1 20 144 https://www.antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/6ac75cab884e6903e8ca85828a326c92.pdf eeb1d61051d34810a2b451c1badfacfe Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/search?query=Richard+Routley+&amp;query_type=keyword&amp;record_types%5B%5D=Item&amp;record_types%5B%5D=File&amp;record_types%5B%5D=Collection&amp;record_types%5B%5D=SimplePagesPage&amp;record_types%5B%5D=Exhibit&amp;record_types%5B%5D=ExhibitPage&amp;submit_search=Search">Richard Routley</a> PDF Text Text �������������������������������������������� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Self-published Papers Description An account of the resource <span>Sylvan favoured the </span><span lang="EN-GB">highly-unorthodox practice of self-publishing a vast amount of his work<span>—</span><span></span>quite literally, using his own printing press!</span> Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource On the ethics of large-scale nuclear war and nuclear deterrence and the political fall-out Type The nature or genre of the resource Report Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Routley</a> Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984-01-01 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Manuscript https://www.antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/6ef0b9e2ef93f843eb517882e681cbb3.pdf 7497b1a142a2ee74e689488a2bfa234a PDF Text Text Inquiry, 21, 133-79 Nuclear Energy and Obligations to the Future R. and V. Routley Plumwood Mountain, Braidwood, Australia The paper considers the morality of nuclear energy development as it concerns future people, especially the creation of highly toxic nuclear wastes requiring longterm storage. On the basis of an example with many parallel moral features it is argued that the imposition of such costs and risks on the future is morally unacceptable. The paper goes on to examine in detail possible ways of escaping this conclusion, especially the escape route of denying that moral obligations of the appropriate type apply to future people. The bulk of the paper comprises discussion of this philosophical issue, including many arguments against assigning obligations to the future drawn both from analyses of obligation and from features of the future such as uncertainty and indeterminacy. A further escape through appeal to moral conflict is also considered, and in particular two conflict arguments, the Poverty and Lights-going-out arguments are briefly discussed. Both these escape routes are rejected and it is concluded that if the same standards of behaviour are applied to the future as to the present, nuclear energy development is morally unacceptable. I. The Bus Example Suppose we consider a bus, a bus which we hope is to make a very long journey. This bus, a third world bus, carries both passengers and freight. The bus sets down and picks up many different passengers in the course of its long journey and the drivers change many times, but because of the way the bus line is managed and the poor service on the route it is nearly always full to overcrowded, with passengers hanging off the back, and as in Afghanistan, passengers riding on the roof, and chickens and goats in the freight compartment. Early in the bus's journey someone consigns on it, to a far distant destination, a package containing a highly toxic and explosive gas. This is packaged in a very thin container, which as the consigner well knows is unlikely to contain the gas for the full distance for which it is consigned, and certainly will not do so if the bus should encounter any trouble, for example if there is a breakdown and the interior of the bus becomes very hot, if the bus should strike a very large bump or pothole of the sort commonly found on some of the bad roads it has to traverse, or if some 1 �134 R. and V. Routley passenger should interfere deliberately or inadvertently with the cargo or perhaps try to steal some of the freight, as also frequently happens. All of these things, let us suppose, have happened on some of the bus's previous journeys. If the container should break the resulting disaster would probably kill at least some of the people and animals on the bus, while others could be maimed or contract serious diseases. There does not seem much doubt about what most of us would say about the morality of the consigner's action, and there is certainly no doubt about what the passengers would say. The consigner's action in putting the safety of the occupants of the bus at risk is appalling. What could excuse such an action, what sort of circumstances might justify it, and what sort of case could the consigner reasonably put up? The consigner might say that it is by no means certain that the gas will escape; he himself is an optimist and therefore feels that such unfavourable possible outcomes should be ignored. In any case the bus might have an accident and the passengers be killed long before the container gets a chance to leak; or the passengers might change to another bus and leave the lethal parcel behind. He might say that it is the responsibility of the passengers and the driver to ensure that the journey is a smooth one, and that if they fail to do so, the results are not his fault. He might say that the journey is such a long one that many of the passengers may have become mere mindless vegetables or degenerate wretches about whose fate no decent person need concern himself, or that they might not care about losing their lives or health or possessions anyway by that time. Most of these excuses will seem little more than a bad joke, and certainly would not usually be reckoned any sort of justification. The main argument the consigner of the lethal parcel employs, however, is that his own pressing needs justify his actions. He has no option but to consign his potentially lethal parcel, he says, since the firm he owns, and which has produced the material as a by-product, is in bad financial straits and cannot afford to produce a better container or to stop the production of the gas. If the firm goes out of business, the consigner says, his wife will leave him, and he will lose his family happiness, the comfortable way of life to which he has become accustomed and sees now as a necessity; his employees will lose their jobs and have to look for others; not only will the firm's customers be inconvenienced but he, the consigner, will have to break some business contracts; the inhabitants of the local village through loss of spending and cancellation of the Multiplier Effect will suffer finan- �Obligations to the Future 135 cial hardship, and, worst of all, the tiny flow of droplets that the poor of the village might receive (theoretically at any rate) as a result of the trickling down of these good things would dry up entirely. In short, some basic and some perhaps uncomfortable changes will be needed in the village. Even if the consigner's story were accepted at face value - and it would be wise to look critically at his story - only someone whose moral sensibilities had been paralysed by the disease of galloping economism could see such a set of considerations, based on 'needs', comfort, and the goal of local prosperity, as justifying the consigner's action. One is not generally entitled to thus simply transfer the risks and costs arising from one's own life onto other uninvolved parties, to get oneself out of a hole of one's own making by creating harm or risk of harm to someone else who has had no share in creating the situation. To create serious risks and costs, especially risks to life or health for such others, simply to avoid having to make some changes to a comfortable life style, or even for a somewhat better reason, is usually thought deserving of moral condemnation, and sometimes considered a crime; for example, the action of a company in creating risks to the lives or health of its workers or customers to prevent itself from going bankrupt. What the consigner says may be an explanation of his behaviour, but it is not a justification. The problem raised by nuclear waste disposal is by no means a perfect analogy to the bus case, since, for example, the passengers on the nuclear bus cannot get off the bus or easily throw out the lethal package. In many crucial moral respects, however, the nuclear waste storage problem as it affects future people, the passengers in the bus we are considering, resembles the consignment of the faultily packaged lethal gas. Not only are rather similar moral principles involved, but a rather similar set of arguments to the lamentable excuses the consigner presents have been seriously put up to justify nuclear development, the difference being that in the nuclear case these arguments have been widely accepted. There is also some parallel in the risks involved; there is no known safe way to package the highly toxic wastes generated by nuclear plants that will be spread around the world if large-scale nuclear development goes ahead.1 The wastes problem will not be a slight one, with each one of the more than 2,000 reactors envisaged by the end of the century, producing on average annual wastes containing one thousand times the radioactivity of the Hiroshima bomb.2 The wastes include not merely the spent fuels and their radioactive by-products, but also everything they contaminate, from fuel containers to the thousands of widely distributed decommissioned nuclear �136 R. and V. Routley reactors which will have to be abandoned, still in a highly radioactive condition, after the expiry of their expected lifetimes of about thirty years, and which have been estimated to require perhaps one and a half million years to reach safe levels of radioactivity.3 The wastes must be kept suitably isolated from the environment for their entire active lifetime; for fission products the required storage period averages a thousand years or so, and for the actinides (transuranic elements) which include plutonium, there is a half-million to a million-year storage problem.4 Serious problems have arisen with both short-term and proposed longterm methods of storage, even with the comparatively small quantities of waste that have been produced over the last twenty years.5 With present known short-term surface methods of storage there is a continued need for human intervention to keep the material isolated from the environment, while with proposed longer-term methods such as storage in salt mines or granite to the risk of human interference there are added the risks of leakage, e.g. through water seepage, and of disturbance, for example through climatic change, earth movements, etc. The risks are significant: no reasonable person with even a limited acquaintance with the history of human affairs over the last 3,000 years could be confident of safe storage by methods involving human intervention over the enormous time periods involved. No one with even a slight knowledge of the geological and climatic history of the earth over the last million years, a period which has seen a number of ice ages and great fluctuations in climate for example, could be confident that the waste material could be safely stored for the vast periods of time required. Much of this waste is highly toxic; for example, even a beachball sized quantity of plutonium appropriately distributed is enough to give every person on the planet lung cancer - so that a leak of even a small part of this waste material could involve huge loss of life, widespread disease and genetic damage, and contamination of immense areas of land.6 Given the enormous costs which could be involved for the future, it is plainly grossly inadequ'ate'to merely speculate concerning untested, but possibly or even probably, safe methods for disposal of wastes. Yet none of the proposed methods has been properly tested, and they may prove to involve all sorts of unforeseen difficulties and risks when an attempt is made to put them into practice on a commercial scale. Only a method that could provide a rigorous guarantee of safety over the storage period, that placed safety beyond reasonable doubt, would be acceptable. It is difficult to see how such rigorous guarantees could be given concerning either the �Obligations to the Future 137 geological or future human factors. But even if an economically viable, rigorously safe long-term storage method could be devised, there is the problem of guaranteeing that it would be universally and invariably used. The assumption that it would be, especially if, as seems likely, such a method proved expensive economically and politically, seems to presuppose a level of efficiency, perfection, and concern for the future not previously encountered in human affairs, and certainly not conspicuous in the nuclear industry.7 Again, unless we assume continuous and faultless guarding of long-term storage sites through perhaps a million years of possible future human activity, weapons-grade radioactive material will be accessible, over much of the million-year storage period, to any party who is in a position to retrieve it. Our behaviour in creating this nightmare situation for the future is certainly no better than that of the consigner in the bus example. Industrialized countries, in order to get out of a mess of their own making essentially the creation of economies dependent on an abundance" of non-renewable energy in a situation where it is in fact in limited supply opt for a 'solution' which may enable them to avoid the making of uncomfortable changes during the lifetime of those now living, at the expense of passing heavy burdens on to the inhabitants of the earth at a future time burdens in the shape of costs and risks which, just as in the bus case, may adversely affect the life and health of future people and their opportunity to lead a decent life.8 It is sometimes suggested that analogies like the bus example are defective; that morally they are crucially different from the nuclear case, since future people, unlike the passengers in the bus, will benefit directly from nuclear development, which will provide an abundance of energy for the indefinite future. But this is incorrect. Nuclear fission creates wastes which may remain toxic for a million years, but even with the breeder reactor it could be an energy source for perhaps only 150 years. It will do nothing for the energy problems of the people of the distant future whose lives could be seriously affected by the wastes. Thus perhaps 30,000 generations of future people could be forced to bear significant risks, without any corresponding benefits, in order to provide for the extravagant energy use of only five generations. Nor is the risk of direct harm from the escape or misuse of radioactive materials the only burden the nuclear solution imposes on the future. Because the energy provided by nuclear fission is merely a stop-gap, it seems probable that in due course the same problem, that of making a �138 R. and V. Routley transition to renewable sources of energy, will have to be faced again by a future population which will probably, again as a result of our actions, be very much worse placed to cope with it.9 For they may well have to face the change to renewable resources in an over-populated world not only burdened with the legacy of our nuclear wastes, but also in a world in which, if the nuclear proponents' dream of global industrialization is realized, more and more of the global population will have become dependent on high energy consumption and associated technology and heavy resource use, and will have lost or reduced its ability to survive without it. It will, moreover, probably be a world which is largely depleted of non-renewable resources, and in which such renewable resources as forests and soils as remain, resources which will have to form a very important part of the basis of life, are in a run-down condition. Such points tell against the idea that future people must be, if not direct beneficiaries of nuclear fission energy, at least indirect beneficiaries. The 'solution' then is to buy time for contemporary industrial society at a price which not only creates serious problems for future people but which reduces their ability to cope with those problems. Just as in the bus case, contemporary industrial society proposes to get itself out of a hole of its own making by creating risk of harm, and by transferring costs and risks, to someone else who has had no part in producing the situation and who will obtain no clear benefit. It has clear alternatives to this action. That it does not take them is due essentially to its unwillingness to avoid changing wasteful patterns of consumption and to its desire to protect the interests of those who benefit from them. If we apply to the nuclear situation the same standards of behaviour and moral principles that we acknowledge (in principle if perhaps often not in fact) in the contemporary world, it will not be easy to avoid the conclusion that the situation involves injustice with respect to future people on a grand scale. It seems to us that there are only two plausible moves that might enable the avoidance of such a conclusion. First, it might be argued that the moral principles and obligations which we acknowledge for the contemporary world and the immediate future do not apply because the recipients of our nuclear parcel are in the non-immediate future. Secondly, an attempt might be made to appeal to overriding circumstances; for to reject the consigner's action in the circumstances outlined is not of course to say that there are no circumstances in which such an action might possibly be justifiable, or at least where the case is less clearcut. It is the same with the nuclear case. Just as in the case of the consigner of the �Obligations to the Future 139 package there is a need to consider what these justifying circumstances might be, and whether they apply in the present case. We turn now to the first of these possible escape routes for the proponent of nuclear development, to the philosophical question of our obligations to the future. II. Obligations to the Distant Future The area in which these philosophical problems arise is that of the distant (i.e. non-immediate) future, that is, the future with which people alive today will make no direct contact; the immediate future provides comparatively few problems for moral theories. The issues involved, although of far more than academic interest, have not received any great attention in recent philosophical literature, despite the fact that the question of obligations to future people presents tests which a number of ethical theories fail to pass, and also raises a number of questions in political philosophy concerning the adequacy of accepted institutions which leave out of account the interests of future people. Moral philosophers have predictably differed on the issue. But contrary to the picture painted in a recent, widely read, and influential work discussing it, Passmore's Man's Responsibility for Nature, a good many philosophers who have explicitly considered the question have come down in favour of the same consideration being given to the rights and interests of future people as to those of contemporary or immediately future people. Other philosophers have tended to fall into three categories - those who acknowledge obligations to the future but who do not take them seriously or who assign them less weight, those who deny, or who are committed by their general moral position to denying, that there are moral obligations beyond the immediate future, and those like Passmore and Golding who come down, with admirable philosophical caution, on both sides of the issue, but with the weight of the argument favouring the view underlying prevailing economic and political institutions, that there are no moral obligations to the future beyond those to the next generation. • According to the most extreme of these positions against moral obligations to the future, our behaviour with respect to the future is morally unconstrained; there are no moral restrictions on acting or failing to act deriving from the effect of our actions on future people. Of those philosophers who say, or whose views imply, that we don't have obligations to the (non-immediate) future, i.e. those who have opted for the uncon- �140 R. and V. Routley strained position, many have based this view on accounts of moral obligation which are built on relations which presuppose some degree of temporal or spatial contiguity. Thus moral obligation is seen as grounded on or as presupposing various relations which could not hold between people widely separated in time (or sometimes in space). For example, obligation is seen as grounded in relations which are proximate or of short duration and also non-transitive. Among such suggested bases or grounds of moral obligation, or requirements for moral obligation, which would rule out obligations to the non-immediate future are these: First, there are those accounts which require that someone to whom a moral obligation is held be able to claim his rights or entitlement. People in the distant future will not be able to claim rights and entitlements as against us, and of course they can do nothing to enforce any claims they might have for their rights against us. Secondly, there are those accounts which base moral obligations on social or legal convention, for example a convention which would require punishment of offenders or at least some kind of social enforcement. But plainly these and other conventions will not hold invariantly over change in society and amendment of legal conventions and so will not be invariant over time. Also future people have no way of enforcing their interests or punishing offenders, and there could be no guarantee that any contemporary institution would do it for them. Both the view that moral obligation requires the context of a moral community and the view that it is contractually based appear to rule out the distant future as a field of moral obligation, as they not only require a commonality, or some sort of common basis, which cannot be guaranteed in the case of the distant future, but also a possibility of interchange or reciprocity of action which cannot apply to the future. Where the basis of moral obligation is seen as mutual exchange, the interests of future people must be set aside because they cannot change the past and cannot be parties to any mutual contract. The exclusion of moral obligations to the distant future also follows from those views which attempt to ground moral obligations in non-transitive relations of short duration such as sympathy and love. There are some difficulties also about love and sympathy for (non-existent) people in the far distant future about whose personal qualities and characteristics one must know very little and who may well be committed to a life-style for which one has no sympathy. On the current showing in the case of nuclear energy it would be easy to conclude that contemporary society lacks both love and sympathy for future people; and it would appear to follow from this that contemporary �Obligations to the Future 141 people have no obligations to future people and can harm them as it suits them. What all these views have in common is a naturalistic picture of obligation as something acquired, either individually or institutionally, something which is conditional on doing something or failing to do something (e.g. participating in the moral community, contracting), or having some characteristic one can fail to have (e.g. love, sympathy, empathy).10 Because obligation therefore becomes conditional, features usually thought to characterize it, such as universality of application and necessitation (i.e. the binding features), are lost, especially where there is a choice of whether or not to do the thing required to acquire the obligation, and so of whether to acquire it. The criteria for acquisition suggested are such as to exclude people in the distant future. However, the view that there are no moral constraints with respect to future people, that one is free to act as one likes with respect to them, is a very difficult one to sustain. Consider the example of a scientific group which, for no particular reason other than to test a particular piece of technology, places in orbit a cobalt bomb which is to be set off by a triggering device designed to go off several hundred years from the time of its despatch. No presently living person and none of their immediate descendants would be affected, but the population of the earth in the distant future would be wiped out as a direct and predictable result of the action. The unconstrained position clearly implies that this is an acceptable moral enterprise, that whatever else we might legitimately criticize in the scientists' experiment, perhaps its being unduly expensive or badly designed, we cannot lodge a moral protest about the damage it will do to future people. The unconstrained position also endorses as morally acceptable the following sorts of examples: A firm discovers it can make a handsome profit from mining, processing, and manufacturing a new type of material which, although it causes no problems for present people or their immediate descendants, will over a period of hundreds of years decay into a substance which will cause an enormous epidemic of cancer among the inhabitants of the earth at that time. According to the unconstrained view the firm is free to act in its own interests, without any consideration for the harm it does to future people. Such counterexamples to the unconstrained view might seem childishly obvious. Yet the unconstrained position concerning the future from which they follow is far from being a straw man; not only have a number of philosophers writing on the issue endorsed this position, but it is the clear �142 R. and V. Routley implication of many currently popular views of the basis of moral obligation, as well as of economic theory. It does not appear, on the other hand, that those who opt for the unconstrained position have considered such examples and endorsed them as morally acceptable, despite their being clearly implied by their position. We suspect that when it is brought out that the unconstrained position admits such counterexamples, that being free to act implies, among other things being free to inflict pointless harm, most of those who opted for the unconstrained position would want to assert that it was not what they intended. What those who have put forward the unconstrained position seem to have had in mind in denying moral obligation is rather that future people can look after themselves, that we are not responsible for their lives. The view that the future can take care of itself also seems to assume a future causally independent of the present. But it is not. It is not as if, in cases such as those discussed above and the nuclear case, the future is simply being left alone to take care of itself. Present people are influencing it, and in doing so must acquire many of the same sorts of moral responsibilities as they do in causally affecting the present and immediate future. The thesis seems thus to assume an incorrect model of an independent and unrelated future. Also, to say that we are not responsible for the lives of future people does not amount to the same as saying that we are free to do as we like with respect to them, that there are no moral constraints on our action involving them. In just the same way, the fact that one does not have, or has not acquired, an obligation to some stranger with whom one has never been involved - that one has no responsibility for his life - does not imply that one is free to do what one likes with respect to him, for example to rob him or to pursue some course of action of advantage to oneself which could seriously harm him. These difficulties for the unconstrained position arise in part from the failure to make an important distinction between, on the one hand, acquired or assumed obligations towards somebody, for which some act of acquisition or assumption is required as a qualifying condition, and on the other hand moral constraints, which require, for example, that one should not act so as to damage or harm someone, and for which no act of acquisition is required. There is a considerable difference in the level and kind of responsibility involved. In the first case one must do something or be something which one can fail to do or be, e.g. have loves, sympathy, be contracted. In the second case responsibility arises as a result of being a causal agent aware of the consequences or probable consequences of his �Obligations to the Future 143 action, and thus does not have to be especially acquired or assumed. Thus there is no problem about how the latter class, moral constraints, can apply to the distant future in cases where it may be difficult or impossible for acquisition or assumption conditions to be satisfied. They apply as a result of the ability to produce causal effects on the distant future of a reasonably predictable nature. Thus also moral constraints can apply to what does not (yet) exist, just as actions can cause results that do not (yet) exist. While it may be the case that there would need to be an acquired or assumed obligation in order for it to be claimed that contemporary people must make special sacrifices of an heroic kind for future people, or even to help them especially, only moral constraints are needed in order for us to be constrained from harming them. Thus, to return to the bus example, the consigner cannot argue in justification of his action that he has never assumed or acquired responsibility for the passengers, that he does not know them and therefore has no love or sympathy for them, and that they are not part of his moral community, in short that he has no special obligations to help them. All that one needs to argue in respect of both the bus and the nuclear case is that there are moral constraints against harming, not that there are specially acquired obligations to take responsibility for the lives of the people involved. The confusion of moral constraints with acquired obligation, and the attempt therewith to view all constraints as acquired and to write off non-acquired constraints, is facilitated through the use of the term 'moral obligation' in philosophy to indicate any type of deontic constraint, while in natural language it is used to indicate something which has to be assumed or acquired. Hence the equation and at least one root of the unconstrained position, that is of the belief that there are no moral constraints concerning the distant future. The unconstrained view tends to give way, under the weight of counterexamples, to a more qualified, and sometimes ambivalent position. Passmore's position in [1] is a striking example of the second ambivalent position. On the one hand Passmore regularly gives the impression of one championing future people; for example, in the final sentence of [1] he says, concerning men a century hence: My sole concern is that we should do nothing which will reduce their freedom of thought and action, whether by destroying.the natural world which makes that freedom possible or the social traditions which permit and encourage it. �144 R. and V. Routley Earlier (esp. pp. 84-85) Passmore appears to endorse the principle 'that we ought not to act so as certainly to harm posterity' and claims (p. 98) that, even where there are uncertainties, 'these uncertainties do not justify negligence'. Nevertheless, though obligations concerning non-immediate posterity are thus admitted, the main thrust of Passmore's argument is entirely different, being in favour of the unconstrained position according to which we have no obligations to non-immediate posterity. Thus his conclusion (p. 91): So whether we approach the problem of obligations to posterity by way of Bentham and Sidgwick, Rawls or Golding, we are led to something like the same conclusion: our obligations are to immediate posterity, we ought to try to improve the world so that we shall be able to hand it over to our immediate successors in a better condition, and that is all.11 Passmore's position is, to all appearances, simply inconsistent. There are two ways one might try to render it consistent, but neither is readily available to Passmore. The first is by taking advantage of the distinction between moral constraints and acquired obligations, but a basis for this distinction is not evident in Passmore's work and indeed the distinction is antithetical to the analyses of obligation that Passmore tries to synthesize with his own analysis in terms of loves. The second, sceptical, route to consistency is by way of the argument that we shall consider shortly, that there is always gross uncertainty with respect to the distant future, uncertainty which relieves us in practice of any moral constraints regarding the distant future. But though Passmore's writing strongly suggests this uncertainty argument (especially his sympathetic discussion of the Premier of Queensland's argument against conservationists [p. 77]), he also rules it out with the claim that uncertainties do not justify negligence.12 Many of the accounts of moral obligation that give rise to the unconstrained position are fused in Passmore's work, again not entirely consistently, since the different accounts exploited do not give uniform results. Thus the primary account of obligation is said to be in terms of loves though the account is never satisfactorily formulated or developed - and it is suggested that because our loves do not extend into the distant future, neither do our obligations. This sentimental account of obligation will obviously lead to different results from utilitarian accounts of obligation, which however Passmore appeals to in his discussion of wilderness. In yet other places in [1], furthermore, social contract and moral community �Obligations to the Future 145 views are appealed to - see, e.g., the treatment of animals, of preservation, and of duties to nature. In the case of obligations to future people, however, Passmore does try to sketch an argument - what we call the convergence argument - that all the accounts lead in the end to the unconstrained position. As well as the convergence argument, and various uncertainty arguments to be considered later, Passmore appears to endorse several other arguments in favour of his theme that there are in practice no obligations to the distant future. In particular, he suggests that such obligations would in practice be otiose. Everything that needs to be accounted for can be encompassed through the chain picture of obligation as linking successive generations, under which each generation has obligations, based on loves, only to the succeeding generation. We outline three objections to this chain account. First, it is inadequate to treat constraints concerning the future as if they applied only between generations, as if there were no question of constraints on individuals as opposed to whole generations, since individuals can create causal effects, e.g. harm, on the future in a way which may create individual responsibility, and which can't necessarily be sheeted home to an entire generation. Secondly, such chains, since they are non-transitive, cannot yield direct obligations to the distant future. But for this very reason the chain picture cannot be adequate, as examples again show. For the picture is unable to explain several of the cases that have to be dealt with, e.g. the examples already discussed which show that we can have a direct effect on the distant future without affecting the next generation, who may not even be able to influence matters.13 Thirdly, improvements for immediate successors may be achieved at the expense of disadvantages to people of the more distant future. Improving the world for immediate successors is quite compatible with, and may even in some circumstances be most easily achieved by, ruining it for less immediate successors. Such cases can hardly be written off as 'never-never land' examples, since many cases of environmental exploitation might be seen as of just this type, e.g. not just the nuclear case but also the exhaustion of non-renewable resources and the long-term depletion of renewable resources such as soils and forests through overcropping. If then such obvious injustices to future people arising from the favouring or exclusive concern with immediate successors are to be avoided, obligations to the future will have to be seen as in some way fairly distributed over time, and not merely as accruing to particular generations in the way the chain picture suggests. �146 R. and V. Routley Passmore tries to represent all obligations to the distant future in terms of heroic self-sacrifice, something which cannot of course be morally required. But in view of the distinctions between constraints and acquired obligation and between obligation and supererogation, this is just to misrepresent the position of these obligations. For example, one is no more engaging in heroic self-sacrifice by not forcing future people into an unviable life position or by refraining from causing them direct harm, than one is resorting to heroic self-sacrifice in refraining from beating and robbing some stranger and leaving him to starve. Passmore's most sustained argument for the unconstrained position is a convergence argument, that different analyses of obligations, including his own, lead to the one conclusion. This style of argument is hardly convincing when there are well-known accounts of obligation which do not lead to the intended conclusion, e.g. deontological accounts such as those of Kant and of modern European schools, and teleological accounts such as those of Moore (in [8]). But such unfavourable positions are either rapidly passed over or ignored in Passmore's historical treatment and narrow selection of historical figures. The style of argument becomes even less persuasive when it is discovered that the accounts of the main authorities appealed to, Bentham, Sidgwick, and Rawls,14 do not lead, without serious distortion, to the intended conclusion. Indeed Passmore has twisted the historical and textual evidence to suit his case, as we now try to indicate. Consider Bentham first. Passmore's assumption, for which no textual evidence is cited, ls is that no Benthamite calculation can take account of a future more extensive than the immediate future (cf. pp. 87-88). The assumption seems to be based simply on the fact that Bentham remarked that 'the value of the pleasure or pain to each person to be considered in any estimate will be greater or less in virtue of the following circumstances'. '3. Its certainty or uncertainty. 4. Its propinquity or remoteness' ([10], p. 16). But this does nothing to show that future persons are discounted: the certainty and propinquity do not concern persons, but the utilities of the persons concerned. As regards which persons are concerned in any calculation Bentham is quite explicit, detailing how to take an exact account. . . of the general tendency of any act.. . .5 . Take an account of the number of persons whose interests appear to be concerned; and repeat the above process [summation of values of pleasure and of pain] with respect to each. ([10], p. 16) �Obligations to the Future 147 It follows that Bentham's calculation takes account of everyone (and, in his larger scheme, every sentient creature) whose interests appear to be concerned: if the interests of people in the distant future appear to be concerned - as they are in conservation issues - they are to be included in the calculation. And there is independent evidence16 that in Bentham's view the principle of utility was not temporally restricted: 'that is useful which, taking all times and all persons into consideration, leaves a balance of happiness' ([10], pp. 17-18, our italics). Thus the future cut-off that Passmore has attributed to Bentham is contradicted by Bentham's own account. The case of Sidgwick is more complex, because there is isolated oscillation in his application of utilitarianism between use of utility and of (something like) expected utility (see [11], pp. 381,414): Sidgwick's utilitarianism is, in its general characterization, essentially that of Bentham: the conduct which . . . is objectively right is that which will produce the greatest amount of happiness on the whole; that is, taking into account all those whose happiness is affected by the conduct. ([11], p. 411) All includes all sentient beings, both existing and to exist, as Sidgwick goes on to explain (p. 414). In particular, in answer to the question 'How far are we to consider the interests of posterity when they seem to conflict with those of existing human beings?' Sidgwick writes ([11], p. 414, our italics): It seems, however, clear that the time at which a man exists cannot affect the value of his happiness from a universal point of view; and that the interests of posterity must concern a Utilitarian as much as those of his contemporaries, except in so far as the effect of his actions on posterity - and even the existence of human beings to be affected - must necessarily be more uncertain. But Passmore manages, first of all, to give a different sense to what Sidgwick is saying by adjusting the quotation, by omitting the clause we have italicized, which equalizes the degree of concern for present and future persons, and by italicizing the whole except-clause, thereby placing much greater emphasis than Sidgwick does on uncertainty. For according to Sidgwick's impartiality principle, 'the mere difference in time is not a �148 R. and V. Routley reasonable ground for having more regard to the consciousness of one -amount than to that of another' ([11], p. 381; see also p. 124). The apparent tension in Sidgwick's theory as to whether uncertainty should be taken into account is readily removed by resort to a modern distinction between values and expected values (i.e. probability weighted values); utilitarian rightness is defined as before in terms of the net happiness of all concerned over all time without mention of uncertainty or probabilities, but it is distinguished from probable rightness (given present information), in the utilitarian sense,17 which is defined in terms of the expected net happiness of those concerned, using present probabilities. It is the latter notion, of probable rightness, that practical reasoning is commonly concerned with and that decision theory studies; and it is this that Passmore supposes Sidgwick is using ([1], p. 84). But it is evident that the utilitarian determination of probable rightness, like that of rightness, will sometimes take into account the distant future - as Sidgwick's discussion of utilitarian determination of optimum population (immediately following his remark on uncertainty) does. So how does Passmore contrive to reverse matters, to have Sidgwick's position lead to his own unconstrained conclusion? The answer is: By inserting an additional assumption of his own - which Sidgwick would certainly have rejected - that the uncertainties entitle us to ignore the distant future. What Passmore has implicitly assumed in his claim ([1], p. 85) that 'utilitarian principles [such as Sidgwick's] are not strong enough' 'to justify the kinds of sacrifice some conservationists now call upon us to make' is his own thesis that 'The uncertainty of harms we are hoping to prevent would in general entitle us to ignore them.. .'