd.ovs economic#). viabili~y, but by massive public of several types :# 9-</ l a,/_,p.;fi.. ~1~ \ C< _:., u~n:,.~'/~{k_ ,' ~~--o-~~ ..2.. 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"''. ~~ a ,,,.A..,;_.~. d.,;, ~ �.b-, ·._:h AoJ,I,. r. t,~, 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 £erµ_ (V,?µ_ /.aY•~ / ~ ra o..c~IILL ~ ~7 '7o /,24- I ~ :> ~ 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 J , ,Juf-41 ~ '7..~,/4.,,./:-, )i..--..r - fj fa.-r o~J /4 Awt- fA.#1. ,4(' /IC/VvU- d/-c,,,r (p/;?~J~, /41~ , /~€- ;t ~ .,r o/7)d~ 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 , ' / ~fJ;,~ ·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 ��,,.f d.ta.~ l ~ </~ I& ,uu. •1:,=r, Q/v-~~ ~A _,1~'/r ~ ./4X ~~ t"-.7 ✓~~· - c/2~ ¢~ ~~ ~/ ~/or- ~~ 11 ~ /1'"~ f!.//' / /'~/~o~ , , CA~ ry~ 7 ~./rL" c~~ ~~4//EP.A:,,p_, _ / - 1'/J~~:::~~ ~ ~ / t > . ~/ a---4 J~ ~ /~ ~ "~ p ~ ~ <-,. r~ AOC r~ -fl.JI' o--/z; ~ 6,--..,__,;,r / ~~~ ~~ //07 j7' 1Jtif'l'€--,1;_ ~ I ~ ~L&l- ·-<- < ,-, ,,.. .__/- /4/' ~r;:t( ,.&;7"'~:-r,,_,7; I l ,u-,.....,e,.___ ~~, ~ c ~ e . ~ ~ ~ _I ... r/4- c// ~ ~ u Y ~ ·7 ✓ ~~-1~r 11 7<L/~ ~,/4- , ,~ .~/ /~~' t~ _,,r~~ --- ~a,f , . ~.AV/~~ C( ~ £--L-. d / ✓ ~/ "- c). c,._...-<. ~~7_D1 ~ f /'~ ~ /A., _,' O,A{:,G ~ ~/ 4 ~~ , ~7 7;;~ ,,,,,._,-6( <r--/ ./J~ ~,,L 6'£ • / .,. tt/(J_ /c~ <C~~ ,f' r,i ~//'71~. /~ /~ pAf 7 /. '-~------------------------------~--"' �~--v>~-e/f 1~,.~ .?~C. .f ~ 41i;L; c--( p7 p-r uf-._!e~~c)~ ;g.,__-,L~ ~~3tf ~G, -";) ' ---:? ~ 11 . ,1~ - - .~ - :-X.ft ~ �_,,,""--'.___;:._;;_..::..::::.=-=-"-=:..::..:~;:_.:_~=-=...:.:...:::.;::_-=~-=-=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 \ f.,~ J JJ~/o/J, Jr �7~ "r 7~ /,,.__~ '(,; l't?I - ---~ co/c.,:;..e., •--:;,..,<r~ / (,__ /'° ~ ;I (>-..._ ;f ,;(~ ;- - ~ -6 - / Y ~ r. C~< <~ (&cn&'tU /?,u~.va- ih ~ ~4~~ I \ •7 /,._,k µ{ ~ I ,,.,_ , I ~ ,__,_ n-t' ,-/4 ,f,_ v -f/tfJ,--f~~-t:, , • r~ r~ bu- /4/~~~~ I/le,/_,~ /(-, /'M-r_ /-L--t.C..h.,-/' //- • #f1 a r~ To~..,.._ ,lr·- -1~.,,,~-7 ,{Mt7 a,,,,_ o/'~ / e. ,,..,_,r_,__ YC- . . .:. 4'/4_ ,i', •..,t CC'.,A-V"~~--- ~7 o-r, d-.,/ ~~. /!....,'f' ~I'~~ ' ,, fe__ , ,-r~~~ J /~"'-:;, _ A--,i,( ~,,..~.L- · ~ , { a f r ~ r1 h ( Th~ ~ r ~~•--L ~ 1/'f~ _y ,11(,,, C.,.;-<:_ J<1./?o.,,-_;~~l _7 :c£. ~ z:., . ,. , 1/ c.1--{,1 7 �3. 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". �-,u.fU 7o--n-l'"'--? ~~ ,!e__u;,.h, ,;?,,-z)~ ~,-'Lr .....,./7 -~ ~ ~ ff.7'L . ·(j-, ~ ~~- 7-~A..'-., 7 ~7 ~er,&,. , 4 ~~ ~~ 7,6- ,,,ffe d,,_ $ ,' .;;,?'? ~6:,cc,.Jro/, /""'.d IE=i")'JC,,.-,... 6 '--X ,..o:,,,...__/J<:r--t.<"it/£ , µ & ~ ~ / ,.,_ ""~ 21 l-9!" • ?Co ,;W'L,_,,,;, ., 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. ;=,..;,. //4 /4 ;,/<, o/u_ z ,G/( . F >/,2 7. 7 Jk_,t,_, - k/4/I,,. ,~ .J-/4 ~ -~.:I ,&.,~ jr "~~7 ~!½-~~ 'l~J / c-,e ~ C>7 "'/· /L !? L-... ,f !JJ ~ ;fI ~-£,-'-. __ 7 ,co/ • ro c ~/,. ~ / _ c..--e_ ••,,( ,r; L- .,.__;__ ...c .,,At /4_ ,,.,. 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I / ✓~.L 'trv'/ ,,-0 ' ~~'Pc jf. /k /;11~ ..-~ ~/V-rl_ I/fl 1~rrn_ /7w.rficd v?:-./ (-~ - C-,-Z/1-,_;,., I ,../fr"" //4 ~ /;2,~~I/~- ~~ L-:. --< -~ tr,7c ~ . . r / ~ /d~,e;;, 1/#"l'~ ,i,,,,ft//-?ft' ,J7._:, ~ ~ .-,I_;;:;;_._, cb- ~~, 7Z AC'c__ ~) . r - ~r ~ t{e/..//1 ~ ,,--~6,,- (--l-i..-< �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~.;.~ f- 7 ~ ~ 7,,....J., / ~ / ¾,_ r-!! 0~ 4S>- I'-- ~ !' ~ / ,,.~~ l'/4 ~ ~ e- ~N~ .,..,_.,,« LvV"' 7#'~} J u /~7 ~~ .a - / .,J.,/2., k._,,,,, ". .,,.-b ~ ./ ~/4:-._ /. £. /4 cl,< .,,.,..( ,i;;..,,.<- ,,-::: c:e£l/.? ,,_~, ,t,_,.,__,. <C'" /''j!fK .;. /)-...._;, ·- di de,.,~,?,;, . h ~ ·~' I '-,,.,_,~ /.,_, , . 7 /.1- ·,',( ... :.... 7 1-. 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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 . 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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 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. (p) !Pa {csfuP~ c C--?\ Ce/>'\ r.,--,._ ( .__:.. '7 1 </{_:_, rh~, t ✓~ ~ I d04r7 A ~ /'{,I(~ ~ ~ UL-117 KL- #- "d c ...... /~,::;., , ~7 (~ ' a-r ,,:ZZ-: :.,.,/ ~ 7 ka.-~ ,,.,;,{,,;,,, j ~ ~ ~ cf~~c-r 77~ 7W{~ ' £--) 11-/'l,,._,r ,/~ £e..-r<- ~ ~7~ ~~ t, .r \t Y/1 ) . 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 =&, 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/ 7 r ;Z_ cbhJ,1 04-r/ u.--, ,..<. .M/~ ; ➔/~) 1~ a~(/ -- -- -- -- ! - - -- -- -,77,._, ~ ~ t,-m k~/e ~~~ LIIL :I'., ~ 70-...___/- 1 /4tY'..-r ,,. ,,"/2._v ,,,_,,o,µ;..~&_ I' ~ll ~ <~~ '- / --/_ ~ I -~ ~~ / ~ 4--t'/o ~c../ C..IY'C- I'-..,._ ~ ....w./ C1-j, ~ / ~~~ W-r C-L- r•l~~ «./c; ,_ di../-<_ ~ ........,, ~/., _ / c-.b To ~ ~,, ~ ~ C.,-1,,, __- r ;, , 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 ~ ~ d,.'£1/ ~d~ .JIM,;,,_ 1 d:L 6e-fC w_"o/- r,?t/7/UI~~). «-/~~ / n.:.__.. W✓ ~ I tPI.Ccn/4.J~ :.::n:::.t. :. 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= · _a_r_g_u_m_e_n__t_~,,.....a.:. :n.:. ;d:,4-i ~,-JV_I_I_.__C_o_n_f_l_i_c_t_ ~ ~~ ~) r Jct ,,MCkv ~ ~ , ~ .~~ ✓/4.- ~ ~ : ; ; ~ ~ r' ~ 7~ , v--0"~7 7 ~~~/, r ou7,fdL{_ , ,,_,,.,,~/,,_ /-c,-?"" ) As /.,,,_. /7~7 ~ 7 1 ~ ~ 7Zr p-'&.-4, 7-/ ~ ¼ A<L ~ '"-;fo- .,_,~=-.:.__ ~ 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- '1 /'t~ /&J 7~ / t:1/1). ... "'--.f 11<11f4.., /4-:J~vf_/J _/ l ~ f.,..,._r), q /l~ ~~,:as;-~ /<ff"" /J~ (~~6t;..._ ) /'~a.. o.u~•~,._•~/.c~ -~ ~k / I ~-.:..,,Lc.1 ,-•.A-e/ 1/ tL/t,.,.f ~ d, ,Af'.._:,:! .,>V°L / ~~ ( _J ~~ /4.l()~J/ > ~ ~k ;_ r/~ / ~C--, /nrv-7 ~ ,..~~,,._~ .- ('c;.. rr.;-/ trv/4.,;_/ wt~ o/ ...-? ' ~ a/~ ~4-t.d ,, <~CU'~ /CJ-u_J,./ ~ ~. 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 (U_ - - J L u.LJ/~/~ 7!d. .,,('°7 O</?'V 0d U,#\.r/Jo./ (2..-<~~c...·c-- I/ f-7 __ -~ '2-?·e--rt.-,hL' c./~ ~ c..... /e_/ ~ ~A;-,..,,rc.-,,..~ -I' CUI/I ~o(_ ,.KtL- 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.. ~t:.e;nOMfCtf :A //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. - .,,/ ~ L, / / ~~t,.L( U~l-r-u- &w /1~~&-1 ~ pu.u.. Ya,1 q(v ~ G-?'d ~ / /I(!/) 1 ~ c_ ~/c.-,1\1 IP~ _ ,,1 / / .. . ~ <t~ ~/Mf?.--7 . / ';;!C.,,,-17 I ...u. ·~ <AJ7?4; e:,r<,- ,Y?/·.u.//u-{ ~ p/C4t.-,t✓// .A'./ , C-tt.../lt..?-Vc~ Yo t'/~ ~~-,,e: d-::;F ,;,er~ ,_._.l.<-//4....:.. I <er ,;;t, ,·, /2 1rd('('n-4c one! 1 , d k,,£~~~ ,,~ /2,. ~/~/-(",., J ~ ~ ,·/ ~ ~~ :/-ru<.. /1/'C./'__,__°'.J~J /1' /4 /4_ t-U?<.,J~ . ;Z / t' Le ;/~1 c~/vr ~~ 1r ~ / e(' e:4A/~ r"' 4e 1/ ~~ ~/ L..-7 ~urr~u<6 d,(_ 't1'~ c-~ e- ~ c,,-e_ Ju~ui-.fw J-e-.J ) c- ~e./ / ,./4~... ~~ c:Mh -,,,,C- f1 td:-, ~.-.. ~ ) 7 c//#'; ....:, ~ . , ,,,,,,,J e,. ,4_ ~ c"~ /21/c 7 -~ ~~ /~7 r7 A~ ~/c1-;fy,, ~L-r/77 ~ ~ - ; , , ~&?Yrn>~ c/4Jrpc,d , // 75t /:-,,', rf ; ~ 7J-I' <'Mh? ~ ~ J~'£ /&WL ~ ~7 ~ ~ 7r~,5 a:_ ) , , -- ., <. r'/~ ;I = cy~ r~~ ,;.,I~ f';;;.;:,t. ~ , /~,q. u7·c.4-I tvut' £..Lr 0 CL-r'U-~ ,J'-,..A }? ~&~/ ·cl- 7~/A_ 7✓~~- ~~;~7 ,£ b e r;rf;:;r- 7 .,.;,., 7 ; ~ /p..nLv,._a__ 1rLvf / du/2AJ-C. /;-<l~ ✓t/ ~-~e,( £-4 U-..,,(_A /.,:., ,,,,,_..,_ ..,._/ / f~ I ftJ / ~ ~, &g f-~ a&-c~7 d/2-~ ~o7,l ~ c~} ea: b.-~',uvr} ~: ~ ~ ~ J,& -17 7 ~/'~. r/~~ •'= 7 c~ /?~_, /'¼/ 7 Zz; we_~ ~ 7 2 I U.:- . Z:._ ~/.,_;~ ~ ~-c G>.-r e,_/ '• ~ Ii.~~ ,$"~ , 7i-, 7~ 27, ~ ~: a. "' 1 ?~~ '\. /~~-«-.:/~ ~ /'~-d 4, /..__ ~ ~~ n'~ ._, ,4,___:,~ _ n /'~._, J ~ 4 t ~ c/"➔ ~ A;f-7 ~ ,_,,_.;_,, ~ /'~--UW ~/ 4,..-,f c,.,;,,t ,_ 7 1/4...f. • . 7~~) ~r-'d /(c/l/Y/~/ ~ i,,~ u~ ,,{e_ /~ /'~w-<_ / . r--1,f.,..~_pAf ~u&.,/ ~ - ( --t<~</4-, £.,_,UA-'-<._ /- / /er-iv d_ o/,,~ T 1 70 1 7 7, <e/1 ~ l= e:., 7' c.. .#-,.../ ~~ ;~~~ ;;t AM~~/' {1,.../4 ~ rA~ ~ 7 '!f ✓ u,,v:,;- / ~ t✓.c✓z/,7 ~~/4-- ~ (/ <~ / 7:fJ '7, ,-". ~/er-/(;/, £4 ~ ,,_ ___,___ /~u-c.~k'L-T~~~ 1 Uvy;,C-, t~ d 7➔ o../4J a. r/-.e.« lo - ;ff~. ./-,c,;. r.:.. r 1 7 "--7 /c,_.(a,... ,7 ceryr, ~ ?-Z -r-4 c.4-'~ <7 ,,___ 7,2 ?>?P 27{,~ //-2{_ ~a...._ • d ,...__ ---7~~ ,/ 7 ...,;,~ / /! I ~~-~7 i/4f £~1 (/ ~ / ~"7 -7 /4r r ignore waste cos ts on the quite . in'.)idmissib It. } ground that it is not known currently what the costs involved are. But even using actual waste handling costs (while wastes await storage) is enough to show that /~'-" /./t,.,. v-< re-.elll.,t-t ~ /t4--i4- I!:. is preferable to nuclear. ~'-"'"' c~h , ,~L 7,.-~;.__1/ *;7'_..c ,4---.1,____ . _:__ ro ~ ~1-if!' coal i~ C:,,,,(A /--0v-r~ 1 ~rew- - /~ ,1,0; ,,.,w-!£~ u,/k-,~-/2~ r «--, ,;.., G.•~ C/',._1- / ~ d;<--.n,-d '"'--:•~ a ~/ ( > ~ , b ~ /:V~ e~....._._7"',~ ~ rc: ~ - ·-~ J~1/?/ ,·Ut" ,i...-r~7 a-~'r ------/_7·--- r?/4 /~~ ~ ;L/~ /4 71.J~' ~/e--1, ~ I -~/ dA,,ri,/,f""'-•J>~t grsm is ~Nuclear rAA,{,~_f.u not economical_,it ll.l'0'ud:tl see111lr it has been ~ c..lQ.N"" "' going ~ t through its ebd.ovs economic#). viabili~y, but by massive public of several types :# 9-</ l a,/_,p.;fi.. ~1~ \ C< _:., u~n:,.~'/~{k_ ,' ~~--o-~~ ..2.. At:Lc--&a-, /J/4i7 /ful-,u/ '7f::,c7,t' --..... o~,,_f";_ ;!,~ heavily subsidized esearch and development, through the Price-Anderson Act, which sharply limits both private and public li.ability, i.e. which i.n effect provided th~ ub s :i.dy ~ 1 king corporate nuclear development economically feasible,~ through 0 overnment agreement to handle all radioactive wastes. / ~ ~-/c,J~~ 0~ I ~;,_err /7' ~ ~ 4~7~ ~/'~ r d/?l' A ~ z:, ~ CLAI ,P~ .... < . •. (1/4(:f:>t cP-, C ~ ~7 ~ a./Ww/ ~ A-~ • r~Lc~ .c.-, t7r/~~ ~o4 /o/ I ;1., ✓/I ~tJ4 , ~ ~ ~ /v~ / f ~ /4- 7~ /4 ~ ~ 7f''4u/ ~/4r-..v o/('<;~~ J /j ,~ ~ do..-.l /;-~--zz' ~ c..o_ ~I ~~;7 I~ •~t,L- / ~76._ ~ . 1r:-:..-- ~ ~ ~) ~ ~ ~ /~~ 4.µ>:z:" a - , < ~ (tA.t{<L.. ~I e«--Y~ nkv4+fv•, -r-C: / ~ d✓ ~/ ~ ~ /J-J~ ~I~/. J 74-'r /,.a-~-- ~ ~ /~d~ / ~ er<~ ('(fi1_'717 (1.-c~ ~ ~ I c:;f eo.c-/1/~ ____7._, £.7 r ;1:£. /"",~-<~ '-- r ?71~ 1,r1c.y-'/ ~r ~7 -~ ~ry ~/ r/4-;r /~7 ' ~ -~, r;:/1~7 k /4.7:.._ r)U ~?TJ:;i; _.£§;~~I:~ ~ff?t,~✓:: CL-+-~./~ ftµ~ nsurance j c/4 r-71 c~ /jf!.. ;/ ~ ~4o...// I ~ 7,.4:-r...:.r ~ r~ 7✓~ ,I /4✓ " - - --' • ~~ /7 , ,__ £_ /~ U/t,e- c/f. tr I A -r4 e~<~. dL cZ...,~~_, r ,-K <M'-71 -:::z J ~/n~ ,,__.,.....,._,,.,,t. /4,_,,-- ~~ /~'- ,/4 r/.. ~ ~ ~ ~ /fe-"f ~ ~~7 ~A-/1 ,__~~... fl /j =-=. ~/4.,,_ /Jv /~ ~ i ~ '1.d ilc. / c~ /tr V4'l, ./'£u..,,· ✓~ ~ 7?f;-t"' I~ ~ V-k &-<.'-4 ~ ' ~~ ~ ,er .~e_..,.-(r'~ ! ~ ;:1:, ;. of eY~) /2-"I!---.. a.-. c.,,_.. ~ c6'1 ~,_r?'~.&_) 1 ~ k - I ~ , ~-C.A-/,,<U-. /.¢' I I J ;?b,,~ 7"4" ~ 7,,..,,.,, -ro 7¼'_.,___ ' <~?f~ ~:J~ 7 /e/Y 1-¥~ .. ;z .~~1~; ~ o/~~~",,:e_ 7 /-'-' ,,,,.f" ;, /\-4J},,!.4/'' f t1/<L ~'L / t(!c /1"' ,<;, /4;;/, c-e,...-/-e. ~~pl,(!_/ ~k /e,/d ,~li/'7 ,.-.,-.~ ;_, , ,,,. 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"''. ~~ a ,,,.A..,;_.~. d.,;, ~ .b-, ·._:h AoJ,I,. r. t,~, 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 £erµ_ (V,?µ_ /.aY•~ / ~ ra o..c~IILL ~ ~7 '7o /,24- I ~ :> ~ 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 J , ,Juf-41 ~ '7..~,/4.,,./:-, )i..--..r - fj fa.-r o~J /4 Awt- fA.#1. ,4(' /IC/VvU- d/-c,,,r (p/;?~J~, /41~ , /~€- ;t ~ .,r o/7)d~ 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 , ' / ~fJ;,~ ·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 ,,.f d.ta.~ l ~ </~ I& ,uu. •1:,=r, Q/v-~~ ~A _,1~'/r ~ ./4X ~~ t"-.7 ✓~~· - c/2~ ¢~ ~~ ~/ ~/or- ~~ 11 ~ /1'"~ f!.//' / /'~/~o~ , , CA~ ry~ 7 ~./rL" c~~ ~~4//EP.A:,,p_, _ / - 1'/J~~:::~~ ~ ~ / t > . ~/ a---4 J~ ~ /~ ~ "~ p ~ ~ <-,. r~ AOC r~ -fl.JI' o--/z; ~ 6,--..,__,;,r / ~~~ ~~ //07 j7' 1Jtif'l'€--,1;_ ~ I ~ ~L&l- ·-<- < ,-, ,,.. .__/- /4/' ~r;:t( ,.&;7"'~:-r,,_,7; I l ,u-,.....,e,.___ ~~, ~ c ~ e . ~ ~ ~ _I ... r/4- c// ~ ~ u Y ~ ·7 ✓ ~~-1~r 11 7<L/~ ~,/4- , ,~ .~/ /~~' t~ _,,r~~ --- ~a,f , . ~.AV/~~ C( ~ £--L-. d / ✓ ~/ "- c). c,._...-<. ~~7_D1 ~ f /'~ ~ /A., _,' O,A{:,G ~ ~/ 4 ~~ , ~7 7;;~ ,,,,,._,-6( <r--/ ./J~ ~,,L 6'£ • / .,. tt/(J_ /c~ <C~~ ,f' r,i ~//'71~. /~ /~ pAf 7 /. '-~------------------------------~--"' ~--v>~-e/f 1~,.~ .?~C. .f ~ 41i;L; c--( p7 p-r uf-._!e~~c)~ ;g.,__-,L~ ~~3tf ~G, -";) ' ---:? ~ 11 . ,1~ - - .~ - :-X.ft ~ _,,,""--'.___;:._;;_..::..::::.=-=-"-=:..::..:~;:_.:_~=-=...:.:...:::.;::_-=~-=-=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 \ f.,~ J JJ~/o/J, Jr 7~ "r 7~ /,,.__~ '(,; l't?I - ---~ co/c.,:;..e., •--:;,..,<r~ / (,__ /'° ~ ;I (>-..._ ;f ,;(~ ;- - ~ -6 - / Y ~ r. C~< <~ (&cn&'tU /?,u~.va- ih ~ ~4~~ I \ •7 /,._,k µ{ ~ I ,,.,_ , I ~ ,__,_ n-t' ,-/4 ,f,_ v -f/tfJ,--f~~-t:, , • r~ r~ bu- /4/~~~~ I/le,/_,~ /(-, /'M-r_ /-L--t.C..h.,-/' //- • #f1 a r~ To~..,.._ ,lr·- -1~.,,,~-7 ,{Mt7 a,,,,_ o/'~ / e. ,,..,_,r_,__ YC- . . .:. 4'/4_ ,i', •..,t CC'.,A-V"~~--- ~7 o-r, d-.,/ ~~. /!....,'f' ~I'~~ ' ,, fe__ , ,-r~~~ J /~"'-:;, _ A--,i,( ~,,..~.L- · ~ , { a f r ~ r1 h ( Th~ ~ r ~~•--L ~ 1/'f~ _y ,11(,,, C.,.;-<:_ J<1./?o.,,-_;~~l _7 :c£. ~ z:., . ,. , 1/ c.1--{,1 7 3. 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". -,u.fU 7o--n-l'"'--? ~~ ,!e__u;,.h, ,;?,,-z)~ ~,-'Lr .....,./7 -~ ~ ~ ff.7'L . ·(j-, ~ ~~- 7-~A..'-., 7 ~7 ~er,&,. , 4 ~~ ~~ 7,6- ,,,ffe d,,_ $ ,' .;;,?'? ~6:,cc,.Jro/, /""'.d IE=i")'JC,,.-,... 6 '--X ,..o:,,,...__/J<:r--t.<"it/£ , µ & ~ ~ / ,.,_ ""~ 21 l-9!" • ?Co ,;W'L,_,,,;, ., 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. ;=,..;,. //4 /4 ;,/<, o/u_ z ,G/( . F >/,2 7. 7 Jk_,t,_, - k/4/I,,. ,~ .J-/4 ~ -~.:I ,&.,~ jr "~~7 ~!½-~~ 'l~J / c-,e ~ C>7 "'/· /L !? L-... ,f !JJ ~ ;fI ~-£,-'-. __ 7 ,co/ • ro c ~/,. ~ / _ c..--e_ ••,,( ,r; L- .,.__;__ ...c .,,At /4_ ,,.,. 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I / ✓~.L 'trv'/ ,,-0 ' ~~'Pc jf. /k /;11~ ..-~ ~/V-rl_ I/fl 1~rrn_ /7w.rficd v?:-./ (-~ - C-,-Z/1-,_;,., I ,../fr"" //4 ~ /;2,~~I/~- ~~ L-:. --< -~ tr,7c ~ . . r / ~ /d~,e;;, 1/#"l'~ ,i,,,,ft//-?ft' ,J7._:, ~ ~ .-,I_;;:;;_._, cb- ~~, 7Z AC'c__ ~) . r - ~r ~ t{e/..//1 ~ ,,--~6,,- (--l-i..-< 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~.;.~ f- 7 ~ ~ 7,,....J., / ~ / ¾,_ r-!! 0~ 4S>- I'-- ~ !' ~ / ,,.~~ l'/4 ~ ~ e- ~N~ .,..,_.,,« LvV"' 7#'~} J u /~7 ~~ .a - / .,J.,/2., k._,,,,, ". .,,.-b ~ ./ ~/4:-._ /. £. /4 cl,< .,,.,..( ,i;;..,,.<- ,,-::: c:e£l/.? ,,_~, ,t,_,.,__,. <C'" /''j!fK .;. /)-...._;, ·- di de,.,~,?,;, . h ~ ·~' I '-,,.,_,~ /.,_, , . 7 /.1- ·,',( ... :.... 7 1-. 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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. 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Title A name given to the resource Box 59, Item 1875: Draft of Nuclear power - ethical, social and political dimensions Subject The topic of the resource 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. Description An account of the resource Title in collection finding aid: RS: Big mss on nuclear. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Routley</a> <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=val+routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Val Routley</a> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 59, Item 1875 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource [71] leaves. 58.48 MB. Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:8e30ade">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:8e30ade</a> Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1982-01-01 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant n/a - location not listed in manuscript finding aid Box 59: Nuclear https://www.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. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Draft Papers Description An account of the resource Sylvan's literary executor encountered an archive in which “all his projects were current", since manuscripts were undated and unattributed. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document 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.  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 1873: Draft of Nuclear power - ethical, social and political dimensions Subject The topic of the resource 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. Description An account of the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Routley</a> <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=val+routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Val Routley</a> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 59, Item 1873 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. 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Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:0475e12">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:0475e12</a> Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1982-01-01 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Australian National University - Far 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://www.antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/181810b7c7449d4d292188b3898281ac.pdf dda615262b03a61d2b045bf2adff5a5e PDF Text Text issue of nuclear power raises many basic issues in ethics. The By means of an example, we argue sorts of transfers of costs, benefits from a illegitimacy of certain the for transfers from one party who obtains given course of action, onto other parties who do The inadequate methods currently available not. nuclear power wastes mean that transfer of serious could permit risks onto costs and the arguments for future these crucial ethical ignore the i)7pra 1 to Social Dimensions Ethical and Nuclear Power are not the acceptability of by the fact such an illegitimate future people. that Many of such risks on imposing transfer the We argue issues. that transfer principles give rise constraints on action such removed for storing nuclear those affected future and are not present people. The nuclear issue and associated arguments also raise in a highly topical w3y really ’need' allow for, or are and all is such needs framework? many basic issues in the consumer in part theory. items nuclear power is it authoritarian or wrong to Are existing democratic mechanisms framework adequate, and excessive question prevent what lives? The approach to all are these basic elements pure or do we need to assume both, alterable social the answer to kinds of social changes would framework and over social their own crucially on intera ction are conceived they social wholes, individuals, are distinct and irreducible, argue? R. the allow for more adequate these questions depends how the underlying elements of to If such.concentrations of power and control by people over the social supposed they give inadequate control or do concentrations of power? is affirmative, people for control over I last Do frustrate such needs, imposed by a particular, the social permit social Routley as we shall �NUCLEAR POWER - ETHICAL, ■•MB SOCIAL AND POLITICAL ptMENSIONS Wl/, I. COMPETING PARADIGMS AND THE NUCLEAR DEBATE. One hardly needs initiation into the dark mysteries of nuclear physics to contribute usefully to the debate now widely ranging over nuclear power. While many important empirical questions are still unresolved, these do not really lie at the centre of the controversy. Instead, it is a debate about values ... many of the questions which arise are social and ethical ones. Sociological investigations have confirmed that the nuclear debate is primarily one over what is worth having or pursuing and over what we are entitled to do They have also confirmed that the debate is polarised along the 2 lines of competing paradigms. According to the entrenched paradigm discerned, to others. that constellation of values, attitudes and beliefs often called the Dominant Social Paradigm (hereafter the Old Paradigm), economic criteria become the benchmark by which a wide range of individual and social action is judged ahd evaluated. And belief in the market and market mechanisms is quite central. Clustering around this core belief is the conviction that enterprise flourishes best in a system of risks and rewards, that differentials are necessary ..., and in the necessity for some form of division of labour, and a hierarchy of skills and expertise. In particular, there is a belief in the competence of experts in general and of scientists in particular. ... there is an emphasis on quantification. The rival world viewT, sometimes called the Alternative Environmental Paradigm (the New Paradigm) differs on almost every point, and, according to sociologists, in ways summarised in the following table A Dominant Social Paradigm CORE VALUES Material (economic growth, progress and development) Natural environment valued as resource Alternative Environmental Paradigm Domination over nature Non-material (self-realisation) Natural environment intrinsically valued Harmony with nature ECONOMY* Market forces Risk and reward Rewards for achievement Differentials Individual self-help Public interest Safety Incomes related to need Egalitarian Collective/social provision POLITY Authoritative structures (experts influential) Hierarchical Law and order Action through official institutions Participative structures (citizen/ worker involvement) Non-hierarchical Liberation Direct action SOCIETY Centralised Large-scale Associational Ordered Decentralised Small-scale Communal Flexible NATURE Ample reserves Nature hostile/neutral Environment controllable Earth's resources limited Nature benign Nature delicately balanced KNOWLEDGE Confidence in science and technology Rationality of means (only) Limits to science Rationality of ends State socialism, as practised in most of the "Eastern bloc", differs as to economic organisation, the market in particular being replaced system by a command system). But since there is virtually no debate confines of state socialism, that minor variant on the Old Paradigm from the Old Paradigm really only by central planning (a market over a nuclear future within the need not be delineated here. �2 No doubt t’ne competing paradigm picture is a trifle simple (and subsequently it is important to disentangle a Modified Old Paradigm, which softens the old economic assumptions with social welfare requirements: really and instead of a New Paradigm there are rather counterparadigms, a cluster of not very well worked out positions that diverge from the cluster marked out as the Old Paradigm). Nonetheless it is empirically investigable, and, most important, it enables the nuclear debate to be focussed. 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 Paradigm. Indeed to introduce ethical and social dimensions into the assessment of nuclear power, instead of or in addition to merely economic factors such as cost and efficiency, is already to move somewhat beyond the received paradigm. For under the Old Paradigm, strictly construed, the nuclear debate is confined to the terms of the narrow utilitarianism 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) irrational. Furthermore, nuclear 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 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 ultimately fails, unless the free enterprise economic assumptions are replaced by the 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. main parts?:- There are two It is argued, firstly, 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. costs of project development and state subsidization with market independence and criteria 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 the Old Paradigm are but very rarely applied in contemporary political practice, �3 the place of pure (or mixed) capitalism having been usurped by corporate capitalism. It is because the nuclear debate can be carried on within the 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 arguments, arguments often considered as encompassing all the nuclear debate is ethically about, best utilitarian means to predetermined ends.) For another leading characteristic of the nuclear debate is the attempt, under the dominant paradigm to remove it from the ethical and social sphere, and to divert it into specialist issues - whether over minutiae and contingencies of present technology or over medical 8 or legal or mathematical details. The double approach can be applied as regards each of the main problems nuclear development poses. There are many interrelated problems, and the argument is further structured in terms of these. For in the advancement and promotion of nuclear power we encounter a remarkable combination of factors, never before assembled: establishment, on a massive scale, of an industry which involves at each stage of its processing serious risks and at some stages of production possible catastrophe, which delivers as a by-product radioactive wastes which require up to a million years’ storage but for which no sound and economic storage methods are known, which grew up as part of the war industry and which is easily subverted to deliver nuclear weapons, which requires for its operation considerable secrecy, limitations on the flow of information and restrictions on civil liberties, which depends for its economics, and in order to generate expected profits, on substantial state subsidization, support, and intervention. with problems. It is, in short, a very high techological development, beset A first important problem, which serves also to exemplify ethical issues and principles involved in other nuclear power questions, is the unresolved 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 passengers and freight. The train which is At an early stop in the journey someone consigns as freight, to a far distant destination, a package which contains a highly toxic and explosive gas. This is packaged in a very thin container which, as the consigner is aware, may not contain the gas for the �4 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 interefere inadvertently or deliberately with the freight, perhaps trying to steal some of it. All of these sorts of contingencies have occurred on some previous journeys. 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 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 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 would normally be seen as ludicrous when set in this What is worth remarking is that similar excuses are not always so seen I when the consigner, again a ’’responsible” businessman, puts his workers’ health context. or other peoples’ welfare at risk. Suppose he ways that it is his own and others’ pressing needs which justify his action. The company he controls, which produces the material as a by-product, is in bad financial 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 the whole company town, through loss of spending and the cancellation of the Multiplier Effect, will be worse off. The poor and unemployed of the town, whom he would otherwise have been able to help, will suffer especially. Few people would accept such a story, even if correct, as justification Even where there are serious risks and costs to oneself or some group for whom one is concerned one is usually considered not to be entitled to simply transfer the heavy burden of those risks and costs onto other uninvolved parties, especially where they arise 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. progresses. How fitting the analogy is will become apparent as the argument There is no known proven safe way to package the highly toxic wastes generated by the nuclear plants that will be spread around the world as 9 large-scale nuclear development goes ahead. 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 toxic. 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 their expected life times of perhaps 40 years, may require and which, some have estimated, million years to reach safe levels of radioactivity. Nuclear wastes must be kept suitably isolated from the environment for their entire active lifetime. For fission products the required storage period averages a thousand years or so, and for transuranic elements, which include plutonium, there is a half 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.Short-term methods of storage require continued human inter­ vention, while proposed longer term methods are subject to both human inter­ ference 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 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 formations or in salt mines, are largely speculative and relatively untested, and have already proved 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 result in multilayered metal containers before rock deposit, simulation models reveal that radioactive material may not remain suitably isolated from human environment.^ In short, the best present storage proposals carry very real possibilities of irradiating future people and damaging their environment , Given the heavy costs which could be involved for the future, and given the known limits of technology, it is methodologically 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 tested, and they may �well prove to involve unforeseen difficulties and risks when an attempt is made to put them into practice on a commercial scale. provide a rigorous guarantee of Only a method that could 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 human factors. But even if an economically viable, rigorously safe long term storage method could be devised, there is the problem of guaranteeing that it would be universally and invariably used. The assumption that it would be (especially if, as appears likely, such a method proved expensive economically and politically) seems to presuppose a level of efficiency, perfection and concern for the future which has not previously been encountered in human affairs, and has certainly not been conspicuous in the nuclear industry. 12 Again, unless we assume continuous and faultless guarding of long term storage sites through perhaps a million years of possible future human activity, weapons- grade radioactive material will be accessible, over much of the million year storage period, to any party who is in a position to retrieve it. The assumption that a way will nonetheless be found, before 2000, which gets around the wastestorage problem (no longer a nere disposal problem) is accordingly not rationally based, but is rather like many assumptions of ways, an article of faith. It is an assumption supplied by the Old Paradigm, a no limitations assumption, that there are really no (development) problems that cannot be solved technologically (if not in a fashion that is always immediately economically feasible). The assumption has played part in development plans and practice. technological optimism (not to say hubris an important It has not only encouraged an unwarranted ), that there are no limits to what humans can accomplish, especially through science; it has led to the embarcation on projects before crucial problems have been satisfactorily solved or a solution is even in 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 likelihood of reactor accidents is a relevant example, discussed below). The original nuclear technology dream was that nuclear fission would provide unlimited energy (a 'clean unlimited supply of power'). shattered. and nuclear That dream soon The nuclear industry apparently remains a net consumer of power, fission will be but a quite short-term supplier of power. �The risks imposed on the future by proceeding with nuclear development are, then, significant. 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 lives could be seriously affected by the wastes. Thus perhaps 40,000 generations of future people could be forced to bear significant risks resulting from the provision of the (extravagant) energy use of only a small proportion of the people of .10 generations Nor is the risk of direct harm from the escape or misuse of radioactive materials the only burden the nuclear solution imposes on the future. Because the energy provided by nuclear fission is merely a stop gap, it seems probable that in due course the same problem, that of making a 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 For they may well have to face the change to renewable resources in an with it. 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 associated technology and heavy resource use and will have lost or reduced its ability to survive without it. It will, moreover, probably be a world which is largely depleted of non-renewable resources, and in which such renewable resources as forests and soils as remain, resources which will have to form a very important part of the basis of life, are in a run-down condition. Such points tell against the idea that future people must be, if not direct beneficiaries of nuclear fission energy, at least indirect beneficiaries. It is for such reasons that the train parable cannot be turned around to work in favour of nuclear power, with for example, the nuclear train bringing relief as well as wastes to a remote town powered (only) 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 get itself out of a mess arising from its chosen 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 �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 - clear 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 often not in fact) in the contemporary world, it is not easy to avoid the conclusion that nuclear development involves gross injustice with respect to the 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 parcel are in the non-immediate future. Secondly, an attempt might be made to appeal to overriding circumstances, for to reject the consigner’s action in the circum­ stances outlined is not of course to imply that there are no circumstances in which such an action might be justifiable, or at least where the matter is less clearcut. It is the same with the nuclear case. 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 they apply in the present case. We consider these possible escape routes for the proponent of nuclear development in turn, beginning with the question of our obligations to the future. Resolution of this question casts light on other ethical questions concerning nuclear develop­ ment. It is only when these have been considered that the matter of whether there are overriding circumstances is taken up again (in section VII). Ill OBLIGATIONS TO THE (DISTANT) FUTURE. The especially problematic area is that of the distant (i.e. non-immediate) future, the future 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 obligations 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 (democratic 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 there are no moral obligations to the future beyond perhaps those to the next generation. According to the most extreme of these positions against moral obligations to the future, our behaviour with respect to the future is morally unconstrained, there are no moral restrictions on acting or failing to act deriving from the effect of our actions on future people. Of those philosophers who say, or whose views imply that we 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. Thus moral obligation is seen as grounded on or as presupposing various relations which could not hold between people widely separated in time (or sometimes in space). For example, obligation is seen as grounded in relations which are proximate or of short duration and also non-transitive. Among such suggested bases or grounds of moral obligation, or requirements 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 rights or entitlement. People in the distant future will not be able to claim rights and entitlements as against us, and of course they can do nothing effective to enforce any claims they might have for their rights against us. Secondly, there are those accounts which base moral obligations on social or legal convention, for example a convention which would require punishment of offenders or at least some kind of social enforcement. But plainly these and other conventions will not hold 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 could be no guarantee that any contemporary institutions would do it for them. �10. Both the view that moral obligation requires the context of a moral community and the view that it is contractually based appear to rule out the distant future as a field of moral obligation as they not only require a commonality or some sort of common basis which cannot be guaranteed in the case of the distant future, but also a possibility of interchange or reciprocity of action which cannot apply to the future. Where the basis of moral obligation is seen as mutual exchange the interests of future people must be set aside because they cannot change the past and cannot be parties to any mutual contract. The exclusion of moral obligations to the distant future also follows from those views which attempt to ground moral obligations in non-transitive relations of short duration such as sympathy and love. As well there are difficulties about love and sympathy for (non-existent) people in the far distant future about whose personal qualities and characteristics one must know very little and who may well be committed to a life-style for which one has little or no sympathy. On the current showing in the case of nuclear energy it would be easy to conclude that contemporary society lacks both love and sympathy for future people; and it would appear to follow from this that contemporary 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 something acquired, either individually or institutionally, something which is conditional on doing something or failing to do something (e.g. participating in the moral community, contracting), or having some characteristic one can fail to have (e.g. love, sympathy, empathy). 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 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, is not however sustainable. Consider, for example, a scientific group which, tor 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 �the earth in the distant future would be wiped out as a result of the action. direct and predictable The unconstrained position clearly implies that this is an acceptable moral enterprise, that whatever else we might legitimately criticize in the scientists’ experiment, perhaps its being over-expensive or badly designed, we cannot lodge a moral protest about the damage it will do to future people. the following sort The unconstrained position also endorses as morally acceptable of policy:- A firm discovers it can make a handsome profit from mining, processing and manufacturing a new type of material which, although it causes no problem for present people or their immediate descendants, will over a period of hundreds of years decay into a substance which will cause an enormous epidemic of cancer among the inhabitants of the earth at that time. According to the unconstrained view the firm is free to act in its own interests, without any consideration for the harm it does remote 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 only have several philosophers endorsed this position, but it is a clear implication 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, despite their being clearly implied by their position. We suspect that - we would certainly hope that - when it is brought out that the unconstrained position admits such counterexamples, that being free to act implies among other things being free to inflict pointless harm for example, most of those who opted for the unconstrained position would want to assert that it was not what they intended. 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 responsible 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, 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. �12. 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 acquired an obligation to some stranger with whom one has never been involved, that one has no responsibility for his life, does not imply that one is free to do what one likes with respect to him, for example to rob him or to pursue some course of action of advantage to oneself which could seriously harm him. These difficulties for the unconstrained position arise in part from the (sometimes deliberate) failure to make an important distinction between acquired or assumed obligation 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. There is a considerable difference in the level and kind of responsibility involved. In the first case one must do something or be something which one can fail to do or be, e.g. have loves, synpathy, 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 (yet) exist. While it may perhaps be the case that there would need to be an acquired or assumed obligation in order for it to be claimed that contemporary people must make special sacrifices for future people of an heroic kind, or even to help them especially, only moral constraints are needed in order for us to be constrained from harming them. Thus, to return to the train parable, the consigner cannot argue in justification of his action that he has never assumed or acquired responsibility for the passengers, that he does not know them and therefore has no love or sympathy for them and that they are not part of his moral community, in short that he has no special obligations to help them. All that one needs to argue 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 �13. 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 then direct harm than the consigner is resorting to heroic self-sacrifice in refraining from placing his dangerous package on the train. The conflation of moral restraints 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 has to be assumed or required. The conflation is encouraged by reductionist positions which, in attempting to account for obligation in general, mistakenly endeavour to collapse all obligations. Hence the equation, and some main roots of the unconstrained position, of the erroneous belief that there are no moral constraints concerning the distant future. The unconstrained view tends to give way, under the weight of counter­ examples, 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 condition, and that is all; there are in practice no obligations to the distant future. 17 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. account. There are at least three objections to this chain First, it is inadequate to treat constraints concerning the future as if they applied only between generations, as if there were no question of constraints on individuals as opposed to whole generations, since individuals can create causal effects, e.g. harm, on the future in a way which may create individual responsibility, and which often cannot be sheeted home to an entire generation. Nuclear power and its wastes, for example, are strictly the responsibility of small groups of power-holders, not a generational responsibility. 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. �14. Thirdly, improvements for immediate successors may be achieved at the expense of disadvantages to people of the more distant future. Improving the world for immediate successors is quite compatible with, and may even in some circumstances be most easily achieved by, ruining it for less immediate successors. Such cases can hardly be written off as ’’never-never land" examples since many cases of environmental exploitation might be seen as of just this type. e.g. not just the nuclear case but also the exhaustion of non-renewable resources and the long-term depletion of renewable resources such as soils and forests through overuse. If then such obvious injustices to future people arising from the favouring or exclusive concern with immediate successors are to be avoided, obligations to the future will have to be seen as in some way fairly distributed over time, and not merely as accruing to particular generations in the way the chain picture suggests. IV. ATTEMPTS TO QUALIFY OBLIGATIONS TO THE FUTURE : ECONQMISTIC UNCERTAINTY AND INDETERMINACY ARGUMENTS. While there are grave difficulties for the unconstrained position, qualification leads to a more defensible position. According to the main 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 costs and benefits (and so of future interests) is obtained by application over time of a discount rate, so discounting costs and risks to future people. The attempt to apply economics as a moral theory, something that is becoming increasingly common, can lead then to the qualified position. objectionable in such an approach is that What is economics should operate within the bounds of moral (deontic) constraints, just as in practice it operates within legal constraints, not determine 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 18 the waste problem. Since there is mounting evidence that future generations may well not be better off than present ones, especially in things that matter, no argument for discounting the interests of future generations on this basis can carry much weight. Nor is that all that is wrong with the argument. For it depends at base on the assumption that poorer contemporaries would be making sacrifices to richer successors in foregoing such (allegedly beneficial) developments as nuclear power. sacrifice argument. That is, it depends on the already scotched In any case, for the waste disposal problem to be legitimately bequeathed to the future generations, 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-immediate 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 equalization of monetary value, that compensation - which is what the waste problem is taken to come to economically - costs much less now than 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, insurmountable practical difficulties about applying such discounting, e.g. how to determine appropriate future discount rates. A more serious objection is that applied generally, the argument presupposes, what is false, that compensation, like value, can always be converted into monetary equivalents, that people (including those outside market frameworks) can be monetarily compensated for a variety of damages, including cancer and loss of life. There is no compensating a dead man, or for a lost species. In fact the argument presupposes a double reduction neither part of which can succeed: it is not just that value cannot in general be represented at all adequately 19 monetarily, but (as against utilitarianism, for example) that constraints and obligations can not be somehow reduced to matters of value. It is also presupposed that all decision methods, suitable for requisite nuclear choices, �16. are bound to apply discounting. This is far from so : indeed Goodin argues that, on the contrary, more appropriate decision rules do not allow discounting, and discounting only works in practice with expected utility rules (such as underlie cost-benefit and benefit-risk analyses), which are, he contends strictly inapplicable for nuclear choices (since not all outcomes can be duly determined and assigned probabilities, in the way that application of the rules requires.). 20 As the preceding arguments reveal, the discounting move often has the same result as the unconstrained position. If, for instance, we consider the cancer example and reduce costs to payable compensation, it is evident that over a sufficiently long period of time discounting at current prices would lead to the conclusion that there are no recoverable damages and so, in economic terms, no constraints. In short, even certain damage to future people could be written off. One way to achieve the bias against future people is by the application of discount rates which are set in accord with the current economic horizons of no 21 more than about 15 years, and application of such rates would simply beg the question against the interests and rights of future people. Where there is certain future damage of a morally forbidden type, for example, the whole method of discounting is simply inapplicable, and its use would violate moral constraints. Another argument for the qualified position, which avoids the objections from cases of certain damage, comes from probability considerations. The distant future, it is argued, is much more uncertain than the present and immediate future, so that probabilities are consequently lower, perhaps even approaching or coinciding with zero for any hypothesis concerning the distant future. But then if we take account of probabilities in the obvious way, by simply multiplying them against costs and benefits , it is evident that the interests of future people, except in cases where there is an unusually high degree of certainty, must count for (very much) less than those of present and neighbouring people where (much) higher probabilities 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 future against a much lower probability of indeterminate 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 doubtful benefits for some present people, in the shape of the opportunity to maintain corporation profitability or to continue unnecessarily high energy use. And even if the costs and benefits were comparable 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 sufficiently large. Such a cost-benefit or risk-benefit approach 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. For example, it would follow on such principles that it is permissible for a firm to injure, or very likely injure, some, innocent party provided the firm stands to make a sufficiently large gain from it. But the costs and benefits involved are not transferable in any simple or general way from one party to another . Transfers of this kind, of costs and benefits involving different parties, commonly raise moral issues - e.g. is x entitled to benefit himself by imposing costs on y - which are not susceptible to a simple cost-benefit 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 transfer 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 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 temporally removed, and these risks will not be in any direct way related to a person’s extent of use. The transfer objection is essentially the same as that to the utilitarian's (happiness) sums as a way of solving moral conflict between different parties, and the introduction of probability considerations - as in utilitarian decision 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 probabilities involving distant future situations are not always less than those concerning the immediate future in the way the argument supposes, and that the outcomes of some moral problems do not depend on a high level of probability anyway. reveals, In some sorts of cases it is enough, as the train parable that a significant risk is created; such cases do not depend critically on high probability assignments. �18. 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 distant future. take serious account of the effects of our actions on the There are two strands to the uncertainty argument, capable of separation, but frequently tangled up. Both arguments are mistaken, the first on a Priori 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 about the effects of our actions on the distant future is unreliable, fuzzy and highly speculative. But we cannot base assessments of how we should act on information of this kind, especially when accurate information is obtain­ able about the present which would indicate different action. Therefore we must regretfully ignore the uncertain effects of our actions on the distant future. More formally and crudely: One only has obligations to the future if these obligations are based on reliable information at present as regards the distant future. 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 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. risk of harm in this sort of case. It is enough that there is a significant 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 of the so-called "speculative" and "unreliable". But if we do not require certainty of action to apply moral constraints in contemporary affairs, why �should we require a much higher standard of certainty in the future? Why should we require for the future, epistemic 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 eipstemic double standard. But such an epistemic double standard, proposed in explaining the difference between the present and the future and to justify ignoring future peoples interests, in fact cannot itself provide an explanation of the differences, since it already presupposes different standards of certainty appropriate to each class, which difference is in turn in need of justification. The second uncertainty argument is a practical uncertainty argument, that whatever our theoretical obligations to the future, we cannot in practice take the interests of future people into account because uncertainty about the distant future is so gross that we canmot 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. this way:- The second uncertainty argument 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 every (action) x”, 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 obtain clear conclusions or directions concerning contemporary action action of the It is wrong to do x” type. Many of the assumptions of the second argument can 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. 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 uncertainty is not so great as 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 in a hundred years in names or footwear, or what flavours of ice 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 the earth of that wonderful variety of non-human life which at present makes it such a rich and interesting place. For this sort of reason, the second uncertainty argument should be rejected. 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 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 proper consideration. Most of these popular moves employ both of the uncertainty arguments as suits the case, switching from one to the other in a way that is again reminiscent of sceptical moves. For example, we may be told that we cannot really take account of future people because we cannot be sure that they will exist or that their tastes and wants will not be completely different from our own, to the point where they will not suffer from our exhaustion of resources or from the �21. things that would affect 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 morally committed to. Again we may be told that there is no guarantee that future people will be worthy of any efforts on our part, because they may be Even if one is morons or forever plugged into enjoyment or other machines. 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 opposed 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 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 logical 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 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 �22. be considered 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 themselves. 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 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 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’ welfare and the 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 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 indeterminate 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 raised particularly by problems of sharing fixed quantities of resources among present and future people, for example oil, when the numbers of the latter are indeterminate. Such problems are indeed difficult, but they are not resolved by ignoring the claims of the future, any more than the problems raised by the need to take account in decision-making of factors difficult to quantify are resolved by �23. ignoring such factors. Nor are distributional problems as large and representative of a class of moral problems concerning the future as the tendency to focus on them would suggest. It can be conceded that there will be cases where the indeterminacy 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 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 be many cases which are not solved by weighing numbers, numbers of interests, or whatever, cases for which one needs to know only the most general probable characteristics of future people. The crucial question which emerges is then: are. there any features of future people which would disqualify them from full moral consideration or reduce their claims to such below those of present people? principle None. The answer is : in Prima facie, 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 dealing satisfactorily with the present: in other words, a theory that did not allow properly for the future would be found to have defects as regards the present, to deal unjustly or unfairly with some present people, e.g. those remotely located, those outside some select subgroup, such as (white­ skinned) humans, etc. The only candidates for characteristics that would fairly rule out future people are the logical features we have been looking at, such as uncertainty and indeterminacy; but, as we have argued, 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 affect his entitlement to just and fair treatment, to full moral 24 consideration; inversely, that it is without basis to discriminate morally against a person in virtue of his temporal position. As a result of this �23a, universalizability, there are the same general obligations to future people as to the present; and thus there is the same obligation to take account of them and their interests in what we do, to be careful in our actions, to take account of the probability (and not just the certainty) of our actions causing harm or damage, and to see, other things being equal, that we do not act so as to rob them of what is necessary for the chance of a good life. and indeterminacy do not relieve us of these obligations. Uncertainty If in a closely comparable case concerning the present the creation of a significant risk is enough to rule out an action as immoral, and there are no independent grounds for requiring greater certainty of �harm in the future case under consideration, then futurity alone will not provide, adequate grounds for proceeding with the action, thus discriminating against future people. Accordingly we cannot escape, through appeal to futurity, the conclusion 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 CORP: MELTDOWN. The 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 space, or a particular geographical 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 another state’s or region’s yard or waters? 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 underpinning the answer, are both like those already given in arguing to the tentative conclusion concerning the injustice of imposing radioactive wastes upon future people. But the cases are not exactly the same: USA and Japan cannot endeavour to discount peoples of the Pacific in whose regions they propose to drop some of their radioactive pollution in quite the same way they can discount, people of two centuries hence. (But what this consideration really reveals is yet another flaw in the idea that entitlement to just treatment can be discounted over time .) Ethical issues of distributive justice, as to equity, concern not only the spatio-temporal location of nuclear waste, but also arise elsewhere in the assessment of nuclear development; in particular, as regards the treatment of those in the neighbourhood of reactors, and, differently, as regards the distribution of (alleged) benefits and costs from nuclear power across nations. People living or working in the vicinity of a nuclear reactor are subject to special costs and risks: firstly, radioactive pollution, due to the fact that reactors discharge radioactive materials into the air and water near the plant, 25 �25. and secondly catastrophic accidents, such as (steam) explosion of a reactor. An immediate question is whether such costs and risks can be imposed, with any ethical 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 other largescale 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” emission, during plant operation, of low level radiation carries carcinogenic and mutagenic costs. While there are undoubtedly costs, there remains, however, substantial disagreement over the likely number 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 (illegitimately) permits free transfer of costs and risks from one person to another, the ethical issue directly raised is said to be: what extent of cancer and genetic damage, if any, is permissibly traded for the advantages of nuclear power, and under what conditions? Under the Old Paradigm the issue is then translated into decision-theoretic questions, such as to ’how to employ risk/benefit analysis as a prelude to government regulation’ and ’how to determine what is an 26 acceptable level of risk/safety for the public. 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 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 agony of cancer. The point is that the costs to one party are not justified, especially when such benefits to other parties can be alternatively obtained without such awful costs, and morally indefensible, 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. particularly 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 large. A non-negligible percentage (in excess of 3% of those exposed for 30 years) of people in the area will die, allegedly for the sake of the majority who are benefitted by nuclear power production (allegedly, for the real reasons for nuclear development do not concern this silent majority). Whatever charm the 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 tiie imposition of radiation on minorities, most of whom have little or no genuine voice in the location of reactors in their environment and cannot move away without serious losses, is quite (morally) acceptable. One cheaper trick, deployed by the US Atomic Energy Commission,^ is to suppose that it is permissible to double, through nuclear technology, the level of (natural) radiation that a population has received with apparently negligible consequences, the argument being that the additional amount (being equivalent to the "natural” level) is also likely to have negligible consequences. The increased amounts of radiation - with their large man-made component - are then accounted normal, and, of course, so it is then claimed, 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 radiation emissions very substantially in excess of the standards laid down; so the emission situation is worse than mere consideration of the standards would disclose. Furthermore, the monitoring of the standards "imposed" is entrusted to the nuclear operators themselves, scarcely disinterested parties. Public policy is determined not so as to guarantee public health, but rather to serve as a private nuclear operations proceed relatively unhampered. public pacifier while �27. 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, 3 and almost have on several occasions (the most notorious being Three Mile Island). If the cooling and emergency core cooling systems fail in American (light water) reactors, then the core melts and ’containment failure’ is likely, with the 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 the size of Pennsylvania would be destroyed. Modern nuclear reactors are about five times the size of the reactor for which 31 these conservative US government figures are given : the consequences of a similar accident with a modern reactor would accordingly be much greater still. The consigner in risking the lives, well-being and property of the passengers on the train has acted inadmissibly. Does a government-sponsored private utility act in a way 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 sible. suppose, inadmissible and irrespon­ 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 arena 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 32 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 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 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 limitatioms and human error, of waste leakage and reactor incidents and quite possibly accidents, not in an ideal world far removed from the actual, a technological dream world where there is no real possibility of a nuclear �28. catastrophe. In such an ideal nuclear world, where waste disposal were fool-proof and reactors were accident-proof, things would no doubt be morally different. But we do not live in such a world. According to the Rasmussen report its calculation of extremely low accident probabilities is based upon reasonable mathematical and technological assumptions and is methodologically sound. This is very far from being the case. The under­ lying mathematical methods, variously called "fault tree analysis" and "reliability estimating techniques", are unsound, because they exclude as not credible" possibilities or as "not significant" branches that are real possibilities, which may well be realised in the real world. It is the eliminations that are otherworldly. In fact the methodology and data of the report 33 has been soundly and decisively criticized. And it has been shown that there is a real possibility, a non-negligible probability, of a serious accident. It is contended, secondly, that even if there is a non-negligible probability of a reactor accident, still it is 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 a risk assessment 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 that of option b, which is already accepted; 34 therefore option a is acceptable. 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 accidents, which are accepted: so nuclear power stations are acceptable. A little reflection reveals that this sort of risk assessment argument involves the same kind of fallacy as transaction models. 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 is the person who undertakes the risks also the person who receives the benefits or �29, primarily, as in driving or cigarette smoking, or are the costs imposed on other parties who do not benefit? It is only if the parties are 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. This is rarely the case, and it is not so in the case of risk assessments of energy options. Secondly, does the person incur the risk as a result of an activity which he knowingly undertakes in a situation where he has a reasonable choice, knowing it entails the risk, etc., and is the level of risk in proportion to the level of 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? A risk that is ethically acceptable for a serious reason may not be ethically acceptable for a trivial reason. Both the arguments (i) and (ii) are often 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 already high if not, some say, too high. 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 moral principle, already argued for by way of examples and already invoked, that one is not, in general, entitled to simply transfer costs of a significant kind arising fron an activity which benefits oneself onto other parties who are not involved in the activity and are not beneficiaries. This transfer principle is especially clear in cases where the significant costs include an effect on life or health or a risk thereof, and where the benefit to the benefitting party is of a noncrucial or dispensible nature, because, e.g. it can be substituted for or done without. Thus, for instance, one is not usually entitled to harm, or risk harming, another in the process of benefitting oneself. Suppose, for another example, we consider a village which produces, as a result of an industrial process by which it lives , a noxious waste material which is expensive and difficult to dispose of and yet creates a risk to life and health 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 service, on the train, to the next village. The inhabitants of this village are then forced to face the problem either of undertaking the expensive and difficult disposal process oor of sustaining risks to their own lives and health or else leaving the village and their livelihoods. transfer of costs as morally unacceptable. Most of us would see this kind of �30. 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 condition are not only future people and future generations (those of the next villages) but neighbours of nuclear reactors, especially, as in third world countries, neighbours who are not nuclear power users. The distribution of costs and damage in such a fashion, i.e. on to non-beneficiaries is a characteristic of certain widespread and serious forms of pollution, and is one of its most objectionable moral features. It is a corollary of the condition that we should not hand the world on to our successors in substantially worse shape than we received it - the l_ramsmission. principle. For if we did then that would be a significant transfer of costs. (The corollary can be independently argued for on the basis of certain ethical theories). VI. OTHER SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL RISKS AND COSTS OF NUCLEAR DEVELOPMENT, ESPECIALLY NUCLEAR WAR. The problems already discussed by no means exhaust the environmental, health and safety 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 transportation 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 proliferation of nuclear armaments - these hazards have parallels, 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".38 Furthermore, the various (often serious) hazards encountered in working in some sectors of uranium fabrication should be differently viewed from those resulting from location I 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 working with radioactive material are now known in advance of choice of such an occupation, 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 "fact" of location cannot be. The social issue of arrangements that contract occupational choices and opportunities 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, is not an issue newly produced by nuclear associated occupations. �31. Other social and environmental problems - though endemic where large-scale industry operates in societies that are highly inegalitarian and include sectors that are far from affluent - are more irdtimately linked with the nuclear power cycle. Though pollution is a common and generally undesirable component of large-scale industrial operation, radioactive pollution, such as uranium mining for instance produces, is especially a legacy of nuclear development, and a specially undesirable one, as enormous rectification estimates for dead radio­ active lands and waterways reveal. Though sabotage is a threat to many large industries, so that modern factory complexes are often guarded like concentration camps (but from us on the outside), sabotage of a nuclear reactor can have dire consequences, of a different order of magnitude from most industrial sabotage (consider again the effects of core meltdown). Though theft of material from more dubious enterprises such as munitions works can pose threats to populations at large and can assist terrorism, no thefts for allegedly peaceful enterprises pose problems of the same order as theft of fissionable material. No other industry produces materials which so readily permit of fabrication into such massive explosives. No other industry is, to sum it up, so vulnerable on so many fronts. In part to reduce it£ vulnerability, in part because of its long and continuing association with military activities, the nuclear industry is subject to, and encourages, 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 association and of expression, and free access to information. These practices include secrecy, restriction of information, formation of special police and guard forces, espionage, curtailment of civil liberties. Already operators of nuclear installations are given extraordinary powers, in vetting employees, to investigate the background and activities not only of employees but also of their families and sometimes even of their friends. The installations themselves become armed camps, which especially offends British sensibilities. The U.K. Atomic Energy (Special Constables) Act of 1976 created a special armed force to guard nuclear installations and made it answerable ... to the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority. ■JLhee-e- developments^in the IJnd t^d —and worjc in West Gcmafiy-ji presage along with nuclear development increasingly authoritarian and anti-democratic societies. That nuclear development appears to force such political consequences tells heavily against it. �32. Nuclear development is further indicted politically by the direct connection of nuclear power with nuclear war. It is fortunately true that ethical questions concerning nuclear war - for example, whether a nuclear war is justified, or just, under any circumstances, and if so what circumstances - are distinguishable from those concerning nuclear power. Undoubtedly, however, the spread of nuclear power is substantially increasing the technical means for engaging in nuclear war and so, to that extent, the opportunity for, and chances of, nuclear engagement. Since nuclear wars are never accountable positive goods, but are at best the lesser of major evils, nuclear wars are always highly ethically undesirable. The spread of nuclear power accordingly expands the opportunity for, and chances of, highly undesirable consequences. Finally the latter, so increasing these chances and opportunities, is itself undesirable, and therefore what leads to it, nuclear development, is also undesirable. The details and considerations that fill out this argument, from nuclear war against nuclear development, are many. They are firstly technical, that it is a relatively straightforward and inexpensive matter to make nuclear explosives given access to a nuclear power plant? secondly political, that nuclear engagements once instituted likely to escalate and that those who control (or differently are likely to force access to) nuclear power plants do not shrink from nuclear confrontation and are certainly prepared to toy with nuclear engagement (up to ’’strategic nuclear strikes” at least); and thirdly ethical, that wars invariably have immoral consequences, such as massive damage to involved parties, however high sounding their justification is. Nuclear wars are certain to be considerably worse as regards damage inflicted than 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 irreversibility of any such confrontations. The supporting considerations are, fourthly, drawn from decision theory, and are designed to show that the chances of such undesirable outcomes is itself undesirable. The core argument is in brief this (the argument will be elaborated in section VIII):- Energy choice between alternative options is a case of decision making under uncertainty, because in particular of the gross uncertainties involved in nuclear development. In cases of this type the appropriate rational procedure is to compare worst consequences of each alternative, to reject those alternatives with the worst of these worst consequences (this is a pretty uncontroversial part of the maximin rule which enjoins selection of the alternative with the best worst consequences). The nuclear alternative has, in particular because of the real possibility of a nuclear war, the worst worst consequences and is accordingly a particularly undesirable alternative. �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 remains open, that of appeal to important overriding circumstances. That appeal, to be ethically acceptable, must go far beyond merely economic considerations. For, as already observed, the consigner’s action cannot be justified by purely economistic arguments, such as that his profits would rise, the firm or the village would be more prosperous, or by appealing to the fact that some possibly uncomfortable changes would otherwise be needed. The transfer principle on which this assessment was based, that one was not usually entitled to create a serious risk to others for these sorts of reasons, applied more generally and, in particular, applied to the nuclear case. For this reason the economistic arguments which are those most commonly advanced under the Old Paradigm to promote nuclear development - e.g. cheapness, efficiency, profitability for electricity utilities, and the need otherwise for uncomfortable changes such as restructuring of employment, investment and consumption - do not even begin to show that the nuclear alternative is an acceptable one. Even if these economistic assumptions about benefits to present people were correct ~ it will be contended that most of them are not - the arguments would fail because economics (like the utilitarianism from which it characteristically derives) has to 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 prima facie unacceptable (nuclear) alternative is taken, some even more unacceptable alternative is the only possible outcome, and will ensue. For example, in the train parable, the consigner may argue that his action is justified because unless it is taken 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 clearcut, and one would perhaps hesitate to condemn any action taken in such circumstances. Some of the arguments advanced to show moral conflict are based on competing commitments to present people, and others on competing obligations to future people, both of which are taken to override the obligations not to impose on the future significant risk of serious harm. The structure of such moral conflict arguments is based crucially on the presentation of a genuine and exhaustive set of alternatives (or at least practical alternatives) and upon showing that the only alternatives to admittedly morally undesirable actions are even more undesirable ones. If some practical alternative which is not morally worse than the action to be justified is overlooked, suppressed, or neglected in the argument - for example, if in the village case it turns out that the villagers have another option �34. to starving or to the sending off of the parcel, namely earning a living in some other way - then the argument is defective and cannot readily be patched. Just such a suppression of practicable alternatives has occurred in the argument designed to show that the alternatives to the nuclear option are even worse than the option itself, and that there are other factual defects in these arguments as well. In short, the arguments depend essentially on the presentation of false dichotomies. 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 industrialised countries. Failure to develop nuclear energy, it is often claimed, would amount to denying them the opportunity to reach the standard of affluence we currently enjoy and would create unemployment and poverty in the industrialised nations. The unemployment and poverty argument does not stand up to examination either for the poor of the industrial countries or for those of the third world. There is good evidence that large-scale nuclear energy will help to increase unemployment and poverty in the industrial world, through the 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 is needed for the third world is even less convincing. Nuclear energy is both politically and economically inappropriate for the third world, since it requires massive amounts of capital, requires numbers of imported scientists and engineers, 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 foreign dependence, adds to centralised entrenched power and reduces the chance for change in the oppressive political 41 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. �35. The poverty argument is then a fraud. help the poor. Nuclear energy will not be used to Both for the third world and for the industrialised countries there are well-known energy-conserving alternatives and the 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 to solar or perhaps fusion development. And there are various alternatives: coal and other fossil fuels, geothermal, and a range of solar options (including as well as narrowly solar, wind, water, tidal and plant power), 42 each possibly in combination with conservation measures. Despite the availability 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). Such an assumption really underlies part of the poverty argument, which thus amounts to an elaboration of the trickledown argument (much favoured within the Old Paradigm setting). runs:- For the argument Nuclear development is necessary for (continuing and increasing) affluence. Affluence inevitably trickles down to the poor. development benefits the poor. Therefore nuclear First, the argument does not on its own show anything specific about nuclear power: for it works equally well if ’energy' is substituted for ’nuclear’. It has also to be shoum, what the next major argument will try to claim, that nuclear development is unique among energy alternatives in increasing affluence. The second assumption, that affluence Inevitably trickles down, has now been roundly refuted, both by recent historical data, which show increasing affluence (e.g. in terms of GNP averaged per capita) coupled with increasing poverty in several countries, both developing and developed, and through economic models which reveal how ’affluence” can increase without redistribution occurring. Another major argument advanced to show moral conflict appeals to a set of supposedly overriding and competing obligations to future people. We have, it is said, a duty to pass on the immensely valuable things and institutions which our culture has developed. Unless our high-technology, high energy industrial society is continued and fostered, our valuable institutions and traditions will fall into decay or be swept away. The argument is essentially that without nuclear power, without the continued level of material wealth it alone is assumed to make possible, the lights of our civilization will go out. Future people will be the losers. 4: �36. The lights-going-out argument does raise questions as to what is valuable in our society, and of what characteristics are necessary for a good society. But for the most part these large questions, which deserve much fuller examination, can be avoided. The reason is that the argument adopts an extremely uncritical position with respect to present high-technology societies, apparently assuming that they are uniformly and uniquely valuable. It assumes that technologic society is unmodifiable, that it cannot be changed in the direction of energy conservation or alternative (perhaps high technology) energy sources without collapse. 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 furnish - are essential to maintain this whole. These assumptions are hard to accept. The assumption that technological society's energy patterns are unmodifiable is especially so — after all it has survived events such as world wars which have required major social and technologic^ restructuring and consumption modification. If western society's demands for energy are totally unmodifiable without collapse, not only would it be committed to a program of increasing destruction, but one might ask what use its culture could be to future people who would very likely, as a consequence of this destruction, lack the resource base which the argument assumes to be essential in the case of contemporary society. There is also difficulty with the assumption of uniform valuableness; but if this is rejected the question becomes not: what is necessary to maintain existing high-technological society and its political institutions, but rather, what is necessary to maintain what is valuable in that society and the political institutions which are needed to maintain those valuable things. While it may be easy to argue that high energy consumption centrally controlled is necessary to maintain the political and economic status quo, it is not so easy to argue that it is essential to maintain what is valuable, and it is what is valuable, presumably that we have a duty to pass on to the future. The evidence, 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 reason in fact to believe that a society with much lower energy and resource consumption would better foster what is valuable than our own. But even if a radical change in these directions is independently desirable, as we should argue, it is not necessary to presuppose such a change, in the short term at least, in order to see that the assumptions of the lights-going-out argument are wrong. No enormous reduction of well-being is required to consume less energy than at �37. present, and certainly far less than the large increase over present levels of 44 consumption which is assumed in the usual economic case for nuclear energy. What the nuclear strategy is really designed to do then is not to prevent the lights going out in western civilisation, but to enable the lights to go on burning all the time - to maintain and even increase the wattage output of the Energy Extravaganza. In fact there is good reason to think that, far from the high energy consumption society fostering what is valuable, it will, especially if energy 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 garrisoned, capital- and expertise-intensive energy source, must be one which is highly susceptible to entrenchment of power, and one in which the forces which control this energy source, whether capitalist or bureaucratic, can exert enormous power over the political system and over people’s lives, even more than they do at present. Such a society would, almost inevitably tend to become authoritarian and increasingly anti-democratic, as an outcome, among other things, of its response to the threat posed by dissident groups in the nuclear 45 situation. 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 authoritarianism - while many valuable aspects, such as the degree of political freedom and those opportunities for personal and collective autonomy which exist, would be lost or diminished: political freedom, for example, is a high price to pay for consumerism 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 technology- nuclear 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, rather, 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 argument, 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 If then we apply - as we have argued we should - appeal to futurity, closed. the same standards of morality to the future as we ought to acknowledge for the present, the conclusion that large-scale nuclear development is a crime against the future is inevitable. Closed also, in the same way, are the escape routes to other arguments — 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 argument thus far, to anti-nuclear conclusions, has relied upon, and defended premisses that would be rejected under the Old Paradigm; for example, such theses as that the interests and utilities of future people are not discounted (in contrast to the temporally-limited utilitarianism of market- centred 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 case, 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 nuclear development 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 alternatives to given economic ends. Admittedly so much capital has already been invested in nuclear fission research and development, in marked contrast to other newer rival sources or 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 (out), and which are, in accordance with Old Paradigm percepts, publicly economic (in that they are approved for public consumption), and the real reasons, which involve private economic factors and matters of power and social. control. �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 Nuclear power is necessary to sustain economic growth. valuable!):- Economic growth is desirable (for all the usual reasons, e.g. to increase the size of the pie, to avoid or postpone redistribution problems, and connected social Therefore nuclear power is desirable. The first premiss is A6 part of US energy policy, and the second premiss is supplied by standard unrest, etc.). 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 environmental costs carried by unqualified economic growth.More to the point, since the second premiss is an assumption of the dominant paradigm, the first premiss (or rather an appropriate and less vulnerable restatement of it) fails even on Old Paradigm standards. For of course nuclear power is not necessary given that there are other, perhaps costlier alternatives. The premiss usually defended is some elaboration of the premiss : Nuclear power is the economically best way to sustain economic growth, ’economically best’ being filled out as 'most efficient’, ’cheapest’, ’having most favourable benefit-cost ratio’, etc. Unfortunately for the argument, and for nuclear development schemes, nuclear power is none of these things a good deal of economic cheating (easy to do) is done. decisively, unless Much data, beginning with the cancellation of nuclear plant orders, can^ 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 be permitted at all, and evidently true premisses if the argument is to be decisive. The data to be summarised splits into two parts, public (governmental) analyses, and private (utility) assessments. Virtually all available data concerns the USA; in Europe, West and East, true costs 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. Romanoff has estimated that capital costs of a nuclear generator (of optimal capacity) 49 will exceed comparable costs of a coal-fired unit by about 26% in 1985. And capital costs are only one part of the equation that now tell against private utility purchase of new nuclear plants. rather decisively Another main factor is the poor performance and low reliability of nuclear generators. Coney showed that nuclear plants can only generate about half the electricity they were designed to produce, and that when Atomic Energy Commission estimates of relative costs of nuclear and coal power, which assumed that both operated at 80% of design capacity, were adjusted accordingly, nuclear generated power proved to be far more �40. expensive than estimated. The discrepancy between actual and estimated capacity is especially important because a plant with an actual capacity factor of 55% produced electricity at a cost about 25% higher than if the plant had performed at the manufacturers’ projected capacity rate of 70-75%. The low reliability of nuclear plants (per kilowatt output) as compared with the superior reliability of smaller coal-fired plants adds to the case, on conventional economic grounds of efficiency and product production costs, against nuclear power. These unfavourable assessments are from a private (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 Act^), in enrichment, and in waste management. It has been estimated that charging such costs to the electricity consumer would increase electricity bills for nuclear power by at least 25% (and probably much more). When official US cost/benefit analyses favouring nuclear power over coal are examined, it is found that they inadmissibly omit several of the public costs involved in producing nuclear power. For example, the analyses ignore waste costs on the quite inadmissible ground that it is not known currently what the costs involved are. But even using actual waste handling costs (while wastes await storage) is enough to show that coal power is preferable to nuclear. When further public costs, such as insurance against accident and for radiation damage, are duly taken into account, the balance is swung still further in favour of alternatives to nuclear and against nuclear power. In short, even on proper Old Paradigm accounting, the nuclear alternative should be rejected. Nuclear development is not economical, it certainly seems; it has been kept going not through its clear economic viability, but by massive public subsidization, of several types. In USA, to take a main example where information is available, nuclear development is publicly supported through heavily subsidized or sometimes free research and development, .th«xugh the Price-Anderson Act^ which sharply limits both private and public liability, i.e. which in effect provided the insurance subsidy making corporate nuclear development economically feasible, and through government agreement to handle all radioactive wastes. While the Old Paradigm strictly construed cannot support uneconomical developments, contemporary liberalisation of the Paradigm does allow for uneconomic projects, seen as operated in the public interest, in such fields as social welfare. Duly admitting social welfare and some equity principles �41. in the distribution of wealth (not necessarily of pollution) leadsjtne modern version of the Old Paradigm, called the-Modified Old Paradigm. The main changes from the Old Paradigm are (as with state socialism) as emphasis of economic factors, e.g. individual self-help is down-played, wealth is to a small extent redistributed, e.g. through taxation, market forces are regulated or displaced (not in principle eliminated, as with state socialism). Now it has been contended - outrageous though it should now seem - that nuclear power is in the public interest as a means to various sought public ends, for example, aparL^from those already mentioned such as energy for growth and cheap electricity, and such as plentiful power for heating and cooking and appliance brown-outs and the like.1 use, avoidance of shortages, rationing, Since 4^ alternative power sources, such as coal, could serve s^me ends given power was supplied with suitable extravagance, the argument has again to show that the choice of nuclear power over other alternatives is best in the requisite respects, in serving the public interest. Such an argument is a matter for decision theory, under which head cost-benefit analyses which rank alternatives also fall as special cases. Decision theory purports to cover theoretically the field of choice between alternatives; it is presented as the theory which deals with the^ problem of choosing one. course of action among several possible courses . Thus the choice of alternative modes of energy production, the energy choice problem, becomes an exercise in decision theory; and the nuclear choice is often’justified” in Old Paradigm terms through appeal to decision theory. But though decision theory is in principle comprehensive, as soon as it is put to work in such practical cases as energy choice, it is very considerably contracted in scope, several major assumptions are surreptitiously imported, and what one is confronted with is a depauperate theory drastically pruned down to conform with the narrow utilitarianism of mainstream economic theory. The extent of reduction can be glimpsed by comparing, to take one important example, a general optimisation model for decision (where uncertainty is not gross) with comparable decision theory methods, such as the expected utility model. The general model for best choice among alternatives specifies maximisation of expected value subject to constraints, which may include ethical constraints excluding certain alternatives under given conditions. Expected utility models demote value to utility, assuming thereby measurability and transference properties that may not obtain, and eliminate constraints altogether (absorbing what is forbidden, for example, as having a high disutility, but one that can be compensated for nonetheless). Thus, in �particular, ethical constraints against nuclear development are replaced, in Old Paradigm fashion, by allowance in principle for compensation 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 (neo-classical) economic assumptions made in the theory, for example as to the assessment of everything to be taken into account through utility (which comes down to monetary terms ■ everything worth accounting has a price), and as to the legitimacy of transferring with limited compensation 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 uncertainty. It is not a case of decision under risk (and so expected utility models are not applicable), because some possible outcomes are so uncertain that, in contrast to the case of risk, no (suitably objective) quantifiable probabilities can be assigned to them. Items that are so uncertain are taken to include nuclear war and core meltdown of a reactor, possible outcomes of nuclear development : widespread radio­ active pollution is, by contrast, not uncertain. The correct rule for decision under uncertainty is, in the case of energy choice, maximin, to maximize the minimum payoff, so it is sometimes contended. In fact, once again, it is unnecessary 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 rejections for options early rejected as the nuclear options, a convergence 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 convergence can be effected also, because the best possible (economic) outcomes of such leading options as coal and a hydroelectric mix are very roughly of the same order as the nuclear option (so Elster contends, and his argument can be elaborated). Under these o conditions complex decision rules (such as the Arrow-Horwicz rule) which take ---- ----------outcomes ------------ ------4^-^ account of both best possible and ^ost- possible under reduce to the maximin rule. each option Whichever energy option is selected under the maximum rule, the nuclear option is certainly rejected since there are options where worst outcomes are substantially better than that of the nuclear option (just, consider the scenario if the nuclear nightmare, not the nuclear dream, is realised). Further application of the rejection rule will reject the fossil fuel (predominantly coal) option, on the basis of estimated effects on the earth’s climate from burning massive quantities of such fuels. �43. Although the rejection rule coupled with position several rivals to maximin each proposed, enjoys a privileged for decision under uncertainty have been of which has associated rejection rules. rules, such as the risk- added which ’assesses maximin Some of these reasoning criticised by Goodin (pp.507-8), the riskiness of a policy in terms of the increment of risk it adds to those pre-existing in the status quo, rather than in terms of the absolute value of the risk associated with the policy’ are decidedly and rather than offering a rational decision procedure appears to afford protection of the (nuclear) status quo. What will be argued, or rather dubious, 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-open or allow-for-reversibility (not an entirely unquestionable rule rule ’of strictly limited applicability’) excludes the nuclear option because ’nuclear plants and their by-products have an air of irreversibility ... ’’One cannot the way one can abandon simply abandon a coal-fired plant"’ (p.506). a nuclear reactor The compare-the- alternatives rule* in ordinary application, leads back to the cost-benefit assessments, which, as already observed, tell decisively against a nuclear option when costing is done properly. The maximise-sustainable-benefits rule, which ’directs us to opt for the policy producing the highest level of net benefits which can be sustained indefinitely’, ’decisively favours renewable Other lesser rules Goodin discusses, sources’, ruling out the nuclear option. which have not really been applied in the nuclear debate, and which lead yet further from the Old Paradigm framework, harm-avoidance and protecting-the- vulnerable. also yield/ the same nuclear-excluding results. Harm-avoidance, in particular, points ’decisively in favour of "alternative" and "renewable" energy sources ... combined with strenuous efforts at energy conservation’ The upshot is evident: whatever reasonable decision rule is adopted (p.442). the result is the same, a standards. nuclear choice is rejected, even by Old Paradigm Nor would reversion to an expected utility analysis alter this conclusion; for such analyses are but glorified cost-benefit analyses, with probabilities duly multiplied in, and the conclusion is as before from cost-benefit considerations, against a nuclear choice. The Old Paradigm does not, it thus appears, sustain the nuclear juggernaut: nor does its Modification. 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, sufficiently evident that contemporary economic behaviour does not accord with Old Paradigm percepts, practice does not accord with neo-classical economic �theory nor, to consider the main modification, with social theory. democratic 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 keen to realise returns on capital already invested. There are also typical self-interest reasons for 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 political affairs, and as a spin-off profits accrue to others, and so on. There are. just as important, ideological reasons, such as a belief in the control of both political and physical power by technocratic-entreprenial elite, a belief in social control from above, control which nuclear power offers far more than alternatives, some of which (vaguely) threaten to alter the power base, a faith in the unlimitedness of 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. Within contemporary corporate capitalism, these sorts of reasons for nuclear development are intimately linked, because those whose types of enterprise benefit substantially from nuclear development are commonly those who hold the requisite beliefs. along with its state It is then, contemporary corporate enterprise image, that fuels the nuclear juggernaut. To be sure, corporate capitalism, which is the political economy largely thrust upon us in western nations, is not necessary for a nuclear future; a totalitarian state of the type 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 national This diagnosis can be development of nuclear power in the US? and the international spread of nuclear technology for which the US has been largely responsible. the Eastern bloc is which had in 1977 only nuclear plants. By comparison with the West, nuclear power production in and is largely confined to the Soviet Union small about 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 else­ where to any great extent. American technology has. �45. The 60s were, because of the growth in electricity demand, a period of great expansion of the electrical utilities in the US. These companies were encouraged to build nuclear plants, rather than coal or oil burning plants, for several state controlled or influenced reasons:- Firstly, owing to governmental regulation procedures the utilities could (it then seemed) earn a higher rate of profit on a nuclear plant than a fossil fuel one. Secondly, the US government arranged to meet crucial costs and risks of nuclear operation, and in this way, and more directly through its federal agencies, actively encouraged a nuclear choice and nuclear development. In particular, state limitation of liability and shouldering of part of insurance for nuclear accidents and state arrangements to handle nuclear wastes were what made profitable private utility operation appear feasible and resulting in nuclear investment. In the 70s, though the state subsidization continued, the private ’high costs of construction combined with low capacity cO , factors and poor reliability have wiped out the iyst advantage that nuclear power picture changed : had enjoyed in the US. Much as the domestic nuclear market in the US is controlled by a few corporations, so the world market is dominated by a few countries, predominantly and first of all the US, which through its two leading nuclear companies, Westinghouse and General Electric, has been the major exporter of nuclear 55 technology. ' These companies were enabled to gain entry into European and subsequently world markets by US foreign policies, basically the "Atoms for Peace" program supplemented by bilateral agreements providing for US technology, research, enriched uranium and financial capital. ’The US offered a Estate subsidized] nuclear package that Europe could not refuse and with which the British could not compete*. In the 70s the picture of US domination of Common Market nuclear technology had given way to subtler influence: American companies held dudlJug with relevant governments) substantial interests in European and Japanese nuclear companies and held licences on the technology which remained largely American. Meanwhile in the 60s and 70s the US entered into bilateral agreements for civilian use of atomic energy with many other countries, for example, Argentina, Brasil, Columbia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Pakistan, Philippines, South Korea, Portugal, South Africa, Taiwan, Turkey, Venezuela, South Vietnam. The US proceeded, Spain, in this way, to ship nuclear technology and nuclear materials in great quantities round the world. It also proceeded to spread nuclear technology through the International Atomic Energy Agency, originally designed to control and safeguard nuclear operations, but most of whose *budget and activities ... have gone to promote nuclear activities’. �46. A main reason for the 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 safety regulations are loose and enforcement rare, where public opposition is not permitted and where weak and corrupt regimes offer easy sales. [For] ... the US has considerable leverage with many of these countries. We know from painful experience that many of the worst dictatorships 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. It is evident from this sketch of the ways and means of reactor proliferation that not only have practices departed far from the framework of the Old Paradigm and five social Modification, but that the practices (or corporate capitalism and associated third world imperialism) involve much that is ethically unacceptable, whether percepts; for principles such as by older, modified, or alternative thos and self-determination are grossly violated. IX. SOCIAL OPTIONS : SHALLOWER AND DEEPER ALTERNATIVES. The future 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 associated phenomena such as acid rain and atmospheric heating, not to mention the despoliation caused by extensive strip mining, all of which result from its use 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 nonbeneficiaries for some concentrated benefits to some profit takers and to some users who do not pay the full costs of production . i 58 and replacement. To these conventional main options a third is often added which emphasizes softer and more benign technologies, such as those of solar energy and, in Northern Europe, hydroelectricity. The deeper choice, which even softer paths tend to neglect, is not technological but social, and involves both conservation measures and the restructuring of production away from energy intensive uses: at a more basic level there is a choice between consumeristic and nonconsumeristic futures. These more fundamental choices between social alternatives, conventional technologically-oriented discussion of energy options tends to be obscure. It is not just a matter of deciding in which way to meet �47. given and unexamined goals (as the Old Paradigm would imply), but also a matter of examining the goals. That is, we are not merely faced with the question 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 matter of examining those alleged needs and the cost of a society that creates them. It is not just a question of devising less damaging ways to meet these alleged needs conceived of as inevitable and unchangeable. (Hence there are solar ways of producing unnecessary trivia no one really wants, as opposed to nuclear ways.) Naturally this is not to deny that these softer options are superior because of the ethically unacceptable features of the harder options. But it is doubtful that any technology, however benign in principle, will be likely to leave a tolerable world for the future if it is expected to meet unbounded and uncontrolled energy 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, for example, the effect on the world’s forests, which are commonly counted as a solar resource, of use for production of methanol or of electricity by woodchipping (as already planned by forest authorities and contemplated by many other energy organisations). While few would object to the use of genuine waste material for energy production, 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 forests. The effects of such additional demands on the maintenance of the forests are often dismissed, even by soft technologicalists, by the simple expedient of waving around the label 'renewable resources'. Many forests are in 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 imminent if not already well advanced. It certainly has begun in many regions, and for many forest types (such as rainforest types) which are now, and very rapidly, being lost for the future. The adaition 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 appreciation of the conduct of contemporary forestry 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, �48. resembling the deforestation of England at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, again for energy purposes, would be extensive and devastating erosion in steeper lands and tropical areas, 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 - important though this is - without any more basic structural and social change is inadequate. Nor is such a simple technological switch likely to be achieved. It is not as if political pressure could oblige the US government to stop its nuclear program (and that of the countries 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 accomplished, it is very unlikely given the integration of political powerholders with those sponsoring nuclear development. The deeper social options involve challenging and trying to change a social structure which promotes consumerism, consumption far beyond genuine needs, and an 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 satisfaction in work and in social relations and other activities, is virtually bound to oe one which generates a vast amount of unnecessary consumption. (A production system that produces goods not to meet genuine 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 implementing the New Paradigm, the move away from consumerism is for example part of the more general shift from materialism and materialist values. The social change option tends to be obscured in most discussions of energy options and of how to meet energy needs, in part because it does question underlying values of current social arrangements. The conventional discussion proceeds by taking alleged demand (often conflated with wants or needs ^) as unchallengeable, and the issue to be one of which technology can �49. 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 and unchangeable. It is commonly argued by representatives The point is readily illustrated. of such industries as transportation and petroleum, as for example by McGrowth of the XS Consumption Co., that people want deep freezers, air conditioners, power boats, ... It would be authoritarian to prevent them from satisfying these wants. Such an argument conveniently ignores the social framework in which such needs and wants arise or are produced. To point to the determination of many such wants at the framework level is not however to accept a Marxist approach according to which they are entirely determined at the framework level (e.g. by industrial organisation) and there is no such thing as individual choice or determination at all. It is to see the social framework as a major factor in determining certain kinds of choices, such as those for travel, and to see apparently individual choices made in such matters as being channelled and directed by a social framework determined largely in the interests of corporate and private profit and advantage. The social change option is a hard option - at least it will be difficult to obtain politically - but it is the only way, so it has been argued, of avoiding passing on serious costs to the future. And there are other sorts of reasons than such ethical ones for taking it: it is the main, indeed the only sort of option 62 open to those who take a deeper ecological perspective , a perspective integral with the New Paradigm but not essential to radical departure from the dominant paradigm. The ethical transmission requirement defended accordingly requires, hardly surprisingly, social and political adjustment. The social and political changes that the deeper alternative requires will be strongly resisted because they and power structure. mean changes in current social organisation To the extent that the option represents some kind of threat to parts of present political and economic arrangements it is not surprising that official energy option discussion proceeds by misrepresenting and often obscuring it. But difficult though a change will be, especially one with such far-reaching effects on the prevailing power structure, is to obtain, it is imperative to try : we are all on the nuclear 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-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 fallacies and decision theory is at least as important as knowledge of nuclear technology. 2. As to the first, see references cited in Goodin, 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 Dunlap, especially p. 34. 5. 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-)nuclear 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 what, suits them. 9. This is a conclusion of several governmental inquiries and is conceded by some leading proponents of nuclear development; for requisite details up to 1977 see Routley (a). The same conclusion 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. See the papers, and simulations, discussed in Goodin, p. 428. 11a. Naturally the effect on humans is not the only factor that has to be taken into account in arriving at moral assessments. Nuclear radiation, 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 example, can hardly improve its case, it suffices if the case against it can be made out solely in terms of its effects on human life in the conventional (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 recently nuclear power is seen as providing man at least with unlimited physical power, power obtained through technology, [ability to manage technology represents the past] 14. On such limitation 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 voting "paradoxes other. on the Other different limitation results are presented in Routley 81. It follows that there are many problems that have no solution and much that is necessarily unknowable. Limitative results put a serious dent in the progress picture. According the 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.243). Therefore, a nuclear future contravenes requirements of justice. �3 16. For examples, and for some details of the history of philosophers’ positions on obligations to the future, see Routley (a). 17. Passmore, p. 91. Passmore’s position is ambivalent and, to all appearances, inconsistent. It is considered in detail in Routley (a), as also is Rawls’ position. 18. For related criticisms of the economists’ arguments for discounting, and for citation of the often eminent economists who sponsor them, see Goodin, 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 presupposes, 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 p). For example, outcomes Goodin says cannot be listed, can be comprehended along such lines as "plant breakdown through human error”. Furthermore the different more appropriate rules Goodin subsequently considers also require listing of "possible" outcomes. are really two points. Goodin’s point can be alternatively stated however. There The first trouble is that such ragbag alternatives cannot in general be assigned required quantitative probabilities, and it is at that point that applications of the models breaks down. The breakdown is just what separates decision making under uncertainty from decision making under risk. Secondly, many influential applications of decision theory methods, the Rasmussen Report is a good example, do, illegitimately, delete possible alternatives from their modellings. 21. Discount, or bank, rates in the economists' sense are usually set to follow the market, cf. P.A. Samuelson, EcOYiorri'icsi 7th Edition, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1967, p.351. 22. A real possibility is one which there is evidence for believing could eventuate. A real possibility requires producible evidence for its consideration. 23. Thus the rates have little moral relevance. The contrast is with mere logical possibility. �4 24. Such a principle is explicit both in classical utilitarianism (e.g. Sidgwick p. 414), and in a range of contract and other theories from Kant and Rousseau to Rawls (p.293). How the principle is argued for will depend heavily, however, on the underlying theory; and we do not want to make our use depend heavily on particular ethical theories. 25. The latter question is taken up in section VII; see especially, the Poverty argument. 26. SF, p. 27. Shrader-Frechette is herself somewhat critical of the carte blanche adoption of these methods, suggesting that ’whoever affirms or denies the desirability of ... [such] standards is, to some degree, symbollically assenting to a number of American value patterns and cultural norms’ 27. (p. 28). The example parallels the sorts of counterexamples often advanced to utilitarianism, e.g. the admissible lynching of pleasure given to the large lynching party. of an innocent person because For the more general case against utilitarianism, see ... 28. US Atomic Energy Commission, Comparative Risk-Cost-Benefit Study of Alternative sources of Electrical Energy (WASH-1224), US Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., December 1974, p.4-7 and p. 1-16. 29. As SF points out, p.37-44., in some detail. As she remarks, ... since standards need not be met, so long as the NRC [Nuclear Regulatory commission] judges that the licence shows ’a reasonable effort’ at meeting them, current policy allows government regulators to trade human health and welfare for the [apparent] good intentions of the promotors of technology. [Such] good intentions have never been known to be sufficient for the morality of an act (p. 39). The failure of state regulation, even where the standards are as mostly not very demanding, and the alliance of regulators with those they are supposed to be regulating, are conspicuous features of modern environmental control, not just of (nuclear) pollution control. 30. �31. The figures are those from the original Brookhaven Report: possibilities and consequences of major 'Theoretical accidents in large nuclear plants’, USAEC Report WASH-740, Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1957. This report was requested in the first place because the Commission bn Atomic Energy wanted positive safety conclusions "to reassure the private insurance companies" so that they would provide coverage for the nuclear industry. Since even the conservative statistics of the report were alarming it was suppressed and its data were not made public until almost 20 years later, after a suit was brought as a result of the Freedom of Information Act (Shrader-Frechette, pp. 78-9). 32. Atomic Energy Commission, Reactor Safety Study: An Assessment of Accident Risks in US Commercial Nuclear Power Plants, Government Printing Office Washington, D.C., 1975. This report, the only allegedly complete study, concluded that fission reactors presented only a minimal health risk to the public. Early in 1979, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (the relevant organisation that superseded the troubled Atomic Energy Commission) withdrew its support for the report, with the result that there is now no comprehensive analysis of nuclear power approved by the US Government. 32a. Most present and planned reactors are of this type: see Gyorgy. 33. 34. Even then relevant environment factors may have been neglected. 35. There are variations on (i) and (ii) which multiply costs against numbers such as probabilities. In this way risks, construed as probable costs, can be taken into account in the assessment. (Alternatively, risks may be assessed through such familiar methods as insurance.) A principle varying (ii), and formulated as follows: (ii’)a is ethically acceptable if (for some b) a includes no more risks than b and b is socially accepted, was the basic ethical principle in terms of which the Cluff Lake Board of Inquiry recently decided that nuclear power development �in Saskatchewan is ethically acceptable: see Cluff Lake Board of Inquiry Final Report, Department of Environment, Government of Saskatchewan, 1978, p. 305 and p. 288. In this report, a is nuclear power and b is either activities clearly accepted by society as alternative power sources. In other applications b has been taken as cigarette smoking, motoring, mining and even the Vietnam 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 inadmissible conventional character. For look at the origin of b: b may be socially accepted though it is no longer socially acceptable, or though its social acceptibility is no longer so clearcut and it would not have been socially What accepted if as much as is now known had been known when it was introduced. 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 the amendments the principles are invalid, for the reasons given in the text. It is not disconcerting that these arguments do not work. It would be sad to see yet another area lost to the experts, namely ethics to actuaries. 36. A main part of the trouble with the models is that they are narrowly utilitarian, and like utilitarianism they neglect distributional features, involve naturalistic fallacies, etc. Really they try to treat as an uncon­ strained optimisation what is a deontically constrained optimisation: see R. and V. Routley ’An expensive repair kit for utilitarianism’. 37. Apparent exceptions to the principle such as taxation (and redistribution of income generally) vanish when wealth is construed (as it has to be if taxation is to be properly justified) as at least partly a social asset unfairly monopolised by a minority of the population. Examples such as that of motoring dangerously do not constitute counterexamples to the principle; for one is not morally entitled to so motor. 38. SF, p. 39. Goodin, p. 433. 40. On all these points see R. Grossman and G. Daneker, Guide to Jobs and 15, where references are also cited. Energy, Environmentalists for Full Employment, Washington DC, 1977, pp.1-7, and also the details supplied in substantiating the interesting case of Commoner On the absorption of available capital by the nuclear industry, see as well E18], p. 23. On the employment issues, see too H.E. Daly in L9 J, p. 149. �A more fundamental challenge to the poverty argument appears in I. Illich, Energy and Equality, Calden and Boyars, London 1974, where it is argued that the sort of development nuclear energy represents is exactly the opposite of what the poor need. 41. For much more detail on the inappropriateness see E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, Blond and Briggs, London, 1973. As to the capital and other requirements, see [2], p. 48, and also [7] and [9]. For an illuminating look at the sort of development high-energy technology will tend to promote in the so-called underdeveloped countries see the paper of Waiko and other papers in The Melanesian Environment (edited J.H. Winslow), Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1977. 42. A useful survey is given in A. Lovins, Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken, Friends of the Earth Australia, 1977 (reprinted from Foreign Affairs, October 1976); see also [17], [6], [7], [14], p. 233 ff, and Schumacher, op. cit. 43. An argument like this is suggested in Passmore, Chapters 4 and 7, with respect to the question of saving resources. In Passmore this argument for the overriding importance of passing on contemporary culture is underpinned by what appears to be a future-directed ethical version of the Hidden Hand argument of economics - that, by a coincidence which if correct would indeed be fortunate, the best way to take care of the future (and perhaps even the only way to do so, since do-good intervention is almost certain to go wrong) is to take proper care of the present and immediate future. The argument has all the defects of the related Chain Argument discussed above and others. 44. See Nader and Abbotts, p. 66, p. 191, and also Commoner. 45. Very persuasive arguments to this effect have been advanced by civil liberties groups and others in a number of countries: see especially M. Flood and R. Grove-White, Nuclear Prospects. A comment on the individual, the State and Nuclear Power, Friends of the Earth, Council for the Protection of Rural England and National Council for Civil Liberties, London, 1976. 46. 'US energy policy, for example, since the passage of the 1954 Atomic Energy Act, has been that nuclear power is necessary to provide ”an economical and reliable basis” needed "to sustain economic growth” (SF, p.lll, and references there cited). �There are now a great many criticisms of the second premiss in the literature. For our criticism, and a reformulation of the premiss in terms of selective economic growth (which would exclude nuclear development), see Routley (b), and also Berkley and Seckier. To simple-mindedly contrast economic growth with no-growth, in the fashion of some discussions of nuclear power, c.f. Elster, is to leave out alternatives; the contraction crucial of course much simplifies the otherwise faulty case for unalleged growth. 48. In UK and USSR nuclear development is explicitly in the public domain, in such countries as France and West Germany the government has very substantial interests in main nuclear involved companies. Even as regards nuclear plant operation in the US, it is difficult to obtain comprehensive data. Estimates of cost very dramtically according to the sample of plants chosen and the assumptions made concerning the measurement of plant performance (Gyorgy, p. 173). 49. 50. See Kalmanoff, p. See Comey. 51. Ref. to what it has to say about Price Anderson Act. 52. Full ref to SF onargument from ignorance etc. 53. These e.g. Elster, p. 377. 54. A recent theme in much economic literature is that Bayesian decision On decision theory see also, theory and risk analysis can be universally 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, and few (and widely diverging) figures for,the probability of a reactor core meltdown, and no reliable estimates as to the likelihood of a nuclear confrontation. Thus Goodin argues (in 78) that 'such uncertainties plague energy theories' as to 'render expected utility calculations impossible’. 55. For details see Gyorgy, p. 398 ff., from which presentation of the international story is adapted. �7 56. Gyorgy, p. 307, and p. 308. points, see Chomsky 57. For elaboration of some of the important and Hermann. Whatever one thinks of the ethical principles underlying the Old Paradigm or its Modification - and they do form a coherent set that many people can respect - these are not the principles underlying contemporary corporate capitalism and associated third-world imperialism. 58. Certainly practical transitional programs may involve temporary and limited use of unacceptable long term commodities such as 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 of such measures as environmental (or replacement) pricing of energy i.e. so that the price of some energy unit includes the full cost of replacing it by an equivalent unit taking account of environmental cost of production. Other (sometimes cooptive) strategies towards more satisfactory alternatives should also, of course, be adopted, in particular the removal of institutional barriers to energy conservation and alternative technology (e.g. local government regulations blocking these), and the removal of state assistance to fuel and power industries. 59. Symptomatic of the fact that it is not treated as renewable is that forest economics do not generally allow for full renewability - if they did the losses and deficits on forestry operations would be much more striking than they already are often enough. It is doubtful, furthermore, that energy cropping of forests can be a fully renewable operation if net energy production is to be worthwhile; see, e.g. the argument in L.R.B. Mann ‘Some difficulties with energy farming for portable fuels’, and add in the costs of ecosystem maintenance. 60. For an outline and explanation of this phenomena see Gyorgy, and also Woodmansee. 61. The requisite distinction is made in several places, e.g. Routley (b), and (to take one example from the real Marxist literature), Baran and Sweezy. 62. The distinction between shallow and deep ecology was first emphasised by Naess. For its environmental importance see Routley (c) further references are cited). (where �/bU/ REFERENCES. In order to contain references to a modest length, reference to primary sources has often been replaced by reference through secondary sources. Generally the reader can easily trace the primary sources. For those parts of the text that overlap Routley (a), fuller references will be found by consulting the latter article. S. Cotgrove and A. Duff, ’Environmentalism, middle-class radicalism and politics’, Sociological 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 Atomic Energy, Outback Press, Melbourne, 1977. R. and V. Routley, 'Nuclear energy and obligations to the future', Inquiry 21 (1978), 133-79 (cited as Routley (a)). Fox Report: Ranger Uranium Environmental Inquiry First Report, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1977. K.S. Schrader-Frechette, Nuclear Power and Public Policy, Reidel, Dordrecht, 1980 (referred to as SF). W.R. Catton, Jr., and R.E. Dunlap, ’A new ecological paradigm for post-exuberant sociology’, American Behavioral Scientist 24 (1980) 15-47. United States Interagency Review group on Nuclear Waste Management, Report to the President, Washington. 29442) (Dept, of Energy) 1979. (Ref. No. El. 28. TID- (cited as US(a)). A.B. Lovins and J.H. Price, Non-Nuclear Futures: The Case for an Ethical Energy Strategy, Friends of the Earth International, San Francisco, 1975. R. Routley, ’On the impossibility of an orthodox social theory and of an orthodox solution to environmental problems’, Logique et Analyse, 23 (1980), 145-66. R. Routley, ’Necessary limits for knowledge: unknowable truths’, in Essays in honour of Paul Weingartner, (ed. E. Morscher), Salzberg, 1980. J. Passmore, Man’s Responsibility for Nature, Duekworth, London, 19 74. �2. R. and V. Routley, The Fight for the Forests, Third Edition, RSSS, Australian National University, 1975 (cited as Routley (b)). J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1971. P.W. Berkley and D.W. Seckier, Economic Growth and Environmental Decay, Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, New York, 1972. J. Elster, ’Risk, uncertainty and nuclear power’, Social Science Information 18 (3) (1979) 371-400. J. Robinson, Economic Heresies, Basic Books, New York, 1971. B. Barry, 'Circumstances of Justice and future generations’ in Obligations to Future Generations (ed. R.T. Sikora and B. Barry), Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1978. II. Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, Macmillan, London, 1962 (reissue). B. Commoner, The Poverty of Power, Knopf, New York, 1975. N. Chomsky and E.S. Herman, The Political Economy of Human Rights, 2 vols., Black Rose Books, Montreal, 1979. J. Woodmansee, The World of a Giant Corporation, North Country Press, Seattle, Washington, 1975. P.A. Bd\ran and P. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, Penguin, 1967. A. Naess, 'The shallow and the deep, long range ecology movement. A summary’, Inquiry 16 (1973) 95-100. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Draft Papers Description An account of the resource Sylvan's literary executor encountered an archive in which “all his projects were current", since manuscripts were undated and unattributed. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document issue of nuclear power raises many basic issues in ethics. The By means of an example, we argue sorts of transfers of costs, benefits from a illegitimacy of certain the for transfers from one party who obtains given course of action, onto other parties who do The inadequate methods currently available not. nuclear power wastes mean that transfer of serious could permit risks onto costs and the arguments for future these crucial ethical ignore the i)7pra 1 to Social Dimensions Ethical and Nuclear Power are not the acceptability of by the fact such an illegitimate future people. that Many of such risks on imposing transfer the We argue issues. that transfer principles give rise constraints on action such removed for storing nuclear those affected future and are not present people. The nuclear issue and associated arguments also raise in a highly topical w3y really ’need' allow for, or are and all is such needs framework? many basic issues in the consumer in part theory. items nuclear power is it authoritarian or wrong to Are existing democratic mechanisms framework adequate, and excessive question prevent what lives? The approach to all are these basic elements pure or do we need to assume both, alterable social the answer to kinds of social changes would framework and over social their own crucially on intera ction are conceived they social wholes, individuals, are distinct and irreducible, argue? R. the allow for more adequate these questions depends how the underlying elements of to If such.concentrations of power and control by people over the social supposed they give inadequate control or do concentrations of power? is affirmative, people for control over I last Do frustrate such needs, imposed by a particular, the social permit social Routley as we shall NUCLEAR POWER - ETHICAL, ■•MB SOCIAL AND POLITICAL ptMENSIONS Wl/, I. COMPETING PARADIGMS AND THE NUCLEAR DEBATE. One hardly needs initiation into the dark mysteries of nuclear physics to contribute usefully to the debate now widely ranging over nuclear power. While many important empirical questions are still unresolved, these do not really lie at the centre of the controversy. Instead, it is a debate about values ... many of the questions which arise are social and ethical ones. Sociological investigations have confirmed that the nuclear debate is primarily one over what is worth having or pursuing and over what we are entitled to do They have also confirmed that the debate is polarised along the 2 lines of competing paradigms. According to the entrenched paradigm discerned, to others. that constellation of values, attitudes and beliefs often called the Dominant Social Paradigm (hereafter the Old Paradigm), economic criteria become the benchmark by which a wide range of individual and social action is judged ahd evaluated. And belief in the market and market mechanisms is quite central. Clustering around this core belief is the conviction that enterprise flourishes best in a system of risks and rewards, that differentials are necessary ..., and in the necessity for some form of division of labour, and a hierarchy of skills and expertise. In particular, there is a belief in the competence of experts in general and of scientists in particular. ... there is an emphasis on quantification. The rival world viewT, sometimes called the Alternative Environmental Paradigm (the New Paradigm) differs on almost every point, and, according to sociologists, in ways summarised in the following table A Dominant Social Paradigm CORE VALUES Material (economic growth, progress and development) Natural environment valued as resource Alternative Environmental Paradigm Domination over nature Non-material (self-realisation) Natural environment intrinsically valued Harmony with nature ECONOMY* Market forces Risk and reward Rewards for achievement Differentials Individual self-help Public interest Safety Incomes related to need Egalitarian Collective/social provision POLITY Authoritative structures (experts influential) Hierarchical Law and order Action through official institutions Participative structures (citizen/ worker involvement) Non-hierarchical Liberation Direct action SOCIETY Centralised Large-scale Associational Ordered Decentralised Small-scale Communal Flexible NATURE Ample reserves Nature hostile/neutral Environment controllable Earth's resources limited Nature benign Nature delicately balanced KNOWLEDGE Confidence in science and technology Rationality of means (only) Limits to science Rationality of ends State socialism, as practised in most of the "Eastern bloc", differs as to economic organisation, the market in particular being replaced system by a command system). But since there is virtually no debate confines of state socialism, that minor variant on the Old Paradigm from the Old Paradigm really only by central planning (a market over a nuclear future within the need not be delineated here. 2 No doubt t’ne competing paradigm picture is a trifle simple (and subsequently it is important to disentangle a Modified Old Paradigm, which softens the old economic assumptions with social welfare requirements: really and instead of a New Paradigm there are rather counterparadigms, a cluster of not very well worked out positions that diverge from the cluster marked out as the Old Paradigm). Nonetheless it is empirically investigable, and, most important, it enables the nuclear debate to be focussed. 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 Paradigm. Indeed to introduce ethical and social dimensions into the assessment of nuclear power, instead of or in addition to merely economic factors such as cost and efficiency, is already to move somewhat beyond the received paradigm. For under the Old Paradigm, strictly construed, the nuclear debate is confined to the terms of the narrow utilitarianism 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) irrational. Furthermore, nuclear 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 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 ultimately fails, unless the free enterprise economic assumptions are replaced by the 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. main parts?:- There are two It is argued, firstly, 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. costs of project development and state subsidization with market independence and criteria 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 the Old Paradigm are but very rarely applied in contemporary political practice, 3 the place of pure (or mixed) capitalism having been usurped by corporate capitalism. It is because the nuclear debate can be carried on within the 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 arguments, arguments often considered as encompassing all the nuclear debate is ethically about, best utilitarian means to predetermined ends.) For another leading characteristic of the nuclear debate is the attempt, under the dominant paradigm to remove it from the ethical and social sphere, and to divert it into specialist issues - whether over minutiae and contingencies of present technology or over medical 8 or legal or mathematical details. The double approach can be applied as regards each of the main problems nuclear development poses. There are many interrelated problems, and the argument is further structured in terms of these. For in the advancement and promotion of nuclear power we encounter a remarkable combination of factors, never before assembled: establishment, on a massive scale, of an industry which involves at each stage of its processing serious risks and at some stages of production possible catastrophe, which delivers as a by-product radioactive wastes which require up to a million years’ storage but for which no sound and economic storage methods are known, which grew up as part of the war industry and which is easily subverted to deliver nuclear weapons, which requires for its operation considerable secrecy, limitations on the flow of information and restrictions on civil liberties, which depends for its economics, and in order to generate expected profits, on substantial state subsidization, support, and intervention. with problems. It is, in short, a very high techological development, beset A first important problem, which serves also to exemplify ethical issues and principles involved in other nuclear power questions, is the unresolved 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 passengers and freight. The train which is At an early stop in the journey someone consigns as freight, to a far distant destination, a package which contains a highly toxic and explosive gas. This is packaged in a very thin container which, as the consigner is aware, may not contain the gas for the 4 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 interefere inadvertently or deliberately with the freight, perhaps trying to steal some of it. All of these sorts of contingencies have occurred on some previous journeys. 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 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 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 would normally be seen as ludicrous when set in this What is worth remarking is that similar excuses are not always so seen I when the consigner, again a ’’responsible” businessman, puts his workers’ health context. or other peoples’ welfare at risk. Suppose he ways that it is his own and others’ pressing needs which justify his action. The company he controls, which produces the material as a by-product, is in bad financial 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 the whole company town, through loss of spending and the cancellation of the Multiplier Effect, will be worse off. The poor and unemployed of the town, whom he would otherwise have been able to help, will suffer especially. Few people would accept such a story, even if correct, as justification Even where there are serious risks and costs to oneself or some group for whom one is concerned one is usually considered not to be entitled to simply transfer the heavy burden of those risks and costs onto other uninvolved parties, especially where they arise 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. progresses. How fitting the analogy is will become apparent as the argument There is no known proven safe way to package the highly toxic wastes generated by the nuclear plants that will be spread around the world as 9 large-scale nuclear development goes ahead. 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 toxic. 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 their expected life times of perhaps 40 years, may require and which, some have estimated, million years to reach safe levels of radioactivity. Nuclear wastes must be kept suitably isolated from the environment for their entire active lifetime. For fission products the required storage period averages a thousand years or so, and for transuranic elements, which include plutonium, there is a half 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.Short-term methods of storage require continued human inter­ vention, while proposed longer term methods are subject to both human inter­ ference 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 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 formations or in salt mines, are largely speculative and relatively untested, and have already proved 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 result in multilayered metal containers before rock deposit, simulation models reveal that radioactive material may not remain suitably isolated from human environment.^ In short, the best present storage proposals carry very real possibilities of irradiating future people and damaging their environment , Given the heavy costs which could be involved for the future, and given the known limits of technology, it is methodologically 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 tested, and they may well prove to involve unforeseen difficulties and risks when an attempt is made to put them into practice on a commercial scale. provide a rigorous guarantee of Only a method that could 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 human factors. But even if an economically viable, rigorously safe long term storage method could be devised, there is the problem of guaranteeing that it would be universally and invariably used. The assumption that it would be (especially if, as appears likely, such a method proved expensive economically and politically) seems to presuppose a level of efficiency, perfection and concern for the future which has not previously been encountered in human affairs, and has certainly not been conspicuous in the nuclear industry. 12 Again, unless we assume continuous and faultless guarding of long term storage sites through perhaps a million years of possible future human activity, weapons- grade radioactive material will be accessible, over much of the million year storage period, to any party who is in a position to retrieve it. The assumption that a way will nonetheless be found, before 2000, which gets around the wastestorage problem (no longer a nere disposal problem) is accordingly not rationally based, but is rather like many assumptions of ways, an article of faith. It is an assumption supplied by the Old Paradigm, a no limitations assumption, that there are really no (development) problems that cannot be solved technologically (if not in a fashion that is always immediately economically feasible). The assumption has played part in development plans and practice. technological optimism (not to say hubris an important It has not only encouraged an unwarranted ), that there are no limits to what humans can accomplish, especially through science; it has led to the embarcation on projects before crucial problems have been satisfactorily solved or a solution is even in 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 likelihood of reactor accidents is a relevant example, discussed below). The original nuclear technology dream was that nuclear fission would provide unlimited energy (a 'clean unlimited supply of power'). shattered. and nuclear That dream soon The nuclear industry apparently remains a net consumer of power, fission will be but a quite short-term supplier of power. The risks imposed on the future by proceeding with nuclear development are, then, significant. 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 lives could be seriously affected by the wastes. Thus perhaps 40,000 generations of future people could be forced to bear significant risks resulting from the provision of the (extravagant) energy use of only a small proportion of the people of .10 generations Nor is the risk of direct harm from the escape or misuse of radioactive materials the only burden the nuclear solution imposes on the future. Because the energy provided by nuclear fission is merely a stop gap, it seems probable that in due course the same problem, that of making a 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 For they may well have to face the change to renewable resources in an with it. 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 associated technology and heavy resource use and will have lost or reduced its ability to survive without it. It will, moreover, probably be a world which is largely depleted of non-renewable resources, and in which such renewable resources as forests and soils as remain, resources which will have to form a very important part of the basis of life, are in a run-down condition. Such points tell against the idea that future people must be, if not direct beneficiaries of nuclear fission energy, at least indirect beneficiaries. It is for such reasons that the train parable cannot be turned around to work in favour of nuclear power, with for example, the nuclear train bringing relief as well as wastes to a remote town powered (only) 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 get itself out of a mess arising from its chosen 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 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 - clear 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 often not in fact) in the contemporary world, it is not easy to avoid the conclusion that nuclear development involves gross injustice with respect to the 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 parcel are in the non-immediate future. Secondly, an attempt might be made to appeal to overriding circumstances, for to reject the consigner’s action in the circum­ stances outlined is not of course to imply that there are no circumstances in which such an action might be justifiable, or at least where the matter is less clearcut. It is the same with the nuclear case. 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 they apply in the present case. We consider these possible escape routes for the proponent of nuclear development in turn, beginning with the question of our obligations to the future. Resolution of this question casts light on other ethical questions concerning nuclear develop­ ment. It is only when these have been considered that the matter of whether there are overriding circumstances is taken up again (in section VII). Ill OBLIGATIONS TO THE (DISTANT) FUTURE. The especially problematic area is that of the distant (i.e. non-immediate) future, the future 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 obligations 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 (democratic 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 there are no moral obligations to the future beyond perhaps those to the next generation. According to the most extreme of these positions against moral obligations to the future, our behaviour with respect to the future is morally unconstrained, there are no moral restrictions on acting or failing to act deriving from the effect of our actions on future people. Of those philosophers who say, or whose views imply that we 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. Thus moral obligation is seen as grounded on or as presupposing various relations which could not hold between people widely separated in time (or sometimes in space). For example, obligation is seen as grounded in relations which are proximate or of short duration and also non-transitive. Among such suggested bases or grounds of moral obligation, or requirements 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 rights or entitlement. People in the distant future will not be able to claim rights and entitlements as against us, and of course they can do nothing effective to enforce any claims they might have for their rights against us. Secondly, there are those accounts which base moral obligations on social or legal convention, for example a convention which would require punishment of offenders or at least some kind of social enforcement. But plainly these and other conventions will not hold 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 could be no guarantee that any contemporary institutions would do it for them. 10. Both the view that moral obligation requires the context of a moral community and the view that it is contractually based appear to rule out the distant future as a field of moral obligation as they not only require a commonality or some sort of common basis which cannot be guaranteed in the case of the distant future, but also a possibility of interchange or reciprocity of action which cannot apply to the future. Where the basis of moral obligation is seen as mutual exchange the interests of future people must be set aside because they cannot change the past and cannot be parties to any mutual contract. The exclusion of moral obligations to the distant future also follows from those views which attempt to ground moral obligations in non-transitive relations of short duration such as sympathy and love. As well there are difficulties about love and sympathy for (non-existent) people in the far distant future about whose personal qualities and characteristics one must know very little and who may well be committed to a life-style for which one has little or no sympathy. On the current showing in the case of nuclear energy it would be easy to conclude that contemporary society lacks both love and sympathy for future people; and it would appear to follow from this that contemporary 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 something acquired, either individually or institutionally, something which is conditional on doing something or failing to do something (e.g. participating in the moral community, contracting), or having some characteristic one can fail to have (e.g. love, sympathy, empathy). 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 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, is not however sustainable. Consider, for example, a scientific group which, tor 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 the earth in the distant future would be wiped out as a result of the action. direct and predictable The unconstrained position clearly implies that this is an acceptable moral enterprise, that whatever else we might legitimately criticize in the scientists’ experiment, perhaps its being over-expensive or badly designed, we cannot lodge a moral protest about the damage it will do to future people. the following sort The unconstrained position also endorses as morally acceptable of policy:- A firm discovers it can make a handsome profit from mining, processing and manufacturing a new type of material which, although it causes no problem for present people or their immediate descendants, will over a period of hundreds of years decay into a substance which will cause an enormous epidemic of cancer among the inhabitants of the earth at that time. According to the unconstrained view the firm is free to act in its own interests, without any consideration for the harm it does remote 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 only have several philosophers endorsed this position, but it is a clear implication 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, despite their being clearly implied by their position. We suspect that - we would certainly hope that - when it is brought out that the unconstrained position admits such counterexamples, that being free to act implies among other things being free to inflict pointless harm for example, most of those who opted for the unconstrained position would want to assert that it was not what they intended. 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 responsible 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, 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. 12. 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 acquired an obligation to some stranger with whom one has never been involved, that one has no responsibility for his life, does not imply that one is free to do what one likes with respect to him, for example to rob him or to pursue some course of action of advantage to oneself which could seriously harm him. These difficulties for the unconstrained position arise in part from the (sometimes deliberate) failure to make an important distinction between acquired or assumed obligation 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. There is a considerable difference in the level and kind of responsibility involved. In the first case one must do something or be something which one can fail to do or be, e.g. have loves, synpathy, 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 (yet) exist. While it may perhaps be the case that there would need to be an acquired or assumed obligation in order for it to be claimed that contemporary people must make special sacrifices for future people of an heroic kind, or even to help them especially, only moral constraints are needed in order for us to be constrained from harming them. Thus, to return to the train parable, the consigner cannot argue in justification of his action that he has never assumed or acquired responsibility for the passengers, that he does not know them and therefore has no love or sympathy for them and that they are not part of his moral community, in short that he has no special obligations to help them. All that one needs to argue 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 13. 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 then direct harm than the consigner is resorting to heroic self-sacrifice in refraining from placing his dangerous package on the train. The conflation of moral restraints 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 has to be assumed or required. The conflation is encouraged by reductionist positions which, in attempting to account for obligation in general, mistakenly endeavour to collapse all obligations. Hence the equation, and some main roots of the unconstrained position, of the erroneous belief that there are no moral constraints concerning the distant future. The unconstrained view tends to give way, under the weight of counter­ examples, 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 condition, and that is all; there are in practice no obligations to the distant future. 17 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. account. There are at least three objections to this chain First, it is inadequate to treat constraints concerning the future as if they applied only between generations, as if there were no question of constraints on individuals as opposed to whole generations, since individuals can create causal effects, e.g. harm, on the future in a way which may create individual responsibility, and which often cannot be sheeted home to an entire generation. Nuclear power and its wastes, for example, are strictly the responsibility of small groups of power-holders, not a generational responsibility. 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. 14. Thirdly, improvements for immediate successors may be achieved at the expense of disadvantages to people of the more distant future. Improving the world for immediate successors is quite compatible with, and may even in some circumstances be most easily achieved by, ruining it for less immediate successors. Such cases can hardly be written off as ’’never-never land" examples since many cases of environmental exploitation might be seen as of just this type. e.g. not just the nuclear case but also the exhaustion of non-renewable resources and the long-term depletion of renewable resources such as soils and forests through overuse. If then such obvious injustices to future people arising from the favouring or exclusive concern with immediate successors are to be avoided, obligations to the future will have to be seen as in some way fairly distributed over time, and not merely as accruing to particular generations in the way the chain picture suggests. IV. ATTEMPTS TO QUALIFY OBLIGATIONS TO THE FUTURE : ECONQMISTIC UNCERTAINTY AND INDETERMINACY ARGUMENTS. While there are grave difficulties for the unconstrained position, qualification leads to a more defensible position. According to the main 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 costs and benefits (and so of future interests) is obtained by application over time of a discount rate, so discounting costs and risks to future people. The attempt to apply economics as a moral theory, something that is becoming increasingly common, can lead then to the qualified position. objectionable in such an approach is that What is economics should operate within the bounds of moral (deontic) constraints, just as in practice it operates within legal constraints, not determine 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 18 the waste problem. Since there is mounting evidence that future generations may well not be better off than present ones, especially in things that matter, no argument for discounting the interests of future generations on this basis can carry much weight. Nor is that all that is wrong with the argument. For it depends at base on the assumption that poorer contemporaries would be making sacrifices to richer successors in foregoing such (allegedly beneficial) developments as nuclear power. sacrifice argument. That is, it depends on the already scotched In any case, for the waste disposal problem to be legitimately bequeathed to the future generations, 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-immediate 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 equalization of monetary value, that compensation - which is what the waste problem is taken to come to economically - costs much less now than 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, insurmountable practical difficulties about applying such discounting, e.g. how to determine appropriate future discount rates. A more serious objection is that applied generally, the argument presupposes, what is false, that compensation, like value, can always be converted into monetary equivalents, that people (including those outside market frameworks) can be monetarily compensated for a variety of damages, including cancer and loss of life. There is no compensating a dead man, or for a lost species. In fact the argument presupposes a double reduction neither part of which can succeed: it is not just that value cannot in general be represented at all adequately 19 monetarily, but (as against utilitarianism, for example) that constraints and obligations can not be somehow reduced to matters of value. It is also presupposed that all decision methods, suitable for requisite nuclear choices, 16. are bound to apply discounting. This is far from so : indeed Goodin argues that, on the contrary, more appropriate decision rules do not allow discounting, and discounting only works in practice with expected utility rules (such as underlie cost-benefit and benefit-risk analyses), which are, he contends strictly inapplicable for nuclear choices (since not all outcomes can be duly determined and assigned probabilities, in the way that application of the rules requires.). 20 As the preceding arguments reveal, the discounting move often has the same result as the unconstrained position. If, for instance, we consider the cancer example and reduce costs to payable compensation, it is evident that over a sufficiently long period of time discounting at current prices would lead to the conclusion that there are no recoverable damages and so, in economic terms, no constraints. In short, even certain damage to future people could be written off. One way to achieve the bias against future people is by the application of discount rates which are set in accord with the current economic horizons of no 21 more than about 15 years, and application of such rates would simply beg the question against the interests and rights of future people. Where there is certain future damage of a morally forbidden type, for example, the whole method of discounting is simply inapplicable, and its use would violate moral constraints. Another argument for the qualified position, which avoids the objections from cases of certain damage, comes from probability considerations. The distant future, it is argued, is much more uncertain than the present and immediate future, so that probabilities are consequently lower, perhaps even approaching or coinciding with zero for any hypothesis concerning the distant future. But then if we take account of probabilities in the obvious way, by simply multiplying them against costs and benefits , it is evident that the interests of future people, except in cases where there is an unusually high degree of certainty, must count for (very much) less than those of present and neighbouring people where (much) higher probabilities 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 future against a much lower probability of indeterminate 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 doubtful benefits for some present people, in the shape of the opportunity to maintain corporation profitability or to continue unnecessarily high energy use. And even if the costs and benefits were comparable 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 sufficiently large. Such a cost-benefit or risk-benefit approach 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. For example, it would follow on such principles that it is permissible for a firm to injure, or very likely injure, some, innocent party provided the firm stands to make a sufficiently large gain from it. But the costs and benefits involved are not transferable in any simple or general way from one party to another . Transfers of this kind, of costs and benefits involving different parties, commonly raise moral issues - e.g. is x entitled to benefit himself by imposing costs on y - which are not susceptible to a simple cost-benefit 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 transfer 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 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 temporally removed, and these risks will not be in any direct way related to a person’s extent of use. The transfer objection is essentially the same as that to the utilitarian's (happiness) sums as a way of solving moral conflict between different parties, and the introduction of probability considerations - as in utilitarian decision 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 probabilities involving distant future situations are not always less than those concerning the immediate future in the way the argument supposes, and that the outcomes of some moral problems do not depend on a high level of probability anyway. reveals, In some sorts of cases it is enough, as the train parable that a significant risk is created; such cases do not depend critically on high probability assignments. 18. 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 distant future. take serious account of the effects of our actions on the There are two strands to the uncertainty argument, capable of separation, but frequently tangled up. Both arguments are mistaken, the first on a Priori 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 about the effects of our actions on the distant future is unreliable, fuzzy and highly speculative. But we cannot base assessments of how we should act on information of this kind, especially when accurate information is obtain­ able about the present which would indicate different action. Therefore we must regretfully ignore the uncertain effects of our actions on the distant future. More formally and crudely: One only has obligations to the future if these obligations are based on reliable information at present as regards the distant future. 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 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. risk of harm in this sort of case. It is enough that there is a significant 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 of the so-called "speculative" and "unreliable". But if we do not require certainty of action to apply moral constraints in contemporary affairs, why should we require a much higher standard of certainty in the future? Why should we require for the future, epistemic 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 eipstemic double standard. But such an epistemic double standard, proposed in explaining the difference between the present and the future and to justify ignoring future peoples interests, in fact cannot itself provide an explanation of the differences, since it already presupposes different standards of certainty appropriate to each class, which difference is in turn in need of justification. The second uncertainty argument is a practical uncertainty argument, that whatever our theoretical obligations to the future, we cannot in practice take the interests of future people into account because uncertainty about the distant future is so gross that we canmot 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. this way:- The second uncertainty argument 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 every (action) x”, 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 obtain clear conclusions or directions concerning contemporary action action of the It is wrong to do x” type. Many of the assumptions of the second argument can 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. 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 uncertainty is not so great as 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 in a hundred years in names or footwear, or what flavours of ice 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 the earth of that wonderful variety of non-human life which at present makes it such a rich and interesting place. For this sort of reason, the second uncertainty argument should be rejected. 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 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 proper consideration. Most of these popular moves employ both of the uncertainty arguments as suits the case, switching from one to the other in a way that is again reminiscent of sceptical moves. For example, we may be told that we cannot really take account of future people because we cannot be sure that they will exist or that their tastes and wants will not be completely different from our own, to the point where they will not suffer from our exhaustion of resources or from the 21. things that would affect 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 morally committed to. Again we may be told that there is no guarantee that future people will be worthy of any efforts on our part, because they may be Even if one is morons or forever plugged into enjoyment or other machines. 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 opposed 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 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 logical 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 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 22. be considered 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 themselves. 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 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 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’ welfare and the 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 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 indeterminate 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 raised particularly by problems of sharing fixed quantities of resources among present and future people, for example oil, when the numbers of the latter are indeterminate. Such problems are indeed difficult, but they are not resolved by ignoring the claims of the future, any more than the problems raised by the need to take account in decision-making of factors difficult to quantify are resolved by 23. ignoring such factors. Nor are distributional problems as large and representative of a class of moral problems concerning the future as the tendency to focus on them would suggest. It can be conceded that there will be cases where the indeterminacy 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 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 be many cases which are not solved by weighing numbers, numbers of interests, or whatever, cases for which one needs to know only the most general probable characteristics of future people. The crucial question which emerges is then: are. there any features of future people which would disqualify them from full moral consideration or reduce their claims to such below those of present people? principle None. The answer is : in Prima facie, 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 dealing satisfactorily with the present: in other words, a theory that did not allow properly for the future would be found to have defects as regards the present, to deal unjustly or unfairly with some present people, e.g. those remotely located, those outside some select subgroup, such as (white­ skinned) humans, etc. The only candidates for characteristics that would fairly rule out future people are the logical features we have been looking at, such as uncertainty and indeterminacy; but, as we have argued, 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 affect his entitlement to just and fair treatment, to full moral 24 consideration; inversely, that it is without basis to discriminate morally against a person in virtue of his temporal position. As a result of this 23a, universalizability, there are the same general obligations to future people as to the present; and thus there is the same obligation to take account of them and their interests in what we do, to be careful in our actions, to take account of the probability (and not just the certainty) of our actions causing harm or damage, and to see, other things being equal, that we do not act so as to rob them of what is necessary for the chance of a good life. and indeterminacy do not relieve us of these obligations. Uncertainty If in a closely comparable case concerning the present the creation of a significant risk is enough to rule out an action as immoral, and there are no independent grounds for requiring greater certainty of harm in the future case under consideration, then futurity alone will not provide, adequate grounds for proceeding with the action, thus discriminating against future people. Accordingly we cannot escape, through appeal to futurity, the conclusion 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 CORP: MELTDOWN. The 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 space, or a particular geographical 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 another state’s or region’s yard or waters? 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 underpinning the answer, are both like those already given in arguing to the tentative conclusion concerning the injustice of imposing radioactive wastes upon future people. But the cases are not exactly the same: USA and Japan cannot endeavour to discount peoples of the Pacific in whose regions they propose to drop some of their radioactive pollution in quite the same way they can discount, people of two centuries hence. (But what this consideration really reveals is yet another flaw in the idea that entitlement to just treatment can be discounted over time .) Ethical issues of distributive justice, as to equity, concern not only the spatio-temporal location of nuclear waste, but also arise elsewhere in the assessment of nuclear development; in particular, as regards the treatment of those in the neighbourhood of reactors, and, differently, as regards the distribution of (alleged) benefits and costs from nuclear power across nations. People living or working in the vicinity of a nuclear reactor are subject to special costs and risks: firstly, radioactive pollution, due to the fact that reactors discharge radioactive materials into the air and water near the plant, 25 25. and secondly catastrophic accidents, such as (steam) explosion of a reactor. An immediate question is whether such costs and risks can be imposed, with any ethical 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 other largescale 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” emission, during plant operation, of low level radiation carries carcinogenic and mutagenic costs. While there are undoubtedly costs, there remains, however, substantial disagreement over the likely number 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 (illegitimately) permits free transfer of costs and risks from one person to another, the ethical issue directly raised is said to be: what extent of cancer and genetic damage, if any, is permissibly traded for the advantages of nuclear power, and under what conditions? Under the Old Paradigm the issue is then translated into decision-theoretic questions, such as to ’how to employ risk/benefit analysis as a prelude to government regulation’ and ’how to determine what is an 26 acceptable level of risk/safety for the public. 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 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 agony of cancer. The point is that the costs to one party are not justified, especially when such benefits to other parties can be alternatively obtained without such awful costs, and morally indefensible, 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. particularly 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 large. A non-negligible percentage (in excess of 3% of those exposed for 30 years) of people in the area will die, allegedly for the sake of the majority who are benefitted by nuclear power production (allegedly, for the real reasons for nuclear development do not concern this silent majority). Whatever charm the 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 tiie imposition of radiation on minorities, most of whom have little or no genuine voice in the location of reactors in their environment and cannot move away without serious losses, is quite (morally) acceptable. One cheaper trick, deployed by the US Atomic Energy Commission,^ is to suppose that it is permissible to double, through nuclear technology, the level of (natural) radiation that a population has received with apparently negligible consequences, the argument being that the additional amount (being equivalent to the "natural” level) is also likely to have negligible consequences. The increased amounts of radiation - with their large man-made component - are then accounted normal, and, of course, so it is then claimed, 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 radiation emissions very substantially in excess of the standards laid down; so the emission situation is worse than mere consideration of the standards would disclose. Furthermore, the monitoring of the standards "imposed" is entrusted to the nuclear operators themselves, scarcely disinterested parties. Public policy is determined not so as to guarantee public health, but rather to serve as a private nuclear operations proceed relatively unhampered. public pacifier while 27. 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, 3 and almost have on several occasions (the most notorious being Three Mile Island). If the cooling and emergency core cooling systems fail in American (light water) reactors, then the core melts and ’containment failure’ is likely, with the 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 the size of Pennsylvania would be destroyed. Modern nuclear reactors are about five times the size of the reactor for which 31 these conservative US government figures are given : the consequences of a similar accident with a modern reactor would accordingly be much greater still. The consigner in risking the lives, well-being and property of the passengers on the train has acted inadmissibly. Does a government-sponsored private utility act in a way 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 sible. suppose, inadmissible and irrespon­ 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 arena 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 32 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 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 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 limitatioms and human error, of waste leakage and reactor incidents and quite possibly accidents, not in an ideal world far removed from the actual, a technological dream world where there is no real possibility of a nuclear 28. catastrophe. In such an ideal nuclear world, where waste disposal were fool-proof and reactors were accident-proof, things would no doubt be morally different. But we do not live in such a world. According to the Rasmussen report its calculation of extremely low accident probabilities is based upon reasonable mathematical and technological assumptions and is methodologically sound. This is very far from being the case. The under­ lying mathematical methods, variously called "fault tree analysis" and "reliability estimating techniques", are unsound, because they exclude as not credible" possibilities or as "not significant" branches that are real possibilities, which may well be realised in the real world. It is the eliminations that are otherworldly. In fact the methodology and data of the report 33 has been soundly and decisively criticized. And it has been shown that there is a real possibility, a non-negligible probability, of a serious accident. It is contended, secondly, that even if there is a non-negligible probability of a reactor accident, still it is 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 a risk assessment 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 that of option b, which is already accepted; 34 therefore option a is acceptable. 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 accidents, which are accepted: so nuclear power stations are acceptable. A little reflection reveals that this sort of risk assessment argument involves the same kind of fallacy as transaction models. 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 is the person who undertakes the risks also the person who receives the benefits or 29, primarily, as in driving or cigarette smoking, or are the costs imposed on other parties who do not benefit? It is only if the parties are 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. This is rarely the case, and it is not so in the case of risk assessments of energy options. Secondly, does the person incur the risk as a result of an activity which he knowingly undertakes in a situation where he has a reasonable choice, knowing it entails the risk, etc., and is the level of risk in proportion to the level of 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? A risk that is ethically acceptable for a serious reason may not be ethically acceptable for a trivial reason. Both the arguments (i) and (ii) are often 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 already high if not, some say, too high. 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 moral principle, already argued for by way of examples and already invoked, that one is not, in general, entitled to simply transfer costs of a significant kind arising fron an activity which benefits oneself onto other parties who are not involved in the activity and are not beneficiaries. This transfer principle is especially clear in cases where the significant costs include an effect on life or health or a risk thereof, and where the benefit to the benefitting party is of a noncrucial or dispensible nature, because, e.g. it can be substituted for or done without. Thus, for instance, one is not usually entitled to harm, or risk harming, another in the process of benefitting oneself. Suppose, for another example, we consider a village which produces, as a result of an industrial process by which it lives , a noxious waste material which is expensive and difficult to dispose of and yet creates a risk to life and health 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 service, on the train, to the next village. The inhabitants of this village are then forced to face the problem either of undertaking the expensive and difficult disposal process oor of sustaining risks to their own lives and health or else leaving the village and their livelihoods. transfer of costs as morally unacceptable. Most of us would see this kind of 30. 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 condition are not only future people and future generations (those of the next villages) but neighbours of nuclear reactors, especially, as in third world countries, neighbours who are not nuclear power users. The distribution of costs and damage in such a fashion, i.e. on to non-beneficiaries is a characteristic of certain widespread and serious forms of pollution, and is one of its most objectionable moral features. It is a corollary of the condition that we should not hand the world on to our successors in substantially worse shape than we received it - the l_ramsmission. principle. For if we did then that would be a significant transfer of costs. (The corollary can be independently argued for on the basis of certain ethical theories). VI. OTHER SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL RISKS AND COSTS OF NUCLEAR DEVELOPMENT, ESPECIALLY NUCLEAR WAR. The problems already discussed by no means exhaust the environmental, health and safety 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 transportation 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 proliferation of nuclear armaments - these hazards have parallels, 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".38 Furthermore, the various (often serious) hazards encountered in working in some sectors of uranium fabrication should be differently viewed from those resulting from location I 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 working with radioactive material are now known in advance of choice of such an occupation, 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 "fact" of location cannot be. The social issue of arrangements that contract occupational choices and opportunities 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, is not an issue newly produced by nuclear associated occupations. 31. Other social and environmental problems - though endemic where large-scale industry operates in societies that are highly inegalitarian and include sectors that are far from affluent - are more irdtimately linked with the nuclear power cycle. Though pollution is a common and generally undesirable component of large-scale industrial operation, radioactive pollution, such as uranium mining for instance produces, is especially a legacy of nuclear development, and a specially undesirable one, as enormous rectification estimates for dead radio­ active lands and waterways reveal. Though sabotage is a threat to many large industries, so that modern factory complexes are often guarded like concentration camps (but from us on the outside), sabotage of a nuclear reactor can have dire consequences, of a different order of magnitude from most industrial sabotage (consider again the effects of core meltdown). Though theft of material from more dubious enterprises such as munitions works can pose threats to populations at large and can assist terrorism, no thefts for allegedly peaceful enterprises pose problems of the same order as theft of fissionable material. No other industry produces materials which so readily permit of fabrication into such massive explosives. No other industry is, to sum it up, so vulnerable on so many fronts. In part to reduce it£ vulnerability, in part because of its long and continuing association with military activities, the nuclear industry is subject to, and encourages, 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 association and of expression, and free access to information. These practices include secrecy, restriction of information, formation of special police and guard forces, espionage, curtailment of civil liberties. Already operators of nuclear installations are given extraordinary powers, in vetting employees, to investigate the background and activities not only of employees but also of their families and sometimes even of their friends. The installations themselves become armed camps, which especially offends British sensibilities. The U.K. Atomic Energy (Special Constables) Act of 1976 created a special armed force to guard nuclear installations and made it answerable ... to the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority. ■JLhee-e- developments^in the IJnd t^d —and worjc in West Gcmafiy-ji presage along with nuclear development increasingly authoritarian and anti-democratic societies. That nuclear development appears to force such political consequences tells heavily against it. 32. Nuclear development is further indicted politically by the direct connection of nuclear power with nuclear war. It is fortunately true that ethical questions concerning nuclear war - for example, whether a nuclear war is justified, or just, under any circumstances, and if so what circumstances - are distinguishable from those concerning nuclear power. Undoubtedly, however, the spread of nuclear power is substantially increasing the technical means for engaging in nuclear war and so, to that extent, the opportunity for, and chances of, nuclear engagement. Since nuclear wars are never accountable positive goods, but are at best the lesser of major evils, nuclear wars are always highly ethically undesirable. The spread of nuclear power accordingly expands the opportunity for, and chances of, highly undesirable consequences. Finally the latter, so increasing these chances and opportunities, is itself undesirable, and therefore what leads to it, nuclear development, is also undesirable. The details and considerations that fill out this argument, from nuclear war against nuclear development, are many. They are firstly technical, that it is a relatively straightforward and inexpensive matter to make nuclear explosives given access to a nuclear power plant? secondly political, that nuclear engagements once instituted likely to escalate and that those who control (or differently are likely to force access to) nuclear power plants do not shrink from nuclear confrontation and are certainly prepared to toy with nuclear engagement (up to ’’strategic nuclear strikes” at least); and thirdly ethical, that wars invariably have immoral consequences, such as massive damage to involved parties, however high sounding their justification is. Nuclear wars are certain to be considerably worse as regards damage inflicted than 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 irreversibility of any such confrontations. The supporting considerations are, fourthly, drawn from decision theory, and are designed to show that the chances of such undesirable outcomes is itself undesirable. The core argument is in brief this (the argument will be elaborated in section VIII):- Energy choice between alternative options is a case of decision making under uncertainty, because in particular of the gross uncertainties involved in nuclear development. In cases of this type the appropriate rational procedure is to compare worst consequences of each alternative, to reject those alternatives with the worst of these worst consequences (this is a pretty uncontroversial part of the maximin rule which enjoins selection of the alternative with the best worst consequences). The nuclear alternative has, in particular because of the real possibility of a nuclear war, the worst worst consequences and is accordingly a particularly undesirable alternative. 