. From a decision-theory viewpoint this is simply irrational18 unless the probabilities of damage are approaching zero. We will deal with the essentially sceptical uncertainty arguments on which Passmore's position depends shortly: here it is enough to observe that Sidgwick's position does not lead to anything like that which Passmore attributes to him - without uncertainty assumptions which Sidgwick would have rejected (for he thought that future people'will certainly have pleasure and suffer pain). We can also begin to gauge from Passmore's treatment of nineteenthcentury utilitarians, such as Bentham and Sidgwick, the extent of the distortion which underlies his more general historical case for the unconstrained position which, so he claims, represents accurately enough what, over the last two centuries, men have seen as their duty to posterity as a whole. . . . ([1], p. 91) �Obligations to the Future 149 The treatment accorded Rawls in only marginally more satisfactory. Passmore supposes that Rawls's theory of justice leads directly to the unconstrained position ([1], p. 87 and p. 91), whereas Rawls claims ([5], p. 293) that we have obligations to future people just as to present ones. But the situation is more complicated than Rawls's claim would indicate, as we now try to explain in a summary way (more detail is given in the Appendix). For, in order to justify this claim on his theory (with its present time-of-entry interpretation), Rawls has to invoke additional and dubious motivational assumptions; even so the theory which thus results does not yield the intended conclusion, but a conclusion inconsistent with Rawls's claim. However, by changing the time-of-entry interpretation to an omnitemporal one, Rawls's claim does result from the theory so amended. Moreover, the amended theory also yields, by exactly Rawls's argument for a just saving rate, a resource conservation policy, and also a case against nuclear development. Accordingly Passmore's other claims regarding Rawls are mistaken, e.g. that the theory cannot justify a policy of resource conservation. Rawls does not emerge unscathed either. As on the issue of whether his contract is a necessary condition for obligations, so on obligations which the contract yields to the distant future, Rawls is far from consistent. Furthermore, institutions such as qualified market and voting systems are recommended as just though from a future perspective their results are far from that. Rawls, then, does not take obligations to the future with full seriousness. In sum, it is not true that the theory of Rawls, any more than the theories of the historical figures actually discussed by Passmore, unequivocally supports the unconstrained position. III. Uncertainty and Indeterminacy Arguments Although there are grave difficulties for the unconstrained position, qualification leads to a more defensible position. According to the qualified position we are not entirely unconstrained with respect to the distant future: there are obligations, but these are not so important as those to the present, and the interests of distant future people cannot weigh very much in the scale against those of the present and immediate future. The interests of future people then, except in unusual cases, count for very much less than the interests of present people. Hence such things as nuclear development and various exploitative activities which benefit present �150 R. and V. Routley people should proceed, even if people of the distant future are disadvantaged by them. The qualified position appears to be widely held and is implicit in most modern economic theories, where the position of a decrease in weight of future costs and benefits (and so of future interests) is obtained by application over time of an (opportunity cost) discount rate. The attempt to apply economics as a moral theory, something that is becoming increasingly common, can lead then to the qualified position. What is objectionable in such an approach is that economics must operate within the bounds of moral (deontic) constraints, just as in practice it operates within legal constraints, and cannot determine what those constraints are. There are, moreover, alternative economic theories and simply to adopt one which discounts the future is to beg all the questions at issue. The discounting move often has the same result as the unconstrained position; if, for instance, we consider the cancer example and consider costs as payable compensation, it is evident that, over a sufficiently long period of time, discounting at current prices would lead to the conclusion that there are no recoverable damages and so, in economic terms, no constraints. In short, even certain damage to future people could be written off. One way to achieve the bias against future people is by the application of discount rates which are set in accord with the current economic horizons of no more than about fifteen years,19 and application of such rates would simply beg the question against the interests and rights of future people. Where there is certain future damage of a morally forbidden type the whole method of discounting is simply inapplicable, and its use would violate moral constraints.20 Another argument for the qualified position, which avoids the objections from cases of certain damage, comes from probability considerations.The distant future, it is argued, is much more uncertain than the present and immediate future, so that probabilities are consequently lower, perhaps even approaching or coinciding with zero for any hypothesis concerning the distant future.21 But then if we take account of probabilities in the obvious way, by simply multiplying them against costs and benefits, it is evident that the interests of future people, except in cases where there is an unusually high degree of certainty, must count for (very much) less than those of present and neighbouring people where (much) higher probabilities obtain. So in the case of conflict between the present and the future where it is a question of weighing certain benefits to the people of the present and the immediate future against a much lower �Obligations to the Future 151 probability of indeterminate costs to an indeterminate number of distant future people, the issue would normally be decided in favour of the present, assuming that anything like similar costs and benefits were involved. But of course it can't be assumed that anything like similarly weighted costs and benefits are involved in the nuclear case, especially if it is a question of risking poisoning some of the earth for half a million or so years, with consequent risk of serious harm to thousands of generations of future people, in order to obtain quite doubtful or trivial benefits for some present people, in the shape of the opportunity to continue unnecessarily high energy use. And even if the costs and benefits were comparable or evenly weighted, such an argument would be defective, since an analogous argument would show that the consigner's action is acceptable provided the benefit, e.g. the profit he stood to gain from imposing significant risks on other people, was sufficiently large. Such a cost-benefit approach to moral and decision problems, with or without the probability frills, is quite inadequate where different parties are concerned, or for dealing with cases of conflict of interest or moral problems where deontic constraints are involved, and commonly yields counterintuitive results. For example, it would follow on such principles that it is permissible for a firm to injure, or very likely injure, some innocent party provided the firm stands to make a sufficiently large gain from it. But the costs and benefits involved are not transferable in any simple or general way from one party to another. Transfers of this kind, of costs and benefits involving different parties, commonly raise moral issues - e.g. is x entitled to benefit himself by imposing costs ony ? - which are not susceptible to a simple cost-benefit approach of the sort adopted by some proponents of nuclear energy, who attempt to dismiss the costs to future people with the soothing remark that any development involves costs as well as benefits. The transfer point is enough to invalidate the comparison, heavily relied on by McCracken [16] in building a case for the acceptability of the nuclear risk, between nuclear risks and those from cigarette smoking. In the latter case those who supposedly benefit from the activity are also, to an overwhelming extent* those who bear the serious health costs and risks involved. In contrast the users and supposed beneficiaries of nuclear energy will be risking not only, or even primarily, their own lives and health, but also those of others who may be non-beneficiaries and who may be spatially or temporally removed, and these risks will not be in any direct way related to a person's extent of use. The transfer objection is essentially the same as that to the utilitarian's �152 R. and V. Routley happiness sums as a way of solving moral conflict between different parties, and the introduction of probability considerations does not change the principles involved but merely complicates analyses. One might further object to the probability argument that probabilities involving distant future situations are not always less than those concerning the immediate future in the way the argument supposes, and that the outcomes of some moral problems such as the bus example do not depend on a high level of probability anyway. In some sorts of cases it is enough, as the bus example reveals, that a significant risk is created; such cases do not depend critically on high probability assignments. Uncertainty arguments in various forms are the most common and important ones used by philosophers and others to argue for the position that we cannot be expected to take serious account of the effects of our actions on the distant future. There are two strands to the uncertainty argument, capable of separation, but frequently entangled. Both arguments are mistaken, the first on a priori grounds, the second on a posteriori grounds. The first argument is a generalized uncertainty argument which runs as follows: In contrast to the exact information we can obtain about the present, the information we can obtain about the effects of our actions on the distant future is unreliable, woolly, and highly speculative. But we cannot base assessments of how we should act on information of this kind, especially when accurate information is obtainable about the present which would indicate different action. Therefore we must regretfully ignore the uncertain effects of our actions on the distant future. More formally and crudely: One only has obligations to the future if these obligations are based on reliable information; there is no reliable information at present as regards the distant future; therefore one has no obligations to the distant future. The first argument is essentially a variation on a sceptical argument in epistemology concerning our knowledge of the future (formally, replace 'obligations' by 'knowledge' in the crude statement of the argument above). The main ploy is to considerably overestimate and overstate the degree of certainty available with respect to the present and immediate future, and the degree of certainty which is required as the basis for moral consideration both with respect to the present and with respect to the future. Associated with this is the attempt to suggest a sharp division as regards certainty between the present and immediate future on the one hand and the distant future on the other. We shall not find, we suggest, that there is any such sharp or simple division between the distant future and �Obligations to the Future 153 the adjacent future and present, at least with respect to those things in the present which are normally subject to moral constraints. We can and constantly do act on the basis of such 'unreliable' information as the sceptic as regards the future conveniently labels 'uncertainty'; for scepticproof certainty is rarely, or never, available with respect to much of the present and immediate future. In moral situations in the present, action often takes account of risk and probability, even quite low probabilities. A good example is again the bus case. We do not need to know for certain that the container will break and the lethal gas escape. In fact it does not even have to be probable, in the relevant sense of more probable than not, in order for us to condemn the consigner's action. It is enough that there is a significant risk of harm in this sort of case. It does not matter if the decreased well-being of the consigner is certain and the prospects of the passengers quite uncertain; the resolution of the problem is still clearly in favour of the so-called 'speculative' and 'unreliable'. But if we do not require certainty of action to apply moral constraints in contemporary affairs, why should we require a much higher standard of certainty in the future? Why should we require epistemic standards for the future which the more familiar sphere of moral action concerning the present and adjacent future does not need to meet? The insistence on certainty as a necessary condition before moral consideration can be given to the distant future, then, amounts to an epistemic double standard. But such an epistemic double standard, proposed in explaining the difference between the present and the future and to justify ignoring future peoples' interests, in fact cannot itself provide an explanation of the differences, since it already presupposes different standards of certainty appropriate to each class, which difference is in turn in need of justification. The second uncertainty argument is a practical uncertainty argument, that whatever our theoretical obligations to the future, we cannot in practice take the interests of future people into account, because uncertainty about the distant future is so gross that we cannot determine what the likely consequences of actions upon it will be and therefore, however good our intentions to the people of the distant future, in practice we have no choice but to ignore their interests. Uncertainty is gross where certain incompatible hypotheses are as good as one another and there is no rational ground for choosing between them. The second uncertainty argument can also be put in this way: If moral principles are, like other principles, implicational in form, that is of such forms as 'if* has character h then x is wrong, for every (action) x', then what the argument claims is �154 R. and V. Routley that we can never obtain the information about future actions which would enable us to detach the antecedent of the implication. So even if moral principles theoretically apply to future people, in practice they cannot be applied to obtain clear conclusions or directions concerning contemporary action of the 'It is wrong to do x' type. Many of the assumptions of the second argument have to be conceded. If the distant future really is so grossly uncertain that in every case it is impossible to determine in any way that is better than chance what the effects of present action will be, and whether any given action will help or hinder future people, then moral principles, although they may apply theoretically to the future, will not be applicable in practice for obtaining any clear conclusions about how to act. Hence the distant future will impose no practical moral constraints on action. However, the argument is factually incorrect in assuming that the future is always so grossly uncertain or indeterminate. Admittedly there is often a high degree of uncertainty concerning the distant future, but as a matter of (contingent) fact it is not always so gross or sweeping as the argument has to assume. There are some areas where uncertainty is not so great as to exclude constraints on action, especially when account is taken of the point, noticed in connection with the first argument, that complete certainty is commonly not required for moral constraints and that all that may be needed in some cases is the creation of"a significant risk. Again there is considerable uncertainty about many factors which are not highly, or at all, morally relevant, but this does not extend to many factors which are of much greater importance to moral issues. For example, we may not have any idea what the fashions will be in a hundred years in girls' names or men's footwear, or what brands of ice cream people will be eating if any, but we do have excellent reason to believe, especially if we consider 3,000 years of history, that what people there are in a hundred years are likely to have material and psychic needs not entirely unlike our own, that they will need a healthy biosphere for a good life; that like us they will not be immune to radiation; that their welfare will not be enhanced by a high incidence of cancer or genetic defects, by the destruction of resources, or the elimination from the face of the earth of that wonderful variety of non-human life which at present makes it such a rich and interesting place. For this sort of reason, the second uncertainty argument should be rejected. While it is true that there are many areas in which the morally relevant information needed is uncertain or unavailable, and in which we cannot therefore determine satisfactorily how to act, there are certainly others in �Obligations to the Future 155 which uncertainty in morally relevant areas is not so great as to preclude moral constraints on action, where we ascertain if not absolute certainties at least probabilities of the same sort of order as are considered sufficient for the application of moral principles in parallel contemporary cases, especially where spatially remote people are involved. The case of nuclear waste storage, and of uncertainty of the effects of it on future people, seems to be of the latter sort. Here there is no gross indeterminacy or uncertainty; it is simply not true that incompatible hypotheses about what may happen are as good as each other. It is plain that nuclear waste storage does impose significant risks of harm on future people, and, as we can see from the bus example, the significant risk of harm is enough in cases of this type to make moral constraints applicable. In terms of the defects of the preceding uncertainty arguments, we can see the corresponding defects in a number of widely employed uncertainty arguments used to write off probable harm to future people as outside the scope of proper consideration. Most of these popular moves employ both of the uncertainty arguments as suits the case, switching from one to the other in a way that is again reminiscent of sceptical moves. For example, we may be told that we cannot really take account of future people because we cannot be sure that they will exist or that their tastes and wants will not be completely different from our own, to the point where they will not suffer from our exhaustion of resources or from the things that would affect us (cf. Passmore [1]). But this is to insist upon complete certainty of a sort beyond what is required for the present and immediate future, where there is also commonly no guarantee that some disaster will not overtake those we are morally committed to. Again we may be told that there is no guarantee that future people will be worthy of any efforts on our part, because they may be morons or forever plugged into enjoyment- or other machines (Golding [12]). Even if one is prepared to accept the elitist approach presupposed - according to which only those who meet certain properly civilized or intellectual standards are eligible for moral consideration - what we are being handed in such arguments as a serious defeating consideration is again a mere outside possibility - like the sceptic who says that the solid-looking desk in front of us is perhaps only a facade, not because he has any particular reason for doing so, but because he hasn't looked around the back, drilled holes in it, etc. Neither the contemporary nor the historical situation gives any positive reason for supposing that a lapse into universal moronity or universal pleasure-machine escapism is a serious possibility, as opposed to a logical possibility. We can contrast �156 R. and V. Routley with these mere logical possibilities the very real historically supportable risks of escape of nuclear waste or decline of a civilization through destruction of its resource base. The possibilities just considered in these uncertainty arguments of sceptical character are not real possibilities. Another argument which may consider a real possibility, but still does not succeed in showing that it is acceptable to proceed with an action which would appear to be harmful to future people, is often introduced in the nuclear waste case. This is the argument that future people may discover a rigorously safe and permanent storage method for nuclear wastes before they are damaged by escaped waste material. Let us grant for the sake of the argument that this is a real possibility (though physical arguments may show that it is not). This still does not affect the fact that there is a significant risk of serious damage and that the creation of a significant risk is enough to rule out an action of this type as morally impermissible. In just the same way, future people may discover a cure for cancer, and the fact that this appears to be a real and not merely a logical possibility, does not make the action of the firm in the example discussed above, of producing a substance likely to cause cancer in future people, morally admissible. The fact that there was a real possibility of future people avoiding the harm would show that actions of these sorts were admissible only if what was required for inadmissibility was certainty of harm or a very high probability of it. In such cases, before such actions could be considered admissible, what would be required is far more than a possibility, real or not22 - it is at least the availability of an applicable, safe, and rigorously tested, not merely speculative, technique for achieving it, something that future people could reasonably be expected to apply to protect themselves. The strategy of most of these uncertainty arguments is fairly clear then, and may be brought out by looking yet again at the bus example, where the consigner says that he cannot be expected to take account of the effect of his actions on the passengers because they may find an effective way to deal with his parcel or some lucky or unlucky accident may occur, e.g. the bus may break down and they may all change to a different bus leaving the parcel behind, or the bus may crash, killing all the passengers before the container gets a chance to leak. These are all possibilities, of course, but there is no positive reason to believe that they are any more than that, that is they are not real possibilities. The strategy is to stress such outside possibilities in order to create the false impression that there is gross uncertainty about the future, that the real possibility that the container will �Obligations to the Future 157 break should be treated in the same way as these mere logical possibilities, that uncertainty about the future is so great as to preclude the consigners' taking account of the passengers' welfare and of the real possibility of harm from his parcel, and thereby excuse his action. A related strategy is to stress a real possibility, such as finding a cure for cancer, and thereby imply that this removes the case for applying moral constraints .This move implicitly makes the assumptions of the first argument, that certainty, or at least a very high probability, of harm is required before an action can be judged morally inadmissible, and the point of stressing the real possibility of avoidance of damage is to show that this allegedly required high degree of certainty or probability cannot be attained. That is, the strategy draws attention to some real uncertainty implying that this is sufficient to defeat the application of moral constraints. But, as we have seen, this is often not so. An argument closely related to the uncertainty arguments is based on the non-existence and indeterminacy of the future.23 An item is indeterminate in a given respect if its properties in that respect are, as a matter of logic, not settled (nor are they settlable in a non-arbitrary fashion). The respects in which future items are indeterminate are well enough known for a few examples to serve as reminders: all the following are indeterminate: the population of Australia at 2001, its distribution, its age structure, the preferences of its members for folk music, wilderness, etc., the size and shape of Wollongong, the average number of rooms in its houses and in its office blocks, and so on. Philosophical discussion of such indeterminacy is as old as Aristotle's sea battle and as modern as truth-value gaps and fuzzy logics, and many positions have been adopted on the existence and determinacy of future items. Nevertheless theories that there are obligations to the future are not sensitive to the metaphysical position adopted concerning the existence or non-existence of the future. Any theory which denied obligations to the future on the metaphysical grounds that the future did not exist, and did not have properties, so that the present could not be related to it, would be committed to denying such obvious facts as that the present could causally influence the future, that present people could be great-grandparents of purely future people, and so on, and hence would have to be rejected on independent grounds. This is not to say that there are not important problems about the existence or non-existence of future items, problems which are perhaps most straightforwardly handled by a Meinongian position which allows that items which do not exist may have properties. The non-existence of the future �158 R. and V. Routley does raise problems for standard theories which buy the Ontological Assumption (the thesis that what does not exist does not have properties), especially given the natural (and correct) inclination to say that the future does not (now) exist; but such theories can adopt various strategies for coping with these problems (e.g. the adoption of a platonistic position according to which the future does now exist, or the allowance for certain sorts of relations between existents at different times), although the satisfactoriness of these strategies is open to question (cf. [4]). Thus whether or not the Ontological Assumption is assumed and however it is applied, it will be allowed that future items will have properties even if they do not have them now, and that is enough to provide the basis for moral concern about the future. Thus the thesis of obligations to the future does not presuppose any special metaphysical position on the existence of the future. If the non-existence of future items creates no special problems for obligations to the future, the same is not true of their indeterminacy. Whether the indeterminacy of future items is seen as a logical feature of the future which results from the non-existence of purely future items or whether one adopts a (mistaken) platonistic view of the future as existing and sees the indeterminacy as an epistemological one resulting from our inability to know the character of these entities - that is, we cannot completely know the future .though it exists and has a definite characterwhichever view we take indeterminacy still creates major difficulties for certain ethical theories and their treatment of the future. The difficulties arise for theories which appear to require a high level of determinacy with respect to the number and character of future items, in particular calculus-type theories such as utilitarianism in its usual forms, where the calculations are critically dependent on such information as numbers, totals, and averages, information which so far as the future is concerned is generally indeterminate. The fact that this numerical information is typically indeterminate means that insofar as head-count utilitarianism requires determinate information on numbers, it is in a similar position to theories discussed earlier; it may apply theoretically to future people, but since the calculations cannot be applied to them their interests will be left out of account. And, in fact, utilitarianism for the most part does not, and perhaps cannot, take future creatures and their interests seriously; there is little discussion as to how the difficulties or impossibility of calculations regarding the open future are to be obtained. Non-platonistic utilitarianism is in logical difficulty on this matter, while platonis- �Obligations to the Future 159 tic utilitarianism - which faces a range of other objections - is inapplicable because of epistemic indeterminacy. We have yet another case of a theory of the sort that applies theoretically but in practice doesn't take the future seriously. But far from this showing that future people's interests should be left out of account, what these considerations show are deficiencies in these sorts of theories, which require excessive determinacy of information. This kind of information is commonly equally unavailable for the accepted areas of moral constraint, the present and immediate future; and the resolution of moral issues is often not heavily dependent on knowledge of such specific determinate features as numbers or other determinate features. For example, we do not need to know how many people there will be on the bus, how intelligent they are, what their preferences are or how badly they will be injured, in order to reach the conclusion that the consigner's action in despatching his parcel is a bad one. Furthermore, it is only the ability of moral considerations to continue to apply in the absence of determinate information about such things as numbers that makes it possible to take account of the possible effects of action, as the risks associated with action - something which is quite essential even for the present if moral considerations are to apply in the normal and accepted way. For it is essential in order to apply moral considerations in the accepted way that we consider alternative worlds, in order to take account of options, risks, and alternative outcomes; but these alternative or counterfactual worlds are not in so different a position from the future with respect to determinacy; for example, there is indeterminacy with respect to the number of people who may be harmed in the bus case or in apossible nuclear reactor melt-down. These alternative worlds, like the distant future, are indeterminate in some respects, but not totally indeterminate. It might still be thought that the indeterminacy of the future, for example with respect to number and exact character, would at least prevent the interest of future people being taken into account where there is a conflict with the present. Since their numbers are indeterminate and their interests unknown, how can we weigh their competing claims against those of the present and immediate future where this information is available in a more or less accurate form? The question is raised particularly by problems of sharing fixed quantities of resources among present and future people, when the numbers of the latter are indeterminate. Such problems are indeed difficult, but they are not resolved by ignoring the claims of the future, any more than the problems raised by the need to take account in decision-making of factors difficult to quantify are resolved by ignoring �160 R. and V. Routley such factors. Nor are such distributional problems as large and representative a class of moral problems concerning the future as the tendency to focus on them would suggest. It should be conceded then that there will be cases where the indeterminacy of aspects of the future will make conflicts very difficult or indeed impossible to resolve - a realistic ethical theory will not deliver a decision procedure - but there will equally be other conflict cases where the level of indeterminacy does not hinder resolution of the issue, e.g. the bus example which is a conflict case of a type. In particular, there will be many cases which are not solved by weighing numbers, numbers of interests, or whatever, cases for which one needs to know only the most general probable characteristics of future people. Moreover, even where numbers are relevant often only bounds will be required, exact numerical counts only being required where, for instance, margins are narrow; e.g. issues may be resolved as in parliament where a detailed vote (or division) is only required when the issue is close. It is certainly not necessary then to have complete determinacy to resolve all cases of conflict. The question we must ask then is what features of future people could disqualify them from moral consideration or reduce their claims to it to below those of present people? The answer is: in principle None. Prima facie moral principles are universalizable, and lawlike, in that they apply independently of position in space or in time, for example.24 But universalizability of principles is an outcome of those ethical theories which are capable of dealing satisfactorily with the present; in other words, a theory that did not allow properly for the future would be found to have defects as regards the present, to deal unjustly or unfairly with some present people, e.g. those remotely located, those outside some select subgroup such as (white-skinned) humans, etc. The only candidates for characteristics that would fairly rule out future people are the logical features we have been looking at, uncertainty and indeterminacy; what we have argued is that it would be far too sweeping to see these features as affecting the moral claims of future people in a general way. These special features only affect certain sorts of cases (e.g. the determination of best probable or practical course of action given only present information). In particular they do not affect cases of the sort being considered, the nuclear one, where highly determinate or certain information about the numbers and characteristics of the class likely to be harmed or certainty of damage are not required. To establish obligations to the future a full universalizability principle is not needed: it is enough to require that the temporal position of a person �Obligations to the Future 161 cannot affect his entitlement to just and fair treatment, to full moral consideration;25 inversely that it is without basis to discriminate morally against a person in virtue of his temporal position. As a result of this universalizability, there is the same obligation to future people as to the present; and thus there is the same obligation to take account of them and their interests in what we do, to be careful in our actions, to take account of the probability (and not just the certainty) of our actions' causing harm or damage, and to see, other things being equal, that we do not act so as to rob future people of what is necessary for the chance of a good life. Uncertainty and indeterminacy do not free us of these obligations. If, in a closely comparable case concerning the present, the creation of a significant risk is enough to rule out an action as immoral, and there are no independent grounds for requiring greater certainty of harm in the future case under consideration, then futurity alone will not provide adequate grounds for proceeding with the action, thus discriminating against future people. Accordingly we cannot escape, through appeal to futurity, the conclusion tentatively reached in our first section, that proposals for nuclear development in the present state of technology for future waste disposal are immoral. IV. Overriding Consideration Arguments In the first part we noticed that the consigner's action could not be justified by purely economistic arguments, such as that his profits would rise, the firm or the village would be more prosperous, or by appealing to the fact that some possibly uncomfortable changes would otherwise be needed. We also observed that the principle on which this assessment was based, that one was not usually entitled to create a serious risk to others for these sorts of reasons, applied more generally and, in particular, applied to the nuclear case. For this reason the economistic arguments which are thus most commonly advanced to promote nuclear development - e.g. cheapness, efficiency, profitability for electricity utilities, and the need otherwise for uncomfortable changes such as restructuring of employment, investment, and consumption-do not even begin to show that the nuclear alternative is an acceptable one. Even if these economistic assumptions about benefits to present people were correct (and there is reason to doubt that most of them are),26 the arguments would fail because economics must operate within the framework of moral constraints, and not vice versa. �162 R. and V. Routley What one does have to consider, however, are moral conflict arguments, that is arguments to the effect that, unless the prima facie unacceptable alternative is taken, some even more unacceptable alternative is the only possible outcome, and will ensue. For example, in the bus case, the consigner may argue that his action is justified because unless it is taken the village will starve. It is by no means clear that even such a justification as this would be sufficient, especially where the risk to the passengers is high, as the case seems to become one of transfer of costs and risks onto others; but such a moral situation would no longer be so clearcut, and one would perhaps hesitate to condemn any action taken in such circumstances. Some of the arguments advanced to show moral conflict are based on competing duties to present people, and others on competing obligations to future people, both of which are taken to override the obligations not to impose on the future significant risk of serious harm. The structure of such moral conflict arguments is based crucially on the presentation of a genuine and exhaustive set of alternatives (or at least practical alternatives), and upon showing that the only alternatives to admittedly morally undesirable actions are even more undesirable ones. If some practical alternative which is not morally worse than the action to be justified is overlooked, suppressed, or neglected in the argument-for example, if in the bus case it turns out that the villagers have another option to starving or to the sending off of the parcel, namely earning a living in some other way - then the argument is defective and cannot readily be patched. We want to argue that suppression of practicable alternatives has occurred in the argument, designed to show that the alternatives to the nuclear option are even worse than the option itself, and that there are other factual defects in these arguments as well. In short, the arguments depend essentially on the presentation of false dichotomies. The first argument, the poverty argument, is that there is an overriding obligation to the poor, both the poor of the third world and the poor of industrialized countries. Failure to develop nuclear energy, it is often claimed, would amount to denying them the opportunity to reach the standard of affluence we currently enjoy and would create unemployment and poverty in the industrialized nations. The unemployment and poverty argument does not stand up to examination either for the poor of the industrial countries or for those of the third world. There is good evidence that large-scale nuclear energy will help to increase unemployment and poverty in the industrial world, through the �Obligations to the Future 163 diversion of great amounts of available capital into an industry which is not only an exceptionally poor provider of direct employment, but also helps to reduce available jobs through encouraging substitution of energy use for labour use. 27 The argument that nuclear energy is needed for the third world is even less convincing. Nuclear energy is both politically and economically inappropriate for the third world, since it requires massive amounts of capital, requires numbers of imported scientists and engineers, and creates negligible employment, while politically it increases foreign dependence, adds to centralized entrenched power and reduces the chance for change in the oppressive political structures which are a large part of the problem.28 The fact that nuclear energy is not in the interests of people of the third world does not, of course, mean that it is not in the interests of, and wanted by, their rulers, the westernized and often military elites in whose interests the economies of these countries are usually organized; but it is not paternalistic to examine critically the demands these ruling elites may make in the name of the poor. The poverty argument then is a fraud. Nuclear energy will not be used to help the poor.29 Both for the third world and for the industrialized countries there are well-known energy-conserving alternatives and the practical option of developing other energy sources,30 alternatives which are morally acceptable and socially preferable to nuclear development, and which have far better prospects for helping the poor.31 The second major argument advanced to show moral conflict appeals to a set of supposedly overriding and competing obligations to future people. We have, it is said, a duty to pass on the immensely valuable things and institutions which our culture has developed. Unless our high-technological, high-energy industrial society is continued and fostered, our valuable institutions and traditions will fall into decay or be swept away. The argument is essentially that without nuclear power, without the continued level of material wealth it alone is assumed to make possible, the lights of our civilization will go out.32 . The lights-going-out argument raises rather sharply questions as to what is valuable in our society, and of what characteristics are necessary for a good society. These are questions which deserve much fuller treatment than we can allot them here, but a few brief points should be made. The argument adopts an extremely uncritical position with respect to existing high-technology societies, apparently assuming that they are uniformly and uniquely valuable; it also assumes that technological society is unmodifiable, that it can't be changed in the direction of energy �164 R. and V. Routley conservation or alternative energy sources without collapse. Such a society has to be accepted and assessed as a whole, and virtually unlimited supplies of energy are essential to maintain this whole. These assumptions are hard to accept. The assumption that technological society's energy patterns are unmodifiable is especially so - after all, it has survived events such as world wars which have required major social and technological restructuring and consumption modification. If western society's demands for energy are totally unmodifiable without collapse, not only would it be committed to a programme of increasing destruction, but one might ask what use its culture could be to future people who would very likely, as a consequence of this destruction, lack the resource base which the argument assumes to be essential in the case of contemporary society. There is also difficulty with the assumption of uniform valuableness; but if this is rejected the question becomes not: what is necessary to maintain existing high-technological society and its political institutions? but rather: what is necessary to maintain what is valuable in that society and the political institutions which are needed to maintain those valuable things? While it may be easy to argue that high energy consumption is necessary to maintain the political and economic status quo, it is not so easy to argue that it is essential to maintain what is valuable, and it is what is valuable, presumably, that we have a duty to pass on to the future. The evidence, e.g. from history, is that no very high level of material affluence or energy consumption is needed to maintain what is valuable. There is good reason in fact to believe that a society with much lower energy and resource consumption would better foster what is valuable than our own. But even if a radical change in these directions is independently desirable, as we believe it is, it is not necessary to presuppose such a change, in the short term at least, in order to see that the assumptions of the lights-going-out argument are wrong. No enormous reduction of wellbeing is required to consume less energy than at present, and certainly far less than the large increase over present levels of consumption which is assumed in the usual economic case for nuclear energy.33 What the nuclear strategy is really designed to do then is not to prevent the lights going out in western civilization, but to enable the lights to go on burning all the time - to maintain and even increase the wattage output of the Energy Extravaganza. In fact there is good reason to think that, far from the high energy consumption society fostering what is valuable, it will, especially if energy �Obligations to the Future 165 is obtained by nuclear-fission means, be positively inimical to it. A society which has become heavily dependent upon an extremely high centralized, controlled, and garrisoned, capital- and expertise-intensive energy source, must be one which is highly susceptible to entrenchment of power, and one in which the forces which control this energy source, whether capitalist or bureaucratic, can exert enormous power over the political system and over people's lives, even more than they do at present. Very persuasive arguments have been advanced by civil liberties groups and others in a number of countries to suggest that such a society would tend to become authoritarian, if only as an outcome of its response to the threat posed by dissident groups in the nuclear situation.34 There are reasons to believe then that with nuclear development what we would be passing on to future generations would be some of the worst aspects of our society (e.g. the consumerism, growing concentration of power, destruction of the natural environment, and latent authoritarianism), while certain valuable aspects would be lost or threatened. Political freedom is a high price to pay for consumerism and energy extravagance. Again, as in the case of the poverty arguments, clear alternatives which do not involve such unacceptable consequences are available. The alternative to the high technology-nuclear option is not a return to the cave, the loss of all that is valuable, but the development of alternative technologies and life-styles which offer far greater scope for the maintenance and further development of what is valuable in our society than the highly centralized nuclear option.35 The lights-going-out argument, as a moral conflict argument, accordingly fails, because it also is based on a false dichotomy. Thus both the escape routes, the appeal to moral conflict and to the appeal to futurity, are closed. If then we apply the same standards of morality to the future as we acknowledge for the present - as we have argued we should - the conclusion that the proposal to develop nuclear energy on a large scale is a crime against the future is inevitable, since both the escape routes are closed. There are, of course, also many other grounds for ruling it out as morally unacceptable, for saying that it-is not only a crime against the distant future but also a crime against the present and immediate future. These other grounds for moral concern about nuclear energy, as it affects the present and immediate future, include problems arising from the possibility of catastrophic releases of radioactive fuel into the environment or of waste material following an accident such as reactor melt-down, of unscheduled discharges of radiation into the environment from a plant fault, of proli- �166 R. and V. Routley feration of nuclear weapons, and of deliberate release or threat of release of radioactive materials as a measure of terrorism or of extortion. All these are important issues, of much moral interest. What we want to claim, however, is that on the basis of its effects on the future alone, the nuclear option is morally unacceptable. Appendix Passmore's Treatment ofRawls, and What Really Happens on Rawls's Theory Passmore takes it that Rawls's theory yields an unconstrained position but, according to Rawls, the theory leads to quite the opposite result; namely, persons in different generations [and not merely neighbouring generations] have duties and obligations to one another just as contemporaries do. The present generation cannot do as it pleases but is bound by the principles that would be chosen in the original position to define justice between persons at different moments of time.. . . The derivation of these duties and obligations may seem at first a somewhat far-fetched application of the central doctrine. Nevertheless these requirements would be acknowledged in the original position [where the parties do not know to which generation they belong], and so the conception of justice as fairness covers these matters without any change in its basic idea. ([5], p. 293; the second insert is drawn from p. 287) Through judicious use of the veil of ignorance and the time of entry of parties to the original contract position, Rawls's contract theory, unlike simpler explicit contract theories, can yield definite obligations to distant future people,36 for example, we ought to save at a just rate for future people. But, as Rawls remarks (p. 284), 'the question of justice between generations . . . subjects any ethical theory to severe if not impossible tests'. It is doubtful that Rawls's theory as formulated passes the tests; for the theory as formulated does not yield the stated conclusion, but a conclusion inconsistent with the thesis that there are the same obligations to future people as to contemporaries. Exactly how these obligations arise from the initial agreement depends critically on the interpretation of the time of �Obligations to the Future 167 entry of the parties into the agreement. Insofar as Rawls insists upon the present-time-of-entry interpretation (p. 139), he has to introduce supplementary motivational assumptions in order to (try to) secure the desired bondings between generations, in particular to ensure that the generation of the original position saves for any later generation, even their immediate successors ([5], p. 140 and p. 292). Rawls falls back on-what is as we have seen inadequate to the task, since it does not exclude one generation damaging another remote generation in a way that bypasses mutually successive generations - 'ties of sentiment between successive generations' (p. 292): to this limited extent Passmore has a point, for such a social contract on its own (without additional assumptions about the motives of the parties to the agreement) does not furnish obligations even to our immediate successors. This is indicative also of the unsatisfactory instability of Rawls's theory under changes, its sensitivity to the way the original agreement is set up, to the motivation of parties, their time of entry, what they can know, etc. To arrive at a more adequate account of obligations to the distant future under Rawls's theory, let us adopt, to avoid the additional, dubious and unsatisfactory, motivational assumptions Rawls invokes, one of the alternative - and non -equivalent - time-of-entry interpretations that Rawls lists (p. 146), that of persons alive at some time in simultaneous agreement. Let us call this, following Rawls's notation (on p. 140), interpretation 4b (it is perhaps unnecessary to assume for 4b any more than 4a that all people need be involved: it may be enough given the equivalencizing effect of the veil of ignorance that some are, and as with the particular quantifier it is quite unnecessary to be specific about numbers). Then of course the parties, since they are, for all they know, of different generations, will presumably agree on a just savings rate, and also to other just distribution principles, simply on the basis of Rawlsian rationality, i.e. advancing their own interests, without additional motivation assumptions. This more appealing omnitemporal interpretation of time of entry into the agreement, which gives a superior account of obligation to the future consistent with Rawls's claim, Rawls in some places puts down as less than best (p. 292) but in his most detailed account of the original position simply dismisses (p. 139): To conceive of the original position [as a gathering of people living at different times] would be to stretch fantasy too far; the conception would cease to be a natural guide to intuition. �168 R. and V. Rout ley This we question: it would be a better guide to intuition than a position (like 4a) which brings out intuitively wrong results; it is a more satisfactory guide, for example, to justice between generations than the present-timeof-entry interpretation, which fails conspicuously to allow for the range of potential persons (all of whom are supposed to qualify on Rawls's account for just treatment, cf. § 77). Moreover, it stretches fantasy no further than science fiction or than some earlier contract accounts.36 But it does require changes in the way the original position is conceived, and it does generate metaphysical difficulties for orthodox ontological views (though not to the same extent for the Meinongian view we prefer); for, to consider the latter, either time travel is possible or the original hypothetical position is an impossible situation, with people who live at different times assembled at the same time. The difficulties - of such an impossible meeting help to reveal that what Rawls's theory offers is but a colourful representation of obligations in terms of a contract agreed upon at a meeting. The metaphysical difficulties do not concern merely possible people, because all those involved are sometime-actual people; nor are there really serious difficulties generated by the fact that very many of these people do not exist, i.e. exist now. The more serious difficulties are either those of time travel, e.g. that future parties relocated into the present may be able to interfere with their own history, or, if time travel is ruled out logically or otherwise, that future parties may be advantaged (or disadvantaged) by their knowledge of history and technology, and that accordingly fairness is lost. As there is considerable freedom in how we choose to (re)arrange the original position, we shall suppose that time travel is rejected as a means of entering the original position. For much less than travel is required; some sort of limited communicational network which filters out, for example, all historical data (and all cultural or species dependent material) would suffice; and in any case if time travel were not excluded essentially the present-time-of-entry interpretation would serve, though fairness would again be put in doubt. The filtered communicational hook-up by which the omnitemporal position is engineered still has - if fairness is to be seen to be built into the decision making - to be combined with a reinterpreted veil of ignorance, so that parties do not know where they are located temporally any more than they know who they are characterwise. This implies, among other things, limitations on the parties' knowledge of factual matters, such as available technology and world and local history; for otherwise parties could work out their location, temporal or spatial. For example, if some party knew, as Rawls supposes, �Obligations to the Future 169 the general social facts, then he would presumably be aware of the history of his time and so of where history ends, that is of the date of his generation, his time (his present), and so be aware of his temporal location. These are already problems for Rawls's so-called 'present-time-ofentry interpretation' - it is, rather, a variable-time-of-entry interpretation - given that the parties may be, as Rawls occasionally admits (e.g. p. 287), of any one generation, not necessarily the present: either they really do have to be ofthepresent time or they cannot be assumed to know as much as Rawls supposes.37 There is, however, no reason why the veil of ignorance should not be extended so as to avoid this problem; and virtually any extension that solves the problem for the variable-time-of-entry interpretation should serve, so it seems, for the omnitemporal one. We shall assume then that the parties know nothing which discloses their respective locations (i.e. in effect we write in conditions for universalizability of principles decided upon). There are still gaps between the assumptions of the omnitemporal position as roughly sketched and the desired conclusion concerning obligations to the future, but (the matter is beginning to look non-trivially provable given not widely implausible assumptions and) the intuitive arguments are as clear as those in [5], indeed they simply restate arguments to obligations given by Rawls. Rawls's theory, under interpretation 4b, admits of nice application to the problems of just distribution of material resources and of nuclear power. The just distribution, or rate of usage, of material resources38 over time is an important conservation issue to which Rawls's theory seems to apply, just as readily, and in a similar fashion, to that in which it applies to the issue of a just rate of savings. In fact the argument from the original position for a just rate of saving - whatever its adequacy - can by simply mimicked to yield an argument for just distribution of resources over generations. Thus, for example: persons in the original position are to ask themselves how much they would be willing to save [i.e. conserve] at each stage of advance on the assumption that all other generations are to save at the same rate [conserve resources to the same extent]. . . . In effect, then, they must choose a just savings principle [resources distribution principle] that assigns an appropriate rate of accumulation to [degree of resource conservation at] each level of advance. ([5], p. 287; our bracketed options give the alternative argument) �170 R. and V. Routley Just as 'they try to piece together a just savings schedule' (p. 289), so they can try to piece together a just resource distribution policy. Just as a case for resource conservation can be made out by appeal to the original position, since it is going to be against the interests of, to the disadvantage of, later parties to find themselves in a resource depleted situation (thus, on Rawlsian assumptions, they will bargain hard for a share of resources), so, interestingly, a case against a rapid programme of nuclear power development can be devised. The basis of a case against large-scale nuclear development is implicit in Rawls's contract theory under interpretation 4b, though naturally the theory is not applied in this sort of way by Rawls. To state the case in its crude but powerful form: people from later generations in the original position are bound to take it as against their interests to simply carry the waste can for energy consumed by an earlier generation. (We have already argued that they will find no convincing overriding considerations that make it worth their while to carry the waste can.) Thus not only has Passmore misrepresented the obligations to the future that Rawls's theory admits; he is also wrong in suggesting (p. 87 and p. 91) that Rawls's theory cannot justify a policy of resource conservation which includes reductions in present consumption. There is, in this connection, an accumulation of errors in Passmore, some of which spill over to Rawls, which it is worth trying to set out. First, Passmore claims ([1], p. 86; cf. also p. 90) that 'Rawls does not so much mention the saving of natural resources'. In fact the 'husbanding of natural resources' is very briefly considered ([5], p. 271). It is true, however, that Rawls does not reveal any of the considerable power that his theory, properly interpreted, has for natural resource conservation, as implying a just distribution of natural resources over time. Secondly, Passmore attempts ([1], pp. 87 ff.) to represent the calls of conservationists for a reduction in present resource usage and for a more just distribution as a call for heroic self-sacrifices; this is part of his more general attempt to represent every moral constraint with respect to the non-immediate future as a matter of self-sacrifice. 'Rawls's theory', Passmore says (on p. 87), 'leaves no room for heroic sacrifice', and so, he infers, leaves no room for conservation. Not only is the conclusion false, but the premiss also: Rawls's theory allows for supererogation, as Rawls explains ([5], p. 117). But resource conservation is, like refraining from nuclear development, not a question of heroic self-sacrifice; it is in part a question of obligations or duties to the distant future. And Rawls's theory allows not only for obligations as well as supererogation, but also for natural duties. Rawls's �Obligations to the Future 171 contract, unlike the contracts of what is usually meant by a 'contract theory', is by no means exhaustive of the moral sphere: But even this wider [contract] theory fails to embrace all moral relationships, since it would seem to include only our relations with other persons and to leave out of account how we are to conduct ourselves towards,animals and the rest of nature. I do not contend that the contract notion offers a way to approach these questions which are certainly of the first importance; and I shall have to put them aside, (p. 17) The important class of obligations beyond the scope of the contract theory surely generates obligations between persons which even the wider contract theory likewise cannot explain. The upshot is that such a contract account, even if sufficient for the determination of obligations, is not necessary. To this extent Rawls' s theory is not a full social contract theory at all. However, Rawls appears to lose sight of the fact that his contract theory delivers only a sufficient condition when he claims, for example (p. 298), that 'one feature of the contract doctrine is that it places an upper bound on how much a generation can be asked to save for the welfare of later generations'. For greater savings may sometimes be required to meet obligations beyond those that the contract doctrine delivers. In short, Rawls appears to have slipped into assuming, inconsistently, that his contract theory is a necessary condition. Although Rawls's theory caters for justice between generations and allows the derivation of important obligations to people in the distant future, the full theory is far from consistent on these matters and there are significant respects in which Rawls does not take justice to the future seriously. The most conspicuous symptoms of this are that justice to the future is reduced to a special case, justice between generations, and that the only aspect of justice between generations that Rawls actually considers is a just savings rate; there is, for example, no proper examination of the just distribution of resources among generations, though these resources, Rawls believes, provide the material base of the just institutions that he wants to see maintained. In fact Rawls strongly recommends a system of markets as a just means for the allocation of most goods and services, recognizing their well-known limitations only in the usual perfunctory fashion ([5], pp. 270 ff.). Yet market systems are limited by a narrow time horizon, and are quite ill-equipped to allocate resources in a just fashion �172 R. and V. Rout ley over a time span of several generations. Similarly Rawls's endorsement of democratic voting procedures as in many cases a just method of determining procedures depends upon the assumptions that everyone with ah interest is represented. But given his own assumptions about obligations to the future and in respect of potential persons this is evidently not the case. Catering in a just fashion for the interests of future people poses serious problems for any method of decision that depends upon people being present to represent their own interests. Some of the more conservative, indeed reactionary, economic assumptions in Rawls emerge with the assumption that all that is required for justice between generations is a just savings rate, that all we need to pass on to the future are the things that guarantee appropriate savings such as capital, factories, and machines. But the transmission of these things is quite insufficient for justice to the future, and neither necessary nor sufficient as a foundation for a good life for future generations. What is required for justice is the transmission in due measure of what is valuable. Rawls has, however, taken value accumulation as capital accumulation, thereby importing one of the grossest economic assumptions, that capital reflects value. But of course the accumulation of capital may conflict with the preservation of what is valuable. It is for this sort of reason (and thus, in essence, because of the introduction of supplementary economistic theses which are not part of the pure contract theory) that Rawls's theory is a reactionary one from an environmental point of view; on the theory as presented (i.e. the contract theory plus all the supplementary assumptions) there is no need to preserve such things as wilderness or natural beauty. The savings doctrine supposes that everything of value for transmission to the future is negotiable in the market or tradeable; but then transmission of savings can by no means guarantee that some valuable things, not properly represented in market systems, are not eliminated or not passed on, thereby making future people worse off. It becomes evident in this way, too, how culturally-bound Rawls's idea of ensuring justice to future generations through savings is. It is not just that the idea does not apply, without a complete overhaul, to non-industrial societies such as those of hunter-gatherers; it does not apply to genuinely post-industrial societies either. Consideration of such alternative societies suggests that whafis required, in place of capital accumulation, is that we pass on what is necessary for a good life, that we ensure that the basics are fairly distributed over time and not eroded, e.g. that in the case of the forest people that the forest is maintained. The narrowness of Rawls's picture, �Obligations to the Future 173 which makes no due allowance for social or cultural diversity (from the original contractual position on) or for individual diversity arises in part from his underlying and especially narrow socio-economic assumption as to what people want: What men want is meaningful work in free association with others, these associations regulating their relations to one another within a framework of just basic institutions. ([5], p. 290) This may be what many Harvard men want; but as a statement of what men want it supplies neither sufficient nor even necessary conditions.39 NOTES 1 Thus according to the Fox Report ([2], p. 110; our italics). There is at present no generally accepted means by which high level waste can be permanently isolated from the environment and remain safe for very long periods. . . . Permanent disposal of high-level solid wastes in stable geological formations is regarded as the most likely solution, but has yet to be demonstrated as feasible. It is not certain that such methods and disposal sites will entirely prevent radioactive releases following disturbances caused by natural processes or human activity. The Fox Report also quoted approvingly ([2], p. 187; our italics) the conclusion of the British (Flowers) Report [6]: There should be no commitment to a large programme of nuclear fission power until it has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that a method exist s to ensure the safe containment of long-lived, highly radioactive waste for the indefinite future. Although the absence of a satisfactory storage method has been conceded by some leading proponents of nuclear development, e.g. Weinberg ([3], pp. 32-33), it is now disputed by others. In particular, the headline for Cohen [15], which reads 'A substantial body of evidence indicates that the high level radioactive wastes generated by U.S. nuclear power plants can be stored satisfactorily in deep geological formations', has suggested to many readers - what it was no doubt intended to suggest- that there is really no problem about the disposal of radioactive wastes after all. Cohen presents, however, no new hard evidence, no evidence not already available to the British and Australian Commissions ([2] and [6]). Moreover the evidence Cohen does outline fails conspicuously to measure up to the standards rightly required by the Flowers and Fox Reports. Does Cohen offer a commercial-scale procedure for waste disposal which can be demonstrated as safe? Far from it: �174 R. and V. Routley The detailed procedures for handling the high-level wastes are not yet definite, but present indications are that. . . . (Cohen [1], p. 24; our italics) Does Cohen 'demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt' the long-term safety of burial of wastes, deep underground? Again, far from it: On the face of it such an approach appears to be reasonably safe. . . . (p. 24; our italics) Cohen has apparently not realized what is required. At issue here are not so much scientific or empirical issues as questions of methodology, of standards of evidence required for claims of safety, and above all, of values, since claims of safety, for example, involve implicit evaluations concerning what counts as an acceptable risk, an admissible cost, etc. In the headline 'a substantial body of evidence . . . indicates that. . . wastes . . . can be stored satisfactorily' the key words (italicized) are evaluative or elastic, and the strategy of Cohen's case is to adopt very low standards for their application. But in view of what is at stake it is hardly acceptable to do this, to dress up in this way what are essentially optimistic assurances and untested speculations about storage, which in any case do little to meet the difficulties and uncertainties that have been widely pointed out as regards precisely the storage proposals Cohen outlines, namely human or natural interference or disturbance. 2 See [18], pp. 24-25. 3 On all these points, see [14], esp. p. 141. According to the Fox Report ([2], p. 110): Parts of the reactor structure will be highly radioactive and their disposal could be very difficult. There is at present no experience of dismantling a full size reactor. 4 See, in particular, The Union of Concerned Scientists, The Nuclear Fuel Cycle, Friends of the Earth Energy Paper, San Francisco 1973, p. 47; also [3], p. 32 and [14], p. 149. 5 As the discussion in [14], pp. 153-7, explains. 6 Cf. [17], pp. 35-36, [18] and, for much detail, J. R. Goffman and A. R. Tamplin, Poisoned Power, Rodale Press, Emmau Pa. 1971. 7 On the pollution and waste disposal record of the infant nuclear industry, see [14] and [17]. The record of many countries on pollution control, where in many cases available technologies for reducing or removing pollution are not applied because they are considered too expensive or because they adversely affect the interests of some powerful group, provides clear historical evidence that the problem of nuclear waste disposal would not end simply with the devising of a 'safe' technology for disposal, even if one could be devised which provided a sufficient guarantee of safety and was commercially feasible. The fact that present economic and political arrangements are overwhelmingly weighted in favour of the interests and concerns of (some) contemporary humans makes it not unrealistic to expect the long-term nuclear waste disposal, if it involved any significant cost at all, when public concern about the issue died down, would be seen to conflict with the interests of contemporary groups, and that these latter interests would in many cases be favoured. Nor, as the history of movements such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament shows, could generalized public concern in the absence of direct personal interest, be relied upon to be sustained for long enough to ensure implementation of costly or troublesome long-term disposal methods - even in those places where public concern exists and is a politically significant force. It must be stressed then that the problem is not merely one of disposal technique. Historical and other evidence points to the conclusion that many of the most important risks associated with nuclear waste disposal are not of the kind which might be amenable �Obligations to the Future 175 to technical solutions in the laboratory. A realistic assessment of potential costs to the future from nuclear development cannot overlook these important non-technical risk factors. 8 Of course the effect on people is not the only factor which has to be taken into consideration in arriving at a moral judgment. Nuclear radiation, unlike most ethical theories, does not confine its scope to human life. But since the harm nuclear development is likely to cause to non-human life can hardly improve its case, it suffices if the case against it can be made out solely in terms of its effects on human life in the conventional way. 9 Proponents of nuclear power often try to give the impression that future people will not just bear costs from nuclear development but will also be beneficiaries, because nuclear powerprovides an 'abundant' or even 'unlimited' source of energy; thus Weinberg ([3], p. 34): 'an all but infinite source of relatively cheap and clean energy'. A good example of an attempt to create the impression that 'abundant' and 'cheap' energy from nuclear fission will be available to 'our descendants', i.e. all future people, is found in the last paragraph of Cohen [15]. Such claims are most misleading, since fission power even with the breeder reactor has only about the same prospective lifetime as coal-produced electricity (a point that can be derived using data in A. Parker, 'World Energy Resources: A Survey', Energy Policy, Vol. 3 [1975], pp. 58-66), and it is quite illegitimate to assume that nuclear fusion, for which there are still major unsolved problems, will have a viable, clean technology by the time fission runs out, or, for that matter, that it ever will. Thus while some few generations of the immediate future may obtain some benefits as well as costs, there is a very substantial chance that tho se of the more distant future will obtain nothing but costs. 10 These feelings, of which Smith's and Hume's sympathy is representative, are but the feeling echoes of obligation. At most, sympathy explains the feeling of obligation or lack of it, and this provides little guide as to whether there is an obligation or not - unless one interprets moral sympathy, the feeling of having a obligation, or being obligated, itself as a sufficient indication of obligation, in which case moral sympathy is a non-explanatory correlate in the feelings department of obligation itself and cannot be truly explanatory of the ground of it; unless, in short, moral sympathy reduces to an emotive rewrite of moral obligation. 11 Elsewhere in [1] Passmore is especially exercised that our institutions and intellectual traditions - presumably only the better ones - should be passed on to posterity, and that we should strive to make the world a better place, if not eventually an ideal one. 12 This is not the only philosophically important issue in environmental ethics on which Passmore is inconsistent. Consider his: 'over-arching intention: to consider whether the solution of ecological problems demands a moral or metaphysical revolution' (p. x), whether the West needs a new ethic and a new metaphysics. Passmore's answer in [1] is an emphatic No. Only insofar as Western moralists have [made various erroneous suggestions] can the West plausibly be said to need a 'new ethic'. What it needs, for the most part, is not so much a 'new ethic' as adherence to a perfectly familiar ethic. For the major sources of our ecological disasters - apart from ignorance - are greed and shortsightedness, which amount to much the same thing. . . There is no novelty in the view that greed is evil; no need of a new ethic to tell us as much. (p. 187) 'The view that the West now needs. . . a new concept of nature' is similarly dismissed (p. 186, cf. p. 72). But in his paper [1*] (i.e. 'Attitudes to Nature', Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures, Vol. 8, Macmillan, London 1975), which is said to be an attempt to bring together and to reformulate some of the basic philosophical themes of [1], Passmore's answer is Yes, and quite different themes, inconsistent with those of [1], are advanced: �176 R. and V. Routley [T]he general conditions I have laid down . . . have not been satisfied in most of the traditional philosophies of nature. To that degree it is true, I think, that we do need a 'new metaphysics' which is genuinely not anthropocentric. . . . A 'new metaphysics', if it is not to falsify the facts, will have to be naturalistic, but not reductionist. The working out of such a metaphysics is, in my judgement, the most important task which lies ahead of philosophy. ([1*], pp. 260-1) A new ethic accompanies this new metaphysics. The emergence of new moral attitudes to nature is bound up, then, with the emergence of a more realistic philosophy of nature. That is the only adequate foundation for effective ecological concern. ([1*], p. 264) This is a far cry from the theme of [1] that ecological problems can be solved within the traditions of the West. 13 Put differently, the causal linkage can bypass intermediate generations, especially given action at a temporal distance: the chain account implies that there are no moral constraints in initiating such causal linkages. The chain picture accordingly seems to presuppose an unsatisfactory Humean model of causation, demanding contiguity and excluding action at a distance. 14 Golding we shall concede to Passmore, though even here the case is not clearcut. For Golding writes towards the end of his article ([12], p. 96): My discussion, until this point, has proceeded on the view that we have obligations to future generations. But do we? I am not sure that the question can be answered in the affirmative with any certainty. I shall conclude this note with a very brief discussion of some of the difficulties. All of Passmore's material on Golding is drawn from this latter and, as Golding says, 'speculative' discussion. 15 There is no textual citation for Bentham at all for the chapter of [1] concerned, viz. Ch. 4, 'Conservation'. 16 As Passmore himself at first concedes ([1], p. 84): If, as Bentham tells us, in deciding how to act men ought to take account of the effects of their actions on every sentient being, they obviously ought to take account of the pleasure and pains of the as yet unborn. 17 Neither rightness nor probable lightness in the hedonistic senses correspond to these notions in the ordinary sense; so at least [13] argues, following much anti-utilitarian literature. 18 On this irrationality different theories agree: the rational procedure, for example according to the minimax rule for decision-making under uncertainty, is to minimize that outcome which maximizes harm. 19 Discount, or bank, rates in the economists' sense are usually set to follow the market (cf. P. A. Samuelson, Economics, 7th ed., McGraw-Hill, New York 1967, p. 351). Thus the rates have little moral relevance. 20 Cf. Rawls [5], p. 287: 'From a moral point of view there are no grounds for discounting future well-being on the basis of pure time preference.' 21 What the probabilities would be depends on the theory of probability adopted: a Carnapian theory, e.g., would lead back to the unconstrained position. �Obligations to the Future 177 22 A real possibility is one which there is evidence for believing could eventuate. A real possibility requires producible evidence for its consideration. The contrast is with mere logical possibility. 23 Thus, to take a simple special case, economists dismiss distant future people from their assessments of utility, welfare, etc., on the basis of their non-existence; cf. Ng ('the utility of a non-existent person is zero') and Harsanyi ('only existing people [not even "nonexisting potential individuals"] can have real utility levels since they are the only ones able to enjoy objects with a positive utility, suffer from objects with a negative utility, and feel indifferent to objects with zero utility') (see Appendix B of Y. K. Ng, 'Preference, Welfare, and Social Welfare', paper presented at the Colloquium on Preference, Choice and Value Theory, RSSS, Australian National University, August 1977, pp. 24, 26-27). Non-existent people have no experiences, no preferences; distant future people do not exist; therefore distant future people have no utility assignments - so the sorites goes. But future people at least will have wants, preferences, and so on, and these have to be taken into account in adequate utility assessments (which should be assessed over afuture time horizon), no matter how much it may complicate or defeat calculations. 24 There are problems about formulating universalizability satisfactorily, but they hardly affect the point. The requisite universalizability can in fact be satisfactorily brought out from the semantical analysis of deontic notions such as obligation, and indeed argued for on the basis of such an analysis which is universal in form. The lawlikeness requirement, which can be similarly defended, is essentially that imposed on genuine scientific laws by logical empiricists (e.g. Carnap and Hempel), that such laws should contain no proper names or the like, no reference to specific locations or times. 25 Such a principle is explicit both in classical utilitarianism (e.g. Sidgwick [11], p. 414), and in a range of contract and other theories from Kant and Rousseau toRawls ([5], p. 293). How the principle is argued for will depend heavily, however, on the underlying theory; and we do not want to make our use depend heavily on particular ethical theories. 26 See esp. R. Lanoue, NuclearPlants:The MoreTheyBuild, The More You Pay, Centerfor Study of Responsive Law, Washington DC 1976; also [14], pp. 212 ff. 27 On all these points see R. Grossman and G. Daneker, Guide to Jobs and Energy, Environmentalists for Full Employment, Washington DC 1977, pp. 1-7, and also the details supplied in substantiating the interesting case of Commoner [7]. On the absorption of available capital by the nuclear industry, see as well [18], p. 23. On the employment issues, see too H. E. Daly in [9], p. 149. A more fundamental challenge to the poverty argument appears in I. Illich, Energy and Equality, Calder & Boyars, London 1974, where it is argued that the sort of development nuclear energy represents is exactly the opposite of what the poor need. 28 For much more detail on the inappropriateness see E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, Blond & Briggs, London 1973. As to the capital and other requirements, see [2], p. 48, and also [7] and [9]. For an illuminating look at the sort of development high-energy technology will tend to promote in the so-called underdeveloped countries, see the paper of Waiko and other papers in the Melanesian Environment (ed. by J. H. Winslow), Australian National University Press, Canberra 1977. 29 This fact is implicitly recognized in [2], p. 56. 30 A useful survey is given in A. Lovins, Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken, Friends of the Earth Australia, 1977 (reprinted from Foreign Affairs, October 1976); see also [17], [6], [7], [14], pp. 233 ff., and Schumacher, op. cit. 31 This is also explained in [2], p. 56. 32 An argument like this is suggested in Passmore [1], Chs. 4 and 7, with respect to the question of saving resources. In Passmore this argument for the overriding importance of passing on contemporary culture is underpinned by what appears to be a future- �178 R. and V. Routley directed ethical version of the Hidden Hand argument of economics - that, by a coincidence which if correct would indeed be fortunate, the best way to take care of the future (and perhaps even the only way to do so, since do-good intervention is almost certain to go wrong) is to take proper care of the present and immediate future. The argument has all the defects of the related Chain Argument discussed above and others. 33 See [14], p. 66, p. 191, and also [7]. 34 For such arguments see esp. M. Flood and R. Grove-White, Nuclear Prospects. A Comment on the Individual, the State and Nuclear Power, Friends of the Earth, Council for the Protection of Rural England and National Council for Civil Liberties, London 1976. 35 For a recent sketch of one such alternative which is outside the framework of the conventional option of centralized bureaucratic socialism, see E. Callenbach's novel, Ecotopia, Banyan Tree Books, Berkeley, California 1975. For the outline of a liberation socialist alternative see Radical Technology (ed. by G. Boyle and P. Harper), Undercurrents Limited, London 1976, and references therein. 36 Some earlier contract theories also did. Burke's contract (in E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Dent, London 1910, pp. 93-94) 'becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are not yet born'. Thus Burke's contract certainly appears to lead to obligations to distant future generations. Needless to say, there are metaphysical difficulties, which however Burke never considers, about contracts between parties at widely separated temporal locations. 37 Several of the preceding points we owe to M. W. Jackson. 38 Resources such as soil fertility and petroleum could even be a primary social goods on Rawls's very hazy general account of these goods ([5], pp. 62, 97): are these 'something a rational man wants whatever else he wants'? The primary social goods should presumably be those which are necessary for the good and just life -which will however vary with culture. 39 We have benefited from discussion with Ian Hughes and Frank Muller and useful comments on the paper from Brian Martin and Derek Browne. REFERENCES [1] J. Passmore, Man's Responsibility for Nature, Duckworth, London 1974. [2] Ranger Uranium Environmental Inquiry First Report, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra 1977. [3] A. M. Weinberg, 'Social Institutions and Nuclear Energy", Science, Vol. 177 (July 1972), pp. 27-34. • [4] R. Routley, 'Exploring Meinong's Jungle II. Existence is Existence Now', Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic (to appear). [5] J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1971. [6] Nuclear Power and the Environment. Sixth Report of the British Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, London 1976. [7] B. Commoner, The Poverty of Power, Knopf, New York 1976. [8] G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1903. [9] B. Commoner, H. Boksenbaum and M. Corr (Eds.), Energy and Human Welfare - A Critical Analysis, Vol. III, Macmillan, New York 1975. �Obligations to the Future 179 [10] J. Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, Vol. 1, published under the superintendence of J. Bowring, with an intro. by J. H. Burton; William Tait, Edinburgh 1843. [11] H. Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, Macmillan, London 1962 (reissue). [12] M. P. Golding, 'Obligations to Future Generations', Monist, Vol. 56 (1972), pp. 85-99. [13] R. and V. Routley, 'An Expensive Repair Kit for Utilitarianism', presented at the Colloquium on Preference, Choice and Value Theory, RSSS, Australian National University, August 1977. [14] R. Nader and J. Abbotts, The Menace of Atomic Energy, Outback Press, Melbourne 1977. [15] B. L. Cohen, 'The Disposal of Radioactive Wastes from Fission Reactors', Scientific American, Vol. 236 (June 1977), pp. 22-31. [16] S. McCracken, 'The Waragainst the Atom' .Commentary (September 1977), pp. 33-47. [17] A. B. Lovins and J. H. Price, Non-Nuclear Futures: The Case for an Ethical Energy Strategy, Friends of the Earth International, San Francisco 1975. [18] A. Roberts, "The Politics of Nuclear Power', Arena, No. 41 (1976), pp. 22-47. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Published Papers Description An account of the resource Sylvan formally published very little of his nuclear ethics and politics, although a nuclear imaginary is present throughout his ouevre. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document Inquiry, 21, 133-79 Nuclear Energy and Obligations to the Future R. and V. Routley Plumwood Mountain, Braidwood, Australia The paper considers the morality of nuclear energy development as it concerns future people, especially the creation of highly toxic nuclear wastes requiring longterm storage. On the basis of an example with many parallel moral features it is argued that the imposition of such costs and risks on the future is morally unacceptable. The paper goes on to examine in detail possible ways of escaping this conclusion, especially the escape route of denying that moral obligations of the appropriate type apply to future people. The bulk of the paper comprises discussion of this philosophical issue, including many arguments against assigning obligations to the future drawn both from analyses of obligation and from features of the future such as uncertainty and indeterminacy. A further escape through appeal to moral conflict is also considered, and in particular two conflict arguments, the Poverty and Lights-going-out arguments are briefly discussed. Both these escape routes are rejected and it is concluded that if the same standards of behaviour are applied to the future as to the present, nuclear energy development is morally unacceptable. I. The Bus Example Suppose we consider a bus, a bus which we hope is to make a very long journey. This bus, a third world bus, carries both passengers and freight. The bus sets down and picks up many different passengers in the course of its long journey and the drivers change many times, but because of the way the bus line is managed and the poor service on the route it is nearly always full to overcrowded, with passengers hanging off the back, and as in Afghanistan, passengers riding on the roof, and chickens and goats in the freight compartment. Early in the bus's journey someone consigns on it, to a far distant destination, a package containing a highly toxic and explosive gas. This is packaged in a very thin container, which as the consigner well knows is unlikely to contain the gas for the full distance for which it is consigned, and certainly will not do so if the bus should encounter any trouble, for example if there is a breakdown and the interior of the bus becomes very hot, if the bus should strike a very large bump or pothole of the sort commonly found on some of the bad roads it has to traverse, or if some 1 134 R. and V. Routley passenger should interfere deliberately or inadvertently with the cargo or perhaps try to steal some of the freight, as also frequently happens. All of these things, let us suppose, have happened on some of the bus's previous journeys. If the container should break the resulting disaster would probably kill at least some of the people and animals on the bus, while others could be maimed or contract serious diseases. There does not seem much doubt about what most of us would say about the morality of the consigner's action, and there is certainly no doubt about what the passengers would say. The consigner's action in putting the safety of the occupants of the bus at risk is appalling. What could excuse such an action, what sort of circumstances might justify it, and what sort of case could the consigner reasonably put up? The consigner might say that it is by no means certain that the gas will escape; he himself is an optimist and therefore feels that such unfavourable possible outcomes should be ignored. In any case the bus might have an accident and the passengers be killed long before the container gets a chance to leak; or the passengers might change to another bus and leave the lethal parcel behind. He might say that it is the responsibility of the passengers and the driver to ensure that the journey is a smooth one, and that if they fail to do so, the results are not his fault. He might say that the journey is such a long one that many of the passengers may have become mere mindless vegetables or degenerate wretches about whose fate no decent person need concern himself, or that they might not care about losing their lives or health or possessions anyway by that time. Most of these excuses will seem little more than a bad joke, and certainly would not usually be reckoned any sort of justification. The main argument the consigner of the lethal parcel employs, however, is that his own pressing needs justify his actions. He has no option but to consign his potentially lethal parcel, he says, since the firm he owns, and which has produced the material as a by-product, is in bad financial straits and cannot afford to produce a better container or to stop the production of the gas. If the firm goes out of business, the consigner says, his wife will leave him, and he will lose his family happiness, the comfortable way of life to which he has become accustomed and sees now as a necessity; his employees will lose their jobs and have to look for others; not only will the firm's customers be inconvenienced but he, the consigner, will have to break some business contracts; the inhabitants of the local village through loss of spending and cancellation of the Multiplier Effect will suffer finan- Obligations to the Future 135 cial hardship, and, worst of all, the tiny flow of droplets that the poor of the village might receive (theoretically at any rate) as a result of the trickling down of these good things would dry up entirely. In short, some basic and some perhaps uncomfortable changes will be needed in the village. Even if the consigner's story were accepted at face value - and it would be wise to look critically at his story - only someone whose moral sensibilities had been paralysed by the disease of galloping economism could see such a set of considerations, based on 'needs', comfort, and the goal of local prosperity, as justifying the consigner's action. One is not generally entitled to thus simply transfer the risks and costs arising from one's own life onto other uninvolved parties, to get oneself out of a hole of one's own making by creating harm or risk of harm to someone else who has had no share in creating the situation. To create serious risks and costs, especially risks to life or health for such others, simply to avoid having to make some changes to a comfortable life style, or even for a somewhat better reason, is usually thought deserving of moral condemnation, and sometimes considered a crime; for example, the action of a company in creating risks to the lives or health of its workers or customers to prevent itself from going bankrupt. What the consigner says may be an explanation of his behaviour, but it is not a justification. The problem raised by nuclear waste disposal is by no means a perfect analogy to the bus case, since, for example, the passengers on the nuclear bus cannot get off the bus or easily throw out the lethal package. In many crucial moral respects, however, the nuclear waste storage problem as it affects future people, the passengers in the bus we are considering, resembles the consignment of the faultily packaged lethal gas. Not only are rather similar moral principles involved, but a rather similar set of arguments to the lamentable excuses the consigner presents have been seriously put up to justify nuclear development, the difference being that in the nuclear case these arguments have been widely accepted. There is also some parallel in the risks involved; there is no known safe way to package the highly toxic wastes generated by nuclear plants that will be spread around the world if large-scale nuclear development goes ahead.1 The wastes problem will not be a slight one, with each one of the more than 2,000 reactors envisaged by the end of the century, producing on average annual wastes containing one thousand times the radioactivity of the Hiroshima bomb.2 The wastes include not merely the spent fuels and their radioactive by-products, but also everything they contaminate, from fuel containers to the thousands of widely distributed decommissioned nuclear 136 R. and V. Routley reactors which will have to be abandoned, still in a highly radioactive condition, after the expiry of their expected lifetimes of about thirty years, and which have been estimated to require perhaps one and a half million years to reach safe levels of radioactivity.3 The wastes must be kept suitably isolated from the environment for their entire active lifetime; for fission products the required storage period averages a thousand years or so, and for the actinides (transuranic elements) which include plutonium, there is a half-million to a million-year storage problem.4 Serious problems have arisen with both short-term and proposed longterm methods of storage, even with the comparatively small quantities of waste that have been produced over the last twenty years.5 With present known short-term surface methods of storage there is a continued need for human intervention to keep the material isolated from the environment, while with proposed longer-term methods such as storage in salt mines or granite to the risk of human interference there are added the risks of leakage, e.g. through water seepage, and of disturbance, for example through climatic change, earth movements, etc. The risks are significant: no reasonable person with even a limited acquaintance with the history of human affairs over the last 3,000 years could be confident of safe storage by methods involving human intervention over the enormous time periods involved. No one with even a slight knowledge of the geological and climatic history of the earth over the last million years, a period which has seen a number of ice ages and great fluctuations in climate for example, could be confident that the waste material could be safely stored for the vast periods of time required. Much of this waste is highly toxic; for example, even a beachball sized quantity of plutonium appropriately distributed is enough to give every person on the planet lung cancer - so that a leak of even a small part of this waste material could involve huge loss of life, widespread disease and genetic damage, and contamination of immense areas of land.6 Given the enormous costs which could be involved for the future, it is plainly grossly inadequ'ate'to merely speculate concerning untested, but possibly or even probably, safe methods for disposal of wastes. Yet none of the proposed methods has been properly tested, and they may prove to involve all sorts of unforeseen difficulties and risks when an attempt is made to put them into practice on a commercial scale. Only a method that could provide a rigorous guarantee of safety over the storage period, that placed safety beyond reasonable doubt, would be acceptable. It is difficult to see how such rigorous guarantees could be given concerning either the Obligations to the Future 137 geological or future human factors. But even if an economically viable, rigorously safe long-term storage method could be devised, there is the problem of guaranteeing that it would be universally and invariably used. The assumption that it would be, especially if, as seems likely, such a method proved expensive economically and politically, seems to presuppose a level of efficiency, perfection, and concern for the future not previously encountered in human affairs, and certainly not conspicuous in the nuclear industry.7 Again, unless we assume continuous and faultless guarding of long-term storage sites through perhaps a million years of possible future human activity, weapons-grade radioactive material will be accessible, over much of the