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 remains open, that of appeal to important overriding circumstances. That appeal, to be ethically acceptable, must go far beyond merely economic considerations. For, as already observed, the consigner’s action cannot be justified by purely economistic arguments, such as that his profits would rise, the firm or the village would be more prosperous, or by appealing to the fact that some possibly uncomfortable changes would otherwise be needed. The transfer principle on which this assessment was based, that one was not usually entitled to create a serious risk to others for these sorts of reasons, applied more generally and, in particular, applied to the nuclear case. For this reason the economistic arguments which are those most commonly advanced under the Old Paradigm to promote nuclear development - e.g. cheapness, efficiency, profitability for electricity utilities, and the need otherwise for uncomfortable changes such as restructuring of employment, investment and consumption - do not even begin to show that the nuclear alternative is an acceptable one. Even if these economistic assumptions about benefits to present people were correct ~ it will be contended that most of them are not - the arguments would fail because economics (like the utilitarianism from which it characteristically derives) has to 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 prima facie unacceptable (nuclear) alternative is taken, some even more unacceptable alternative is the only possible outcome, and will ensue. For example, in the train parable, the consigner may argue that his action is justified because unless it is taken 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 clearcut, and one would perhaps hesitate to condemn any action taken in such circumstances. Some of the arguments advanced to show moral conflict are based on competing commitments to present people, and others on competing obligations to future people, both of which are taken to override the obligations not to impose on the future significant risk of serious harm. The structure of such moral conflict arguments is based crucially on the presentation of a genuine and exhaustive set of alternatives (or at least practical alternatives) and upon showing that the only alternatives to admittedly morally undesirable actions are even more undesirable ones. If some practical alternative which is not morally worse than the action to be justified is overlooked, suppressed, or neglected in the argument - for example, if in the village case it turns out that the villagers have another option 34. to starving or to the sending off of the parcel, namely earning a living in some other way - then the argument is defective and cannot readily be patched. Just such a suppression of practicable alternatives has occurred in the argument designed to show that the alternatives to the nuclear option are even worse than the option itself, and that there are other factual defects in these arguments as well. In short, the arguments depend essentially on the presentation of false dichotomies. 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 industrialised countries. Failure to develop nuclear energy, it is often claimed, would amount to denying them the opportunity to reach the standard of affluence we currently enjoy and would create unemployment and poverty in the industrialised nations. The unemployment and poverty argument does not stand up to examination either for the poor of the industrial countries or for those of the third world. There is good evidence that large-scale nuclear energy will help to increase unemployment and poverty in the industrial world, through the 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 is needed for the third world is even less convincing. Nuclear energy is both politically and economically inappropriate for the third world, since it requires massive amounts of capital, requires numbers of imported scientists and engineers, 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 foreign dependence, adds to centralised entrenched power and reduces the chance for change in the oppressive political 41 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. 35. The poverty argument is then a fraud. help the poor. Nuclear energy will not be used to Both for the third world and for the industrialised countries there are well-known energy-conserving alternatives and the 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 to solar or perhaps fusion development. And there are various alternatives: coal and other fossil fuels, geothermal, and a range of solar options (including as well as narrowly solar, wind, water, tidal and plant power), 42 each possibly in combination with conservation measures. Despite the availability 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). Such an assumption really underlies part of the poverty argument, which thus amounts to an elaboration of the trickledown argument (much favoured within the Old Paradigm setting). runs:- For the argument Nuclear development is necessary for (continuing and increasing) affluence. Affluence inevitably trickles down to the poor. development benefits the poor. Therefore nuclear First, the argument does not on its own show anything specific about nuclear power: for it works equally well if ’energy' is substituted for ’nuclear’. It has also to be shoum, what the next major argument will try to claim, that nuclear development is unique among energy alternatives in increasing affluence. The second assumption, that affluence Inevitably trickles down, has now been roundly refuted, both by recent historical data, which show increasing affluence (e.g. in terms of GNP averaged per capita) coupled with increasing poverty in several countries, both developing and developed, and through economic models which reveal how ’affluence” can increase without redistribution occurring. Another major argument advanced to show moral conflict appeals to a set of supposedly overriding and competing obligations to future people. We have, it is said, a duty to pass on the immensely valuable things and institutions which our culture has developed. Unless our high-technology, high energy industrial society is continued and fostered, our valuable institutions and traditions will fall into decay or be swept away. The argument is essentially that without nuclear power, without the continued level of material wealth it alone is assumed to make possible, the lights of our civilization will go out. Future people will be the losers. 4: 36. The lights-going-out argument does raise questions as to what is valuable in our society, and of what characteristics are necessary for a good society. But for the most part these large questions, which deserve much fuller examination, can be avoided. The reason is that the argument adopts an extremely uncritical position with respect to present high-technology societies, apparently assuming that they are uniformly and uniquely valuable. It assumes that technologic society is unmodifiable, that it cannot be changed in the direction of energy conservation or alternative (perhaps high technology) energy sources without collapse. 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 furnish - are essential to maintain this whole. These assumptions are hard to accept. The assumption that technological society's energy patterns are unmodifiable is especially so — after all it has survived events such as world wars which have required major social and technologic^ restructuring and consumption modification. If western society's demands for energy are totally unmodifiable without collapse, not only would it be committed to a program of increasing destruction, but one might ask what use its culture could be to future people who would very likely, as a consequence of this destruction, lack the resource base which the argument assumes to be essential in the case of contemporary society. There is also difficulty with the assumption of uniform valuableness; but if this is rejected the question becomes not: what is necessary to maintain existing high-technological society and its political institutions, but rather, what is necessary to maintain what is valuable in that society and the political institutions which are needed to maintain those valuable things. While it may be easy to argue that high energy consumption centrally controlled is necessary to maintain the political and economic status quo, it is not so easy to argue that it is essential to maintain what is valuable, and it is what is valuable, presumably that we have a duty to pass on to the future. The evidence, 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 reason in fact to believe that a society with much lower energy and resource consumption would better foster what is valuable than our own. But even if a radical change in these directions is independently desirable, as we should argue, it is not necessary to presuppose such a change, in the short term at least, in order to see that the assumptions of the lights-going-out argument are wrong. No enormous reduction of well-being is required to consume less energy than at 37. present, and certainly far less than the large increase over present levels of 44 consumption which is assumed in the usual economic case for nuclear energy. What the nuclear strategy is really designed to do then is not to prevent the lights going out in western civilisation, but to enable the lights to go on burning all the time - to maintain and even increase the wattage output of the Energy Extravaganza. In fact there is good reason to think that, far from the high energy consumption society fostering what is valuable, it will, especially if energy 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 garrisoned, capital- and expertise-intensive energy source, must be one which is highly susceptible to entrenchment of power, and one in which the forces which control this energy source, whether capitalist or bureaucratic, can exert enormous power over the political system and over people’s lives, even more than they do at present. Such a society would, almost inevitably tend to become authoritarian and increasingly anti-democratic, as an outcome, among other things, of its response to the threat posed by dissident groups in the nuclear 45 situation. 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 authoritarianism - while many valuable aspects, such as the degree of political freedom and those opportunities for personal and collective autonomy which exist, would be lost or diminished: political freedom, for example, is a high price to pay for consumerism 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 technology- nuclear 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, rather, 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 argument, 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 If then we apply - as we have argued we should - appeal to futurity, closed. the same standards of morality to the future as we ought to acknowledge for the present, the conclusion that large-scale nuclear development is a crime against the future is inevitable. Closed also, in the same way, are the escape routes to other arguments — 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 argument thus far, to anti-nuclear conclusions, has relied upon, and defended premisses that would be rejected under the Old Paradigm; for example, such theses as that the interests and utilities of future people are not discounted (in contrast to the temporally-limited utilitarianism of market- centred 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 case, 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 nuclear development 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 alternatives to given economic ends. Admittedly so much capital has already been invested in nuclear fission research and development, in marked contrast to other newer rival sources or 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 (out), and which are, in accordance with Old Paradigm percepts, publicly economic (in that they are approved for public consumption), and the real reasons, which involve private economic factors and matters of power and social. control. 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 Nuclear power is necessary to sustain economic growth. valuable!):- Economic growth is desirable (for all the usual reasons, e.g. to increase the size of the pie, to avoid or postpone redistribution problems, and connected social Therefore nuclear power is desirable. The first premiss is A6 part of US energy policy, and the second premiss is supplied by standard unrest, etc.). 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 environmental costs carried by unqualified economic growth.More to the point, since the second premiss is an assumption of the dominant paradigm, the first premiss (or rather an appropriate and less vulnerable restatement of it) fails even on Old Paradigm standards. For of course nuclear power is not necessary given that there are other, perhaps costlier alternatives. The premiss usually defended is some elaboration of the premiss : Nuclear power is the economically best way to sustain economic growth, ’economically best’ being filled out as 'most efficient’, ’cheapest’, ’having most favourable benefit-cost ratio’, etc. Unfortunately for the argument, and for nuclear development schemes, nuclear power is none of these things a good deal of economic cheating (easy to do) is done. decisively, unless Much data, beginning with the cancellation of nuclear plant orders, can^ 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 be permitted at all, and evidently true premisses if the argument is to be decisive. The data to be summarised splits into two parts, public (governmental) analyses, and private (utility) assessments. Virtually all available data concerns the USA; in Europe, West and East, true costs 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. Romanoff has estimated that capital costs of a nuclear generator (of optimal capacity) 49 will exceed comparable costs of a coal-fired unit by about 26% in 1985. And capital costs are only one part of the equation that now tell against private utility purchase of new nuclear plants. rather decisively Another main factor is the poor performance and low reliability of nuclear generators. Coney showed that nuclear plants can only generate about half the electricity they were designed to produce, and that when Atomic Energy Commission estimates of relative costs of nuclear and coal power, which assumed that both operated at 80% of design capacity, were adjusted accordingly, nuclear generated power proved to be far more 40. expensive than estimated. The discrepancy between actual and estimated capacity is especially important because a plant with an actual capacity factor of 55% produced electricity at a cost about 25% higher than if the plant had performed at the manufacturers’ projected capacity rate of 70-75%. The low reliability of nuclear plants (per kilowatt output) as compared with the superior reliability of smaller coal-fired plants adds to the case, on conventional economic grounds of efficiency and product production costs, against nuclear power. These unfavourable assessments are from a private (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 Act^), in enrichment, and in waste management. It has been estimated that charging such costs to the electricity consumer would increase electricity bills for nuclear power by at least 25% (and probably much more). When official US cost/benefit analyses favouring nuclear power over coal are examined, it is found that they inadmissibly omit several of the public costs involved in producing nuclear power. For example, the analyses ignore waste costs on the quite inadmissible ground that it is not known currently what the costs involved are. But even using actual waste handling costs (while wastes await storage) is enough to show that coal power is preferable to nuclear. When further public costs, such as insurance against accident and for radiation damage, are duly taken into account, the balance is swung still further in favour of alternatives to nuclear and against nuclear power. In short, even on proper Old Paradigm accounting, the nuclear alternative should be rejected. Nuclear development is not economical, it certainly seems; it has been kept going not through its clear economic viability, but by massive public subsidization, of several types. In USA, to take a main example where information is available, nuclear development is publicly supported through heavily subsidized or sometimes free research and development, .th«xugh the Price-Anderson Act^ which sharply limits both private and public liability, i.e. which in effect provided the insurance subsidy making corporate nuclear development economically feasible, and through government agreement to handle all radioactive wastes. While the Old Paradigm strictly construed cannot support uneconomical developments, contemporary liberalisation of the Paradigm does allow for uneconomic projects, seen as operated in the public interest, in such fields as social welfare. Duly admitting social welfare and some equity principles 41. in the distribution of wealth (not necessarily of pollution) leadsjtne modern version of the Old Paradigm, called the-Modified Old Paradigm. The main changes from the Old Paradigm are (as with state socialism) as emphasis of economic factors, e.g. individual self-help is down-played, wealth is to a small extent redistributed, e.g. through taxation, market forces are regulated or displaced (not in principle eliminated, as with state socialism). Now it has been contended - outrageous though it should now seem - that nuclear power is in the public interest as a means to various sought public ends, for example, aparL^from those already mentioned such as energy for growth and cheap electricity, and such as plentiful power for heating and cooking and appliance brown-outs and the like.1 use, avoidance of shortages, rationing, Since 4^ alternative power sources, such as coal, could serve s^me ends given power was supplied with suitable extravagance, the argument has again to show that the choice of nuclear power over other alternatives is best in the requisite respects, in serving the public interest. Such an argument is a matter for decision theory, under which head cost-benefit analyses which rank alternatives also fall as special cases. Decision theory purports to cover theoretically the field of choice between alternatives; it is presented as the theory which deals with the^ problem of choosing one. course of action among several possible courses . Thus the choice of alternative modes of energy production, the energy choice problem, becomes an exercise in decision theory; and the nuclear choice is often’justified” in Old Paradigm terms through appeal to decision theory. But though decision theory is in principle comprehensive, as soon as it is put to work in such practical cases as energy choice, it is very considerably contracted in scope, several major assumptions are surreptitiously imported, and what one is confronted with is a depauperate theory drastically pruned down to conform with the narrow utilitarianism of mainstream economic theory. The extent of reduction can be glimpsed by comparing, to take one important example, a general optimisation model for decision (where uncertainty is not gross) with comparable decision theory methods, such as the expected utility model. The general model for best choice among alternatives specifies maximisation of expected value subject to constraints, which may include ethical constraints excluding certain alternatives under given conditions. Expected utility models demote value to utility, assuming thereby measurability and transference properties that may not obtain, and eliminate constraints altogether (absorbing what is forbidden, for example, as having a high disutility, but one that can be compensated for nonetheless). Thus, in particular, ethical constraints against nuclear development are replaced, in Old Paradigm fashion, by allowance in principle for compensation 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 (neo-classical) economic assumptions made in the theory, for example as to the assessment of everything to be taken into account through utility (which comes down to monetary terms ■ everything worth accounting has a price), and as to the legitimacy of transferring with limited compensation 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 uncertainty. It is not a case of decision under risk (and so expected utility models are not applicable), because some possible outcomes are so uncertain that, in contrast to the case of risk, no (suitably objective) quantifiable probabilities can be assigned to them. Items that are so uncertain are taken to include nuclear war and core meltdown of a reactor, possible outcomes of nuclear development : widespread radio­ active pollution is, by contrast, not uncertain. The correct rule for decision under uncertainty is, in the case of energy choice, maximin, to maximize the minimum payoff, so it is sometimes contended. In fact, once again, it is unnecessary 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 rejections for options early rejected as the nuclear options, a convergence 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 convergence can be effected also, because the best possible (economic) outcomes of such leading options as coal and a hydroelectric mix are very roughly of the same order as the nuclear option (so Elster contends, and his argument can be elaborated). Under these o conditions complex decision rules (such as the Arrow-Horwicz rule) which take ---- ----------outcomes ------------ ------4^-^ account of both best possible and ^ost- possible under reduce to the maximin rule. each option Whichever energy option is selected under the maximum rule, the nuclear option is certainly rejected since there are options where worst outcomes are substantially better than that of the nuclear option (just, consider the scenario if the nuclear nightmare, not the nuclear dream, is realised). Further application of the rejection rule will reject the fossil fuel (predominantly coal) option, on the basis of estimated effects on the earth’s climate from burning massive quantities of such fuels. 43. Although the rejection rule coupled with position several rivals to maximin each proposed, enjoys a privileged for decision under uncertainty have been of which has associated rejection rules. rules, such as the risk- added which ’assesses maximin Some of these reasoning criticised by Goodin (pp.507-8), the riskiness of a policy in terms of the increment of risk it adds to those pre-existing in the status quo, rather than in terms of the absolute value of the risk associated with the policy’ are decidedly and rather than offering a rational decision procedure appears to afford protection of the (nuclear) status quo. What will be argued, or rather dubious, 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-open or allow-for-reversibility (not an entirely unquestionable rule rule ’of strictly limited applicability’) excludes the nuclear option because ’nuclear plants and their by-products have an air of irreversibility ... ’’One cannot the way one can abandon simply abandon a coal-fired plant"’ (p.506). a nuclear reactor The compare-the- alternatives rule* in ordinary application, leads back to the cost-benefit assessments, which, as already observed, tell decisively against a nuclear option when costing is done properly. The maximise-sustainable-benefits rule, which ’directs us to opt for the policy producing the highest level of net benefits which can be sustained indefinitely’, ’decisively favours renewable Other lesser rules Goodin discusses, sources’, ruling out the nuclear option. which have not really been applied in the nuclear debate, and which lead yet further from the Old Paradigm framework, harm-avoidance and protecting-the- vulnerable. also yield/ the same nuclear-excluding results. Harm-avoidance, in particular, points ’decisively in favour of "alternative" and "renewable" energy sources ... combined with strenuous efforts at energy conservation’ The upshot is evident: whatever reasonable decision rule is adopted (p.442). the result is the same, a standards. nuclear choice is rejected, even by Old Paradigm Nor would reversion to an expected utility analysis alter this conclusion; for such analyses are but glorified cost-benefit analyses, with probabilities duly multiplied in, and the conclusion is as before from cost-benefit considerations, against a nuclear choice. The Old Paradigm does not, it thus appears, sustain the nuclear juggernaut: nor does its Modification. 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, sufficiently evident that contemporary economic behaviour does not accord with Old Paradigm percepts, practice does not accord with neo-classical economic theory nor, to consider the main modification, with social theory. democratic 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 keen to realise returns on capital already invested. There are also typical self-interest reasons for 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 political affairs, and as a spin-off profits accrue to others, and so on. There are. just as important, ideological reasons, such as a belief in the control of both political and physical power by technocratic-entreprenial elite, a belief in social control from above, control which nuclear power offers far more than alternatives, some of which (vaguely) threaten to alter the power base, a faith in the unlimitedness of 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. Within contemporary corporate capitalism, these sorts of reasons for nuclear development are intimately linked, because those whose types of enterprise benefit substantially from nuclear development are commonly those who hold the requisite beliefs. along with its state It is then, contemporary corporate enterprise image, that fuels the nuclear juggernaut. To be sure, corporate capitalism, which is the political economy largely thrust upon us in western nations, is not necessary for a nuclear future; a totalitarian state of the type 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 national This diagnosis can be development of nuclear power in the US? and the international spread of nuclear technology for which the US has been largely responsible. the Eastern bloc is which had in 1977 only nuclear plants. By comparison with the West, nuclear power production in and is largely confined to the Soviet Union small about 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 else­ where to any great extent. American technology has. 45. The 60s were, because of the growth in electricity demand, a period of great expansion of the electrical utilities in the US. These companies were encouraged to build nuclear plants, rather than coal or oil burning plants, for several state controlled or influenced reasons:- Firstly, owing to governmental regulation procedures the utilities could (it then seemed) earn a higher rate of profit on a nuclear plant than a fossil fuel one. Secondly, the US government arranged to meet crucial costs and risks of nuclear operation, and in this way, and more directly through its federal agencies, actively encouraged a nuclear choice and nuclear development. In particular, state limitation of liability and shouldering of part of insurance for nuclear accidents and state arrangements to handle nuclear wastes were what made profitable private utility operation appear feasible and resulting in nuclear investment. In the 70s, though the state subsidization continued, the private ’high costs of construction combined with low capacity cO , factors and poor reliability have wiped out the iyst advantage that nuclear power picture changed : had enjoyed in the US. Much as the domestic nuclear market in the US is controlled by a few corporations, so the world market is dominated by a few countries, predominantly and first of all the US, which through its two leading nuclear companies, Westinghouse and General Electric, has been the major exporter of nuclear 55 technology. ' These companies were enabled to gain entry into European and subsequently world markets by US foreign policies, basically the "Atoms for Peace" program supplemented by bilateral agreements providing for US technology, research, enriched uranium and financial capital. ’The US offered a Estate subsidized] nuclear package that Europe could not refuse and with which the British could not compete*. In the 70s the picture of US domination of Common Market nuclear technology had given way to subtler influence: American companies held dudlJug with relevant governments) substantial interests in European and Japanese nuclear companies and held licences on the technology which remained largely American. Meanwhile in the 60s and 70s the US entered into bilateral agreements for civilian use of atomic energy with many other countries, for example, Argentina, Brasil, Columbia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Pakistan, Philippines, South Korea, Portugal, South Africa, Taiwan, Turkey, Venezuela, South Vietnam. The US proceeded, Spain, in this way, to ship nuclear technology and nuclear materials in great quantities round the world. It also proceeded to spread nuclear technology through the International Atomic Energy Agency, originally designed to control and safeguard nuclear operations, but most of whose *budget and activities ... have gone to promote nuclear activities’. 46. A main reason for the 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 safety regulations are loose and enforcement rare, where public opposition is not permitted and where weak and corrupt regimes offer easy sales. [For] ... the US has considerable leverage with many of these countries. We know from painful experience that many of the worst dictatorships 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. It is evident from this sketch of the ways and means of reactor proliferation that not only have practices departed far from the framework of the Old Paradigm and five social Modification, but that the practices (or corporate capitalism and associated third world imperialism) involve much that is ethically unacceptable, whether percepts; for principles such as by older, modified, or alternative thos and self-determination are grossly violated. IX. SOCIAL OPTIONS : SHALLOWER AND DEEPER ALTERNATIVES. The future 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 associated phenomena such as acid rain and atmospheric heating, not to mention the despoliation caused by extensive strip mining, all of which result from its use 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 nonbeneficiaries for some concentrated benefits to some profit takers and to some users who do not pay the full costs of production . i 58 and replacement. To these conventional main options a third is often added which emphasizes softer and more benign technologies, such as those of solar energy and, in Northern Europe, hydroelectricity. The deeper choice, which even softer paths tend to neglect, is not technological but social, and involves both conservation measures and the restructuring of production away from energy intensive uses: at a more basic level there is a choice between consumeristic and nonconsumeristic futures. These more fundamental choices between social alternatives, conventional technologically-oriented discussion of energy options tends to be obscure. It is not just a matter of deciding in which way to meet 47. given and unexamined goals (as the Old Paradigm would imply), but also a matter of examining the goals. That is, we are not merely faced with the question 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 matter of examining those alleged needs and the cost of a society that creates them. It is not just a question of devising less damaging ways to meet these alleged needs conceived of as inevitable and unchangeable. (Hence there are solar ways of producing unnecessary trivia no one really wants, as opposed to nuclear ways.) Naturally this is not to deny that these softer options are superior because of the ethically unacceptable features of the harder options. But it is doubtful that any technology, however benign in principle, will be likely to leave a tolerable world for the future if it is expected to meet unbounded and uncontrolled energy 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, for example, the effect on the world’s forests, which are commonly counted as a solar resource, of use for production of methanol or of electricity by woodchipping (as already planned by forest authorities and contemplated by many other energy organisations). While few would object to the use of genuine waste material for energy production, 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 forests. The effects of such additional demands on the maintenance of the forests are often dismissed, even by soft technologicalists, by the simple expedient of waving around the label 'renewable resources'. Many forests are in 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 imminent if not already well advanced. It certainly has begun in many regions, and for many forest types (such as rainforest types) which are now, and very rapidly, being lost for the future. The adaition 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 appreciation of the conduct of contemporary forestry 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, 48. resembling the deforestation of England at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, again for energy purposes, would be extensive and devastating erosion in steeper lands and tropical areas, 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 - important though this is - without any more basic structural and social change is inadequate. Nor is such a simple technological switch likely to be achieved. It is not as if political pressure could oblige the US government to stop its nuclear program (and that of the countries 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 accomplished, it is very unlikely given the integration of political powerholders with those sponsoring nuclear development. The deeper social options involve challenging and trying to change a social structure which promotes consumerism, consumption far beyond genuine needs, and an 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 satisfaction in work and in social relations and other activities, is virtually bound to oe one which generates a vast amount of unnecessary consumption. (A production system that produces goods not to meet genuine 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 implementing the New Paradigm, the move away from consumerism is for example part of the more general shift from materialism and materialist values. The social change option tends to be obscured in most discussions of energy options and of how to meet energy needs, in part because it does question underlying values of current social arrangements. The conventional discussion proceeds by taking alleged demand (often conflated with wants or needs ^) as unchallengeable, and the issue to be one of which technology can 49. 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 and unchangeable. It is commonly argued by representatives The point is readily illustrated. of such industries as transportation and petroleum, as for example by McGrowth of the XS Consumption Co., that people want deep freezers, air conditioners, power boats, ... It would be authoritarian to prevent them from satisfying these wants. Such an argument conveniently ignores the social framework in which such needs and wants arise or are produced. To point to the determination of many such wants at the framework level is not however to accept a Marxist approach according to which they are entirely determined at the framework level (e.g. by industrial organisation) and there is no such thing as individual choice or determination at all. It is to see the social framework as a major factor in determining certain kinds of choices, such as those for travel, and to see apparently individual choices made in such matters as being channelled and directed by a social framework determined largely in the interests of corporate and private profit and advantage. The social change option is a hard option - at least it will be difficult to obtain politically - but it is the only way, so it has been argued, of avoiding passing on serious costs to the future. And there are other sorts of reasons than such ethical ones for taking it: it is the main, indeed the only sort of option 62 open to those who take a deeper ecological perspective , a perspective integral with the New Paradigm but not essential to radical departure from the dominant paradigm. The ethical transmission requirement defended accordingly requires, hardly surprisingly, social and political adjustment. The social and political changes that the deeper alternative requires will be strongly resisted because they and power structure. mean changes in current social organisation To the extent that the option represents some kind of threat to parts of present political and economic arrangements it is not surprising that official energy option discussion proceeds by misrepresenting and often obscuring it. But difficult though a change will be, especially one with such far-reaching effects on the prevailing power structure, is to obtain, it is imperative to try : we are all on the nuclear 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-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 fallacies and decision theory is at least as important as knowledge of nuclear technology. 2. As to the first, see references cited in Goodin, 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 Dunlap, especially p. 34. 5. 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-)nuclear 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 what, suits them. 9. This is a conclusion of several governmental inquiries and is conceded by some leading proponents of nuclear development; for requisite details up to 1977 see Routley (a). The same conclusion 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. See the papers, and simulations, discussed in Goodin, p. 428. 11a. Naturally the effect on humans is not the only factor that has to be taken into account in arriving at moral assessments. Nuclear radiation, 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 example, can hardly improve its case, it suffices if the case against it can be made out solely in terms of its effects on human life in the conventional (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 recently nuclear power is seen as providing man at least with unlimited physical power, power obtained through technology, [ability to manage technology represents the past] 14. On such limitation 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 voting "paradoxes other. on the Other different limitation results are presented in Routley 81. It follows that there are many problems that have no solution and much that is necessarily unknowable. Limitative results put a serious dent in the progress picture. According the 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.243). Therefore, a nuclear future contravenes requirements of justice. 3 16. For examples, and for some details of the history of philosophers’ positions on obligations to the future, see Routley (a). 17. Passmore, p. 91. Passmore’s position is ambivalent and, to all appearances, inconsistent. It is considered in detail in Routley (a), as also is Rawls’ position. 18. For related criticisms of the economists’ arguments for discounting, and for citation of the often eminent economists who sponsor them, see Goodin, 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 presupposes, 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 p). For example, outcomes Goodin says cannot be listed, can be comprehended along such lines as "plant breakdown through human error”. Furthermore the different more appropriate rules Goodin subsequently considers also require listing of "possible" outcomes. are really two points. Goodin’s point can be alternatively stated however. There The first trouble is that such ragbag alternatives cannot in general be assigned required quantitative probabilities, and it is at that point that applications of the models breaks down. The breakdown is just what separates decision making under uncertainty from decision making under risk. Secondly, many influential applications of decision theory methods, the Rasmussen Report is a good example, do, illegitimately, delete possible alternatives from their modellings. 21. Discount, or bank, rates in the economists' sense are usually set to follow the market, cf. P.A. Samuelson, EcOYiorri'icsi 7th Edition, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1967, p.351. 22. A real possibility is one which there is evidence for believing could eventuate. A real possibility requires producible evidence for its consideration. 23. Thus the rates have little moral relevance. The contrast is with mere logical possibility. 4 24. Such a principle is explicit both in classical utilitarianism (e.g. Sidgwick p. 414), and in a range of contract and other theories from Kant and Rousseau to Rawls (p.293). How the principle is argued for will depend heavily, however, on the underlying theory; and we do not want to make our use depend heavily on particular ethical theories. 25. The latter question is taken up in section VII; see especially, the Poverty argument. 26. SF, p. 27. Shrader-Frechette is herself somewhat critical of the carte blanche adoption of these methods, suggesting that ’whoever affirms or denies the desirability of ... [such] standards is, to some degree, symbollically assenting to a number of American value patterns and cultural norms’ 27. (p. 28). The example parallels the sorts of counterexamples often advanced to utilitarianism, e.g. the admissible lynching of pleasure given to the large lynching party. of an innocent person because For the more general case against utilitarianism, see ... 28. US Atomic Energy Commission, Comparative Risk-Cost-Benefit Study of Alternative sources of Electrical Energy (WASH-1224), US Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., December 1974, p.4-7 and p. 1-16. 29. As SF points out, p.37-44., in some detail. As she remarks, ... since standards need not be met, so long as the NRC [Nuclear Regulatory commission] judges that the licence shows ’a reasonable effort’ at meeting them, current policy allows government regulators to trade human health and welfare for the [apparent] good intentions of the promotors of technology. [Such] good intentions have never been known to be sufficient for the morality of an act (p. 39). The failure of state regulation, even where the standards are as mostly not very demanding, and the alliance of regulators with those they are supposed to be regulating, are conspicuous features of modern environmental control, not just of (nuclear) pollution control. 30. 31. The figures are those from the original Brookhaven Report: possibilities and consequences of major 'Theoretical accidents in large nuclear plants’, USAEC Report WASH-740, Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1957. This report was requested in the first place because the Commission bn Atomic Energy wanted positive safety conclusions "to reassure the private insurance companies" so that they would provide coverage for the nuclear industry. Since even the conservative statistics of the report were alarming it was suppressed and its data were not made public until almost 20 years later, after a suit was brought as a result of the Freedom of Information Act (Shrader-Frechette, pp. 78-9). 32. Atomic Energy Commission, Reactor Safety Study: An Assessment of Accident Risks in US Commercial Nuclear Power Plants, Government Printing Office Washington, D.C., 1975. This report, the only allegedly complete study, concluded that fission reactors presented only a minimal health risk to the public. Early in 1979, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (the relevant organisation that superseded the troubled Atomic Energy Commission) withdrew its support for the report, with the result that there is now no comprehensive analysis of nuclear power approved by the US Government. 32a. Most present and planned reactors are of this type: see Gyorgy. 33. 34. Even then relevant environment factors may have been neglected. 35. There are variations on (i) and (ii) which multiply costs against numbers such as probabilities. In this way risks, construed as probable costs, can be taken into account in the assessment. (Alternatively, risks may be assessed through such familiar methods as insurance.) A principle varying (ii), and formulated as follows: (ii’)a is ethically acceptable if (for some b) a includes no more risks than b and b is socially accepted, was the basic ethical principle in terms of which the Cluff Lake Board of Inquiry recently decided that nuclear power development in Saskatchewan is ethically acceptable: see Cluff Lake Board of Inquiry Final Report, Department of Environment, Government of Saskatchewan, 1978, p. 305 and p. 288. In this report, a is nuclear power and b is either activities clearly accepted by society as alternative power sources. In other applications b has been taken as cigarette smoking, motoring, mining and even the Vietnam 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 inadmissible conventional character. For look at the origin of b: b may be socially accepted though it is no longer socially acceptable, or though its social acceptibility is no longer so clearcut and it would not have been socially What accepted if as much as is now known had been known when it was introduced. 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 the amendments the principles are invalid, for the reasons given in the text. It is not disconcerting that these arguments do not work. It would be sad to see yet another area lost to the experts, namely ethics to actuaries. 36. A main part of the trouble with the models is that they are narrowly utilitarian, and like utilitarianism they neglect distributional features, involve naturalistic fallacies, etc. Really they try to treat as an uncon­ strained optimisation what is a deontically constrained optimisation: see R. and V. Routley ’An expensive repair kit for utilitarianism’. 37. Apparent exceptions to the principle such as taxation (and redistribution of income generally) vanish when wealth is construed (as it has to be if taxation is to be properly justified) as at least partly a social asset unfairly monopolised by a minority of the population. Examples such as that of motoring dangerously do not constitute counterexamples to the principle; for one is not morally entitled to so motor. 38. SF, p. 39. Goodin, p. 433. 40. On all these points see R. Grossman and G. Daneker, Guide to Jobs and 15, where references are also cited. Energy, Environmentalists for Full Employment, Washington DC, 1977, pp.1-7, and also the details supplied in substantiating the interesting case of Commoner On the absorption of available capital by the nuclear industry, see as well E18], p. 23. On the employment issues, see too H.E. Daly in L9 J, p. 149. A more fundamental challenge to the poverty argument appears in I. Illich, Energy and Equality, Calden and Boyars, London 1974, where it is argued that the sort of development nuclear energy represents is exactly the opposite of what the poor need. 41. For much more detail on the inappropriateness see E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, Blond and Briggs, London, 1973. As to the capital and other requirements, see [2], p. 48, and also [7] and [9]. For an illuminating look at the sort of development high-energy technology will tend to promote in the so-called underdeveloped countries see the paper of Waiko and other papers in The Melanesian Environment (edited J.H. Winslow), Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1977. 42. A useful survey is given in A. Lovins, Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken, Friends of the Earth Australia, 1977 (reprinted from Foreign Affairs, October 1976); see also [17], [6], [7], [14], p. 233 ff, and Schumacher, op. cit. 43. An argument like this is suggested in Passmore, Chapters 4 and 7, with respect to the question of saving resources. In Passmore this argument for the overriding importance of passing on contemporary culture is underpinned by what appears to be a future-directed ethical version of the Hidden Hand argument of economics - that, by a coincidence which if correct would indeed be fortunate, the best way to take care of the future (and perhaps even the only way to do so, since do-good intervention is almost certain to go wrong) is to take proper care of the present and immediate future. The argument has all the defects of the related Chain Argument discussed above and others. 44. See Nader and Abbotts, p. 66, p. 191, and also Commoner. 45. Very persuasive arguments to this effect have been advanced by civil liberties groups and others in a number of countries: see especially M. Flood and R. Grove-White, Nuclear Prospects. A comment on the individual, the State and Nuclear Power, Friends of the Earth, Council for the Protection of Rural England and National Council for Civil Liberties, London, 1976. 46. 'US energy policy, for example, since the passage of the 1954 Atomic Energy Act, has been that nuclear power is necessary to provide ”an economical and reliable basis” needed "to sustain economic growth” (SF, p.lll, and references there cited). There are now a great many criticisms of the second premiss in the literature. For our criticism, and a reformulation of the premiss in terms of selective economic growth (which would exclude nuclear development), see Routley (b), and also Berkley and Seckier. To simple-mindedly contrast economic growth with no-growth, in the fashion of some discussions of nuclear power, c.f. Elster, is to leave out alternatives; the contraction crucial of course much simplifies the otherwise faulty case for unalleged growth. 48. In UK and USSR nuclear development is explicitly in the public domain, in such countries as France and West Germany the government has very substantial interests in main nuclear involved companies. Even as regards nuclear plant operation in the US, it is difficult to obtain comprehensive data. Estimates of cost very dramtically according to the sample of plants chosen and the assumptions made concerning the measurement of plant performance (Gyorgy, p. 173). 49. 50. See Kalmanoff, p. See Comey. 51. Ref. to what it has to say about Price Anderson Act. 52. Full ref to SF onargument from ignorance etc. 53. These e.g. Elster, p. 377. 54. A recent theme in much economic literature is that Bayesian decision On decision theory see also, theory and risk analysis can be universally 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, and few (and widely diverging) figures for,the probability of a reactor core meltdown, and no reliable estimates as to the likelihood of a nuclear confrontation. Thus Goodin argues (in 78) that 'such uncertainties plague energy theories' as to 'render expected utility calculations impossible’. 55. For details see Gyorgy, p. 398 ff., from which presentation of the international story is adapted. 7 56. Gyorgy, p. 307, and p. 308. points, see Chomsky 57. For elaboration of some of the important and Hermann. Whatever one thinks of the ethical principles underlying the Old Paradigm or its Modification - and they do form a coherent set that many people can respect - these are not the principles underlying contemporary corporate capitalism and associated third-world imperialism. 58. Certainly practical transitional programs may involve temporary and limited use of unacceptable long term commodities such as 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 of such measures as environmental (or replacement) pricing of energy i.e. so that the price of some energy unit includes the full cost of replacing it by an equivalent unit taking account of environmental cost of production. Other (sometimes cooptive) strategies towards more satisfactory alternatives should also, of course, be adopted, in particular the removal of institutional barriers to energy conservation and alternative technology (e.g. local government regulations blocking these), and the removal of state assistance to fuel and power industries. 59. Symptomatic of the fact that it is not treated as renewable is that forest economics do not generally allow for full renewability - if they did the losses and deficits on forestry operations would be much more striking than they already are often enough. It is doubtful, furthermore, that energy cropping of forests can be a fully renewable operation if net energy production is to be worthwhile; see, e.g. the argument in L.R.B. Mann ‘Some difficulties with energy farming for portable fuels’, and add in the costs of ecosystem maintenance. 60. For an outline and explanation of this phenomena see Gyorgy, and also Woodmansee. 61. The requisite distinction is made in several places, e.g. Routley (b), and (to take one example from the real Marxist literature), Baran and Sweezy. 62. The distinction between shallow and deep ecology was first emphasised by Naess. For its environmental importance see Routley (c) further references are cited). (where /bU/ REFERENCES. In order to contain references to a modest length, reference to primary sources has often been replaced by reference through secondary sources. Generally the reader can easily trace the primary sources. For those parts of the text that overlap Routley (a), fuller references will be found by consulting the latter article. S. Cotgrove and A. Duff, ’Environmentalism, middle-class radicalism and politics’, Sociological 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 Atomic Energy, Outback Press, Melbourne, 1977. R. and V. Routley, 'Nuclear energy and obligations to the future', Inquiry 21 (1978), 133-79 (cited as Routley (a)). Fox Report: Ranger Uranium Environmental Inquiry First Report, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1977. K.S. Schrader-Frechette, Nuclear Power and Public Policy, Reidel, Dordrecht, 1980 (referred to as SF). W.R. Catton, Jr., and R.E. Dunlap, ’A new ecological paradigm for post-exuberant sociology’, American Behavioral Scientist 24 (1980) 15-47. United States Interagency Review group on Nuclear Waste Management, Report to the President, Washington. 29442) (Dept, of Energy) 1979. (Ref. No. El. 28. TID- (cited as US(a)). A.B. Lovins and J.H. Price, Non-Nuclear Futures: The Case for an Ethical Energy Strategy, Friends of the Earth International, San Francisco, 1975. R. Routley, ’On the impossibility of an orthodox social theory and of an orthodox solution to environmental problems’, Logique et Analyse, 23 (1980), 145-66. R. Routley, ’Necessary limits for knowledge: unknowable truths’, in Essays in honour of Paul Weingartner, (ed. E. Morscher), Salzberg, 1980. J. Passmore, Man’s Responsibility for Nature, Duekworth, London, 19 74. 2. R. and V. Routley, The Fight for the Forests, Third Edition, RSSS, Australian National University, 1975 (cited as Routley (b)). J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1971. P.W. Berkley and D.W. Seckier, Economic Growth and Environmental Decay, Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, New York, 1972. J. Elster, ’Risk, uncertainty and nuclear power’, Social Science Information 18 (3) (1979) 371-400. J. Robinson, Economic Heresies, Basic Books, New York, 1971. B. Barry, 'Circumstances of Justice and future generations’ in Obligations to Future Generations (ed. R.T. Sikora and B. Barry), Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1978. II. Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, Macmillan, London, 1962 (reissue). B. Commoner, The Poverty of Power, Knopf, New York, 1975. N. Chomsky and E.S. Herman, The Political Economy of Human Rights, 2 vols., Black Rose Books, Montreal, 1979. J. Woodmansee, The World of a Giant Corporation, North Country Press, Seattle, Washington, 1975. P.A. Bd\ran and P. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, Penguin, 1967. A. Naess, 'The shallow and the deep, long range ecology movement. A summary’, Inquiry 16 (1973) 95-100.  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 106, Item 4: Draft of Nuclear power - ethical and social dimensions ; Draft of Nuclear power - ethical, social and political dimensions Subject The topic of the resource Two draft papers. First paper, typescript, corrections with whiteout, undated. Second paper, typescript (photocopy) of draft, with handwritten emendations, 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. Description An account of the resource Papers housed in unnumbered folder marked Australia's Defence. Item number assigned by library staff. One of four papers digitised from item 2. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Routley</a> <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=val+routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Val Routley</a> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, <span>Box 106, Item 4</span> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource [62] leaves. 51.91 MB. Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:f644a2a">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:f644a2a</a> Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1982-01-01 Box 106: Culture, Politics, Environment, Economics [War and Peace] https://www.antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/1d651af96cc7b07825a4edfa9eabdc93.pdf c09e6df28a2be8efc88346ca0115f7fb PDF Text Text �HUMAN CHAUVINISM AND ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS * Richard and Vai Routley Class chauvinism has been and remains a cardinal weakness of most moral codes - including, so it will be argued, Western ethics. A most serious failure of Western ethics is its human chauvinism or anthropocentricism - a chauvinism which emerges in a refined, and apparently more reasonable, form as person chauvinism in much modern ethical theory. What is chauvinism? Class chauvinism, in the relevant sense, is differential, discriminatory and inferior treatment (by sufficiently many members of the class) for items outside the class, for which there is not justification. PLzwan chauvinism is class chauvinism where the class is humans, zzzuZe chauvinism where the class is human males, chauvinism where the class is animals, etc. It would be bud, to say the least, if Western ethics, in its various strands, were to turn out to rest on human, or person, chauvinism. For Western ethics would then have no better foundation than, and be open to the same sorts of objections as, moral codes based on other sorts of chauvinisms, e.g. on familial, national, sexual, racial or socio-economic class chauvinism - in particular it would be open to the objection that * This paper (which considerably elaborates R. Routley 'Is There a need for d ew, an environmental, ethic?', of f/ze XVfb VorZd P3 1 (1973), pp.205-10), was drafted in 1973 and read in 19 he University of Indiana, Bloomington, at Notre Dame University, an t the Conference on The Good Society held at the University of Canada. Since the main virtue of the paper has been that it h ed much interesting discussion, the original form has been retained, the authors are no longer especially happy with the form, an theses remain insufficiently developed or e the previous and continuing defended. But in order have been made, even though the criticism, no substanti paper has been raided and segments o it presented in improved form 'Against the inevitability elsewhere, especially (a) R. and V. Rou of human chauvinism', in MoruZ P/zfZosopbz/ e University Press, (edited by K. Goodpaster and K. Sayre), Notre 1978, and (b) R. and V. Routley, 'An expensiv , Choice utilitarianism', paper presented at the Colloquium on some u?zd VuZz^g, RSSS, Australian National University, 1977. sizeable additions have been made, with a view to incre intelligibility and enlarging the scope of the original draft, ing some of the many objections. 1 �v' it discriminated against nonhumans in a prejudiced and unwarranted way, and would thereby stand condemned. For it is hard to see how an ethic based on simple species loyalty could have any greater claim to absolute­ ness or deserve any more respect than moral codes based on simple loyalty to national, sexual, or racial classes. Such an ethic could no more command allegiance - once the facts are brought into clear view - than other normally-deplored examples of localised class chauvinism, such as the Mafia or protection agencies or rackets or enclaves of slavery. Unfortunately prevailing Western ethics appear to be of just this sort. §1. THE WESTERN CASE FOR ITS HUMAN (OR PERSON) CHAUVINISM: THE FIRST LINES OF DEFENCE It is important, then, for defenders of the Western ideology to be able to show - i/ it can be shown - that an ethic which discriminates strongly in favour of humans, as Western ethics apparently does, is not chauvinistic. Otherwise the ethic stands condemned. Of course not every distinction in treatment qualifies as chauvinistic - the distinction in treatment may not be substantial or systematic, and there may be an adequate and explicable basis for the distinction, so that some discrimin­ ation is warranted. In order to escape the charge of human chauvinism, it has to be shown how and why the drastic and general discrimination in favour of humans sanctioned and enjoined by modern (as by historical) Western ethical systems is warranted, and that it has an adequate basis. The extent of this chauvinism, especially with respect to animals, is at last - after centuries of a priori prejudice and gross distortion of the characteristics of wild animals and wilderness - beginning to be spelt 'x out. 1 'X It is at least clear from the outset that an adequate justification cannot be provided which simply selects all and only these members of the species human (i.e. Zzcmo sup^e^s) as zoologically defined. nothing about the characteristic of There is itself (as distinct perhaps from its accompanying properties) which could provide a justification for overwhelmingly favourable treatment for humans (and unfavourable treatment for nonhumans) as opposed to other possible, and possibly some actual, nonhuman creatures. Once again, an adequate ethic and justification can­ not possibly be based on blind and unthinking species loyalty. The same 1 See, e.g., S. and R. Godlovitch and J. Harris (eds), 4^iwcZs^ and* Morals. 4% <?y Gollancz, London, 1971; P. Singer, 4 net.) /or cy Cape, London, 1976; S.R.L. Clark, 7'Zie -Staffs <?y 4^iwaZs, Clarendon, Oxford, 1977. 2 �Meeds argument: objection applies against the simple the commonly assumed domination of human needs over all else (e.g. over all environ­ mental considerations) has, if it is to have any merit, to be based on 2 more than speciesism. We shall have to look then for some other not merely taxonomic characteristic to provide the sought justification. It will emerge however, that any such characteristic is held or may be held by nonhumans, and is not held, or potentially not held, by all items of the species human. Of course there are many characteristics which can, as a contingent matter, be used to distinguish human beings as a general class from other higher animals - although in fact with increasing knowledge of animals it is no longer clear that some of these characteristics distinguish as clearly as was assumed a priori in the past. For example, humans have a language, and a culture of a certain sort and even various logics. And, as we are accustomed to have people point out, other terrestrial animals do not conduct philosophical discussions on environmental ethics. However not only is participation in these activities potentially available to nonhuman creatures, and these characteristics possibly possessed by some, but these activities are not generally engaged in even by humans (particularly the power elite), many humans lack the requisite competence, and even among those who do qualify, such activities are carried out to a very varying extent. We run the risk, then, in applying such demanding criteria, of ruling out, of classing as deserving of "sub-human" or "sub­ person" treatment, a considerable class of human beings - items most humans would consider as worthy of better treatment than that normally accorded by humans to nonhuman animals. What is more important however is that such criteria as human language, culture, human civilization, human intentionality, or whatever, appear to provide no satisfactory for the substantially unfavourable treatment allotted those falling outside the privileged class. should there be such strong discrimination in favour of language or a higher level of creatures having a (certain sort of) intelligence and against creatures or items which do not, in favour of things with a certain sort of culture or a certain logic and against those without? Especially when some of these criteria are clearly, and As McCloskey remarked (in a letter dated 5.7.77 containing many helpful comments) 'talking about needs does little but obscure the problem, as needs, to be normatively relevant, involve reference to goods; and that merely transfers the problem'. On next page. 3 �unjustifiably,loaded in favour of human interests, achievements and abilities (cf. the cultural loading of various intelligence tests). By contrast the very many respects in which some uvimuT-s or sorts of animals are corsftierabZi/ s^pericr to /zMwars (many are noted in V.B. Droscher, T^e Mayic o/ * t^e Senses. /VeM Diseorerfes tn ^nfmat Perception, Allen, London, 1969) are rarely considered; yet some of these features would, if taken in the same serious way as some respects in which humans excell, justify a reverse chauvinism (which could be reflected as, /or example, in the Hindu treatment of cows). The only sort of justification for the discrimination that might appear convincing - that those who have the given characteristic (e.g. those that are more intelligent, or more rational, or richer) are more valuable or worth special treatment - is vitiated by the fact that were it accepted by Western ethics it would warrant similar discrimination hcfMccv humans (or persons). For how do we show that the allegedly warranted discrimination is sufficiently different from making substantial (class) distinctions between humans in terms of their level of intelli­ gence, linguistic or logical ability, or level or kind of cultural achievement - so that those with "lower" levels of these valued abilities are treated in a consistently inferior way and regarded as available for the use of the others? In short, these characteristics do not provide adequate justification for the substantially inferior treatment accorded those not having them, and so the charge of chauvinism is not escaped by producing them. A similar set of points applies against a number of other criteria traditionally or recently proposed to distinguish the privileged class. 4 Often these are propounded in terms of personhood and criteria for being a pgrscyz (the class marked out for privileged treatment being the class of persons) rather than criteria for being /zvmuTZ - in order to escape difficulties raised by young, senile, decrepit, stupid, irrational, For undoubtedly many mammals, birds and insects can communicate, some­ times in ways analogous to language, even if the honorific term 'language' is withheld (see - to select an unfavourable source - the discussion in E.O. Wilson, TZze ZVetJ SpvtTzesis, Belknap, Cambridge Mass., 1975, chapter 8 ff.). It is becoming increasingly evident, however, that the ascription of some linguistic ability, and of elementary languages, to nonhuman creatures should not be withheld; see, e.g. the details assembled in E. Linden, 4pes^ Mev Lavpvupe, Penguin, New York, 1976. (But contrast Wilson, op. cit., pp.555-59, and to set this in proper perspective, consider Wilson's discussion of ethics and aesthetics a few pages later, pp.562-65.) Many of the criteria that have been proposed are assessed, and found wanting, in Routley (a). 4 �damaged and defective humans, extraterrestrial creatures, and super animals; to avoid the merely contingent connections between being human and having requisite person-determining characteristics (such as ration­ ality or knowledge) supposed to warrant discriminatory treatment; and to defeat, though it is a pyrrhic victory, the charge of human chauvinism (or equivalents of the charge, such as anthropocentricism or speciesism). But much the same problems then arise in terms of criteria for a person, and the chauvinism problem reappears as the problem of furnish­ ing criteria which are suitably clearcut, and do separate persons from assumed nonpersons, and which would provide an adequate justification for substantially privileged treatment for persons and inferior treatment for nonpersons. Unless such a justification is forthcoming the charge of person c^unrin^sm is not escaped. Most of the criteria proposed for personhood fall down in just these sorts of ways, e.g. being autonomous, the having of projects, the producing of junk, the assessing of some of one's performances as successful or not, the awareness of oneself as an Not only does it appear that (the more worthy of) such criteria apply (or could apply) to many nonhuman animals - thus agent or initiator. animals are generally more autonomous (in main senses of the term) than humans, many animals have projects (e.g. home and nest building), and they are well aware of themselves, as opposed to rivals, as initiators of 5 projects - and that they do not apply uniformly to humans or indeed to persons in any ordinary sense; but again it is extremely difficult to see what there is in these characteristics which would warrant or justify the vast difference in treatment between the privileged and nonprivileged classes, or justify regarding the non-privileged class as something available for the of the privileged class. Similar objections can be lodged against the proposal that knowledge or the possession of knowledge, provides f/zg (or a ur^c-Lai!-) distinguishing It can hardly provide the appropriate filter, since it not only gives no sharp cut-off point, 6 but does not even always rank humans or feature. persons above nonhumans or nonpersons. Moreover, taken seriously it should lead to substantial moral differentiation between persons, a person's moral rating also fluctuating during his lifetime. In any case, For example, the shiftless intelligent person, or the primitive person, who has no projects and engages in no moral reflection, and thus offends protestant ethics, is not thereby deregisterable as a person, any more than an intelligent animal with projects can join the union. .6 on next page. 5 �why rank knowledge so highly: for (paca Socrates) knowledge is not the foundation of virtue, but is frequently turned to evil ends, and even where it is meritorious it is not the sole (or even a crucial) criterion of worth. Similar difficulties apply too to the historic criterion of along with the added problem that it is very difficult to say what it is in any clear or generally acceptable way, or to prevent it from degenerating into a simple "pro" word. If a hallmark of rationality is commitment to the consequences of what one believes and seriously says, then many humans fail the test. If, on the other hand rationality is, for example, the ability to discover and pursue courses and actions likely to achieve desired goals (direct action toward goals), ability to solve problems concerned, etc., then plainly many animals have it, and possibly to a greater extent than humans in some cases (and of certain humans in If it were the ability, e.g. to do (say propositional calculus) or to assess reasoning verbally, then the (biassed) almost all cases). criterion would be far too strong and rule out many humans. Again, why should one make such a marked discrimination on this basis? What is so meritorious about this characteristic, that it warrants such a marked distinction? Nothing (at least in the ordinary academic's view, or logicians would receive more favoured treatment). Other criteria, which yield an analytic connection between being a person and enjoying freedom or having rationality, in part beg the question. For in persons - are free. respect is it that persons - or worse, just Also the justificatory problem, as to how the claimed freedom or rationality warrants such differential treatment, remains. Characterisations of persons vary enormously, from so strong that they rule out suburban humans who are not "self-made" enterpreneurs, to so weak that they admit very /nanp animals. An (unintentional) example of the latter is the following: persons, that is, ... beings who are not only sentient but also capable of intensional autonomous action, beings that must be ascribed not only states of consciousness but also states of belief, thought and intention (A. Townsend, /iMstraZasfar 'Radical vegetarians', PAfZosopTip, 57 (1979), p.89). 6 In addition, the relation "a has at least as much knowledge as b" is only a partial ordering. For example, a dog's and a child's knowledge may be incomparable, because they know about different matters, how to do quite different sorts of things, etc. (The idea that knowledge is the key to moral discrimination, that it is what makes humans rank the way Western ethics ranks them, may be found in C.B. Daniels, TZze 6>y FZ^fcaZ Y'/ieorfgs, Philosophy in Canada Monograph, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1975.) 6 �Most rats and rabbits satisfy the conditions: they are sentient, conscious animals that have intentions (e.g. to get through some barrier such as a floor or a fence), beliefs and thoughts preferred food beyond the barrier). (e.g. that there is For his further argument Townsend shifts - without notice, but in a way that is quite typical of this scene - to stronger requirements upon being a person (such that one who does not meet them is incapacitated as a person) which rule out many humans, e.g. 'The person must recognise canons of evidence and inference warranting changes in his beliefs, and be capable of changing his beliefs 7 accordingly' (op. cit., p.90). In meeting hypothetical objections, Townsend slips in a further require­ ment of rationality, but the characterisation of person given does not include any such requirement. Subsequently, however, Townsend commits himself, without argument, to the thesis that 'a fairly high degree of rationality is prerequisite' to attributing 'intensionality' (as dis­ tinct from 'intentionality'). This is not going to help much. For, firstly, rationality is very much a notion which admits of degrees, without the relatively sharp cut-off stages required for pgrscvz as a notion of orthodox moral relevance, or possessed by the notion of to which Townsend sneaks back in his chauvinistic conclusion (p.93). Secondly, TzozJ high a degree is prerequisite for being a person? If only enough to satisfy the conditions for being a person, then the animals that are persons have it. If more, then either the initial characterisation of a person fails or the thesis breaks down. The much stronger requirements upon being a person that Townsend sub­ sequently appeals to are said to derive from S.I. Benn. But, if any­ thing they strengthen one of the stronger of several KOHegtcZvaZenf characterisations of (%afMruZ) person - none of them equivalent to - that Benn has at various times offered. While Benn's weaker characterisations appear to admit at least many "higher" animals, e.g. that of a natural person as a chooser, conscious of himself as able to make a difference to the way the world goes, by deciding to do this rather than that, having projects, therefore, of his own, whose life experience may consequently be understood, not simply as a chronicle of events, but as an enterprise, on which he puts his own construct­ ion ((a) 'The protection and limitation of privacy, Part I', LazJ <7a^r?za:Z, 52 (1978), p.605); the stronger characterisations which invoke (rather vaguely specified, and (Ziy/greuf) minimum conditions of rationality in belief and action said to imply respcHsfbiZitp on bhe part of the person for what s/he does, though they do - exclude many of the creatures admitted by weaker characterisations. For such stronger characterisations see 'Individuality, autonomy and community' in CowwL/yrZfp (ed. E. Kamenka) Edward Arnold (forthcoming) and (c) 'Freedom, autonomy and the concept of a person', c/ thg PocZefp, 76 (1976), pp.109-30. 7 �The foregoing points, taken together, support our contention that it is not possible to provide criteria which would distinguishing, in the sharp way standard Western ethics do, between humans and certain nonhuman creatures, and particularly those creatures which have preferg ences or preferred states. For such criteria appear to depend upon the mistaken assumption that moral respect for other creatures is due only when they can be shown to measure up to some rather and traded tests for membership of a privileged class (essentially an elitist view), instead of upon, say, respect for the preferences of other creatures. Accordingly sk<2rp nzoraZ commonly accepted in ethics by philosophers and others alike, hgfzjggzz uZZ Tztzwuzzs Zacks a satfs/cctcr^ cokcrcrzt basfs. anZmaZ aZZ ofker The distinction, which historically rested on the assumption that humans possessed a soul (or higher reason) but that other animals, brutes, did not, appears to have been uncritically retained even after the religious beliefs or philosophical theories underpinning it have been abandoned. Given that the distinction underlying human chauvinism fails, is there anywhere satisfactory demarcations of moral relevance can be made 9 among things? Yes, several divisions of wcrcZ can be made; but of these coincides with a division into human and others. Consider, first, the question of consideration others, and the matter of which offers are to be taken into account in cases where others' interests and preferences are affected by some action. Insofar as moral consideration for others (among sentient items) is based on analogical (empathetic, and essentially inductive) principles, such as taking account of their worthwhile preferences, objectives, interests etc., There are of course further arguments for the contention, for example from the anatomical and physiological affinities of human and other animals, from their common evolutionary history, and so on. These arguments are of varying force; for example, evolutionary arguments can be arrested, temporarily, by the claim that there was a "quantum jump" in human evolutionary development which did not occur with other creatures with a previously shared evolutionary history (cf. Wilson, op. cit.). Although the divisions may be conceptually sharp enough, they are any­ thing but sharp when applied in the field to the variety of creatures and circumstances that occur. For example, preference-havers is, so far at least, sharp enough, but it is far from clear which creatures qualify, e.g. which, if any, Crustacea? For the present most of these potential decision cases are cases for cheerful indecision; but, alternatively, the divisions may be viewed - perhaps better - not as sharp boundaries, but as gradation states, as where two colours in a rainbow meet. 8 �it is difficult to see how such consideration can fail to apply to all (including nonhuman) preference-having creatures; and one does not need to apply criteria such as linguistic ability, navigational ability, intelligence, piano-playing, hunting skill, etc., to obtain a basis for such consideration (indeed one cannot). of preferences (and The of preferences revealed through choices) is however a quite sufficient basis for sort of consideration and concern. It is at this point, we suggest, that the requisite, important and non-arbitrary distinction is to be drawn which marks out the class of creatures towards which obligations may be held; that is, the usually recognised principles of consideration towards others (of the privileged class) properly extend or should be generalised to consideration for other creatures having prefer­ ences, and t/ze corresponding penerut defecsihZe odtipution principle is not to pnt others ("ot/zer pre/erence-Zzurers? into a dispre/erred state for no pood reason. Insofar as moral behaviour is based on consideration for others and not harming others, preference-having provides an adequate basis, and does appear to provide a sufficient justification for substantially different treatment for preference-having over non-preference-having items - because items without preference cannot (literally) be put into a dispreferred state. Thus preference-having appears to tie in with an important basis for moral obligation, and appears to provide a superior criterion, for a certain serf of moral consideration, to other criteria sometimes proposed such as sentience - or, differently, intelligence especially since in the absence of preferences such notions as Jzurminp something (in a way that does affect it) and damaging its interests become difficult of application (not to say nonsignificant, except in extended senses). The unsatisfactoriness of the sentience criterion for what one can hold obligations towards can be grasped from the case of the sentient machine or purely sentient creature which does not have preferen­ ces, does not care what state it is in or whether it is destroyed,etc. The sentience criterion is often converted by utilitarians into a suffer­ ing criterion, by taking pain as a paradigm of sentience: but plainly the two criteria diverge since some sentient creatures may never feel pain or suffer. Suffering is even less satisfactory than sentience; for suffering is neither necessary nor sufficient for being in a dispreferred state (consider masochists who suffer but are not in a dispreferred state, and well-treated workers who are in a dispreferred state but do not suffer). Preference-having provides a lower bound; it is a sufficient but -not necessary condition for being an object of this sort of moral 9 �consideration and concern. That it is not necessary is revealed, independently of environmental examples, by the following sorts of cases: the treatment of "human vegetables", successful stoics, and science­ fiction cases in which people are brain-washed into performing certain goals and having no dispreferred states apart from the programmed goals. In all three cases the question of dispreferences does not arise, but relevant moral issues can.^^ The necessary condition, that corresponds to preference-having as a sufficient condition, appears to be capability at some time (e.g. previously, when developed) for preference-having. It has been taken for granted that many animals (from species higher on the evolutionary scale) have preferences, make choices, and the like. This is the merest commonsense, which can be readily confirmed in a scientific way. For example, some of the preference-rankings of a black­ tail wallaby as to types of foliage to eat are readily established by observation, and it is fairly straightforward verifying that bushrats prefer cheese to soap, this preference being revealed by regular choices. It has however been claimed by some recent philosophers, for reasons apparently different from those offered by traditional philosophers such as Aristotle, Aquinas and Descartes,H that animals do not have intentions, or at least do not have them in a full sense. It is unclear whether these intentions, which are taken to include thoughts and beliefs and, perhaps, desires, include preferences; but it is hard to see how preferences, which are intentional, are excluded if desires are included in intentions. The recent arguments to show that animals do not really have intentions, which do not bear much investigation even in such central cases as 12 belief, appear extremely feeble when applied to preference. For the arguments start from the claim that we cannot say zj/zuf it is that animals As N. Griffin, who supplied the examples, remarked a similar thing happens also in less extreme cases of the type brought in to prominence, e.g., by the women's movement: that it is possible, by means of indoctrination, to limit the range of someone's dispreferences; treatment of such persons may still remain immoral even when it does not place them outside the (artificially widened) range of their preferred states. The traditional reasons look slight also in the case of preferences and choices. It would have been claimed - the theory forces the claim - that animals' choices could not be rational. Interestingly, choices of many animals conform to behavioural criteria for rationality pro­ posed in economics. See J. Bishop, 'More thought on thought and talk', (forthcoming) and R. Routley, 'Alleged problems in attributing beliefs to animals', paper prepared for the FeZig/ conference, University of Queensland, 1979. 10 �believe (of course very often we can, and unproblematically) and fall back on the claim that animals lack concepts of a fit sort. In the case of preferences, however, there is often no problem in saying what it is animals prefer, or in confirming the claim. Nor is it that we cannot attribute propositional-style preferences to animals; if black-tail wallabies prefer, as they do, new foliage to old then they prefer the foliage's being new over the foliage's being old. As for the concept claim, in the sense in which concept is delineated in psychology, animals have concepts. And if a philosopher's notion of "concept" gets in the way of the claim that free dogs prefer bones to carrots (or other vegetables) then it is not the claim that requires revision, but the philosopher's notion. The preference-having criteria appear to distinguish non-arbitrarily and sharply enough between higher animals and other items, and to rule out of the relevant class elementary animals, trees, rocks and also some human items, e.g. human kidneys. The criteria plainly exclude inanimate objects, and they separate animate objects. For while living creatures such as plants and elementary animals can be said in an extended sense to have and also optimal living conditions, e.g., for healthy develop­ ment, and in sense to have preferred states or environments, they do not have preferences, and cannot strictly be harmed or have their welfare affected, in that they can be put into states they disprefer. Nor do empathy and analogical considerations extend beyond preference-having creatures: for only these can care about how they are treated. At the same time the criteria indicate another important division. For in a wider sense, animate objects which do not (significantly) have preferences or make choices, are sometimes said to have 'preferred states' or 'preferred environments' (as, e.g., in 'the plant prefers a sunny frost-free location with a well drained soil'). us say that the or To avoid confusion let of animate objects and also such biological items as ecosystems can be affected in one way or another, e.g. increased, decreased, upset. For instance, the wellbeing of a coastal community and of the individual trees in it can be reduced to zero by sandmining, and it can be seriously threatened by pumping waste detergent In this broad sense too, living things, things that participate in the growth process, have interests. However under a narrower and more common determinate of the slippery term 'interests', only preference­ havers have interests (again sentient creatures do not provide the boundary). Because the term 'interests' so readily admits of high redefinition, and the infiltration of chauvinism, its use is better limited (or even avoided), in favour of other more stable terms. 11 �into the nearby ocean. There is a general obligation principle corresponding likewise to this more comprehensive class of welfare­ bearers, namely, z-zat fa jaaparjise tTze zJaHhefzzp a_f ?zatzzraZ abjaafs or sz/sfews zjft/zaz^t paad reasor. Moral coroerr does not of course end with what is in some way animate, much as the class of valuable objects is not tied to what relates suitably to central preference-havers. In suitable settings, a (virtually) dead landscape, a rare stone, a cave, can be items of moral or aesthetic concern; indeed any object of value can in principle be of such concern, and arzp abjact car., in principle at least, be ar object a/ value or disvalue, and so of morat corcerr. corcerrfry almost any sort of object. There can then be obligations Naturally only a fraction of the things that exist have especial value, and only a few of the things that exist will be things concerning which some of us have obligations. Furthermore these sorts of obligations do not in general reduce to the conditions or arrangements (e.g. contractual or joint welfare arrangements) of preference-havers or some select subclass thereof (what will sub­ sequently be called, as the argument is developed, the base c^ass). Just as there are relevant divisions beyond the class of preference­ havers, so there are within the class. Thus the suggestion that the class hazards which moral obligations (and a corresponding serf of moral concern which takes account of creatures' states) may be held is bounded by the class of preference-havers, does not of course imply that %a dfsfizzcfiazzs can be made zjffbfrz the class of preference-havers with respect to the kind of behaviour appropriate to them. For example, cazifracfzzaT- obligations - which by no means exhaust obligations - can only be held directly (as distinct from by way of a representative) with respect to a much narrower class of creatures, from which many humans are excluded. The class is also distinct from the class of persons, at least as 'person' is usually characterised. What emerges is an ann^Zar pfcfzzra of types of objects of moral relevance, some matched by types of moral obligation (described toward the end of Routley (a)), with nested zones representing respectively different sorts of objects - such as, objects of moral concern, welfare-having objects, preference-havers (and choice-makers), right-holders, obligation­ holders and responsibility-bearers, those contractually-committed-and the different sorts of obligations that can significantly apply to such objects. Not all the types of objects indicated are distinct, nor is the listing intended to be exhaustive but rather illustrative. For strictly the labels given should be expanded, as the distinctions are categorial ones, so that what matters is not whether an object is, for instance, 12 �contractually committed in some fashion but whether it is the sort of thing that can be, whether it can significantly enter into or be committed by arrangements of a contractual kind. is to Similarly function as a categorial marker, that marks out the sorts of things that can (significantly) have preferences: the assumption that preference­ havers coincide with choice-makers is based on this categorial reading. Although the annular picture is (as will become clear in §5) important for the environmental alternative to be elaborated, and in meeting object­ ions to it, the countercharge has been laid that it reintroduces chauvin­ ism through its inegalitarian distinctions. This is a mistake: not every sort of ethical distinction, certainly not a justified distinction, involves chauvinism. Chauvinism is exhibited where, for example, objects of a favoured class are treated in a preferential way to superior items of an exluded class, e.g. defective humans as against apes, degenerate French against normal Pygmies. The annular picture neither involves nor encourages such differences in treatment: it is neutral and unchauvin- istic, for the reason that it relies only on categorial distinctions which tie analytically with ethical notions (see the semantical analyses of §5). It is certainly in no way species chauvinist or human chauvinist. For none of the zones of the annular picture comprises the class of humans (or its minor variant the class of persons); for this class is not of moral relevance. The reason is that the human/nonhuman distinction is not an ethically significant one, and can, and should, be demoted from its dominant, and damaging, position in ethical theory. But dropping the notion of out of ethics, is only part of the ethical change that is called for: taking due account of nonhumans is also required. In particular - to return to the theme - what is quite unacceptable, . . 14 and based on a set of distinctions which are arbitrary and unjustifiable, is the differential treatment enjoined nonpersons as distinct from persons under Western ethics, and the view that only persons or humans have any (nonderivative) right to moral consideration and concern as preference-havers and that there are obligations towards other creatures 14 According to Q. Gibson such a criticism of chauvinism is based firmly on Western ethical equality and egalitarian principles. This is simply not so: there is no reliance on such principles. The general argument takes the form; feature f cannot be what justifies the differential treatment of humans and nonhumans, because either f is not morally relevant or not all humans have f or some nonhumans have f. Neither equality nor substitutions based upon equality are invoked at any stage. Moreover Western equality principles - at least as convention­ ally formulated - are in serious doubt, especially with the rejection of human chauvinism (see further §6). 13 �only insofar as these are or reduce to obligations to persons or humans. §2. THE EXTENT OF CHAUVINISM, AND FURTHER LINES OF DEFENCE Western ethics are, then, human chauvinist in that they characterist­ ically take humans (or, to make a slight improvement, persons) to be the only items worthy of proper moral consideration, and sanction or even enjoin substantially inferior treatment for the class of non-human preference-having creatures, without - so it certainly appears - adequate justification. The prevailing nineteenth century Western attitude to wild creatures is evident from Judge Blackstone (quoted approvingly in W. Cobbett, Penguin, London, 1967, pp.431): With regard likewise to wild animals, aZZ bub by tbe o/ ZTzg Creator a right to pursue and take away any fowl or insect of the air, any fish or inhabitant of the waters, and any beast or reptile of the field: and this natural right still continues in every individual, unless where it is restrained by the civil laws of the country. And when a man has once so seized them, they become, while living his qualified property, or if dead, are absolutely his own. Prevailing Western attitudes have not shifted markedly since that time; for example, foresters, widely regarded as socially responsible, think nothing of dislodging from their homes and environment, or even destroying, communities of animals which do not directly interfere with human welfare. But there is another very important broader respect in which Western ethics are human (or person) chauvinistic, namely in the treat­ ment accorded to and attitude taken towards the broader class of natural items such as trees and forests, herbs, grasslands and swamps, soils and waterways and ecosystems. Unlike higher animals such items cannot liter­ ally be put into dispreferred states (and in fbbs obvious sense, as opposed to the wider sense of 'interests' tied to welfare, they have no interests), but they can be damaged or destroyed or have their uaZ^e eroded or impaired. The Western, chauvinistic, assumption is that this can only happen where human interests are affected. The basic assumption is that value attaches essentially only to humans or to what serves or bears on human interests, or derivatively, to items which derive from human skill, ingenuity or labour. Since natural items have no other value, there is no restriction on the way they are treated insofar as this does not interfere with others; as far as -ZsoZufgb natural things are con­ cerned anything is permissible. 14 �It is, at base, because of these chauvinistic features of Western ethics that there is a need for a new ethic and value theory (and so derivatively for a new economics, and new politics, etc.) setting out not just people's relations to preference-havers generally but also (along with many other things) people's relations to the natural environment - in Leopold's words 'an ethic dealing with man's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it' (A. Leopold, SuTzd" zlZ-muzzur? zjvt/z ot/zer essays on Conservation, New York, 1966, p.238). It is not of course that old and prevailing ethics do not deal with man's relation to nature: they do, and on the prevailing view man is free to deal with nature as he pleases, i.e. his relations with nature - insofar at least as they do not affect others, as pollution and vandalism do - are not subject to moral censure. Thus assertions such as 'Crusoe ought not to be mutilating those trees' are significant and morally determinate but inasmuch at least as Crusoe's actions do not interfere with others, they are false or do not hold - and trees are not, in a good sense, moral objects. It is to this, to the values and evaluations of the prevailing ethics, that Leopold, Fraser Darling and many others, both earlier and later, take exception. Leopold regards as subject to moral criticism, as wrong, behaviour that on prevailing views is morally permissible. But it is not, then, as Leopold seems to think, that such behaviour is beyond the scope of the prevailing ethics and that merely an extension of traditional morality is required to cover such cases, to fill a moral void. If Leopold is right in his criticism of prevailing conduct, what is required is a change in the ethics, in attitudes, values and evaluations; for example, what is permissible on the prevailing ethics will be no longer permissible on the new. For as matters stand, as Leopold himself explains, humans generally do not feel morally ashamed if they interfere with a wilderness, if they maltreat the land, extract from it whatever will yield, and then move on; and such conduct is not taken to interfere with and does not rouse the moral indignation of others, and is accordingly permissible on prevailing ethics. As Leopold says: A farmer who clears the woods off a 75% slope, turns his cows into the clearing, and dumps its rainfall, rocks, and soil into the community creek, is still (if otherwise decent) a respected member of society (op. cit., p.245). Only recently has such behaviour begun to be seriously questioned and become the subject of criticism, e.g. by environmentalists. Under what will be accounted an erzvvroHwgutaZ. et/zvc, however, such traditionally 15 �permissible conduct would be accounted morally wrong, and the farmer subject to proper moral criticism. That ethics and morality are not, and never have been, restricted to human concerns, or exclusively to relations between persons, is important in rebutting objections to the very idea of an environmental ethic, based on the premiss that morality just is restricted (definitionally) to human relationships (and connected values) and is not significant beyond that. The problem of moral relations with respect to preference-havers other than persons and to inanimate items cannot be resolved or escaped simply by declaring morality to apply solely,or as a matter of meaning or defin­ ition only to humans (or to persons). For first, such a solution would run counter to the common view that humans are subject to seme moral con­ straints, even if comparatively minor ones, towards other creatures; the having of such constraints cannot be ruled out definitionally, and corres­ pondingly the judgments formulating these constraints or prohibitions cannot be ruled out as nonsignificant, yet they are surely moral. The only way in the end, that the claim gets support is by a narrow, and no longer acceptable, account of what is mcraZ in terms of concern with humans alone (cf. §6). Likewise, the question of the moral interrelations of humans with intelligent nonhuman extraterrestrial beings, even if at present hypothetical, is certainly a meaningful one, and some interesting and clearly moral issues of this sort are frequently raised in science fiction. Only if the extent of morality is, somewhat misleadingly, reconstrued in terms of the class of constraints on the behaviour of those it applies to - that is, in terms of limitations, as distinct from moral freedom does the claim that Western morality is restricted to humans (or persons) begin to gain plausibility. For it is true that beyond the favoured base class, humans or persons, few constraints are supposed to operate (and ad hoc ones at that) unless the welfare of members of the base class is adversely affected. Under an environmental ethic, such as that Leopold advocates, this would change: previously unconstrained behaviour would sense the scope of morality would be morally circumscribed, and in be extended. It is not evident, however, that a ethic, an ethic in the case at hand, is required to accommodate even radical new judgments seriously constraining traditionally approved conduct, i.e. imposing limitations on behaviour previously considered morally permissible. For one reason it is none too clear what is going to count as a new ethic, much as it is often unclear whether a new development in physics counts as a new physics or just as a modification or extension of the old. 16 For, �notoriously, ethics are not clearly articulated or at all well worked out, so that the application of identity criteria for ethics may remain obscure. They are nonetheless (pace Quineans) perfectly good objects for investigation. Furthermore, there is a tendency to cluster a family of ethical systems which do not differ on core or fundamental principles together as the one ethic: e.g. the Christian ethic, which is an umbrella notion covering a cluster of differing and even competing systems. There are two other possibilities, apart from a new environmental ethic, which might cater for the new principles and evaluations; that of an extension or modification of the prevailing ethic, and that of the development of principles that are already encompassed or latent within the prevailing ethic. The possibility that environmental evaluations can be incorporated within (and ecological problems solved within) the not inflexible framework of prevailing Western ethics, may appear open because there is not a single ethical system uniquely assumed in Western civiliz­ ation: on many issues, and especially on controversial issues such as infanticide, women's rights and drugs, there are competing sets of principles. Talk of a new ethic and prevailing ethics tends to suggest a sort of monolithic structure, a uniformity, that prevailing ethics, and even a single ethic, need not have. The Western ethic is not so monolithic In particular, three important traditions in Western ethical views 15 concerning man's relation to nature have recently been mapped out: a dominant tradition, the despotic position, with man as despot (or tyrant), and two lesser traditions, the stewardship position, with man as custod­ ian, and the cooperative position with man as perfector. the only traditions; Nor are these primitivism is another, and both romanticism and mysticism have influenced Western views. The dominant Western view is simply inconsistent with an environmental ethic; for according to it nature is the dominion of man and he is free to deal with it as he pleases (since - at least on the mainstream Stoic16 Augustine view - it exists only for his sake ), whereas on an See especially (a) J. Passmore, Afurz's Duckworth, London, 1974; also R. Nash, Affzzd, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1973. (All further references to Passmore's work are, unless otherwise indicated, to Passmore (a).) The dominant position has also been sketched in many other recent texts, e.g. I. McHarg, Doubleday, New York, 1969, while the lesser traditions have been appealed to in meeting criticisms of the Western ethic as involving the dominant view. The masculine particles are appropriate; 17 so is the resulting tone. �environmental ethic man is not so free to do as s/he pleases. But it is not quite so obvious that an environmental ethic cannot be coupled with one of the lesser traditions. Part of the problem is that the lesser traditions are by no means adequately characterised anywhere, especially when the religious backdrop is removed, e.g. (as further considered in §4) who is man steward for and responsible to? However both traditions are inconsistent with a deeper environmental ethic because they imply policies of complete interference, whereas on an environmental ethic some worthwhile parts of the earth's surface should be preserved from sub­ stantial human interference, whether of the "improving" sort or not. Both traditions would in fact prefer to see the earth's land surfaces reshaped along the lines of the tame and comfortable but ecologically impoverished European small farm and village langscape. According to the cooperative position man's proper role is to develop, cultivate and perfect nature - all nature eventually - by bringing out its potential­ ities, the test of perfection being basically /ur while on the stewardship view man's role, like that of a farm manager, is to make nature productive by his efforts though not by means that will deliberately degrade its resources. Thus these positions figure among those of the shallow ecological movement (as depicted by A. Naess, 'The shallow and the deep, long-range ecology movement', 16 (1973), 95-100): longer term. they are typically exploitative, even if only in the Although these lesser positions both depart from the dominant position in a way which enables the incorporation of some evaluations of an environmental ethic, e.g. some of those concerning the irresponsible farmer, and allow for some of the modern extensions of the Western ethic that have been made, e.g. concerning the treatment of animals and criticisms of vandalism, they are not well-developed, fit poorly into the prevailing framework, and do ^<9 /ar For in the present situation of expanding populations confined to finite natural areas, they will lead to, and enjoin the perfecting, farming and utilizing of all natural areas. Indeed these lesser traditions lead to, what a thorough­ going environmental ethic would reject, a principle of total use, implying that every natural area should be cultivated or otherwise used for 17 if 'use' is extended, somewhat illicitly, to include use for preservation, this total use principle is rendered innocuous at least as regards it actual effects. Note that the total use principle, in the usual sense, is tied to the resource view of nature (cf. (d) R. and V. Routley, T/ze /or f/ze Forests, Third Edition, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1975). Such a principle, like the requirement of economic growth, emerges directly from - it is an integral part of neoclassical economic theory. 18 �"humanized". As the important Western traditions mentioned exclude an environ­ mental ethic, it would appear, at first glance anyway, that such an ethic - not primitive, mystical or romantic - would be new alright - or at least new from a Western perspective. For, from a wider perspective, which takes due account of traditional societies (such as those of some American Indians, Australian Aboriginals, and Pygmies), there is, it will turn out, nothing so very new about what is included in (as distinct from the theoretical setting of) the "new" ethics. Even from the narrow Western perspective, the matter is not so straightforward: for the dominant ethic has been substantially qualified, in particular by the rider that one is not always entitled to do as one pleases where this 19 physically interferes with others. " It may be that some such non-inter­ ference proviso was implicit all along (despite evidence to the contrary); and that it was simply assumed that doing what one pleased with natural 20 items would not affect others (a?2CMfnfcr/cre?Ycc cssz^npffcyz). Be this as it may, the wcdfyfeti pcsfffoz? appears, at least for many thinkers, to have supplanted the dominant position; and the modified position can undoubtedly go much further towards an environmental ethic. For example the farmer's polluting of a community stream may be ruled immoral on the grounds that it physically interferes with others who use or would use the stream. Likewise business enterprises which destroy the natural environ­ ment for no satisfactory (taxable) returns or which cause pollution deleterious to the health of future humans can be criticised on the sort of welfare basis (e.g. that of P.W. Barkley and D.W. Seckier, Economic Humanization, and humanitarian measures, may be a cloak for human chauvinism - in which case, far from being virtuous, they may be positively undesirable. Also, as Leopold has observed, the class of others has been progress­ ively widened, e.g. from the family group, to the tribe, to the nation or race, even to all humans including often enough future humans - but rarely further in the West until recently. 20 The assumption is not the same as its relative, Benn's principle of rzo^-i^fcrycrcuce, 'that no one may legitimately frustrate or prevent (or interfere with) a person's doing what he chooses to do, unless there is some reason for preventing him' (Benn (c), op. cit.; inset from (a), p.605). The principle is said to derive from 'the notion of a person' (e.g. (a), p.605), but it only so derives given commission of the fallacy of conversion of an A-proposition. Moreover even reduced to a 'formal principle ... locating the onus of justification' (cf.(a)), the principle is dubious, especially cyiven principles of respect for objects other than persons, with which persons may be interfering. It is, however, a formal principle that will help to keep entreprenuerial humans happy. 19 �Pggg:2/, Grczjf?? T^g S c7Mf7c?? * f-ggcwgs f/zg PrchZgw^ York, 1972) that blends with the modified position; be criticised on welfare grounds; and so on. New vandalism can usually The modified position may even serve to restrict the sort of family size one is entitled to have, since in a finite situation excessive population levels will interfere with future people. Nonetheless neither the modified dominant position nor its Western variants, obtained by combining it with the lesser trad­ itions, is adequate as an environmental ethic. chauvinism. None moves outside human They are all encompassed under the Dowz'nic?? t??gsis - the view that the earth and all its non-human contents exist or are available for human benefit or to serve human interests, and hence that humans are entitled to manipulate the world and its systems as they want, in their own interests - which is but the ecological restatement of the strong thesis of human chauvinism, according to which items outside the privil­ eged human class have no value except one as instrumental value (both theses are criticised in Routley (a)). To escape from chauvinism, and from its thesis, a new ethic 7s wanted, as we now try to show. §3. GENERAL ENVIRONMENTAL ARGUMENTS AGAINST WESTERN ETHICS The main argument is directed primarily against the modified dominant position, but will incidentally show the inadequacy of the lesser Western traditions. The strategy is to locate core features of Western ethics, and to reveal through examples their thoroughgoing chauvinism and class bias, and in this way to provide decisive grounds for rejecting For the general argument some more technical points have to be made them. first. (An) gf^7g is ambiguous, as between a specific ethical system, a spgcffiu ethic, and a more generic notion, a SMpgr-gf^fg, under which specific ethics are grouped. (As usual, a wgfu-ethic is a theory about ethics, super-ethics, their features and fundamental notions.) An sz/sfgm s is, near enough, a propositional system (i.e. a structured set of propositions) or a theory which includes (like individuals of a theory) a set of values and (like postulates of a theory) a set of general evaluative judgments concerning conduct, typically of what is obligatory, permissible and wrong, of what are rights and responsibilities, what is valued, and so forth. (On newer perceptions an ethical system will include rather less in the way of prescriptions, of duties, obligations and the like, and more as to what are matters of care and of concern and for respect.) Since an ethical system is propositional in character, such notions as consistency, coherence, independence of 20 �assumptions, and the like, apply to it without further ado. It is evident, from a consideration of competing or incompatible values and principles, that t/zgre are Z^z/iz-z-ZteZz/ wary gf/zZcuZ sz/stezns. Moreover appropriately general criteria for rationality will not reduce this class to a singleton. . Accordingly, there is logical space for aZferratire ratiaraZ etTzies. A general or lawlike proposition of a system (characterised along similar lines to a scientific law) is a pr-ZzzcZpZe; and certainly if systems Si and S2 contain different principles, they they are different systems. It will follow then that an environmental ethic differs from the important traditional ethics outlined if it differs on some principles. Moreover if environmental ethics differ from each Western ethical system on some core principle or other embedded in that Western system, then these systems differ from the Western super-ethic (assuming, what seems to be so, that that ethic can be sufficiently characterised) - in which case if an environmental ethic is needed then a new ethic is wanted. It would suffice then to locate a common core principle and to provide environmental counterexamples to it. It is illuminating (and necessary, so it will emerge) to attempt to do a little more than this minimum, with a view to bringing out the basic assumptions of the Western super-ethic. Two major classes of evaluative statements, commonly distinguished, are axiological statements, concerning what is good, worthwhile, valuable, best, etc., and deontological state­ ments, which concern what is obligatory, permissible, wrong, etc. Now there appear to be core principles of Western ethics on both axiological and deontic fronts, principles, for example, as to what is valuable and as to what is permissible. Naturally these principles are interconnected, because anything is permitted with respect to what has no value except insofar as it interferes with what does have value. A strong historical case can be made out for what is commonly assumed, that there are, what amount to, core principles of Western ethical systems, principles that will accordingly belong to the superethic. example. The fairness principle inscribed in the Golden Rule provides one Directly relevant here, as a good stab at a core deontic principle, is the commonly formulated liberal principle of the modified dominant position. A recent formulation of this principle runs as 21 follows (Barkley and Seckier, op. cit., p.58): 21 On next page. 21 �The liberal philosophy of the Western world holds that (D) one should be able to do what he wishes, providing (1) that he does not harm others {and (2) that he is not likely to harm himself irreparably}. The principle, which is built into or derivable from most traditional ethical theories, may be alternatively formulated in terms of permissib­ ility, as the principle that a pgrscu's action is <ioos not intor/ere zjit/z others, profide<i if (i.e. other people, including perhaps the A related economic principle is that free enterprise can operate agent). within similar limits. It is because of these permissibility formulations that the principle - which incorporates fundamental features of (human or person) chauvinism - is sometimes hailed as a freedom principle; for it gives permission to perform a wide range of actions (including actions which degrade the environment and natural things) providing they do not harm others. others. In fact it tends to cunningly shift the onus of proof to It is worth remarking that 'harming others' in the restriction is narrower than a restriction to the (usual) interests of others; it is not enough that it is in my interests, because I detest you, that you stop breathing; you are free to breath, for the time being anyway, because it does not harm me. There remains a problem however as to exactly what counts as harm or interference. Mo'reover the width of the principle is so far obscure, because 'other' may be filled out in significantly different ways: it makes a difference to the extent - and privilege - of The principle is attributed by Barkley and Seckier to Mill, though something like it was fairly common currency in nineteenth century European thought. It appears, furthermore, that Mill would have rejected the principle on account of clause (2): thus, for example: Those interests, I contend, authorise the subjection of individual spontaneity to external control, ouZi/ in respect of those actions of each, which concern the interest of people (J.S. Mill, f-Zbgrfy Everyman's Library, Dent, London, 1910, p.74, emphasis added). The deletion of clause (2) from (D) does not affect the general argument: hence the braces. (We owe this reference and the points in the next footnote to N. Griffin.) A similarly modified form of (D) is found in much recent Western literature, even radical literature which purports to make due allow­ ance for environmental concerns. A good example of the latter is I. Illich, TcoZs /or Calder & Boyers, London, 1973, where Mill's (D) appears, in various forms, at several places (e.g. p.xii, p.41). What this indicates is that Illich's "convivial society" will not - if its principles are taken seriously - move beyond chauvinism in its treatment of animals and the natural environment; it will at best yield some form of resource conservation. 22 �the chauvinism whether 'other' expands to 'other human' - which is too restrictive - or to 'other person' or to 'other sentient being'; and it makes a difference to the adequacy of the principle, and inversely to its economic applicability, to which class of other persons it is intended to apply, whether to future as well as to present others, whether to remote future others or only to nondiscountable future others, and whether to possible others. The latter would make the principle untestable and com­ and it is generally assumed that it pletely unworkable in practice; applies at most to present and (some) future others, to those to whom it 22 would make a (fairly immediate) difference (thus excluding past others ). For the purposes of the general argument however, the problems in specify­ ing the class of others is not material, so long as the class includes no 23 more than persons that at some time exist. Fortunately the main argument is not very sensitive to the precise formulation of principle (D). Not only can clause (2) be deleted, and 'other' left rather unspecific, but additions can be made; then even if the main argument does not succeed, minor oarianfs a/ fba main argument zjiZ^ snccooti. An important case concerns the treatment of animals. Unless (D) is construed widely (extending 'other'), or hedged by further qualifying clauses,the basic principle fails to take proper account of concern for animals, especially that one should not inflict "unnecessary" cruelty or "impermissible" harm. animals then comes to matter; these issues can be avoided. What counts as permissible harm to and familiar conflict issues arise. But For the core principle (0), of basic chauvinism, can be modified to include (historically recent) moral concern for higher animals by adding, after 'harm others', something like 'or harm animals unnecessarily'. Then however the new principle succumbs to the Although the interests and preferences of past others are excluded in conventional utilitarianism, as in (welfare) economic theory and vot­ ing theory, these are often respected in ethical and legal settings, e.g. in wills, last wishes, etc. Similarly (as N. Griffin also point­ ed out), in the treatment of "human vegetables", past preferences of the person when capable of making decisions are often taken to be morally relevant, or even decisive, to the question as to whether to keep the body alive. If merely possible persons are included then the valuational rankings of environmental ethics, indeed of virtually any ethics, can be reflected in a "utilitarian" fashion. The argument of (c) R. and V. Routley, 'Semantical foundations for value theory', /Vaas (accepted for publication in 1974; still forthcoming?), can be used to show this. Or unless it can be made out, what seems entirely implausible, that what is wrong with torturing animals is not what it does to them but the way it affects other people (the Aquinas-Kant thesis). 23 �attitudes, and more comprehensively the associated ideologies, are of critical importance; for it is to these and Western influence that the world's main - serious and very extensive - environmental problems can be ascribed. Hypothetical situations are introduced in designing counterexamples to core principles (D) and (A). The basis of the method lies in the semantical analyses of permissibility, obligation and value statements which stretch out over ideal situations (which may be incomplete or even inconsistent), so that what is permissible holds in some permitted situation, what is obligatory in every such situation, and what is wrong is excluded in every such situation. ' But the main point to grasp for the counterexamples that follow, is that ethical principles if correct are universal and are assessed over a class of situations. Thus hypothetical cases are logically perfectly legitimate and cannot be ruled out on one pretext or another, e.g. as rare, as desert island cases, as hypothetical, The counterexamples to (D) and (A) presented depend largely on etc. designing situations different from the actual where there are either too few or too many humans or persons. But alternative special situations where interference with others is minimized or is immaterial are readily devised. (i) The example. The last man (or woman or person) surviving the collapse of the world system sets to work eliminating, as far as he can, every living thing, animal or plant (but painlessly if you like, as at the best abattoirs). What he does is quite permissible according to principle (D) but on environmental grounds what he does is wrong. Moreover one does not have to be committed to esoteric values to regard Mr. Last Man as behaving badly and destroying things of value (the reason being perhaps that radical thinking and values have shifted in an environmental direction in advance of corresponding shifts in the Characteristically Westerners have attempted to recast these value systems, sometimes misleadingly, in a religious guise - probably because it was thought that there was no non-religious way of presenting them so as to make them intelligible or have them comprehended. Thus they get represented as basically chauvinistic in view of the relations of Man and God. On these semantical analyses, which avoid all the usual problems of modal theories of axiological and deontic terms, see R. Routley, R.K. Meyer, and others, T/zefr RSSS, Australian National University, 1979, chapters 7 and 8. A sketch is given in §5 below. The situations or worlds with respect to which the interpretation is made permit of different construals; e.g. instead of permitted situ­ ations, the situations can be construed evaluatively as ideal situations. 26 �formulation of fundamental evaluative principles). The usual vandalism charge does not apply against Mr. Last Man since he does no damage to others. Moreover, Mr. Last Man's activities may be toned down to avoid any vandalism charge, yet succumb to the (extended) chauvinist charge, e.g. he may simply destroy seme environ­ mentally valuable things unnecessarily (without due reason or some need). (ii) The Zusf pecpZe example. to the last people example. The last man example can be extended We can assume that they know they are the last people, e.g. because they are aware that radiation effects have blocked any chance of reproduction. One considers the last people in order to rule out the possibility that what these people do harms or somehow physically interferes with later people. Otherwise one could as well consider science fiction cases where people arrive at a new planet and destroy its ecosystems, whether with good intentions such as perfect­ ing the planet for their ends and making it more fruitful or, forgetting the lesser traditions, just for the sheer enjoyment of it. Let us assume that the last people are very numerous. They humanely exterminate every wild animal and they eliminate the fish of the seas, they put all arable land under intensive cultivation, and all remaining natural forests disappear in favour of pastures or plantations,and so on. They may give various familiar reasons for this, e.g. they believe it is the way to salvation or to perfection, or they are simply satisfying reasonable needs, or even that it is needed to keep the last people employed or occupied so that they do not worry too much about their impending extinction. behaved badly; of value; On an environmental ethic the last people have they have done what is impermissible and destroyed much for they have simplified and largely destroyed all the natural ecosystems, and with their demise the world will soon be an ugly and largely wrecked place. But this conduct may conform with the core principles (D) and (A), and as well with the principles enjoined by the lesser traditions under more obvious construals of these principles. Indeed the main point of elaborating this extension of the last man example is because principles (D) and (A) may, as they stand, appear to conflict with stewardship, cooperation and perfection positions, as the last man example reveals. The apparent conflict between these positions and principle (D) may be definitively removed, it seems, by conjoining a further proviso to the principle, to the effect (3) that he does not wilfully destroy natural resources. But as the last people who are not vandals do not destroy resources wilfully, but perhaps "for the best of 28 reasons", the variant is still environmentally inadequate. 2 8 On next page. 27 �(iii) The grreat e^frgpre^gz/r example. The last man example can be adjusted so as to not fall foul of clause (3). industrialist; The last man is an he runs a giant complex of automated factories and farms which he proceeds to extend. He produces automobiles among other things, from renewable and recyclable resources of course, only he dumps and recycles these shortly after manufacture and sale to a dummy buyer instead of putting them on the road for a short time as we do. Of course he has the best of reasons for his activity, e.g. he is increasing gross world product, or he is improving output to fulfil some plan, and he will be increasing his own and general welfare since he much prefers increased output and productivity. The entrepreneur's behaviour is on the Western ethic quite permissible; indeed his conduct is commonly thought to be quite fine and even meets Pareto optimality requirements given prevailing notions of being "better off". It may be objected, however, that there is no reason or warrant for the great entrepreneur's production and it is simply wasteful. But we can easily amend the example by adding consumers who want to use the out­ put. Just as we can extend the last man example to a class of last people, so we can extend (iii) to the sociefz/ example (iv): the society looks depressingly like ours except for its reproductive incapacity. (v) The example. The blue whale (reduced to a 29 mixed good on the economic picture ) is on the verge of extinction because of its qualities as a private good, as a profitable source of oil and meat. whalers; The catching and marketing of blue whales does not harm the it does not harm or physically interfere with others in any good sense, though it may upset them and they may be prepared to compen­ sate the whalers if they desist; destruction. nor need whale hunting be wilful (Slightly different examples which eliminate the hunting aspect of the blue whale example are provided by cases where a species is eliminated or threatened through destruction of its habitat by man's 2 8 There are however elements in the lesser traditions - especially if 'cooperation' and 'perfection' are reconstrued in less chauvinistic and homocentric terms - which point the way to a more satisfactory ethic. 29 The example is adapted from Barkley and Seckier, op. cit., who nicely expose the orthodox economic picture. To make the example more difficult for utilitarians in the tradition of Bentham, it can be further supposed that the killing of the whalesis near instantaneous and painless, the whale products are very valuable to humans and indeed irreplaceable, and that the whales led a good life while they lived. (Would the killing of remote groups of humans under similar conditions be then so much worse?). 28 �activity or the activities of animals he has introduced, e.g. many plains-dwelling Australian marsupials and the Arabian oryx.) The behaviour of the whalers in eliminating this magnificent species of whale is accordingly quite permissible - at least according to basic chauvinism. But on an environmental ethic it is not. However the free-market mechanism did not cease allocating whales to commercial uses, as a satisfactory environmental economics would: instead the market system ground inexorably (for the tragedy-of-the-privatised-commons type reasons well-explained in Barkley and Seckier, op. cit.) along the private demand curve until the blue whale population was no longer viable. It has been objected that the operation of the free market is restrained by ethical principles - or rather legally enforced copies thereof; for example, it would be profitable to exploit child labour, but moral prohibitions, legally enforced, exclude such exploitation of children. But the case is quite different; children, unlike young animals such as vealers, are already shielded under the modified dominant position. If anything, the "objection" is a further illustration of chauvinism at work. 30 Although the vanishing species example given does not apply decisively against extended utilitarianisms, such as that of Bentham, which widen the base class to all sentient creatures, the case is easily varied so that it does: class of tropical plant species simply select one of the currently threatened with extinction. (vi) The fuufory farw example. On the farm animals of various sorts are kept under artificial, confined conditions and simply used for the market goods they deliver, e.g. eggs in the case of battery hens, milk in the case of rotor cows, veal in the case of calves. The animals are subject to whatever conditions (e.g. forced feeding, iron deficient diets, constant lighting) will deliver maximal quantities of desired goods for the human commodity market. The animals do not necessarily suffer pain (and insofar as they do in behaviourally conspicuous ways the problem can For the most part the operation of the free market is only constrained by chauvinistic principles: otherwise enterpreneurs tend to undertake whatever apparently profitable business activity they can get away with, including substantial exploitation of animals and widespread environ­ mental destruction, and their lack of concern is illustrated by such facts as that they are generally prepared to pay taxes (e.g. to compensate other humans) rather than to forgo their activities in cases such as river and lake pollution and forest removal. In fact, of course, fairly unfettered operation of the market tends to encourage more restricted chauvinisms, e.g. the exploitation of cheap foreign or female labour in the secondary labour market. 29 �be met by antibiotics), but they are imprisoned under dispreferred conditions. The threatment of the animals on the "farm" is perfectly permissible according to the core principle (or at least minor adjustments to exclude unnecessary suffering will ensure conformity), but on an environmental ethic it is not. The treatment of the animals on the farm also seems to conform to the principles of the lesser traditions, insofar as these principles are spelled out in a way that can be applied to the example, that is so long as cooperation and perfection are construed in intended chauvinistic fashion. (vii) The MiZderness example. The wilderness, though isolated and rarely visited or thought about by environmentalists, is known to contain nothing of use to humans, such as seed or drug supplies, that is not adequately replicated elsewhere. It does contain however some "low quality" forest that could supply pulpwood on a commercial basis were the local government to provide subsidies on the usual basis. The logging would destroy the wilderness in a largely irreversible way (e.g. it grows on high sand dune country or on lateritic soils) and kill many animals which live in the forest. The prevailing ethic sees nothing wrong with the destruction of such a wilderness, nor do the lesser traditions: a deeper environmental ethic does. Again the example requires variation, e.g. to a wilderness devoid of sentient individuals, if it is to counter clearly such extensions of Western ethics as those of animal liberationists. For this sort of reason we do not want to overstate or overrate the role of as distinct from variations upon such examples. examples - Firstly, people deeply committed to human chauvinism - as many, perhaps most, people are - will find some of the examples unconvincing because they depend on non- chauvinistic assumptions. Secondly, there are rejoinders to some of the examples based on the prevailing ethic. In this case what we claim is that there are variations on, and elaborations of the examples which meet such considerations. In connection with this we do not want to deny that there are other strands supplementing the prevailing ethic which are critical of some activities of the sort described in the examples, e.g. anti-vandalism principles and strictures against conspicuous consumption But, as remarked, these principles as reflected, e.g. in sumptuary laws. have not been adequately incorporated in the prevailing ethic in such a way as to meet variations on the examples or to serve environmental purposes; and if the attempt were made to fully incorporate such princi­ ples once again a new ethic would be the upshot. before the change from an ethic which sanctioned 30 (Compare the situation slavery.) �In summary,what the examples show is that core axiological and deontic assumptions of the Western super-ethic are environmentally inadequate; and accordingly Western ethics should be superseded by a more environmentally adequate ethic. The class of permissible actions that rebound on the environment is more narrowly circumscribed on such an environmental ethic than it is in the Western superethic, and the class of noninstrumentally valuable objects is correspondingly wider than it is on the Western super-ethic. But is not an environmentalist ethic going too far in implying that these people - those of the examples and respected entrepreneurs and industrialists and bureaucrats, farmers and fishermen and foresters - are behaving, when engaging in environmentally degrading activities of the sort described, in a morally impermissible way? No, what these people do is to a greater or lesser extent evil, since destructive of what is valuable, and hence in serious cases morally impermissible. For example, insofar as the killing or forced displacement of primitive peoples who stand in the way of an industrial development is morally indefensible and impermissible, so also is the destruction of the forest where the people may live, or the slaughter of remaining blue whales, or the gross exploitation of experimental or factory-farm animals for private profit or as part of the latest 5 year plan. Those who organise or engage in such activities are (to a greater or lesser extent, depending on their mode of engagement) morally culpable. Models of permissible respected life styles and of the good life (for others to emulate) depend upon what the underlying ethic accounts good and evil, permissible or not, and changes with change of ethic. A new ethic is needed not merely to accommodate the evaluations, and so forth; prescriptions and models indicated, in a way decidedly different from Western ethics, but in order to cope with a much wider range of more practical, and often more controversial, cases where Western ethics yield (without epicycling, i.e. extensive resort to theory-saving strategems) unacceptable or inadequately grounded results. An alternative ethic is also needed by a growing number of valuers because they have values, interests and new concerns of ecological sorts which do not fit in with, but conflict with, central features of prevailing Western ethics. There is occurring, it seems, a far-reaching cultural, and ethical change, a change in consciousness, and in particular a change in attitudes to what is natural and the natural environment (a change which may eventually be as fundamental as, and partly overturn, the humanist changes of the Enlightenment). A new ethic is accordingly needed to reflect and formul­ ate, and enable the defence and application of, a new, increasingly fel,t, 31 �but not so far well-articulated system of values, in much the same way that a system of probability was needed and formulated to articulate and systematise likelihood and probability principles, and relevant logic systems required to capture pre-analytic views of entailment. The explication of environmental ethics is a similar theoretical concern; again, as commonly, theory lags behind the facts of change and the felt data. Furthermore, just as entailment systems are not uniquely determined, or desired or accepted by every thinker, so enoironwontuZ gt/zios will not be nnip^otp detorwZng<i, or adopted by every valuer. On the contrary, as is plain enough, their adaption and furtherance will be vigorously resisted by many vested interests, as - to take just one instance - the furtherance of programmes for the determination of environmental sources of cancer is vigorously opposed by industrial chemical companies. The matter of persuading other valuers to accept values and principles of a new ethic is of course a further and somewhat separate issue from the question of need for such an ethic. The procedures for trying to effect changes in values are but variations on the usual pro­ cedures, and like them are not fully effective: excluding coercion and education, they include, for example, argumentation, and propaganda, in each case of many sorts. 31 As usual, too, where there is a broad common 32 basis, especially in felt evaluations and emotional presentation, effecting a change, or a conversion, will generally be an easier task. In the case of transformation to environmental values, what is often important are distinctive features regarding the factual bases of many of the evaluations. correcting In particular, there is the matter of removing or /Tztsoonooptions on a broad range of matters of Some of these sorts are considered in more detail in (c) J. Passmore, 'Ecological problems and persuasion' in FpnoZZtp arid Freedom. * JntornutZonoZ and Comparattvo c/nr-Zoprz/donoo (ed. G. Dorsey), Oceana Publications, New York, 1977, pp.431-42. The apposite term 'emotional presentation' is adapted from Meinong; see especially FwotZonaZ Prosentatton (trans. M.L. Schubert-Kalsi), Northwestern University Press, 1972. The notion of emotional present­ ation can play an important role in the explanation of how emotions enter into (environmental) evaluations, the objects evaluated (canyons, mountains, giant trees) often being emotionally presented. A little more precisely, the connections are these: A value ranking (e.g. c is better, more valuable, than d) of a valuer is explained emotionally through - it does not reduce to - certain preference rankings of the valuer; and the preference rankings have in turn dual factual and emotional bases, in the same sort of way that an item may be preferred or chosen in virtue of its factual features and the valuer's emotional responses to those. The main details of such a semantical analysis of value, which is discussed in §5, are given in Routley (c). 32 �environmental concern; for example, about animals, their various behaviour, abilities, etc; about the alleged gulf between humans and other animals and the uniqueness of humans and each human; about the profitability, or desirability, or necessity, of environmentally destruct­ ive enterprises; about the inevitability of current Western social arrangements and about the history of the way these particular arrange­ ments developed. There is, moreover, the matter of sheer information, for example as to how free animals live together and what they do; about how factory and experimental animals are treated, and in the latter case for what: about the sources and effects of various forms of pollution and the reasons for it; about how natural creatures such as whales or environments such as forests are commonly dealt with, for what products, by what interests, for what ends. Naturally (given a fact/value division) none of this information is entirely conclusive support for a change in ethic; for many of the evaluations the data helps support can be included in other ethics (including sometimes modifications of prevailing ethics), while remaining evaluations can, at worst, be simply rejected (as e.g., those utilitarians who extend consideration just to sentient creatures are obliged to reject versions of the last man argument where no sentient creatures are affected). Although a new ethic is needed, for the reasons indicated, and although such an ethic can,furthermore, be a considerable asset in practical environmental argument (e.g., as to the point of trying to retain a piece of not-especially-unique near-wilderness), for many practical ecological purposes, there is no need to apply it or to fall back on it. For example, virtually the whole environmental issue of destructive forestry in Australia can be argued without invoking any unconventional ethical principles or values at all, i.e. entirely within the prevailing chauvinistic framework. wap??/ environmental disputes. The same sort of point applies to But, it by no means applies to all. A corollary is an inadequacy in the presentation of environmental problems and suggested solutions in standard (human) ecology texts Tssz^gs A. Erlich's (such as P. and FuoZ-Ctyz/, Freeman, San Francisco, 1970, to select one example), which are set erzf-freZz/ within the chauvinistic framework.^4 Also, differently, in the way that theories are in enabling one to see how to move and argue in a discussion. Quite properly given prevailing sentiments, according to some erring conservationists, who account themselves "realists". 33 �Since it is sometimes charged - despite all that has been said - that an environmental ethic does not differ in practice from that of more conventional "chauvinistic" ethics, there is point in spelling out in yet other ways how it can differ in practice: Firstly, many conventional positions, in particular social contract and sympathy theories, cannot take proper account of moral obligation to future humans (who are not in the immediate future). Since the usual attempt to argue, in terms of value and benefit to humans, that natural areas and ecosystems generally should not be destroyed or degraded depends critically on introducing possible future humans who will suffer or be worse off as a result of its destruction or degradation, it is plain that an environ­ mental ethic will differ radically from such conventional positions. That is, the usual argument depends on the reduction of value of a natural item to the interests of present and /Izf^re humans, in which reduction future humans must play a critical role if conclusions not blatantly opposed to conservation are to be reached. Hence there will usually be a very great gulf between the practical value judgements of conservation ethics and those of conventional positions which discount the (nonimmediate) future. Secondly, as we have already seen through examples, there are practical differences between an environmental ethic and conventional instrumental views which dr take account of the interests of past, present and future humans, differences which emerge sharply at the It is, however, unnecessary to hypothetical (possible world) level. turn to possible world examples to see that normally there would be very great differences in the practical valuations and behaviour of those who believe that natural items can have value and create obligations not reducible (in any way) to human interests and those who do not, as the following further examples show. We need only consider the operation of irtersioraZ- corcepfs Example 1. Mif/zizz uctz^^Z- zjerZ-d, for example, the concept of duwupe to a natural item, and the associated notion of campezzsaffrr for that damage. C. Stone, for instance, in S/za^Zd Trees #are Sfardirp? Tdp^fs /dr /Vaf^raZ. dhj^efs Thus Tabards L^pcZ (Avon Books, New York, 1975) notes the practical legal differences between taking the damage to a polluted river as affecting its intrinsic value, and taking it as just affecting human river users. In the one case one will see adequate compensation as restoring the original state of the river (rectifying the wrong to the river) and in the other as compensating those present (or future) humans who will suffer from its pollution. As Stone points out, the sum 34 �adequate to compensate the latter may well be much less than that required to restore the river to its unpolluted state, thus making it economic, and in terms of the human chauvinist theory, fair and reason­ able, to compensate those damaged and continue pollution of the river. In the first case, of course, adequate compensation or restoration for the harm done would have to consist in restoring the river to its unpolluted condition and will not just be paid to the people affected. Compare here Stone's example of compensation for injury to a Greek slave; in the instrumentalist case this will involve compensating the slave's owner for the loss of his slave's working time; in the other, where the slave is regarded as not merely an instrument for his owner, it will compensate the sZaue not the ozjyzer, for this compensation will also take account of the pain and suffering of the slave, even where this has not affected his working ability. There is a difference not only in the amount of compensation, but to zj/zow it is directed. In the case of a natural item damage may be compensated by payment to a trust set up to protect and restore it. The believer in intrinsic values may avoid making unnecessary and excessive noise in the forest, out of respect for the forest and its Example 2. nonhuman inhabitants. She will do this even when it is certain that there is no other human around to know the difference. For one to whom the forest and its inhabitants are merely another conventional utility, however, there will be no such constraint. He may avoid unnecessary noise if he thinks it will disturb other humans, but if he is certain none are about to hear him he will feel at liberty to make as much and as loud a noise as he chooses, and this will affect his behaviour. Examples like this cannot be dealt with by the introduction of future humans, since they will be unable to hear the noise in question. To claim that the making of noise in such circumstances is a matter of no importance, and therefore there is no important difference in behaviour, is of course to assess the matter through human chauvinist eyes. question-begging. From the intrinsic viewpoint it So such a claim is make a difference, and be reflected in practical behavioural difference. Example 3. Consider an aboriginal tribe which holds a particular place to be sacred, and where this sanctity and intrinsic valuableness and beauty is celebrated by a number of beautiful cave paintings. A typically "progressive" instrumentalist Western view would hold the cave (and perhaps place) to be worth preservation because of its value to the aboriginal people, and because of the artistic merit of the human arti­ facts, the cave paintings the cave contained. 35 To the "enlightened" �Westerner, if the tribe should cease to exist, and the paintings be destroyed, it would be permissible to destroy the place if this should be in what is judged to be the best interests of human kind, e.g. to get at the uranium underneath. To the aboriginal the human artifacts, the cave paintings would be irrelevant, a celebration of the value of the place, but certainly not a surrogate for it, and the obligation to the place would not die because the tribe disappeared or declined. Similarly no ordinary sum of money would be able to compensate for the loss of such a place, in the way that it might for something conceived of as a utility or convenience, as having value only because of the benefits it confers on the "users" of it. There is an enormous /gZt or difference between feeling that a place should be valued or respected for itself, for its perceived beauty and character, and feeling that it should not be defaced because it is valued by one's fellow humans, and provides pleasurable sensations or money or convenience for them. Compare too the differences between feeling that a yellow robin, say, is a fellow creature in many ways akin to oneself, and feeling that it is a nice little yellow and grey, basically clockwork, aesthetic object. These differences in emotional presentation are accompanied by or expressed by an enormous range of behavioural differences, of which the examples given represent only a very small The sort of behaviour uurrarzteti by each viewpoint and thought by it, the concept of what one is free to do, for example, will normally be very different. It is certainly no coincidence that cultures sample. holding to the intrinsic view have normally been far less destructive of nature than the dominant Western human chauvinist culture. In summary, the claim that there is no reaZ practical difference, that the intrinsic value viewpoint is empty verbalisation, does not stand up to examination. The capacity - no doubt exaggerated, but nonetheless far from negligible - of Western industrial societies to solve their ecological problems (at least to their own pathetically low standards) within a chauvinistic framework, does considerably complicate, and obstruct, an alternative more practical argument to the need for a new ethic, t/ze arpMwezzt yrcm problems, that in no other way ... [than] prepared[ness] to accept a "new ethic", as distinct even from adding one or two new moral principles to an accepted common ... can modern industrial 35 societies solve their ecological problems. On next page. 36 �Not only does the argument encounter various objections - most obviously that many of the problems can be solved, if not within Western ethics, in immediate extensions of them - but the case suggested would hardly be a satisfactory basis for the type of ethic sought. It is not so much that it would be a chauvinistic way of arriving at a supposedly nonchauvinistic ethic, for bad procedures can lead to good results; rather it is that important ecological problems, shaping environmental ethics, such as preservation of substantial tracts of wilderness and just treatment of animals, tend to be written off in industrial societies as not serious problems. But even if the argument suggested has too narrow a problem base, and so may yield too limited a change in attitudes as compared with the main theoretical argument, the argument merits fuller formulation and further investigation. The argument to need for ethical revision is as follows: (1) A satisfactory solution to environmental problems (of modern industrial societies) implies (the adoption of) an alternative (2) environmental ethic. A satisfactory solution to environmental problems is needed. Therefore, an alternative environmental ethic is needed. The argument is valid, given, what seems correct, that pimplies q implies that p is needed implies that q is needed. The second premiss is or can be made analytic, on the sense of 'satisfactory' 'satisfactory' imply 'needed'); (e.g. by having so the case is complete if the first premiss can be established (in the same sense of 'satisfactory'), and the conclusion is then plausible to at least the extent the premiss is. Al37 though the first premiss, or something like it, is widely endorsed, cogent 3 5 Passmore (c) op. cit., p.438. According to Passmore (p.431), By common consent, there are four major pollution, the exhaustion of resources, species, and overpopulation ... To solve such problems involves finding types of human conduct or of preventing having its present consequences. ecological problems: the destruction of a way either of altering that human conduct from In what follows the assumption that 'there are four major ecological problems' gets rejected. 36 Here and elsewhere, 'environmental' less interchangeably. and 'ecological' are used more or 37 Even Passmore, though previously (e.g. in (a)) highly critical of proposals for new ethics, gives qualified endorsement to an assumption of this sort ((c), p.441). ... I do not doubt, all the same, that our attitudes to nature stand badly in need of revision and that, as they stand, they form a major obstacle to the solution of ecological problems. 37 �arguments for it are few and it is no simple matter rendering the premiss plausible. Moreover rendering it plausible involves a substant­ ial detour through social theory; for the case for the premiss proceeds along these sorts of lines: (3) Unless there are (certain) major changes in socio-economic structure, environmental problems will not be satisfactorily solved. (4) The major changes in socio-economic structure involve an alternative ethic. A much stronger thesis than (3) has been argued for using systems analysis, namely that without very extensive socio-economic changes, modern industrial society will collapse; but several of the assumptions made in the analysis are doubtful or disputed. independently of that stronger thesis; But (3) has been argued for example, it will follow from the thesis (of Falk, Commoner and others) 'that the modern industrial ethic as we have known it is not sustainable on ecological grounds'. 39 In a sense, (3) is obvious; for it is present socio-economic arrangements that have produced many of the present serious environmental problems; without major changes in those arrangements most of the problems will persist or, more likely, intensify. What is not immediately evident is that the major changes called for, in satisfying (3), suffice for (4). However reflection on the specific 'types of changes required - for example at a superficial level, human population limitation, reduction of poll­ ution, more sensible resource usage, selective economic growth - reveals that significant changes in value, and also in what is considered permissible, are bound to be involved in the changes. plausible, and therewith the intended conclusion. So (4) is decidedly But the argument leaves the detailed character of the needed alternative ethic rather obscure; and it may well be that the ethic so yielded is somewhat chauvinistic in character. The more practical argument cannot entirely supplant the main theoretical argument. In sum, there are good and pressing reasons to investigate the alternatives to chauvinistic ethics, especially human chauvinism, because such chauvinistic ethics are discriminatory, because the case for them 38 39 See, in particular, D. Meadows and others, T/ze Limits fa GrgzjfZz, Potomac Associates, Washington, D.C., 1972. R.A. Falk, 'Anarchism and world order', FVozncs IX, 1978, p.66. Falk refers for the case to B.Commoner, TTze CZrsizzy Circle, Knopf, New York, 1971; R.A. Falk, PZuzzef, Random House, New York. 1971; E. Goldsmith and others /or SMrrfzJuZ, Houghton and Miflin, Boston, 1972, and Meadows of uZ-., op. cit. 38 �does not stand up to examination, and because they have been involved in the destruction of much of value and now threaten the viability of much that is valuable. §4 . ENVIRONMENTAL ALTERNATIVES : NARROWING THE CHOICE AMONG ENVIRONMENTAL ETHIC The basic-and basically mistaken-doctrine of the Western super-ethic is, as we have seen, that people, humans of whatever shape or form, are the fundamental carriers or objects of value and that all other items are valuable only in an instrumental or derivative way. It is important, in­ deed mandatory in a genuine environmental ethic, to reject this view and allow natural items to have a value in their own right, iz? t/ze same /as/ziazz as CzzaZzza^Ze? peapZe, both for the reasons outlined above, of the theoret­ ical unsatisfactoriness and arbitrariness of the traditional view, and for more practical reasons, namely, to help ensure the ecological sustain­ ability of modern society, and in optimising human welfare. It has often been pointed out that 'a totally humanised world would diminish us as 40 human beings', that the traditional view of humans, or classes of humans, as dominant, and of natural items as without value except where they serve human or class interests-a view that often carries contempt for nature leads not only to the destruction of much that is of value but (paradoxic­ ally) to counterproductive results even with respect to human welfare. Thus McHarg (in attractively coloured rhetoric):- Show me a man-oriented society inwhich it is believed that reality exists only because man can perceive it, that the cosmos is a struct­ ure erected to support man on its pinnacle, that man exclusively is divine and given dominion over all things, indeed that God is made in the image of man, and I will predict the nature of its cities and their landscape. I need not look far for we have seen them-the hot­ dog stands, the neon shill, the ticky-tacky houses, dysgenic city and mined landscapes. centric man; This is the image of the anthropomorphic, anthropo­ he seeks not unity with nature but conquest (op. cit.). The rejection of this view and its replacement by a view in which natural items can be regarded as of value and as worthy of our respect for themselves and not merely for what we can get out of them or what use we 40 See e.g. the discussion at pp.116-17 of (a) J. Rodman, 'The Liberation of nature', IzzgMfrz/, 20 (1977) 83-145. All subsequent references to Rodman's work without further indication are to this article. Note well that the rejection of human chauvinism does z?ot imply that no chauvinistic arguments - or rather, arguments that are usually stated in chauvinistic form - carry weight. On the contrary, some chauvinistic arguments (e.g. those supporting wilderness retention and species preservation) carry considerable weight; and, since the prevailing industrial ethics remain chauvinistic, environmentalists would be rash not to use them. 39 �can make of them, is becoming increasingly widespread in parts of the environmental movement. It is this primarily that makes for an important ideological split in the conservation movement, between what Naess (op. cit.) called and Teep ecology, between those who see conservation as just a matter of wiser, better-controlled topper-term exploitation of the environment - something which is compatible with denying value to 42 ... everything except man ' and those who see it at least in part as involving a recognition of value for natural items independent of man, and hence as involving (at least to some extent) a Ttf^erept uttitp(7e to Mature. The first view, the long-term or erttpbteped e^ptoitatior view, which is closely tied to prevailing more enlightened economic assumptions, tends to make heavy use of the watershed term 'resource'; the problem of conserv­ ation is seen as one of 'zjfse pse of resources', a resource being something of use to humans or persons. On this view, which does not get beyond the confines of human chauvinism, and so is no direction for a satisfactory environmental ethic to take, items which have no perceivable use to man, i.e. non-resources, can be destroyed without loss; and the environmental problem is viewed as largely one of making people aware of the extent to which natural items and processes have frstr^meptut value, i.e. of how far we are dependent on them and they are of pse to us. There is no recognition either that some items might be valuable precisely because they are independent of man. Resource Conservation, or the shallow position, is the first of the 42 four ideal types that Rodman discerns in his investigation of the contemporary environmental movement. The deeper ecological position gets split under Rodman's division into three ideological positions - though Rodman prefers to put the matter in symbolic or experiential terms, in terms of forms of consciousness - namely Wilderness Preservation, Nature Moralism, and Ecological Resistance. Though the positions discerned are neither characterised in an exclusive fashion, nor exhaustive of ecological positions, and though we shall have to look beyond all the positions for a satisfactory environmental ethic, nonetheless they afford an excellent perspective on the main types of alternative positions that have been adopted by those within environmental movements. It is not uncommon to encounter attempts to write the shallow position into the very meaning or definition of copseraotiop, e.g. 'conservation is the use of resources to the greatest advantage of man', 4 Sprrep of /Ipstrotfap Forestry and tVood-Fused Ipd^strfes. Part PT. Prodpcttop Forestry Peretopmept PZup. Draft (31 October, 1974), p.ll - a blatantly chauvinistic account. On next page. 40 �According to (Wilderness) Preservation, which focusses on wilderness, wilderness is to be preserved for the wilderness experience, wilderness offers a natural cathedral, a sacred place where human beings can transcend the limitations of everyday experience and become renewed through contact with the power of creation ((b), p.49). The values discerned in wilderness and natural landscape are primarily aesthetic and quasi-religious, or mystical, 'the experience of the holy is esthetically mediated'; what is valuable remains human experiences. Thus the Wilderness Preservation position does not move outside the sphere of human chauvinism, and can no more than Resource Conservation offer a frame for an environmental ethic. conclusion: Rodman reaches a similar Resource Conservation and Wilderness Preservation appear variations on the theme of wise use, the former oriented to the [efficient] production of commodities for human consumption, the latter to providing human amenities ((b), p.50). For this reason, the Wilderness Preservation position fails even on the score of justifying the preservation of wilderness - on the very task it was designed to accomplish - in a range of circumstances. Like other See especially (b) J. Rodman, 'Theory and practice in the environmental movement: notes towards an ecology of experience', in Search /or i?? a ^orZ-d^ International Cultural Foundation, New York, 1978, pp.45-56. Some of the types are portrayed in greater detail in other Rodman papers. The remainder of this largely new section on environmental ethical alternatives is heavily indebted, in ways the references mostly make plain, to Rodman's work. His work covers a vast range of interlinked topics; only those of immediate relevance have been touched upon. But there is very much in the remainder that repays careful reading, and TnMc/z to think about and to question or reject, reaching perhaps its lowest point in the paradoxical themes: Just as our statements about other people tend also to be concealed statements about ourselves, so statements about non­ human nature tend to be concealed statements about the human condition, and movements to liberate nonhuman nature tend also to be movements to liberate the repressed potentials of human nature (p.105). In part because these themes and the related myth of microcosm are taken seriously, and not for the evident falsehoods they are, in part because the ethical adequacy of the human/nonhuman distinction is never seriously questioned (e.g. it is taken for granted, what is not the case, that rights apply to humans and are problematic beyond them), and in part because of the characteristically chauvinistic emphasis on human experience and the endeavour to bring everything within that experiential purvue, and the associated weight assigned to human symbolic, mythic and ritual activities, one is left with the feeling, at the end of all the investigations one can profitably follow Rodman through, that one has not got beyond the confines of human chauvinism. 41 �instrumentalist accounts of wilderness value, it breaks down entirely With examples like the Last Man, assuming that Mr. Last Man is never turned on by natural spendour. More alarmingly, under readily conceivable developments, it would allow the elimination of wilderness entirely. For consider the Wilderness Experience Machine, a low-impact low-tech philosophical machine, recently patented by I.M. Diabolic, which can duplicate entirely, even for groups of people, wilderness experiences, but in a downtown room. As far as the psychological experience goes, this machine can provide a complete substitute for any actual wilderness, and were the value of wilderness to reside in the experience it afforded, could entirely replace it and eliminate the alleged need for it. Most environmentalists would be (rightly) dissatisfied with, not to say appalled by, the idea that Wilderness Experience Machines could sub­ stitute for wildernesses, since they provided the same experiences. what else they wanted, the answer would of course be: Asked Wildernesses, not merely wilderness experiences. Wildernesses are valuable in their own right, over and above the experiences they can afford. 4 3 Really, that is, they consider wildernesses intrinsically valuable, but have been pushed by the prevailing ethical ethics into stating, and misrepresenting, their position in experiential terms. There is some independent evidence that the Wilderness Preservation position is frequently a disguised intrinsic value position, in the attitude taken to examples like the Last Man case, that purely hypothetical experiencers (who may vanish into counterfactuals) are good enough, and that in some real-life cases it is enough that wilderness is there to be contemplated, whether or not anyone actually takes advantage of its presence to gain experiences, or indeed whether or not it is in fact contemplated. Such examples remove the disguise and reveal the position as at bottom an intrinsic value position. In that event it is however better to avoid the disguise; for the case for wilder­ ness preservation which starts from the position that some wilderness tracts have intrinsic as well as merely instrumental value is substantially stronger than any position which assigns them merely instrumental value. Wilderness lovers and nature conservationists have in fact worked out - or concocted - a set of arguments to show why wildernesses and nature conservation are of benefit to humans, to argue for their instrumental The concept of too can vary with the operative ideology, e.g. on certain views, such as Wilderness Preservation, wilderness comprises areas that are (or provide the opportunity for use), e.g. used for experiential enrichment. By contrast, on a genuine Environ­ mental Resistance view, wilderness is a wild area, use of which is not implied: it may never be used, and it may not matter that it affords no opportunity for (human) use. (Under popular high redefinition of 'wilderness', there are of course no wildernesses remaining on the earth, and wilderness vanishes as soon as humanly experienced.) 42 �value. For example, there are various arguments from the scientific value, or usefulness, of wilderness, e.g. for the study of natural eco­ systems, for the investigation of plant history and evolution, as a repository of genetic diversity, etc. These arguments, which (like parallel arguments for species preservation) are not to be especially as regards persuasive force, can be put in nonchauvinistic form; for science and knowledge are not linked essentially with, for example, the feature of being human. Often however - e.g. where the wilderness defended has, so far as it is known, little that is very special to offer - such arguments appear to be merely a conventional front for the real (or deeper) reasons - and in seme instances, correspondingly weak and unpersuasive (as Fraser Darling has remarked, and Passmore has tried to show in (a)) - the real reasons being based on the perception of nonuseful properties of value. This is particularly marked in the case of arguments for preserving the most complex and beautiful of the world's plant communities, tropical rainforest. Such arguments as that various uninvestigated rainforest trees may at some time be found to contain useful drugs, by no means exhaust the true value of the rainforest. For it is in the intrinsic, i.e. noninstrumental, value of the rainforest that the main reason for not unduly interfering with it, e.g. not interfering in ways that threaten its stability or viability, lies. In particular, destruction of a wilderness, such as a rainforest, would significantly diminish intrinsic value, and so should (in general) be resisted. Environmentalists who are aware of these sorts of problems and dangers with resource use approaches to wilderness preservation sometimes attempt to formulate their alternative view in terms of one of the lesser traditions, most popularly in terms of the image, in which man is seen as the steward of the earth - an analogy which, as Passmore points out (in (a)), is problematic outside a religious context. For who is man steward to? If not to God, then how is the analogy to be unpacked, and what conditions must "stewardship" conform to? If "good stewardship" is management in the interests of humans, or humanity, then the position does not go beyond Resource Conservation; if it is manage4 4 ment to serve intrinsic values, or God, then good stewardship is but a cover for the recognition of intrinsic values, which are better introduced directly. Thus admitting values which are not instrumental, which do not answer back in some way to states or conditions of humans is a feature of all satisfactory deeper ecological alternatives. In order to allow for such intrinsic values and/or associated attitudes of respect, e.g. for On some interpretations; chauvinism. on others theism may serve to reinforce human 43 �nature and various natural things, it is however unnecessary to adopt a religious backdrop such as the "Good Stewardship" image suggests, or even a semi-religious framework such as a mystical or superstitious one with taboos and sacred places as symbolic and ritual elements. A theory of intrinsic value which assigns intrinsic value to wilderness and species of free animals, for good reasons, can be entirely naturalistic (in a main sense of that much-abused term). The third, somewhat amorphous, cluster of positions Rodman describes, noninstrumental, value to natural items, such as - on some versions of the position wilderness. Nature Moralisms, do just that, assign intrinsic, f/zat [An] alternative perspective ... [to] the theme of wise use 4 5 ... is provided by the tradition growing out of the humane movement, recently radicalised by animal liberationists, and sometimes generalised to embrace non-animal beings as well. In contrast to the economic ethos of Resource Conservation and the religious/ esthetic character of Wilderness Preservation, this perspective is strikingly moral in style. Its notion of human virtue is not prudence or reverence, but justice. In contrast to the caste­ bound universe of the Resource Conservationist, the Natural Moralist affirms the democratic principle that all natural entities (or, more narrowly, all forms of life) have intrinsic value, and that wild animals, plants, rivers, and whole ecosystems have a right to exist, flourish and reproduce - or at least that human beings have no right to exploit or unnecessarily harm or destroy other members of the biotic community. In contrast to the aristo­ cratic universe of Wilderness Preservation, where some places (and some forms of recreation) are holier than others and certain types of natural entities ... are traditionally more worthy of being saved than others ..., the world of the Nature Moralist is characterised by an apparent egalitarianism ((b), p.50^ my rearrangement). Each of the sweep of environmental alternatives indicated can be seen as an of conventional Western ethics: intrinsic value is extended uniformly to all animals or certain favoured features of all these, e.g. their experience, happiness, avoidance of suffering, or is extended to all living creatures or systems, or is extended to all natural items or even to objects - it may or may be distributed uniformly or equally; Human use and human experience, it might be added. 44 �rather independently, rights may be ceded to all animals, or to some or all living things, or to all things, or, alternatively and differently, right-holders' rights with respect to some or other of these classes are restricted; and similarly other deontic notions, justice, obligation, even perhaps duty, may extend to apply to larger classes of items than all humans or persons. The sweep, which is impressive, is intended to include both extended utilitarianisms, e.g. Bentham's utilitarianism as revamped by Singer according to which all sentient creatures are entitled to equal consider­ ation of interest, and extended (legal) rights doctrines, e.g. the assignment of rights or legal standing to all natural objects as suggested by, for instance, Stone.it also includes Darwin's ethic and Leopold's "land ethic". 4 7 In order to capture some of the intended examples of Nature Moralists, and all the Moral Extension positions, Rodman's characterisation requires some adjustment - which will be taken for granted in what follows. For example, Singer and other animal liberation- ists do not assign intrinsic value to all forms of life, or even to all animals; but (as Rodman is well aware) to all sentient creatures; that is, further classifications have to be taken into account. The egalitarian, or uniformity, assumptions that serve in character­ ising Natural Moralism are mistaken. Not all objects are of equal value; some are more valuable then others, while some have little or no value (and some have a negative value). Impressive though the sweep of extensions is, all the positions indicated should be rejected on one ground or another, and sometimes on several grounds. Against positions which do not extend the class of objects of moral concern and candidates for value to include all objects, variants of the counterexamples to the Western super-ethic can be directed. Consider, for instance, the positions (of usual animal liber- ationists) which extend the moral boundaries just to include sentient creatures (or e.g. preference-havers). Adapt the Last Man and Last People examples, the Wilderness example, etc., by removing all (inessential) animals from the examples, e.g. the wilderness contains no animals, in the Last People situation there are no other animals than the 46 p. singer, *??; E-ZEerafZc /VeD Random House, New York, 1975; C. Stone, op. cit. 47 at least on a straightforward reading of Leopold's eventual position: but not according to Rodman; see his contrast of Leopold with Stone, p.110. Darwin's ethic, which anticipates Leopold's, is presented in C. Darwin, Second edition, J. Murray, London, 1883. 48 On next page. 45 �last people themselves. Then the counterexamples apply as before against the liberation positions. It is unnecessary to go quite so far afield to fault such positions, at least in practice: facts of experience: as.Rodman might put it, they are countered by the ... I need only to stand in the midst of a clear-cut forest, a strip-mined hillside, a defoliated jungle, or a dammed canyon to feel uneasy with assumptions that could yield the conclusion that no human action can make any difference to the welfare of anything but sentient animals (p.89). But an advantage of the counterexamples is that the same examples, among many others (e.g. situations devoid of sentient creatures, situations where the message of experience conflicts with justice or fairness), reveals the erroneousness of the well-sponsored thesis, a simple analogue of empiricism, that all value 49 derives from experience (of experiential, or sentient, objects). A corollary is that value is not to be assessed either, in any simple way, in terms of the facts of experience. Insofar as Nature Moralism relies upon simple extensions of utilitarianisms, or of subjectivisms, to include a larger class of subjects, (a larger base class), such as all present sentient creatures, or all preference-havers at any one time, * etc., it is open not merely to adaptations of the argument against chauvinism (animal chauvinism is not that much more satisfactory than human chauvinism), but most of the Nor, on Moral Extensions, need all objects that have rights have equal rights. Rights may not be very democratically distributed. Some things have rights, e.g. as a result of agreements, of a sort others do not hold or are not capable of holding. Even rights to exist, to flourish and to reproduce (each case is different) are in much doubt where there is scarcity or conflict and where some right holders are taken to be worth much more than others. Nor are such leading examplars of Natural Moralism as Singer and Stone, though they are concerned to extend principles of justice, committed to equality of rights assumptions. Stone explicitly rejects equal distribution of rights; but the principle that all natural objects are equal in having rights, which really says no more than that they all have rights, is at best a very weak egalitarian principle. Singer offers (and presumably would offer) no equality of rights principle, rejects an equality of treatment principle, and proposes as a principle of equality a (near vacuous) principle of equal consideration of interests. Not, this time, knowledge. But amusingly "value empiricism" collapses into empiricism proper given the Socratic identification: Value (generalising Virtue) is knowledge. The only natural stopping point under value empiricism is, of course, with all creatures that have (or could have) the relevant experiences: again not with humans. 46 �standard objections to utilitarians, subjectivisms, etc. Many versions of Nature Moralism may than be defeated on rather conventional grounds. There emerges, further, a dilemma for extensions. Either the crucial notions of right and intrinsic value are extended to all sentient creatures (experience-havers), in which case the objections just lodged apply, or they are extended more sweepingly, e.g. to all natural objects. But the latter involves attributing to such items attributes they do not have, most obviously rights to such objects as stones; it also violates the conditions that have to be met for the holding of rights and for the entitlement of rights. Thus, for example, Stone considers underpinning his extension of rights, beyond sentient creatures in the ordinary sense - or of legal rights beyond recognised "legal persons" - by a postulate of 50 universal sentience or consciousness; in short, by an unacceptable metaphysics, or myth. There are several further objections which work against many versions of Natural Moralism to which Rodman draws attention: (1) Moral Extensions are 'inadequate to articulate the intention that sustains the [environmental] movement' wilderness preservation movements. (p.88), specifically wilderness and It takes but little argument to show that utilitarian ethics, such as Singer's, so far from assisting the environmental movement, can (if adopted) reinforce the case wilderness and preservation of wild species. But an extension like Stone's extension of legal rights can help, and has helped, at least in the courts where its meta-physical underpining is unlikely to be glimpsed. The basic point is however that the rights talk does not connect with, and is insensitive to, the experiential basis. Mere extensions of moral notions such as interest or right or justice are insufficient to treat and do just­ ice to the multi-dimensional depth of environmental issues, such as the damming of a river (p.115). Part of the reason is said to be that the usual moral aparatus, which was evolved in the case of certain person-to-person See Rodman's discussion, pp.92-3. But Rodman overstates his case in claiming that 'some such postulate as universal consciousness is there­ fore necessary if the notion of rights for trees is not to seem a rootless fancy'. For, as explained below, extended rights can be defined by a rather "natural extension" of the familiar notion of right, without any such postulate; and grounds of entitlement can be traced back to value of the items. Certainly extended rights sever what linkage there may have been between rights and liabilities, but with the modern separations of rights from responsibilities that linkage was already damaged or broken. 47 �relations, is inadequate for getting to grips with a new dimension of moral experience, that concerned with environment, and inadequate to reflect ecological sensibility. Rodman tries to press, however, a much stronger, and rather more dubious, theme, the SsZZ-onf thesis: By adapting the moral/legal theory of 'rights', [the movement] may sell its soul, its roots in mythic and ritual experience, to get easier judicial standing (p.88); and more savagely, the progressive extension model of ethics, while holding out the promise of transcending the homocentric perspective of modern culture, subtly fulfills and legitimates the basic project of modernity - the total conquest of nature by man (p.97, also p.119). While neither of these large claims is strictly true - soul-selling is simply avoided through adoption of the notion of extended-right, which can yield a conservative extension of the original position; and even utilitarians may be committed to blocking projects which threaten free animals - each has a substantial point. Part of the point behind the latter claim is worth developing separately:(2) Moral Extensions typically cast natural objects, notably animals, in the role of inferior humans, 'legal incompetents', imbeciles, human vegetables, and the like. They are ... degraded by our failure to respect them for having their own existence, their own character and potentialities, their own forms of excellence, their own integrity, a degradation usually reflected in our reduction of 'them to the status of instruments for our own ends', and not removed 'by "giving" them rights, by assigning them to the status of inferior human beings' (p.94). Many of us know where the treatment of natural objects as mere means The mistaken treatment of them for human ends tends to lead and has led. as inferior humans, a treatment which fails to see and 'respect the otherness of nonhuman forms of life', leads in the same direction. For given that animals, for example, are inferior, it is legitimate to treat them also as inferior; a greater value principle, which moral extensions typically endorse, yields a similar result. The needs of increasing populations of superior humans will eventually outweigh, if they do not do so already, the cases of inferior inhabitants of this finite earth for the retention of their natural habitats. 48 For their rights and their �In the larger perspective, the Moral values will be less than "ours". Extensions, with their built-in greater value assumptions, do legitimate the conquest of nature by humans. Thus too they fail seriously, on what will soon enough be quite practical grounds, as satisfactory environmental ethics. (3) The extensions, like the parent ethics which they extend, are narrowly individualistic, and insufficiently holistic. This is particularly conspicuous in the case of utilitarianisms, which in principle arrive at all assessments by some sort of calculations, e.g. summations and perhaps averaging, from an initially given unit conforming to requisite equality conditions, e.g. equal consideration, equal units of suffering. In practice of course the method is, almost invariably, to pretend that the calculations will yield results which agree with alternatively and previously arrived at, usually intuitive, often prejudiced, evaluations; that is, in practice the method is not applied except in a handwaving back-up fashion. The method is not applied in part because there are serious, well enough known, problems in applying it. The individualistic bias carried over in other moral extensions, e.g. any experiential theory, likewise limits their satisfactoriness. It is to understate the matter to say merely that 'the moral atomism that focuses on individual animals and their subjective experiences does not seem well adapted to coping with ecological systems' (p.89), 'to explore the notion of shared habitat and the notion that an organism's relationship to its natural environment may be an important part of the organism's character' ((b), p.52). A moral atomism that focuses on individuals, discounting their interrelations, is bound to result in ecological complexes that matter (such as ecosystems, wilderness, and species) getting seriously short-changed. To illustrate:- Under atomism, the value of a complex, or the rights of a complex, amount to no more than those of its individual members; but since these are, in isolation from the complex, no more valuable than other things of their order, e.g. one gentian than another, a bush rat from a Norwegian rat, there no special merit in a complex, or rights attaching to it, in virtue of its rareity or uniqueness or special features as a complex. Thus, for instance, a utilitarianism under which only individual animals count assigns, and can assign, no special value to species, and can (as remarked) be used to argue against preservation of species: Since all animals are equal - or at least all animals of the same genus are more or less equal - one can substitute for another. Fora rare species of rat to die out painlessly cannot matter while there are plenty of other rats. A rights theory is in similar difficulties so long 49 �as rights are assigned only to individuals, taken in isolation from their environmental setting (i.e. only to the usual separable individuals of philosophical theory). These problems may be avoided, in part, by assign­ ing rights to complexes (given the notion of rights will take that much further stretching; which it will not if right holders are assumed to be conscious or to be preference-havers), and by attributing independent value to complexes. But, since the value of a whole is sometimes more than the sum of the separable values of its individual members, this move involves the rejection of usual atomism, utilitarianisms in particular. The objection against the narrow individualism of the extensions - a defect they share with standard ethics which do not admit of ready extension, such as contract theories - soon broadens into an objection that these extensions are built on an inadequate metaphysics, a metaphysics of rather isolated individuals who (or which) are seriously depauperate in An ethics presupposes a metaphysics at their relations with other objects. least through its choice of base class: thus for example, usual homocen- tric formulations of utilitarianisms and contract theories suppose a base class of narrowly self-interested humans. The remedy is not (as Rodman suggests in various places in his elaboration of Ecological Resistance) to move to holism: to do so would be to accept the other half of a false dichotomy mainstream philosophical thought engenders (cf. Routley (g), this volume). It is rather to move to a metaphysics that is built on a concept­ ion of objects (which may or may not be individuals) which are rich in their interrelations and connections. In summary, the moral extensions are the wrong direction in which to seek a satisfactory environmental ethic. But the failure of Nature Moralism does not mean, as Rodman tends to assume, that all positions that are moral in style are thereby ruled out. 51 For one thing, Nature Moralism, as characterised (or generalised), is far from exhaustive of the range of prima facie viable moral positions. More satisfactory positions will simply avoid the damaging assumptions of Nature Moralism (and likewise those of inadequate ethical positions, such as contract theories or naturalism, and those linking morality to legality; For another, if the quest is for an ruled out. cf. p.103). moral notions can hardly be Even if it is assumed that the call for a 'new ethic' is 'to guide the human/nature relationship (p.95) - a somewhat unfortunate way of putting it - whereas what matters is the human/nature relationship itself, and that in coping with that relation fixation on morality or 51 His thesis of the 'limitation of the moral/legal stage of unconscious­ ness' is investigated in more detail in what follows. 50 �legality is a serious handicap, and may contribute to the problem of the relationship rather than helping solve it (pp.103-4); still part of the problem is that of indicating entitlements of agents with respect to their environment, what sort of exploitation, if any, is permissible, what the limits on conventional morality are, and discovering 'a larger normative order within which we and our species-specific moral and legal systems (p.97). have a niche' Nor, in outlining Ecological Resistance, does Rodman shrink from using - he could not avoid the effect of - axiological terms such as 'good' and deontic terms such as 'should'; he does not doubt, for example, that some of what is natural that is threatened is valuable and that threats to it should be resisted; and he admits that 'prudence, justice, and reverence may be essential parts of a[n ecologic­ ally] good life'. Ecological Resistance, which is said to be the alternative 'most faithful to the integrity of experience', exhibits indeed the negativity of resistance. The position is founded on action, resistance, and theory only emerges retrospectively (if perhaps at all). Its (insufficiently qualified) central principle is 'that diversity is natural, good and threatened by the forces of monoculture'. The struggle between these forces, diversity and monoculture - between (ecological) good and evil - occurs in several different spheres of experience, i.e. at various levels, which reflect one another. Resistance is not undertaken for self-interest or utilitarian reasons, or for moral reasons, or for religious or mystical reasons (such as preventing profanation), but because the threat to the [natural object or system] ... is perceived aZso as a threat to the self, or rather to the principle of diversity and spontaneity that is the endangered side of the basic balance that defines and sustains the very nature of things ((b), p.54). The disjunction, 'or', separates however two rather different (though combin­ able) reasons-cum-motives for resistance. The second disjunct yields the following reasons for resistance (which are linked by a metaphysical assumption connecting diversity and spontaneity with the nature of things): (i) The threat to the natural item is a threat to the principle of diversity and spontaneity. So, by the central principle, it is a threat to what is good, etc. (ii) The threat to the natural object 'is a threat to the very nature of things': (as to how consider the example of the wild river threatened by a dam, p.115). So - by an unstated, but nonetheless implied and assumed, principle, that the very nature of things is good (and natural) it is a threat to the forces of good. 51 �The first disjunct yields form: a further, different, argument; in simplest (iii) The threat to the natural object is a threat to oneself. What is a threat to oneself is bad and to be resisted, so what is a threat to the natural object is bad and has to be resisted (since what is bad should, in general, be resisted). Although the arguments are valid, the underlying principles are faulty; for instance, the diversity (and spontaneity) principle because it is too simple (and so too does not harmonize with the nature of things); and the second principle, the intrinsic merit of the very nature of the things, because not everything that is the case or is natural is meritor­ ious, e.g. genuinely natural disasters. Rodman plans to avoid obstacles to adopting nature as an absolute standard and, at the same time, to bridge the gap the principle spans, by resort to a version of naturalism which equates 'the "natural" with the "moral"' (pp.96-7). But for well- known reasons which can be supported (e.g. those telling against objective ethics of the sort such naturalism would yield), substantive evaluative assumptions cannot be removed in this fashion; though they can be suppressed, they reappear as soon as connections between empirical The trouble, characteristic of reductionism, arises from the mistaken attempt grounds and evaluative judgments based upon them are queried. to collapse a grounding, or founding, relation to an identity, to close the gap - which is not problematic but is widely thought to be problem­ atic - between value and empirical fact by a reduction of value to fact, of the thesis that evaluative features are grounded on natural features to the thesis that evaluative features are nothing but certain natural 52 features (e.g. to be good is just to have certain natural features). 52 Rodman interprets naturalistically the statement of Jonas's that he quotes approvingly (p.95): Only an ethic which is grounded in the breadth of being, not merely in the singularity or oddness of man, can have significance in the scheme of things ... an ethics no longer founded on divine authority [or upon human arete], must be founded on a principle discoverable in the nature of things ... . He interprets it in terms of 'an ontologically-grounded moral order in the "the phenomenon of life" or "the nature of things".' In this way can be avoided the reduction of 'the quest for an ethics ... to prattle about "values" taken in abstraction from the "facts" of experience'. But Jonas's statement can be construed nonnaturalistically, by taking the founding or grounding relation seriously, as connecting, but not reducing, values to empirical facts. So construed the statement does help in delineating the sort of environmental ethics sought. 52 �Such reductions commit the naturalistic and prescriptive fallacies - which can be avoided neither by thinking 'our way through or around them' (p.97), nor by holistic assimilation of morality in a 'more encompassing ethical life' (p.103 and note 66). But details of the fallacies need not detain us, since we can consider immediately Rodman's important suggestion 53 for circumnavigating them (pp.103-4). Under natural social conditions, such as are obtained in some traditional societies and in some free animal societies (as ethological studies reveal), but have been lost in modern societies, law and morality, at least in their coercive aspects, would disappear, as they did in William Morris's /row and somewhat as they would in a Kantian community of fully autonomous beings. In terms of modern physics, morality and law are not invariants but vary under transformation of axes, and in fact vanish or prove eliminable under a suitable transformations, e.g. to a natural condition. There is a similar natural condition for morality and legality, a condition in which the prohibitions now prescribed 54 by God, Conscience and the State would have operated "naturally" (i.e. from inside the organism, as a matter of course), and patterns now stated prescriptively could have been stated descriptively. When the Way is abandoned, then we get Humanity and Justice (Tac Te #18) (p.103). Even if a change of social axes could place us back on the Way, or on the way to the Way, morality is not really avoidable in our local frame where we are far from the Way. So ethical disputes over environmental matters 55 are also unavoidable; * for those a satisfactory ethic is a desideratum, and can help in bringing about a change of social axes. Thus too, the identity of the prescriptive with the descriptive, of "ought" with (suitable) "is", is a merely contingent (extensional) one and fails in 53 The suggestion helps explain not only Rodman's naturalism, but his thesis of the limitation of morality and legality; it also introduces the anarchistic social change view that suffuses much of the (very uneven) later parts of (a): the view appears therein as the elabor­ ation of what is 'unthinkable'. 54 Given prevailing socio-economic conditions it should be rather: that would (ideally) be prescribed. Let us hope, for environmental reasons, that the principles that are lived by in natural conditions bear not too great a resemblance to those now prescribed. 55 Nor is there, in the local frame, much alternative but to resort to legal strategies, where they can be applied (where standing is granted), to delay "the war against nature". 53 �alternative situations; hence, as always, there is no deduction of "ought" from "is", since deducibility would require coincidence in the alternative situations. Nor would morality - as distinct from legality, which requires some codification - strictly disappear under natural conditions, though its coercive aspects would: on the whole, as they ought to be. things would simply be, But while deontology would have a much diminished role (as it does on the preferred environmental ethic), axiology (the theory of value) would still have its place - some objects (e.g. diverse landscapes) would be more valuable than others (monocultural landscapes), some not valuable, etc. (As things stand, of course, axiology does have an important place in working out the theory of Ecological Resistance, especially in assessing its central principle of diversity.) The upshot is that without much elaboration (like that indicated below) of an axiological kind, which connects value through a grounding relation, as distinct from an identity, with the run of things (but not aZZ things) that are natural, reason (ii) for ecological resistance fails. Does reason (i), which is premissed on the central principle that diversity is good and natural and threatened by monoculture, fare any better? While it is a matter of fact that that diversity is threatened, indeed is being very rapidly reduced by the forces of monoculture, diver­ sity is not, as opponents of ecological values are wont to point out, an entirely unqualified good. Nor is diversity is always natural: a temperate rain forest can be "enriched" and rendered more diverse by interplanting of exotics (a practice foresters have applied, e.g. in New Zealand) but the result is not natural and sometimes at least bad. Or, differently, ecological diversity can often be increased by increasing edges between ecosystems, but the practice of increasing edges can easily be unnatural and far from good, as, e.g. in rainforest logging with (say) 50% canopy retention. So although a reduction of diversity is commonly bad, since the reduction reduces the quality of an ecological whole, and increase in diversity good, diversity can not be accepted as a solo principle. In fact, Rodman often couples diversity with other factors, such as naturalness (inadmissible in determining, noncircularly, what is good and natural), richness, spontaneity and integrity, which help to remove various of the counterexamples to a diversity principle. The procedure points in the direction to be pursued: replacement of the oversimple principle of diversity by a principle combining all relevant ecological factors. After all ecological sensibility - ecological resist­ ance is assumed to be the position of the person of ecological sensibility requires sensitivity to all such ecological factors. 54 Once it is determined �through consideration of a mix of ecological factors, that, or whether, a natural object is good or valuable the reasons for resistance can be restated: (iv) Where a natural object is valuable - as c/fe?? natural objects are, a natural object does not have to be very ecologically distinctive to be valuable - the threat to the natural object is a threat to what is But, other things being equal, threats to what is valuable valuable. should be resisted. So, similarly, threats to natural objects should often be resisted - and always (on whatever level) resisted where the objects are valuable and the costs of resisting are not overridingly high (to begin to spell out the ceteris paribus clause). It remains to tie in reason (iii), a key premiss of which can now take the initial form that the threat to a valuable natural object is a threat to oneself. A threat to what is valuable, to what one as a valuer values, is a threat to the valuer, to oneself, for these are one's values. To make some of those connections good again requires an excursion into axiology, one, this time, that connects what is valuable with a valuer's values. But Rodman, in trying to connect the threats to natural objects and to oneself, is forced further afield, and resorts to the myth of microcosm: 'Ecological Resistance involves a ritual affirmation of the Myth of Microcosm' universe' (OED). ((b), p.5.4), i.e'. the view of man 'as epitome of the While such an affirmation - without the ritual - would yield the requisite connection, it is a classic piece of anthropocentric- ism, quite hostile to a nonchauvinistic position, and, fortunately, inessential to genuine ecological resistance. What Rodman reaches for from the myth (which could be restated in terms of without its classic homocentric bias) is however extremely important: it is an account of the which is not a separate subject isolated from its (natural) environment (as a Humean individual is),56 but is connected intensionally and causally interrelated with that environment. Rodman introduces this metaphysics in rather old-fashioned terms: Ecological Resistance ... assumes a version of the theory of internal relations: the human personality discovers its structure through interaction with the nonhuman order. I am what I am at least partly in my relation to my natural environment, and changes in that environ­ ment affect my own identity. If I stand idly by and let it be destroyed, a part of me is destroyed or seriously deranged ((b) p. 54). Not Man Apart, in the terms of Friends of the Earth. 55 �For among my interests are its interests, part of my welfare is its 57 welfare; I am identified in part with it. The metaphysics deepens, A resister 'does not stand over against then, the reasons for resistance. "his environment" as manager, sight-seer, or do-gooder; integral part of [it]' he is an ((b), p.56). But the environmental metaphysics, that underlies and helps support the ethics, that is part of a fuller environmental theory, need not be, and should not be if it is to be coherent, as (Hegelian and) holistic as Rodman immediately goes on to suppose that it is: ... By making the principle of diversity central, Ecological Resistance can incorporate the other three perspectives as moments within the dialectic of a larger whole. Economics, morality, and an esthetic religiosity have niches in the ecology of our experience of nature, and each has its limits (p.56 continued). But a principle of diversity which opposes the forces of monoculture will not yield pluralism, unless illegitimately extrapolated to theories where its merit is much less evident, especially when some of these theories are not only mutually inconsistent but false. Rodman risks the distinctive features of Ecological Resistance for a dubious synthesis. It is only true that the positions can be combined if the first three positions are limited indeed, and then a trivial combination with each theory working where it works (which may be nowhere actual in the case of the religious component) can be managed. Moreover Ecological Resistance properly developed, will lead to economic and ethical theories which compete with the rather conventional, and environmentally defective theories of, respectively, Resource Conservation and Natural Moralism. Not only is Ecological Resistance severely handicapped by having implausible holistic theses tacked in to it (not all of which have been discussed); further, Ecological Resistance is too negative. A more positive theory - which includes a theory of value and, ultimately, for a fuller environmental position, a metaphysics - is required, not only for orientation and to meet felt needs of environmentalists already noted, but for more effective, coherent and systematic resistance. It is but a short step to the 'fully ecological sensibility [which] knows with Carl Sandburg that:' There is an eagle in me ... and the eagle flies among the Rocky Mountains of my dreams and fights among the Sierra crags of what I want ... . And I got the eagle ... from the wilderness, (p.118) The poem almost admits of neutral logical formalisation. 56 �trees, kill everything f/xe Farf/z, (ed. T.C. McLuhan, Sphere Books, London, 1973, p.15). The great care with which so many of the Indians utilized every portion of the carcass of a hunted animal was an expression, not of economic thrift, but of courtesy and respect (D. Lee, in Farf/z, p.15)- What the respect position is based on is the fact that it is possible to make use of something without treating it as something which is no more than a means to one's ends. That is, it is possible to make use of some­ thing in limited, constrained ways - with constraints which may not derive entirely from considerations of the welfare of other humans, as in the case of the Indians' use of animals - without treating it as available for any kind of use. To so use something without treating it as available for unlimited or unconstrained use for human ends is characteristic of use. In contrast non-respectful use treats the use of the item as constrained by no considerations arising from the item itself and the user's relationship to it, but as constrained only in a derivative way, by considerations of the convenience, welfare and so forth of other humans. The Western view, as the Indians realised, is the non-respect position, that the world is available for unconstrained human use. People who hold respect positions, such as the Indians, see such a position as indicative of a lack of moral sensitivity, and sometimes in even stronger terms. The conventional wisdom of Western society tends to offer a false dichotomy of use versus respectful nonuse - a false choice which comes out especially clearly again in the treatment of animals. Here the choice presented in Western thought is typically one of edf/zer use without respect or serious constraint, of using animals for example in the ways character­ istic of large-scale mass-production farming and a market economic system which are incompatible with respect, or on the other hand of not making any use of animals at all, for example, never making use of animals for food or for farming purposes. What is left out in this choice is the alternative the Indians and other non-Western people have recognised, the alternative of limited and respectful use, which enables use to be made of animals, but does not allow animals to be used in an unconstrained way or merely as a means to human ends. Such an alternative can have some applic­ ation in a Western context (for some limited examples of respectful use in the operations of a small farmer, see John Seymour, CompZtsfe Faber, London, 1976). A limited and respectful use position would condemn the infliction of unnecessary pain on animals, and also the treatment of animals as machines, as in factory farming. 84 It �would also condemn unecessary and wasteful killing and especially killing for amusement or "sport", which is incompatible with respect and assumes that animals can be used merely as a means for human ends. But it would not necessarily oppose the use of animals in the case of approp­ riate non-trivial need, e.g. for food, although here again it would insist that the ways in which use can be made are limited, and not just by considerations of effect on other humans. The limited and respectful use position avoids some of the serious problems of the no-use position of the animal liberationists, although it shares many of the same beliefs concerning the illegitimacy of factory farming and similar disrespectful methods of making use of and exploiting animals. The no-use position faces the problem that it proposes that humans should treat animals in ways which are quite different from the ways in which animals treat one another, for example, prohibiting needful use for food. Thus the no-use position seems obliged to say either that the world would be a better place without carnivores, or else that carnivorous animals themselves are inferior, immoral, moral creatures - whichever, alternative amoral or non- is taken here the bulk of animals emerge as inferior to humans, or at least vegetarian humans. It implies too that an impoverished natural order which lacked carnivores - and given what we know of ecology this would be a very highly impoverished one indeed, not to say an unworkable "natural" order - is preferable to a rich natural one with a normal proportion of carnivorous and partly carnivorous species. carnivores, Since it would imply the moral inferiority of the no-use position appears to arrive at the negation of its own starting point, (as regards e.g., the equality consideration) of all animals, human and non-human. In thus seeing humans as capable of a moral existence which most animals are not capable of, it sees man as apart from a largely amoral, (or immoral) natural world, denies community with the animal and natural world,and indirectly reinforces human chauvinism. §6. TOWARDS AN ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOSOPHY: A PRELIMINARY SKETCH OF THE EXTENT OF PHILOSOPHICAL REVISION ENSUING ON ABANDONMENT OF CHAUVINISTIC ETHICS A radical change in a theory not uncommonly forces changes elsewhere - conceptual revision which affects not only the theory itself but many neighbouring areas. The phenomenon is well-known in the case of major physical theories, but it holds as well for ethical and philosophical theories; for example, a logical theory which rejects the Reference Theory in a thoroughgoing way has important repercussions throughout much of the rest of philosophy, and requires modification not only of logical 85 �systems and their semantics, but also, for instance, of the usual meta­ theory which also accepts the Reference Theory and indeed which is 95 tailored to cater only for logics which do conform. A thorough-going environmental ethics likewise has a substantial impact and forces many changes. The escape from human chauvinism not only involves sweeping changes in ethical principles and value theory but it induces substantial'reverberations elsewhere - both inwards, for example in metaphysics, in epistemology, and in the philosophy and method­ ology of science, and outwards (in subjects that presuppose value theory) in social theory, in politics, in economics and in law, and beyond. For human chauvinism is deeply embedded in Western culture, and affects not only the ideology and the institutions but the arts. Thus, for example, much of literature, and especially of ballet and film, is given over to a celebration of things human, of the species. Even the timely new emphasis, for instance of the counterculture, on human relations (as opposed to self- contained private individuals of social theories) remains well within the inherited chauvinistic framework. As to the changes, let us begin again with ethics. As we have begun to see, an environmental ethic can retain, though in a much amended theoretical framework (which affects meanings of terms), virtually all the standard ethical terminology. But even at a superficial syntactical level, there will be conspicuous alterations: firstly, ethical terminology will be enriched with new environmental terms, drawn in particular from ecology, somewhat as it was expanded in the late nineteenth century by terminology from evolutionary theories; and secondly, accompanying the attitudinal shifts the new ethic involves, there will be a marked shift in ethical terminology, away from the predominance of such terms as (and examples associated with) 'obligation', to such expressions as 'care', 'respect', 'consciousness'. 'duty', 'concern', 'promise', 'responsibility', 'contract', 'trust', Because the theoretical and attitudinal frame is changed, an environmental ethic forces - as we have already found with such notions as and - reexamination of, and modified analyses of, characteristic ethical notions. It requires, furthermore, reassessment of traditional and conventional analyses of such notions as natural right, ground of right, and permissib­ ility, especially where these are based on chauvinist assumptions - much as it requires the rejection of most of the more prominent meta-ethical gr These points are explained in detail in Routley (e); and also in L. Goddard and R. Routley, T/ze py urui Context, Vol. 1, Scottish Academic Press, 1973, chapters 3 and 4. 86 �positions. Cursory examination of recent accounts of nutMruZ wcrcZZtpj jMst-Zce and cctfc?? will help illustrate and confirm these points. Hart, for example, accepts (subject to defeating conditions which are here irrelevant) the classical doctrine of natural rights according to which, among other things, any adult human ... capable of choice is at liberty to do (i.e. is under no obligation to abstain from) any action which is not one coercing or restraining or designed to injure other persons (H.L.A. Hart, 'Are there any natural rights?', reprinted in PcZZticuZ PbiZoscpbp, (ed. A. Quinton), Blackwell, Oxford 1967). But this sufficient condition for a human natural right depends on accepting the basic chauvinist principle - a variant of (D) - environmental ethics reject; since if a person has a natural right he has a right. So too the definition of a natural right adopted by classical theorists and accepted with minor qualifications by Hart presupposes the same defective principle. Accordingly an environmental ethic would have to amend the classical notion of a natural right, a far from straightforward matter now that human rights with respect to animals and the natural environment are, like those with respect to slaves not all that long ago, undergoing major re-evaluation. Another example of chauvinism at work in the very setting up of the field of discussion and problems in ethics is provided by recent accounts of .^ercZ'Ztp, where it is simply taken for granted that 'moral' distinguishe 96 among actions, policies, motives and reasons, and that what is moral refers essentially to human well-being (contentment, happiness or something of this general sort, tied with appropriate states or conditions of humans). Such criteria for what is moral are chauvinistic- ally based, assuming that what does not bear on human states or conditions cannot be a moral matter. What happens in worlds without humans, how animals fare or are treated, what is done or what happens to plants or other natural objects - none of these are directly moral matters, except insofar as they impinge on human welfare. That is human 96 Thus for instance, B. Williams, ^eruZitz/.- Xx tc Effies, Harper & Row, New York, 1972, p.79. Williams does, however, remark in his Preface (p.xiv) how 'shaky and problematic' the distinction - which he subsequently takes for granted - is. 97 see, for example, P.R. Foot, Tbecries cf FtZrZcs, Oxford University Press, London, 1967,and G.J. Warnock, Oc^tewpcrcrp McraZ PhZZcscpbp, Macmillan, London, 1967, and also The Object cf AfcrcZZty, Methuen, London, 1971. 87 �chauvinism at work, and is at the same time a reductio such criteria. ad absurdum of A different nonchauvinistic account of what is moral is required (a beginning can be made by adopting certain of the maligned formal criteria). It is evident that any account which meets even weak conditions of adequacy will serve to meet the objection that an environmental ethic is not concerned with what is moral but is really an aesthetic theory. For the objection as usually presented depends squarely on a chauvinistic restriction on morality, all the rest of value theory being classed, or dismissed, as "(mere) aesthetics". The case of morality illustrates the characteristic way in which theories - in this case chauvinistic ethics - redefine crucial notions in their own terms to suit their own ends, such as entrenchment and fortification of the theories against objections. Further corollaries of the rejection of chauvinism include the inadequacy of recent fashionable attempts, mainly derivative from Hobhouse, at characterising eguuZitp and justifying it in ways that argue from man's humanity,98 and the inadequacy of much recent, largely chauvinistic, work which takes it for granted that action and 99 rationality requirements on action are bound up with human nature. in the philosophy of The abandonment of chauvinism implies the rejection not only of much ethical analysis, but of all current major ethical positions. The bias of prevailing ethical positions, and also of economic positions, which aim to make principles of conduct or reasonable economic behaviour calculable is especially evident. These positions typically employ a single criterion p, such as preference or happiness, as a summum bonum; characteristically each individual of some base class, almost always humans, but perhaps including future humans, is supposed to have (at least) an ordinal p- ranking of the states in question (e.g. of affairs, of the economy); then some principle is supplied to determine a collective p-ranking of these states in terms of individual p-rankings, and what is best or ought to be done is determined either directly, as in act-utilitarianism under the Greatest Happiness principle, or indirectly, as in rule-utilitarianism in terms of some optimization principle applied to the collective ranking, The species bias is transparent from the selection of the base class. go And Among such unsatisfactory liberal egalitarian positions are those presented in G. Vlastos, 'Justice and equality' in JooiuZ (ed. R.B. Brandt), Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1962, and B.A.O. Williams, ' The idea of equality' in P^i^osoph^, Pacifies artJ Jpcietz/, Second series (ed. P. Laslett and W.G. Runciman), Blackwell, Oxford, 1963. 99 gee, e.g. T. Nagel, TTns PossiM7-7fi/ of Oxford, 1970. 88 Clarendon Press, �even if the base class is extended to include persons or some animals (at the cost, like that of including remotely future humans, of losing testability), the positions are open to familiar criticism, namely that the whole of the base class may be prejudiced in a way which leads to unjust principles. To take a simple example, if every member of the base class detests dingoes, on the basis of mistaken data as to dingoes' behaviour, then by the Pareto ranking test the collective ranking will rank states where dingoes are exterminated very highly, from which it will generally be concluded that dingoes ought to be exterminated (still unfortunately the evaluation of most Australian farmers, though it lacks any requisite empirical basis). Likewise it would just be a happy accident, it seems, if collective demand (horizontally summed from individual demand) for a state of the economy with sperm whales as a mixed good, were to succeed in outweighing private whaling demands; for if but few in the base class happened to know that sperm whales exist or cared a jot that they do, then even the most "rational economic decision­ making would do nothing to prevent their extinction. But whether the sperm whale survives should not have to depend on what humans know or what they see on television. Summed human interests, or preferences of certain private individuals, are far too parochial to provide a satisfactory basis for deciding upon what is environmentally desirable. Nor would such accidental bases be adequate. Moreover ways out of the problem do not bear much investigation. It cannot be assumed, for instance, that the base class is on the whole good, and hence will not enjoin reprehensible behaviour, because such an assumption seems false, would at best be contingently true (so that the theory would fail for different circumstances to which it should apply), and would involve a deep problem in the theory, since it would then seem to admit the determination of goodness - that of the base class, on the whole - independently of what the theory was set up to determine, among other things, goodness. Nor can it be assumed, without serious circularity that the optimisation is constrained by requirements of justice or fairness (see Routley (b) and §5 above). The ethical and economic theories just singled out (which are based on optimisation over select features of the base class) are not alone in their species chauvinism; much the same applies to mosf going meta- ethical theories which, unlike intuitionistic theories, try to offer some rationale for their basic principles. That is, the argument against utilitarian-type ethical and economic theories generalises. For instance, on social contract positions, obligations are a matter of mutual agreement 89 �between individuals of a given (but again problematic) base class; on a social justice picture, rights and obligations spring from the application of symmetrical fairness principles to members of the base class, usually a rather special class of persons;while on a Kantian position, which has some vogue, obligations somehow arise from respect for members of the base class, persons.In each case, if members of the base class happen to be ill-disposed to items outside the base class, then that is unfortun­ ate for them: that is (rough) justice. Looking outwards from the ethics, the abandonment of chauvinism has likewise a wide set of consequences, both theoretical and practical, in One economics, politics and law, and generally in the social sciences major practical economic impact of environmental ethics is in the extent to which free enterprise can operate unimpeded or unchanged. of business and enterpreneurial activity - to But consider one option - will involve, in turn, either legal constraints, or reallocation of activity by such devices as environmental pricing, which directs activity away from environmentally undesirable pursuits. For example, if it is wrong to destroy a rare ecosystem in order to make a few more dollars, then restrictions should be imposed on business activity by one method or another. To some limited extent this is already happening in the field of pollution, but primarily because of the likely effects, direct or not too far removed, that pollution comes to have on other humans, not for a wider set of reasons, and often not for the right reasons. With a wider environ mental code, the public and legal intrusion into areas typically regarded as "private" and open to the free enterprise operations (of "open go") would be much more extensive. The same applies in the case of private 100 Thus for example, [Rawls'] original position seems to presuppose not just a neutral theory of the good, but a liberal, individualistic conception according to which the best that can be wished for someone is the unimpeded pursuit of his own path, provided it does not interfere with the rights of others. This view is persuasively developed in the later portions of the book, but without a sense of its controver­ sial character (T. Nagel, 'Rawls on justice', PkiZcscphicuZ 82 (1973), p.228). Nagel also effectively argues that Rawls' original position is not neutrally determined but involves substantial moral assumptions (e.g. pp.232, 233); they are mostly, as it happens, of a chauvinistic cast. 10^ While the first of Kant's maxims is not so restricted in actual form­ ulation, others are (see H.J. Paton, TPe Hutchinson, London, 1947. And, firstly, such maxims are s^pp<9se^ to be equivalent to ones formulated in terms of persons; secondly, they are supposed to be derived from features of, or connected with, people. 90 �property; for example, given that it is not permissible to erode hill­ sides then there should, in this setting, be (legal) restrictions on farmers' and foresters' activities. Although the impact on the practice of economics of a thoroughgoing environmental ethic would be drastic - market negotiations, firms' activities,-international trade, all would be affected - the impact on the underlying theories of preference and choice is comparatively less, but still far from negligible. For much of economics is squarely founded on chauvinism. The theoretical bias follows directly from the utilitarian bases of the theory, which is fairly explicit in welfare theory and rather heavily disguised in neoclassical theory. But although choice and value theory are, as characteristically presented in economics and elsewhere, damagingly chauvinistic, they do not have to be. For the theories can be reformulated in a non-chauvinistic way, as was indicated (in §5) above for utilitarianism - upon which economic theory is modelled. On such a revamped foundation an environmental economics to match the chosen environmental ethic can be built (for some preliminaries on this approach, see Routley (d), appendices 1 and 6). Several of the objections to base class theories such as utilitar­ ianism apply not merely against orthodox economic theory, but also to voting theory, to representative democratic systems of determination of political action. If, for, example, the base class consists of private individuals motivated by their own self-contained interest then such procedures can readily lead to most undesirable results, especially if these individuals compromise representative individuals. their autonomy through the election of For the more powerful of these representative individuals can be - and typically are, as their behaviour if not their protestations show - not favourably disposed to (the welfare of) things outside the base class or even to many members of the base class. Nearer the theoretical surface, especially in such branches of economics as "resource management", the chauvinism is more conspicuous. The following narrowly utilitarian assumption is quite typical: The goal of resource managers should be to communicate and act in ways that maximize human satisfaction (H.J. Campbell, 'Economic and social significance of upstream aquatic resources' in Forest Fses Oregon State University, Corcallis, 1971, p-14, also p.17). When management - where such is management becomes needed at all - the goals will be changed from such chauvinistic ones. 91 �The method of interference in "free economic enterprise", of controls and regulations, of legal and political constraints, is only one way in which leading principles of an environmental ethics can be put into effect. A quite different, and ultimately far more appealing, approach is by way of structural change, by changing the socio-economic structure in such a way that it comes to reflect on environmental ethics (by altering the frame of reference, or axes, to use the physical picture of §4, so.that major problems vanish). Requisite structural change is 102 . far-reaching, both practically and theoretically' in every reach of social science. For example, while on the position, capitalist markets are subject to further regulation, either directly imposed or by way of suitable pricing policies, in the sfrzzcfLzraZ- position, capitalist markets are eliminated; while under state regulation private property is subject to further controls,given approp­ riate structural change private property disappears. Looking inwards, an environmental ethic has an impact on the practice of many sciences other than the social sciences - what they do experimentally with natural objects (e.g. the treatment of animals in laboratory testing); how their research programmes are organised and directed (consider, e.g., projects involving irradiation or broadscale herbicide treatments of rainforests); the way classifications are made and which are made (consider, e.g. the extent to which human perception enters into classifications in botany); recommended on the basis of such sciences. and, of course, what is For as it stands human chauvinism is deeply embedded in the practice of science, directly in research and experimentation and in shaping classifications, theses and theories. Indeed the effect of a different ethic may extend even to the theory of such sciences, in particular through the bearing the ethic has 103 on metaphysics which in turn influences the foundations or such sciences. Such a new ethic would quite properly upset (as §1 should indicate) the extent to which humans are seen at the centre of things and things as accountable through them and scientific theories as 'human constructions wrestled from a hostile nature' (after Popper). It would help overthrow the pernicious chauvinistic idea that, apart from certain elementary facts, AZZes value. isf AfeyzscZzoMMor^., all necessity, all intensionality, all It should result too in the shattering of still widespread As (g) V. and R. Routley, 'Social theory, self management and environmental problems', this volume, begins to explain. Cf. R. Harre, P/zi^osop?zies of 1972; and also Routley (e). 92 Oxford University Press, �assumptions as to the nature of animals and plants, for instance that their apparently goal-directed and intensional behaviour can be explained (away) mechanistically, and the deeply-rooted idea that some sort of Cartesian metaphysical picture of natural, as distinct from spiritual or rational, objects can be maintained (cf. again §1). In metaphysics there are at least two further important classes of effects. Firstly, the orthodox views of man's relation to nature, the dominant and modified dominant and lesser traditions, have to be abandoned and new positions worked out. In this sense, a new environmental ethic implies a similarly new metaphysic redefining Man's place in nature and human/nature relationships.^^4 such a new philosophy of nature will recognise various natural objects other than humans as of independent value, so it will not be naturalistic. Nor will it view natural objects as simply available for the use, wise or otherwise, of humans. Several principles derived from the orthodox metaphysical positions will have to be abandoned and replacements worked out (as in the case of (D) in ethics). Thus superseded, for example, will be the principles of total use of natural areas for human use and of maximum long-term productivity of the earth's resources (principles criticised in their application in forestry in Routley (d)). At a deeper level, such a philosophy of nature will involve a turning away from the leading ideological principles of both the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and of much that went with them (e.g. with the Rennaissance, the rise of commerce, bureaucracy, professionalism, formal education, and subsequently, with the Enlightenment, the rise of the modern state, capitalism and scientific enlightenment). For it means the dismissal of the chauvinistic principles of the Renaissance, with 'Man as the kernel of the Universe', a creature 'half-earthly and half—divine, his body and soul form[ing] a microcosm enabling him to understand and control Nature . ..'.^O-^ It means too removal of the humanism of the Enlightenment, the reduction of what formerly was assigned to the religious, such as ethical and political principles, to the human, a reduction which 404 Passmore has observed - inconsistently with what is claimed in his (a) - in 'Attitudes to Nature', Poz/aZ. Irzstitz^te P/ziZ-csopTzz/ lectures, volume 8, Macmillan, London, 1975. As against Passmore (a) p.3, such new ethics and metaphysics need involve no abandonment of 'the analytical, critical approach which is the glory of the West': on the contrary, they may well mean a more thoroughly critical and analytical approach than hitherto. 104 goth quotations are from ?7ze <9/ t/z<3 Pgrzaissa^cg (ed. D. Hay) Thames and Hudson, London 1967, pp.7-10, where too main movements, practical and ideological, of the Renaissance are usefully indicated. 93 �was based on the false dichotomy, which has still not lost its hold: reli.gious or humanistic. Secondly, the removal of humans from a dominant position in the natural order renders immediately suspect a range of familiar philosophical positions of a verificationistic or idealistic kind such as phenomenalism in epistemology (how can what exists depend on what is perceived by members of such a transitory and perhaps not so important species or on whether there exist <2722/ perceivers?), intuitionism in mathematics, con­ ventionalism in logical theory, the Copenhagen interpretation in micro­ physics, and subjectivisms not only in ethics but in every other philosophical sphere. True, most of these positions are defeated on the basis of other considerations anyway; but it is an immediate and further point against them that they are damagingly chauvinistic. Thus a corollary of the thoroughgoing rejection of human chauvinism, of very considerable philosophical importance, is the rejection of all 'the usual forms of idealism, i.e. all positions which accord primacy to the human subject and make the existence of a world of things or the nature of things dependent upon such subjects. A paradigmatic example is phenomenalism; other examples are Kantian idealisms, Hegelianisms and later German idealisms, Christian philosophies based on the primacy of human (and superhuman) consciousness, existentialisms; more surprising examples are empiricisms - inasmuch as all knowledge and truth is supposed to be ultimately derived from human experience - and their holistic images, dialectical materialisms and Marxisms. A satisfactory environ­ mental philosophy will be significantly different from all these positions. 94 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Draft Papers Description An account of the resource Sylvan's literary executor encountered an archive in which “all his projects were current", since manuscripts were undated and unattributed. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document HUMAN CHAUVINISM AND ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS * Richard and Vai Routley Class chauvinism has been and remains a cardinal weakness of most moral codes - including, so it will be argued, Western ethics. A most serious failure of Western ethics is its human chauvinism or anthropocentricism - a chauvinism which emerges in a refined, and apparently more reasonable, form as person chauvinism in much modern ethical theory. What is chauvinism? Class chauvinism, in the relevant sense, is differential, discriminatory and inferior treatment (by sufficiently many members of the class) for items outside the class, for which there is not justification. PLzwan chauvinism is class chauvinism where the class is humans, zzzuZe chauvinism where the class is human males, chauvinism where the class is animals, etc. It would be bud, to say the least, if Western ethics, in its various strands, were to turn out to rest on human, or person, chauvinism. For Western ethics would then have no better foundation than, and be open to the same sorts of objections as, moral codes based on other sorts of chauvinisms, e.g. on familial, national, sexual, racial or socio-economic class chauvinism - in particular it would be open to the objection that * This paper (which considerably elaborates R. Routley 'Is There a need for d ew, an environmental, ethic?', of f/ze XVfb VorZd P3 1 (1973), pp.205-10), was drafted in 1973 and read in 19 he University of Indiana, Bloomington, at Notre Dame University, an t the Conference on The Good Society held at the University of Canada. Since the main virtue of the paper has been that it h ed much interesting discussion, the original form has been retained, the authors are no longer especially happy with the form, an theses remain insufficiently developed or e the previous and continuing defended. But in order have been made, even though the criticism, no substanti paper has been raided and segments o it presented in improved form 'Against the inevitability elsewhere, especially (a) R. and V. Rou of human chauvinism', in MoruZ P/zfZosopbz/ e University Press, (edited by K. Goodpaster and K. Sayre), Notre 1978, and (b) R. and V. Routley, 'An expensiv , Choice utilitarianism', paper presented at the Colloquium on some u?zd VuZz^g, RSSS, Australian National University, 1977. sizeable additions have been made, with a view to incre intelligibility and enlarging the scope of the original draft, ing some of the many objections. 1 v' it discriminated against nonhumans in a prejudiced and unwarranted way, and would thereby stand condemned. For it is hard to see how an ethic based on simple species loyalty could have any greater claim to absolute­ ness or deserve any more respect than moral codes based on simple loyalty to national, sexual, or racial classes. Such an ethic could no more command allegiance - once the facts are brought into clear view - than other normally-deplored examples of localised class chauvinism, such as the Mafia or protection agencies or rackets or enclaves of slavery. Unfortunately prevailing Western ethics appear to be of just this sort. §1. THE WESTERN CASE FOR ITS HUMAN (OR PERSON) CHAUVINISM: THE FIRST LINES OF DEFENCE It is important, then, for defenders of the Western ideology to be able to show - i/ it can be shown - that an ethic which discriminates strongly in favour of humans, as Western ethics apparently does, is not chauvinistic. Otherwise the ethic stands condemned. Of course not every distinction in treatment qualifies as chauvinistic - the distinction in treatment may not be substantial or systematic, and there may be an adequate and explicable basis for the distinction, so that some discrimin­ ation is warranted. In order to escape the charge of human chauvinism, it has to be shown how and why the drastic and general discrimination in favour of humans sanctioned and enjoined by modern (as by historical) Western ethical systems is warranted, and that it has an adequate basis. The extent of this chauvinism, especially with respect to animals, is at last - after centuries of a priori prejudice and gross distortion of the characteristics of wild animals and wilderness - beginning to be spelt 'x out. 1 'X It is at least clear from the outset that an adequate justification cannot be provided which simply selects all and only these members of the species human (i.e. Zzcmo sup^e^s) as zoologically defined. nothing about the characteristic of There is itself (as distinct perhaps from its accompanying properties) which could provide a justification for overwhelmingly favourable treatment for humans (and unfavourable treatment for nonhumans) as opposed to other possible, and possibly some actual, nonhuman creatures. Once again, an adequate ethic and justification can­ not possibly be based on blind and unthinking species loyalty. The same 1 See, e.g., S. and R. Godlovitch and J. Harris (eds), 4^iwcZs^ and* Morals. 4% <?y Gollancz, London, 1971; P. Singer, 4 net.) /or cy Cape, London, 1976; S.R.L. Clark, 7'Zie -Staffs <?y 4^iwaZs, Clarendon, Oxford, 1977. 2 Meeds argument: objection applies against the simple the commonly assumed domination of human needs over all else (e.g. over all environ­ mental considerations) has, if it is to have any merit, to be based on 2 more than speciesism. We shall have to look then for some other not merely taxonomic characteristic to provide the sought justification. It will emerge however, that any such characteristic is held or may be held by nonhumans, and is not held, or potentially not held, by all items of the species human. Of course there are many characteristics which can, as a contingent matter, be used to distinguish human beings as a general class from other higher animals - although in fact with increasing knowledge of animals it is no longer clear that some of these characteristics distinguish as clearly as was assumed a priori in the past. For example, humans have a language, and a culture of a certain sort and even various logics. And, as we are accustomed to have people point out, other terrestrial animals do not conduct philosophical discussions on environmental ethics. However not only is participation in these activities potentially available to nonhuman creatures, and these characteristics possibly possessed by some, but these activities are not generally engaged in even by humans (particularly the power elite), many humans lack the requisite competence, and even among those who do qualify, such activities are carried out to a very varying extent. We run the risk, then, in applying such demanding criteria, of ruling out, of classing as deserving of "sub-human" or "sub­ person" treatment, a considerable class of human beings - items most humans would consider as worthy of better treatment than that normally accorded by humans to nonhuman animals. What is more important however is that such criteria as human language, culture, human civilization, human intentionality, or whatever, appear to provide no satisfactory for the substantially unfavourable treatment allotted those falling outside the privileged class. should there be such strong discrimination in favour of language or a higher level of creatures having a (certain sort of) intelligence and against creatures or items which do not, in favour of things with a certain sort of culture or a certain logic and against those without? Especially when some of these criteria are clearly, and As McCloskey remarked (in a letter dated 5.7.77 containing many helpful comments) 'talking about needs does little but obscure the problem, as needs, to be normatively relevant, involve reference to goods; and that merely transfers the problem'. On next page. 3 unjustifiably,loaded in favour of human interests, achievements and abilities (cf. the cultural loading of various intelligence tests). By contrast the very many respects in which some uvimuT-s or sorts of animals are corsftierabZi/ s^pericr to /zMwars (many are noted in V.B. Droscher, T^e Mayic o/ * t^e Senses. /VeM Diseorerfes tn ^nfmat Perception, Allen, London, 1969) are rarely considered; yet some of these features would, if taken in the same serious way as some respects in which humans excell, justify a reverse chauvinism (which could be reflected as, /or example, in the Hindu treatment of cows). The only sort of justification for the discrimination that might appear convincing - that those who have the given characteristic (e.g. those that are more intelligent, or more rational, or richer) are more valuable or worth special treatment - is vitiated by the fact that were it accepted by Western ethics it would warrant similar discrimination hcfMccv humans (or persons). For how do we show that the allegedly warranted discrimination is sufficiently different from making substantial (class) distinctions between humans in terms of their level of intelli­ gence, linguistic or logical ability, or level or kind of cultural achievement - so that those with "lower" levels of these valued abilities are treated in a consistently inferior way and regarded as available for the use of the others? In short, these characteristics do not provide adequate justification for the substantially inferior treatment accorded those not having them, and so the charge of chauvinism is not escaped by producing them. A similar set of points applies against a number of other criteria traditionally or recently proposed to distinguish the privileged class. 4 Often these are propounded in terms of personhood and criteria for being a pgrscyz (the class marked out for privileged treatment being the class of persons) rather than criteria for being /zvmuTZ - in order to escape difficulties raised by young, senile, decrepit, stupid, irrational, For undoubtedly many mammals, birds and insects can communicate, some­ times in ways analogous to language, even if the honorific term 'language' is withheld (see - to select an unfavourable source - the discussion in E.O. Wilson, TZze ZVetJ SpvtTzesis, Belknap, Cambridge Mass., 1975, chapter 8 ff.). It is becoming increasingly evident, however, that the ascription of some linguistic ability, and of elementary languages, to nonhuman creatures should not be withheld; see, e.g. the details assembled in E. Linden, 4pes^ Mev Lavpvupe, Penguin, New York, 1976. (But contrast Wilson, op. cit., pp.555-59, and to set this in proper perspective, consider Wilson's discussion of ethics and aesthetics a few pages later, pp.562-65.) Many of the criteria that have been proposed are assessed, and found wanting, in Routley (a). 4 damaged and defective humans, extraterrestrial creatures, and super animals; to avoid the merely contingent connections between being human and having requisite person-determining characteristics (such as ration­ ality or knowledge) supposed to warrant discriminatory treatment; and to defeat, though it is a pyrrhic victory, the charge of human chauvinism (or equivalents of the charge, such as anthropocentricism or speciesism). But much the same problems then arise in terms of criteria for a person, and the chauvinism problem reappears as the problem of furnish­ ing criteria which are suitably clearcut, and do separate persons from assumed nonpersons, and which would provide an adequate justification for substantially privileged treatment for persons and inferior treatment for nonpersons. Unless such a justification is forthcoming the charge of person c^unrin^sm is not escaped. Most of the criteria proposed for personhood fall down in just these sorts of ways, e.g. being autonomous, the having of projects, the producing of junk, the assessing of some of one's performances as successful or not, the awareness of oneself as an Not only does it appear that (the more worthy of) such criteria apply (or could apply) to many nonhuman animals - thus agent or initiator. animals are generally more autonomous (in main senses of the term) than humans, many animals have projects (e.g. home and nest building), and they are well aware of themselves, as opposed to rivals, as initiators of 5 projects - and that they do not apply uniformly to humans or indeed to persons in any ordinary sense; but again it is extremely difficult to see what there is in these characteristics which would warrant or justify the vast difference in treatment between the privileged and nonprivileged classes, or justify regarding the non-privileged class as something available for the of the privileged class. Similar objections can be lodged against the proposal that knowledge or the possession of knowledge, provides f/zg (or a ur^c-Lai!-) distinguishing It can hardly provide the appropriate filter, since it not only gives no sharp cut-off point, 6 but does not even always rank humans or feature. persons above nonhumans or nonpersons. Moreover, taken seriously it should lead to substantial moral differentiation between persons, a person's moral rating also fluctuating during his lifetime. In any case, For example, the shiftless intelligent person, or the primitive person, who has no projects and engages in no moral reflection, and thus offends protestant ethics, is not thereby deregisterable as a person, any more than an intelligent animal with projects can join the union. .6 on next page. 5 why rank knowledge so highly: for (paca Socrates) knowledge is not the foundation of virtue, but is frequently turned to evil ends, and even where it is meritorious it is not the sole (or even a crucial) criterion of worth. Similar difficulties apply too to the historic criterion of along with the added problem that it is very difficult to say what it is in any clear or generally acceptable way, or to prevent it from degenerating into a simple "pro" word. If a hallmark of rationality is commitment to the consequences of what one believes and seriously says, then many humans fail the test. If, on the other hand rationality is, for example, the ability to discover and pursue courses and actions likely to achieve desired goals (direct action toward goals), ability to solve problems concerned, etc., then plainly many animals have it, and possibly to a greater extent than humans in some cases (and of certain humans in If it were the ability, e.g. to do (say propositional calculus) or to assess reasoning verbally, then the (biassed) almost all cases). criterion would be far too strong and rule out many humans. Again, why should one make such a marked discrimination on this basis? What is so meritorious about this characteristic, that it warrants such a marked distinction? Nothing (at least in the ordinary academic's view, or logicians would receive more favoured treatment). Other criteria, which yield an analytic connection between being a person and enjoying freedom or having rationality, in part beg the question. For in persons - are free. respect is it that persons - or worse, just Also the justificatory problem, as to how the claimed freedom or rationality warrants such differential treatment, remains. Characterisations of persons vary enormously, from so strong that they rule out suburban humans who are not "self-made" enterpreneurs, to so weak that they admit very /nanp animals. An (unintentional) example of the latter is the following: persons, that is, ... beings who are not only sentient but also capable of intensional autonomous action, beings that must be ascribed not only states of consciousness but also states of belief, thought and intention (A. Townsend, /iMstraZasfar 'Radical vegetarians', PAfZosopTip, 57 (1979), p.89). 6 In addition, the relation "a has at least as much knowledge as b" is only a partial ordering. For example, a dog's and a child's knowledge may be incomparable, because they know about different matters, how to do quite different sorts of things, etc. (The idea that knowledge is the key to moral discrimination, that it is what makes humans rank the way Western ethics ranks them, may be found in C.B. Daniels, TZze 6>y FZ^fcaZ Y'/ieorfgs, Philosophy in Canada Monograph, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1975.) 6 Most rats and rabbits satisfy the conditions: they are sentient, conscious animals that have intentions (e.g. to get through some barrier such as a floor or a fence), beliefs and thoughts preferred food beyond the barrier). (e.g. that there is For his further argument Townsend shifts - without notice, but in a way that is quite typical of this scene - to stronger requirements upon being a person (such that one who does not meet them is incapacitated as a person) which rule out many humans, e.g. 'The person must recognise canons of evidence and inference warranting changes in his beliefs, and be capable of changing his beliefs 7 accordingly' (op. cit., p.90). In meeting hypothetical objections, Townsend slips in a further require­ ment of rationality, but the characterisation of person given does not include any such requirement. Subsequently, however, Townsend commits himself, without argument, to the thesis that 'a fairly high degree of rationality is prerequisite' to attributing 'intensionality' (as dis­ tinct from 'intentionality'). This is not going to help much. For, firstly, rationality is very much a notion which admits of degrees, without the relatively sharp cut-off stages required for pgrscvz as a notion of orthodox moral relevance, or possessed by the notion of to which Townsend sneaks back in his chauvinistic conclusion (p.93). Secondly, TzozJ high a degree is prerequisite for being a person? If only enough to satisfy the conditions for being a person, then the animals that are persons have it. If more, then either the initial characterisation of a person fails or the thesis breaks down. The much stronger requirements upon being a person that Townsend sub­ sequently appeals to are said to derive from S.I. Benn. But, if any­ thing they strengthen one of the stronger of several KOHegtcZvaZenf characterisations of (%afMruZ) person - none of them equivalent to - that Benn has at various times offered. While Benn's weaker characterisations appear to admit at least many "higher" animals, e.g. that of a natural person as a chooser, conscious of himself as able to make a difference to the way the world goes, by deciding to do this rather than that, having projects, therefore, of his own, whose life experience may consequently be understood, not simply as a chronicle of events, but as an enterprise, on which he puts his own construct­ ion ((a) 'The protection and limitation of privacy, Part I', LazJ <7a^r?za:Z, 52 (1978), p.605); the stronger characterisations which invoke (rather vaguely specified, and (Ziy/greuf) minimum conditions of rationality in belief and action said to imply respcHsfbiZitp on bhe part of the person for what s/he does, though they do - exclude many of the creatures admitted by weaker characterisations. For such stronger characterisations see 'Individuality, autonomy and community' in CowwL/yrZfp (ed. E. Kamenka) Edward Arnold (forthcoming) and (c) 'Freedom, autonomy and the concept of a person', c/ thg PocZefp, 76 (1976), pp.109-30. 7 The foregoing points, taken together, support our contention that it is not possible to provide criteria which would distinguishing, in the sharp way standard Western ethics do, between humans and certain nonhuman creatures, and particularly those creatures which have preferg ences or preferred states. For such criteria appear to depend upon the mistaken assumption that moral respect for other creatures is due only when they can be shown to measure up to some rather and traded tests for membership of a privileged class (essentially an elitist view), instead of upon, say, respect for the preferences of other creatures. Accordingly sk<2rp nzoraZ commonly accepted in ethics by philosophers and others alike, hgfzjggzz uZZ Tztzwuzzs Zacks a satfs/cctcr^ cokcrcrzt basfs. anZmaZ aZZ ofker The distinction, which historically rested on the assumption that humans possessed a soul (or higher reason) but that other animals, brutes, did not, appears to have been uncritically retained even after the religious beliefs or philosophical theories underpinning it have been abandoned. Given that the distinction underlying human chauvinism fails, is there anywhere satisfactory demarcations of moral relevance can be made 9 among things? Yes, several divisions of wcrcZ can be made; but of these coincides with a division into human and others. Consider, first, the question of consideration others, and the matter of which offers are to be taken into account in cases where others' interests and preferences are affected by some action. Insofar as moral consideration for others (among sentient items) is based on analogical (empathetic, and essentially inductive) principles, such as taking account of their worthwhile preferences, objectives, interests etc., There are of course further arguments for the contention, for example from the anatomical and physiological affinities of human and other animals, from their common evolutionary history, and so on. These arguments are of varying force; for example, evolutionary arguments can be arrested, temporarily, by the claim that there was a "quantum jump" in human evolutionary development which did not occur with other creatures with a previously shared evolutionary history (cf. Wilson, op. cit.). Although the divisions may be conceptually sharp enough, they are any­ thing but sharp when applied in the field to the variety of creatures and circumstances that occur. For example, preference-havers is, so far at least, sharp enough, but it is far from clear which creatures qualify, e.g. which, if any, Crustacea? For the present most of these potential decision cases are cases for cheerful indecision; but, alternatively, the divisions may be viewed - perhaps better - not as sharp boundaries, but as gradation states, as where two colours in a rainbow meet. 8 it is difficult to see how such consideration can fail to apply to all (including nonhuman) preference-having creatures; and one does not need to apply criteria such as linguistic ability, navigational ability, intelligence, piano-playing, hunting skill, etc., to obtain a basis for such consideration (indeed one cannot). of preferences (and The of preferences revealed through choices) is however a quite sufficient basis for sort of consideration and concern. It is at this point, we suggest, that the requisite, important and non-arbitrary distinction is to be drawn which marks out the class of creatures towards which obligations may be held; that is, the usually recognised principles of consideration towards others (of the privileged class) properly extend or should be generalised to consideration for other creatures having prefer­ ences, and t/ze corresponding penerut defecsihZe odtipution principle is not to pnt others ("ot/zer pre/erence-Zzurers? into a dispre/erred state for no pood reason. Insofar as moral behaviour is based on consideration for others and not harming others, preference-having provides an adequate basis, and does appear to provide a sufficient justification for substantially different treatment for preference-having over non-preference-having items - because items without preference cannot (literally) be put into a dispreferred state. Thus preference-having appears to tie in with an important basis for moral obligation, and appears to provide a superior criterion, for a certain serf of moral consideration, to other criteria sometimes proposed such as sentience - or, differently, intelligence especially since in the absence of preferences such notions as Jzurminp something (in a way that does affect it) and damaging its interests become difficult of application (not to say nonsignificant, except in extended senses). The unsatisfactoriness of the sentience criterion for what one can hold obligations towards can be grasped from the case of the sentient machine or purely sentient creature which does not have preferen­ ces, does not care what state it is in or whether it is destroyed,etc. The sentience criterion is often converted by utilitarians into a suffer­ ing criterion, by taking pain as a paradigm of sentience: but plainly the two criteria diverge since some sentient creatures may never feel pain or suffer. Suffering is even less satisfactory than sentience; for suffering is neither necessary nor sufficient for being in a dispreferred state (consider masochists who suffer but are not in a dispreferred state, and well-treated workers who are in a dispreferred state but do not suffer). Preference-having provides a lower bound; it is a sufficient but -not necessary condition for being an object of this sort of moral 9 consideration and concern. That it is not necessary is revealed, independently of environmental examples, by the following sorts of cases: the treatment of "human vegetables", successful stoics, and science­ fiction cases in which people are brain-washed into performing certain goals and having no dispreferred states apart from the programmed goals. In all three cases the question of dispreferences does not arise, but relevant moral issues can.^^ The necessary condition, that corresponds to preference-having as a sufficient condition, appears to be capability at some time (e.g. previously, when developed) for preference-having. It has been taken for granted that many animals (from species higher on the evolutionary scale) have preferences, make choices, and the like. This is the merest commonsense, which can be readily confirmed in a scientific way. For example, some of the preference-rankings of a black­ tail wallaby as to types of foliage to eat are readily established by observation, and it is fairly straightforward verifying that bushrats prefer cheese to soap, this preference being revealed by regular choices. It has however been claimed by some recent philosophers, for reasons apparently different from those offered by traditional philosophers such as Aristotle, Aquinas and Descartes,H that animals do not have intentions, or at least do not have them in a full sense. It is unclear whether these intentions, which are taken to include thoughts and beliefs and, perhaps, desires, include preferences; but it is hard to see how preferences, which are intentional, are excluded if desires are included in intentions. The recent arguments to show that animals do not really have intentions, which do not bear much investigation even in such central cases as 12 belief, appear extremely feeble when applied to preference. For the arguments start from the claim that we cannot say zj/zuf it is that animals As N. Griffin, who supplied the examples, remarked a similar thing happens also in less extreme cases of the type brought in to prominence, e.g., by the women's movement: that it is possible, by means of indoctrination, to limit the range of someone's dispreferences; treatment of such persons may still remain immoral even when it does not place them outside the (artificially widened) range of their preferred states. The traditional reasons look slight also in the case of preferences and choices. It would have been claimed - the theory forces the claim - that animals' choices could not be rational. Interestingly, choices of many animals conform to behavioural criteria for rationality pro­ posed in economics. See J. Bishop, 'More thought on thought and talk', (forthcoming) and R. Routley, 'Alleged problems in attributing beliefs to animals', paper prepared for the FeZig/ conference, University of Queensland, 1979. 10 believe (of course very often we can, and unproblematically) and fall back on the claim that animals lack concepts of a fit sort. In the case of preferences, however, there is often no problem in saying what it is animals prefer, or in confirming the claim. Nor is it that we cannot attribute propositional-style preferences to animals; if black-tail wallabies prefer, as they do, new foliage to old then they prefer the foliage's being new over the foliage's being old. As for the concept claim, in the sense in which concept is delineated in psychology, animals have concepts. And if a philosopher's notion of "concept" gets in the way of the claim that free dogs prefer bones to carrots (or other vegetables) then it is not the claim that requires revision, but the philosopher's notion. The preference-having criteria appear to distinguish non-arbitrarily and sharply enough between higher animals and other items, and to rule out of the relevant class elementary animals, trees, rocks and also some human items, e.g. human kidneys. The criteria plainly exclude inanimate objects, and they separate animate objects. For while living creatures such as plants and elementary animals can be said in an extended sense to have and also optimal living conditions, e.g., for healthy develop­ ment, and in sense to have preferred states or environments, they do not have preferences, and cannot strictly be harmed or have their welfare affected, in that they can be put into states they disprefer. Nor do empathy and analogical considerations extend beyond preference-having creatures: for only these can care about how they are treated. At the same time the criteria indicate another important division. For in a wider sense, animate objects which do not (significantly) have preferences or make choices, are sometimes said to have 'preferred states' or 'preferred environments' (as, e.g., in 'the plant prefers a sunny frost-free location with a well drained soil'). us say that the or To avoid confusion let of animate objects and also such biological items as ecosystems can be affected in one way or another, e.g. increased, decreased, upset. For instance, the wellbeing of a coastal community and of the individual trees in it can be reduced to zero by sandmining, and it can be seriously threatened by pumping waste detergent In this broad sense too, living things, things that participate in the growth process, have interests. However under a narrower and more common determinate of the slippery term 'interests', only preference­ havers have interests (again sentient creatures do not provide the boundary). Because the term 'interests' so readily admits of high redefinition, and the infiltration of chauvinism, its use is better limited (or even avoided), in favour of other more stable terms. 11 into the nearby ocean. There is a general obligation principle corresponding likewise to this more comprehensive class of welfare­ bearers, namely, z-zat fa jaaparjise tTze zJaHhefzzp a_f ?zatzzraZ abjaafs or sz/sfews zjft/zaz^t paad reasor. Moral coroerr does not of course end with what is in some way animate, much as the class of valuable objects is not tied to what relates suitably to central preference-havers. In suitable settings, a (virtually) dead landscape, a rare stone, a cave, can be items of moral or aesthetic concern; indeed any object of value can in principle be of such concern, and arzp abjact car., in principle at least, be ar object a/ value or disvalue, and so of morat corcerr. corcerrfry almost any sort of object. There can then be obligations Naturally only a fraction of the things that exist have especial value, and only a few of the things that exist will be things concerning which some of us have obligations. Furthermore these sorts of obligations do not in general reduce to the conditions or arrangements (e.g. contractual or joint welfare arrangements) of preference-havers or some select subclass thereof (what will sub­ sequently be called, as the argument is developed, the base c^ass). Just as there are relevant divisions beyond the class of preference­ havers, so there are within the class. Thus the suggestion that the class hazards which moral obligations (and a corresponding serf of moral concern which takes account of creatures' states) may be held is bounded by the class of preference-havers, does not of course imply that %a dfsfizzcfiazzs can be made zjffbfrz the class of preference-havers with respect to the kind of behaviour appropriate to them. For example, cazifracfzzaT- obligations - which by no means exhaust obligations - can only be held directly (as distinct from by way of a representative) with respect to a much narrower class of creatures, from which many humans are excluded. The class is also distinct from the class of persons, at least as 'person' is usually characterised. What emerges is an ann^Zar pfcfzzra of types of objects of moral relevance, some matched by types of moral obligation (described toward the end of Routley (a)), with nested zones representing respectively different sorts of objects - such as, objects of moral concern, welfare-having objects, preference-havers (and choice-makers), right-holders, obligation­ holders and responsibility-bearers, those contractually-committed-and the different sorts of obligations that can significantly apply to such objects. Not all the types of objects indicated are distinct, nor is the listing intended to be exhaustive but rather illustrative. For strictly the labels given should be expanded, as the distinctions are categorial ones, so that what matters is not whether an object is, for instance, 12 contractually committed in some fashion but whether it is the sort of thing that can be, whether it can significantly enter into or be committed by arrangements of a contractual kind. is to Similarly function as a categorial marker, that marks out the sorts of things that can (significantly) have preferences: the assumption that preference­ havers coincide with choice-makers is based on this categorial reading. Although the annular picture is (as will become clear in §5) important for the environmental alternative to be elaborated, and in meeting object­ ions to it, the countercharge has been laid that it reintroduces chauvin­ ism through its inegalitarian distinctions. This is a mistake: not every sort of ethical distinction, certainly not a justified distinction, involves chauvinism. Chauvinism is exhibited where, for example, objects of a favoured class are treated in a preferential way to superior items of an exluded class, e.g. defective humans as against apes, degenerate French against normal Pygmies. The annular picture neither involves nor encourages such differences in treatment: it is neutral and unchauvin- istic, for the reason that it relies only on categorial distinctions which tie analytically with ethical notions (see the semantical analyses of §5). It is certainly in no way species chauvinist or human chauvinist. For none of the zones of the annular picture comprises the class of humans (or its minor variant the class of persons); for this class is not of moral relevance. The reason is that the human/nonhuman distinction is not an ethically significant one, and can, and should, be demoted from its dominant, and damaging, position in ethical theory. But dropping the notion of out of ethics, is only part of the ethical change that is called for: taking due account of nonhumans is also required. In particular - to return to the theme - what is quite unacceptable, . . 14 and based on a set of distinctions which are arbitrary and unjustifiable, is the differential treatment enjoined nonpersons as distinct from persons under Western ethics, and the view that only persons or humans have any (nonderivative) right to moral consideration and concern as preference-havers and that there are obligations towards other creatures 14 According to Q. Gibson such a criticism of chauvinism is based firmly on Western ethical equality and egalitarian principles. This is simply not so: there is no reliance on such principles. The general argument takes the form; feature f cannot be what justifies the differential treatment of humans and nonhumans, because either f is not morally relevant or not all humans have f or some nonhumans have f. Neither equality nor substitutions based upon equality are invoked at any stage. Moreover Western equality principles - at least as convention­ ally formulated - are in serious doubt, especially with the rejection of human chauvinism (see further §6). 13 only insofar as these are or reduce to obligations to persons or humans. §2. THE EXTENT OF CHAUVINISM, AND FURTHER LINES OF DEFENCE Western ethics are, then, human chauvinist in that they characterist­ ically take humans (or, to make a slight improvement, persons) to be the only items worthy of proper moral consideration, and sanction or even enjoin substantially inferior treatment for the class of non-human preference-having creatures, without - so it certainly appears - adequate justification. The prevailing nineteenth century Western attitude to wild creatures is evident from Judge Blackstone (quoted approvingly in W. Cobbett, Penguin, London, 1967, pp.431): With regard likewise to wild animals, aZZ bub by tbe o/ ZTzg Creator a right to pursue and take away any fowl or insect of the air, any fish or inhabitant of the waters, and any beast or reptile of the field: and this natural right still continues in every individual, unless where it is restrained by the civil laws of the country. And when a man has once so seized them, they become, while living his qualified property, or if dead, are absolutely his own. Prevailing Western attitudes have not shifted markedly since that time; for example, foresters, widely regarded as socially responsible, think nothing of dislodging from their homes and environment, or even destroying, communities of animals which do not directly interfere with human welfare. But there is another very important broader respect in which Western ethics are human (or person) chauvinistic, namely in the treat­ ment accorded to and attitude taken towards the broader class of natural items such as trees and forests, herbs, grasslands and swamps, soils and waterways and ecosystems. Unlike higher animals such items cannot liter­ ally be put into dispreferred states (and in fbbs obvious sense, as opposed to the wider sense of 'interests' tied to welfare, they have no interests), but they can be damaged or destroyed or have their uaZ^e eroded or impaired. The Western, chauvinistic, assumption is that this can only happen where human interests are affected. The basic assumption is that value attaches essentially only to humans or to what serves or bears on human interests, or derivatively, to items which derive from human skill, ingenuity or labour. Since natural items have no other value, there is no restriction on the way they are treated insofar as this does not interfere with others; as far as -ZsoZufgb natural things are con­ cerned anything is permissible. 14 It is, at base, because of these chauvinistic features of Western ethics that there is a need for a new ethic and value theory (and so derivatively for a new economics, and new politics, etc.) setting out not just people's relations to preference-havers generally but also (along with many other things) people's relations to the natural environment - in Leopold's words 'an ethic dealing with man's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it' (A. Leopold, SuTzd" zlZ-muzzur? zjvt/z ot/zer essays on Conservation, New York, 1966, p.238). It is not of course that old and prevailing ethics do not deal with man's relation to nature: they do, and on the prevailing view man is free to deal with nature as he pleases, i.e. his relations with nature - insofar at least as they do not affect others, as pollution and vandalism do - are not subject to moral censure. Thus assertions such as 'Crusoe ought not to be mutilating those trees' are significant and morally determinate but inasmuch at least as Crusoe's actions do not interfere with others, they are false or do not hold - and trees are not, in a good sense, moral objects. It is to this, to the values and evaluations of the prevailing ethics, that Leopold, Fraser Darling and many others, both earlier and later, take exception. Leopold regards as subject to moral criticism, as wrong, behaviour that on prevailing views is morally permissible. But it is not, then, as Leopold seems to think, that such behaviour is beyond the scope of the prevailing ethics and that merely an extension of traditional morality is required to cover such cases, to fill a moral void. If Leopold is right in his criticism of prevailing conduct, what is required is a change in the ethics, in attitudes, values and evaluations; for example, what is permissible on the prevailing ethics will be no longer permissible on the new. For as matters stand, as Leopold himself explains, humans generally do not feel morally ashamed if they interfere with a wilderness, if they maltreat the land, extract from it whatever will yield, and then move on; and such conduct is not taken to interfere with and does not rouse the moral indignation of others, and is accordingly permissible on prevailing ethics. As Leopold says: A farmer who clears the woods off a 75% slope, turns his cows into the clearing, and dumps its rainfall, rocks, and soil into the community creek, is still (if otherwise decent) a respected member of society (op. cit., p.245). Only recently has such behaviour begun to be seriously questioned and become the subject of criticism, e.g. by environmentalists. Under what will be accounted an erzvvroHwgutaZ. et/zvc, however, such traditionally 15 permissible conduct would be accounted morally wrong, and the farmer subject to proper moral criticism. That ethics and morality are not, and never have been, restricted to human concerns, or exclusively to relations between persons, is important in rebutting objections to the very idea of an environmental ethic, based on the premiss that morality just is restricted (definitionally) to human relationships (and connected values) and is not significant beyond that. The problem of moral relations with respect to preference-havers other than persons and to inanimate items cannot be resolved or escaped simply by declaring morality to apply solely,or as a matter of meaning or defin­ ition only to humans (or to persons). For first, such a solution would run counter to the common view that humans are subject to seme moral con­ straints, even if comparatively minor ones, towards other creatures; the having of such constraints cannot be ruled out definitionally, and corres­ pondingly the judgments formulating these constraints or prohibitions cannot be ruled out as nonsignificant, yet they are surely moral. The only way in the end, that the claim gets support is by a narrow, and no longer acceptable, account of what is mcraZ in terms of concern with humans alone (cf. §6). Likewise, the question of the moral interrelations of humans with intelligent nonhuman extraterrestrial beings, even if at present hypothetical, is certainly a meaningful one, and some interesting and clearly moral issues of this sort are frequently raised in science fiction. Only if the extent of morality is, somewhat misleadingly, reconstrued in terms of the class of constraints on the behaviour of those it applies to - that is, in terms of limitations, as distinct from moral freedom does the claim that Western morality is restricted to humans (or persons) begin to gain plausibility. For it is true that beyond the favoured base class, humans or persons, few constraints are supposed to operate (and ad hoc ones at that) unless the welfare of members of the base class is adversely affected. Under an environmental ethic, such as that Leopold advocates, this would change: previously unconstrained behaviour would sense the scope of morality would be morally circumscribed, and in be extended. It is not evident, however, that a ethic, an ethic in the case at hand, is required to accommodate even radical new judgments seriously constraining traditionally approved conduct, i.e. imposing limitations on behaviour previously considered morally permissible. For one reason it is none too clear what is going to count as a new ethic, much as it is often unclear whether a new development in physics counts as a new physics or just as a modification or extension of the old. 16 For, notoriously, ethics are not clearly articulated or at all well worked out, so that the application of identity criteria for ethics may remain obscure. They are nonetheless (pace Quineans) perfectly good objects for investigation. Furthermore, there is a tendency to cluster a family of ethical systems which do not differ on core or fundamental principles together as the one ethic: e.g. the Christian ethic, which is an umbrella notion covering a cluster of differing and even competing systems. There are two other possibilities, apart from a new environmental ethic, which might cater for the new principles and evaluations; that of an extension or modification of the prevailing ethic, and that of the development of principles that are already encompassed or latent within the prevailing ethic. The possibility that environmental evaluations can be incorporated within (and ecological problems solved within) the not inflexible framework of prevailing Western ethics, may appear open because there is not a single ethical system uniquely assumed in Western civiliz­ ation: on many issues, and especially on controversial issues such as infanticide, women's rights and drugs, there are competing sets of principles. Talk of a new ethic and prevailing ethics tends to suggest a sort of monolithic structure, a uniformity, that prevailing ethics, and even a single ethic, need not have. The Western ethic is not so monolithic In particular, three important traditions in Western ethical views 15 concerning man's relation to nature have recently been mapped out: a dominant tradition, the despotic position, with man as despot (or tyrant), and two lesser traditions, the stewardship position, with man as custod­ ian, and the cooperative position with man as perfector. the only traditions; Nor are these primitivism is another, and both romanticism and mysticism have influenced Western views. The dominant Western view is simply inconsistent with an environmental ethic; for according to it nature is the dominion of man and he is free to deal with it as he pleases (since - at least on the mainstream Stoic16 Augustine view - it exists only for his sake ), whereas on an See especially (a) J. Passmore, Afurz's Duckworth, London, 1974; also R. Nash, Affzzd, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1973. (All further references to Passmore's work are, unless otherwise indicated, to Passmore (a).) The dominant position has also been sketched in many other recent texts, e.g. I. McHarg, Doubleday, New York, 1969, while the lesser traditions have been appealed to in meeting criticisms of the Western ethic as involving the dominant view. The masculine particles are appropriate; 17 so is the resulting tone. environmental ethic man is not so free to do as s/he pleases. But it is not quite so obvious that an environmental ethic cannot be coupled with one of the lesser traditions. Part of the problem is that the lesser traditions are by no means adequately characterised anywhere, especially when the religious backdrop is removed, e.g. (as further considered in §4) who is man steward for and responsible to? However both traditions are inconsistent with a deeper environmental ethic because they imply policies of complete interference, whereas on an environmental ethic some worthwhile parts of the earth's surface should be preserved from sub­ stantial human interference, whether of the "improving" sort or not. Both traditions would in fact prefer to see the earth's land surfaces reshaped along the lines of the tame and comfortable but ecologically impoverished European small farm and village langscape. According to the cooperative position man's proper role is to develop, cultivate and perfect nature - all nature eventually - by bringing out its potential­ ities, the test of perfection being basically /ur while on the stewardship view man's role, like that of a farm manager, is to make nature productive by his efforts though not by means that will deliberately degrade its resources. Thus these positions figure among those of the shallow ecological movement (as depicted by A. Naess, 'The shallow and the deep, long-range ecology movement', 16 (1973), 95-100): longer term. they are typically exploitative, even if only in the Although these lesser positions both depart from the dominant position in a way which enables the incorporation of some evaluations of an environmental ethic, e.g. some of those concerning the irresponsible farmer, and allow for some of the modern extensions of the Western ethic that have been made, e.g. concerning the treatment of animals and criticisms of vandalism, they are not well-developed, fit poorly into the prevailing framework, and do ^<9 /ar For in the present situation of expanding populations confined to finite natural areas, they will lead to, and enjoin the perfecting, farming and utilizing of all natural areas. Indeed these lesser traditions lead to, what a thorough­ going environmental ethic would reject, a principle of total use, implying that every natural area should be cultivated or otherwise used for 17 if 'use' is extended, somewhat illicitly, to include use for preservation, this total use principle is rendered innocuous at least as regards it actual effects. Note that the total use principle, in the usual sense, is tied to the resource view of nature (cf. (d) R. and V. Routley, T/ze /or f/ze Forests, Third Edition, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1975). Such a principle, like the requirement of economic growth, emerges directly from - it is an integral part of neoclassical economic theory. 18 "humanized". As the important Western traditions mentioned exclude an environ­ mental ethic, it would appear, at first glance anyway, that such an ethic - not primitive, mystical or romantic - would be new alright - or at least new from a Western perspective. For, from a wider perspective, which takes due account of traditional societies (such as those of some American Indians, Australian Aboriginals, and Pygmies), there is, it will turn out, nothing so very new about what is included in (as distinct from the theoretical setting of) the "new" ethics. Even from the narrow Western perspective, the matter is not so straightforward: for the dominant ethic has been substantially qualified, in particular by the rider that one is not always entitled to do as one pleases where this 19 physically interferes with others. " It may be that some such non-inter­ ference proviso was implicit all along (despite evidence to the contrary); and that it was simply assumed that doing what one pleased with natural 20 items would not affect others (a?2CMfnfcr/cre?Ycc cssz^npffcyz). Be this as it may, the wcdfyfeti pcsfffoz? appears, at least for many thinkers, to have supplanted the dominant position; and the modified position can undoubtedly go much further towards an environmental ethic. For example the farmer's polluting of a community stream may be ruled immoral on the grounds that it physically interferes with others who use or would use the stream. Likewise business enterprises which destroy the natural environ­ ment for no satisfactory (taxable) returns or which cause pollution deleterious to the health of future humans can be criticised on the sort of welfare basis (e.g. that of P.W. Barkley and D.W. Seckier, Economic Humanization, and humanitarian measures, may be a cloak for human chauvinism - in which case, far from being virtuous, they may be positively undesirable. Also, as Leopold has observed, the class of others has been progress­ ively widened, e.g. from the family group, to the tribe, to the nation or race, even to all humans including often enough future humans - but rarely further in the West until recently. 20 The assumption is not the same as its relative, Benn's principle of rzo^-i^fcrycrcuce, 'that no one may legitimately frustrate or prevent (or interfere with) a person's doing what he chooses to do, unless there is some reason for preventing him' (Benn (c), op. cit.; inset from (a), p.605). The principle is said to derive from 'the notion of a person' (e.g. (a), p.605), but it only so derives given commission of the fallacy of conversion of an A-proposition. Moreover even reduced to a 'formal principle ... locating the onus of justification' (cf.(a)), the principle is dubious, especially cyiven principles of respect for objects other than persons, with which persons may be interfering. It is, however, a formal principle that will help to keep entreprenuerial humans happy. 19 Pggg:2/, Grczjf?? T^g S c7Mf7c?? * f-ggcwgs f/zg PrchZgw^ York, 1972) that blends with the modified position; be criticised on welfare grounds; and so on. New vandalism can usually The modified position may even serve to restrict the sort of family size one is entitled to have, since in a finite situation excessive population levels will interfere with future people. Nonetheless neither the modified dominant position nor its Western variants, obtained by combining it with the lesser trad­ itions, is adequate as an environmental ethic. chauvinism. None moves outside human They are all encompassed under the Dowz'nic?? t??gsis - the view that the earth and all its non-human contents exist or are available for human benefit or to serve human interests, and hence that humans are entitled to manipulate the world and its systems as they want, in their own interests - which is but the ecological restatement of the strong thesis of human chauvinism, according to which items outside the privil­ eged human class have no value except one as instrumental value (both theses are criticised in Routley (a)). To escape from chauvinism, and from its thesis, a new ethic 7s wanted, as we now try to show. §3. GENERAL ENVIRONMENTAL ARGUMENTS AGAINST WESTERN ETHICS The main argument is directed primarily against the modified dominant position, but will incidentally show the inadequacy of the lesser Western traditions. The strategy is to locate core features of Western ethics, and to reveal through examples their thoroughgoing chauvinism and class bias, and in this way to provide decisive grounds for rejecting For the general argument some more technical points have to be made them. first. (An) gf^7g is ambiguous, as between a specific ethical system, a spgcffiu ethic, and a more generic notion, a SMpgr-gf^fg, under which specific ethics are grouped. (As usual, a wgfu-ethic is a theory about ethics, super-ethics, their features and fundamental notions.) An sz/sfgm s is, near enough, a propositional system (i.e. a structured set of propositions) or a theory which includes (like individuals of a theory) a set of values and (like postulates of a theory) a set of general evaluative judgments concerning conduct, typically of what is obligatory, permissible and wrong, of what are rights and responsibilities, what is valued, and so forth. (On newer perceptions an ethical system will include rather less in the way of prescriptions, of duties, obligations and the like, and more as to what are matters of care and of concern and for respect.) Since an ethical system is propositional in character, such notions as consistency, coherence, independence of 20 assumptions, and the like, apply to it without further ado. It is evident, from a consideration of competing or incompatible values and principles, that t/zgre are Z^z/iz-z-ZteZz/ wary gf/zZcuZ sz/stezns. Moreover appropriately general criteria for rationality will not reduce this class to a singleton. . Accordingly, there is logical space for aZferratire ratiaraZ etTzies. A general or lawlike proposition of a system (characterised along similar lines to a scientific law) is a pr-ZzzcZpZe; and certainly if systems Si and S2 contain different principles, they they are different systems. It will follow then that an environmental ethic differs from the important traditional ethics outlined if it differs on some principles. Moreover if environmental ethics differ from each Western ethical system on some core principle or other embedded in that Western system, then these systems differ from the Western super-ethic (assuming, what seems to be so, that that ethic can be sufficiently characterised) - in which case if an environmental ethic is needed then a new ethic is wanted. It would suffice then to locate a common core principle and to provide environmental counterexamples to it. It is illuminating (and necessary, so it will emerge) to attempt to do a little more than this minimum, with a view to bringing out the basic assumptions of the Western super-ethic. Two major classes of evaluative statements, commonly distinguished, are axiological statements, concerning what is good, worthwhile, valuable, best, etc., and deontological state­ ments, which concern what is obligatory, permissible, wrong, etc. Now there appear to be core principles of Western ethics on both axiological and deontic fronts, principles, for example, as to what is valuable and as to what is permissible. Naturally these principles are interconnected, because anything is permitted with respect to what has no value except insofar as it interferes with what does have value. A strong historical case can be made out for what is commonly assumed, that there are, what amount to, core principles of Western ethical systems, principles that will accordingly belong to the superethic. example. The fairness principle inscribed in the Golden Rule provides one Directly relevant here, as a good stab at a core deontic principle, is the commonly formulated liberal principle of the modified dominant position. A recent formulation of this principle runs as 21 follows (Barkley and Seckier, op. cit., p.58): 21 On next page. 21 The liberal philosophy of the Western world holds that (D) one should be able to do what he wishes, providing (1) that he does not harm others {and (2) that he is not likely to harm himself irreparably}. The principle, which is built into or derivable from most traditional ethical theories, may be alternatively formulated in terms of permissib­ ility, as the principle that a pgrscu's action is <ioos not intor/ere zjit/z others, profide<i if (i.e. other people, including perhaps the A related economic principle is that free enterprise can operate agent). within similar limits. It is because of these permissibility formulations that the principle - which incorporates fundamental features of (human or person) chauvinism - is sometimes hailed as a freedom principle; for it gives permission to perform a wide range of actions (including actions which degrade the environment and natural things) providing they do not harm others. others. In fact it tends to cunningly shift the onus of proof to It is worth remarking that 'harming others' in the restriction is narrower than a restriction to the (usual) interests of others; it is not enough that it is in my interests, because I detest you, that you stop breathing; you are free to breath, for the time being anyway, because it does not harm me. There remains a problem however as to exactly what counts as harm or interference. Mo'reover the width of the principle is so far obscure, because 'other' may be filled out in significantly different ways: it makes a difference to the extent - and privilege - of The principle is attributed by Barkley and Seckier to Mill, though something like it was fairly common currency in nineteenth century European thought. It appears, furthermore, that Mill would have rejected the principle on account of clause (2): thus, for example: Those interests, I contend, authorise the subjection of individual spontaneity to external control, ouZi/ in respect of those actions of each, which concern the interest of people (J.S. Mill, f-Zbgrfy Everyman's Library, Dent, London, 1910, p.74, emphasis added). The deletion of clause (2) from (D) does not affect the general argument: hence the braces. (We owe this reference and the points in the next footnote to N. Griffin.) A similarly modified form of (D) is found in much recent Western literature, even radical literature which purports to make due allow­ ance for environmental concerns. A good example of the latter is I. Illich, TcoZs /or Calder & Boyers, London, 1973, where Mill's (D) appears, in various forms, at several places (e.g. p.xii, p.41). What this indicates is that Illich's "convivial society" will not - if its principles are taken seriously - move beyond chauvinism in its treatment of animals and the natural environment; it will at best yield some form of resource conservation. 22 the chauvinism whether 'other' expands to 'other human' - which is too restrictive - or to 'other person' or to 'other sentient being'; and it makes a difference to the adequacy of the principle, and inversely to its economic applicability, to which class of other persons it is intended to apply, whether to future as well as to present others, whether to remote future others or only to nondiscountable future others, and whether to possible others. The latter would make the principle untestable and com­ and it is generally assumed that it pletely unworkable in practice; applies at most to present and (some) future others, to those to whom it 22 would make a (fairly immediate) difference (thus excluding past others ). For the purposes of the general argument however, the problems in specify­ ing the class of others is not material, so long as the class includes no 23 more than persons that at some time exist. Fortunately the main argument is not very sensitive to the precise formulation of principle (D). Not only can clause (2) be deleted, and 'other' left rather unspecific, but additions can be made; then even if the main argument does not succeed, minor oarianfs a/ fba main argument zjiZ^ snccooti. An important case concerns the treatment of animals. Unless (D) is construed widely (extending 'other'), or hedged by further qualifying clauses,the basic principle fails to take proper account of concern for animals, especially that one should not inflict "unnecessary" cruelty or "impermissible" harm. animals then comes to matter; these issues can be avoided. What counts as permissible harm to and familiar conflict issues arise. But For the core principle (0), of basic chauvinism, can be modified to include (historically recent) moral concern for higher animals by adding, after 'harm others', something like 'or harm animals unnecessarily'. Then however the new principle succumbs to the Although the interests and preferences of past others are excluded in conventional utilitarianism, as in (welfare) economic theory and vot­ ing theory, these are often respected in ethical and legal settings, e.g. in wills, last wishes, etc. Similarly (as N. Griffin also point­ ed out), in the treatment of "human vegetables", past preferences of the person when capable of making decisions are often taken to be morally relevant, or even decisive, to the question as to whether to keep the body alive. If merely possible persons are included then the valuational rankings of environmental ethics, indeed of virtually any ethics, can be reflected in a "utilitarian" fashion. The argument of (c) R. and V. Routley, 'Semantical foundations for value theory', /Vaas (accepted for publication in 1974; still forthcoming?), can be used to show this. Or unless it can be made out, what seems entirely implausible, that what is wrong with torturing animals is not what it does to them but the way it affects other people (the Aquinas-Kant thesis). 23 attitudes, and more comprehensively the associated ideologies, are of critical importance; for it is to these and Western influence that the world's main - serious and very extensive - environmental problems can be ascribed. Hypothetical situations are introduced in designing counterexamples to core principles (D) and (A). The basis of the method lies in the semantical analyses of permissibility, obligation and value statements which stretch out over ideal situations (which may be incomplete or even inconsistent), so that what is permissible holds in some permitted situation, what is obligatory in every such situation, and what is wrong is excluded in every such situation. ' But the main point to grasp for the counterexamples that follow, is that ethical principles if correct are universal and are assessed over a class of situations. Thus hypothetical cases are logically perfectly legitimate and cannot be ruled out on one pretext or another, e.g. as rare, as desert island cases, as hypothetical, The counterexamples to (D) and (A) presented depend largely on etc. designing situations different from the actual where there are either too few or too many humans or persons. But alternative special situations where interference with others is minimized or is immaterial are readily devised. (i) The example. The last man (or woman or person) surviving the collapse of the world system sets to work eliminating, as far as he can, every living thing, animal or plant (but painlessly if you like, as at the best abattoirs). What he does is quite permissible according to principle (D) but on environmental grounds what he does is wrong. Moreover one does not have to be committed to esoteric values to regard Mr. Last Man as behaving badly and destroying things of value (the reason being perhaps that radical thinking and values have shifted in an environmental direction in advance of corresponding shifts in the Characteristically Westerners have attempted to recast these value systems, sometimes misleadingly, in a religious guise - probably because it was thought that there was no non-religious way of presenting them so as to make them intelligible or have them comprehended. Thus they get represented as basically chauvinistic in view of the relations of Man and God. On these semantical analyses, which avoid all the usual problems of modal theories of axiological and deontic terms, see R. Routley, R.K. Meyer, and others, T/zefr RSSS, Australian National University, 1979, chapters 7 and 8. A sketch is given in §5 below. The situations or worlds with respect to which the interpretation is made permit of different construals; e.g. instead of permitted situ­ ations, the situations can be construed evaluatively as ideal situations. 26 formulation of fundamental evaluative principles). The usual vandalism charge does not apply against Mr. Last Man since he does no damage to others. Moreover, Mr. Last Man's activities may be toned down to avoid any vandalism charge, yet succumb to the (extended) chauvinist charge, e.g. he may simply destroy seme environ­ mentally valuable things unnecessarily (without due reason or some need). (ii) The Zusf pecpZe example. to the last people example. The last man example can be extended We can assume that they know they are the last people, e.g. because they are aware that radiation effects have blocked any chance of reproduction. One considers the last people in order to rule out the possibility that what these people do harms or somehow physically interferes with later people. Otherwise one could as well consider science fiction cases where people arrive at a new planet and destroy its ecosystems, whether with good intentions such as perfect­ ing the planet for their ends and making it more fruitful or, forgetting the lesser traditions, just for the sheer enjoyment of it. Let us assume that the last people are very numerous. They humanely exterminate every wild animal and they eliminate the fish of the seas, they put all arable land under intensive cultivation, and all remaining natural forests disappear in favour of pastures or plantations,and so on. They may give various familiar reasons for this, e.g. they believe it is the way to salvation or to perfection, or they are simply satisfying reasonable needs, or even that it is needed to keep the last people employed or occupied so that they do not worry too much about their impending extinction. behaved badly; of value; On an environmental ethic the last people have they have done what is impermissible and destroyed much for they have simplified and largely destroyed all the natural ecosystems, and with their demise the world will soon be an ugly and largely wrecked place. But this conduct may conform with the core principles (D) and (A), and as well with the principles enjoined by the lesser traditions under more obvious construals of these principles. Indeed the main point of elaborating this extension of the last man example is because principles (D) and (A) may, as they stand, appear to conflict with stewardship, cooperation and perfection positions, as the last man example reveals. The apparent conflict between these positions and principle (D) may be definitively removed, it seems, by conjoining a further proviso to the principle, to the effect (3) that he does not wilfully destroy natural resources. But as the last people who are not vandals do not destroy resources wilfully, but perhaps "for the best of 28 reasons", the variant is still environmentally inadequate. 2 8 On next page. 27 (iii) The grreat e^frgpre^gz/r example. The last man example can be adjusted so as to not fall foul of clause (3). industrialist; The last man is an he runs a giant complex of automated factories and farms which he proceeds to extend. He produces automobiles among other things, from renewable and recyclable resources of course, only he dumps and recycles these shortly after manufacture and sale to a dummy buyer instead of putting them on the road for a short time as we do. Of course he has the best of reasons for his activity, e.g. he is increasing gross world product, or he is improving output to fulfil some plan, and he will be increasing his own and general welfare since he much prefers increased output and productivity. The entrepreneur's behaviour is on the Western ethic quite permissible; indeed his conduct is commonly thought to be quite fine and even meets Pareto optimality requirements given prevailing notions of being "better off". It may be objected, however, that there is no reason or warrant for the great entrepreneur's production and it is simply wasteful. But we can easily amend the example by adding consumers who want to use the out­ put. Just as we can extend the last man example to a class of last people, so we can extend (iii) to the sociefz/ example (iv): the society looks depressingly like ours except for its reproductive incapacity. (v) The example. The blue whale (reduced to a 29 mixed good on the economic picture ) is on the verge of extinction because of its qualities as a private good, as a profitable source of oil and meat. whalers; The catching and marketing of blue whales does not harm the it does not harm or physically interfere with others in any good sense, though it may upset them and they may be prepared to compen­ sate the whalers if they desist; destruction. nor need whale hunting be wilful (Slightly different examples which eliminate the hunting aspect of the blue whale example are provided by cases where a species is eliminated or threatened through destruction of its habitat by man's 2 8 There are however elements in the lesser traditions - especially if 'cooperation' and 'perfection' are reconstrued in less chauvinistic and homocentric terms - which point the way to a more satisfactory ethic. 29 The example is adapted from Barkley and Seckier, op. cit., who nicely expose the orthodox economic picture. To make the example more difficult for utilitarians in the tradition of Bentham, it can be further supposed that the killing of the whalesis near instantaneous and painless, the whale products are very valuable to humans and indeed irreplaceable, and that the whales led a good life while they lived. (Would the killing of remote groups of humans under similar conditions be then so much worse?). 28 activity or the activities of animals he has introduced, e.g. many plains-dwelling Australian marsupials and the Arabian oryx.) The behaviour of the whalers in eliminating this magnificent species of whale is accordingly quite permissible - at least according to basic chauvinism. But on an environmental ethic it is not. However the free-market mechanism did not cease allocating whales to commercial uses, as a satisfactory environmental economics would: instead the market system ground inexorably (for the tragedy-of-the-privatised-commons type reasons well-explained in Barkley and Seckier, op. cit.) along the private demand curve until the blue whale population was no longer viable. It has been objected that the operation of the free market is restrained by ethical principles - or rather legally enforced copies thereof; for example, it would be profitable to exploit child labour, but moral prohibitions, legally enforced, exclude such exploitation of children. But the case is quite different; children, unlike young animals such as vealers, are already shielded under the modified dominant position. If anything, the "objection" is a further illustration of chauvinism at work. 30 Although the vanishing species example given does not apply decisively against extended utilitarianisms, such as that of Bentham, which widen the base class to all sentient creatures, the case is easily varied so that it does: class of tropical plant species simply select one of the currently threatened with extinction. (vi) The fuufory farw example. On the farm animals of various sorts are kept under artificial, confined conditions and simply used for the market goods they deliver, e.g. eggs in the case of battery hens, milk in the case of rotor cows, veal in the case of calves. The animals are subject to whatever conditions (e.g. forced feeding, iron deficient diets, constant lighting) will deliver maximal quantities of desired goods for the human commodity market. The animals do not necessarily suffer pain (and insofar as they do in behaviourally conspicuous ways the problem can For the most part the operation of the free market is only constrained by chauvinistic principles: otherwise enterpreneurs tend to undertake whatever apparently profitable business activity they can get away with, including substantial exploitation of animals and widespread environ­ mental destruction, and their lack of concern is illustrated by such facts as that they are generally prepared to pay taxes (e.g. to compensate other humans) rather than to forgo their activities in cases such as river and lake pollution and forest removal. In fact, of course, fairly unfettered operation of the market tends to encourage more restricted chauvinisms, e.g. the exploitation of cheap foreign or female labour in the secondary labour market. 29 be met by antibiotics), but they are imprisoned under dispreferred conditions. The threatment of the animals on the "farm" is perfectly permissible according to the core principle (or at least minor adjustments to exclude unnecessary suffering will ensure conformity), but on an environmental ethic it is not. The treatment of the animals on the farm also seems to conform to the principles of the lesser traditions, insofar as these principles are spelled out in a way that can be applied to the example, that is so long as cooperation and perfection are construed in intended chauvinistic fashion. (vii) The MiZderness example. The wilderness, though isolated and rarely visited or thought about by environmentalists, is known to contain nothing of use to humans, such as seed or drug supplies, that is not adequately replicated elsewhere. It does contain however some "low quality" forest that could supply pulpwood on a commercial basis were the local government to provide subsidies on the usual basis. The logging would destroy the wilderness in a largely irreversible way (e.g. it grows on high sand dune country or on lateritic soils) and kill many animals which live in the forest. The prevailing ethic sees nothing wrong with the destruction of such a wilderness, nor do the lesser traditions: a deeper environmental ethic does. Again the example requires variation, e.g. to a wilderness devoid of sentient individuals, if it is to counter clearly such extensions of Western ethics as those of animal liberationists. For this sort of reason we do not want to overstate or overrate the role of as distinct from variations upon such examples. examples - Firstly, people deeply committed to human chauvinism - as many, perhaps most, people are - will find some of the examples unconvincing because they depend on non- chauvinistic assumptions. Secondly, there are rejoinders to some of the examples based on the prevailing ethic. In this case what we claim is that there are variations on, and elaborations of the examples which meet such considerations. In connection with this we do not want to deny that there are other strands supplementing the prevailing ethic which are critical of some activities of the sort described in the examples, e.g. anti-vandalism principles and strictures against conspicuous consumption But, as remarked, these principles as reflected, e.g. in sumptuary laws. have not been adequately incorporated in the prevailing ethic in such a way as to meet variations on the examples or to serve environmental purposes; and if the attempt were made to fully incorporate such princi­ ples once again a new ethic would be the upshot. before the change from an ethic which sanctioned 30 (Compare the situation slavery.) In summary,what the examples show is that core axiological and deontic assumptions of the Western super-ethic are environmentally inadequate; and accordingly Western ethics should be superseded by a more environmentally adequate ethic. The class of permissible actions that rebound on the environment is more narrowly circumscribed on such an environmental ethic than it is in the Western superethic, and the class of noninstrumentally valuable objects is correspondingly wider than it is on the Western super-ethic. But is not an environmentalist ethic going too far in implying that these people - those of the examples and respected entrepreneurs and industrialists and bureaucrats, farmers and fishermen and foresters - are behaving, when engaging in environmentally degrading activities of the sort described, in a morally impermissible way? No, what these people do is to a greater or lesser extent evil, since destructive of what is valuable, and hence in serious cases morally impermissible. For example, insofar as the killing or forced displacement of primitive peoples who stand in the way of an industrial development is morally indefensible and impermissible, so also is the destruction of the forest where the people may live, or the slaughter of remaining blue whales, or the gross exploitation of experimental or factory-farm animals for private profit or as part of the latest 5 year plan. Those who organise or engage in such activities are (to a greater or lesser extent, depending on their mode of engagement) morally culpable. Models of permissible respected life styles and of the good life (for others to emulate) depend upon what the underlying ethic accounts good and evil, permissible or not, and changes with change of ethic. A new ethic is needed not merely to accommodate the evaluations, and so forth; prescriptions and models indicated, in a way decidedly different from Western ethics, but in order to cope with a much wider range of more practical, and often more controversial, cases where Western ethics yield (without epicycling, i.e. extensive resort to theory-saving strategems) unacceptable or inadequately grounded results. An alternative ethic is also needed by a growing number of valuers because they have values, interests and new concerns of ecological sorts which do not fit in with, but conflict with, central features of prevailing Western ethics. There is occurring, it seems, a far-reaching cultural, and ethical change, a change in consciousness, and in particular a change in attitudes to what is natural and the natural environment (a change which may eventually be as fundamental as, and partly overturn, the humanist changes of the Enlightenment). A new ethic is accordingly needed to reflect and formul­ ate, and enable the defence and application of, a new, increasingly fel,t, 31 but not so far well-articulated system of values, in much the same way that a system of probability was needed and formulated to articulate and systematise likelihood and probability principles, and relevant logic systems required to capture pre-analytic views of entailment. The explication of environmental ethics is a similar theoretical concern; again, as commonly, theory lags behind the facts of change and the felt data. Furthermore, just as entailment systems are not uniquely determined, or desired or accepted by every thinker, so enoironwontuZ gt/zios will not be nnip^otp detorwZng<i, or adopted by every valuer. On the contrary, as is plain enough, their adaption and furtherance will be vigorously resisted by many vested interests, as - to take just one instance - the furtherance of programmes for the determination of environmental sources of cancer is vigorously opposed by industrial chemical companies. The matter of persuading other valuers to accept values and principles of a new ethic is of course a further and somewhat separate issue from the question of need for such an ethic. The procedures for trying to effect changes in values are but variations on the usual pro­ cedures, and like them are not fully effective: excluding coercion and education, they include, for example, argumentation, and propaganda, in each case of many sorts. 31 As usual, too, where there is a broad common 32 basis, especially in felt evaluations and emotional presentation, effecting a change, or a conversion, will generally be an easier task. In the case of transformation to environmental values, what is often important are distinctive features regarding the factual bases of many of the evaluations. correcting In particular, there is the matter of removing or /Tztsoonooptions on a broad range of matters of Some of these sorts are considered in more detail in (c) J. Passmore, 'Ecological problems and persuasion' in FpnoZZtp arid Freedom. * JntornutZonoZ and Comparattvo c/nr-Zoprz/donoo (ed. G. Dorsey), Oceana Publications, New York, 1977, pp.431-42. The apposite term 'emotional presentation' is adapted from Meinong; see especially FwotZonaZ Prosentatton (trans. M.L. Schubert-Kalsi), Northwestern University Press, 1972. The notion of emotional present­ ation can play an important role in the explanation of how emotions enter into (environmental) evaluations, the objects evaluated (canyons, mountains, giant trees) often being emotionally presented. A little more precisely, the connections are these: A value ranking (e.g. c is better, more valuable, than d) of a valuer is explained emotionally through - it does not reduce to - certain preference rankings of the valuer; and the preference rankings have in turn dual factual and emotional bases, in the same sort of way that an item may be preferred or chosen in virtue of its factual features and the valuer's emotional responses to those. The main details of such a semantical analysis of value, which is discussed in §5, are given in Routley (c). 32 environmental concern; for example, about animals, their various behaviour, abilities, etc; about the alleged gulf between humans and other animals and the uniqueness of humans and each human; about the profitability, or desirability, or necessity, of environmentally destruct­ ive enterprises; about the inevitability of current Western social arrangements and about the history of the way these particular arrange­ ments developed. There is, moreover, the matter of sheer information, for example as to how free animals live together and what they do; about how factory and experimental animals are treated, and in the latter case for what: about the sources and effects of various forms of pollution and the reasons for it; about how natural creatures such as whales or environments such as forests are commonly dealt with, for what products, by what interests, for what ends. Naturally (given a fact/value division) none of this information is entirely conclusive support for a change in ethic; for many of the evaluations the data helps support can be included in other ethics (including sometimes modifications of prevailing ethics), while remaining evaluations can, at worst, be simply rejected (as e.g., those utilitarians who extend consideration just to sentient creatures are obliged to reject versions of the last man argument where no sentient creatures are affected). Although a new ethic is needed, for the reasons indicated, and although such an ethic can,furthermore, be a considerable asset in practical environmental argument (e.g., as to the point of trying to retain a piece of not-especially-unique near-wilderness), for many practical ecological purposes, there is no need to apply it or to fall back on it. For example, virtually the whole environmental issue of destructive forestry in Australia can be argued without invoking any unconventional ethical principles or values at all, i.e. entirely within the prevailing chauvinistic framework. wap??/ environmental disputes. The same sort of point applies to But, it by no means applies to all. A corollary is an inadequacy in the presentation of environmental problems and suggested solutions in standard (human) ecology texts Tssz^gs A. Erlich's (such as P. and FuoZ-Ctyz/, Freeman, San Francisco, 1970, to select one example), which are set erzf-freZz/ within the chauvinistic framework.^4 Also, differently, in the way that theories are in enabling one to see how to move and argue in a discussion. Quite properly given prevailing sentiments, according to some erring conservationists, who account themselves "realists". 33 Since it is sometimes charged - despite all that has been said - that an environmental ethic does not differ in practice from that of more conventional "chauvinistic" ethics, there is point in spelling out in yet other ways how it can differ in practice: Firstly, many conventional positions, in particular social contract and sympathy theories, cannot take proper account of moral obligation to future humans (who are not in the immediate future). Since the usual attempt to argue, in terms of value and benefit to humans, that natural areas and ecosystems generally should not be destroyed or degraded depends critically on introducing possible future humans who will suffer or be worse off as a result of its destruction or degradation, it is plain that an environ­ mental ethic will differ radically from such conventional positions. That is, the usual argument depends on the reduction of value of a natural item to the interests of present and /Izf^re humans, in which reduction future humans must play a critical role if conclusions not blatantly opposed to conservation are to be reached. Hence there will usually be a very great gulf between the practical value judgements of conservation ethics and those of conventional positions which discount the (nonimmediate) future. Secondly, as we have already seen through examples, there are practical differences between an environmental ethic and conventional instrumental views which dr take account of the interests of past, present and future humans, differences which emerge sharply at the It is, however, unnecessary to hypothetical (possible world) level. turn to possible world examples to see that normally there would be very great differences in the practical valuations and behaviour of those who believe that natural items can have value and create obligations not reducible (in any way) to human interests and those who do not, as the following further examples show. We need only consider the operation of irtersioraZ- corcepfs Example 1. Mif/zizz uctz^^Z- zjerZ-d, for example, the concept of duwupe to a natural item, and the associated notion of campezzsaffrr for that damage. C. Stone, for instance, in S/za^Zd Trees #are Sfardirp? Tdp^fs /dr /Vaf^raZ. dhj^efs Thus Tabards L^pcZ (Avon Books, New York, 1975) notes the practical legal differences between taking the damage to a polluted river as affecting its intrinsic value, and taking it as just affecting human river users. In the one case one will see adequate compensation as restoring the original state of the river (rectifying the wrong to the river) and in the other as compensating those present (or future) humans who will suffer from its pollution. As Stone points out, the sum 34 adequate to compensate the latter may well be much less than that required to restore the river to its unpolluted state, thus making it economic, and in terms of the human chauvinist theory, fair and reason­ able, to compensate those damaged and continue pollution of the river. In the first case, of course, adequate compensation or restoration for the harm done would have to consist in restoring the river to its unpolluted condition and will not just be paid to the people affected. Compare here Stone's example of compensation for injury to a Greek slave; in the instrumentalist case this will involve compensating the slave's owner for the loss of his slave's working time; in the other, where the slave is regarded as not merely an instrument for his owner, it will compensate the sZaue not the ozjyzer, for this compensation will also take account of the pain and suffering of the slave, even where this has not affected his working ability. There is a difference not only in the amount of compensation, but to zj/zow it is directed. In the case of a natural item damage may be compensated by payment to a trust set up to protect and restore it. The believer in intrinsic values may avoid making unnecessary and excessive noise in the forest, out of respect for the forest and its Example 2. nonhuman inhabitants. She will do this even when it is certain that there is no other human around to know the difference. For one to whom the forest and its inhabitants are merely another conventional utility, however, there will be no such constraint. He may avoid unnecessary noise if he thinks it will disturb other humans, but if he is certain none are about to hear him he will feel at liberty to make as much and as loud a noise as he chooses, and this will affect his behaviour. Examples like this cannot be dealt with by the introduction of future humans, since they will be unable to hear the noise in question. To claim that the making of noise in such circumstances is a matter of no importance, and therefore there is no important difference in behaviour, is of course to assess the matter through human chauvinist eyes. question-begging. From the intrinsic viewpoint it So such a claim is make a difference, and be reflected in practical behavioural difference. Example 3. Consider an aboriginal tribe which holds a particular place to be sacred, and where this sanctity and intrinsic valuableness and beauty is celebrated by a number of beautiful cave paintings. A typically "progressive" instrumentalist Western view would hold the cave (and perhaps place) to be worth preservation because of its value to the aboriginal people, and because of the artistic merit of the human arti­ facts, the cave paintings the cave contained. 35 To the "enlightened" Westerner, if the tribe should cease to exist, and the paintings be destroyed, it would be permissible to destroy the place if this should be in what is judged to be the best interests of human kind, e.g. to get at the uranium underneath. To the aboriginal the human artifacts, the cave paintings would be irrelevant, a celebration of the value of the place, but certainly not a surrogate for it, and the obligation to the place would not die because the tribe disappeared or declined. Similarly no ordinary sum of money would be able to compensate for the loss of such a place, in the way that it might for something conceived of as a utility or convenience, as having value only because of the benefits it confers on the "users" of it. There is an enormous /gZt or difference between feeling that a place should be valued or respected for itself, for its perceived beauty and character, and feeling that it should not be defaced because it is valued by one's fellow humans, and provides pleasurable sensations or money or convenience for them. Compare too the differences between feeling that a yellow robin, say, is a fellow creature in many ways akin to oneself, and feeling that it is a nice little yellow and grey, basically clockwork, aesthetic object. These differences in emotional presentation are accompanied by or expressed by an enormous range of behavioural differences, of which the examples given represent only a very small The sort of behaviour uurrarzteti by each viewpoint and thought by it, the concept of what one is free to do, for example, will normally be very different. It is certainly no coincidence that cultures sample. holding to the intrinsic view have normally been far less destructive of nature than the dominant Western human chauvinist culture. In summary, the claim that there is no reaZ practical difference, that the intrinsic value viewpoint is empty verbalisation, does not stand up to examination. The capacity - no doubt exaggerated, but nonetheless far from negligible - of Western industrial societies to solve their ecological problems (at least to their own pathetically low standards) within a chauvinistic framework, does considerably complicate, and obstruct, an alternative more practical argument to the need for a new ethic, t/ze arpMwezzt yrcm problems, that in no other way ... [than] prepared[ness] to accept a "new ethic", as distinct even from adding one or two new moral principles to an accepted common ... can modern industrial 35 societies solve their ecological problems. On next page. 36 Not only does the argument encounter various objections - most obviously that many of the problems can be solved, if not within Western ethics, in immediate extensions of them - but the case suggested would hardly be a satisfactory basis for the type of ethic sought. It is not so much that it would be a chauvinistic way of arriving at a supposedly nonchauvinistic ethic, for bad procedures can lead to good results; rather it is that important ecological problems, shaping environmental ethics, such as preservation of substantial tracts of wilderness and just treatment of animals, tend to be written off in industrial societies as not serious problems. But even if the argument suggested has too narrow a problem base, and so may yield too limited a change in attitudes as compared with the main theoretical argument, the argument merits fuller formulation and further investigation. The argument to need for ethical revision is as follows: (1) A satisfactory solution to environmental problems (of modern industrial societies) implies (the adoption of) an alternative (2) environmental ethic. A satisfactory solution to environmental problems is needed. Therefore, an alternative environmental ethic is needed. The argument is valid, given, what seems correct, that pimplies q implies that p is needed implies that q is needed. The second premiss is or can be made analytic, on the sense of 'satisfactory' 'satisfactory' imply 'needed'); (e.g. by having so the case is complete if the first premiss can be established (in the same sense of 'satisfactory'), and the conclusion is then plausible to at least the extent the premiss is. Al37 though the first premiss, or something like it, is widely endorsed, cogent 3 5 Passmore (c) op. cit., p.438. According to Passmore (p.431), By common consent, there are four major pollution, the exhaustion of resources, species, and overpopulation ... To solve such problems involves finding types of human conduct or of preventing having its present consequences. ecological problems: the destruction of a way either of altering that human conduct from In what follows the assumption that 'there are four major ecological problems' gets rejected. 36 Here and elsewhere, 'environmental' less interchangeably. and 'ecological' are used more or 37 Even Passmore, though previously (e.g. in (a)) highly critical of proposals for new ethics, gives qualified endorsement to an assumption of this sort ((c), p.441). ... I do not doubt, all the same, that our attitudes to nature stand badly in need of revision and that, as they stand, they form a major obstacle to the solution of ecological problems. 37 arguments for it are few and it is no simple matter rendering the premiss plausible. Moreover rendering it plausible involves a substant­ ial detour through social theory; for the case for the premiss proceeds along these sorts of lines: (3) Unless there are (certain) major changes in socio-economic structure, environmental problems will not be satisfactorily solved. (4) The major changes in socio-economic structure involve an alternative ethic. A much stronger thesis than (3) has been argued for using systems analysis, namely that without very extensive socio-economic changes, modern industrial society will collapse; but several of the assumptions made in the analysis are doubtful or disputed. independently of that stronger thesis; But (3) has been argued for example, it will follow from the thesis (of Falk, Commoner and others) 'that the modern industrial ethic as we have known it is not sustainable on ecological grounds'. 39 In a sense, (3) is obvious; for it is present socio-economic arrangements that have produced many of the present serious environmental problems; without major changes in those arrangements most of the problems will persist or, more likely, intensify. What is not immediately evident is that the major changes called for, in satisfying (3), suffice for (4). However reflection on the specific 'types of changes required - for example at a superficial level, human population limitation, reduction of poll­ ution, more sensible resource usage, selective economic growth - reveals that significant changes in value, and also in what is considered permissible, are bound to be involved in the changes. plausible, and therewith the intended conclusion. So (4) is decidedly But the argument leaves the detailed character of the needed alternative ethic rather obscure; and it may well be that the ethic so yielded is somewhat chauvinistic in character. The more practical argument cannot entirely supplant the main theoretical argument. In sum, there are good and pressing reasons to investigate the alternatives to chauvinistic ethics, especially human chauvinism, because such chauvinistic ethics are discriminatory, because the case for them 38 39 See, in particular, D. Meadows and others, T/ze Limits fa GrgzjfZz, Potomac Associates, Washington, D.C., 1972. R.A. Falk, 'Anarchism and world order', FVozncs IX, 1978, p.66. Falk refers for the case to B.Commoner, TTze CZrsizzy Circle, Knopf, New York, 1971; R.A. Falk, PZuzzef, Random House, New York. 1971; E. Goldsmith and others /or SMrrfzJuZ, Houghton and Miflin, Boston, 1972, and Meadows of uZ-., op. cit. 38 does not stand up to examination, and because they have been involved in the destruction of much of value and now threaten the viability of much that is valuable. §4 . ENVIRONMENTAL ALTERNATIVES : NARROWING THE CHOICE AMONG ENVIRONMENTAL ETHIC The basic-and basically mistaken-doctrine of the Western super-ethic is, as we have seen, that people, humans of whatever shape or form, are the fundamental carriers or objects of value and that all other items are valuable only in an instrumental or derivative way. It is important, in­ deed mandatory in a genuine environmental ethic, to reject this view and allow natural items to have a value in their own right, iz? t/ze same /as/ziazz as CzzaZzza^Ze? peapZe, both for the reasons outlined above, of the theoret­ ical unsatisfactoriness and arbitrariness of the traditional view, and for more practical reasons, namely, to help ensure the ecological sustain­ ability of modern society, and in optimising human welfare. It has often been pointed out that 'a totally humanised world would diminish us as 40 human beings', that the traditional view of humans, or classes of humans, as dominant, and of natural items as without value except where they serve human or class interests-a view that often carries contempt for nature leads not only to the destruction of much that is of value but (paradoxic­ ally) to counterproductive results even with respect to human welfare. Thus McHarg (in attractively coloured rhetoric):- Show me a man-oriented society inwhich it is believed that reality exists only because man can perceive it, that the cosmos is a struct­ ure erected to support man on its pinnacle, that man exclusively is divine and given dominion over all things, indeed that God is made in the image of man, and I will predict the nature of its cities and their landscape. I need not look far for we have seen them-the hot­ dog stands, the neon shill, the ticky-tacky houses, dysgenic city and mined landscapes. centric man; This is the image of the anthropomorphic, anthropo­ he seeks not unity with nature but conquest (op. cit.). The rejection of this view and its replacement by a view in which natural items can be regarded as of value and as worthy of our respect for themselves and not merely for what we can get out of them or what use we 40 See e.g. the discussion at pp.116-17 of (a) J. Rodman, 'The Liberation of nature', IzzgMfrz/, 20 (1977) 83-145. All subsequent references to Rodman's work without further indication are to this article. Note well that the rejection of human chauvinism does z?ot imply that no chauvinistic arguments - or rather, arguments that are usually stated in chauvinistic form - carry weight. On the contrary, some chauvinistic arguments (e.g. those supporting wilderness retention and species preservation) carry considerable weight; and, since the prevailing industrial ethics remain chauvinistic, environmentalists would be rash not to use them. 39 can make of them, is becoming increasingly widespread in parts of the environmental movement. It is this primarily that makes for an important ideological split in the conservation movement, between what Naess (op. cit.) called and Teep ecology, between those who see conservation as just a matter of wiser, better-controlled topper-term exploitation of the environment - something which is compatible with denying value to 42 ... everything except man ' and those who see it at least in part as involving a recognition of value for natural items independent of man, and hence as involving (at least to some extent) a Ttf^erept uttitp(7e to Mature. The first view, the long-term or erttpbteped e^ptoitatior view, which is closely tied to prevailing more enlightened economic assumptions, tends to make heavy use of the watershed term 'resource'; the problem of conserv­ ation is seen as one of 'zjfse pse of resources', a resource being something of use to humans or persons. On this view, which does not get beyond the confines of human chauvinism, and so is no direction for a satisfactory environmental ethic to take, items which have no perceivable use to man, i.e. non-resources, can be destroyed without loss; and the environmental problem is viewed as largely one of making people aware of the extent to which natural items and processes have frstr^meptut value, i.e. of how far we are dependent on them and they are of pse to us. There is no recognition either that some items might be valuable precisely because they are independent of man. Resource Conservation, or the shallow position, is the first of the 42 four ideal types that Rodman discerns in his investigation of the contemporary environmental movement. The deeper ecological position gets split under Rodman's division into three ideological positions - though Rodman prefers to put the matter in symbolic or experiential terms, in terms of forms of consciousness - namely Wilderness Preservation, Nature Moralism, and Ecological Resistance. Though the positions discerned are neither characterised in an exclusive fashion, nor exhaustive of ecological positions, and though we shall have to look beyond all the positions for a satisfactory environmental ethic, nonetheless they afford an excellent perspective on the main types of alternative positions that have been adopted by those within environmental movements. It is not uncommon to encounter attempts to write the shallow position into the very meaning or definition of copseraotiop, e.g. 'conservation is the use of resources to the greatest advantage of man', 4 Sprrep of /Ipstrotfap Forestry and tVood-Fused Ipd^strfes. Part PT. Prodpcttop Forestry Peretopmept PZup. Draft (31 October, 1974), p.ll - a blatantly chauvinistic account. On next page. 40 According to (Wilderness) Preservation, which focusses on wilderness, wilderness is to be preserved for the wilderness experience, wilderness offers a natural cathedral, a sacred place where human beings can transcend the limitations of everyday experience and become renewed through contact with the power of creation ((b), p.49). The values discerned in wilderness and natural landscape are primarily aesthetic and quasi-religious, or mystical, 'the experience of the holy is esthetically mediated'; what is valuable remains human experiences. Thus the Wilderness Preservation position does not move outside the sphere of human chauvinism, and can no more than Resource Conservation offer a frame for an environmental ethic. conclusion: Rodman reaches a similar Resource Conservation and Wilderness Preservation appear variations on the theme of wise use, the former oriented to the [efficient] production of commodities for human consumption, the latter to providing human amenities ((b), p.50). For this reason, the Wilderness Preservation position fails even on the score of justifying the preservation of wilderness - on the very task it was designed to accomplish - in a range of circumstances. Like other See especially (b) J. Rodman, 'Theory and practice in the environmental movement: notes towards an ecology of experience', in Search /or i?? a ^orZ-d^ International Cultural Foundation, New York, 1978, pp.45-56. Some of the types are portrayed in greater detail in other Rodman papers. The remainder of this largely new section on environmental ethical alternatives is heavily indebted, in ways the references mostly make plain, to Rodman's work. His work covers a vast range of interlinked topics; only those of immediate relevance have been touched upon. But there is very much in the remainder that repays careful reading, and TnMc/z to think about and to question or reject, reaching perhaps its lowest point in the paradoxical themes: Just as our statements about other people tend also to be concealed statements about ourselves, so statements about non­ human nature tend to be concealed statements about the human condition, and movements to liberate nonhuman nature tend also to be movements to liberate the repressed potentials of human nature (p.105). In part because these themes and the related myth of microcosm are taken seriously, and not for the evident falsehoods they are, in part because the ethical adequacy of the human/nonhuman distinction is never seriously questioned (e.g. it is taken for granted, what is not the case, that rights apply to humans and are problematic beyond them), and in part because of the characteristically chauvinistic emphasis on human experience and the endeavour to bring everything within that experiential purvue, and the associated weight assigned to human symbolic, mythic and ritual activities, one is left with the feeling, at the end of all the investigations one can profitably follow Rodman through, that one has not got beyond the confines of human chauvinism. 41 instrumentalist accounts of wilderness value, it breaks down entirely With examples like the Last Man, assuming that Mr. Last Man is never turned on by natural spendour. More alarmingly, under readily conceivable developments, it would allow the elimination of wilderness entirely. For consider the Wilderness Experience Machine, a low-impact low-tech philosophical machine, recently patented by I.M. Diabolic, which can duplicate entirely, even for groups of people, wilderness experiences, but in a downtown room. As far as the psychological experience goes, this machine can provide a complete substitute for any actual wilderness, and were the value of wilderness to reside in the experience it afforded, could entirely replace it and eliminate the alleged need for it. Most environmentalists would be (rightly) dissatisfied with, not to say appalled by, the idea that Wilderness Experience Machines could sub­ stitute for wildernesses, since they provided the same experiences. what else they wanted, the answer would of course be: Asked Wildernesses, not merely wilderness experiences. Wildernesses are valuable in their own right, over and above the experiences they can afford. 4 3 Really, that is, they consider wildernesses intrinsically valuable, but have been pushed by the prevailing ethical ethics into stating, and misrepresenting, their position in experiential terms. There is some independent evidence that the Wilderness Preservation position is frequently a disguised intrinsic value position, in the attitude taken to examples like the Last Man case, that purely hypothetical experiencers (who may vanish into counterfactuals) are good enough, and that in some real-life cases it is enough that wilderness is there to be contemplated, whether or not anyone actually takes advantage of its presence to gain experiences, or indeed whether or not it is in fact contemplated. Such examples remove the disguise and reveal the position as at bottom an intrinsic value position. In that event it is however better to avoid the disguise; for the case for wilder­ ness preservation which starts from the position that some wilderness tracts have intrinsic as well as merely instrumental value is substantially stronger than any position which assigns them merely instrumental value. Wilderness lovers and nature conservationists have in fact worked out - or concocted - a set of arguments to show why wildernesses and nature conservation are of benefit to humans, to argue for their instrumental The concept of too can vary with the operative ideology, e.g. on certain views, such as Wilderness Preservation, wilderness comprises areas that are (or provide the opportunity for use), e.g. used for experiential enrichment. By contrast, on a genuine Environ­ mental Resistance view, wilderness is a wild area, use of which is not implied: it may never be used, and it may not matter that it affords no opportunity for (human) use. (Under popular high redefinition of 'wilderness', there are of course no wildernesses remaining on the earth, and wilderness vanishes as soon as humanly experienced.) 42 value. For example, there are various arguments from the scientific value, or usefulness, of wilderness, e.g. for the study of natural eco­ systems, for the investigation of plant history and evolution, as a repository of genetic diversity, etc. These arguments, which (like parallel arguments for species preservation) are not to be especially as regards persuasive force, can be put in nonchauvinistic form; for science and knowledge are not linked essentially with, for example, the feature of being human. Often however - e.g. where the wilderness defended has, so far as it is known, little that is very special to offer - such arguments appear to be merely a conventional front for the real (or deeper) reasons - and in seme instances, correspondingly weak and unpersuasive (as Fraser Darling has remarked, and Passmore has tried to show in (a)) - the real reasons being based on the perception of nonuseful properties of value. This is particularly marked in the case of arguments for preserving the most complex and beautiful of the world's plant communities, tropical rainforest. Such arguments as that various uninvestigated rainforest trees may at some time be found to contain useful drugs, by no means exhaust the true value of the rainforest. For it is in the intrinsic, i.e. noninstrumental, value of the rainforest that the main reason for not unduly interfering with it, e.g. not interfering in ways that threaten its stability or viability, lies. In particular, destruction of a wilderness, such as a rainforest, would significantly diminish intrinsic value, and so should (in general) be resisted. Environmentalists who are aware of these sorts of problems and dangers with resource use approaches to wilderness preservation sometimes attempt to formulate their alternative view in terms of one of the lesser traditions, most popularly in terms of the image, in which man is seen as the steward of the earth - an analogy which, as Passmore points out (in (a)), is problematic outside a religious context. For who is man steward to? If not to God, then how is the analogy to be unpacked, and what conditions must "stewardship" conform to? If "good stewardship" is management in the interests of humans, or humanity, then the position does not go beyond Resource Conservation; if it is manage4 4 ment to serve intrinsic values, or God, then good stewardship is but a cover for the recognition of intrinsic values, which are better introduced directly. Thus admitting values which are not instrumental, which do not answer back in some way to states or conditions of humans is a feature of all satisfactory deeper ecological alternatives. In order to allow for such intrinsic values and/or associated attitudes of respect, e.g. for On some interpretations; chauvinism. on others theism may serve to reinforce human 43 nature and various natural things, it is however unnecessary to adopt a religious backdrop such as the "Good Stewardship" image suggests, or even a semi-religious framework such as a mystical or superstitious one with taboos and sacred places as symbolic and ritual elements. A theory of intrinsic value which assigns intrinsic value to wilderness and species of free animals, for good reasons, can be entirely naturalistic (in a main sense of that much-abused term). The third, somewhat amorphous, cluster of positions Rodman describes, noninstrumental, value to natural items, such as - on some versions of the position wilderness. Nature Moralisms, do just that, assign intrinsic, f/zat [An] alternative perspective ... [to] the theme of wise use 4 5 ... is provided by the tradition growing out of the humane movement, recently radicalised by animal liberationists, and sometimes generalised to embrace non-animal beings as well. In contrast to the economic ethos of Resource Conservation and the religious/ esthetic character of Wilderness Preservation, this perspective is strikingly moral in style. Its notion of human virtue is not prudence or reverence, but justice. In contrast to the caste­ bound universe of the Resource Conservationist, the Natural Moralist affirms the democratic principle that all natural entities (or, more narrowly, all forms of life) have intrinsic value, and that wild animals, plants, rivers, and whole ecosystems have a right to exist, flourish and reproduce - or at least that human beings have no right to exploit or unnecessarily harm or destroy other members of the biotic community. In contrast to the aristo­ cratic universe of Wilderness Preservation, where some places (and some forms of recreation) are holier than others and certain types of natural entities ... are traditionally more worthy of being saved than others ..., the world of the Nature Moralist is characterised by an apparent egalitarianism ((b), p.50^ my rearrangement). Each of the sweep of environmental alternatives indicated can be seen as an of conventional Western ethics: intrinsic value is extended uniformly to all animals or certain favoured features of all these, e.g. their experience, happiness, avoidance of suffering, or is extended to all living creatures or systems, or is extended to all natural items or even to objects - it may or may be distributed uniformly or equally; Human use and human experience, it might be added. 44 rather independently, rights may be ceded to all animals, or to some or all living things, or to all things, or, alternatively and differently, right-holders' rights with respect to some or other of these classes are restricted; and similarly other deontic notions, justice, obligation, even perhaps duty, may extend to apply to larger classes of items than all humans or persons. The sweep, which is impressive, is intended to include both extended utilitarianisms, e.g. Bentham's utilitarianism as revamped by Singer according to which all sentient creatures are entitled to equal consider­ ation of interest, and extended (legal) rights doctrines, e.g. the assignment of rights or legal standing to all natural objects as suggested by, for instance, Stone.it also includes Darwin's ethic and Leopold's "land ethic". 4 7 In order to capture some of the intended examples of Nature Moralists, and all the Moral Extension positions, Rodman's characterisation requires some adjustment - which will be taken for granted in what follows. For example, Singer and other animal liberation- ists do not assign intrinsic value to all forms of life, or even to all animals; but (as Rodman is well aware) to all sentient creatures; that is, further classifications have to be taken into account. The egalitarian, or uniformity, assumptions that serve in character­ ising Natural Moralism are mistaken. Not all objects are of equal value; some are more valuable then others, while some have little or no value (and some have a negative value). Impressive though the sweep of extensions is, all the positions indicated should be rejected on one ground or another, and sometimes on several grounds. Against positions which do not extend the class of objects of moral concern and candidates for value to include all objects, variants of the counterexamples to the Western super-ethic can be directed. Consider, for instance, the positions (of usual animal liber- ationists) which extend the moral boundaries just to include sentient creatures (or e.g. preference-havers). Adapt the Last Man and Last People examples, the Wilderness example, etc., by removing all (inessential) animals from the examples, e.g. the wilderness contains no animals, in the Last People situation there are no other animals than the 46 p. singer, *??; E-ZEerafZc /VeD Random House, New York, 1975; C. Stone, op. cit. 47 at least on a straightforward reading of Leopold's eventual position: but not according to Rodman; see his contrast of Leopold with Stone, p.110. Darwin's ethic, which anticipates Leopold's, is presented in C. Darwin, Second edition, J. Murray, London, 1883. 48 On next page. 45 last people themselves. Then the counterexamples apply as before against the liberation positions. It is unnecessary to go quite so far afield to fault such positions, at least in practice: facts of experience: as.Rodman might put it, they are countered by the ... I need only to stand in the midst of a clear-cut forest, a strip-mined hillside, a defoliated jungle, or a dammed canyon to feel uneasy with assumptions that could yield the conclusion that no human action can make any difference to the welfare of anything but sentient animals (p.89). But an advantage of the counterexamples is that the same examples, among many others (e.g. situations devoid of sentient creatures, situations where the message of experience conflicts with justice or fairness), reveals the erroneousness of the well-sponsored thesis, a simple analogue of empiricism, that all value 49 derives from experience (of experiential, or sentient, objects). A corollary is that value is not to be assessed either, in any simple way, in terms of the facts of experience. Insofar as Nature Moralism relies upon simple extensions of utilitarianisms, or of subjectivisms, to include a larger class of subjects, (a larger base class), such as all present sentient creatures, or all preference-havers at any one time, * etc., it is open not merely to adaptations of the argument against chauvinism (animal chauvinism is not that much more satisfactory than human chauvinism), but most of the Nor, on Moral Extensions, need all objects that have rights have equal rights. Rights may not be very democratically distributed. Some things have rights, e.g. as a result of agreements, of a sort others do not hold or are not capable of holding. Even rights to exist, to flourish and to reproduce (each case is different) are in much doubt where there is scarcity or conflict and where some right holders are taken to be worth much more than others. Nor are such leading examplars of Natural Moralism as Singer and Stone, though they are concerned to extend principles of justice, committed to equality of rights assumptions. Stone explicitly rejects equal distribution of rights; but the principle that all natural objects are equal in having rights, which really says no more than that they all have rights, is at best a very weak egalitarian principle. Singer offers (and presumably would offer) no equality of rights principle, rejects an equality of treatment principle, and proposes as a principle of equality a (near vacuous) principle of equal consideration of interests. Not, this time, knowledge. But amusingly "value empiricism" collapses into empiricism proper given the Socratic identification: Value (generalising Virtue) is knowledge. The only natural stopping point under value empiricism is, of course, with all creatures that have (or could have) the relevant experiences: again not with humans. 46 standard objections to utilitarians, subjectivisms, etc. Many versions of Nature Moralism may than be defeated on rather conventional grounds. There emerges, further, a dilemma for extensions. Either the crucial notions of right and intrinsic value are extended to all sentient creatures (experience-havers), in which case the objections just lodged apply, or they are extended more sweepingly, e.g. to all natural objects. But the latter involves attributing to such items attributes they do not have, most obviously rights to such objects as stones; it also violates the conditions that have to be met for the holding of rights and for the entitlement of rights. Thus, for example, Stone considers underpinning his extension of rights, beyond sentient creatures in the ordinary sense - or of legal rights beyond recognised "legal persons" - by a postulate of 50 universal sentience or consciousness; in short, by an unacceptable metaphysics, or myth. There are several further objections which work against many versions of Natural Moralism to which Rodman draws attention: (1) Moral Extensions are 'inadequate to articulate the intention that sustains the [environmental] movement' wilderness preservation movements. (p.88), specifically wilderness and It takes but little argument to show that utilitarian ethics, such as Singer's, so far from assisting the environmental movement, can (if adopted) reinforce the case wilderness and preservation of wild species. But an extension like Stone's extension of legal rights can help, and has helped, at least in the courts where its meta-physical underpining is unlikely to be glimpsed. The basic point is however that the rights talk does not connect with, and is insensitive to, the experiential basis. Mere extensions of moral notions such as interest or right or justice are insufficient to treat and do just­ ice to the multi-dimensional depth of environmental issues, such as the damming of a river (p.115). Part of the reason is said to be that the usual moral aparatus, which was evolved in the case of certain person-to-person See Rodman's discussion, pp.92-3. But Rodman overstates his case in claiming that 'some such postulate as universal consciousness is there­ fore necessary if the notion of rights for trees is not to seem a rootless fancy'. For, as explained below, extended rights can be defined by a rather "natural extension" of the familiar notion of right, without any such postulate; and grounds of entitlement can be traced back to value of the items. Certainly extended rights sever what linkage there may have been between rights and liabilities, but with the modern separations of rights from responsibilities that linkage was already damaged or broken. 47 relations, is inadequate for getting to grips with a new dimension of moral experience, that concerned with environment, and inadequate to reflect ecological sensibility. Rodman tries to press, however, a much stronger, and rather more dubious, theme, the SsZZ-onf thesis: By adapting the moral/legal theory of 'rights', [the movement] may sell its soul, its roots in mythic and ritual experience, to get easier judicial standing (p.88); and more savagely, the progressive extension model of ethics, while holding out the promise of transcending the homocentric perspective of modern culture, subtly fulfills and legitimates the basic project of modernity - the total conquest of nature by man (p.97, also p.119). While neither of these large claims is strictly true - soul-selling is simply avoided through adoption of the notion of extended-right, which can yield a conservative extension of the original position; and even utilitarians may be committed to blocking projects which threaten free animals - each has a substantial point. Part of the point behind the latter claim is worth developing separately:(2) Moral Extensions typically cast natural objects, notably animals, in the role of inferior humans, 'legal incompetents', imbeciles, human vegetables, and the like. They are ... degraded by our failure to respect them for having their own existence, their own character and potentialities, their own forms of excellence, their own integrity, a degradation usually reflected in our reduction of 'them to the status of instruments for our own ends', and not removed 'by "giving" them rights, by assigning them to the status of inferior human beings' (p.94). Many of us know where the treatment of natural objects as mere means The mistaken treatment of them for human ends tends to lead and has led. as inferior humans, a treatment which fails to see and 'respect the otherness of nonhuman forms of life', leads in the same direction. For given that animals, for example, are inferior, it is legitimate to treat them also as inferior; a greater value principle, which moral extensions typically endorse, yields a similar result. The needs of increasing populations of superior humans will eventually outweigh, if they do not do so already, the cases of inferior inhabitants of this finite earth for the retention of their natural habitats. 48 For their rights and their In the larger perspective, the Moral values will be less than "ours". Extensions, with their built-in greater value assumptions, do legitimate the conquest of nature by humans. Thus too they fail seriously, on what will soon enough be quite practical grounds, as satisfactory environmental ethics. (3) The extensions, like the parent ethics which they extend, are narrowly individualistic, and insufficiently holistic. This is particularly conspicuous in the case of utilitarianisms, which in principle arrive at all assessments by some sort of calculations, e.g. summations and perhaps averaging, from an initially given unit conforming to requisite equality conditions, e.g. equal consideration, equal units of suffering. In practice of course the method is, almost invariably, to pretend that the calculations will yield results which agree with alternatively and previously arrived at, usually intuitive, often prejudiced, evaluations; that is, in practice the method is not applied except in a handwaving back-up fashion. The method is not applied in part because there are serious, well enough known, problems in applying it. The individualistic bias carried over in other moral extensions, e.g. any experiential theory, likewise limits their satisfactoriness. It is to understate the matter to say merely that 'the moral atomism that focuses on individual animals and their subjective experiences does not seem well adapted to coping with ecological systems' (p.89), 'to explore the notion of shared habitat and the notion that an organism's relationship to its natural environment may be an important part of the organism's character' ((b), p.52). A moral atomism that focuses on individuals, discounting their interrelations, is bound to result in ecological complexes that matter (such as ecosystems, wilderness, and species) getting seriously short-changed. To illustrate:- Under atomism, the value of a complex, or the rights of a complex, amount to no more than those of its individual members; but since these are, in isolation from the complex, no more valuable than other things of their order, e.g. one gentian than another, a bush rat from a Norwegian rat, there no special merit in a complex, or rights attaching to it, in virtue of its rareity or uniqueness or special features as a complex. Thus, for instance, a utilitarianism under which only individual animals count assigns, and can assign, no special value to species, and can (as remarked) be used to argue against preservation of species: Since all animals are equal - or at least all animals of the same genus are more or less equal - one can substitute for another. Fora rare species of rat to die out painlessly cannot matter while there are plenty of other rats. A rights theory is in similar difficulties so long 49 as rights are assigned only to individuals, taken in isolation from their environmental setting (i.e. only to the usual separable individuals of philosophical theory). These problems may be avoided, in part, by assign­ ing rights to complexes (given the notion of rights will take that much further stretching; which it will not if right holders are assumed to be conscious or to be preference-havers), and by attributing independent value to complexes. But, since the value of a whole is sometimes more than the sum of the separable values of its individual members, this move involves the rejection of usual atomism, utilitarianisms in particular. The objection against the narrow individualism of the extensions - a defect they share with standard ethics which do not admit of ready extension, such as contract theories - soon broadens into an objection that these extensions are built on an inadequate metaphysics, a metaphysics of rather isolated individuals who (or which) are seriously depauperate in An ethics presupposes a metaphysics at their relations with other objects. least through its choice of base class: thus for example, usual homocen- tric formulations of utilitarianisms and contract theories suppose a base class of narrowly self-interested humans. The remedy is not (as Rodman suggests in various places in his elaboration of Ecological Resistance) to move to holism: to do so would be to accept the other half of a false dichotomy mainstream philosophical thought engenders (cf. Routley (g), this volume). It is rather to move to a metaphysics that is built on a concept­ ion of objects (which may or may not be individuals) which are rich in their interrelations and connections. In summary, the moral extensions are the wrong direction in which to seek a satisfactory environmental ethic. But the failure of Nature Moralism does not mean, as Rodman tends to assume, that all positions that are moral in style are thereby ruled out. 51 For one thing, Nature Moralism, as characterised (or generalised), is far from exhaustive of the range of prima facie viable moral positions. More satisfactory positions will simply avoid the damaging assumptions of Nature Moralism (and likewise those of inadequate ethical positions, such as contract theories or naturalism, and those linking morality to legality; For another, if the quest is for an ruled out. cf. p.103). moral notions can hardly be Even if it is assumed that the call for a 'new ethic' is 'to guide the human/nature relationship (p.95) - a somewhat unfortunate way of putting it - whereas what matters is the human/nature relationship itself, and that in coping with that relation fixation on morality or 51 His thesis of the 'limitation of the moral/legal stage of unconscious­ ness' is investigated in more detail in what follows. 50 legality is a serious handicap, and may contribute to the problem of the relationship rather than helping solve it (pp.103-4); still part of the problem is that of indicating entitlements of agents with respect to their environment, what sort of exploitation, if any, is permissible, what the limits on conventional morality are, and discovering 'a larger normative order within which we and our species-specific moral and legal systems (p.97). have a niche' Nor, in outlining Ecological Resistance, does Rodman shrink from using - he could not avoid the effect of - axiological terms such as 'good' and deontic terms such as 'should'; he does not doubt, for example, that some of what is natural that is threatened is valuable and that threats to it should be resisted; and he admits that 'prudence, justice, and reverence may be essential parts of a[n ecologic­ ally] good life'. Ecological Resistance, which is said to be the alternative 'most faithful to the integrity of experience', exhibits indeed the negativity of resistance. The position is founded on action, resistance, and theory only emerges retrospectively (if perhaps at all). Its (insufficiently qualified) central principle is 'that diversity is natural, good and threatened by the forces of monoculture'. The struggle between these forces, diversity and monoculture - between (ecological) good and evil - occurs in several different spheres of experience, i.e. at various levels, which reflect one another. Resistance is not undertaken for self-interest or utilitarian reasons, or for moral reasons, or for religious or mystical reasons (such as preventing profanation), but because the threat to the [natural object or system] ... is perceived aZso as a threat to the self, or rather to the principle of diversity and spontaneity that is the endangered side of the basic balance that defines and sustains the very nature of things ((b), p.54). The disjunction, 'or', separates however two rather different (though combin­ able) reasons-cum-motives for resistance. The second disjunct yields the following reasons for resistance (which are linked by a metaphysical assumption connecting diversity and spontaneity with the nature of things): (i) The threat to the natural item is a threat to the principle of diversity and spontaneity. So, by the central principle, it is a threat to what is good, etc. (ii) The threat to the natural object 'is a threat to the very nature of things': (as to how consider the example of the wild river threatened by a dam, p.115). So - by an unstated, but nonetheless implied and assumed, principle, that the very nature of things is good (and natural) it is a threat to the forces of good. 51 The first disjunct yields form: a further, different, argument; in simplest (iii) The threat to the natural object is a threat to oneself. What is a threat to oneself is bad and to be resisted, so what is a threat to the natural object is bad and has to be resisted (since what is bad should, in general, be resisted). Although the arguments are valid, the underlying principles are faulty; for instance, the diversity (and spontaneity) principle because it is too simple (and so too does not harmonize with the nature of things); and the second principle, the intrinsic merit of the very nature of the things, because not everything that is the case or is natural is meritor­ ious, e.g. genuinely natural disasters. Rodman plans to avoid obstacles to adopting nature as an absolute standard and, at the same time, to bridge the gap the principle spans, by resort to a version of naturalism which equates 'the "natural" with the "moral"' (pp.96-7). But for well- known reasons which can be supported (e.g. those telling against objective ethics of the sort such naturalism would yield), substantive evaluative assumptions cannot be removed in this fashion; though they can be suppressed, they reappear as soon as connections between empirical The trouble, characteristic of reductionism, arises from the mistaken attempt grounds and evaluative judgments based upon them are queried. to collapse a grounding, or founding, relation to an identity, to close the gap - which is not problematic but is widely thought to be problem­ atic - between value and empirical fact by a reduction of value to fact, of the thesis that evaluative features are grounded on natural features to the thesis that evaluative features are nothing but certain natural 52 features (e.g. to be good is just to have certain natural features). 52 Rodman interprets naturalistically the statement of Jonas's that he quotes approvingly (p.95): Only an ethic which is grounded in the breadth of being, not merely in the singularity or oddness of man, can have significance in the scheme of things ... an ethics no longer founded on divine authority [or upon human arete], must be founded on a principle discoverable in the nature of things ... . He interprets it in terms of 'an ontologically-grounded moral order in the "the phenomenon of life" or "the nature of things".' In this way can be avoided the reduction of 'the quest for an ethics ... to prattle about "values" taken in abstraction from the "facts" of experience'. But Jonas's statement can be construed nonnaturalistically, by taking the founding or grounding relation seriously, as connecting, but not reducing, values to empirical facts. So construed the statement does help in delineating the sort of environmental ethics sought. 52 Such reductions commit the naturalistic and prescriptive fallacies - which can be avoided neither by thinking 'our way through or around them' (p.97), nor by holistic assimilation of morality in a 'more encompassing ethical life' (p.103 and note 66). But details of the fallacies need not detain us, since we can consider immediately Rodman's important suggestion 53 for circumnavigating them (pp.103-4). Under natural social conditions, such as are obtained in some traditional societies and in some free animal societies (as ethological studies reveal), but have been lost in modern societies, law and morality, at least in their coercive aspects, would disappear, as they did in William Morris's /row and somewhat as they would in a Kantian community of fully autonomous beings. In terms of modern physics, morality and law are not invariants but vary under transformation of axes, and in fact vanish or prove eliminable under a suitable transformations, e.g. to a natural condition. There is a similar natural condition for morality and legality, a condition in which the prohibitions now prescribed 54 by God, Conscience and the State would have operated "naturally" (i.e. from inside the organism, as a matter of course), and patterns now stated prescriptively could have been stated descriptively. When the Way is abandoned, then we get Humanity and Justice (Tac Te #18) (p.103). Even if a change of social axes could place us back on the Way, or on the way to the Way, morality is not really avoidable in our local frame where we are far from the Way. So ethical disputes over environmental matters 55 are also unavoidable; * for those a satisfactory ethic is a desideratum, and can help in bringing about a change of social axes. Thus too, the identity of the prescriptive with the descriptive, of "ought" with (suitable) "is", is a merely contingent (extensional) one and fails in 53 The suggestion helps explain not only Rodman's naturalism, but his thesis of the limitation of morality and legality; it also introduces the anarchistic social change view that suffuses much of the (very uneven) later parts of (a): the view appears therein as the elabor­ ation of what is 'unthinkable'. 