million-year storage period, to any party who is in a position to retrieve it. Our behaviour in creating this nightmare situation for the future is certainly no better than that of the consigner in the bus example. Industrialized countries, in order to get out of a mess of their own making essentially the creation of economies dependent on an abundance" of non-renewable energy in a situation where it is in fact in limited supply opt for a 'solution' which may enable them to avoid the making of uncomfortable changes during the lifetime of those now living, at the expense of passing heavy burdens on to the inhabitants of the earth at a future time burdens in the shape of costs and risks which, just as in the bus case, may adversely affect the life and health of future people and their opportunity to lead a decent life.8 It is sometimes suggested that analogies like the bus example are defective; that morally they are crucially different from the nuclear case, since future people, unlike the passengers in the bus, will benefit directly from nuclear development, which will provide an abundance of energy for the indefinite future. But this is incorrect. Nuclear fission creates wastes which may remain toxic for a million years, but even with the breeder reactor it could be an energy source for perhaps only 150 years. It will do nothing for the energy problems of the people of the distant future whose lives could be seriously affected by the wastes. Thus perhaps 30,000 generations of future people could be forced to bear significant risks, without any corresponding benefits, in order to provide for the extravagant energy use of only five generations. Nor is the risk of direct harm from the escape or misuse of radioactive materials the only burden the nuclear solution imposes on the future. Because the energy provided by nuclear fission is merely a stop-gap, it seems probable that in due course the same problem, that of making a 138 R. and V. Routley transition to renewable sources of energy, will have to be faced again by a future population which will probably, again as a result of our actions, be very much worse placed to cope with it.9 For they may well have to face the change to renewable resources in an over-populated world not only burdened with the legacy of our nuclear wastes, but also in a world in which, if the nuclear proponents' dream of global industrialization is realized, more and more of the global population will have become dependent on high energy consumption and associated technology and heavy resource use, and will have lost or reduced its ability to survive without it. It will, moreover, probably be a world which is largely depleted of non-renewable resources, and in which such renewable resources as forests and soils as remain, resources which will have to form a very important part of the basis of life, are in a run-down condition. Such points tell against the idea that future people must be, if not direct beneficiaries of nuclear fission energy, at least indirect beneficiaries. The 'solution' then is to buy time for contemporary industrial society at a price which not only creates serious problems for future people but which reduces their ability to cope with those problems. Just as in the bus case, contemporary industrial society proposes to get itself out of a hole of its own making by creating risk of harm, and by transferring costs and risks, to someone else who has had no part in producing the situation and who will obtain no clear benefit. It has clear alternatives to this action. That it does not take them is due essentially to its unwillingness to avoid changing wasteful patterns of consumption and to its desire to protect the interests of those who benefit from them. If we apply to the nuclear situation the same standards of behaviour and moral principles that we acknowledge (in principle if perhaps often not in fact) in the contemporary world, it will not be easy to avoid the conclusion that the situation involves injustice with respect to future people on a grand scale. It seems to us that there are only two plausible moves that might enable the avoidance of such a conclusion. First, it might be argued that the moral principles and obligations which we acknowledge for the contemporary world and the immediate future do not apply because the recipients of our nuclear parcel are in the non-immediate future. Secondly, an attempt might be made to appeal to overriding circumstances; for to reject the consigner's action in the circumstances outlined is not of course to say that there are no circumstances in which such an action might possibly be justifiable, or at least where the case is less clearcut. It is the same with the nuclear case. Just as in the case of the consigner of the Obligations to the Future 139 package there is a need to consider what these justifying circumstances might be, and whether they apply in the present case. We turn now to the first of these possible escape routes for the proponent of nuclear development, to the philosophical question of our obligations to the future. II. Obligations to the Distant Future The area in which these philosophical problems arise is that of the distant (i.e. non-immediate) future, that is, the future with which people alive today will make no direct contact; the immediate future provides comparatively few problems for moral theories. The issues involved, although of far more than academic interest, have not received any great attention in recent philosophical literature, despite the fact that the question of obligations to future people presents tests which a number of ethical theories fail to pass, and also raises a number of questions in political philosophy concerning the adequacy of accepted institutions which leave out of account the interests of future people. Moral philosophers have predictably differed on the issue. But contrary to the picture painted in a recent, widely read, and influential work discussing it, Passmore's Man's Responsibility for Nature, a good many philosophers who have explicitly considered the question have come down in favour of the same consideration being given to the rights and interests of future people as to those of contemporary or immediately future people. Other philosophers have tended to fall into three categories - those who acknowledge obligations to the future but who do not take them seriously or who assign them less weight, those who deny, or who are committed by their general moral position to denying, that there are moral obligations beyond the immediate future, and those like Passmore and Golding who come down, with admirable philosophical caution, on both sides of the issue, but with the weight of the argument favouring the view underlying prevailing economic and political institutions, that there are no moral obligations to the future beyond those to the next generation. • According to the most extreme of these positions against moral obligations to the future, our behaviour with respect to the future is morally unconstrained; there are no moral restrictions on acting or failing to act deriving from the effect of our actions on future people. Of those philosophers who say, or whose views imply, that we don't have obligations to the (non-immediate) future, i.e. those who have opted for the uncon- 140 R. and V. Routley strained position, many have based this view on accounts of moral obligation which are built on relations which presuppose some degree of temporal or spatial contiguity. Thus moral obligation is seen as grounded on or as presupposing various relations which could not hold between people widely separated in time (or sometimes in space). For example, obligation is seen as grounded in relations which are proximate or of short duration and also non-transitive. Among such suggested bases or grounds of moral obligation, or requirements for moral obligation, which would rule out obligations to the non-immediate future are these: First, there are those accounts which require that someone to whom a moral obligation is held be able to claim his rights or entitlement. People in the distant future will not be able to claim rights and entitlements as against us, and of course they can do nothing to enforce any claims they might have for their rights against us. Secondly, there are those accounts which base moral obligations on social or legal convention, for example a convention which would require punishment of offenders or at least some kind of social enforcement. But plainly these and other conventions will not hold invariantly over change in society and amendment of legal conventions and so will not be invariant over time. Also future people have no way of enforcing their interests or punishing offenders, and there could be no guarantee that any contemporary institution would do it for them. Both the view that moral obligation requires the context of a moral community and the view that it is contractually based appear to rule out the distant future as a field of moral obligation, as they not only require a commonality, or some sort of common basis, which cannot be guaranteed in the case of the distant future, but also a possibility of interchange or reciprocity of action which cannot apply to the future. Where the basis of moral obligation is seen as mutual exchange, the interests of future people must be set aside because they cannot change the past and cannot be parties to any mutual contract. The exclusion of moral obligations to the distant future also follows from those views which attempt to ground moral obligations in non-transitive relations of short duration such as sympathy and love. There are some difficulties also about love and sympathy for (non-existent) people in the far distant future about whose personal qualities and characteristics one must know very little and who may well be committed to a life-style for which one has no sympathy. On the current showing in the case of nuclear energy it would be easy to conclude that contemporary society lacks both love and sympathy for future people; and it would appear to follow from this that contemporary Obligations to the Future 141 people have no obligations to future people and can harm them as it suits them. What all these views have in common is a naturalistic picture of obligation as something acquired, either individually or institutionally, something which is conditional on doing something or failing to do something (e.g. participating in the moral community, contracting), or having some characteristic one can fail to have (e.g. love, sympathy, empathy).10 Because obligation therefore becomes conditional, features usually thought to characterize it, such as universality of application and necessitation (i.e. the binding features), are lost, especially where there is a choice of whether or not to do the thing required to acquire the obligation, and so of whether to acquire it. The criteria for acquisition suggested are such as to exclude people in the distant future. However, the view that there are no moral constraints with respect to future people, that one is free to act as one likes with respect to them, is a very difficult one to sustain. Consider the example of a scientific group which, for no particular reason other than to test a particular piece of technology, places in orbit a cobalt bomb which is to be set off by a triggering device designed to go off several hundred years from the time of its despatch. No presently living person and none of their immediate descendants would be affected, but the population of the earth in the distant future would be wiped out as a direct and predictable result of the action. The unconstrained position clearly implies that this is an acceptable moral enterprise, that whatever else we might legitimately criticize in the scientists' experiment, perhaps its being unduly expensive or badly designed, we cannot lodge a moral protest about the damage it will do to future people. The unconstrained position also endorses as morally acceptable the following sorts of examples: A firm discovers it can make a handsome profit from mining, processing, and manufacturing a new type of material which, although it causes no problems for present people or their immediate descendants, will over a period of hundreds of years decay into a substance which will cause an enormous epidemic of cancer among the inhabitants of the earth at that time. According to the unconstrained view the firm is free to act in its own interests, without any consideration for the harm it does to future people. Such counterexamples to the unconstrained view might seem childishly obvious. Yet the unconstrained position concerning the future from which they follow is far from being a straw man; not only have a number of philosophers writing on the issue endorsed this position, but it is the clear 142 R. and V. Routley implication of many currently popular views of the basis of moral obligation, as well as of economic theory. It does not appear, on the other hand, that those who opt for the unconstrained position have considered such examples and endorsed them as morally acceptable, despite their being clearly implied by their position. We suspect that when it is brought out that the unconstrained position admits such counterexamples, that being free to act implies, among other things being free to inflict pointless harm, most of those who opted for the unconstrained position would want to assert that it was not what they intended. What those who have put forward the unconstrained position seem to have had in mind in denying moral obligation is rather that future people can look after themselves, that we are not responsible for their lives. The view that the future can take care of itself also seems to assume a future causally independent of the present. But it is not. It is not as if, in cases such as those discussed above and the nuclear case, the future is simply being left alone to take care of itself. Present people are influencing it, and in doing so must acquire many of the same sorts of moral responsibilities as they do in causally affecting the present and immediate future. The thesis seems thus to assume an incorrect model of an independent and unrelated future. Also, to say that we are not responsible for the lives of future people does not amount to the same as saying that we are free to do as we like with respect to them, that there are no moral constraints on our action involving them. In just the same way, the fact that one does not have, or has not acquired, an obligation to some stranger with whom one has never been involved - that one has no responsibility for his life - does not imply that one is free to do what one likes with respect to him, for example to rob him or to pursue some course of action of advantage to oneself which could seriously harm him. These difficulties for the unconstrained position arise in part from the failure to make an important distinction between, on the one hand, acquired or assumed obligations towards somebody, for which some act of acquisition or assumption is required as a qualifying condition, and on the other hand moral constraints, which require, for example, that one should not act so as to damage or harm someone, and for which no act of acquisition is required. There is a considerable difference in the level and kind of responsibility involved. In the first case one must do something or be something which one can fail to do or be, e.g. have loves, sympathy, be contracted. In the second case responsibility arises as a result of being a causal agent aware of the consequences or probable consequences of his Obligations to the Future 143 action, and thus does not have to be especially acquired or assumed. Thus there is no problem about how the latter class, moral constraints, can apply to the distant future in cases where it may be difficult or impossible for acquisition or assumption conditions to be satisfied. They apply as a result of the ability to produce causal effects on the distant future of a reasonably predictable nature. Thus also moral constraints can apply to what does not (yet) exist, just as actions can cause results that do not (yet) exist. While it may be the case that there would need to be an acquired or assumed obligation in order for it to be claimed that contemporary people must make special sacrifices of an heroic kind for future people, or even to help them especially, only moral constraints are needed in order for us to be constrained from harming them. Thus, to return to the bus example, the consigner cannot argue in justification of his action that he has never assumed or acquired responsibility for the passengers, that he does not know them and therefore has no love or sympathy for them, and that they are not part of his moral community, in short that he has no special obligations to help them. All that one needs to argue in respect of both the bus and the nuclear case is that there are moral constraints against harming, not that there are specially acquired obligations to take responsibility for the lives of the people involved. The confusion of moral constraints with acquired obligation, and the attempt therewith to view all constraints as acquired and to write off non-acquired constraints, is facilitated through the use of the term 'moral obligation' in philosophy to indicate any type of deontic constraint, while in natural language it is used to indicate something which has to be assumed or acquired. Hence the equation and at least one root of the unconstrained position, that is of the belief that there are no moral constraints concerning the distant future. The unconstrained view tends to give way, under the weight of counterexamples, to a more qualified, and sometimes ambivalent position. Passmore's position in [1] is a striking example of the second ambivalent position. On the one hand Passmore regularly gives the impression of one championing future people; for example, in the final sentence of [1] he says, concerning men a century hence: My sole concern is that we should do nothing which will reduce their freedom of thought and action, whether by destroying.the natural world which makes that freedom possible or the social traditions which permit and encourage it. 144 R. and V. Routley Earlier (esp. pp. 84-85) Passmore appears to endorse the principle 'that we ought not to act so as certainly to harm posterity' and claims (p. 98) that, even where there are uncertainties, 'these uncertainties do not justify negligence'. Nevertheless, though obligations concerning non-immediate posterity are thus admitted, the main thrust of Passmore's argument is entirely different, being in favour of the unconstrained position according to which we have no obligations to non-immediate posterity. Thus his conclusion (p. 91): So whether we approach the problem of obligations to posterity by way of Bentham and Sidgwick, Rawls or Golding, we are led to something like the same conclusion: our obligations are to immediate posterity, we ought to try to improve the world so that we shall be able to hand it over to our immediate successors in a better condition, and that is all.11 Passmore's position is, to all appearances, simply inconsistent. There are two ways one might try to render it consistent, but neither is readily available to Passmore. The first is by taking advantage of the distinction between moral constraints and acquired obligations, but a basis for this distinction is not evident in Passmore's work and indeed the distinction is antithetical to the analyses of obligation that Passmore tries to synthesize with his own analysis in terms of loves. The second, sceptical, route to consistency is by way of the argument that we shall consider shortly, that there is always gross uncertainty with respect to the distant future, uncertainty which relieves us in practice of any moral constraints regarding the distant future. But though Passmore's writing strongly suggests this uncertainty argument (especially his sympathetic discussion of the Premier of Queensland's argument against conservationists [p. 77]), he also rules it out with the claim that uncertainties do not justify negligence.12 Many of the accounts of moral obligation that give rise to the unconstrained position are fused in Passmore's work, again not entirely consistently, since the different accounts exploited do not give uniform results. Thus the primary account of obligation is said to be in terms of loves though the account is never satisfactorily formulated or developed - and it is suggested that because our loves do not extend into the distant future, neither do our obligations. This sentimental account of obligation will obviously lead to different results from utilitarian accounts of obligation, which however Passmore appeals to in his discussion of wilderness. In yet other places in [1], furthermore, social contract and moral community Obligations to the Future 145 views are appealed to - see, e.g., the treatment of animals, of preservation, and of duties to nature. In the case of obligations to future people, however, Passmore does try to sketch an argument - what we call the convergence argument - that all the accounts lead in the end to the unconstrained position. As well as the convergence argument, and various uncertainty arguments to be considered later, Passmore appears to endorse several other arguments in favour of his theme that there are in practice no obligations to the distant future. In particular, he suggests that such obligations would in practice be otiose. Everything that needs to be accounted for can be encompassed through the chain picture of obligation as linking successive generations, under which each generation has obligations, based on loves, only to the succeeding generation. We outline three objections to this chain account. First, it is inadequate to treat constraints concerning the future as if they applied only between generations, as if there were no question of constraints on individuals as opposed to whole generations, since individuals can create causal effects, e.g. harm, on the future in a way which may create individual responsibility, and which can't necessarily be sheeted home to an entire generation. Secondly, such chains, since they are non-transitive, cannot yield direct obligations to the distant future. But for this very reason the chain picture cannot be adequate, as examples again show. For the picture is unable to explain several of the cases that have to be dealt with, e.g. the examples already discussed which show that we can have a direct effect on the distant future without affecting the next generation, who may not even be able to influence matters.13 Thirdly, improvements for immediate successors may be achieved at the expense of disadvantages to people of the more distant future. Improving the world for immediate successors is quite compatible with, and may even in some circumstances be most easily achieved by, ruining it for less immediate successors. Such cases can hardly be written off as 'never-never land' examples, since many cases of environmental exploitation might be seen as of just this type, e.g. not just the nuclear case but also the exhaustion of non-renewable resources and the long-term depletion of renewable resources such as soils and forests through overcropping. If then such obvious injustices to future people arising from the favouring or exclusive concern with immediate successors are to be avoided, obligations to the future will have to be seen as in some way fairly distributed over time, and not merely as accruing to particular generations in the way the chain picture suggests. 146 R. and V. Routley Passmore tries to represent all obligations to the distant future in terms of heroic self-sacrifice, something which cannot of course be morally required. But in view of the distinctions between constraints and acquired obligation and between obligation and supererogation, this is just to misrepresent the position of these obligations. For example, one is no more engaging in heroic self-sacrifice by not forcing future people into an unviable life position or by refraining from causing them direct harm, than one is resorting to heroic self-sacrifice in refraining from beating and robbing some stranger and leaving him to starve. Passmore's most sustained argument for the unconstrained position is a convergence argument, that different analyses of obligations, including his own, lead to the one conclusion. This style of argument is hardly convincing when there are well-known accounts of obligation which do not lead to the intended conclusion, e.g. deontological accounts such as those of Kant and of modern European schools, and teleological accounts such as those of Moore (in [8]). But such unfavourable positions are either rapidly passed over or ignored in Passmore's historical treatment and narrow selection of historical figures. The style of argument becomes even less persuasive when it is discovered that the accounts of the main authorities appealed to, Bentham, Sidgwick, and Rawls,14 do not lead, without serious distortion, to the intended conclusion. Indeed Passmore has twisted the historical and textual evidence to suit his case, as we now try to indicate. Consider Bentham first. Passmore's assumption, for which no textual evidence is cited, ls is that no Benthamite calculation can take account of a future more extensive than the immediate future (cf. pp. 87-88). The assumption seems to be based simply on the fact that Bentham remarked that 'the value of the pleasure or pain to each person to be considered in any estimate will be greater or less in virtue of the following circumstances'. '3. Its certainty or uncertainty. 4. Its propinquity or remoteness' ([10], p. 16). But this does nothing to show that future persons are discounted: the certainty and propinquity do not concern persons, but the utilities of the persons concerned. As regards which persons are concerned in any calculation Bentham is quite explicit, detailing how to take an exact account. . . of the general tendency of any act.. . .5 . Take an account of the number of persons whose interests appear to be concerned; and repeat the above process [summation of values of pleasure and of pain] with respect to each. ([10], p. 16) Obligations to the Future 147 It follows that Bentham's calculation takes account of everyone (and, in his larger scheme, every sentient creature) whose interests appear to be concerned: if the interests of people in the distant future appear to be concerned - as they are in conservation issues - they are to be included in the calculation. And there is independent evidence16 that in Bentham's view the principle of utility was not temporally restricted: 'that is useful which, taking all times and all persons into consideration, leaves a balance of happiness' ([10], pp. 17-18, our italics). Thus the future cut-off that Passmore has attributed to Bentham is contradicted by Bentham's own account. The case of Sidgwick is more complex, because there is isolated oscillation in his application of utilitarianism between use of utility and of (something like) expected utility (see [11], pp. 381,414): Sidgwick's utilitarianism is, in its general characterization, essentially that of Bentham: the conduct which . . . is objectively right is that which will produce the greatest amount of happiness on the whole; that is, taking into account all those whose happiness is affected by the conduct. ([11], p. 411) All includes all sentient beings, both existing and to exist, as Sidgwick goes on to explain (p. 414). In particular, in answer to the question 'How far are we to consider the interests of posterity when they seem to conflict with those of existing human beings?' Sidgwick writes ([11], p. 414, our italics): It seems, however, clear that the time at which a man exists cannot affect the value of his happiness from a universal point of view; and that the interests of posterity must concern a Utilitarian as much as those of his contemporaries, except in so far as the effect of his actions on posterity - and even the existence of human beings to be affected - must necessarily be more uncertain. But Passmore manages, first of all, to give a different sense to what Sidgwick is saying by adjusting the quotation, by omitting the clause we have italicized, which equalizes the degree of concern for present and future persons, and by italicizing the whole except-clause, thereby placing much greater emphasis than Sidgwick does on uncertainty. For according to Sidgwick's impartiality principle, 'the mere difference in time is not a 148 R. and V. Routley reasonable ground for having more regard to the consciousness of one -amount than to that of another' ([11], p. 381; see also p. 124). The apparent tension in Sidgwick's theory as to whether uncertainty should be taken into account is readily removed by resort to a modern distinction between values and expected values (i.e. probability weighted values); utilitarian rightness is defined as before in terms of the net happiness of all concerned over all time without mention of uncertainty or probabilities, but it is distinguished from probable rightness (given present information), in the utilitarian sense,17 which is defined in terms of the expected net happiness of those concerned, using present probabilities. It is the latter notion, of probable rightness, that practical reasoning is commonly concerned with and that decision theory studies; and it is this that Passmore supposes Sidgwick is using ([1], p. 84). But it is evident that the utilitarian determination of probable rightness, like that of rightness, will sometimes take into account the distant future - as Sidgwick's discussion of utilitarian determination of optimum population (immediately following his remark on uncertainty) does. So how does Passmore contrive to reverse matters, to have Sidgwick's position lead to his own unconstrained conclusion? The answer is: By inserting an additional assumption of his own - which Sidgwick would certainly have rejected - that the uncertainties entitle us to ignore the distant future. What Passmore has implicitly assumed in his claim ([1], p. 85) that 'utilitarian principles [such as Sidgwick's] are not strong enough' 'to justify the kinds of sacrifice some conservationists now call upon us to make' is his own thesis that 'The uncertainty of harms we are hoping to prevent would in general entitle us to ignore them.. .'. From a decision-theory viewpoint this is simply irrational18 unless the probabilities of damage are approaching zero. We will deal with the essentially sceptical uncertainty arguments on which Passmore's position depends shortly: here it is enough to observe that Sidgwick's position does not lead to anything like that which Passmore attributes to him - without uncertainty assumptions which Sidgwick would have rejected (for he thought that future people'will certainly have pleasure and suffer pain). We can also begin to gauge from Passmore's treatment of nineteenthcentury utilitarians, such as Bentham and Sidgwick, the extent of the distortion which underlies his more general historical case for the unconstrained position which, so he claims, represents accurately enough what, over the last two centuries, men have seen as their duty to posterity as a whole. . . . ([1], p. 91) Obligations to the Future 149 The treatment accorded Rawls in only marginally more satisfactory. Passmore supposes that Rawls's theory of justice leads directly to the unconstrained position ([1], p. 87 and p. 91), whereas Rawls claims ([5], p. 293) that we have obligations to future people just as to present ones. But the situation is more complicated than Rawls's claim would indicate, as we now try to explain in a summary way (more detail is given in the Appendix). For, in order to justify this claim on his theory (with its present time-of-entry interpretation), Rawls has to invoke additional and dubious motivational assumptions; even so the theory which thus results does not yield the intended conclusion, but a conclusion inconsistent with Rawls's claim. However, by changing the time-of-entry interpretation to an omnitemporal one, Rawls's claim does result from the theory so amended. Moreover, the amended theory also yields, by exactly Rawls's argument for a just saving rate, a resource conservation policy, and also a case against nuclear development. Accordingly Passmore's other claims regarding Rawls are mistaken, e.g. that the theory cannot justify a policy of resource conservation. Rawls does not emerge unscathed either. As on the issue of whether his contract is a necessary condition for obligations, so on obligations which the contract yields to the distant future, Rawls is far from consistent. Furthermore, institutions such as qualified market and voting systems are recommended as just though from a future perspective their results are far from that. Rawls, then, does not take obligations to the future with full seriousness. In sum, it is not true that the theory of Rawls, any more than the theories of the historical figures actually discussed by Passmore, unequivocally supports the unconstrained position. III. Uncertainty and Indeterminacy Arguments Although there are grave difficulties for the unconstrained position, qualification leads to a more defensible position. According to the qualified position we are not entirely unconstrained with respect to the distant future: there are obligations, but these are not so important as those to the present, and the interests of distant future people cannot weigh very much in the scale against those of the present and immediate future. The interests of future people then, except in unusual cases, count for very much less than the interests of present people. Hence such things as nuclear development and various exploitative activities which benefit present 150 R. and V. Routley people should proceed, even if people of the distant future are disadvantaged by them. The qualified position appears to be widely held and is implicit in most modern economic theories, where the position of a decrease in weight of future costs and benefits (and so of future interests) is obtained by application over time of an (opportunity cost) discount rate. The attempt to apply economics as a moral theory, something that is becoming increasingly common, can lead then to the qualified position. What is objectionable in such an approach is that economics must operate within the bounds of moral (deontic) constraints, just as in practice it operates within legal constraints, and cannot determine what those constraints are. There are, moreover, alternative economic theories and simply to adopt one which discounts the future is to beg all the questions at issue. The discounting move often has the same result as the unconstrained position; if, for instance, we consider the cancer example and consider costs as payable compensation, it is evident that, over a sufficiently long period of time, discounting at current prices would lead to the conclusion that there are no recoverable damages and so, in economic terms, no constraints. In short, even certain damage to future people could be written off. One way to achieve the bias against future people is by the application of discount rates which are set in accord with the current economic horizons of no more than about fifteen years,19 and application of such rates would simply beg the question against the interests and rights of future people. Where there is certain future damage of a morally forbidden type the whole method of discounting is simply inapplicable, and its use would violate moral constraints.20 Another argument for the qualified position, which avoids the objections from cases of certain damage, comes from probability considerations.The distant future, it is argued, is much more uncertain than the present and immediate future, so that probabilities are consequently lower, perhaps even approaching or coinciding with zero for any hypothesis concerning the distant future.21 But then if we take account of probabilities in the obvious way, by simply multiplying them against costs and benefits, it is evident that the interests of future people, except in cases where there is an unusually high degree of certainty, must count for (very much) less than those of present and neighbouring people where (much) higher probabilities obtain. So in the case of conflict between the present and the future where it is a question of weighing certain benefits to the people of the present and the immediate future against a much lower Obligations to the Future 151 probability of indeterminate costs to an indeterminate number of distant future people, the issue would normally be decided in favour of the present, assuming that anything like similar costs and benefits were involved. But of course it can't be assumed that anything like similarly weighted costs and benefits are involved in the nuclear case, especially if it is a question of risking poisoning some of the earth for half a million or so years, with consequent risk of serious harm to thousands of generations of future people, in order to obtain quite doubtful or trivial benefits for some present people, in the shape of the opportunity to continue unnecessarily high energy use. And even if the costs and benefits were comparable or evenly weighted, such an argument would be defective, since an analogous argument would show that the consigner's action is acceptable provided the benefit, e.g. the profit he stood to gain from imposing significant risks on other people, was sufficiently large. Such a cost-benefit approach to moral and decision problems, with or without the probability frills, is quite inadequate where different parties are concerned, or for dealing with cases of conflict of interest or moral problems where deontic constraints are involved, and commonly yields counterintuitive results. For example, it would follow on such principles that it is permissible for a firm to injure, or very likely injure, some innocent party provided the firm stands to make a sufficiently large gain from it. But the costs and benefits involved are not transferable in any simple or general way from one party to another. Transfers of this kind, of costs and benefits involving different parties, commonly raise moral issues - e.g. is x entitled to benefit himself by imposing costs ony ? - which are not susceptible to a simple cost-benefit approach of the sort adopted by some proponents of nuclear energy, who attempt to dismiss the costs to future people with the soothing remark that any development involves costs as well as benefits. The transfer point is enough to invalidate the comparison, heavily relied on by McCracken [16] in building a case for the acceptability of the nuclear risk, between nuclear risks and those from cigarette smoking. In the latter case those who supposedly benefit from the activity are also, to an overwhelming extent* those who bear the serious health costs and risks involved. In contrast the users and supposed beneficiaries of nuclear energy will be risking not only, or even primarily, their own lives and health, but also those of others who may be non-beneficiaries and who may be spatially or temporally removed, and these risks will not be in any direct way related to a person's extent of use. The transfer objection is essentially the same as that to the utilitarian's 152 R. and V. Routley happiness sums as a way of solving moral conflict between different parties, and the introduction of probability considerations does not change the principles involved but merely complicates analyses. One might further object to the probability argument that probabilities involving distant future situations are not always less than those concerning the immediate future in the way the argument supposes, and that the outcomes of some moral problems such as the bus example do not depend on a high level of probability anyway. In some sorts of cases it is enough, as the bus example reveals, that a significant risk is created; such cases do not depend critically on high probability assignments. Uncertainty arguments in various forms are the most common and important ones used by philosophers and others to argue for the position that we cannot be expected to take serious account of the effects of our actions on the distant future. There are two strands to the uncertainty argument, capable of separation, but frequently entangled. Both arguments are mistaken, the first on a priori grounds, the second on a posteriori grounds. The first argument is a generalized uncertainty argument which runs as follows: In contrast to the exact information we can obtain about the present, the information we can obtain about the effects of our actions on the distant future is unreliable, woolly, and highly speculative. But we cannot base assessments of how we should act on information of this kind, especially when accurate information is obtainable about the present which would indicate different action. Therefore we must regretfully ignore the uncertain effects of our actions on the distant future. More formally and crudely: One only has obligations to the future if these obligations are based on reliable information; there is no reliable information at present as regards the distant future; therefore one has no obligations to the distant future. The first argument is essentially a variation on a sceptical argument in epistemology concerning our knowledge of the future (formally, replace 'obligations' by 'knowledge' in the crude statement of the argument above). The main ploy is to considerably overestimate and overstate the degree of certainty available with respect to the present and immediate future, and the degree of certainty which is required as the basis for moral consideration both with respect to the present and with respect to the future. Associated with this is the attempt to suggest a sharp division as regards certainty between the present and immediate future on the one hand and the distant future on the other. We shall not find, we suggest, that there is any such sharp or simple division between the distant future and Obligations to the Future 153 the adjacent future and present, at least with respect to those things in the present which are normally subject to moral constraints. We can and constantly do act on the basis of such 'unreliable' information as the sceptic as regards the future conveniently labels 'uncertainty'; for scepticproof certainty is rarely, or never, available with respect to much of the present and immediate future. In moral situations in the present, action often takes account of risk and probability, even quite low probabilities. A good example is again the bus case. We do not need to know for certain that the container will break and the lethal gas escape. In fact it does not even have to be probable, in the relevant sense of more probable than not, in order for us to condemn the consigner's action. It is enough that there is a significant risk of harm in this sort of case. It does not matter if the decreased well-being of the consigner is certain and the prospects of the passengers quite uncertain; the resolution of the problem is still clearly in favour of the so-called 'speculative' and 'unreliable'. But if we do not require certainty of action to apply moral constraints in contemporary affairs, why should we require a much higher standard of certainty in the future? Why should we require epistemic standards for the future which the more familiar sphere of moral action concerning the present and adjacent future does not need to meet? The insistence on certainty as a necessary condition before moral consideration can be given to the distant future, then, amounts to an epistemic double standard. But such an epistemic double standard, proposed in explaining the difference between the present and the future and to justify ignoring future peoples' interests, in fact cannot itself provide an explanation of the differences, since it already presupposes different standards of certainty appropriate to each class, which difference is in turn in need of justification. The second uncertainty argument is a practical uncertainty argument, that whatever our theoretical obligations to the future, we cannot in practice take the interests of future people into account, because uncertainty about the distant future is so gross that we cannot determine what the likely consequences of actions upon it will be and therefore, however good our intentions to the people of the distant future, in practice we have no choice but to ignore their interests. Uncertainty is gross where certain incompatible hypotheses are as good as one another and there is no rational ground for choosing between them. The second uncertainty argument can also be put in this way: If moral principles are, like other principles, implicational in form, that is of such forms as 'if* has character h then x is wrong, for every (action) x', then what the argument claims is 154 R. and V. Routley that we can never obtain the information about future actions which would enable us to detach the antecedent of the implication. So even if moral principles theoretically apply to future people, in practice they cannot be applied to obtain clear conclusions or directions concerning contemporary action of the 'It is wrong to do x' type. Many of the assumptions of the second argument have to be conceded. If the distant future really is so grossly uncertain that in every case it is impossible to determine in any way that is better than chance what the effects of present action will be, and whether any given action will help or hinder future people, then moral principles, although they may apply theoretically to the future, will not be applicable in practice for obtaining any clear conclusions about how to act. Hence the distant future will impose no practical moral constraints on action. However, the argument is factually incorrect in assuming that the future is always so grossly uncertain or indeterminate. Admittedly there is often a high degree of uncertainty concerning the distant future, but as a matter of (contingent) fact it is not always so gross or sweeping as the argument has to assume. There are some areas where uncertainty is not so great as to exclude constraints on action, especially when account is taken of the point, noticed in connection with the first argument, that complete certainty is commonly not required for moral constraints and that all that may be needed in some cases is the creation of"a significant risk. Again there is considerable uncertainty about many factors which are not highly, or at all, morally relevant, but this does not extend to many factors which are of much greater importance to moral issues. For example, we may not have any idea what the fashions will be in a hundred years in girls' names or men's footwear, or what brands of ice cream people will be eating if any, but we do have excellent reason to believe, especially if we consider 3,000 years of history, that what people there are in a hundred years are likely to have material and psychic needs not entirely unlike our own, that they will need a healthy biosphere for a good life; that like us they will not be immune to radiation; that their welfare will not be enhanced by a high incidence of cancer or genetic defects, by the destruction of resources, or the elimination from the face of the earth of that wonderful variety of non-human life which at present makes it such a rich and interesting place. For this sort of reason, the second uncertainty argument should be rejected. While it is true that there are many areas in which the morally relevant information needed is uncertain or unavailable, and in which we cannot therefore determine satisfactorily how to act, there are certainly others in Obligations to the Future 155 which uncertainty in