54 Given prevailing socio-economic conditions it should be rather: that would (ideally) be prescribed. Let us hope, for environmental reasons, that the principles that are lived by in natural conditions bear not too great a resemblance to those now prescribed. 55 Nor is there, in the local frame, much alternative but to resort to legal strategies, where they can be applied (where standing is granted), to delay "the war against nature". 53 alternative situations; hence, as always, there is no deduction of "ought" from "is", since deducibility would require coincidence in the alternative situations. Nor would morality - as distinct from legality, which requires some codification - strictly disappear under natural conditions, though its coercive aspects would: on the whole, as they ought to be. things would simply be, But while deontology would have a much diminished role (as it does on the preferred environmental ethic), axiology (the theory of value) would still have its place - some objects (e.g. diverse landscapes) would be more valuable than others (monocultural landscapes), some not valuable, etc. (As things stand, of course, axiology does have an important place in working out the theory of Ecological Resistance, especially in assessing its central principle of diversity.) The upshot is that without much elaboration (like that indicated below) of an axiological kind, which connects value through a grounding relation, as distinct from an identity, with the run of things (but not aZZ things) that are natural, reason (ii) for ecological resistance fails. Does reason (i), which is premissed on the central principle that diversity is good and natural and threatened by monoculture, fare any better? While it is a matter of fact that that diversity is threatened, indeed is being very rapidly reduced by the forces of monoculture, diver­ sity is not, as opponents of ecological values are wont to point out, an entirely unqualified good. Nor is diversity is always natural: a temperate rain forest can be "enriched" and rendered more diverse by interplanting of exotics (a practice foresters have applied, e.g. in New Zealand) but the result is not natural and sometimes at least bad. Or, differently, ecological diversity can often be increased by increasing edges between ecosystems, but the practice of increasing edges can easily be unnatural and far from good, as, e.g. in rainforest logging with (say) 50% canopy retention. So although a reduction of diversity is commonly bad, since the reduction reduces the quality of an ecological whole, and increase in diversity good, diversity can not be accepted as a solo principle. In fact, Rodman often couples diversity with other factors, such as naturalness (inadmissible in determining, noncircularly, what is good and natural), richness, spontaneity and integrity, which help to remove various of the counterexamples to a diversity principle. The procedure points in the direction to be pursued: replacement of the oversimple principle of diversity by a principle combining all relevant ecological factors. After all ecological sensibility - ecological resist­ ance is assumed to be the position of the person of ecological sensibility requires sensitivity to all such ecological factors. 54 Once it is determined through consideration of a mix of ecological factors, that, or whether, a natural object is good or valuable the reasons for resistance can be restated: (iv) Where a natural object is valuable - as c/fe?? natural objects are, a natural object does not have to be very ecologically distinctive to be valuable - the threat to the natural object is a threat to what is But, other things being equal, threats to what is valuable valuable. should be resisted. So, similarly, threats to natural objects should often be resisted - and always (on whatever level) resisted where the objects are valuable and the costs of resisting are not overridingly high (to begin to spell out the ceteris paribus clause). It remains to tie in reason (iii), a key premiss of which can now take the initial form that the threat to a valuable natural object is a threat to oneself. A threat to what is valuable, to what one as a valuer values, is a threat to the valuer, to oneself, for these are one's values. To make some of those connections good again requires an excursion into axiology, one, this time, that connects what is valuable with a valuer's values. But Rodman, in trying to connect the threats to natural objects and to oneself, is forced further afield, and resorts to the myth of microcosm: 'Ecological Resistance involves a ritual affirmation of the Myth of Microcosm' universe' (OED). ((b), p.5.4), i.e'. the view of man 'as epitome of the While such an affirmation - without the ritual - would yield the requisite connection, it is a classic piece of anthropocentric- ism, quite hostile to a nonchauvinistic position, and, fortunately, inessential to genuine ecological resistance. What Rodman reaches for from the myth (which could be restated in terms of without its classic homocentric bias) is however extremely important: it is an account of the which is not a separate subject isolated from its (natural) environment (as a Humean individual is),56 but is connected intensionally and causally interrelated with that environment. Rodman introduces this metaphysics in rather old-fashioned terms: Ecological Resistance ... assumes a version of the theory of internal relations: the human personality discovers its structure through interaction with the nonhuman order. I am what I am at least partly in my relation to my natural environment, and changes in that environ­ ment affect my own identity. If I stand idly by and let it be destroyed, a part of me is destroyed or seriously deranged ((b) p. 54). Not Man Apart, in the terms of Friends of the Earth. 55 For among my interests are its interests, part of my welfare is its 57 welfare; I am identified in part with it. The metaphysics deepens, A resister 'does not stand over against then, the reasons for resistance. "his environment" as manager, sight-seer, or do-gooder; integral part of [it]' he is an ((b), p.56). But the environmental metaphysics, that underlies and helps support the ethics, that is part of a fuller environmental theory, need not be, and should not be if it is to be coherent, as (Hegelian and) holistic as Rodman immediately goes on to suppose that it is: ... By making the principle of diversity central, Ecological Resistance can incorporate the other three perspectives as moments within the dialectic of a larger whole. Economics, morality, and an esthetic religiosity have niches in the ecology of our experience of nature, and each has its limits (p.56 continued). But a principle of diversity which opposes the forces of monoculture will not yield pluralism, unless illegitimately extrapolated to theories where its merit is much less evident, especially when some of these theories are not only mutually inconsistent but false. Rodman risks the distinctive features of Ecological Resistance for a dubious synthesis. It is only true that the positions can be combined if the first three positions are limited indeed, and then a trivial combination with each theory working where it works (which may be nowhere actual in the case of the religious component) can be managed. Moreover Ecological Resistance properly developed, will lead to economic and ethical theories which compete with the rather conventional, and environmentally defective theories of, respectively, Resource Conservation and Natural Moralism. Not only is Ecological Resistance severely handicapped by having implausible holistic theses tacked in to it (not all of which have been discussed); further, Ecological Resistance is too negative. A more positive theory - which includes a theory of value and, ultimately, for a fuller environmental position, a metaphysics - is required, not only for orientation and to meet felt needs of environmentalists already noted, but for more effective, coherent and systematic resistance. It is but a short step to the 'fully ecological sensibility [which] knows with Carl Sandburg that:' There is an eagle in me ... and the eagle flies among the Rocky Mountains of my dreams and fights among the Sierra crags of what I want ... . And I got the eagle ... from the wilderness, (p.118) The poem almost admits of neutral logical formalisation. 56 trees, kill everything f/xe Farf/z, (ed. T.C. McLuhan, Sphere Books, London, 1973, p.15). The great care with which so many of the Indians utilized every portion of the carcass of a hunted animal was an expression, not of economic thrift, but of courtesy and respect (D. Lee, in Farf/z, p.15)- What the respect position is based on is the fact that it is possible to make use of something without treating it as something which is no more than a means to one's ends. That is, it is possible to make use of some­ thing in limited, constrained ways - with constraints which may not derive entirely from considerations of the welfare of other humans, as in the case of the Indians' use of animals - without treating it as available for any kind of use. To so use something without treating it as available for unlimited or unconstrained use for human ends is characteristic of use. In contrast non-respectful use treats the use of the item as constrained by no considerations arising from the item itself and the user's relationship to it, but as constrained only in a derivative way, by considerations of the convenience, welfare and so forth of other humans. The Western view, as the Indians realised, is the non-respect position, that the world is available for unconstrained human use. People who hold respect positions, such as the Indians, see such a position as indicative of a lack of moral sensitivity, and sometimes in even stronger terms. The conventional wisdom of Western society tends to offer a false dichotomy of use versus respectful nonuse - a false choice which comes out especially clearly again in the treatment of animals. Here the choice presented in Western thought is typically one of edf/zer use without respect or serious constraint, of using animals for example in the ways character­ istic of large-scale mass-production farming and a market economic system which are incompatible with respect, or on the other hand of not making any use of animals at all, for example, never making use of animals for food or for farming purposes. What is left out in this choice is the alternative the Indians and other non-Western people have recognised, the alternative of limited and respectful use, which enables use to be made of animals, but does not allow animals to be used in an unconstrained way or merely as a means to human ends. Such an alternative can have some applic­ ation in a Western context (for some limited examples of respectful use in the operations of a small farmer, see John Seymour, CompZtsfe Faber, London, 1976). A limited and respectful use position would condemn the infliction of unnecessary pain on animals, and also the treatment of animals as machines, as in factory farming. 84 It would also condemn unecessary and wasteful killing and especially killing for amusement or "sport", which is incompatible with respect and assumes that animals can be used merely as a means for human ends. But it would not necessarily oppose the use of animals in the case of approp­ riate non-trivial need, e.g. for food, although here again it would insist that the ways in which use can be made are limited, and not just by considerations of effect on other humans. The limited and respectful use position avoids some of the serious problems of the no-use position of the animal liberationists, although it shares many of the same beliefs concerning the illegitimacy of factory farming and similar disrespectful methods of making use of and exploiting animals. The no-use position faces the problem that it proposes that humans should treat animals in ways which are quite different from the ways in which animals treat one another, for example, prohibiting needful use for food. Thus the no-use position seems obliged to say either that the world would be a better place without carnivores, or else that carnivorous animals themselves are inferior, immoral, moral creatures - whichever, alternative amoral or non- is taken here the bulk of animals emerge as inferior to humans, or at least vegetarian humans. It implies too that an impoverished natural order which lacked carnivores - and given what we know of ecology this would be a very highly impoverished one indeed, not to say an unworkable "natural" order - is preferable to a rich natural one with a normal proportion of carnivorous and partly carnivorous species. carnivores, Since it would imply the moral inferiority of the no-use position appears to arrive at the negation of its own starting point, (as regards e.g., the equality consideration) of all animals, human and non-human. In thus seeing humans as capable of a moral existence which most animals are not capable of, it sees man as apart from a largely amoral, (or immoral) natural world, denies community with the animal and natural world,and indirectly reinforces human chauvinism. §6. TOWARDS AN ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOSOPHY: A PRELIMINARY SKETCH OF THE EXTENT OF PHILOSOPHICAL REVISION ENSUING ON ABANDONMENT OF CHAUVINISTIC ETHICS A radical change in a theory not uncommonly forces changes elsewhere - conceptual revision which affects not only the theory itself but many neighbouring areas. The phenomenon is well-known in the case of major physical theories, but it holds as well for ethical and philosophical theories; for example, a logical theory which rejects the Reference Theory in a thoroughgoing way has important repercussions throughout much of the rest of philosophy, and requires modification not only of logical 85 systems and their semantics, but also, for instance, of the usual meta­ theory which also accepts the Reference Theory and indeed which is 95 tailored to cater only for logics which do conform. A thorough-going environmental ethics likewise has a substantial impact and forces many changes. The escape from human chauvinism not only involves sweeping changes in ethical principles and value theory but it induces substantial'reverberations elsewhere - both inwards, for example in metaphysics, in epistemology, and in the philosophy and method­ ology of science, and outwards (in subjects that presuppose value theory) in social theory, in politics, in economics and in law, and beyond. For human chauvinism is deeply embedded in Western culture, and affects not only the ideology and the institutions but the arts. Thus, for example, much of literature, and especially of ballet and film, is given over to a celebration of things human, of the species. Even the timely new emphasis, for instance of the counterculture, on human relations (as opposed to self- contained private individuals of social theories) remains well within the inherited chauvinistic framework. As to the changes, let us begin again with ethics. As we have begun to see, an environmental ethic can retain, though in a much amended theoretical framework (which affects meanings of terms), virtually all the standard ethical terminology. But even at a superficial syntactical level, there will be conspicuous alterations: firstly, ethical terminology will be enriched with new environmental terms, drawn in particular from ecology, somewhat as it was expanded in the late nineteenth century by terminology from evolutionary theories; and secondly, accompanying the attitudinal shifts the new ethic involves, there will be a marked shift in ethical terminology, away from the predominance of such terms as (and examples associated with) 'obligation', to such expressions as 'care', 'respect', 'consciousness'. 'duty', 'concern', 'promise', 'responsibility', 'contract', 'trust', Because the theoretical and attitudinal frame is changed, an environmental ethic forces - as we have already found with such notions as and - reexamination of, and modified analyses of, characteristic ethical notions. It requires, furthermore, reassessment of traditional and conventional analyses of such notions as natural right, ground of right, and permissib­ ility, especially where these are based on chauvinist assumptions - much as it requires the rejection of most of the more prominent meta-ethical gr These points are explained in detail in Routley (e); and also in L. Goddard and R. Routley, T/ze py urui Context, Vol. 1, Scottish Academic Press, 1973, chapters 3 and 4. 86 positions. Cursory examination of recent accounts of nutMruZ wcrcZZtpj jMst-Zce and cctfc?? will help illustrate and confirm these points. Hart, for example, accepts (subject to defeating conditions which are here irrelevant) the classical doctrine of natural rights according to which, among other things, any adult human ... capable of choice is at liberty to do (i.e. is under no obligation to abstain from) any action which is not one coercing or restraining or designed to injure other persons (H.L.A. Hart, 'Are there any natural rights?', reprinted in PcZZticuZ PbiZoscpbp, (ed. A. Quinton), Blackwell, Oxford 1967). But this sufficient condition for a human natural right depends on accepting the basic chauvinist principle - a variant of (D) - environmental ethics reject; since if a person has a natural right he has a right. So too the definition of a natural right adopted by classical theorists and accepted with minor qualifications by Hart presupposes the same defective principle. Accordingly an environmental ethic would have to amend the classical notion of a natural right, a far from straightforward matter now that human rights with respect to animals and the natural environment are, like those with respect to slaves not all that long ago, undergoing major re-evaluation. Another example of chauvinism at work in the very setting up of the field of discussion and problems in ethics is provided by recent accounts of .^ercZ'Ztp, where it is simply taken for granted that 'moral' distinguishe 96 among actions, policies, motives and reasons, and that what is moral refers essentially to human well-being (contentment, happiness or something of this general sort, tied with appropriate states or conditions of humans). Such criteria for what is moral are chauvinistic- ally based, assuming that what does not bear on human states or conditions cannot be a moral matter. What happens in worlds without humans, how animals fare or are treated, what is done or what happens to plants or other natural objects - none of these are directly moral matters, except insofar as they impinge on human welfare. That is human 96 Thus for instance, B. Williams, ^eruZitz/.- Xx tc Effies, Harper & Row, New York, 1972, p.79. Williams does, however, remark in his Preface (p.xiv) how 'shaky and problematic' the distinction - which he subsequently takes for granted - is. 97 see, for example, P.R. Foot, Tbecries cf FtZrZcs, Oxford University Press, London, 1967,and G.J. Warnock, Oc^tewpcrcrp McraZ PhZZcscpbp, Macmillan, London, 1967, and also The Object cf AfcrcZZty, Methuen, London, 1971. 87 chauvinism at work, and is at the same time a reductio such criteria. ad absurdum of A different nonchauvinistic account of what is moral is required (a beginning can be made by adopting certain of the maligned formal criteria). It is evident that any account which meets even weak conditions of adequacy will serve to meet the objection that an environmental ethic is not concerned with what is moral but is really an aesthetic theory. For the objection as usually presented depends squarely on a chauvinistic restriction on morality, all the rest of value theory being classed, or dismissed, as "(mere) aesthetics". The case of morality illustrates the characteristic way in which theories - in this case chauvinistic ethics - redefine crucial notions in their own terms to suit their own ends, such as entrenchment and fortification of the theories against objections. Further corollaries of the rejection of chauvinism include the inadequacy of recent fashionable attempts, mainly derivative from Hobhouse, at characterising eguuZitp and justifying it in ways that argue from man's humanity,98 and the inadequacy of much recent, largely chauvinistic, work which takes it for granted that action and 99 rationality requirements on action are bound up with human nature. in the philosophy of The abandonment of chauvinism implies the rejection not only of much ethical analysis, but of all current major ethical positions. The bias of prevailing ethical positions, and also of economic positions, which aim to make principles of conduct or reasonable economic behaviour calculable is especially evident. These positions typically employ a single criterion p, such as preference or happiness, as a summum bonum; characteristically each individual of some base class, almost always humans, but perhaps including future humans, is supposed to have (at least) an ordinal p- ranking of the states in question (e.g. of affairs, of the economy); then some principle is supplied to determine a collective p-ranking of these states in terms of individual p-rankings, and what is best or ought to be done is determined either directly, as in act-utilitarianism under the Greatest Happiness principle, or indirectly, as in rule-utilitarianism in terms of some optimization principle applied to the collective ranking, The species bias is transparent from the selection of the base class. go And Among such unsatisfactory liberal egalitarian positions are those presented in G. Vlastos, 'Justice and equality' in JooiuZ (ed. R.B. Brandt), Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1962, and B.A.O. Williams, ' The idea of equality' in P^i^osoph^, Pacifies artJ Jpcietz/, Second series (ed. P. Laslett and W.G. Runciman), Blackwell, Oxford, 1963. 99 gee, e.g. T. Nagel, TTns PossiM7-7fi/ of Oxford, 1970. 88 Clarendon Press, even if the base class is extended to include persons or some animals (at the cost, like that of including remotely future humans, of losing testability), the positions are open to familiar criticism, namely that the whole of the base class may be prejudiced in a way which leads to unjust principles. To take a simple example, if every member of the base class detests dingoes, on the basis of mistaken data as to dingoes' behaviour, then by the Pareto ranking test the collective ranking will rank states where dingoes are exterminated very highly, from which it will generally be concluded that dingoes ought to be exterminated (still unfortunately the evaluation of most Australian farmers, though it lacks any requisite empirical basis). Likewise it would just be a happy accident, it seems, if collective demand (horizontally summed from individual demand) for a state of the economy with sperm whales as a mixed good, were to succeed in outweighing private whaling demands; for if but few in the base class happened to know that sperm whales exist or cared a jot that they do, then even the most "rational economic decision­ making would do nothing to prevent their extinction. But whether the sperm whale survives should not have to depend on what humans know or what they see on television. Summed human interests, or preferences of certain private individuals, are far too parochial to provide a satisfactory basis for deciding upon what is environmentally desirable. Nor would such accidental bases be adequate. Moreover ways out of the problem do not bear much investigation. It cannot be assumed, for instance, that the base class is on the whole good, and hence will not enjoin reprehensible behaviour, because such an assumption seems false, would at best be contingently true (so that the theory would fail for different circumstances to which it should apply), and would involve a deep problem in the theory, since it would then seem to admit the determination of goodness - that of the base class, on the whole - independently of what the theory was set up to determine, among other things, goodness. Nor can it be assumed, without serious circularity that the optimisation is constrained by requirements of justice or fairness (see Routley (b) and §5 above). The ethical and economic theories just singled out (which are based on optimisation over select features of the base class) are not alone in their species chauvinism; much the same applies to mosf going meta- ethical theories which, unlike intuitionistic theories, try to offer some rationale for their basic principles. That is, the argument against utilitarian-type ethical and economic theories generalises. For instance, on social contract positions, obligations are a matter of mutual agreement 89 between individuals of a given (but again problematic) base class; on a social justice picture, rights and obligations spring from the application of symmetrical fairness principles to members of the base class, usually a rather special class of persons;while on a Kantian position, which has some vogue, obligations somehow arise from respect for members of the base class, persons.In each case, if members of the base class happen to be ill-disposed to items outside the base class, then that is unfortun­ ate for them: that is (rough) justice. Looking outwards from the ethics, the abandonment of chauvinism has likewise a wide set of consequences, both theoretical and practical, in One economics, politics and law, and generally in the social sciences major practical economic impact of environmental ethics is in the extent to which free enterprise can operate unimpeded or unchanged. of business and enterpreneurial activity - to But consider one option - will involve, in turn, either legal constraints, or reallocation of activity by such devices as environmental pricing, which directs activity away from environmentally undesirable pursuits. For example, if it is wrong to destroy a rare ecosystem in order to make a few more dollars, then restrictions should be imposed on business activity by one method or another. To some limited extent this is already happening in the field of pollution, but primarily because of the likely effects, direct or not too far removed, that pollution comes to have on other humans, not for a wider set of reasons, and often not for the right reasons. With a wider environ mental code, the public and legal intrusion into areas typically regarded as "private" and open to the free enterprise operations (of "open go") would be much more extensive. The same applies in the case of private 100 Thus for example, [Rawls'] original position seems to presuppose not just a neutral theory of the good, but a liberal, individualistic conception according to which the best that can be wished for someone is the unimpeded pursuit of his own path, provided it does not interfere with the rights of others. This view is persuasively developed in the later portions of the book, but without a sense of its controver­ sial character (T. Nagel, 'Rawls on justice', PkiZcscphicuZ 82 (1973), p.228). Nagel also effectively argues that Rawls' original position is not neutrally determined but involves substantial moral assumptions (e.g. pp.232, 233); they are mostly, as it happens, of a chauvinistic cast. 10^ While the first of Kant's maxims is not so restricted in actual form­ ulation, others are (see H.J. Paton, TPe Hutchinson, London, 1947. And, firstly, such maxims are s^pp<9se^ to be equivalent to ones formulated in terms of persons; secondly, they are supposed to be derived from features of, or connected with, people. 90 property; for example, given that it is not permissible to erode hill­ sides then there should, in this setting, be (legal) restrictions on farmers' and foresters' activities. Although the impact on the practice of economics of a thoroughgoing environmental ethic would be drastic - market negotiations, firms' activities,-international trade, all would be affected - the impact on the underlying theories of preference and choice is comparatively less, but still far from negligible. For much of economics is squarely founded on chauvinism. The theoretical bias follows directly from the utilitarian bases of the theory, which is fairly explicit in welfare theory and rather heavily disguised in neoclassical theory. But although choice and value theory are, as characteristically presented in economics and elsewhere, damagingly chauvinistic, they do not have to be. For the theories can be reformulated in a non-chauvinistic way, as was indicated (in §5) above for utilitarianism - upon which economic theory is modelled. On such a revamped foundation an environmental economics to match the chosen environmental ethic can be built (for some preliminaries on this approach, see Routley (d), appendices 1 and 6). Several of the objections to base class theories such as utilitar­ ianism apply not merely against orthodox economic theory, but also to voting theory, to representative democratic systems of determination of political action. If, for, example, the base class consists of private individuals motivated by their own self-contained interest then such procedures can readily lead to most undesirable results, especially if these individuals compromise representative individuals. their autonomy through the election of For the more powerful of these representative individuals can be - and typically are, as their behaviour if not their protestations show - not favourably disposed to (the welfare of) things outside the base class or even to many members of the base class. Nearer the theoretical surface, especially in such branches of economics as "resource management", the chauvinism is more conspicuous. The following narrowly utilitarian assumption is quite typical: The goal of resource managers should be to communicate and act in ways that maximize human satisfaction (H.J. Campbell, 'Economic and social significance of upstream aquatic resources' in Forest Fses Oregon State University, Corcallis, 1971, p-14, also p.17). When management - where such is management becomes needed at all - the goals will be changed from such chauvinistic ones. 91 The method of interference in "free economic enterprise", of controls and regulations, of legal and political constraints, is only one way in which leading principles of an environmental ethics can be put into effect. A quite different, and ultimately far more appealing, approach is by way of structural change, by changing the socio-economic structure in such a way that it comes to reflect on environmental ethics (by altering the frame of reference, or axes, to use the physical picture of §4, so.that major problems vanish). Requisite structural change is 102 . far-reaching, both practically and theoretically' in every reach of social science. For example, while on the position, capitalist markets are subject to further regulation, either directly imposed or by way of suitable pricing policies, in the sfrzzcfLzraZ- position, capitalist markets are eliminated; while under state regulation private property is subject to further controls,given approp­ riate structural change private property disappears. Looking inwards, an environmental ethic has an impact on the practice of many sciences other than the social sciences - what they do experimentally with natural objects (e.g. the treatment of animals in laboratory testing); how their research programmes are organised and directed (consider, e.g., projects involving irradiation or broadscale herbicide treatments of rainforests); the way classifications are made and which are made (consider, e.g. the extent to which human perception enters into classifications in botany); recommended on the basis of such sciences. and, of course, what is For as it stands human chauvinism is deeply embedded in the practice of science, directly in research and experimentation and in shaping classifications, theses and theories. Indeed the effect of a different ethic may extend even to the theory of such sciences, in particular through the bearing the ethic has 103 on metaphysics which in turn influences the foundations or such sciences. Such a new ethic would quite properly upset (as §1 should indicate) the extent to which humans are seen at the centre of things and things as accountable through them and scientific theories as 'human constructions wrestled from a hostile nature' (after Popper). It would help overthrow the pernicious chauvinistic idea that, apart from certain elementary facts, AZZes value. isf AfeyzscZzoMMor^., all necessity, all intensionality, all It should result too in the shattering of still widespread As (g) V. and R. Routley, 'Social theory, self management and environmental problems', this volume, begins to explain. Cf. R. Harre, P/zi^osop?zies of 1972; and also Routley (e). 92 Oxford University Press, assumptions as to the nature of animals and plants, for instance that their apparently goal-directed and intensional behaviour can be explained (away) mechanistically, and the deeply-rooted idea that some sort of Cartesian metaphysical picture of natural, as distinct from spiritual or rational, objects can be maintained (cf. again §1). In metaphysics there are at least two further important classes of effects. Firstly, the orthodox views of man's relation to nature, the dominant and modified dominant and lesser traditions, have to be abandoned and new positions worked out. In this sense, a new environmental ethic implies a similarly new metaphysic redefining Man's place in nature and human/nature relationships.^^4 such a new philosophy of nature will recognise various natural objects other than humans as of independent value, so it will not be naturalistic. Nor will it view natural objects as simply available for the use, wise or otherwise, of humans. Several principles derived from the orthodox metaphysical positions will have to be abandoned and replacements worked out (as in the case of (D) in ethics). Thus superseded, for example, will be the principles of total use of natural areas for human use and of maximum long-term productivity of the earth's resources (principles criticised in their application in forestry in Routley (d)). At a deeper level, such a philosophy of nature will involve a turning away from the leading ideological principles of both the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and of much that went with them (e.g. with the Rennaissance, the rise of commerce, bureaucracy, professionalism, formal education, and subsequently, with the Enlightenment, the rise of the modern state, capitalism and scientific enlightenment). For it means the dismissal of the chauvinistic principles of the Renaissance, with 'Man as the kernel of the Universe', a creature 'half-earthly and half—divine, his body and soul form[ing] a microcosm enabling him to understand and control Nature . ..'.^O-^ It means too removal of the humanism of the Enlightenment, the reduction of what formerly was assigned to the religious, such as ethical and political principles, to the human, a reduction which 404 Passmore has observed - inconsistently with what is claimed in his (a) - in 'Attitudes to Nature', Poz/aZ. Irzstitz^te P/ziZ-csopTzz/ lectures, volume 8, Macmillan, London, 1975. As against Passmore (a) p.3, such new ethics and metaphysics need involve no abandonment of 'the analytical, critical approach which is the glory of the West': on the contrary, they may well mean a more thoroughly critical and analytical approach than hitherto. 104 goth quotations are from ?7ze <9/ t/z<3 Pgrzaissa^cg (ed. D. Hay) Thames and Hudson, London 1967, pp.7-10, where too main movements, practical and ideological, of the Renaissance are usefully indicated. 93 was based on the false dichotomy, which has still not lost its hold: reli.gious or humanistic. Secondly, the removal of humans from a dominant position in the natural order renders immediately suspect a range of familiar philosophical positions of a verificationistic or idealistic kind such as phenomenalism in epistemology (how can what exists depend on what is perceived by members of such a transitory and perhaps not so important species or on whether there exist <2722/ perceivers?), intuitionism in mathematics, con­ ventionalism in logical theory, the Copenhagen interpretation in micro­ physics, and subjectivisms not only in ethics but in every other philosophical sphere. True, most of these positions are defeated on the basis of other considerations anyway; but it is an immediate and further point against them that they are damagingly chauvinistic. Thus a corollary of the thoroughgoing rejection of human chauvinism, of very considerable philosophical importance, is the rejection of all 'the usual forms of idealism, i.e. all positions which accord primacy to the human subject and make the existence of a world of things or the nature of things dependent upon such subjects. A paradigmatic example is phenomenalism; other examples are Kantian idealisms, Hegelianisms and later German idealisms, Christian philosophies based on the primacy of human (and superhuman) consciousness, existentialisms; more surprising examples are empiricisms - inasmuch as all knowledge and truth is supposed to be ultimately derived from human experience - and their holistic images, dialectical materialisms and Marxisms. A satisfactory environ­ mental philosophy will be significantly different from all these positions. 94  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 20, Item 3: Draft of Human chauvinism and environmental ethics Subject The topic of the resource Printout of draft, undated. Pages 57-85 missing. Paper published, Routley R and Routley V (1980) 'Human chauvinism and environmental ethics', in Mannison DS, McRobbie, MA, Routley R (eds) Environmental philosophy, Dept. of Philosophy, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. Description An account of the resource Unnumbered paper from collection, item number assigned by library staff. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Routley</a> <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=val+routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Val Routley</a> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 20, Item 3 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. 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Type The nature or genre of the resource Correspondence Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:31eb305">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:31eb305</a> Box 20: More Green Como House Como House > [Item not listed with location] https://www.antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/e982e570c60865b3674aefbc54296e15.pdf 85a1e7e591aff80e1814d6e487e4fc61 PDF Text Text �— ?HUMAN CHAUVINISM AND.ENVIRONMENTAL.ETHICS* Richard and Vai Routley / * . * Class chauvinism has been and remains a cardinal weakness of most . moral codes - including, so it will°be argued, Western ethics. * A most serious failure 6f Western ethics is its human chauvinism or anthropo^centricism - a chauvinism which emerges in a refined, and apparently more reds&n*able, form as person chauvinism in much modern ethical theory. * w What is chauvinism? $ * Class chauvinism, in the relevant sense, is sz^Etant^aZ-Z-z/ differential, discriminatory and inferior treatment (by sufficiently many members of the class) for items outside the class, for which there is not enff-ZcZen^ justification. Pnwan chauvinism is class chauvinism where the class is humans, wuZ-e chauvinism where the class is human males, an-Z/zzaZ. chauvinism where the class is animals, etc. It would be bazf, to say the least, if Western ethics, in its various strands, were to turn out to rest on human, or person, chauvinism. For Western ethics would then have no better foundation than, and be open to the same sorts of objections as, moral codes based on other sorts of chauvinisms, e.g. on familial, national, sexual, racial or socio-economic class chauvinism - in particular it would be open to the objection that This paper (which considerably elaborates R. Routley 'Is There a need for a new, an environmental, ethic?', Procee^-Znps of Zz/ze XPt/z ^orZ^ Ccnpress of PTz^Z-cscp/zz/, 1 (1973), pp.205-10), was drafted in 1973 and read in 1974 at the University of Indiana, Bloomington, at Notre Dame University, and at the Conference on The Good Society held at the University of Victoria, Canada. Since the main virtue of the paper has been that it'has generated much interesting discussion, the original form has been retained, though the authors are no longer especially happy with the form, and many theses remain insufficiently developed or defended. But in order not to remove the previous and continuing criticism, no substantial deletions have been made, even though the paper has been raided and segments of it presented in improved form elsewhere, especially (a) R. and V. Routley, 'Against the inevitability of human chauvinism', in MoraZ P/z-ZZosopTzz/ an<7 t?ze Tzjentp-F-Zrst Centnrz/ (edited by K. Goodpaster and K. Sayre), Notre Dame University Press, 1979, and (b) R. and V. Routley, 'An expensive repair-kit for utilitarianism', paper presented at the Colloquium on Preferences CTzo^ce an<i FaZzve, RSSS, Australian National University, 1977. However some sizeable additions have been made, with a view to increasing the intelligibility and enlarging the scope of the original draft, and meet­ ing some of the many objections. 1 �it discriminated against nonhumans in a prejudiced and unwarranted way, and would thereby stand condemned. For it is hard to see how an ethic based on simple spoo-Zes loyalty could have any greater claim to absolute­ ness or deserve any more respect than moral codes based on simple loyalty to national, sexual, or racial classes. Such an ethic could no more command allegiance - once the facts are brought into clear view - than other normally-deplored examples of localised class chauvinism, such as the Mafia or protection agencies or rackets or enclaves of slavery. Unfortunately prevailing Western ethics appear to be of just this sort. §1. THE WESTERN CASE FOR ITS HUMAN (OR PERSON) CHAUVINISM: THE FIRST LINES OF DEFENCE It is important, then, for defenders of the Western ideology to be able to show - *Zf it can be shown - that an ethic which discriminates strongly in favour of humans, as Western ethics apparently does, is not chauvinistic. Otherwise the ethic stands condemned. Of course not every distinction in treatment qualifies as chauvinistic - the distinction in treatment may not be substantial or systematic, and there may be an adequate and explicable basis for the distinction, so that some discrimin­ ation is warranted. In order to escape the charge of human chauvinism, it has to be shown how and why the drastic and general discrimination in favour of humans sanctioned and enjoined by modern (as by historical) Western ethical systems is warranted, and that it has an adequate basis. The extent of this chauvinism, especially with respect to animals, is at last - after centuries of a priori prejudice and gross distortion of the characteristics of wild animals and wilderness - beginning to be spelt 1 out. It is at least clear from the outset that an adequate justification cannot be provided which simply selects all and only these members of the species human (i.e. /zowo sap*Zo?zs) as zoologically defined. There is nothing about the characteristic of TzMwazzZZp itself (as distinct perhaps from its accompanying properties) which could provide a justification for overwhelmingly favourable treatment for humans (and unfavourable treatment for nonhumans) as opposed to other possible, and possibly some actual, nonhuman creatures. Once again, an adequate ethic and justification can­ not possibly be based on blind and unthinking species loyalty. The same 1 See, e.g., S. and R. Godlovitch and J. Harris (eds), Mor azzd Morals. -Z^Zo Z/ze zzzaZ^roat/TzozzZ of yzorz-ZzMwaMS, Gollancz, London, 1971; P. Singer, ?l?z-Z7na:Z f-Z^oraf-ZoM. pzezj o^/z-Zos for OMr of azz*Z/??aZs, Cape, London, 1976; S.R.L. Clark, y/zo A7oraZ of ^H-ZwaZs, Clarendon, Oxford, 1977. 2 �CB objection applies against the simple need's argument: the commonly assumed domination of human needs over all else (e.g. over all environ­ mental considerations) has, if it is to have any merit, to be based on more than speciesism.^ We shall have to look then for some other not merely taxonomic characteristic to provide the sought justification. It will emerge however, that any such characteristic is held or may be held by nonhumans, and is not held, or potentially not held, by all items of the species human. Of course there are many characteristics which can, as a contingent matter, be used to distinguish human beings as a general class from other higher animals - although in fact with increasing knowledge of animals it is no longer clear that some of these characteristics distinguish as clearly as was assumed a priori in the past. For example, humans have a language, and a culture of a certain sort and even various logics. And, as we are accustomed to have people point out, other terrestrial animals do not conduct philosophical discussions on environmental ethics. However not only is participation in these activities potentially available to nonhuman creatures, and these characteristics possibly possessed by some, but these activities are not generally engaged in even by humans (particularly the power elite), many humans lack the requisite competence, and even among those who do qualify, such activities are carried out to a very varying extent. We run the risk, then, in applying such demanding criteria, of ruling out, of classing as deserving of "sub-human" or "sub­ person" treatment, a considerable class of human beings — items most humans would consider as worthy of better treatment than that normally accorded by humans to nonhuman animals. What is more important however is that such criteria as human language, culture, human civilization, human intentionality, or whatever, appear to provide no satisfactory for the substantially unfavourable treatment allotted those falling outside the privileged class. should there be such strong discrimination in favour of creatures having a (certain sort of)^ language or a higher level of intelligence and against creatures or items which do not, in favour of things with a certain sort of culture or a certain logic and against those without? Especially when some of these criteria are clearly, and 2 As McCloskey remarked (in a letter dated 5.7.77 containing many helpful comments) 'talking about needs does little but obscure the problem, as needs, to be normatively relevant, involve reference to goods; and that merely transfers the problem'. 3 On next page. 3 �*3 unjustifiably,loaded in favour of human interests, achievements and By contrast the very many respects in which some or sorts of animals are superior bo bMfnans (many are noted in V.B. Droscher, Tbe abilities (cf. the cultural loading of various intelligence tests). 4?ibmaZ Parcaptbo^, Allen, London, of tbe Sassos. 1969) are rarely considered; yet some of these features would, if taken in the same serious way as some respects in which humans excell, justify a reverse chauvinism (which could be reflected as, for exampZ-e, in the Hindu treatment of cows). The only sort of justification for the discrimination that might appear convincing - that those who have the given characteristic (e.g. those that are more intelligent, or more rational, or richer) are more valuable or worth special treatment - is vitiated by the fact that were it accepted by Western ethics it would warrant similar discrimination humans (or persons). For how do we show that the allegedly warranted discrimination is sufficiently different from making substantial (class) distinctions between humans in terms of their level of intelli­ gence, linguistic or logical ability, or level or kind of cultural achievement - so that those with "lower" levels of these valued abilities are treated in a consistently inferior way and regarded as available for the use of the others? In short, these characteristics do not provide adequate justification for the substantially inferior treatment accorded those not having them, and so the charge of chauvinism is not escaped by producing them. A similar set of points applies against a number of other criteria^ traditionally or recently proposed to distinguish the privileged class. Often these are propounded in terms of personhood and criteria for being a parson (the class marked out for privileged treatment being the class of persons) rather than criteria for being bz^wan - in order to escape difficulties raised by young, senile, decrepit, stupid, irrational, 3 For undoubtedly many mammals, birds and insects can communicate, some times in ways analogous to language, even if the honorific term 'language' is withheld (see - to select an unfavourable source the discussion in E.O. Wilson, SocZobboZ-opp. Belknap, Cambridge Mass., 1975, chapter 8 ff.). It is becoming increasingly evident, however, that the ascription of some linguistic ability, and of elementary languages, to nonhuman creatures should not be withheld, see e.q. the details assembled in E. Linden, 4p<2s_, Penguin,New York, 1976. (But contrast Wilson, op. cit., pp.555 59, and to set this in proper perspective, consider Wilson s discussion of ethics and aesthetics a few pages later, pp.562-65.) 4 Many of the criteria that have been proposed are assessed, and found wanting, in Routley (a). 4 �damaged and defective humans, extraterrestrial creatures, and super animals; to avoid the merely contingent connections between being human and having requisite person-determining characteristics (such as ration­ ality or knowledge) supposed to warrant discriminatory treatment; and t defeat, though it is a pyrrhic victory, the charge of human chauvinism (or equivalents of the charge, such as anthropocentricism or speciesism). But much the same problems then arise in terms of criteria for u person, and the chauvinism problem reappears as the problem of furnish­ ing criteria which are suitably clearcut, and do separate persons from assumed nonpersons, and which would provide an adequate justification for substantially privileged treatment for persons and inferior treatment for nonpersons. Unless such a justification is forthcoming the charge of person is not escaped. Most of the criteria proposed for personhood fall down in just these sorts of ways, e.g. being autonomous, the having of projects, the producing of junk, the assessing of some of one's performances as successful or not, the awareness of oneself as an agent or initiator. Not only does it appear that (the more worthy of) such criteria apply (or could apply) to many nonhuman animals - thus animals are generally more autonomous (in main senses of the term) than humans, many animals have projects (e.g. home and nest building), and they are well aware of themselves, as opposed to rivals, as initiators of 5 projects - and that they do not apply uniformly to humans or indeed to persons in any ordinary sense; but again it is extremely difficult to see what there is in these characteristics which would warrant or justify the vast difference in treatment between the privileged and nonprivileged classes, or justify regarding the non-privileged class as something available for the of the privileged class. Similar objections can be lodged against the proposal that knowledge or the possession of knowledge, provides feature. (or u crMc^uZ) distinguishing It can hardly provide the appropriate filter, since it not only gives no sharp cut-off point,but does not even always rank humans or persons above nonhumans or nonpersons. Moreover, taken seriously it should lead to substantial moral differentiation between persons, a person's moral rating also fluctuating during his lifetime. In any case, For example, the shiftless intelligent person, or the primitive person, who has no projects and engages in no moral reflection, and thus offends protestant ethics, is not thereby deregisterable as a person, any more than an intelligent animal with projects can join the union. On next page. 5 �4 why rank knowledge so highly: for (pace Socrates) knowledge is not the foundation of virtue, but is frequently turned to evil ends, and even where it is meritorious it is not the sole (or even a crucial) criterion of worth. Similar difficulties apply too to the historic criterion of ratZozzaZZZp, along with the added problem that it is -very difficult to say what it is in any clear or generally acceptable way, or to prevent it from degenerating into a simple "pro" word. If a hallmark of rationality is commitment to the consequences of what one believes and seriously says, then many humans fail the test. If, on the other hand rationality i^, for example, the ability to discover and pursue courses and actions likely to achieve desired goals (direct action toward goals), ability to solve problems concerned, etc., then plainly many animals have it, and possibly to a greater extent than humans in some cases (and of certain humans in almost all cases). If it were the ability, e.g. to do ZopZc (say propositional calculus) or to assess reasoning verbally, then the (biassed) criterion would be far too strong and rule out many humans. Again, why should one make such a marked discrimination on this basis? What is so meritorious about this characteristic, that it warrants such a marked distinction? Nothing (at least in the ordinary academic's view, or logicians would receive more favoured treatment). Other criteria, which yield an analytic connection between being a person and enjoying freedom or having rationality, in part beg the question. For in D?zat respect is it that persons - or worse, just persons - are free. Also the justificatory problem, as to how the claimed freedom or rationality warrants such differential treatment, remains. Characterisations of parsons vary enormously, from so strong that they rule out suburban humans who are not "self-made" enterpreneurs, to so weak that they admit very wa^z/ animals. An (unintentional) example of the latter is the following: persons, that is, ... beings who are not only sentient but also capable of intensional autonomous action, beings that must be ascribed not only states of consciousness but also states of belief, thought and intention (A. Townsend, 'Radical vegetarians , 4zzstraZasZa?z JoMrzzaZ of P/zZZosop/zz/, 57 (1979), p.89). 6 in addition, the relation "a has at least as much knowledge as b is only a partial ordering. For example, a dog's and a child s knowledge may be incomparable, because they know about different matters how to do quite different sorts of things, etc. (The idea that knowledge is the key to moral discrimination, that it is what makes humans rank t way Western ethics ranks them, may be found in C.B. Daniels, PaaZMaZZoK of FZTzZcaZ T/zoorZes, Philosophy in Canada Monograph, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1975.) 6 �O) Most rats and rabbits satisfy the conditions: conscious animals that have intentions they are sentient, (e.g. to get through some barrier such as a floor or a fence), beliefs and thoughts (e.g. that there is For his further argument Townsend preferred food beyond the barrier). shifts - without notice, but in a way that is quite typical of this scene - to wzzcTz stronger requirements upon being a person (such that one who does not meet them is incapacitated as a person) which rule out many humans, e.g. 'The person must recognise canons of evidence and inference warranting changes in his beliefs, and be capable of changing his beliefs 7 accordingly' (op. cit., p.90). In meeting hypothetical objections, Townsend slips in a further require ment of rationality, but the characterisation of person given does not include any such requirement. Subsequently, however, Townsend commits himself, without argument, to the thesis that 'a fairly high degree of rationality is prerequisite' to attributing 'intensionality' (as dis­ tinct from 'intentionality'). This is not going to help much. For, firstly, rationality is very much a notion which admits of degrees, without the relatively sharp cut-off stages required for person as a notion of orthodox moral relevance, or possessed by the notion of /zzzwczzz to which Townsend sneaks back in his chauvinistic conclusion (p.93). Secondly, Tzozj high a degree is prerequisite for being a person? If only enough to satisfy the conditions for being a person, then the animals that are persons have it. If more, then either the initial characterisation of a person fails or the thesis breaks down. The much stronger requirements upon being a person that Townsend sub­ sequently appeals to are said to derive from S.I. Benn. But, if any­ thing they strengthen one of the stronger of several zzozze^zz-Zz^uZezzf characterisations of (zzatz^raZ) person - none of them equivalent to /zzzzzzuzz - that Benn has at various times offered. While Benn's weaker characterisations appear to admit at least many "higher" animals, e.g. that of a natural person as a chooser, conscious of himself as able to make a difference to the way the world goes, by deciding to do this rather than that, having projects, therefore, of his own, whose life experience may consequently be understood, not simply as a chronicle of events, but as an enterprise, on which he puts his own construct­ ion ((a) 'The protection and limitation of privacy, Part I', ^MstraZ-Zazz Lazj JozzrzzczZ, 52 (1978), p.605); the stronger characterisations which invoke (rather vaguely specified, and cZ-Z//ere?zt) minimum conditions of rationality in belief and action said to imply respoTzs-Zb-ZZ-Ztz/ on the part of the person for what s/he does, though they do zzcf - exclude many of the creatures admitted by weaker characterisations. For such stronger characterisations see 'Individuality, autonomy and community' in CozzzzzzMzz-Ztz/ (ed. E. Kamenka) Edward Arnold (forthcoming) and (c) 'Freedom, autonomy and the concept of a person', ProceecZ-Zzzps o/ t?ze ^r-Zs^oteZ-Zuzz Society, 76 (1976), pp.109-30. 7 �D The foregoing points, taken together, support our contention that it is not possible to provide criteria which would distinguishing, in the sharp way standard Western ethics do, between humans and certain nonhuman creatures, and particularly those creatures which have prefer­ ences or preferred states.For such criteria appear to depend upon the mistaken assumption that moral respect for other creatures is due only when they can be shown to measure up to some rather and tests for membership of a privileged class (essentially an elitist view), instead of upon, say, respect for the preferences of other creatures. Accordingly fka skarp woraZ ethics by philosophers and others alike, commonly accepted m aZZ ofkar a^-fmaZ speafas, Zacks a safZsfacforz/ cokarazif bcsZs. The distinction, which historically rested on the assumption that humans possessed a soul (or higher reason) but that other animals, brutes, did not, appears to have been uncritically retained even after the religious beliefs or philosophical theories underpinning it have been abandoned. Given that the distinction underlying human chauvinism fails, is there anywhere satisfactory demarcations of moral relevance can be made among things? Yes, several divisions^ of mcraZ can be made; but of these coincides with a division into human and others. Consider, first, the question of consideration fiards others, and the matter of which offers are to be taken into account in cases where others' interests and preferences are affected by some action. Insofar as moral consideration for others (among sentient items) is based on analogical (empathetic, and essentially inductive) principles, such as taking account of their worthwhile preferences, objectives, interests etc., 8 There are of course further arguments for the contention, for example from the anatomical and physiological affinities of human and other animals, from their common evolutionary history, and so on. The arguments are of varying force; for example, evolutionary arguments can be arrested, temporarily, by the claim that there was a quantum jump" in human evolutionary development which did not occur with other creatures with a previously shared evolutionary history (cf. Wilson, op. cit.). 9 Although the divisions may be conceptually sharp enough, they are any­ thing but sharp when applied in the field to the variety of creature and circumstances that occur. For example, preference-havers is, so far at least, sharp enough, but it is far from clear which creatures qualify, e.g. which, if any, Crustacea? For the present most of t ese potential decision cases are cases for cheerful indecision; _ u , alternatively, the divisions may be viewed - perhaps better not a sharp boundaries, but as gradation states, as where two colours m a rainbow meet. 8 * �c- it is difficult to see how such consideration can fail to apply to all (including nonhuman) preference-having creatures; and one does not need to apply criteria such as linguistic ability, navigational ability, intelligence, piano-playing, hunting skill, etc., to obtain a basis for such consideration (indeed one cannot). The /zuzzz^zz^ a/* pr^yerezzces (and of preferences revealed through choices) is however a quite sufficient basis for z^/zz^s of consideration and concern. It is at this point, we suggest, that the requisite, important and non-arbitrary distinction is to be drawn which marks out the class of creatures towards which obligations may be held; that is, the usually recognised principles of consideration towards others (of the privileged class) properly extend or should be generalised to consideration for other creatures having prefer­ ences, and t/ze correspazz^zzy pezzaraZ zza^ to putt afTzars a/zZ-^pa^azz pr^zzc^pZ-e ("at/zer preyerezzce-TzuzJersJ tzzto a c%spreyerra<^ stato y*ar zza paa<i raasazz. Insofar as moral behaviour is based on consideration for others and not harming others, preference-having provides an adequate basis, and does appear to provide a sufficient justification for substantially different treatment for preference-having over non-preference-having items - because items without preference cannot (literally) be put into a dispreferred state. Thus preference-having appears to tie in with an important basis for moral obligation, and appears to provide a superior criterion, for a sort of moral consideration, to other criteria sometimes proposed such as sentience - or, differently, intelligence - especially since in the absence of preferences such notions as /zurzzztzz^ something (in a way that does affect it) and damaging its interests become difficult of application (not to say nonsignificant, except in extended senses). The unsatisfactoriness of the sentience criterion for what one can hold obligations ^azJarzis can be grasped from the case of the sentient machine or purely sentient creature which does not have preferen­ ces, does not care what state it is in or whether it is destroyed,etc. The sentience criterion is often converted by utilitarians into a suffer­ ing criterion, by taking pain as a paradigm of sentience: but plainly the two criteria diverge since some sentient creatures may never feel pain or suffer. Suffering is even less satisfactory than sentience; for suffering is neither necessary nor sufficient for being in a dispreferred state (consider masochists who suffer but are not in a dispreferred state, and well-treated workers who are in a dispreferred state but do not suffer). Preference-having provides a lower bound; it is a sufficient but zzat zzecassurz/ condition for being an object of this sort of moral 9 �consideration and concern. That it is not necessary is revealed, independently of environmental examples, by the following sorts of cases: the treatment of "human vegetables", successful stoics, and science­ fiction cases in which people are brain-washed into performing certain goals and having no dispreferred states apart from the programmed goals. In all three cases the question of dispreferences does not arise, but relevant moral issues can.*^ The necessary condition, that corresponds to preference-having as a sufficient condition, appears to be capability at some time (e.g. previously, when developed) for preference-having. It has been taken for granted that many animals (from species higher on the evolutionary scale) have preferences, make choices, and the like. This is the merest commonsense, which can be readily confirmed in a scientific way. For example, some of the preference-rankings of a black­ tail wallaby as to types of foliage to eat are readily established by observation, and it is fairly straightforward verifying that bushrats prefer cheese to soap, this preference being revealed by regular choices. It has however been claimed by some recent philosophers, for reasons apparently different from those offered by traditional philosophers such as Aristotle, Aquinas and Descartes,that animals do not have intentions, or at least do not have them in a full sense. It is unclear whether these intentions, which are taken to include thoughts and beliefs and, perhaps, desires, include preferences; but it is hard to see how preferences, which are intentional, are excluded if desires are included in intentions. The recent arguments to show that animals do not really have intentions, which do not bear much investigation even in such central cases as belief,12 appear extremely feeble when applied to preference. For the arguments start from the claim that we cannot say zjTzat it is that animals As N Griffin, who supplied the examples, remarked a similar thing happens also in less extreme cases of the type brought in to prominence, e.q. by the women's movement: that it is possible, by means of indoctrination, to limit the range of someone's dispreferences; treatment of such persons may still remain immoral even when it does not place them outside the (artificially widened) range of their preferred states. 11 The traditional reasons look slight also in the case of preferences and choices. It would have been claimed - the theory forces the claim Interestingly, choices - that animals' choices could not be rational, of many animals conform to behavioural criteria for rationality pro posed in economics. (forthcoming) 12 See J. Bishop, 'More thought on thought and talk', and R Routley, 'Alleged problems in attributing beliefs to anima s , paper'prepared for the B.Ztef conference, University of Queensland, 1979. 10 �believe (of course very often we can, and unproblematically) and fall back on the claim that animals lack concepts of a fit sort. In the case of preferences, however, there is often no problem in saying what it is animals prefer, or in confirming the claim. Nor is it that we cannot attribute propositional-style preferences to animals; if black-tail wallabies prefer, as they do, new foliage to old then they prefer the foliage's being new over the foliage's being old. As for the concept claim, in the sense in which is delineated in psychology, animals have concepts. And if a philosopher's notion of "concept gets in the way of the claim that free dogs prefer bones to carrots (or other vegetables) then it is not the claim that requires revision, but the philosopher's notion. The preference-having criteria appear to distinguish non-arbitrarily and sharply enough between higher animals and other items, and to rule out of the relevant class elementary animals, trees, rocks and also some human items, e.g. human kidneys. The criteria plainly exclude inanimate objects, and they separate animate objects. For while living creatures such as plants and elementary animals can be said in an extended sense to have and also optimal living conditions, e.g., for healthy develop­ ment, and in sense to have preferred states or environments, they do not have preferences, and cannot be put into states they disprefer. All that is required for an 'interest' or 'welfare' in the broad sense is a telos or life-goal, as possessed by living things, or an equilibrium or system goal, as possessed by living ecosystems. At the same time the criteria indicate another important division. For in a wider sense, animate objects which do not (significantly) have preferences or make choices, are sometimes said to have or 'preferred environments' (as, e.g., in 'the plant prefers a sunny frost-free location with a well drained soil'). us say that the or preferred states To avoid confusion let of animate objects and also such biological items as ecosystems can be affected in one way or another, e.g. increased, decreased, upset.For instance, the wellbeing of a coastal community and of the individual trees in it can be reduced to zero by sandmining, and it can be seriously threatened by pumping waste detergent 13 in this broad sense too, living things, things that participate in the growth process, have interests. However under a narrower and more common determinate of the slippery term 'interests', only preference­ havers have interests (again sentient creatures do not provide the boundary). Because the term 'interests' so readily admits of high redefinition, and the infiltration of chauvinism, its use is better limited (or even avoided), in favour of other more stable terms. 11 �There is a general obligation principle into the nearby ocean. corresponding likewise to this more comprehensive class of welfare bearers, namely, sz/sf67??s ohjecfs <9r ^<90<i reason. Moral does not of course end with what is in some way animate, much as the class of valuable objects is not tied to what relates suitably to central preference-havers. In suitable settings, a (virtually) dead landscape, a rare stone, a cave, can be items of moral or aesthetic concern; indeed any object of value can in principle be of such concern, and in principle at least, value or disvalue, and so of woraZ concern. almost any sort of object. <2% object of There can then be obligations Naturally only a fraction of the things that exist have especial value, and only a few of the things that exist will be things concerning which some of us have obligations. Furthermore these sorts of obligations do not in general reduce to the conditions or arrangements (e.g. contractual or joint welfare arrangements) of preference-havers or some select subclass thereof (what will sub­ sequently be called, as the argument is developed, the base cZass). Just as there are relevant divisions beyond the class of preference­ havers, so there are within the class. Thus the suggestion that the class towards which moral obligations (and a corresponding sort of moral concern which takes account of creatures' states) may be held is bounded by the class of preference-havers, does not of course imply that d^st^^ot^o^s can be made the class of preference-havers with respect to the kind of behaviour appropriate to them. For example, obligations which by no means exhaust obligations - can only be held directly (as distinct from by way of a representative) with respect to a much narrower class of creatures, from which many humans are excluded. The class is also distinct from the class of persons, at least as 'person' is usually characterised. What emerges is an of types of objects of moral relevance, some matched by types of moral obligation (described toward the end of Routley (a)), with nested zones representing respectively different sorts of objects - such as, objects of moral concern, welfare-having objects, preference-havers (and choice-makers), right-holders, obligationholders and responsibility-bearers, those contractually-comnitted-and the different sorts of obligations that can significantly apply to such objects. Not all the types of objects indicated are distinct, nor is the listing intended to be exhaustive but rather illustrative. For strictly the labels given should be expanded, as the distinctions are categorial ones, so that what matters is not whether an object is, for instance, 12 �contractually committed in some fashion but whether it is the sort of thing that can be, whether it can significantly enter into or be committed by arrangements of a contractual kind. is to Similarly function as a categorial marker, that marks out the sorts of things that can (significantly) have preferences: the assumption that preference­ havers coincide with choice-makers is based on this categorial reading. Although the annular picture is (as will become clear in §5) important for the environmental alternative to be elaborated, and in meeting object­ ions to it, the countercharge has been laid that it reintroduces chauvin­ ism through its inegalitarian distinctions. This is a mistake: not every sort of ethical distinction, certainly not a justified distinction, involves chauvinism. Chauvinism is exhibited where, for example, objects of a favoured class are treated in a preferential way to superior items of an excluded class,e.g. defective humans as against apes, degenerate French against normal Pygmies. The annular picture neither involves nor encourages such differences in treatment: it is neutral and unchauvinistic, for the reason that it relies only on categorial distinctions which tie analytically with ethical notions (see the semantical analyses of §5). It is certainly in no way species chauvinist or human chauvinist For none of the zones of the annular picture comprises the class of humans (or its minor variant the class of persons); for this class is not of moral relevance. The reason is that the human/nonhuman distinction is not an ethically significant one, and can, and should, be demoted from its dominant, and damaging, position in ethical theory. notion of But dropping the out of ethics, is only part of the ethical change that is called for: taking due account of nonhumans is also required. In particular - to return to the theme - what is quite unacceptable, 14 and based on a set of distinctions which are arbitrary and unjustifiable, differential treatment enjoined nonpersons as distinct is the ex from persons under Western ethics, and the view that only persons or humans have any (nonderivative) right to moral consideration and concern as preference-havers and that there are obligations towards other creatures such a criticism of chauvinism is based firmly 14 According to Q. Gibson ----- ----. . . . ' " This is simply on Western ethical equality and egalitarian principles,. ___ The general argument not so: there is no reliance on such principles, feature -f cannot be what justifies the differential takes the form; ----- — - . . . treatment of humans and nonhumans, because either f is not morally relevant or not all humans have f or some nonhumans have f., Neither Nei__. equality nor substitutions based upon equality are invoked at any stage. 13 �only insofar as these are or reduce to obligations to persons or humans. §2. THE EXTENT OF CHAUVINISM, AND FURTHER LINES OF DEFENCE Western ethics are, then, human chauvinist in that they characterist ically take humans (or, to make a slight improvement, persons) to be the only items worthy of proper moral consideration, and sanction or even enjoin substantially inferior treatment for the class of non-human preference-having creatures, without - so it certainly appears - adequate justification. The prevailing nineteenth century Western attitude to wild creatures is evident from Judge Blackstone (quoted approvingly in Penguin, London, 1967, pp.431): W. Cobbett, E^raZ With regard likewise to wild animals, aZZ rT?a%kZ%<7 arZ^ZnaZ bz/ the the Creator a right to pursue and take away any fowl or insect of the air, any fish or inhabitant of the waters, and any beast or reptile of the field: and this natural right still continues in every individual, unless where it is restrained by the civil laws of the country. And when a man has once so seized them, they become, while living his qualified property, or if dead, are absolutely his own. Prevailing Western attitudes have not shifted markedly since that time; for example, foresters, widely regarded as socially responsible, think nothing of dislodging from their homes and environment, or even destroying, communities of animals which do not directly interfere with human welfare. But there is another very important broader respect in which Western ethics are human (or person) chauvinistic, namely in the treat­ ment accorded to and attitude taken towards the broader class of natural items such as trees and forests, herbs, grasslands and swamps, soils and waterways and ecosystems. Unlike higher animals such items cannot liter­ ally be put into dispreferred states (and in Z/zZs obvious sense, as opposed to the wider sense of 'interests' tied to welfare, they have no interests), but they can be damaged or destroyed or have their eroded or impaired. The Western, chauvinistic, assumption is that this can only happen where human interests are affected. The basic assumption is that value attaches essentially only to humans or to what serves or bears on human interests, or derivatively, to items which derive from human skill, ingenuity or labour. Since natural items have no other value, there is no restriction on the way they are treated insofar as this does not interfere with others; as far as ZsoZate^ natural things are con­ cerned anything is permissible. 14 �It is, at base, because of these chauvinistic features of Western ethics that there is a need for a new ethic and value theory (and so derivatively for a new economics, and new politics, etc.) setting out not just people's relations to preference-havers generally but also (along with many other things) people's relations to the natural environment - in Leopold's words 'an ethic dealing with man's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it' ct/zer essuz/s (A. Leopold, A Coz^/ztz/ New York, 1966, p.238). /Uzzzu^zuc It is not of course that old and prevailing ethics do not deal with man's relation to nature: they do, and on the prevailing view man is free to deal with nature as he pleases, i.e. his relations with nature - insofar at least as they do not affect others, as pollution and vandalism do - are not subject to moral censure. Thus assertions such as 'Crusoe ought not to be mutilating those trees' are significant and morally determinate but inasmuch at least as Crusoe's actions do not interfere with others, they are false or do not hold - and trees are not, in a good sense, moral objects. It is to this, to the values and evaluations of the prevailing ethics, that Leopold, Fraser Darling and many others, both earlier and later, take exception. Leopold regards as subject to moral criticism, as wrong, behaviour that on prevailing views is morally permissible. But it is not, then, as Leopold seems to think, that such behaviour is beyond the scope of the prevailing ethics and that merely an extension of traditional morality is required to cover such cases, to fill a moral void. If Leopold is right in his criticism of prevailing conduct, what is required is a change in the ethics, in attitudes, values and evaluations; for example, what is permissible on the prevailing ethics will be no longer permissible on the new. For as matters stand, as Leopold himself explains, humans generally do not feel morally ashamed if they interfere with a wilderness, if they maltreat the land, extract from it whatever will yield, and then move on; and such conduct is not taken to interfere with and does not rouse the moral indignation of others, and is accordingly permissible on prevailing ethics. As Leopold says: A farmer who clears the woods off a 75% slope, turns his cows into the clearing, and dumps its rainfall, rocks, and soil into the coi^munity creek, is still (if otherwise decent) a respected member of society (op. cit., p.245). Only recently has such behaviour begun to be seriously questioned and become the subject of criticism,e.g. by environmentalists. Under what will be accounted an eyz^trozi/TzeMtuZ gtTz^c, however, such traditionally 15 �permissible conduct would be accounted morally wrong, and the farmer subject to proper moral criticism. That ethics and morality are not, and never have been, restricted to human concerns, or exclusively to relations between persons, is important in rebutting objections to the very idea of an environmental ethic, based on the premiss that morality just is restricted (definitionally) to human relationships (and connected values) and is not significant beyond that. The problem of moral relations with respect to preference-havers other than persons and to inanimate items cannot be resolved or escaped simply by declaring morality to apply solely,or as a matter of meaning or defin­ ition only to humans (or to persons). For first, such a solution would run counter to the common view that humans are subject to some moral con­ straints, even if comparatively minor ones, towards other creatures; the having of such constraints cannot be ruled out definitionally, and corres pondingly the judgments formulating these constraints or prohibitions cannot be ruled out as nonsignificant, yet they are surely moral. The only way in the end, that the claim gets support is by a narrow, and no longer acceptable, account of what is moral in terms of concern with humans alone (cf. S6). Likewise, the question of the moral interrelations of humans with intelligent nonhuman extraterrestrial beings, even if at present hypothetical, is certainly a meaningful one, and some interesting and clearly moral issues of this sort are frequently raised in science fiction. Only if the extent of morality is, somewhat misleadingly, reconstrue in terms of the class of constraints on the behaviour of those it applies to - that is, in terms of limitations, as distinct from moral freedom does the claim that Western morality is restricted to humans (or persons) begin to gain plausibility. For it is true that beyond the favoured base class, humans or persons, few constraints are supposed to operate (and ad hoc ones at that) unless the welfare of members of the base class is adversely affected. Under an environmental ethic, such as that Leopold advocates, this would change: previously unconstrained behaviour would be morally circumscribed, and in this sense the scope of morality would be extended. It is not evident, however, that a ethic ethic, an in the case at hand, is required to accommodate even radical new judgments seriously constraining traditionally approved conduct, i.e. imposing limitations on behaviour previously considered morally permissible. For one reason it is none too clear what is going to count as a new ethic, much as it is often unclear whether a new development in physics counts as a new physics or just as a modification or extension of the old. 16 For, �notoriously, ethics are not clearly articulated or at all well worked out, so that the application of identity criteria for ethics may remain obscure. They are nonetheless (pace Quineans) perfectly good objects for investigation. Furthermore, there is a tendency to cluster a family of ethical systems which do not differ on core or fundamental principles together as the one ethic: e.g. the Christian ethic, which is an umbrella notion covering a cluster of differing and even competing systems. There are two other possibilities, apart from a new environmental ethic, which might cater for the new principles and evaluations; that of an extension or modification of the prevailing ethic, and that of the development of principles that are already encompassed or latent within the prevailing ethic. The possibility that environmental evaluations can be incorporated within (and ecological problems solved within) the not inflexible framework of prevailing Western ethics, may appear open because there is not a single ethical system uniquely assumed in Western civiliz­ ation: on many issues, and especially on controversial issues such as infanticide, women's rights and drugs, there are competing sets of principles. Talk of a new ethic and prevailing ethics tends to suggest a sort of monolithic structure, a uniformity, that prevailing ethics, and even a single ethic, need not have. The Western ethic is not so monolithic. In particular, three important traditions in Western ethical views n ,been mapped .3 out: 4. 15 a concerning man's relation to nature have recently dominant tradition, the despotic position, with man as despot (or tyrant), and two lesser traditions, the stewardship position, with man as custod­ ian, and the cooperative position with man as perfector. the only traditions; Nor are these primitivism is another, and both romanticism and mysticism have influenced Western views. The dominant Western view is simply inconsistent with an environmental ethic; for according to it nature is the dominion of man and he is free to deal with it as he pleases (since - at least on the mainstream StoicAugustine view - it exists only for his sake^^), whereas on an See especially (a) J. Passmore, Man's Fespons^btZ^^z/ for Duckworth, London, 1974; also R. Nash, ^tZderness an^ t/ze Yale University Press, New Haven, 1973. (All further references to Passmore's work are, unless otherwise indicated, to Passmore (a).) The dominant position has also been sketched in many other recent texts, e.g. I. McHarg, Z)es^<yn Doubleday, New York, 1969, while the lesser traditions have been appealed to in meeting criticisms of the Western ethic as involving the dominant view. The masculine particles are appropriate; so is the resulting tone. �environmental ethic man is not so free to do as s/he pleases. But it is not quite so obvious that an environmental ethic cannot be coupled with one of the lesser traditions. Part of the problem is that the lesser traditions are by no means adequately characterised anywhere, especially when the religious backdrop is removed, e.g. (as further considered in §4) who is man steward for and responsible to? However both traditions are inconsistent with a deeper environmental ethic because they imply policies of complete interference, whereas on an environmental ethic some worthwhile parts of the earth's surface should be preserved from sub­ stantial human interference, whether of the "improving" sort or not. Both traditions would in fact prefer to see the earth's land surfaces reshaped along the lines of the tame and comfortable but ecologically impoverished European small farm and village langscape. According to the cooperative position man's proper role is to develop, cultivate and perfect nature - all nature eventually - by bringing out its potential­ ities, the test of perfection being basically purposes; /or while on the stewardship view man's role, like that of a farm manager, is to make nature productive by his efforts though not by means that will deliberately degrade its resources. Thus these positions figure among those of the shallow ecological movement (as depicted by A. Naess, 16 'The shallow and the deep, long-range ecology movement', Tr^M^rz/ (1973), 95-100): longer term. they are typically exploitative, even if only in the Although these lesser positions both depart from the dominant position in a way which enables the incorporation of some evaluations of an environmental ethic, e.g. some of those concerning the irresponsible farmer, and allow for some of the modern extensions of the Western ethic that have been made, e.g. concerning the treatment of animals and criticisms of vandalism, they are not well-developed, fit poorly into the prevailing framework, and do zzof p<9 /ar orozz^Zz. For in the present situation of expanding populations confined to finite natural areas, they will lead to, and enjoin the perfecting, farming and utilizing of all natural areas. Indeed these lesser traditions lead to, what a thorough­ going environmental ethic would reject, a principle of total use, implying 17 that every natural area should be cultivated or otherwise used for /zzzzzzor 17 if 'use' is extended, somewhat illicitly, to include use for preservation, this total use principle is rendered innocuous at least as regards it actual effects. Note that the total use principle, in the usual sense, is tied to the resource view of nature (cf. (d) R. and V. Routley, F-z^/zt /or z^/ze Forests, Third Edition, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1975). Such a principle, like the requirement of economic growth, emerges directly from - it is an integral part of neoclassical economic theory. 18 �18 "humanized". As the important Western traditions mentioned exclude an environ­ mental ethic, it would appear, at first glance anyway, that such an ethic - not primitive, mystical or romantic - would be new alright - or at least new from a Western perspective. For, from a wider perspective, which takes due account of traditional societies (such as those of some American Indians, Australian Aboriginals, and Pygmies), there is, it will turn out, nothing so very new about what is included in (as distinct from the theoretical setting of) the "new" ethics. Even from the narrow Western perspective, the matter is not so straightforward. for the dominant ethic has been substantially qualified, in particular by the rider that one is not always entitled to do as one pleases where this physically interferes with others.^ It may be that some such non-inter­ ference proviso was implicit all along (despite evidence to the contrary); and that it was simply assumed that doing what one pleased vn.th natural items would not affect others (a^oT^terfereMcg assMwpf^^). it may, the Be this as appears, at least for many thinkers to have supplanted the dominant position; and the modified position can undoubtedly go much further towards an environmental ethic. For example the farmer's polluting of a community stream may be ruled immoral on the grounds that it physically interferes with others who use or would use the stream. Likewise business enterprises which destroy the natural environ­ ment for no satisfactory (taxable) returns or which cause pollution deleterious to the health of future humans can be criticised on the sort of welfare basis (e.g. that of P.W. Barkley and D.W. Seckier, 18 Humanization, and humanitarian measures, may be a cloak for human chauvinism - in which case, far from being virtuous, they may be positively undesirable. 19 Also, as Leopold has observed, the class of has been ively widened, e.g. from the family group, to the tribe, to the nation or race, even to all humans including often enough future humans but rarely further in the West until recently. of 20 The assumption is not the same as its relative, Benn's 'that no one may legitimately frustrate or prevent (or interfere with) a person's doing what he chooses to do, ^nles there is some reason for preventing him (Benn (c), op. cit., in from (a) P.605). The principle is said to derive from 'the notion of a person' ^e.g. (a), p.605), but it only so derives given commission ofPfhe fallacy of conversion of an A-proposition. Moreover even reduced to a 'formal principle ... locating the onus of justification (cf (a)) the principle is dubious, especially given principles of respect for objects other than persons, with which persons may be interfering. It is, however, a formal principle that will help to keep entreprenuerial humans happy. �* GrozjZ/z <2%^ Dgcaz/, T/ze ^oZz^ZZc^ ^gcowgs York, 1972) that blends with the modified position; be criticised on welfare grounds; and so on. Fr^hZ^w^ New vandalism can usually The modified position may even serve to restrict the sort of family size one is entitled to have, since in a finite situation excessive population levels will interfere with future people. Nonetheless neither the modified dominant position nor its Western variants, obtained by combining it with the lesser trad­ itions, is adequate as an environmental ethic. chauvinism. None moves outside human They are all encompassed under the t^es-Zs - the view that the earth and all its non-human contents exist or are available for human benefit or to serve human interests, and hence that humans are entitled to manipulate the world and its systems as they want, in their own interests - which is but the ecological restatement of the strong thesis of human chauvinism, according to which items outside the privil­ eged human class have no value except one as instrumental value (both theses are criticised in Routley (a)). To escape from chauvinism, and from its thesis, a new ethic -Zs wanted, as we now try to show. §3. GENERAL ENVIRONMENTAL ARGUMENTS AGAINST WESTERN ETHICS The main argument is directed primarily against the modified dominant position, but will incidentally show the inadequacy of the lesser Western traditions. The strategy is to locate core features of Western ethics, and to reveal through examples their thoroughgoing chauvinism and class bias, and in this way to provide decisive grounds for rejecting For the general argument some more technical points have to be made them. first. (An) spgcZyZc ethic, is ambiguous, as between a specific ethical system, a and a more generic notion, a specific ethics are grouped. under which (As usual, a weZu-ethic is a theory about ethics, super-ethics, their features and fundamental notions.) An ^Z/zZcaZ sz/sZsw s is, near enough, a propositional system (i.e. a structured set of propositions) or a theory which includes (like individuals of a theory) a set of values and (like postulates of a theory) a set of general evaluative judgments concerning conduct, typically of what is obligatory, permissible and wrong, of what are rights and responsibilities, what is valued, and so forth, (On newer perceptions an ethical system will include rather less in the way of prescriptions, of duties, obligations and the like, and more as to what are matters of care and of concern and for respect.) Since an ethical system is propositional in character, such notions as consistency, coherence, independence of 20 a �assumptions, and the like, apply to it without further ado. It is evident, from a consideration of competing or incompatible values and principles, that are sz/s^ews. Moreover appropriately general criteria for rationality will not reduce this class to a singleton. Accordingly, there is logical space for a^terrzaf^re A general or lawlike proposition of a system (characterised along similar lines to a scientific law) is a pr^Mc^pZe; and certainly if systems Si and S2 contain different principles, they they are different systems. It will follow then that an environmental ethic differs from the important traditional ethics outlined if it differs on some principles. Moreover if environmental ethics differ from each Western ethical system on some core principle or other embedded in that Western system, then these systems differ from the Western super-ethic (assuming, what seems to be so, that that ethic can be sufficiently characterised) - in which case if an environmental ethic is needed then a new ethic is wanted. It would suffice then to locate a common core principle and to provide environmental counterexamples to it. It is illuminating (and necessary, so it will emerge) to attempt to do a little more than this minimum, with a view to bringing out the basic assumptions of the Western super-ethic. Two major classes of evaluative statements, commonly distinguished, are axiological statements, concerning what is good, worthwhile, valuable, best, etc., and deontological state­ ments, which concern what is obligatory, permissible, wrong, etc. Now there appear to be core principles of Western ethics on both axiological and deontic fronts, principles, for example, as to what is valuable and as to what is permissible. Naturally these principles are interconnected, because anything is permitted with respect to what has no value except insofar as it interferes with what does have value. A strong historical case can be made out for what is commonly assumed, that there are, what amount to, core principles of Western ethical systems, principles that will accordingly belong to the super- ethic. example. The fairness principle inscribed in the Golden Rule provides one Directly relevant here, as a good stab at a core deontic principle, is the commonly formulated liberal principle of the modified A recent formulation of this principle runs as 21 follows (Barkley and Seckier, op. cit., p.58): dominant position. On next page. 21 �The liberal philosophy of the Western world holds that (D) one should be able to do what he wishes, providing (1) that he does not harm others {and (2) that he is not likely to harm himself irreparably}. The principle, which is built into or derivable from most traditional ethical theories, may be alternatively formulated in terms of permissib­ ility, as the principle that <2 person's (foes no^ ^n^er/ere zJ-^/z o^/zers, ^s perw^ss^&^e provt^e^ (i.e. other people, including perhaps the A related economic principle is that free enterprise can operate agent). within similar limits. It is because of these permissibility formulations that the principle - which incorporates fundamental features of (human or person) chauvinism - is sometimes hailed as a freedom principle; for it gives permission to perform a wide range of actions (including actions which degrade the environment and natural things) providing they do not harm others. others. In fact it tends to cunningly shift the onus of proof to It is worth remarking that 'harming others' in the restriction is narrower than a restriction to the (usual) interests of others; it is not enough that it is in my interests, because I detest you, that you stop breathing; you are free to breath, for the time being anyway, because it does not harm me. There remains a problem however as to exactly what counts as harm or interference. Moreover the width of the principle is so far obscure, because 'other' may be filled out in significantly different ways: 21 it makes a difference to the extent - and privilege - of The principle is attributed by Barkley and Seckier to Mill, though something like it was fairly common currency in nineteenth century European thought. It appears, furthermore, that Mill would have rejected the principle on account of clause (2): thus, for example: Those interests, I contend, authorise the subjection of individual spontaneity to external control, ozzZz/ in respect of those actions of each, which concern the interest of o^Zzer people (J.S. Mill, (/^^Z^^ar^uzz^szzzj L^&gr^z/ az-z^f 7?eprese?z^az^zze ^ozz6r?z777g?z^, Everyman's Library, Dent, London, 1910, p.74, emphasis added). The deletion of clause (2) from (D) does not affect the general argument: hence the braces. (We owe this reference and the points in the next footnote to N. Griffin.) A similarly modified form of (D) is found in much recent Western literature, even radical literature which purports to make due allow­ ance for environmental concerns. A good example of the latter is I. Illich, TcoZs /cr Cofz^ttz^uZ-z^z/, Calder & Boyers, London, 1973, where Mill's (D) appears, in various forms, at several places (e.g. p.xii, p.41). What this indicates is that Illich's "convivial society" will not - if its principles are taken seriously - move beyond chauvinism in its treatment of animals and the natural environment; it will at best yield some form of resource conservation. 22 �a the chauvinism whether 'other' expands to 'other human' - which is too restrictive - or to 'other person' or to 'other sentient being'; and it makes a difference to the adequacy of the principle, and inversely to its economic applicability, to which class of other persons it is intended to apply, whether to future as well as to present others, whether to remote future others or only to nondiscountable future others, and whether to poss^bZe others. The latter would make the principle untestable and com­ and it is generally assumed that it pletely unworkable in practice; applies at most to present and (some) future others, to those to whom it would make a (fairly immediate) difference (thus excluding past others ). For the purposes of the general argument however, the problems in specify­ ing the class of others is not material, so long as the class includes no 23 more than persons that at some time exist. Fortunately the main argument is not very sensitive to the precise formulation of principle (D). Not only can clause (2) be deleted, and 'other' left rather unspecific, but additions can be made; then even if the main argument does not succeed, m-z^or succeed. o/ t/ze zzzu^M arpz^g?^ An important case concerns the treatment of animals. Unless (D) is construed widely (extending 'other'), or hedged by further qualifying clauses,24 the basic principle fails to take proper account of concern for animals, especially that one should not inflict "unnecessary cruelty or "impermissible" harm. animals then comes to matter; these issues can be avoided. What counts as per^ss^Me Tzurzzz to and familiar conflict issues arise. But For the core principle (D), of basic chauvinism, can be modified to include (historically recent) moral concern for higher animals by adding, after 'harm others', something like 'or harm animals unnecessarily'. Then however the new principle succumbs to the 22 Although the interests and preferences of past others are excluded in conventional utilitarianism, as in (welfare) economic theory and vot inq theory, these are often respected in ethical and legal settings, e.g. in wills, last wishes, etc. Similarly (as N. Griffin also point­ ed out), in the treatment of "human vegetables", past preferences of the person when capable of making decisions are often taken to be morally relevant, or even decisive, to the question as to whether to keep the body alive. 23 if merely possible persons are included then the valuational rankings of environmental ethics, indeed of virtually any ethics, can be reflected in a "utilitarian" fashion. The argument of (c) R. and V. Routley, 'Semantical foundations for value theory', (accepted for publication in 1974; still forthcoming?), can be used to show this. 24 or unless it can be made out, what seems entirely implausible, that what is wrong with torturing animals is not what it does to them but the way it affects other people (the Aquinas-Kant thesis). 23 �main argument - upon at most simple variation of the counterexamples to be given. Modification becomes more important in the case of standard ethical theories which lead to principles conflicting with (D), such as utilitar­ ianism does unless (D) and the maximisation principle of utilitarianism are appropriately segregated, e.g. by severing connections at some point in the chain connecting entitlement, permissibility, right, maximum utility. For, as in widely recognised, net utility may be increased in ways that violate (D), e.g. by injustice to, or the infliction of suffer­ ing upon, or harming, some individual by others. Thus utilitarianisms in the tradition of Mill, which both include (D) and characterise entitlement in utilitarian terms, are inconsistent (as simple hypothetical cases show). To avoid counterexamples it is not enough merely to distinguish higher and lower utilities, though this is an initial step in what is required, namely - ideally by constraints (as is explained in §5) - o/ unconstrained Although qualification of utilitar­ ianism principles to ensure (D), as a restriction (but not the orzZz/ restriction) on what is permissible,is the proper course, it is a course not all utilitarians are prepared to follow. To defeat isms, it is not enough to adduce counterexamples to (D). utilitarian­ Counterexamples to some other core principle of such utilitarianisms must be located; otherwise the main argument fails against a quite standard, and important, class of positions supporting chauvinism and the Dominion thesis. Fortunately, again, neither a suitable core principle nor appropriate counterexamples are hard to find. The common utilitarian principle provides such a core, and several of the examples directed against (D) serve to counter it (in its various forms). An axiological principle corresponding to (D) (%72<i to some of its variants) runs along these lines: (A) Only those objects which are of use or concern to humans (or persons), or which are the product of human (or person) labour or ingenuity, are of value; thus these are all that need to be taken into account in determining best choice or best course of action, what is good, etc. Roughly, value consists in answering back to certain features of human (or person) involvement. No calculus of value or what is best need look beyond human values. According to a matching value-ranking thesis, item a is better than b only if a serves human concerns more than b. A narrower version of principle (A) embedded in main forms of Marxism is 24 �the human labour theory of value. 25 Thus a corollary will be that Marxism is certainly - unless severely modified - no direction in which to seek an environmental ethic or social theory. There may appear to be exceptions to principle (A) in such objects But although values are assigned to works of art where as works of art. these may not positively affect human welfare, the basis for assigning value is usually taken to be the human skill or ingenuity involved in their production. principle (A). Hence such assignments do not extend, or violate, Indeed the problem raised by natural objects which cost nothing to produce and involved nothing human is very different from the matter of valuing art objects. objects rctse <2 problem. There are also other important differences between natural objects and works of art, apart from the characteristic noninvolvement of humans, namely those turning on the issues of replaceability and the reversibility of destruction. Human artefacts are always replaceable by similar objects, e.g. modern cities, especially concrete jungles are all too similar and replaceable, and using modern techniques paintings can be substanially duplicated; whereas there is no possibility of replicating, even remotely, such as extinct species or real damaged or destroyed natural objects jungles (or lost or vanishing cultures). In terms of replacement costs, these are much more valuable than such human artefacts as material works of art. Thus attempts to assimilate natural objects to material works of art break down. There is an additional reason for rejecting a now familiar approach to natural objects through works of art, namely that it is premissed on the assumption that some sort of chauvinistic account of works of art is adequate: that is not so, as the (intermediate) situation of objet trouve begins to reveal. It is in connection with principles qualification to (D) and especially (A) that the ethics (already required at several points) becomes important for the argument; for various non-Western ethics have not adopted these principles, e.g. both American Indians and Australian Aborigines appear to recognise clearly values in natural items which are not reducible (simply or at all) to human values - and apparently not essentially theistic (supra-human). In any case Western ethics and 25 According to some Marxists, and apparently to Marx, the labour theory is superceded when the period of accumulation is completed and the post­ scarcity era reached. But by the time this high-energy high-tech stage is reached, if ever, irreparable and frequently irreversible environmental damage will have been wreaked. 26 On next page. 25 �p attitudes, and more comprehensively the associated ideologies, are of critical importance; for it is to these and Western influence that the world's main - serious and very extensive - environmental problems can be ascribed. Hypothetical situations are introduced in designing counterexamples to core principles (D) and (A). The basis of the method lies in the semantical analyses of permissibility, obligation and value statements which stretch out over ideal situations (which may be incomplete or even inconsistent), so that what is permissible holds in some permitted situation, what is obligatory in every such situation, and what is wrong is excluded m every such situation. But the main point to grasp for the counterexamples that follow, is that ethical principles if correct are universal and are assessed over a class of situations. Thus hypothetical cases are logically perfectly legitimate and cannot be ruled out on one pretext or another, e.g. as rare, as desert island cases, as hypothetical, The counterexamples to (D) and (A) presented depend largely on etc. designing situations different from the actual where there are either too few or too many humans or persons. But alternative special situations where interference with others is minimized or is immaterial are readily devised. (i) The example. The last man (or woman or person) surviving the collapse of the world system sets to work eliminating, as far as he can, every living thing, animal or plant (but painlessly if you like, as at the best abattoirs). What he does is quite permissible according to principle (D) but on environmental grounds what he does is wrong. Moreover one does not have to be committed to esoteric values to regard Mr. Last Man as behaving badly and destroying things of value (the reason being perhaps that radical thinking and values have shifted in an environmental direction in advance of corresponding shifts in the Characteristically Westerners have attempted to recast these value systems, sometimes misleadingly, in a religious guise - probably because it was thought that there was no non-religious way of presenting them so as to make them intelligible or have them comprehended. Thus they get represented as basically chauvinistic in view of the relations of Man and God. On these semantical analyses, which avoid all the usual problems of modal theories of axiological and deontic terms, see R. Routley, R.K. Meyer, and others, RSSS, Australian National University, 1979, chapters 7 and 8. A sketch is given in §5 below. The situations or worlds with respect to which the interpretation is made permit of different construals; e.g. instead of permitted situ­ ations, the situations can be construed evaluatively as ideal situations. 26 �3 Q formulation of fundamental evaluative principles). The usual vandalism charge does not apply against Mr. Last Man since he does no damage to others. Moreover, Mr. Last Man's activities may be toned down to avoid any vandalism charge, yet succumb to the (extended) chauvinist charge, e.g. he may simply destroy sows environ­ mentally valuable things unnecessarily (without due reason or some need). (ii) The Zest pgopZe example. to the last people example. The last man example can be extended We can assume that they know they are the last people, e.g. because they are aware that radiation effects have One considers the last people in blocked any chance of reproduction. order to rule out the possibility that what these people do harms or somehow physically interferes with later people. Otherwise one could as well consider science fiction cases where people arrive at a new planet and destroy its ecosystems, whether with good intentions such as perfect­ ing the planet for their ends and making it more fruitful or, forgetting the lesser traditions, just for the sheer enjoyment of it. Let us assume that the last people are very numerous. They humanely exterminate every wild animal and they eliminate the fish of the seas, they put all arable land under intensive cultivation, and all remaining natural forests disappear in favour of pastures or plantations,and so on. They may give various familiar reasons for this, e.g. they believe it is the way to salvation or to perfection, or they are simply satisfying reasonable needs, or even that it is needed to keep the last people employed or occupied so that they do not worry too much about their impending extinction. behaved badly; of value; On an environmental ethic the last people have they have done what is impermissible and destroyed much for they have simplified and largely destroyed all the natural ecosystems, and with their demise the world will soon be an ugly and largely wrecked place. But this conduct may conform with the core principles (D) and (A), and as well with the principles enjoined by the lesser traditions under more obvious construals of these principles. Indeed the main point of elaborating this extension of the last man example is because principles (D) and (A) may, as they stand, appear to conflict with stewardship, cooperation and perfection positions, as the last man example reveals. The apparent conflict between these positions and principle (D) may be definitively removed, it seems, by conjoining a further proviso to the principle, to the effect (3) that he does not wilfully destroy natural resources. But as the last people who are not vandals do not destroy resources wilfully, but perhaps "for the best of 28 reasons", the variant is still environmentally inadequate. 28 On next page. 27 �(iii) The ^reu^ eTz^repr^KeMr example. The last man example can be adjusted so as to not fall foul of clause (3). industrialist; The last man is an he runs a giant complex of automated factories and farms which he proceeds to extend. He produces automobiles among other things, from renewable and recyclable resources of course, only he dumps and recycles these shortly after manufacture and sale to a dummy buyer instead of putting them on the road for a short time as we do. Of course he has the best of reasons for his activity, e.g. he is increasing gross world product, or he is improving output to fulfil some plan, and he will be increasing his own and general welfare since he much prefers increased output and productivity. The entrepreneur's behaviour is on the Western ethic quite permissible; indeed his conduct is commonly thought to be quite fine and even meets Pareto optimality requirements given prevailing notions of being "better off". It may be objected, however, that there is no reason or warrant for the great entrepreneur's production and it is simply wasteful. But we can easily amend the example by adding consumers who want to use the out­ put. Just as we can extend the last man example to a class of last people, so we can extend (iii) to the socket!/ example (iv): the society looks depressingly like ours except for its reproductive incapacity. (v) The species example. The blue whale (reduced to a 29 mixed good on the economic picture ) is on the verge of extinction because of its qualities as a private good, as a profitable source of oil and meat. whalers; The catching and marketing of blue whales does not harm the it does not harm or physically interfere with others in any good sense, though it may upset them and they may be prepared to compen­ sate the whalers if they desist; destruction. nor need whale hunting be wilful (Slightly different examples which eliminate the hunting aspect of the blue whale example are provided by cases where a species is eliminated or threatened through destruction of its habitat by man's 28 There are however elements in the lesser traditions - especially if 'cooperation' and 'perfection' are reconstrued in less chauvinistic and homocentric terms - which point the way to a more satisfactory ethic. 29 The example is adapted from Barkley and Seckier, op. cit., who nicely expose the orthodox economic picture. To make the example more difficult for utilitarians in the tradition of Bentham, it can be further supposed that the killing of the whalesis near instantaneous and painless, the whale products are very valuable to humans and indeed irreplaceable, and that the whales led a good life while they lived. (Would the killing of remote groups of humans under similar conditions be then so much worse?). 28 �* activity or the activities of animals he has introduced, e.g. many plains-dwelling Australian marsupials and the Arabian oryx.) The behaviour of the whalers in eliminating this magnificent species of whale is accordingly quite permissible - at least according to basic chauvinism. But on an environmental ethic it is not. However the free-market mechanism did not cease allocating whales to commercial uses, as a satisfactory environmental economics would: instead the market system ground inexorably (for the sorts of reasons well-explained in Barkley and Seckier, op. cit.) along the private demand curve until the blue whale population was no longer viable. It has been objected that the operation of the free market is restrained by ethical principles - or rather legally enforced copies thereof; for example, it would be profitable to exploit child labour, but moral prohibitions, legally enforced, exclude such exploitation of children. But the case is quite different; children, unlike young animals such as vealers, are already shielded under the modified dominant position. If anything, the "objection" is a further illustration of chauvinism at work.^O Although the vanishing species example given does not apply decisively against extended utilitarianisms, such as that of Bentham, which widen the base class to all sentient creatures, the case is easily varied so that it does: class of tropical plant species simply select one of the currently threatened with extinction. (vi) The /actorz/ /arm example. On the farm animals of various sorts are kept under artificial, confined conditions and simply used for the market goods they deliver, e.g. eggs in the case of battery hens, milk in the case of rotor cows, veal in the case of calves. The animals are subject to whatever conditions (e.g. forced feeding, iron deficient diets, constant lighting) will deliver maximal quantities of desired goods for the human commodity market. The animals do not necessarily suffer pain (and insofar as they do in behaviourally conspicuous ways the problem can For the most part the operation of the free market is only constrained by chauvinistic principles: otherwise enterpreneurs tend to undertake whatever apparently profitable business activity they can get away with, including substantial exploitation of animals and widespread environ­ mental destruction, and their lack of concern is illustrated by such facts as that they are generally prepared to pay taxes (e.g. to compensate other humans) rather than to forgo their activities in cases such as river and lake pollution and forest removal. In fact, of course, fairly unfettered operation of the market tends to encourage more restricted chauvinisms, e.g. the exploitation of cheap foreign or female labour in the secondary labour market. 29 �be met by antibiotics), but they are imprisoned under dispreferred conditions. The threatment of the animals on the "farm" is perfectly permissible according to the core principle (or at least minor adjustments to exclude unnecessary suffering will ensure conformity), but on an The treatment of the animals on the farm environmental ethic it is not. also seems to conform to the principles of the lesser traditions, insofar as these principles are spelled out in a way that can be applied to the example, that is so long as cooperation and perfection are construed in intended chauvinistic fashion. (vii) The example. The wilderness, though isolated and rarely visited or thought about by environmentalists, is known to contain nothing of use to humans, such as seed or drug supplies, that is not adequately replicated elsewhere. It does contain however some "low quality" forest that could supply pulpwood on a commercial basis were the local government to provide subsidies on the usual basis. The logging would destroy the wilderness in a largely irreversible way (e.g. it grows on high sand dune country or on lateritic soils) and kill many animals which live in the forest. sees The prevailing with the destruction of such ethic wrong nothing a wilderness, nor do the lesser traditions: a deeper environmental ethic does. Again the example requires variation, e.g. to a wilderness devoid of sentient individuals, if it is to counter clearly such extensions of Western ethics as those of animal liberationists. For this sort of reason we do not want to overstate or overrate the role of as distinct from variations upon such examples. examples - Firstly, people deeply committed to human chauvinism - as many, perhaps most, people are - will find some of the examples unconvincing because they depend on non- chauvinistic assumptions. Secondly, there are rejoinders to some of the examples based on the prevailing ethic. In this case what we claim is that there are variations on, and elaborations of the examples which meet such considerations. In connection with this we do not want to deny that there are other strands supplementing the prevailing ethic which are critical of some activities of the sort described in the examples, e.g. anti-vandalism principles and strictures against conspicuous consumption But, as remarked, these principles as reflected, e.g. in sumptuary laws. have not been adequately incorporated in the prevailing ethic in such a way as to meet variations on the examples or to serve environmental purposes; and if the attempt were made to fully incorporate such princi­ ples once again a new ethic would be the upshot. (Compare the situation before the change from an ethic which sanctioned Tzu/na??. slavery.) 30 �* In summary,what the examples show is that core axiological and deontic assumptions of the Western super-ethic are environmentally inadequate; and accordingly Western ethics should be superseded by a more environmentally adequate ethic. The class of permissible actions that rebound on the environment is more narrowly circumscribed on such an environmental ethic than it is in the Western superethic, and the class of noninstrumentally valuable objects is correspondingly wider than it is on the Western super-ethic. But is not an environmentalist ethic going too far in implying that these people - those of the examples and respected entrepreneurs and industrialists and bureaucrats, farmers and fishermen and foresters - are behaving, when engaging in environmentally degrading activities of the sort described, in a morally impermissible way? No, what these people do is to a greater or lesser extent evil, since destructive of what is valuable, and hence in serious cases morally impermissible. For example, insofar as the killing or forced displacement of primitive peoples who stand in the way of an industrial development is morally indefensible and impermissible, so also is the destruction of the forest where the people may live, or the slaughter of remaining blue whales, or the gross exploitation of experimental or factory-farm animals for private profit or as part of the latest 5 year plan. Those who organise or engage in such activities are (to a greater or lesser extent, depending on their mode of engagement) morally culpable. Models of permissible respected life styles and of the good life (for others to emulate) depend upon what the underlying ethic accounts good and evil, permissible or not, and so forth; and changes with change of ethic. A new ethic is needed not merely to accommodate the evaluations, prescriptions and models indicated, in a way decidedly different from Western ethics, but in order to cope with a much wider range of more practical, and often more controversial, cases where Western ethics yield (without epicycling, i.e. extensive resort to theory-saving strategems) unacceptable or inadequately grounded results. An alternative ethic is also needed by a growing number of valuers because they have values, interests and new concerns of ecological sorts which do not fit in with, but conflict with, central features of prevailing Western ethics. There is occurring, it seems, a far-reaching cultural, and ethical change, a change in consciousness, and in particular a change in attitudes to what is natural and the natural environment (a change which may eventually be as fundamental as, and partly overturn, the humanist changes of the Enlightenment). A new ethic is accordingly needed to reflect and formul­ ate, and enable the defence and application of, a new, increasingly felt, 31 �a but not so far well-articulated system of values, in much the same way that a system of probability was needed and formulated to articulate and systematise likelihood and probability principles, and relevant logic systems required to capture pre-analytic views of entailment. The explication of environmental ethics is a similar theoretical concern; again, as commonly, theory lags behind the facts of change and the felt data. Furthermore, just as entailment systems are not uniquely determined, or desired or accepted by every thinker, so ezzzz*Zr<9zzwe7zfaZ. be %%-z^MeZz/ (ie^grzzz-Zzzg^, or adopted by every valuer. will zzct On the contrary, as is plain enough, their adaption and furtherance will be vigorously resisted by many vested interests, as - to take just one instance - the furtherance of programmes for the elimination of environmental sources of cancer is vigorously opposed by industrial chemical companies. The matter of persuading other, valuers to accept values and principles of a new ethic is of course a further and somewhat separate issue from the question of need for such an ethic. The procedures for trying to effect changes in values are but variations on the usual pro­ cedures, and like them are not fully effective: excluding coercion and education, they include, for example, argumentation, and propaganda, in each case of many sorts.As usual, too, where there is a broad common 32 basis, especially in felt evaluations and emotional presentation, effecting a change, or a conversion, will generally be an easier task. In the case of transformation to environmental values, what is often important are distinctive features regarding the factual bases of many of the evaluations. correcting In particular, there is the matter of removing or /zz^scozzcept^oTZS on a broad range of matters of Some of these sorts are considered in more detail in (c) J. Passmore, 'Ecological problems and persuasion' in PpnaZ^fz/ ipz^erTzaz^ozzaZ u?Z(Z Comparative t/vrisprz/devce (ed. G. Dorsey) , Oceana Publications, New York, 1977, pp.431-42. The apposite term 'emotional presentation' is adapted from Meinong; see especially Ov FmotiozzaZ Presentation (trans. M.L. Schubert-Kalsi), Northwestern University Press, 1972. The notion of emotional present­ ation can play an important role in the explanation of how emotions enter into (environmental) evaluations, the objects evaluated (canyons, mountains, giant trees) often being emotionally presented. A little more precisely, the connections are these: A value ranking (e.g. c is better, more valuable, than d) of a valuer is explained emotionally through - it does not reduce to - certain preference rankings of the valuer; and the preference rankings have in turn dual factual and emotional bases, in the same sort of way that an item may be preferred or chosen in virtue of its factual features and the valuer's emotional responses to those. The main details of such a semantical analysis of value, which is discussed in §5, are given in Routley (c). 32 �environmental concern; for example, about animals, their various behaviour, abilities, etc; about the alleged gulf between humans and other animals and the uniqueness of humans and each human; about the profitability, or desirability, or necessity, of environmentally destruct­ ive enterprises; about the inevitability of current Western social arrangements and about the history of the way these particular arrange­ ments developed. There is, moreover, the matter of sheer information, for example as to how free animals live together and what they do; about how factory and experimental animals are treated, and in the latter case for what: about the sources and effects of various forms of pollution and the reasons for it; about how natural creatures such as whales or environments such as forests are commonly dealt with, for what products, by what interests, for what ends. Naturally (given a fact/value division) none of this information is entirely conclusive support for a change in ethic; for many of the evaluations the data helps support can be included in other ethics (including sometimes modifications of prevailing ethics), while remaining evaluations can, at worst, be simply rejected (as e.g., those utilitarians who extend consideration just to sentient creatures are obliged to reject versions of the last man argument where no sentient creatures are affected). Althouth a new ethic is needed, for the reasons indicated, and although such an ethic can,furthermore, be a considerable asset in practical environmental argument (e.g., as to the point of trying to 33 retain a piece of not-especially-unique near-wilderness), for many practical ecological purposes, there is no need to apply it or to fall back on it. For example, virtually the whole environmental issue of destructive forestry in Australia can be argued without invoking any unconventional ethical principles or values at all, i.e. entirely within the prevailing chauvinistic framework. environmental disputes. The same sort of point applies to But, it by no means applies to all. A corollary is an inadequacy in the presentation of environmental problems and suggested solutions in standard (human) ecology texts (such as P. and JssMss A. Erlich's Freeman, San Francisco, 1970, to select one example), which are set 34 e/zf-ZreZz/ within the chauvinistic framework. Also, differently, in the way that theories are in enabling one to see how to move and argue in a discussion. Quite properly given prevailing sentiments, according to some erring conservationists, who account themselves "realists". 33 �Since it is sometimes charged - despite all that has been said that an environmental ethic does not differ in practice from that of more conventional "chauvinistic" ethics, there is point in spelling out in Firstly, many conventional yet other ways how it can differ in practice: positions, in particular social contract and sympathy theories, cannot take proper account of moral obligation to future humans (who are not in the immediate future). Since the usual attempt to argue, in terms of value and benefit to humans, that natural areas ecosystems generally should not be destroyed or degraded depends critically on introducing possible future humans who will suffer or be worse off as a result of its destruction or degradation, it is plain that an environ­ and mental ethic will differ radically from such conventional positions. That is, the usual argument depends on the reduction of value of a natural item to the interests of present and /nfure humans, in which reduction future humans must play a critical role if conclusions not blatantly opposed to conservation are to be reached. Hence there will usually be a very great gulf between the practical value judgements of conservation ethics and those of conventional positions which discount the (non- immediate) future. Secondly, as we have already seen through examples, there are practical differences between an environmental ethic and conventional instrumental views which do take account of the interests of past, present and future humans, differences which emerge sharply at the It is, however, unnecessary to hypothetical (possible world) level. turn to possible world examples to see that normally there would be very great differences in the practical valuations and behaviour of those who believe that natural items can have value and create obligations not reducible (in any way) to human interests and those who do not, as the following further examples show. Example 1. We need only consider the operation of zJorZd, for example, the concept of damapo to a natural item, and the associated notion of coTnpeMsafdoM for that damage. C. Stone, for instance, in STzo^Zd Troes ^fuTid^Mp? Thus Towards LepaZ. /"or ZVufMraZ- Objocfs (Avon Books, New York, 1975) notes the practical legal differences between taking the damage to a polluted river as affecting its intrinsic value, and taking it as just affecting human river users. In the one case one will see adequate compensation as restoring the original state of the river (rectifying the wrong to the river) and in the other as compensating those present (or future) humans who will suffer from its pollution. As Stone points out, the sum 34 �adequate to compensate the latter may well be much less than that required to restore the river to its unpolluted state, thus making it economic, and in terms of the human chauvinist theory, fair and reason­ able, to compensate those damaged and continue pollution of the river. In the first case, of course, adequate compensation or restoration for the harm done would have to consist in restoring the river to its unpolluted condition and will not just be paid to the people affected. Compare here Stone's example of compensation for injury to a Greek slave; in the instrumentalist case this will involve compensating the slave's owner for the loss of his slave's working time; in the other, where the slave is regarded as not merely an instrument for his owner, it will compensate the sZuue not the for this compensation will also take account of the pain and suffering of the slave, even where this has not affected his working ability. There is a difference not only in the amount of compensation, but to zj/zow it is directed. In the case of a natural item damage may be compensated by payment to a trust set up to protect and restore it. Example 2. The believer in intrinsic values may avoid making unnecessary and excessive noise in the forest, out of respect for the forest and its nonhuman inhabitants. She will do this even when it is certain that there is no other human around to know the difference. For one to whom the forest and its inhabitants are merely another conventional utility, however, there will be no such constraint. He may avoid unnecessary noise if he thinks it will disturb other humans, but if he is certain none are about to hear him he will feel at liberty to make as much and as loud a noise as he chooses, and this will affect his behaviour. Examples like this cannot be dealt with by the introduction of future humans, since they will be unable to hear the noise in question. To claim that the making of noise in such circumstances is a matter of no importance, and therefore there is no important difference in behaviour, is of course to assess the matter through human chauvinist eyes. question-begging. From the intrinsic viewpoint it So such a claim is make a difference, and be reflected in practical behavioural difference. Example 3. Consider an aboriginal tribe which holds a particular place to be sacred, and where this sanctity and intrinsic valuableness and beauty is celebrated by a number of beautiful cave paintings. A typically "progressive" instrumentalist Western view would hold the cave (and perhaps place) to be worth preservation because of its value to the aboriginal people, and because of the artistic merit of the human arti­ facts, the cave paintings the cave contained. 35 To the "enlightened" �Westerner, if the tribe should cease to exist, and the paintings be i destroyed, it would be permissible to destroy the place if this should be in what is judged to be the best interests of human kind, e.g. to get at the uranium underneath. To the aboriginal the human artifacts, the cave paintings would be irrelevant, a celebration of the value of the place, but certainly not a surrogate for it, and the obligation to the place would not die because the tribe disappeared or declined. Similarly no ordinary sum of money would be able to compensate for the loss of such a place, in the way that it might for something conceived of as a utility or convenience, as having value only because of the benefits it confers on the "users" of it. There is an enormous or difference between feeling that a place should be valued or respected for itself, for its perceived beauty and character., and.feeling that it should not be defaced because it is valued by one's fellow humans, and provides pleasurable sensations or money or convenience for them. Compare too the differences between feeling that a yellow robin, say, is a fellow creature in many ways akin to oneself, and feeling that it is a nice little yellow and grey, basically clockwork, aesthetic object. These differences in emotional presentation are accompanied by or expressed by an enormous range of behavioural differences, of which the examples given represent only a very small sample. The sort of behaviour by each viewpoint and thought by it, the concept of what one is free to do, for example, will normally be very different. It is certainly no coincidence that cultures holding to the intrinsic view have normally been far less destructive of nature than the dominant Western human chauvinist culture. In summary, the claim that there is no difference, that the intrinsic value viewpoint is empty verbalisation, does not stand up to examination. The capacity - no doubt exaggerated, but nonetheless far from negligible - of Western industrial societies to solve their ecological problems (at least to their own pathetically low standards) within a chauvinistic framework, does considerably complicate, and obstruct, an alternative more practical argument to the need for a new ethic, /row that in no other way ... [than] prepared[ness] to accept a "new ethic", as distinct even from adding one or two new moral principles to an accepted common ... can modern industrial 35 societies solve their ecological problems. On next page. 36 �Not only does the argument encounter various objections - most obviously that many of the problems can be solved, if not within Western ethics, in immediate extensions of them - but the case suggested would hardly be a satisfactory basis for the type of ethic sought. It is not so much that it would be a chauvinistic way of arriving at a supposedly nonchauvinistic ethic, for bad procedures can lead to good results; rather it is that important ecological problems, shaping environmental ethics, such as preservation of substantial tracts of wilderness and just treatment of animals, tend to be written off in industrial societies as not serious problems. But even if the argument suggested has too narrow a problem base, and so may yield too limited a change in attitudes as compared with the main theoretical argument, the argument merits fuller formulation and further investigation. The argument to need for ethical revision is as follows: (1) A satisfactory solution to environmental problems (of modern industrial societies) implies (the adoption of) an alternative environmental ethic. (2) A satisfactory solution to environmental problems is needed. Therefore, an alternative environmental ethic is needed.36 The argument is valid, given, what seems correct, that pimplies q implies that p is needed implies that q is needed. The second premiss is or can be made analytic, on the sense of 'satisfactory' 'satisfactory' imply 'needed'); (e.g. by having so the case is complete if the first premiss can be established (in the same sense of 'satisfactory'), and the conclusion is then plausible to at least the extent the premiss is. Al37 though the first premiss, or something like it, is widely endorsed, cogent 35 Passmore (c) op. cit., p.438. According to Passmore (p.431), By common consent, there are four major ecological problems: pollution, the exhaustion of resources, the destruction of species, and overpopulation ... To solve such problems involves finding a way either of altering types of human conduct or of preventing that human conduct from having its present consequences. In what follows the assumption that 'there are four major ecological problems' gets rejected. 36 This implies only, that a new ethic is necessary for solving environmental problems, and not of course that it is 37 Even Passmore, though previously (e.g. in (a)) highly critical of proposals for new ethics, gives qualified endorsement to an assumption of this sort ((c), p.441). ... I do not doubt, all the same, that our attitudes to nature stand badly in need of revision and that, as they stand, they form a major obstacle to the solution of ecological problems. 37 �# arguments for it are few and it is no simple matter rendering the premiss plausible. Moreover rendering it plausible involves a substant­ ial detour through social theory; for the case for the premiss proceeds along these sorts of lines: (3) Unless there are (certain) major changes in socio-economic structure, environmental problems will not be satisfactorily solved. (4) The major changes in socio-economic structure involve ethic. an alternative A much stronger thesis than (3) has been argued for using systems analysis, namely that without very extensive socio-economic changes, modern industrial society will collapse; but several of the assumptions made in the analysis are doubtful or disputed. independently of that stronger thesis; But (3) has been argued for example, it will follow from the thesis (of Falk, Commoner and others) 'that the modern industrial ethic as we have known it is not sustainable on ecological grounds'.^ In a sense, (3) is obvious; for it is present socio-economic arrangements that have produced many of the present serious environmental problems; without major changes in those arrangements most of the problems will What is not immediately evident is persist or, more likely, intensify. that the major changes called for, in satisfying (3), suffice for (4). However reflection on the specific types of changes required - for example at a superficial level, human population limitation, reduction of poll­ ution, more sensible resource usage, selective economic growth - reveals that significant changes in value, and also in what is considered permissible, are bound to be involved in the changes. plausible, and therewith the intended conclusion. So (4) is decidedly But the argument leaves the detailed character of the needed alternative ethic rather obscure; and it may well be that the ethic so yielded is somewhat chauvinistic in character. The more practical argument cannot entirely supplant the main theoretical argument. In sum, there are good and pressing reasons to investigate the alternatives to chauvinistic ethics, especially human chauvinism, because such chauvinistic ethics are discriminatory, because the case for them 38 39 See, in particular, D. Meadows and others, Potomac Associates, Washington, D.C., 1972. PtwZts to CrozjtT?, R.A. Falk, 'Anarchism and world order', Pornos IX, 1978, p.66. Falk refers for the case to B.Commoner, TPs CZosZ^p CZroZo, Knopf, New York, 1971; R.A. Falk, T/zZs PZo^ot, Random House, New York. 1971; E. Goldsmith and others EZMoprZut /or F^rvZ^aZ, Houghton and Miflin, Boston, 1972, and Meadows et aZ., op. cit. 38 O �does not stand up to examination, and because they have been involved in the destruction of much of value and now threaten the viability of much that is valuable. § 4 . ENVIRONMENTAL ALTERNATIVES : NARROWING THE CHOICE AMONG ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS . The basic - and basically mistaken - doctrine of the Western super-ethic is, as we have seen, that people, humans of whatever shape or form, are the fundamental carriers or objects of value and that all other items are valuable only in an instrumental or derivative way. It is important, in­ deed mandatory in a genuine environmental ethic, to reject this view and allow natural items to have a value in their own right, ^yz i/ze sazzze /as/z^oM as peopZ-e, both for the reasons outlined above, of the theoret­ ical unsatisfactoriness and arbitrariness of the traditional view, and for more practical reasons, namely, to help ensure the ecological sustain­ ability of modern society, and in optimising human welfare. It has often been pointed out that 'a totally humanised world would diminish us as 40 human beings', that the traditional view of humans, or classes of humans, as dominant, and of natural items as without value except where they serve human or class interests - a view that often carries contempt for nature leads not only to the destruction of much that is of value but (paradoxic­ ally) to counterproductive results even with respect to human welfare. Thus McHarg (in attractively coloured rhetoric) Show me a man-oriented society in which it is believed that reality exists only because man can perceive it, that the cosmos is a struct­ ure erected to support man on its pinnacle, that man exclusively is divine and given dominion over all things, indeed that God is made in the image of man, and I will predict the nature of its cities and their landscape. I need not look far for we have seen them-the hot­ dog stands, the neon shill, the ticky-tacky houses, dysgenic city and mined landscapes. centric man; This is the image of the anthropomorphic, anthropo­ he seeks not unity with nature but conquest (op. cit.). The rejection of this view and its replacement by a view in which natural items can be regarded as of value and as worthy of our respect for themselves and not merely for what we can get out of them or what use we 40 see e.g. the discussion at pp.116-17 of (a) J. Rodman, 'The Liberation of nature', Irz^z^rz/, 20 (1977) 83-145. All subsequent references to Rodman's work without further indication are to this article. Note well that the rejection of human chauvinism does Moi imply that no chauvinistic arguments - or rafTzsr, arguments that are usually stated in chauvinistic form - carry weight. On the contrary, some chauvinistic arguments (e.g. those supporting wilderness retention and species preservation) carry considerable weight; and, since the prevailing industrial ethics remain chauvinistic, environmentalists would be rash not to use them. 39 �& can make of them, is becoming increasingly widespread in parts of the environmental movement. It is this primarily that makes for an important ideological split in the conservation movement, between what Naess (op. cit.) called sTzaZZozj and Fesp ecology, between those who see conservation as just a matter of wiser, better-controlled exploitation of the environment — something which is compatible with denying value to everything except man and those who see it at least in part as involving a recognition of value for natural items independent of man, and hence as involving (at least to some extent) a The gzEpZo^a^opz view, which is first view, the long-term or closely tied to prevailing more enlightened economic assumptions, tends to make heavy use of the watershed term 'resource'; the problem of conserv­ ation is seen as one of 'zjFss Mse oy resoMrcss', a resource being something of use to humans or persons. On this view, which does not get beyond the confines of human chauvinism, and so is no direction for.a satisfactory environmental ethic to take, items which have no perceivable use to man, i.e. non-resources, can be destroyed without loss; and the environmental problem is viewed as largely one of making people aware of the extent to which natural items and processes have Fustrz^gnPaZ- value, i.e. of how far we are dependent on them and they are of to us. There is no recognition either that some items might be valuable precisely they are independent of man. Resource Conservation, or the shallow position, is the first of the 42 four ideal types that Rodman discerns in his investigation of the contemporary environmental movement. The deeper ecological position gets split under Rodman's division into three ideological positions - though Rodman prefers to put the matter in symbolic or experiential terms, in terms of forms of consciousness - namely Wilderness Preservation, Nature Moralism, and Ecological Resistance. Though the positions discerned are neither characterised in an exclusive fashion, nor exhaustive of ecological positions, and though we shall have to look beyond all the positions for a satisfactory environmental ethic, nonetheless they afford an excellent perspective on the main types of alternative positions that have been adopted by those within environmental movements. It is not uncommon to encounter attempts to write the shallow position into the very meaning or definition of e.g. 'conservation is the use of resources to the greatest advantage of man', 4 Furvez/ py Fcrgsz^rz/ T^FMSz^r^es. ParP FT. Foresfrz/ Pe^gZ.opz7?e?2^ PZ-arz. Draft (31 October, 1974), p.ll - a blatantly chauvinistic account. On next page. 40 �According to (Wilderness) Preservation, which focusses on wilderness, wilderness is to be preserved for the wilderness experience, wilderness offers a natural cathedral, a sacred place where human beings can transcend the limitations of everyday experience and become renewed through contact with the power of creation ((b), p.49). The values discerned in wilderness and natural landscape are primarily aesthetic and quasi-religious, or mystical, 'the experience of the holy is esthetically mediated'; what is valuable remains human experiences. Thus the Wilderness Preservation position does not move outside the sphere of human chauvinism, and can no more than Resource Conservation offer a frame for an environmental ethic. Rodman reaches a similar conclusion: Resource Conservation and Wilderness Preservation appear variations on the theme of wise use, the former oriented to the [efficient] production of commodities for human consumption, the latter to providing human amenities ((b), p.50). For this reason, the Wilderness Preservation position fails even on the score of justifying the preservation of wilderness - on the very task it was designed to accomplish - in a range of circumstances. Like other See especially (b) J. Rodman, 'Theory and practice in the environmental movement: notes towards an ecology of experience', in Search for VuZzzes a International Cultural Foundation, New York, 1978, pp.45-56. Some of the types are portrayed in greater detail in other Rodman papers. The remainder of this largely new section on environmental ethical alternatives is heavily indebted, in ways the references mostly make plain, to Rodman's work. His work covers a vast range of interlinked topics; only those of immediate relevance have been touched upon. But there is very much in the remainder that repays careful reading, and zzzMc/z to think about and to question or reject, reaching perhaps its lowest point in the paradoxical themes: Just as our statements about other people tend also to be concealed statements about ourselves, so statements about non­ human nature tend to be concealed statements about the human condition, and movements to liberate nonhuman nature tend also to be movements to liberate the repressed potentials of human nature (p.105). In part because these themes and the related myth of microcosm are taken seriously, and not for the evident falsehoods they are, in part because the ethical adequacy of the human/nonhuman distinction is never seriously questioned (e.g. it is taken for granted, what is not the case, that rights apply to humans and are problematic beyond them), and in part because of the characteristically chauvinistic emphasis on human experience and the endeavour to bring everything within that experiential purvue, and the associated weight assigned to human symbolic, mythic and ritual activities, one is left with the feeling, at the end of all the investigations one can profitably follow Rodman through, that one has not got beyond the confines of human chauvinism. 41 �instrumentalist accounts of wilderness value, it breaks down entirely with examples like the Last Man, assuming that Mr. Last Man is never turned on by natural spendour. More alarmingly, under readily conceivable developments, it would allow the elimination of wilderness entirely. For consider the Wilderness Experience Machine, a low-impact low-tech philosophical machine, recently patented by I.M. Diabolic, which can duplicate entirely, even for groups of people, wilderness experiences, but in a downtown room. As far as the psychological experience goes, this machine can provide a complete substitute for any actual wilderness, and were the value of wilderness to reside in the experience it afforded, could entirely replace it and eliminate the alleged need for it. Most environmentalists would be (rightly) dissatisfied with, not to say appalled by, the idea that Wilderness Experience Machines could sub­ stitute for wildernesses, since they provided the same experiences. what else they wanted, the answer would of course be: Asked Wildernesses, not merely wilderness experiences. Wildernesses are valuable in their own right, over and above the experiences they can afford.43 Really, that is, they consider wildernesses intrinsically valuable, but have been pushed by the prevailing ethical ethos into stating, and misrepresenting, their position in experiential terms. There is some independent evidence that the Wilderness Preservation position is frequently a disguised intrinsic value position, in the attitude taken to examples like the Last Man case, that purely hypothetical experiencers (who may vanish into counterfactuals) are good enough, and that in some real-life cases it is enough that wilderness is there to be contemplated, whether or not anyone actually takes advantage of its presence to gain experiences, or indeed whether or not it is in fact contemplated. Such examples remove the disguise and reveal the position as at bottom an intrinsic value position. In that event it is however better to avoid the disguise; for the case for wilder­ ness preservation which starts from the position that some wilderness tracts have intrinsic as well as merely instrumental value is substantially stronger than any position which assigns them merely instrumental value. Wilderness lovers and nature conservationists have in fact worked out - or concocted - a set of arguments to show why wildernesses and nature conservation are of benefit to humans, to argue for their instrumental — The concept of zjfZ-demess too can vary with the operative ideology, e.g. on certain views, such as Wilderness Preservation, wilderness comprises areas that are (or provide the opportunity for use), e.g. used for experiential enrichment. By contrast, on a genuine Environ­ mental Resistance view, wilderness is a wild area, use of which is not implied: it may never be used, and it may not matter that it affords no opportunity for (human) use. (Under popular high redefinition of 'wilderness', there are of course no wildernesses remaining on the earth, and wilderness vanishes as soon as humanly experienced.) 42 �value. For example, there are various arguments from the scientific value, or usefulness, of wilderness, e.g. for the study of natural eco­ systems, for the investigation of plant history and evolution, as a repository of genetic diversity, etc. These arguments, which (like parallel arguments for species preservation) are not to be especially as regards persuasive force, can be put in nonchauvinistic form; for science and knowledge are not linked essentially with, for example, the feature of being human. Often however - e.g. where the wilderness defended has, so far as it is known, little that is very special to offer - such arguments appear to be merely a conventional front for the real (or deeper) reasons - and in sofne instances, correspondingly weak and unpersuasive (as Fraser Darling has remarked, and Passmore has tried to show in (a)) - the real reasons being based on the perception of nonuseful properties of value. This is particularly marked in the case of arguments for preserving the most complex and beautiful of the world's plant communities, tropical rainforest. Such arguments as that various uninvestigated rainforest trees may at some time be found to contain useful drugs, by no means exhaust the true value of the rainforest. For it is in the intrinsic, i.e. noninstrumental, value of the rainforest that the main reason for not unduly interfering with it, e.g. not interfering in ways that threaten its stability or viability, lies. In particular, destruction of a wilderness, such as a rainforest, would significantly diminish intrinsic value, and so should (in general) be resisted. Environmentalists who are aware of these sorts of problems and dangers with resource use approaches to wilderness preservation sometimes attempt to formulate their alternative view in terms of one of the lesser traditions, most popularly in terms of the image, in which man is seen as the steward of the earth - an analogy which, as Passmore points out (in (a)), is problematic outside a religious context. For who is man steward to? If not to God, then how is the analogy to be unpacked, and what conditions must "stewardship" conform to? If "good stewardship" is management in the interests of humans, or humanity, then the position does not go beyond Resource Conservation; if it is manage44 ment to serve intrinsic values, or God, then good stewardship is but a cover for the recognition of intrinsic values, which are better introduced directly. Thus admitting values which are not instrumental, which do not answer back in some way to states or conditions of humans is a feature of all satisfactory deeper ecological alternatives. In order to allow for such intrinsic values and/or associated attitudes of respect, e.g. for 44 on some interpretations; chauvinism. on others theism may serve to reinforce human 43 �nature and various natural things, it is however unnecessary to adopt a religious backdrop such as the "Good Stewardship" image suggests, or even a semi-religious framework such as a mystical or superstitious one with taboos and sacred places as symbolic and ritual elements. A theory of intrinsic value which assigns intrinsic value to wilderness and species of free animals, for good reasons, can be entirely naturalistic (in a main sense of that much-abused term). The third, somewhat amorphous, cluster of positions Rodman describes, Nature Moralisms, do just that, assign intrinsic, noninstrumental, value to natural items, such as - on some versions of the position wilderness. [An] alternative perspective ... [to] the theme of wise use 45 ... is provided by the tradition growing out of the humane movement, recently radicalised by animal liberationists, and sometimes generalised to embrace non-animal beings as well. to the economic ethos of Resource In contrast Conservation and the religious/ esthetic character of Wilderness Preservation, this perspective is strikingly moral in style. Its notion of human virtue is not prudence or reverence, but justice. In contrast to the caste­ bound universe of the Resource Conservationist, the Natural Moralist affirms the democratic principle that all natural entities (or, more narrowly, all forms of life) have intrinsic value, and that wild animals, plants, rivers, and whole ecosystems have a right to exist, flourish and reproduce - or at least that human beings have no right to exploit or unnecessarily harm or destroy other members of the biotic community. In contrast to the aristo­ cratic universe of Wilderness Preservation, where some places (and some forms of recreation) are holier than others and certain types of natural entities ... are traditionally more worthy of being saved than others ..., the world of the Nature Moralist is characterised by an apparent egalitarianism ((b), p.50, my rearrangement). Each of the sweep of environmental alternatives indicated can be seen as an of conventional Western ethics: intrinsic value is extended uniformly to all animals or certain favoured features of all these, e.g. their experience, happiness, avoidance of suffering, or is extended to all living creatures or systems, or is extended to all natural items or even to objects - it may or may 45 be distributed uniformly or equally; Human use and human experience, it might be added. 44 �rather independently, rights may be ceded to all animals, or to some or all living things, or to all things, or, alternatively and differently, right-holders' rights with respect to some or other of these classes are restricted; and similarly other deontic notions, justice, obligation, even perhaps duty, may extend to apply to larger classes of items than all humans or persons. The sweep, which is impressive, is intended to include both extended utilitarianisms, e.g. Bentham's utilitarianism as revamped by Singer according to which all sentient creatures are entitled to equal consider­ ation of interest, and extended (legal) rights doctrines, e.g. the assignment of rights or legal standing to all natural objects as suggested by, for instance, Stone. 46 It also includes Darwin's ethic and Leopold s 47 "land ethic". In order to capture some of the intended examples of Nature Moralists, and all the Moral Extension positions, Rodman's characterisation requires some adjustment - which will be taken for granted in what follows. For example, Singer and other animal liberation- ists do not assign intrinsic value to all forms of life, or even to all animals; but (as Rodman is well aware) to all sentient creatures; that is, further classifications have to be taken into account. The egalitarian, or uniformity, assumptions that serve in character­ ising Natural Moralism are mistaken. Not all objects are of equal value; some are more valuable then others, while some have little or no value (and some have a negative value).4^ Impressive though the sweep of extensions is, all the positions indicated should be rejected on one ground or another, and sometimes on several grounds. Against positions which do not extend the class of objects of moral concern and candidates for value to include all objects, variants of the counterexamples to the Western super-ethic can be directed. Consider, for instance, the positions (of usual animal liber- ationists) which extend the moral boundaries just to include sentient creatures (or e.g. preference-havers). Adapt the Last Man and Last People examples, the Wilderness example, etc., by removing all (inessential) animals from the examples, e.g. the wilderness contains no animals, in the Last People situation there are no other animals than the 46 p. Singer, .4 ZVozJ Random House, New York, 1975; for (7%r C. Stone, op. cit. <?y 47 At least on a straightforward reading of Leopold's eventual position, but not according to Rodman; see his contrast of Leopold with Stone,, p.110. Darwin's ethic, which anticipates Leopold's, is presented m C. Darwin, of Muzz, Second edition, J. Murray, London, 1883. 4 8 On next page. 45 �1* Then the counterexamples apply as before last people themselves. against the liberation positions. It is unnecessary to go quite so far afield to fault such positions, at least in practice: as Rodman might put it, they are countered by the facts of experience: ... I need only to stand in the midst of a clear-cut forest, a strip-mined hillside, a defoliated jungle, or a dammed canyon to feel uneasy with assumptions that could yield the conclusion that no human action can make any difference to the welfare of anything but sentient animals (p.89). But an advantage of the counterexamples is that the same examples, among many others (e.g. situations devoid of sentient creatures, situations where the message of experience conflicts with justice or fairness), reveals the erroneousness of the well-sponsored thesis, a simple analogue of empiricism, that all value or sentient, objects). derives from experience (of experiential, A corollary is that value is not to be assessed either, in any simple way, in terms of the facts of experience. Insofar as Nature Moralism relies upon simple extensions of utilitarianisms, or of subjectivisms, to include a larger class of subjects, (a larger base class), such as all present sentient creatures, or all preference-havers at any one time, etc., it is open not merely to adaptations of the argument against chauvinism (animal chauvinism is not that much more satisfactory than human chauvinism), but most of the Nor, on Moral Extensions, need all objects that have rights have equal rights. Rights may not be very democratically distributed. Some things have rights, e.g. as a result of agreements, of a sort others do not hold or are not capable of holding. Even rights to exist, to flourish and to reproduce (each case is different) are in much doubt where there is scarcity or conflict and where some right holders are taken to be worth much more than others. Nor are such leading examplars of Natural Moralism as Singer and Stone, though they are concerned to extend principles of justice, committed to equality of rights assumptions. Stone explicitly rejects equal distribution of rights; but the principle that all natural objects are equal in having rights, which really says no more than that they all have rights, is at best a very weak egalitarian principle. Singer offers (and presumably would offer) no equality of rights principle, rejects an equality of treatment principle, and proposes as a principle of equality a (near vacuous) principle of equal consideration of interests. Not, this time, knowledge. But amusingly "value empiricism" collapses into empiricism proper given the Socratic identification: Value (generalising Virtue) is knowledge. The only natural stopping point under value empiricism is, of course, with all creatures that have (or could have) the relevant experiences: again not with humans. 46 �standard objections to utilitarians, subjectivisms, etc. Many versions of Nature Moralism may than be defeated on rather conventional grounds. There emerges, further, a dilemma for extensions. Either the crucial notions of right and intrinsic value are extended to all sentient creatures (experience-havers), in which case the objections just lodged apply, or they are extended more sweepingly, e.g. to all natural objects. But the latter involves attributing to such items attributes they do not have, most obviously rights to such objects as stones; it also violates the conditions that have to be met for the holding of rights and for the entitlement of rights. Thus, for example, Stone considers underpinning his extension of rights, beyond sentient creatures in the ordinary sense - or of legal rights beyond recognised "legal persons" - by a postulate of 50 universal sentience or consciousness; in short, by an unacceptable metaphysics, or myth. There are several further objections which work against many versions of Natural Moralism to which Rodman draws attention: (1) Moral Extensions are 'inadequate to articulate the intention that sustains the [environmental] movement' wilderness preservation movements. (p.88), specifically wilderness and It takes but little argument to show that utilitarian ethics, such as Singer's, so far from assisting the environmental movement, can (if adopted) reinforce the case wilderness and preservation of wild species. But an extension like Stone's extension of legal rights can help, and has helped, at least in the courts where its meta-physical underpining is unlikely to be glimpsed. The basic point is however that the rights talk does not connect with, and is insensitive to, the experiential basis. Mere extensions of moral notions such as interest or right or justice are insufficient to treat and do just­ ice to the multi-dimensional depth of environmental issues, such as the damming of a river (p.115). Part of the reason is said to be that the usual moral aparatus, which was evolved in the case of certain person-to-person 50 See Rodman's discussion, pp.92-3. But Rodman overstates his case m claiming that 'some such postulate as universal consciousness is there­ fore necessary if the notion of rights for trees is not to seem a rootless fancy'. For , as explained below, extended rights can be defined by a rather "natural extension" of the familiar notion of right, without any such postulate; and grounds of entitlement can be traced back to value of the items. Certainly extended rights sever what linkage there may have been between rights and liabilities, but with the modern separations of rights from responsibilities that linkage was already damaged or broken. 47 �* relations, is inadequate for getting to grips with a new dimension of moral experience, that concerned with environment, and inadequate to reflect ecological sensibility. Rodman tries to press, however, a much stronger, and rather more dubious, theme, the By adapting the moral/legal theory of 'rights', [the movement] may sell its soul, its roots in mythic and ritual experience, to get easier judicial standing (p.88); and more savagely, the progressive extension model of ethics, while holding out the promise of transcending the homocentric perspective of modern culture, subtly fulfills and legitimates the basic project of modernity - the total conquest of nature by man (p.97, also 'p.119)7* " While neither of these large claims is strictly true - soul-selling is simply avoided through adoption of the notion of extended-right, which can yield a conservative extension of the original position; and even utilitarians may be committed to blocking projects which threaten free animals - each has a substantial point. Part of the point behind the latter claim is worth developing separately:- (2) Moral Extensions typically cast natural objects, notably animals, in the role of inferior humans, 'legal incompetents', imbeciles, human vegetables, and the like. They are ... degraded by our failure to respect them for having their own existence, their own character and potentialities, their own forms of excellence, their own integrity, a degradation usually reflected in our reduction of 'them to the status of instruments for our own ends', and not removed 'by "giving" them rights, by assigning them to the status of inferior human beings' (p.94). Many of us know where the treatment of natural objects as mere means for human ends tends to lead and has led. The mistaken treatment of them as inferior humans, a treatment which fails to see and 'respect the otherness of nonhuman forms of life', leads in the same direction. For given that animals, for example, are inferior, it is legitimate to treat them also as inferior; a greater value principle, which moral extensions typically endorse, yields a similar result. The needs of increasing populations of superior humans will eventually outweigh, if they do not do so already, the cases of inferior inhabitants of this finite earth for the retention of their natural habitats. 48 For their rights and their �In the larger perspective, the Moral values will be less than "ours". Extensions, with their built-in greater value assumptions, do legitimate the conquest of nature by humans. Thus too they fail seriously, on what will soon enough be quite practical grounds, as satisfactory environmental ethics. (3) The extensions, like the parent ethics which they extend, are narrowly individualistic, and insufficiently holistic. This is particularly conspicuous in the case of utilitarianisms, which in principle arrive at all assessments by some sort of calculations, e.g. summations and perhaps averaging, from an initially given unit conforming to requisite equality conditions, e.g. equal consideration, equal units of suffering. In practice of course the method is, almost invariably, to pretend that the calculations will yield results which agree with alternatively and previously arrived at, usually intuitive, often prejudiced, evaluations; that is, in practice the method is not applied except in a handwaving back-up fashion. The method is not applied in part because there are serious, well enough known, problems in applying it. The individualistic bias carried over in other moral extensions, e.g. any experiential theory, likewise limits their satisfactoriness. It is to understate the matter to say merely that 'the moral atomism that focuses on individual animals and their subjective experiences does not seem well adapted to coping with ecological systems' (p.89), 'to explore the notion of shared habitat and the notion that an organism's relationship to its natural environment may be an important part of the organism's character' ((b), p.52). A moral atomism that focuses on individuals, discounting their interrelations, is bound to result in ecological complexes that matter (such as ecosystems, wilderness, and species) getting seriously short-changed. To illustrate:- Under atomism, the value of a complex, or the rights of a complex, amount to no more than those of its individual members; but since these are, in isolation from the complex, no more valuable than other things of their order, e.g. one gentian than another, a bush rat from a Norwegian rat, there no special merit in a complex, or rights attaching to it, in virtue of its rareity or uniqueness or special features as a complex. Thus, for instance, a utilitarianism under which only individual animals count assigns, and can assign, no special value to species, and can (as remarked) be used to argue against preservation of species: Since all animals are equal - or at least all animals of the same genus are more or less equal - one can substitute for another. For a rare species of rat to die out painlessly cannot matter while there are plenty of other rats. A rights theory is in similar difficulties so long 49 �w as rights are assigned only to individuals, taken in isolation from their environmental setting (i.e. only to the usual separable individuals of philosophical theory). These problems may be avoided, in part, by assign­ ing rights to complexes (given the notion of rights will take that much further stretching; which it will not if right holders are assumed to be conscious or to be preference-havers), and by attributing independent value to complexes. But, since the value of a whole is sometimes more than the sum of the separable values of its individual members, this move involves the rejection of usual atomism, utilitarianisms in particular. The objection against the narrow individualism of the extensions - a defect they share with standard ethics which do not admit of ready extension, such as contract theories - soon broadens into an objection that these extensions are built on an inadequate metaphysics, a metaphysics of rather isolated individuals who (or which) are seriously depauperate in An ethics presupposes a metaphysics at their relations with other objects. least through its choice of base class: thus for example, usual homocen- tric formulations of utilitarianisms and contract theories suppose a base class of narrowly self-interested humans. The remedy is not (as Rodman suggests in various places in his elaboration of Ecological Resistance) to move to holism: to do so would be to accept the other half of a false dichotomy mainstream philosophical thought engenders (cf. Routley (g), this volume). It is rather to move to a metaphysics that is built on a concept­ ion of objects (which may or may not be individuals) which are rich in their interrelations and connections. In summary, the moral extensions are the wrong direction in which to seek a satisfactory environmental ethic. But the failure of Nature Moralism does not mean, as Rodman tends to assume, that all positions 51 that are moral in style are thereby ruled out. For one thing, Nature Moralism, as characterised (or generalised), is far from exhaustive of the range of prima facie viable moral positions. More satisfactory positions will simply avoid the damaging assumptions of Nature Moralism (and likewise those of inadequate ethical positions, such as contract theories or naturalism, and those linking morality to legality; For another, if the quest is for an ruled out. cf. p.103). moral notions can hardly be Even if it is assumed that the call for a 'new ethic' is 'to guide the human/nature relationship (p.95) - a somewhat unfortunate way of putting it - whereas what matters is the human/nature relationship itself, and that in coping with that relation fixation on morality or 51 His thesis of the 'limitation of the moral/legal stage of unconscious­ ness' is investigated in more detail in what follows. 50 �G. $ legality is a serious handicap, and may contribute to the problem of the relationship rather than helping solve it (pp.103-4); still part of the problem is that of indicating entitlements of agents with respect to their environment, what sort of exploitation, if any, is permissible, what the limits on conventional morality are, and discovering 'a larger normative order within which we and our species-specific moral and legal systems have a niche' (p.97). Nor, in outlining Ecological Resistance, does Rodman shrink from using - he could not avoid the effect of - axiological terms such as 'good' and deontic terms such as 'should'; he does not doubt, for example, that some of what is natural that is threatened is valuable and that threats to it should be resisted; and he admits that 'prudence, justice, and reverence may be essential parts of a[n ecologic­ ally] good life'. Ecological Resistance, which is said to be the alternative 'most faithful to the integrity of experience', exhibits indeed the negativity of resistance. The position is founded on action, resistance, and theory only emerges retrospectively (if perhaps at all). Its (insufficiently qualified) central principle is 'that diversity is natural, good and threatened by the forces of monoculture'. The struggle between these forces, diversity and monoculture - between (ecological) good and evil occurs in several different spheres of experience, i.e. at various levels, which reflect one another. Resistance is not undertaken for self-interest or utilitarian reasons, or for moral reasons, or for religious or mystical reasons (such as preventing profanation), but because the threat to the [natural object or system] ... is perceived aZso as a threat to the self, or rather to the principle of diversity and spontaneity that is the endangered side of the basic balance that defines and sustains the very nature of things ((b), p.54). The disjunction, 'or', separates however two rather different (though combin­ able) reasons-cum-motives for resistance. The second disjunct yields the following reasons for resistance (which are linked by a metaphysical assumption connecting diversity and spontaneity with the nature of things): (i) The threat to the natural item is a threat to the principle of diversity and spontaneity. So, by the central principle, it is a threat to what is good, etc. (ii) The threat to the natural object 'is a threat to the very nature of things': (as to how consider the example of the wild river threatened by a dam, p.115). So - by an unstated, but nonetheless implied and assumed, principle, that the very nature of things is good (and natural) it is a threat to the forces of good. 51 �W- The first disjunct yields a further, different, argument; in simplest form: (iii) The threat to the natural object is a threat to oneself. What is a threat to oneself is bad and to be resisted, so what is a threat to the natural object is bad and has to be resisted (since what is bad should, in general, be resisted). Although the arguments are valid, the underlying principles are faulty; for instance, the diversity (and spontaneity) principle because it is too simple (and so too does not harmonize with the nature of things) ; and the second principle, the intrinsic merit of the very nature of the things, because not everything that is the case or is natural is meritor ­ ious, e.g. genuinely natural disasters. Rodman plans to avoid obstacles to adopting nature as an absolute standard and, at the same time, to bridge the gap the principle spans, by resort to a version of naturalism which equates 'the "natural" with the "moral"' (pp.96-7). But for well- known reasons which can be supported (e.g. those telling against objective ethics of the sort such naturalism would yield), substantive evaluative assumptions cannot be removed in this fashion; though they can be suppressed, they reappear as soon as connections between empirical grounds and evaluative judgments based upon them are queried. The trouble, characteristic of reductionism, arises from the mistaken attempt to collapse a grounding, or founding, relation to an identity, to close the gap - which is not problematic but is widely thought to be problem­ atic - between value and empirical fact by a reduction of value to fact, of the thesis that evaluative features are grounded on natural features to the thesis that evaluative features are nothing but certain natural , 52 features (e.g. to be good is just to have certain natural features). 52 Rodman interprets naturalistically the statement of Jonas's that he quotes approvingly (p.95): Only an ethic which is grounded in the breadth of being, not merely in the singularity or oddness of man, can have significance in the scheme of things ... an ethics no longer founded on divine authority [or upon human arete], must be founded on a principle discoverable in the nature of things ... . He interprets it in terms of 'an ontologically-grounded moral order in the "the phenomenon of life" or "the nature of things".' In this way can be avoided the reduction of 'the quest for an ethics ... to prattle about "values" taken in abstraction from the "facts" of experience'. But Jonas's statement can be construed nonnaturalistically, by taking the founding or grounding relation seriously, as connecting, but not reducing, values to empirical facts. So construed the statement does help in delineating the sort of environmental ethics sought. 52 * �C Such reductions commit the naturalistic and prescriptive fallacies which can be avoided neither by thinking 'our way through or around them' (p.97), nor by holistic assimilation of morality in a 'more encompassing ethical life' (p.103 and note 66). But details of the fallacies need not detain us, since we can consider immediately Rodman's important suggestion 53 for circumnavigating them (pp.103-4). Under natural social conditions, such as are obtained in some traditional societies and in some free animal societies (as ethological studies reveal), but have been lost in modern societies, law and morality, at least in their coercive aspects, would disappear, as they did in William Morris's yrow TVozj/zgre, and somewhat as they would in a Kantian community of fully autonomous beings. In terms of modern physics, morality and law are not invariants but vary under transformation of axes, and in fact vanish or prove eliminable under a suitable transformations, e.g. to a natural condition. There is a similar natural condition for morality and legality, a condition in which the prohibitions now prescribed 54 Conscience and the State would have operated "naturally by God, (i.e. from inside the organism, as a matter of course) , and patterns now stated prescriptively could have been stated descriptively. When the Way is abandoned, then we get Humanity and Justice (T<2<9 T6 , #18) (p.103). Even if a change of social axes could place us back on the Way, or on the way to the Way, morality is not really avoidable in our local frame where we are far from the Way. So ethical disputes over environmental matters are also unavoidable;^ for those a satisfactory ethic is a desideratum, and can help in bringing about a change of social axes. Thus too, the identity of the prescriptive with the descriptive, of "ought" with (suitable) "is", is a merely contingent (extensional) one and fails in The suggestion helps explain not only Rodman's naturalism, but his thesis of the limitation of morality and legality; it also introduces the anarchistic social change view that suffuses much of the (very uneven) later parts of (a): the view appears therein as the elabor ation of what is 'unthinkable'. Given prevailing socio-economic conditions it should be rather: that would (ideally) be prescribed. Let us hope, for environmental reasons, that the principles that are lived by in natural conditions bear not too great a resemblance to those now prescribed. Nor is there, in the local frame, much alternative but to resort to legal strategies, where they can be applied (where standing is granted) to delay "the war against nature". 53 �V alternative situations; * hence, as always, there is no deduction of "ought" from "is", since deducibility would require coincidence in the alternative situations. Nor would morality — as distinct from legality, which requires some codification - strictly disappear under natural conditions, though its coercive aspects would: on the whole, as they ought to be. things would simply be, But while deontology would have a much diminished role (as it does on the preferred environmental ethic), axiology (the theory of value) would still have its place - some objects (e.g. diverse landscapes) would be more valuable than others (monocultural landscapes), some not valuable, etc. (As things stand, of course, axiology does have an important place in working out the theory of Ecological Resistance, especially in assessing its central principle of diversity.) The upshot is that without much elaboration (like that indicated below) of an axiological kind; which connects value through a grounding relation, as distinct from an identity, with the run of things (but not aZZ things) that are natural, reason (ii) for ecological resistance fails. Does reason (i), which is premissed on the central principle that diversity is good and natural and threatened by monoculture, fare any better? While it is a matter of fact that that diversity is threatened, indeed is being very rapidly reduced by the forces of monoculture, diver­ sity is not, as opponents of ecological values are wont to point out, an entirely unqualified good. Nor is diversity is always natural: a temperate rain forest can be "enriched" and rendered more diverse by interplanting of exotics (a practice foresters have applied, e.g. in New Zealand) but the result is not natural and sometimes at least bad. Or, differently, ecological diversity can often be increased by increasing edges between ecosystems, but the practice of increasing edges can easily be unnatural and far from good, as, e.g. in rainforest logging with (say) 50% canopy retention. So although a reduction of diversity is commonly bad, since the reduction reduces the quality of an ecological whole, and increase in diversity good, diversity can not be accepted as a solo principle. In fact, Rodman often couples diversity with other factors, such as naturalness (inadmissible in determining, noncircularly, what is good and natural), richness, spontaneity and integrity, which help to remove various of the counterexamples to a diversity principle. procedure points in the direction to be pursued: The replacement of the over- simple principle of diversity by a principle combining all relevant ecological factors. After all ecological sensibility - ecological resist­ ance is assumed to be the position of the person of ecological sensibility - requires sensitivity to all such ecological factors. 54 Once it is determined, �* through consideration of a mix of ecological factors, that, or whether, a natural object is good or valuable the reasons for resistance can be restated: (iv) Where a natural object is valuable - as natural objects are, a natural object does not have to be very ecologically distinctive to be valuable - the threat to the natural object is a threat to what is But, other things being equal, threats to what is valuable valuable. should be resisted. So, similarly, threats to natural objects should often be resisted - and always (on whatever level) resisted where the objects are valuable and the costs of resisting are not overridingly high (to begin to spell out the ceteris paribus clause). It remains to tie in reason (iii), a key premiss of which can now take the initial form that the threat to a valuable natural object is a threat to oneself. A threat to what is valuable, to what one as a valuer values, is athreat to the valuer, to oneself, for these are one's values. To make some of those connections good again requires an excursion into axiology, one, this time, that connects what is valuable with a valuer's values. But Rodman, in trying to connect the threats to natural objects and to oneself, is forced further microcosm: afield, and resorts to the myth of 'Ecological Resistance involves a ritual affirmation of the Myth of Microcosm' universe' (OED). ((b), p.5.4), i.e. the view of man 'as epitome of the While such an affirmation - without the ritual - would yield the requisite connection, it is a classic piece of anthropocentric- ism, quite hostile to a nonchauvinistic position, and, fortunately, inessential to genuine ecological resistance. What Rodman reaches for from the myth (which could be restated in terms of seZ/, without its classic homocentric bias) is however extremely important: account of the it is an which is not a separate subject isolated from its (natural) environment (as a Humean individual is), but is connected intensionally and causally interrelated with that environment. Rodman introduces this metaphysics in rather old-fashioned terms: Ecological Resistance ... assumes a version of the theory of internal relations: the human personality discovers its structure through interaction with the nonhuman order. I am what I am at least partly in my relation to my natural environment, and changes in that environ­ ment affect my own identity. If I stand idly by and let it be destroyed, a part of me is destroyed or seriously deranged ((b) p. 54). Not Man Apart, in the terms of Friends of the Earth. 55 �w For among my interests are its interests, part of my welfare is its welfare; I am identified in part with it.^ The metaphysics deepens, then, the reasons for resistance. A resister 'does not stand over against "his environment" as manager, sight-seer, or do-gooder; he is an integral part of [it]' ((b), p.56). But the environmental metaphysics, that underlies and helps support the ethics, that is part of a fuller environmental theory, need not be, and should not be if it is to be coherent, as (Hegelian and) holistic as Rodman immediately goes on to suppose that it is: __ By making the principle of diversity central, Ecological Resistance can incorporate the other three perspectives as moments within the dialectic of a larger whole. an esthetic religiosity have niches Economics, morality, and in the ecology of our experience of nature, and each has its limits (p.56 continued). But a principle of diversity which opposes the forces of monoculture will not yield f/z-fs pluralism, unless illegitimately extrapolated to theories where its merit is much less evident, especially when some of these theories are not only mutually inconsistent but false. Rodman risks the distinctive features of Ecological Resistance for a dubious synthesis. It is only true that the positions can be combined if the first three positions are verz/ limited indeed, and then a trivial combination with each theory working where it works (which may be nowhere actual in the case of the religious component) can be managed. Moreover Ecological Resistance properly developed, will lead to economic and ethical theories which compete with the rather conventional, and environmentally defective theories of, respectively, Resource Conservation and Natural Moralism. Not only is Ecological Resistance severely handicapped by having implausible holistic theses tacked in to it (not all of which have been discussed); further, Ecological Resistance is too negative. A more positive theory - which includes a theory of value and, ultimately, for a fuller environmental position, a metaphysics - is required, not only for orientation and to meet felt needs of environmentalists already noted, but for more effective, coherent and systematic resistance. S'? it is but a short step to the ; fully ecological sensibility [which] knows with Carl Sandburg that: There is an eagle in me ... and the eagle flies among the Rocky Mountains of my dreams and fights among the Sierra crags of what I want ... . And I got the eagle ... from the wilderness, (p.118) The poem almost admits of neutral logical formalisation. 56 �§5. THE VIABILITY OF THE SORT OF ALTERNATIVE ENVIRONMENTAL ETHIC SELECTED It is not necessary for an environmental ethic to take a set position on all the issues so far raised for environmental ethics (or others, such as whether, and if so which, ecological principles should be integrated for example, it does not with the ethical system) ; to decide exactly But it can hardly avoid determining which items do or can have rights. some of the boundaries in a way different from conventional ethics if it is to count as an environmental ethic. In particular, the issues of what sort of items have or carry noninstrumental value, and how they obtain it, cannot be escaped indefinitely. Without the assignment of (intrinsic) value to some items independent of the states and conditions of humans, an ethic would remain within the confines of human chauvinism. But how, it is all too often asked, is such an assignment possible, or rational? In any case, the environmental examples already relied upon (in §3) pre­ suppose items. the assignment of intrinsic value to nonhuman, and to nonsentient So a theory of value is not only unavoidable but owed. that can be adopted on an environmental Of the many accounts of ethic, the following has much to recommend it:- Some values are instru­ mental, i.e. a means or an instrument to something else that has value, and some are not, but are non-instrumental or intrinsic. Some values at least must be intrinsic, some objects valuable in themselves and not as a means to other ends. not, however, imply That a value is (reckoned to be) intrinsic does that it is absolute or system independent; the values that are intrinsic on one ethical theory may be instrumental or relative on another. More controversially, values may be in one way or another, on other things, on other values or, importantly, on non­ values (such as experiences or felt needs, or facts or natural objects); but while some values are reducible to others, others are not but are That is, contrary to naturalism and to other forms of For reductionism such as subjectivism, some values are irreducible. analogues of the naturalistic and prescriptive fallacies, formulated in irreducible. terms of 'valuable', are fallacies. In particular, evaluative judgments, such as those as to what is valuable, are not deducible from nonvaluative judgments, such as those as to what is conventionally valued or what is 58 experienced. That values in natural items are intrinsic does not imply that they are naturalistic. eliminating or Indeed intrinsic value cannot - on pain of - amount to being natural, or reduce to the experiences of humans or of sentient creatures, to their suffering or happiness or preferences. 58 On next page. 57 �w Although some of these things, some of these experiences, some do not, but have no value, or a negative value or disvalue; value, 59 and some things, e.g. some experiences or some natural objects, have more value (are more valuable) than others. of value, but by no means everything is. Almost anything can be an object Value is distributed unevenly throughout the universe in something the way that electrical charge is; some items have positive quantities of varying degrees of intensity (e.g. a thundercloud may carry a positive charge, and have positive value), some negative, and some none. There are however important differences: elect­ rical charge is a quantitative notion, value a qualitative, comparative, one; charges are always commensurable, values less certainly or straight­ forwardly so;60 and the distribution of values (and especially of intrinsic values) is much more theory (system, or viewpoint) relative than .the di^sbributtdn of charges. For example, on an environmental view, matiy of the plants Mr Last Man eliminates have (intrinsic) value, whereas on animal liberation (usual animal chauvinist) views the plants have no value if no animals remain: there would be no similar disagreement about whether the plants were electrically charged. Evaluative features such as worth, merit, beauty are features which behave in rather the way that philosophers of science now mistakenly suppose that behave: empirical features they do not have a hard observational basis but are decidedly theory-dependent, though the theories involved are evaluative in character and not empirical. To assert that value or redness or remoteness is distributed through the universe is not to imply that these features, value or redness or For an outline of how this nondeducibility thesis, which yields a nondefinability thesis, may be proved (in limited contexts), see the final section of R. and V. Routley, 'The semantics of first degree entailment', ZVoMS, 6 (1972), pp. 335-59. A simpler argument against naturalistic reducibility of values is a consequence of the intensionality of values and the fact that intensional notions cannot be extensionally analysed (syntactically), which is what naturalistism characteristically assumes. Strictly the account of instrumental value should be widened if disvalues as well as (positive) values are to be taken proper account of. That is, mcrg may be at best a partial order, and so an inadequate basis on which to define total utility functions, and on which to rationally reconstruct modern economic theory. If this is so, as Godfrey Smith has suggested, and the orderings cannot be completed, applications of the optimistisation models subsequently introduced will have to work with partial functions. 58 �remoteness, exist, or are to be found in the universe. undermines much criticism of nonsubjective values; The point alone for example, Mackie's empiricist case is premissed on the false assumption that the existence of values is necessary to objectivism, which he does not distinguish from nonsubjectivism. Mackie's "argument from queernessis similarly broken at the outset: since values are not entities at all, they are not strange sorts of entities. To see how unpersuasive Mackie's argument should be, replace '(objective) values' throughout by, e.g., ordinals'. universe; 'transfinite They too would be 'utterly different from'anything in Mackie's but that does not show that there are no transfinite ordinals. Thus too, since values are not entities, the account of value being developed is Met a reaZ-Zst one (in the ordinary sense).62 Values, of one sort or another, are features objects may have or lack; they are not subjective, they are not features which reduce to states or conditions of subjects or valuers. But no more are they object­ ive features, natural or empirical features of objects, features entirely detached from valuers. A largely unquestioned false dichotomy between subjective and objective ethical theories has served to rule out important options (it has been helped by a connected false dichotomy between instrumental and detached accounts of value: see Routley (b)). In simplest terms, an objective account of value has values "located" in objects entirely independently of valuers, in the way that (inertial) mass is located in physical objects independently of observers; more satisfactorily, objects have values and masses irrespective of valuers or observers. Objectivism forces intuitionism, when it is inquired how values are apprehended or known; thus a fuller objective theory is almost always accompanied by an account, so far always unsatisfactory, 61 The position is that for properties and relations argued in (e) R. Routley, EepcTX'd, RSSS, Australian National University, 1979. Such objects do not exist, but they have important theoretical, explanatory, and other roles. 62 j.c. Mackie, Ft/zZcs. especially pp.38-9. F-ZpTzt Penguin, 1977; see 62 So undermining 0K6 part of D. Mannison's claim that we want to defend a reaZ-Zst theory of values, i.e. a theory of values that accounts for the truth of "x has value" with no ineliminable reference to the interests and concerns of the evaluating group ('Critique of a proposal for an "environmental ethic'", this volume). The further parts of Mannison's claim are assessed in what immediately follows. We are indebted to Mannison for forcing us to try to work out what is wrong and right about detached value theses. 59 �3 characteristically modelled on sense perception, of the way in which 64 values are intuited or apprehended. It is also regularly assumed on objective accounts that values exist, in the world; noneism) that is a separable assumption. but evidently (given By contrast, a subjective account finds values in, or not independent of, actual subjects, and commonly as linked with the pyschological states of valuers. Although subjectivism, like objectivism, comes in a variety of forms, it is always required that where an item is valued there exists, at sometime or other, a valuer who values it: "no values without a valuer" holds, in a strong, an excessively strong,implausible and erroneous, form; namely, a world without existing valuers in it is, by that very fact, a world without values. Fortunately - since both objectivisms and subjectivisms suffer from serious, and mostly well-known, defects - the positions are not exhaustive. The way between is perhaps best revealed in terms of alter­ native worlds.65 Although values in a world (more precisely, that items in that world a have evaluative features) always depend upon a valuer existing in sows world, the valuer may not exist in the world of the values (i.e. the valuer may not exist in a). For example, our claim that a certain world without valuers, e.g. a pure plant world of botanically rich form, is a fine world, depends on our existing in this world (in order to make the claim, in fact); "make sense" but it does not demand in order to (of course the claim is significant) or to be true, what is ex hypothesis ruled out, the existence of valuers in the pure plant world. That the world is a fine one, is dependent on a valuer in some world (and that valuer's assessments of value and, if you like, theory or overview of what is valuable and not); by contrast, that the world contains only plants of this or that leaf type, biomass or colour, does not depend upon a perceiver.66 since values are not entirely independent of a valuer in the way that empirical properties are independent of an observer, the An important corollary is that resulting account is not objective. transworld evaluation does not require objectivism, nor (as we shall see) intuitionism. Call the resulting account, which is neither objective nor, (short for, neither objective nor as is evident, subjective, subjective: the term is ugly but memorable). For a fuller account and worthwhile criticism, see N. Smith, Penguin, 1954. The use of worlds in ethical theorising, which is old, soon leads into world semantical analyses of ethical notions, which is newer but will also be taken for granted: it is ^problematic. On next page. 60 �The replacement of the (no detachable values) thesis, (1) There are no values without a valuer, by the revised thesis, (1°) There are no values which are entirely independent of a valuer, still affords the requisite semantical connections between values and valuers subjectivists have been at pains to maintain, still allows for the requisite theory dependence and cultural relativity of values, and still avoids the extravagances of objectivism. The replacement enables the defeat of various sophistical arguments designed to show, in virtue of the conceptual character of evaluative terms, that the case so far presented against human (or person) chauvinism collapses. argument of this sort runs thus: A simple Objectivism is untenable; but that leaves subjectivism, which validates (1), as the only alternative; and subjectivism undermines the counterexamples to chauvinism.6& One defect of this argument lies in the assumption that a theory can just dispose of counterexamples, when commonly examples are harder data than any theory. Note that the difference between evaluative and empirical properties is not adequately explained counterfactually: if an appropriate valuer - it cannot be an arbitrarily chosen valuer - were placed in the world it would rate the world fine, to be sure; but equally a suitable observer would perceive perceptual properties. Both these things objectivism can quite well allow. Partly for this reason Rescher's attempt to maintain his initially subjectivist thesis that value must be benefit-oriented, while admitting Moore's comparison of unoccupied worlds, is unsuccessful. Rescher's thesis really gets modified to: value must be potential-benefit-oriented - with which an objectivist might well agree, since it becomes a truism if 'benefit' is construed sufficiently widely (e.g. as 'value'), once unscrambled counterfactually thus:the unseen sunset has aesthetic value because of the potential benefits it affords ... [i.e.] someone were placed on to such a world, he be able to appreciate and enjoy this sunset. (N. Rescher, Prentice Hill, 1969 , pp.136-37.) But insofar as Rescher wants to suggest that value comes down to potential-benefit-orientation, that the unseen sunset has value jMst because of the potential benefits, which are entirely captured counter­ factually, objectivists will rightly object; even if no one were placed in this world, the sunset which delivered no benefits the world, would still have value, still be beautiful. In short, a counterfactually-extended subjectivism remains inadequate. The requisite relation of entire independence is explained semantically in terms of worlds. The truth of A is not entirely independent of b iff, in every model, for every world of the model in which A holds there is some world of the model in which b exists. The valuer of (1°) need not exist; it is only required (in each model) that it exist in some world. Such an argument appears, in essentials, in R. Elliot, species?', this publication. 61 'Why preserve �9 Such a procedure is methodologically unsound. In this case the examples tell against subjectivism, and point to another defect in the theoretical argument, namely the reliance on the false objective/subjective dichotomy. It has been objected 69 that the nonjective way between subjective and objective is unsatisfactory, for the reason that (1°) results in unacceptible assignments of value. But the objection depends upon under­ standing 'a valuer' in (1°) not in the intended way, as 'a certain (or definite) valuer' , the determination of valuer being MpoM the values concerned, but as a choice term, as 'an arbitrarily chosen valuer', or 'some valuer or other (you choose)' - which would require, what can never happen, that every hypothetical valuer agrees in the values assigned. A precisely similar misunderstanding of (1) likewise gives strange results: namely that any state of affairs, however environmentally appalling, is valuable because we can find a valuer, e.g. a spokesman for your local development association., who would account it valuable. understood yields no such bizarre results: But (1) properly all it guarantees is that, where a state of affairs has a value then there is a certain valuer (zj/z^cT? depending upon the state of affairs and the value assigned, i.e. the choice is heavily constrained) who assigns that value to that state. Similarly in the case of (1°) choice of appropriate valuers is a dependent choice, not an arbitrary one. There are several, deeper (because metaphysically grounded), sophistical arguments that conclude on the basis of (1) among other 70 things, that human, or at least person, chauvinism is unavoidable. These arguments too fail with (1). It is simply a (common) mistake to think that values and rights do not have a meaning, or an application, outside the human context or situation: to establish this point (on which Moore rightly insisted) it is enough to point out again that (hypothetical) valuers, not necessarily human or persons, can assign 69 For example by R. Elliot op. cit. Elliot's objection depends on a misconstrual. The original draft of this paper pointed out that principle (1) is strictly mistaken: it would be a little more accurate to assert that there are no values without possible valuers. A world in which there are no valuers extant may still contain valuable items. It does not follow from this, what Elliot infers, that 'a state of affairs has value if it is such that it would be valued by some sentient individual if such an individual were to exist', with 'some' read 'some or other'. 70 These arguments are examined in detail in Routley (a), and found wanting. The objections there lodged apply equally against variations of the arguments built on (1°) . What follows in the text on sorne of these arguments is largely a condensation of some of the points developed more fully there. 62 �C Q values with respect to situations and worlds devoid of humans and of persons altogether. But though these deeper arguments strictly fail with the demise of (1), they can be readily restated in terms of (1°), which can equally be taken (given further assumptions) to support the thesis that persons (or preference-havers) are the primary items of value or, more strongly, that persons are the ozzZ-y items of intrinsic value. One of these arguments relies on the idea that persons are the source of value. But the argument trades on an ambiguity. A person is the source of value-judgements and values in one sense, i.e. s/he is the valuer; but not in another, namely s/he is not responsible for valued item having its valued properties. Nor is there any licence for reducing the values assigned to those that serve the interests of the valuer. The argument is likely to be given the following sort of initial elaboration: By (1°), whatever has a value has its value in virtue of an assignment from certain valuers. But valuers are always persons. The argument is however ever has a value gets its value from persons. defective. Therefore what­ For even if values were always assigned by persons the items their values from persons assigned values do not thereby yet or (or those of persons). They have what value they have partly in virtue of features of their own. Nonetheless, the argument continues, the empirical features of objects valued are relevant because they are taken into account in preference rankings on which valuers base their assignments. By (1°) (or a derivative) values are relational properties not properties simpliciter as objectivism would have it. They are relational properties which depend on certain features of the related item. Which features, of values? Well, obviously, preferences and interests of valuers. So, it is con­ cluded, values answer to, or reduce to, interests of persons: no alternative to chauvinism. there is Rather similar arguments lead to such (mistaken) conclusions as that rights are interest-oriented, that 71 obligations must answer to people's interests, etc. etc. The arguments can furthermore - in case the transit seemed excessively swift - be filled out, for example as follows: By (1°), Thus, e.g. K. Baier, T/ze AforczZ Po^yzt o/ Ithaca, 1958. 63 Cornell University Press, �-B. Values depend upon valuers, upon their value assignments or rankings. -A. These value rankings depend upon valuers' preference rankings. A. Hence Values depend upon, or are determined through, the preference rankings of valuers. B. Valuers' preference rankings are determined through valuers' interests. C. Valuers are humans [persons]. Therefore D. Values are determined through, or depend upon, human [or 72 persons'] interests. Hence, it is sometimes concluded, not only is it perfectly acceptable for humans to reduce matters of value and morality to matters of human, interest, there is no rational or feasible alternative to doing so: any alternative to chauvinism is simply incoherent. With the replacement of (1) by (1°), premiss (C) is rendered implausible unless 'human' is supplanted by 'person' (where the variable 'person' is so characterised that all valuers are persons, something some accounts of person would rule out). Thus, without (1), the argument leads at best to person chauvinism. Nor does -B follow from (1°): "not entirely independent of" does not imply "dependent upon", but at best "partially dependent upon". However it does seem that values are, in a sense, determined through value assignments - assignments made certainly in virtue of features of the objects valued and of preference rankings of valuers, that is having dual factual and attitudinal bases - but assign­ ments nevertheless. Accordingly, the central part of the argument can be reformulated, in a way which locates the main source of damage, thus A'. Values are determined through value assignments [preference rankings] of valuers. B'. The value assignments [preference ranking] of valuers are determined through valuers' interests. In order to reach what amounts to chauvinism 73 from B', however, 'interest' has to be narrowly construed, after the fashion of egoism, as 'own, self- centred or selfish, interest'. D'. Otherwise the conclusion, Values are determined through valuers' interests, Many variations on this argument are considered in Routley (a); and obviously there are yet other variations, e.g. value assignments could be directly linked with interests. On next page. 64 �c Q is innocuous; valuers. it does nothing to confine what determines value, to For valuers' interests may concern almost anything, and in particular may include the interests of nonvaluers(as in 'its interest is among my interests') and the welfare of natural systems. understood, is no more chauvinistic than: D', so Values are value-centred. To succeed the argument has to narrow the elements assessed in determining value to features of the base class of persons [or humans]; their interests and welfare alone. e.g. to For if we have to look beyond this class to assess value - even to determine interests and welfare - then the argument to chauvinism fails. Thus the argument has, in order to suc­ ceed, to rely upon assumptions either of egoism - valuers' interests are restricted to their own (perhaps enlightened) self-interest - or of a group analogue - valuers' interests are restricted to those of the group, the base class - where (to indicate the final trick in the argument) there is, in each case, a slide on the elastic term 'interests', e.g. from ^?z) f/z^r ozjzz ozjyz Mses or purposes. to t/z^^r ozjzz u^urztape., or t/ze^r It is evident enough that in order to succeed the argument has to assume one of the very points at issue, that interests, which are progressively restricted to chauvinistic interests, are so restricted.74 But consider, to expose the character of the assumptions made, parallel arguments to egoism and groupism, i.e. group egoism: AE. Persons always act (in freely chosen cases, or rational cases) in the way they prefer or choose, i.e. in accord with their (revealed) preference rankings. BE. Individual [group] preference rankings are always determined through (reflect) self [group] interest. 71 What amounts to chauvinism; for if a position were reached in this way by a sound argument, then the position would not be chauvinistic, being justified. For this reason, it is absurd for a rational creature to present itself (as some philosophers have) as a human chauvinist or a person chauvinist. There is however a descriptive analogue of chauvinism, in which the justificatory clause is omitted; and this use of 'chauvinism' we have resorted to ourselves (as the astute reader will have observed) as an interim step. In the end of course such descriptive-chauvinism is chauvinism, since the discrimination involved is unwarranted. 74 The claim generalises: it is not possible to mount an argument for person [or human] chauvinism on the basis of the meaning, or analysis, of such notions as, o^Z^pa^o/z or r^pTzf or without assuming, in the analysis or the course of the argument, the very points at issue. This is an outcome of the viability of nonchauvinistic analyses of these notions, together with the content preservation character of genuine deductive arguments. 65 �Therefore DE. Individual persons [groups of persons] always act in ways determined in their own self [group] interests (or that reflect their own interest^). Thereafter follows the slide from "in their own interests" to "to their own advantage", or "for their own uses or purposes". The eventual con­ clusion of egoism, again parallelling the class chauvinism case, is not only that the egoistic position is perfectly in order and thoroughly rational, but that there are no alternatives; least ought to be, no other way of acting, that is, there is, or at 'that men can only choose to do what is in their own interests or that it is only rational to do Thus,person or (human) chauvinism, as based.on the central argument, 3 stands revealed as like group selfishness, "group egoism" one might almost say. Likewise the criticisms of the as we shall now call the argument through D or D', parallel those of egoism; in particular, premiss B' to those that defeat premiss BE. (or B) succumbs to similar objections Group selfishness is no more acceptable than egoism, since it depends on exactly the same set of confusions between values, preferences, interests, and advantages (encouraged by slippery terms such as 'interests' and 'self-interest') as the arguments on which egoism rests. Briefly, because one may discern or select one's own preference or value rankings, it does not follow that these rankings are set up or selected in one's own selfish (or enlightened self) interests; similarly in group cases, because a group determines its own rankings, it does not follow that it determines them in its own interests; the group includes environmental individuals. certainly not if Thus just as BE is refuted, at least prima facie, by a range of examples where preference, and value, rankings run counter to self-regarding interest, e.g. cases of otherregarding interest or altruism, so prima facie at least, B is refuted by examples where value, and also overall preference rankings, vary from group interests, e.g. cases of group altruism and extra-group-regarding interests, as in resistance movements, environmental action groups, and so on. It is often in selfish human interests (no less selfish because pertaining to a group) to open up and develop the wilderness, strip mine the earth, exploit animals, and so on, but ecological resistance workers Nowell Smith, op. cit., p.140. Nowell-Smith's very appealing critique of egoism (pp.140-44) may, by simple paraphrase, be converted into a critique of group selfishness. This is obvious once B' and BE are compared. 66 �who oppose doing so are commonly not acting just out of (their own or) human intragroup interests, but out of direct concern for the environment and its welfare. But, just as BE is not demolished by such counterexamples of apparently other-regarding and altruistic action, neither is B: in each case it can be made out that further selfish (i.e. self-regarding) inter­ ests are involved, e.g., in the case of B, that an agent did what he did, an altruistic action, because he in the egoism case, doing it. As Nowell-Smith explains 'interest' is written in as an internal accusative, thereby rendering such theses as BE true at the cost, however, of trivial- More generally, valuing something gets written in as a further sort of "interest"; whatever valuers value that does not seem to ising them. be in their interests is said to provide a further interest, either the value itself or an invented value surrogate; for example, the environ­ mentalist who works to retain a wilderness he never expects to see may be said to be so acting only because he has an interest in or derives benefit or advantage from just knowing it exists, just as he would be said to in the egoist case. "retained"; By such strategies the theses can be for then a valued item really is in valuers' interests, in the extended sense, even if they are in obvious ways seriously incon­ venienced by it, i.e. even if it is Mot in their narrow interests in the customary sense. Thus B, like BE, is preserved by stretching the elastic term 'interests', in a way that it too readily admits, to include values, or value surrogates, among interests. Then however the conclus­ ion of the Group Selfishness argument loses its intended force, and becomes the platitude that values are determined through valuers' values, just as egoism, under the extension which makes us all covert egoists, loses its sting and becomes a platitude. Human chauvinism in this form, like egoism, derives its plausibility from vacillation on the sense of 'interests', with a resulting fluctuation between a strong false thesis when interests are narrowed through group interests to group restricted interests - the real face of human chauvinism - and a trivial analytic thesis, between paradox and platitude. To reject the reductionist conclusion D, or D', is by no means to be committed to the view that the valuers and their preference rankings play %<? role in determining values and that values are a further set of In the sense of Wisdom's (meta)philosophy. The technique of rescuing philosophical theses by shifts, which begin with natural extensions of terms, enforced by accompanying redefinitions of terms - including the thesis "We're all selfish really" - is delightfully explained in J. Wisdom, dt/zer Blackwell, Oxford, 1952, especially chapter 1. 67 �mysterious independent items somehow perceived by valuers through a special (even mystical and non-rational) moral sense. An intuitionist theory of value is not required, and is not lurking in the background. One can simply admit that valuers' preference rankings play an important role in evaluation; one is not thereby committed to D unless one assumes - what amounts to premiss B - that these preference rankings reflect, or can be reduced to, valuers' (narrow) interests. Even so important problems remain unresolved, in particular, precisely what role valuers' preference-rankings play, and how this role enables the damaging features of intuitionism to be avoided. The arguments against genuinely environmental ethics from the character of are sometimes followed up by the objection that such a ethic can be given no, or no satisfactory, theory of value (or metaethic, to.use the current, but questionable, jargon transferred from logical theory). It is true that several theories of value are quickly ruled out, including mainstream noncognitive theories, which are objection­ ably chauvinistic, allowing no non-instrumental value to any non-sentient natural items. While an environmental ethic, like almost any other normative ethic, ca?? be supplied with an intuitionist theory of value, an environmental ethic, unlike most other ethics, wa?/ appear to have no option to such a theory, though the theory is unsatisfactory and causes especial problems for the ethic. 75 The unsatisfactoriness of intuitionism is in part for the usual reasons: apart from the perceptual comparison which is problematic in several ways (e.g. evaluative properties are not like perceptual properties, the moral sense is rather different from other senses), the theory is (like a purely axiomatic theory) too much of a black box, which gives no explanation of many things that call for explanation, e.g. the semantics of value, how value judgements are based on factual and emotional or attitudinal bases; but it is in part because intuitionism provides little guidance or assistance in accounting for the intrinsic value of environmental objects. These difficulties can be evaded and the problems largely resolved through a semantical theory of value, and more generally of ethical terms. Thus D. Mannison, 'the "new environmental ethic" is ... irredeemably intuitionistic' (op. cit.), and H.J. McCloskey: As far as I can see of the known, plausible meta-ethics, the only one available ... is an intuitionist one. ... [There] would still be ... the problem of associating it with a non-human-centred normative ethic, one which did not locate all values in human capacities states, goods, but accorded to environmental phenomena value in their own right. ('Ecological ethics and its justification: a critical appraisal', this volume.) 68 �For the truth-conditions, 7 8 and resulting interpretation conditions, will supply an account of meaning not only of axiological expressions but also of deontic expressions, and moreover in a way that is plainly nonchauvinistic; e.g., it enables natural items to be awarded intrinsic value in much the way that states or conditions of humans are on chauvinistic theories. Something of the shape and character of the semantical analyses emerges from the evaluation rules for important axiological and deontic 79 functions. The semantics are set within the framework of the semantics of entailment: in this way several paradoxes possible world semantics induces in deontic (and axiological) theory are automatically removed. The semantical analyses of the central axiological functor, 'that ... is better than that __ ', abbreviated 'Bt', and the key deontic predicate 'that ... is permissible', abbreviated 'P', restricted to sentential terms, take respectively the following forms: I(A Bt B, a) = 1 iff [B] i.e. [A], where [C] = {c e K: I(C, c) =1}, [C] is the range of C, the class of situations where C holds, some­ times called the proposition C expresses. In short, that A is better than that B holds in world a iff from the perspective of a, the proposition B expresses is less preferable than the proposition A expresses, where the ordering relation is spelt out in terms of a preference ranking. I(PA, a) = 1 iff, for some world b such that Tab, I(A, b) = 1; i.e., that A is permissible holds in a iff for some world b permitted as far as a is concerned, A holds in b - where the relation T is spelt out in terms of a relative permittedness relation. Enough of the semantical theory has been exposed to indicate some important features. Firstly, betterness - and something the same holds for other value terms - is assessed semantically in terms of a world- relativised preference ranking. In the simplest case, where betterness is assessed as to truth (rather than interpretation, or meaning), i.e. at actual world T, the assessment just is in terms of a preference ranking (so validating a form of premiss B above, for a technical sense of 70 Ethical judgements, both axiological and deontic, have truth values, relative to their context of occurrence. By use of context, objections, e.g. from relativity, to the attribution of truth-values to such judgements can be straightforwardly avoided. 79 Full details of the semantics are presented elsewhere, in Routley (c), and in R. Routley, R.K. Meyer, and others, PeZevuzzf TZzeZr P-ZfaZs, RSSS, Australian National University, 1979. 69 �'determined'). Secondly, the semantics of can be given in descriptive terms; similarly for deontic terms such as The semantical analysis bridges the fact-value gap, by a functional linkage, without however closing it. preferential basis. For it provides no of value to its The linkage enables a simple explanation of how environmental considerations can count: criteria may be preferred. worlds satisfying environmental Sets of worlds where human interests or needs are not met but ecosystems are maintained may, for example, be prefer­ entially ranked above worlds where human needs are met at the expense of ecosystems. The way in which the factual basis, which includes environ­ mental facts - the descriptive better-making characteristics - enters into the evaluative judgments of quality, is in outline as follows: factual criteria delimit preference rankings on worlds in the same way that descriptive features of objects delimit preference rankings of these objects. It is not the case, then, that we are unable to explain zj?zz/ a natural item is valuable if we cannot point to some human interest or purpose which is served. This again assumes mistakenly, that because a valuer­ relative preference-ranking is involved, the evaluation must somehow be reducible to the interests or purposes of the valuer. That there is an allusion in the semantical unpacking of value to the preference system of a certain valuer no more requires that the items valued are valuable only insofar as they serve the valuer's interests or preferences than it does in more familiar cases such as valuing a work of art, a library or an old building. Valuers can and do value items because they perceive in them properties they take to be valuable, and in the interests of other things whose interests are their own, and not simply for what they can get out of them or how far they serve their own interests. The answer to the question 'Why is it valuable?', for a natural item, will not always be, as it must always be on the instrumental view, 'Because it is good for such and such purpose or end of the valuer or those of his group', but may be: 'Because it has properties A, B and C which the valuer holds to be valuable in virtue of considered preferences, including iterated (second order) preferences which reflect the preferences of other preference-havers. In the end, then, environmental value systems are cvz different How a seTnaTzt-fcaZ analysis - as distinct from a analysis may make bridges without involving a reduction - but leaving everything as it is - is more fully explained in R. Routley 'The semantical meta­ morphosis of metaphysics', JoMruaZ P/z^Zosop/zz/, 54 (1976), 187-205. For more on how the fact/value gap is semantically bridged see Routley (c). 70 �preference rankings, which take into account different facts from the chauvinistic systems they are beginning to compete with and aim to supplant - a different group preference ranking and network (emanating from the valuer and those like her) which is grounded in a different perception and emotional presentation of nature. The semantical meta-ethic is not as neutral as an intuitionistic meta-ethic: for the preference-rankings involved require a valuer, i.e. thesis (1°) is applied, thereby excluding objective theories. The fact that the semantical theory will work (perhaps after minor adaptions) for a range of normative theories is no serious objection. not have to be precisely tailored to a given ethic: A meta-ethic does the same (sort of) metalogic may work satisfactorily for many different logics. It is not merely that the distinctiveness of the meta-ethic may be what is more serious is that the contested; (normative) ethic, even newness of the within Western traditions, may be challenged. It has been suggested, for instance, that such ethics are but versions or minor variants of ideal utilitarianism McCloskey, op. cit.). (cf. Elliot, op. cit.; To assess this claim, and to reveal how much the preferred environmental ethic has in common with such utilitarianism and how much it differs, considering what counts as ideal utilitarianism is unavoidable. In indicating what does count, there is real point in going back to Rashdall's original explanation: ... all moral judgements are ultimately judgements as to the value of ends. This view of Ethics, which combines the utilitarian principle that Ethics must be teleological with a non-hedonistic view of the ethical end I propose to call Ideal Utilitarianism. According to this view actions are right or wrong according as they tend to produce for all mankind an ideal end or good, which includes but is not limited to pleasure. ... The right action is always that which (so far as the agent has means of knowing) will produce the greatest amount of good upon the whole. (H- Rashdall, TTze T/zeorz/ o/ Fzz-z^Z, Oxford University Press, 1907, p.184.) Ideal utilitarianism is thus, according to Rashdall, nonhedonistic utilitarianism, and so conforms to the core theses of utilitarianism, namely: (i) The ethical or ideal end (the good) is determined simply by maximisation of net utility or value of certain factors or ends, typically (but not invariably) experiences or states of consciousness such as pleasure, enjoyment, satisfaction of desires or preferences 71 �!* (ii) The ends or experiences are those of some given base class, e.g. mankind, present persons, sentient creatures (Pase <?Zass r^Z-az^z^sut-Zczz); and (iii) Other ethical notions, right in particular, are defined as determined in terms of the ethical end (^eZeoZ-c^-ZcuZ re^zzc^-Zozz-Zsw). A corollary of the reductionist assumption - which can take various forms, e.g. act, rule, average utilitarianism - is that maximisation is uncon­ strained by deontic requirements. The core principles are also readily discerned in that other paradigmatic ideal utilitarian, Moore, who like Rashdall, objects to (hedonistic) utilitarianism on the grounds of its hedonistic principle (e.g. p.184), and accordingly widens the ends admitted in (i), and, again like Rashdall, takes the base class to consist of humans. as assessed through its paradigm exponents *Zs thus chauvinistic, and zzo e^zz-ZrczzwezztuZ. sc/zewa /or azz Human chauvinism is in fact integral to both Rashdall'sand Moore's work. For example, Rashdall characterises r-z^TzZ; in terms of good for mankind, and endorses a strong form of the greater value assumption (p.215). And Moore not only identifies the best poss-ZbZe state of things in this world with Human Good (p.183), but considers 'by far the most valuable things we can know or -z^azy-Z/ze, are certain states of consciousness', Zzzz?n<27z consciousness (p.188, my italics). Each one of the core theses of utilitarianism is false (the case is argued in detail in Routley (b)). Contrary to (i) optimisation needs to be constrained, deontically constrained, else serious injustices to and ill-treatment of objects within the base class and, more important, objects outside that class, are all too likely. But, as against (iii) this destroys prospects of successful deontic reductions, which are, on independent grounds, improbable. To avoid the chauvinism, typically built See Pr-Zpzc-Zp-Zu Ez^/z^cu, Cambridge University Press, 1903, chapters V and VI. Moore does say (p.188) that No one, probably, ... who has asked himself the question, has even doubted that personal affection and appreciation of what is beautiful in Art or Nature, are good in themselves. But 'appreciation of what is beautiful' reduces, on Moore's account, to 'enjoyment of beautiful objects'; and any independent value in what is beautiful is 'so small as to be negligible in comparison with that which attaches to the cozzsu^ozzszzess of beauty', (p.189). Moore's chauvinistic account thus appears open to familiar objections e.g. those based on enjoyment machines (cf. the wilderness experience machine discussed above), and on beautiful worlds lacking conscious beings-which help show that beauty is what counts and not just, or primarily, experiences of beauty. Moore was not, however, entirely unaware of such points: cf. pp.194-95. 72 * �into (ii), (i) requires restatement in terms of factors which avoid base class relativisation; then clause (ii) is eliminated. The need for con­ straints in optimisation modellings of utilitarian or economic sorts can be seen from the phenomena of interrelated interests and preferences: that my interests include, or depend upon, yours, means that these cannot vary independently, but are interrelated. Repairing the defects of ideal utilitarianism results in more adequate optimisation modelling. notion of The recipe elementary analysis of the item leads to is, in essence, as follows: Maximise a weighted function (e.g. a sum) of the factors that value a determines subject to appropriate constraints: symbolically, maximise n-place function E = E(x) subject to constraining relations Rj(x) and x = <x^,...,x^>). (with j an index, Special cases of such optimisation modellings are familiar from engineering and economic applications (e.g. determination of optimal social welfare in concave programming). What is more general 82 about the model indicated, is, in particular, the form of constraints permitted, which can include that ... Xi ... X2 ..." bounds for optimals). deontic constraints, e.g. "It is forbidden (which has the effect of putting a subspace out of Since there is nothing to prevent moral prohibitions, requirements of fairness, and the like, from appearing among the constraints ethics, economics, and practical reasoning can in principle be success­ fully amalgamated. The optimisation modelling of general value theory differs significantly from that of (ideal) utilitarianism. Although maximization is fundamental in both, in utilitarianism value is characteristically replaced by net utility, measured usually in terms of experiential units of some sort, whereas in general value theory this reduction is rejected. In each case there is a of an ethical calculus, but the currency is different, being values in one case and base class or individual utilities (units of utility) in the other; but in both cases the calculus is so far (equally) unworkable except in very special cases. In each case there is an analysis into components of the objective (function) maximized, but the analysis is very different. In utilitarianism net utility is broken down into individual utilities of members of some base class. In general value theory such a reduction is rejected (except perhaps where appropriate hypothetical valuers are admitted); analysis into factors that carry value is made. instead an (But in Moore's ideal The general model is motivated, explained, illustrated, applied and defended in Routley (b) and (d) and also in R. Routley, 'The choice of logical foundations: nonclassical choices and the ultralogical choice', L<9<2"f<?a, 38 (1979). 73 �utilitarianism, unlike utilitarianism proper, the way is opened for factors, such as beauty, which carry intrinsic value and are not reducible to features of the base class or its members.) In utilitarianism deontic notions, such as right, are analysed in terms of the value theory; general value theory deontic notions are taken as given constraints are imposed on optimisations. but in and deontic Whereas the maximisations of utilitarianisms proper are (single element) unconstrained maximisations (hence the injustice, unfairness, and ill-treatment such ethics condone), general value theory optimisations are constrained. in principle While there is room for constraints in ideal utilitarianism, as there is for a switch to factors which are base-class independent - though the theory has never been elaborated to the point where these things are done - deontic constraints cannot be noncircularly imposed, given the teleological reduction thesis (so the problems of unfairness and ill-treatment remain). It is a fairly evident corollary of the differences that general value theory removes leading objections to utilitarianisms. It is not perhaps so evident, however, how it applies to environmental cases or what the factors of environmental relevance are. To expose some of the factors - and to indicate just how far an environmental ethics is dis­ tanced even from a comparatively liberal ethic like Moore's ideal utilitarianism - consider the very difficult optimisation problems as to the determination of the Ideal. Moore distinguishes (1) The Ideal, from, what is more interesting, state of things the best possZbZe state of things in this world', toward which our action should be directed' absolute ideal' (KI) and (2) 'the (2) 'the MZtZ/naZe end (p.183). Call (1) 'The 'the T ideal' or 'the this world ideal' (TI). A crucial difference between the two problems lies in the constraints: determination of TI is constrained by features - many of them unknown - of the actual world T (now and in the immediate future), by its populations of humans and of various species of living things on its various earths, by its natural features, by its physical and technological resources, limitations of which will impose characteristic scarcity constraints. By That does not imply that no analyses can be given of deontic notions. Although axiological reductions are ruled out, others are not. Certainly semantical analysis, like that already sketched for permissib­ ility, can be supplied and elaborated. Moore's teleological ethic is not far removed from Aristotle's ethic more than 2000 years earlier (which exhibits features of ideal utilitarianism) . From the point of view of this long relativelyunchanged base line, environmental ethics are not merely new and radical, but represent a paradigm shift. 74 �- contrast, KI is presumably not constrained by resources or technology (in relation to populations); this is just one reason why Leibnitz's equations of TI with KI and with things as at present fails. theless constrained. 8S KI is none­ There will, for example, be constraints forbidding unfair or ill-treatment of various sorts (given that such treatment is possible), and there will be constraints interrelating factors that are not independent. The factors entering into the modelling will no doubt represent, in some way, many of the positive goods, such as enjoyment of the "meritor­ ious" sorts that Moore managed to discern - positively weighted - and many of the evils he found - but negatively weighted (but some of these things are better represented through constraints). There remain, 86 however, many features of ecological importance that Moore never con­ templated; for example, diversity of systems and creatures, naturalness, o7 integrity of systems, stability of systems, harmony of systems. Optimising a mix of factors, which are mutually constrained, meets constant reproaches made against such ecological values as diversity. The objections take the form that enhancement of diversity as a sole factor can lead to undesirable ecological results, indeed can diminish Op net value and so be wrong on utilitarianism grounds. On the multiple factor model diversity is constrained by naturalness and stability, for example; thus net value is not going to be increased through increasing the diversity of a simple temperate rainforest by felling some of its trees and replacing them with exotic species. On the other hand, diver­ sity will be increased by planting the banks of a stream, eroded through excess clearing and overgrazing, with suitable exotic species - then birds Perhaps, moreover, there are no limiting natural laws, such as con­ servation principles, but the universe operates according to beneficient natural laws. There are distinctions here between worlds and physically possible worlds which Moore did not make. There may also be, at least in the case of KI, as Moore observed, factors that we are unaware of - at least under the intended construal of 'conceivable'. Rough and ready measures of such factors as diversity are not so difficult to come by, and, in important respects, present fewer problems than obtaining measures of pleasure that encompass, in ways that take account of interspecies and interindividual comparisons, all sentient creatures. Compare the objections made in §4 to Rodman's reliance on the single criteria of diversity; and also Passmore's points in (a) against diversity as a single criterion in arguments for preservation. 75 �and other animals will increase as well as plant diversity - and in such a case stability will also be increased in the longer term and natural­ ness not diminished (since already removed); thus overall value will be increased (it may also be increased by the enjoyment of conservationists formerly appalled by the stream landscape). Diversity,though (like enjoy­ ment or pleasure) good in itself, is (again like hedonistic values) not an unconstrained value (compare, e.g., enjoyment obtained through secret maltreatment of animals or by impoverishment of an unvisited streamside). The multiple factor model also solves the problem of how to combine traditional values, such as the virtues and creature enjoyment with what many in the West are only beginning to discern, environmental values; namely, by a constrained optimisation which takes due (i.e. weighted) account of them Thus in moving to an environmental (or nonchauvinist) ethic one is not ordinarily acknowledged welfare values for persons or humans, but simply recognising a further set of values to which such welfare values should be added. welfare values are retained; Nor is one humans, for human one is simply aiming to remove - through constraints which may reduce assignments to human values in favour of other values - the unwarranted privilege and chauvinism of the displaced Western super-ethic. One would not have come very far if, despite the claim to have recognised environmental values, one assumed that wherever there is con­ flict between natural values and human values, the latter must always prevail. This would be equivalent to assigning them very low weight, or even zero value, in all serious conflict cases. One would not have advanced far past rejection of axiological principle (A) if one then accepted, in assessments as to how things should be done, the yreafer namely that even though other things may have intrinsic value, people or humans are more valuable than anything else, and rank more highly (no matter how large their number).To allow that sows in human welfare values may sometimes - or even often, especially with increasing human populations - have to be accepted in cases of conflict is an essential part of assigning a genuine positive value to nonhuman factors. Sometimes humans, their states and conditions, do not come first: the greater value assumption should be rejected. Such an assumption - in popular form, that people come first - is extrgTMgZ-z/ widespread and is even included in animal liberation theory; cf. Singer, op. cit. For striking examples of the damaging assumption at work, see the (chauvinistic) resolutions of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment. �o 4 There are many kinds of examples. Conspicuous examples are provided by recognisedly evil people (there are, under current social arrangements, plenty), whose welfare, or even lives, do not rank above, for example, valuable natural items, or the welfare of future persons. More con­ troversial are evaluations which rank the preservation of an animal species, such as the tiger, above the increase (or even retention) of human population in given areas.91 But, for the most part, the compar­ ative value of humans as opposed to other creatures and things has been greatly exaggerated. The arguments used in support of the greater value assumption are but variations of those for human chauvinism already considered, and largely rejected (in §1). Thus, for instance, Keller argues for a greater value thesis on the ground that a 'human being is the most complex thing which we know; its depth and range of experience far transcend that of any other known living thing' (p.209) Ecological Concern', Zz/^o/z, vol.6 (J.A. Keller, (1971), pp.197-209). complexity the claim is almost certainly false: are much more complex. 'Types of Motives for As regards pure tropical forest ecosystems The claim about range of experience is open to doubt, even for "normal" humans, since many animals have a much wider range of such sensory experiences as smells; and it is false of many humans. More important, range and "depth" of experience, of certain have) , does not, on its own, select sorts (those that normally establish greater value in any routine or regular way. Often enough it is no good basis for assigning greater value. The generalised optimisation model will commonly give way, in applications less sweeping and more feasible than that of the determining TI, to such special cases of it as Bayesian decision theory and cost­ benefit analysis, where these analyses allow properly for environmental values and duly incorporate ethical constraints (see Routley (a)). 90 91 It The fact of the matter is that prevailing unqualified attitudes to human welfare or the "sanctity" of human life - as opposed to other life - are shot through with inconsistency. For instance, despite common claims that human life is sacrosanct, neither the largely unquestioned military ethics nor medical ethics nor the state or "the law" take such a position: most individual humans are regarded as expendible, replaceable, and not particularly or uniquely valuable. On the prevailing ethic quite a different evaluation is taken for granted: e.g. It would be unrealistic to agree, of course, that preservation of wildlife should take precedence over providing for human needs. (S. Richardson, writing in T/ze CuTZ&erru November 29, 1974 , p.12) On an environmental ethic, while it might not be politically expedient, it would not be at all "unrealistic", to so agree. 77 �& is these more special methods that should normally be applied in trying to determine a best course of action in a range of difficult decision cases thrown up for an environmental ethics, especially cases where there is a conflict (i.e. constraining conditions) between retention of natural values (e.g. preserving a wilderness or a national park) and maintenance of humanistic values (e.g. keeping some humans alive, commonly reckoned one of the highest human-values). But for a cost-benefit weigh-up to be attempted such cases have to be described in more detail usually provided by chauvinistic philosophers who than is to direct such examples against environmental evaluations - as if furthermore, the examples were quite conclusive, when they almost always presuppose from the very beginning what is in dispute, a greater value assumption. In connection with such intended counterexamples to properly environmental ethics, two further points are worth recording: firstly, resort to such analytical methods is the rational procedure in such cases (unless a time urgency intrudes, as seldom happens, or should happen, in philosophy); secondly, an environmental ethic should not, any more than other ethics or economics, be expected to provide a decision procedure for any and every case that may arise: the theory (and accompanying intuitions) may have to be developed to resolve some cases, while other cases may go (cheerfully) undecided. On similar test or decision cases, e.g. one group of starving people versus another group in a situation of limited resources, or quality of life versus number of humans, conventional ethical theories may offer no quick, or clearcut, resolutions, etc. The optimisation model indicates, among many other things, how axiological principle (A) is to be modified. For best choice and best course of action are now determined by taking account of the further range of values, not just those that are human-based. Then (A) vanishes into the truism that only those objects that are of intrinsic value are of intrinsic value, or need be taken into account in the values of the optimisation model. How to rectify the deontic principle (D) is rather less obvious than how to adjust (A). An obvious strategy, is, however, to add further 92 Even when a case is more fully described there will, of course be (unavoidable) difficulties in quantifying some of the values, e.g. those of "intangible" factors; but these difficulties are not sub­ stantially worse than those already encountered in routine business accounting in quantifying such assets as good-will and such matters as wage relativities for different work. As L. Tribe has pointed out (in 'Ways not to think about plastic trees: new foundations for environmental law', YaZ-e AuzJ vol.83 (1974) , pp.1315-1348) the difficulties of transferring or adapting rather standard methods of assessment, such as decision theory and cost-benefit analyses, to pro vide rational decision methods in the case of environmental matters has been much exaggerated, to the detriment of the environment. 78 * �provisos. way; But it is unsatisfactory to do this in a piecemeal sort of it hardly suffices, for example, to simply add further riders excluding unnecessary cruelty to animals, speciescide, etc. What has to is unwarranted interference with other preference­ be ruled out havers (and goal-possessors) and the degrading of items of value. A revised principle appears then to go something like this:- DN. One is free to act as one wishes provided that (i) one does not unwarrantedly interfere with other preference-havers, and (ii) one does not damage or ill-treat or devalue anything of value. Though the revised principle has a rather more complex and restrictive character than freedom principle (D) and Western variants thereon, it still does the requisite task (D) set out to do, namely to state that out­ side certain prescribed areas one is free, that select behaviour is permissible.93 it is simply that the proscribed area is far larger than inadequate homocentric ethics have envisaged. But perhaps the whole conception underlying (D), and the way it fixes onus of proof, should be stood on its head. On the view behind (D), one starts from an unlimited position permitting unlimited interference and exploitation; restrictions are added primarily because other ones (again ones of the privileged class) are also starting from a similar unlimited position whose freedom of action may be (impermissibly) curtailed by one's own. So results the initial position, e.g. of (D). For inter­ ference in others' projects (no matter how exploitative) beyond this "evident" initial position,good reasons have always to be offered. alternative thoroughgoing On the respect view, which is illustrated by various nonexploitative non-Western ethics, one starts from a restricted position, a position of no interference and no exploitation, a position at peace with the natural world so to say, and allows interference - not as on thinking, restricts interference - for good reasons. thus entirely inverted: stop interference. Western The onus of proof is good reasons are required y<2r interference, not The good reasons include the collecting of fruit and nuts (and other natural "produce") for life support purposes, but not, for example, the collection of a substantial surplus of forest orchids on whim or in the hope that they may be sold at a profit. A theory of value like that outlined, though it takes it for granted, 93 The revised freedom principle is not incompatible with, but can be combined with and supplemented by, a bill of rights, charter or catechism specifying positively types of rights and of permissible conduct. 79 �A in the constraints imposed in optimisation, that there are deontic principles limiting what is done to many objects other than persons, leaves main deontic issues open, and in particular does not thereby imply that such objects have rights. For woraZ forbidding certain actions with respect to an object (fo not, in general, that object a 94 corretattle r-^p/zt. That it would be wrong to mutilate a given oak or landscape painting does not entail that the tree or painting has a correl­ ative right not to be mutilated - without (what has a point) stretching the notion of r^p*7z^. An environmental ethic like the respect ethic being advanced does not automatically commit one to the view that natural objects or artifacts sometimes have rights. It is sometimes held that some such objects do have rights, e.g. under the influence of pantheism. But construed literally, pantheism is false, since artefacts, and other inanimate objects, are not alive. The view that the class of right-holders extends beyond the class of preference-havers can however be placed on bases less extravagant than pantheism - most obviously in terms of a suitable deontic analysis of r^p?zt, for instance along the following lines: others d has a right to iff (obligation-holders) are not entitled to interfere with d's cj)ing (if d (f)'s or were to (j)). Under this account, of which emerges straight-forwardly from modern analyses of r^p/zt, a painting or a tree may indeed have "rights", such as to continue existing. Although the term 'right' can no doubt be 6^ctezz<ie(i along some such lines, the analysis leaves out essential elements of the normal notion, namely the involvement of choice. There are, once again, various competing environ­ mental ethics, some simple extensions of Western ethics which extrapolate the notion of r^p/zt, some not, some rationalistic, some not, and so on. Environmental positions can - but need not - adhere to the familiar assumption that rights divide into the following two broad classes:First, there are rights held by those (persons, in o?z6 sense) who can duly claim their rights themselves, a class which excludes many humans So rejected also is the s^rozz^ correlation thesis, presented e.g. in S.I. Benn and R.S. Peters, Pocz^aZ Pr^Tzc^pZes a7z<i ^Tze Pew<9<?r<2^<? Allen and Unwin/1959, pp.89-9, according to which 'right and duty are different names for the same normative relation, according to the point of view from which it is regarded' (thereby also elevating what is at best a coentailment into a stronger identity relation). For example, that d has a duty to look after the painting does not entail that the painting has a right to be looked after by d, in any sense of 'right' Benn and Peters are prepared to acknowledge. The weaker correlation thesis - that d has a right to R entails that at least someone else has a duty with respect to R - is not at issue. 80 & �and (so far as we know) almost all nonhuman animals. Such rights are often supposed to carry with them various responsibilities. Secondly, there are rights held by certain other (sometime sentient) creatures; though the extent of this subclass of right-holders is a controversial matter, it is generally taken to include at least infants, mentally defective humans, dead humans, and some animals. These rights do not carry corresponding responsibilities, though they are, of course, the However the assumption that certain rights - ground for various claims. the really central rights - are restricted to those who can claim them on their OM% behalf, seems to be based on the faulty idea of private (or separable) individuals as the basic metaphysical units. In a community of socio-environmental individuals there is no reason why one creature's rights should not be claimed, as infants' and animals' rights frequently are, by another: these rights are others' responsibilities. right-holder has itself no specific responsibilities. Often a Moreover the supposed division leaves it quite vague what responsibilities "central" often, it seems, they have none that right-holders are supposed to have; connect relevantly with their rights. be put on the alleged division: a primary nonderivative way). Accordingly but little weight will any preference-haver can hold rights (in That any preference-haver can hold rights is a consequence of the account of rt<y72t that usage of 'right to' appears to lead to, namely for very many (action-type) predicates cj), d has a right to iff, for every other (obligation-holder) z, z is not entitled to interfere with d if d chooses or would choose to <&. Thus that d holds rights requires of d only that it be the sort of creature that can make choices, that it be a preference-haver. The result holds good generally. Consider the other main case, where the right is to some object b: d has a right to b iff, for certain ot (a class of obligation holders, which may consist of a single person), members of a have an obligation to cede b to d if a chooses or would choose (to have) b (cf. Benn and Peters, op. cit., p.89). To be sure, there are other cases where rights to are attributed, but these appear to reduce to the cases given; which seems to amount to something like: to work. e.g. a has a right to work, a has a right to an opportunity Similar analyses - again with significance restrictions on the class of (])S and bs - apply to rights ??ot to, e.g. an animal has a right not to be kept in a cage. Rights of this sort can likewise be held by any preference-haver (but once again such rights be extended beyond this class to all natural objects). Not every right-holder bears responsibilities or carries obligations : infants for instance do not. Responsibility-bearers and obligation­ holders are a very proper subclass of humans and may only overlap the 81 �A t* class of humans, and likewise the class of potential responsibility­ bearers only overlaps the class of humans. Thus more demanding deontic notions afford no point of access for human chauvinism. To be responsible for something requires more than ability to have preferences or capacity to make choices; it implies liability to be called to account for the thing, answerability for it. Similarly, the undertaking of obligations involves entering into binding relations which imply answerability. Responsibility­ bearers and obligation-holders are thus a subclass of preference-havers, in accord with the annular theory. For answerability and accountability involve some level of linguistic competence - at the very least an ability to answer, in some language (usually presumed to be translatable, easily?, into some human language) - which many preference-havers do not possess. But responsibility and obligation lead a kind of a double life. For a creature that does not have responsibilities, may nonetheless be responsible for various things, in the sense of having done them, and sometimes done them deliberately; as, e.g., the wallaby who breaks down protecting netting and branches time and again is responsible for the demise of a Japanese plumtree. Rather similar oz^p/zf-statements hold true of subjects who do not carry obligations; consider, e.g., "wombats ought to be more careful in crossing roads". The upshot is that an environmental ethic can - despite its very different value theory - retain, in large measure, and sharpen, rather standard accounts of, and distinctions concerning, rights and obligations. It is in this respect, however, that the sort of environmental ethic being advanced differs markedly from alternative environmental ethics, e.g. those which would, implausibly, confer rights to trees, assign obligations to the soil, and so on. JM<?7z 6J?fe?zs^o?z pos^f^o/zs, of which Leopold's would be a leading example, ^Tzaf <2% eM^iro^z/??6?zfaZ ef/z^c znz^sf yoZZozJ i/zg paffgru cy hosier?? ef/z^<?s &ase <?^uss. orzZz/ a zzzzzcTz The way to a satisfactory, environmental, ethic is to reject the pattern of the Western super-ethic, not to simply extend it. The way is through some sort of annular theory which recognises categorial distinc­ tions between different sorts of things, not through a theory which would delete the legitimate distinctions between the sorts of things. latter mistaken way is unnecessary. The For example, in order to reject the instrumental view of value, and to assign natural objects intrinsic value, it is unnecessary to take Leopold's course of viewing all natural objects as having r^p/zfs in the same way as persons and preference-havers are regarded as having rights, or of persons as having obligations natural objects such as trees in the same sort of way as to other persons. Thus too there is no need to see the rejection of the instrumental 82 �<! view as mystical or anti-rational, or as reverting to the view that trees and other natural items house spirits (a view which in any case may have simply been a way of expressing an allotment of value to natural items), and hence as gross superstition. An environmental ethic can be as tough, practical, rational and secular as prevailing Western ethics. so such an ethics will lose much Even if it loses contact with its felt bases in natural things and appreciation of natural things. An environmental ethic will be much the poorer too if it limits itself to the moral terminology, and variations of the categories, of chauvinistically shaped ethics. There will much more as to care, concern and respect in the presentation and main principles of such an ethic than, what occupies standard Western ethics, duties, obligations and rights. In this way too, further problems and puzzles for environmental ethics can be resolved. For example, the view that ethical concepts can apply to the non-human world in an irreducible way is often seen as very puzzling. Much of this puzzlement is generated by attempting to transfer intact a strongly legalistic and person-oriented category of moral concepts, such as rights, moral obligations, duties, and so on, to items in the natural world where they give rise to such apparg^tZ-y problematic questions as 'Do stones have rights?', 'What are our moral obligations to trees?', and so on. If we attempt instead to apply a broader, less legalistic class of moral concepts, such as care, concern, responsibility and respect, much of the puzzling character of these still essentially moral attributions vanishes. There is no great problem for example about how we can legitimately apply notions such as respect to natural items, once a few distinctions are made. The view that the land, animals, and the natural world should be treated with respect was a common one in many hunting and gathering societies, and it is clear that this respect was not seen as generated merely by moral obligations to other persons. dimension to relations with Respect adds a moral the natural world. Respect - or the lack of it - comes out in everyday actions concerning the natural world. The following passage contrasts the Western treatment of the land which lacks respect with the careful and respectful treatment of some American Indians: The White people never cared for land or dear or bear. we Indians kill meat, we eat it all up. little holes. When we dig roots we make When we built houses, we make little holes. burn grass for grasshoppers, we don't ruin things. acorns and pinenuts. dead wood. When We don't chop down the trees. When we We shake down We only use But the White people plow up the ground, pull down the 83 �St trees, kill everything (Tozzck ike Furik, (ed. T.C. McLuhan, Sphere Books, London, 1973, p.15). The great care with which so many of the Indians utilized every portion of the carcass of a hunted animal was an expression, not of economic thrift, but of courtesy and respect (D. Lee, in Tonck ike Forik, p.15)What the respect position is based on is the fact that it is possible to make use of something without treating it as something which is no more than a means to one's ends. That is, it is possible to make use of some­ thing in limited, constrained ways - with constraints which may not derive entirely from considerations of the welfare of other humans, as in the case of the Indians' use of animals - without treating it as available for any kind of use. To so use something without treating it as available for unlimited or unconstrained use for human ends is characteristic of use. In contrast non-respectful use treats the use of the item as constrained by no considerations arising from the item itself and the user's relationship to it, but as constrained only in a derivative way, by considerations of the convenience, welfare and so forth of other humans. The Western view, as the Indians realised, is the non-respect position, that the world is available for unconstrained human use. People who hold respect positions, such as the Indians, see such a position as indicative of a lack of moral sensitivity, and sometimes in even stronger terms. The conventional wisdom of Western society tends to offer a false dichotomy of use versus respectful nonuse - a false choice which comes out especially clearly again in the treatment of animals. Here the choice presented in Western thought is typically one of eiiker use without respect or serious constraint, of using animals for example in the ways character­ istic of large-scale mass-production farming and a market economic system which are incompatible with respect, or on the other hand of not making any use of animals at all, for example, never making use of animals for food or for farming purposes. What is left out in this choice is the alternative the Indians and other non-Western people have recognised, the alternative of limited and respectful use, which enables use to be made of animals, but does not allow animals to be used in an unconstrained way or merely as a means to human ends. Such an alternative can have some applic­ ation in a Western context (for some limited examples of respectful use in the operations of a small farmer, see John Seymour, Tke Cowpiete Rook of Faber, London, 1976). A limited and respectful use position would condemn the infliction of unnecessary pain on animals, and also the treatment of animals as machines, as in factory farming. 84 It �would also condemn unecessary and wasteful killing and especially killing for amusement or "sport", which is incompatible with respect and assumes that animals can be used merely as a means for ZrZz?ZuZ human ends. But it would not necessarily oppose the use of animals in the case of approp­ riate non-trivial need, e.g. for food, although here again it would insist that the ways in which use can be made are limited, and not just by considerations of effect on other humans. The limited and respectful use position avoids some of the serious problems of the no-use position of the animal liberationists, although it shares many of the same beliefs concerning the illegitimacy of factory farming and similar disrespectful methods of making use of and exploiting animals. The no-use position faces the problem that it proposes that humans should treat animals in ways which are quite different from the ways in which animals treat one another, for example, prohibiting needful use for food. Thus the no-use position seems obliged to say either that the world would be a better place without carnivores, or else that carnivorous animals themselves are inferior, immoral, moral creatures - whichever alternative amoral or non- is taken here the bulk of animals emerge as inferior to humans, or at least vegetarian humans. It implies too that an impoverished natural order which lacked carnivores - and given what we know of ecology this would be a very highly impoverished one indeed, not to say an unworkable "natural" order - is preferable to a rich natural one with a normal proportion of carnivorous and partly carnivorous species. carnivores, Since it would imply the moral inferiority of the no-use position appears to arrive at the negation of its own starting point, (as regards e.g., the equality consideration) of all animals, human and non-human. In thus seeing humans as capable of a moral existence which most animals are not capable of, it sees man as apart from a largely amoral (or immoral) natural world, denies community with the animal and natural world,and indirectly reinforces human chauvinism. §6. TOWARDS AN ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOSOPHY: A PRELIMINARY SKETCH OF THE EXTENT OF PHILOSOPHICAL REVISION ENSUING ON ABANDONMENT OF CHAUVINISTIC ETHICS A radical change in a theory not uncommonly forces changes elsewhere - conceptual revision which affects not only the theory itself but many neighbouring areas. The phenomenon is well-known in the case of major physical theories, but it holds as well for ethical and philosophical theories; for example, a logical theory which rejects the Reference Theory in a thoroughgoing way has important repercussions throughout much of the rest of philosophy, and requires modification not only of logical 85 �systems and their semantics, but also, for instance, of the usual meta­ theory which also accepts the Reference Theory and indeed which is 95 tailored to cater only for logics which do conform. A thorough-going environmental ethics likewise has a substantial impact and forces many changes. The escape from human chauvinism not only involves sweeping changes in ethical principles and value theory but it induces substantial reverberations elsewhere - both inwards, for example in metaphysics, in epistemology, and in the philosophy and method­ ology of science, and outwards (in subjects that presuppose value theory) in social theory, in politics, in economics and in law, and beyond. For human chauvinism is deeply embedded in Western culture, and affects not only the ideology and the institutions but the arts. Thus, for example, much of literature, and especially of ballet and film, is given over to a celebration :of things' human,', of .'the species. ,-;Eveh the. ti.RfeLy herw,eYnphas.is, for instance of the counterculture, on-human relations (a-s opposed to selfcontained private individuals of social theories) remains well within the inherited chauvinistic framework. As to the changes, let us begin again with ethics. As we have begun to see, an environmental ethic can retain, though in a much amended theoretical framework (which affects meanings of terms), virtually all the standard ethical terminology. But even at a superficial syntactical level, there will be conspicuous alterations: firstly, ethical terminology will be enriched with new environmental terms, drawn in particular from ecology, somewhat as it was expanded in the late nineteenth century by terminology from evolutionary theories; and secondly, accompanying the attitudinal shifts the new ethic involves, there will be a marked shift in ethical terminology, away from the predominance of such terms as (and examples associated with) 'obligation', to such expressions as 'care', 'respect', 'consciousness'. 'duty', 'concern', 'promise', 'contract', 'responsibility', 'trust', Because the theoretical and attitudinal frame is changed, an environmental ethic forces - as we have already found with such notions as z)oZ-Me, cZzotce, interference and (Zowa^e reexamination of, and modified analyses of, characteristic ethical notions. It requires, furthermore, reassessment of traditional and conventional analyses of such notions as nctnraZ- ri^/zt, ^ronn^Z of ri^Zzt^ and perznissib- iZitz/., especially where these are based on chauvinist assumptions - much as it requires the rejection of most of the more prominent meta-ethical These points are explained in detail in Routley (e); and also in L. Goddard and R. Routley, TZze Lopic of Cipnificonce an^Z Context, Vol. 1, Scottish Academic Press, 1973, chapters 3 and 4. 86 �0 46 positions. Cursory examination of recent accounts of TzuZ^ruZ rZpTzZ^ zzzoruZ-Ztz/-, and ucf-Zczz will help illustrate and confirm these points. Hart, for example, accepts (subject to defeating conditions which are here irrelevant) the classical doctrine of natural rights according to which, among other things, any adult human ... capable of choice is at liberty to do (i.e. is under no obligation to abstain from) any action which is not one coercing or restraining or designed to injure other persons Hart, (H.L.A. 'Are there any natural rights?', reprinted in PcZ-ZZ-ZcuZ P/z-fZoscpZzz/, (ed. A. Quinton), Blackwell, Oxford 1967). But this sufficient condition for a human natural right depends on accepting the basic chauvinist principle - a variant of (D) - environmental ethics reject; since if a person has a natural right he has a right. So too the definition of a natural right adopted by classical theorists and accepted with minor qualifications by Hart presupposes the same defective principle. Accordingly an environmental ethic would have to amend the classical notion of a natural right, a far from straightforward matter now that human rights with respect to animals and the natural environment are, like those with respect to slaves not all that long ago, undergoing major re-evaluation. Another example of chauvinism at work in the very setting up of the field of discussion and problems in ethics is provided by recent accounts of woruZ-ZZy, where it is simply taken for granted that 'moral' distinguishes 96 among ZzMzzzu?z actions, policies, motives and reasons, and that what is moral refers essentially to human well-being (contentment, happiness or something of this general sort, tied with appropriate states or 97 conditions of humans). Such criteria for what is moral are chauvinistically based, assuming that what does not bear on human states or conditions cannot be a moral matter. What happens in worlds without humans, how animals fare or are treated, what is done or what happens to plants or other natural objects - none of these are directly moral matters, except insofar as they impinge on human welfare. That is human 96 Thus for instance, B. Williams, AfcruZ-Ztp; 24% P^z^rodMcf-Zo^ fo Ff/z-Zcs^ Harper & Row, New York, 1972, p.79. Williams does, however, remark in his Preface (p.xiv) how 'shaky and problematic' the distinction - which he subsequently takes for granted - is. 97 See, for example, P.R. Foot, TZzeor'Zes Ft/z-Zcs, Oxford University Press, London, 1967, and G.J. Warnock, Ccwfewporurz/ AforuZ P/z-ZZosop/zz/, Macmillan, London, 1967, and also TZzg o.f MoraZ-Zfz/, Methuen, London, 1971. 87 �t* chauvinism at work, and is at the same time a reductio such criteria. s- ad absurdum of A different nonchauvinistic account of what is moral is required (a beginning can be made by adopting certain of the maligned formal criteria). It is evident that any account which meets even weak conditions of adequacy will serve to meet the objection that an environ­ mental ethic is not concerned with what is moral but is really an aesthetic theory. For the objection as usually presented depends squarely on a chauvinistic restriction on morality, all the rest of value theory being classed, or dismissed, as "(mere) aesthetics". The case of morality illustrates the characteristic way in which theories - in this case chauvinistic ethics - redefine crucial notions in their own terms to suit their own ends, such as entrenchment and fortification of the theories against objections. Further corollaries of the rejection of chauvinism include the inadequacy of recent fashionable attempts, mainly derivative from Hobhouse, at characterising a^naZf^z/ and justifying it in ways that argue from man's humanity^98 and the inadequacy of much recent, largely chauvinistic, work in the philosophy of actdan, which takes it for granted that action and 99 rationality requirements on action are bound up with human nature. The abandonment of chauvinism implies the rejection not only of much ethical analysis, but of all current major ethical positions. The bias of prevailing ethical positions, and also of economic positions, which aim to make principles of conduct or reasonable economic behaviour calculable is especially evident. These positions typically employ a single criterion p, such as preference or happiness, as a summum bonum; characteristically each individual of some base class, almost always humans, but perhaps including future humans, is supposed to have (at least) an ordinal p- ranking of the states in question (e.g. of affairs, of the economy); then some principle is supplied to determine a collective p-ranking of these states in terms of individual p-rankings, and what is best or ought to be done is determined either directly, as in act-utilitarianism under the Greatest Happiness principle, or indirectly, as in rule-utilitarianism in terms of some optimization principle applied to the collective ranking. The species bias is transparent from the selection of the base class. And 98 Among such unsatisfactory liberal egalitarian positions are those presented in G. Vlastos, 'Justice and equality' in SacZaZ JnstZae (ed. R.B. Brandt), Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1962, and B.A.O. Williams, 'The idea of equality' in P^Zasap/zz^., PaZfZfcs and JacZafz/, Second series (ed. P. Laslett and W.G. Runciman), Blackwell, Oxford, 1963. 99 see, e.g.^T. Nagel, T/ze Pass-Z&'ZZ'Ztz/ a/ ^ZZrnZszzz, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1970. 88 �even if the base class is extended to include persons or some animals (at the cost, like that of including remotely future humans, of losing testability), the positions are open to familiar criticism, namely that the whole of the base class may be prejudiced in a way which leads to unjust principles. To take a simple example, if every member of the base class detests dingoes, on the basis of mistaken data as to dingoes' behaviour, then by the Pareto ranking test the collective ranking will rank states where dingoes are exterminated very highly, from which it will generally be concluded that dingoes ought to be exterminated (still unfortunately the evaluation of most Australian farmers, though it lacks any requisite empirical basis). Likewise it would just be a happy accident, it seems, if collective demand (horizontally summed from individual demand) for a state of the economy with sperm whales as a mixed good, were to succeed in outweighing private whaling demands; for if but few in the base class happened to know that sperm whales exist or cared a jot that they do, then even the most "rational" economic decision­ making would do nothing to prevent their extinction. But whether the sperm whale survives should not have to depend on what humans know or what they see on television. Summed human interests, or preferences of certain private individuals, are far too parochial to provide a satisfactory basis for deciding upon what is environmentally desirable. Nor would such accidental bases be adequate. Moreover ways out of the problem do not bear much investigation. It cannot be assumed, for instance, that the base class is on the whole good, and hence will not enjoin reprehensible behaviour, because such an assumption seems false, would at best be contingently true (so that the theory would fail for different circumstances to which it should apply), and would involve a deep problem in the theory, since it would then seem to admit the determination of goodness - that of the base class, on the whole - independently of what the theory was set up to determine, among other things, goodness. Nor can it be assumed, without serious circularity, that the optimisation is constrained by requirements of justice or fairness (see Routley (b) and §5 above). The ethical and economic theories just singled out (which are based on optimisation over select features of the base class) are not alone in their species chauvinism; much the same applies to west going meta- ethical theories which, unlike intuitionistic theories, try to offer some rationale for their basic principles. That is, the argument against utilitarian—type ethical and economic theories generalises. For instance, on social contract positions, obligations are a matter of mutual agreement 89 �between individuals of a given (but again problematic) base class; on a social justice picture, rights and obligations spring from the application of symmetrical fairness principles to members of the base class, usually a rather special class of persons;^00 while on a Kantian position, which has some vogue, obligations somehow arise from respect for members of the base class, persons.In each case, if members of the base class happen to be ill-disposed to items outside the base class, then that is unfortun­ ate for them: that is (rough) justice. Looking outwards from the ethics, the abandonment of chauvinism has likewise a wide set of consequences, both theoretical and practical, in economics, politics and law, and generally in the social sciences. One major practical economic impact of environmental ethics is in the extent to which free enterprise can operate unimpeded or unchanged. of business and enterpreneurial activity - to But consider <9722 option - will involve, in turn, either legal constraints, or reallocation of activity by such devices as environmental pricing, which directs activity away from environmentally undesirable pursuits. For example, if it is wrong to destroy a rare ecosystem in order to make a few more dollars, then restrictions should be imposed on business activity by one method or another. To some limited extent this is already happening in the field of pollution, but primarily because of the likely effects, direct or not too far removed, that pollution comes to have on other humans, not for a wider set of reasons, and often not for the right reasons. With a wider environ­ mental code, the public and legal intrusion into areas typically regarded as "private" and open to the free enterprise operations (of "open go") would be much more extensive. The same applies in the case of private Thus for example, [Rawls'] original position seems to presuppose not just a neutral theory of the good, but a liberal, individualistic conception according to which the best that can be wished for someone is the unimpeded pursuit of his own path, provided it does not interfere with the rights of others. This view is persuasively developed in the later portions of the book, but without a sense of its controver­ sial character (T. Nagel, 'Rawls on justice' , P/z^Zcsop/ztcczZ 82 (1973), p.228). Nagel also effectively argues that Rawls' original position is not neutrally determined but involves substantial moral assumptions (e.g. pp.232, 233); they are mostly, as it happens, of a chauvinistic cast. While the first of Kant's maxims is not so restricted in actual form­ ulation, others are (see H.J. Paton, AforuZ P<2M, Hutchinson, London, 1947) . And, firstly, such maxims are s^ppast?^ to be equivalent to ones formulated in terms of persons; secondly, they are supposed to be derived from features of, or connected with, people. 90 �-4 property; for example, given that it is not permissible to erode hill­ sides then there should, in this setting, be (legal) restrictions on farmers' and foresters' activities. Although the impact on the practice of economics of a thoroughgoing environmental ethic would be drastic - market negotiations, firms' activities, international trade, all would be affected - the impact on the underlying theories of preference and choice is comparatively For much of economics is squarely founded but still far from negligible. on chauvinism. less, The theoretical bias follows directly from the utilitarian bases of the theory, which is fairly explicit in welfare theory and rather heavily disguised in neoclassical theory. But although choice and value theory are, as characteristically presented in economics and elsewhere, damagingly chauvinistic, they do not have to be. For the theories can be reformulated in a non-chauvinistic way, as was indicated (in §5) above for utilitarianism - upon which economic theory is modelled. On such a revamped foundation an environmental economics to match the chosen environmental ethic can be built (for some preliminaries on this approach, see Routley (d), appendices 1 and 6). Several of the objections to base class theories such as utilitar­ ianism apply not merely against orthodox economic theory, but also to voting theory, to representative democratic systems of determination of political action. If, for, example, the base class consists of private individuals motivated by their own self-contained interest then such procedures can readily lead to most undesirable results, especially if these individuals compromise representative individuals. their autonomy through the election of For the more powerful of these representative individuals can be - and typically are, as their behaviour if not their protestations show - not favourably disposed to (the welfare of) things outside the base class or even to many members of the base class. Nearer the theoretical surface, especially in such branches of economics as "resource management", the chauvinism is more conspicuous. The following narrowly utilitarian assumption is quite typical: The goal of resource managers should be to communicate and act in ways that maximize human satisfaction (H.J. Campbell, 'Economic and social significance of upstream aquatic resources' in Forest Fs^s Oregon State University, Corcallis, 1971, p.14, also p.17). When management - where such is management becomes needed at all - the goals will be changed from such chauvinistic ones. 91 �The method of interference in "free economic enterprise", of controls and regulations, of legal and political constraints, is only one way in which leading principles of an environmental ethics can be put into effect. A quite different, and ultimately far more appealing, approach is by way of structural change, by changing the socio-economic structure in such a way that it comes to reflect on environmental ethics (by altering the frame of reference, or axes, to use the physical picture of §4, so that major problems vanish). Requisite structural change is . 102 far-reaching, both practically and theoretically in every reach of social science. For example, while on the position, capitalist markets are subject to further regulation, either directly imposed or by way of suitable pricing policies, in the s^rz^g^raZ. c/zaMgre position, capitalist markets are eliminated; while under state regulation private property is subject to further Controls,given approp­ riate structural change private property disappears. Looking inwards, an environmental ethic has an impact on the practice of many sciences other than the social sciences - what they do experimentally with natural objects (e.g. the treatment of animals in laboratory testing); how their research programmes are organised and directed (consider,e.g., projects involving irradiation or broadscale herbicide treatments of rainforests); the way classifications are made and which are made (consider, e.g. the extent to which human perception enters into classifications in botany); recommended on the basis of such sciences. and, of course, what is For as it stands human chauvinism is deeply embedded in the practice of science, directly in research and experimentation and in shaping classifications, theses and theories. Indeed the effect of a different ethic may extend even to the theory of such sciences, in particular through the bearing the ethic has 103 on metaphysics which m turn influences the foundations of such sciences. Such a new ethic would quite properly upset (as §1 should indicate) the extent to which humans are seen at the centre of things and things as accountable through them and scientific theories as 'human constructions wrestled from a hostile nature' (after Popper). It would help overthrow the pernicious chauvinistic idea that, apart from certain elementary facts, 4ZZ-es value. Me?zs<?/ze?zzjgr^, all necessity, all intensionality, all It should result too in the shattering of still widespread As (g) V. and R. Routley, 'Social theories, self management and environmental problems', this volume, begins to explain. Cf. R. Harre, TTza P/z^Zosop/ztes c/ S'c^eyzcg, Oxford University Press, 1972; and also Routley (e). 92 �***** assumptions as to the nature of animals and plants, for instance that their apparently goal—directed and intensional behaviour can be explained (away) mechanistically, and the deeply-rooted idea that some sort of Cartesian metaphysical picture of natural, as distinct from spiritual or rational, objects can be maintained (cf. again §1). In metaphysics there are at least two further important classes of effects. Firstly, the orthodox views of man's relation to nature, the dominant and modified dominant and lesser traditions, have to be abandoned and new positions worked out. In this sense, a new environmental ethic implies a similarly new metaphysic redefining Man's place in nature and human/nature relationships.104 Such a new philosophy of nature will recognise various natural objects other than humans as of independent value, so it will not be naturalistic. Nor will it view natural objects as simply available for the use, wise or otherwise, of humans. Several principles derived from the orthodox metaphysical positions will have to be abandoned and replacements worked out (as in the case of (D) in ethics) Thus superseded, for example, will be the principles of total use of natural areas for human use and of maximum long-term productivity of the earth's resources (principles criticised in their application in forestry in Routley (d)). At a deeper level, such a philosophy of nature will involve a turning away from the leading ideological principles of both the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and of much that went with them (e.g. with the Renaissance, the rise of commerce, bureaucracy, professionalism, formal education, and subsequently, with the Enlightenment, the rise of the modern state, capitalism and scientific enlightenment). For it means the dismissal of the chauvinistic principles of theRenaissance,with 'Man as the kernel of the Universe', a creature 'half-earthly and half-divine, his body and soul form[ing] a microcosm enabling him to understand and control Nature ...'.1°5 It means too removal of the humanism of the Enlightenment, the reduction of what formerly was assigned to the religious, such as ethical and political principles, to the human, a reduction which 104 As Passmore has observed - inconsistently with what is claimed m his (a) - in 'Attitudes to Nature', Roz/aZ of PTz^oscp/zy Lectures, volume 8, Macmillan, London, 1975. As against Passmore (a) p.3, such new ethics and metaphysics need involve no abandonment of 'the analytical, critical approach which is the glory of the West : on the contrary, they may well mean a more thoroughly critical and analytical approach than hitherto. 105 goth quotations are from T^ze <?y tTzg 7?e7z<2^ss(2%<3g (ed. D. Hay) Thames and Hudson, London 1967, pp.7-10, where too main movements, practical and ideological, of the Renaissance are usefully indicated. 93 �was based on the false dichotomy, which has still not lost its hpld:, religious or humanistic. Secondly, the removal of humans from a dominant position JhT the natural order renders immediately suspect a range of familiar philosophical positions of a verificationistic or idealistic kind such as phenomenalism in epistemology (how can what exists depend on what is perceived by members of such a transitory and perhaps not so important species or ^on whether there exist perceivers?), intuitionism in mathematics, con­ ventionalism in logical theory, the Copenhagen interpretation ir^ micr<^- physics, and subjectivisms not only in ethics but in every other* * True, most of these positions are defeated on t^e basis of other considerations anyway; but it is an immediate and fur,t^ier philosophical sphere. point against them that they are damagingly chauvinistic. Thus a corollary of the thoroughgoing rejection of human chauvinism, of very considerable philosophical importance, is the rejection of all the usual forms of idealism, i.e. all positions which accord primacy to the human subject and make the existence of a world of things or the nature of things dependent upon such subjects. A paradigmatic example is phenomenalism; other examples are Kantian idealisms, Hegelianisms and later German idealisms, Christian philosophies based on the primacy of human (and superhuman) consciousness, existentialisms; more surprising examples are empiricisms - inasmuch as all knowledge and truth is supposed to be ultimately derived from human experience - and their holistic images, dialectical materialisms and Marxisms. A satisfactory environ­ mental philosophy will be significantly different from all these positions. 94 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Draft Papers Description An account of the resource Sylvan's literary executor encountered an archive in which “all his projects were current", since manuscripts were undated and unattributed. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document — ?HUMAN CHAUVINISM AND.ENVIRONMENTAL.ETHICS* Richard and Vai Routley / * . * Class chauvinism has been and remains a cardinal weakness of most . moral codes - including, so it will°be argued, Western ethics. * A most serious failure 6f Western ethics is its human chauvinism or anthropo^centricism - a chauvinism which emerges in a refined, and apparently more reds&n*able, form as person chauvinism in much modern ethical theory. * w What is chauvinism? $ * Class chauvinism, in the relevant sense, is sz^Etant^aZ-Z-z/ differential, discriminatory and inferior treatment (by sufficiently many members of the class) for items outside the class, for which there is not enff-ZcZen^ justification. Pnwan chauvinism is class chauvinism where the class is humans, wuZ-e chauvinism where the class is human males, an-Z/zzaZ. chauvinism where the class is animals, etc. It would be bazf, to say the least, if Western ethics, in its various strands, were to turn out to rest on human, or person, chauvinism. For Western ethics would then have no better foundation than, and be open to the same sorts of objections as, moral codes based on other sorts of chauvinisms, e.g. on familial, national, sexual, racial or socio-economic class chauvinism - in particular it would be open to the objection that This paper (which considerably elaborates R. Routley 'Is There a need for a new, an environmental, ethic?', Procee^-Znps of Zz/ze XPt/z ^orZ^ Ccnpress of PTz^Z-cscp/zz/, 1 (1973), pp.205-10), was drafted in 1973 and read in 1974 at the University of Indiana, Bloomington, at Notre Dame University, and at the Conference on The Good Society held at the University of Victoria, Canada. Since the main virtue of the paper has been that it'has generated much interesting discussion, the original form has been retained, though the authors are no longer especially happy with the form, and many theses remain insufficiently developed or defended. But in order not to remove the previous and continuing criticism, no substantial deletions have been made, even though the paper has been raided and segments of it presented in improved form elsewhere, especially (a) R. and V. Routley, 'Against the inevitability of human chauvinism', in MoraZ P/z-ZZosopTzz/ an<7 t?ze Tzjentp-F-Zrst Centnrz/ (edited by K. Goodpaster and K. Sayre), Notre Dame University Press, 1979, and (b) R. and V. Routley, 'An expensive repair-kit for utilitarianism', paper presented at the Colloquium on Preferences CTzo^ce an<i FaZzve, RSSS, Australian National University, 1977. However some sizeable additions have been made, with a view to increasing the intelligibility and enlarging the scope of the original draft, and meet­ ing some of the many objections. 1 it discriminated against nonhumans in a prejudiced and unwarranted way, and would thereby stand condemned. For it is hard to see how an ethic based on simple spoo-Zes loyalty could have any greater claim to absolute­ ness or deserve any more respect than moral codes based on simple loyalty to national, sexual, or racial classes. Such an ethic could no more command allegiance - once the facts are brought into clear view - than other normally-deplored examples of localised class chauvinism, such as the Mafia or protection agencies or rackets or enclaves of slavery. Unfortunately prevailing Western ethics appear to be of just this sort. §1. THE WESTERN CASE FOR ITS HUMAN (OR PERSON) CHAUVINISM: THE FIRST LINES OF DEFENCE It is important, then, for defenders of the Western ideology to be able to show - *Zf it can be shown - that an ethic which discriminates strongly in favour of humans, as Western ethics apparently does, is not chauvinistic. Otherwise the ethic stands condemned. Of course not every distinction in treatment qualifies as chauvinistic - the distinction in treatment may not be substantial or systematic, and there may be an adequate and explicable basis for the distinction, so that some discrimin­ ation is warranted. In order to escape the charge of human chauvinism, it has to be shown how and why the drastic and general discrimination in favour of humans sanctioned and enjoined by modern (as by historical) Western ethical systems is warranted, and that it has an adequate basis. The extent of this chauvinism, especially with respect to animals, is at last - after centuries of a priori prejudice and gross distortion of the characteristics of wild animals and wilderness - beginning to be spelt 1 out. It is at least clear from the outset that an adequate justification cannot be provided which simply selects all and only these members of the species human (i.e. /zowo sap*Zo?zs) as zoologically defined. There is nothing about the characteristic of TzMwazzZZp itself (as distinct perhaps from its accompanying properties) which could provide a justification for overwhelmingly favourable treatment for humans (and unfavourable treatment for nonhumans) as opposed to other possible, and possibly some actual, nonhuman creatures. Once again, an adequate ethic and justification can­ not possibly be based on blind and unthinking species loyalty. The same 1 See, e.g., S. and R. Godlovitch and J. Harris (eds), Mor azzd Morals. -Z^Zo Z/ze zzzaZ^roat/TzozzZ of yzorz-ZzMwaMS, Gollancz, London, 1971; P. Singer, ?l?z-Z7na:Z f-Z^oraf-ZoM. pzezj o^/z-Zos for OMr of azz*Z/??aZs, Cape, London, 1976; S.R.L. Clark, y/zo A7oraZ of ^H-ZwaZs, Clarendon, Oxford, 1977. 2 CB objection applies against the simple need's argument: the commonly assumed domination of human needs over all else (e.g. over all environ­ mental considerations) has, if it is to have any merit, to be based on more than speciesism.^ We shall have to look then for some other not merely taxonomic characteristic to provide the sought justification. It will emerge however, that any such characteristic is held or may be held by nonhumans, and is not held, or potentially not held, by all items of the species human. Of course there are many characteristics which can, as a contingent matter, be used to distinguish human beings as a general class from other higher animals - although in fact with increasing knowledge of animals it is no longer clear that some of these characteristics distinguish as clearly as was assumed a priori in the past. For example, humans have a language, and a culture of a certain sort and even various logics. And, as we are accustomed to have people point out, other terrestrial animals do not conduct philosophical discussions on environmental ethics. However not only is participation in these activities potentially available to nonhuman creatures, and these characteristics possibly possessed by some, but these activities are not generally engaged in even by humans (particularly the power elite), many humans lack the requisite competence, and even among those who do qualify, such activities are carried out to a very varying extent. We run the risk, then, in applying such demanding criteria, of ruling out, of classing as deserving of "sub-human" or "sub­ person" treatment, a considerable class of human beings — items most humans would consider as worthy of better treatment than that normally accorded by humans to nonhuman animals. What is more important however is that such criteria as human language, culture, human civilization, human intentionality, or whatever, appear to provide no satisfactory for the substantially unfavourable treatment allotted those falling outside the privileged class. should there be such strong discrimination in favour of creatures having a (certain sort of)^ language or a higher level of intelligence and against creatures or items which do not, in favour of things with a certain sort of culture or a certain logic and against those without? Especially when some of these criteria are clearly, and 2 As McCloskey remarked (in a letter dated 5.7.77 containing many helpful comments) 'talking about needs does little but obscure the problem, as needs, to be normatively relevant, involve reference to goods; and that merely transfers the problem'. 3 On next page. 3 *3 unjustifiably,loaded in favour of human interests, achievements and By contrast the very many respects in which some or sorts of animals are superior bo bMfnans (many are noted in V.B. Droscher, Tbe abilities (cf. the cultural loading of various intelligence tests). 4?ibmaZ Parcaptbo^, Allen, London, of tbe Sassos. 1969) are rarely considered; yet some of these features would, if taken in the same serious way as some respects in which humans excell, justify a reverse chauvinism (which could be reflected as, for exampZ-e, in the Hindu treatment of cows). The only sort of justification for the discrimination that might appear convincing - that those who have the given characteristic (e.g. those that are more intelligent, or more rational, or richer) are more valuable or worth special treatment - is vitiated by the fact that were it accepted by Western ethics it would warrant similar discrimination humans (or persons). For how do we show that the allegedly warranted discrimination is sufficiently different from making substantial (class) distinctions between humans in terms of their level of intelli­ gence, linguistic or logical ability, or level or kind of cultural achievement - so that those with "lower" levels of these valued abilities are treated in a consistently inferior way and regarded as available for the use of the others? In short, these characteristics do not provide adequate justification for the substantially inferior treatment accorded those not having them, and so the charge of chauvinism is not escaped by producing them. A similar set of points applies against a number of other criteria^ traditionally or recently proposed to distinguish the privileged class. Often these are propounded in terms of personhood and criteria for being a parson (the class marked out for privileged treatment being the class of persons) rather than criteria for being bz^wan - in order to escape difficulties raised by young, senile, decrepit, stupid, irrational, 3 For undoubtedly many mammals, birds and insects can communicate, some times in ways analogous to language, even if the honorific term 'language' is withheld (see - to select an unfavourable source the discussion in E.O. Wilson, SocZobboZ-opp. Belknap, Cambridge Mass., 1975, chapter 8 ff.). It is becoming increasingly evident, however, that the ascription of some linguistic ability, and of elementary languages, to nonhuman creatures should not be withheld, see e.q. the details assembled in E. Linden, 4p<2s_, Penguin,New York, 1976. (But contrast Wilson, op. cit., pp.555 59, and to set this in proper perspective, consider Wilson s discussion of ethics and aesthetics a few pages later, pp.562-65.) 4 Many of the criteria that have been proposed are assessed, and found wanting, in Routley (a). 4 damaged and defective humans, extraterrestrial creatures, and super animals; to avoid the merely contingent connections between being human and having requisite person-determining characteristics (such as ration­ ality or knowledge) supposed to warrant discriminatory treatment; and t defeat, though it is a pyrrhic victory, the charge of human chauvinism (or equivalents of the charge, such as anthropocentricism or speciesism). But much the same problems then arise in terms of criteria for u person, and the chauvinism problem reappears as the problem of furnish­ ing criteria which are suitably clearcut, and do separate persons from assumed nonpersons, and which would provide an adequate justification for substantially privileged treatment for persons and inferior treatment for nonpersons. Unless such a justification is forthcoming the charge of person is not escaped. Most of the criteria proposed for personhood fall down in just these sorts of ways, e.g. being autonomous, the having of projects, the producing of junk, the assessing of some of one's performances as successful or not, the awareness of oneself as an agent or initiator. Not only does it appear that (the more worthy of) such criteria apply (or could apply) to many nonhuman animals - thus animals are generally more autonomous (in main senses of the term) than humans, many animals have projects (e.g. home and nest building), and they are well aware of themselves, as opposed to rivals, as initiators of 5 projects - and that they do not apply uniformly to humans or indeed to persons in any ordinary sense; but again it is extremely difficult to see what there is in these characteristics which would warrant or justify the vast difference in treatment between the privileged and nonprivileged classes, or justify regarding the non-privileged class as something available for the of the privileged class. Similar objections can be lodged against the proposal that knowledge or the possession of knowledge, provides feature. (or u crMc^uZ) distinguishing It can hardly provide the appropriate filter, since it not only gives no sharp cut-off point,but does not even always rank humans or persons above nonhumans or nonpersons. Moreover, taken seriously it should lead to substantial moral differentiation between persons, a person's moral rating also fluctuating during his lifetime. In any case, For example, the shiftless intelligent person, or the primitive person, who has no projects and engages in no moral reflection, and thus offends protestant ethics, is not thereby deregisterable as a person, any more than an intelligent animal with projects can join the union. On next page. 5 4 why rank knowledge so highly: for (pace Socrates) knowledge is not the foundation of virtue, but is frequently turned to evil ends, and even where it is meritorious it is not the sole (or even a crucial) criterion of worth. Similar difficulties apply too to the historic criterion of ratZozzaZZZp, along with the added problem that it is -very difficult to say what it is in any clear or generally acceptable way, or to prevent it from degenerating into a simple "pro" word. If a hallmark of rationality is commitment to the consequences of what one believes and seriously says, then many humans fail the test. If, on the other hand rationality i^, for example, the ability to discover and pursue courses and actions likely to achieve desired goals (direct action toward goals), ability to solve problems concerned, etc., then plainly many animals have it, and possibly to a greater extent than humans in some cases (and of certain humans in almost all cases). If it were the ability, e.g. to do ZopZc (say propositional calculus) or to assess reasoning verbally, then the (biassed) criterion would be far too strong and rule out many humans. Again, why should one make such a marked discrimination on this basis? What is so meritorious about this characteristic, that it warrants such a marked distinction? Nothing (at least in the ordinary academic's view, or logicians would receive more favoured treatment). Other criteria, which yield an analytic connection between being a person and enjoying freedom or having rationality, in part beg the question. For in D?zat respect is it that persons - or worse, just persons - are free. Also the justificatory problem, as to how the claimed freedom or rationality warrants such differential treatment, remains. Characterisations of parsons vary enormously, from so strong that they rule out suburban humans who are not "self-made" enterpreneurs, to so weak that they admit very wa^z/ animals. An (unintentional) example of the latter is the following: persons, that is, ... beings who are not only sentient but also capable of intensional autonomous action, beings that must be ascribed not only states of consciousness but also states of belief, thought and intention (A. Townsend, 'Radical vegetarians , 4zzstraZasZa?z JoMrzzaZ of P/zZZosop/zz/, 57 (1979), p.89). 6 in addition, the relation "a has at least as much knowledge as b is only a partial ordering. For example, a dog's and a child s knowledge may be incomparable, because they know about different matters how to do quite different sorts of things, etc. (The idea that knowledge is the key to moral discrimination, that it is what makes humans rank t way Western ethics ranks them, may be found in C.B. Daniels, PaaZMaZZoK of FZTzZcaZ T/zoorZes, Philosophy in Canada Monograph, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1975.) 6 O) Most rats and rabbits satisfy the conditions: conscious animals that have intentions they are sentient, (e.g. to get through some barrier such as a floor or a fence), beliefs and thoughts (e.g. that there is For his further argument Townsend preferred food beyond the barrier). shifts - without notice, but in a way that is quite typical of this scene - to wzzcTz stronger requirements upon being a person (such that one who does not meet them is incapacitated as a person) which rule out many humans, e.g. 'The person must recognise canons of evidence and inference warranting changes in his beliefs, and be capable of changing his beliefs 7 accordingly' (op. cit., p.90). In meeting hypothetical objections, Townsend slips in a further require ment of rationality, but the characterisation of person given does not include any such requirement. Subsequently, however, Townsend commits himself, without argument, to the thesis that 'a fairly high degree of rationality is prerequisite' to attributing 'intensionality' (as dis­ tinct from 'intentionality'). This is not going to help much. For, firstly, rationality is very much a notion which admits of degrees, without the relatively sharp cut-off stages required for person as a notion of orthodox moral relevance, or possessed by the notion of /zzzwczzz to which Townsend sneaks back in his chauvinistic conclusion (p.93). Secondly, Tzozj high a degree is prerequisite for being a person? If only enough to satisfy the conditions for being a person, then the animals that are persons have it. If more, then either the initial characterisation of a person fails or the thesis breaks down. The much stronger requirements upon being a person that Townsend sub­ sequently appeals to are said to derive from S.I. Benn. But, if any­ thing they strengthen one of the stronger of several zzozze^zz-Zz^uZezzf characterisations of (zzatz^raZ) person - none of them equivalent to /zzzzzzuzz - that Benn has at various times offered. While Benn's weaker characterisations appear to admit at least many "higher" animals, e.g. that of a natural person as a chooser, conscious of himself as able to make a difference to the way the world goes, by deciding to do this rather than that, having projects, therefore, of his own, whose life experience may consequently be understood, not simply as a chronicle of events, but as an enterprise, on which he puts his own construct­ ion ((a) 'The protection and limitation of privacy, Part I', ^MstraZ-Zazz Lazj JozzrzzczZ, 52 (1978), p.605); the stronger characterisations which invoke (rather vaguely specified, and cZ-Z//ere?zt) minimum conditions of rationality in belief and action said to imply respoTzs-Zb-ZZ-Ztz/ on the part of the person for what s/he does, though they do zzcf - exclude many of the creatures admitted by weaker characterisations. For such stronger characterisations see 'Individuality, autonomy and community' in CozzzzzzMzz-Ztz/ (ed. E. Kamenka) Edward Arnold (forthcoming) and (c) 'Freedom, autonomy and the concept of a person', ProceecZ-Zzzps o/ t?ze ^r-Zs^oteZ-Zuzz Society, 76 (1976), pp.109-30. 7 D The foregoing points, taken together, support our contention that it is not possible to provide criteria which would distinguishing, in the sharp way standard Western ethics do, between humans and certain nonhuman creatures, and particularly those creatures which have prefer­ ences or preferred states.For such criteria appear to depend upon the mistaken assumption that moral respect for other creatures is due only when they can be shown to measure up to some rather and tests for membership of a privileged class (essentially an elitist view), instead of upon, say, respect for the preferences of other creatures. Accordingly fka skarp woraZ ethics by philosophers and others alike, commonly accepted m aZZ ofkar a^-fmaZ speafas, Zacks a safZsfacforz/ cokarazif bcsZs. The distinction, which historically rested on the assumption that humans possessed a soul (or higher reason) but that other animals, brutes, did not, appears to have been uncritically retained even after the religious beliefs or philosophical theories underpinning it have been abandoned. Given that the distinction underlying human chauvinism fails, is there anywhere satisfactory demarcations of moral relevance can be made among things? Yes, several divisions^ of mcraZ can be made; but of these coincides with a division into human and others. Consider, first, the question of consideration fiards others, and the matter of which offers are to be taken into account in cases where others' interests and preferences are affected by some action. Insofar as moral consideration for others (among sentient items) is based on analogical (empathetic, and essentially inductive) principles, such as taking account of their worthwhile preferences, objectives, interests etc., 8 There are of course further arguments for the contention, for example from the anatomical and physiological affinities of human and other animals, from their common evolutionary history, and so on. The arguments are of varying force; for example, evolutionary arguments can be arrested, temporarily, by the claim that there was a quantum jump" in human evolutionary development which did not occur with other creatures with a previously shared evolutionary history (cf. Wilson, op. cit.). 9 Although the divisions may be conceptually sharp enough, they are any­ thing but sharp when applied in the field to the variety of creature and circumstances that occur. For example, preference-havers is, so far at least, sharp enough, but it is far from clear which creatures qualify, e.g. which, if any, Crustacea? For the present most of t ese potential decision cases are cases for cheerful indecision; _ u , alternatively, the divisions may be viewed - perhaps better not a sharp boundaries, but as gradation states, as where two colours m a rainbow meet. 8 * c- it is difficult to see how such consideration can fail to apply to all (including nonhuman) preference-having creatures; and one does not need to apply criteria such as linguistic ability, navigational ability, intelligence, piano-playing, hunting skill, etc., to obtain a basis for such consideration (indeed one cannot). The /zuzzz^zz^ a/* pr^yerezzces (and of preferences revealed through choices) is however a quite sufficient basis for z^/zz^s of consideration and concern. It is at this point, we suggest, that the requisite, important and non-arbitrary distinction is to be drawn which marks out the class of creatures towards which obligations may be held; that is, the usually recognised principles of consideration towards others (of the privileged class) properly extend or should be generalised to consideration for other creatures having prefer­ ences, and t/ze correspazz^zzy pezzaraZ zza^ to putt afTzars a/zZ-^pa^azz pr^zzc^pZ-e ("at/zer preyerezzce-TzuzJersJ tzzto a c%spreyerra<^ stato y*ar zza paa<i raasazz. Insofar as moral behaviour is based on consideration for others and not harming others, preference-having provides an adequate basis, and does appear to provide a sufficient justification for substantially different treatment for preference-having over non-preference-having items - because items without preference cannot (literally) be put into a dispreferred state. Thus preference-having appears to tie in with an important basis for moral obligation, and appears to provide a superior criterion, for a sort of moral consideration, to other criteria sometimes proposed such as sentience - or, differently, intelligence - especially since in the absence of preferences such notions as /zurzzztzz^ something (in a way that does affect it) and damaging its interests become difficult of application (not to say nonsignificant, except in extended senses). The unsatisfactoriness of the sentience criterion for what one can hold obligations ^azJarzis can be grasped from the case of the sentient machine or purely sentient creature which does not have preferen­ ces, does not care what state it is in or whether it is destroyed,etc. The sentience criterion is often converted by utilitarians into a suffer­ ing criterion, by taking pain as a paradigm of sentience: but plainly the two criteria diverge since some sentient creatures may never feel pain or suffer. Suffering is even less satisfactory than sentience; for suffering is neither necessary nor sufficient for being in a dispreferred state (consider masochists who suffer but are not in a dispreferred state, and well-treated workers who are in a dispreferred state but do not suffer). Preference-having provides a lower bound; it is a sufficient but zzat zzecassurz/ condition for being an object of this sort of moral 9 consideration and concern. That it is not necessary is revealed, independently of environmental examples, by the following sorts of cases: the treatment of "human vegetables", successful stoics, and science­ fiction cases in which people are brain-washed into performing certain goals and having no dispreferred states apart from the programmed goals. In all three cases the question of dispreferences does not arise, but relevant moral issues can.*^ The necessary condition, that corresponds to preference-having as a sufficient condition, appears to be capability at some time (e.g. previously, when developed) for preference-having. It has been taken for granted that many animals (from species higher on the evolutionary scale) have preferences, make choices, and the like. This is the merest commonsense, which can be readily confirmed in a scientific way. For example, some of the preference-rankings of a black­ tail wallaby as to types of foliage to eat are readily established by observation, and it is fairly straightforward verifying that bushrats prefer cheese to soap, this preference being revealed by regular choices. It has however been claimed by some recent philosophers, for reasons apparently different from those offered by traditional philosophers such as Aristotle, Aquinas and Descartes,that animals do not have intentions, or at least do not have them in a full sense. It is unclear whether these intentions, which are taken to include thoughts and beliefs and, perhaps, desires, include preferences; but it is hard to see how preferences, which are intentional, are excluded if desires are included in intentions. The recent arguments to show that animals do not really have intentions, which do not bear much investigation even in such central cases as belief,12 appear extremely feeble when applied to preference. For the arguments start from the claim that we cannot say zjTzat it is that animals As N Griffin, who supplied the examples, remarked a similar thing happens also in less extreme cases of the type brought in to prominence, e.q. by the women's movement: that it is possible, by means of indoctrination, to limit the range of someone's dispreferences; treatment of such persons may still remain immoral even when it does not place them outside the (artificially widened) range of their preferred states. 11 The traditional reasons look slight also in the case of preferences and choices. It would have been claimed - the theory forces the claim Interestingly, choices - that animals' choices could not be rational, of many animals conform to behavioural criteria for rationality pro posed in economics. (forthcoming) 12 See J. Bishop, 'More thought on thought and talk', and R Routley, 'Alleged problems in attributing beliefs to anima s , paper'prepared for the B.Ztef conference, University of Queensland, 1979. 10 believe (of course very often we can, and unproblematically) and fall back on the claim that animals lack concepts of a fit sort. In the case of preferences, however, there is often no problem in saying what it is animals prefer, or in confirming the claim. Nor is it that we cannot attribute propositional-style preferences to animals; if black-tail wallabies prefer, as they do, new foliage to old then they prefer the foliage's being new over the foliage's being old. As for the concept claim, in the sense in which is delineated in psychology, animals have concepts. And if a philosopher's notion of "concept gets in the way of the claim that free dogs prefer bones to carrots (or other vegetables) then it is not the claim that requires revision, but the philosopher's notion. The preference-having criteria appear to distinguish non-arbitrarily and sharply enough between higher animals and other items, and to rule out of the relevant class elementary animals, trees, rocks and also some human items, e.g. human kidneys. The criteria plainly exclude inanimate objects, and they separate animate objects. For while living creatures such as plants and elementary animals can be said in an extended sense to have and also optimal living conditions, e.g., for healthy develop­ ment, and in sense to have preferred states or environments, they do not have preferences, and cannot be put into states they disprefer. All that is required for an 'interest' or 'welfare' in the broad sense is a telos or life-goal, as possessed by living things, or an equilibrium or system goal, as possessed by living ecosystems. At the same time the criteria indicate another important division. For in a wider sense, animate objects which do not (significantly) have preferences or make choices, are sometimes said to have or 'preferred environments' (as, e.g., in 'the plant prefers a sunny frost-free location with a well drained soil'). us say that the or preferred states To avoid confusion let of animate objects and also such biological items as ecosystems can be affected in one way or another, e.g. increased, decreased, upset.For instance, the wellbeing of a coastal community and of the individual trees in it can be reduced to zero by sandmining, and it can be seriously threatened by pumping waste detergent 13 in this broad sense too, living things, things that participate in the growth process, have interests. However under a narrower and more common determinate of the slippery term 'interests', only preference­ havers have interests (again sentient creatures do not provide the boundary). Because the term 'interests' so readily admits of high redefinition, and the infiltration of chauvinism, its use is better limited (or even avoided), in favour of other more stable terms. 11 There is a general obligation principle into the nearby ocean. corresponding likewise to this more comprehensive class of welfare bearers, namely, sz/sf67??s ohjecfs <9r ^<90<i reason. Moral does not of course end with what is in some way animate, much as the class of valuable objects is not tied to what relates suitably to central preference-havers. In suitable settings, a (virtually) dead landscape, a rare stone, a cave, can be items of moral or aesthetic concern; indeed any object of value can in principle be of such concern, and in principle at least, value or disvalue, and so of woraZ concern. almost any sort of object. <2% object of There can then be obligations Naturally only a fraction of the things that exist have especial value, and only a few of the things that exist will be things concerning which some of us have obligations. Furthermore these sorts of obligations do not in general reduce to the conditions or arrangements (e.g. contractual or joint welfare arrangements) of preference-havers or some select subclass thereof (what will sub­ sequently be called, as the argument is developed, the base cZass). Just as there are relevant divisions beyond the class of preference­ havers, so there are within the class. Thus the suggestion that the class towards which moral obligations (and a corresponding sort of moral concern which takes account of creatures' states) may be held is bounded by the class of preference-havers, does not of course imply that d^st^^ot^o^s can be made the class of preference-havers with respect to the kind of behaviour appropriate to them. For example, obligations which by no means exhaust obligations - can only be held directly (as distinct from by way of a representative) with respect to a much narrower class of creatures, from which many humans are excluded. The class is also distinct from the class of persons, at least as 'person' is usually characterised. What emerges is an of types of objects of moral relevance, some matched by types of moral obligation (described toward the end of Routley (a)), with nested zones representing respectively different sorts of objects - such as, objects of moral concern, welfare-having objects, preference-havers (and choice-makers), right-holders, obligationholders and responsibility-bearers, those contractually-comnitted-and the different sorts of obligations that can significantly apply to such objects. Not all the types of objects indicated are distinct, nor is the listing intended to be exhaustive but rather illustrative. For strictly the labels given should be expanded, as the distinctions are categorial ones, so that what matters is not whether an object is, for instance, 12 contractually committed in some fashion but whether it is the sort of thing that can be, whether it can significantly enter into or be committed by arrangements of a contractual kind. is to Similarly function as a categorial marker, that marks out the sorts of things that can (significantly) have preferences: the assumption that preference­ havers coincide with choice-makers is based on this categorial reading. Although the annular picture is (as will become clear in §5) important for the environmental alternative to be elaborated, and in meeting object­ ions to it, the countercharge has been laid that it reintroduces chauvin­ ism through its inegalitarian distinctions. This is a mistake: not every sort of ethical distinction, certainly not a justified distinction, involves chauvinism. Chauvinism is exhibited where, for example, objects of a favoured class are treated in a preferential way to superior items of an excluded class,e.g. defective humans as against apes, degenerate French against normal Pygmies. The annular picture neither involves nor encourages such differences in treatment: it is neutral and unchauvinistic, for the reason that it relies only on categorial distinctions which tie analytically with ethical notions (see the semantical analyses of §5). It is certainly in no way species chauvinist or human chauvinist For none of the zones of the annular picture comprises the class of humans (or its minor variant the class of persons); for this class is not of moral relevance. The reason is that the human/nonhuman distinction is not an ethically significant one, and can, and should, be demoted from its dominant, and damaging, position in ethical theory. notion of But dropping the out of ethics, is only part of the ethical change that is called for: taking due account of nonhumans is also required. In particular - to return to the theme - what is quite unacceptable, 14 and based on a set of distinctions which are arbitrary and unjustifiable, differential treatment enjoined nonpersons as distinct is the ex from persons under Western ethics, and the view that only persons or humans have any (nonderivative) right to moral consideration and concern as preference-havers and that there are obligations towards other creatures such a criticism of chauvinism is based firmly 14 According to Q. Gibson ----- ----. . . . ' " This is simply on Western ethical equality and egalitarian principles,. ___ The general argument not so: there is no reliance on such principles, feature -f cannot be what justifies the differential takes the form; ----- — - . . . treatment of humans and nonhumans, because either f is not morally relevant or not all humans have f or some nonhumans have f., Neither Nei__. equality nor substitutions based upon equality are invoked at any stage. 13 only insofar as these are or reduce to obligations to persons or humans. §2. THE EXTENT OF CHAUVINISM, AND FURTHER LINES OF DEFENCE Western ethics are, then, human chauvinist in that they characterist ically take humans (or, to make a slight improvement, persons) to be the only items worthy of proper moral consideration, and sanction or even enjoin substantially inferior treatment for the class of non-human preference-having creatures, without - so it certainly appears - adequate justification. The prevailing nineteenth century Western attitude to wild creatures is evident from Judge Blackstone (quoted approvingly in Penguin, London, 1967, pp.431): W. Cobbett, E^raZ With regard likewise to wild animals, aZZ rT?a%kZ%<7 arZ^ZnaZ bz/ the the Creator a right to pursue and take away any fowl or insect of the air, any fish or inhabitant of the waters, and any beast or reptile of the field: and this natural right still continues in every individual, unless where it is restrained by the civil laws of the country. And when a man has once so seized them, they become, while living his qualified property, or if dead, are absolutely his own. Prevailing Western attitudes have not shifted markedly since that time; for example, foresters, widely regarded as socially responsible, think nothing of dislodging from their homes and environment, or even destroying, communities of animals which do not directly interfere with human welfare. But there is another very important broader respect in which Western ethics are human (or person) chauvinistic, namely in the treat­ ment accorded to and attitude taken towards the broader class of natural items such as trees and forests, herbs, grasslands and swamps, soils and waterways and ecosystems. Unlike higher animals such items cannot liter­ ally be put into dispreferred states (and in Z/zZs obvious sense, as opposed to the wider sense of 'interests' tied to welfare, they have no interests), but they can be damaged or destroyed or have their eroded or impaired. The Western, chauvinistic, assumption is that this can only happen where human interests are affected. The basic assumption is that value attaches essentially only to humans or to what serves or bears on human interests, or derivatively, to items which derive from human skill, ingenuity or labour. Since natural items have no other value, there is no restriction on the way they are treated insofar as this does not interfere with others; as far as ZsoZate^ natural things are con­ cerned anything is permissible. 14 It is, at base, because of these chauvinistic features of Western ethics that there is a need for a new ethic and value theory (and so derivatively for a new economics, and new politics, etc.) setting out not just people's relations to preference-havers generally but also (along with many other things) people's relations to the natural environment - in Leopold's words 'an ethic dealing with man's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it' ct/zer essuz/s (A. Leopold, A Coz^/ztz/ New York, 1966, p.238). /Uzzzu^zuc It is not of course that old and prevailing ethics do not deal with man's relation to nature: they do, and on the prevailing view man is free to deal with nature as he pleases, i.e. his relations with nature - insofar at least as they do not affect others, as pollution and vandalism do - are not subject to moral censure. Thus assertions such as 'Crusoe ought not to be mutilating those trees' are significant and morally determinate but inasmuch at least as Crusoe's actions do not interfere with others, they are false or do not hold - and trees are not, in a good sense, moral objects. It is to this, to the values and evaluations of the prevailing ethics, that Leopold, Fraser Darling and many others, both earlier and later, take exception. Leopold regards as subject to moral criticism, as wrong, behaviour that on prevailing views is morally permissible. But it is not, then, as Leopold seems to think, that such behaviour is beyond the scope of the prevailing ethics and that merely an extension of traditional morality is required to cover such cases, to fill a moral void. If Leopold is right in his criticism of prevailing conduct, what is required is a change in the ethics, in attitudes, values and evaluations; for example, what is permissible on the prevailing ethics will be no longer permissible on the new. For as matters stand, as Leopold himself explains, humans generally do not feel morally ashamed if they interfere with a wilderness, if they maltreat the land, extract from it whatever will yield, and then move on; and such conduct is not taken to interfere with and does not rouse the moral indignation of others, and is accordingly permissible on prevailing ethics. As Leopold says: A farmer who clears the woods off a 75% slope, turns his cows into the clearing, and dumps its rainfall, rocks, and soil into the coi^munity creek, is still (if otherwise decent) a respected member of society (op. cit., p.245). Only recently has such behaviour begun to be seriously questioned and become the subject of criticism,e.g. by environmentalists. Under what will be accounted an eyz^trozi/TzeMtuZ gtTz^c, however, such traditionally 15 permissible conduct would be accounted morally wrong, and the farmer subject to proper moral criticism. That ethics and morality are not, and never have been, restricted to human concerns, or exclusively to relations between persons, is important in rebutting objections to the very idea of an environmental ethic, based on the premiss that morality just is restricted (definitionally) to human relationships (and connected values) and is not significant beyond that. The problem of moral relations with respect to preference-havers other than persons and to inanimate items cannot be resolved or escaped simply by declaring morality to apply solely,or as a matter of meaning or defin­ ition only to humans (or to persons). For first, such a solution would run counter to the common view that humans are subject to some moral con­ straints, even if comparatively minor ones, towards other creatures; the having of such constraints cannot be ruled out definitionally, and corres pondingly the judgments formulating these constraints or prohibitions cannot be ruled out as nonsignificant, yet they are surely moral. The only way in the end, that the claim gets support is by a narrow, and no longer acceptable, account of what is moral in terms of concern with humans alone (cf. S6). Likewise, the question of the moral interrelations of humans with intelligent nonhuman extraterrestrial beings, even if at present hypothetical, is certainly a meaningful one, and some interesting and clearly moral issues of this sort are frequently raised in science fiction. Only if the extent of morality is, somewhat misleadingly, reconstrue in terms of the class of constraints on the behaviour of those it applies to - that is, in terms of limitations, as distinct from moral freedom does the claim that Western morality is restricted to humans (or persons) begin to gain plausibility. For it is true that beyond the favoured base class, humans or persons, few constraints are supposed to operate (and ad hoc ones at that) unless the welfare of members of the base class is adversely affected. Under an environmental ethic, such as that Leopold advocates, this would change: previously unconstrained behaviour would be morally circumscribed, and in this sense the scope of morality would be extended. It is not evident, however, that a ethic ethic, an in the case at hand, is required to accommodate even radical new judgments seriously constraining traditionally approved conduct, i.e. imposing limitations on behaviour previously considered morally permissible. For one reason it is none too clear what is going to count as a new ethic, much as it is often unclear whether a new development in physics counts as a new physics or just as a modification or extension of the old. 16 For, notoriously, ethics are not clearly articulated or at all well worked out, so that the application of identity criteria for ethics may remain obscure. They are nonetheless (pace Quineans) perfectly good objects for investigation. Furthermore, there is a tendency to cluster a family of ethical systems which do not differ on core or fundamental principles together as the one ethic: e.g. the Christian ethic, which is an umbrella notion covering a cluster of differing and even competing systems. There are two other possibilities, apart from a new environmental ethic, which might cater for the new principles and evaluations; that of an extension or modification of the prevailing ethic, and that of the development of principles that are already encompassed or latent within the prevailing ethic. The possibility that environmental evaluations can be incorporated within (and ecological problems solved within) the not inflexible framework of prevailing Western ethics, may appear open because there is not a single ethical system uniquely assumed in Western civiliz­ ation: on many issues, and especially on controversial issues such as infanticide, women's rights and drugs, there are competing sets of principles. Talk of a new ethic and prevailing ethics tends to suggest a sort of monolithic structure, a uniformity, that prevailing ethics, and even a single ethic, need not have. The Western ethic is not so monolithic. In particular, three important traditions in Western ethical views n ,been mapped .3 out: 4. 15 a concerning man's relation to nature have recently dominant tradition, the despotic position, with man as despot (or tyrant), and two lesser traditions, the stewardship position, with man as custod­ ian, and the cooperative position with man as perfector. the only traditions; Nor are these primitivism is another, and both romanticism and mysticism have influenced Western views. The dominant Western view is simply inconsistent with an environmental ethic; for according to it nature is the dominion of man and he is free to deal with it as he pleases (since - at least on the mainstream StoicAugustine view - it exists only for his sake^^), whereas on an See especially (a) J. Passmore, Man's Fespons^btZ^^z/ for Duckworth, London, 1974; also R. Nash, ^tZderness an^ t/ze Yale University Press, New Haven, 1973. (All further references to Passmore's work are, unless otherwise indicated, to Passmore (a).) The dominant position has also been sketched in many other recent texts, e.g. I. McHarg, Z)es^<yn Doubleday, New York, 1969, while the lesser traditions have been appealed to in meeting criticisms of the Western ethic as involving the dominant view. The masculine particles are appropriate; so is the resulting tone. environmental ethic man is not so free to do as s/he pleases. But it is not quite so obvious that an environmental ethic cannot be coupled with one of the lesser traditions. Part of the problem is that the lesser traditions are by no means adequately characterised anywhere, especially when the religious backdrop is removed, e.g. (as further considered in §4) who is man steward for and responsible to? However both traditions are inconsistent with a deeper environmental ethic because they imply policies of complete interference, whereas on an environmental ethic some worthwhile parts of the earth's surface should be preserved from sub­ stantial human interference, whether of the "improving" sort or not. Both traditions would in fact prefer to see the earth's land surfaces reshaped along the lines of the tame and comfortable but ecologically impoverished European small farm and village langscape. According to the cooperative position man's proper role is to develop, cultivate and perfect nature - all nature eventually - by bringing out its potential­ ities, the test of perfection being basically purposes; /or while on the stewardship view man's role, like that of a farm manager, is to make nature productive by his efforts though not by means that will deliberately degrade its resources. Thus these positions figure among those of the shallow ecological movement (as depicted by A. Naess, 16 'The shallow and the deep, long-range ecology movement', Tr^M^rz/ (1973), 95-100): longer term. they are typically exploitative, even if only in the Although these lesser positions both depart from the dominant position in a way which enables the incorporation of some evaluations of an environmental ethic, e.g. some of those concerning the irresponsible farmer, and allow for some of the modern extensions of the Western ethic that have been made, e.g. concerning the treatment of animals and criticisms of vandalism, they are not well-developed, fit poorly into the prevailing framework, and do zzof p<9 /ar orozz^Zz. For in the present situation of expanding populations confined to finite natural areas, they will lead to, and enjoin the perfecting, farming and utilizing of all natural areas. Indeed these lesser traditions lead to, what a thorough­ going environmental ethic would reject, a principle of total use, implying 17 that every natural area should be cultivated or otherwise used for /zzzzzzor 17 if 'use' is extended, somewhat illicitly, to include use for preservation, this total use principle is rendered innocuous at least as regards it actual effects. Note that the total use principle, in the usual sense, is tied to the resource view of nature (cf. (d) R. and V. Routley, F-z^/zt /or z^/ze Forests, Third Edition, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1975). Such a principle, like the requirement of economic growth, emerges directly from - it is an integral part of neoclassical economic theory. 18 18 "humanized". As the important Western traditions mentioned exclude an environ­ mental ethic, it would appear, at first glance anyway, that such an ethic - not primitive, mystical or romantic - would be new alright - or at least new from a Western perspective. For, from a wider perspective, which takes due account of traditional societies (such as those of some American Indians, Australian Aboriginals, and Pygmies), there is, it will turn out, nothing so very new about what is included in (as distinct from the theoretical setting of) the "new" ethics. Even from the narrow Western perspective, the matter is not so straightforward. for the dominant ethic has been substantially qualified, in particular by the rider that one is not always entitled to do as one pleases where this physically interferes with others.^ It may be that some such non-inter­ ference proviso was implicit all along (despite evidence to the contrary); and that it was simply assumed that doing what one pleased vn.th natural items would not affect others (a^oT^terfereMcg assMwpf^^). it may, the Be this as appears, at least for many thinkers to have supplanted the dominant position; and the modified position can undoubtedly go much further towards an environmental ethic. For example the farmer's polluting of a community stream may be ruled immoral on the grounds that it physically interferes with others who use or would use the stream. Likewise business enterprises which destroy the natural environ­ ment for no satisfactory (taxable) returns or which cause pollution deleterious to the health of future humans can be criticised on the sort of welfare basis (e.g. that of P.W. Barkley and D.W. Seckier, 18 Humanization, and humanitarian measures, may be a cloak for human chauvinism - in which case, far from being virtuous, they may be positively undesirable. 19 Also, as Leopold has observed, the class of has been ively widened, e.g. from the family group, to the tribe, to the nation or race, even to all humans including often enough future humans but rarely further in the West until recently. of 20 The assumption is not the same as its relative, Benn's 'that no one may legitimately frustrate or prevent (or interfere with) a person's doing what he chooses to do, ^nles there is some reason for preventing him (Benn (c), op. cit., in from (a) P.605). The principle is said to derive from 'the notion of a person' ^e.g. (a), p.605), but it only so derives given commission ofPfhe fallacy of conversion of an A-proposition. Moreover even reduced to a 'formal principle ... locating the onus of justification (cf (a)) the principle is dubious, especially given principles of respect for objects other than persons, with which persons may be interfering. It is, however, a formal principle that will help to keep entreprenuerial humans happy. * GrozjZ/z <2%^ Dgcaz/, T/ze ^oZz^ZZc^ ^gcowgs York, 1972) that blends with the modified position; be criticised on welfare grounds; and so on. Fr^hZ^w^ New vandalism can usually The modified position may even serve to restrict the sort of family size one is entitled to have, since in a finite situation excessive population levels will interfere with future people. Nonetheless neither the modified dominant position nor its Western variants, obtained by combining it with the lesser trad­ itions, is adequate as an environmental ethic. chauvinism. None moves outside human They are all encompassed under the t^es-Zs - the view that the earth and all its non-human contents exist or are available for human benefit or to serve human interests, and hence that humans are entitled to manipulate the world and its systems as they want, in their own interests - which is but the ecological restatement of the strong thesis of human chauvinism, according to which items outside the privil­ eged human class have no value except one as instrumental value (both theses are criticised in Routley (a)). To escape from chauvinism, and from its thesis, a new ethic -Zs wanted, as we now try to show. §3. GENERAL ENVIRONMENTAL ARGUMENTS AGAINST WESTERN ETHICS The main argument is directed primarily against the modified dominant position, but will incidentally show the inadequacy of the lesser Western traditions. The strategy is to locate core features of Western ethics, and to reveal through examples their thoroughgoing chauvinism and class bias, and in this way to provide decisive grounds for rejecting For the general argument some more technical points have to be made them. first. (An) spgcZyZc ethic, is ambiguous, as between a specific ethical system, a and a more generic notion, a specific ethics are grouped. under which (As usual, a weZu-ethic is a theory about ethics, super-ethics, their features and fundamental notions.) An ^Z/zZcaZ sz/sZsw s is, near enough, a propositional system (i.e. a structured set of propositions) or a theory which includes (like individuals of a theory) a set of values and (like postulates of a theory) a set of general evaluative judgments concerning conduct, typically of what is obligatory, permissible and wrong, of what are rights and responsibilities, what is valued, and so forth, (On newer perceptions an ethical system will include rather less in the way of prescriptions, of duties, obligations and the like, and more as to what are matters of care and of concern and for respect.) Since an ethical system is propositional in character, such notions as consistency, coherence, independence of 20 a assumptions, and the like, apply to it without further ado. It is evident, from a consideration of competing or incompatible values and principles, that are sz/s^ews. Moreover appropriately general criteria for rationality will not reduce this class to a singleton. Accordingly, there is logical space for a^terrzaf^re A general or lawlike proposition of a system (characterised along similar lines to a scientific law) is a pr^Mc^pZe; and certainly if systems Si and S2 contain different principles, they they are different systems. It will follow then that an environmental ethic differs from the important traditional ethics outlined if it differs on some principles. Moreover if environmental ethics differ from each Western ethical system on some core principle or other embedded in that Western system, then these systems differ from the Western super-ethic (assuming, what seems to be so, that that ethic can be sufficiently characterised) - in which case if an environmental ethic is needed then a new ethic is wanted. It would suffice then to locate a common core principle and to provide environmental counterexamples to it. It is illuminating (and necessary, so it will emerge) to attempt to do a little more than this minimum, with a view to bringing out the basic assumptions of the Western super-ethic. Two major classes of evaluative statements, commonly distinguished, are axiological statements, concerning what is good, worthwhile, valuable, best, etc., and deontological state­ ments, which concern what is obligatory, permissible, wrong, etc. Now there appear to be core principles of Western ethics on both axiological and deontic fronts, principles, for example, as to what is valuable and as to what is permissible. Naturally these principles are interconnected, because anything is permitted with respect to what has no value except insofar as it interferes with what does have value. A strong historical case can be made out for what is commonly assumed, that there are, what amount to, core principles of Western ethical systems, principles that will accordingly belong to the super- ethic. example. The fairness principle inscribed in the Golden Rule provides one Directly relevant here, as a good stab at a core deontic principle, is the commonly formulated liberal principle of the modified A recent formulation of this principle runs as 21 follows (Barkley and Seckier, op. cit., p.58): dominant position. On next page. 21 The liberal philosophy of the Western world holds that (D) one should be able to do what he wishes, providing (1) that he does not harm others {and (2) that he is not likely to harm himself irreparably}. The principle, which is built into or derivable from most traditional ethical theories, may be alternatively formulated in terms of permissib­ ility, as the principle that <2 person's (foes no^ ^n^er/ere zJ-^/z o^/zers, ^s perw^ss^&^e provt^e^ (i.e. other people, including perhaps the A related economic principle is that free enterprise can operate agent). within similar limits. It is because of these permissibility formulations that the principle - which incorporates fundamental features of (human or person) chauvinism - is sometimes hailed as a freedom principle; for it gives permission to perform a wide range of actions (including actions which degrade the environment and natural things) providing they do not harm others. others. In fact it tends to cunningly shift the onus of proof to It is worth remarking that 'harming others' in the restriction is narrower than a restriction to the (usual) interests of others; it is not enough that it is in my interests, because I detest you, that you stop breathing; you are free to breath, for the time being anyway, because it does not harm me. There remains a problem however as to exactly what counts as harm or interference. Moreover the width of the principle is so far obscure, because 'other' may be filled out in significantly different ways: 21 it makes a difference to the extent - and privilege - of The principle is attributed by Barkley and Seckier to Mill, though something like it was fairly common currency in nineteenth century European thought. It appears, furthermore, that Mill would have rejected the principle on account of clause (2): thus, for example: Those interests, I contend, authorise the subjection of individual spontaneity to external control, ozzZz/ in respect of those actions of each, which concern the interest of o^Zzer people (J.S. Mill, (/^^Z^^ar^uzz^szzzj L^&gr^z/ az-z^f 7?eprese?z^az^zze ^ozz6r?z777g?z^, Everyman's Library, Dent, London, 1910, p.74, emphasis added). The deletion of clause (2) from (D) does not affect the general argument: hence the braces. (We owe this reference and the points in the next footnote to N. Griffin.) A similarly modified form of (D) is found in much recent Western literature, even radical literature which purports to make due allow­ ance for environmental concerns. A good example of the latter is I. Illich, TcoZs /cr Cofz^ttz^uZ-z^z/, Calder & Boyers, London, 1973, where Mill's (D) appears, in various forms, at several places (e.g. p.xii, p.41). What this indicates is that Illich's "convivial society" will not - if its principles are taken seriously - move beyond chauvinism in its treatment of animals and the natural environment; it will at best yield some form of resource conservation. 22 a the chauvinism whether 'other' expands to 'other human' - which is too restrictive - or to 'other person' or to 'other sentient being'; and it makes a difference to the adequacy of the principle, and inversely to its economic applicability, to which class of other persons it is intended to apply, whether to future as well as to present others, whether to remote future others or only to nondiscountable future others, and whether to poss^bZe others. The latter would make the principle untestable and com­ and it is generally assumed that it pletely unworkable in practice; applies at most to present and (some) future others, to those to whom it would make a (fairly immediate) difference (thus excluding past others ). For the purposes of the general argument however, the problems in specify­ ing the class of others is not material, so long as the class includes no 23 more than persons that at some time exist. Fortunately the main argument is not very sensitive to the precise formulation of principle (D). Not only can clause (2) be deleted, and 'other' left rather unspecific, but additions can be made; then even if the main argument does not succeed, m-z^or succeed. o/ t/ze zzzu^M arpz^g?^ An important case concerns the treatment of animals. Unless (D) is construed widely (extending 'other'), or hedged by further qualifying clauses,24 the basic principle fails to take proper account of concern for animals, especially that one should not inflict "unnecessary cruelty or "impermissible" harm. animals then comes to matter; these issues can be avoided. What counts as per^ss^Me Tzurzzz to and familiar conflict issues arise. But For the core principle (D), of basic chauvinism, can be modified to include (historically recent) moral concern for higher animals by adding, after 'harm others', something like 'or harm animals unnecessarily'. Then however the new principle succumbs to the 22 Although the interests and preferences of past others are excluded in conventional utilitarianism, as in (welfare) economic theory and vot inq theory, these are often respected in ethical and legal settings, e.g. in wills, last wishes, etc. Similarly (as N. Griffin also point­ ed out), in the treatment of "human vegetables", past preferences of the person when capable of making decisions are often taken to be morally relevant, or even decisive, to the question as to whether to keep the body alive. 23 if merely possible persons are included then the valuational rankings of environmental ethics, indeed of virtually any ethics, can be reflected in a "utilitarian" fashion. The argument of (c) R. and V. Routley, 'Semantical foundations for value theory', (accepted for publication in 1974; still forthcoming?), can be used to show this. 24 or unless it can be made out, what seems entirely implausible, that what is wrong with torturing animals is not what it does to them but the way it affects other people (the Aquinas-Kant thesis). 23 main argument - upon at most simple variation of the counterexamples to be given. Modification becomes more important in the case of standard ethical theories which lead to principles conflicting with (D), such as utilitar­ ianism does unless (D) and the maximisation principle of utilitarianism are appropriately segregated, e.g. by severing connections at some point in the chain connecting entitlement, permissibility, right, maximum utility. For, as in widely recognised, net utility may be increased in ways that violate (D), e.g. by injustice to, or the infliction of suffer­ ing upon, or harming, some individual by others. Thus utilitarianisms in the tradition of Mill, which both include (D) and characterise entitlement in utilitarian terms, are inconsistent (as simple hypothetical cases show). To avoid counterexamples it is not enough merely to distinguish higher and lower utilities, though this is an initial step in what is required, namely - ideally by constraints (as is explained in §5) - o/ unconstrained Although qualification of utilitar­ ianism principles to ensure (D), as a restriction (but not the orzZz/ restriction) on what is permissible,is the proper course, it is a course not all utilitarians are prepared to follow. To defeat isms, it is not enough to adduce counterexamples to (D). utilitarian­ Counterexamples to some other core principle of such utilitarianisms must be located; otherwise the main argument fails against a quite standard, and important, class of positions supporting chauvinism and the Dominion thesis. Fortunately, again, neither a suitable core principle nor appropriate counterexamples are hard to find. The common utilitarian principle provides such a core, and several of the examples directed against (D) serve to counter it (in its various forms). An axiological principle corresponding to (D) (%72<i to some of its variants) runs along these lines: (A) Only those objects which are of use or concern to humans (or persons), or which are the product of human (or person) labour or ingenuity, are of value; thus these are all that need to be taken into account in determining best choice or best course of action, what is good, etc. Roughly, value consists in answering back to certain features of human (or person) involvement. No calculus of value or what is best need look beyond human values. According to a matching value-ranking thesis, item a is better than b only if a serves human concerns more than b. A narrower version of principle (A) embedded in main forms of Marxism is 24 the human labour theory of value. 25 Thus a corollary will be that Marxism is certainly - unless severely modified - no direction in which to seek an environmental ethic or social theory. There may appear to be exceptions to principle (A) in such objects But although values are assigned to works of art where as works of art. these may not positively affect human welfare, the basis for assigning value is usually taken to be the human skill or ingenuity involved in their production. principle (A). Hence such assignments do not extend, or violate, Indeed the problem raised by natural objects which cost nothing to produce and involved nothing human is very different from the matter of valuing art objects. objects rctse <2 problem. There are also other important differences between natural objects and works of art, apart from the characteristic noninvolvement of humans, namely those turning on the issues of replaceability and the reversibility of destruction. Human artefacts are always replaceable by similar objects, e.g. modern cities, especially concrete jungles are all too similar and replaceable, and using modern techniques paintings can be substanially duplicated; whereas there is no possibility of replicating, even remotely, such as extinct species or real damaged or destroyed natural objects jungles (or lost or vanishing cultures). In terms of replacement costs, these are much more valuable than such human artefacts as material works of art. Thus attempts to assimilate natural objects to material works of art break down. There is an additional reason for rejecting a now familiar approach to natural objects through works of art, namely that it is premissed on the assumption that some sort of chauvinistic account of works of art is adequate: that is not so, as the (intermediate) situation of objet trouve begins to reveal. It is in connection with principles qualification to (D) and especially (A) that the ethics (already required at several points) becomes important for the argument; for various non-Western ethics have not adopted these principles, e.g. both American Indians and Australian Aborigines appear to recognise clearly values in natural items which are not reducible (simply or at all) to human values - and apparently not essentially theistic (supra-human). In any case Western ethics and 25 According to some Marxists, and apparently to Marx, the labour theory is superceded when the period of accumulation is completed and the post­ scarcity era reached. But by the time this high-energy high-tech stage is reached, if ever, irreparable and frequently irreversible environmental damage will have been wreaked. 26 On next page. 25 p attitudes, and more comprehensively the associated ideologies, are of critical importance; for it is to these and Western influence that the world's main - serious and very extensive - environmental problems can be ascribed. Hypothetical situations are introduced in designing counterexamples to core principles (D) and (A). The basis of the method lies in the semantical analyses of permissibility, obligation and value statements which stretch out over ideal situations (which may be incomplete or even inconsistent), so that what is permissible holds in some permitted situation, what is obligatory in every such situation, and what is wrong is excluded m every such situation. But the main point to grasp for the counterexamples that follow, is that ethical principles if correct are universal and are assessed over a class of situations. Thus hypothetical cases are logically perfectly legitimate and cannot be ruled out on one pretext or another, e.g. as rare, as desert island cases, as hypothetical, The counterexamples to (D) and (A) presented depend largely on etc. designing situations different from the actual where there are either too few or too many humans or persons. But alternative special situations where interference with others is minimized or is immaterial are readily devised. (i) The example. The last man (or woman or person) surviving the collapse of the world system sets to work eliminating, as far as he can, every living thing, animal or plant (but painlessly if you like, as at the best abattoirs). What he does is quite permissible according to principle (D) but on environmental grounds what he does is wrong. Moreover one does not have to be committed to esoteric values to regard Mr. Last Man as behaving badly and destroying things of value (the reason being perhaps that radical thinking and values have shifted in an environmental direction in advance of corresponding shifts in the Characteristically Westerners have attempted to recast these value systems, sometimes misleadingly, in a religious guise - probably because it was thought that there was no non-religious way of presenting them so as to make them intelligible or have them comprehended. Thus they get represented as basically chauvinistic in view of the relations of Man and God. On these semantical analyses, which avoid all the usual problems of modal theories of axiological and deontic terms, see R. Routley, R.K. Meyer, and others, RSSS, Australian National University, 1979, chapters 7 and 8. A sketch is given in §5 below. The situations or worlds with respect to which the interpretation is made permit of different construals; e.g. instead of permitted situ­ ations, the situations can be construed evaluatively as ideal situations. 26 3 Q formulation of fundamental evaluative principles). The usual vandalism charge does not apply against Mr. Last Man since he does no damage to others. Moreover, Mr. Last Man's activities may be toned down to avoid any vandalism charge, yet succumb to the (extended) chauvinist charge, e.g. he may simply destroy sows environ­ mentally valuable things unnecessarily (without due reason or some need). (ii) The Zest pgopZe example. to the last people example. The last man example can be extended We can assume that they know they are the last people, e.g. because they are aware that radiation effects have One considers the last people in blocked any chance of reproduction. order to rule out the possibility that what these people do harms or somehow physically interferes with later people. Otherwise one could as well consider science fiction cases where people arrive at a new planet and destroy its ecosystems, whether with good intentions such as perfect­ ing the planet for their ends and making it more fruitful or, forgetting the lesser traditions, just for the sheer enjoyment of it. Let us assume that the last people are very numerous. They humanely exterminate every wild animal and they eliminate the fish of the seas, they put all arable land under intensive cultivation, and all remaining natural forests disappear in favour of pastures or plantations,and so on. They may give various familiar reasons for this, e.g. they believe it is the way to salvation or to perfection, or they are simply satisfying reasonable needs, or even that it is needed to keep the last people employed or occupied so that they do not worry too much about their impending extinction. behaved badly; of value; On an environmental ethic the last people have they have done what is impermissible and destroyed much for they have simplified and largely destroyed all the natural ecosystems, and with their demise the world will soon be an ugly and largely wrecked place. But this conduct may conform with the core principles (D) and (A), and as well with the principles enjoined by the lesser traditions under more obvious construals of these principles. Indeed the main point of elaborating this extension of the last man example is because principles (D) and (A) may, as they stand, appear to conflict with stewardship, cooperation and perfection positions, as the last man example reveals. The apparent conflict between these positions and principle (D) may be definitively removed, it seems, by conjoining a further proviso to the principle, to the effect (3) that he does not wilfully destroy natural resources. But as the last people who are not vandals do not destroy resources wilfully, but perhaps "for the best of 28 reasons", the variant is still environmentally inadequate. 28 On next page. 27 (iii) The ^reu^ eTz^repr^KeMr example. The last man example can be adjusted so as to not fall foul of clause (3). industrialist; The last man is an he runs a giant complex of automated factories and farms which he proceeds to extend. He produces automobiles among other things, from renewable and recyclable resources of course, only he dumps and recycles these shortly after manufacture and sale to a dummy buyer instead of putting them on the road for a short time as we do. Of course he has the best of reasons for his activity, e.g. he is increasing gross world product, or he is improving output to fulfil some plan, and he will be increasing his own and general welfare since he much prefers increased output and productivity. The entrepreneur's behaviour is on the Western ethic quite permissible; indeed his conduct is commonly thought to be quite fine and even meets Pareto optimality requirements given prevailing notions of being "better off". It may be objected, however, that there is no reason or warrant for the great entrepreneur's production and it is simply wasteful. But we can easily amend the example by adding consumers who want to use the out­ put. Just as we can extend the last man example to a class of last people, so we can extend (iii) to the socket!/ example (iv): the society looks depressingly like ours except for its reproductive incapacity. (v) The species example. The blue whale (reduced to a 29 mixed good on the economic picture ) is on the verge of extinction because of its qualities as a private good, as a profitable source of oil and meat. whalers; The catching and marketing of blue whales does not harm the it does not harm or physically interfere with others in any good sense, though it may upset them and they may be prepared to compen­ sate the whalers if they desist; destruction. nor need whale hunting be wilful (Slightly different examples which eliminate the hunting aspect of the blue whale example are provided by cases where a species is eliminated or threatened through destruction of its habitat by man's 28 There are however elements in the lesser traditions - especially if 'cooperation' and 'perfection' are reconstrued in less chauvinistic and homocentric terms - which point the way to a more satisfactory ethic. 29 The example is adapted from Barkley and Seckier, op. cit., who nicely expose the orthodox economic picture. To make the example more difficult for utilitarians in the tradition of Bentham, it can be further supposed that the killing of the whalesis near instantaneous and painless, the whale products are very valuable to humans and indeed irreplaceable, and that the whales led a good life while they lived. (Would the killing of remote groups of humans under similar conditions be then so much worse?). 28 * activity or the activities of animals he has introduced, e.g. many plains-dwelling Australian marsupials and the Arabian oryx.) The behaviour of the whalers in eliminating this magnificent species of whale is accordingly quite permissible - at least according to basic chauvinism. But on an environmental ethic it is not. However the free-market mechanism did not cease allocating whales to commercial uses, as a satisfactory environmental economics would: instead the market system ground inexorably (for the sorts of reasons well-explained in Barkley and Seckier, op. cit.) along the private demand curve until the blue whale population was no longer viable. It has been objected that the operation of the free market is restrained by ethical principles - or rather legally enforced copies thereof; for example, it would be profitable to exploit child labour, but moral prohibitions, legally enforced, exclude such exploitation of children. But the case is quite different; children, unlike young animals such as vealers, are already shielded under the modified dominant position. If anything, the "objection" is a further illustration of chauvinism at work.^O Although the vanishing species example given does not apply decisively against extended utilitarianisms, such as that of Bentham, which widen the base class to all sentient creatures, the case is easily varied so that it does: class of tropical plant species simply select one of the currently threatened with extinction. (vi) The /actorz/ /arm example. On the farm animals of various sorts are kept under artificial, confined conditions and simply used for the market goods they deliver, e.g. eggs in the case of battery hens, milk in the case of rotor cows, veal in the case of calves. The animals are subject to whatever conditions (e.g. forced feeding, iron deficient diets, constant lighting) will deliver maximal quantities of desired goods for the human commodity market. The animals do not necessarily suffer pain (and insofar as they do in behaviourally conspicuous ways the problem can For the most part the operation of the free market is only constrained by chauvinistic principles: otherwise enterpreneurs tend to undertake whatever apparently profitable business activity they can get away with, including substantial exploitation of animals and widespread environ­ mental destruction, and their lack of concern is illustrated by such facts as that they are generally prepared to pay taxes (e.g. to compensate other humans) rather than to forgo their activities in cases such as river and lake pollution and forest removal. In fact, of course, fairly unfettered operation of the market tends to encourage more restricted chauvinisms, e.g. the exploitation of cheap foreign or female labour in the secondary labour market. 29 be met by antibiotics), but they are imprisoned under dispreferred conditions. The threatment of the animals on the "farm" is perfectly permissible according to the core principle (or at least minor adjustments to exclude unnecessary suffering will ensure conformity), but on an The treatment of the animals on the farm environmental ethic it is not. also seems to conform to the principles of the lesser traditions, insofar as these principles are spelled out in a way that can be applied to the example, that is so long as cooperation and perfection are construed in intended chauvinistic fashion. (vii) The example. The wilderness, though isolated and rarely visited or thought about by environmentalists, is known to contain nothing of use to humans, such as seed or drug supplies, that is not adequately replicated elsewhere. It does contain however some "low quality" forest that could supply pulpwood on a commercial basis were the local government to provide subsidies on the usual basis. The logging would destroy the wilderness in a largely irreversible way (e.g. it grows on high sand dune country or on lateritic soils) and kill many animals which live in the forest. sees The prevailing with the destruction of such ethic wrong nothing a wilderness, nor do the lesser traditions: a deeper environmental ethic does. Again the example requires variation, e.g. to a wilderness devoid of sentient individuals, if it is to counter clearly such extensions of Western ethics as those of animal liberationists. For this sort of reason we do not want to overstate or overrate the role of as distinct from variations upon such examples. examples - Firstly, people deeply committed to human chauvinism - as many, perhaps most, people are - will find some of the examples unconvincing because they depend on non- chauvinistic assumptions. Secondly, there are rejoinders to some of the examples based on the prevailing ethic. In this case what we claim is that there are variations on, and elaborations of the examples which meet such considerations. In connection with this we do not want to deny that there are other strands supplementing the prevailing ethic which are critical of some activities of the sort described in the examples, e.g. anti-vandalism principles and strictures against conspicuous consumption But, as remarked, these principles as reflected, e.g. in sumptuary laws. have not been adequately incorporated in the prevailing ethic in such a way as to meet variations on the examples or to serve environmental purposes; and if the attempt were made to fully incorporate such princi­ ples once again a new ethic would be the upshot. (Compare the situation before the change from an ethic which sanctioned Tzu/na??. slavery.) 