morally relevant areas is not so great as to preclude moral constraints on action, where we ascertain if not absolute certainties at least probabilities of the same sort of order as are considered sufficient for the application of moral principles in parallel contemporary cases, especially where spatially remote people are involved. The case of nuclear waste storage, and of uncertainty of the effects of it on future people, seems to be of the latter sort. Here there is no gross indeterminacy or uncertainty; it is simply not true that incompatible hypotheses about what may happen are as good as each other. It is plain that nuclear waste storage does impose significant risks of harm on future people, and, as we can see from the bus example, the significant risk of harm is enough in cases of this type to make moral constraints applicable. In terms of the defects of the preceding uncertainty arguments, we can see the corresponding defects in a number of widely employed uncertainty arguments used to write off probable harm to future people as outside the scope of proper consideration. Most of these popular moves employ both of the uncertainty arguments as suits the case, switching from one to the other in a way that is again reminiscent of sceptical moves. For example, we may be told that we cannot really take account of future people because we cannot be sure that they will exist or that their tastes and wants will not be completely different from our own, to the point where they will not suffer from our exhaustion of resources or from the things that would affect us (cf. Passmore [1]). But this is to insist upon complete certainty of a sort beyond what is required for the present and immediate future, where there is also commonly no guarantee that some disaster will not overtake those we are morally committed to. Again we may be told that there is no guarantee that future people will be worthy of any efforts on our part, because they may be morons or forever plugged into enjoyment- or other machines (Golding [12]). Even if one is prepared to accept the elitist approach presupposed - according to which only those who meet certain properly civilized or intellectual standards are eligible for moral consideration - what we are being handed in such arguments as a serious defeating consideration is again a mere outside possibility - like the sceptic who says that the solid-looking desk in front of us is perhaps only a facade, not because he has any particular reason for doing so, but because he hasn't looked around the back, drilled holes in it, etc. Neither the contemporary nor the historical situation gives any positive reason for supposing that a lapse into universal moronity or universal pleasure-machine escapism is a serious possibility, as opposed to a logical possibility. We can contrast 156 R. and V. Routley with these mere logical possibilities the very real historically supportable risks of escape of nuclear waste or decline of a civilization through destruction of its resource base. The possibilities just considered in these uncertainty arguments of sceptical character are not real possibilities. Another argument which may consider a real possibility, but still does not succeed in showing that it is acceptable to proceed with an action which would appear to be harmful to future people, is often introduced in the nuclear waste case. This is the argument that future people may discover a rigorously safe and permanent storage method for nuclear wastes before they are damaged by escaped waste material. Let us grant for the sake of the argument that this is a real possibility (though physical arguments may show that it is not). This still does not affect the fact that there is a significant risk of serious damage and that the creation of a significant risk is enough to rule out an action of this type as morally impermissible. In just the same way, future people may discover a cure for cancer, and the fact that this appears to be a real and not merely a logical possibility, does not make the action of the firm in the example discussed above, of producing a substance likely to cause cancer in future people, morally admissible. The fact that there was a real possibility of future people avoiding the harm would show that actions of these sorts were admissible only if what was required for inadmissibility was certainty of harm or a very high probability of it. In such cases, before such actions could be considered admissible, what would be required is far more than a possibility, real or not22 - it is at least the availability of an applicable, safe, and rigorously tested, not merely speculative, technique for achieving it, something that future people could reasonably be expected to apply to protect themselves. The strategy of most of these uncertainty arguments is fairly clear then, and may be brought out by looking yet again at the bus example, where the consigner says that he cannot be expected to take account of the effect of his actions on the passengers because they may find an effective way to deal with his parcel or some lucky or unlucky accident may occur, e.g. the bus may break down and they may all change to a different bus leaving the parcel behind, or the bus may crash, killing all the passengers before the container gets a chance to leak. These are all possibilities, of course, but there is no positive reason to believe that they are any more than that, that is they are not real possibilities. The strategy is to stress such outside possibilities in order to create the false impression that there is gross uncertainty about the future, that the real possibility that the container will Obligations to the Future 157 break should be treated in the same way as these mere logical possibilities, that uncertainty about the future is so great as to preclude the consigners' taking account of the passengers' welfare and of the real possibility of harm from his parcel, and thereby excuse his action. A related strategy is to stress a real possibility, such as finding a cure for cancer, and thereby imply that this removes the case for applying moral constraints .This move implicitly makes the assumptions of the first argument, that certainty, or at least a very high probability, of harm is required before an action can be judged morally inadmissible, and the point of stressing the real possibility of avoidance of damage is to show that this allegedly required high degree of certainty or probability cannot be attained. That is, the strategy draws attention to some real uncertainty implying that this is sufficient to defeat the application of moral constraints. But, as we have seen, this is often not so. An argument closely related to the uncertainty arguments is based on the non-existence and indeterminacy of the future.23 An item is indeterminate in a given respect if its properties in that respect are, as a matter of logic, not settled (nor are they settlable in a non-arbitrary fashion). The respects in which future items are indeterminate are well enough known for a few examples to serve as reminders: all the following are indeterminate: the population of Australia at 2001, its distribution, its age structure, the preferences of its members for folk music, wilderness, etc., the size and shape of Wollongong, the average number of rooms in its houses and in its office blocks, and so on. Philosophical discussion of such indeterminacy is as old as Aristotle's sea battle and as modern as truth-value gaps and fuzzy logics, and many positions have been adopted on the existence and determinacy of future items. Nevertheless theories that there are obligations to the future are not sensitive to the metaphysical position adopted concerning the existence or non-existence of the future. Any theory which denied obligations to the future on the metaphysical grounds that the future did not exist, and did not have properties, so that the present could not be related to it, would be committed to denying such obvious facts as that the present could causally influence the future, that present people could be great-grandparents of purely future people, and so on, and hence would have to be rejected on independent grounds. This is not to say that there are not important problems about the existence or non-existence of future items, problems which are perhaps most straightforwardly handled by a Meinongian position which allows that items which do not exist may have properties. The non-existence of the future 158 R. and V. Routley does raise problems for standard theories which buy the Ontological Assumption (the thesis that what does not exist does not have properties), especially given the natural (and correct) inclination to say that the future does not (now) exist; but such theories can adopt various strategies for coping with these problems (e.g. the adoption of a platonistic position according to which the future does now exist, or the allowance for certain sorts of relations between existents at different times), although the satisfactoriness of these strategies is open to question (cf. [4]). Thus whether or not the Ontological Assumption is assumed and however it is applied, it will be allowed that future items will have properties even if they do not have them now, and that is enough to provide the basis for moral concern about the future. Thus the thesis of obligations to the future does not presuppose any special metaphysical position on the existence of the future. If the non-existence of future items creates no special problems for obligations to the future, the same is not true of their indeterminacy. Whether the indeterminacy of future items is seen as a logical feature of the future which results from the non-existence of purely future items or whether one adopts a (mistaken) platonistic view of the future as existing and sees the indeterminacy as an epistemological one resulting from our inability to know the character of these entities - that is, we cannot completely know the future .though it exists and has a definite characterwhichever view we take indeterminacy still creates major difficulties for certain ethical theories and their treatment of the future. The difficulties arise for theories which appear to require a high level of determinacy with respect to the number and character of future items, in particular calculus-type theories such as utilitarianism in its usual forms, where the calculations are critically dependent on such information as numbers, totals, and averages, information which so far as the future is concerned is generally indeterminate. The fact that this numerical information is typically indeterminate means that insofar as head-count utilitarianism requires determinate information on numbers, it is in a similar position to theories discussed earlier; it may apply theoretically to future people, but since the calculations cannot be applied to them their interests will be left out of account. And, in fact, utilitarianism for the most part does not, and perhaps cannot, take future creatures and their interests seriously; there is little discussion as to how the difficulties or impossibility of calculations regarding the open future are to be obtained. Non-platonistic utilitarianism is in logical difficulty on this matter, while platonis- Obligations to the Future 159 tic utilitarianism - which faces a range of other objections - is inapplicable because of epistemic indeterminacy. We have yet another case of a theory of the sort that applies theoretically but in practice doesn't take the future seriously. But far from this showing that future people's interests should be left out of account, what these considerations show are deficiencies in these sorts of theories, which require excessive determinacy of information. This kind of information is commonly equally unavailable for the accepted areas of moral constraint, the present and immediate future; and the resolution of moral issues is often not heavily dependent on knowledge of such specific determinate features as numbers or other determinate features. For example, we do not need to know how many people there will be on the bus, how intelligent they are, what their preferences are or how badly they will be injured, in order to reach the conclusion that the consigner's action in despatching his parcel is a bad one. Furthermore, it is only the ability of moral considerations to continue to apply in the absence of determinate information about such things as numbers that makes it possible to take account of the possible effects of action, as the risks associated with action - something which is quite essential even for the present if moral considerations are to apply in the normal and accepted way. For it is essential in order to apply moral considerations in the accepted way that we consider alternative worlds, in order to take account of options, risks, and alternative outcomes; but these alternative or counterfactual worlds are not in so different a position from the future with respect to determinacy; for example, there is indeterminacy with respect to the number of people who may be harmed in the bus case or in apossible nuclear reactor melt-down. These alternative worlds, like the distant future, are indeterminate in some respects, but not totally indeterminate. It might still be thought that the indeterminacy of the future, for example with respect to number and exact character, would at least prevent the interest of future people being taken into account where there is a conflict with the present. Since their numbers are indeterminate and their interests unknown, how can we weigh their competing claims against those of the present and immediate future where this information is available in a more or less accurate form? The question is raised particularly by problems of sharing fixed quantities of resources among present and future people, when the numbers of the latter are indeterminate. Such problems are indeed difficult, but they are not resolved by ignoring the claims of the future, any more than the problems raised by the need to take account in decision-making of factors difficult to quantify are resolved by ignoring 160 R. and V. Routley such factors. Nor are such distributional problems as large and representative a class of moral problems concerning the future as the tendency to focus on them would suggest. It should be conceded then that there will be cases where the indeterminacy of aspects of the future will make conflicts very difficult or indeed impossible to resolve - a realistic ethical theory will not deliver a decision procedure - but there will equally be other conflict cases where the level of indeterminacy does not hinder resolution of the issue, e.g. the bus example which is a conflict case of a type. In particular, there will be many cases which are not solved by weighing numbers, numbers of interests, or whatever, cases for which one needs to know only the most general probable characteristics of future people. Moreover, even where numbers are relevant often only bounds will be required, exact numerical counts only being required where, for instance, margins are narrow; e.g. issues may be resolved as in parliament where a detailed vote (or division) is only required when the issue is close. It is certainly not necessary then to have complete determinacy to resolve all cases of conflict. The question we must ask then is what features of future people could disqualify them from moral consideration or reduce their claims to it to below those of present people? The answer is: in principle None. Prima facie moral principles are universalizable, and lawlike, in that they apply independently of position in space or in time, for example.24 But universalizability of principles is an outcome of those ethical theories which are capable of dealing satisfactorily with the present; in other words, a theory that did not allow properly for the future would be found to have defects as regards the present, to deal unjustly or unfairly with some present people, e.g. those remotely located, those outside some select subgroup such as (white-skinned) humans, etc. The only candidates for characteristics that would fairly rule out future people are the logical features we have been looking at, uncertainty and indeterminacy; what we have argued is that it would be far too sweeping to see these features as affecting the moral claims of future people in a general way. These special features only affect certain sorts of cases (e.g. the determination of best probable or practical course of action given only present information). In particular they do not affect cases of the sort being considered, the nuclear one, where highly determinate or certain information about the numbers and characteristics of the class likely to be harmed or certainty of damage are not required. To establish obligations to the future a full universalizability principle is not needed: it is enough to require that the temporal position of a person Obligations to the Future 161 cannot affect his entitlement to just and fair treatment, to full moral consideration;25 inversely that it is without basis to discriminate morally against a person in virtue of his temporal position. As a result of this universalizability, there is the same obligation to future people as to the present; and thus there is the same obligation to take account of them and their interests in what we do, to be careful in our actions, to take account of the probability (and not just the certainty) of our actions' causing harm or damage, and to see, other things being equal, that we do not act so as to rob future people of what is necessary for the chance of a good life. Uncertainty and indeterminacy do not free us of these obligations. If, in a closely comparable case concerning the present, the creation of a significant risk is enough to rule out an action as immoral, and there are no independent grounds for requiring greater certainty of harm in the future case under consideration, then futurity alone will not provide adequate grounds for proceeding with the action, thus discriminating against future people. Accordingly we cannot escape, through appeal to futurity, the conclusion tentatively reached in our first section, that proposals for nuclear development in the present state of technology for future waste disposal are immoral. IV. Overriding Consideration Arguments In the first part we noticed that the consigner's action could not be justified by purely economistic arguments, such as that his profits would rise, the firm or the village would be more prosperous, or by appealing to the fact that some possibly uncomfortable changes would otherwise be needed. We also observed that the principle on which this assessment was based, that one was not usually entitled to create a serious risk to others for these sorts of reasons, applied more generally and, in particular, applied to the nuclear case. For this reason the economistic arguments which are thus most commonly advanced to promote nuclear development - e.g. cheapness, efficiency, profitability for electricity utilities, and the need otherwise for uncomfortable changes such as restructuring of employment, investment, and consumption-do not even begin to show that the nuclear alternative is an acceptable one. Even if these economistic assumptions about benefits to present people were correct (and there is reason to doubt that most of them are),26 the arguments would fail because economics must operate within the framework of moral constraints, and not vice versa. 162 R. and V. Routley What one does have to consider, however, are moral conflict arguments, that is arguments to the effect that, unless the prima facie unacceptable alternative is taken, some even more unacceptable alternative is the only possible outcome, and will ensue. For example, in the bus case, the consigner may argue that his action is justified because unless it is taken the village will starve. It is by no means clear that even such a justification as this would be sufficient, especially where the risk to the passengers is high, as the case seems to become one of transfer of costs and risks onto others; but such a moral situation would no longer be so clearcut, and one would perhaps hesitate to condemn any action taken in such circumstances. Some of the arguments advanced to show moral conflict are based on competing duties to present people, and others on competing obligations to future people, both of which are taken to override the obligations not to impose on the future significant risk of serious harm. The structure of such moral conflict arguments is based crucially on the presentation of a genuine and exhaustive set of alternatives (or at least practical alternatives), and upon showing that the only alternatives to admittedly morally undesirable actions are even more undesirable ones. If some practical alternative which is not morally worse than the action to be justified is overlooked, suppressed, or neglected in the argument-for example, if in the bus case it turns out that the villagers have another option to starving or to the sending off of the parcel, namely earning a living in some other way - then the argument is defective and cannot readily be patched. We want to argue that suppression of practicable alternatives has occurred in the argument, designed to show that the alternatives to the nuclear option are even worse than the option itself, and that there are other factual defects in these arguments as well. In short, the arguments depend essentially on the presentation of false dichotomies. The first argument, the poverty argument, is that there is an overriding obligation to the poor, both the poor of the third world and the poor of industrialized countries. Failure to develop nuclear energy, it is often claimed, would amount to denying them the opportunity to reach the standard of affluence we currently enjoy and would create unemployment and poverty in the industrialized nations. The unemployment and poverty argument does not stand up to examination either for the poor of the industrial countries or for those of the third world. There is good evidence that large-scale nuclear energy will help to increase unemployment and poverty in the industrial world, through the Obligations to the Future 163 diversion of great amounts of available capital into an industry which is not only an exceptionally poor provider of direct employment, but also helps to reduce available jobs through encouraging substitution of energy use for labour use. 27 The argument that nuclear energy is needed for the third world is even less convincing. Nuclear energy is both politically and economically inappropriate for the third world, since it requires massive amounts of capital, requires numbers of imported scientists and engineers, and creates negligible employment, while politically it increases foreign dependence, adds to centralized entrenched power and reduces the chance for change in the oppressive political structures which are a large part of the problem.28 The fact that nuclear energy is not in the interests of people of the third world does not, of course, mean that it is not in the interests of, and wanted by, their rulers, the westernized and often military elites in whose interests the economies of these countries are usually organized; but it is not paternalistic to examine critically the demands these ruling elites may make in the name of the poor. The poverty argument then is a fraud. Nuclear energy will not be used to help the poor.29 Both for the third world and for the industrialized countries there are well-known energy-conserving alternatives and the practical option of developing other energy sources,30 alternatives which are morally acceptable and socially preferable to nuclear development, and which have far better prospects for helping the poor.31 The second major argument advanced to show moral conflict appeals to a set of supposedly overriding and competing obligations to future people. We have, it is said, a duty to pass on the immensely valuable things and institutions which our culture has developed. Unless our high-technological, high-energy industrial society is continued and fostered, our valuable institutions and traditions will fall into decay or be swept away. The argument is essentially that without nuclear power, without the continued level of material wealth it alone is assumed to make possible, the lights of our civilization will go out.32 . The lights-going-out argument raises rather sharply questions as to what is valuable in our society, and of what characteristics are necessary for a good society. These are questions which deserve much fuller treatment than we can allot them here, but a few brief points should be made. The argument adopts an extremely uncritical position with respect to existing high-technology societies, apparently assuming that they are uniformly and uniquely valuable; it also assumes that technological society is unmodifiable, that it can't be changed in the direction of energy 164 R. and V. Routley conservation or alternative energy sources without collapse. Such a society has to be accepted and assessed as a whole, and virtually unlimited supplies of energy are essential to maintain this whole. These assumptions are hard to accept. The assumption that technological society's energy patterns are unmodifiable is especially so - after all, it has survived events such as world wars which have required major social and technological restructuring and consumption modification. If western society's demands for energy are totally unmodifiable without collapse, not only would it be committed to a programme of increasing destruction, but one might ask what use its culture could be to future people who would very likely, as a consequence of this destruction, lack the resource base which the argument assumes to be essential in the case of contemporary society. There is also difficulty with the assumption of uniform valuableness; but if this is rejected the question becomes not: what is necessary to maintain existing high-technological society and its political institutions? but rather: what is necessary to maintain what is valuable in that society and the political institutions which are needed to maintain those valuable things? While it may be easy to argue that high energy consumption is necessary to maintain the political and economic status quo, it is not so easy to argue that it is essential to maintain what is valuable, and it is what is valuable, presumably, that we have a duty to pass on to the future. The evidence, e.g. from history, is that no very high level of material affluence or energy consumption is needed to maintain what is valuable. There is good reason in fact to believe that a society with much lower energy and resource consumption would better foster what is valuable than our own. But even if a radical change in these directions is independently desirable, as we believe it is, it is not necessary to presuppose such a change, in the short term at least, in order to see that the assumptions of the lights-going-out argument are wrong. No enormous reduction of wellbeing is required to consume less energy than at present, and certainly far less than the large increase over present levels of consumption which is assumed in the usual economic case for nuclear energy.33 What the nuclear strategy is really designed to do then is not to prevent the lights going out in western civilization, but to enable the lights to go on burning all the time - to maintain and even increase the wattage output of the Energy Extravaganza. In fact there is good reason to think that, far from the high energy consumption society fostering what is valuable, it will, especially if energy Obligations to the Future 165 is obtained by nuclear-fission means, be positively inimical to it. A society which has become heavily dependent upon an extremely high centralized, controlled, and garrisoned, capital- and expertise-intensive energy source, must be one which is highly susceptible to entrenchment of power, and one in which the forces which control this energy source, whether capitalist or bureaucratic, can exert enormous power over the political system and over people's lives, even more than they do at present. Very persuasive arguments have been advanced by civil liberties groups and others in a number of countries to suggest that such a society would tend to become authoritarian, if only as an outcome of its response to the threat posed by dissident groups in the nuclear situation.34 There are reasons to believe then that with nuclear development what we would be passing on to future generations would be some of the worst aspects of our society (e.g. the consumerism, growing concentration of power, destruction of the natural environment, and latent authoritarianism), while certain valuable aspects would be lost or threatened. Political freedom is a high price to pay for consumerism and energy extravagance. Again, as in the case of the poverty arguments, clear alternatives which do not involve such unacceptable consequences are available. The alternative to the high technology-nuclear option is not a return to the cave, the loss of all that is valuable, but the development of alternative technologies and life-styles which offer far greater scope for the maintenance and further development of what is valuable in our society than the highly centralized nuclear option.35 The lights-going-out argument, as a moral conflict argument, accordingly fails, because it also is based on a false dichotomy. Thus both the escape routes, the appeal to moral conflict and to the appeal to futurity, are closed. If then we apply the same standards of morality to the future as we acknowledge for the present - as we have argued we should - the conclusion that the proposal to develop nuclear energy on a large scale is a crime against the future is inevitable, since both the escape routes are closed. There are, of course, also many other grounds for ruling it out as morally unacceptable, for saying that it-is not only a crime against the distant future but also a crime against the present and immediate future. These other grounds for moral concern about nuclear energy, as it affects the present and immediate future, include problems arising from the possibility of catastrophic releases of radioactive fuel into the environment or of waste material following an accident such as reactor melt-down, of unscheduled discharges of radiation into the environment from a plant fault, of proli- 166 R. and V. Routley feration of nuclear weapons, and of deliberate release or threat of release of radioactive materials as a measure of terrorism or of extortion. All these are important issues, of much moral interest. What we want to claim, however, is that on the basis of its effects on the future alone, the nuclear option is morally unacceptable. Appendix Passmore's Treatment ofRawls, and What Really Happens on Rawls's Theory Passmore takes it that Rawls's theory yields an unconstrained position but, according to Rawls, the theory leads to quite the opposite result; namely, persons in different generations [and not merely neighbouring generations] have duties and obligations to one another just as contemporaries do. The present generation cannot do as it pleases but is bound by the principles that would be chosen in the original position to define justice between persons at different moments of time.. . . The derivation of these duties and obligations may seem at first a somewhat far-fetched application of the central doctrine. Nevertheless these requirements would be acknowledged in the original position [where the parties do not know to which generation they belong], and so the conception of justice as fairness covers these matters without any change in its basic idea. ([5], p. 293; the second insert is drawn from p. 287) Through judicious use of the veil of ignorance and the time of entry of parties to the original contract position, Rawls's contract theory, unlike simpler explicit contract theories, can yield definite obligations to distant future people,36 for example, we ought to save at a just rate for future people. But, as Rawls remarks (p. 284), 'the question of justice between generations . . . subjects any ethical theory to severe if not impossible tests'. It is doubtful that Rawls's theory as formulated passes the tests; for the theory as formulated does not yield the stated conclusion, but a conclusion inconsistent with the thesis that there are the same obligations to future people as to contemporaries. Exactly how these obligations arise from the initial agreement depends critically on the interpretation of the time of Obligations to the Future 167 entry of the parties into the agreement. Insofar as Rawls insists upon the present-time-of-entry interpretation (p. 139), he has to introduce supplementary motivational assumptions in order to (try to) secure the desired bondings between generations, in particular to ensure that the generation of the original position saves for any later generation, even their immediate successors ([5], p. 140 and p. 292). Rawls falls back on-what is as we have seen inadequate to the task, since it does not exclude one generation damaging another remote generation in a way that bypasses mutually successive generations - 'ties of sentiment between successive generations' (p. 292): to this limited extent Passmore has a point, for such a social contract on its own (without additional assumptions about the motives of the parties to the agreement) does not furnish obligations even to our immediate successors. This is indicative also of the unsatisfactory instability of Rawls's theory under changes, its sensitivity to the way the original agreement is set up, to the motivation of parties, their time of entry, what they can know, etc. To arrive at a more adequate account of obligations to the distant future under Rawls's theory, let us adopt, to avoid the additional, dubious and unsatisfactory, motivational assumptions Rawls invokes, one of the alternative - and non -equivalent - time-of-entry interpretations that Rawls lists (p. 146), that of persons alive at some time in simultaneous agreement. Let us call this, following Rawls's notation (on p. 140), interpretation 4b (it is perhaps unnecessary to assume for 4b any more than 4a that all people need be involved: it may be enough given the equivalencizing effect of the veil of ignorance that some are, and as with the particular quantifier it is quite unnecessary to be specific about numbers). Then of course the parties, since they are, for all they know, of different generations, will presumably agree on a just savings rate, and also to other just distribution principles, simply on the basis of Rawlsian rationality, i.e. advancing their own interests, without additional motivation assumptions. This more appealing omnitemporal interpretation of time of entry into the agreement, which gives a superior account of obligation to the future consistent with Rawls's claim, Rawls in some places puts down as less than best (p. 292) but in his most detailed account of the original position simply dismisses (p. 139): To conceive of the original position [as a gathering of people living at different times] would be to stretch fantasy too far; the conception would cease to be a natural guide to intuition. 168 R. and V. Rout ley This we question: it would be a better guide to intuition than a position (like 4a) which brings out intuitively wrong results; it is a more satisfactory guide, for example, to justice between generations than the present-timeof-entry interpretation, which fails conspicuously to allow for the range of potential persons (all of whom are supposed to qualify on Rawls's account for just treatment, cf. § 77). Moreover, it stretches fantasy no further than science fiction or than some earlier contract accounts.36 But it does require changes in the way the original position is conceived, and it does generate metaphysical difficulties for orthodox ontological views (though not to the same extent for the Meinongian view we prefer); for, to consider the latter, either time travel is possible or the original hypothetical position is an impossible situation, with people who live at different times assembled at the same time. The difficulties - of such an impossible meeting help to reveal that what Rawls's theory offers is but a colourful representation of obligations in terms of a contract agreed upon at a meeting. The metaphysical difficulties do not concern merely possible people, because all those involved are sometime-actual people; nor are there really serious difficulties generated by the fact that very many of these people do not exist, i.e. exist now. The more serious difficulties are either those of time travel, e.g. that future parties relocated into the present may be able to interfere with their own history, or, if time travel is ruled out logically or otherwise, that future parties may be advantaged (or disadvantaged) by their knowledge of history and technology, and that accordingly fairness is lost. As there is considerable freedom in how we choose to (re)arrange the original position, we shall suppose that time travel is rejected as a means of entering the original position. For much less than travel is required; some sort of limited communicational network which filters out, for example, all historical data (and all cultural or species dependent material) would suffice; and in any case if time travel were not excluded essentially the present-time-of-entry interpretation would serve, though fairness would again be put in doubt. The filtered communicational hook-up by which the omnitemporal position is engineered still has - if fairness is to be seen to be built into the decision making - to be combined with a reinterpreted veil of ignorance, so that parties do not know where they are located temporally any more than they know who they are characterwise. This implies, among other things, limitations on the parties' knowledge of factual matters, such as available technology and world and local history; for otherwise parties could work out their location, temporal or spatial. For example, if some party knew, as Rawls supposes, Obligations to the Future 169 the general social facts, then he would presumably be aware of the history of his time and so of where history ends, that is of the date of his generation, his time (his present), and so be aware of his temporal location. These are already problems for Rawls's so-called 'present-time-ofentry interpretation' - it is, rather, a variable-time-of-entry interpretation - given that the parties may be, as Rawls occasionally admits (e.g. p. 287), of any one generation, not necessarily the present: either they really do have to be ofthepresent time or they cannot be assumed to know as much as Rawls supposes.37 There is, however, no reason why the veil of ignorance should not be extended so as to avoid this problem; and virtually any extension that solves the problem for the variable-time-of-entry interpretation should serve, so it seems, for the omnitemporal one. We shall assume then that the parties know nothing which discloses their respective locations (i.e. in effect we write in conditions for universalizability of principles decided upon). There are still gaps between the assumptions of the omnitemporal position as roughly sketched and the desired conclusion concerning obligations to the future, but (the matter is beginning to look non-trivially provable given not widely implausible assumptions and) the intuitive arguments are as clear as those in [5], indeed they simply restate arguments to obligations given by Rawls. Rawls's theory, under interpretation 4b, admits of nice application to the problems of just distribution of material resources and of nuclear power. The just distribution, or rate of usage, of material resources38 over time is an important conservation issue to which Rawls's theory seems to apply, just as readily, and in a similar fashion, to that in which it applies to the issue of a just rate of savings. In fact the argument from the original position for a just rate of saving - whatever its adequacy - can by simply mimicked to yield an argument for just distribution of resources over generations. Thus, for example: persons in the original position are to ask themselves how much they would be willing to save [i.e. conserve] at each stage of advance on the assumption that all other generations are to save at the same rate [conserve resources to the same extent]. . . . In effect, then, they must choose a just savings principle [resources distribution principle] that assigns an appropriate rate of accumulation to [degree of resource conservation at] each level of advance. ([5], p. 287; our bracketed options give the alternative argument) 170 R. and V. Routley Just as 'they try to piece together a just savings schedule' (p. 289), so they can try to piece together a just resource distribution policy. Just as a case for resource conservation can be made out by appeal to the original position, since it is going to be against the interests of, to the disadvantage of, later parties to find themselves in a resource depleted situation (thus, on Rawlsian assumptions, they will bargain hard for a share of resources), so, interestingly, a case against a rapid programme of nuclear power development can be devised. The basis of a case against large-scale nuclear development is implicit in Rawls's contract theory under interpretation 4b, though naturally the theory is not applied in this sort of way by Rawls. To state the case in its crude but powerful form: people from later generations in the original position are bound to take it as against their interests to simply carry the waste can for energy consumed by an earlier generation. (We have already argued that they will find no convincing overriding considerations that make it worth their while to carry the waste can.) Thus not only has Passmore misrepresented the obligations to the future that Rawls's theory admits; he is also wrong in suggesting (p. 87 and p. 91) that Rawls's theory cannot justify a policy of resource conservation which includes reductions in present consumption. There is, in this connection, an accumulation of errors in Passmore, some of which spill over to Rawls, which it is worth trying to set out. First, Passmore claims ([1], p. 86; cf. also p. 90) that 'Rawls does not so much mention the saving of natural resources'. In fact the 'husbanding of natural resources' is very briefly considered ([5], p. 271). It is true, however, that Rawls does not reveal any of the considerable power that his theory, properly interpreted, has for natural resource conservation, as implying a just distribution of natural resources over time. Secondly, Passmore attempts ([1], pp. 87 ff.) to represent the calls of conservationists for a reduction in present resource usage and for a more just distribution as a call for heroic self-sacrifices; this is part of his more general attempt to represent every moral constraint with respect to the non-immediate future as a matter of self-sacrifice. 'Rawls's theory', Passmore says (on p. 87), 'leaves no room for heroic sacrifice', and so, he infers, leaves no room for conservation. Not only is the conclusion false, but the premiss also: Rawls's theory allows for supererogation, as Rawls explains ([5], p. 117). But resource conservation is, like refraining from nuclear development, not a question of heroic self-sacrifice; it is in part a question of obligations or duties to the distant future. And Rawls's theory allows not only for obligations as well as supererogation, but also for natural duties. Rawls's Obligations to the Future 171 contract, unlike the contracts of what is usually meant by a 'contract theory', is by no means exhaustive of the moral sphere: But even this wider [contract] theory fails to embrace all moral relationships, since it would seem to include only our relations with other persons and to leave out of account how we are to conduct ourselves towards,animals and the rest of nature. I do not contend that the contract notion offers a way to approach these questions which are certainly of the first importance; and I shall have to put them aside, (p. 17) The important class of obligations beyond the scope of the contract theory surely generates obligations between persons which even the wider contract theory likewise cannot explain. The upshot is that such a contract account, even if sufficient for the determination of obligations, is not necessary. To this extent Rawls' s theory is not a full social contract theory at all. However, Rawls appears to lose sight of the fact that his contract theory delivers only a sufficient condition when he claims, for example (p. 298), that 'one feature of the contract doctrine is that it places an upper bound on how much a generation can be asked to save for the welfare of later generations'. For greater savings may sometimes be required to meet obligations beyond those that the contract doctrine delivers. In short, Rawls appears to have slipped into assuming, inconsistently, that his contract theory is a necessary condition. Although Rawls's theory caters for justice between generations and allows the derivation of important obligations to people in the distant future, the full theory is far from consistent on these matters and there are significant respects in which Rawls does not take justice to the future seriously. The most conspicuous symptoms of this are that justice to the future is reduced to a special case, justice between generations, and that the only aspect of justice between generations that Rawls actually considers is a just savings rate; there is, for example, no proper examination of the just distribution of resources among generations, though these resources, Rawls believes, provide the material base of the just institutions that he wants to see maintained. In fact Rawls strongly recommends a system of markets as a just means for the allocation of most goods and services, recognizing their well-known limitations only in the usual perfunctory fashion ([5], pp. 270 ff.). Yet market systems are limited by a narrow time horizon, and are quite ill-equipped to allocate resources in a just fashion 172 R. and V. Rout ley over a time span of several generations. Similarly Rawls's endorsement of democratic voting procedures as in many cases a just method of determining procedures depends upon the assumptions that everyone with ah interest is represented. But given his own assumptions about obligations to the future and in respect of potential persons this is evidently not the case. Catering in a just fashion for the interests of future people poses serious problems for any method of decision that depends upon people being present to represent their own interests. Some of the more conservative, indeed reactionary, economic assumptions in Rawls emerge with the assumption that all that is required for justice between generations is a just savings rate, that all we need to pass on to the future are the things that guarantee appropriate savings such as capital, factories, and machines. But the transmission of these things is quite insufficient for justice to the future, and neither necessary nor sufficient as a foundation for a good life for future generations. What is required for justice is the transmission in due measure of what is valuable. Rawls has, however, taken value accumulation as capital accumulation, thereby importing one of the grossest economic assumptions, that capital reflects value. But of course the accumulation of capital may conflict with the preservation of what is valuable. It is for this sort of reason (and thus, in essence, because of the introduction of supplementary economistic theses which are not part of the pure contract theory) that Rawls's theory is a reactionary one from an environmental point of view; on the theory as presented (i.e. the contract theory plus all the supplementary assumptions) there is no need to preserve such things as wilderness or natural beauty. The savings doctrine supposes that everything of value for transmission to the future is negotiable in the market or tradeable; but then transmission of savings can by no means guarantee that some valuable things, not properly represented in market systems, are not eliminated or not passed on, thereby making future people worse off. It becomes evident in this way, too, how culturally-bound Rawls's idea of ensuring justice to future generations through savings is. It is not just that the idea does not apply, without a complete overhaul, to non-industrial societies such as those of hunter-gatherers; it does not apply to genuinely post-industrial societies either. Consideration of such alternative societies suggests that whafis required, in place of capital accumulation, is that we pass on what is necessary for a good life, that we ensure that the basics are fairly distributed over time and not eroded, e.g. that in the case of the forest people that the forest is maintained. The narrowness of Rawls's picture, Obligations to the Future 173 which makes no due allowance for social or cultural diversity (from the original contractual position on) or for individual diversity arises in part from his underlying and especially narrow socio-economic assumption as to what people want: What men want is meaningful work in free association with others, these associations regulating their relations to one another within a framework of just basic institutions. ([5], p. 290) This may be what many Harvard men want; but as a statement of what men want it supplies neither sufficient nor even necessary conditions.39 NOTES 1 Thus according to the Fox Report ([2], p. 110; our italics). There is at present no generally accepted means by which high level waste can be permanently isolated from the environment and remain safe for very long periods. . . . Permanent disposal of high-level solid wastes in stable geological formations is regarded as the most likely solution, but has yet to be demonstrated as feasible. It is not certain that such methods and disposal sites will entirely prevent radioactive releases following disturbances caused by natural processes or human activity. The Fox Report also quoted approvingly ([2], p. 187; our italics) the conclusion of the British (Flowers) Report [6]: There should be no commitment to a large programme of nuclear fission power until it has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that a method exist s to ensure the safe containment of long-lived, highly radioactive waste for the indefinite future. Although the absence of a satisfactory storage method has been conceded by some leading proponents of nuclear development, e.g. Weinberg ([3], pp. 32-33), it is now disputed by others. In particular, the headline for Cohen [15], which reads 'A substantial body of evidence indicates that the high level radioactive wastes generated by U.S. nuclear power plants can be stored satisfactorily in deep geological formations', has suggested to many readers - what it was no doubt intended to suggest- that there is really no problem about the disposal of radioactive wastes after all. Cohen presents, however, no new hard evidence, no evidence not already available to the British and Australian Commissions ([2] and [6]). Moreover the evidence Cohen does outline fails conspicuously to measure up to the standards rightly required by the Flowers and Fox Reports. Does Cohen offer a commercial-scale procedure for waste disposal which can be demonstrated as safe? Far from it: 174 R. and V. Routley The detailed procedures for handling the high-level wastes are not yet definite, but present indications are that. . . . (Cohen [1], p. 24; our italics) Does Cohen 'demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt' the long-term safety of burial of wastes, deep underground? Again, far from it: On the face of it such an approach appears to be reasonably safe. . . . (p. 24; our italics) Cohen has apparently not realized what is required. At issue here are not so much scientific or empirical issues as questions of methodology, of standards of evidence required for claims of safety, and above all, of values, since claims of safety, for example, involve implicit evaluations concerning what counts as an acceptable risk, an admissible cost, etc. In the headline 'a substantial body of evidence . . . indicates that. . . wastes . . . can be stored satisfactorily' the key words (italicized) are evaluative or elastic, and the strategy of Cohen's case is to adopt very low standards for their application. But in view of what is at stake it is hardly acceptable to do this, to dress up in this way what are essentially optimistic assurances and untested speculations about storage, which in any case do little to meet the difficulties and uncertainties that have been widely pointed out as regards precisely the storage proposals Cohen outlines, namely human or natural interference or disturbance. 2 See [18], pp. 24-25. 3 On all these points, see [14], esp. p. 141. According to the Fox Report ([2], p. 110): Parts of the reactor structure will be highly radioactive and their disposal could be very difficult. There is at present no experience of dismantling a full size reactor. 4 See, in particular, The Union of Concerned Scientists, The Nuclear Fuel Cycle, Friends of the Earth Energy Paper, San Francisco 1973, p. 47; also [3], p. 32 and [14], p. 149. 5 As the discussion in [14], pp. 153-7, explains. 6 Cf. [17], pp. 35-36, [18] and, for much detail, J. R. Goffman and A. R. Tamplin, Poisoned Power, Rodale Press, Emmau Pa. 1971. 7 On the pollution and waste disposal record of the infant nuclear industry, see [14] and [17]. The record of many countries on pollution control, where in many cases available technologies for reducing or removing pollution are not applied because they are considered too expensive or because they adversely affect the interests of some powerful group, provides clear historical evidence that the problem of nuclear waste disposal would not end simply with the devising of a 'safe' technology for disposal, even if one could be devised which provided a sufficient guarantee of safety and was commercially feasible. The fact that present economic and political arrangements are overwhelmingly weighted in favour of the interests and concerns of (some) contemporary humans makes it not unrealistic to expect the long-term nuclear waste disposal, if it involved any significant cost at all, when public concern about the issue died down, would be seen to conflict with the interests of contemporary groups, and that these latter interests would in many cases be favoured. Nor, as the history of movements such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament shows, could generalized public concern in the absence of direct personal interest, be relied upon to be sustained for long enough to ensure implementation of costly or troublesome long-term disposal methods - even in those places where public concern exists and is a politically significant force. It must be stressed then that the problem is not merely one of disposal technique. Historical and other evidence points to the conclusion that many of the most important risks associated with nuclear waste disposal are not of the kind which might be amenable Obligations to the Future 175 to technical solutions in the laboratory. A realistic assessment of potential costs to the future from nuclear development cannot overlook these important non-technical risk factors. 8 Of course the effect on people is not the only factor which has to be taken into consideration in arriving at a moral judgment. Nuclear radiation, unlike most ethical theories, does not confine its scope to human life. But since the harm nuclear development is likely to cause to non-human life can hardly improve its case, it suffices if the case against it can be made out solely in terms of its effects on human life in the conventional way. 9 Proponents of nuclear power often try to give the impression that future people will not just bear costs from nuclear development but will also be beneficiaries, because nuclear powerprovides an 'abundant' or even 'unlimited' source of energy; thus Weinberg ([3], p. 34): 'an all but infinite source of relatively cheap and clean energy'. A good example of an attempt to create the impression that 'abundant' and 'cheap' energy from nuclear fission will be available to 'our descendants', i.e. all future people, is found in the last paragraph of Cohen [15]. Such claims are most misleading, since fission power even with the breeder reactor has only about the same prospective lifetime as coal-produced electricity (a point that can be derived using data in A. Parker, 'World Energy Resources: A Survey', Energy Policy, Vol. 3 [1975], pp. 58-66), and it is quite illegitimate to assume that nuclear fusion, for which there are still major unsolved problems, will have a viable, clean technology by the time fission runs out, or, for that matter, that it ever will. Thus while some few generations of the immediate future may obtain some benefits as well as costs, there is a very substantial chance that tho se of the more distant future will obtain nothing but costs. 10 These feelings, of which Smith's and Hume's sympathy is representative, are but the feeling echoes of obligation. At most, sympathy explains the feeling of obligation or lack of it, and this provides little guide as to whether there is an obligation or not - unless one interprets moral sympathy, the feeling of having a obligation, or being obligated, itself as a sufficient indication of obligation, in which case moral sympathy is a non-explanatory correlate in the feelings department of obligation itself and cannot be truly explanatory of the ground of it; unless, in short, moral sympathy reduces to an emotive rewrite of moral obligation. 11 Elsewhere in [1] Passmore is especially exercised that our institutions and intellectual traditions - presumably only the better ones - should be passed on to posterity, and that we should strive to make the world a better place, if not eventually an ideal one. 12 This is not the only philosophically important issue in environmental ethics on which Passmore is inconsistent. Consider his: 'over-arching intention: to consider whether the solution of ecological problems demands a moral or metaphysical revolution' (p. x), whether the West needs a new ethic and a new metaphysics. Passmore's answer in [1] is an emphatic No. Only insofar as Western moralists have [made various erroneous suggestions] can the West plausibly be said to need a 'new ethic'. What it needs, for the most part, is not so much a 'new ethic' as adherence to a perfectly familiar ethic. For the major sources of our ecological disasters - apart from ignorance - are greed and shortsightedness, which amount to much the same thing. . . There is no novelty in the view that greed is evil; no need of a new ethic to tell us as much. (p. 187) 'The view that the West now needs. . . a new concept of nature' is similarly dismissed (p. 186, cf. p. 72). But in his paper [1*] (i.e. 'Attitudes to Nature', Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures, Vol. 8, Macmillan, London 1975), which is said to be an attempt to bring together and to reformulate some of the basic philosophical themes of [1], Passmore's answer is Yes, and quite different themes, inconsistent with those of [1], are advanced: 176 R. and V. Routley [T]he general conditions I have laid down . . . have not been satisfied in most of the traditional philosophies of nature. To that degree it is true, I think, that we do need a 'new metaphysics' which is genuinely not anthropocentric. . . . A 'new metaphysics', if it is not to falsify the facts, will have to be naturalistic, but not reductionist. The working out of such a metaphysics is, in my judgement, the most important task which lies ahead of philosophy. ([1*], pp. 260-1) A new ethic accompanies this new metaphysics. The emergence of new moral attitudes to nature is bound up, then, with the emergence of a more realistic philosophy of nature. That is the only adequate foundation for effective ecological concern. ([1*], p. 264) This is a far cry from the theme of [1] that ecological problems can be solved within the traditions of the West. 13 Put differently, the causal linkage can bypass intermediate generations, especially given action at a temporal distance: the chain account implies that there are no moral constraints in initiating such causal linkages. The chain picture accordingly seems to presuppose an unsatisfactory Humean model of causation, demanding contiguity and excluding action at a distance. 14 Golding we shall concede to Passmore, though even here the case is not clearcut. For Golding writes towards the end of his article ([12], p. 96): My discussion, until this point, has proceeded on the view that we have obligations to future generations. But do we? I am not sure that the question can be answered in the affirmative with any certainty. I shall conclude this note with a very brief discussion of some of the difficulties. All of Passmore's material on Golding is drawn from this latter and, as Golding says, 'speculative' discussion. 15 There is no textual citation for Bentham at all for the chapter of [1] concerned, viz. Ch. 4, 'Conservation'. 16 As Passmore himself at first concedes ([1], p. 84): If, as Bentham tells us, in deciding how to act men ought to take account of the effects of their actions on every sentient being, they obviously ought to take account of the pleasure and pains of the as yet unborn. 17 Neither rightness nor probable lightness in the hedonistic senses correspond to these notions in the ordinary sense; so at least [13] argues, following much anti-utilitarian literature. 18 On this irrationality different theories agree: the rational procedure, for example according to the minimax rule for decision-making under uncertainty, is to minimize that outcome which maximizes harm. 19 Discount, or bank, rates in the economists' sense are usually set to follow the market (cf. P. A. Samuelson, Economics, 7th ed., McGraw-Hill, New York 1967, p. 351). Thus the rates have little moral relevance. 20 Cf. Rawls [5], p. 287: 'From a moral point of view there are no grounds for discounting future well-being on the basis of pure time preference.' 21 What the probabilities would be depends on the theory of probability adopted: a Carnapian theory, e.g., would lead back to the unconstrained position. Obligations to the Future 177 22 A real possibility is one which there is evidence for believing could eventuate. A real possibility requires producible evidence for its consideration. The contrast is with mere logical possibility. 23 Thus, to take a simple special case, economists dismiss distant future people from their assessments of utility, welfare, etc., on the basis of their non-existence; cf. Ng ('the utility of a non-existent person is zero') and Harsanyi ('only existing people [not even "nonexisting potential individuals"] can have real utility levels since they are the only ones able to enjoy objects with a positive utility, suffer from objects with a negative utility, and feel indifferent to objects with zero utility') (see Appendix B of Y. K. Ng, 'Preference, Welfare, and Social Welfare', paper presented at the Colloquium on Preference, Choice and Value Theory, RSSS, Australian National University, August 1977, pp. 24, 26-27). Non-existent people have no experiences, no preferences; distant future people do not exist; therefore distant future people have no utility assignments - so the sorites goes. But future people at least will have wants, preferences, and so on, and these have to be taken into account in adequate utility assessments (which should be assessed over afuture time horizon), no matter how much it may complicate or defeat calculations. 24 There are problems about formulating universalizability satisfactorily, but they hardly affect the point. The requisite universalizability can in fact be satisfactorily brought out from the semantical analysis of deontic notions such as obligation, and indeed argued for on the basis of such an analysis which is universal in form. The lawlikeness requirement, which can be similarly defended, is essentially that imposed on genuine scientific laws by logical empiricists (e.g. Carnap and Hempel), that such laws should contain no proper names or the like, no reference to specific locations or times. 25 Such a principle is explicit both in classical utilitarianism (e.g. Sidgwick [11], p. 414), and in a range of contract and other theories from Kant and Rousseau toRawls ([5], p. 293). How the principle is argued for will depend heavily, however, on the underlying theory; and we do not want to make our use depend heavily on particular ethical theories. 26 See esp. R. Lanoue, NuclearPlants:The MoreTheyBuild, The More You Pay, Centerfor Study of Responsive Law, Washington DC 1976; also [14], pp. 212 ff. 27 On all these points see R. Grossman and G. Daneker, Guide to Jobs and Energy, Environmentalists for Full Employment, Washington DC 1977, pp. 1-7, and also the details supplied in substantiating the interesting case of Commoner [7]. On the absorption of available capital by the nuclear industry, see as well [18], p. 23. On the employment issues, see too H. E. Daly in [9], p. 149. A more fundamental challenge to the poverty argument appears in I. Illich, Energy and Equality, Calder & Boyars, London 1974, where it is argued that the sort of development nuclear energy represents is exactly the opposite of what the poor need. 28 For much more detail on the inappropriateness see E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, Blond & Briggs, London 1973. As to the capital and other requirements, see [2], p. 48, and also [7] and [9]. For an illuminating look at the sort of development high-energy technology will tend to promote in the so-called underdeveloped countries, see the paper of Waiko and other papers in the Melanesian Environment (ed. by J. H. Winslow), Australian National University Press, Canberra 1977. 29 This fact is implicitly recognized in [2], p. 56. 30 A useful survey is given in A. Lovins, Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken, Friends of the Earth Australia, 1977 (reprinted from Foreign Affairs, October 1976); see also [17], [6], [7], [14], pp. 233 ff., and Schumacher, op. cit. 31 This is also explained in [2], p. 56. 32 An argument like this is suggested in Passmore [1], Chs. 4 and 7, with respect to the question of saving resources. In Passmore this argument for the overriding importance of passing on contemporary culture is underpinned by what appears to be a future- 178 R. and V. Routley directed ethical version of the Hidden Hand argument of economics - that, by a coincidence which if correct would indeed be fortunate, the best way to take care of the future (and perhaps even the only way to do so, since do-good intervention is almost certain to go wrong) is to take proper care of the present and immediate future. The argument has all the defects of the related Chain Argument discussed above and others. 33 See [14], p. 66, p. 191, and also [7]. 34 For such arguments see esp. M. Flood and R. Grove-White, Nuclear Prospects. A Comment on the Individual, the State and Nuclear Power, Friends of the Earth, Council for the Protection of Rural England and National Council for Civil Liberties, London 1976. 35 For a recent sketch of one such alternative which is outside the framework of the conventional option of centralized bureaucratic socialism, see E. Callenbach's novel, Ecotopia, Banyan Tree Books, Berkeley, California 1975. For the outline of a liberation socialist alternative see Radical Technology (ed. by G. Boyle and P. Harper), Undercurrents Limited, London 1976, and references therein. 36 Some earlier contract theories also did. Burke's contract (in E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Dent, London 1910, pp. 93-94) 'becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are not yet born'. Thus Burke's contract certainly appears to lead to obligations to distant future generations. Needless to say, there are metaphysical difficulties, which however Burke never considers, about contracts between parties at widely separated temporal locations. 37 Several of the preceding points we owe to M. W. Jackson. 38 Resources such as soil fertility and petroleum could even be a primary social goods on Rawls's very hazy general account of these goods ([5], pp. 62, 97): are these 'something a rational man wants whatever else he wants'? The primary social goods should presumably be those which are necessary for the good and just life -which will however vary with culture. 39 We have benefited from discussion with Ian Hughes and Frank Muller and useful comments on the paper from Brian Martin and Derek Browne. REFERENCES [1] J. Passmore, Man's Responsibility for Nature, Duckworth, London 1974. [2] Ranger Uranium Environmental Inquiry First Report, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra 1977. [3] A. M. Weinberg, 'Social Institutions and Nuclear Energy", Science, Vol. 177 (July 1972), pp. 27-34. • [4] R. Routley, 'Exploring Meinong's Jungle II. Existence is Existence Now', Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic (to appear). [5] J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1971. [6] Nuclear Power and the Environment. Sixth Report of the British Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, London 1976. [7] B. Commoner, The Poverty of Power, Knopf, New York 1976. [8] G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1903. [9] B. Commoner, H. Boksenbaum and M. Corr (Eds.), Energy and Human Welfare - A Critical Analysis, Vol. III, Macmillan, New York 1975. Obligations to the Future 179 [10] J. Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, Vol. 1, published under the superintendence of J. Bowring, with an intro. by J. H. Burton; William Tait, Edinburgh 1843. [11] H. Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, Macmillan, London 1962 (reissue). [12] M. P. Golding, 'Obligations to Future Generations', Monist, Vol. 56 (1972), pp. 85-99. [13] R. and V. Routley, 'An Expensive Repair Kit for Utilitarianism', presented at the Colloquium on Preference, Choice and Value Theory, RSSS, Australian National University, August 1977. [14] R. Nader and J. Abbotts, The Menace of Atomic Energy, Outback Press, Melbourne 1977. [15] B. L. Cohen, 'The Disposal of Radioactive Wastes from Fission Reactors', Scientific American, Vol. 236 (June 1977), pp. 22-31. [16] S. McCracken, 'The Waragainst the Atom' .Commentary (September 1977), pp. 33-47. [17] A. B. Lovins and J. H. Price, Non-Nuclear Futures: The Case for an Ethical Energy Strategy, Friends of the Earth International, San Francisco 1975. [18] A. Roberts, "The Politics of Nuclear Power', Arena, No. 41 (1976), pp. 22-47.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Nuclear waste, obligations to the future, and social choice Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Routley</a> <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=val+routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Val Routley</a> Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource c.1979 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Manuscript https://www.antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/0b7902d211e4ae23ce6364a79b1fdef4.pdf 903a4c17a0584ed036707fe4b4aa469a PDF Text Text ������������������������������������������������������������� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Draft Papers Description An account of the resource Sylvan's literary executor encountered an archive in which “all his projects were current", since manuscripts were undated and unattributed. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Nuclear Power—Some Ethical, Social and Political Dimensions Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Routley</a> <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=val+routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Val Routley</a> Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://manuscripts.library.uq.edu.au/index.php/uqfl291" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Richard Sylvan Papers, UQFL291</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Manuscript https://www.antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/aa63c63d0f45fac75f526b06c8424b3c.pdf 17bec21c0f33132227ac917e05e5336e PDF Text Text ������������ Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Published Papers Description An account of the resource Sylvan formally published very little of his nuclear ethics and politics, although a nuclear imaginary is present throughout his ouevre. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Nuclear Power—Some Ethical and Social Dimensions Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Routley</a> <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=val+routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Val Routley</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Rowman and Littlefield Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1982 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Manuscript https://www.antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/f6c3d304b2d018293fdb7af1b751feb9.pdf 7497b1a142a2ee74e689488a2bfa234a PDF Text Text Inquiry, 21, 133-79 Nuclear Energy and Obligations to the Future R. and V. Routley Plumwood Mountain, Braidwood, Australia The paper considers the morality of nuclear energy development as it concerns future people, especially the creation of highly toxic nuclear wastes requiring longterm storage. On the basis of an example with many parallel moral features it is argued that the imposition of such costs and risks on the future is morally unacceptable. The paper goes on to examine in detail possible ways of escaping this conclusion, especially the escape route of denying that moral obligations of the appropriate type apply to future people. The bulk of the paper comprises discussion of this philosophical issue, including many arguments against assigning obligations to the future drawn both from analyses of obligation and from features of the future such as uncertainty and indeterminacy. A further escape through appeal to moral conflict is also considered, and in particular two conflict arguments, the Poverty and Lights-going-out arguments are briefly discussed. Both these escape routes are rejected and it is concluded that if the same standards of behaviour are applied to the future as to the present, nuclear energy development is morally unacceptable. I. The Bus Example Suppose we consider a bus, a bus which we hope is to make a very long journey. This bus, a third world bus, carries both passengers and freight. The bus sets down and picks up many different passengers in the course of its long journey and the drivers change many times, but because of the way the bus line is managed and the poor service on the route it is nearly always full to overcrowded, with passengers hanging off the back, and as in Afghanistan, passengers riding on the roof, and chickens and goats in the freight compartment. Early in the bus's journey someone consigns on it, to a far distant destination, a package containing a highly toxic and explosive gas. This is packaged in a very thin container, which as the consigner well knows is unlikely to contain the gas for the full distance for which it is consigned, and certainly will not do so if the bus should encounter any trouble, for example if there is a breakdown and the interior of the bus becomes very hot, if the bus should strike a very large bump or pothole of the sort commonly found on some of the bad roads it has to traverse, or if some 1 �134 R. and V. Routley passenger should interfere deliberately or inadvertently with the cargo or perhaps try to steal some of the freight, as also frequently happens. All of these things, let us suppose, have happened on some of the bus's previous journeys. If the container should break the resulting disaster would probably kill at least some of the people and animals on the bus, while others could be maimed or contract serious diseases. There does not seem much doubt about what most of us would say about the morality of the consigner's action, and there is certainly no doubt about what the passengers would say. The consigner's action in putting the safety of the occupants of the bus at risk is appalling. What could excuse such an action, what sort of circumstances might justify it, and what sort of case could the consigner reasonably put up? The consigner might say that it is by no means certain that the gas will escape; he himself is an optimist and therefore feels that such unfavourable possible outcomes should be ignored. In any case the bus might have an accident and the passengers be killed long before the container gets a chance to leak; or the passengers might change to another bus and leave the lethal parcel behind. He might say that it is the responsibility of the passengers and the driver to ensure that the journey is a smooth one, and that if they fail to do so, the results are not his fault. He might say that the journey is such a long one that many of the passengers may have become mere mindless vegetables or degenerate wretches about whose fate no decent person need concern himself, or that they might not care about losing their lives or health or possessions anyway by that time. Most of these excuses will seem little more than a bad joke, and certainly would not usually be reckoned any sort of justification. The main argument the consigner of the lethal parcel employs, however, is that his own pressing needs justify his actions. He has no option but to consign his potentially lethal parcel, he says, since the firm he owns, and which has produced the material as a by-product, is in bad financial straits and cannot afford to produce a better container or to stop the production of the gas. If the firm goes out of business, the consigner says, his wife will leave him, and he will lose his family happiness, the comfortable way of life to which he has become accustomed and sees now as a necessity; his employees will lose their jobs and have to look for others; not only will the firm's customers be inconvenienced but he, the consigner, will have to break some business contracts; the inhabitants of the local village through loss of spending and cancellation of the Multiplier Effect will suffer finan- �Obligations to the Future 135 cial hardship, and, worst of all, the tiny flow of droplets that the poor of the village might receive (theoretically at any rate) as a result of the trickling down of these good things would dry up entirely. In short, some basic and some perhaps uncomfortable changes will be needed in the village. Even if the consigner's story were accepted at face value - and it would be wise to look critically at his story - only someone whose moral sensibilities had been paralysed by the disease of galloping economism could see such a set of considerations, based on 'needs', comfort, and the goal of local prosperity, as justifying the consigner's action. One is not generally entitled to thus simply transfer the risks and costs arising from one's own life onto other uninvolved parties, to get oneself out of a hole of one's own making by creating harm or risk of harm to someone else who has had no share in creating the situation. To create serious risks and costs, especially risks to life or health for such others, simply to avoid having to make some changes to a comfortable life style, or even for a somewhat better reason, is usually thought deserving of moral condemnation, and sometimes considered a crime; for example, the action of a company in creating risks to the lives or health of its workers or customers to prevent itself from going bankrupt. What the consigner says may be an explanation of his behaviour, but it is not a justification. The problem raised by nuclear waste disposal is by no means a perfect analogy to the bus case, since, for example, the passengers on the nuclear bus cannot get off the bus or easily throw out the lethal package. In many crucial moral respects, however, the nuclear waste storage problem as it affects future people, the passengers in the bus we are considering, resembles the consignment of the faultily packaged lethal gas. Not only are rather similar moral principles involved, but a rather similar set of arguments to the lamentable excuses the consigner presents have been seriously put up to justify nuclear development, the difference being that in the nuclear case these arguments have been widely accepted. There is also some parallel in the risks involved; there is no known safe way to package the highly toxic wastes generated by nuclear plants that will be spread around the world if large-scale nuclear development goes ahead.1 The wastes problem will not be a slight one, with each one of the more than 2,000 reactors envisaged by the end of the century, producing on average annual wastes containing one thousand times the radioactivity of the Hiroshima bomb.2 The wastes include not merely the spent fuels and their radioactive by-products, but also everything they contaminate, from fuel containers to the thousands of widely distributed decommissioned nuclear �136 R. and V. Routley reactors which will have to be abandoned, still in a highly radioactive condition, after the expiry of their expected lifetimes of about thirty years, and which have been estimated to require perhaps one and a half million years to reach safe levels of radioactivity.3 The wastes must be kept suitably isolated from the environment for their entire active lifetime; for fission products the required storage period averages a thousand years or so, and for the actinides (transuranic elements) which include plutonium, there is a half-million to a million-year storage problem.4 Serious problems have arisen with both short-term and proposed longterm methods of storage, even with the comparatively small quantities of waste that have been produced over the last twenty years.5 With present known short-term surface methods of storage there is a continued need for human intervention to keep the material isolated from the environment, while with proposed longer-term methods such as storage in salt mines or granite to the risk of human interference there are added the risks of leakage, e.g. through water seepage, and of disturbance, for example through climatic change, earth movements, etc. The risks are significant: no reasonable person with even a limited acquaintance with the history of human affairs over the last 3,000 years could be confident of safe storage by methods involving human intervention over the enormous time periods involved. No one with even a slight knowledge of the geological and climatic history of the earth over the last million years, a period which has seen a number of ice ages and great fluctuations in climate for example, could be confident that the waste material could be safely stored for the vast periods of time required. Much of this waste is highly toxic; for example, even a beachball sized quantity of plutonium appropriately distributed is enough to give every person on the planet lung cancer - so that a leak of even a small part of this waste material could involve huge loss of life, widespread disease and genetic damage, and contamination of immense areas of land.6 Given the enormous costs which could be involved for the future, it is plainly grossly inadequ'ate'to merely speculate concerning untested, but possibly or even probably, safe methods for disposal of wastes. Yet none of the proposed methods has been properly tested, and they may prove to involve all sorts of unforeseen difficulties and risks when an attempt is made to put them into practice on a commercial scale. Only a method that could provide a rigorous guarantee of safety over the storage period, that placed safety beyond reasonable doubt, would be acceptable. It is difficult to see how such rigorous guarantees could be given concerning either the �Obligations to the Future 137 geological or future human factors. But even if an economically viable, rigorously safe long-term storage method could be devised, there is the problem of guaranteeing that it would be universally and invariably used. The assumption that it would be, especially if, as seems likely, such a method proved expensive economically and politically, seems to presuppose a level of efficiency, perfection, and concern for the future not previously encountered in human affairs, and certainly not conspicuous in the nuclear industry.7 Again, unless we assume continuous and faultless guarding of long-term storage sites through perhaps a million years of possible future human activity, weapons-grade radioactive material will be accessible, over much of the million-year storage period, to any party who is in a position to retrieve it. Our behaviour in creating this nightmare situation for the future is certainly no better than that of the consigner in the bus example. Industrialized countries, in order to get out of a mess of their own making essentially the creation of economies dependent on an abundance" of non-renewable energy in a situation where it is in fact in limited supply opt for a 'solution' which may enable them to avoid the making of uncomfortable changes during the lifetime of those now living, at the expense of passing heavy burdens on to the inhabitants of the earth at a future time burdens in the shape of costs and risks which, just as in the bus case, may adversely affect the life and health of future people and their opportunity to lead a decent life.8 It is sometimes suggested that analogies like the bus example are defective; that morally they are crucially different from the nuclear case, since future people, unlike the passengers in the bus, will benefit directly from nuclear development, which will provide an abundance of energy for the indefinite future. But this is incorrect. Nuclear fission creates wastes which may remain toxic for a million years, but even with the breeder reactor it could be an energy source for perhaps only 150 years. It will do nothing for the energy problems of the people of the distant future whose lives could be seriously affected by the wastes. Thus perhaps 30,000 generations of future people could be forced to bear significant risks, without any corresponding benefits, in order to provide for the extravagant energy use of only five generations. Nor is the risk of direct harm from the escape or misuse of radioactive materials the only burden the nuclear solution imposes on the future. Because the energy provided by nuclear fission is merely a stop-gap, it seems probable that in due course the same problem, that of making a �138 R. and V. Routley transition to renewable sources of energy, will have to be faced again by a future population which will probably, again as a result of our actions, be very much worse placed to cope with it.9 For they may well have to face the change to renewable resources in an over-populated world not only burdened with the legacy of our nuclear wastes, but also in a world in which, if the nuclear proponents' dream of global industrialization is realized, more and more of the global population will have become dependent on high energy consumption and associated technology and heavy resource use, and will have lost or reduced its ability to survive without it. It will, moreover, probably be a world which is largely depleted of non-renewable resources, and in which such renewable resources as forests and soils as remain, resources which will have to form a very important part of the basis of life, are in a run-down condition. Such points tell against the idea that future people must be, if not direct beneficiaries of nuclear fission energy, at least indirect beneficiaries. The 'solution' then is to buy time for contemporary industrial society at a price which not only creates serious problems for future people but which reduces their ability to cope with those problems. Just as in the bus case, contemporary industrial society proposes to get itself out of a hole of its own making by creating risk of harm, and by transferring costs and risks, to someone else who has had no part in producing the situation and who will obtain no clear benefit. It has clear alternatives to this action. That it does not take them is due essentially to its unwillingness to avoid changing wasteful patterns of consumption and to its desire to protect the interests of those who benefit from them. If we apply to the nuclear situation the same standards of behaviour and moral principles that we acknowledge (in principle if perhaps often not in fact) in the contemporary world, it will not be easy to avoid the conclusion that the situation involves injustice with respect to future people on a grand scale. It seems to us that there are only two plausible moves that might enable the avoidance of such a conclusion. First, it might be argued that the moral principles and obligations which we acknowledge for the contemporary world and the immediate future do not apply because the recipients of our nuclear parcel are in the non-immediate future. Secondly, an attempt might be made to appeal to overriding circumstances; for to reject the consigner's action in the circumstances outlined is not of course to say that there are no circumstances in which such an action might possibly be justifiable, or at least where the case is less clearcut. It is the same with the nuclear case. Just as in the case of the consigner of the �Obligations to the Future 139 package there is a need to consider what these justifying circumstances might be, and whether they apply in the present case. We turn now to the first of these possible escape routes for the proponent of nuclear development, to the philosophical question of our obligations to the future. II. Obligations to the Distant Future The area in which these philosophical problems arise is that of the distant (i.e. non-immediate) future, that is, the future with which people alive today will make no direct contact; the immediate future provides comparatively few problems for moral theories. The issues involved, although of far more than academic interest, have not received any great attention in recent philosophical literature, despite the fact that the question of obligations to future people presents tests which a number of ethical theories fail to pass, and also raises a number of questions in political philosophy concerning the adequacy of accepted institutions which leave out of account the interests of future people. Moral philosophers have predictably differed on the issue. But contrary to the picture painted in a recent, widely read, and influential work discussing it, Passmore's Man's Responsibility for Nature, a good many philosophers who have explicitly considered the question have come down in favour of the same consideration being given to the rights and interests of future people as to those of contemporary or immediately future people. Other philosophers have tended to fall into three categories - those who acknowledge obligations to the future but who do not take them seriously or who assign them less weight, those who deny, or who are committed by their general moral position to denying, that there are moral obligations beyond the immediate future, and those like Passmore and Golding who come down, with admirable philosophical caution, on both sides of the issue, but with the weight of the argument favouring the view underlying prevailing economic and political institutions, that there are no moral obligations to the future beyond those to the next generation. • According to the most extreme of these positions against moral obligations to the future, our behaviour with respect to the future is morally unconstrained; there are no moral restrictions on acting or failing to act deriving from the effect of our actions on future people. Of those philosophers who say, or whose views imply, that we don't have obligations to the (non-immediate) future, i.e. those who have opted for the uncon- �140 R. and V. Routley strained position, many have based this view on accounts of moral obligation which are built on relations which presuppose some degree of temporal or spatial contiguity. Thus moral obligation is seen as grounded on or as presupposing various relations which could not hold between people widely separated in time (or sometimes in space). For example, obligation is seen as grounded in relations which are proximate or of short duration and also non-transitive. Among such suggested bases or grounds of moral obligation, or requirements for moral obligation, which would rule out obligations to the non-immediate future are these: First, there are those accounts which require that someone to whom a moral obligation is held be able to claim his rights or entitlement. People in the distant future will not be able to claim rights and entitlements as against us, and of course they can do nothing to enforce any claims they might have for their rights against us. Secondly, there are those accounts which base moral obligations on social or legal convention, for example a convention which would require punishment of offenders or at least some kind of social enforcement. But plainly these and other conventions will not hold invariantly over change in society and amendment of legal conventions and so will not be invariant over time. Also future people have no way of enforcing their interests or punishing offenders, and there could be no guarantee that any contemporary institution would do it for them. Both the view that moral obligation requires the context of a moral community and the view that it is contractually based appear to rule out the distant future as a field of moral obligation, as they not only require a commonality, or some sort of common basis, which cannot be guaranteed in the case of the distant future, but also a possibility of interchange or reciprocity of action which cannot apply to the future. Where the basis of moral obligation is seen as mutual exchange, the interests of future people must be set aside because they cannot change the past and cannot be parties to any mutual contract. The exclusion of moral obligations to the distant future also follows from those views which attempt to ground moral obligations in non-transitive relations of short duration such as sympathy and love. There are some difficulties also about love and sympathy for (non-existent) people in the far distant future about whose personal qualities and characteristics one must know very little and who may well be committed to a life-style for which one has no sympathy. On the current showing in the case of nuclear energy it would be easy to conclude that contemporary society lacks both love and sympathy for future people; and it would appear to follow from this that contemporary �Obligations to the Future 141 people have no obligations to future people and can harm them as it suits them. What all these views have in common is a naturalistic picture of obligation as something acquired, either individually or institutionally, something which is conditional on doing something or failing to do something (e.g. participating in the moral community, contracting), or having some characteristic one can fail to have (e.g. love, sympathy, empathy).10 Because obligation therefore becomes conditional, features usually thought to characterize it, such as universality of application and necessitation (i.e. the binding features), are lost, especially where there