30 * In summary,what the examples show is that core axiological and deontic assumptions of the Western super-ethic are environmentally inadequate; and accordingly Western ethics should be superseded by a more environmentally adequate ethic. The class of permissible actions that rebound on the environment is more narrowly circumscribed on such an environmental ethic than it is in the Western superethic, and the class of noninstrumentally valuable objects is correspondingly wider than it is on the Western super-ethic. But is not an environmentalist ethic going too far in implying that these people - those of the examples and respected entrepreneurs and industrialists and bureaucrats, farmers and fishermen and foresters - are behaving, when engaging in environmentally degrading activities of the sort described, in a morally impermissible way? No, what these people do is to a greater or lesser extent evil, since destructive of what is valuable, and hence in serious cases morally impermissible. For example, insofar as the killing or forced displacement of primitive peoples who stand in the way of an industrial development is morally indefensible and impermissible, so also is the destruction of the forest where the people may live, or the slaughter of remaining blue whales, or the gross exploitation of experimental or factory-farm animals for private profit or as part of the latest 5 year plan. Those who organise or engage in such activities are (to a greater or lesser extent, depending on their mode of engagement) morally culpable. Models of permissible respected life styles and of the good life (for others to emulate) depend upon what the underlying ethic accounts good and evil, permissible or not, and so forth; and changes with change of ethic. A new ethic is needed not merely to accommodate the evaluations, prescriptions and models indicated, in a way decidedly different from Western ethics, but in order to cope with a much wider range of more practical, and often more controversial, cases where Western ethics yield (without epicycling, i.e. extensive resort to theory-saving strategems) unacceptable or inadequately grounded results. An alternative ethic is also needed by a growing number of valuers because they have values, interests and new concerns of ecological sorts which do not fit in with, but conflict with, central features of prevailing Western ethics. There is occurring, it seems, a far-reaching cultural, and ethical change, a change in consciousness, and in particular a change in attitudes to what is natural and the natural environment (a change which may eventually be as fundamental as, and partly overturn, the humanist changes of the Enlightenment). A new ethic is accordingly needed to reflect and formul­ ate, and enable the defence and application of, a new, increasingly felt, 31 a but not so far well-articulated system of values, in much the same way that a system of probability was needed and formulated to articulate and systematise likelihood and probability principles, and relevant logic systems required to capture pre-analytic views of entailment. The explication of environmental ethics is a similar theoretical concern; again, as commonly, theory lags behind the facts of change and the felt data. Furthermore, just as entailment systems are not uniquely determined, or desired or accepted by every thinker, so ezzzz*Zr<9zzwe7zfaZ. be %%-z^MeZz/ (ie^grzzz-Zzzg^, or adopted by every valuer. will zzct On the contrary, as is plain enough, their adaption and furtherance will be vigorously resisted by many vested interests, as - to take just one instance - the furtherance of programmes for the elimination of environmental sources of cancer is vigorously opposed by industrial chemical companies. The matter of persuading other, valuers to accept values and principles of a new ethic is of course a further and somewhat separate issue from the question of need for such an ethic. The procedures for trying to effect changes in values are but variations on the usual pro­ cedures, and like them are not fully effective: excluding coercion and education, they include, for example, argumentation, and propaganda, in each case of many sorts.As usual, too, where there is a broad common 32 basis, especially in felt evaluations and emotional presentation, effecting a change, or a conversion, will generally be an easier task. In the case of transformation to environmental values, what is often important are distinctive features regarding the factual bases of many of the evaluations. correcting In particular, there is the matter of removing or /zz^scozzcept^oTZS on a broad range of matters of Some of these sorts are considered in more detail in (c) J. Passmore, 'Ecological problems and persuasion' in PpnaZ^fz/ ipz^erTzaz^ozzaZ u?Z(Z Comparative t/vrisprz/devce (ed. G. Dorsey) , Oceana Publications, New York, 1977, pp.431-42. The apposite term 'emotional presentation' is adapted from Meinong; see especially Ov FmotiozzaZ Presentation (trans. M.L. Schubert-Kalsi), Northwestern University Press, 1972. The notion of emotional present­ ation can play an important role in the explanation of how emotions enter into (environmental) evaluations, the objects evaluated (canyons, mountains, giant trees) often being emotionally presented. A little more precisely, the connections are these: A value ranking (e.g. c is better, more valuable, than d) of a valuer is explained emotionally through - it does not reduce to - certain preference rankings of the valuer; and the preference rankings have in turn dual factual and emotional bases, in the same sort of way that an item may be preferred or chosen in virtue of its factual features and the valuer's emotional responses to those. The main details of such a semantical analysis of value, which is discussed in §5, are given in Routley (c). 32 environmental concern; for example, about animals, their various behaviour, abilities, etc; about the alleged gulf between humans and other animals and the uniqueness of humans and each human; about the profitability, or desirability, or necessity, of environmentally destruct­ ive enterprises; about the inevitability of current Western social arrangements and about the history of the way these particular arrange­ ments developed. There is, moreover, the matter of sheer information, for example as to how free animals live together and what they do; about how factory and experimental animals are treated, and in the latter case for what: about the sources and effects of various forms of pollution and the reasons for it; about how natural creatures such as whales or environments such as forests are commonly dealt with, for what products, by what interests, for what ends. Naturally (given a fact/value division) none of this information is entirely conclusive support for a change in ethic; for many of the evaluations the data helps support can be included in other ethics (including sometimes modifications of prevailing ethics), while remaining evaluations can, at worst, be simply rejected (as e.g., those utilitarians who extend consideration just to sentient creatures are obliged to reject versions of the last man argument where no sentient creatures are affected). Althouth a new ethic is needed, for the reasons indicated, and although such an ethic can,furthermore, be a considerable asset in practical environmental argument (e.g., as to the point of trying to 33 retain a piece of not-especially-unique near-wilderness), for many practical ecological purposes, there is no need to apply it or to fall back on it. For example, virtually the whole environmental issue of destructive forestry in Australia can be argued without invoking any unconventional ethical principles or values at all, i.e. entirely within the prevailing chauvinistic framework. environmental disputes. The same sort of point applies to But, it by no means applies to all. A corollary is an inadequacy in the presentation of environmental problems and suggested solutions in standard (human) ecology texts (such as P. and JssMss A. Erlich's Freeman, San Francisco, 1970, to select one example), which are set 34 e/zf-ZreZz/ within the chauvinistic framework. Also, differently, in the way that theories are in enabling one to see how to move and argue in a discussion. Quite properly given prevailing sentiments, according to some erring conservationists, who account themselves "realists". 33 Since it is sometimes charged - despite all that has been said that an environmental ethic does not differ in practice from that of more conventional "chauvinistic" ethics, there is point in spelling out in Firstly, many conventional yet other ways how it can differ in practice: positions, in particular social contract and sympathy theories, cannot take proper account of moral obligation to future humans (who are not in the immediate future). Since the usual attempt to argue, in terms of value and benefit to humans, that natural areas ecosystems generally should not be destroyed or degraded depends critically on introducing possible future humans who will suffer or be worse off as a result of its destruction or degradation, it is plain that an environ­ and mental ethic will differ radically from such conventional positions. That is, the usual argument depends on the reduction of value of a natural item to the interests of present and /nfure humans, in which reduction future humans must play a critical role if conclusions not blatantly opposed to conservation are to be reached. Hence there will usually be a very great gulf between the practical value judgements of conservation ethics and those of conventional positions which discount the (non- immediate) future. Secondly, as we have already seen through examples, there are practical differences between an environmental ethic and conventional instrumental views which do take account of the interests of past, present and future humans, differences which emerge sharply at the It is, however, unnecessary to hypothetical (possible world) level. turn to possible world examples to see that normally there would be very great differences in the practical valuations and behaviour of those who believe that natural items can have value and create obligations not reducible (in any way) to human interests and those who do not, as the following further examples show. Example 1. We need only consider the operation of zJorZd, for example, the concept of damapo to a natural item, and the associated notion of coTnpeMsafdoM for that damage. C. Stone, for instance, in STzo^Zd Troes ^fuTid^Mp? Thus Towards LepaZ. /"or ZVufMraZ- Objocfs (Avon Books, New York, 1975) notes the practical legal differences between taking the damage to a polluted river as affecting its intrinsic value, and taking it as just affecting human river users. In the one case one will see adequate compensation as restoring the original state of the river (rectifying the wrong to the river) and in the other as compensating those present (or future) humans who will suffer from its pollution. As Stone points out, the sum 34 adequate to compensate the latter may well be much less than that required to restore the river to its unpolluted state, thus making it economic, and in terms of the human chauvinist theory, fair and reason­ able, to compensate those damaged and continue pollution of the river. In the first case, of course, adequate compensation or restoration for the harm done would have to consist in restoring the river to its unpolluted condition and will not just be paid to the people affected. Compare here Stone's example of compensation for injury to a Greek slave; in the instrumentalist case this will involve compensating the slave's owner for the loss of his slave's working time; in the other, where the slave is regarded as not merely an instrument for his owner, it will compensate the sZuue not the for this compensation will also take account of the pain and suffering of the slave, even where this has not affected his working ability. There is a difference not only in the amount of compensation, but to zj/zow it is directed. In the case of a natural item damage may be compensated by payment to a trust set up to protect and restore it. Example 2. The believer in intrinsic values may avoid making unnecessary and excessive noise in the forest, out of respect for the forest and its nonhuman inhabitants. She will do this even when it is certain that there is no other human around to know the difference. For one to whom the forest and its inhabitants are merely another conventional utility, however, there will be no such constraint. He may avoid unnecessary noise if he thinks it will disturb other humans, but if he is certain none are about to hear him he will feel at liberty to make as much and as loud a noise as he chooses, and this will affect his behaviour. Examples like this cannot be dealt with by the introduction of future humans, since they will be unable to hear the noise in question. To claim that the making of noise in such circumstances is a matter of no importance, and therefore there is no important difference in behaviour, is of course to assess the matter through human chauvinist eyes. question-begging. From the intrinsic viewpoint it So such a claim is make a difference, and be reflected in practical behavioural difference. Example 3. Consider an aboriginal tribe which holds a particular place to be sacred, and where this sanctity and intrinsic valuableness and beauty is celebrated by a number of beautiful cave paintings. A typically "progressive" instrumentalist Western view would hold the cave (and perhaps place) to be worth preservation because of its value to the aboriginal people, and because of the artistic merit of the human arti­ facts, the cave paintings the cave contained. 35 To the "enlightened" Westerner, if the tribe should cease to exist, and the paintings be i destroyed, it would be permissible to destroy the place if this should be in what is judged to be the best interests of human kind, e.g. to get at the uranium underneath. To the aboriginal the human artifacts, the cave paintings would be irrelevant, a celebration of the value of the place, but certainly not a surrogate for it, and the obligation to the place would not die because the tribe disappeared or declined. Similarly no ordinary sum of money would be able to compensate for the loss of such a place, in the way that it might for something conceived of as a utility or convenience, as having value only because of the benefits it confers on the "users" of it. There is an enormous or difference between feeling that a place should be valued or respected for itself, for its perceived beauty and character., and.feeling that it should not be defaced because it is valued by one's fellow humans, and provides pleasurable sensations or money or convenience for them. Compare too the differences between feeling that a yellow robin, say, is a fellow creature in many ways akin to oneself, and feeling that it is a nice little yellow and grey, basically clockwork, aesthetic object. These differences in emotional presentation are accompanied by or expressed by an enormous range of behavioural differences, of which the examples given represent only a very small sample. The sort of behaviour by each viewpoint and thought by it, the concept of what one is free to do, for example, will normally be very different. It is certainly no coincidence that cultures holding to the intrinsic view have normally been far less destructive of nature than the dominant Western human chauvinist culture. In summary, the claim that there is no difference, that the intrinsic value viewpoint is empty verbalisation, does not stand up to examination. The capacity - no doubt exaggerated, but nonetheless far from negligible - of Western industrial societies to solve their ecological problems (at least to their own pathetically low standards) within a chauvinistic framework, does considerably complicate, and obstruct, an alternative more practical argument to the need for a new ethic, /row that in no other way ... [than] prepared[ness] to accept a "new ethic", as distinct even from adding one or two new moral principles to an accepted common ... can modern industrial 35 societies solve their ecological problems. On next page. 36 Not only does the argument encounter various objections - most obviously that many of the problems can be solved, if not within Western ethics, in immediate extensions of them - but the case suggested would hardly be a satisfactory basis for the type of ethic sought. It is not so much that it would be a chauvinistic way of arriving at a supposedly nonchauvinistic ethic, for bad procedures can lead to good results; rather it is that important ecological problems, shaping environmental ethics, such as preservation of substantial tracts of wilderness and just treatment of animals, tend to be written off in industrial societies as not serious problems. But even if the argument suggested has too narrow a problem base, and so may yield too limited a change in attitudes as compared with the main theoretical argument, the argument merits fuller formulation and further investigation. The argument to need for ethical revision is as follows: (1) A satisfactory solution to environmental problems (of modern industrial societies) implies (the adoption of) an alternative environmental ethic. (2) A satisfactory solution to environmental problems is needed. Therefore, an alternative environmental ethic is needed.36 The argument is valid, given, what seems correct, that pimplies q implies that p is needed implies that q is needed. The second premiss is or can be made analytic, on the sense of 'satisfactory' 'satisfactory' imply 'needed'); (e.g. by having so the case is complete if the first premiss can be established (in the same sense of 'satisfactory'), and the conclusion is then plausible to at least the extent the premiss is. Al37 though the first premiss, or something like it, is widely endorsed, cogent 35 Passmore (c) op. cit., p.438. According to Passmore (p.431), By common consent, there are four major ecological problems: pollution, the exhaustion of resources, the destruction of species, and overpopulation ... To solve such problems involves finding a way either of altering types of human conduct or of preventing that human conduct from having its present consequences. In what follows the assumption that 'there are four major ecological problems' gets rejected. 36 This implies only, that a new ethic is necessary for solving environmental problems, and not of course that it is 37 Even Passmore, though previously (e.g. in (a)) highly critical of proposals for new ethics, gives qualified endorsement to an assumption of this sort ((c), p.441). ... I do not doubt, all the same, that our attitudes to nature stand badly in need of revision and that, as they stand, they form a major obstacle to the solution of ecological problems. 37 # arguments for it are few and it is no simple matter rendering the premiss plausible. Moreover rendering it plausible involves a substant­ ial detour through social theory; for the case for the premiss proceeds along these sorts of lines: (3) Unless there are (certain) major changes in socio-economic structure, environmental problems will not be satisfactorily solved. (4) The major changes in socio-economic structure involve ethic. an alternative A much stronger thesis than (3) has been argued for using systems analysis, namely that without very extensive socio-economic changes, modern industrial society will collapse; but several of the assumptions made in the analysis are doubtful or disputed. independently of that stronger thesis; But (3) has been argued for example, it will follow from the thesis (of Falk, Commoner and others) 'that the modern industrial ethic as we have known it is not sustainable on ecological grounds'.^ In a sense, (3) is obvious; for it is present socio-economic arrangements that have produced many of the present serious environmental problems; without major changes in those arrangements most of the problems will What is not immediately evident is persist or, more likely, intensify. that the major changes called for, in satisfying (3), suffice for (4). However reflection on the specific types of changes required - for example at a superficial level, human population limitation, reduction of poll­ ution, more sensible resource usage, selective economic growth - reveals that significant changes in value, and also in what is considered permissible, are bound to be involved in the changes. plausible, and therewith the intended conclusion. So (4) is decidedly But the argument leaves the detailed character of the needed alternative ethic rather obscure; and it may well be that the ethic so yielded is somewhat chauvinistic in character. The more practical argument cannot entirely supplant the main theoretical argument. In sum, there are good and pressing reasons to investigate the alternatives to chauvinistic ethics, especially human chauvinism, because such chauvinistic ethics are discriminatory, because the case for them 38 39 See, in particular, D. Meadows and others, Potomac Associates, Washington, D.C., 1972. PtwZts to CrozjtT?, R.A. Falk, 'Anarchism and world order', Pornos IX, 1978, p.66. Falk refers for the case to B.Commoner, TPs CZosZ^p CZroZo, Knopf, New York, 1971; R.A. Falk, T/zZs PZo^ot, Random House, New York. 1971; E. Goldsmith and others EZMoprZut /or F^rvZ^aZ, Houghton and Miflin, Boston, 1972, and Meadows et aZ., op. cit. 38 O does not stand up to examination, and because they have been involved in the destruction of much of value and now threaten the viability of much that is valuable. § 4 . ENVIRONMENTAL ALTERNATIVES : NARROWING THE CHOICE AMONG ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS . The basic - and basically mistaken - doctrine of the Western super-ethic is, as we have seen, that people, humans of whatever shape or form, are the fundamental carriers or objects of value and that all other items are valuable only in an instrumental or derivative way. It is important, in­ deed mandatory in a genuine environmental ethic, to reject this view and allow natural items to have a value in their own right, ^yz i/ze sazzze /as/z^oM as peopZ-e, both for the reasons outlined above, of the theoret­ ical unsatisfactoriness and arbitrariness of the traditional view, and for more practical reasons, namely, to help ensure the ecological sustain­ ability of modern society, and in optimising human welfare. It has often been pointed out that 'a totally humanised world would diminish us as 40 human beings', that the traditional view of humans, or classes of humans, as dominant, and of natural items as without value except where they serve human or class interests - a view that often carries contempt for nature leads not only to the destruction of much that is of value but (paradoxic­ ally) to counterproductive results even with respect to human welfare. Thus McHarg (in attractively coloured rhetoric) Show me a man-oriented society in which it is believed that reality exists only because man can perceive it, that the cosmos is a struct­ ure erected to support man on its pinnacle, that man exclusively is divine and given dominion over all things, indeed that God is made in the image of man, and I will predict the nature of its cities and their landscape. I need not look far for we have seen them-the hot­ dog stands, the neon shill, the ticky-tacky houses, dysgenic city and mined landscapes. centric man; This is the image of the anthropomorphic, anthropo­ he seeks not unity with nature but conquest (op. cit.). The rejection of this view and its replacement by a view in which natural items can be regarded as of value and as worthy of our respect for themselves and not merely for what we can get out of them or what use we 40 see e.g. the discussion at pp.116-17 of (a) J. Rodman, 'The Liberation of nature', Irz^z^rz/, 20 (1977) 83-145. All subsequent references to Rodman's work without further indication are to this article. Note well that the rejection of human chauvinism does Moi imply that no chauvinistic arguments - or rafTzsr, arguments that are usually stated in chauvinistic form - carry weight. On the contrary, some chauvinistic arguments (e.g. those supporting wilderness retention and species preservation) carry considerable weight; and, since the prevailing industrial ethics remain chauvinistic, environmentalists would be rash not to use them. 39 & can make of them, is becoming increasingly widespread in parts of the environmental movement. It is this primarily that makes for an important ideological split in the conservation movement, between what Naess (op. cit.) called sTzaZZozj and Fesp ecology, between those who see conservation as just a matter of wiser, better-controlled exploitation of the environment — something which is compatible with denying value to everything except man and those who see it at least in part as involving a recognition of value for natural items independent of man, and hence as involving (at least to some extent) a The gzEpZo^a^opz view, which is first view, the long-term or closely tied to prevailing more enlightened economic assumptions, tends to make heavy use of the watershed term 'resource'; the problem of conserv­ ation is seen as one of 'zjFss Mse oy resoMrcss', a resource being something of use to humans or persons. On this view, which does not get beyond the confines of human chauvinism, and so is no direction for.a satisfactory environmental ethic to take, items which have no perceivable use to man, i.e. non-resources, can be destroyed without loss; and the environmental problem is viewed as largely one of making people aware of the extent to which natural items and processes have Fustrz^gnPaZ- value, i.e. of how far we are dependent on them and they are of to us. There is no recognition either that some items might be valuable precisely they are independent of man. Resource Conservation, or the shallow position, is the first of the 42 four ideal types that Rodman discerns in his investigation of the contemporary environmental movement. The deeper ecological position gets split under Rodman's division into three ideological positions - though Rodman prefers to put the matter in symbolic or experiential terms, in terms of forms of consciousness - namely Wilderness Preservation, Nature Moralism, and Ecological Resistance. Though the positions discerned are neither characterised in an exclusive fashion, nor exhaustive of ecological positions, and though we shall have to look beyond all the positions for a satisfactory environmental ethic, nonetheless they afford an excellent perspective on the main types of alternative positions that have been adopted by those within environmental movements. It is not uncommon to encounter attempts to write the shallow position into the very meaning or definition of e.g. 'conservation is the use of resources to the greatest advantage of man', 4 Furvez/ py Fcrgsz^rz/ T^FMSz^r^es. ParP FT. Foresfrz/ Pe^gZ.opz7?e?2^ PZ-arz. Draft (31 October, 1974), p.ll - a blatantly chauvinistic account. On next page. 40 According to (Wilderness) Preservation, which focusses on wilderness, wilderness is to be preserved for the wilderness experience, wilderness offers a natural cathedral, a sacred place where human beings can transcend the limitations of everyday experience and become renewed through contact with the power of creation ((b), p.49). The values discerned in wilderness and natural landscape are primarily aesthetic and quasi-religious, or mystical, 'the experience of the holy is esthetically mediated'; what is valuable remains human experiences. Thus the Wilderness Preservation position does not move outside the sphere of human chauvinism, and can no more than Resource Conservation offer a frame for an environmental ethic. Rodman reaches a similar conclusion: Resource Conservation and Wilderness Preservation appear variations on the theme of wise use, the former oriented to the [efficient] production of commodities for human consumption, the latter to providing human amenities ((b), p.50). For this reason, the Wilderness Preservation position fails even on the score of justifying the preservation of wilderness - on the very task it was designed to accomplish - in a range of circumstances. Like other See especially (b) J. Rodman, 'Theory and practice in the environmental movement: notes towards an ecology of experience', in Search for VuZzzes a International Cultural Foundation, New York, 1978, pp.45-56. Some of the types are portrayed in greater detail in other Rodman papers. The remainder of this largely new section on environmental ethical alternatives is heavily indebted, in ways the references mostly make plain, to Rodman's work. His work covers a vast range of interlinked topics; only those of immediate relevance have been touched upon. But there is very much in the remainder that repays careful reading, and zzzMc/z to think about and to question or reject, reaching perhaps its lowest point in the paradoxical themes: Just as our statements about other people tend also to be concealed statements about ourselves, so statements about non­ human nature tend to be concealed statements about the human condition, and movements to liberate nonhuman nature tend also to be movements to liberate the repressed potentials of human nature (p.105). In part because these themes and the related myth of microcosm are taken seriously, and not for the evident falsehoods they are, in part because the ethical adequacy of the human/nonhuman distinction is never seriously questioned (e.g. it is taken for granted, what is not the case, that rights apply to humans and are problematic beyond them), and in part because of the characteristically chauvinistic emphasis on human experience and the endeavour to bring everything within that experiential purvue, and the associated weight assigned to human symbolic, mythic and ritual activities, one is left with the feeling, at the end of all the investigations one can profitably follow Rodman through, that one has not got beyond the confines of human chauvinism. 41 instrumentalist accounts of wilderness value, it breaks down entirely with examples like the Last Man, assuming that Mr. Last Man is never turned on by natural spendour. More alarmingly, under readily conceivable developments, it would allow the elimination of wilderness entirely. For consider the Wilderness Experience Machine, a low-impact low-tech philosophical machine, recently patented by I.M. Diabolic, which can duplicate entirely, even for groups of people, wilderness experiences, but in a downtown room. As far as the psychological experience goes, this machine can provide a complete substitute for any actual wilderness, and were the value of wilderness to reside in the experience it afforded, could entirely replace it and eliminate the alleged need for it. Most environmentalists would be (rightly) dissatisfied with, not to say appalled by, the idea that Wilderness Experience Machines could sub­ stitute for wildernesses, since they provided the same experiences. what else they wanted, the answer would of course be: Asked Wildernesses, not merely wilderness experiences. Wildernesses are valuable in their own right, over and above the experiences they can afford.43 Really, that is, they consider wildernesses intrinsically valuable, but have been pushed by the prevailing ethical ethos into stating, and misrepresenting, their position in experiential terms. There is some independent evidence that the Wilderness Preservation position is frequently a disguised intrinsic value position, in the attitude taken to examples like the Last Man case, that purely hypothetical experiencers (who may vanish into counterfactuals) are good enough, and that in some real-life cases it is enough that wilderness is there to be contemplated, whether or not anyone actually takes advantage of its presence to gain experiences, or indeed whether or not it is in fact contemplated. Such examples remove the disguise and reveal the position as at bottom an intrinsic value position. In that event it is however better to avoid the disguise; for the case for wilder­ ness preservation which starts from the position that some wilderness tracts have intrinsic as well as merely instrumental value is substantially stronger than any position which assigns them merely instrumental value. Wilderness lovers and nature conservationists have in fact worked out - or concocted - a set of arguments to show why wildernesses and nature conservation are of benefit to humans, to argue for their instrumental — The concept of zjfZ-demess too can vary with the operative ideology, e.g. on certain views, such as Wilderness Preservation, wilderness comprises areas that are (or provide the opportunity for use), e.g. used for experiential enrichment. By contrast, on a genuine Environ­ mental Resistance view, wilderness is a wild area, use of which is not implied: it may never be used, and it may not matter that it affords no opportunity for (human) use. (Under popular high redefinition of 'wilderness', there are of course no wildernesses remaining on the earth, and wilderness vanishes as soon as humanly experienced.) 42 value. For example, there are various arguments from the scientific value, or usefulness, of wilderness, e.g. for the study of natural eco­ systems, for the investigation of plant history and evolution, as a repository of genetic diversity, etc. These arguments, which (like parallel arguments for species preservation) are not to be especially as regards persuasive force, can be put in nonchauvinistic form; for science and knowledge are not linked essentially with, for example, the feature of being human. Often however - e.g. where the wilderness defended has, so far as it is known, little that is very special to offer - such arguments appear to be merely a conventional front for the real (or deeper) reasons - and in sofne instances, correspondingly weak and unpersuasive (as Fraser Darling has remarked, and Passmore has tried to show in (a)) - the real reasons being based on the perception of nonuseful properties of value. This is particularly marked in the case of arguments for preserving the most complex and beautiful of the world's plant communities, tropical rainforest. Such arguments as that various uninvestigated rainforest trees may at some time be found to contain useful drugs, by no means exhaust the true value of the rainforest. For it is in the intrinsic, i.e. noninstrumental, value of the rainforest that the main reason for not unduly interfering with it, e.g. not interfering in ways that threaten its stability or viability, lies. In particular, destruction of a wilderness, such as a rainforest, would significantly diminish intrinsic value, and so should (in general) be resisted. Environmentalists who are aware of these sorts of problems and dangers with resource use approaches to wilderness preservation sometimes attempt to formulate their alternative view in terms of one of the lesser traditions, most popularly in terms of the image, in which man is seen as the steward of the earth - an analogy which, as Passmore points out (in (a)), is problematic outside a religious context. For who is man steward to? If not to God, then how is the analogy to be unpacked, and what conditions must "stewardship" conform to? If "good stewardship" is management in the interests of humans, or humanity, then the position does not go beyond Resource Conservation; if it is manage44 ment to serve intrinsic values, or God, then good stewardship is but a cover for the recognition of intrinsic values, which are better introduced directly. Thus admitting values which are not instrumental, which do not answer back in some way to states or conditions of humans is a feature of all satisfactory deeper ecological alternatives. In order to allow for such intrinsic values and/or associated attitudes of respect, e.g. for 44 on some interpretations; chauvinism. on others theism may serve to reinforce human 43 nature and various natural things, it is however unnecessary to adopt a religious backdrop such as the "Good Stewardship" image suggests, or even a semi-religious framework such as a mystical or superstitious one with taboos and sacred places as symbolic and ritual elements. A theory of intrinsic value which assigns intrinsic value to wilderness and species of free animals, for good reasons, can be entirely naturalistic (in a main sense of that much-abused term). The third, somewhat amorphous, cluster of positions Rodman describes, Nature Moralisms, do just that, assign intrinsic, noninstrumental, value to natural items, such as - on some versions of the position wilderness. [An] alternative perspective ... [to] the theme of wise use 45 ... is provided by the tradition growing out of the humane movement, recently radicalised by animal liberationists, and sometimes generalised to embrace non-animal beings as well. to the economic ethos of Resource In contrast Conservation and the religious/ esthetic character of Wilderness Preservation, this perspective is strikingly moral in style. Its notion of human virtue is not prudence or reverence, but justice. In contrast to the caste­ bound universe of the Resource Conservationist, the Natural Moralist affirms the democratic principle that all natural entities (or, more narrowly, all forms of life) have intrinsic value, and that wild animals, plants, rivers, and whole ecosystems have a right to exist, flourish and reproduce - or at least that human beings have no right to exploit or unnecessarily harm or destroy other members of the biotic community. In contrast to the aristo­ cratic universe of Wilderness Preservation, where some places (and some forms of recreation) are holier than others and certain types of natural entities ... are traditionally more worthy of being saved than others ..., the world of the Nature Moralist is characterised by an apparent egalitarianism ((b), p.50, my rearrangement). Each of the sweep of environmental alternatives indicated can be seen as an of conventional Western ethics: intrinsic value is extended uniformly to all animals or certain favoured features of all these, e.g. their experience, happiness, avoidance of suffering, or is extended to all living creatures or systems, or is extended to all natural items or even to objects - it may or may 45 be distributed uniformly or equally; Human use and human experience, it might be added. 44 rather independently, rights may be ceded to all animals, or to some or all living things, or to all things, or, alternatively and differently, right-holders' rights with respect to some or other of these classes are restricted; and similarly other deontic notions, justice, obligation, even perhaps duty, may extend to apply to larger classes of items than all humans or persons. The sweep, which is impressive, is intended to include both extended utilitarianisms, e.g. Bentham's utilitarianism as revamped by Singer according to which all sentient creatures are entitled to equal consider­ ation of interest, and extended (legal) rights doctrines, e.g. the assignment of rights or legal standing to all natural objects as suggested by, for instance, Stone. 46 It also includes Darwin's ethic and Leopold s 47 "land ethic". In order to capture some of the intended examples of Nature Moralists, and all the Moral Extension positions, Rodman's characterisation requires some adjustment - which will be taken for granted in what follows. For example, Singer and other animal liberation- ists do not assign intrinsic value to all forms of life, or even to all animals; but (as Rodman is well aware) to all sentient creatures; that is, further classifications have to be taken into account. The egalitarian, or uniformity, assumptions that serve in character­ ising Natural Moralism are mistaken. Not all objects are of equal value; some are more valuable then others, while some have little or no value (and some have a negative value).4^ Impressive though the sweep of extensions is, all the positions indicated should be rejected on one ground or another, and sometimes on several grounds. Against positions which do not extend the class of objects of moral concern and candidates for value to include all objects, variants of the counterexamples to the Western super-ethic can be directed. Consider, for instance, the positions (of usual animal liber- ationists) which extend the moral boundaries just to include sentient creatures (or e.g. preference-havers). Adapt the Last Man and Last People examples, the Wilderness example, etc., by removing all (inessential) animals from the examples, e.g. the wilderness contains no animals, in the Last People situation there are no other animals than the 46 p. Singer, .4 ZVozJ Random House, New York, 1975; for (7%r C. Stone, op. cit. <?y 47 At least on a straightforward reading of Leopold's eventual position, but not according to Rodman; see his contrast of Leopold with Stone,, p.110. Darwin's ethic, which anticipates Leopold's, is presented m C. Darwin, of Muzz, Second edition, J. Murray, London, 1883. 4 8 On next page. 45 1* Then the counterexamples apply as before last people themselves. against the liberation positions. It is unnecessary to go quite so far afield to fault such positions, at least in practice: as Rodman might put it, they are countered by the facts of experience: ... I need only to stand in the midst of a clear-cut forest, a strip-mined hillside, a defoliated jungle, or a dammed canyon to feel uneasy with assumptions that could yield the conclusion that no human action can make any difference to the welfare of anything but sentient animals (p.89). But an advantage of the counterexamples is that the same examples, among many others (e.g. situations devoid of sentient creatures, situations where the message of experience conflicts with justice or fairness), reveals the erroneousness of the well-sponsored thesis, a simple analogue of empiricism, that all value or sentient, objects). derives from experience (of experiential, A corollary is that value is not to be assessed either, in any simple way, in terms of the facts of experience. Insofar as Nature Moralism relies upon simple extensions of utilitarianisms, or of subjectivisms, to include a larger class of subjects, (a larger base class), such as all present sentient creatures, or all preference-havers at any one time, etc., it is open not merely to adaptations of the argument against chauvinism (animal chauvinism is not that much more satisfactory than human chauvinism), but most of the Nor, on Moral Extensions, need all objects that have rights have equal rights. Rights may not be very democratically distributed. Some things have rights, e.g. as a result of agreements, of a sort others do not hold or are not capable of holding. Even rights to exist, to flourish and to reproduce (each case is different) are in much doubt where there is scarcity or conflict and where some right holders are taken to be worth much more than others. Nor are such leading examplars of Natural Moralism as Singer and Stone, though they are concerned to extend principles of justice, committed to equality of rights assumptions. Stone explicitly rejects equal distribution of rights; but the principle that all natural objects are equal in having rights, which really says no more than that they all have rights, is at best a very weak egalitarian principle. Singer offers (and presumably would offer) no equality of rights principle, rejects an equality of treatment principle, and proposes as a principle of equality a (near vacuous) principle of equal consideration of interests. Not, this time, knowledge. But amusingly "value empiricism" collapses into empiricism proper given the Socratic identification: Value (generalising Virtue) is knowledge. The only natural stopping point under value empiricism is, of course, with all creatures that have (or could have) the relevant experiences: again not with humans. 46 standard objections to utilitarians, subjectivisms, etc. Many versions of Nature Moralism may than be defeated on rather conventional grounds. There emerges, further, a dilemma for extensions. Either the crucial notions of right and intrinsic value are extended to all sentient creatures (experience-havers), in which case the objections just lodged apply, or they are extended more sweepingly, e.g. to all natural objects. But the latter involves attributing to such items attributes they do not have, most obviously rights to such objects as stones; it also violates the conditions that have to be met for the holding of rights and for the entitlement of rights. Thus, for example, Stone considers underpinning his extension of rights, beyond sentient creatures in the ordinary sense - or of legal rights beyond recognised "legal persons" - by a postulate of 50 universal sentience or consciousness; in short, by an unacceptable metaphysics, or myth. There are several further objections which work against many versions of Natural Moralism to which Rodman draws attention: (1) Moral Extensions are 'inadequate to articulate the intention that sustains the [environmental] movement' wilderness preservation movements. (p.88), specifically wilderness and It takes but little argument to show that utilitarian ethics, such as Singer's, so far from assisting the environmental movement, can (if adopted) reinforce the case wilderness and preservation of wild species. But an extension like Stone's extension of legal rights can help, and has helped, at least in the courts where its meta-physical underpining is unlikely to be glimpsed. The basic point is however that the rights talk does not connect with, and is insensitive to, the experiential basis. Mere extensions of moral notions such as interest or right or justice are insufficient to treat and do just­ ice to the multi-dimensional depth of environmental issues, such as the damming of a river (p.115). Part of the reason is said to be that the usual moral aparatus, which was evolved in the case of certain person-to-person 50 See Rodman's discussion, pp.92-3. But Rodman overstates his case m claiming that 'some such postulate as universal consciousness is there­ fore necessary if the notion of rights for trees is not to seem a rootless fancy'. For , as explained below, extended rights can be defined by a rather "natural extension" of the familiar notion of right, without any such postulate; and grounds of entitlement can be traced back to value of the items. Certainly extended rights sever what linkage there may have been between rights and liabilities, but with the modern separations of rights from responsibilities that linkage was already damaged or broken. 47 * relations, is inadequate for getting to grips with a new dimension of moral experience, that concerned with environment, and inadequate to reflect ecological sensibility. Rodman tries to press, however, a much stronger, and rather more dubious, theme, the By adapting the moral/legal theory of 'rights', [the movement] may sell its soul, its roots in mythic and ritual experience, to get easier judicial standing (p.88); and more savagely, the progressive extension model of ethics, while holding out the promise of transcending the homocentric perspective of modern culture, subtly fulfills and legitimates the basic project of modernity - the total conquest of nature by man (p.97, also 'p.119)7* " While neither of these large claims is strictly true - soul-selling is simply avoided through adoption of the notion of extended-right, which can yield a conservative extension of the original position; and even utilitarians may be committed to blocking projects which threaten free animals - each has a substantial point. Part of the point behind the latter claim is worth developing separately:- (2) Moral Extensions typically cast natural objects, notably animals, in the role of inferior humans, 'legal incompetents', imbeciles, human vegetables, and the like. They are ... degraded by our failure to respect them for having their own existence, their own character and potentialities, their own forms of excellence, their own integrity, a degradation usually reflected in our reduction of 'them to the status of instruments for our own ends', and not removed 'by "giving" them rights, by assigning them to the status of inferior human beings' (p.94). Many of us know where the treatment of natural objects as mere means for human ends tends to lead and has led. The mistaken treatment of them as inferior humans, a treatment which fails to see and 'respect the otherness of nonhuman forms of life', leads in the same direction. For given that animals, for example, are inferior, it is legitimate to treat them also as inferior; a greater value principle, which moral extensions typically endorse, yields a similar result. The needs of increasing populations of superior humans will eventually outweigh, if they do not do so already, the cases of inferior inhabitants of this finite earth for the retention of their natural habitats. 48 For their rights and their In the larger perspective, the Moral values will be less than "ours". Extensions, with their built-in greater value assumptions, do legitimate the conquest of nature by humans. Thus too they fail seriously, on what will soon enough be quite practical grounds, as satisfactory environmental ethics. (3) The extensions, like the parent ethics which they extend, are narrowly individualistic, and insufficiently holistic. This is particularly conspicuous in the case of utilitarianisms, which in principle arrive at all assessments by some sort of calculations, e.g. summations and perhaps averaging, from an initially given unit conforming to requisite equality conditions, e.g. equal consideration, equal units of suffering. In practice of course the method is, almost invariably, to pretend that the calculations will yield results which agree with alternatively and previously arrived at, usually intuitive, often prejudiced, evaluations; that is, in practice the method is not applied except in a handwaving back-up fashion. The method is not applied in part because there are serious, well enough known, problems in applying it. The individualistic bias carried over in other moral extensions, e.g. any experiential theory, likewise limits their satisfactoriness. It is to understate the matter to say merely that 'the moral atomism that focuses on individual animals and their subjective experiences does not seem well adapted to coping with ecological systems' (p.89), 'to explore the notion of shared habitat and the notion that an organism's relationship to its natural environment may be an important part of the organism's character' ((b), p.52). A moral atomism that focuses on individuals, discounting their interrelations, is bound to result in ecological complexes that matter (such as ecosystems, wilderness, and species) getting seriously short-changed. To illustrate:- Under atomism, the value of a complex, or the rights of a complex, amount to no more than those of its individual members; but since these are, in isolation from the complex, no more valuable than other things of their order, e.g. one gentian than another, a bush rat from a Norwegian rat, there no special merit in a complex, or rights attaching to it, in virtue of its rareity or uniqueness or special features as a complex. Thus, for instance, a utilitarianism under which only individual animals count assigns, and can assign, no special value to species, and can (as remarked) be used to argue against preservation of species: Since all animals are equal - or at least all animals of the same genus are more or less equal - one can substitute for another. For a rare species of rat to die out painlessly cannot matter while there are plenty of other rats. A rights theory is in similar difficulties so long 49 w as rights are assigned only to individuals, taken in isolation from their environmental setting (i.e. only to the usual separable individuals of philosophical theory). These problems may be avoided, in part, by assign­ ing rights to complexes (given the notion of rights will take that much further stretching; which it will not if right holders are assumed to be conscious or to be preference-havers), and by attributing independent value to complexes. But, since the value of a whole is sometimes more than the sum of the separable values of its individual members, this move involves the rejection of usual atomism, utilitarianisms in particular. The objection against the narrow individualism of the extensions - a defect they share with standard ethics which do not admit of ready extension, such as contract theories - soon broadens into an objection that these extensions are built on an inadequate metaphysics, a metaphysics of rather isolated individuals who (or which) are seriously depauperate in An ethics presupposes a metaphysics at their relations with other objects. least through its choice of base class: thus for example, usual homocen- tric formulations of utilitarianisms and contract theories suppose a base class of narrowly self-interested humans. The remedy is not (as Rodman suggests in various places in his elaboration of Ecological Resistance) to move to holism: to do so would be to accept the other half of a false dichotomy mainstream philosophical thought engenders (cf. Routley (g), this volume). It is rather to move to a metaphysics that is built on a concept­ ion of objects (which may or may not be individuals) which are rich in their interrelations and connections. In summary, the moral extensions are the wrong direction in which to seek a satisfactory environmental ethic. But the failure of Nature Moralism does not mean, as Rodman tends to assume, that all positions 51 that are moral in style are thereby ruled out. For one thing, Nature Moralism, as characterised (or generalised), is far from exhaustive of the range of prima facie viable moral positions. More satisfactory positions will simply avoid the damaging assumptions of Nature Moralism (and likewise those of inadequate ethical positions, such as contract theories or naturalism, and those linking morality to legality; For another, if the quest is for an ruled out. cf. p.103). moral notions can hardly be Even if it is assumed that the call for a 'new ethic' is 'to guide the human/nature relationship (p.95) - a somewhat unfortunate way of putting it - whereas what matters is the human/nature relationship itself, and that in coping with that relation fixation on morality or 51 His thesis of the 'limitation of the moral/legal stage of unconscious­ ness' is investigated in more detail in what follows. 50 G. $ legality is a serious handicap, and may contribute to the problem of the relationship rather than helping solve it (pp.103-4); still part of the problem is that of indicating entitlements of agents with respect to their environment, what sort of exploitation, if any, is permissible, what the limits on conventional morality are, and discovering 'a larger normative order within which we and our species-specific moral and legal systems have a niche' (p.97). Nor, in outlining Ecological Resistance, does Rodman shrink from using - he could not avoid the effect of - axiological terms such as 'good' and deontic terms such as 'should'; he does not doubt, for example, that some of what is natural that is threatened is valuable and that threats to it should be resisted; and he admits that 'prudence, justice, and reverence may be essential parts of a[n ecologic­ ally] good life'. Ecological Resistance, which is said to be the alternative 'most faithful to the integrity of experience', exhibits indeed the negativity of resistance. The position is founded on action, resistance, and theory only emerges retrospectively (if perhaps at all). Its (insufficiently qualified) central principle is 'that diversity is natural, good and threatened by the forces of monoculture'. The struggle between these forces, diversity and monoculture - between (ecological) good and evil occurs in several different spheres of experience, i.e. at various levels, which reflect one another. Resistance is not undertaken for self-interest or utilitarian reasons, or for moral reasons, or for religious or mystical reasons (such as preventing profanation), but because the threat to the [natural object or system] ... is perceived aZso as a threat to the self, or rather to the principle of diversity and spontaneity that is the endangered side of the basic balance that defines and sustains the very nature of things ((b), p.54). The disjunction, 'or', separates however two rather different (though combin­ able) reasons-cum-motives for resistance. The second disjunct yields the following reasons for resistance (which are linked by a metaphysical assumption connecting diversity and spontaneity with the nature of things): (i) The threat to the natural item is a threat to the principle of diversity and spontaneity. So, by the central principle, it is a threat to what is good, etc. (ii) The threat to the natural object 'is a threat to the very nature of things': (as to how consider the example of the wild river threatened by a dam, p.115). So - by an unstated, but nonetheless implied and assumed, principle, that the very nature of things is good (and natural) it is a threat to the forces of good. 51 W- The first disjunct yields a further, different, argument; in simplest form: (iii) The threat to the natural object is a threat to oneself. What is a threat to oneself is bad and to be resisted, so what is a threat to the natural object is bad and has to be resisted (since what is bad should, in general, be resisted). Although the arguments are valid, the underlying principles are faulty; for instance, the diversity (and spontaneity) principle because it is too simple (and so too does not harmonize with the nature of things) ; and the second principle, the intrinsic merit of the very nature of the things, because not everything that is the case or is natural is meritor ­ ious, e.g. genuinely natural disasters. Rodman plans to avoid obstacles to adopting nature as an absolute standard and, at the same time, to bridge the gap the principle spans, by resort to a version of naturalism which equates 'the "natural" with the "moral"' (pp.96-7). But for well- known reasons which can be supported (e.g. those telling against objective ethics of the sort such naturalism would yield), substantive evaluative assumptions cannot be removed in this fashion; though they can be suppressed, they reappear as soon as connections between empirical grounds and evaluative judgments based upon them are queried. The trouble, characteristic of reductionism, arises from the mistaken attempt to collapse a grounding, or founding, relation to an identity, to close the gap - which is not problematic but is widely thought to be problem­ atic - between value and empirical fact by a reduction of value to fact, of the thesis that evaluative features are grounded on natural features to the thesis that evaluative features are nothing but certain natural , 52 features (e.g. to be good is just to have certain natural features). 52 Rodman interprets naturalistically the statement of Jonas's that he quotes approvingly (p.95): Only an ethic which is grounded in the breadth of being, not merely in the singularity or oddness of man, can have significance in the scheme of things ... an ethics no longer founded on divine authority [or upon human arete], must be founded on a principle discoverable in the nature of things ... . He interprets it in terms of 'an ontologically-grounded moral order in the "the phenomenon of life" or "the nature of things".' In this way can be avoided the reduction of 'the quest for an ethics ... to prattle about "values" taken in abstraction from the "facts" of experience'. But Jonas's statement can be construed nonnaturalistically, by taking the founding or grounding relation seriously, as connecting, but not reducing, values to empirical facts. So construed the statement does help in delineating the sort of environmental ethics sought. 52 * C Such reductions commit the naturalistic and prescriptive fallacies which can be avoided neither by thinking 'our way through or around them' (p.97), nor by holistic assimilation of morality in a 'more encompassing ethical life' (p.103 and note 66). But details of the fallacies need not detain us, since we can consider immediately Rodman's important suggestion 53 for circumnavigating them (pp.103-4). Under natural social conditions, such as are obtained in some traditional societies and in some free animal societies (as ethological studies reveal), but have been lost in modern societies, law and morality, at least in their coercive aspects, would disappear, as they did in William Morris's yrow TVozj/zgre, and somewhat as they would in a Kantian community of fully autonomous beings. In terms of modern physics, morality and law are not invariants but vary under transformation of axes, and in fact vanish or prove eliminable under a suitable transformations, e.g. to a natural condition. There is a similar natural condition for morality and legality, a condition in which the prohibitions now prescribed 54 Conscience and the State would have operated "naturally by God, (i.e. from inside the organism, as a matter of course) , and patterns now stated prescriptively could have been stated descriptively. When the Way is abandoned, then we get Humanity and Justice (T<2<9 T6 , #18) (p.103). Even if a change of social axes could place us back on the Way, or on the way to the Way, morality is not really avoidable in our local frame where we are far from the Way. So ethical disputes over environmental matters are also unavoidable;^ for those a satisfactory ethic is a desideratum, and can help in bringing about a change of social axes. Thus too, the identity of the prescriptive with the descriptive, of "ought" with (suitable) "is", is a merely contingent (extensional) one and fails in The suggestion helps explain not only Rodman's naturalism, but his thesis of the limitation of morality and legality; it also introduces the anarchistic social change view that suffuses much of the (very uneven) later parts of (a): the view appears therein as the elabor ation of what is 'unthinkable'. Given prevailing socio-economic conditions it should be rather: that would (ideally) be prescribed. Let us hope, for environmental reasons, that the principles that are lived by in natural conditions bear not too great a resemblance to those now prescribed. Nor is there, in the local frame, much alternative but to resort to legal strategies, where they can be applied (where standing is granted) to delay "the war against nature". 53 V alternative situations; * hence, as always, there is no deduction of "ought" from "is", since deducibility would require coincidence in the alternative situations. Nor would morality — as distinct from legality, which requires some codification - strictly disappear under natural conditions, though its coercive aspects would: on the whole, as they ought to be. things would simply be, But while deontology would have a much diminished role (as it does on the preferred environmental ethic), axiology (the theory of value) would still have its place - some objects (e.g. diverse landscapes) would be more valuable than others (monocultural landscapes), some not valuable, etc. (As things stand, of course, axiology does have an important place in working out the theory of Ecological Resistance, especially in assessing its central principle of diversity.) The upshot is that without much elaboration (like that indicated below) of an axiological kind; which connects value through a grounding relation, as distinct from an identity, with the run of things (but not aZZ things) that are natural, reason (ii) for ecological resistance fails. Does reason (i), which is premissed on the central principle that diversity is good and natural and threatened by monoculture, fare any better? While it is a matter of fact that that diversity is threatened, indeed is being very rapidly reduced by the forces of monoculture, diver­ sity is not, as opponents of ecological values are wont to point out, an entirely unqualified good. Nor is diversity is always natural: a temperate rain forest can be "enriched" and rendered more diverse by interplanting of exotics (a practice foresters have applied, e.g. in New Zealand) but the result is not natural and sometimes at least bad. Or, differently, ecological diversity can often be increased by increasing edges between ecosystems, but the practice of increasing edges can easily be unnatural and far from good, as, e.g. in rainforest logging with (say) 50% canopy retention. So although a reduction of diversity is commonly bad, since the reduction reduces the quality of an ecological whole, and increase in diversity good, diversity can not be accepted as a solo principle. In fact, Rodman often couples diversity with other factors, such as naturalness (inadmissible in determining, noncircularly, what is good and natural), richness, spontaneity and integrity, which help to remove various of the counterexamples to a diversity principle. procedure points in the direction to be pursued: The replacement of the over- simple principle of diversity by a principle combining all relevant ecological factors. After all ecological sensibility - ecological resist­ ance is assumed to be the position of the person of ecological sensibility - requires sensitivity to all such ecological factors. 54 Once it is determined, * through consideration of a mix of ecological factors, that, or whether, a natural object is good or valuable the reasons for resistance can be restated: (iv) Where a natural object is valuable - as natural objects are, a natural object does not have to be very ecologically distinctive to be valuable - the threat to the natural object is a threat to what is But, other things being equal, threats to what is valuable valuable. should be resisted. So, similarly, threats to natural objects should often be resisted - and always (on whatever level) resisted where the objects are valuable and the costs of resisting are not overridingly high (to begin to spell out the ceteris paribus clause). It remains to tie in reason (iii), a key premiss of which can now take the initial form that the threat to a valuable natural object is a threat to oneself. A threat to what is valuable, to what one as a valuer values, is athreat to the valuer, to oneself, for these are one's values. To make some of those connections good again requires an excursion into axiology, one, this time, that connects what is valuable with a valuer's values. But Rodman, in trying to connect the threats to natural objects and to oneself, is forced further microcosm: afield, and resorts to the myth of 'Ecological Resistance involves a ritual affirmation of the Myth of Microcosm' universe' (OED). ((b), p.5.4), i.e. the view of man 'as epitome of the While such an affirmation - without the ritual - would yield the requisite connection, it is a classic piece of anthropocentric- ism, quite hostile to a nonchauvinistic position, and, fortunately, inessential to genuine ecological resistance. What Rodman reaches for from the myth (which could be restated in terms of seZ/, without its classic homocentric bias) is however extremely important: account of the it is an which is not a separate subject isolated from its (natural) environment (as a Humean individual is), but is connected intensionally and causally interrelated with that environment. Rodman introduces this metaphysics in rather old-fashioned terms: Ecological Resistance ... assumes a version of the theory of internal relations: the human personality discovers its structure through interaction with the nonhuman order. I am what I am at least partly in my relation to my natural environment, and changes in that environ­ ment affect my own identity. If I stand idly by and let it be destroyed, a part of me is destroyed or seriously deranged ((b) p. 54). Not Man Apart, in the terms of Friends of the Earth. 55 w For among my interests are its interests, part of my welfare is its welfare; I am identified in part with it.^ The metaphysics deepens, then, the reasons for resistance. A resister 'does not stand over against "his environment" as manager, sight-seer, or do-gooder; he is an integral part of [it]' ((b), p.56). But the environmental metaphysics, that underlies and helps support the ethics, that is part of a fuller environmental theory, need not be, and should not be if it is to be coherent, as (Hegelian and) holistic as Rodman immediately goes on to suppose that it is: __ By making the principle of diversity central, Ecological Resistance can incorporate the other three perspectives as moments within the dialectic of a larger whole. an esthetic religiosity have niches Economics, morality, and in the ecology of our experience of nature, and each has its limits (p.56 continued). But a principle of diversity which opposes the forces of monoculture will not yield f/z-fs pluralism, unless illegitimately extrapolated to theories where its merit is much less evident, especially when some of these theories are not only mutually inconsistent but false. Rodman risks the distinctive features of Ecological Resistance for a dubious synthesis. It is only true that the positions can be combined if the first three positions are verz/ limited indeed, and then a trivial combination with each theory working where it works (which may be nowhere actual in the case of the religious component) can be managed. Moreover Ecological Resistance properly developed, will lead to economic and ethical theories which compete with the rather conventional, and environmentally defective theories of, respectively, Resource Conservation and Natural Moralism. Not only is Ecological Resistance severely handicapped by having implausible holistic theses tacked in to it (not all of which have been discussed); further, Ecological Resistance is too negative. A more positive theory - which includes a theory of value and, ultimately, for a fuller environmental position, a metaphysics - is required, not only for orientation and to meet felt needs of environmentalists already noted, but for more effective, coherent and systematic resistance. S'? it is but a short step to the ; fully ecological sensibility [which] knows with Carl Sandburg that: There is an eagle in me ... and the eagle flies among the Rocky Mountains of my dreams and fights among the Sierra crags of what I want ... . And I got the eagle ... from the wilderness, (p.118) The poem almost admits of neutral logical formalisation. 56 §5. THE VIABILITY OF THE SORT OF ALTERNATIVE ENVIRONMENTAL ETHIC SELECTED It is not necessary for an environmental ethic to take a set position on all the issues so far raised for environmental ethics (or others, such as whether, and if so which, ecological principles should be integrated for example, it does not with the ethical system) ; to decide exactly But it can hardly avoid determining which items do or can have rights. some of the boundaries in a way different from conventional ethics if it is to count as an environmental ethic. In particular, the issues of what sort of items have or carry noninstrumental value, and how they obtain it, cannot be escaped indefinitely. Without the assignment of (intrinsic) value to some items independent of the states and conditions of humans, an ethic would remain within the confines of human chauvinism. But how, it is all too often asked, is such an assignment possible, or rational? In any case, the environmental examples already relied upon (in §3) pre­ suppose items. the assignment of intrinsic value to nonhuman, and to nonsentient So a theory of value is not only unavoidable but owed. that can be adopted on an environmental Of the many accounts of ethic, the following has much to recommend it:- Some values are instru­ mental, i.e. a means or an instrument to something else that has value, and some are not, but are non-instrumental or intrinsic. Some values at least must be intrinsic, some objects valuable in themselves and not as a means to other ends. not, however, imply That a value is (reckoned to be) intrinsic does that it is absolute or system independent; the values that are intrinsic on one ethical theory may be instrumental or relative on another. More controversially, values may be in one way or another, on other things, on other values or, importantly, on non­ values (such as experiences or felt needs, or facts or natural objects); but while some values are reducible to others, others are not but are That is, contrary to naturalism and to other forms of For reductionism such as subjectivism, some values are irreducible. analogues of the naturalistic and prescriptive fallacies, formulated in irreducible. terms of 'valuable', are fallacies. In particular, evaluative judgments, such as those as to what is valuable, are not deducible from nonvaluative judgments, such as those as to what is conventionally valued or what is 58 experienced. That values in natural items are intrinsic does not imply that they are naturalistic. eliminating or Indeed intrinsic value cannot - on pain of - amount to being natural, or reduce to the experiences of humans or of sentient creatures, to their suffering or happiness or preferences. 58 On next page. 57 w Although some of these things, some of these experiences, some do not, but have no value, or a negative value or disvalue; value, 59 and some things, e.g. some experiences or some natural objects, have more value (are more valuable) than others. of value, but by no means everything is. Almost anything can be an object Value is distributed unevenly throughout the universe in something the way that electrical charge is; some items have positive quantities of varying degrees of intensity (e.g. a thundercloud may carry a positive charge, and have positive value), some negative, and some none. There are however important differences: elect­ rical charge is a quantitative notion, value a qualitative, comparative, one; charges are always commensurable, values less certainly or straight­ forwardly so;60 and the distribution of values (and especially of intrinsic values) is much more theory (system, or viewpoint) relative than .the di^sbributtdn of charges. For example, on an environmental view, matiy of the plants Mr Last Man eliminates have (intrinsic) value, whereas on animal liberation (usual animal chauvinist) views the plants have no value if no animals remain: there would be no similar disagreement about whether the plants were electrically charged. Evaluative features such as worth, merit, beauty are features which behave in rather the way that philosophers of science now mistakenly suppose that behave: empirical features they do not have a hard observational basis but are decidedly theory-dependent, though the theories involved are evaluative in character and not empirical. To assert that value or redness or remoteness is distributed through the universe is not to imply that these features, value or redness or For an outline of how this nondeducibility thesis, which yields a nondefinability thesis, may be proved (in limited contexts), see the final section of R. and V. Routley, 'The semantics of first degree entailment', ZVoMS, 6 (1972), pp. 335-59. A simpler argument against naturalistic reducibility of values is a consequence of the intensionality of values and the fact that intensional notions cannot be extensionally analysed (syntactically), which is what naturalistism characteristically assumes. Strictly the account of instrumental value should be widened if disvalues as well as (positive) values are to be taken proper account of. That is, mcrg may be at best a partial order, and so an inadequate basis on which to define total utility functions, and on which to rationally reconstruct modern economic theory. If this is so, as Godfrey Smith has suggested, and the orderings cannot be completed, applications of the optimistisation models subsequently introduced will have to work with partial functions. 58 remoteness, exist, or are to be found in the universe. undermines much criticism of nonsubjective values; The point alone for example, Mackie's empiricist case is premissed on the false assumption that the existence of values is necessary to objectivism, which he does not distinguish from nonsubjectivism. Mackie's "argument from queernessis similarly broken at the outset: since values are not entities at all, they are not strange sorts of entities. To see how unpersuasive Mackie's argument should be, replace '(objective) values' throughout by, e.g., ordinals'. universe; 'transfinite They too would be 'utterly different from'anything in Mackie's but that does not show that there are no transfinite ordinals. Thus too, since values are not entities, the account of value being developed is Met a reaZ-Zst one (in the ordinary sense).62 Values, of one sort or another, are features objects may have or lack; they are not subjective, they are not features which reduce to states or conditions of subjects or valuers. But no more are they object­ ive features, natural or empirical features of objects, features entirely detached from valuers. A largely unquestioned false dichotomy between subjective and objective ethical theories has served to rule out important options (it has been helped by a connected false dichotomy between instrumental and detached accounts of value: see Routley (b)). In simplest terms, an objective account of value has values "located" in objects entirely independently of valuers, in the way that (inertial) mass is located in physical objects independently of observers; more satisfactorily, objects have values and masses irrespective of valuers or observers. Objectivism forces intuitionism, when it is inquired how values are apprehended or known; thus a fuller objective theory is almost always accompanied by an account, so far always unsatisfactory, 61 The position is that for properties and relations argued in (e) R. Routley, EepcTX'd, RSSS, Australian National University, 1979. Such objects do not exist, but they have important theoretical, explanatory, and other roles. 62 j.c. Mackie, Ft/zZcs. especially pp.38-9. F-ZpTzt Penguin, 1977; see 62 So undermining 0K6 part of D. Mannison's claim that we want to defend a reaZ-Zst theory of values, i.e. a theory of values that accounts for the truth of "x has value" with no ineliminable reference to the interests and concerns of the evaluating group ('Critique of a proposal for an "environmental ethic'", this volume). The further parts of Mannison's claim are assessed in what immediately follows. We are indebted to Mannison for forcing us to try to work out what is wrong and right about detached value theses. 59 3 characteristically modelled on sense perception, of the way in which 64 values are intuited or apprehended. It is also regularly assumed on objective accounts that values exist, in the world; noneism) that is a separable assumption. but evidently (given By contrast, a subjective account finds values in, or not independent of, actual subjects, and commonly as linked with the pyschological states of valuers. Although subjectivism, like objectivism, comes in a variety of forms, it is always required that where an item is valued there exists, at sometime or other, a valuer who values it: "no values without a valuer" holds, in a strong, an excessively strong,implausible and erroneous, form; namely, a world without existing valuers in it is, by that very fact, a world without values. Fortunately - since both objectivisms and subjectivisms suffer from serious, and mostly well-known, defects - the positions are not exhaustive. The way between is perhaps best revealed in terms of alter­ native worlds.65 Although values in a world (more precisely, that items in that world a have evaluative features) always depend upon a valuer existing in sows world, the valuer may not exist in the world of the values (i.e. the valuer may not exist in a). For example, our claim that a certain world without valuers, e.g. a pure plant world of botanically rich form, is a fine world, depends on our existing in this world (in order to make the claim, in fact); "make sense" but it does not demand in order to (of course the claim is significant) or to be true, what is ex hypothesis ruled out, the existence of valuers in the pure plant world. That the world is a fine one, is dependent on a valuer in some world (and that valuer's assessments of value and, if you like, theory or overview of what is valuable and not); by contrast, that the world contains only plants of this or that leaf type, biomass or colour, does not depend upon a perceiver.66 since values are not entirely independent of a valuer in the way that empirical properties are independent of an observer, the An important corollary is that resulting account is not objective. transworld evaluation does not require objectivism, nor (as we shall see) intuitionism. Call the resulting account, which is neither objective nor, (short for, neither objective nor as is evident, subjective, subjective: the term is ugly but memorable). For a fuller account and worthwhile criticism, see N. Smith, Penguin, 1954. The use of worlds in ethical theorising, which is old, soon leads into world semantical analyses of ethical notions, which is newer but will also be taken for granted: it is ^problematic. On next page. 60 The replacement of the (no detachable values) thesis, (1) There are no values without a valuer, by the revised thesis, (1°) There are no values which are entirely independent of a valuer, still affords the requisite semantical connections between values and valuers subjectivists have been at pains to maintain, still allows for the requisite theory dependence and cultural relativity of values, and still avoids the extravagances of objectivism. The replacement enables the defeat of various sophistical arguments designed to show, in virtue of the conceptual character of evaluative terms, that the case so far presented against human (or person) chauvinism collapses. argument of this sort runs thus: A simple Objectivism is untenable; but that leaves subjectivism, which validates (1), as the only alternative; and subjectivism undermines the counterexamples to chauvinism.6& One defect of this argument lies in the assumption that a theory can just dispose of counterexamples, when commonly examples are harder data than any theory. Note that the difference between evaluative and empirical properties is not adequately explained counterfactually: if an appropriate valuer - it cannot be an arbitrarily chosen valuer - were placed in the world it would rate the world fine, to be sure; but equally a suitable observer would perceive perceptual properties. Both these things objectivism can quite well allow. Partly for this reason Rescher's attempt to maintain his initially subjectivist thesis that value must be benefit-oriented, while admitting Moore's comparison of unoccupied worlds, is unsuccessful. Rescher's thesis really gets modified to: value must be potential-benefit-oriented - with which an objectivist might well agree, since it becomes a truism if 'benefit' is construed sufficiently widely (e.g. as 'value'), once unscrambled counterfactually thus:the unseen sunset has aesthetic value because of the potential benefits it affords ... [i.e.] someone were placed on to such a world, he be able to appreciate and enjoy this sunset. (N. Rescher, Prentice Hill, 1969 , pp.136-37.) But insofar as Rescher wants to suggest that value comes down to potential-benefit-orientation, that the unseen sunset has value jMst because of the potential benefits, which are entirely captured counter­ factually, objectivists will rightly object; even if no one were placed in this world, the sunset which delivered no benefits the world, would still have value, still be beautiful. In short, a counterfactually-extended subjectivism remains inadequate. The requisite relation of entire independence is explained semantically in terms of worlds. The truth of A is not entirely independent of b iff, in every model, for every world of the model in which A holds there is some world of the model in which b exists. The valuer of (1°) need not exist; it is only required (in each model) that it exist in some world. Such an argument appears, in essentials, in R. Elliot, species?', this publication. 61 'Why preserve 9 Such a procedure is methodologically unsound. In this case the examples tell against subjectivism, and point to another defect in the theoretical argument, namely the reliance on the false objective/subjective dichotomy. It has been objected 69 that the nonjective way between subjective and objective is unsatisfactory, for the reason that (1°) results in unacceptible assignments of value. But the objection depends upon under­ standing 'a valuer' in (1°) not in the intended way, as 'a certain (or definite) valuer' , the determination of valuer being MpoM the values concerned, but as a choice term, as 'an arbitrarily chosen valuer', or 'some valuer or other (you choose)' - which would require, what can never happen, that every hypothetical valuer agrees in the values assigned. A precisely similar misunderstanding of (1) likewise gives strange results: namely that any state of affairs, however environmentally appalling, is valuable because we can find a valuer, e.g. a spokesman for your local development association., who would account it valuable. understood yields no such bizarre results: But (1) properly all it guarantees is that, where a state of affairs has a value then there is a certain valuer (zj/z^cT? depending upon the state of affairs and the value assigned, i.e. the choice is heavily constrained) who assigns that value to that state. Similarly in the case of (1°) choice of appropriate valuers is a dependent choice, not an arbitrary one. There are several, deeper (because metaphysically grounded), sophistical arguments that conclude on the basis of (1) among other 70 things, that human, or at least person, chauvinism is unavoidable. These arguments too fail with (1). It is simply a (common) mistake to think that values and rights do not have a meaning, or an application, outside the human context or situation: to establish this point (on which Moore rightly insisted) it is enough to point out again that (hypothetical) valuers, not necessarily human or persons, can assign 69 For example by R. Elliot op. cit. Elliot's objection depends on a misconstrual. The original draft of this paper pointed out that principle (1) is strictly mistaken: it would be a little more accurate to assert that there are no values without possible valuers. A world in which there are no valuers extant may still contain valuable items. It does not follow from this, what Elliot infers, that 'a state of affairs has value if it is such that it would be valued by some sentient individual if such an individual were to exist', with 'some' read 'some or other'. 70 These arguments are examined in detail in Routley (a), and found wanting. The objections there lodged apply equally against variations of the arguments built on (1°) . What follows in the text on sorne of these arguments is largely a condensation of some of the points developed more fully there. 62 C Q values with respect to situations and worlds devoid of humans and of persons altogether. But though these deeper arguments strictly fail with the demise of (1), they can be readily restated in terms of (1°), which can equally be taken (given further assumptions) to support the thesis that persons (or preference-havers) are the primary items of value or, more strongly, that persons are the ozzZ-y items of intrinsic value. One of these arguments relies on the idea that persons are the source of value. But the argument trades on an ambiguity. A person is the source of value-judgements and values in one sense, i.e. s/he is the valuer; but not in another, namely s/he is not responsible for valued item having its valued properties. Nor is there any licence for reducing the values assigned to those that serve the interests of the valuer. The argument is likely to be given the following sort of initial elaboration: By (1°), whatever has a value has its value in virtue of an assignment from certain valuers. But valuers are always persons. The argument is however ever has a value gets its value from persons. defective. Therefore what­ For even if values were always assigned by persons the items their values from persons assigned values do not thereby yet or (or those of persons). They have what value they have partly in virtue of features of their own. Nonetheless, the argument continues, the empirical features of objects valued are relevant because they are taken into account in preference rankings on which valuers base their assignments. By (1°) (or a derivative) values are relational properties not properties simpliciter as objectivism would have it. They are relational properties which depend on certain features of the related item. Which features, of values? Well, obviously, preferences and interests of valuers. So, it is con­ cluded, values answer to, or reduce to, interests of persons: no alternative to chauvinism. there is Rather similar arguments lead to such (mistaken) conclusions as that rights are interest-oriented, that 71 obligations must answer to people's interests, etc. etc. The arguments can furthermore - in case the transit seemed excessively swift - be filled out, for example as follows: By (1°), Thus, e.g. K. Baier, T/ze AforczZ Po^yzt o/ Ithaca, 1958. 63 Cornell University Press, -B. Values depend upon valuers, upon their value assignments or rankings. -A. These value rankings depend upon valuers' preference rankings. A. Hence Values depend upon, or are determined through, the preference rankings of valuers. B. Valuers' preference rankings are determined through valuers' interests. C. Valuers are humans [persons]. Therefore D. Values are determined through, or depend upon, human [or 72 persons'] interests. Hence, it is sometimes concluded, not only is it perfectly acceptable for humans to reduce matters of value and morality to matters of human, interest, there is no rational or feasible alternative to doing so: any alternative to chauvinism is simply incoherent. With the replacement of (1) by (1°), premiss (C) is rendered implausible unless 'human' is supplanted by 'person' (where the variable 'person' is so characterised that all valuers are persons, something some accounts of person would rule out). Thus, without (1), the argument leads at best to person chauvinism. Nor does -B follow from (1°): "not entirely independent of" does not imply "dependent upon", but at best "partially dependent upon". However it does seem that values are, in a sense, determined through value assignments - assignments made certainly in virtue of features of the objects valued and of preference rankings of valuers, that is having dual factual and attitudinal bases - but assign­ ments nevertheless. Accordingly, the central part of the argument can be reformulated, in a way which locates the main source of damage, thus A'. Values are determined through value assignments [preference rankings] of valuers. B'. The value assignments [preference ranking] of valuers are determined through valuers' interests. In order to reach what amounts to chauvinism 73 from B', however, 'interest' has to be narrowly construed, after the fashion of egoism, as 'own, self- centred or selfish, interest'. D'. Otherwise the conclusion, Values are determined through valuers' interests, Many variations on this argument are considered in Routley (a); and obviously there are yet other variations, e.g. value assignments could be directly linked with interests. On next page. 64 c Q is innocuous; valuers. it does nothing to confine what determines value, to For valuers' interests may concern almost anything, and in particular may include the interests of nonvaluers(as in 'its interest is among my interests') and the welfare of natural systems. understood, is no more chauvinistic than: D', so Values are value-centred. To succeed the argument has to narrow the elements assessed in determining value to features of the base class of persons [or humans]; their interests and welfare alone. e.g. to For if we have to look beyond this class to assess value - even to determine interests and welfare - then the argument to chauvinism fails. Thus the argument has, in order to suc­ ceed, to rely upon assumptions either of egoism - valuers' interests are restricted to their own (perhaps enlightened) self-interest - or of a group analogue - valuers' interests are restricted to those of the group, the base class - where (to indicate the final trick in the argument) there is, in each case, a slide on the elastic term 'interests', e.g. from ^?z) f/z^r ozjzz ozjyz Mses or purposes. to t/z^^r ozjzz u^urztape., or t/ze^r It is evident enough that in order to succeed the argument has to assume one of the very points at issue, that interests, which are progressively restricted to chauvinistic interests, are so restricted.74 But consider, to expose the character of the assumptions made, parallel arguments to egoism and groupism, i.e. group egoism: AE. Persons always act (in freely chosen cases, or rational cases) in the way they prefer or choose, i.e. in accord with their (revealed) preference rankings. BE. Individual [group] preference rankings are always determined through (reflect) self [group] interest. 71 What amounts to chauvinism; for if a position were reached in this way by a sound argument, then the position would not be chauvinistic, being justified. For this reason, it is absurd for a rational creature to present itself (as some philosophers have) as a human chauvinist or a person chauvinist. There is however a descriptive analogue of chauvinism, in which the justificatory clause is omitted; and this use of 'chauvinism' we have resorted to ourselves (as the astute reader will have observed) as an interim step. In the end of course such descriptive-chauvinism is chauvinism, since the discrimination involved is unwarranted. 74 The claim generalises: it is not possible to mount an argument for person [or human] chauvinism on the basis of the meaning, or analysis, of such notions as, o^Z^pa^o/z or r^pTzf or without assuming, in the analysis or the course of the argument, the very points at issue. This is an outcome of the viability of nonchauvinistic analyses of these notions, together with the content preservation character of genuine deductive arguments. 65 Therefore DE. Individual persons [groups of persons] always act in ways determined in their own self [group] interests (or that reflect their own interest^). Thereafter follows the slide from "in their own interests" to "to their own advantage", or "for their own uses or purposes". The eventual con­ clusion of egoism, again parallelling the class chauvinism case, is not only that the egoistic position is perfectly in order and thoroughly rational, but that there are no alternatives; least ought to be, no other way of acting, that is, there is, or at 'that men can only choose to do what is in their own interests or that it is only rational to do Thus,person or (human) chauvinism, as based.on the central argument, 3 stands revealed as like group selfishness, "group egoism" one might almost say. Likewise the criticisms of the as we shall now call the argument through D or D', parallel those of egoism; in particular, premiss B' to those that defeat premiss BE. (or B) succumbs to similar objections Group selfishness is no more acceptable than egoism, since it depends on exactly the same set of confusions between values, preferences, interests, and advantages (encouraged by slippery terms such as 'interests' and 'self-interest') as the arguments on which egoism rests. Briefly, because one may discern or select one's own preference or value rankings, it does not follow that these rankings are set up or selected in one's own selfish (or enlightened self) interests; similarly in group cases, because a group determines its own rankings, it does not follow that it determines them in its own interests; the group includes environmental individuals. certainly not if Thus just as BE is refuted, at least prima facie, by a range of examples where preference, and value, rankings run counter to self-regarding interest, e.g. cases of otherregarding interest or altruism, so prima facie at least, B is refuted by examples where value, and also overall preference rankings, vary from group interests, e.g. cases of group altruism and extra-group-regarding interests, as in resistance movements, environmental action groups, and so on. It is often in selfish human interests (no less selfish because pertaining to a group) to open up and develop the wilderness, strip mine the earth, exploit animals, and so on, but ecological resistance workers Nowell Smith, op. cit., p.140. Nowell-Smith's very appealing critique of egoism (pp.140-44) may, by simple paraphrase, be converted into a critique of group selfishness. This is obvious once B' and BE are compared. 66 who oppose doing so are commonly not acting just out of (their own or) human intragroup interests, but out of direct concern for the environment and its welfare. But, just as BE is not demolished by such counterexamples of apparently other-regarding and altruistic action, neither is B: in each case it can be made out that further selfish (i.e. self-regarding) inter­ ests are involved, e.g., in the case of B, that an agent did what he did, an altruistic action, because he in the egoism case, doing it. As Nowell-Smith explains 'interest' is written in as an internal accusative, thereby rendering such theses as BE true at the cost, however, of trivial- More generally, valuing something gets written in as a further sort of "interest"; whatever valuers value that does not seem to ising them. be in their interests is said to provide a further interest, either the value itself or an invented value surrogate; for example, the environ­ mentalist who works to retain a wilderness he never expects to see may be said to be so acting only because he has an interest in or derives benefit or advantage from just knowing it exists, just as he would be said to in the egoist case. "retained"; By such strategies the theses can be for then a valued item really is in valuers' interests, in the extended sense, even if they are in obvious ways seriously incon­ venienced by it, i.e. even if it is Mot in their narrow interests in the customary sense. Thus B, like BE, is preserved by stretching the elastic term 'interests', in a way that it too readily admits, to include values, or value surrogates, among interests. Then however the conclus­ ion of the Group Selfishness argument loses its intended force, and becomes the platitude that values are determined through valuers' values, just as egoism, under the extension which makes us all covert egoists, loses its sting and becomes a platitude. Human chauvinism in this form, like egoism, derives its plausibility from vacillation on the sense of 'interests', with a resulting fluctuation between a strong false thesis when interests are narrowed through group interests to group restricted interests - the real face of human chauvinism - and a trivial analytic thesis, between paradox and platitude. To reject the reductionist conclusion D, or D', is by no means to be committed to the view that the valuers and their preference rankings play %<? role in determining values and that values are a further set of In the sense of Wisdom's (meta)philosophy. The technique of rescuing philosophical theses by shifts, which begin with natural extensions of terms, enforced by accompanying redefinitions of terms - including the thesis "We're all selfish really" - is delightfully explained in J. Wisdom, dt/zer Blackwell, Oxford, 1952, especially chapter 1. 67 mysterious independent items somehow perceived by valuers through a special (even mystical and non-rational) moral sense. An intuitionist theory of value is not required, and is not lurking in the background. One can simply admit that valuers' preference rankings play an important role in evaluation; one is not thereby committed to D unless one assumes - what amounts to premiss B - that these preference rankings reflect, or can be reduced to, valuers' (narrow) interests. Even so important problems remain unresolved, in particular, precisely what role valuers' preference-rankings play, and how this role enables the damaging features of intuitionism to be avoided. The arguments against genuinely environmental ethics from the character of are sometimes followed up by the objection that such a ethic can be given no, or no satisfactory, theory of value (or metaethic, to.use the current, but questionable, jargon transferred from logical theory). It is true that several theories of value are quickly ruled out, including mainstream noncognitive theories, which are objection­ ably chauvinistic, allowing no non-instrumental value to any non-sentient natural items. While an environmental ethic, like almost any other normative ethic, ca?? be supplied with an intuitionist theory of value, an environmental ethic, unlike most other ethics, wa?/ appear to have no option to such a theory, though the theory is unsatisfactory and causes especial problems for the ethic. 75 The unsatisfactoriness of intuitionism is in part for the usual reasons: apart from the perceptual comparison which is problematic in several ways (e.g. evaluative properties are not like perceptual properties, the moral sense is rather different from other senses), the theory is (like a purely axiomatic theory) too much of a black box, which gives no explanation of many things that call for explanation, e.g. the semantics of value, how value judgements are based on factual and emotional or attitudinal bases; but it is in part because intuitionism provides little guidance or assistance in accounting for the intrinsic value of environmental objects. These difficulties can be evaded and the problems largely resolved through a semantical theory of value, and more generally of ethical terms. Thus D. Mannison, 'the "new environmental ethic" is ... irredeemably intuitionistic' (op. cit.), and H.J. McCloskey: As far as I can see of the known, plausible meta-ethics, the only one available ... is an intuitionist one. ... [There] would still be ... the problem of associating it with a non-human-centred normative ethic, one which did not locate all values in human capacities states, goods, but accorded to environmental phenomena value in their own right. ('Ecological ethics and its justification: a critical appraisal', this volume.) 68 For the truth-conditions, 7 8 and resulting interpretation conditions, will supply an account of meaning not only of axiological expressions but also of deontic expressions, and moreover in a way that is plainly nonchauvinistic; e.g., it enables natural items to be awarded intrinsic value in much the way that states or conditions of humans are on chauvinistic theories. Something of the shape and character of the semantical analyses emerges from the evaluation rules for important axiological and deontic 79 functions. The semantics are set within the framework of the semantics of entailment: in this way several paradoxes possible world semantics induces in deontic (and axiological) theory are automatically removed. The semantical analyses of the central axiological functor, 'that ... is better than that __ ', abbreviated 'Bt', and the key deontic predicate 'that ... is permissible', abbreviated 'P', restricted to sentential terms, take respectively the following forms: I(A Bt B, a) = 1 iff [B] i.e. [A], where [C] = {c e K: I(C, c) =1}, [C] is the range of C, the class of situations where C holds, some­ times called the proposition C expresses. In short, that A is better than that B holds in world a iff from the perspective of a, the proposition B expresses is less preferable than the proposition A expresses, where the ordering relation is spelt out in terms of a preference ranking. I(PA, a) = 1 iff, for some world b such that Tab, I(A, b) = 1; i.e., that A is permissible holds in a iff for some world b permitted as far as a is concerned, A holds in b - where the relation T is spelt out in terms of a relative permittedness relation. Enough of the semantical theory has been exposed to indicate some important features. Firstly, betterness - and something the same holds for other value terms - is assessed semantically in terms of a world- relativised preference ranking. In the simplest case, where betterness is assessed as to truth (rather than interpretation, or meaning), i.e. at actual world T, the assessment just is in terms of a preference ranking (so validating a form of premiss B above, for a technical sense of 70 Ethical judgements, both axiological and deontic, have truth values, relative to their context of occurrence. By use of context, objections, e.g. from relativity, to the attribution of truth-values to such judgements can be straightforwardly avoided. 79 Full details of the semantics are presented elsewhere, in Routley (c), and in R. Routley, R.K. Meyer, and others, PeZevuzzf TZzeZr P-ZfaZs, RSSS, Australian National University, 1979. 69 'determined'). Secondly, the semantics of can be given in descriptive terms; similarly for deontic terms such as The semantical analysis bridges the fact-value gap, by a functional linkage, without however closing it. preferential basis. For it provides no of value to its The linkage enables a simple explanation of how environmental considerations can count: criteria may be preferred. worlds satisfying environmental Sets of worlds where human interests or needs are not met but ecosystems are maintained may, for example, be prefer­ entially ranked above worlds where human needs are met at the expense of ecosystems. The way in which the factual basis, which includes environ­ mental facts - the descriptive better-making characteristics - enters into the evaluative judgments of quality, is in outline as follows: factual criteria delimit preference rankings on worlds in the same way that descriptive features of objects delimit preference rankings of these objects. It is not the case, then, that we are unable to explain zj?zz/ a natural item is valuable if we cannot point to some human interest or purpose which is served. This again assumes mistakenly, that because a valuer­ relative preference-ranking is involved, the evaluation must somehow be reducible to the interests or purposes of the valuer. That there is an allusion in the semantical unpacking of value to the preference system of a certain valuer no more requires that the items valued are valuable only insofar as they serve the valuer's interests or preferences than it does in more familiar cases such as valuing a work of art, a library or an old building. Valuers can and do value items because they perceive in them properties they take to be valuable, and in the interests of other things whose interests are their own, and not simply for what they can get out of them or how far they serve their own interests. The answer to the question 'Why is it valuable?', for a natural item, will not always be, as it must always be on the instrumental view, 'Because it is good for such and such purpose or end of the valuer or those of his group', but may be: 'Because it has properties A, B and C which the valuer holds to be valuable in virtue of considered preferences, including iterated (second order) preferences which reflect the preferences of other preference-havers. In the end, then, environmental value systems are cvz different How a seTnaTzt-fcaZ analysis - as distinct from a analysis may make bridges without involving a reduction - but leaving everything as it is - is more fully explained in R. Routley 'The semantical meta­ morphosis of metaphysics', JoMruaZ P/z^Zosop/zz/, 54 (1976), 187-205. For more on how the fact/value gap is semantically bridged see Routley (c). 70 preference rankings, which take into account different facts from the chauvinistic systems they are beginning to compete with and aim to supplant - a different group preference ranking and network (emanating from the valuer and those like her) which is grounded in a different perception and emotional presentation of nature. The semantical meta-ethic is not as neutral as an intuitionistic meta-ethic: for the preference-rankings involved require a valuer, i.e. thesis (1°) is applied, thereby excluding objective theories. The fact that the semantical theory will work (perhaps after minor adaptions) for a range of normative theories is no serious objection. not have to be precisely tailored to a given ethic: A meta-ethic does the same (sort of) metalogic may work satisfactorily for many different logics. It is not merely that the distinctiveness of the meta-ethic may be what is more serious is that the contested; (normative) ethic, even newness of the within Western traditions, may be challenged. It has been suggested, for instance, that such ethics are but versions or minor variants of ideal utilitarianism McCloskey, op. cit.). (cf. Elliot, op. cit.; To assess this claim, and to reveal how much the preferred environmental ethic has in common with such utilitarianism and how much it differs, considering what counts as ideal utilitarianism is unavoidable. In indicating what does count, there is real point in going back to Rashdall's original explanation: ... all moral judgements are ultimately judgements as to the value of ends. This view of Ethics, which combines the utilitarian principle that Ethics must be teleological with a non-hedonistic view of the ethical end I propose to call Ideal Utilitarianism. According to this view actions are right or wrong according as they tend to produce for all mankind an ideal end or good, which includes but is not limited to pleasure. ... The right action is always that which (so far as the agent has means of knowing) will produce the greatest amount of good upon the whole. (H- Rashdall, TTze T/zeorz/ o/ Fzz-z^Z, Oxford University Press, 1907, p.184.) Ideal utilitarianism is thus, according to Rashdall, nonhedonistic utilitarianism, and so conforms to the core theses of utilitarianism, namely: (i) The ethical or ideal end (the good) is determined simply by maximisation of net utility or value of certain factors or ends, typically (but not invariably) experiences or states of consciousness such as pleasure, enjoyment, satisfaction of desires or preferences 71 !* (ii) The ends or experiences are those of some given base class, e.g. mankind, present persons, sentient creatures (Pase <?Zass r^Z-az^z^sut-Zczz); and (iii) Other ethical notions, right in particular, are defined as determined in terms of the ethical end (^eZeoZ-c^-ZcuZ re^zzc^-Zozz-Zsw). A corollary of the reductionist assumption - which can take various forms, e.g. act, rule, average utilitarianism - is that maximisation is uncon­ strained by deontic requirements. The core principles are also readily discerned in that other paradigmatic ideal utilitarian, Moore, who like Rashdall, objects to (hedonistic) utilitarianism on the grounds of its hedonistic principle (e.g. p.184), and accordingly widens the ends admitted in (i), and, again like Rashdall, takes the base class to consist of humans. as assessed through its paradigm exponents *Zs thus chauvinistic, and zzo e^zz-ZrczzwezztuZ. sc/zewa /or azz Human chauvinism is in fact integral to both Rashdall'sand Moore's work. For example, Rashdall characterises r-z^TzZ; in terms of good for mankind, and endorses a strong form of the greater value assumption (p.215). And Moore not only identifies the best poss-ZbZe state of things in this world with Human Good (p.183), but considers 'by far the most valuable things we can know or -z^azy-Z/ze, are certain states of consciousness', Zzzz?n<27z consciousness (p.188, my italics). Each one of the core theses of utilitarianism is false (the case is argued in detail in Routley (b)). Contrary to (i) optimisation needs to be constrained, deontically constrained, else serious injustices to and ill-treatment of objects within the base class and, more important, objects outside that class, are all too likely. But, as against (iii) this destroys prospects of successful deontic reductions, which are, on independent grounds, improbable. To avoid the chauvinism, typically built See Pr-Zpzc-Zp-Zu Ez^/z^cu, Cambridge University Press, 1903, chapters V and VI. Moore does say (p.188) that No one, probably, ... who has asked himself the question, has even doubted that personal affection and appreciation of what is beautiful in Art or Nature, are good in themselves. But 'appreciation of what is beautiful' reduces, on Moore's account, to 'enjoyment of beautiful objects'; and any independent value in what is beautiful is 'so small as to be negligible in comparison with that which attaches to the cozzsu^ozzszzess of beauty', (p.189). Moore's chauvinistic account thus appears open to familiar objections e.g. those based on enjoyment machines (cf. the wilderness experience machine discussed above), and on beautiful worlds lacking conscious beings-which help show that beauty is what counts and not just, or primarily, experiences of beauty. Moore was not, however, entirely unaware of such points: cf. pp.194-95. 72 * into (ii), (i) requires restatement in terms of factors which avoid base class relativisation; then clause (ii) is eliminated. The need for con­ straints in optimisation modellings of utilitarian or economic sorts can be seen from the phenomena of interrelated interests and preferences: that my interests include, or depend upon, yours, means that these cannot vary independently, but are interrelated. Repairing the defects of ideal utilitarianism results in more adequate optimisation modelling. notion of The recipe elementary analysis of the item leads to is, in essence, as follows: Maximise a weighted function (e.g. a sum) of the factors that value a determines subject to appropriate constraints: symbolically, maximise n-place function E = E(x) subject to constraining relations Rj(x) and x = <x^,...,x^>). (with j an index, Special cases of such optimisation modellings are familiar from engineering and economic applications (e.g. determination of optimal social welfare in concave programming). What is more general 82 about the model indicated, is, in particular, the form of constraints permitted, which can include that ... Xi ... X2 ..." bounds for optimals). deontic constraints, e.g. "It is forbidden (which has the effect of putting a subspace out of Since there is nothing to prevent moral prohibitions, requirements of fairness, and the like, from appearing among the constraints ethics, economics, and practical reasoning can in principle be success­ fully amalgamated. The optimisation modelling of general value theory differs significantly from that of (ideal) utilitarianism. Although maximization is fundamental in both, in utilitarianism value is characteristically replaced by net utility, measured usually in terms of experiential units of some sort, whereas in general value theory this reduction is rejected. In each case there is a of an ethical calculus, but the currency is different, being values in one case and base class or individual utilities (units of utility) in the other; but in both cases the calculus is so far (equally) unworkable except in very special cases. In each case there is an analysis into components of the objective (function) maximized, but the analysis is very different. In utilitarianism net utility is broken down into individual utilities of members of some base class. In general value theory such a reduction is rejected (except perhaps where appropriate hypothetical valuers are admitted); analysis into factors that carry value is made. instead an (But in Moore's ideal The general model is motivated, explained, illustrated, applied and defended in Routley (b) and (d) and also in R. Routley, 'The choice of logical foundations: nonclassical choices and the ultralogical choice', L<9<2"f<?a, 38 (1979). 73 utilitarianism, unlike utilitarianism proper, the way is opened for factors, such as beauty, which carry intrinsic value and are not reducible to features of the base class or its members.) In utilitarianism deontic notions, such as right, are analysed in terms of the value theory; general value theory deontic notions are taken as given constraints are imposed on optimisations. but in and deontic Whereas the maximisations of utilitarianisms proper are (single element) unconstrained maximisations (hence the injustice, unfairness, and ill-treatment such ethics condone), general value theory optimisations are constrained. in principle While there is room for constraints in ideal utilitarianism, as there is for a switch to factors which are base-class independent - though the theory has never been elaborated to the point where these things are done - deontic constraints cannot be noncircularly imposed, given the teleological reduction thesis (so the problems of unfairness and ill-treatment remain). It is a fairly evident corollary of the differences that general value theory removes leading objections to utilitarianisms. It is not perhaps so evident, however, how it applies to environmental cases or what the factors of environmental relevance are. To expose some of the factors - and to indicate just how far an environmental ethics is dis­ tanced even from a comparatively liberal ethic like Moore's ideal utilitarianism - consider the very difficult optimisation problems as to the determination of the Ideal. Moore distinguishes (1) The Ideal, from, what is more interesting, state of things the best possZbZe state of things in this world', toward which our action should be directed' absolute ideal' (KI) and (2) 'the (2) 'the MZtZ/naZe end (p.183). Call (1) 'The 'the T ideal' or 'the this world ideal' (TI). A crucial difference between the two problems lies in the constraints: determination of TI is constrained by features - many of them unknown - of the actual world T (now and in the immediate future), by its populations of humans and of various species of living things on its various earths, by its natural features, by its physical and technological resources, limitations of which will impose characteristic scarcity constraints. By That does not imply that no analyses can be given of deontic notions. Although axiological reductions are ruled out, others are not. Certainly semantical analysis, like that already sketched for permissib­ ility, can be supplied and elaborated. Moore's teleological ethic is not far removed from Aristotle's ethic more than 2000 years earlier (which exhibits features of ideal utilitarianism) . From the point of view of this long relativelyunchanged base line, environmental ethics are not merely new and radical, but represent a paradigm shift. 74 - contrast, KI is presumably not constrained by resources or technology (in relation to populations); this is just one reason why Leibnitz's equations of TI with KI and with things as at present fails. theless constrained. 8S KI is none­ There will, for example, be constraints forbidding unfair or ill-treatment of various sorts (given that such treatment is possible), and there will be constraints interrelating factors that are not independent. The factors entering into the modelling will no doubt represent, in some way, many of the positive goods, such as enjoyment of the "meritor­ ious" sorts that Moore managed to discern - positively weighted - and many of the evils he found - but negatively weighted (but some of these things are better represented through constraints). There remain, 86 however, many features of ecological importance that Moore never con­ templated; for example, diversity of systems and creatures, naturalness, o7 integrity of systems, stability of systems, harmony of systems. Optimising a mix of factors, which are mutually constrained, meets constant reproaches made against such ecological values as diversity. The objections take the form that enhancement of diversity as a sole factor can lead to undesirable ecological results, indeed can diminish Op net value and so be wrong on utilitarianism grounds. On the multiple factor model diversity is constrained by naturalness and stability, for example; thus net value is not going to be increased through increasing the diversity of a simple temperate rainforest by felling some of its trees and replacing them with exotic species. On the other hand, diver­ sity will be increased by planting the banks of a stream, eroded through excess clearing and overgrazing, with suitable exotic species - then birds Perhaps, moreover, there are no limiting natural laws, such as con­ servation principles, but the universe operates according to beneficient natural laws. There are distinctions here between worlds and physically possible worlds which Moore did not make. There may also be, at least in the case of KI, as Moore observed, factors that we are unaware of - at least under the intended construal of 'conceivable'. Rough and ready measures of such factors as diversity are not so difficult to come by, and, in important respects, present fewer problems than obtaining measures of pleasure that encompass, in ways that take account of interspecies and interindividual comparisons, all sentient creatures. Compare the objections made in §4 to Rodman's reliance on the single criteria of diversity; and also Passmore's points in (a) against diversity as a single criterion in arguments for preservation. 75 and other animals will increase as well as plant diversity - and in such a case stability will also be increased in the longer term and natural­ ness not diminished (since already removed); thus overall value will be increased (it may also be increased by the enjoyment of conservationists formerly appalled by the stream landscape). Diversity,though (like enjoy­ ment or pleasure) good in itself, is (again like hedonistic values) not an unconstrained value (compare, e.g., enjoyment obtained through secret maltreatment of animals or by impoverishment of an unvisited streamside). The multiple factor model also solves the problem of how to combine traditional values, such as the virtues and creature enjoyment with what many in the West are only beginning to discern, environmental values; namely, by a constrained optimisation which takes due (i.e. weighted) account of them Thus in moving to an environmental (or nonchauvinist) ethic one is not ordinarily acknowledged welfare values for persons or humans, but simply recognising a further set of values to which such welfare values should be added. welfare values are retained; Nor is one humans, for human one is simply aiming to remove - through constraints which may reduce assignments to human values in favour of other values - the unwarranted privilege and chauvinism of the displaced Western super-ethic. One would not have come very far if, despite the claim to have recognised environmental values, one assumed that wherever there is con­ flict between natural values and human values, the latter must always prevail. This would be equivalent to assigning them very low weight, or even zero value, in all serious conflict cases. One would not have advanced far past rejection of axiological principle (A) if one then accepted, in assessments as to how things should be done, the yreafer namely that even though other things may have intrinsic value, people or humans are more valuable than anything else, and rank more highly (no matter how large their number).To allow that sows in human welfare values may sometimes - or even often, especially with increasing human populations - have to be accepted in cases of conflict is an essential part of assigning a genuine positive value to nonhuman factors. Sometimes humans, their states and conditions, do not come first: the greater value assumption should be rejected. Such an assumption - in popular form, that people come first - is extrgTMgZ-z/ widespread and is even included in animal liberation theory; cf. Singer, op. cit. For striking examples of the damaging assumption at work, see the (chauvinistic) resolutions of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment. o 4 There are many kinds of examples. Conspicuous examples are provided by recognisedly evil people (there are, under current social arrangements, plenty), whose welfare, or even lives, do not rank above, for example, valuable natural items, or the welfare of future persons. More con­ troversial are evaluations which rank the preservation of an animal species, such as the tiger, above the increase (or even retention) of human population in given areas.91 But, for the most part, the compar­ ative value of humans as opposed to other creatures and things has been greatly exaggerated. The arguments used in support of the greater value assumption are but variations of those for human chauvinism already considered, and largely rejected (in §1). Thus, for instance, Keller argues for a greater value thesis on the ground that a 'human being is the most complex thing which we know; its depth and range of experience far transcend that of any other known living thing' (p.209) Ecological Concern', Zz/^o/z, vol.6 (J.A. Keller, (1971), pp.197-209). complexity the claim is almost certainly false: are much more complex. 'Types of Motives for As regards pure tropical forest ecosystems The claim about range of experience is open to doubt, even for "normal" humans, since many animals have a much wider range of such sensory experiences as smells; and it is false of many humans. More important, range and "depth" of experience, of certain have) , does not, on its own, select sorts (those that normally establish greater value in any routine or regular way. Often enough it is no good basis for assigning greater value. The generalised optimisation model will commonly give way, in applications less sweeping and more feasible than that of the determining TI, to such special cases of it as Bayesian decision theory and cost­ benefit analysis, where these analyses allow properly for environmental values and duly incorporate ethical constraints (see Routley (a)). 90 91 It The fact of the matter is that prevailing unqualified attitudes to human welfare or the "sanctity" of human life - as opposed to other life - are shot through with inconsistency. For instance, despite common claims that human life is sacrosanct, neither the largely unquestioned military ethics nor medical ethics nor the state or "the law" take such a position: most individual humans are regarded as expendible, replaceable, and not particularly or uniquely valuable. On the prevailing ethic quite a different evaluation is taken for granted: e.g. It would be unrealistic to agree, of course, that preservation of wildlife should take precedence over providing for human needs. (S. Richardson, writing in T/ze CuTZ&erru November 29, 1974 , p.12) On an environmental ethic, while it might not be politically expedient, it would not be at all "unrealistic", to so agree. 77 & is these more special methods that should normally be applied in trying to determine a best course of action in a range of difficult decision cases thrown up for an environmental ethics, especially cases where there is a conflict (i.e. constraining conditions) between retention of natural values (e.g. preserving a wilderness or a national park) and maintenance of humanistic values (e.g. keeping some humans alive, commonly reckoned one of the highest human-values). But for a cost-benefit weigh-up to be attempted such cases have to be described in more detail usually provided by chauvinistic philosophers who than is to direct such examples against environmental evaluations - as if furthermore, the examples were quite conclusive, when they almost always presuppose from the very beginning what is in dispute, a greater value assumption. In connection with such intended counterexamples to properly environmental ethics, two further points are worth recording: firstly, resort to such analytical methods is the rational procedure in such cases (unless a time urgency intrudes, as seldom happens, or should happen, in philosophy); secondly, an environmental ethic should not, any more than other ethics or economics, be expected to provide a decision procedure for any and every case that may arise: the theory (and accompanying intuitions) may have to be developed to resolve some cases, while other cases may go (cheerfully) undecided. On similar test or decision cases, e.g. one group of starving people versus another group in a situation of limited resources, or quality of life versus number of humans, conventional ethical theories may offer no quick, or clearcut, resolutions, etc. The optimisation model indicates, among many other things, how axiological principle (A) is to be modified. For best choice and best course of action are now determined by taking account of the further range of values, not just those that are human-based. Then (A) vanishes into the truism that only those objects that are of intrinsic value are of intrinsic value, or need be taken into account in the values of the optimisation model. How to rectify the deontic principle (D) is rather less obvious than how to adjust (A). An obvious strategy, is, however, to add further 92 Even when a case is more fully described there will, of course be (unavoidable) difficulties in quantifying some of the values, e.g. those of "intangible" factors; but these difficulties are not sub­ stantially worse than those already encountered in routine business accounting in quantifying such assets as good-will and such matters as wage relativities for different work. As L. Tribe has pointed out (in 'Ways not to think about plastic trees: new foundations for environmental law', YaZ-e AuzJ vol.83 (1974) , pp.1315-1348) the difficulties of transferring or adapting rather standard methods of assessment, such as decision theory and cost-benefit analyses, to pro vide rational decision methods in the case of environmental matters has been much exaggerated, to the detriment of the environment. 78 * provisos. way; But it is unsatisfactory to do this in a piecemeal sort of it hardly suffices, for example, to simply add further riders excluding unnecessary cruelty to animals, speciescide, etc. What has to is unwarranted interference with other preference­ be ruled out havers (and goal-possessors) and the degrading of items of value. A revised principle appears then to go something like this:- DN. One is free to act as one wishes provided that (i) one does not unwarrantedly interfere with other preference-havers, and (ii) one does not damage or ill-treat or devalue anything of value. Though the revised principle has a rather more complex and restrictive character than freedom principle (D) and Western variants thereon, it still does the requisite task (D) set out to do, namely to state that out­ side certain prescribed areas one is free, that select behaviour is permissible.93 it is simply that the proscribed area is far larger than inadequate homocentric ethics have envisaged. But perhaps the whole conception underlying (D), and the way it fixes onus of proof, should be stood on its head. On the view behind (D), one starts from an unlimited position permitting unlimited interference and exploitation; restrictions are added primarily because other ones (again ones of the privileged class) are also starting from a similar unlimited position whose freedom of action may be (impermissibly) curtailed by one's own. So results the initial position, e.g. of (D). For inter­ ference in others' projects (no matter how exploitative) beyond this "evident" initial position,good reasons have always to be offered. alternative thoroughgoing On the respect view, which is illustrated by various nonexploitative non-Western ethics, one starts from a restricted position, a position of no interference and no exploitation, a position at peace with the natural world so to say, and allows interference - not as on thinking, restricts interference - for good reasons. thus entirely inverted: stop interference. Western The onus of proof is good reasons are required y<2r interference, not The good reasons include the collecting of fruit and nuts (and other natural "produce") for life support purposes, but not, for example, the collection of a substantial surplus of forest orchids on whim or in the hope that they may be sold at a profit. A theory of value like that outlined, though it takes it for granted, 93 The revised freedom principle is not incompatible with, but can be combined with and supplemented by, a bill of rights, charter or catechism specifying positively types of rights and of permissible conduct. 79 A in the constraints imposed in optimisation, that there are deontic principles limiting what is done to many objects other than persons, leaves main deontic issues open, and in particular does not thereby imply that such objects have rights. For woraZ forbidding certain actions with respect to an object (fo not, in general, that object a 94 corretattle r-^p/zt. That it would be wrong to mutilate a given oak or landscape painting does not entail that the tree or painting has a correl­ ative right not to be mutilated - without (what has a point) stretching the notion of r^p*7z^. An environmental ethic like the respect ethic being advanced does not automatically commit one to the view that natural objects or artifacts sometimes have rights. It is sometimes held that some such objects do have rights, e.g. under the influence of pantheism. But construed literally, pantheism is false, since artefacts, and other inanimate objects, are not alive. The view that the class of right-holders extends beyond the class of preference-havers can however be placed on bases less extravagant than pantheism - most obviously in terms of a suitable deontic analysis of r^p?zt, for instance along the following lines: others d has a right to iff (obligation-holders) are not entitled to interfere with d's cj)ing (if d (f)'s or were to (j)). Under this account, of which emerges straight-forwardly from modern analyses of r^p/zt, a painting or a tree may indeed have "rights", such as to continue existing. Although the term 'right' can no doubt be 6^ctezz<ie(i along some such lines, the analysis leaves out essential elements of the normal notion, namely the involvement of choice. There are, once again, various competing environ­ mental ethics, some simple extensions of Western ethics which extrapolate the notion of r^p/zt, some not, some rationalistic, some not, and so on. Environmental positions can - but need not - adhere to the familiar assumption that rights divide into the following two broad classes:First, there are rights held by those (persons, in o?z6 sense) who can duly claim their rights themselves, a class which excludes many humans So rejected also is the s^rozz^ correlation thesis, presented e.g. in S.I. Benn and R.S. Peters, Pocz^aZ Pr^Tzc^pZes a7z<i ^Tze Pew<9<?r<2^<? Allen and Unwin/1959, pp.89-9, according to which 'right and duty are different names for the same normative relation, according to the point of view from which it is regarded' (thereby also elevating what is at best a coentailment into a stronger identity relation). For example, that d has a duty to look after the painting does not entail that the painting has a right to be looked after by d, in any sense of 'right' Benn and Peters are prepared to acknowledge. The weaker correlation thesis - that d has a right to R entails that at least someone else has a duty with respect to R - is not at issue. 80 & and (so far as we know) almost all nonhuman animals. Such rights are often supposed to carry with them various responsibilities. Secondly, there are rights held by certain other (sometime sentient) creatures; though the extent of this subclass of right-holders is a controversial matter, it is generally taken to include at least infants, mentally defective humans, dead humans, and some animals. These rights do not carry corresponding responsibilities, though they are, of course, the However the assumption that certain rights - ground for various claims. the really central rights - are restricted to those who can claim them on their OM% behalf, seems to be based on the faulty idea of private (or separable) individuals as the basic metaphysical units. In a community of socio-environmental individuals there is no reason why one creature's rights should not be claimed, as infants' and animals' rights frequently are, by another: these rights are others' responsibilities. right-holder has itself no specific responsibilities. Often a Moreover the supposed division leaves it quite vague what responsibilities "central" often, it seems, they have none that right-holders are supposed to have; connect relevantly with their rights. be put on the alleged division: a primary nonderivative way). Accordingly but little weight will any preference-haver can hold rights (in That any preference-haver can hold rights is a consequence of the account of rt<y72t that usage of 'right to' appears to lead to, namely for very many (action-type) predicates cj), d has a right to iff, for every other (obligation-holder) z, z is not entitled to interfere with d if d chooses or would choose to <&. Thus that d holds rights requires of d only that it be the sort of creature that can make choices, that it be a preference-haver. The result holds good generally. Consider the other main case, where the right is to some object b: d has a right to b iff, for certain ot (a class of obligation holders, which may consist of a single person), members of a have an obligation to cede b to d if a chooses or would choose (to have) b (cf. Benn and Peters, op. cit., p.89). To be sure, there are other cases where rights to are attributed, but these appear to reduce to the cases given; which seems to amount to something like: to work. e.g. a has a right to work, a has a right to an opportunity Similar analyses - again with significance restrictions on the class of (])S and bs - apply to rights ??ot to, e.g. an animal has a right not to be kept in a cage. Rights of this sort can likewise be held by any preference-haver (but once again such rights be extended beyond this class to all natural objects). Not every right-holder bears responsibilities or carries obligations : infants for instance do not. Responsibility-bearers and obligation­ holders are a very proper subclass of humans and may only overlap the 81 A t* class of humans, and likewise the class of potential responsibility­ bearers only overlaps the class of humans. Thus more demanding deontic notions afford no point of access for human chauvinism. To be responsible for something requires more than ability to have preferences or capacity to make choices; it implies liability to be called to account for the thing, answerability for it. Similarly, the undertaking of obligations involves entering into binding relations which imply answerability. Responsibility­ bearers and obligation-holders are thus a subclass of preference-havers, in accord with the annular theory. For answerability and accountability involve some level of linguistic competence - at the very least an ability to answer, in some language (usually presumed to be translatable, easily?, into some human language) - which many preference-havers do not possess. But responsibility and obligation lead a kind of a double life. For a creature that does not have responsibilities, may nonetheless be responsible for various things, in the sense of having done them, and sometimes done them deliberately; as, e.g., the wallaby who breaks down protecting netting and branches time and again is responsible for the demise of a Japanese plumtree. Rather similar oz^p/zf-statements hold true of subjects who do not carry obligations; consider, e.g., "wombats ought to be more careful in crossing roads". The upshot is that an environmental ethic can - despite its very different value theory - retain, in large measure, and sharpen, rather standard accounts of, and distinctions concerning, rights and obligations. It is in this respect, however, that the sort of environmental ethic being advanced differs markedly from alternative environmental ethics, e.g. those which would, implausibly, confer rights to trees, assign obligations to the soil, and so on. JM<?7z 6J?fe?zs^o?z pos^f^o/zs, of which Leopold's would be a leading example, ^Tzaf <2% eM^iro^z/??6?zfaZ ef/z^c znz^sf yoZZozJ i/zg paffgru cy hosier?? ef/z^<?s &ase <?^uss. orzZz/ a zzzzzcTz The way to a satisfactory, environmental, ethic is to reject the pattern of the Western super-ethic, not to simply extend it. The way is through some sort of annular theory which recognises categorial distinc­ tions between different sorts of things, not through a theory which would delete the legitimate distinctions between the sorts of things. latter mistaken way is unnecessary. The For example, in order to reject the instrumental view of value, and to assign natural objects intrinsic value, it is unnecessary to take Leopold's course of viewing all natural objects as having r^p/zfs in the same way as persons and preference-havers are regarded as having rights, or of persons as having obligations natural objects such as trees in the same sort of way as to other persons. Thus too there is no need to see the rejection of the instrumental 82 <! view as mystical or anti-rational, or as reverting to the view that trees and other natural items house spirits (a view which in any case may have simply been a way of expressing an allotment of value to natural items), and hence as gross superstition. An environmental ethic can be as tough, practical, rational and secular as prevailing Western ethics. so such an ethics will lose much Even if it loses contact with its felt bases in natural things and appreciation of natural things. An environmental ethic will be much the poorer too if it limits itself to the moral terminology, and variations of the categories, of chauvinistically shaped ethics. There will much more as to care, concern and respect in the presentation and main principles of such an ethic than, what occupies standard Western ethics, duties, obligations and rights. In this way too, further problems and puzzles for environmental ethics can be resolved. For example, the view that ethical concepts can apply to the non-human world in an irreducible way is often seen as very puzzling. Much of this puzzlement is generated by attempting to transfer intact a strongly legalistic and person-oriented category of moral concepts, such as rights, moral obligations, duties, and so on, to items in the natural world where they give rise to such apparg^tZ-y problematic questions as 'Do stones have rights?', 'What are our moral obligations to trees?', and so on. If we attempt instead to apply a broader, less legalistic class of moral concepts, such as care, concern, responsibility and respect, much of the puzzling character of these still essentially moral attributions vanishes. There is no great problem for example about how we can legitimately apply notions such as respect to natural items, once a few distinctions are made. The view that the land, animals, and the natural world should be treated with respect was a common one in many hunting and gathering societies, and it is clear that this respect was not seen as generated merely by moral obligations to other persons. dimension to relations with Respect adds a moral the natural world. Respect - or the lack of it - comes out in everyday actions concerning the natural world. The following passage contrasts the Western treatment of the land which lacks respect with the careful and respectful treatment of some American Indians: The White people never cared for land or dear or bear. we Indians kill meat, we eat it all up. little holes. When we dig roots we make When we built houses, we make little holes. burn grass for grasshoppers, we don't ruin things. acorns and pinenuts. dead wood. When We don't chop down the trees. When we We shake down We only use But the White people plow up the ground, pull down the 83 St trees, kill everything (Tozzck ike Furik, (ed. T.C. McLuhan, Sphere Books, London, 1973, p.15). The great care with which so many of the Indians utilized every portion of the carcass of a hunted animal was an expression, not of economic thrift, but of courtesy and respect (D. Lee, in Tonck ike Forik, p.15)What the respect position is based on is the fact that it is possible to make use of something without treating it as something which is no more than a means to one's ends. That is, it is possible to make use of some­ thing in limited, constrained ways - with constraints which may not derive entirely from considerations of the welfare of other humans, as in the case of the Indians' use of animals - without treating it as available for any kind of use. To so use something without treating it as available for unlimited or unconstrained use for human ends is characteristic of use. In contrast non-respectful use treats the use of the item as constrained by no considerations arising from the item itself and the user's relationship to it, but as constrained only in a derivative way, by considerations of the convenience, welfare and so forth of other humans. The Western view, as the Indians realised, is the non-respect position, that the world is available for unconstrained human use. People who hold respect positions, such as the Indians, see such a position as indicative of a lack of moral sensitivity, and sometimes in even stronger terms. The conventional wisdom of Western society tends to offer a false dichotomy of use versus respectful nonuse - a false choice which comes out especially clearly again in the treatment of animals. Here the choice presented in Western thought is typically one of eiiker use without respect or serious constraint, of using animals for example in the ways character­ istic of large-scale mass-production farming and a market economic system which are incompatible with respect, or on the other hand of not making any use of animals at all, for example, never making use of animals for food or for farming purposes. What is left out in this choice is the alternative the Indians and other non-Western people have recognised, the alternative of limited and respectful use, which enables use to be made of animals, but does not allow animals to be used in an unconstrained way or merely as a means to human ends. Such an alternative can have some applic­ ation in a Western context (for some limited examples of respectful use in the operations of a small farmer, see John Seymour, Tke Cowpiete Rook of Faber, London, 1976). A limited and respectful use position would condemn the infliction of unnecessary pain on animals, and also the treatment of animals as machines, as in factory farming. 84 It would also condemn unecessary and wasteful killing and especially killing for amusement or "sport", which is incompatible with respect and assumes that animals can be used merely as a means for ZrZz?ZuZ human ends. But it would not necessarily oppose the use of animals in the case of approp­ riate non-trivial need, e.g. for food, although here again it would insist that the ways in which use can be made are limited, and not just by considerations of effect on other humans. The limited and respectful use position avoids some of the serious problems of the no-use position of the animal liberationists, although it shares many of the same beliefs concerning the illegitimacy of factory farming and similar disrespectful methods of making use of and exploiting animals. The no-use position faces the problem that it proposes that humans should treat animals in ways which are quite different from the ways in which animals treat one another, for example, prohibiting needful use for food. Thus the no-use position seems obliged to say either that the world would be a better place without carnivores, or else that carnivorous animals themselves are inferior, immoral, moral creatures - whichever alternative amoral or non- is taken here the bulk of animals emerge as inferior to humans, or at least vegetarian humans. It implies too that an impoverished natural order which lacked carnivores - and given what we know of ecology this would be a very highly impoverished one indeed, not to say an unworkable "natural" order - is preferable to a rich natural one with a normal proportion of carnivorous and partly carnivorous species. carnivores, Since it would imply the moral inferiority of the no-use position appears to arrive at the negation of its own starting point, (as regards e.g., the equality consideration) of all animals, human and non-human. In thus seeing humans as capable of a moral existence which most animals are not capable of, it sees man as apart from a largely amoral (or immoral) natural world, denies community with the animal and natural world,and indirectly reinforces human chauvinism. §6. TOWARDS AN ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOSOPHY: A PRELIMINARY SKETCH OF THE EXTENT OF PHILOSOPHICAL REVISION ENSUING ON ABANDONMENT OF CHAUVINISTIC ETHICS A radical change in a theory not uncommonly forces changes elsewhere - conceptual revision which affects not only the theory itself but many neighbouring areas. The phenomenon is well-known in the case of major physical theories, but it holds as well for ethical and philosophical theories; for example, a logical theory which rejects the Reference Theory in a thoroughgoing way has important repercussions throughout much of the rest of philosophy, and requires modification not only of logical 85 systems and their semantics, but also, for instance, of the usual meta­ theory which also accepts the Reference Theory and indeed which is 95 tailored to cater only for logics which do conform. A thorough-going environmental ethics likewise has a substantial impact and forces many changes. The escape from human chauvinism not only involves sweeping changes in ethical principles and value theory but it induces substantial reverberations elsewhere - both inwards, for example in metaphysics, in epistemology, and in the philosophy and method­ ology of science, and outwards (in subjects that presuppose value theory) in social theory, in politics, in economics and in law, and beyond. For human chauvinism is deeply embedded in Western culture, and affects not only the ideology and the institutions but the arts. Thus, for example, much of literature, and especially of ballet and film, is given over to a celebration :of things' human,', of .'the species. ,-;Eveh the. ti.RfeLy herw,eYnphas.is, for instance of the counterculture, on-human relations (a-s opposed to selfcontained private individuals of social theories) remains well within the inherited chauvinistic framework. As to the changes, let us begin again with ethics. As we have begun to see, an environmental ethic can retain, though in a much amended theoretical framework (which affects meanings of terms), virtually all the standard ethical terminology. But even at a superficial syntactical level, there will be conspicuous alterations: firstly, ethical terminology will be enriched with new environmental terms, drawn in particular from ecology, somewhat as it was expanded in the late nineteenth century by terminology from evolutionary theories; and secondly, accompanying the attitudinal shifts the new ethic involves, there will be a marked shift in ethical terminology, away from the predominance of such terms as (and examples associated with) 'obligation', to such expressions as 'care', 'respect', 'consciousness'. 'duty', 'concern', 'promise', 'contract', 'responsibility', 'trust', Because the theoretical and attitudinal frame is changed, an environmental ethic forces - as we have already found with such notions as z)oZ-Me, cZzotce, interference and (Zowa^e reexamination of, and modified analyses of, characteristic ethical notions. It requires, furthermore, reassessment of traditional and conventional analyses of such notions as nctnraZ- ri^/zt, ^ronn^Z of ri^Zzt^ and perznissib- iZitz/., especially where these are based on chauvinist assumptions - much as it requires the rejection of most of the more prominent meta-ethical These points are explained in detail in Routley (e); and also in L. Goddard and R. Routley, TZze Lopic of Cipnificonce an^Z Context, Vol. 1, Scottish Academic Press, 1973, chapters 3 and 4. 86 0 46 positions. Cursory examination of recent accounts of TzuZ^ruZ rZpTzZ^ zzzoruZ-Ztz/-, and ucf-Zczz will help illustrate and confirm these points. Hart, for example, accepts (subject to defeating conditions which are here irrelevant) the classical doctrine of natural rights according to which, among other things, any adult human ... capable of choice is at liberty to do (i.e. is under no obligation to abstain from) any action which is not one coercing or restraining or designed to injure other persons Hart, (H.L.A. 'Are there any natural rights?', reprinted in PcZ-ZZ-ZcuZ P/z-fZoscpZzz/, (ed. A. Quinton), Blackwell, Oxford 1967). But this sufficient condition for a human natural right depends on accepting the basic chauvinist principle - a variant of (D) - environmental ethics reject; since if a person has a natural right he has a right. So too the definition of a natural right adopted by classical theorists and accepted with minor qualifications by Hart presupposes the same defective principle. Accordingly an environmental ethic would have to amend the classical notion of a natural right, a far from straightforward matter now that human rights with respect to animals and the natural environment are, like those with respect to slaves not all that long ago, undergoing major re-evaluation. Another example of chauvinism at work in the very setting up of the field of discussion and problems in ethics is provided by recent accounts of woruZ-ZZy, where it is simply taken for granted that 'moral' distinguishes 96 among ZzMzzzu?z actions, policies, motives and reasons, and that what is moral refers essentially to human well-being (contentment, happiness or something of this general sort, tied with appropriate states or 97 conditions of humans). Such criteria for what is moral are chauvinistically based, assuming that what does not bear on human states or conditions cannot be a moral matter. What happens in worlds without humans, how animals fare or are treated, what is done or what happens to plants or other natural objects - none of these are directly moral matters, except insofar as they impinge on human welfare. That is human 96 Thus for instance, B. Williams, AfcruZ-Ztp; 24% P^z^rodMcf-Zo^ fo Ff/z-Zcs^ Harper & Row, New York, 1972, p.79. Williams does, however, remark in his Preface (p.xiv) how 'shaky and problematic' the distinction - which he subsequently takes for granted - is. 97 See, for example, P.R. Foot, TZzeor'Zes Ft/z-Zcs, Oxford University Press, London, 1967, and G.J. Warnock, Ccwfewporurz/ AforuZ P/z-ZZosop/zz/, Macmillan, London, 1967, and also TZzg o.f MoraZ-Zfz/, Methuen, London, 1971. 87 t* chauvinism at work, and is at the same time a reductio such criteria. s- ad absurdum of A different nonchauvinistic account of what is moral is required (a beginning can be made by adopting certain of the maligned formal criteria). It is evident that any account which meets even weak conditions of adequacy will serve to meet the objection that an environ­ mental ethic is not concerned with what is moral but is really an aesthetic theory. For the objection as usually presented depends squarely on a chauvinistic restriction on morality, all the rest of value theory being classed, or dismissed, as "(mere) aesthetics". The case of morality illustrates the characteristic way in which theories - in this case chauvinistic ethics - redefine crucial notions in their own terms to suit their own ends, such as entrenchment and fortification of the theories against objections. Further corollaries of the rejection of chauvinism include the inadequacy of recent fashionable attempts, mainly derivative from Hobhouse, at characterising a^naZf^z/ and justifying it in ways that argue from man's humanity^98 and the inadequacy of much recent, largely chauvinistic, work in the philosophy of actdan, which takes it for granted that action and 99 rationality requirements on action are bound up with human nature. The abandonment of chauvinism implies the rejection not only of much ethical analysis, but of all current major ethical positions. The bias of prevailing ethical positions, and also of economic positions, which aim to make principles of conduct or reasonable economic behaviour calculable is especially evident. These positions typically employ a single criterion p, such as preference or happiness, as a summum bonum; characteristically each individual of some base class, almost always humans, but perhaps including future humans, is supposed to have (at least) an ordinal p- ranking of the states in question (e.g. of affairs, of the economy); then some principle is supplied to determine a collective p-ranking of these states in terms of individual p-rankings, and what is best or ought to be done is determined either directly, as in act-utilitarianism under the Greatest Happiness principle, or indirectly, as in rule-utilitarianism in terms of some optimization principle applied to the collective ranking. The species bias is transparent from the selection of the base class. And 98 Among such unsatisfactory liberal egalitarian positions are those presented in G. Vlastos, 'Justice and equality' in SacZaZ JnstZae (ed. R.B. Brandt), Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1962, and B.A.O. Williams, 'The idea of equality' in P^Zasap/zz^., PaZfZfcs and JacZafz/, Second series (ed. P. Laslett and W.G. Runciman), Blackwell, Oxford, 1963. 99 see, e.g.^T. Nagel, T/ze Pass-Z&'ZZ'Ztz/ a/ ^ZZrnZszzz, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1970. 88 even if the base class is extended to include persons or some animals (at the cost, like that of including remotely future humans, of losing testability), the positions are open to familiar criticism, namely that the whole of the base class may be prejudiced in a way which leads to unjust principles. To take a simple example, if every member of the base class detests dingoes, on the basis of mistaken data as to dingoes' behaviour, then by the Pareto ranking test the collective ranking will rank states where dingoes are exterminated very highly, from which it will generally be concluded that dingoes ought to be exterminated (still unfortunately the evaluation of most Australian farmers, though it lacks any requisite empirical basis). Likewise it would just be a happy accident, it seems, if collective demand (horizontally summed from individual demand) for a state of the economy with sperm whales as a mixed good, were to succeed in outweighing private whaling demands; for if but few in the base class happened to know that sperm whales exist or cared a jot that they do, then even the most "rational" economic decision­ making would do nothing to prevent their extinction. But whether the sperm whale survives should not have to depend on what humans know or what they see on television. Summed human interests, or preferences of certain private individuals, are far too parochial to provide a satisfactory basis for deciding upon what is environmentally desirable. Nor would such accidental bases be adequate. Moreover ways out of the problem do not bear much investigation. It cannot be assumed, for instance, that the base class is on the whole good, and hence will not enjoin reprehensible behaviour, because such an assumption seems false, would at best be contingently true (so that the theory would fail for different circumstances to which it should apply), and would involve a deep problem in the theory, since it would then seem to admit the determination of goodness - that of the base class, on the whole - independently of what the theory was set up to determine, among other things, goodness. Nor can it be assumed, without serious circularity, that the optimisation is constrained by requirements of justice or fairness (see Routley (b) and §5 above). The ethical and economic theories just singled out (which are based on optimisation over select features of the base class) are not alone in their species chauvinism; much the same applies to west going meta- ethical theories which, unlike intuitionistic theories, try to offer some rationale for their basic principles. That is, the argument against utilitarian—type ethical and economic theories generalises. For instance, on social contract positions, obligations are a matter of mutual agreement 89 between individuals of a given (but again problematic) base class; on a social justice picture, rights and obligations spring from the application of symmetrical fairness principles to members of the base class, usually a rather special class of persons;^00 while on a Kantian position, which has some vogue, obligations somehow arise from respect for members of the base class, persons.In each case, if members of the base class happen to be ill-disposed to items outside the base class, then that is unfortun­ ate for them: that is (rough) justice. Looking outwards from the ethics, the abandonment of chauvinism has likewise a wide set of consequences, both theoretical and practical, in economics, politics and law, and generally in the social sciences. One major practical economic impact of environmental ethics is in the extent to which free enterprise can operate unimpeded or unchanged. of business and enterpreneurial activity - to But consider <9722 option - will involve, in turn, either legal constraints, or reallocation of activity by such devices as environmental pricing, which directs activity away from environmentally undesirable pursuits. For example, if it is wrong to destroy a rare ecosystem in order to make a few more dollars, then restrictions should be imposed on business activity by one method or another. To some limited extent this is already happening in the field of pollution, but primarily because of the likely effects, direct or not too far removed, that pollution comes to have on other humans, not for a wider set of reasons, and often not for the right reasons. With a wider environ­ mental code, the public and legal intrusion into areas typically regarded as "private" and open to the free enterprise operations (of "open go") would be much more extensive. The same applies in the case of private Thus for example, [Rawls'] original position seems to presuppose not just a neutral theory of the good, but a liberal, individualistic conception according to which the best that can be wished for someone is the unimpeded pursuit of his own path, provided it does not interfere with the rights of others. This view is persuasively developed in the later portions of the book, but without a sense of its controver­ sial character (T. Nagel, 'Rawls on justice' , P/z^Zcsop/ztcczZ 82 (1973), p.228). Nagel also effectively argues that Rawls' original position is not neutrally determined but involves substantial moral assumptions (e.g. pp.232, 233); they are mostly, as it happens, of a chauvinistic cast. While the first of Kant's maxims is not so restricted in actual form­ ulation, others are (see H.J. Paton, AforuZ P<2M, Hutchinson, London, 1947) . And, firstly, such maxims are s^ppast?^ to be equivalent to ones formulated in terms of persons; secondly, they are supposed to be derived from features of, or connected with, people. 90 -4 property; for example, given that it is not permissible to erode hill­ sides then there should, in this setting, be (legal) restrictions on farmers' and foresters' activities. Although the impact on the practice of economics of a thoroughgoing environmental ethic would be drastic - market negotiations, firms' activities, international trade, all would be affected - the impact on the underlying theories of preference and choice is comparatively For much of economics is squarely founded but still far from negligible. on chauvinism. less, The theoretical bias follows directly from the utilitarian bases of the theory, which is fairly explicit in welfare theory and rather heavily disguised in neoclassical theory. But although choice and value theory are, as characteristically presented in economics and elsewhere, damagingly chauvinistic, they do not have to be. For the theories can be reformulated in a non-chauvinistic way, as was indicated (in §5) above for utilitarianism - upon which economic theory is modelled. On such a revamped foundation an environmental economics to match the chosen environmental ethic can be built (for some preliminaries on this approach, see Routley (d), appendices 1 and 6). Several of the objections to base class theories such as utilitar­ ianism apply not merely against orthodox economic theory, but also to voting theory, to representative democratic systems of determination of political action. If, for, example, the base class consists of private individuals motivated by their own self-contained interest then such procedures can readily lead to most undesirable results, especially if these individuals compromise representative individuals. their autonomy through the election of For the more powerful of these representative individuals can be - and typically are, as their behaviour if not their protestations show - not favourably disposed to (the welfare of) things outside the base class or even to many members of the base class. Nearer the theoretical surface, especially in such branches of economics as "resource management", the chauvinism is more conspicuous. The following narrowly utilitarian assumption is quite typical: The goal of resource managers should be to communicate and act in ways that maximize human satisfaction (H.J. Campbell, 'Economic and social significance of upstream aquatic resources' in Forest Fs^s Oregon State University, Corcallis, 1971, p.14, also p.17). When management - where such is management becomes needed at all - the goals will be changed from such chauvinistic ones. 91 The method of interference in "free economic enterprise", of controls and regulations, of legal and political constraints, is only one way in which leading principles of an environmental ethics can be put into effect. A quite different, and ultimately far more appealing, approach is by way of structural change, by changing the socio-economic structure in such a way that it comes to reflect on environmental ethics (by altering the frame of reference, or axes, to use the physical picture of §4, so that major problems vanish). Requisite structural change is . 102 far-reaching, both practically and theoretically in every reach of social science. For example, while on the position, capitalist markets are subject to further regulation, either directly imposed or by way of suitable pricing policies, in the s^rz^g^raZ. c/zaMgre position, capitalist markets are eliminated; while under state regulation private property is subject to further Controls,given approp­ riate structural change private property disappears. Looking inwards, an environmental ethic has an impact on the practice of many sciences other than the social sciences - what they do experimentally with natural objects (e.g. the treatment of animals in laboratory testing); how their research programmes are organised and directed (consider,e.g., projects involving irradiation or broadscale herbicide treatments of rainforests); the way classifications are made and which are made (consider, e.g. the extent to which human perception enters into classifications in botany); recommended on the basis of such sciences. and, of course, what is For as it stands human chauvinism is deeply embedded in the practice of science, directly in research and experimentation and in shaping classifications, theses and theories. Indeed the effect of a different ethic may extend even to the theory of such sciences, in particular through the bearing the ethic has 103 on metaphysics which m turn influences the foundations of such sciences. Such a new ethic would quite properly upset (as §1 should indicate) the extent to which humans are seen at the centre of things and things as accountable through them and scientific theories as 'human constructions wrestled from a hostile nature' (after Popper). It would help overthrow the pernicious chauvinistic idea that, apart from certain elementary facts, 4ZZ-es value. Me?zs<?/ze?zzjgr^, all necessity, all intensionality, all It should result too in the shattering of still widespread As (g) V. and R. Routley, 'Social theories, self management and environmental problems', this volume, begins to explain. Cf. R. Harre, TTza P/z^Zosop/ztes c/ S'c^eyzcg, Oxford University Press, 1972; and also Routley (e). 92 ***** assumptions as to the nature of animals and plants, for instance that their apparently goal—directed and intensional behaviour can be explained (away) mechanistically, and the deeply-rooted idea that some sort of Cartesian metaphysical picture of natural, as distinct from spiritual or rational, objects can be maintained (cf. again §1). In metaphysics there are at least two further important classes of effects. Firstly, the orthodox views of man's relation to nature, the dominant and modified dominant and lesser traditions, have to be abandoned and new positions worked out. In this sense, a new environmental ethic implies a similarly new metaphysic redefining Man's place in nature and human/nature relationships.104 Such a new philosophy of nature will recognise various natural objects other than humans as of independent value, so it will not be naturalistic. Nor will it view natural objects as simply available for the use, wise or otherwise, of humans. Several principles derived from the orthodox metaphysical positions will have to be abandoned and replacements worked out (as in the case of (D) in ethics) Thus superseded, for example, will be the principles of total use of natural areas for human use and of maximum long-term productivity of the earth's resources (principles criticised in their application in forestry in Routley (d)). At a deeper level, such a philosophy of nature will involve a turning away from the leading ideological principles of both the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and of much that went with them (e.g. with the Renaissance, the rise of commerce, bureaucracy, professionalism, formal education, and subsequently, with the Enlightenment, the rise of the modern state, capitalism and scientific enlightenment). For it means the dismissal of the chauvinistic principles of theRenaissance,with 'Man as the kernel of the Universe', a creature 'half-earthly and half-divine, his body and soul form[ing] a microcosm enabling him to understand and control Nature ...'.1°5 It means too removal of the humanism of the Enlightenment, the reduction of what formerly was assigned to the religious, such as ethical and political principles, to the human, a reduction which 104 As Passmore has observed - inconsistently with what is claimed m his (a) - in 'Attitudes to Nature', Roz/aZ of PTz^oscp/zy Lectures, volume 8, Macmillan, London, 1975. As against Passmore (a) p.3, such new ethics and metaphysics need involve no abandonment of 'the analytical, critical approach which is the glory of the West : on the contrary, they may well mean a more thoroughly critical and analytical approach than hitherto. 105 goth quotations are from T^ze <?y tTzg 7?e7z<2^ss(2%<3g (ed. D. Hay) Thames and Hudson, London 1967, pp.7-10, where too main movements, practical and ideological, of the Renaissance are usefully indicated. 93 was based on the false dichotomy, which has still not lost its hpld:, religious or humanistic. Secondly, the removal of humans from a dominant position JhT the natural order renders immediately suspect a range of familiar philosophical positions of a verificationistic or idealistic kind such as phenomenalism in epistemology (how can what exists depend on what is perceived by members of such a transitory and perhaps not so important species or ^on whether there exist perceivers?), intuitionism in mathematics, con­ ventionalism in logical theory, the Copenhagen interpretation ir^ micr<^- physics, and subjectivisms not only in ethics but in every other* * True, most of these positions are defeated on t^e basis of other considerations anyway; but it is an immediate and fur,t^ier philosophical sphere. point against them that they are damagingly chauvinistic. Thus a corollary of the thoroughgoing rejection of human chauvinism, of very considerable philosophical importance, is the rejection of all the usual forms of idealism, i.e. all positions which accord primacy to the human subject and make the existence of a world of things or the nature of things dependent upon such subjects. A paradigmatic example is phenomenalism; other examples are Kantian idealisms, Hegelianisms and later German idealisms, Christian philosophies based on the primacy of human (and superhuman) consciousness, existentialisms; more surprising examples are empiricisms - inasmuch as all knowledge and truth is supposed to be ultimately derived from human experience - and their holistic images, dialectical materialisms and Marxisms. A satisfactory environ­ mental philosophy will be significantly different from all these positions. 94  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 20, Item 2: Draft of Human chauvinism and environmental ethics Subject The topic of the resource Printout of draft, undated. Handwritten on attached leaf to paper: 57-85 Taken out for age. Paper published, Routley R and Routley V (1980) 'Human chauvinism and environmental ethics', in Mannison DS, McRobbie, MA, Routley R (eds) Environmental philosophy, Dept. of Philosophy, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. Description An account of the resource Unnumbered paper from collection, item number assigned by library staff. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Routley</a> <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=val+routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Val Routley</a> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, <span>Box 20, Item 2</span> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource [1] leaf + [94] leaves. 263.2 MB. Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:31eb305">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:31eb305</a> Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Como - [Item not listed with location] Box 20: More Green Como House Como House > [Item not listed with location] https://www.antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/9f9cd664a357631422c0407999af2f49.pdf f27e006c59271d6af13259b01440ea8f PDF Text Text THE IRREFUTABILITY OF ANARCHISM 1. GOD, THE CHURCH, AND THE STATE. The State is like God: the anarchist is like the atheist in disbelief and non~ecognition of what is commonly assumed, mostly as a matter of faith, to be needed. The parallel, drawn by Bakunin, has its weaknesses as well as its strengths. While the atheist believes that God does not exist, the anarchist does not believe that there are no states: none are legitimate. on the contrary, there are all too many, though The important parallel is as to arguments. The agnostic does not believe that the arguments for the existence of God succeed, and so adopts a "neutral" stance; similarly the State-agnostic does not believe that the arguments for the State work, and likewise tries to adopt a fencesitting position. Soundly based atheism goes further than agnosticism, not only faulting the arguments for, but taking it for granted that there are arguments, or at least solid considerations, against. So it is with soundly based anarchism, which can both fault arguments for the State and produce a case against the State. A more obvious comparison, appreciated from Reformation on and again emphasised by Bakunin; is that of State and Church. This institutional comparison enables several relevant features of the State to be emphasised; for example, how, as the Church used to, the State assigns to itself many very extensive powers, such as a monopoly on the production and control of the main medium of exchange, currency, and an ultimate monopoly an organised violence, all other internal security arrangements being eventually answerable to its police and military; how it is of the same category as business organisations such as multinationals, which now to some extent threaten it but by and large collaborate with it; how, as again the Church used to, it has nominal support of most of its "subjects", though many of them are little better than Sunday believers, and an increasing number have come to see the State as in many respects evil and inevitably corrupt, but as a necessary evil. Whether the State is inevitably evil or not, it is unnecessary, so it will be argued, in a way parallelling the famous Five Ways of Aquinas designed to prove that God exists. Since the State is unnecessary, as well as costly and typically at least evil in many of its practices and undesirable in other respects, it should be superseded. social arrangements. And it can be succeeded, by alternative �2 2. THE FIRST WAY OF SHOWING THAT THE STATE IS NOT REQUIRED: THE REPLACEMENT ARGUMENT. The core of the argument is simple and persuasive: everything in the collective interest accomplished by the State can equally be accomplished by alternative arrangements such as voluntary cooperation, the remainder of State activity being dispensed with. The argument is not a straight substitution argument, for it is not as if a rational person would want to have everything accomplished by the State replicated by alternative arrangements. There is much the State does or supports that is at best rather indifferent, e.g. sponsorship of pomp and ceremony and of junkets by VIPs; and a great deal of typical State activity is positively evil and not in the collective interest, e.g. graft, corruption, brutality, maintenance of inequitable distribution of wealth, land and other resources, and encouragement or protection of polluting or environmentally destructive industries (e.g. without state sponsorship we should not be well embarked on a nuclear ·. future, without state assistance and subsidization Australia would not be burdened with its extensive forestdestructive pine planting and woodchip projects). The modern State has however many other functions than repressive or damaging ones, functions of community welfare or of otherwise beneficial kind. This does not upset the replacement argument for anarchism. The argument, implicit in the works of the classical anarchists, goes like this:- The functions of the State can be divided into two types, those that are in the collective interest and generally beneficial such as community welfare and organisational functions, and those that are not (but are, presumably, in the interests of some of the powerful groups the State tends to serve). But as regards functions of the first type, the generally beneficial functions which are in the collective interest, no coercion is required. For why should people have to be coerced into carrying out functions which are in their collective interest? Such functions can be performed, and performed better, without the coercion which is the hallmark of of the State, and without the accompanying tendency of the State to pervert such functions to the maintenance of privilege and inequality of power, and to remove power from those it "serves". The detailed argument that such functions can be performed takes a case by case 2 form, considering each function in turn. In each case the function is carried out through alternative arrangements, such as voluntary cooperation by the people directly concerned, which replace State arrangements. Consider, for example, the operation of mutual aid or self help medical services or building programs, or self ma~aged welfare, housing or environment services, or community access communications (e.g. radio), most of which are presently either starved of infrastructure or hindered by the State. Such beneficial services would in general be reorganised so that all the relevant infrastructure became communally �3 held, and those wishing to arrange or use the service would manage the operation themselves, taking the operation into their own hands instead of being the passive recipients of favours meted out to them by professionals and powerful agencies. Coercion is unnecessary because, in more communal types of anarchism, the basic infrastructure and many resources (other than individual labour) are already held by the community, so there is no need to apply coercion to individuals to extract these resources needed for community welfare projects, as there is in the situation where wealth and resources are privatised and coercion is required to wrest resources from unwilling private individuals. As for the second type of functions, those which are not in the collective interest, coercion will normally he required for the performance of those functions, and is thus an essential part of the State's operation. But those functions are better dispensed with, since they are not in the collective interest. In this way, while the good part of the State's operation is retained and improved upon, the bad part - especially the evils of brutality, corruption and other abuses invariably associated with the coercive apparatus is detached. State services that are _concerned with order, in the general sense, may be similarly removed or replaced. These services, which include reduction of violence to persons and redress for such violence, quarantine services, securitt.y, orderly operation of traffic, and so on, have often been said to make for especial difficulties for anarchism, or even to refute it. do not. They Firstly, disputes can be settled and offences dealt with directly by communities themselves without intervention by the State. Secondly, a great many of these problems are created or enhanced by the State, e.g. violence of which the State is the main purveyor and which is often the outcome of 3 the State's propping up of gross inequalities. A community which seriously limits (or dispenses with) the institution of private property and removes grossinequalitiesin the distribution of wealth thereby removes the need for many "welfare" services and the basis for a great many offences involving violence: virtually all those involving violence to private property and many of those involving personal violence. Such a left-leaning anarchism is also quite invulnerable 'to further familiar, but ludicrous, arguments for the State, such as those from the fairer distribution of land, property and wealth that is alleged to be achieved by State enforcement of redistribution. As all too many people are aware, a major function of the State is to maintain and police inequitable distribution. This then is the main classical argument for anarchism. The argument has however been challenged, both by historical �4 and more recent objections, which are designed to show that people cannot act in their collective interest without coercion. 3. THE CASE AGAINST REPLACEMENT FROM PRISONERS' DILEMMA SITUATIONS AND THE LIKE. The main arguments designed to rebut the replacement argument for anarchism and to buttress the State status quo, are based on variants of the Prisoners' Dilemma, to the effect that there are important cases where individuals will not agree or cooperate to provide themselves with (or to maintain) collective goods without coercion, such as only the State can 4 furnish. In such "dilemma" situations each individual will hope to gain advantage, without contributing (or exercising restraint), from others' contributions (or restraint), by freeloading on others (or profiting from others' restraint). The claim is that only the State with its backing of force can resolve such situations: anarchistic replacement cannot succeed. A basic ingredient of a considerable variety of arguments of this type, including Hobbes' and Hume's arguments for the State, the "Tragedy of the Commons" argument, and recent economic arguments for State intervention to secure collective goods, is the single Prisoners' Dilemma game with just two players. 5 Two prisoners, 1 and 2, taken to be accomplices in a crime, have been separately imprisoned. A State representative makes the following offers separately to each: if the prisoner confesses and becomes a State's witness while his or her accomplice remains silent, he or she will be released at once while the accomplice gets 8 years. It so happens that if both prisoners remain silent the State has only enough evidence to impose a 1 year sentence. if both confess they would each receive 4 years. But The "game" can be summarised in the following "payoff" matrix:Prisoner 1 Strategies s S (ilence) C(onfess) -1, -1 -8, 0 Prisoner 2 C o, -8 -4, -4 The game is not intended to present a moral dilemma, that each can only go free at the cost of the others' freedom, but the following dilemma:- It is in each prisoner's private interest to choose strategy C no matter what the other does: strategy C is, in the jargon, each players' "dominant" strategy (and also in fact a minimax strategy). For if 2, for example, remains silent, then 1 goes free by confessing, while if 2 confesses, then 1 halves his or her sentence by confessing. But if both prisoners choose their dominant strategy they obtain an inferior outcome to that which wou:ld have resulted by what is tendentiously called "cooperating", by their both remaining silent .. �5 4. FOILING THE PRISONERS" DILEMMA ARGUMENT. It is bizarre that a dilemma alleged to show the necessity of the State - which is supposed to intervene, forcibly if required, to ensure that the prisoners "cooperate" to obtain an 6 Of course optimal outcome - should be set up by the State's own operative. the State's presence in arranging (or accentuating) some such dilemma.sis inessential, as is much else from the example. But some features of the prisoner's relations are essential, in particular the separability assumption that the prisoners are isolated, and so have no opportunity to communicate or really cooperate. Similarly, in the more general argument, a privatisation assumption is smuggled in in the way the dilemma is formulated, that we are dealing with self contained individuals who, like the prisoners, act only in their own narrowly construed private interests and whose interests -are opposed. The applicability of the dilemma to the human condition is accordingly seriously limited. 7 A cursory aside is often added to the Prisoners' Dilemma to the effect that the segregation of the prisoners makes no real difference. It is claimed that even if the prisoners could meet and discuss and even agreed to cooperate, that would make no difference, since neither could trust (the sincerity) of the other (Abrams, p. 193), 'neither has an incentive to keep the agreement' (Taylor, p. 5). Experimental and historical evidence indicates that this is very often not so - and in a more cooperative social setting than the currently encouraged privatisation of life, the extent of cooperation and trust would undoubtedly be much higher. 