is a choice of whether or not to do the thing required to acquire the obligation, and so of whether to acquire it. The criteria for acquisition suggested are such as to exclude people in the distant future. However, the view that there are no moral constraints with respect to future people, that one is free to act as one likes with respect to them, is a very difficult one to sustain. Consider the example of a scientific group which, for no particular reason other than to test a particular piece of technology, places in orbit a cobalt bomb which is to be set off by a triggering device designed to go off several hundred years from the time of its despatch. No presently living person and none of their immediate descendants would be affected, but the population of the earth in the distant future would be wiped out as a direct and predictable result of the action. The unconstrained position clearly implies that this is an acceptable moral enterprise, that whatever else we might legitimately criticize in the scientists' experiment, perhaps its being unduly expensive or badly designed, we cannot lodge a moral protest about the damage it will do to future people. The unconstrained position also endorses as morally acceptable the following sorts of examples: A firm discovers it can make a handsome profit from mining, processing, and manufacturing a new type of material which, although it causes no problems for present people or their immediate descendants, will over a period of hundreds of years decay into a substance which will cause an enormous epidemic of cancer among the inhabitants of the earth at that time. According to the unconstrained view the firm is free to act in its own interests, without any consideration for the harm it does to future people. Such counterexamples to the unconstrained view might seem childishly obvious. Yet the unconstrained position concerning the future from which they follow is far from being a straw man; not only have a number of philosophers writing on the issue endorsed this position, but it is the clear �142 R. and V. Routley implication of many currently popular views of the basis of moral obligation, as well as of economic theory. It does not appear, on the other hand, that those who opt for the unconstrained position have considered such examples and endorsed them as morally acceptable, despite their being clearly implied by their position. We suspect that when it is brought out that the unconstrained position admits such counterexamples, that being free to act implies, among other things being free to inflict pointless harm, most of those who opted for the unconstrained position would want to assert that it was not what they intended. What those who have put forward the unconstrained position seem to have had in mind in denying moral obligation is rather that future people can look after themselves, that we are not responsible for their lives. The view that the future can take care of itself also seems to assume a future causally independent of the present. But it is not. It is not as if, in cases such as those discussed above and the nuclear case, the future is simply being left alone to take care of itself. Present people are influencing it, and in doing so must acquire many of the same sorts of moral responsibilities as they do in causally affecting the present and immediate future. The thesis seems thus to assume an incorrect model of an independent and unrelated future. Also, to say that we are not responsible for the lives of future people does not amount to the same as saying that we are free to do as we like with respect to them, that there are no moral constraints on our action involving them. In just the same way, the fact that one does not have, or has not acquired, an obligation to some stranger with whom one has never been involved - that one has no responsibility for his life - does not imply that one is free to do what one likes with respect to him, for example to rob him or to pursue some course of action of advantage to oneself which could seriously harm him. These difficulties for the unconstrained position arise in part from the failure to make an important distinction between, on the one hand, acquired or assumed obligations towards somebody, for which some act of acquisition or assumption is required as a qualifying condition, and on the other hand moral constraints, which require, for example, that one should not act so as to damage or harm someone, and for which no act of acquisition is required. There is a considerable difference in the level and kind of responsibility involved. In the first case one must do something or be something which one can fail to do or be, e.g. have loves, sympathy, be contracted. In the second case responsibility arises as a result of being a causal agent aware of the consequences or probable consequences of his �Obligations to the Future 143 action, and thus does not have to be especially acquired or assumed. Thus there is no problem about how the latter class, moral constraints, can apply to the distant future in cases where it may be difficult or impossible for acquisition or assumption conditions to be satisfied. They apply as a result of the ability to produce causal effects on the distant future of a reasonably predictable nature. Thus also moral constraints can apply to what does not (yet) exist, just as actions can cause results that do not (yet) exist. While it may be the case that there would need to be an acquired or assumed obligation in order for it to be claimed that contemporary people must make special sacrifices of an heroic kind for future people, or even to help them especially, only moral constraints are needed in order for us to be constrained from harming them. Thus, to return to the bus example, the consigner cannot argue in justification of his action that he has never assumed or acquired responsibility for the passengers, that he does not know them and therefore has no love or sympathy for them, and that they are not part of his moral community, in short that he has no special obligations to help them. All that one needs to argue in respect of both the bus and the nuclear case is that there are moral constraints against harming, not that there are specially acquired obligations to take responsibility for the lives of the people involved. The confusion of moral constraints with acquired obligation, and the attempt therewith to view all constraints as acquired and to write off non-acquired constraints, is facilitated through the use of the term 'moral obligation' in philosophy to indicate any type of deontic constraint, while in natural language it is used to indicate something which has to be assumed or acquired. Hence the equation and at least one root of the unconstrained position, that is of the belief that there are no moral constraints concerning the distant future. The unconstrained view tends to give way, under the weight of counterexamples, to a more qualified, and sometimes ambivalent position. Passmore's position in [1] is a striking example of the second ambivalent position. On the one hand Passmore regularly gives the impression of one championing future people; for example, in the final sentence of [1] he says, concerning men a century hence: My sole concern is that we should do nothing which will reduce their freedom of thought and action, whether by destroying.the natural world which makes that freedom possible or the social traditions which permit and encourage it. �144 R. and V. Routley Earlier (esp. pp. 84-85) Passmore appears to endorse the principle 'that we ought not to act so as certainly to harm posterity' and claims (p. 98) that, even where there are uncertainties, 'these uncertainties do not justify negligence'. Nevertheless, though obligations concerning non-immediate posterity are thus admitted, the main thrust of Passmore's argument is entirely different, being in favour of the unconstrained position according to which we have no obligations to non-immediate posterity. Thus his conclusion (p. 91): So whether we approach the problem of obligations to posterity by way of Bentham and Sidgwick, Rawls or Golding, we are led to something like the same conclusion: our obligations are to immediate posterity, we ought to try to improve the world so that we shall be able to hand it over to our immediate successors in a better condition, and that is all.11 Passmore's position is, to all appearances, simply inconsistent. There are two ways one might try to render it consistent, but neither is readily available to Passmore. The first is by taking advantage of the distinction between moral constraints and acquired obligations, but a basis for this distinction is not evident in Passmore's work and indeed the distinction is antithetical to the analyses of obligation that Passmore tries to synthesize with his own analysis in terms of loves. The second, sceptical, route to consistency is by way of the argument that we shall consider shortly, that there is always gross uncertainty with respect to the distant future, uncertainty which relieves us in practice of any moral constraints regarding the distant future. But though Passmore's writing strongly suggests this uncertainty argument (especially his sympathetic discussion of the Premier of Queensland's argument against conservationists [p. 77]), he also rules it out with the claim that uncertainties do not justify negligence.12 Many of the accounts of moral obligation that give rise to the unconstrained position are fused in Passmore's work, again not entirely consistently, since the different accounts exploited do not give uniform results. Thus the primary account of obligation is said to be in terms of loves though the account is never satisfactorily formulated or developed - and it is suggested that because our loves do not extend into the distant future, neither do our obligations. This sentimental account of obligation will obviously lead to different results from utilitarian accounts of obligation, which however Passmore appeals to in his discussion of wilderness. In yet other places in [1], furthermore, social contract and moral community �Obligations to the Future 145 views are appealed to - see, e.g., the treatment of animals, of preservation, and of duties to nature. In the case of obligations to future people, however, Passmore does try to sketch an argument - what we call the convergence argument - that all the accounts lead in the end to the unconstrained position. As well as the convergence argument, and various uncertainty arguments to be considered later, Passmore appears to endorse several other arguments in favour of his theme that there are in practice no obligations to the distant future. In particular, he suggests that such obligations would in practice be otiose. Everything that needs to be accounted for can be encompassed through the chain picture of obligation as linking successive generations, under which each generation has obligations, based on loves, only to the succeeding generation. We outline three objections to this chain account. First, it is inadequate to treat constraints concerning the future as if they applied only between generations, as if there were no question of constraints on individuals as opposed to whole generations, since individuals can create causal effects, e.g. harm, on the future in a way which may create individual responsibility, and which can't necessarily be sheeted home to an entire generation. Secondly, such chains, since they are non-transitive, cannot yield direct obligations to the distant future. But for this very reason the chain picture cannot be adequate, as examples again show. For the picture is unable to explain several of the cases that have to be dealt with, e.g. the examples already discussed which show that we can have a direct effect on the distant future without affecting the next generation, who may not even be able to influence matters.13 Thirdly, improvements for immediate successors may be achieved at the expense of disadvantages to people of the more distant future. Improving the world for immediate successors is quite compatible with, and may even in some circumstances be most easily achieved by, ruining it for less immediate successors. Such cases can hardly be written off as 'never-never land' examples, since many cases of environmental exploitation might be seen as of just this type, e.g. not just the nuclear case but also the exhaustion of non-renewable resources and the long-term depletion of renewable resources such as soils and forests through overcropping. If then such obvious injustices to future people arising from the favouring or exclusive concern with immediate successors are to be avoided, obligations to the future will have to be seen as in some way fairly distributed over time, and not merely as accruing to particular generations in the way the chain picture suggests. �146 R. and V. Routley Passmore tries to represent all obligations to the distant future in terms of heroic self-sacrifice, something which cannot of course be morally required. But in view of the distinctions between constraints and acquired obligation and between obligation and supererogation, this is just to misrepresent the position of these obligations. For example, one is no more engaging in heroic self-sacrifice by not forcing future people into an unviable life position or by refraining from causing them direct harm, than one is resorting to heroic self-sacrifice in refraining from beating and robbing some stranger and leaving him to starve. Passmore's most sustained argument for the unconstrained position is a convergence argument, that different analyses of obligations, including his own, lead to the one conclusion. This style of argument is hardly convincing when there are well-known accounts of obligation which do not lead to the intended conclusion, e.g. deontological accounts such as those of Kant and of modern European schools, and teleological accounts such as those of Moore (in [8]). But such unfavourable positions are either rapidly passed over or ignored in Passmore's historical treatment and narrow selection of historical figures. The style of argument becomes even less persuasive when it is discovered that the accounts of the main authorities appealed to, Bentham, Sidgwick, and Rawls,14 do not lead, without serious distortion, to the intended conclusion. Indeed Passmore has twisted the historical and textual evidence to suit his case, as we now try to indicate. Consider Bentham first. Passmore's assumption, for which no textual evidence is cited, ls is that no Benthamite calculation can take account of a future more extensive than the immediate future (cf. pp. 87-88). The assumption seems to be based simply on the fact that Bentham remarked that 'the value of the pleasure or pain to each person to be considered in any estimate will be greater or less in virtue of the following circumstances'. '3. Its certainty or uncertainty. 4. Its propinquity or remoteness' ([10], p. 16). But this does nothing to show that future persons are discounted: the certainty and propinquity do not concern persons, but the utilities of the persons concerned. As regards which persons are concerned in any calculation Bentham is quite explicit, detailing how to take an exact account. . . of the general tendency of any act.. . .5 . Take an account of the number of persons whose interests appear to be concerned; and repeat the above process [summation of values of pleasure and of pain] with respect to each. ([10], p. 16) �Obligations to the Future 147 It follows that Bentham's calculation takes account of everyone (and, in his larger scheme, every sentient creature) whose interests appear to be concerned: if the interests of people in the distant future appear to be concerned - as they are in conservation issues - they are to be included in the calculation. And there is independent evidence16 that in Bentham's view the principle of utility was not temporally restricted: 'that is useful which, taking all times and all persons into consideration, leaves a balance of happiness' ([10], pp. 17-18, our italics). Thus the future cut-off that Passmore has attributed to Bentham is contradicted by Bentham's own account. The case of Sidgwick is more complex, because there is isolated oscillation in his application of utilitarianism between use of utility and of (something like) expected utility (see [11], pp. 381,414): Sidgwick's utilitarianism is, in its general characterization, essentially that of Bentham: the conduct which . . . is objectively right is that which will produce the greatest amount of happiness on the whole; that is, taking into account all those whose happiness is affected by the conduct. ([11], p. 411) All includes all sentient beings, both existing and to exist, as Sidgwick goes on to explain (p. 414). In particular, in answer to the question 'How far are we to consider the interests of posterity when they seem to conflict with those of existing human beings?' Sidgwick writes ([11], p. 414, our italics): It seems, however, clear that the time at which a man exists cannot affect the value of his happiness from a universal point of view; and that the interests of posterity must concern a Utilitarian as much as those of his contemporaries, except in so far as the effect of his actions on posterity - and even the existence of human beings to be affected - must necessarily be more uncertain. But Passmore manages, first of all, to give a different sense to what Sidgwick is saying by adjusting the quotation, by omitting the clause we have italicized, which equalizes the degree of concern for present and future persons, and by italicizing the whole except-clause, thereby placing much greater emphasis than Sidgwick does on uncertainty. For according to Sidgwick's impartiality principle, 'the mere difference in time is not a �148 R. and V. Routley reasonable ground for having more regard to the consciousness of one -amount than to that of another' ([11], p. 381; see also p. 124). The apparent tension in Sidgwick's theory as to whether uncertainty should be taken into account is readily removed by resort to a modern distinction between values and expected values (i.e. probability weighted values); utilitarian rightness is defined as before in terms of the net happiness of all concerned over all time without mention of uncertainty or probabilities, but it is distinguished from probable rightness (given present information), in the utilitarian sense,17 which is defined in terms of the expected net happiness of those concerned, using present probabilities. It is the latter notion, of probable rightness, that practical reasoning is commonly concerned with and that decision theory studies; and it is this that Passmore supposes Sidgwick is using ([1], p. 84). But it is evident that the utilitarian determination of probable rightness, like that of rightness, will sometimes take into account the distant future - as Sidgwick's discussion of utilitarian determination of optimum population (immediately following his remark on uncertainty) does. So how does Passmore contrive to reverse matters, to have Sidgwick's position lead to his own unconstrained conclusion? The answer is: By inserting an additional assumption of his own - which Sidgwick would certainly have rejected - that the uncertainties entitle us to ignore the distant future. What Passmore has implicitly assumed in his claim ([1], p. 85) that 'utilitarian principles [such as Sidgwick's] are not strong enough' 'to justify the kinds of sacrifice some conservationists now call upon us to make' is his own thesis that 'The uncertainty of harms we are hoping to prevent would in general entitle us to ignore them.. .'. From a decision-theory viewpoint this is simply irrational18 unless the probabilities of damage are approaching zero. We will deal with the essentially sceptical uncertainty arguments on which Passmore's position depends shortly: here it is enough to observe that Sidgwick's position does not lead to anything like that which Passmore attributes to him - without uncertainty assumptions which Sidgwick would have rejected (for he thought that future people'will certainly have pleasure and suffer pain). We can also begin to gauge from Passmore's treatment of nineteenthcentury utilitarians, such as Bentham and Sidgwick, the extent of the distortion which underlies his more general historical case for the unconstrained position which, so he claims, represents accurately enough what, over the last two centuries, men have seen as their duty to posterity as a whole. . . . ([1], p. 91) �Obligations to the Future 149 The treatment accorded Rawls in only marginally more satisfactory. Passmore supposes that Rawls's theory of justice leads directly to the unconstrained position ([1], p. 87 and p. 91), whereas Rawls claims ([5], p. 293) that we have obligations to future people just as to present ones. But the situation is more complicated than Rawls's claim would indicate, as we now try to explain in a summary way (more detail is given in the Appendix). For, in order to justify this claim on his theory (with its present time-of-entry interpretation), Rawls has to invoke additional and dubious motivational assumptions; even so the theory which thus results does not yield the intended conclusion, but a conclusion inconsistent with Rawls's claim. However, by changing the time-of-entry interpretation to an omnitemporal one, Rawls's claim does result from the theory so amended. Moreover, the amended theory also yields, by exactly Rawls's argument for a just saving rate, a resource conservation policy, and also a case against nuclear development. Accordingly Passmore's other claims regarding Rawls are mistaken, e.g. that the theory cannot justify a policy of resource conservation. Rawls does not emerge unscathed either. As on the issue of whether his contract is a necessary condition for obligations, so on obligations which the contract yields to the distant future, Rawls is far from consistent. Furthermore, institutions such as qualified market and voting systems are recommended as just though from a future perspective their results are far from that. Rawls, then, does not take obligations to the future with full seriousness. In sum, it is not true that the theory of Rawls, any more than the theories of the historical figures actually discussed by Passmore, unequivocally supports the unconstrained position. III. Uncertainty and Indeterminacy Arguments Although there are grave difficulties for the unconstrained position, qualification leads to a more defensible position. According to the qualified position we are not entirely unconstrained with respect to the distant future: there are obligations, but these are not so important as those to the present, and the interests of distant future people cannot weigh very much in the scale against those of the present and immediate future. The interests of future people then, except in unusual cases, count for very much less than the interests of present people. Hence such things as nuclear development and various exploitative activities which benefit present �150 R. and V. Routley people should proceed, even if people of the distant future are disadvantaged by them. The qualified position appears to be widely held and is implicit in most modern economic theories, where the position of a decrease in weight of future costs and benefits (and so of future interests) is obtained by application over time of an (opportunity cost) discount rate. The attempt to apply economics as a moral theory, something that is becoming increasingly common, can lead then to the qualified position. What is objectionable in such an approach is that economics must operate within the bounds of moral (deontic) constraints, just as in practice it operates within legal constraints, and cannot determine what those constraints are. There are, moreover, alternative economic theories and simply to adopt one which discounts the future is to beg all the questions at issue. The discounting move often has the same result as the unconstrained position; if, for instance, we consider the cancer example and consider costs as payable compensation, it is evident that, over a sufficiently long period of time, discounting at current prices would lead to the conclusion that there are no recoverable damages and so, in economic terms, no constraints. In short, even certain damage to future people could be written off. One way to achieve the bias against future people is by the application of discount rates which are set in accord with the current economic horizons of no more than about fifteen years,19 and application of such rates would simply beg the question against the interests and rights of future people. Where there is certain future damage of a morally forbidden type the whole method of discounting is simply inapplicable, and its use would violate moral constraints.20 Another argument for the qualified position, which avoids the objections from cases of certain damage, comes from probability considerations.The distant future, it is argued, is much more uncertain than the present and immediate future, so that probabilities are consequently lower, perhaps even approaching or coinciding with zero for any hypothesis concerning the distant future.21 But then if we take account of probabilities in the obvious way, by simply multiplying them against costs and benefits, it is evident that the interests of future people, except in cases where there is an unusually high degree of certainty, must count for (very much) less than those of present and neighbouring people where (much) higher probabilities obtain. So in the case of conflict between the present and the future where it is a question of weighing certain benefits to the people of the present and the immediate future against a much lower �Obligations to the Future 151 probability of indeterminate costs to an indeterminate number of distant future people, the issue would normally be decided in favour of the present, assuming that anything like similar costs and benefits were involved. But of course it can't be assumed that anything like similarly weighted costs and benefits are involved in the nuclear case, especially if it is a question of risking poisoning some of the earth for half a million or so years, with consequent risk of serious harm to thousands of generations of future people, in order to obtain quite doubtful or trivial benefits for some present people, in the shape of the opportunity to continue unnecessarily high energy use. And even if the costs and benefits were comparable or evenly weighted, such an argument would be defective, since an analogous argument would show that the consigner's action is acceptable provided the benefit, e.g. the profit he stood to gain from imposing significant risks on other people, was sufficiently large. Such a cost-benefit approach to moral and decision problems, with or without the probability frills, is quite inadequate where different parties are concerned, or for dealing with cases of conflict of interest or moral problems where deontic constraints are involved, and commonly yields counterintuitive results. For example, it would follow on such principles that it is permissible for a firm to injure, or very likely injure, some innocent party provided the firm stands to make a sufficiently large gain from it. But the costs and benefits involved are not transferable in any simple or general way from one party to another. Transfers of this kind, of costs and benefits involving different parties, commonly raise moral issues - e.g. is x entitled to benefit himself by imposing costs ony ? - which are not susceptible to a simple cost-benefit approach of the sort adopted by some proponents of nuclear energy, who attempt to dismiss the costs to future people with the soothing remark that any development involves costs as well as benefits. The transfer point is enough to invalidate the comparison, heavily relied on by McCracken [16] in building a case for the acceptability of the nuclear risk, between nuclear risks and those from cigarette smoking. In the latter case those who supposedly benefit from the activity are also, to an overwhelming extent* those who bear the serious health costs and risks involved. In contrast the users and supposed beneficiaries of nuclear energy will be risking not only, or even primarily, their own lives and health, but also those of others who may be non-beneficiaries and who may be spatially or temporally removed, and these risks will not be in any direct way related to a person's extent of use. The transfer objection is essentially the same as that to the utilitarian's �152 R. and V. Routley happiness sums as a way of solving moral conflict between different parties, and the introduction of probability considerations does not change the principles involved but merely complicates analyses. One might further object to the probability argument that probabilities involving distant future situations are not always less than those concerning the immediate future in the way the argument supposes, and that the outcomes of some moral problems such as the bus example do not depend on a high level of probability anyway. In some sorts of cases it is enough, as the bus example reveals, that a significant risk is created; such cases do not depend critically on high probability assignments. Uncertainty arguments in various forms are the most common and important ones used by philosophers and others to argue for the position that we cannot be expected to take serious account of the effects of our actions on the distant future. There are two strands to the uncertainty argument, capable of separation, but frequently entangled. Both arguments are mistaken, the first on a priori grounds, the second on a posteriori grounds. The first argument is a generalized uncertainty argument which runs as follows: In contrast to the exact information we can obtain about the present, the information we can obtain about the effects of our actions on the distant future is unreliable, woolly, and highly speculative. But we cannot base assessments of how we should act on information of this kind, especially when accurate information is obtainable about the present which would indicate different action. Therefore we must regretfully ignore the uncertain effects of our actions on the distant future. More formally and crudely: One only has obligations to the future if these obligations are based on reliable information; there is no reliable information at present as regards the distant future; therefore one has no obligations to the distant future. The first argument is essentially a variation on a sceptical argument in epistemology concerning our knowledge of the future (formally, replace 'obligations' by 'knowledge' in the crude statement of the argument above). The main ploy is to considerably overestimate and overstate the degree of certainty available with respect to the present and immediate future, and the degree of certainty which is required as the basis for moral consideration both with respect to the present and with respect to the future. Associated with this is the attempt to suggest a sharp division as regards certainty between the present and immediate future on the one hand and the distant future on the other. We shall not find, we suggest, that there is any such sharp or simple division between the distant future and �Obligations to the Future 153 the adjacent future and present, at least with respect to those things in the present which are normally subject to moral constraints. We can and constantly do act on the basis of such 'unreliable' information as the sceptic as regards the future conveniently labels 'uncertainty'; for scepticproof certainty is rarely, or never, available with respect to much of the present and immediate future. In moral situations in the present, action often takes account of risk and probability, even quite low probabilities. A good example is again the bus case. We do not need to know for certain that the container will break and the lethal gas escape. In fact it does not even have to be probable, in the relevant sense of more probable than not, in order for us to condemn the consigner's action. It is enough that there is a significant risk of harm in this sort of case. It does not matter if the decreased well-being of the consigner is certain and the prospects of the passengers quite uncertain; the resolution of the problem is still clearly in favour of the so-called 'speculative' and 'unreliable'. But if we do not require certainty of action to apply moral constraints in contemporary affairs, why should we require a much higher standard of certainty in the future? Why should we require epistemic standards for the future which the more familiar sphere of moral action concerning the present and adjacent future does not need to meet? The insistence on certainty as a necessary condition before moral consideration can be given to the distant future, then, amounts to an epistemic double standard. But such an epistemic double standard, proposed in explaining the difference between the present and the future and to justify ignoring future peoples' interests, in fact cannot itself provide an explanation of the differences, since it already presupposes different standards of certainty appropriate to each class, which difference is in turn in need of justification. The second uncertainty argument is a practical uncertainty argument, that whatever our theoretical obligations to the future, we cannot in practice take the interests of future people into account, because uncertainty about the distant future is so gross that we cannot determine what the likely consequences of actions upon it will be and therefore, however good our intentions to the people of the distant future, in practice we have no choice but to ignore their interests. Uncertainty is gross where certain incompatible hypotheses are as good as one another and there is no rational ground for choosing between them. The second uncertainty argument can also be put in this way: If moral principles are, like other principles, implicational in form, that is of such forms as 'if* has character h then x is wrong, for every (action) x', then what the argument claims is �154 R. and V. Routley that we can never obtain the information about future actions which would enable us to detach the antecedent of the implication. So even if moral principles theoretically apply to future people, in practice they cannot be applied to obtain clear conclusions or directions concerning contemporary action of the 'It is wrong to do x' type. Many of the assumptions of the second argument have to be conceded. If the distant future really is so grossly uncertain that in every case it is impossible to determine in any way that is better than chance what the effects of present action will be, and whether any given action will help or hinder future people, then moral principles, although they may apply theoretically to the future, will not be applicable in practice for obtaining any clear conclusions about how to act. Hence the distant future will impose no practical moral constraints on action. However, the argument is factually incorrect in assuming that the future is always so grossly uncertain or indeterminate. Admittedly there is often a high degree of uncertainty concerning the distant future, but as a matter of (contingent) fact it is not always so gross or sweeping as the argument has to assume. There are some areas where uncertainty is not so great as to exclude constraints on action, especially when account is taken of the point, noticed in connection with the first argument, that complete certainty is commonly not required for moral constraints and that all that may be needed in some cases is the creation of"a significant risk. Again there is considerable uncertainty about many factors which are not highly, or at all, morally relevant, but this does not extend to many factors which are of much greater importance to moral issues. For example, we may not have any idea what the fashions will be in a hundred years in girls' names or men's footwear, or what brands of ice cream people will be eating if any, but we do have excellent reason to believe, especially if we consider 3,000 years of history, that what people there are in a hundred years are likely to have material and psychic needs not entirely unlike our own, that they will need a healthy biosphere for a good life; that like us they will not be immune to radiation; that their welfare will not be enhanced by a high incidence of cancer or genetic defects, by the destruction of resources, or the elimination from the face of the earth of that wonderful variety of non-human life which at present makes it such a rich and interesting place. For this sort of reason, the second uncertainty argument should be rejected. While it is true that there are many areas in which the morally relevant information needed is uncertain or unavailable, and in which we cannot therefore determine satisfactorily how to act, there are certainly others in �Obligations to the Future 155 which uncertainty in morally relevant areas is not so great as to preclude moral constraints on action, where we ascertain if not absolute certainties at least probabilities of the same sort of order as are considered sufficient for the application of moral principles in parallel contemporary cases, especially where spatially remote people are involved. The case of nuclear waste storage, and of uncertainty of the effects of it on future people, seems to be of the latter sort. Here there is no gross indeterminacy or uncertainty; it is simply not true that incompatible hypotheses about what may happen are as good as each other. It is plain that nuclear waste storage does impose significant risks of harm on future people, and, as we can see from the bus example, the significant risk of harm is enough in cases of this type to make moral constraints applicable. In terms of the defects of the preceding uncertainty arguments, we can see the corresponding defects in a number of widely employed uncertainty arguments used to write off probable harm to future people as outside the scope of proper consideration. Most of these popular moves employ both of the uncertainty arguments as suits the case, switching from one to the other in a way that is again reminiscent of sceptical moves. For example, we may be told that we cannot really take account of future people because we cannot be sure that they will exist or that their tastes and wants will not be completely different from our own, to the point where they will not suffer from our exhaustion of resources or from the things that would affect us (cf. Passmore [1]). But this is to insist upon complete certainty of a sort beyond what is required for the present and immediate future, where there is also commonly no guarantee that some disaster will not overtake those we are morally committed to. Again we may be told that there is no guarantee that future people will be worthy of any efforts on our part, because they may be morons or forever plugged into enjoyment- or other machines (Golding [12]). Even if one is prepared to accept the elitist approach presupposed - according to which only those who meet certain properly civilized or intellectual standards are eligible for moral consideration - what we are being handed in such arguments as a serious defeating consideration is again a mere outside possibility - like the sceptic who says that the solid-looking desk in front of us is perhaps only a facade, not because he has any particular reason for doing so, but because he hasn't looked around the back, drilled holes in it, etc. Neither the contemporary nor the historical situation gives any positive reason for supposing that a lapse into universal moronity or universal pleasure-machine escapism is a serious possibility, as opposed to a logical possibility. We can contrast �156 R. and V. Routley with these mere logical possibilities the very real historically supportable risks of escape of nuclear waste or decline of a civilization through destruction of its resource base. The possibilities just considered in these uncertainty arguments of sceptical character are not real possibilities. Another argument which may consider a real possibility, but still does not succeed in showing that it is acceptable to proceed with an action which would appear to be harmful to future people, is often introduced in the nuclear waste case. This is the argument that future people may discover a rigorously safe and permanent storage method for nuclear wastes before they are damaged by escaped waste material. Let us grant for the sake of the argument that this is a real possibility (though physical arguments may show that it is not). This still does not affect the fact that there is a significant risk of serious damage and that the creation of a significant risk is enough to rule out an action of this type as morally impermissible. In just the same way, future people may discover a cure for cancer, and the fact that this appears to be a real and not merely a logical possibility, does not make the action of the firm in the example discussed above, of producing a substance likely to cause cancer in future people, morally admissible. The fact that there was a real possibility of future people avoiding the harm would show that actions of these sorts were admissible only if what was required for inadmissibility was certainty of harm or a very high probability of it. In such cases, before such actions could be considered admissible, what would be required is far more than a possibility, real or not22 - it is at least the availability of an applicable, safe, and rigorously tested, not merely speculative, technique for achieving it, something that future people could reasonably be expected to apply to protect themselves. The strategy of most of these uncertainty arguments is fairly clear then, and may be brought out by looking yet again at the bus example, where the consigner says that he cannot be expected to take account of the effect of his actions on the passengers because they may find an effective way to deal with his parcel or some lucky or unlucky accident may occur, e.g. the bus may break down and they may all change to a different bus leaving the parcel behind, or the bus may crash, killing all the passengers before the container gets a chance to leak. These are all possibilities, of course, but there is no positive reason to believe that they are any more than that, that is they are not real possibilities. The strategy is to stress such outside possibilities in order to create the false impression that there is gross uncertainty about the future, that the real possibility that the container will �Obligations to the Future 157 break should be treated in the same way as these mere logical possibilities, that uncertainty about the future is so great as to preclude the consigners' taking account of the passengers' welfare and of the real possibility of harm from his parcel, and thereby excuse his action. A related strategy is to stress a real possibility, such as finding a cure for cancer, and thereby imply that this removes the case for applying moral constraints .This move implicitly makes the assumptions of the first argument, that certainty, or at least a very high probability, of harm is required before an action can be judged morally inadmissible, and the point of stressing the real possibility of avoidance of damage is to show that this allegedly required high degree of certainty or probability cannot be attained. That is, the strategy draws attention to some real uncertainty implying that this is sufficient to defeat the application of moral constraints. But, as we have seen, this is often not so. An argument closely related to the uncertainty arguments is based on the non-existence and indeterminacy of the future.23 An item is indeterminate in a given respect if its properties in that respect are, as a matter of logic, not settled (nor are they settlable in a non-arbitrary fashion). The respects in which future items are indeterminate are well enough known for a few examples to serve as reminders: all the following are indeterminate: the population of Australia at 2001, its distribution, its age structure, the preferences of its members for folk music, wilderness, etc., the size and shape of Wollongong, the average number of rooms in its houses and in its office blocks, and so on. Philosophical discussion of such indeterminacy is as old as Aristotle's sea battle and as modern as truth-value gaps and fuzzy logics, and many positions have been adopted on the existence and determinacy of future items. Nevertheless theories that there are obligations to the future are not sensitive to the metaphysical position adopted concerning the existence or non-existence of the future. Any theory which denied obligations to the future on the metaphysical grounds that the future did not exist, and did not have properties, so that the present could not be related to it, would be committed to denying such obvious facts as that the present could causally influence the future, that present people could be great-grandparents of purely future people, and so on, and hence would have to be rejected on independent grounds. This is not to say that there are not important problems about the existence or non-existence of future items, problems which are perhaps most straightforwardly handled by a Meinongian position which allows that items which do not exist may have properties. The non-existence of the future �158 R. and V. Routley does raise problems for standard theories which buy the Ontological Assumption (the thesis that what does not exist does not have properties), especially given the natural (and correct) inclination to say that the future does not (now) exist; but such theories can adopt various strategies for coping with these problems (e.g. the adoption of a platonistic position according to which the future does now exist, or the allowance for certain sorts of relations between existents at different times), although the satisfactoriness of these strategies is open to question (cf. [4]). Thus whether or not the Ontological Assumption is assumed and however it is applied, it will be allowed that future items will have properties even if they do not have them now, and that is enough to provide the basis for moral concern about the future. Thus the thesis of obligations to the future does not presuppose any special metaphysical position on the existence of the future. If the non-existence of future items creates no special problems for obligations to the future, the same is not true of their indeterminacy. Whether the indeterminacy of future items is seen as a logical feature of the future which results from the non-existence of purely future items or whether one adopts a (mistaken) platonistic view of the future as existing and sees the indeterminacy as an epistemological one resulting from our inability to know the character of these entities - that is, we cannot completely know the future .though it exists and has a definite characterwhichever view we take indeterminacy still creates major difficulties for certain ethical theories and their treatment of the future. The difficulties arise for theories which appear to require a high level of determinacy with respect to the number and character of future items, in particular calculus-type theories such as utilitarianism in its usual forms, where the calculations are critically dependent on such information as numbers, totals, and averages, information which so far as the future is concerned is generally indeterminate. The fact that this numerical information is typically indeterminate means that insofar as head-count utilitarianism requires determinate information on numbers, it is in a similar position to