8 The argument has to depend crucially then on substantially mistaken assumptions about human propensities in various settings, e.g. that purely egoistic interests are always pursued, backed up by a large measure of scepticism about the reliability of other people (but if people were that - unreliable and devious , many State arrangements involved in providing public goods would not succeed either). That such assumptions are operating can be seen by elaborating the situation; e.g., to bring out the first,suppose the priso~ers have a common bond, e.g., they are friends or they are political prisoners with a shared social commitment, or they are neighbours and face a future in the same community; to bring out the philosophical scepticism involved, suppose the prisoner with a tarnished record offers the other security against default, and so on. The question of the character of human interests and preferences and the extent of their determination by the social context in which they occur is fundamental to the whole question of social and economic arrangements, and also accordingly to arguments for the State on the basis of human propensities. A major assumption underlying prevailing (non-Marxist) economics and associated political theory, is that the interests and preferences, as summed up in a preference ranking or utility function, of each human that is taken to count �6 is an independent parameter, which depends neither on the preference rankings of others nor on the social context in which that human _operates. While the individuals and firms of mainstream economic theory do, by definition, satisfy the independence requirements, and while there is very substantial cultural pressure on consumers to conform (through. advertising, education, popular media), very many humans do not conform, and the extent of cultural pressure towards privatisation itself belies the naturalness of this independence. And having sufficiently many interest-interdependent people in a . small community (which is not thoroughly impoverished) is normally enough, given their social influence, to avoid or resolve, by cooperation, the types of Prisoners' Dilennna situations that appear to count in favour of the State-. 9 5. WHY THE DILEMMA ARGUMENTS CANNOT SUCCEED. What the Dilemma-based case for .the State has to show - what never has been shown·- is that there are outstanding Dilemma situations, which are relevant and important, and also damaging if unresolved, and that they are resolvable by State intervention, and only so (optimally) resolved. Finally it has to be shown that in the course of so resolving these Dilemma situations, worse situations than those that are resolved are not thereby induced. These complex conditions cannot be satisfied, of they can be satisfied at all, in a way that is not question begging. For several of the conditions are value dependent (e.g. what is important, damaging, optional, worse) and involve considerations about which reasonable parties can differ. The selection of Dilemmas itself provides an example of such: after all there are many such Dilemmas (e.g. as to environmental degradation, of overexploitation, of family violence or feuds) which are considered beyond the sphere of the State or not worthy of State attention. There are now grounds for concluding that the conditions cannot be satisfied at all. For many of the arguments using Prisoners' Dilennna games, Hobbes' and Hume's arguments for the State and Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons" for instance, turn out when properly formalised to consist not just of a single game but of a sequence of · such games, to be more adequately represented by what is called a superg~e. But in many such sequential Prisoners' Dilemma games, rational "cooperation" can occur, even assuming . h pure 1 y egoistic . . interests. . , lO For wh at sequentia . 1 separa t e d payers wit 1 games permit that isolated games exclude, is th.at players' actions may be dependent upon past performance of other players. This dependence effectively removes one extremely unrealistic self-containment assumption from Dilemma situations, that individuals act in totally isolated ways, not learning from past social interaction. In such supergames then, no intervention is required. �7 Undoubtedly some Dilemmas are resolved by "intervention", e.g. by allowing the prisoners to get in touch so that they find they are neighbours or that they can really cooperate. Equally important, and equally independent of the State, is the matter of breaking down the adversary, or game, situation so the prisoners do not act as competitors but are prepared to cooperate. 11 Informational input may also. be important, e.g. news that each prisone_r has J_to agreements a good record of adherin~h or if not is prepared to stake collateral, etc. Nor is force or threat of force required as an incentive to guarantee optimal strategies : a range of other inducements and incentives they be required in recalcitrant cases), and gifts, deprivation, social pressure, etc. is known (should is used even by the State, e.g. But at no stage is the State required to make these arrangements: much as some real Prisoners' Dilemmas are resolved by work of Amnesty International, so voluntary organisations can be formed to detect and deal with Prisoners' Dilemma situations where they are not already catered for. And in fact communal and cooperative organisation did resolve Prisoners' Dilemma-type situations historically, for example in the case of the Commons. In sum, here also replacement works. There are no important Dilemma situations, it seems, where the State is essential. The State has been thought to be essential because of certain influential false dichotomies; for example, that all behaviour that is not egoistic is altruistic (but altruistic behaviour is uncommon, and "irrational"), that the only way of allocating goods, apart from profit-directed markets - which tend to deal abysmally with collective goods - is through State control. 1 2 But it is quite evident that there are other methods of allocation, both economic (e.g. exchange, through traditional markets, based on supply costs) and social (e.g. by cooperatives, clubs). Lastly, introduction of the State to resolve some Dilemma situations 13 · . · . h as very extensive e ff ects, -many o f t h em negative, soth at t h e gains ma d e, any, in so resolving Dilemma 1· f situations, appear to be substantially outweighed by the costs involved. For there are the many evil aspects of the typical State to put in the balance. As regards Dilemma situations, entry of the State with its authority showing may not help but may worsen some situations, and more important, new Dilemmas may be initiated by State activity, as i ri the cas e of the prisone rs,br differently with the State as a further player (since the State . may engage in whaling, have access to a commons, etc.). also to further arguments against the State. These points lead �8 6. THE SECOND WAY: THE ARGUMENT FROM PROBLEM RECURRENCE. The solution by the State to problems of social organisation repeats or generates in more dangerous form the very problems introduction of the State was designed to solve, including new Dilemmas. Suppose, for instance, the secular State ·really were introduced in order to solve Prisoners' Dilemmas - introduced as opposed to inherited from the religious State and the Church, and maintained to prop up privilege and foster objectives that are not in its communities' interests then the array of States generates new Prisoners' Dilemmas, which there is no Super-State to resolve by coercion. Suppose, as the myth has it, the State really were introduced in _the interest of order and stability and to curb violence; then the arrays of States resulting more than negates these advantages, with instability, disorder and violence on a grander scale than before the emergence of modern secular States. 14 7. THE THIRD WAY: THE OVERSHOOT ARGUMENT,FROM THE INADEQUACY OF INSTITUTIONAL CONTROLS ON STATE POWER. Having ceded a monopoly on power to the State, in order to resolve some dilemmas, some of them arising from an inequitable distribution of power, what controls or balances the power of the State? A Super-State. And its power? There is a vicious infinite regress if the reply to the question "What controls the controller?" is "a further 15 The only promising way of avoiding this problem - other routes controller". lead (even more) directly to totalitarianism - is by having the first of these controllers, the State, answer back to those in whose interests it is allegedly established, those of the society or group of communities it controls. implies democratic methods of some kind. This Others go further: 'democracy [is] the only known means to achieve this control, the only known device by which 16 we can try to protect ourselves against the misuse of political power'. In this event, control has mostly failed. Democracy is extremely attenuated, even in those states that claim to practice it. The exercise of power in modern "democratid' states - much increased power reaching deep into peoples' lives, power which has passed to certain political elites and is directed at the attainment of such objectives as economic growth and material "progress" - is often channelled through 'non-elected authority' and 'is not democratic in the traditional meaning of the term' 17 In any case, indirect democratic and other institutional checks are tenuous in as much as they depend ultimately on the toleration of those who have direct control of the forces of the State. Experience seems to show that such toleration will only be shown so long as democratic procedures deliver results that are not too disagreeable, that are broadly in accord with what those who control the coercive power are prepared �9 to accept. (Toleration of such a tamed democracy then brings benefits to those who hold power, especially the cover of legitimation). checks which operate only insofar as a system But institutional acceptable to the powerholders is not seriously challenged, and which depend ultimately upon the toleration of those "checked~' are not really checks at all. The problem of controlling the power of the State, and preventing the State once established from usurping further power and exceeding its mandate, is only satisfactorily solved by not ceding power to the State in the first place. The best way of avoiding the evils of accumulated power is the anarchist way, of blocking its accumulation. 8. THE FOURTH WAY: THE ARGUMENT FROM FREEDOM AND AUTONOMY. responsible for actions deliberately undertaken. A person is This premiss can be derived, if need be, from the notion of a person as a moral agent. Taking · responsibility for one's actions implies, among other things, making the final decision about h;such what to do on eac~A occasion oneself, not acting simply on direction from outside,but determining how to act, what ought to be done, oneself; not handing that decision over to someone or something else. It implies, that is, moral autonomy. Autonomy in turn implies, what responsibility requires, freedom. For the autonomous being, endorsing its own decisions and principles ~ is not subject to the will of another. another so directs. Even if it does what another directs, it is not because In being free, not of constraints (both physical and self-determined), but of the constraints and will of others, an autonomous being is morally free. A necessary feature of the State is authority over those in its territory (under its de facto jurisdiction), the right to rule and impose its will upon them. Such authority backed by force is incompatible with moral autonomy and with freedom. An autonomous being, though it may act in accordance with some imperatives of the State, those it independently endorses, is bound to reject such (a claim to) authority, and therewith the State. In sum, being a person, as also being autonomous and being free, implies rejecting the authority of the State, and so not acknowledging the State; that is, each condition on personhood implies, i f t he argument is sound , anarchism. 18 It is possible to combine autonomy with an extremely attenuated "State", one based on on-going unanimous direct democracy. But such a "State", with no independent authority, is not really a state, since any participant can dissolve it at any time, and so constitutes no threat to anarchism o On the contrary, such direct democratic methods are part of the very stuff of anarchistic organisation. �10 9. THE FIFTH WAY: THE ARGUMENT FROM ANARCHIST EXPERIENCE. The replacement argument enables construction of a model · of a society functioning without the State, of a practically possible Stateless world; which shows that the State is not necessary. But it can always be claimed - even if the claim can seldom or ever be made good - that the modelling leaves out some crucial feature of real world circumstances, rendering it inapplicable. The gap may be closed by appeal to the independently valuable argument from experience, that at various times and places anarchism has been tested and has worked. Examples of such Stateless organisation suffice to show that crucial real world features have not been omitted. There are many examples of nonindustrialised societies which were, or are, 19 anarchistic, there is the rich experience of the Spanish collectives, and there is much localised experience of self-management and small-scale anarchistic arrangements within the State structure. 20 10. THE EMERGING CHARACTER OF ANARCHISM AND ITS ORGANISATION. The arguments outlined, predominantly theoretical, inform the practical, revealing the options open for anarchism, courses of action in superannuating the State and for transition to a stateless Society, and so on. For example, spontaneous anarchism - according to which organisation is unnecessary and social arrangements will arise spontaneously, and will be ushered in during the revolution without any prior organisation-is a position which is not viable and could not endure, because it makes none of the requisite replacements upon which durable supersession of the State depends. The sort of anarchist society which these theoretical arguments delineate will certainly be organised, but the organisation will not be compulsory, and will eschew authoritarian measures (and, by the overshoot argument, will reject transition by any strengthening of the centralised State), relying heavily on voluntary cooperation and direct democracy. The society which emerges will be much as Bakunin and Kropotkin sometimes pictured it. It will be based on smaller-scale decentralised connnunities, for otherwise such arrangements as connnunity replacement of State welfare arrangements, control of their environment, removal of Prisoners' Dilennnas, and participatory democracy, will work less satisfactorily. Connnunities will be federated and control will be bottom-up, not merely by representation and subject to a downward system of command. Within each connnunity there will not be great discrepancies in the distribution of wealth and property, and no highly concentrated economic property and power. community wilt be a rather equalitarian group, sharing in much that is cennnunally owned or not owned at all. A · �11 While theoretical arguments help outline the general shape of social and also economic arrangements they do not determine them completely, they offer no detailed blueprint. Accordingly what emerges is not a particular form of anarchism, for instance anarchist communism, but a more experimental and pluralistic anarchism, such as was instituted in the Spanish collectives. 11. STRATEGIES FOR TRANSITION TO ANARCHIST SOCIETY: THE FOREST SUCCESSION MODEL OF REPLACEMENT BY AN ALTERNATIVE STRUCTURE. The main strategy, emerging. from the First Way, is that of replacement: transition to a new anarchist social order proceeds by replacement or aooption of the more satisfactory State organisations and structures by organisations and structures of a more anarchistic cast, and by removal or phasing out of remaining no longer necessary or unsatisfactory State arrangements. Replacement and supersession suggest a biological model, of such change and succession as occurs where one forest type succeeds another; and such a model is in turn very suggestive. To make the model more definite, and to give it some local colour, consider forest succession where a sub-tropical rainforest replaces a eucalypt forest, as analogous to the case where anarchism replaces a Statist society. There is certainly a marked change in structure, typically from a tall forest with a fairly open canopy to a more compact closed forest with more layers of vegetation, much more local diversity and a richer variety of life forms, especially floral forms. A forest is not merely a set of trees, but trees in structura J arrangement and interdependence, not merely on one another but on other life forms such as pollinating insects, seed-carrying birds and animals, and so on; and the changes in structure include changes in microclimate, in soil moisture levels and humus and bacterial content. The change of forest type may be by evolution, by hastened or induced evolution, or by catastrophe (revolution) as when a eucalypt forest is clearfelled and artificially succeeded by planted rainforest. (Strictly, there is a spectrum of practices and replacement strategies between evolutionary and revolutionary, and various different revolutionary strategies; and the standard evolutionary-revolutionary contrast presents a false dichotomy.) Even reliance on predominantly evolutionary methods, which tend to be very slow by human time scale~ may require some (management) practices, else evolution towards rainforest will not begin or continue. For example, seeds for rainforest species may not be available if adjoining areas have been stripped of suitable seed trees, e.g. by clearing or eucalypt conversion, in which case it will be necessary to introduce seeds (of anarchist ideas, methods, arrangements, etc.). And rainforest evolution may not be able to �12 continue because the area is burnt occasionally, e.g. by State officers, in which case protection against fire will be required: for with burning (suppression) regimes rainforest seedlings are killed and eucalypt dominance perpetuated. Furthermore, evolution can be hastened or induced by intro- ducing seeds, or planting rainforest trees in poorly seeded areas (i.e. setting up alternative social arrangements) under the eucalypt overstorey, or even by some careful culling of eucalypts. But even without culling there will be much for anarchist management to do. As the rainforest cover begins to grow up through the eucalypt forest, the forest begins to change structurally. Younger eucalypt poles die, and their replacement by eucalypts is generally precluded owing to low light intensities near the forest floor (in something the same way conditions for capitalist entrepreneurs to flourish are excluded in an emerging anarchist society). Gradually, as the rainforest grows, only scattered giant eucalypts emerge through the canopy, and in time these fall to the forest floor, to rot and not to be replaced - unless the climax rainforest is subject to catastrophe, such as fire or cyclone. Catastrophic methods, such as clearfalling the eucalypt forest, replanting with rainforest, protecting the new forest, and removing eucalyptus regrowth, are much more problematic. To be applied they require either a large workforce or much mechanical power (so it is with violent revolutions which require a large support basis not available in advanced capitalist and state socialist countries, or else access to means of perpetrating violence comparable to that of the State). There are often similar requirements for success; otherwise the area may be choked by rapidly growing weeds or the rainforest plants may be suppressed by eucalypt seedlings and a pioneer eucalypt stage recur. Moreover, a eucalypt overstorey sometimes affords good conditions for rainforest growth, e.g. plant protection from excessive sun, occasional frosts, and drying winds, better moisture retention conditions,and so on. (_Similarly anarchist organisations can sometimes use the environment afforded by the State to get started.) But under some conditions, such as excessive interference (as happens to alternative arrangements in highly repressive States where local conditions also commonly favour revolutionary succession), there may be little or no alternative t o clearfelling practices. But just as clearfelling the eucalypt forest can create favourable conditions for weeds, so violent revolutions can only too easily create the conditions for a new (State) elite, controlling the concentrated power generated for the overthrow of the older regime. �13 12. APPLYING THE FOREST SUCCESSION MODEL. How to apply the model is not difficult to see in broad outline, and many of the further details have been filled out by work that can be described as indicating how allegiance can be shifted in practice from where we mostly are to alternative social arrangements and life-styles built on self-management and mutual aid.~ The seeds of anarchism should be broadcast or planted, anarchist (nonStatist) arrangements instituted or strengthened, and efforts made to replace or modify vulnerable Statist arrangements, e.g. by democratization of present institutions and development of nonStatist and noncapitalist . alternatives. Some of the practices are familiar: anarchist groups, clubs, pamphlets, broadcasts, newsletters, etc.; (anarchist) cooperatives, exchanges, neighbourhood groups, rural communities, etc. are slightly less familiar: Others avoidance of State influence by arrangements beyond State reach such as costless (or alternative currency) interchanges of goods and services, action directed at removing decision-making from State departments, such as forest services, and into citizen hands, and ultimately, to decentralized local communities. In this sort of way worthwhile State arrangements can be replaced, and power can be progressively transferred from the State, and returned to the community and to people more directly involved. �FOOTNOTES 1. Bakunin on Anarchy (edited S. Dolgoff), Allen & Unwin, London, 1973, especially p. 139. Much else in this paper, e.g. the distinction between the State and Society, also derives from Bakunin. 2. That is, proper elaboration of this argument takes each facet of generally beneficial state activity~ there is only a (relative:1-y small) finite number to consider - and shows how it can be replaced in one way or another. course uniquely determined. Replacement is not of Lines such replacements can tfke are indicated in much anarchist (and self-management) literature, consider especially but not uncritically, P. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid. New York University Press, 1972, and also his Fields, Factories and Workshops, second edition, Nelson, London, 1913, and The Conquest of Bread, Chapman and Hall, London, 1913. 3. On these points see, e.g. Kropotkin_'s Revolutionary Pamphlets (edited S. Baldwin), Dover Publications, New York, 1970, p. 206 ff.; also P.J. Proudhon, Confessions of a Revolutionary. For recent discussion of, and practical examples of, replacements for arbitration and law court procedures (but for right-leaning anarchism), see C.D. Stone, 'Some reflections on arbitrating our way to anarchy', Anarchism, (reprint of Nomos _ XIx),New York University Press, 1978, pp. 213-4. 4. Arguments of this typ.e are sometimes said to represent 'the strongest case that can be made for the desirability of the State' (M. Taylor, Anarchy and Cooperation, Wiley, London, 1976, p. 9). To cover all arguments of the type, and to avoid repetition of the phrase 'variants of' and disputes as to whether certain arguments such as those of Hume and of Olson involve Prisoners' Dilemma situations, 'Prisoner's Dilemma' is used in a wide sense to include not merely single n-person Prisoners' Dilemma games, but for example, games where the payoffs are not merely egoistic (as with both Hobbes and Hume) and where such games are iterated. As the bracketed clauses in the text indicate, there are two types of case, not sharply separated and both of the same logical form - those where people do not contribute to supply themselves with, or with "optimum" quantities of, a "collective good" (e.g. security, order, sewage), and those where people do not restrain themselves to maintain, or maintain "optimum" quantities of, some already available "collective good" (e.g. commons, �2 unpolluted streams, whales, wilderness). That received arguments of all these types involves Prisoners' Dilemma situations (in the wide sense) is argued, in effect, in Taylor, op. cit. and elsewhere. An easier introduction to the material covered by Taylor, which also surveys other important literature, is given in the final chapter of R. Abrams, Foundations of Political Analysis, Columbia University Press, New York, 1980. 5. An important matter the two player game does not illustrate is the relevance of population size in the arguments for the State. But size is not decisive (see, e.g., Taylor, chapter 2), and the issue can be avoided (or relocated) by organisation into smaller communities. The figures given in the matrix are illustrative only; for inequalities which suffice for a Dilemma situation, see Taylor, p. 5. 6. It is similarly bizarre that there should be outcomes that the State alone is said to be able to arrange, but not mere social cooperation, when the State is (as on many theories) the result or reflection of social cooperation. 7. This important point is much elaborated in V. and R. Routley, 'Social Theories, Self Management, and Environmental Problems' in Environmental Philosophy (edited D. Mannison and others), RSSS, Australian National University, 1980. 8. As a result of G. Hardin's "Travesty of the Commons", historical evidence has been assembled which reveals how far Hardin's "Commons" diverges from historic commons; see, in particular, A. Roberts, The SelfManaging Environment, Allison & · Busby, London, 1979, chapter 10, but also Routley, op. cit., p. 285 and pp. 329-332. Similar points apply as regards many other Dilemma situations. 'In the experimental studies of the prisoner's dilemma game approximately half of the participants choose a cooperative strategy even when they know for certain that the other player will cooperate'. Abrams, op. cit., p. 308. 9. Cf. the discus$ion in Taylor, op. cit., p. 93. �3 10. This important result is established in Taylor, op. cit., for a number of critical cases, though not generally; see, e.g. p. 32 but especially chapter 5. 11. Such moves have proved valuable in reducing the State's role in legal prosecution, and in eliminating courtroom procedures, including cases where the State is one of the "adversaries". 12. Both the false dichotomies cited are commonplace, not to say rife, in modern economic and political theorising. Both are to be found in Abram's final chapter, for example, and the first (with an attempt to plaster over the gap with a definition) in Taylor. For a further criticism of such false dichotomies, see Routley, op.cit.,pp.250 ff. 13. For instance, a certain social escapism: one escapes one's social roles and is enabled to concentrate on private affairs or just to laze. Or so it may appear: for in reality anyone who works, works long and often alienated hours to pay for this apparent escapism and to cover the high costs of frequently inadequate State activity. 14. The argument, to be found in Bakunin, is elaborated a little in Taylor, op. cit., chapter 7. A related argument, also in Bakunin, is from the way in which emergence of the State compromises and even closes off nonstate solutions to problems of social organisation in adjoining regions. 15. The question is in effect Plato's question, and the regress is reminiscent of his Third Man argument. 16. K.R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. II. Fourth edition (revised), Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1962, p. 129 and p. 127. The ~vershoot) problem is, according to Popper 'the most fundamental problem of all politics: the control of the controller, of the dangerous accumulation of power represented in the State•, 'upon which' Marxists never had 'any well-considered view' (p. 129). 17. V. Lauber, 'Ecology, politics and liberal democracy', Government and Opposition 13 (1978)., 199-217: seep. 209 and p. 21l. 18. The argument, outlined by Bakunin, is much elaborated in R.P. Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism, Harper & Row, New York., 1970. No argument is however without assumptions, which are open to dispute. argument, for example,is disputed by G. Wall, 'Philosophical anarchism revised' Nomos XIX, op. cit., p. 273 ff. Wolff's �4 19. Documented in The Anarchist Collectives (edited S. Dolgoff), Free Life Editions, New York, 1974. 20. As B. Martin boldly asserts, 'The advantages of _self-management and alternative lifestyles are many and significant. And these alternatives are entirely feasible: there is plenty of evidence and experience to support operates. their superiority over the present way society The obstacles to self-management and alternative life styles are powerful vested interests and institutional resistance to change', Changing the Cogs, Friends of the Earth, Canberra, 1979, p. 6. 21. As sketched in some of the material already cited, for example, Routley, p. 284 ff. �Richard Routley lives and works. in the NSW forest. He is sponsored in pursuit of his research interests - in arguments and theories especially by the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University (a state-supported and state-supporting institution, holding 20,000 shares in the uranium industry). His main published work is in metaphysics and alternative logics and in forestry and environmental philosophy. preparation of this article by Val Routley. He was helped in �The following has been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. Cutting (photocopy) Routley R and Routley V (1982) 'The irrefutability of anarchism', Social alternatives, 2(3): 23-29. (7 leaves) � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Draft Papers Description An account of the resource Sylvan's literary executor encountered an archive in which “all his projects were current", since manuscripts were undated and unattributed. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document THE IRREFUTABILITY OF ANARCHISM 1. GOD, THE CHURCH, AND THE STATE. The State is like God: the anarchist is like the atheist in disbelief and non~ecognition of what is commonly assumed, mostly as a matter of faith, to be needed. The parallel, drawn by Bakunin, has its weaknesses as well as its strengths. While the atheist believes that God does not exist, the anarchist does not believe that there are no states: none are legitimate. on the contrary, there are all too many, though The important parallel is as to arguments. The agnostic does not believe that the arguments for the existence of God succeed, and so adopts a "neutral" stance; similarly the State-agnostic does not believe that the arguments for the State work, and likewise tries to adopt a fencesitting position. Soundly based atheism goes further than agnosticism, not only faulting the arguments for, but taking it for granted that there are arguments, or at least solid considerations, against. So it is with soundly based anarchism, which can both fault arguments for the State and produce a case against the State. A more obvious comparison, appreciated from Reformation on and again emphasised by Bakunin; is that of State and Church. This institutional comparison enables several relevant features of the State to be emphasised; for example, how, as the Church used to, the State assigns to itself many very extensive powers, such as a monopoly on the production and control of the main medium of exchange, currency, and an ultimate monopoly an organised violence, all other internal security arrangements being eventually answerable to its police and military; how it is of the same category as business organisations such as multinationals, which now to some extent threaten it but by and large collaborate with it; how, as again the Church used to, it has nominal support of most of its "subjects", though many of them are little better than Sunday believers, and an increasing number have come to see the State as in many respects evil and inevitably corrupt, but as a necessary evil. Whether the State is inevitably evil or not, it is unnecessary, so it will be argued, in a way parallelling the famous Five Ways of Aquinas designed to prove that God exists. Since the State is unnecessary, as well as costly and typically at least evil in many of its practices and undesirable in other respects, it should be superseded. social arrangements. And it can be succeeded, by alternative 2 2. THE FIRST WAY OF SHOWING THAT THE STATE IS NOT REQUIRED: THE REPLACEMENT ARGUMENT. The core of the argument is simple and persuasive: everything in the collective interest accomplished by the State can equally be accomplished by alternative arrangements such as voluntary cooperation, the remainder of State activity being dispensed with. The argument is not a straight substitution argument, for it is not as if a rational person would want to have everything accomplished by the State replicated by alternative arrangements. There is much the State does or supports that is at best rather indifferent, e.g. sponsorship of pomp and ceremony and of junkets by VIPs; and a great deal of typical State activity is positively evil and not in the collective interest, e.g. graft, corruption, brutality, maintenance of inequitable distribution of wealth, land and other resources, and encouragement or protection of polluting or environmentally destructive industries (e.g. without state sponsorship we should not be well embarked on a nuclear ·. future, without state assistance and subsidization Australia would not be burdened with its extensive forestdestructive pine planting and woodchip projects). The modern State has however many other functions than repressive or damaging ones, functions of community welfare or of otherwise beneficial kind. This does not upset the replacement argument for anarchism. The argument, implicit in the works of the classical anarchists, goes like this:- The functions of the State can be divided into two types, those that are in the collective interest and generally beneficial such as community welfare and organisational functions, and those that are not (but are, presumably, in the interests of some of the powerful groups the State tends to serve). But as regards functions of the first type, the generally beneficial functions which are in the collective interest, no coercion is required. For why should people have to be coerced into carrying out functions which are in their collective interest? Such functions can be performed, and performed better, without the coercion which is the hallmark of of the State, and without the accompanying tendency of the State to pervert such functions to the maintenance of privilege and inequality of power, and to remove power from those it "serves". The detailed argument that such functions can be performed takes a case by case 2 form, considering each function in turn. In each case the function is carried out through alternative arrangements, such as voluntary cooperation by the people directly concerned, which replace State arrangements. Consider, for example, the operation of mutual aid or self help medical services or building programs, or self ma~aged welfare, housing or environment services, or community access communications (e.g. radio), most of which are presently either starved of infrastructure or hindered by the State. Such beneficial services would in general be reorganised so that all the relevant infrastructure became communally 3 held, and those wishing to arrange or use the service would manage the operation themselves, taking the operation into their own hands instead of being the passive recipients of favours meted out to them by professionals and powerful agencies. Coercion is unnecessary because, in more communal types of anarchism, the basic infrastructure and many resources (other than individual labour) are already held by the community, so there is no need to apply coercion to individuals to extract these resources needed for community welfare projects, as there is in the situation where wealth and resources are privatised and coercion is required to wrest resources from unwilling private individuals. As for the second type of functions, those which are not in the collective interest, coercion will normally he required for the performance of those functions, and is thus an essential part of the State's operation. But those functions are better dispensed with, since they are not in the collective interest. In this way, while the good part of the State's operation is retained and improved upon, the bad part - especially the evils of brutality, corruption and other abuses invariably associated with the coercive apparatus is detached. State services that are _concerned with order, in the general sense, may be similarly removed or replaced. These services, which include reduction of violence to persons and redress for such violence, quarantine services, securitt.y, orderly operation of traffic, and so on, have often been said to make for especial difficulties for anarchism, or even to refute it. do not. They Firstly, disputes can be settled and offences dealt with directly by communities themselves without intervention by the State. Secondly, a great many of these problems are created or enhanced by the State, e.g. violence of which the State is the main purveyor and which is often the outcome of 3 the State's propping up of gross inequalities. A community which seriously limits (or dispenses with) the institution of private property and removes grossinequalitiesin the distribution of wealth thereby removes the need for many "welfare" services and the basis for a great many offences involving violence: virtually all those involving violence to private property and many of those involving personal violence. Such a left-leaning anarchism is also quite invulnerable 'to further familiar, but ludicrous, arguments for the State, such as those from the fairer distribution of land, property and wealth that is alleged to be achieved by State enforcement of redistribution. As all too many people are aware, a major function of the State is to maintain and police inequitable distribution. This then is the main classical argument for anarchism. The argument has however been challenged, both by historical 4 and more recent objections, which are designed to show that people cannot act in their collective interest without coercion. 3. THE CASE AGAINST REPLACEMENT FROM PRISONERS' DILEMMA SITUATIONS AND THE LIKE. The main arguments designed to rebut the replacement argument for anarchism and to buttress the State status quo, are based on variants of the Prisoners' Dilemma, to the effect that there are important cases where individuals will not agree or cooperate to provide themselves with (or to maintain) collective goods without coercion, such as only the State can 4 furnish. In such "dilemma" situations each individual will hope to gain advantage, without contributing (or exercising restraint), from others' contributions (or restraint), by freeloading on others (or profiting from others' restraint). The claim is that only the State with its backing of force can resolve such situations: anarchistic replacement cannot succeed. A basic ingredient of a considerable variety of arguments of this type, including Hobbes' and Hume's arguments for the State, the "Tragedy of the Commons" argument, and recent economic arguments for State intervention to secure collective goods, is the single Prisoners' Dilemma game with just two players. 5 Two prisoners, 1 and 2, taken to be accomplices in a crime, have been separately imprisoned. A State representative makes the following offers separately to each: if the prisoner confesses and becomes a State's witness while his or her accomplice remains silent, he or she will be released at once while the accomplice gets 8 years. It so happens that if both prisoners remain silent the State has only enough evidence to impose a 1 year sentence. if both confess they would each receive 4 years. But The "game" can be summarised in the following "payoff" matrix:Prisoner 1 Strategies s S (ilence) C(onfess) -1, -1 -8, 0 Prisoner 2 C o, -8 -4, -4 The game is not intended to present a moral dilemma, that each can only go free at the cost of the others' freedom, but the following dilemma:- It is in each prisoner's private interest to choose strategy C no matter what the other does: strategy C is, in the jargon, each players' "dominant" strategy (and also in fact a minimax strategy). For if 2, for example, remains silent, then 1 goes free by confessing, while if 2 confesses, then 1 halves his or her sentence by confessing. But if both prisoners choose their dominant strategy they obtain an inferior outcome to that which wou:ld have resulted by what is tendentiously called "cooperating", by their both remaining silent .. 5 4. FOILING THE PRISONERS" DILEMMA ARGUMENT. It is bizarre that a dilemma alleged to show the necessity of the State - which is supposed to intervene, forcibly if required, to ensure that the prisoners "cooperate" to obtain an 6 Of course optimal outcome - should be set up by the State's own operative. the State's presence in arranging (or accentuating) some such dilemma.sis inessential, as is much else from the example. But some features of the prisoner's relations are essential, in particular the separability assumption that the prisoners are isolated, and so have no opportunity to communicate or really cooperate. Similarly, in the more general argument, a privatisation assumption is smuggled in in the way the dilemma is formulated, that we are dealing with self contained individuals who, like the prisoners, act only in their own narrowly construed private interests and whose interests -are opposed. The applicability of the dilemma to the human condition is accordingly seriously limited. 7 A cursory aside is often added to the Prisoners' Dilemma to the effect that the segregation of the prisoners makes no real difference. It is claimed that even if the prisoners could meet and discuss and even agreed to cooperate, that would make no difference, since neither could trust (the sincerity) of the other (Abrams, p. 193), 'neither has an incentive to keep the agreement' (Taylor, p. 5). Experimental and historical evidence indicates that this is very often not so - and in a more cooperative social setting than the currently encouraged privatisation of life, the extent of cooperation and trust would undoubtedly be much higher. 8 The argument has to depend crucially then on substantially mistaken assumptions about human propensities in various settings, e.g. that purely egoistic interests are always pursued, backed up by a large measure of scepticism about the reliability of other people (but if people were that - unreliable and devious , many State arrangements involved in providing public goods would not succeed either). That such assumptions are operating can be seen by elaborating the situation; e.g., to bring out the first,suppose the priso~ers have a common bond, e.g., they are friends or they are political prisoners with a shared social commitment, or they are neighbours and face a future in the same community; to bring out the philosophical scepticism involved, suppose the prisoner with a tarnished record offers the other security against default, and so on. The question of the character of human interests and preferences and the extent of their determination by the social context in which they occur is fundamental to the whole question of social and economic arrangements, and also accordingly to arguments for the State on the basis of human propensities. A major assumption underlying prevailing (non-Marxist) economics and associated political theory, is that the interests and preferences, as summed up in a preference ranking or utility function, of each human that is taken to count 6 is an independent parameter, which depends neither on the preference rankings of others nor on the social context in which that human _operates. While the individuals and firms of mainstream economic theory do, by definition, satisfy the independence requirements, and while there is very substantial cultural pressure on consumers to conform (through. advertising, education, popular media), very many humans do not conform, and the extent of cultural pressure towards privatisation itself belies the naturalness of this independence. And having sufficiently many interest-interdependent people in a . small community (which is not thoroughly impoverished) is normally enough, given their social influence, to avoid or resolve, by cooperation, the types of Prisoners' Dilennna situations that appear to count in favour of the State-. 9 5. WHY THE DILEMMA ARGUMENTS CANNOT SUCCEED. What the Dilemma-based case for .the State has to show - what never has been shown·- is that there are outstanding Dilemma situations, which are relevant and important, and also damaging if unresolved, and that they are resolvable by State intervention, and only so (optimally) resolved. Finally it has to be shown that in the course of so resolving these Dilemma situations, worse situations than those that are resolved are not thereby induced. These complex conditions cannot be satisfied, of they can be satisfied at all, in a way that is not question begging. For several of the conditions are value dependent (e.g. what is important, damaging, optional, worse) and involve considerations about which reasonable parties can differ. The selection of Dilemmas itself provides an example of such: after all there are many such Dilemmas (e.g. as to environmental degradation, of overexploitation, of family violence or feuds) which are considered beyond the sphere of the State or not worthy of State attention. There are now grounds for concluding that the conditions cannot be satisfied at all. For many of the arguments using Prisoners' Dilennna games, Hobbes' and Hume's arguments for the State and Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons" for instance, turn out when properly formalised to consist not just of a single game but of a sequence of · such games, to be more adequately represented by what is called a superg~e. But in many such sequential Prisoners' Dilemma games, rational "cooperation" can occur, even assuming . h pure 1 y egoistic . . interests. . , lO For wh at sequentia . 1 separa t e d payers wit 1 games permit that isolated games exclude, is th.at players' actions may be dependent upon past performance of other players. This dependence effectively removes one extremely unrealistic self-containment assumption from Dilemma situations, that individuals act in totally isolated ways, not learning from past social interaction. In such supergames then, no intervention is required. 7 Undoubtedly some Dilemmas are resolved by "intervention", e.g. by allowing the prisoners to get in touch so that they find they are neighbours or that they can really cooperate. Equally important, and equally independent of the State, is the matter of breaking down the adversary, or game, situation so the prisoners do not act as competitors but are prepared to cooperate. 11 Informational input may also. be important, e.g. news that each prisone_r has J_to agreements a good record of adherin~h or if not is prepared to stake collateral, etc. Nor is force or threat of force required as an incentive to guarantee optimal strategies : a range of other inducements and incentives they be required in recalcitrant cases), and gifts, deprivation, social pressure, etc. is known (should is used even by the State, e.g. But at no stage is the State required to make these arrangements: much as some real Prisoners' Dilemmas are resolved by work of Amnesty International, so voluntary organisations can be formed to detect and deal with Prisoners' Dilemma situations where they are not already catered for. And in fact communal and cooperative organisation did resolve Prisoners' Dilemma-type situations historically, for example in the case of the Commons. In sum, here also replacement works. There are no important Dilemma situations, it seems, where the State is essential. The State has been thought to be essential because of certain influential false dichotomies; for example, that all behaviour that is not egoistic is altruistic (but altruistic behaviour is uncommon, and "irrational"), that the only way of allocating goods, apart from profit-directed markets - which tend to deal abysmally with collective goods - is through State control. 1 2 But it is quite evident that there are other methods of allocation, both economic (e.g. exchange, through traditional markets, based on supply costs) and social (e.g. by cooperatives, clubs). Lastly, introduction of the State to resolve some Dilemma situations 13 · . · . h as very extensive e ff ects, -many o f t h em negative, soth at t h e gains ma d e, any, in so resolving Dilemma 1· f situations, appear to be substantially outweighed by the costs involved. For there are the many evil aspects of the typical State to put in the balance. As regards Dilemma situations, entry of the State with its authority showing may not help but may worsen some situations, and more important, new Dilemmas may be initiated by State activity, as i ri the cas e of the prisone rs,br differently with the State as a further player (since the State . may engage in whaling, have access to a commons, etc.). also to further arguments against the State. These points lead 8 6. THE SECOND WAY: THE ARGUMENT FROM PROBLEM RECURRENCE. The solution by the State to problems of social organisation repeats or generates in more dangerous form the very problems introduction of the State was designed to solve, including new Dilemmas. Suppose, for instance, the secular State ·really were introduced in order to solve Prisoners' Dilemmas - introduced as opposed to inherited from the religious State and the Church, and maintained to prop up privilege and foster objectives that are not in its communities' interests then the array of States generates new Prisoners' Dilemmas, which there is no Super-State to resolve by coercion. Suppose, as the myth has it, the State really were introduced in _the interest of order and stability and to curb violence; then the arrays of States resulting more than negates these advantages, with instability, disorder and violence on a grander scale than before the emergence of modern secular States. 14 7. THE THIRD WAY: THE OVERSHOOT ARGUMENT,FROM THE INADEQUACY OF INSTITUTIONAL CONTROLS ON STATE POWER. Having ceded a monopoly on power to the State, in order to resolve some dilemmas, some of them arising from an inequitable distribution of power, what controls or balances the power of the State? A Super-State. And its power? There is a vicious infinite regress if the reply to the question "What controls the controller?" is "a further 15 The only promising way of avoiding this problem - other routes controller". lead (even more) directly to totalitarianism - is by having the first of these controllers, the State, answer back to those in whose interests it is allegedly established, those of the society or group of communities it controls. implies democratic methods of some kind. This Others go further: 'democracy [is] the only known means to achieve this control, the only known device by which 16 we can try to protect ourselves against the misuse of political power'. In this event, control has mostly failed. Democracy is extremely attenuated, even in those states that claim to practice it. The exercise of power in modern "democratid' states - much increased power reaching deep into peoples' lives, power which has passed to certain political elites and is directed at the attainment of such objectives as economic growth and material "progress" - is often channelled through 'non-elected authority' and 'is not democratic in the traditional meaning of the term' 17 In any case, indirect democratic and other institutional checks are tenuous in as much as they depend ultimately on the toleration of those who have direct control of the forces of the State. Experience seems to show that such toleration will only be shown so long as democratic procedures deliver results that are not too disagreeable, that are broadly in accord with what those who control the coercive power are prepared 9 to accept. (Toleration of such a tamed democracy then brings benefits to those who hold power, especially the cover of legitimation). checks which operate only insofar as a system But institutional acceptable to the powerholders is not seriously challenged, and which depend ultimately upon the toleration of those "checked~' are not really checks at all. The problem of controlling the power of the State, and preventing the State once established from usurping further power and exceeding its mandate, is only satisfactorily solved by not ceding power to the State in the first place. The best way of avoiding the evils of accumulated power is the anarchist way, of blocking its accumulation. 8. THE FOURTH WAY: THE ARGUMENT FROM FREEDOM AND AUTONOMY. responsible for actions deliberately undertaken. A person is This premiss can be derived, if need be, from the notion of a person as a moral agent. Taking · responsibility for one's actions implies, among other things, making the final decision about h;such what to do on eac~A occasion oneself, not acting simply on direction from outside,but determining how to act, what ought to be done, oneself; not handing that decision over to someone or something else. It implies, that is, moral autonomy. Autonomy in turn implies, what responsibility requires, freedom. For the autonomous being, endorsing its own decisions and principles ~ is not subject to the will of another. another so directs. Even if it does what another directs, it is not because In being free, not of constraints (both physical and self-determined), but of the constraints and will of others, an autonomous being is morally free. A necessary feature of the State is authority over those in its territory (under its de facto jurisdiction), the right to rule and impose its will upon them. Such authority backed by force is incompatible with moral autonomy and with freedom. An autonomous being, though it may act in accordance with some imperatives of the State, those it independently endorses, is bound to reject such (a claim to) authority, and therewith the State. In sum, being a person, as also being autonomous and being free, implies rejecting the authority of the State, and so not acknowledging the State; that is, each condition on personhood implies, i f t he argument is sound , anarchism. 18 It is possible to combine autonomy with an extremely attenuated "State", one based on on-going unanimous direct democracy. But such a "State", with no independent authority, is not really a state, since any participant can dissolve it at any time, and so constitutes no threat to anarchism o On the contrary, such direct democratic methods are part of the very stuff of anarchistic organisation. 10 9. THE FIFTH WAY: THE ARGUMENT FROM ANARCHIST EXPERIENCE. The replacement argument enables construction of a model · of a society functioning without the State, of a practically possible Stateless world; which shows that the State is not necessary. But it can always be claimed - even if the claim can seldom or ever be made good - that the modelling leaves out some crucial feature of real world circumstances, rendering it inapplicable. The gap may be closed by appeal to the independently valuable argument from experience, that at various times and places anarchism has been tested and has worked. Examples of such Stateless organisation suffice to show that crucial real world features have not been omitted. There are many examples of nonindustrialised societies which were, or are, 19 anarchistic, there is the rich experience of the Spanish collectives, and there is much localised experience of self-management and small-scale anarchistic arrangements within the State structure. 20 10. THE EMERGING CHARACTER OF ANARCHISM AND ITS ORGANISATION. The arguments outlined, predominantly theoretical, inform the practical, revealing the options open for anarchism, courses of action in superannuating the State and for transition to a stateless Society, and so on. For example, spontaneous anarchism - according to which organisation is unnecessary and social arrangements will arise spontaneously, and will be ushered in during the revolution without any prior organisation-is a position which is not viable and could not endure, because it makes none of the requisite replacements upon which durable supersession of the State depends. The sort of anarchist society which these theoretical arguments delineate will certainly be organised, but the organisation will not be compulsory, and will eschew authoritarian measures (and, by the overshoot argument, will reject transition by any strengthening of the centralised State), relying heavily on voluntary cooperation and direct democracy. The society which emerges will be much as Bakunin and Kropotkin sometimes pictured it. It will be based on smaller-scale decentralised connnunities, for otherwise such arrangements as connnunity replacement of State welfare arrangements, control of their environment, removal of Prisoners' Dilennnas, and participatory democracy, will work less satisfactorily. Connnunities will be federated and control will be bottom-up, not merely by representation and subject to a downward system of command. Within each connnunity there will not be great discrepancies in the distribution of wealth and property, and no highly concentrated economic property and power. community wilt be a rather equalitarian group, sharing in much that is cennnunally owned or not owned at all. A · 11 While theoretical arguments help outline the general shape of social and also economic arrangements they do not determine them completely, they offer no detailed blueprint. Accordingly what emerges is not a particular form of anarchism, for instance anarchist communism, but a more experimental and pluralistic anarchism, such as was instituted in the Spanish collectives. 11. STRATEGIES FOR TRANSITION TO ANARCHIST SOCIETY: THE FOREST SUCCESSION MODEL OF REPLACEMENT BY AN ALTERNATIVE STRUCTURE. The main strategy, emerging. from the First Way, is that of replacement: transition to a new anarchist social order proceeds by replacement or aooption of the more satisfactory State organisations and structures by organisations and structures of a more anarchistic cast, and by removal or phasing out of remaining no longer necessary or unsatisfactory State arrangements. Replacement and supersession suggest a biological model, of such change and succession as occurs where one forest type succeeds another; and such a model is in turn very suggestive. To make the model more definite, and to give it some local colour, consider forest succession where a sub-tropical rainforest replaces a eucalypt forest, as analogous to the case where anarchism replaces a Statist society. There is certainly a marked change in structure, typically from a tall forest with a fairly open canopy to a more compact closed forest with more layers of vegetation, much more local diversity and a richer variety of life forms, especially floral forms. A forest is not merely a set of trees, but trees in structura J arrangement and interdependence, not merely on one another but on other life forms such as pollinating insects, seed-carrying birds and animals, and so on; and the changes in structure include changes in microclimate, in soil moisture levels and humus and bacterial content. The change of forest type may be by evolution, by hastened or induced evolution, or by catastrophe (revolution) as when a eucalypt forest is clearfelled and artificially succeeded by planted rainforest. (Strictly, there is a spectrum of practices and replacement strategies between evolutionary and revolutionary, and various different revolutionary strategies; and the standard evolutionary-revolutionary contrast presents a false dichotomy.) Even reliance on predominantly evolutionary methods, which tend to be very slow by human time scale~ may require some (management) practices, else evolution towards rainforest will not begin or continue. For example, seeds for rainforest species may not be available if adjoining areas have been stripped of suitable seed trees, e.g. by clearing or eucalypt conversion, in which case it will be necessary to introduce seeds (of anarchist ideas, methods, arrangements, etc.). And rainforest evolution may not be able to 12 continue because the area is burnt occasionally, e.g. by State officers, in which case protection against fire will be required: for with burning (suppression) regimes rainforest seedlings are killed and eucalypt dominance perpetuated. Furthermore, evolution can be hastened or induced by intro- ducing seeds, or planting rainforest trees in poorly seeded areas (i.e. setting up alternative social arrangements) under the eucalypt overstorey, or even by some careful culling of eucalypts. But even without culling there will be much for anarchist management to do. As the rainforest cover begins to grow up through the eucalypt forest, the forest begins to change structurally. Younger eucalypt poles die, and their replacement by eucalypts is generally precluded owing to low light intensities near the forest floor (in something the same way conditions for capitalist entrepreneurs to flourish are excluded in an emerging anarchist society). Gradually, as the rainforest grows, only scattered giant eucalypts emerge through the canopy, and in time these fall to the forest floor, to rot and not to be replaced - unless the climax rainforest is subject to catastrophe, such as fire or cyclone. Catastrophic methods, such as clearfalling the eucalypt forest, replanting with rainforest, protecting the new forest, and removing eucalyptus regrowth, are much more problematic. To be applied they require either a large workforce or much mechanical power (so it is with violent revolutions which require a large support basis not available in advanced capitalist and state socialist countries, or else access to means of perpetrating violence comparable to that of the State). There are often similar requirements for success; otherwise the area may be choked by rapidly growing weeds or the rainforest plants may be suppressed by eucalypt seedlings and a pioneer eucalypt stage recur. Moreover, a eucalypt overstorey sometimes affords good conditions for rainforest growth, e.g. plant protection from excessive sun, occasional frosts, and drying winds, better moisture retention conditions,and so on. (_Similarly anarchist organisations can sometimes use the environment afforded by the State to get started.) But under some conditions, such as excessive interference (as happens to alternative arrangements in highly repressive States where local conditions also commonly favour revolutionary succession), there may be little or no alternative t o clearfelling practices. But just as clearfelling the eucalypt forest can create favourable conditions for weeds, so violent revolutions can only too easily create the conditions for a new (State) elite, controlling the concentrated power generated for the overthrow of the older regime. 13 12. APPLYING THE FOREST SUCCESSION MODEL. How to apply the model is not difficult to see in broad outline, and many of the further details have been filled out by work that can be described as indicating how allegiance can be shifted in practice from where we mostly are to alternative social arrangements and life-styles built on self-management and mutual aid.~ The seeds of anarchism should be broadcast or planted, anarchist (nonStatist) arrangements instituted or strengthened, and efforts made to replace or modify vulnerable Statist arrangements, e.g. by democratization of present institutions and development of nonStatist and noncapitalist . alternatives. Some of the practices are familiar: anarchist groups, clubs, pamphlets, broadcasts, newsletters, etc.; (anarchist) cooperatives, exchanges, neighbourhood groups, rural communities, etc. are slightly less familiar: Others avoidance of State influence by arrangements beyond State reach such as costless (or alternative currency) interchanges of goods and services, action directed at removing decision-making from State departments, such as forest services, and into citizen hands, and ultimately, to decentralized local communities. In this sort of way worthwhile State arrangements can be replaced, and power can be progressively transferred from the State, and returned to the community and to people more directly involved. FOOTNOTES 1. Bakunin on Anarchy (edited S. Dolgoff), Allen & Unwin, London, 1973, especially p. 139. Much else in this paper, e.g. the distinction between the State and Society, also derives from Bakunin. 2. That is, proper elaboration of this argument takes each facet of generally beneficial state activity~ there is only a (relative:1-y small) finite number to consider - and shows how it can be replaced in one way or another. course uniquely determined. Replacement is not of Lines such replacements can tfke are indicated in much anarchist (and self-management) literature, consider especially but not uncritically, P. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid. New York University Press, 1972, and also his Fields, Factories and Workshops, second edition, Nelson, London, 1913, and The Conquest of Bread, Chapman and Hall, London, 1913. 3. On these points see, e.g. Kropotkin_'s Revolutionary Pamphlets (edited S. Baldwin), Dover Publications, New York, 1970, p. 206 ff.; also P.J. Proudhon, Confessions of a Revolutionary. For recent discussion of, and practical examples of, replacements for arbitration and law court procedures (but for right-leaning anarchism), see C.D. Stone, 'Some reflections on arbitrating our way to anarchy', Anarchism, (reprint of Nomos _ XIx),New York University Press, 1978, pp. 213-4. 4. Arguments of this typ.e are sometimes said to represent 'the strongest case that can be made for the desirability of the State' (M. Taylor, Anarchy and Cooperation, Wiley, London, 1976, p. 9). To cover all arguments of the type, and to avoid repetition of the phrase 'variants of' and disputes as to whether certain arguments such as those of Hume and of Olson involve Prisoners' Dilemma situations, 'Prisoner's Dilemma' is used in a wide sense to include not merely single n-person Prisoners' Dilemma games, but for example, games where the payoffs are not merely egoistic (as with both Hobbes and Hume) and where such games are iterated. As the bracketed clauses in the text indicate, there are two types of case, not sharply separated and both of the same logical form - those where people do not contribute to supply themselves with, or with "optimum" quantities of, a "collective good" (e.g. security, order, sewage), and those where people do not restrain themselves to maintain, or maintain "optimum" quantities of, some already available "collective good" (e.g. commons, 2 unpolluted streams, whales, wilderness). That received arguments of all these types involves Prisoners' Dilemma situations (in the wide sense) is argued, in effect, in Taylor, op. cit. and elsewhere. An easier introduction to the material covered by Taylor, which also surveys other important literature, is given in the final chapter of R. Abrams, Foundations of Political Analysis, Columbia University Press, New York, 1980. 5. An important matter the two player game does not illustrate is the relevance of population size in the arguments for the State. But size is not decisive (see, e.g., Taylor, chapter 2), and the issue can be avoided (or relocated) by organisation into smaller communities. The figures given in the matrix are illustrative only; for inequalities which suffice for a Dilemma situation, see Taylor, p. 5. 6. It is similarly bizarre that there should be outcomes that the State alone is said to be able to arrange, but not mere social cooperation, when the State is (as on many theories) the result or reflection of social cooperation. 7. This important point is much elaborated in V. and R. Routley, 'Social Theories, Self Management, and Environmental Problems' in Environmental Philosophy (edited D. Mannison and others), RSSS, Australian National University, 1980. 8. As a result of G. Hardin's "Travesty of the Commons", historical evidence has been assembled which reveals how far Hardin's "Commons" diverges from historic commons; see, in particular, A. Roberts, The SelfManaging Environment, Allison & · Busby, London, 1979, chapter 10, but also Routley, op. cit., p. 285 and pp. 329-332. Similar points apply as regards many other Dilemma situations. 'In the experimental studies of the prisoner's dilemma game approximately half of the participants choose a cooperative strategy even when they know for certain that the other player will cooperate'. Abrams, op. cit., p. 308. 9. Cf. the discus$ion in Taylor, op. cit., p. 93. 3 10. This important result is established in Taylor, op. cit., for a number of critical cases, though not generally; see, e.g. p. 32 but especially chapter 5. 11. Such moves have proved valuable in reducing the State's role in legal prosecution, and in eliminating courtroom procedures, including cases where the State is one of the "adversaries". 12. Both the false dichotomies cited are commonplace, not to say rife, in modern economic and political theorising. Both are to be found in Abram's final chapter, for example, and the first (with an attempt to plaster over the gap with a definition) in Taylor. For a further criticism of such false dichotomies, see Routley, op.cit.,pp.250 ff. 13. For instance, a certain social escapism: one escapes one's social roles and is enabled to concentrate on private affairs or just to laze. Or so it may appear: for in reality anyone who works, works long and often alienated hours to pay for this apparent escapism and to cover the high costs of frequently inadequate State activity. 14. The argument, to be found in Bakunin, is elaborated a little in Taylor, op. cit., chapter 7. A related argument, also in Bakunin, is from the way in which emergence of the State compromises and even closes off nonstate solutions to problems of social organisation in adjoining regions. 15. The question is in effect Plato's question, and the regress is reminiscent of his Third Man argument. 16. K.R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. II. Fourth edition (revised), Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1962, p. 129 and p. 127. The ~vershoot) problem is, according to Popper 'the most fundamental problem of all politics: the control of the controller, of the dangerous accumulation of power represented in the State•, 'upon which' Marxists never had 'any well-considered view' (p. 129). 17. V. Lauber, 'Ecology, politics and liberal democracy', Government and Opposition 13 (1978)., 199-217: seep. 209 and p. 21l. 18. The argument, outlined by Bakunin, is much elaborated in R.P. Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism, Harper & Row, New York., 1970. No argument is however without assumptions, which are open to dispute. argument, for example,is disputed by G. Wall, 'Philosophical anarchism revised' Nomos XIX, op. cit., p. 273 ff. Wolff's 4 19. Documented in The Anarchist Collectives (edited S. Dolgoff), Free Life Editions, New York, 1974. 20. As B. Martin boldly asserts, 'The advantages of _self-management and alternative lifestyles are many and significant. And these alternatives are entirely feasible: there is plenty of evidence and experience to support operates. their superiority over the present way society The obstacles to self-management and alternative life styles are powerful vested interests and institutional resistance to change', Changing the Cogs, Friends of the Earth, Canberra, 1979, p. 6. 21. As sketched in some of the material already cited, for example, Routley, p. 284 ff. Richard Routley lives and works. in the NSW forest. He is sponsored in pursuit of his research interests - in arguments and theories especially by the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University (a state-supported and state-supporting institution, holding 20,000 shares in the uranium industry). His main published work is in metaphysics and alternative logics and in forestry and environmental philosophy. preparation of this article by Val Routley. He was helped in The following has been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. Cutting (photocopy) Routley R and Routley V (1982) 'The irrefutability of anarchism', Social alternatives, 2(3): 23-29. (7 leaves)  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 70, Item 2: Draft and cutting of The irrefutability of anarchism Subject The topic of the resource Typescript of draft, corrections with whiteout and handwritten emendations, undated, with cutting (photocopy) of published version, Routley R and Routley V (1982) 'The irrefutability of anarchism', Social alternatives, 2(3): 23-29. Description An account of the resource Cutting redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. Unnumbered paper from collection, item number assigned by library staff. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Routley</a> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 70, Item 2 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource [25] leaves. [3.01 MB] Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:e525618">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:e525618</a> Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant n/a - not numbered in manuscript finding aid Box 70: Unlisted and Untitled Boxes https://www.antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/7a9a113e9450d48a14c3453e40634d75.pdf 8b2ff607f479ab23bd89d5f3693348f9 PDF Text Text 00948 ��' A ,-,/X^ ^6- c4>-yil^r7^7 Tt%^ . /. ^C- 7. — �4 ^r-^7^ /.^ ^4 , 4 " /z^ JL,^ ^c^-< y4^/^4L — �2- �/^ /t4>vx - <^jt/y! ? ?^L CC^s. 7^ / ^ , ** / / �The most notorious of these (econstructions*are the social contract theories ^pf^ilg&bes, Rousseau,reccntly Rawls. , whereby individual members of a society fictitiously enter into an enforceable contract, inescapable for themselves and all their descendants, setting up the state, primarily as a security arrangement. In later versions4here is much negotiating and bargaining in contrived sifuations, where humans lose many of their distinctive features and accoutrements (in a effort to ensure some initial fairness). A variant on contract theories, which justify some sort of state arrangements aj y they arose in an ideal way, is retrojustification of the state as naturally arising, as a sort of super­ insurance agency, from pre-state arrangements. For example, the minimal state evolves from a competing set of state-like security agencies one of which somehow gains a monopoly, and is retrojustified through insurance arguments (concerning risk and compensation). Now modern states did not arise in any such "natural" or contractual way. Often they we^^posed by conquest or through colonialisation, and with a few exceptions, using military means^ra&*than Offering much sweetness and light and choic^Nor do the ideal constructions ( or histories offer much justification for these resulting state power configurations. For the states so delivered are very different from those most people presently toil under. In any case, the arguments involved do not succeed. They are extraordinarily gappy by contemporary logical standards, amd (hey depend upon some utterly implausible assumptions, for example as to how vile conditions are in extra-state situations. No doubt some of the gaps Could be plugged by further, further contestable, assumptions, but such analytic work remains ,^V- Au to be attempted and assessed. In fact it was ea^ realised that such arguments exhibit unlikely and even paradoxical features. For example, in consenting to a state for security purposes, '4 participants to the state contract proceed to establish an institution which is far more dangerous to them than the power of others taken distribudvely. It would seem that those smart enough to enter into a social contract for a state would be smart enough to foresee the problems of hiring a monster, and to avoid the steer and stated along without it. WA s c<\/ /dv 01/ j A < *-T? A- <0^. �yZ / / ^z<* v^!<L-^ //f/4//?^. /^r Z y?/-ftz<&4 ^,';Z^rZ? 7z^7^; c/^7L- */ ^4^ c^ ' /^/<r J / <r<^-n> <4 Zs //^4 4- ,ZJV *- _ , "77^/ \ y ��____j ^<9C/<3/ co/trract arguments Ms^that-ofTiobbes areScon jobs.) ^uch argument, aim to show / 'the state is necessary and that ' the state is superior to its absence, 1)ut w;, argument^as are presented depend upon a false choice. For only two opdons are considered: H, a horrible Hobbesian "state of nature" and S, a well ordered(contructually-rea^e^Hobbesian state. The argument, appealing to the vices of H and the virtues of S, has little trouble in concluding * * S is better than H (or similarly, radial agents would select S over H, etc.) The choice conveniently leaves out other options, as anarchist ones. Why should anarchists want to line up with S? They can agree with proposition * *. They might also want to assert that anarchistic arrangements Z are superior to S. Whereupon it is evident that neither * nor * follows. For necessity all aggeRible alternatives have to be considered (by the That has not been done. For superiority the superiority of S to Z and semantics of other altemadves has to be taken into account. That has not been done. One alternative is Carter's -Society which produces 'the kind of individuals who have strongly internalized values and can live cooperatively and freely without the threat of force ...' (p-25).5 5 " Hobbe s Bottom half: really a reranking. �ryn< \C /)<te<ft^j A. /t"^**', the arguments, ^even if somehow repaired, would not establish an institution with anything approaching the power and complexity of the modem state. Arguments to the state typically establish, only a rather minimal state, with certain protective and regulatory powers. Such * minimal state, would not deliver many of the goods economists, still less socialists, have come to expect of the state. The arguments certainly do not establish anything like the oppressive paternal state with a panoply of powers that many citizens are forceably subject to, powers states have accumulated by their own unjustified predatory activity. In this respect too, arguments to the state resemble arguments to God. Deistic arguments characteristically establish (insofar as they establish anything) only a quite minimal fAtzr w/hcA, a first cause, a most perfect object, a universal designer, "clockmaker" or the like. They do nothing to establish many of the powers or properties ascribed to God. ;CK(L ? trt P ) A �4?^ -v.y.^z *^<L ** ^/c^j/ ) /r^ /y rt^Z /4^ C1—\ " -Z /^,/ 7.^/ Z^ 7^, _ y x, . Zt rZZ'l^L^ /"^ /%-/ A^' Z<^ C-€_ ^EEE%zE^ " "YT^ 7 r—<4. V y <<^,^ 7^, ^ <7^ K— ; ?4- 7%,^/ ,-;/^ CL-^ ^4c. ,y . /^C-v*t t-a. *4? ��:///W7< // rc)^"T / 3 <y <? *^, ^7*^ 7*c �^RORLEM& IN PRESENT WORLD SOCIAL AND-POLITICAL There are great many problems, many of them getting worse rapidly. Though anarchist arrangements played little part in producing these problems, many of them developing and & . . —. getting out of central under free-enterprise capitalist and state-socialist arrangements, it is sometimes outragously with an array of these problems, and fail/ as s...^.. Because it is unable to do so. Why on earth should anarchism be presumed to do this?----- -, One critic endowed with this level of 'gall' (one A. Werthei'per) contends that anarchism is unable to successfully deal with four presently existing world social conditions. These are: 1) that "the population of the earth is (perhaps) too large, but increasing at a rapid rate with no prospect for a serious reduction"; 2) that "in much of the world, basic human needs are not being satisfied"; 3) that "the world's natural and human resources are not evenly distributed ac%ross the globe"; and finally 4) that "the present level of subsistence is based on a high level of social and economic interdependence among various regions of the world and within the regions themselves". In addition/?^., anarchism is unable to cope with conflicts between individual self-interest and social needs, particularly as relates to... defense (Clark p.142). The short response is So what? Firstly, insofar as these conditions constitute problems ("condition " 3) is more a fact than a "problem"^ no political theory is coping successfully, only bn all-conquering ideology would pretend to be able to cope. Democratic capitalism has had (important isolated pockets excepted) little impact in limiting India's gross population; Maorist socialism has done only a little better in China. Part of the problem in almost all such overpopulated regions lies in getting the problem recognised as a problem. ^.Secondly, prospects of success for anarchism are primarily regional, But a region can hardly be expected to handle, rather than make limited contributions towards, world problems. Suppose, for instance, Niue became (or reverted to) an anarchist society, a successful one locally. It would be no detraction from its local success that it made no impact upon demilitarizing the USA or halting the world's resource drain to thereto, or that its success was scarcely known aboutthere. ,,6 �3 -.J /yj*<^47j ^0^' Ar"t^- <^y 4/^ ^y ^X^C//4*c/ r^^—? <a ^7 / <*^V* '%^<- <^4?t^ A-?- '^-^' ^zfcLfyF*/, / /^ 4 y^?4/ y 4^ yw/ ^7 7- ^^-t-cy-^y ^L<<\- /' 7 ��, /tA_^ A / ^4/^- 4-n[ y -1- Z ^o _ �6' �^2 - /,^i//;; / ' / / Z^V / ' J /^- ' -' <' ^7^ 4i /^V , ^7^7 gsa^ v-T^EksCTs / ^3 7t<^ ^-. ^7 r, 7^\ 7^— <^/ %si^-7 <T7 Z7/ �2? 4^/ / �/^//^7^.A^(L- !?J 7^ . CL- z" 4?c/. ( ^*4A* /%^CP < y^^^y<^-<-. -^-j <?z<^-v ^**/" . ZtZZC f) Z^ rs^zZ; -- (,^v-crA-c— ^/!? t. ^ -^-? y y^4/- /7 ^Z<) ,- z\o/^ Z C^Z^ *Z_ <=t*^ ? C tZZZ^^/^^ Z<_ .c.4^- s^Z, Z^^/ y?^ /^ZyZ 7 < 4^-* 4?, />^^ 47/^^ 7^ , zj ^Z^^7'^Z4Z-^y A^/\ <-4'^-7 ^^c/Zf* /%^)Z yi zZ/^yZ^-LrVv^J . -7^'Z<x?^tA/ /^y c< r< —bZ* ^i/?-J</ <^Z ^y^c^T, /^ry-e s. cc^X*^-JL^, ^Jcr c^vr^ .——------ c^c^y- ; Zn//3-^ Z ZhT/^ ^4^-? /Z /Z/. c z^v-^ ^7 , /%yi<^ , /^c/, Z? ^4V/^ /Zc^_ Z^? ^jL/ 7t) 4t- ^s^ZZr 4/TLt^*-t"TM—%r /<?4^<^ /4yc)7t^ ZLZ^4^y4^/ ? t <4 Zy ^^s<Z ^7 Z-* Z *^yZ^y<yZ �/C/, c-3%7tr&<^ /%%*/%i^< 7%CV(1 ^02 . /2L y �%2 c <2-7 ^*<L_ ^4o /^7^/ ��y , / / / A ' z ' /<wr^ ^//V/^^L i ^f^92^ //T^ /^\*^ /^ ^7^4^ r<. 7/c^^ ^?- ^^1/Ct -^7 Vyt^Zt-T ^-CC-^A ' / Z/?/ y^v /^ V ^tt^/^-ZY^r /1u/^ y <5^T^/ e%3/J ^2r^ cy^Zt ^r <^ ; �^7. �y,.^ ^y^7< ^x:?S-.^ y ,;*.^^^- ' <.^^4 A /4fA 2/^ . n -*^ "—<- 2/2? ?' ^//" ^1'^S ' ^/ 2%. �4 ��^336^? �/// r<zc/^^ /$^V z? /^C^J r A/7" VO^AZ? ^2/7*7 c/^ € (7 / 7 77 y4^/j ^7o c)-v^ 7j Z^T^ ZZ /"X / ^LC 7 j/<c �f �^./ J ) //yyi ^2 c %/ ^ ^ZL-y <^-<gy>--, A �7^7,. (4) 7 A? ^7^ '-"A ^*. ,^T4_ A c' / /^r7 , / ��/ / < j*^s- C/T%^ ? . c*^c* �% /f^cy^ 4 /j €< 6 y-^CL 4 f4 r A " ,<^4A. y^./^*,^/ <^=. 'r^ ' 4 / px^^ <et^<? A_^_l_ A"' <3L^ A ^A C, < 4-_ ���JJ/' ^/ <*soZ � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Draft Papers Description An account of the resource Sylvan's literary executor encountered an archive in which “all his projects were current", since manuscripts were undated and unattributed. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document 00948 ' A ,-,/X^ ^6- c4>-yil^r7^7 Tt%^ . /. ^C- 7. — 4 ^r-^7^ /.^ ^4 , 4 " /z^ JL,^ ^c^-< y4^/^4L — 2- /^ /t4>vx - <^jt/y! ? ?^L CC^s. 7^ / ^ , ** / / The most notorious of these (econstructions*are the social contract theories ^pf^ilg&bes, Rousseau,reccntly Rawls. , whereby individual members of a society fictitiously enter into an enforceable contract, inescapable for themselves and all their descendants, setting up the state, primarily as a security arrangement. In later versions4here is much negotiating and bargaining in contrived sifuations, where humans lose many of their distinctive features and accoutrements (in a effort to ensure some initial fairness). A variant on contract theories, which justify some sort of state arrangements aj y they arose in an ideal way, is retrojustification of the state as naturally arising, as a sort of super­ insurance agency, from pre-state arrangements. For example, the minimal state evolves from a competing set of state-like security agencies one of which somehow gains a monopoly, and is retrojustified through insurance arguments (concerning risk and compensation). Now modern states did not arise in any such "natural" or contractual way. Often they we^^posed by conquest or through colonialisation, and with a few exceptions, using military means^ra&*than Offering much sweetness and light and choic^Nor do the ideal constructions ( or histories offer much justification for these resulting state power configurations. For the states so delivered are very different from those most people presently toil under. In any case, the arguments involved do not succeed. They are extraordinarily gappy by contemporary logical standards, amd (hey depend upon some utterly implausible assumptions, for example as to how vile conditions are in extra-state situations. No doubt some of the gaps Could be plugged by further, further contestable, assumptions, but such analytic work remains ,^V- Au to be attempted and assessed. In fact it was ea^ realised that such arguments exhibit unlikely and even paradoxical features. For example, in consenting to a state for security purposes, '4 participants to the state contract proceed to establish an institution which is far more dangerous to them than the power of others taken distribudvely. It would seem that those smart enough to enter into a social contract for a state would be smart enough to foresee the problems of hiring a monster, and to avoid the steer and stated along without it. WA s c<\/ /dv 01/ j A < *-T? A- <0^. yZ / / ^z<* v^!<L-^ //f/4//?^. /^r Z y?/-ftz<&4 ^,';Z^rZ? 7z^7^; c/^7L- */ ^4^ c^ ' /^/<r J / <r<^-n> <4 Zs //^4 4- ,ZJV *- _ , "77^/ \ y ____j ^<9C/<3/ co/trract arguments Ms^that-ofTiobbes areScon jobs.) ^uch argument, aim to show / 'the state is necessary and that ' the state is superior to its absence, 1)ut w;, argument^as are presented depend upon a false choice. For only two opdons are considered: H, a horrible Hobbesian "state of nature" and S, a well ordered(contructually-rea^e^Hobbesian state. The argument, appealing to the vices of H and the virtues of S, has little trouble in concluding * * S is better than H (or similarly, radial agents would select S over H, etc.) The choice conveniently leaves out other options, as anarchist ones. Why should anarchists want to line up with S? They can agree with proposition * *. They might also want to assert that anarchistic arrangements Z are superior to S. Whereupon it is evident that neither * nor * follows. For necessity all aggeRible alternatives have to be considered (by the That has not been done. For superiority the superiority of S to Z and semantics of other altemadves has to be taken into account. That has not been done. One alternative is Carter's -Society which produces 'the kind of individuals who have strongly internalized values and can live cooperatively and freely without the threat of force ...' (p-25).5 5 " Hobbe s Bottom half: really a reranking. ryn< \C /)<te<ft^j A. /t"^**', the arguments, ^even if somehow repaired, would not establish an institution with anything approaching the power and complexity of the modem state. Arguments to the state typically establish, only a rather minimal state, with certain protective and regulatory powers. Such * minimal state, would not deliver many of the goods economists, still less socialists, have come to expect of the state. The arguments certainly do not establish anything like the oppressive paternal state with a panoply of powers that many citizens are forceably subject to, powers states have accumulated by their own unjustified predatory activity. In this respect too, arguments to the state resemble arguments to God. Deistic arguments characteristically establish (insofar as they establish anything) only a quite minimal fAtzr w/hcA, a first cause, a most perfect object, a universal designer, "clockmaker" or the like. They do nothing to establish many of the powers or properties ascribed to God. ;CK(L ? trt P ) A 4?^ -v.y.^z *^<L ** ^/c^j/ ) /r^ /y rt^Z /4^ C1—\ " -Z /^,/ 7.^/ Z^ 7^, _ y x, . Zt rZZ'l^L^ /"^ /%-/ A^' Z<^ C-€_ ^EEE%zE^ " "YT^ 7 r—<4. V y <<^,^ 7^, ^ <7^ K— ; ?4- 7%,^/ ,-;/^ CL-^ ^4c. ,y . /^C-v*t t-a. *4? :///W7< // rc)^"T / 3 <y <? *^, ^7*^ 7*c ^RORLEM& IN PRESENT WORLD SOCIAL AND-POLITICAL There are great many problems, many of them getting worse rapidly. Though anarchist arrangements played little part in producing these problems, many of them developing and & . . —. getting out of central under free-enterprise capitalist and state-socialist arrangements, it is sometimes outragously with an array of these problems, and fail/ as s...^.. Because it is unable to do so. Why on earth should anarchism be presumed to do this?----- -, One critic endowed with this level of 'gall' (one A. Werthei'per) contends that anarchism is unable to successfully deal with four presently existing world social conditions. These are: 1) that "the population of the earth is (perhaps) too large, but increasing at a rapid rate with no prospect for a serious reduction"; 2) that "in much of the world, basic human needs are not being satisfied"; 3) that "the world's natural and human resources are not evenly distributed ac%ross the globe"; and finally 4) that "the present level of subsistence is based on a high level of social and economic interdependence among various regions of the world and within the regions themselves". In addition/?^., anarchism is unable to cope with conflicts between individual self-interest and social needs, particularly as relates to... defense (Clark p.142). The short response is So what? Firstly, insofar as these conditions constitute problems ("condition " 3) is more a fact than a "problem"^ no political theory is coping successfully, only bn all-conquering ideology would pretend to be able to cope. Democratic capitalism has had (important isolated pockets excepted) little impact in limiting India's gross population; Maorist socialism has done only a little better in China. Part of the problem in almost all such overpopulated regions lies in getting the problem recognised as a problem. ^.Secondly, prospects of success for anarchism are primarily regional, But a region can hardly be expected to handle, rather than make limited contributions towards, world problems. Suppose, for instance, Niue became (or reverted to) an anarchist society, a successful one locally. It would be no detraction from its local success that it made no impact upon demilitarizing the USA or halting the world's resource drain to thereto, or that its success was scarcely known aboutthere. ,,6 3 -.J /yj*<^47j ^0^' Ar"t^- <^y 4/^ ^y ^X^C//4*c/ r^^—? <a ^7 / <*^V* '%^<- <^4?t^ A-?- '^-^' ^zfcLfyF*/, / /^ 4 y^?4/ y 4^ yw/ ^7 7- ^^-t-cy-^y ^L<<\- /' 7 , /tA_^ A / ^4/^- 4-n[ y -1- Z ^o _ 6' ^2 - /,^i//;; / ' / / Z^V / ' J /^- ' -' <' ^7^ 4i /^V , ^7^7 gsa^ v-T^EksCTs / ^3 7t<^ ^-. ^7 r, 7^\ 7^— <^/ %si^-7 <T7 Z7/ 2? 4^/ / /^//^7^.A^(L- !?J 7^ . CL- z" 4?c/. ( ^*4A* /%^CP < y^^^y<^-<-. -^-j <?z<^-v ^**/" . ZtZZC f) Z^ rs^zZ; -- (,^v-crA-c— ^/!? t. ^ -^-? y y^4/- /7 ^Z<) ,- z\o/^ Z C^Z^ *Z_ <=t*^ ? C tZZZ^^/^^ Z<_ .c.4^- s^Z, Z^^/ y?^ /^ZyZ 7 < 4^-* 4?, />^^ 47/^^ 7^ , zj ^Z^^7'^Z4Z-^y A^/\ <-4'^-7 ^^c/Zf* /%^)Z yi zZ/^yZ^-LrVv^J . -7^'Z<x?^tA/ /^y c< r< —bZ* ^i/?-J</ <^Z ^y^c^T, /^ry-e s. cc^X*^-JL^, ^Jcr c^vr^ .——------ c^c^y- ; Zn//3-^ Z ZhT/^ ^4^-? /Z /Z/. c z^v-^ ^7 , /%yi<^ , /^c/, Z? ^4V/^ /Zc^_ Z^? ^jL/ 7t) 4t- ^s^ZZr 4/TLt^*-t"TM—%r /<?4^<^ /4yc)7t^ ZLZ^4^y4^/ ? t <4 Zy ^^s<Z ^7 Z-* Z *^yZ^y<yZ /C/, c-3%7tr&<^ /%%*/%i^< 7%CV(1 ^02 . /2L y %2 c <2-7 ^*<L_ ^4o /^7^/ y , / / / A ' z ' /<wr^ ^//V/^^L i ^f^92^ //T^ /^\*^ /^ ^7^4^ r<. 7/c^^ ^?- ^^1/Ct -^7 Vyt^Zt-T ^-CC-^A ' / Z/?/ y^v /^ V ^tt^/^-ZY^r /1u/^ y <5^T^/ e%3/J ^2r^ cy^Zt ^r <^ ; ^7. y,.^ ^y^7< ^x:?S-.^ y ,;*.^^^- ' <.^^4 A /4fA 2/^ . n -*^ "—<- 2/2? ?' ^//" ^1'^S ' ^/ 2%. 4 ^336^? /// r<zc/^^ /$^V z? /^C^J r A/7" VO^AZ? ^2/7*7 c/^ € (7 / 7 77 y4^/j ^7o c)-v^ 7j Z^T^ ZZ /"X / ^LC 7 j/<c f ^./ J ) //yyi ^2 c %/ ^ ^ZL-y <^-<gy>--, A 7^7,. (4) 7 A? ^7^ '-"A ^*. ,^T4_ A c' / /^r7 , / / / < j*^s- C/T%^ ? . c*^c* % /f^cy^ 4 /j €< 6 y-^CL 4 f4 r A " ,<^4A. y^./^*,^/ <^=. 'r^ ' 4 / px^^ <et^<? A_^_l_ A"' <3L^ A ^A C, < 4-_ JJ/' ^/ <*soZ  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Box 13, Item 948: Early drafts and finished papers on anarchism Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Sylvan&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Sylvan</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Description An account of the resource Typescripts and handwritten chapters, with handwritten emendations and annotations. Title in collection finding aid: RS: Anarkism. Early Drafts + Finished Papers. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span><span>,</span> Box 13, item 948 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource [41] leaves. 87.25 MB. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:a6a08c8" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:a6a08c8</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Lake George - Floor - Pile 6 Box 13: Green Projects in Progress Lake George House Lake George House > Floor > Pile 6 https://www.antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/5920bc40eda84ef7c51d0a551039383b.pdf 6aa8131b8382bef6992e275a7bff05a8 PDF Text Text 1031 /&J 29.5.95 PARADIGMATIC ROOTS OF ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS Abstract. Virtually all diagnoses of the roots, and sources, of environmental problems are defective. While defective diagnoses persist, problems will not be adequately addressed. Focal questions ask why human communities so frequently degrade, impoverish or even destroy their own environments, and more generally why the whole earth is now in jeopardy through human enterprise. More immediate answers, sometimes correct so far as they go (which is not deep enough), look to components of environmental impact equations. More thorough-going answers fall into two classes: first those that do not question entrenched paradigms, but seek (unsuccessfully) to explain widespread problems simply through defective practice, and secondly those that, rightly recognising that defective practice is no adequate answer, look to deeper paradigmatic sources of problems. A fatal flaw in most of the latter answers lies in their monistic concentration on a single paradigm, or single narrow band of paradigms. These flaws are exposed, whence a wider, more satisfactory answer can be broached. Background busywork includes firstly, explaining problems and relevant paradigms and how paradigms operate regarding environmental problems, and secondly, detailed disentangling of proposed and alleged sources of the problems. With this done, it is argued that none of these answers, fashionable or other, to the focal questions is satisfactory. Here lies the important hard, but very negative and decidedly incomplete, work of the present investigation. A different more complex investigation is accordingly instigated. An initial answer is located through broader classes of paradigms : environmentally friendly and unfriendly. Further effort is expended, profitably, in trying to characterize these classes. Among significant corollaries, one is striking: philosophy as portrayed through its standard history is dismal environmental news. �2 PARADIGMATIC ROOTS of ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS Broaching focal questions, and searching for deeper answers. Human activity is now degrading terrestrial eco-systems at an extraordinarily rapid rate (liquidation of natural forest systems affords just one striking example). In modern times humans have devised sophisticated and sophistical idea-systems which justify such system degradation. Often in the past they would not have seen such transformation as mattering; many remain so programmed, regarding transformation as increasing wealth (a presumption encouraged under mainstream economics). More recently dominant human cultures have developed social systems which induct most humans into degradation procedures (through need, tax impositions, pressure to engage in cash economies, and so on) and which weave entrapping justificatory webs (through agencies, councils, courts, educations, missions, and so on). Whence arises an increasingly broached question1: Why is this happening? More explicitly, why do human communities so frequently degrade and impoverish their environments, their own habitats? Indeed why do they sometimes, persistently, perhaps over a long period, destroy their own habitats? More sweepingly, why is the whole earth now perhaps in jeopardy through human enterprise^ For those eager to anticipate the main outcome, the unremarkable answer to be eventually found to these focal questions is in essence this: because too many humans, especially those in control of environmentally impacting enterprises, remain committed to or caught within environmentally unfriendly paradigms, diverse paradigms but all displaying quite insufficient regard for the health and well-being of relevant habitats and of the earth. Parts of any answers to such focal questions come immediately through environmental impact equations, conservation laws, and such like. For example, degradation is occurring through the impact of overpopulation, excessive pollution, damaging or faulty technologies, and so on. While such answers are important, and often correct as far as they go in combination, and while they may correctly indicate what has to be changed somehow, they are nonetheless somewhat superficial, and they leave much to be explained. For example, they do not explain why a community persisted upon a course that deliberately led to such problems, or why it is so resistant to changes that might reduce impacts and pull it out of its problem-holes. Less superficial answers look to ideologically entrenched attitudes and commitments, to 1 In sources as diverse as Shepard (first page) and Jacobs (p.23). Contrary to other sources, such as Marshall, humans are by no means the only biological species that proceed to degrade or impoverish their own environments. Introduced “pest” species, such as rabbits and mynahs in Antipodes, also do so; perhaps some botanical species contrive to as well. �3 pervasive paradigms that underwrite anti-environmental practices, as for instance the wood­ production ideology does forestry practice, even so-called “new forestry”, and market ideology does economic practice, even so-called “environmental economics”.2 An illustrative example which reveals the power of paradigms in blocking or facilitating action will shortcut a more elaborate argument, through action theory, to the efficacy of idea­ systems. Consider an unwanted pregnancy, resulting despite due precautions or whatever. Observe that, more and more there are comparatively safe technologies available to effect termination and seemingly solve the immediate problem. Ask: why so many people are opposed to choice of abortion? A very common answer is: because they are operating under an elaborate paradigm, typically organised religion (bureaucratic Christianity in the West), themes of which, the creeds of which, prohibit such choices.3 Of course pro-choice considerations are also paradigmatically embedded, for instance in forms of liberalism. Picturesquely, a social paradigm imposes controls on action, a system of red and green lights on a captured agent's routing procedures. Or with a different picture, paradigms project a steeply impeding Paradigms not only guide, control and limit; they also correlatively give permission—as, for instance, space to play god, freedom to release a new topography on action space. species or variety which may or has proved a pest or noxious or has been biologically engineered, liberty to neglect or degrade or vandalize. But paradigms do even more; they facilitate explanation, above all they make understanding possible. In these regards, they may work for better as well as for worse. Thus it is not a matter of getting rid of them, were this even feasible, but of getting right paradigms. The settings in terms of which agents such as humans act and operate, even down-toearth everyday agents, invariably include, not far in the background, paradigms, cultures, creeds, ideologies, pervasive myths or the like, all idea-systems, all involving models (in a technical sense) of one sort or another. Even the most practical (and vociferously practical) of humans are governed by background ideosystems. It is in terms of these background ideosystems that a great deal concerning human practices with respect to natural environments can be explained, what would otherwise lack satisfactory explanation.4 That explanation comes not however through a single paradigm, as has too often been supposed in trying to answer focal questions, but through a bundle of somehow aligned paradigms. Compare how a person may be represented, in social science, not through a single 2 3 4 For more on this style of explanation, see further RP. It is not, going to be contended that religion—or a certain Abramic religion, such as Christianity—is the main villain of the environmental piece. It is now well enough appreciated that religions in general borrowed much in their damaging articles from ancient philosophies. What will however, be suggested is that dominant philosophies do have much to answer for in this regard. Further, as logical positivists observed, explanation and justification patterns tend to overlap. How people justify their practices offers an explanation, though perhaps a misleading or superficial explanation, of them. ; As well, positivistic theories show, though in an oversimplified way, how models, which paradigms are, serve in explanation justification and understanding. See e.g. Hanson. /. / �4 role or program, but by way of a set of interconnected roles. What has been regularly overlooked in seeking deeper paradigmatic sources of environmental problems is systematic plurality. In part this neglect of plurality can be explained through countervailing propensity to seek single answers, and to try to locate uniqueness, where however causes and sources are plural. So it is with paradigmatic sources and roots of environmental problems. They are plural. As to what is going on theoretically, there is a fairly complex story to be told, an easier working image for which is appropriately ecological. That image focusses upon the structure of a perhaps impenetrable thicket or tangle, such as a dense rainforest patch, or, itself simplified, a fig or bamboo thicket. Below an emergent top layer representing the problems concerned, those raised by the focal questions, there is the canopy layer, of interlinked proximate causes. Below that again stands a plurality of stems, plural supports, which can be construed as supporting sources, and below them again, ultimately sustaining the whole structure, a multiplicity of intertwined roots, representing paradigmatic basics. What is sought are ultimate sources, and roots, not immediate causes. The cause of local pollution may be a factory that an agent installed, to produce more flim-flam. That too may be the physical source of the immediate problem. But deeper questioning seeks the reasons for such production and such factories. While there may be problems with ideas and idea­ structures as causes, as causally efficacious, these problems do not transfer to reasons and sources. Nonetheless there are buried metaphors, and linkages, to be unscrambled: how are “A is source of B” and “A is a root of B” to be explicated? While there is much written on roots and sources of environmental problems or developments virtually none of it addresses the question of what is meant by the partially buried metaphors of roots and sources . One striking example is supplied by Pepper's useful introductory text, The Roots of Modern Environmentalism. Although this text presents itself specifically as concerning roots, there is in fact no explication offered of the crucial roots metaphor/which it turns. For that matter there is no direct account of what the roots of environmentalism—still less, though quite different, of environmental problems to which environmentalism answers—are supposed to be (granted there is much oblique material). It is apparent also that Pepper has become rather carried away with the roots metaphor, throwing it into several chapter headings and applying it pretty indiscriminately to mean simply elements (from some earlier occurrence); thus for instance, ‘the roots of the theme of reconciliation of freedom and authority’ (p.193). Such usage is unsound. Because rudiments of some idea make an earlier appearance in some authority or work, later workers may not have arrived at such an idea by expanding on these rudiments; they may have arrived where they did quite independently or by a different route. The mistake is that of reading a source or (genetic) causal linkage into a mere temporal conjunction: post hoc, propter hoc. Neither roots nor sources are mere beginnings or simply early occurrences; there have to be continuing connections, with directional relationships such as supply or sustenance. But for �5 roots and sources different connections and elaborations are to be expected. After all, the metaphors, and likewise what they give rise to, are evidently different; more literally, plants have roots, normally below them, springs and streams rise from sources, not roots, often above them, and so on. Both differ from another popular basis-beginning buried metaphor, that of foundations. Foundations bring in other features such as solidity, stability and comparative permanency, while severing critical transmission features (for foundations may merely passively support, not sustain supported superstructure). So foundations, for all their importance in epistemology and elsewhere iffoundationalism is correct, can be set aside.5 So far dictionaries do better than popular and philosophical texts. For instance, a short listing for the figurature use of ‘root’ runs: ‘the basis, bottom, the fundamental part, or that which supplies origin, sustenance, means of development, etc.’ (Concise English Dictionary). Such a two component account will serve nicely, for a start. However conjunctions should substantially displace disjunctions, else roots could collapse to foundations or could collapse to mere trace element supplements. Roots both give a basis and bottom binding into a substratum and supply sustenance and means of development. Roots connections are richer as well as more specific than sources, which may merely show from where an item comes or is obtained. Further that place of derivation that may not be a basis or bottom, but for instance a source­ book. With roots, like normal foundations, a basis or bottom is reached, whereas sources may have further sources (hence the search for “deeper”, even ultimate, sources). Finally, root and source connections carry explanations, at least genetic explanations—concerning how items got to be what and the way they are—because roots and sources are characteristically that from which items develop. Sometimes even more information, including a whole control system, gets transmitted. As much happens where roots are paradigmatic, to return to that strange mix of buried metaphors. Reaching deeper roots is important. Without locating them, perhaps all the roots (should they resemble blackberry), problems may not get properly addressed. Should we wrongly locate roots, then proposed resolutions directed at these, cutting them off or replacing them, will also go astray, wrongly directed or whatever. Such is the fate of many proposals concerning environmental problems. There are several parts to the approach sketched, if it is to be properly elaborated— including a working classification of environmental problems and their proximate solutions, and an account of paradigms and their roles—before getting to paradigmatic answers to focal questions. But we can be brief on these necessary preliminaries, because main details are already in circulation and because they have been addressed elsewhere. 1. Problems and paradigms. 5 Despite a referee’s suggestion that discussion of “roots” ‘could be improved by a contrast of the “roots” metaphor with the “foundations” metaphor, the fact is that we are decidedly not concerned with foundations of environmental problems; to the contrary, we do not wish to see them supported (if shoddily), established and so on. On the growing complexity and varying interpretations offoundations, an emergent bog, see for instance Chisholm. �6 Although these will be duly connected, with paradigms implicated in problems, they are different components, and admit and deserve separate explanation. la. Environmental problems and proximate solutions. Definitions of ‘environmental problem’, and classifications of such problems, have already been ventured.6 What problems emerge as environmental depends upon background value framework. What counts as a major problem on deeper environmental perceptions may be but a minor problem, or written off as not a problem at all, on shallower perspectives. Among such indicator problems, ones here taken as serious problems, are those of • sustaining biodiversity and • maintaining significant wilderness.7 Even if the broad impact of human enterprise were sufficiently reduced to guarantee comfortable survival of future humans, these desiderata may well not be guaranteed. There would be outstanding problems. In any event, it is not too difficult to say more or less what environmental problems are (at worst by furnishing familiar lists), and in many cases to indicate at least in principle how they might be resolved. Environmental impact equations, encountered in a more perceptive classification of problems, reveal how they can be resolved. Namely, by altering relevant impact parameters. Given this why are they proving so intractable? Why is so little done? Why is so very little spent, despite all the talk.8 Proximate solutions, about as far as positive science conveys us, are not however satisfactory stopping points. How is it, given so much scientific information and expertise, that humans are continuing to sharply degrade, and risk substantially destroying, their habitats. To these, the focal questions of this exercise, there is an array of competing answers on offer or to be met in an extensive literative. As we will soon discover, most of these answers are too simple; and taken, as intended, as comprehensive, they are wrong. Correct answers to the questions are however important, because if we fail to get to bottom of the issues, there is even less prospect of satisfactory action to turn around a difficult and deterioration situation^. That these issues do not matter, that casual human relationships, or how many devaluing dollars uncaring humans can briefly stuff in their pockets, matter more than whole islands of habitats—these sorts of value judgements (after all matter is a value term par excellence) derive from and are supported by particular ideologies. lb. Model-like objects: paradigms, ideologies, cultures ,and so on. A paradigm can be explicated, technically, as a model in precisely a generous logical sense.9 See for example GE, which duly details connections of the problems with impact equations and proximate solutions. As to the extent of the problem (even) in North America, and a proposed remedy, see The Wildlands Project. See e.g. The cost ofpast environmental policy in OECD countries, Box 1.7, in Pearce et al, p.24. See RP, where many environmentally relevant illustrations are given and explained. ry) �- That is, a paradigm amounts to a structure supplied by an elaborate interpretation function on a general system, i.e. semantical and other evaluations defined on an integrated relational structure. Naturally it is required to be faithful to what it models, the social forms and norms, scientific research programs, or whatever. A social paradigm, in contrast to a scientific paradigm, is a paradigm where the propositional and action theory, the socio-political themes and value judgements, is that of a social group. A pure culture is but a comprehensive social paradigm, where by “comprehensive” is meant that it covers a sufficiently comprehensive part of the life-styles and life-forms of the community concerned. There are now many examples of formulations of the themes delivered under rival social paradigms and under different cultures; from these, mostly sketchy formulations we can work back towards the underlying models. The basic vehicle, a situations or worlds model, is a semantical object, an item like a complex universal10 similarly open to a range of construals and reduction attempts, e.g. metaphysical, conceptual, epistemic, linguistic and so on. Once this is realised, it can be seen that successive cohorts of philosophers and sociologists, historians and geographers have repeated one another in vaguely discerning essentially the same sorts of underlying structures under different categorisations: thus, for instance, forms of understanding (Kant), of consciousness (Marx), of life (Wittgenstein), conceptual schemes (Conant), presuppositions (Collingwood), discursive formations (Foucault), Weltanschauungs, total views (Naess), traditions (MacIntyre), traditions of thought, cultures, perspectives, outlooks, ideologies, programs,.... An ideology, for instance, in the nonderogatory (non-Marxist) sense is an ideasA system, initially a propositional system or theory with a relevant domain of ideas operative, from which a paradigm can be discerned and elaborated. Such models are typically presented in extremely truncated form, for example through a tabulation of capsule themes. Here is a combination example: TABLE 1: Elements of Taoism as contrasted with Deep Ecology and with the dominant paradigm: an initial capsule formulation J1 Taoism Deep Ecology Dominant (Western) Paradigm Harmony with nature, through Tao Harmony with nature Domination over nature Nature valuable in itself; “humanism” rejected Natural environment valued for itself Nature a resource; intrinsic value confined to humans It resembles a structured universal; compare e.g. Plato’s system of forms, Locke’s of complex ideas. Naturally there are differences between, for instance, traditions (of thought) which are historically bound, cultures, which are geographically and otherewise connected, and conceptual schemes (where a conceptual reduction is insinuated), but all are, at logical bottom, models of paradigmatic sort. This tripartite example is adapted from UTD, where capsule elements of Taoism are duly expanded. �8 Levelling of differences; wide impartiality Biocentric egalitarianism Human supremacy Supplies ample Earth supplies limited Ample resources with substitutes Following Tao-te Spiritual goals, especially self-realisation Material economic growth a predominant goal Enlightenment Self-realisation Personal (material) enrichment Doing with enough (recycling inappropriate) Doing with enough; recycling Consumerism Non-competitive lifestyle; voluntary simplicity Cooperative lifestyle Competitive lifestyle Decentralised/neighbourhood and village focus Decentralised/bioregional /neighbourhood focus Centralised/urban centred/ national focus Hierarchy without power structure; anarchoid Non-hierarchical/ grassroots democracy Power structure hierarchical Limited technology Appropriate technology High technology Considerable caution Precautionary practice Risking taking (verging upon adventurism) Paradigms control action space by some equivalent of directives; under an earlier analogy, red and green lights duly interpreted. They may not supply direct commands, general obligations and prohibitions, but may operate more indirectly. For instance an enlightened person, a role model, a person following Tao, would act this way, not that. (Taoism, like certain modern ideologies, eschews deontic judgements.) Paradigms are absorbed and they guide practice. They commonly form part of actors' worlds; they are certainly part of actors' programs for practice and considered action in a world. In a sense then, they are things, programs actors carry round in their heads; so heads (or rather consciousnesses) have to be changed, not rolled. 2. Proposed answers to focal questions; a preliminary classification of inadequate answers (7) and suggested remedies. Most of the extraordinary range of answers proposed supply but a single source, and are accordingly defective for this reason, usually among other reasons. Indeed it is not much of an exaggeration to assert that virtually everything proposed, in a now extensive literature, is wrong. TABLE 2. Main tabulation of answers and remedies, in three stages. D. Defective practice answers Source Remedy Objections 7 �9 DI. Ignorance Relevant information Information now available D2. Unintended consequences Relevant information Information now available D2a Faulty technique, or technology Repairs Repairs already made D3 Deviation (from theory, etc.) Education (for failure to limit deviance) Adherence D4. Systemic lock-in (through poverty, ensnarement in market forces, etc.) Trap removal a. Explains only certain cases, and b. Due to paradigmatic features D5. Insensitivity or insensibility Problem apprised Remedy tried; background ideological blockage D3a a. Deviation uneliminable, or b. Adherence no remedy When pursued, objections like those noted either force defective practice out as unsatisfactory, or push it back to paradigmatic features. Source single paradigm Remedies proposed (among others) Pl. Christianity (mainstream Catholicism) Scientific enlightenment, or alternative (Eastern) religion Pla. Protestantism and its ethic P2. P2a Cartesianism Dualism P. Defective paradigm answers Monism Anti-dualism Modified holism P2b Mechanism Substance metaphysics P3. P3a Possessive individualism P3aa Personalism Organicism Process metaphysics Non-reductionism Transpersonalism P4. Capitalism Socialism P5. Industrialism Pre-industrialism (romanticism) Post-industrialism P5a Technocratic bureaucracy P5aa. Transnational business P6. Enlightenment Anti-enlightenment Anti-materialism �10 P6a Materialism Spiritualism P8. P9 Patriarchy, andocentrism Human domination of humans Feminism Anti-domination (anti-hierarchy) Observe that what some have proposed as remedies, others have been as sources; remedies proposed tend to share defects of sources. PS. Further sample listings of this paradigmatic sort (but with the paradigms often subject specific or partial) include: Source Platonism Typical remedy suggested New metaphysics Leibnitzianism New metaphysics Kantianism Anglo-American philosophy12 Consequentialism Utilitarianism Economism (economic imperialism as Alternative ethics Continental philosophy New social science; ethics contrasted with straight economic roots) Contractarianism Domination transfer Consequentialism Domination removal Human nature (esp. aggression) Adolescencism Maturation Infantilism (from Freudian physchology) Maturation And so on. A very rough recipe runs as follows: draw up a potted list of major movements and factors in dominant Western thought. Then many—perhaps it is not excessive to say most—entries in that list will have been nominated, likely separately, by someone as the source of the problems. That list accordingly continues (even including, sometimes, entries like Taylorism, i.e. reorganisation of industry along lines popularized by Taylor), but what is included is representative of the important and more interesting answers to be encountered. There are other allegedly nonparadigmatic answers however, varying from interesting to crazy, that should also be taken into some account, for instance answers like Shepard's challenging answer. Although Shepard dismisses ideologies, what he offers is a further ideosystem, of similar dubious or false cast. Strange answers include pushing it all back to human psychology (thus not only Shepard, but also Fox, and Ehrlich and other gurus with insistence upon ‘mental maladaptation’). The mainstream form, analytic philosophy, appears to comprise empiricism-cum-utilitarianism in Britain, tempered in America by pragmatism. /s ' �11 Basically, there is something wrong with a society that does that to its habitat. It is sick —in a popular sense, yes, it is sick. It is the slides that follow, however, along psychological routes, that are to be resisted. One slide begins invitingly: As it is not literally sick, well not physically usually, it must be mentally sick; that is, sliding further and fast, insane or mad. But the sources of mental sickness lie in childhood (as Freudianism erroneously insists). The slide continues to: what we have are immature societies, frozen at an early stage of development. No doubt there is something toyheme that dominant societies, USA especially (which now influences so much in other cultures), are locked into youth culture, a sort of late consumptive adolescence.13 No doubt, too, that maturity—but an environmental maturity—is desirable, even mandatory. Meanwhile, immaturity is fostered right through human life. Considerable effort is put into trying to induct older people, who are often marginalised, into active consumptive society, to spend their money through tourism, on new compact housing, in those most wasteful of modem institutions such as airliners and hotels, hospitals and old-age homes, and so forth. 3. Documentation as to some of the acclaimed purer sources. Like the lists of proposals and intricated paradigms, the documentation too is somewhat perfunctory, tending here and there towards notes. Of course there are excuses. While whole theses could be spun out on several of these topics, already beginning to elicit such treatment, a prime objective here is different from usual: neither to convict, nor to clear or excuse, but to partially implicate most items cited in the main tabulation above. Consider, in brief, some of the usually accredited sources: • Western religion, above all Christianity. The theme that the source of ecological problems, ‘the historical roots of our ecological crisis’, are to be found in Western religion, and specifically in ‘the Judaeo-Christian belief that mankind was created to have dominion over nature’, was repeated in a particularly pointed and subsequently influential way by White.14 One helpful summary of White's line of argument runs as follows: Allied with technological and scientific developments, orthodox Christianity has produced arrogant exploitation of nature, and a contemporary ecological crisis. White's thesis is that the West's successful science and technology developed between the 8th and 12th centuries — it is much older than the scientific revolution though it was not until about 1850 — following the democratic revolutions — that the science and technology were combined to produce truly immense powers to change nature. The early development, however, was paralleled by the development of exploitative attitudes to nature which seemed to be ‘in harmony with larger intellectual patterns , namely the victory of Christianity over paganism. This destroyed the animistic beliefs whereby men thought twice before they plundered and destroyed natural objects. It substituted instead a faith in perpetual progress, 13 14 It interestingly matches the locking of primary production systems into pioneering stages such as preclimax formations. Shepard’s dialectic is investigated in more detail in the Appendix . White's article has generated an enormous defensive literature, primarily from Christian apologists, but also from softer environmentalists and from testy historians of ideas. The whole area looks in danger of disappearing from intellectual view under a heavy blanketing snowfall, snowed. �12 a belief that God designed nature for man's benefit and rule, and that action, not contemplation, was the correct Christian behaviour. Science formed an extension of theology (for to know God you had to find out how his creation worked), and technology provided the active means to carry out God's will. Because today's attitudes are essentially inherited from Christianity, then it ‘bears the burden of guilt’ for contemporary ecological disruption.15 What has happened with the divisive charge, advanced by White, that Christianity was the prime source of environmental problems, is particularly instructive. In an attempt to diffuse the charge Christian apologists pointed to, what there undoubtedly were, recessive strands or isolated seeds in Christianity which were much more environmentally benign (though some such as stewardship, which has evolved toward total managerialism and sustainable development, have proved increasingly problematic). That does little or nothing to meet a more sensitive and telling criticism that mainstream (or dominant) Christianity has much to answer for as regards destruction and degradation of natural environments.16 Similar responses are apposite for attempts to exonerate their wider sources, such as Western philosophy. Against the sheeting of responsibility to religion, dominant forms of which should undoubtedly cop some heavy criticism, it has been contended that philosophy ... is the primary source of most Western ideas [and] is ... responsible for the ideas and attitudes that inhibit environmental protection today.... Religion ... though often criticized ... as the chief culprit, has played a much less fundamental role. Most of the environmentally offensive ideas in Western religion originated not in religion but in Western philosophy.17 • Classical Greek philosophy, above all the peak philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. Greek philosophers approached natural phenomena in a way that (1) prevented the development of an ecological perspective, (2) discouraged the aesthetic appreciation of the natural world, and (3) promoted a conception of reality that made the idea of nature preservation conceptually difficult, if not impossible.18 More sweepingly, they set Western philosophy on a ruinous environmental course, a course accentuated with the appearance of modem rationalist and empiricist philosophies. • Cartesian philosophy. The dominant modern environmental approach is sometimes 15 16 17 18 Pepper pp.44-5. Pepper then embarks upon the murky story of alternative interpretations of Biblical data and the Christian tradition, dredged up by a series of White's critiques. The issue continuejto be debated; for an older survey of traditions see Passmore, for a challenging recent contribution to the debate see Callicott. Each religion is multistranded. But we should look hardest at dominant operative forms: Ask, not merely what they say, but what they do, and would do. For an outline of just such a telling criticism of mainstream Christianity, see Singer esp. pp.265-8. Hargrove p.15. Certainly the sort of message that Pentecostal missionaries even now try to preach to resistant Australian Aboriginals, that the earth is just filth, mere rubbish, can be traced back in direct line to Plato’s attitude to the land, an attitude Hargrove and Plumwood help expose. Hargrove p.21. Hargrove’s claims may appear to have been confuted by Attfield, but really, while they have been subject to minor qualification, they have been highlighted. There is a much fuller story still to be told about classical Greek philosophy reassessed environmentally, of the very different roles and impacts of Plato (with his unearthly philosophy), of Aristotle (with his earthier chauvinism), of Stoics and of Epicureans, and of neo-Platonists. For a modest beginning, see Plumwood on Plato, Toulmin on Stoics as contrasted with Epicureans, and Glacken on lesser or lost Greek strands. [S �13 denominated Cartesianism, or the Cartesian Technocratic paradigm, in honour of Descartes, upon whom (as a conveniently select individual from a swag of like-minded people) several of the leading themes and ideas can be pinned.19 While Descartes was undoubtedly extraordinarily influential, so were others; Newton for one, Locke for another. The paradigm is accordingly better denominated the Atomist-Empiricist-Technocratic paradigm, or some such. Evidently it substantially overlaps other modern ideologies, such as that of the Enlightenment, widely implicated as major sources of environmental problems. • Western metaphysics. While some conglomeration of the preceding sources and others (some potted history of Western metaphysics, so to say) may be offered, more often what is presented is some selection of Western metaphysical elements. Here is one example, plainly exhibiting a heavy Heideggerean influence: The roots of our environmental problems lie in Western metaphysics. For metaphysics, Being is presencing; no allowance is made for any other mode (sheltering, declining, concealing). Once metaphysics has established the absolute dominion of the present over the not-present or no-longer-present, the way is paved for the scientific method, with its emphasis on replicability of results, predicability, quantification, and control. Nature becomes a “natural resource” —and people become “human resources”. The sources of anthropocentricism, imperialism, colonialism, sexism and consumerism can all be traced back to metaphysics. Western metaphysics has more or less conquered the world, and there is no going back. Western metaphysics is more than simply a false consciousness overlaid on top of “authentic” experience. Being changes historically, and metaphysics is the index of that change... Metaphysics has a conquering, exclusive imperative, ... and different [former] modes now exist only as vestigial traSces. They cannot be resurrected through ancient wisdom, native healing, goddess worship, or any other supposedly intact, dormant system. We cannot create a “new order”. That would simply be another form of the Will to Power... We can—and must—turn away from the dominant rhythms of western metaphysics if we are to avoid the nihilism of a perpetually ensconced technocratic rationalism.20 An alternative to turning entirely away from Western metaphysics, consists in combining b rejection of standard Western metaphysics (or, less sweepingly, of dominant metaphysics, characteristically individualistic and atomistic) in favour of development of recessive traditions or mere Western seeds. Such a more sophisticated approach, also critical of Western metaphysics, with atomism a main villain, is pursued by those who promote instead process or plenum metaphysics.21 For encapsulation of the Cartesianism paradigm (a dominant dualistic form), summarising Drengson’s exposition, see RP, table 5. Drengson, for one, has helped portray Descartes as the environmentally evil genius (or demiurge). That some orthodox philosophers, not merely maverick philosophers, are now rushing to the defence of Descartes should be seen as entirely in keeping with the character and roles of Western philosophy. Undisclosed source. Amusingly, I have seen myself accused of ‘rejecting] in its entirety mainstream western philosophy and science, ... seen as the cause of the [environmental] problem’ and instead basing my ‘ecocentric values on Eastern philosophies’ (thus Bellett). This charge was levelled on the strength of a peripheral exercise on classical Taoism and Deep Ecology (now included in UTD). For the first process option, see Gare; for the second, where the plenum is that of a holistic relativity theory (more exactly holistic relativistic geometrodynamics), see Mathews. �14 • Enlightenment. The source of problems lies in ‘the intellectual heritage of the Enlightenment’ (e.g. Dobson). Of course the main doctrines of the Enlightenment substantially overlap those of modern mainstream philosophy and of Descartes’ philosophy (but they shed dualistic and theistic scholastic hang-overs). • Capitalism. The assumption that capitalism is responsible for environmental as well as social evils, widespread until recently in state-socialist countries (when their own records were revealed), can be traced back to Marx. According to Marx, with capitalism for the first time, nature becomes purely an object for humankind, purely a matter of utility; ceases to be recognised as a power for itself; and the theoretical discovery of its autonomous laws appears merely as a ruse so as to subject it under human needs, whether as an object of consumption or as a means of production.22 But, as observed, a main embedded theme had appeared in earlier philosophy; for instance, the idea of nature as purely an object for humankind, was advanced in Aristotle: ‘Now if nature makes nothing incomplete and nothing in vain, the inference must be that she has made all animals for the sake of man’.23 Aristotle adopted a similar stance on nature as on other species. The theme was to be oft repeated in subsequent Aristotelianism, and reiterated apparently in shallower Stoicism. But the subjection of everything to utility, no doubt a relative of capitalism, appears to be a distinctively modem contribution. • Modern industrial society or industrialism. Modern industrialism (‘the smooth­ superhighway of industrial progress’) is the source, such is an extraordinarily popular theme: ‘... the root causes of the present crisis lie deep with the very foundations of the industrial paradigm’.24 Similarly ‘roots [of] the environment crisis ... go deeper to the foundations of modern industrial society’25 Again, ‘the structural roots of the environmental crises [are found in] industrialism, in commoditization, in commercialism, and in competition and greed’26 The popular theme, that industrialism is the source, tends to confuse mere means— industrial technology can without any doubt at all vastly facilitate environmental degradation (as well as, It should not be overlooked that some of those who nominated metaphysics meant thereby paradigm or paradigms or an equivalent. But what they may gain thereby in verisimilitude, they tend to lose in confusion. Grundrisse p.409f. Aristotle, Politics, Book 1, ch.8. What an inference, you might well exclaim. See further Hargrove p.25. M. Gabriel, ‘How “attitudes and implements” have brought us to “the end of nature’”, a paper presented at UNE Environmental Paradigms Conference, April 1993. Gabriel proposes a managerial resolution: ‘for us to learn to manage both our relationship to our environment, and more broadly the environment itself’ (quotes from abstract of paper). This amounts to the flip side of an old problematic record. For the “solution” derives from the same defective box as the evident problem. Gabriel ibid. Similarly industrialism is assumed as the source throughout McLaughlin (the theme pervades his book) and as the root of the modern problem in Marshall (p.5ff). While seriously astray as to roots and sources, those critical of industrialism have a significant case. For, as well as functioning as a major inflator of intact problems, industrialism has helped generate side problems of its own, as with new types of chemical and nuclear pollution. Editorial in The Ecologist, Jan-Feb 1992, p.2. �15 less satisfactorily, subsequent clean-up and environmental repair)— with sources and causes, what directs and powers those uses of industrial technique and practice. • Economic growth or economic development. ‘According to a common and currently influential diagnosis, the environmental crisis has essentially economic roots One widespread misconception is that economic growth is the source of environmental problems. The assumption is astray for several reasons. For one, growth is at best a proximate cause, itself in need of explanation. More importantly, growth may occur in sectors of an economy, such as information technology or religious or artistic services, which have little or no environmental impact. Also conversely, an economy which fails to grow, but is desperately trying to survive, may exact heavy environmental costs (e.g. the forests are clear-felled to pay for continuing employment). No doubt though, stock economic growth is intimately intricated with proximate causes of environmental problems (through environmental impact equations). Similar considerations tell against the familiar proposition that the source of the problems is economic development itself or, what is different, the entrenched model of economic development. While it is no doubt correct, and important to emphasize, that ‘the Western model of economic development, far from being the solution to’ environmental and social problems, is ‘actually fuelling’ them, it is not the sole or distinguished source of the problems.27 28 • Human nature. "... the roots of our ecologic crisis reach beyond the variable topsoil of intellectual history, whether Eastern or Western, into the common substrata of human nature itself.’29 What such “nature” amounts to and how it functions as roots, both commonly left obscure, turns upon background hypotheses as to the nature of this nature. Different false 27 28 29 Goodin, p.573. While not contesting the theme, Goodin does continue: ‘the problem is not just that there are too many people, or even that they are enjoying too high a standard of living. All that is true, too, of course. More fundamentally, however, problems of environmental despoliation are said to derive from skewed incentives as they pursue their various goals’ (p.573). That too will be seen to be seriously astray, though it contains large grains of truth; it presumes unchanged the prevailing economically-skewed dominant social paradigm. Both socialists and other opponents of capitalistic conspicuous consumption tend to select the living-standard component of the main environmental impact equation as the source of the crisis. Thus Cuban luminary, Castro, in a recent stunningly succinct speech: ‘Less luxury, less wastage. Otherwise it will be too late’. Quoting claims of E. Goldsmith, advanced in an interview in Forest and Bird 273 (August 1994) pp.46-7. The need for emphasis will persist while locally prominent political figures like the present Prime Minister of Australia travel around the Earth with the hackneyed message that only economic growth will solve environmental problems. Seeing growth as the problem affords only a superficial analysis, like that of pointing to overconsumption with which growth is interconnected. As deeper inquiry reveals, underlying both issues of economic growth, employment and consumption, and alternatives taken, are models, paradigmatic models. Growth is but a means to objectives assumed in the dominant paradigm. A deeper analysis shows too why more growth will not ultimately solve relevant problems. Callicott and Ames, ‘Epilogue: On the relation of idea and action’ p.282 (see also p.281), in a desperate and apparently unsuccessful attempt to reconcile the claim (repeatedly advanced in their book) that Asian traditions of thought can make a significant contribution to much improved treatment for natural and built environments, with ‘the deplorable environmental conditions prevailing in contemporary Asia’ (p.280). �16 hypotheses, that humans are invariably driven by aggression, sexual or reproductive imperatives, economic needs, yield different defective accounts. 0 • Patriarchy. The source is patriarchy, and androgyny; problems derive from mistreatment of women. ‘Our troubles begin with the invention of male deities located off the planet’.30 ‘patriarchy is the source of the environmental crisis’.31 One sample linkage statement runs as follows: ... there is a huge denial ... of the violence perpetrated on women both historically and ... presently] and ... this?the same energy that, turned against the Earth, is destroying the very life-support systems and rapidly destroying the conditions that makes complex life possible. The fires that consume the Amazon are the very same fires that burned 9 million witches and I believe that there can be no solution of our ecological problems unless we simultaneously address our gender issues.32 A 15 Patriarchy, as source, is evidently a special case of long invoked domination transfer themes: • Human domination and exploitation of humans'. It is an extraordinarily widespread assumption that the impact of humans (or, until recently, of Man!) on the environment, or creatures or things in it, is a product of that of humans with each other, typically of groups or classes. In misleadingly brief form, the source is social: Man’s inhumanity to Man; and the solution correspondingly is social. Unremarkably, this unlikely assumption comes in a variety of different forms: early, concerning the mistreatment of animals as an (inevitable) spill-over from mistreatment of humans, recently concerning maltreatment of nature spilling over from, or being one with, that of women. The fashionable assumption runs, in one form or another, from Aquinas through Kant to a range of recent trend-setters, including Marcuse, Illich, Passmore, Bookchin ... and some leading feminists. In particular, it is part of the very meaning of social ecology, an ideology shaped and championed by Bookchin: ‘ecological problems arise from deep-seated social problems’.33 On this theme among others, Bookchin simply follows a prominent trend in social anarchism set by Kropotkin and his contemporary Reclus: all see that the domination and exploitation of nature by man is but an extension of the domination of man by man. Thus, ‘Both Kropotkin and Reclus ... laid the foundations of a radical theory of human ecology. Ecological despoliation was seen to reflect imbalances in human relationships —domination of nature thus following from human domination’. ... It follows that if domineering and exploitative human relationships can be avoided in small-scale decentralised societies then such societies are also best for a 30 31 32 33 /n Quoted in Eckersley p.64, who develops and begins to assess patriarchical source themes. For a more critical assessment see the sequel to GE. See Seed, quoted in the sequel to GE; also Salleh (e.g. in EP3). John Seed’s Workshop Schedule 1992, Rainforest Information Centre, Lismore, 12. 12.91. Seed’s extravagant identity claims are but a dramatic extension of that popular tendency to transform comparison and similarity statements into identity claims. Indeed reductionism often reaches further, with attempted conversion of all relational statements into identity ones, along with unrelational property claims. Bookchin sometimes qualifies this central claim, with ‘nearly all present’, e.g. EP3 p.354. But he is not strictly entitled to any such qualification, given his invariant theme that the domination of nature always results from humans’ domination of other humans (see e.g. Clark EP3, p.346). The text EP3 contains a sizeable section providing a useful introduction to social ecology. f/e. orths Jwy JHcA a ztci/uvC-., <‘oi»rW «L , as fw (Aibttnte qfndw hiasseX. Jrn. ; rvuzcC. cf �17 harmonious man-nature relationship.34 Domination and exploitation of one division by another can in turn be seen as a case of dualism at work, between the one, the dominator or dominating class, and the other, the dominated. • A snare of dualisms. Environmental problems derive from operation of a set of connected ideologically-entrenched and defective dualisms.35 • Modern educational systems'. Roots of environmental problems lie in educational systems. Or if roots don't, solutions do. However, roots of environmental or social problems do not lie in educational systems. Parts of their solutions may however. For education is critical, for instance, in correcting insufficient adherence to established satisfactory arrangements, such as, so it is claimed, Enlightenment ideals or traditional ethical systems.36 Therewith we are transported full circle back to defective practice answers. 4. A selective commentary on, and objections to, proposed answers A main part of this exercise consists in a detailed critical commentary on the entries in the main tabulation, and on proposals like them. Small beginnings are made on the exercise, in two stages reflecting a major division in the main tabulation. ad D. Defective practice answers tend to come from those who presume we are already in possession of adequate theories, or what approximates them or supplies main elements of them. (Such answers are also more liable to emanate from conservatives, opposed to new or radical theories, advanced on the basis of inadequacy of prevailing theories in practice.) Defective practice answers are especially popular in economic reaches. There was a time, perhaps not past yet, when all market failures in the shape of negative externalities were passed off as unintended consequences of economic activity. While “consequences” or outputs such things as pollution certainly are, unintended they mostly are not now, without emptying ‘unintended’ of its normal sense. For example, industrialists, apprised of conservation laws and unsurprised by polluted wastes, who dump their waste where and when regulators and waste­ watchers are not looking, can hardly pretend that that output is an unintended consequence of their industry. That should now be a rotten joke, itself with serious consequences. Accordingly new ecological economics insists that we dig deeper—without however exceeding economic settings or a shifting dominant paradigm—to discover why markets may foreseeably fail and why environmentally rectifying technology is not delivered.37 Where they Pepper p.192, with internal quotation from Breitbart. Unfortunately it is all too evident, given humans could so socially organise, that they could settle into harmonious small-scale communities which retained but little of pristine natural environments. Such a proposition obtains a much fuller elaboration within Plumwood. In an interesting way, such a proposal can hardly be wrong, given the conclusion reached below that a set of defective paradigms ifl at work. For evidently paradigms can be covered by dualisms, represented by a set of them in each case, somewhat as numbers can be represented in binary terms, generated from a basic two-oneness duality. Thus Passmore, Attfield, and others. For a critical assessment of education, see GE Thus e.g. Jacobs, p.24. �18 usually arrive, travelling within such unduly confined settings, is, like welfare economics before ecological, at better regulated markets, with business set as before within frameworks of plans and incentives, controls and penalties. Environmentally, however, such approaches do not reach very deep, or tap into underlying paradigmatic problem-sources. But these sorts of defective practice answers do not always derive from standard economic sources. A deviation-style answer is much favoured by Marxists to explain failure, environmental and other, of the former Soviet Union and other Eastern block countries; namely that true, or authentic, Marxism was not practiced. Unfortunately, even if it had been, environmental consequences would be little better, given the heavy industrial commitments and environmental shallowness, at best, of true Marxism.38 Differently, enlightenment liberals like Passmore try to ascribe failures in Western environmental practice, not to any deficiencies in mainstream theory, but to deviation from well established principles. Unfortunately adherence to these “well established principles” is just one way in which the Earth will lose what remains of its wilderness and remarkable diversity. Now there are no doubt cases, past especially but also present, some resulting (collectively) in extensive environmental degradation, where defective practice answers may be correct. For example, there is harrowing case after harrowing case (brought together in texts like Topsoil and Civilization and Agricultural Origins and Dispersal) of degradation of prime agricultural lands by imposed farming practices, where at least early on (before damage became visible) ignorance and unintended consequences could be legitimately claimed. In most historical cases we do not have enough information to be able to say with much assurance that agriculture proceeded until effective collapse because of continuing ignorance, or because practices were locked-in in one way or another, or because of sheer obduracy. But we do know more about present agricultural practices, for example in more arid parts of Australia, concerning both irrigated and dry-land agriculture. Many of these practices are undoubtedly sharply degrading lands, and the consequences of the practices, which cannot plead or pretend ignorance, are sufficiently appreciated. But the practices persist, and are encouraged by a sweep of subsidies or concessions. No doubt some of the practitioners can reasonably claim that they are locked into bad practices through circumstance, circumstances now beyond their control such as financial pressures, unfavourable terms-of-trade, and so on, coupled with the need to make a living. But some, such as companies controlling large tracts of land, can make no such claims or excuses, nor can claim such things as family precedence, attachment to place, and similar. Their obdurate practice has to be attributed to something else, most obviously not deviation from theory, but commitment to an environmentally defective paradigm. ad P and PS. Dealing with defective paradigm answers is an even more complex, and vexed, 38 It is surprising how much of the practice of later Socialist states is prefigured in texts like The Communist Manifesto. Thus “industrial armies” are to be set up; credit, communications and transport are to become state monopolies; “migrants and rebels” are to have their property confiscated; and so on. All this runs contrary to much Marxist apologetics (as A. Urquhart, who made those points, also observed). �19 business. Let us try to condense main matters to a few broad themes: 1. Many of the (incomplete) paradigms listed are not even sufficient for environmental impasses. They may be seriously mistaken, they may have undesirable intellectual and perhaps social effects, but a society could persist sustainably with those drawbacks. Thus, for example, substance metaphysics (under modified Spinozism), dualisms, even patriarchy. The same might even hold for materialism and mechanism, (assuming these practices can be coherently made out, that depending on how differentiated ideologies and values are accommodated, and so forth). To illustrate: a metaphysics, of any sort, cannot be the whole story, because it does not, on its own, account for action, anti-environmental or other. Without special bridges, link principles, from metaphysics to value-intricating action theory, a sort of naturalistic fallacy operates. Thus subverted, in essentially Hume’s way, are all the vulgar sources of environmental problems which take them as derived from metaphysics of one sort or another. Such a criticism does not however extend to more comprehensive paradigms which connect appropriately with practice. 2. While several—not just one—of the paradigms listed are sufficient—in the right circumstances (given long historical development, accumulation, and so on39)—none are necessary. Similar impasses could arise, and locally have arisen, given significantly different paradigms; for example given, instead of main Western trouble-making paradigms, Confucianism or advanced Polynesianism. At this stage in dialectic, green history and the like—bio-history, eco-history, and related virtual histories (concerning what would have happened)—enter decisively. For instance, Ponting's Green History of the World begins with a graphic account of the rise and ecological fall of Easter Island under the impact of Polynesian projects. The work also conveniently documents many other examples, well-known to biohistorians, of ecological degradation or collapse, far from the influence of Western paradigms.40 An important example (much less speculative than some of the numerous other examples because of a comparative wealth of primary documentation) outlines the destruction of accessible Chinese ecosystems under Confucian dynasties. What several of these examples—Polynesian, Mayan, Sumerian and others—also reveal is that no very high level of technology is needed to inflict serious environmental damage; persistence in pursuit of an ideological project (with nothing directly to do with basic needs) will suffice. Other cultures did wreak, or would (given the technology and numbers, both of which While it is easy to imagine ineffectual or incompetent tribes which live benignly environmentally, by just muddling along, under even the worst of paradigms, that is not really to the point. A pertinent tribe needs to have developed the structure which leads to problems, to have the means, and so on. Ponting’s valuable/ though rather simple/ book is but one of several bleak texts. Another is Hillel’s, and there is a succession of earlier classic works by geographers: Lowdermilk, Dale, Mallory, Thorp and others. In general however, geographers and historian do not dig deep enough, to paradigmatic roots. /3 �20 some were gaining) have wreaked similar damage. For instance, deforestation, salination, megafaunal elimination, and so on, were well established, and expanding, before (or effectively outside) the rise of modern Western paradigms, or in extensive regions outside their influence. 3. The list of paradigms, as so far assembled, is substantially Western in orientation. Moreover environmental woes are regularly ascribed to Western sources — wrongly. For non­ Western paradigms have led, or would lead given the opportunities (including access to the technologies), to outcomes as undesirable as under dominant Western paradigm. Witness again Confucianism, for instance, and its role and influence in Asian regions. Confucianism incorporates human chauvinism par excellence (as well as, some might say, Chinese chauvinism).41 Or consider Islam, with its reach across the Middle East and beyond. The main tabulation (of table 2) should accordingly be extended to take due account of non-Western paradigms, including for example: Other Abrahamic religions Islam Judaism Confucianism Shintoism Polynesianism, at least in advanced forms as on Easter Island. What is “Western” is tending to blur also. Is Judaism Western, how western, or Islam? There is also a tendency to suppose that more Western religions, Abrahamic religions, with their intense monotheism, are significantly ideologically worse than non-Westem. But the contrasts are different and much more complex than that. A better divide is into monistic and pluralistic. Even so, many undesirable social and environmental features are incorporated in, or encouraged by, religious pluralisms from the Indian subcontinent. 4. All the single paradigm answers are inadequate, all are too simple. Even so some are less inadequate than others. It is the same, more or less, for the combined answers, often to be encountered. For generally they represent but one thin cross-section of Western paradigms. While all the single one-source one-shot paradigmatic answers, occur on their own, often they are combined. For instance, although Descartes is often cited as a villain, more often criticism of Cartesianism is combined with criticism of other concurrent ideological elements, such as Baconian empiricism (less incompatibly, Drengson, for one, regularly combines criticism of the technocratic paradigm with criticism of Cartesianism—though Descartes, for all his rich and appalling thought, contributed little to the rise of technocratic organisation.) Similarly Hargrove combines Greek philosophy, as original source, with modern rationalism and much else. 5. A general method of showing the inadequacy of all the paradigmatic answers tabulated, and others, is familiar from logical theory: namely, the method of counter-models, of which the 41 Its net of effects extends widely. Consider, e.g., the role of Chinese medicine in decline of large fauna worldwide. �21 counter-examples (under head 2) provide special cases. A presently important illustration concerns patriarchy as a source of environmental woes. Counter-models reveal the substantial independence of mistreatment of women and mistreatment of environmental items such as animals or ecosystems. One the one hand, it is easy to envisage situations, not far from the actual in some regions, where the lot of women is significantly improved, but the lot of environmental items is not (e.g. men change their behaviour and attitudes relevantly as regards women, are forced to change, or whatever); just such an outcome would accord with persisting human chauvinism. More relevant, on the other, there are situations where the position of environmental items is much improved, for instance under much more careful husbandry, but that of women is not, for one reason or another (e.g. they remain other, different, second class, etc.). It follows from the elaboration of such counter-models that patriarchy is not the source of environmental problems, as there can be continuing patriarchy without the present range of environmental problems (problems can dry up while patriarchy continues to operate). There is no need to deny that patriarchy as (contingently) practised, with its sweeping supremacist attitudes which make no due distinctions between inferior items, may be a major contributing factor in present problems. Such slack contingent conjunctions do not convert to roots or sources. Similarly with other social roots of environmental problems, for instance with human domination of humans as^supposed source of all problems. 5. Towards a more satisfactory explanation. Not only are the paradigmatic roots seriously intertangled (because of connections of one paradigm with another, because for instance of heavy philosophical inputs into religious paradigms), but further there is not a single defective paradigm. Rather there is a family or sheaf of paradigms, commitment to any of which, or any suitable combination of which, in requisite circumstances, appears to have yielded environmentally untoward outcomes (requisite circumstances including availability of technology, extent of social support, and so on). Within that plurality there are of course gradations—and not only gradations but major differences—in calibre, in environmental friendliness. For example, Cartesianism which regards animals as mere automata incapable of feeling genuine pain, is significantly worse as regards other life­ forms and their decent treatment than a utilitarianism which positively values animal sentience. The family is not exclusively Western, nor somewhat more plausibly Northern, even though as a result of forces like migration, colonialism and cultural imperialism, paradigms of these sorts now predominate. Paradigms and cultures of less “advanced” and of third world communities have also operated to enhance environmental vandalism and degradation locally and regionally. Nor are major inflators of environmental problems essentially Western. Industrialization and technological advance—neither intrinsically Western, both manifested in varying degrees in other cultures—are, without much doubt, what have inflated environmental problems from rather localised ones, damaging for instance islands and river catchments, to grander and even global ones. They are the engines, powerhouses, of major problems, generating thereby spin­ �22 off problems as well. But, once again, they are not deeper sources, but only means. (For again push questioning deeper, and ask: why bother or persist with industry, the effort and dirt and mess involved?) Nor, however, did they run on their own, nor do they continue on their own. Such engines were not designed and built, fuelled and tended, independently.42 They evolved primarily in the specially favoured culture of capitalism, though parallel developments could have occurred, and later did, in other prepared and heavily controlled surroundings, such as state socialism or post-imperial Confucianism. Now however these engines have been rendered more reliable and less dependent on careful cultural support, and have been transformed to run in less favourable settings. Thus inflation can escalate from a multiplicity of prepared sources, thereby intensifying problems and spreading them to larger regions. The intensification and spread is much facilitated by the joint transfer of technology, industry and coupled problems from region to region. As a result of transfer, inflation can occur within settings of quite different paradigms. Even if the whole “West” went into a terminal decline, and its paradigms disappeared into history, serious environmental exploitation and degradation would continue, driven by other enthusiastic cultures. For instance, the West could in theory collapse through protracted war, through pollution and congestion, or climate change and agriculture failure (there are many unexcludible routes to catastrophic decline, outlined in “Limits to Growth” scenarios, that could differentially impact on the West). Degradation would now continue however; there would be only temporary respite from environmental crises. While most of the conspicuous problems, awfully aggregated in contemporary environmental crises, are accelerated by—what connects them—contemporary industrial society, not all environmental problems are or have been of this sort. However, too many of the other problems, such as destruction of rainforests by itinerant peasants, can be seen as by­ products or similar of the main generators. Thus, in the illustration, the peasants displaced by agribusiness or absentee wealth-holders, arrived there on industrially-made roads opening the forests, and often wrecked this damage using industrial machinery. An environmental friendly culture has to be much more critical concerning certain types of industrialization, and much more selective regarding technology than present dominant cultures, Western or non-Western. A friendly paradigm would not only ensure much more selectivity and care, but would sharply limit impacts of damaging technology and industrialization. While there are such paradigms, on the ideas market, they mostly lack Lacking favourable ideological settings, earlier technological “break throughs” were not duly developed: thus early wheels, steam engines, dyes, gunpowder, etc. Western cultures did not enjoy a monopoly upon technology powerful enough, when massed, to induce global crises. The picture of development of large-scale environmental problems being sketched bears superficial resemblance to that now tendered for development of the early Universe, where, to achieve presumed size, a source event, the Big Bang, was followed by huge inflationary phenomena. Naturally the resemblance has limitations; for instance, universe inflation is not terrestrially replicable in the way industrialization now is (hired or delivered off the shelf, pollution problems and all, with a big price tag). �Ti sophisticated contemporary elaboration and they may be flawed in other respects. Examples of more friendly paradigms, that do not lead of themselves to massive environmental problems and crises conditions, include those now tabulated: TABLE 3: Examples, some flawed, of environmentally friendly paradigms. Oriental ideologies: Taoism (classical) recessive traditions, now with tiny followings and little political influence. Jainism Indigenous cultures: Australian Aboriginals (e.g. Aranda) Amazonian Indians. Western philosophies: under certain favourable interpretations old Stoicism new Deep-green theories, such as deep ecology. Given the remoteness of most of these examples from predominant contemporary life, and difficulties with their wide adaptability, it is a short step to a familiar conclusion that new paradigms need to be worked out soon. Much much more intellectual effort should be devoted to such enterprise. One upshot, then, is a rough classification of paradigms into two families, the second large: environmentally friendly, and unfriendly. No doubt there is a small fuzzy residue class43 lying between major unfriendly and friendly divisions. Environmental friendliness means more or less what it appear, to mean, what a functional break-down into components would yield: friendliness in approaches, practices and attitudes, to environments, especially more natural environments, with friendliness including, as usual, goodwill and kindliness towards (and substantially displaceable by these). As indicated, such friendliness concerns not merely actual practices, but also attitudes held, as reflected in what would be done in certain other sorts of situations. Certainly a culture that manifests unfriendliness, as a sweep of Northern cultures do, is unfriendly. But, as well, various “primitive” cultures, whose practices are not hostile, for example because they lack means or resources, energy or health, may nonetheless be unfriendly; for instance all members of a culture hold thoroughly negative attiudes which they are in fact unable to put into practice. It is not too difficult to explain in outline which paradigms will, if duly, diligently or religiously practiced, lead to environmental problems and impasse. In logical terms neither, perhaps as well as another residue class, both. Certain family �24 characteristics, of unfriendly paradigms are worth elaborating: * Direct untoward effects, illustrated through Cartesianism and Confucianism. More generally, direct impact is illustrated by any idea-system which attributes little or no value to natural items, and typically much value to nature transforming or interfering human (or elite) projects, and whose themes are linked to practice. So it is with Confucianism, which is entirely human focussed. ‘Centering his attention on man in his present life, Confucius had as his goal the achievement of a good society characterized by harmonious social relations.’44 The outside world, the natural environment, was of no moral significance. It mattered only instrumentally, to humans. Descartes went further. Human bodies too were automata, complex machinery. ‘The exception is [mind, or specifically] thought, and its external manifestation language: this alone cannot be explained mechanistically—a thesis which leads Descartes to assert a fundamental divide between human beings and “the beasts’”.45 The remaining world, the natural environment—lacking humanity, thought, mind—was again of no moral significance. It possessed derivatively only what value and meaning humans, or minds, chose to confer or project upon it, typically little or none. Since, either way, any way, a natural environment devoid of humans has no thoughts, purposes or interests, no value or meaning of its own, it could hardly matter what happens to it. It could be regarded and treated, justifiably, as nothing but a reservoir of resources for humans. Cartesians drew just such conclusions; similar conclusions derive, by one route or another from Platonism and Pentecostalism, and are implicit at least in Confucianism. Descartes again went further than some others. His practices and methods, like those of Bacon, were ‘aimed at making men the masters and possessors of nature’.46 Untowards effects result through linkage of ideological theory to heavy practice. Link principles, reminiscent of “correspondence rules” used in explaining applications of scientific theories and normally included in comprehensive paradigms, connect the theoretic level to practice, they also serve to activate otherwise inoperative or uncoupled paradigms. Such principles may take the form of directives; familiar examples include maximization directives, such as maximize personal fun, tribal utility, national interest, or state GNP. * Indirect combination effects, illustrated through Leibnitzianism. Any which yield satisfaction of all or enough elements of the consumption impact equation, and so would generate excessive impacts. To illustrate, consider what might be called Leibnitzianism, in honour of Leibnitz’s fragmentary ideology. Leibnitz was substantially committed to all of human population growth, unfettered technological advance, and human lifestyles of consumption,47 in short, to Reese p.102 For much more on the geographic impact of Confucianism, as also compared with other (Asian) paradigms, see Tuan’s investigations. Cottingham p.15. The utter invalidity of Descartes' argument (reported in Cottingham) to this divide is now comparatively easy to expose, given almost 400 years of hindsight. There are no such status divides—just as flamboyant forms of deep ecology maintain. See Descartes, Discourse VI. For requisite details, see Aiton. The case against Leibnitzianism is developed in a sequel. �25 precisely those factors that combine in the impact recipe to produce excessive human impacts upon environments. However neutral Leibnitz’s metaphysics, his monadology, may have been—by contrast with Plato’s or Descartes’, both of which explicitly devalued much or all of the natural world—Leibnitz’s wider ideology is linked indirectly, through impact equations, to damaging effects. Some imagine that this oblique formalistic detailing, through direct and indirect classes, can be simply cut through, retaining plurality and so forth. Surely environmental friendliness is nothing but environmental depth? While the suggestion points in the right sort of direction (for the relevant sort of depth) it too is astray.48 Depth is neither necessary nor sufficient. Take the move plausible sufficiency half, plausible because depth helps, no end. Nonetheless depth can be achieved in macho ways (as ecofeminism has emphasized against deep ecology), ways which may not be altogether friendly to less favoured species, groups or habitats. For example, depth can be satisfied through due selection and support of some super species and magnificent habitats—requisite environmental impartiality (and reflected justice), critical for friendliness as intended, being neglected.49 Still less in depth necessary. For kindliness can, both in principle and in practice, extend far beyond humans, still ranked top, to much more of “creation”. Such extensive kindliness, observed in some humanistic humans, appears to be exhibited in some sects and tribes not committed to depth, and it could well be considerably more widespread, under changed but not deepened ideological conditions. Naturally, however, deepening would afford an obvious, and excellent, reason for change. As friendliness is not tantamount to depth, nor similarly is a prime part of what explains depth, recognition of intrinsic value in nature outside humans. Some animal liberationists who display high regard for creatures with capacity to suffer, show little goodwill towards forests largely unpopulated by such creatures. Conversely, though shifting ground, an environmentally friendly society may hold that value is but an anthropocentric construct, merely projected onto a basically neutral world. All the same, aspects of depth are normally reliable indicators of environmental sensitivity and friendliness, and inversely, aspects of shallowness (as investigated in authentic deep ecology) marks of unfriendliness. Shallowness will work out satisfactorily environmentally only with what is now rare (given ideological dominance), a right mix of humans; and its any longer working widely is implausible. These reliable marks include such familiar features as * short-term framework. * devaluation of natural items as against human elements or artefacts (typically exhibiting As to the relevant sort of depth, see GE. Other accounts of depth are also preferred in deep ecology, some of which relate to the present exercise. In particular deep questioning should lead to paradigmatic roots, to Naess’s “total views”. Herein lies another reason why something like biospecies egalitarianism is essential in deep ecology; such a requirement needs, not dilution away (as has happened in American and transpersonal deep ecology), but rectification. �26 human chauvinism); and, as a corollary of heavy devaluation, * entitlement to domination, dominion over nature; * appropriation of nature, its conversion to property. * maximization assumptions concerning personal or societal aggrandizement, utility and size, coupled with grand projects. * technofix approach to environmental problems. Friendly paradigms will tend to invert these features. An environmentally friendly paradigm can be expected to yield environmentally significant corollaries, such as the following samples: * an end to degrading primary production; instead ecological forestry and ecological agriculture will come to prevail. * a strong selectivity regarding industrialization, which weeds out damaging forms. * a calling off of grand ideologically-grounded projects, interfering with or damaging natural environments, such as major dams, river diversions, demolished islands (e.g. for airports), new mountains, terraforming, extensive rainmaking, climatic interference, and generally the sweep of “playing God” projects. A little of this sort of unfriendly technology can go a very long way. As unfriendly paradigms are decidedly plural, so likewise are answers to questions as to why agents adhere, or continue to adhere, to environmentally unfriendly paradigms. Some of the diverse answers match answers already encountered in the main tabulation. Reasons are psychological, social and cultural (with a familiar circularity here encountered), and include considerations of the following sorts and others: because that is how things are done, or have always been done; because needs can be met, perhaps only met, in that way, so it is believed; because there are no alternatives, or none seen, perhaps because none have been sought; because negative outcomes can be overcome, or do not really matter; and so on. A short answer can now be ventured to the focal questions: Because, in one way or another, most agents are bound to—locked into, committed to, captured by, or just passively go along with—environmentally unfriendly paradigms. As a result the (long-term) health of the rest of environments does not matter, or matter enough. 6. Glimpsing an entertaining corollary: an unfavourable report upon dominant philosophy. It will hardly have escaped notice that virtually all dominant philosophical roads lead to Rome, to environmentally unfriendly paradigms. Stripped of metaphor, there are environmental conditions of adequacy, which most philosophical systems fail to meet. In an environmentally friendly new world, most philosophy that is remembered, indeed most of the humanities, is destined for scrapping. Prevailing philosophy is a serious impediment to satisfactory environmental outcomes. Predominant philosophy, not just Western philosophy, has by and large been bad environmental news. It may be insisted that philosophy can make no difference, for instance to environmental practice. It is not an expression of basic needs, or of any such practical matters. Exceptions to �27 such practical bravado have however to be recognised almost immediately; philosophy soon enters for organizational, justificatory and explanatory ends. That concession still grossly under-estimates the extent to which ideas, and more generally paradigms, influence and even govern action and practice, especially reflective and rational action. The substantial point is not therefore removed through any alleged practical impotence of philosophy. Mainstream philosophy has supplied, or mightily assisted in supplying, dominant unfriendly paradigms under which environments labour. Of course not everything has to be trashed, as even defective enterprises or evil projects may include decent part or worthwhile features; much can be salvaged, arguments, subtheories and so on (and with intellectual tipping there need be little material waste). Nor therefore is it as if an entirely fresh start has to be made. As well as salvaged bits and pieces (which need to be carefully tested for soundness), there are brash new alternatives such as authentic deep ecology, and there are recessive paradigms and neglected traditions to peruse for suggestions, for inspiration, and perhaps to rehabilitate. Richard Sylvan* APPENDIX. On Shepard’s approach to focal questions. A remarkably sustained investigation of the focal questions is found in Shepard’s intriguing books. In his Nature and Madness, he considers and quickly dismisses many of the stock responses to focal questions suggested by contemporary luminaries (or by himself in earlier work), such as lack of information, faulty technique, insensibility, greed, political inertia, change to agriculture and settlement,50... . He would (and should, for his eliminative argument) have also dismissed industrialization, state and corporate control, and so on. More disconcertingly, for present purposes, Shepard claims that ‘a history of ideas’— similarly no doubt a story of paradigms—will not serve; for it ‘is not enough to explain human behaviour’ (p.3), it ‘seems too easy and academic’ (p.3), itself an easy and superficial criticism. But if, for instance, the ‘dictum that nature should serve man’ and ‘insistence that animals feel no pain’ should become widely entrenched, then they may well impact heavily on practice, as accordingly appears to be the case. His slight further argument appears to miss the intended target: ‘The meticulous analysis of these philosophies and the discovery that they articulate an ethos beg the question’ (p.3). How, it can reasonably be inquired? What is offered is but the An earlier, even rougher version of this article was presented at the Environmental Paradigms Conference, University of New England, Armidale, April 1993. It would not have been written without its solicitation for the Conference; also it might well not been thought through in fashionable but confining and perhaps misleading paradigmatic terms. A subsequent working draft has benefitted, slightly, from comments from very unimpressed reviewers. Thanks certainly to Holmes Rolston for helpful comments. No doubt a popular picture of human social changes with agriculture and settlement zs simplistic: that before societies lived in harmony, afterwards they did not. But it is also too simple to go on to claim, as Shepard does, that ‘the economic and material demands of growing villages and towns are ... not causes but results of this change’ (p.3). Some demands appear to derive from factors, such as population pressures, which were among causes of the changes. �28 facile, false, ‘ideas are impotent’ consideration, fostered by thinking and operating in terms of causes (e.g. lower p.3), rather than reasons and (rational) explanation, and encouraged through an attempted move to (what is explanatorily inadequate) pure behaviour. For a simple example of the familiar explanatory roles of ideas and paradigms, consider an alternative explanation through them. The admittedly bizarre (“crazy”) ‘turning everything into something man-made and [or] man-used’ (p.5) is readily explained through dominant paradigms: that is the way it acquires value, otherwise it is worthless. There is no need at all for psychopathology here. Correspondingly Shepard briefly reviews and rejects several of the very partial, and often hopeless, solutions suggested under stock responses to focal questions such as making information, or better information, more widely available, bringing people from all walks of like together, encouraging conviviality, hitting problems with smart technology, practicing conservation, and so on. Shepard’s own resolution is more readily reached from a further (meta-focal) question that he proceeds to ask: why do humans persist in degrading their habitats once sources and solutions are made transparent? He effectively argues by elimination: other sources (read as causes) do not succeed in providing an answer; but ‘the idea of a sick society’ (which he leaps to, without argument, p.4) does. Wrong on both counts: On the first because a non-causal explanation in terms of ideological wiring can provide answers (listen to politicians, representative of the people, again, just a little time). On the second because some industrial societies are not sick in a normal sense (though some may be), rather sickness has to be so redefined (such low redefinitions are among underlying subplots51) that having certain ideological commitments that are carried into practice counts as “sickness”. So it is that Shepard arrives at his theme of ‘general, culturally-ratified distortions of childhood, of massive disablement of ontogeny as the basis of irrational and self-destructive attitudes towards the natural environment’ (p.ix). Succinctly, ‘there are profound psychic dislocations at the root of modern society’ (p.xii). Psychic disorders have evolved: ‘over the centuries major institutions and metaphysics might finally celebrate attitudes and ideas originating in the normal context of immaturity [or]... adolescence ...’ (p. 15). Having glided easily and invalidly to the idea of sick societies, in a mere three pages, Shepard proceeds to diagnose in more detail the nature of th'e alleged sickness.52 It supposedly arises, like other psychopathy with which it is immediately associated, in infancy, and is manifest in life-long immaturity, with whole societies stuck in a kind of destructive adolescence. No doubt there is something to some of what Shepard describes in child and For trickery through redefinition of sickness and madness, Wisdom has already prepared us. Observe that Shepard’s redefinition of sickness to include sick (i.e. debasing and devaluing) practices with regard to natural habitats (and conjoined therewith, to, older people) does not leave no contrast classes. For there remain benign ‘relic tribal’ societies, such as the Manus, Crow and Comanche, Aranda and !Kung San (p.xii), ‘people who feel themselves to be guests rather than masters' (p.6 empasis added)—an elegant analogy. ‘The idea of a sick society’, which as Shepard confesses (on p.4) is hardly new, is reached on the third page of the main text. �29 person development (not the ‘private demons’ and so on) or might well have described. There is evidently, conspicuously in “new world” societies, wide commitment to a shallow juvenile culture, adulation or imitation of immature media and sport models and flawed authority figures, marginalization of the elderly, and so on, coupled with hyper-activity, violence and vandalism. But, like political commitment to extensive economic activity, this is hardly satisfactorily accounted for through psychopathological reduction, concentrating the whole social problematic in the ontogeny of individuals.53 A superior explanation to widespread individual psychic disorder proceeds through ideological commitment, that industrial humans are raised and educated in, inducted into and committed to, defective ideologies, without coming to know or properly experience alternatives. The ‘portraits of maturity’ alluded to likewise appear individualistic and culture-bound, resembling those of deep ecology, directed at embroidery of person and self, through personal growth and identity, wider identification and relatedness, self-realization.54 They are not exactly those of older and ecologically wiser societies. They do not reveal ecologically mature mixed communities. Furthermore, comparisons with relic tribal societies, which are important, can be decoupled from psychopathological analysis and reduction. Different lifeways, commitments and ideologies, are what they are and do not all reduce to matters of mental health. Undoubtedly we can learn of and from these different societies. We can still witness ‘small- group, leisured, foraging life-ways with[in] natural surroundings. ... there is the rub—... for us, now, that world no longer exists’ (p. 14 rearranged). Nor is it really true that such a world is no longer accessible to most of us; more leisured small-group ways can be retrieved, some natural surrounding can even now be restored. In a curious fashion, Shepard has managed to invert likely causal relations. While a certain interaction can no doubt be conceded, it is not so much human ill-health that is leading to environmental degradation, but rather environmental degradation, generally brought about for other reasons, that is increasingly leading to human ill-health, and in the longer term causing erosion of life-support systems. REFERENCES E.J. Aiton, Leibnitz A Biography, Adam Hilger, Bristol, 1985. 53 54 A psychopathic reduction is in part made plausible by reexpression in medical or psychological terms of what would better be otherwise expressed. Consider, for instance the language of the following clever paragraph, which infiltrates much with no argument: ‘The person himself is, of course, caught between his inner calendar and the surgeries of ' society. His momentum for further growth may be twisted or amputated according to the hostilities, fears, or fantasies required of him, as his retardation is silently engineered to domesticate his integrity or to allow him to share in the collective dream of mastery’ (p. 16). But the trapping of agents between inner directives and social conditions and demands, or between rival ideologies, can be retold in different, less medical and metaphorical terms. Cf pp.12-14. Likewise there is a conservative underlay, more oppressive than that of deep ecology: insistence on ‘one particular mother’ (p.7) even suggestion of unsatisfactoriness in ‘taking mothers off to work’ (p. 15)! �30 R. Attfield, ‘Has the history of philosophy ruined the environment?’ Environmental Ethics 13(1991) 127-137. R. Attfield, The Ethics of Environmental Concern, Second edition, University of Georgia Press, Athens, 1991. A. Bellett, ‘The evaluation of values compatible with ecological sustainability’, Fundamental Questions Papers, No.2, CRES, Australian National University, 1990. J.B. Callicott and R.T. Ames (eds), Nature in Asian Traditions of Thought, SUNY Press, Albany NY., 1989. J. Callicott, ‘Genesis and John Muir’ ReVision 12(3) (1990) 31-41. R. Chisholm, The Foundations of Knowing, Harvester Press, Sussex, 1982. J. Cottingham, The Rationalists, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1988. C. Dale, Topsoil and Civilization, Revised edition by V.G. Carter, University of Oklahama Press, Norman, 1974. A Dobson (ed.), Green Reader, Routledge, London, 1991? A. Drengson, ‘Ecosophy’, Positive Vibrations, (1990?) 8-10. R. Eckersley, Environmentalism and Political Theory, UCL Press, London, 1992. W. Fox, Towards a Transpersonal Ecology, Shambala, Boston, 1990. A. Gare, Beyond European Civilization, Eco-logical Press, Bungendore, 1993. C. J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1967. R. Goodin, ‘Selling environmental indulgences’, Kyklos 47(1994) 573-596. N. R. Hanson, Patterns of discovery: an inquiry into conceptual foundations of science, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1958. E. C. Hargrove, Foundations of Environmental Ethics, Prentice Hall, N.J., 1989. D Hillel, Out of the Earth: Civilization and the Life of the Soil., Free Press, Macmillan, 1991. M. Jacobs, The Green Economy, Pluto, London, 1991. K. Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of political economy, Harmondsworth, England 1973. F. Mathews, The Ecological Self, Routledge, London, 1991. A. McLaughlin, Regarding Nature: Industrialism and Deep Ecology , SUNY Press, Albany N. Y., 1993. P. Marshall, Nature’s Web, in two editions, Simon and Schuster, 1992 and 1993. A. Naess and D. Rothenberg, Ecology, community and Lifestyle, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989. J. Passmore, Man’s Responsibility for Nature, Duckworth, London, 1974. D. Pearce and others, Blueprint for a Green Economy, Earthscan Publications, London, 1989. D. Pepper, The Roots of Modern Environmentalism, Ed: Tom Colveson London; Dover N.H. Croom Helm 1984. V. Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, Routledge, London, 1993. C. Ponting, A Green History of the World, Sinclair-Stevenson, London, 1991. �31 R. Routley, ‘Roles and limits of paradigms in environmental thought and action’, Discussion papers in environmental philosophy #1, RSSS, Australian National University, 1982; also, modified, in Environmental Philosophy (ed. R. Elliot and A. Gare), University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1983; referred to as RP. C. O. Sauer, Agricultural Origins and Dispersal, American Geographical Society, New York, 1952. P. Singer, Practical Ethics, expanded edition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993. P. Shepard, Nature and Madness, Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, 1982. R. Sylvan and D. Bennett, The Greening of Ethics, White Horse Press, Cambridge, 1994; referred to as GE. R. Sylvan with D. Bennett, Of Utopias, Tao and Deep Ecology, Green Series #19, RSSS Australian National University, 1990; referred to as UTD. The Wildlands Project, World Earth, special issue, Canton NY, 1993. Y.F. Tuan, ‘Discrepancies between environmental attitude and behaviour: examples from Europe and China’, The Canadian Geographer 12(1968) 176-91. S. Toulmin, The Return to Cosmology, University of California, Berkeley, 1982. L. White Jr., ‘Historic roots of our ecologic crisis’, Science 155(1967) 1203-7. J. Wisdom, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, Blackwell, Oxford, 1953. M. Zimmerman and others (eds.), Environmental Philosophy, Prentice Hall, N.J., 1993; referred to as EP3. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Draft Papers Description An account of the resource Sylvan's literary executor encountered an archive in which “all his projects were current", since manuscripts were undated and unattributed. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document 1031 /&J 29.5.95 PARADIGMATIC ROOTS OF ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS Abstract. Virtually all diagnoses of the roots, and sources, of environmental problems are defective. While defective diagnoses persist, problems will not be adequately addressed. Focal questions ask why human communities so frequently degrade, impoverish or even destroy their own environments, and more generally why the whole earth is now in jeopardy through human enterprise. More immediate answers, sometimes correct so far as they go (which is not deep enough), look to components of environmental impact equations. More thorough-going answers fall into two classes: first those that do not question entrenched paradigms, but seek (unsuccessfully) to explain widespread problems simply through defective practice, and secondly those that, rightly recognising that defective practice is no adequate answer, look to deeper paradigmatic sources of problems. A fatal flaw in most of the latter answers lies in their monistic concentration on a single paradigm, or single narrow band of paradigms. These flaws are exposed, whence a wider, more satisfactory answer can be broached. Background busywork includes firstly, explaining problems and relevant paradigms and how paradigms operate regarding environmental problems, and secondly, detailed disentangling of proposed and alleged sources of the problems. With this done, it is argued that none of these answers, fashionable or other, to the focal questions is satisfactory. Here lies the important hard, but very negative and decidedly incomplete, work of the present investigation. A different more complex investigation is accordingly instigated. An initial answer is located through broader classes of paradigms : environmentally friendly and unfriendly. Further effort is expended, profitably, in trying to characterize these classes. Among significant corollaries, one is striking: philosophy as portrayed through its standard history is dismal environmental news. 2 PARADIGMATIC ROOTS of ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS Broaching focal questions, and searching for deeper answers. Human activity is now degrading terrestrial eco-systems at an extraordinarily rapid rate (liquidation of natural forest systems affords just one striking example). In modern times humans have devised sophisticated and sophistical idea-systems which justify such system degradation. Often in the past they would not have seen such transformation as mattering; many remain so programmed, regarding transformation as increasing wealth (a presumption encouraged under mainstream economics). More recently dominant human cultures have developed social systems which induct most humans into degradation procedures (through need, tax impositions, pressure to engage in cash economies, and so on) and which weave entrapping justificatory webs (through agencies, councils, courts, educations, missions, and so on). Whence arises an increasingly broached question1: Why is this happening? More explicitly, why do human communities so frequently degrade and impoverish their environments, their own habitats? Indeed why do they sometimes, persistently, perhaps over a long period, destroy their own habitats? More sweepingly, why is the whole earth now perhaps in jeopardy through human enterprise^ For those eager to anticipate the main outcome, the unremarkable answer to be eventually found to these focal questions is in essence this: because too many humans, especially those in control of environmentally impacting enterprises, remain committed to or caught within environmentally unfriendly paradigms, diverse paradigms but all displaying quite insufficient regard for the health and well-being of relevant habitats and of the earth. Parts of any answers to such focal questions come immediately through environmental impact equations, conservation laws, and such like. For example, degradation is occurring through the impact of overpopulation, excessive pollution, damaging or faulty technologies, and so on. While such answers are important, and often correct as far as they go in combination, and while they may correctly indicate what has to be changed somehow, they are nonetheless somewhat superficial, and they leave much to be explained. For example, they do not explain why a community persisted upon a course that deliberately led to such problems, or why it is so resistant to changes that might reduce impacts and pull it out of its problem-holes. Less superficial answers look to ideologically entrenched attitudes and commitments, to 1 In sources as diverse as Shepard (first page) and Jacobs (p.23). Contrary to other sources, such as Marshall, humans are by no means the only biological species that proceed to degrade or impoverish their own environments. Introduced “pest” species, such as rabbits and mynahs in Antipodes, also do so; perhaps some botanical species contrive to as well. 3 pervasive paradigms that underwrite anti-environmental practices, as for instance the wood­ production ideology does forestry practice, even so-called “new forestry”, and market ideology does economic practice, even so-called “environmental economics”.2 An illustrative example which reveals the power of paradigms in blocking or facilitating action will shortcut a more elaborate argument, through action theory, to the efficacy of idea­ systems. Consider an unwanted pregnancy, resulting despite due precautions or whatever. Observe that, more and more there are comparatively safe technologies available to effect termination and seemingly solve the immediate problem. Ask: why so many people are opposed to choice of abortion? A very common answer is: because they are operating under an elaborate paradigm, typically organised religion (bureaucratic Christianity in the West), themes of which, the creeds of which, prohibit such choices.3 Of course pro-choice considerations are also paradigmatically embedded, for instance in forms of liberalism. Picturesquely, a social paradigm imposes controls on action, a system of red and green lights on a captured agent's routing procedures. Or with a different picture, paradigms project a steeply impeding Paradigms not only guide, control and limit; they also correlatively give permission—as, for instance, space to play god, freedom to release a new topography on action space. species or variety which may or has proved a pest or noxious or has been biologically engineered, liberty to neglect or degrade or vandalize. But paradigms do even more; they facilitate explanation, above all they make understanding possible. In these regards, they may work for better as well as for worse. Thus it is not a matter of getting rid of them, were this even feasible, but of getting right paradigms. The settings in terms of which agents such as humans act and operate, even down-toearth everyday agents, invariably include, not far in the background, paradigms, cultures, creeds, ideologies, pervasive myths or the like, all idea-systems, all involving models (in a technical sense) of one sort or another. Even the most practical (and vociferously practical) of humans are governed by background ideosystems. It is in terms of these background ideosystems that a great deal concerning human practices with respect to natural environments can be explained, what would otherwise lack satisfactory explanation.4 That explanation comes not however through a single paradigm, as has too often been supposed in trying to answer focal questions, but through a bundle of somehow aligned paradigms. Compare how a person may be represented, in social science, not through a single 2 3 4 For more on this style of explanation, see further RP. It is not, going to be contended that religion—or a certain Abramic religion, such as Christianity—is the main villain of the environmental piece. It is now well enough appreciated that religions in general borrowed much in their damaging articles from ancient philosophies. What will however, be suggested is that dominant philosophies do have much to answer for in this regard. Further, as logical positivists observed, explanation and justification patterns tend to overlap. How people justify their practices offers an explanation, though perhaps a misleading or superficial explanation, of them. ; As well, positivistic theories show, though in an oversimplified way, how models, which paradigms are, serve in explanation justification and understanding. See e.g. Hanson. /. / 4 role or program, but by way of a set of interconnected roles. What has been regularly overlooked in seeking deeper paradigmatic sources of environmental problems is systematic plurality. In part this neglect of plurality can be explained through countervailing propensity to seek single answers, and to try to locate uniqueness, where however causes and sources are plural. So it is with paradigmatic sources and roots of environmental problems. They are plural. As to what is going on theoretically, there is a fairly complex story to be told, an easier working image for which is appropriately ecological. That image focusses upon the structure of a perhaps impenetrable thicket or tangle, such as a dense rainforest patch, or, itself simplified, a fig or bamboo thicket. Below an emergent top layer representing the problems concerned, those raised by the focal questions, there is the canopy layer, of interlinked proximate causes. Below that again stands a plurality of stems, plural supports, which can be construed as supporting sources, and below them again, ultimately sustaining the whole structure, a multiplicity of intertwined roots, representing paradigmatic basics. What is sought are ultimate sources, and roots, not immediate causes. The cause of local pollution may be a factory that an agent installed, to produce more flim-flam. That too may be the physical source of the immediate problem. But deeper questioning seeks the reasons for such production and such factories. While there may be problems with ideas and idea­ structures as causes, as causally efficacious, these problems do not transfer to reasons and sources. Nonetheless there are buried metaphors, and linkages, to be unscrambled: how are “A is source of B” and “A is a root of B” to be explicated? While there is much written on roots and sources of environmental problems or developments virtually none of it addresses the question of what is meant by the partially buried metaphors of roots and sources . One striking example is supplied by Pepper's useful introductory text, The Roots of Modern Environmentalism. Although this text presents itself specifically as concerning roots, there is in fact no explication offered of the crucial roots metaphor/which it turns. For that matter there is no direct account of what the roots of environmentalism—still less, though quite different, of environmental problems to which environmentalism answers—are supposed to be (granted there is much oblique material). It is apparent also that Pepper has become rather carried away with the roots metaphor, throwing it into several chapter headings and applying it pretty indiscriminately to mean simply elements (from some earlier occurrence); thus for instance, ‘the roots of the theme of reconciliation of freedom and authority’ (p.193). Such usage is unsound. Because rudiments of some idea make an earlier appearance in some authority or work, later workers may not have arrived at such an idea by expanding on these rudiments; they may have arrived where they did quite independently or by a different route. The mistake is that of reading a source or (genetic) causal linkage into a mere temporal conjunction: post hoc, propter hoc. Neither roots nor sources are mere beginnings or simply early occurrences; there have to be continuing connections, with directional relationships such as supply or sustenance. But for 5 roots and sources different connections and elaborations are to be expected. After all, the metaphors, and likewise what they give rise to, are evidently different; more literally, plants have roots, normally below them, springs and streams rise from sources, not roots, often above them, and so on. Both differ from another popular basis-beginning buried metaphor, that of foundations. Foundations bring in other features such as solidity, stability and comparative permanency, while severing critical transmission features (for foundations may merely passively support, not sustain supported superstructure). So foundations, for all their importance in epistemology and elsewhere iffoundationalism is correct, can be set aside.5 So far dictionaries do better than popular and philosophical texts. For instance, a short listing for the figurature use of ‘root’ runs: ‘the basis, bottom, the fundamental part, or that which supplies origin, sustenance, means of development, etc.’ (Concise English Dictionary). Such a two component account will serve nicely, for a start. However conjunctions should substantially displace disjunctions, else roots could collapse to foundations or could collapse to mere trace element supplements. Roots both give a basis and bottom binding into a substratum and supply sustenance and means of development. Roots connections are richer as well as more specific than sources, which may merely show from where an item comes or is obtained. Further that place of derivation that may not be a basis or bottom, but for instance a source­ book. With roots, like normal foundations, a basis or bottom is reached, whereas sources may have further sources (hence the search for “deeper”, even ultimate, sources). Finally, root and source connections carry explanations, at least genetic explanations—concerning how items got to be what and the way they are—because roots and sources are characteristically that from which items develop. Sometimes even more information, including a whole control system, gets transmitted. As much happens where roots are paradigmatic, to return to that strange mix of buried metaphors. Reaching deeper roots is important. Without locating them, perhaps all the roots (should they resemble blackberry), problems may not get properly addressed. Should we wrongly locate roots, then proposed resolutions directed at these, cutting them off or replacing them, will also go astray, wrongly directed or whatever. Such is the fate of many proposals concerning environmental problems. There are several parts to the approach sketched, if it is to be properly elaborated— including a working classification of environmental problems and their proximate solutions, and an account of paradigms and their roles—before getting to paradigmatic answers to focal questions. But we can be brief on these necessary preliminaries, because main details are already in circulation and because they have been addressed elsewhere. 1. Problems and paradigms. 5 Despite a referee’s suggestion that discussion of “roots” ‘could be improved by a contrast of the “roots” metaphor with the “foundations” metaphor, the fact is that we are decidedly not concerned with foundations of environmental problems; to the contrary, we do not wish to see them supported (if shoddily), established and so on. On the growing complexity and varying interpretations offoundations, an emergent bog, see for instance Chisholm. 6 Although these will be duly connected, with paradigms implicated in problems, they are different components, and admit and deserve separate explanation. la. Environmental problems and proximate solutions. Definitions of ‘environmental problem’, and classifications of such problems, have already been ventured.6 What problems emerge as environmental depends upon background value framework. What counts as a major problem on deeper environmental perceptions may be but a minor problem, or written off as not a problem at all, on shallower perspectives. Among such indicator problems, ones here taken as serious problems, are those of • sustaining biodiversity and • maintaining significant wilderness.7 Even if the broad impact of human enterprise were sufficiently reduced to guarantee comfortable survival of future humans, these desiderata may well not be guaranteed. There would be outstanding problems. In any event, it is not too difficult to say more or less what environmental problems are (at worst by furnishing familiar lists), and in many cases to indicate at least in principle how they might be resolved. Environmental impact equations, encountered in a more perceptive classification of problems, reveal how they can be resolved. Namely, by altering relevant impact parameters. Given this why are they proving so intractable? Why is so little done? Why is so very little spent, despite all the talk.8 Proximate solutions, about as far as positive science conveys us, are not however satisfactory stopping points. How is it, given so much scientific information and expertise, that humans are continuing to sharply degrade, and risk substantially destroying, their habitats. To these, the focal questions of this exercise, there is an array of competing answers on offer or to be met in an extensive literative. As we will soon discover, most of these answers are too simple; and taken, as intended, as comprehensive, they are wrong. Correct answers to the questions are however important, because if we fail to get to bottom of the issues, there is even less prospect of satisfactory action to turn around a difficult and deterioration situation^. That these issues do not matter, that casual human relationships, or how many devaluing dollars uncaring humans can briefly stuff in their pockets, matter more than whole islands of habitats—these sorts of value judgements (after all matter is a value term par excellence) derive from and are supported by particular ideologies. lb. Model-like objects: paradigms, ideologies, cultures ,and so on. A paradigm can be explicated, technically, as a model in precisely a generous logical sense.9 See for example GE, which duly details connections of the problems with impact equations and proximate solutions. As to the extent of the problem (even) in North America, and a proposed remedy, see The Wildlands Project. See e.g. The cost ofpast environmental policy in OECD countries, Box 1.7, in Pearce et al, p.24. See RP, where many environmentally relevant illustrations are given and explained. ry) - That is, a paradigm amounts to a structure supplied by an elaborate interpretation function on a general system, i.e. semantical and other evaluations defined on an integrated relational structure. Naturally it is required to be faithful to what it models, the social forms and norms, scientific research programs, or whatever. A social paradigm, in contrast to a scientific paradigm, is a paradigm where the propositional and action theory, the socio-political themes and value judgements, is that of a social group. A pure culture is but a comprehensive social paradigm, where by “comprehensive” is meant that it covers a sufficiently comprehensive part of the life-styles and life-forms of the community concerned. There are now many examples of formulations of the themes delivered under rival social paradigms and under different cultures; from these, mostly sketchy formulations we can work back towards the underlying models. The basic vehicle, a situations or worlds model, is a semantical object, an item like a complex universal10 similarly open to a range of construals and reduction attempts, e.g. metaphysical, conceptual, epistemic, linguistic and so on. Once this is realised, it can be seen that successive cohorts of philosophers and sociologists, historians and geographers have repeated one another in vaguely discerning essentially the same sorts of underlying structures under different categorisations: thus, for instance, forms of understanding (Kant), of consciousness (Marx), of life (Wittgenstein), conceptual schemes (Conant), presuppositions (Collingwood), discursive formations (Foucault), Weltanschauungs, total views (Naess), traditions (MacIntyre), traditions of thought, cultures, perspectives, outlooks, ideologies, programs,.... An ideology, for instance, in the nonderogatory (non-Marxist) sense is an ideasA system, initially a propositional system or theory with a relevant domain of ideas operative, from which a paradigm can be discerned and elaborated. Such models are typically presented in extremely truncated form, for example through a tabulation of capsule themes. Here is a combination example: TABLE 1: Elements of Taoism as contrasted with Deep Ecology and with the dominant paradigm: an initial capsule formulation J1 Taoism Deep Ecology Dominant (Western) Paradigm Harmony with nature, through Tao Harmony with nature Domination over nature Nature valuable in itself; “humanism” rejected Natural environment valued for itself Nature a resource; intrinsic value confined to humans It resembles a structured universal; compare e.g. Plato’s system of forms, Locke’s of complex ideas. Naturally there are differences between, for instance, traditions (of thought) which are historically bound, cultures, which are geographically and otherewise connected, and conceptual schemes (where a conceptual reduction is insinuated), but all are, at logical bottom, models of paradigmatic sort. This tripartite example is adapted from UTD, where capsule elements of Taoism are duly expanded. 8 Levelling of differences; wide impartiality Biocentric egalitarianism Human supremacy Supplies ample Earth supplies limited Ample resources with substitutes Following Tao-te Spiritual goals, especially self-realisation Material economic growth a predominant goal Enlightenment Self-realisation Personal (material) enrichment Doing with enough (recycling inappropriate) Doing with enough; recycling Consumerism Non-competitive lifestyle; voluntary simplicity Cooperative lifestyle Competitive lifestyle Decentralised/neighbourhood and village focus Decentralised/bioregional /neighbourhood focus Centralised/urban centred/ national focus Hierarchy without power structure; anarchoid Non-hierarchical/ grassroots democracy Power structure hierarchical Limited technology Appropriate technology High technology Considerable caution Precautionary practice Risking taking (verging upon adventurism) Paradigms control action space by some equivalent of directives; under an earlier analogy, red and green lights duly interpreted. They may not supply direct commands, general obligations and prohibitions, but may operate more indirectly. For instance an enlightened person, a role model, a person following Tao, would act this way, not that. (Taoism, like certain modern ideologies, eschews deontic judgements.) Paradigms are absorbed and they guide practice. They commonly form part of actors' worlds; they are certainly part of actors' programs for practice and considered action in a world. In a sense then, they are things, programs actors carry round in their heads; so heads (or rather consciousnesses) have to be changed, not rolled. 2. Proposed answers to focal questions; a preliminary classification of inadequate answers (7) and suggested remedies. Most of the extraordinary range of answers proposed supply but a single source, and are accordingly defective for this reason, usually among other reasons. Indeed it is not much of an exaggeration to assert that virtually everything proposed, in a now extensive literature, is wrong. TABLE 2. Main tabulation of answers and remedies, in three stages. D. Defective practice answers Source Remedy Objections 7 9 DI. Ignorance Relevant information Information now available D2. Unintended consequences Relevant information Information now available D2a Faulty technique, or technology Repairs Repairs already made D3 Deviation (from theory, etc.) Education (for failure to limit deviance) Adherence D4. Systemic lock-in (through poverty, ensnarement in market forces, etc.) Trap removal a. Explains only certain cases, and b. Due to paradigmatic features D5. Insensitivity or insensibility Problem apprised Remedy tried; background ideological blockage D3a a. Deviation uneliminable, or b. Adherence no remedy When pursued, objections like those noted either force defective practice out as unsatisfactory, or push it back to paradigmatic features. Source single paradigm Remedies proposed (among others) Pl. Christianity (mainstream Catholicism) Scientific enlightenment, or alternative (Eastern) religion Pla. Protestantism and its ethic P2. P2a Cartesianism Dualism P. Defective paradigm answers Monism Anti-dualism Modified holism P2b Mechanism Substance metaphysics P3. P3a Possessive individualism P3aa Personalism Organicism Process metaphysics Non-reductionism Transpersonalism P4. Capitalism Socialism P5. Industrialism Pre-industrialism (romanticism) Post-industrialism P5a Technocratic bureaucracy P5aa. Transnational business P6. Enlightenment Anti-enlightenment Anti-materialism 10 P6a Materialism Spiritualism P8. P9 Patriarchy, andocentrism Human domination of humans Feminism Anti-domination (anti-hierarchy) Observe that what some have proposed as remedies, others have been as sources; remedies proposed tend to share defects of sources. PS. Further sample listings of this paradigmatic sort (but with the paradigms often subject specific or partial) include: Source Platonism Typical remedy suggested New metaphysics Leibnitzianism New metaphysics Kantianism Anglo-American philosophy12 Consequentialism Utilitarianism Economism (economic imperialism as Alternative ethics Continental philosophy New social science; ethics contrasted with straight economic roots) Contractarianism Domination transfer Consequentialism Domination removal Human nature (esp. aggression) Adolescencism Maturation Infantilism (from Freudian physchology) Maturation And so on. A very rough recipe runs as follows: draw up a potted list of major movements and factors in dominant Western thought. Then many—perhaps it is not excessive to say most—entries in that list will have been nominated, likely separately, by someone as the source of the problems. That list accordingly continues (even including, sometimes, entries like Taylorism, i.e. reorganisation of industry along lines popularized by Taylor), but what is included is representative of the important and more interesting answers to be encountered. There are other allegedly nonparadigmatic answers however, varying from interesting to crazy, that should also be taken into some account, for instance answers like Shepard's challenging answer. Although Shepard dismisses ideologies, what he offers is a further ideosystem, of similar dubious or false cast. Strange answers include pushing it all back to human psychology (thus not only Shepard, but also Fox, and Ehrlich and other gurus with insistence upon ‘mental maladaptation’). The mainstream form, analytic philosophy, appears to comprise empiricism-cum-utilitarianism in Britain, tempered in America by pragmatism. /s ' 11 Basically, there is something wrong with a society that does that to its habitat. It is sick —in a popular sense, yes, it is sick. It is the slides that follow, however, along psychological routes, that are to be resisted. One slide begins invitingly: As it is not literally sick, well not physically usually, it must be mentally sick; that is, sliding further and fast, insane or mad. But the sources of mental sickness lie in childhood (as Freudianism erroneously insists). The slide continues to: what we have are immature societies, frozen at an early stage of development. No doubt there is something toyheme that dominant societies, USA especially (which now influences so much in other cultures), are locked into youth culture, a sort of late consumptive adolescence.13 No doubt, too, that maturity—but an environmental maturity—is desirable, even mandatory. Meanwhile, immaturity is fostered right through human life. Considerable effort is put into trying to induct older people, who are often marginalised, into active consumptive society, to spend their money through tourism, on new compact housing, in those most wasteful of modem institutions such as airliners and hotels, hospitals and old-age homes, and so forth. 3. Documentation as to some of the acclaimed purer sources. Like the lists of proposals and intricated paradigms, the documentation too is somewhat perfunctory, tending here and there towards notes. Of course there are excuses. While whole theses could be spun out on several of these topics, already beginning to elicit such treatment, a prime objective here is different from usual: neither to convict, nor to clear or excuse, but to partially implicate most items cited in the main tabulation above. Consider, in brief, some of the usually accredited sources: • Western religion, above all Christianity. The theme that the source of ecological problems, ‘the historical roots of our ecological crisis’, are to be found in Western religion, and specifically in ‘the Judaeo-Christian belief that mankind was created to have dominion over nature’, was repeated in a particularly pointed and subsequently influential way by White.14 One helpful summary of White's line of argument runs as follows: Allied with technological and scientific developments, orthodox Christianity has produced arrogant exploitation of nature, and a contemporary ecological crisis. White's thesis is that the West's successful science and technology developed between the 8th and 12th centuries — it is much older than the scientific revolution though it was not until about 1850 — following the democratic revolutions — that the science and technology were combined to produce truly immense powers to change nature. The early development, however, was paralleled by the development of exploitative attitudes to nature which seemed to be ‘in harmony with larger intellectual patterns , namely the victory of Christianity over paganism. This destroyed the animistic beliefs whereby men thought twice before they plundered and destroyed natural objects. It substituted instead a faith in perpetual progress, 13 14 It interestingly matches the locking of primary production systems into pioneering stages such as preclimax formations. Shepard’s dialectic is investigated in more detail in the Appendix . White's article has generated an enormous defensive literature, primarily from Christian apologists, but also from softer environmentalists and from testy historians of ideas. The whole area looks in danger of disappearing from intellectual view under a heavy blanketing snowfall, snowed. 12 a belief that God designed nature for man's benefit and rule, and that action, not contemplation, was the correct Christian behaviour. Science formed an extension of theology (for to know God you had to find out how his creation worked), and technology provided the active means to carry out God's will. Because today's attitudes are essentially inherited from Christianity, then it ‘bears the burden of guilt’ for contemporary ecological disruption.15 What has happened with the divisive charge, advanced by White, that Christianity was the prime source of environmental problems, is particularly instructive. In an attempt to diffuse the charge Christian apologists pointed to, what there undoubtedly were, recessive strands or isolated seeds in Christianity which were much more environmentally benign (though some such as stewardship, which has evolved toward total managerialism and sustainable development, have proved increasingly problematic). That does little or nothing to meet a more sensitive and telling criticism that mainstream (or dominant) Christianity has much to answer for as regards destruction and degradation of natural environments.16 Similar responses are apposite for attempts to exonerate their wider sources, such as Western philosophy. Against the sheeting of responsibility to religion, dominant forms of which should undoubtedly cop some heavy criticism, it has been contended that philosophy ... is the primary source of most Western ideas [and] is ... responsible for the ideas and attitudes that inhibit environmental protection today.... Religion ... though often criticized ... as the chief culprit, has played a much less fundamental role. Most of the environmentally offensive ideas in Western religion originated not in religion but in Western philosophy.17 • Classical Greek philosophy, above all the peak philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. Greek philosophers approached natural phenomena in a way that (1) prevented the development of an ecological perspective, (2) discouraged the aesthetic appreciation of the natural world, and (3) promoted a conception of reality that made the idea of nature preservation conceptually difficult, if not impossible.18 More sweepingly, they set Western philosophy on a ruinous environmental course, a course accentuated with the appearance of modem rationalist and empiricist philosophies. • Cartesian philosophy. The dominant modern environmental approach is sometimes 15 16 17 18 Pepper pp.44-5. Pepper then embarks upon the murky story of alternative interpretations of Biblical data and the Christian tradition, dredged up by a series of White's critiques. The issue continuejto be debated; for an older survey of traditions see Passmore, for a challenging recent contribution to the debate see Callicott. Each religion is multistranded. But we should look hardest at dominant operative forms: Ask, not merely what they say, but what they do, and would do. For an outline of just such a telling criticism of mainstream Christianity, see Singer esp. pp.265-8. Hargrove p.15. Certainly the sort of message that Pentecostal missionaries even now try to preach to resistant Australian Aboriginals, that the earth is just filth, mere rubbish, can be traced back in direct line to Plato’s attitude to the land, an attitude Hargrove and Plumwood help expose. Hargrove p.21. Hargrove’s claims may appear to have been confuted by Attfield, but really, while they have been subject to minor qualification, they have been highlighted. There is a much fuller story still to be told about classical Greek philosophy reassessed environmentally, of the very different roles and impacts of Plato (with his unearthly philosophy), of Aristotle (with his earthier chauvinism), of Stoics and of Epicureans, and of neo-Platonists. For a modest beginning, see Plumwood on Plato, Toulmin on Stoics as contrasted with Epicureans, and Glacken on lesser or lost Greek strands. [S 13 denominated Cartesianism, or the Cartesian Technocratic paradigm, in honour of Descartes, upon whom (as a conveniently select individual from a swag of like-minded people) several of the leading themes and ideas can be pinned.19 While Descartes was undoubtedly extraordinarily influential, so were others; Newton for one, Locke for another. The paradigm is accordingly better denominated the Atomist-Empiricist-Technocratic paradigm, or some such. Evidently it substantially overlaps other modern ideologies, such as that of the Enlightenment, widely implicated as major sources of environmental problems. • Western metaphysics. While some conglomeration of the preceding sources and others (some potted history of Western metaphysics, so to say) may be offered, more often what is presented is some selection of Western metaphysical elements. Here is one example, plainly exhibiting a heavy Heideggerean influence: The roots of our environmental problems lie in Western metaphysics. For metaphysics, Being is presencing; no allowance is made for any other mode (sheltering, declining, concealing). Once metaphysics has established the absolute dominion of the present over the not-present or no-longer-present, the way is paved for the scientific method, with its emphasis on replicability of results, predicability, quantification, and control. Nature becomes a “natural resource” —and people become “human resources”. The sources of anthropocentricism, imperialism, colonialism, sexism and consumerism can all be traced back to metaphysics. Western metaphysics has more or less conquered the world, and there is no going back. Western metaphysics is more than simply a false consciousness overlaid on top of “authentic” experience. Being changes historically, and metaphysics is the index of that change... Metaphysics has a conquering, exclusive imperative, ... and different [former] modes now exist only as vestigial traSces. They cannot be resurrected through ancient wisdom, native healing, goddess worship, or any other supposedly intact, dormant system. We cannot create a “new order”. That would simply be another form of the Will to Power... We can—and must—turn away from the dominant rhythms of western metaphysics if we are to avoid the nihilism of a perpetually ensconced technocratic rationalism.20 An alternative to turning entirely away from Western metaphysics, consists in combining b rejection of standard Western metaphysics (or, less sweepingly, of dominant metaphysics, characteristically individualistic and atomistic) in favour of development of recessive traditions or mere Western seeds. Such a more sophisticated approach, also critical of Western metaphysics, with atomism a main villain, is pursued by those who promote instead process or plenum metaphysics.21 For encapsulation of the Cartesianism paradigm (a dominant dualistic form), summarising Drengson’s exposition, see RP, table 5. Drengson, for one, has helped portray Descartes as the environmentally evil genius (or demiurge). That some orthodox philosophers, not merely maverick philosophers, are now rushing to the defence of Descartes should be seen as entirely in keeping with the character and roles of Western philosophy. Undisclosed source. Amusingly, I have seen myself accused of ‘rejecting] in its entirety mainstream western philosophy and science, ... seen as the cause of the [environmental] problem’ and instead basing my ‘ecocentric values on Eastern philosophies’ (thus Bellett). This charge was levelled on the strength of a peripheral exercise on classical Taoism and Deep Ecology (now included in UTD). For the first process option, see Gare; for the second, where the plenum is that of a holistic relativity theory (more exactly holistic relativistic geometrodynamics), see Mathews. 14 • Enlightenment. The source of problems lies in ‘the intellectual heritage of the Enlightenment’ (e.g. Dobson). Of course the main doctrines of the Enlightenment substantially overlap those of modern mainstream philosophy and of Descartes’ philosophy (but they shed dualistic and theistic scholastic hang-overs). • Capitalism. The assumption that capitalism is responsible for environmental as well as social evils, widespread until recently in state-socialist countries (when their own records were revealed), can be traced back to Marx. According to Marx, with capitalism for the first time, nature becomes purely an object for humankind, purely a matter of utility; ceases to be recognised as a power for itself; and the theoretical discovery of its autonomous laws appears merely as a ruse so as to subject it under human needs, whether as an object of consumption or as a means of production.22 But, as observed, a main embedded theme had appeared in earlier philosophy; for instance, the idea of nature as purely an object for humankind, was advanced in Aristotle: ‘Now if nature makes nothing incomplete and nothing in vain, the inference must be that she has made all animals for the sake of man’.23 Aristotle adopted a similar stance on nature as on other species. The theme was to be oft repeated in subsequent Aristotelianism, and reiterated apparently in shallower Stoicism. But the subjection of everything to utility, no doubt a relative of capitalism, appears to be a distinctively modem contribution. • Modern industrial society or industrialism. Modern industrialism (‘the smooth­ superhighway of industrial progress’) is the source, such is an extraordinarily popular theme: ‘... the root causes of the present crisis lie deep with the very foundations of the industrial paradigm’.24 Similarly ‘roots [of] the environment crisis ... go deeper to the foundations of modern industrial society’25 Again, ‘the structural roots of the environmental crises [are found in] industrialism, in commoditization, in commercialism, and in competition and greed’26 The popular theme, that industrialism is the source, tends to confuse mere means— industrial technology can without any doubt at all vastly facilitate environmental degradation (as well as, It should not be overlooked that some of those who nominated metaphysics meant thereby paradigm or paradigms or an equivalent. But what they may gain thereby in verisimilitude, they tend to lose in confusion. Grundrisse p.409f. Aristotle, Politics, Book 1, ch.8. What an inference, you might well exclaim. See further Hargrove p.25. M. Gabriel, ‘How “attitudes and implements” have brought us to “the end of nature’”, a paper presented at UNE Environmental Paradigms Conference, April 1993. Gabriel proposes a managerial resolution: ‘for us to learn to manage both our relationship to our environment, and more broadly the environment itself’ (quotes from abstract of paper). This amounts to the flip side of an old problematic record. For the “solution” derives from the same defective box as the evident problem. Gabriel ibid. Similarly industrialism is assumed as the source throughout McLaughlin (the theme pervades his book) and as the root of the modern problem in Marshall (p.5ff). While seriously astray as to roots and sources, those critical of industrialism have a significant case. For, as well as functioning as a major inflator of intact problems, industrialism has helped generate side problems of its own, as with new types of chemical and nuclear pollution. Editorial in The Ecologist, Jan-Feb 1992, p.2. 15 less satisfactorily, subsequent clean-up and environmental repair)— with sources and causes, what directs and powers those uses of industrial technique and practice. • Economic growth or economic development. ‘According to a common and currently influential diagnosis, the environmental crisis has essentially economic roots One widespread misconception is that economic growth is the source of environmental problems. The assumption is astray for several reasons. For one, growth is at best a proximate cause, itself in need of explanation. More importantly, growth may occur in sectors of an economy, such as information technology or religious or artistic services, which have little or no environmental impact. Also conversely, an economy which fails to grow, but is desperately trying to survive, may exact heavy environmental costs (e.g. the forests are clear-felled to pay for continuing employment). No doubt though, stock economic growth is intimately intricated with proximate causes of environmental problems (through environmental impact equations). Similar considerations tell against the familiar proposition that the source of the problems is economic development itself or, what is different, the entrenched model of economic development. While it is no doubt correct, and important to emphasize, that ‘the Western model of economic development, far from being the solution to’ environmental and social problems, is ‘actually fuelling’ them, it is not the sole or distinguished source of the problems.27 28 • Human nature. "... the roots of our ecologic crisis reach beyond the variable topsoil of intellectual history, whether Eastern or Western, into the common substrata of human nature itself.’29 What such “nature” amounts to and how it functions as roots, both commonly left obscure, turns upon background hypotheses as to the nature of this nature. Different false 27 28 29 Goodin, p.573. While not contesting the theme, Goodin does continue: ‘the problem is not just that there are too many people, or even that they are enjoying too high a standard of living. All that is true, too, of course. More fundamentally, however, problems of environmental despoliation are said to derive from skewed incentives as they pursue their various goals’ (p.573). That too will be seen to be seriously astray, though it contains large grains of truth; it presumes unchanged the prevailing economically-skewed dominant social paradigm. Both socialists and other opponents of capitalistic conspicuous consumption tend to select the living-standard component of the main environmental impact equation as the source of the crisis. Thus Cuban luminary, Castro, in a recent stunningly succinct speech: ‘Less luxury, less wastage. Otherwise it will be too late’. Quoting claims of E. Goldsmith, advanced in an interview in Forest and Bird 273 (August 1994) pp.46-7. The need for emphasis will persist while locally prominent political figures like the present Prime Minister of Australia travel around the Earth with the hackneyed message that only economic growth will solve environmental problems. Seeing growth as the problem affords only a superficial analysis, like that of pointing to overconsumption with which growth is interconnected. As deeper inquiry reveals, underlying both issues of economic growth, employment and consumption, and alternatives taken, are models, paradigmatic models. Growth is but a means to objectives assumed in the dominant paradigm. A deeper analysis shows too why more growth will not ultimately solve relevant problems. Callicott and Ames, ‘Epilogue: On the relation of idea and action’ p.282 (see also p.281), in a desperate and apparently unsuccessful attempt to reconcile the claim (repeatedly advanced in their book) that Asian traditions of thought can make a significant contribution to much improved treatment for natural and built environments, with ‘the deplorable environmental conditions prevailing in contemporary Asia’ (p.280). 16 hypotheses, that humans are invariably driven by aggression, sexual or reproductive imperatives, economic needs, yield different defective accounts. 0 • Patriarchy. The source is patriarchy, and androgyny; problems derive from mistreatment of women. ‘Our troubles begin with the invention of male deities located off the planet’.30 ‘patriarchy is the source of the environmental crisis’.31 One sample linkage statement runs as follows: ... there is a huge denial ... of the violence perpetrated on women both historically and ... presently] and ... this?the same energy that, turned against the Earth, is destroying the very life-support systems and rapidly destroying the conditions that makes complex life possible. The fires that consume the Amazon are the very same fires that burned 9 million witches and I believe that there can be no solution of our ecological problems unless we simultaneously address our gender issues.32 A 15 Patriarchy, as source, is evidently a special case of long invoked domination transfer themes: • Human domination and exploitation of humans'. It is an extraordinarily widespread assumption that the impact of humans (or, until recently, of Man!) on the environment, or creatures or things in it, is a product of that of humans with each other, typically of groups or classes. In misleadingly brief form, the source is social: Man’s inhumanity to Man; and the solution correspondingly is social. Unremarkably, this unlikely assumption comes in a variety of different forms: early, concerning the mistreatment of animals as an (inevitable) spill-over from mistreatment of humans, recently concerning maltreatment of nature spilling over from, or being one with, that of women. The fashionable assumption runs, in one form or another, from Aquinas through Kant to a range of recent trend-setters, including Marcuse, Illich, Passmore, Bookchin ... and some leading feminists. In particular, it is part of the very meaning of social ecology, an ideology shaped and championed by Bookchin: ‘ecological problems arise from deep-seated social problems’.33 On this theme among others, Bookchin simply follows a prominent trend in social anarchism set by Kropotkin and his contemporary Reclus: all see that the domination and exploitation of nature by man is but an extension of the domination of man by man. Thus, ‘Both Kropotkin and Reclus ... laid the foundations of a radical theory of human ecology. Ecological despoliation was seen to reflect imbalances in human relationships —domination of nature thus following from human domination’. ... It follows that if domineering and exploitative human relationships can be avoided in small-scale decentralised societies then such societies are also best for a 30 31 32 33 /n Quoted in Eckersley p.64, who develops and begins to assess patriarchical source themes. For a more critical assessment see the sequel to GE. See Seed, quoted in the sequel to GE; also Salleh (e.g. in EP3). John Seed’s Workshop Schedule 1992, Rainforest Information Centre, Lismore, 12. 12.91. Seed’s extravagant identity claims are but a dramatic extension of that popular tendency to transform comparison and similarity statements into identity claims. Indeed reductionism often reaches further, with attempted conversion of all relational statements into identity ones, along with unrelational property claims. Bookchin sometimes qualifies this central claim, with ‘nearly all present’, e.g. EP3 p.354. But he is not strictly entitled to any such qualification, given his invariant theme that the domination of nature always results from humans’ domination of other humans (see e.g. Clark EP3, p.346). The text EP3 contains a sizeable section providing a useful introduction to social ecology. f/e. orths Jwy JHcA a ztci/uvC-., <‘oi»rW «L , as fw (Aibttnte qfndw hiasseX. Jrn. ; rvuzcC. cf 17 harmonious man-nature relationship.34 Domination and exploitation of one division by another can in turn be seen as a case of dualism at work, between the one, the dominator or dominating class, and the other, the dominated. • A snare of dualisms. Environmental problems derive from operation of a set of connected ideologically-entrenched and defective dualisms.35 • Modern educational systems'. Roots of environmental problems lie in educational systems. Or if roots don't, solutions do. However, roots of environmental or social problems do not lie in educational systems. Parts of their solutions may however. For education is critical, for instance, in correcting insufficient adherence to established satisfactory arrangements, such as, so it is claimed, Enlightenment ideals or traditional ethical systems.36 Therewith we are transported full circle back to defective practice answers. 4. A selective commentary on, and objections to, proposed answers A main part of this exercise consists in a detailed critical commentary on the entries in the main tabulation, and on proposals like them. Small beginnings are made on the exercise, in two stages reflecting a major division in the main tabulation. ad D. Defective practice answers tend to come from those who presume we are already in possession of adequate theories, or what approximates them or supplies main elements of them. (Such answers are also more liable to emanate from conservatives, opposed to new or radical theories, advanced on the basis of inadequacy of prevailing theories in practice.) Defective practice answers are especially popular in economic reaches. There was a time, perhaps not past yet, when all market failures in the shape of negative externalities were passed off as unintended consequences of economic activity. While “consequences” or outputs such things as pollution certainly are, unintended they mostly are not now, without emptying ‘unintended’ of its normal sense. For example, industrialists, apprised of conservation laws and unsurprised by polluted wastes, who dump their waste where and when regulators and waste­ watchers are not looking, can hardly pretend that that output is an unintended consequence of their industry. That should now be a rotten joke, itself with serious consequences. Accordingly new ecological economics insists that we dig deeper—without however exceeding economic settings or a shifting dominant paradigm—to discover why markets may foreseeably fail and why environmentally rectifying technology is not delivered.37 Where they Pepper p.192, with internal quotation from Breitbart. Unfortunately it is all too evident, given humans could so socially organise, that they could settle into harmonious small-scale communities which retained but little of pristine natural environments. Such a proposition obtains a much fuller elaboration within Plumwood. In an interesting way, such a proposal can hardly be wrong, given the conclusion reached below that a set of defective paradigms ifl at work. For evidently paradigms can be covered by dualisms, represented by a set of them in each case, somewhat as numbers can be represented in binary terms, generated from a basic two-oneness duality. Thus Passmore, Attfield, and others. For a critical assessment of education, see GE Thus e.g. Jacobs, p.24. 18 usually arrive, travelling within such unduly confined settings, is, like welfare economics before ecological, at better regulated markets, with business set as before within frameworks of plans and incentives, controls and penalties. Environmentally, however, such approaches do not reach very deep, or tap into underlying paradigmatic problem-sources. But these sorts of defective practice answers do not always derive from standard economic sources. A deviation-style answer is much favoured by Marxists to explain failure, environmental and other, of the former Soviet Union and other Eastern block countries; namely that true, or authentic, Marxism was not practiced. Unfortunately, even if it had been, environmental consequences would be little better, given the heavy industrial commitments and environmental shallowness, at best, of true Marxism.38 Differently, enlightenment liberals like Passmore try to ascribe failures in Western environmental practice, not to any deficiencies in mainstream theory, but to deviation from well established principles. Unfortunately adherence to these “well established principles” is just one way in which the Earth will lose what remains of its wilderness and remarkable diversity. Now there are no doubt cases, past especially but also present, some resulting (collectively) in extensive environmental degradation, where defective practice answers may be correct. For example, there is harrowing case after harrowing case (brought together in texts like Topsoil and Civilization and Agricultural Origins and Dispersal) of degradation of prime agricultural lands by imposed farming practices, where at least early on (before damage became visible) ignorance and unintended consequences could be legitimately claimed. In most historical cases we do not have enough information to be able to say with much assurance that agriculture proceeded until effective collapse because of continuing ignorance, or because practices were locked-in in one way or another, or because of sheer obduracy. But we do know more about present agricultural practices, for example in more arid parts of Australia, concerning both irrigated and dry-land agriculture. Many of these practices are undoubtedly sharply degrading lands, and the consequences of the practices, which cannot plead or pretend ignorance, are sufficiently appreciated. But the practices persist, and are encouraged by a sweep of subsidies or concessions. No doubt some of the practitioners can reasonably claim that they are locked into bad practices through circumstance, circumstances now beyond their control such as financial pressures, unfavourable terms-of-trade, and so on, coupled with the need to make a living. But some, such as companies controlling large tracts of land, can make no such claims or excuses, nor can claim such things as family precedence, attachment to place, and similar. Their obdurate practice has to be attributed to something else, most obviously not deviation from theory, but commitment to an environmentally defective paradigm. ad P and PS. Dealing with defective paradigm answers is an even more complex, and vexed, 38 It is surprising how much of the practice of later Socialist states is prefigured in texts like The Communist Manifesto. Thus “industrial armies” are to be set up; credit, communications and transport are to become state monopolies; “migrants and rebels” are to have their property confiscated; and so on. All this runs contrary to much Marxist apologetics (as A. Urquhart, who made those points, also observed). 19 business. Let us try to condense main matters to a few broad themes: 1. Many of the (incomplete) paradigms listed are not even sufficient for environmental impasses. They may be seriously mistaken, they may have undesirable intellectual and perhaps social effects, but a society could persist sustainably with those drawbacks. Thus, for example, substance metaphysics (under modified Spinozism), dualisms, even patriarchy. The same might even hold for materialism and mechanism, (assuming these practices can be coherently made out, that depending on how differentiated ideologies and values are accommodated, and so forth). To illustrate: a metaphysics, of any sort, cannot be the whole story, because it does not, on its own, account for action, anti-environmental or other. Without special bridges, link principles, from metaphysics to value-intricating action theory, a sort of naturalistic fallacy operates. Thus subverted, in essentially Hume’s way, are all the vulgar sources of environmental problems which take them as derived from metaphysics of one sort or another. Such a criticism does not however extend to more comprehensive paradigms which connect appropriately with practice. 2. While several—not just one—of the paradigms listed are sufficient—in the right circumstances (given long historical development, accumulation, and so on39)—none are necessary. Similar impasses could arise, and locally have arisen, given significantly different paradigms; for example given, instead of main Western trouble-making paradigms, Confucianism or advanced Polynesianism. At this stage in dialectic, green history and the like—bio-history, eco-history, and related virtual histories (concerning what would have happened)—enter decisively. For instance, Ponting's Green History of the World begins with a graphic account of the rise and ecological fall of Easter Island under the impact of Polynesian projects. The work also conveniently documents many other examples, well-known to biohistorians, of ecological degradation or collapse, far from the influence of Western paradigms.40 An important example (much less speculative than some of the numerous other examples because of a comparative wealth of primary documentation) outlines the destruction of accessible Chinese ecosystems under Confucian dynasties. What several of these examples—Polynesian, Mayan, Sumerian and others—also reveal is that no very high level of technology is needed to inflict serious environmental damage; persistence in pursuit of an ideological project (with nothing directly to do with basic needs) will suffice. Other cultures did wreak, or would (given the technology and numbers, both of which While it is easy to imagine ineffectual or incompetent tribes which live benignly environmentally, by just muddling along, under even the worst of paradigms, that is not really to the point. A pertinent tribe needs to have developed the structure which leads to problems, to have the means, and so on. Ponting’s valuable/ though rather simple/ book is but one of several bleak texts. Another is Hillel’s, and there is a succession of earlier classic works by geographers: Lowdermilk, Dale, Mallory, Thorp and others. In general however, geographers and historian do not dig deep enough, to paradigmatic roots. /3 20 some were gaining) have wreaked similar damage. For instance, deforestation, salination, megafaunal elimination, and so on, were well established, and expanding, before (or effectively outside) the rise of modern Western paradigms, or in extensive regions outside their influence. 3. The list of paradigms, as so far assembled, is substantially Western in orientation. Moreover environmental woes are regularly ascribed to Western sources — wrongly. For non­ Western paradigms have led, or would lead given the opportunities (including access to the technologies), to outcomes as undesirable as under dominant Western paradigm. Witness again Confucianism, for instance, and its role and influence in Asian regions. Confucianism incorporates human chauvinism par excellence (as well as, some might say, Chinese chauvinism).41 Or consider Islam, with its reach across the Middle East and beyond. The main tabulation (of table 2) should accordingly be extended to take due account of non-Western paradigms, including for example: Other Abrahamic religions Islam Judaism Confucianism Shintoism Polynesianism, at least in advanced forms as on Easter Island. What is “Western” is tending to blur also. Is Judaism Western, how western, or Islam? There is also a tendency to suppose that more Western religions, Abrahamic religions, with their intense monotheism, are significantly ideologically worse than non-Westem. But the contrasts are different and much more complex than that. A better divide is into monistic and pluralistic. Even so, many undesirable social and environmental features are incorporated in, or encouraged by, religious pluralisms from the Indian subcontinent. 4. All the single paradigm answers are inadequate, all are too simple. Even so some are less inadequate than others. It is the same, more or less, for the combined answers, often to be encountered. For generally they represent but one thin cross-section of Western paradigms. While all the single one-source one-shot paradigmatic answers, occur on their own, often they are combined. For instance, although Descartes is often cited as a villain, more often criticism of Cartesianism is combined with criticism of other concurrent ideological elements, such as Baconian empiricism (less incompatibly, Drengson, for one, regularly combines criticism of the technocratic paradigm with criticism of Cartesianism—though Descartes, for all his rich and appalling thought, contributed little to the rise of technocratic organisation.) Similarly Hargrove combines Greek philosophy, as original source, with modern rationalism and much else. 5. A general method of showing the inadequacy of all the paradigmatic answers tabulated, and others, is familiar from logical theory: namely, the method of counter-models, of which the 41 Its net of effects extends widely. Consider, e.g., the role of Chinese medicine in decline of large fauna worldwide. 21 counter-examples (under head 2) provide special cases. A presently important illustration concerns patriarchy as a source of environmental woes. Counter-models reveal the substantial independence of mistreatment of women and mistreatment of environmental items such as animals or ecosystems. One the one hand, it is easy to envisage situations, not far from the actual in some regions, where the lot of women is significantly improved, but the lot of environmental items is not (e.g. men change their behaviour and attitudes relevantly as regards women, are forced to change, or whatever); just such an outcome would accord with persisting human chauvinism. More relevant, on the other, there are situations where the position of environmental items is much improved, for instance under much more careful husbandry, but that of women is not, for one reason or another (e.g. they remain other, different, second class, etc.). It follows from the elaboration of such counter-models that patriarchy is not the source of environmental problems, as there can be continuing patriarchy without the present range of environmental problems (problems can dry up while patriarchy continues to operate). There is no need to deny that patriarchy as (contingently) practised, with its sweeping supremacist attitudes which make no due distinctions between inferior items, may be a major contributing factor in present problems. Such slack contingent conjunctions do not convert to roots or sources. Similarly with other social roots of environmental problems, for instance with human domination of humans as^supposed source of all problems. 5. Towards a more satisfactory explanation. Not only are the paradigmatic roots seriously intertangled (because of connections of one paradigm with another, because for instance of heavy philosophical inputs into religious paradigms), but further there is not a single defective paradigm. Rather there is a family or sheaf of paradigms, commitment to any of which, or any suitable combination of which, in requisite circumstances, appears to have yielded environmentally untoward outcomes (requisite circumstances including availability of technology, extent of social support, and so on). Within that plurality there are of course gradations—and not only gradations but major differences—in calibre, in environmental friendliness. For example, Cartesianism which regards animals as mere automata incapable of feeling genuine pain, is significantly worse as regards other life­ forms and their decent treatment than a utilitarianism which positively values animal sentience. The family is not exclusively Western, nor somewhat more plausibly Northern, even though as a result of forces like migration, colonialism and cultural imperialism, paradigms of these sorts now predominate. Paradigms and cultures of less “advanced” and of third world communities have also operated to enhance environmental vandalism and degradation locally and regionally. Nor are major inflators of environmental problems essentially Western. Industrialization and technological advance—neither intrinsically Western, both manifested in varying degrees in other cultures—are, without much doubt, what have inflated environmental problems from rather localised ones, damaging for instance islands and river catchments, to grander and even global ones. They are the engines, powerhouses, of major problems, generating thereby spin­ 22 off problems as well. But, once again, they are not deeper sources, but only means. (For again push questioning deeper, and ask: why bother or persist with industry, the effort and dirt and mess involved?) Nor, however, did they run on their own, nor do they continue on their own. Such engines were not designed and built, fuelled and tended, independently.42 They evolved primarily in the specially favoured culture of capitalism, though parallel developments could have occurred, and later did, in other prepared and heavily controlled surroundings, such as state socialism or post-imperial Confucianism. Now however these engines have been rendered more reliable and less dependent on careful cultural support, and have been transformed to run in less favourable settings. Thus inflation can escalate from a multiplicity of prepared sources, thereby intensifying problems and spreading them to larger regions. The intensification and spread is much facilitated by the joint transfer of technology, industry and coupled problems from region to region. As a result of transfer, inflation can occur within settings of quite different paradigms. Even if the whole “West” went into a terminal decline, and its paradigms disappeared into history, serious environmental exploitation and degradation would continue, driven by other enthusiastic cultures. For instance, the West could in theory collapse through protracted war, through pollution and congestion, or climate change and agriculture failure (there are many unexcludible routes to catastrophic decline, outlined in “Limits to Growth” scenarios, that could differentially impact on the West). Degradation would now continue however; there would be only temporary respite from environmental crises. While most of the conspicuous problems, awfully aggregated in contemporary environmental crises, are accelerated by—what connects them—contemporary industrial society, not all environmental problems are or have been of this sort. However, too many of the other problems, such as destruction of rainforests by itinerant peasants, can be seen as by­ products or similar of the main generators. Thus, in the illustration, the peasants displaced by agribusiness or absentee wealth-holders, arrived there on industrially-made roads opening the forests, and often wrecked this damage using industrial machinery. An environmental friendly culture has to be much more critical concerning certain types of industrialization, and much more selective regarding technology than present dominant cultures, Western or non-Western. A friendly paradigm would not only ensure much more selectivity and care, but would sharply limit impacts of damaging technology and industrialization. While there are such paradigms, on the ideas market, they mostly lack Lacking favourable ideological settings, earlier technological “break throughs” were not duly developed: thus early wheels, steam engines, dyes, gunpowder, etc. Western cultures did not enjoy a monopoly upon technology powerful enough, when massed, to induce global crises. The picture of development of large-scale environmental problems being sketched bears superficial resemblance to that now tendered for development of the early Universe, where, to achieve presumed size, a source event, the Big Bang, was followed by huge inflationary phenomena. Naturally the resemblance has limitations; for instance, universe inflation is not terrestrially replicable in the way industrialization now is (hired or delivered off the shelf, pollution problems and all, with a big price tag). Ti sophisticated contemporary elaboration and they may be flawed in other respects. Examples of more friendly paradigms, that do not lead of themselves to massive environmental problems and crises conditions, include those now tabulated: TABLE 3: Examples, some flawed, of environmentally friendly paradigms. Oriental ideologies: Taoism (classical) recessive traditions, now with tiny followings and little political influence. Jainism Indigenous cultures: Australian Aboriginals (e.g. Aranda) Amazonian Indians. Western philosophies: under certain favourable interpretations old Stoicism new Deep-green theories, such as deep ecology. Given the remoteness of most of these examples from predominant contemporary life, and difficulties with their wide adaptability, it is a short step to a familiar conclusion that new paradigms need to be worked out soon. Much much more intellectual effort should be devoted to such enterprise. One upshot, then, is a rough classification of paradigms into two families, the second large: environmentally friendly, and unfriendly. No doubt there is a small fuzzy residue class43 lying between major unfriendly and friendly divisions. Environmental friendliness means more or less what it appear, to mean, what a functional break-down into components would yield: friendliness in approaches, practices and attitudes, to environments, especially more natural environments, with friendliness including, as usual, goodwill and kindliness towards (and substantially displaceable by these). As indicated, such friendliness concerns not merely actual practices, but also attitudes held, as reflected in what would be done in certain other sorts of situations. Certainly a culture that manifests unfriendliness, as a sweep of Northern cultures do, is unfriendly. But, as well, various “primitive” cultures, whose practices are not hostile, for example because they lack means or resources, energy or health, may nonetheless be unfriendly; for instance all members of a culture hold thoroughly negative attiudes which they are in fact unable to put into practice. It is not too difficult to explain in outline which paradigms will, if duly, diligently or religiously practiced, lead to environmental problems and impasse. In logical terms neither, perhaps as well as another residue class, both. Certain family 24 characteristics, of unfriendly paradigms are worth elaborating: * Direct untoward effects, illustrated through Cartesianism and Confucianism. More generally, direct impact is illustrated by any idea-system which attributes little or no value to natural items, and typically much value to nature transforming or interfering human (or elite) projects, and whose themes are linked to practice. So it is with Confucianism, which is entirely human focussed. ‘Centering his attention on man in his present life, Confucius had as his goal the achievement of a good society characterized by harmonious social relations.’44 The outside world, the natural environment, was of no moral significance. It mattered only instrumentally, to humans. Descartes went further. Human bodies too were automata, complex machinery. ‘The exception is [mind, or specifically] thought, and its external manifestation language: this alone cannot be explained mechanistically—a thesis which leads Descartes to assert a fundamental divide between human beings and “the beasts’”.45 The remaining world, the natural environment—lacking humanity, thought, mind—was again of no moral significance. It possessed derivatively only what value and meaning humans, or minds, chose to confer or project upon it, typically little or none. Since, either way, any way, a natural environment devoid of humans has no thoughts, purposes or interests, no value or meaning of its own, it could hardly matter what happens to it. It could be regarded and treated, justifiably, as nothing but a reservoir of resources for humans. Cartesians drew just such conclusions; similar conclusions derive, by one route or another from Platonism and Pentecostalism, and are implicit at least in Confucianism. Descartes again went further than some others. His practices and methods, like those of Bacon, were ‘aimed at making men the masters and possessors of nature’.46 Untowards effects result through linkage of ideological theory to heavy practice. Link principles, reminiscent of “correspondence rules” used in explaining applications of scientific theories and normally included in comprehensive paradigms, connect the theoretic level to practice, they also serve to activate otherwise inoperative or uncoupled paradigms. Such principles may take the form of directives; familiar examples include maximization directives, such as maximize personal fun, tribal utility, national interest, or state GNP. * Indirect combination effects, illustrated through Leibnitzianism. Any which yield satisfaction of all or enough elements of the consumption impact equation, and so would generate excessive impacts. To illustrate, consider what might be called Leibnitzianism, in honour of Leibnitz’s fragmentary ideology. Leibnitz was substantially committed to all of human population growth, unfettered technological advance, and human lifestyles of consumption,47 in short, to Reese p.102 For much more on the geographic impact of Confucianism, as also compared with other (Asian) paradigms, see Tuan’s investigations. Cottingham p.15. The utter invalidity of Descartes' argument (reported in Cottingham) to this divide is now comparatively easy to expose, given almost 400 years of hindsight. There are no such status divides—just as flamboyant forms of deep ecology maintain. See Descartes, Discourse VI. For requisite details, see Aiton. The case against Leibnitzianism is developed in a sequel. 25 precisely those factors that combine in the impact recipe to produce excessive human impacts upon environments. However neutral Leibnitz’s metaphysics, his monadology, may have been—by contrast with Plato’s or Descartes’, both of which explicitly devalued much or all of the natural world—Leibnitz’s wider ideology is linked indirectly, through impact equations, to damaging effects. Some imagine that this oblique formalistic detailing, through direct and indirect classes, can be simply cut through, retaining plurality and so forth. Surely environmental friendliness is nothing but environmental depth? While the suggestion points in the right sort of direction (for the relevant sort of depth) it too is astray.48 Depth is neither necessary nor sufficient. Take the move plausible sufficiency half, plausible because depth helps, no end. Nonetheless depth can be achieved in macho ways (as ecofeminism has emphasized against deep ecology), ways which may not be altogether friendly to less favoured species, groups or habitats. For example, depth can be satisfied through due selection and support of some super species and magnificent habitats—requisite environmental impartiality (and reflected justice), critical for friendliness as intended, being neglected.49 Still less in depth necessary. For kindliness can, both in principle and in practice, extend far beyond humans, still ranked top, to much more of “creation”. Such extensive kindliness, observed in some humanistic humans, appears to be exhibited in some sects and tribes not committed to depth, and it could well be considerably more widespread, under changed but not deepened ideological conditions. Naturally, however, deepening would afford an obvious, and excellent, reason for change. As friendliness is not tantamount to depth, nor similarly is a prime part of what explains depth, recognition of intrinsic value in nature outside humans. Some animal liberationists who display high regard for creatures with capacity to suffer, show little goodwill towards forests largely unpopulated by such creatures. Conversely, though shifting ground, an environmentally friendly society may hold that value is but an anthropocentric construct, merely projected onto a basically neutral world. All the same, aspects of depth are normally reliable indicators of environmental sensitivity and friendliness, and inversely, aspects of shallowness (as investigated in authentic deep ecology) marks of unfriendliness. Shallowness will work out satisfactorily environmentally only with what is now rare (given ideological dominance), a right mix of humans; and its any longer working widely is implausible. These reliable marks include such familiar features as * short-term framework. * devaluation of natural items as against human elements or artefacts (typically exhibiting As to the relevant sort of depth, see GE. Other accounts of depth are also preferred in deep ecology, some of which relate to the present exercise. In particular deep questioning should lead to paradigmatic roots, to Naess’s “total views”. Herein lies another reason why something like biospecies egalitarianism is essential in deep ecology; such a requirement needs, not dilution away (as has happened in American and transpersonal deep ecology), but rectification. 26 human chauvinism); and, as a corollary of heavy devaluation, * entitlement to domination, dominion over nature; * appropriation of nature, its conversion to property. * maximization assumptions concerning personal or societal aggrandizement, utility and size, coupled with grand projects. * technofix approach to environmental problems. Friendly paradigms will tend to invert these features. An environmentally friendly paradigm can be expected to yield environmentally significant corollaries, such as the following samples: * an end to degrading primary production; instead ecological forestry and ecological agriculture will come to prevail. * a strong selectivity regarding industrialization, which weeds out damaging forms. * a calling off of grand ideologically-grounded projects, interfering with or damaging natural environments, such as major dams, river diversions, demolished islands (e.g. for airports), new mountains, terraforming, extensive rainmaking, climatic interference, and generally the sweep of “playing God” projects. A little of this sort of unfriendly technology can go a very long way. As unfriendly paradigms are decidedly plural, so likewise are answers to questions as to why agents adhere, or continue to adhere, to environmentally unfriendly paradigms. Some of the diverse answers match answers already encountered in the main tabulation. Reasons are psychological, social and cultural (with a familiar circularity here encountered), and include considerations of the following sorts and others: because that is how things are done, or have always been done; because needs can be met, perhaps only met, in that way, so it is believed; because there are no alternatives, or none seen, perhaps because none have been sought; because negative outcomes can be overcome, or do not really matter; and so on. A short answer can now be ventured to the focal questions: Because, in one way or another, most agents are bound to—locked into, committed to, captured by, or just passively go along with—environmentally unfriendly paradigms. As a result the (long-term) health of the rest of environments does not matter, or matter enough. 6. Glimpsing an entertaining corollary: an unfavourable report upon dominant philosophy. It will hardly have escaped notice that virtually all dominant philosophical roads lead to Rome, to environmentally unfriendly paradigms. Stripped of metaphor, there are environmental conditions of adequacy, which most philosophical systems fail to meet. In an environmentally friendly new world, most philosophy that is remembered, indeed most of the humanities, is destined for scrapping. Prevailing philosophy is a serious impediment to satisfactory environmental outcomes. Predominant philosophy, not just Western philosophy, has by and large been bad environmental news. It may be insisted that philosophy can make no difference, for instance to environmental practice. It is not an expression of basic needs, or of any such practical matters. Exceptions to 27 such practical bravado have however to be recognised almost immediately; philosophy soon enters for organizational, justificatory and explanatory ends. That concession still grossly under-estimates the extent to which ideas, and more generally paradigms, influence and even govern action and practice, especially reflective and rational action. The substantial point is not therefore removed through any alleged practical impotence of philosophy. Mainstream philosophy has supplied, or mightily assisted in supplying, dominant unfriendly paradigms under which environments labour. Of course not everything has to be trashed, as even defective enterprises or evil projects may include decent part or worthwhile features; much can be salvaged, arguments, subtheories and so on (and with intellectual tipping there need be little material waste). Nor therefore is it as if an entirely fresh start has to be made. As well as salvaged bits and pieces (which need to be carefully tested for soundness), there are brash new alternatives such as authentic deep ecology, and there are recessive paradigms and neglected traditions to peruse for suggestions, for inspiration, and perhaps to rehabilitate. Richard Sylvan* APPENDIX. On Shepard’s approach to focal questions. A remarkably sustained investigation of the focal questions is found in Shepard’s intriguing books. In his Nature and Madness, he considers and quickly dismisses many of the stock responses to focal questions suggested by contemporary luminaries (or by himself in earlier work), such as lack of information, faulty technique, insensibility, greed, political inertia, change to agriculture and settlement,50... . He would (and should, for his eliminative argument) have also dismissed industrialization, state and corporate control, and so on. More disconcertingly, for present purposes, Shepard claims that ‘a history of ideas’— similarly no doubt a story of paradigms—will not serve; for it ‘is not enough to explain human behaviour’ (p.3), it ‘seems too easy and academic’ (p.3), itself an easy and superficial criticism. But if, for instance, the ‘dictum that nature should serve man’ and ‘insistence that animals feel no pain’ should become widely entrenched, then they may well impact heavily on practice, as accordingly appears to be the case. His slight further argument appears to miss the intended target: ‘The meticulous analysis of these philosophies and the discovery that they articulate an ethos beg the question’ (p.3). How, it can reasonably be inquired? What is offered is but the An earlier, even rougher version of this article was presented at the Environmental Paradigms Conference, University of New England, Armidale, April 1993. It would not have been written without its solicitation for the Conference; also it might well not been thought through in fashionable but confining and perhaps misleading paradigmatic terms. A subsequent working draft has benefitted, slightly, from comments from very unimpressed reviewers. Thanks certainly to Holmes Rolston for helpful comments. No doubt a popular picture of human social changes with agriculture and settlement zs simplistic: that before societies lived in harmony, afterwards they did not. But it is also too simple to go on to claim, as Shepard does, that ‘the economic and material demands of growing villages and towns are ... not causes but results of this change’ (p.3). Some demands appear to derive from factors, such as population pressures, which were among causes of the changes. 28 facile, false, ‘ideas are impotent’ consideration, fostered by thinking and operating in terms of causes (e.g. lower p.3), rather than reasons and (rational) explanation, and encouraged through an attempted move to (what is explanatorily inadequate) pure behaviour. For a simple example of the familiar explanatory roles of ideas and paradigms, consider an alternative explanation through them. The admittedly bizarre (“crazy”) ‘turning everything into something man-made and [or] man-used’ (p.5) is readily explained through dominant paradigms: that is the way it acquires value, otherwise it is worthless. There is no need at all for psychopathology here. Correspondingly Shepard briefly reviews and rejects several of the very partial, and often hopeless, solutions suggested under stock responses to focal questions such as making information, or better information, more widely available, bringing people from all walks of like together, encouraging conviviality, hitting problems with smart technology, practicing conservation, and so on. Shepard’s own resolution is more readily reached from a further (meta-focal) question that he proceeds to ask: why do humans persist in degrading their habitats once sources and solutions are made transparent? He effectively argues by elimination: other sources (read as causes) do not succeed in providing an answer; but ‘the idea of a sick society’ (which he leaps to, without argument, p.4) does. Wrong on both counts: On the first because a non-causal explanation in terms of ideological wiring can provide answers (listen to politicians, representative of the people, again, just a little time). On the second because some industrial societies are not sick in a normal sense (though some may be), rather sickness has to be so redefined (such low redefinitions are among underlying subplots51) that having certain ideological commitments that are carried into practice counts as “sickness”. So it is that Shepard arrives at his theme of ‘general, culturally-ratified distortions of childhood, of massive disablement of ontogeny as the basis of irrational and self-destructive attitudes towards the natural environment’ (p.ix). Succinctly, ‘there are profound psychic dislocations at the root of modern society’ (p.xii). Psychic disorders have evolved: ‘over the centuries major institutions and metaphysics might finally celebrate attitudes and ideas originating in the normal context of immaturity [or]... adolescence ...’ (p. 15). Having glided easily and invalidly to the idea of sick societies, in a mere three pages, Shepard proceeds to diagnose in more detail the nature of th'e alleged sickness.52 It supposedly arises, like other psychopathy with which it is immediately associated, in infancy, and is manifest in life-long immaturity, with whole societies stuck in a kind of destructive adolescence. No doubt there is something to some of what Shepard describes in child and For trickery through redefinition of sickness and madness, Wisdom has already prepared us. Observe that Shepard’s redefinition of sickness to include sick (i.e. debasing and devaluing) practices with regard to natural habitats (and conjoined therewith, to, older people) does not leave no contrast classes. For there remain benign ‘relic tribal’ societies, such as the Manus, Crow and Comanche, Aranda and !Kung San (p.xii), ‘people who feel themselves to be guests rather than masters' (p.6 empasis added)—an elegant analogy. ‘The idea of a sick society’, which as Shepard confesses (on p.4) is hardly new, is reached on the third page of the main text. 29 person development (not the ‘private demons’ and so on) or might well have described. There is evidently, conspicuously in “new world” societies, wide commitment to a shallow juvenile culture, adulation or imitation of immature media and sport models and flawed authority figures, marginalization of the elderly, and so on, coupled with hyper-activity, violence and vandalism. But, like political commitment to extensive economic activity, this is hardly satisfactorily accounted for through psychopathological reduction, concentrating the whole social problematic in the ontogeny of individuals.53 A superior explanation to widespread individual psychic disorder proceeds through ideological commitment, that industrial humans are raised and educated in, inducted into and committed to, defective ideologies, without coming to know or properly experience alternatives. The ‘portraits of maturity’ alluded to likewise appear individualistic and culture-bound, resembling those of deep ecology, directed at embroidery of person and self, through personal growth and identity, wider identification and relatedness, self-realization.54 They are not exactly those of older and ecologically wiser societies. They do not reveal ecologically mature mixed communities. Furthermore, comparisons with relic tribal societies, which are important, can be decoupled from psychopathological analysis and reduction. Different lifeways, commitments and ideologies, are what they are and do not all reduce to matters of mental health. Undoubtedly we can learn of and from these different societies. We can still witness ‘small- group, leisured, foraging life-ways with[in] natural surroundings. ... there is the rub—... for us, now, that world no longer exists’ (p. 14 rearranged). Nor is it really true that such a world is no longer accessible to most of us; more leisured small-group ways can be retrieved, some natural surrounding can even now be restored. In a curious fashion, Shepard has managed to invert likely causal relations. While a certain interaction can no doubt be conceded, it is not so much human ill-health that is leading to environmental degradation, but rather environmental degradation, generally brought about for other reasons, that is increasingly leading to human ill-health, and in the longer term causing erosion of life-support systems. REFERENCES E.J. Aiton, Leibnitz A Biography, Adam Hilger, Bristol, 1985. 53 54 A psychopathic reduction is in part made plausible by reexpression in medical or psychological terms of what would better be otherwise expressed. Consider, for instance the language of the following clever paragraph, which infiltrates much with no argument: ‘The person himself is, of course, caught between his inner calendar and the surgeries of ' society. 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Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1967. R. Goodin, ‘Selling environmental indulgences’, Kyklos 47(1994) 573-596. N. R. Hanson, Patterns of discovery: an inquiry into conceptual foundations of science, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1958. E. C. Hargrove, Foundations of Environmental Ethics, Prentice Hall, N.J., 1989. D Hillel, Out of the Earth: Civilization and the Life of the Soil., Free Press, Macmillan, 1991. M. Jacobs, The Green Economy, Pluto, London, 1991. K. Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of political economy, Harmondsworth, England 1973. F. Mathews, The Ecological Self, Routledge, London, 1991. A. McLaughlin, Regarding Nature: Industrialism and Deep Ecology , SUNY Press, Albany N. Y., 1993. P. Marshall, Nature’s Web, in two editions, Simon and Schuster, 1992 and 1993. A. Naess and D. Rothenberg, Ecology, community and Lifestyle, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989. J. Passmore, Man’s Responsibility for Nature, Duckworth, London, 1974. D. Pearce and others, Blueprint for a Green Economy, Earthscan Publications, London, 1989. D. Pepper, The Roots of Modern Environmentalism, Ed: Tom Colveson London; Dover N.H. Croom Helm 1984. V. Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, Routledge, London, 1993. C. Ponting, A Green History of the World, Sinclair-Stevenson, London, 1991. 31 R. Routley, ‘Roles and limits of paradigms in environmental thought and action’, Discussion papers in environmental philosophy #1, RSSS, Australian National University, 1982; also, modified, in Environmental Philosophy (ed. R. Elliot and A. Gare), University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1983; referred to as RP. C. O. Sauer, Agricultural Origins and Dispersal, American Geographical Society, New York, 1952. P. Singer, Practical Ethics, expanded edition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993. P. Shepard, Nature and Madness, Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, 1982. R. Sylvan and D. Bennett, The Greening of Ethics, White Horse Press, Cambridge, 1994; referred to as GE. R. Sylvan with D. Bennett, Of Utopias, Tao and Deep Ecology, Green Series #19, RSSS Australian National University, 1990; referred to as UTD. The Wildlands Project, World Earth, special issue, Canton NY, 1993. Y.F. Tuan, ‘Discrepancies between environmental attitude and behaviour: examples from Europe and China’, The Canadian Geographer 12(1968) 176-91. S. Toulmin, The Return to Cosmology, University of California, Berkeley, 1982. L. White Jr., ‘Historic roots of our ecologic crisis’, Science 155(1967) 1203-7. J. Wisdom, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, Blackwell, Oxford, 1953. M. Zimmerman and others (eds.), Environmental Philosophy, Prentice Hall, N.J., 1993; referred to as EP3.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Box 15, item 1031: Paradigmatic roots on environmental problems Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Sylvan&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Sylvan</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. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995-05-29. 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> Subject The topic of the resource Typescript dated 29.5.95. With handwritten emendations. Description An account of the resource Title in collection finding aid: RS: Paradigmatic Roots of Environmental Problems. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 15, item 1031 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource [31] leaves. 33.04 MB. 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Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Lake George - Desk Pile 1: Theories for Everything Box 15: Green Projects in Progress Lake George House Lake George House > Desk Pile 1: Theories for Everything https://www.antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/f6748caa77d394f98064c95f59219565.pdf fdad19b4223a20f4ae583cb194a94be7 PDF Text Text �^_/^L z ^-^7 7 /(L^y 7^4 y v^€ , - % /%^r^7rW /^//; ' z/7<<^ </V^p /J i c ^y /^-? r^C " /^, t 7<-t^v q. �/7 /7 X r 7;^ _ -y <Pr ^/? ^/(jL/?1^ ^,yy- ^ i ?3- / I /*/^v 5 ^^/<* ^7 Z^7Y^ —- Z^? �The following has been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. Annotated cutting (photocopy) of two pages from Sears PB (1965) 'Utopia and the living landscape', Daedalus, 94:474–486. (1 leaf) �Z^7b r. �, x^L. BEHIND LEFT AND RIGHT: ENVIRONMENTAL ANARCHISM. There are forms of anarchism which represent a new political ^dimension outside the lineal left-right classification. Of course these forms of anarchism have features in common with rightist positions (forms of capitalism and "free" enterprise) and with of leftist positions (formsXsocialism and communism) and currently with both. But they reject crucial features of both, and, more to the point, assumptions upon which the classification of the conventional right-left political spectrum is based.These are assumptions of central control of a state, of control of the means of production (on the one side by private individuals and on the other side by the people or a committee supposedly representing them), of ownership of property (privately versus publicly) , and overarching all these the familiar assumptions of human chauvinism (e.g. those discussed in [1], such as that all of value resides in humankind or answers back to human interests). There are forms of anarchism - especially environmental anarchisms, the working out of the character of which is one of the main objectives - which reject, or importantly qualify, all these assumptions. There has been a concerted, but intellectually fradulent, attempt by statements of both right and left to absorb anarchism as theirs. For example, Nozick [2] and others to the right try to represent anarchism as fitting into their libertarian scheme. Nozick (in his final chapter) outlines a framework for utopias, a generous framework which would include most anarchist options; but 1 As might be expected the right-left classification is not a single thing, but a bundle of different, and not mutually consistent, classifications. In the sense in which 'right' means 'conservative for example, in contrast to 'left' as 'non-conservative', the dichotomy is exhaustive, but then the distinction is a different one from that under discussion and attack. The origin of the classification would hardly lead one to anticipate completeness. The members of continental parliaments who sat on the right or the left hardly exhausted the range of political positions, especially those in opposition to such a centralised state mechanism of cont.. �1.1 control and concentration of power. In the end the right­ left 'distinction' is to be left behind: it is only some­ thing to hang an introduction on. From a philosophical viewpoint there is hardly a more interesting word in English than 'right' with 24 headings in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, several of major philosophical importance, and by no means all of the senses there are untangled. �2. he goes on, without any discernible argument,to claim - what certainly seems false that the framework for utopias is nothing but his minimal state. Both this minimal state and the arguments for it are, however, decidedly objectionable at least from anarchist viewpoints not to the right, in particular which reject the propertarians or chauvinistic assumptions slipped into the bottom of Nozick's position. (The criticism of Nozick is so far no more than a set of memos: it will have to be spelled out.) The attempted take-over bid by the left is sometimes if anything, even cruder. Consider, for example, Guerin's argument from meaning for his inclusion thesis that every anarchist is a ([1], p.12). socialist It is this:- Anarchism is really a synonym for socialism. The anarchist is primarly a socialist whose aim is to abolish the exploitation of man by man. Anarchism is only one of the streams of socialist thought, that stream whose main components are concern for liberty and haste to abolish the State. This is inconsistent: for if anarchism is really a synonym for then anarchism is no sub-variety of socialism, socialism,/but identical with it. In fact the terms are far from synonymous, as perusal of a better dictionary would have revealed, and neither includes the other in meaning: that is all. there is overlap, and An environmental anarchist's aims extend further than abolishing the exploitation of man by man, it also includes ending the exploitation of other things, natural items by man. in particular, This is, of course, by not the only respect in which anarchism may differ from socialism; for it may well reject the collectiv-istassumptions of socialism, the public ownership of all the means of productions, etc. Guerin not only relies on the synonymy claim but goes so far as to say that 'today the terms "anarchist" and "libertarian" have become interchangeable'. By transitivity then, "libertarian" and "socialist" are interchangeable so Nozick, also is a libertarian, is a socialist: this would come �as a surprise to Nozick. Chomsky's argument that the consistent anarchist is a socialist (in his Introduction to [1], p.XO) is more elaborate and devious but equally invalid. Chomsky's moves begin with several appeals to authority, to the anarchist historian Rocker (first introduced as an anarchist, and then as a socialist), to Fischer (who simply asserted a version of the thesis in need of defence) and to Bakunin (who simply laid down the principle that each member must be, to begin with, a socialist' in his "anarchist manifesto",something which only reflects Bakunin's narrowness, that he was only prepared to admit certain approved types of anarchists to his projected revolutionary fraternity. The appeal to authority can be no better than the arguments of the authority, and unfortunately for Chomsky the remaining authority, Rocker, does not deliver the arguments. himself to modern For a start he restricts anarchism, thereby excluding such counter­ examples to the inclusion thesis as Thoreau. Secondly Rocker's argument from the 'realities of capitalist economic forms' and the resulting 'exploitation of man by man' does not show that 'anarchism is necessarily anti-capitalist', but only that it is opposed to the tried forms of large-scale capitalism. Small-scale capitalism, for example with appropriate technology, is not ruled out thereby; and nor are anarchist's who would incorporate such features into their theory. Thirdly, Rocker simply assumes in his view that modern anarchism is the confluence of socialism and liberalism, that it must be one or the other (it is not the one he thinks, so by Disjunctive Syllogism, it must be the other): but the dichotomy is a false one, as we have already seen. �Chomsky's direct argument for his qualified**" inclusion thesis begins thus: Any consistent anarchist must oppose private ownership of the means of production and the wage-slavery which is a component of this system, as incompatible with the principle that labor must be freely undertaken and under the control of the producer (p.xiii). Libertarian anarchists would deny this. 'The means of production' is ambiguous as between 'some means (or methods) of production; and 'all means of production'. 1 Need we wonder what becomes of the inconsistent anarchist? �The following have been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. 1. Letter, Fred to Richard Sylvan re: Interested in draft paper ‘Behind left and right’ by Sylvan. (1 leaf) 2. Photocopy of eight pages from Moore B (1972) Reflections on the causes of human misery and upon certain proposals to eliminate them, Allen Lane. (4 leaves) ����The following have been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. 1. Annotated photocopy of four pages from Russell B (1935) In praise of idleness and other essays, Allen & Unwin. (2 leaves) 2. Annotated photocopy of two pages from unidentified publication. (1 leaf) �lf)f)%Racvch^ paper �^7 ^C o/)/^ /**7f c J /7 c v;/ < C^4A Xc^< , / /%pT-/ 3/- C^"!G ^CX^-y y / (/ . �BOOK NUMBER? J / / f 7/^" AUTHOR (BLOCK - LETTERS) TITLE DATE DUE /b^/7?rx 4^/ Z) / f 77 JNAME ) / /o X* U ' & W^EPT^-) K5LOCK— l&tTERS) 7^^ ToP^ONE NUMBER IF YOU WISH DETELS OF THIS LOAN TO REMAINJ3ONFIDENTIAL. PLEASElNITiAL SPACE BELOW DATE SIGNATURE 228 81 ��The following has been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. Photocopy of four pages from unidentified publication. (2 leaves) ��The following has been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. Annotated photocopy of two pages from unidentified publication by Hobbes? (1 leaf) �/ cases. . themselves. BIEDENKOPF IGNORED Although the symposium was entitled Multinationals in Muller (American University, Washington D.C.) had thrown few heretical thoughts into the discussion - but they were ignored. on trust bevond question", said Biedenkopf, "that in the new economic order? which is characterized above all by confrontation ^tween industrial ^ates^an^_^ey^^^„ countries, the role of private prope^ y <ri ^i-,a T-d^rivitv of the concept of property Biedenkopf compared the relati y German industry, with that of patent Paction. As long a=,ue in the last century, lagged J?^fa Q^y ^hen German consistently against paten j_ ^<g Bismarck became an industry had caught up with England s, advocate of patent protection. Biedenkopf said that claims to ^gyg^iimited in time; than patent claims, since P^^^J^^tess "Should the holdi^g^of^private ^stments in developing countries^not^ allow the most important industrial and be in foreign hands. �WHAT IS THE " BERNE DECLARATION " "Berne Declaration": development policy. theologians. original name of a manifesto on Swiss Published in 1968 on the initiative of some The Declaration was signed by over 10,000 persons, who thus made a financial and political commitment (e.g. to giving up 1-3%'oftheir income to development aid for three years). An organisation sprung from it which combines information on the relationship between Switzerland and the Third World with social and political action: e.g. coffee campaign, meat renunciation campaign, evaluation of school materials and children's books, campaign against arms exports, etc. No fund raising for projects abroad, financially independent and not linked to any political party. Membership: Over 10,000 signatories of the original Declaration, including about 1,200 members of the Association "For Development in Solidarity". For further reading on this topic we recommend: Richard J. Barnet and Ronald E. Muller. Global Reach: The Power of the Multinational Corporations Published by Simon & Schuster, New York 1974 (US$ 11.95) �The following have been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. 1. Annotated photocopy of two pages from unidentified publication. (1 leaf) 2. Letter, [?], Philosophy Department, University of Queensland to Richard, 2 Jul 1993 re update on review of the Word Society and Kaldor tax. (1 leaf) �,, Democracy within ANARCHY, and ' .--7 '^;' '2 DEMANARCHY Present electoral arrangements offer what? What presently have is a competative game between competating blocks of the ruling elite (with professional power-brokers who trade with each other their patronage and cites/br the acclaimed right to govern. Thus elections hardly represent a genuine expression of agreement by the populace to be governed; rather they are occasions when the populace is duped into supporting one or other elite team. For the most part power is concentrated in organisations which are not elected not controlled by the people effected by their contractions and not representative. By and large, satisfactory democratic arrangements will not be participatory (see Burnheim). are valuable for limited purposes, viz. as/a// . satisfactory in general (p.91). There is no need to dissent. B argues that they are not 1. Encourage those without interest in, or not genuinely affected by issue not to vote. 2. only structural, not material issu^to refs. Certainly not material moral issues, for instance, not capital punishment, not abortion. has the wrong etymology and the wrong meaning for anarchist purposes. It the office of a demarch [a president, chief magistrate, major or govemnorj; a popular government. The municipal body of a modem Greek commune' (OED). Anarchism recognises no chiefs or leaders, even democratic ones or demogogues. What can be done very simply, however, is to enlarge the word by a simple important syllable 'an', giving ��The following has been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. Flyer, Australian National University Centre for Resource and Environment Studies Seminar, Resource development dilemmas in Indochina by Dr Philip Hirsh, 24 Oct 1991. With handwritten annotations. (1 leaf) ��/ ��/r< f 7^ .1. . �Z —z ��/- .// ^ y �ism? I take ; ___ Why does democracy entai 1 anarchy and social The democracy to be government of the people by the people. not is It 'Which people are we talking about?", question is: democratic, I presume, for the people of Sydney to be deciding 'minding whether or not Melbourne has trams. They would not be I assume their own business" as we say. So for these reasons by affected that the people are those people who are primarily perhaps the decision. OK, -some are affected more than others and by an?/ everyone is affected a little bit, albeit unnoticeably, or if you like So that"s why I say 'primarily' decision, There will be difficulty in many cases in knowing 'mostly". the someone is affected sufficently to get into whether By and electorate, but we needn"t get too up tight about that. large people will be the best judge of that themselves. Now if society operated in some such way, there could be no laws in the common sense of 'law". For a law is a decision to the effect that everyone of a certain type will be constrained to behave in a certain fashion. But the people who are primarily affected by the people of that type being constrained in that way will vary from time to time, so that, in a democracy, such a law could be deemed to be operative only for as long as the people primarily affected by it (a) remained the same and (b) had no wish to change their behaviour - and that, for anything a lawyer would call a law would be to all intents and purposes no time! at Dead all. Hence the truly democratic society will be lawless, people are no longer affected by social decisions they helped to make. So any such social decisions must be remade by the new electorate. / y / / k< i - Similarly, democracy entails socialism, where by socialism I mean the public control of the means of production, distribution Producing, distributing and exchanging are all and exchange. acts, which, if made democratically, are made publicly - by those Those members of the public that are primarily affected. primarily affected will be those who are required to do the work, those who receive the goods or services produced, and those who e.g. suffer the negative effects of the industrial decision, deprivation of wealth or income, unemployment or pollution. Democracy does not entail optimum freedom, if that means optimum satisfaction. However, on the assumption that people will want to maximise their satisfaction, they should prefer optimally satisfying decision procedures in the democratic decision making processes. Given that they are rational in this regard, they will therefore opt for rational conflict resolution procedures rather than merely counting heads, hands or ballot papers. I take it that you don"t need counterexamples to show the invalidity of arguing from anarchy or socialism to democracy. v < A ���/y . y—,4< ^y*^7T2^V-- ------------ /,^/-'- LZ 'j?<. ^j // t < 7 0 4^? J - A*-^ 4 �x �The following has been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. Cutting (two pages) from a Griffith University National Institute for Law, Ethics and Public Affairs publication. Article 'The church in a liberal society' has handwritten annotations. (1 leaf) ��The following has been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. Annotated photocopy of six pages from MacIntyre A (1988) Whose justice? Which rationality?, Notre Dame. (3 leaves) ���7 7< / ,'^j^t ^C C *"<? \7 . t? , r c 4^*7- *= 7^t 7^ �There is matxangx nothing per se about pluralist societies XXXXX , jM&eg multi-cultural w egalitarian. ��The following has been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. Annotated photocopy of two pages from unidentified publication. (1 leaf) �GJ CD GJ GJ CO GJ 00 "j CD cn GJ 4^. GJ GJ GJ C<3 �? ���7^ CHARACTERISING ANARCHISM: reaching the core of anarchism ��c/ ��3^/ ^16^1222^ € Vh /o //!>? oc/^^ ^^dvv/^y/? ^(L y^y z^A </^A ) , A^*^* / r/y^ ^c-A^ /<^-< 7*^ r^v^A /J /V —t. —^L—7 (. C 4^ ��z^%e y^/$ '/Z^py- <^< c^/7^.y y^^jf VL^^4 t/^-^*4Z^Z <-{w7^>y^, z^Z , —r r �/2. ^4 4^v c^4 \.y 7 /^- 44 .^. ^t/, 4 ^ j , ,4-. 4^47 - ; - 4^ ( y <4-^-^ �^7^ ��The following has been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. Annotated cutting (photocopy) of New Scientist (15 July 1999) 'Let them eat yellowcake', New Scientist, 123(1673):3. (1 leaf) ���The following have been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. 1. Annotated photocopy of two pages from unidentified publication. (1 leaf) 2. Annotated cutting (photocopy) of Jacobs, M (August 1989) 'Green blues in Europe', Australian Society, 32-33. (2 leaves) ��i^y ' j^4 -S^T ^= '/C 3TT$h L^C / <c ��............ 1 ""' ' BOOK NUMBER M \n AUTHOR ^ETTERS) J. TITLE^S> t/ y! / /7 /L ?yv/ / NAME ! DEPT. (BLOCK LETTERS) ------------------------------- PHONE NUMBER IF YOU WISH DETAILS OF THIS LOAN TO REMAIN CONFIDENTIAL. PLEASE INITIAL SPACE BELOW. CP-228-81 GTO ... - ---- ! DATE DUE DATE/^O 4p ' ------------------------ �The present situation can be summarised in terms of certainties and uncertainties. The certainties are: There are limits to the absorptive capacity (of technological waste products and toxic substances), resilience, and adaptability of biological systems - a principle which applies as much to the biosphere as a whole as it does to local ecosystems and to individual organisms. 1. ,______________________rin 2. The present pattern of increasing per capita resources, discharge of technological wastes and use of J__ 2.3 is ecologically unsustainable: energy in human ___ society if it is 1not -- brought under control through' deliberate -- as — a societal action, it will come to an end either consequence of depletion of mineral resources or, more nf seriously, as the result of irreversible damage to the biosphere caused by technological waste products. The uncertainties are: 1 How much longer the biosphere can continue to P^^ * suitable habitat tor humanity given the present pattern of industrial productivity. Which particular culturally-induced environmental changes 2. represent the greatest threat to the integrity o the biosphere. Which cultural phenomena are the most critical m causing undesirable change in the biosphere . 3. t For example, social goals, patterns of investment, favoured technologies, modes of decision-making, loci of power J �use of machines powered by extrasomatic energy (e.g. fossil fuels). As a consequence of these developments, the ecological impact of the human species (as expressed in terms of energy use) is now about 15,000 times greater than it was at the time of the domestic transition. 98 percent of this increase has occurred since 1800 AD, and 80 percent in the last 50 years. It is certain that the biosphere, as a dynamic system capable of supporting the human species, will not be able to tolerate this continuing intensification of technometabolism (i.e. use of energy and resources and discharge of technological wastes by the human population) indefinitely. . * . -t ecologically sustainable. * Phase Four human society is not �/^e^/ dyx-^7 '' ' If humans are to continue to exist in the biosphere, they must devise a nee societal system (or systems) , such that their needs can be satisfied with a more modest rate of resource and energy use than that which at present prevails in the high-energy societies. Certain essential characteristics, or biosocral imperatives of ^t^-new societal system are clear . . rhe additional ecological load now imposed on the biosphere by human society is, in energy terms, equivalent to about 5 percent of the total ecological load imposed by all other animals and plants put together. If the technometabolism of human society as a whole continues to intensify at the same rate as it has over the past 20 years, by the year 2100 human beings will be using as much energy, and consequently having as much impact on the biosphere, as all other existing forms of life. In fact, it is highly unlikely that the biosphere would be able to tolerate this eventuality. Moreover, many authors are of the opinion that the biosphere would not be able to withstand an intensification of technometabolism in the developing countries of the world such that it reached the present level of intensity characteristic of the modern high-energy societies^-J:t^t^is, 5 times the present global level of technometabolism)Indeed,-^ 7^533= *=^ady mentionetA i is clear that the biosphere will not be able to tolerate indefinitely even the present pattern of technometabolism. �Four important biosocial imperatives can be stated as follows: * 1. The si2e of the Auman population must be stable. 2. The overall rate of resource and energy use and of technological waste production by society fi.e. the intensity of technometabolism? must be steady for decreasing?. This rate must be considerably lower than that characteristic of the high-energy societies at the present time. 3. The organisation of society and the economic system must be such that human health, well-being and enjoyment of life do not depend on continually increasing per capita use of resources and energy and production of technological wastes. 4. The organisation of society and the economic system must be such that high rates of employment* are not dependent on increasing consumption of the products of resource—intensive anc? ener^ry-in tensive industry. distribution of natural resources, should be an essential aim of society at both regional and global levels. Moreover, it is also assumed that all societal activities that threaten the integrity of the biosphere must cease — including the manufacture, storage and deployment of nuclear weapons. It is self-evident that these biosocial imperatives raise some important questions about the future of human society. The FQP is based on the view that consideration of these questions is an urgent matter, and that serious thought should now be given to the design of a new society which, for an indefinite period, satisfies the health and well-being needs both of the biosphere^- * ** The actual size of this sustainable stable population will depend on its pattern of resource and energy use. The higher the intensity of technometabolism, the smaller the sustainable human population. For the purposes of this Program, 25 percent of the present per capita intensity of technometabolism in the high-energy societies will be taken initially as a reasonable societal objective. *** The word employment is used here in a broad sense to include all direct or indirect subsistence activities that are associated with a sense of personal involvement and purpose. (Indirect subsistence activities are those which are aimed at providing subsistence but which do not involve the direct acquisition of food from its place of origin. Working for wages with which to procure food and shelter is thus an indirect subsistence activity). ��7^^/ y^y)^7 ... <4- r^\. ( /\^^<&I-. '^_A-/ Xy C 7^t< /y //? ' <^* ^7^--- ' <^- / ! <? Ty. v ^L_—, y �ro t ��r"—'——*-- - - si- /- .- s.y / / ' / ��.. /J /4 CJ / / r W^ /2^ ���^7 7^-?^? (/ <-O-« 7-7 ^*-r /*r--^ "vnK^ �*—< ^c <^^7 / ! /^?//^ f /^^-/$' i ^/(/YL^7 r^ y^c^ Z^ z-r y<rt-^ 4-/^^ %f /J A. Z^% t/^?z/^<- y tr y^ /^t/ - <,^/' y, 4, ,y',^ ^./ , V *" .,t^r^^, y^, / ^/..^y, y y y .7,^.4^, " /<^^y , - y^< 6 ? y "^y y —y^* �/ 7 7^ 0 Y W^ -^C—< Z^^tz/Ly y4 4^' %- \ ! �\Jk^ ,- <L^r2^)(_ / /e\ f ^Q^? T^VL^ C) /%^//^^ -/ 2 /t y* - T <* z* - y /*_ A �/< ^n/ cs < J y$i^?*^ *Xc y^ / '-Zj7 , ./ c^-y 7^7 A ^//<^ ^-y ^X 4-^4 / J <a — " <*' *" ' ' ' # �The following has been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. Annotated photocopy of six pages from Bahro R (1982) Socialism and survival : (articles, essays, and talks, 1979-1982), Heretic Books. (3 leaves) ��A / / / / 4^- -^ - /"?^c/c ., ./ ^7' ^A'o^Tr iE^ k - 4//' , *A. ? J . /z. ,/6^ /^a /! /^c& / -/^y <^7^^ ?4- , 7*u -y? Z-^>^ * j/^ <Tr-C^U , r/^ y — _______ c//?Z7/^/^ w//?/< p "^2^ , t rc , /4y- ���' 7^ . 7 -7. �// r ��WORLD ORDER, CULTURAL CONVERGENCE AND REGIONAL CULTURAL AUTONOMY The success of Australia's relations with the Pacific Island States will be based upon the practical and sustained recognition that no one culture is basically superior to another, -that each and every [traditional] culture, together with its social, polLtical and economic ingredients, have a measuring and value ... that our new found freedoms [and independence] were fought so that to a significant degree a renaissance of Melanesian values, principles and expectations can take place (Lini, p.ll and p.6). World order with regional cultural autonomy is a highly desirable goal. It is an objective not only of political leaders such as Lini but also of ambitious proposals such as Mazrui's world federation of cultures J But there is evidence that, despite its prime facte plausibility and appeal, it is an impossible goal. There are various routes to this most unwelcome conclusion. Mazrui admits that tris 'approach Consider first Mazrui's cultural paradox. to appears have But it is worse than that: contradictory aims' (M p.9). approach is contradictory, almost as it stands, and Mazrui way out. to the next premiss: calculations. reform as a problem of building up on 'To get mankind to agree to a new world system [one with social reasoning and Consensus behind three or four values will need consensus behind many more supporting values and perspectives. world clear In Mazrui's terms, which leal order], we need to give mankind that shared framework of social no The argument proceeds as follows: World order implies a certain consensus. Pl. indicates the problem of supporting mobilizing values; ... consensus; and we see In summary, w* s <e we see consensus as a this latter as an outgrowth of cultural convergence' (M p.l). P2. Such consensus implies [substantial] cultural convergence. In Mazrui's 'World order...': as mentioned before, I think you should take into account the world order writings of people such as Richard Falk (A Study of Future Worlds, etc.) and Johan Galtung (The True Worlds, etc.). �'Consensus formulation, behind much-needed world reforms is impossible without substantial cultural convergence on a global scale' (M p.9). [Substantial] P3. Mazrul's cultural formulation: 'the convergence In which the world has so far convergence cultural dependence. cultural implies attained carries with it the evil of dependency'. P4. Cultural dependence is incompatible with regional cultural autonomy. Hence, by P1-P4, world order is incompatible with and world order with such regional autonomy is impossible. hence is valid, but some of the premisses can of P2 with Pl. produce cultural regional be certainly shaken, autonomy, The argument the especially Even so, no matter how hard they are shaken the problem cannot be entirely removed. ***** There is no general solution to the cultural regional This autonomy. problem result of world order maintaining is an application of a generalised Arrow's Theorem.in the application, world options or courses-of-action are the regional cultures are the factors. and alternatives, Then the factor rankings are different cultural rankings of the world options. that is there no dominant culture, no cultural dictator. conditions can be assumed satisfied, or satisfied by result Regional autonomy implies Since the other adjustments 3, the dismal given that world order it taken to require overall rankings of follows, world options. Although a general solution is impossible, a solution possible confront. however for all the choices world a federation Given the environmental and economic that seems increasingly unlikely: choices more may be nonetheless cultures ever has to of that and are more, being made because environmental dependence, choices made by one culture spill over into others. 2 of �The resolutions hitherto have primarily been cultural assimilation. the And by cultural arsenal of defences, ranging from explicit claims of cultural claims through down superiority of democratic cultural adjustment .(tribal voting with the feet) tn the face of technological superiority and improved "standards of living" least registered as imported by e.g. relatively easy to shatter; dominant culture ranked highly, concerning local environments); etc. economics). the of Many superiority is these only (at defences are in the things not in other matters (such as discrimination the improved "standards of living" often enough from leisurely lives of primitive affluence to "wage slaves", people converted and been backed up by has domination cultural domination Some of the evangelical defences are harder to break. While it is easy in hindsight to see that there was little justification for imposing religions like various forms of Christianity in the way they were imposed on other gentler or militarily weaker cultures, the same is not seen in regard to ideologies such as positivistic science of mainstream economics. Perhaps most more that dangerous than pretentious the idea main Western culture is the guardian of the truth, is the idea that it has a special Rationality is tool a all, of dangerous hold on rationality. that can be applied to justify convergence to orthodox Western norms. A world federation of cultures - an Integrated world culture, so almost to say - appears to afford a viable alternative to world government, as a source of world order in particular. firstly, it is a what 'we it less remote prospect: than we were a century ago; Secondly, Moreover, should is preferable alternative, -'we are no nearer a world government but we are much nearer to world culture' be since, (t p.2). aiming for are internalised controls [those of �culture], based on new human inclinations, rather organisational mechanisms [government]' (M p.2). than external not. governmental, typically by Thirdly, cultural controls and liaisons permit flexibility, regional autonomy, and so on, rigid controls in ways that more authoritive and externally imposed, controls do There is evidence, furthermore, from a range of indigenous cultures - Melanesian cultures are ]ust one group of examples - that culture can substitute Hie vision of a well-ordered for government. cultures government without it anarchists; especially is goes of federation back, of course, prominent in the organisations to the century and of convergence to Bakunin of work 19th or Kroprotkin. To make the vision work does not however require the Mazrui extent imagines; it does not require a single shared culture essence, a single characterising feature is wanted in the rope strands [the regional cultures need as sought where a family resemblance is what A model for a world federation is given Wittgenstein s rope picture. strands Various erroneously Mazrui has shared cultural universe, or one world culture an cultura1 overlap and criss-cross It is this overlap of that give the rope its strength usually does, run through the length of the rope. But no strand So similarly there need be no shared or common culture for a world federation, or rope, of culttires to have strength, and to ensure thereby world order. regional cultures overlap one another suitably. it will not follow that It is enough that adjacent Nor is overlap transitive; there must be something shared. so This rope model of cultures may be alternatively described in other family ways , e.g in terms of a network of cultures. FOOTNOTES 1. For these objectives see Mazrui's Introduction, p.l ff. Here as elsewhere in text, author's names double as references. �2. On the generalisation see Routley. 3. For methods of adjustment, e.g. completing rankings, see again Routley. REFERENCES O. Lint, 'Keynote Address', Australia and the South Pacific, Proceedings on a Conference held at the Australian National University, Centre for Continuing Education, Canberra, 1982. A.A. Mazrui, A World Federation of Cultures: An African Perspective, Free Press, New York" 1*976. All page references prefixed M are to this work. R. Routley, 'On the impossibility of an orthodox social theory and of an orthodox solution to environmental problems', Logique et Analyse 23 (1980) 145-166. K. Lehrer and C. Wagner, Rational consensus Rolland, 1981. Science in and Society, Re Idel, 1. It is widely assumed that cultural convergence is a good thing, to NOTES promoted. This is the operational assumption in Lehrer and Wanner, who want to see the conditions for everywhere their (fortunately, fail for important real excessive be cultural Markov convergence theorem applying virtually of course, the conditions are pretty restrictive, and life cases). convergence is There not are good reasons for thinking a good thing. Certainly some cases of convergence are undecidable. Experimental testing of convergence (Defi groups) showed that when convergence, occurred, tended to confirm the status quo. Methods of convergence are it essentially conservative. Both locally and on a larger scene such methods can be damaging, in several respects. They undercut the perhaps otherwise positions of minorities. And they can reinforce the posltLon of dangerous power triggers. Consider what would happen - what appears to be happening - scene the world where we have, in some measure, "enforced convergence". What we would be headed for - what we are headed for ts imposition western in paradigm, with its economism, 5 everywhere violence of and the dominant environmental �* " destructiveness. Lower cultures are progressively undermined. buddhism, which stand opposed to main afford just one conspicuous example. (The useful working example.) Buddhism is Those practicing directions of the dominant paradigm, American right out impact of- on step Thailand with is a economism, encouraging as it does removal of consumerist ambitions, and it is dianetrically opposed to violence and like destructive practices. (Thus to pull Buddhism out of the educational curriculum, as in the fairly recent American-inspired, constitution, their is not the enlightened step it is usually seen as: to be sure, it is "progressive" enough, but in a direction more of us should not be headed.) 2. Total consensus represents a limit of convergence. Consensus also its serious limitations then. 6 has �WORLD ORDER, CULTURAL CONVERGENCE AND REGIONAL CULTURAL AUTONOMY The success of Australia's relations with the Pacific Island States will be based upon the practical and sustained recognition that no one culture is basically superior to another, that each and every [traditional] culture, together with its social, political and economic ingredients, have a measuring and value ... that our new found freedoms [and independence] were fought so that to a significant degree a renaissance of Melanesian values, principles and expectations can take place (Lini, p.ll and p.6). World order with regional cultural autonomy is a highly desirable goal. It is an objective not only of political leaders such as Lini but also of ambitious proposals such as Mazrui's world federation of cultures.But there is evidence that, despite its prima facie plausibility and appeal, it is an impossible goal. There are various routes to this most unwelcome conclusion. Consider first Mazrui's cultural paradox. appears to have Mazrui admits that his 'approach But it is worse than that: contradictory aims' (M p.9). approach is contradictory, almost as it stands, and Mazrui way out. to the next premiss: calculations. reform as a problem of building up on 'To get mankind to agree to a new world system [one with social reasoning and Consensus behind three or four values will need consensus behind many more supporting values and perspectives. world clear In Mazrui's terms, which lead order], we need to give mankind that shared framework of social no The argument proceeds as follows: World order implies a certain consensus. Pl. indicates the problem of supporting mobilizing values; ... consensus; and we see In summary, we see we see consensus as a this latter as an outgrowth of cultural convergence' (M p.l). P2. Such consensus implies [substantial] cultural convergence. In Mazrui's �formulation, 'Consensus behind much-needed world reforms is impossible without substantial cultural convergence on a global scale' (M p.9). [Substantial] P3. cultural formulation: Mazrui's 'the implies convergence cultural dependence. cultural In which the world has so far convergence attained carries with it the evil of dependency'. P4. Cultural dependence is incompatible with regional cultural autonomy. Hence, by P1-P4, world order is incompatible with and cultural world order with such regional autonomy is impossible. hence is valid, but some of the premisses can of P2 with Pl. produce regional certainly shaken, be autonomy, The argument especially the Even so, no matter how hard they are shaken the problem cannot be entirely removed. ***** problem There is no general solution to the regional This autonomy. cultural result of order world maintaining is an application of a generalised Arrow's Theorem.in the application, world options or courses-of-action are the alternatives, regional cultures are the factors. and Then the factor rankings are different cultural rankings of the world options. that is there no dominant culture, no cultural dictator. conditions can be assumed satisfied, or satisfied by result Regional autonomy implies Since the other adjustments 3, the dismal given that world order it taken to require overall rankings of follows, world options. Although a general solution is impossible, a solution possible confront. however for all the choices world a federation Given the environmental and economic that seems increasingly unlikely: choices more may be nonetheless cultures ever has to of that and are more, being made because environmental dependence, choices made by one culture spill over into others. 2 of �The resolutions hitherto have primarily been cultural the And assimilation. cultural by cultural arsenal of defences, ranging from explicit claims of cultural claims through down superiority of democratic cultural adjustment (tribal voting with the feet) in the face of technological superiority and improved "standards of living" least registered as ranked culture e.g. people converted etc. the superiority of is these only (at defences are in things the not in other matters (such as discrimination highly, concerning local environments); Many economics). imported by relatively easy to shatter; dominant and been backed up by has domination domination the improved "standards of living" often enough from leisurely lives of primitive affluence to "wage slaves", Some of the evangelical defences are harder to break. While it is easy in hindsight to see that there was little justification for imposing religions like various forms of Christianity in the way they were imposed on other gentler or militarily weaker cultures, the same is not seen in regard to ideologies such as positivistic science of mainstream economics. more dangerous than pretentious the idea Perhaps most that is tool a all, main Western culture is the guardian of the truth, is the idea that it has a special Rationality of dangerous hold on rationality. that can be applied to justify convergence to orthodox Western norms. A world federation of cultures - an integrated world culture, so almost to say - appears to afford a viable alternative to world government, as a source of world order in particular. firstly, it is a what 'we it less remote prospect: than we were a century ago; Secondly, Moreover, should is preferable alternative, 'we are no nearer a world government but we are much nearer to world culture' be since, (M p.2). aiming for are internalised controls [those of 3 �culture], based on new human inclinations, than rather organisational mechanisms [government]' (M p.2). typically governmental, in ways more that authoritive and externally imposed, controls do There is evidence, furthermore, from a not. by Thirdly, cultural controls and liaisons permit flexibility, regional autonomy, and so on, rigid controls external range of indigenous cultures - Melanesian cultures are just one group of examples — that culture can substitute The vision of a well-ordered for government. government without cultures it anarchists; especially is back, of course, prominent in the goes organisations of federation the to century and of convergence to Bakunin of work 19th or Kroprotkin. To make the vision work does not however require Mazrui extent the imagines; does not require a single shared culture , a it shared cultural universe, or one world culture. an cultural erroneously Mazrui has sought essence, a single characterising feature, where a family resemblance is what is wanted. Various A model for a world federation is given Wittgenstein's rope picture. strands in the rope overlap and criss-cross. It is this overlap of strands [the regional cultures] that give the rope its strength. need, as usually does, run through the length of the rope. But no strand So similarly there need be no shared or common culture for a world federation, or rope, of cultures to have strength, and to ensure thereby world order. regional cultures overlap one another suitably. it will not follow that It is enough that adjacent Nor is overlap transitive; there must be something shared. so This rope model of cultures may be alternatively described in other family ways, e.g. in terms of a network of cultures. FOOTNOTES 1. For these objectives see Mazrui's Introduction, p.l ff. Here as elsewhere in text, author's names double as references. 4 �2. On the generalisation see Routley. 3. For methods of adjustment, e.g. completing rankings, see again Routley. REFERENCES W. Lini, 'Keynote Address', Australia and the South Pacific, Proceedings on a Conference held at the Australian National University, Centre for Continuing Education, Canberra, 1982. A.A. Mazrui, A World Federation of Cultures: An African Perspective, Free Press, New York, 1976. All page references prefixed M are to this work. R. Routley, 'On the impossibility of an orthodox social theory and of an orthodox solution to environmental problems', Logique et Analyse 23 (1980) 145-166. K. Lehrer and C. Wagner, Rational consensus in Science and Society, Reidel, Holland, 1981. 1. It is widely assumed that cultural convergence is a good thing, to NOTES promoted. This is the operational assumption in Lehrer and Wagner, who want to see the conditions for everywhere their (fortunately, fail for important real excessive be cultural Markov convergence theorem applying virtually of course, the conditions are pretty restrictive, and life cases). convergence is There not are good reasons for thinking a good thing. Certainly some cases of convergence are undecidable. Experimental testing of convergence (Defi groups) showed that occurred, tended to confirm the status quo. Methods of convergence are it when convergence, essentially conservative. Both locally and on a larger scene such methods can be damaging, in several respects. They undercut the perhaps otherwise positions of minorities. And they can reinforce the position of dangerous power triggers. Consider what would happen - what appears to be happening - scene, the world where we have, in some measure, "enforced convergence". What we would be headed for - what we are headed for is imposition western in paradigm, with its economism, 5 everywhere violence of and the dominant environmental �destructiveness. Lower cultures are progressively undermined. which Buddhism, stand opposed to main afford just one conspicuous example. (The useful working example.) Buddhism is Those practicing directions of the dominant paradigm, American right out impact of on step Thailand with is a economism, encouraging as it does removal of consumerist ambitions, and it is dianetrically opposed to violence and like destructive practices. (Thus to pull Buddhism out of the educational curriculum, as in the fairly recent American-inspired, constitution, their is not the enlightened step it is usually seen as: to be sure, it is "progressive" enough, but in a direction more of us should not be headed.) 2. Total consensus represents a limit of convergence. Consensus also its serious limitations then has �� 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 ^_/^L z ^-^7 7 /(L^y 7^4 y v^€ , - % /%^r^7rW /^//; ' z/7<<^ </V^p /J i c ^y /^-? r^C " /^, t 7<-t^v q. /7 /7 X r 7;^ _ -y <Pr ^/? ^/(jL/?1^ ^,yy- ^ i ?3- / I /*/^v 5 ^^/<* ^7 Z^7Y^ —- Z^? The following has been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. Annotated cutting (photocopy) of two pages from Sears PB (1965) 'Utopia and the living landscape', Daedalus, 94:474–486. (1 leaf) Z^7b r. , x^L. BEHIND LEFT AND RIGHT: ENVIRONMENTAL ANARCHISM. There are forms of anarchism which represent a new political ^dimension outside the lineal left-right classification. Of course these forms of anarchism have features in common with rightist positions (forms of capitalism and "free" enterprise) and with of leftist positions (formsXsocialism and communism) and currently with both. But they reject crucial features of both, and, more to the point, assumptions upon which the classification of the conventional right-left political spectrum is based.These are assumptions of central control of a state, of control of the means of production (on the one side by private individuals and on the other side by the people or a committee supposedly representing them), of ownership of property (privately versus publicly) , and overarching all these the familiar assumptions of human chauvinism (e.g. those discussed in [1], such as that all of value resides in humankind or answers back to human interests). There are forms of anarchism - especially environmental anarchisms, the working out of the character of which is one of the main objectives - which reject, or importantly qualify, all these assumptions. There has been a concerted, but intellectually fradulent, attempt by statements of both right and left to absorb anarchism as theirs. For example, Nozick [2] and others to the right try to represent anarchism as fitting into their libertarian scheme. Nozick (in his final chapter) outlines a framework for utopias, a generous framework which would include most anarchist options; but 1 As might be expected the right-left classification is not a single thing, but a bundle of different, and not mutually consistent, classifications. In the sense in which 'right' means 'conservative for example, in contrast to 'left' as 'non-conservative', the dichotomy is exhaustive, but then the distinction is a different one from that under discussion and attack. The origin of the classification would hardly lead one to anticipate completeness. The members of continental parliaments who sat on the right or the left hardly exhausted the range of political positions, especially those in opposition to such a centralised state mechanism of cont.. 1.1 control and concentration of power. In the end the right­ left 'distinction' is to be left behind: it is only some­ thing to hang an introduction on. From a philosophical viewpoint there is hardly a more interesting word in English than 'right' with 24 headings in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, several of major philosophical importance, and by no means all of the senses there are untangled. 2. he goes on, without any discernible argument,to claim - what certainly seems false that the framework for utopias is nothing but his minimal state. Both this minimal state and the arguments for it are, however, decidedly objectionable at least from anarchist viewpoints not to the right, in particular which reject the propertarians or chauvinistic assumptions slipped into the bottom of Nozick's position. (The criticism of Nozick is so far no more than a set of memos: it will have to be spelled out.) The attempted take-over bid by the left is sometimes if anything, even cruder. Consider, for example, Guerin's argument from meaning for his inclusion thesis that every anarchist is a ([1], p.12). socialist It is this:- Anarchism is really a synonym for socialism. The anarchist is primarly a socialist whose aim is to abolish the exploitation of man by man. Anarchism is only one of the streams of socialist thought, that stream whose main components are concern for liberty and haste to abolish the State. This is inconsistent: for if anarchism is really a synonym for then anarchism is no sub-variety of socialism, socialism,/but identical with it. In fact the terms are far from synonymous, as perusal of a better dictionary would have revealed, and neither includes the other in meaning: that is all. there is overlap, and An environmental anarchist's aims extend further than abolishing the exploitation of man by man, it also includes ending the exploitation of other things, natural items by man. in particular, This is, of course, by not the only respect in which anarchism may differ from socialism; for it may well reject the collectiv-istassumptions of socialism, the public ownership of all the means of productions, etc. Guerin not only relies on the synonymy claim but goes so far as to say that 'today the terms "anarchist" and "libertarian" have become interchangeable'. By transitivity then, "libertarian" and "socialist" are interchangeable so Nozick, also is a libertarian, is a socialist: this would come as a surprise to Nozick. Chomsky's argument that the consistent anarchist is a socialist (in his Introduction to [1], p.XO) is more elaborate and devious but equally invalid. Chomsky's moves begin with several appeals to authority, to the anarchist historian Rocker (first introduced as an anarchist, and then as a socialist), to Fischer (who simply asserted a version of the thesis in need of defence) and to Bakunin (who simply laid down the principle that each member must be, to begin with, a socialist' in his "anarchist manifesto",something which only reflects Bakunin's narrowness, that he was only prepared to admit certain approved types of anarchists to his projected revolutionary fraternity. The appeal to authority can be no better than the arguments of the authority, and unfortunately for Chomsky the remaining authority, Rocker, does not deliver the arguments. himself to modern For a start he restricts anarchism, thereby excluding such counter­ examples to the inclusion thesis as Thoreau. Secondly Rocker's argument from the 'realities of capitalist economic forms' and the resulting 'exploitation of man by man' does not show that 'anarchism is necessarily anti-capitalist', but only that it is opposed to the tried forms of large-scale capitalism. Small-scale capitalism, for example with appropriate technology, is not ruled out thereby; and nor are anarchist's who would incorporate such features into their theory. Thirdly, Rocker simply assumes in his view that modern anarchism is the confluence of socialism and liberalism, that it must be one or the other (it is not the one he thinks, so by Disjunctive Syllogism, it must be the other): but the dichotomy is a false one, as we have already seen. Chomsky's direct argument for his qualified**" inclusion thesis begins thus: Any consistent anarchist must oppose private ownership of the means of production and the wage-slavery which is a component of this system, as incompatible with the principle that labor must be freely undertaken and under the control of the producer (p.xiii). Libertarian anarchists would deny this. 'The means of production' is ambiguous as between 'some means (or methods) of production; and 'all means of production'. 1 Need we wonder what becomes of the inconsistent anarchist? The following have been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. 1. Letter, Fred to Richard Sylvan re: Interested in draft paper ‘Behind left and right’ by Sylvan. (1 leaf) 2. Photocopy of eight pages from Moore B (1972) Reflections on the causes of human misery and upon certain proposals to eliminate them, Allen Lane. (4 leaves) The following have been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. 1. Annotated photocopy of four pages from Russell B (1935) In praise of idleness and other essays, Allen & Unwin. (2 leaves) 2. Annotated photocopy of two pages from unidentified publication. (1 leaf) lf)f)%Racvch^ paper ^7 ^C o/)/^ /**7f c J /7 c v;/ < C^4A Xc^< , / /%pT-/ 3/- C^"!G ^CX^-y y / (/ . BOOK NUMBER? J / / f 7/^" AUTHOR (BLOCK - LETTERS) TITLE DATE DUE /b^/7?rx 4^/ Z) / f 77 JNAME ) / /o X* U ' & W^EPT^-) K5LOCK— l&tTERS) 7^^ ToP^ONE NUMBER IF YOU WISH DETELS OF THIS LOAN TO REMAINJ3ONFIDENTIAL. PLEASElNITiAL SPACE BELOW DATE SIGNATURE 228 81 The following has been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. Photocopy of four pages from unidentified publication. (2 leaves) The following has been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. Annotated photocopy of two pages from unidentified publication by Hobbes? (1 leaf) / cases. . themselves. BIEDENKOPF IGNORED Although the symposium was entitled Multinationals in Muller (American University, Washington D.C.) had thrown few heretical thoughts into the discussion - but they were ignored. on trust bevond question", said Biedenkopf, "that in the new economic order? which is characterized above all by confrontation ^tween industrial ^ates^an^_^ey^^^„ countries, the role of private prope^ y <ri ^i-,a T-d^rivitv of the concept of property Biedenkopf compared the relati y German industry, with that of patent Paction. As long a=,ue in the last century, lagged J?^fa Q^y ^hen German consistently against paten j_ ^<g Bismarck became an industry had caught up with England s, advocate of patent protection. Biedenkopf said that claims to ^gyg^iimited in time; than patent claims, since P^^^J^^tess "Should the holdi^g^of^private ^stments in developing countries^not^ allow the most important industrial and be in foreign hands. WHAT IS THE " BERNE DECLARATION " "Berne Declaration": development policy. theologians. original name of a manifesto on Swiss Published in 1968 on the initiative of some The Declaration was signed by over 10,000 persons, who thus made a financial and political commitment (e.g. to giving up 1-3%'oftheir income to development aid for three years). An organisation sprung from it which combines information on the relationship between Switzerland and the Third World with social and political action: e.g. coffee campaign, meat renunciation campaign, evaluation of school materials and children's books, campaign against arms exports, etc. No fund raising for projects abroad, financially independent and not linked to any political party. Membership: Over 10,000 signatories of the original Declaration, including about 1,200 members of the Association "For Development in Solidarity". For further reading on this topic we recommend: Richard J. Barnet and Ronald E. Muller. Global Reach: The Power of the Multinational Corporations Published by Simon & Schuster, New York 1974 (US$ 11.95) The following have been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. 1. Annotated photocopy of two pages from unidentified publication. (1 leaf) 2. Letter, [?], Philosophy Department, University of Queensland to Richard, 2 Jul 1993 re update on review of the Word Society and Kaldor tax. (1 leaf) ,, Democracy within ANARCHY, and ' .--7 '^;' '2 DEMANARCHY Present electoral arrangements offer what? What presently have is a competative game between competating blocks of the ruling elite (with professional power-brokers who trade with each other their patronage and cites/br the acclaimed right to govern. Thus elections hardly represent a genuine expression of agreement by the populace to be governed; rather they are occasions when the populace is duped into supporting one or other elite team. For the most part power is concentrated in organisations which are not elected not controlled by the people effected by their contractions and not representative. By and large, satisfactory democratic arrangements will not be participatory (see Burnheim). are valuable for limited purposes, viz. as/a// . satisfactory in general (p.91). There is no need to dissent. B argues that they are not 1. Encourage those without interest in, or not genuinely affected by issue not to vote. 2. only structural, not material issu^to refs. Certainly not material moral issues, for instance, not capital punishment, not abortion. has the wrong etymology and the wrong meaning for anarchist purposes. It the office of a demarch [a president, chief magistrate, major or govemnorj; a popular government. The municipal body of a modem Greek commune' (OED). Anarchism recognises no chiefs or leaders, even democratic ones or demogogues. What can be done very simply, however, is to enlarge the word by a simple important syllable 'an', giving The following has been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. Flyer, Australian National University Centre for Resource and Environment Studies Seminar, Resource development dilemmas in Indochina by Dr Philip Hirsh, 24 Oct 1991. With handwritten annotations. (1 leaf) / /r< f 7^ .1. . Z —z /- .// ^ y ism? I take ; ___ Why does democracy entai 1 anarchy and social The democracy to be government of the people by the people. not is It 'Which people are we talking about?", question is: democratic, I presume, for the people of Sydney to be deciding 'minding whether or not Melbourne has trams. They would not be I assume their own business" as we say. So for these reasons by affected that the people are those people who are primarily perhaps the decision. OK, -some are affected more than others and by an?/ everyone is affected a little bit, albeit unnoticeably, or if you like So that"s why I say 'primarily' decision, There will be difficulty in many cases in knowing 'mostly". the someone is affected sufficently to get into whether By and electorate, but we needn"t get too up tight about that. large people will be the best judge of that themselves. Now if society operated in some such way, there could be no laws in the common sense of 'law". For a law is a decision to the effect that everyone of a certain type will be constrained to behave in a certain fashion. But the people who are primarily affected by the people of that type being constrained in that way will vary from time to time, so that, in a democracy, such a law could be deemed to be operative only for as long as the people primarily affected by it (a) remained the same and (b) had no wish to change their behaviour - and that, for anything a lawyer would call a law would be to all intents and purposes no time! at Dead all. Hence the truly democratic society will be lawless, people are no longer affected by social decisions they helped to make. So any such social decisions must be remade by the new electorate. / y / / k< i - Similarly, democracy entails socialism, where by socialism I mean the public control of the means of production, distribution Producing, distributing and exchanging are all and exchange. acts, which, if made democratically, are made publicly - by those Those members of the public that are primarily affected. primarily affected will be those who are required to do the work, those who receive the goods or services produced, and those who e.g. suffer the negative effects of the industrial decision, deprivation of wealth or income, unemployment or pollution. Democracy does not entail optimum freedom, if that means optimum satisfaction. However, on the assumption that people will want to maximise their satisfaction, they should prefer optimally satisfying decision procedures in the democratic decision making processes. Given that they are rational in this regard, they will therefore opt for rational conflict resolution procedures rather than merely counting heads, hands or ballot papers. I take it that you don"t need counterexamples to show the invalidity of arguing from anarchy or socialism to democracy. v < A /y . y—,4< ^y*^7T2^V-- ------------ /,^/-'- LZ 'j?<. ^j // t < 7 0 4^? J - A*-^ 4 x The following has been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. Cutting (two pages) from a Griffith University National Institute for Law, Ethics and Public Affairs publication. Article 'The church in a liberal society' has handwritten annotations. (1 leaf) The following has been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. Annotated photocopy of six pages from MacIntyre A (1988) Whose justice? Which rationality?, Notre Dame. (3 leaves) 7 7< / ,'^j^t ^C C *"<? \7 . t? , r c 4^*7- *= 7^t 7^ There is matxangx nothing per se about pluralist societies XXXXX , jM&eg multi-cultural w egalitarian. The following has been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. Annotated photocopy of two pages from unidentified publication. (1 leaf) GJ CD GJ GJ CO GJ 00 "j CD cn GJ 4^. GJ GJ GJ C<3 ? 7^ CHARACTERISING ANARCHISM: reaching the core of anarchism c/ 3^/ ^16^1222^ € Vh /o //!>? oc/^^ ^^dvv/^y/? ^(L y^y z^A </^A ) , A^*^* / r/y^ ^c-A^ /<^-< 7*^ r^v^A /J /V —t. —^L—7 (. C 4^ z^%e y^/$ '/Z^py- <^< c^/7^.y y^^jf VL^^4 t/^-^*4Z^Z <-{w7^>y^, z^Z , —r r /2. ^4 4^v c^4 \.y 7 /^- 44 .^. ^t/, 4 ^ j , ,4-. 4^47 - ; - 4^ ( y <4-^-^ ^7^ The following has been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. Annotated cutting (photocopy) of New Scientist (15 July 1999) 'Let them eat yellowcake', New Scientist, 123(1673):3. (1 leaf) The following have been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. 1. Annotated photocopy of two pages from unidentified publication. (1 leaf) 2. Annotated cutting (photocopy) of Jacobs, M (August 1989) 'Green blues in Europe', Australian Society, 32-33. (2 leaves) i^y ' j^4 -S^T ^= '/C 3TT$h L^C / <c ............ 1 ""' ' BOOK NUMBER M \n AUTHOR ^ETTERS) J. TITLE^S> t/ y! / /7 /L ?yv/ / NAME ! DEPT. (BLOCK LETTERS) ------------------------------- PHONE NUMBER IF YOU WISH DETAILS OF THIS LOAN TO REMAIN CONFIDENTIAL. PLEASE INITIAL SPACE BELOW. CP-228-81 GTO ... - ---- ! DATE DUE DATE/^O 4p ' ------------------------ The present situation can be summarised in terms of certainties and uncertainties. The certainties are: There are limits to the absorptive capacity (of technological waste products and toxic substances), resilience, and adaptability of biological systems - a principle which applies as much to the biosphere as a whole as it does to local ecosystems and to individual organisms. 1. ,______________________rin 2. The present pattern of increasing per capita resources, discharge of technological wastes and use of J__ 2.3 is ecologically unsustainable: energy in human ___ society if it is 1not -- brought under control through' deliberate -- as — a societal action, it will come to an end either consequence of depletion of mineral resources or, more nf seriously, as the result of irreversible damage to the biosphere caused by technological waste products. The uncertainties are: 1 How much longer the biosphere can continue to P^^ * suitable habitat tor humanity given the present pattern of industrial productivity. Which particular culturally-induced environmental changes 2. represent the greatest threat to the integrity o the biosphere. Which cultural phenomena are the most critical m causing undesirable change in the biosphere . 3. t For example, social goals, patterns of investment, favoured technologies, modes of decision-making, loci of power J use of machines powered by extrasomatic energy (e.g. fossil fuels). As a consequence of these developments, the ecological impact of the human species (as expressed in terms of energy use) is now about 15,000 times greater than it was at the time of the domestic transition. 98 percent of this increase has occurred since 1800 AD, and 80 percent in the last 50 years. It is certain that the biosphere, as a dynamic system capable of supporting the human species, will not be able to tolerate this continuing intensification of technometabolism (i.e. use of energy and resources and discharge of technological wastes by the human population) indefinitely. . * . -t ecologically sustainable. * Phase Four human society is not /^e^/ dyx-^7 '' ' If humans are to continue to exist in the biosphere, they must devise a nee societal system (or systems) , such that their needs can be satisfied with a more modest rate of resource and energy use than that which at present prevails in the high-energy societies. Certain essential characteristics, or biosocral imperatives of ^t^-new societal system are clear . . rhe additional ecological load now imposed on the biosphere by human society is, in energy terms, equivalent to about 5 percent of the total ecological load imposed by all other animals and plants put together. If the technometabolism of human society as a whole continues to intensify at the same rate as it has over the past 20 years, by the year 2100 human beings will be using as much energy, and consequently having as much impact on the biosphere, as all other existing forms of life. In fact, it is highly unlikely that the biosphere would be able to tolerate this eventuality. Moreover, many authors are of the opinion that the biosphere would not be able to withstand an intensification of technometabolism in the developing countries of the world such that it reached the present level of intensity characteristic of the modern high-energy societies^-J:t^t^is, 5 times the present global level of technometabolism)Indeed,-^ 7^533= *=^ady mentionetA i is clear that the biosphere will not be able to tolerate indefinitely even the present pattern of technometabolism. Four important biosocial imperatives can be stated as follows: * 1. The si2e of the Auman population must be stable. 2. The overall rate of resource and energy use and of technological waste production by society fi.e. the intensity of technometabolism? must be steady for decreasing?. This rate must be considerably lower than that characteristic of the high-energy societies at the present time. 3. The organisation of society and the economic system must be such that human health, well-being and enjoyment of life do not depend on continually increasing per capita use of resources and energy and production of technological wastes. 4. The organisation of society and the economic system must be such that high rates of employment* are not dependent on increasing consumption of the products of resource—intensive anc? ener^ry-in tensive industry. distribution of natural resources, should be an essential aim of society at both regional and global levels. Moreover, it is also assumed that all societal activities that threaten the integrity of the biosphere must cease — including the manufacture, storage and deployment of nuclear weapons. It is self-evident that these biosocial imperatives raise some important questions about the future of human society. The FQP is based on the view that consideration of these questions is an urgent matter, and that serious thought should now be given to the design of a new society which, for an indefinite period, satisfies the health and well-being needs both of the biosphere^- * ** The actual size of this sustainable stable population will depend on its pattern of resource and energy use. The higher the intensity of technometabolism, the smaller the sustainable human population. For the purposes of this Program, 25 percent of the present per capita intensity of technometabolism in the high-energy societies will be taken initially as a reasonable societal objective. *** The word employment is used here in a broad sense to include all direct or indirect subsistence activities that are associated with a sense of personal involvement and purpose. (Indirect subsistence activities are those which are aimed at providing subsistence but which do not involve the direct acquisition of food from its place of origin. Working for wages with which to procure food and shelter is thus an indirect subsistence activity). 7^^/ y^y)^7 ... <4- r^\. ( /\^^<&I-. '^_A-/ Xy C 7^t< /y //? ' <^* ^7^--- ' <^- / ! <? Ty. v ^L_—, y ro t r"—'——*-- - - si- /- .- s.y / / ' / .. /J /4 CJ / / r W^ /2^ ^7 7^-?^? (/ <-O-« 7-7 ^*-r /*r--^ "vnK^ *—< ^c <^^7 / ! /^?//^ f /^^-/$' i ^/(/YL^7 r^ y^c^ Z^ z-r y<rt-^ 4-/^^ %f /J A. Z^% t/^?z/^<- y tr y^ /^t/ - <,^/' y, 4, ,y',^ ^./ , V *" .,t^r^^, y^, / ^/..^y, y y y .7,^.4^, " /<^^y , - y^< 6 ? y "^y y —y^* / 7 7^ 0 Y W^ -^C—< Z^^tz/Ly y4 4^' %- \ ! \Jk^ ,- <L^r2^)(_ / /e\ f ^Q^? T^VL^ C) /%^//^^ -/ 2 /t y* - T <* z* - y /*_ A /< ^n/ cs < J y$i^?*^ *Xc y^ / '-Zj7 , ./ c^-y 7^7 A ^//<^ ^-y ^X 4-^4 / J <a — " <*' *" ' ' ' # The following has been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. Annotated photocopy of six pages from Bahro R (1982) Socialism and survival : (articles, essays, and talks, 1979-1982), Heretic Books. (3 leaves) A / / / / 4^- -^ - /"?^c/c ., ./ ^7' ^A'o^Tr iE^ k - 4//' , *A. ? J . /z. ,/6^ /^a /! /^c& / -/^y <^7^^ ?4- , 7*u -y? Z-^>^ * j/^ <Tr-C^U , r/^ y — _______ c//?Z7/^/^ w//?/< p "^2^ , t rc , /4y- ' 7^ . 7 -7. // r WORLD ORDER, CULTURAL CONVERGENCE AND REGIONAL CULTURAL AUTONOMY The success of Australia's relations with the Pacific Island States will be based upon the practical and sustained recognition that no one culture is basically superior to another, -that each and every [traditional] culture, together with its social, polLtical and economic ingredients, have a measuring and value ... that our new found freedoms [and independence] were fought so that to a significant degree a renaissance of Melanesian values, principles and expectations can take place (Lini, p.ll and p.6). World order with regional cultural autonomy is a highly desirable goal. It is an objective not only of political leaders such as Lini but also of ambitious proposals such as Mazrui's world federation of cultures J But there is evidence that, despite its prime facte plausibility and appeal, it is an impossible goal. There are various routes to this most unwelcome conclusion. Mazrui admits that tris 'approach Consider first Mazrui's cultural paradox. to appears have But it is worse than that: contradictory aims' (M p.9). approach is contradictory, almost as it stands, and Mazrui way out. to the next premiss: calculations. reform as a problem of building up on 'To get mankind to agree to a new world system [one with social reasoning and Consensus behind three or four values will need consensus behind many more supporting values and perspectives. world clear In Mazrui's terms, which leal order], we need to give mankind that shared framework of social no The argument proceeds as follows: World order implies a certain consensus. Pl. indicates the problem of supporting mobilizing values; ... consensus; and we see In summary, w* s <e we see consensus as a this latter as an outgrowth of cultural convergence' (M p.l). P2. Such consensus implies [substantial] cultural convergence. In Mazrui's 'World order...': as mentioned before, I think you should take into account the world order writings of people such as Richard Falk (A Study of Future Worlds, etc.) and Johan Galtung (The True Worlds, etc.). 'Consensus formulation, behind much-needed world reforms is impossible without substantial cultural convergence on a global scale' (M p.9). [Substantial] P3. Mazrul's cultural formulation: 'the convergence In which the world has so far convergence cultural dependence. cultural implies attained carries with it the evil of dependency'. P4. Cultural dependence is incompatible with regional cultural autonomy. Hence, by P1-P4, world order is incompatible with and world order with such regional autonomy is impossible. hence is valid, but some of the premisses can of P2 with Pl. produce cultural regional be certainly shaken, autonomy, The argument the especially Even so, no matter how hard they are shaken the problem cannot be entirely removed. ***** There is no general solution to the cultural regional This autonomy. problem result of world order maintaining is an application of a generalised Arrow's Theorem.in the application, world options or courses-of-action are the regional cultures are the factors. and alternatives, Then the factor rankings are different cultural rankings of the world options. that is there no dominant culture, no cultural dictator. conditions can be assumed satisfied, or satisfied by result Regional autonomy implies Since the other adjustments 3, the dismal given that world order it taken to require overall rankings of follows, world options. Although a general solution is impossible, a solution possible confront. however for all the choices world a federation Given the environmental and economic that seems increasingly unlikely: choices more may be nonetheless cultures ever has to of that and are more, being made because environmental dependence, choices made by one culture spill over into others. 2 of The resolutions hitherto have primarily been cultural assimilation. the And by cultural arsenal of defences, ranging from explicit claims of cultural claims through down superiority of democratic cultural adjustment .(tribal voting with the feet) tn the face of technological superiority and improved "standards of living" least registered as imported by e.g. relatively easy to shatter; dominant culture ranked highly, concerning local environments); etc. economics). the of Many superiority is these only (at defences are in the things not in other matters (such as discrimination the improved "standards of living" often enough from leisurely lives of primitive affluence to "wage slaves", people converted and been backed up by has domination cultural domination Some of the evangelical defences are harder to break. While it is easy in hindsight to see that there was little justification for imposing religions like various forms of Christianity in the way they were imposed on other gentler or militarily weaker cultures, the same is not seen in regard to ideologies such as positivistic science of mainstream economics. Perhaps most more that dangerous than pretentious the idea main Western culture is the guardian of the truth, is the idea that it has a special Rationality is tool a all, of dangerous hold on rationality. that can be applied to justify convergence to orthodox Western norms. A world federation of cultures - an Integrated world culture, so almost to say - appears to afford a viable alternative to world government, as a source of world order in particular. firstly, it is a what 'we it less remote prospect: than we were a century ago; Secondly, Moreover, should is preferable alternative, -'we are no nearer a world government but we are much nearer to world culture' be since, (t p.2). aiming for are internalised controls [those of culture], based on new human inclinations, rather organisational mechanisms [government]' (M p.2). than external not. governmental, typically by Thirdly, cultural controls and liaisons permit flexibility, regional autonomy, and so on, rigid controls in ways that more authoritive and externally imposed, controls do There is evidence, furthermore, from a range of indigenous cultures - Melanesian cultures are ]ust one group of examples - that culture can substitute Hie vision of a well-ordered for government. cultures government without it anarchists; especially is goes of federation back, of course, prominent in the organisations to the century and of convergence to Bakunin of work 19th or Kroprotkin. To make the vision work does not however require the Mazrui extent imagines; it does not require a single shared culture essence, a single characterising feature is wanted in the rope strands [the regional cultures need as sought where a family resemblance is what A model for a world federation is given Wittgenstein s rope picture. strands Various erroneously Mazrui has shared cultural universe, or one world culture an cultura1 overlap and criss-cross It is this overlap of that give the rope its strength usually does, run through the length of the rope. But no strand So similarly there need be no shared or common culture for a world federation, or rope, of culttires to have strength, and to ensure thereby world order. regional cultures overlap one another suitably. it will not follow that It is enough that adjacent Nor is overlap transitive; there must be something shared. so This rope model of cultures may be alternatively described in other family ways , e.g in terms of a network of cultures. FOOTNOTES 1. For these objectives see Mazrui's Introduction, p.l ff. Here as elsewhere in text, author's names double as references. 2. On the generalisation see Routley. 3. For methods of adjustment, e.g. completing rankings, see again Routley. REFERENCES O. Lint, 'Keynote Address', Australia and the South Pacific, Proceedings on a Conference held at the Australian National University, Centre for Continuing Education, Canberra, 1982. A.A. Mazrui, A World Federation of Cultures: An African Perspective, Free Press, New York" 1*976. All page references prefixed M are to this work. R. Routley, 'On the impossibility of an orthodox social theory and of an orthodox solution to environmental problems', Logique et Analyse 23 (1980) 145-166. K. Lehrer and C. Wagner, Rational consensus Rolland, 1981. Science in and Society, Re Idel, 1. It is widely assumed that cultural convergence is a good thing, to NOTES promoted. This is the operational assumption in Lehrer and Wanner, who want to see the conditions for everywhere their (fortunately, fail for important real excessive be cultural Markov convergence theorem applying virtually of course, the conditions are pretty restrictive, and life cases). convergence is There not are good reasons for thinking a good thing. Certainly some cases of convergence are undecidable. Experimental testing of convergence (Defi groups) showed that when convergence, occurred, tended to confirm the status quo. Methods of convergence are it essentially conservative. Both locally and on a larger scene such methods can be damaging, in several respects. They undercut the perhaps otherwise positions of minorities. And they can reinforce the posltLon of dangerous power triggers. Consider what would happen - what appears to be happening - scene the world where we have, in some measure, "enforced convergence". What we would be headed for - what we are headed for ts imposition western in paradigm, with its economism, 5 everywhere violence of and the dominant environmental * " destructiveness. Lower cultures are progressively undermined. buddhism, which stand opposed to main afford just one conspicuous example. (The useful working example.) Buddhism is Those practicing directions of the dominant paradigm, American right out impact of- on step Thailand with is a economism, encouraging as it does removal of consumerist ambitions, and it is dianetrically opposed to violence and like destructive practices. (Thus to pull Buddhism out of the educational curriculum, as in the fairly recent American-inspired, constitution, their is not the enlightened step it is usually seen as: to be sure, it is "progressive" enough, but in a direction more of us should not be headed.) 2. Total consensus represents a limit of convergence. Consensus also its serious limitations then. 6 has WORLD ORDER, CULTURAL CONVERGENCE AND REGIONAL CULTURAL AUTONOMY The success of Australia's relations with the Pacific Island States will be based upon the practical and sustained recognition that no one culture is basically superior to another, that each and every [traditional] culture, together with its social, political and economic ingredients, have a measuring and value ... that our new found freedoms [and independence] were fought so that to a significant degree a renaissance of Melanesian values, principles and expectations can take place (Lini, p.ll and p.6). World order with regional cultural autonomy is a highly desirable goal. It is an objective not only of political leaders such as Lini but also of ambitious proposals such as Mazrui's world federation of cultures.But there is evidence that, despite its prima facie plausibility and appeal, it is an impossible goal. There are various routes to this most unwelcome conclusion. Consider first Mazrui's cultural paradox. appears to have Mazrui admits that his 'approach But it is worse than that: contradictory aims' (M p.9). approach is contradictory, almost as it stands, and Mazrui way out. to the next premiss: calculations. reform as a problem of building up on 'To get mankind to agree to a new world system [one with social reasoning and Consensus behind three or four values will need consensus behind many more supporting values and perspectives. world clear In Mazrui's terms, which lead order], we need to give mankind that shared framework of social no The argument proceeds as follows: World order implies a certain consensus. Pl. indicates the problem of supporting mobilizing values; ... consensus; and we see In summary, we see we see consensus as a this latter as an outgrowth of cultural convergence' (M p.l). P2. Such consensus implies [substantial] cultural convergence. In Mazrui's formulation, 'Consensus behind much-needed world reforms is impossible without substantial cultural convergence on a global scale' (M p.9). [Substantial] P3. cultural formulation: Mazrui's 'the implies convergence cultural dependence. cultural In which the world has so far convergence attained carries with it the evil of dependency'. P4. Cultural dependence is incompatible with regional cultural autonomy. Hence, by P1-P4, world order is incompatible with and cultural world order with such regional autonomy is impossible. hence is valid, but some of the premisses can of P2 with Pl. produce regional certainly shaken, be autonomy, The argument especially the Even so, no matter how hard they are shaken the problem cannot be entirely removed. ***** problem There is no general solution to the regional This autonomy. cultural result of order world maintaining is an application of a generalised Arrow's Theorem.in the application, world options or courses-of-action are the alternatives, regional cultures are the factors. and Then the factor rankings are different cultural rankings of the world options. that is there no dominant culture, no cultural dictator. conditions can be assumed satisfied, or satisfied by result Regional autonomy implies Since the other adjustments 3, the dismal given that world order it taken to require overall rankings of follows, world options. Although a general solution is impossible, a solution possible confront. however for all the choices world a federation Given the environmental and economic that seems increasingly unlikely: choices more may be nonetheless cultures ever has to of that and are more, being made because environmental dependence, choices made by one culture spill over into others. 2 of The resolutions hitherto have primarily been cultural the And assimilation. cultural by cultural arsenal of defences, ranging from explicit claims of cultural claims through down superiority of democratic cultural adjustment (tribal voting with the feet) in the face of technological superiority and improved "standards of living" least registered as ranked culture e.g. people converted etc. the superiority of is these only (at defences are in things the not in other matters (such as discrimination highly, concerning local environments); Many economics). imported by relatively easy to shatter; dominant and been backed up by has domination domination the improved "standards of living" often enough from leisurely lives of primitive affluence to "wage slaves", Some of the evangelical defences are harder to break. While it is easy in hindsight to see that there was little justification for imposing religions like various forms of Christianity in the way they were imposed on other gentler or militarily weaker cultures, the same is not seen in regard to ideologies such as positivistic science of mainstream economics. more dangerous than pretentious the idea Perhaps most that is tool a all, main Western culture is the guardian of the truth, is the idea that it has a special Rationality of dangerous hold on rationality. that can be applied to justify convergence to orthodox Western norms. A world federation of cultures - an integrated world culture, so almost to say - appears to afford a viable alternative to world government, as a source of world order in particular. firstly, it is a what 'we it less remote prospect: than we were a century ago; Secondly, Moreover, should is preferable alternative, 'we are no nearer a world government but we are much nearer to world culture' be since, (M p.2). aiming for are internalised controls [those of 3 culture], based on new human inclinations, than rather organisational mechanisms [government]' (M p.2). typically governmental, in ways more that authoritive and externally imposed, controls do There is evidence, furthermore, from a not. by Thirdly, cultural controls and liaisons permit flexibility, regional autonomy, and so on, rigid controls external range of indigenous cultures - Melanesian cultures are just one group of examples — that culture can substitute The vision of a well-ordered for government. government without cultures it anarchists; especially is back, of course, prominent in the goes organisations of federation the to century and of convergence to Bakunin of work 19th or Kroprotkin. To make the vision work does not however require Mazrui extent the imagines; does not require a single shared culture , a it shared cultural universe, or one world culture. an cultural erroneously Mazrui has sought essence, a single characterising feature, where a family resemblance is what is wanted. Various A model for a world federation is given Wittgenstein's rope picture. strands in the rope overlap and criss-cross. It is this overlap of strands [the regional cultures] that give the rope its strength. need, as usually does, run through the length of the rope. But no strand So similarly there need be no shared or common culture for a world federation, or rope, of cultures to have strength, and to ensure thereby world order. regional cultures overlap one another suitably. it will not follow that It is enough that adjacent Nor is overlap transitive; there must be something shared. so This rope model of cultures may be alternatively described in other family ways, e.g. in terms of a network of cultures. FOOTNOTES 1. For these objectives see Mazrui's Introduction, p.l ff. Here as elsewhere in text, author's names double as references. 4 2. On the generalisation see Routley. 3. For methods of adjustment, e.g. completing rankings, see again Routley. REFERENCES W. Lini, 'Keynote Address', Australia and the South Pacific, Proceedings on a Conference held at the Australian National University, Centre for Continuing Education, Canberra, 1982. A.A. Mazrui, A World Federation of Cultures: An African Perspective, Free Press, New York, 1976. All page references prefixed M are to this work. R. Routley, 'On the impossibility of an orthodox social theory and of an orthodox solution to environmental problems', Logique et Analyse 23 (1980) 145-166. K. Lehrer and C. Wagner, Rational consensus in Science and Society, Reidel, Holland, 1981. 1. It is widely assumed that cultural convergence is a good thing, to NOTES promoted. This is the operational assumption in Lehrer and Wagner, who want to see the conditions for everywhere their (fortunately, fail for important real excessive be cultural Markov convergence theorem applying virtually of course, the conditions are pretty restrictive, and life cases). convergence is There not are good reasons for thinking a good thing. Certainly some cases of convergence are undecidable. Experimental testing of convergence (Defi groups) showed that occurred, tended to confirm the status quo. Methods of convergence are it when convergence, essentially conservative. Both locally and on a larger scene such methods can be damaging, in several respects. They undercut the perhaps otherwise positions of minorities. And they can reinforce the position of dangerous power triggers. Consider what would happen - what appears to be happening - scene, the world where we have, in some measure, "enforced convergence". What we would be headed for - what we are headed for is imposition western in paradigm, with its economism, 5 everywhere violence of and the dominant environmental destructiveness. Lower cultures are progressively undermined. which Buddhism, stand opposed to main afford just one conspicuous example. (The useful working example.) Buddhism is Those practicing directions of the dominant paradigm, American right out impact of on step Thailand with is a economism, encouraging as it does removal of consumerist ambitions, and it is dianetrically opposed to violence and like destructive practices. (Thus to pull Buddhism out of the educational curriculum, as in the fairly recent American-inspired, constitution, their is not the enlightened step it is usually seen as: to be sure, it is "progressive" enough, but in a direction more of us should not be headed.) 2. Total consensus represents a limit of convergence. Consensus also its serious limitations then has  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Box 13, Item 999: Notes and clippings on anarchy Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Sylvan&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Sylvan</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. 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>. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:b38b8da" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:b38b8da</a> Subject The topic of the resource Typescripts and handwritten notes. Includes copies of published works by other authors and letters. Description An account of the resource Published works and letters redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. Title in collection finding aid: Green Folder single large staggered bundle of notes on anarchy. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, <span>Box 13, Item 999</span> Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource [124] leaves. 195.74 MB. Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Lake George - Floor - Pile 7 Box 13: Green Projects in Progress Lake George House Lake George House > Floor > Pile 7