theories discussed earlier; it may apply theoretically to future people, but since the calculations cannot be applied to them their interests will be left out of account. And, in fact, utilitarianism for the most part does not, and perhaps cannot, take future creatures and their interests seriously; there is little discussion as to how the difficulties or impossibility of calculations regarding the open future are to be obtained. Non-platonistic utilitarianism is in logical difficulty on this matter, while platonis- �Obligations to the Future 159 tic utilitarianism - which faces a range of other objections - is inapplicable because of epistemic indeterminacy. We have yet another case of a theory of the sort that applies theoretically but in practice doesn't take the future seriously. But far from this showing that future people's interests should be left out of account, what these considerations show are deficiencies in these sorts of theories, which require excessive determinacy of information. This kind of information is commonly equally unavailable for the accepted areas of moral constraint, the present and immediate future; and the resolution of moral issues is often not heavily dependent on knowledge of such specific determinate features as numbers or other determinate features. For example, we do not need to know how many people there will be on the bus, how intelligent they are, what their preferences are or how badly they will be injured, in order to reach the conclusion that the consigner's action in despatching his parcel is a bad one. Furthermore, it is only the ability of moral considerations to continue to apply in the absence of determinate information about such things as numbers that makes it possible to take account of the possible effects of action, as the risks associated with action - something which is quite essential even for the present if moral considerations are to apply in the normal and accepted way. For it is essential in order to apply moral considerations in the accepted way that we consider alternative worlds, in order to take account of options, risks, and alternative outcomes; but these alternative or counterfactual worlds are not in so different a position from the future with respect to determinacy; for example, there is indeterminacy with respect to the number of people who may be harmed in the bus case or in apossible nuclear reactor melt-down. These alternative worlds, like the distant future, are indeterminate in some respects, but not totally indeterminate. It might still be thought that the indeterminacy of the future, for example with respect to number and exact character, would at least prevent the interest of future people being taken into account where there is a conflict with the present. Since their numbers are indeterminate and their interests unknown, how can we weigh their competing claims against those of the present and immediate future where this information is available in a more or less accurate form? The question is raised particularly by problems of sharing fixed quantities of resources among present and future people, when the numbers of the latter are indeterminate. Such problems are indeed difficult, but they are not resolved by ignoring the claims of the future, any more than the problems raised by the need to take account in decision-making of factors difficult to quantify are resolved by ignoring �160 R. and V. Routley such factors. Nor are such distributional problems as large and representative a class of moral problems concerning the future as the tendency to focus on them would suggest. It should be conceded then that there will be cases where the indeterminacy of aspects of the future will make conflicts very difficult or indeed impossible to resolve - a realistic ethical theory will not deliver a decision procedure - but there will equally be other conflict cases where the level of indeterminacy does not hinder resolution of the issue, e.g. the bus example which is a conflict case of a type. In particular, there will be many cases which are not solved by weighing numbers, numbers of interests, or whatever, cases for which one needs to know only the most general probable characteristics of future people. Moreover, even where numbers are relevant often only bounds will be required, exact numerical counts only being required where, for instance, margins are narrow; e.g. issues may be resolved as in parliament where a detailed vote (or division) is only required when the issue is close. It is certainly not necessary then to have complete determinacy to resolve all cases of conflict. The question we must ask then is what features of future people could disqualify them from moral consideration or reduce their claims to it to below those of present people? The answer is: in principle None. Prima facie moral principles are universalizable, and lawlike, in that they apply independently of position in space or in time, for example.24 But universalizability of principles is an outcome of those ethical theories which are capable of dealing satisfactorily with the present; in other words, a theory that did not allow properly for the future would be found to have defects as regards the present, to deal unjustly or unfairly with some present people, e.g. those remotely located, those outside some select subgroup such as (white-skinned) humans, etc. The only candidates for characteristics that would fairly rule out future people are the logical features we have been looking at, uncertainty and indeterminacy; what we have argued is that it would be far too sweeping to see these features as affecting the moral claims of future people in a general way. These special features only affect certain sorts of cases (e.g. the determination of best probable or practical course of action given only present information). In particular they do not affect cases of the sort being considered, the nuclear one, where highly determinate or certain information about the numbers and characteristics of the class likely to be harmed or certainty of damage are not required. To establish obligations to the future a full universalizability principle is not needed: it is enough to require that the temporal position of a person �Obligations to the Future 161 cannot affect his entitlement to just and fair treatment, to full moral consideration;25 inversely that it is without basis to discriminate morally against a person in virtue of his temporal position. As a result of this universalizability, there is the same obligation to future people as to the present; and thus there is the same obligation to take account of them and their interests in what we do, to be careful in our actions, to take account of the probability (and not just the certainty) of our actions' causing harm or damage, and to see, other things being equal, that we do not act so as to rob future people of what is necessary for the chance of a good life. Uncertainty and indeterminacy do not free us of these obligations. If, in a closely comparable case concerning the present, the creation of a significant risk is enough to rule out an action as immoral, and there are no independent grounds for requiring greater certainty of harm in the future case under consideration, then futurity alone will not provide adequate grounds for proceeding with the action, thus discriminating against future people. Accordingly we cannot escape, through appeal to futurity, the conclusion tentatively reached in our first section, that proposals for nuclear development in the present state of technology for future waste disposal are immoral. IV. Overriding Consideration Arguments In the first part we noticed that the consigner's action could not be justified by purely economistic arguments, such as that his profits would rise, the firm or the village would be more prosperous, or by appealing to the fact that some possibly uncomfortable changes would otherwise be needed. We also observed that the principle on which this assessment was based, that one was not usually entitled to create a serious risk to others for these sorts of reasons, applied more generally and, in particular, applied to the nuclear case. For this reason the economistic arguments which are thus most commonly advanced to promote nuclear development - e.g. cheapness, efficiency, profitability for electricity utilities, and the need otherwise for uncomfortable changes such as restructuring of employment, investment, and consumption-do not even begin to show that the nuclear alternative is an acceptable one. Even if these economistic assumptions about benefits to present people were correct (and there is reason to doubt that most of them are),26 the arguments would fail because economics must operate within the framework of moral constraints, and not vice versa. �162 R. and V. Routley What one does have to consider, however, are moral conflict arguments, that is arguments to the effect that, unless the prima facie unacceptable alternative is taken, some even more unacceptable alternative is the only possible outcome, and will ensue. For example, in the bus case, the consigner may argue that his action is justified because unless it is taken the village will starve. It is by no means clear that even such a justification as this would be sufficient, especially where the risk to the passengers is high, as the case seems to become one of transfer of costs and risks onto others; but such a moral situation would no longer be so clearcut, and one would perhaps hesitate to condemn any action taken in such circumstances. Some of the arguments advanced to show moral conflict are based on competing duties to present people, and others on competing obligations to future people, both of which are taken to override the obligations not to impose on the future significant risk of serious harm. The structure of such moral conflict arguments is based crucially on the presentation of a genuine and exhaustive set of alternatives (or at least practical alternatives), and upon showing that the only alternatives to admittedly morally undesirable actions are even more undesirable ones. If some practical alternative which is not morally worse than the action to be justified is overlooked, suppressed, or neglected in the argument-for example, if in the bus case it turns out that the villagers have another option to starving or to the sending off of the parcel, namely earning a living in some other way - then the argument is defective and cannot readily be patched. We want to argue that suppression of practicable alternatives has occurred in the argument, designed to show that the alternatives to the nuclear option are even worse than the option itself, and that there are other factual defects in these arguments as well. In short, the arguments depend essentially on the presentation of false dichotomies. The first argument, the poverty argument, is that there is an overriding obligation to the poor, both the poor of the third world and the poor of industrialized countries. Failure to develop nuclear energy, it is often claimed, would amount to denying them the opportunity to reach the standard of affluence we currently enjoy and would create unemployment and poverty in the industrialized nations. The unemployment and poverty argument does not stand up to examination either for the poor of the industrial countries or for those of the third world. There is good evidence that large-scale nuclear energy will help to increase unemployment and poverty in the industrial world, through the �Obligations to the Future 163 diversion of great amounts of available capital into an industry which is not only an exceptionally poor provider of direct employment, but also helps to reduce available jobs through encouraging substitution of energy use for labour use. 27 The argument that nuclear energy is needed for the third world is even less convincing. Nuclear energy is both politically and economically inappropriate for the third world, since it requires massive amounts of capital, requires numbers of imported scientists and engineers, and creates negligible employment, while politically it increases foreign dependence, adds to centralized entrenched power and reduces the chance for change in the oppressive political structures which are a large part of the problem.28 The fact that nuclear energy is not in the interests of people of the third world does not, of course, mean that it is not in the interests of, and wanted by, their rulers, the westernized and often military elites in whose interests the economies of these countries are usually organized; but it is not paternalistic to examine critically the demands these ruling elites may make in the name of the poor. The poverty argument then is a fraud. Nuclear energy will not be used to help the poor.29 Both for the third world and for the industrialized countries there are well-known energy-conserving alternatives and the practical option of developing other energy sources,30 alternatives which are morally acceptable and socially preferable to nuclear development, and which have far better prospects for helping the poor.31 The second major argument advanced to show moral conflict appeals to a set of supposedly overriding and competing obligations to future people. We have, it is said, a duty to pass on the immensely valuable things and institutions which our culture has developed. Unless our high-technological, high-energy industrial society is continued and fostered, our valuable institutions and traditions will fall into decay or be swept away. The argument is essentially that without nuclear power, without the continued level of material wealth it alone is assumed to make possible, the lights of our civilization will go out.32 . The lights-going-out argument raises rather sharply questions as to what is valuable in our society, and of what characteristics are necessary for a good society. These are questions which deserve much fuller treatment than we can allot them here, but a few brief points should be made. The argument adopts an extremely uncritical position with respect to existing high-technology societies, apparently assuming that they are uniformly and uniquely valuable; it also assumes that technological society is unmodifiable, that it can't be changed in the direction of energy �164 R. and V. Routley conservation or alternative energy sources without collapse. Such a society has to be accepted and assessed as a whole, and virtually unlimited supplies of energy are essential to maintain this whole. These assumptions are hard to accept. The assumption that technological society's energy patterns are unmodifiable is especially so - after all, it has survived events such as world wars which have required major social and technological restructuring and consumption modification. If western society's demands for energy are totally unmodifiable without collapse, not only would it be committed to a programme of increasing destruction, but one might ask what use its culture could be to future people who would very likely, as a consequence of this destruction, lack the resource base which the argument assumes to be essential in the case of contemporary society. There is also difficulty with the assumption of uniform valuableness; but if this is rejected the question becomes not: what is necessary to maintain existing high-technological society and its political institutions? but rather: what is necessary to maintain what is valuable in that society and the political institutions which are needed to maintain those valuable things? While it may be easy to argue that high energy consumption is necessary to maintain the political and economic status quo, it is not so easy to argue that it is essential to maintain what is valuable, and it is what is valuable, presumably, that we have a duty to pass on to the future. The evidence, e.g. from history, is that no very high level of material affluence or energy consumption is needed to maintain what is valuable. There is good reason in fact to believe that a society with much lower energy and resource consumption would better foster what is valuable than our own. But even if a radical change in these directions is independently desirable, as we believe it is, it is not necessary to presuppose such a change, in the short term at least, in order to see that the assumptions of the lights-going-out argument are wrong. No enormous reduction of wellbeing is required to consume less energy than at present, and certainly far less than the large increase over present levels of consumption which is assumed in the usual economic case for nuclear energy.33 What the nuclear strategy is really designed to do then is not to prevent the lights going out in western civilization, but to enable the lights to go on burning all the time - to maintain and even increase the wattage output of the Energy Extravaganza. In fact there is good reason to think that, far from the high energy consumption society fostering what is valuable, it will, especially if energy �Obligations to the Future 165 is obtained by nuclear-fission means, be positively inimical to it. A society which has become heavily dependent upon an extremely high centralized, controlled, and garrisoned, capital- and expertise-intensive energy source, must be one which is highly susceptible to entrenchment of power, and one in which the forces which control this energy source, whether capitalist or bureaucratic, can exert enormous power over the political system and over people's lives, even more than they do at present. Very persuasive arguments have been advanced by civil liberties groups and others in a number of countries to suggest that such a society would tend to become authoritarian, if only as an outcome of its response to the threat posed by dissident groups in the nuclear situation.34 There are reasons to believe then that with nuclear development what we would be passing on to future generations would be some of the worst aspects of our society (e.g. the consumerism, growing concentration of power, destruction of the natural environment, and latent authoritarianism), while certain valuable aspects would be lost or threatened. Political freedom is a high price to pay for consumerism and energy extravagance. Again, as in the case of the poverty arguments, clear alternatives which do not involve such unacceptable consequences are available. The alternative to the high technology-nuclear option is not a return to the cave, the loss of all that is valuable, but the development of alternative technologies and life-styles which offer far greater scope for the maintenance and further development of what is valuable in our society than the highly centralized nuclear option.35 The lights-going-out argument, as a moral conflict argument, accordingly fails, because it also is based on a false dichotomy. Thus both the escape routes, the appeal to moral conflict and to the appeal to futurity, are closed. If then we apply the same standards of morality to the future as we acknowledge for the present - as we have argued we should - the conclusion that the proposal to develop nuclear energy on a large scale is a crime against the future is inevitable, since both the escape routes are closed. There are, of course, also many other grounds for ruling it out as morally unacceptable, for saying that it-is not only a crime against the distant future but also a crime against the present and immediate future. These other grounds for moral concern about nuclear energy, as it affects the present and immediate future, include problems arising from the possibility of catastrophic releases of radioactive fuel into the environment or of waste material following an accident such as reactor melt-down, of unscheduled discharges of radiation into the environment from a plant fault, of proli- �166 R. and V. Routley feration of nuclear weapons, and of deliberate release or threat of release of radioactive materials as a measure of terrorism or of extortion. All these are important issues, of much moral interest. What we want to claim, however, is that on the basis of its effects on the future alone, the nuclear option is morally unacceptable. Appendix Passmore's Treatment ofRawls, and What Really Happens on Rawls's Theory Passmore takes it that Rawls's theory yields an unconstrained position but, according to Rawls, the theory leads to quite the opposite result; namely, persons in different generations [and not merely neighbouring generations] have duties and obligations to one another just as contemporaries do. The present generation cannot do as it pleases but is bound by the principles that would be chosen in the original position to define justice between persons at different moments of time.. . . The derivation of these duties and obligations may seem at first a somewhat far-fetched application of the central doctrine. Nevertheless these requirements would be acknowledged in the original position [where the parties do not know to which generation they belong], and so the conception of justice as fairness covers these matters without any change in its basic idea. ([5], p. 293; the second insert is drawn from p. 287) Through judicious use of the veil of ignorance and the time of entry of parties to the original contract position, Rawls's contract theory, unlike simpler explicit contract theories, can yield definite obligations to distant future people,36 for example, we ought to save at a just rate for future people. But, as Rawls remarks (p. 284), 'the question of justice between generations . . . subjects any ethical theory to severe if not impossible tests'. It is doubtful that Rawls's theory as formulated passes the tests; for the theory as formulated does not yield the stated conclusion, but a conclusion inconsistent with the thesis that there are the same obligations to future people as to contemporaries. Exactly how these obligations arise from the initial agreement depends critically on the interpretation of the time of �Obligations to the Future 167 entry of the parties into the agreement. Insofar as Rawls insists upon the present-time-of-entry interpretation (p. 139), he has to introduce supplementary motivational assumptions in order to (try to) secure the desired bondings between generations, in particular to ensure that the generation of the original position saves for any later generation, even their immediate successors ([5], p. 140 and p. 292). Rawls falls back on-what is as we have seen inadequate to the task, since it does not exclude one generation damaging another remote generation in a way that bypasses mutually successive generations - 'ties of sentiment between successive generations' (p. 292): to this limited extent Passmore has a point, for such a social contract on its own (without additional assumptions about the motives of the parties to the agreement) does not furnish obligations even to our immediate successors. This is indicative also of the unsatisfactory instability of Rawls's theory under changes, its sensitivity to the way the original agreement is set up, to the motivation of parties, their time of entry, what they can know, etc. To arrive at a more adequate account of obligations to the distant future under Rawls's theory, let us adopt, to avoid the additional, dubious and unsatisfactory, motivational assumptions Rawls invokes, one of the alternative - and non -equivalent - time-of-entry interpretations that Rawls lists (p. 146), that of persons alive at some time in simultaneous agreement. Let us call this, following Rawls's notation (on p. 140), interpretation 4b (it is perhaps unnecessary to assume for 4b any more than 4a that all people need be involved: it may be enough given the equivalencizing effect of the veil of ignorance that some are, and as with the particular quantifier it is quite unnecessary to be specific about numbers). Then of course the parties, since they are, for all they know, of different generations, will presumably agree on a just savings rate, and also to other just distribution principles, simply on the basis of Rawlsian rationality, i.e. advancing their own interests, without additional motivation assumptions. This more appealing omnitemporal interpretation of time of entry into the agreement, which gives a superior account of obligation to the future consistent with Rawls's claim, Rawls in some places puts down as less than best (p. 292) but in his most detailed account of the original position simply dismisses (p. 139): To conceive of the original position [as a gathering of people living at different times] would be to stretch fantasy too far; the conception would cease to be a natural guide to intuition. �168 R. and V. Rout ley This we question: it would be a better guide to intuition than a position (like 4a) which brings out intuitively wrong results; it is a more satisfactory guide, for example, to justice between generations than the present-timeof-entry interpretation, which fails conspicuously to allow for the range of potential persons (all of whom are supposed to qualify on Rawls's account for just treatment, cf. § 77). Moreover, it stretches fantasy no further than science fiction or than some earlier contract accounts.36 But it does require changes in the way the original position is conceived, and it does generate metaphysical difficulties for orthodox ontological views (though not to the same extent for the Meinongian view we prefer); for, to consider the latter, either time travel is possible or the original hypothetical position is an impossible situation, with people who live at different times assembled at the same time. The difficulties - of such an impossible meeting help to reveal that what Rawls's theory offers is but a colourful representation of obligations in terms of a contract agreed upon at a meeting. The metaphysical difficulties do not concern merely possible people, because all those involved are sometime-actual people; nor are there really serious difficulties generated by the fact that very many of these people do not exist, i.e. exist now. The more serious difficulties are either those of time travel, e.g. that future parties relocated into the present may be able to interfere with their own history, or, if time travel is ruled out logically or otherwise, that future parties may be advantaged (or disadvantaged) by their knowledge of history and technology, and that accordingly fairness is lost. As there is considerable freedom in how we choose to (re)arrange the original position, we shall suppose that time travel is rejected as a means of entering the original position. For much less than travel is required; some sort of limited communicational network which filters out, for example, all historical data (and all cultural or species dependent material) would suffice; and in any case if time travel were not excluded essentially the present-time-of-entry interpretation would serve, though fairness would again be put in doubt. The filtered communicational hook-up by which the omnitemporal position is engineered still has - if fairness is to be seen to be built into the decision making - to be combined with a reinterpreted veil of ignorance, so that parties do not know where they are located temporally any more than they know who they are characterwise. This implies, among other things, limitations on the parties' knowledge of factual matters, such as available technology and world and local history; for otherwise parties could work out their location, temporal or spatial. For example, if some party knew, as Rawls supposes, �Obligations to the Future 169 the general social facts, then he would presumably be aware of the history of his time and so of where history ends, that is of the date of his generation, his time (his present), and so be aware of his temporal location. These are already problems for Rawls's so-called 'present-time-ofentry interpretation' - it is, rather, a variable-time-of-entry interpretation - given that the parties may be, as Rawls occasionally admits (e.g. p. 287), of any one generation, not necessarily the present: either they really do have to be ofthepresent time or they cannot be assumed to know as much as Rawls supposes.37 There is, however, no reason why the veil of ignorance should not be extended so as to avoid this problem; and virtually any extension that solves the problem for the variable-time-of-entry interpretation should serve, so it seems, for the omnitemporal one. We shall assume then that the parties know nothing which discloses their respective locations (i.e. in effect we write in conditions for universalizability of principles decided upon). There are still gaps between the assumptions of the omnitemporal position as roughly sketched and the desired conclusion concerning obligations to the future, but (the matter is beginning to look non-trivially provable given not widely implausible assumptions and) the intuitive arguments are as clear as those in [5], indeed they simply restate arguments to obligations given by Rawls. Rawls's theory, under interpretation 4b, admits of nice application to the problems of just distribution of material resources and of nuclear power. The just distribution, or rate of usage, of material resources38 over time is an important conservation issue to which Rawls's theory seems to apply, just as readily, and in a similar fashion, to that in which it applies to the issue of a just rate of savings. In fact the argument from the original position for a just rate of saving - whatever its adequacy - can by simply mimicked to yield an argument for just distribution of resources over generations. Thus, for example: persons in the original position are to ask themselves how much they would be willing to save [i.e. conserve] at each stage of advance on the assumption that all other generations are to save at the same rate [conserve resources to the same extent]. . . . In effect, then, they must choose a just savings principle [resources distribution principle] that assigns an appropriate rate of accumulation to [degree of resource conservation at] each level of advance. ([5], p. 287; our bracketed options give the alternative argument) �170 R. and V. Routley Just as 'they try to piece together a just savings schedule' (p. 289), so they can try to piece together a just resource distribution policy. Just as a case for resource conservation can be made out by appeal to the original position, since it is going to be against the interests of, to the disadvantage of, later parties to find themselves in a resource depleted situation (thus, on Rawlsian assumptions, they will bargain hard for a share of resources), so, interestingly, a case against a rapid programme of nuclear power development can be devised. The basis of a case against large-scale nuclear development is implicit in Rawls's contract theory under interpretation 4b, though naturally the theory is not applied in this sort of way by Rawls. To state the case in its crude but powerful form: people from later generations in the original position are bound to take it as against their interests to simply carry the waste can for energy consumed by an earlier generation. (We have already argued that they will find no convincing overriding considerations that make it worth their while to carry the waste can.) Thus not only has Passmore misrepresented the obligations to the future that Rawls's theory admits; he is also wrong in suggesting (p. 87 and p. 91) that Rawls's theory cannot justify a policy of resource conservation which includes reductions in present consumption. There is, in this connection, an accumulation of errors in Passmore, some of which spill over to Rawls, which it is worth trying to set out. First, Passmore claims ([1], p. 86; cf. also p. 90) that 'Rawls does not so much mention the saving of natural resources'. In fact the 'husbanding of natural resources' is very briefly considered ([5], p. 271). It is true, however, that Rawls does not reveal any of the considerable power that his theory, properly interpreted, has for natural resource conservation, as implying a just distribution of natural resources over time. Secondly, Passmore attempts ([1], pp. 87 ff.) to represent the calls of conservationists for a reduction in present resource usage and for a more just distribution as a call for heroic self-sacrifices; this is part of his more general attempt to represent every moral constraint with respect to the non-immediate future as a matter of self-sacrifice. 'Rawls's theory', Passmore says (on p. 87), 'leaves no room for heroic sacrifice', and so, he infers, leaves no room for conservation. Not only is the conclusion false, but the premiss also: Rawls's theory allows for supererogation, as Rawls explains ([5], p. 117). But resource conservation is, like refraining from nuclear development, not a question of heroic self-sacrifice; it is in part a question of obligations or duties to the distant future. And Rawls's theory allows not only for obligations as well as supererogation, but also for natural duties. Rawls's �Obligations to the Future 171 contract, unlike the contracts of what is usually meant by a 'contract theory', is by no means exhaustive of the moral sphere: But even this wider [contract] theory fails to embrace all moral relationships, since it would seem to include only our relations with other persons and to leave out of account how we are to conduct ourselves towards,animals and the rest of nature. I do not contend that the contract notion offers a way to approach these questions which are certainly of the first importance; and I shall have to put them aside, (p. 17) The important class of obligations beyond the scope of the contract theory surely generates obligations between persons which even the wider contract theory likewise cannot explain. The upshot is that such a contract account, even if sufficient for the determination of obligations, is not necessary. To this extent Rawls' s theory is not a full social contract theory at all. However, Rawls appears to lose sight of the fact that his contract theory delivers only a sufficient condition when he claims, for example (p. 298), that 'one feature of the contract doctrine is that it places an upper bound on how much a generation can be asked to save for the welfare of later generations'. For greater savings may sometimes be required to meet obligations beyond those that the contract doctrine delivers. In short, Rawls appears to have slipped into assuming, inconsistently, that his contract theory is a necessary condition. Although Rawls's theory caters for justice between generations and allows the derivation of important obligations to people in the distant future, the full theory is far from consistent on these matters and there are significant respects in which Rawls does not take justice to the future seriously. The most conspicuous symptoms of this are that justice to the future is reduced to a special case, justice between generations, and that the only aspect of justice between generations that Rawls actually considers is a just savings rate; there is, for example, no proper examination of the just distribution of resources among generations, though these resources, Rawls believes, provide the material base of the just institutions that he wants to see maintained. In fact Rawls strongly recommends a system of markets as a just means for the allocation of most goods and services, recognizing their well-known limitations only in the usual perfunctory fashion ([5], pp. 270 ff.). Yet market systems are limited by a narrow time horizon, and are quite ill-equipped to allocate resources in a just fashion �172 R. and V. Rout ley over a time span of several generations. Similarly Rawls's endorsement of democratic voting procedures as in many cases a just method of determining procedures depends upon the assumptions that everyone with ah interest is represented. But given his own assumptions about obligations to the future and in respect of potential persons this is evidently not the case. Catering in a just fashion for the interests of future people poses serious problems for any method of decision that depends upon people being present to represent their own interests. Some of the more conservative, indeed reactionary, economic assumptions in Rawls emerge with the assumption that all that is required for justice between generations is a just savings rate, that all we need to pass on to the future are the things that guarantee appropriate savings such as capital, factories, and machines. But the transmission of these things is quite insufficient for justice to the future, and neither necessary nor sufficient as a foundation for a good life for future generations. What is required for justice is the transmission in due measure of what is valuable. Rawls has, however, taken value accumulation as capital accumulation, thereby importing one of the grossest economic assumptions, that capital reflects value. But of course the accumulation of capital may conflict with the preservation of what is valuable. It is for this sort of reason (and thus, in essence, because of the introduction of supplementary economistic theses which are not part of the pure contract theory) that Rawls's theory is a reactionary one from an environmental point of view; on the theory as presented (i.e. the contract theory plus all the supplementary assumptions) there is no need to preserve such things as wilderness or natural beauty. The savings doctrine supposes that everything of value for transmission to the future is negotiable in the market or tradeable; but then transmission of savings can by no means guarantee that some valuable things, not properly represented in market systems, are not eliminated or not passed on, thereby making future people worse off. It becomes evident in this way, too, how culturally-bound Rawls's idea of ensuring justice to future generations through savings is. It is not just that the idea does not apply, without a complete overhaul, to non-industrial societies such as those of hunter-gatherers; it does not apply to genuinely post-industrial societies either. Consideration of such alternative societies suggests that whafis required, in place of capital accumulation, is that we pass on what is necessary for a good life, that we ensure that the basics are fairly distributed over time and not eroded, e.g. that in the case of the forest people that the forest is maintained. The narrowness of Rawls's picture, �Obligations to the Future 173 which makes no due allowance for social or cultural diversity (from the original contractual position on) or for individual diversity arises in part from his underlying and especially narrow socio-economic assumption as to what people want: What men want is meaningful work in free association with others, these associations regulating their relations to one another within a framework of just basic institutions. ([5], p. 290) This may be what many Harvard men want; but as a statement of what men want it supplies neither sufficient nor even necessary conditions.39 NOTES 1 Thus according to the Fox Report ([2], p. 110; our italics). There is at present no generally accepted means by which high level waste can be permanently isolated from the environment and remain safe for very long periods. . . . Permanent disposal of high-level solid wastes in stable geological formations is regarded as the most likely solution, but has yet to be demonstrated as feasible. It is not certain that such methods and disposal sites will entirely prevent radioactive releases following disturbances caused by natural processes or human activity. The Fox Report also quoted approvingly ([2], p. 187; our italics) the conclusion of the British (Flowers) Report [6]: There should be no commitment to a large programme of nuclear fission power until it has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that a method exist s to ensure the safe containment of long-lived, highly radioactive waste for the indefinite future. Although the absence of a satisfactory storage method has been conceded by some leading proponents of nuclear development, e.g. Weinberg ([3], pp. 32-33), it is now disputed by others. In particular, the headline for Cohen [15], which reads 'A substantial body of evidence indicates that the high level radioactive wastes generated by U.S. nuclear power plants can be stored satisfactorily in deep geological formations', has suggested to many readers - what it was no doubt intended to suggest- that there is really no problem about the disposal of radioactive wastes after all. Cohen presents, however, no new hard evidence, no evidence not already available to the British and Australian Commissions ([2] and [6]). Moreover the evidence Cohen does outline fails conspicuously to measure up to the standards rightly required by the Flowers and Fox Reports. Does Cohen offer a commercial-scale procedure for waste disposal which can be demonstrated as safe? Far from it: �174 R. and V. Routley The detailed procedures for handling the high-level wastes are not yet definite, but present indications are that. . . . (Cohen [1], p. 24; our italics) Does Cohen 'demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt' the long-term safety of burial of wastes, deep underground? Again, far from it: On the face of it such an approach appears to be reasonably safe. . . . (p. 24; our italics) Cohen has apparently not realized what is required. At issue here are not so much scientific or empirical issues as questions of methodology, of standards of evidence required for claims of safety, and above all, of values, since claims of safety, for example, involve implicit evaluations concerning what counts as an acceptable risk, an admissible cost, etc. In the headline 'a substantial body of evidence . . . indicates that. . . wastes . . . can be stored satisfactorily' the key words (italicized) are evaluative or elastic, and the strategy of Cohen's case is to adopt very low standards for their application. But in view of what is at stake it is hardly acceptable to do this, to dress up in this way what are essentially optimistic assurances and untested speculations about storage, which in any case do little to meet the difficulties and uncertainties that have been widely pointed out as regards precisely the storage proposals Cohen outlines, namely human or natural interference or disturbance. 2 See [18], pp. 24-25. 3 On all these points, see [14], esp. p. 141. According to the Fox Report ([2], p. 110): Parts of the reactor structure will be highly radioactive and their disposal could be very difficult. There is at present no experience of dismantling a full size reactor. 4 See, in particular, The Union of Concerned Scientists, The Nuclear Fuel Cycle, Friends of the Earth Energy Paper, San Francisco 1973, p. 47; also [3], p. 32 and [14], p. 149. 5 As the discussion in [14], pp. 153-7, explains. 6 Cf. [17], pp. 35-36, [18] and, for much detail, J. R. Goffman and A. R. Tamplin, Poisoned Power, Rodale Press, Emmau Pa. 1971. 7 On the pollution and waste disposal record of the infant nuclear industry, see [14] and [17]. The record of many countries on pollution control, where in many cases available technologies for reducing or removing pollution are not applied because they are considered too expensive or because they adversely affect the interests of some powerful group, provides clear historical evidence that the problem of nuclear waste disposal would not end simply with the devising of a 'safe' technology for disposal, even if one could be devised which provided a sufficient guarantee of safety and was commercially feasible. The fact that present economic and political arrangements are overwhelmingly weighted in favour of the interests and concerns of (some) contemporary humans makes it not unrealistic to expect the long-term nuclear waste disposal, if it involved any significant cost at all, when public concern about the issue died down, would be seen to conflict with the interests of contemporary groups, and that these latter interests would in many cases be favoured. Nor, as the history of movements such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament shows, could generalized public concern in the absence of direct personal interest, be relied upon to be sustained for long enough to ensure implementation of costly or troublesome long-term disposal methods - even in those places where public concern exists and is a politically significant force. It must be stressed then that the problem is not merely one of disposal technique. Historical and other evidence points to the conclusion that many of the most important risks associated with nuclear waste disposal are not of the kind which might be amenable �Obligations to the Future 175 to technical solutions in the laboratory. A realistic assessment of potential costs to the future from nuclear development cannot overlook these important non-technical risk factors. 8 Of course the effect on people is not the only factor which has to be taken into consideration in arriving at a moral judgment. Nuclear radiation, unlike most ethical theories, does not confine its scope to human life. But since the harm nuclear development is likely to cause to non-human life can hardly improve its case, it suffices if the case against it can be made out solely in terms of its effects on human life in the conventional way. 9 Proponents of nuclear power often try to give the impression that future people will not just bear costs from nuclear development but will also be beneficiaries, because nuclear powerprovides an 'abundant' or even 'unlimited' source of energy; thus Weinberg ([3], p. 34): 'an all but infinite source of relatively cheap and clean energy'. A good example of an attempt to create the impression that 'abundant' and 'cheap' energy from nuclear fission will be available to 'our descendants', i.e. all future people, is found in the last paragraph of Cohen [15]. Such claims are most misleading, since fission power even with the breeder reactor has only about the same prospective lifetime as coal-produced electricity (a point that can be derived using data in A. Parker, 'World Energy Resources: A Survey', Energy Policy, Vol. 3 [1975], pp. 58-66), and it is quite illegitimate to assume that nuclear fusion, for which there are still major unsolved problems, will have a viable, clean technology by the time fission runs out, or, for that matter, that it ever will. Thus while some few generations of the immediate future may obtain some benefits as well as costs, there is a very substantial chance that tho se of the more distant future will obtain nothing but costs. 10 These feelings, of which Smith's and Hume's sympathy is representative, are but the feeling echoes of obligation. At most, sympathy explains the feeling of obligation or lack of it, and this provides little guide as to whether there is an obligation or not - unless one interprets moral sympathy, the feeling of having a obligation, or being obligated, itself as a sufficient indication of obligation, in which case moral sympathy is a non-explanatory correlate in the feelings department of obligation itself and cannot be truly explanatory of the ground of it; unless, in short, moral sympathy reduces to an emotive rewrite of moral obligation. 11 Elsewhere in [1] Passmore is especially exercised that our institutions and intellectual traditions - presumably only the better ones - should be passed on to posterity, and that we should strive to make the world a better place, if not eventually an ideal one. 12 This is not the only philosophically important issue in environmental ethics on which Passmore is inconsistent. Consider his: 'over-arching intention: to consider whether the solution of ecological problems demands a moral or metaphysical revolution' (p. x), whether the West needs a new ethic and a new metaphysics. Passmore's answer in [1] is an emphatic No. Only insofar as Western moralists have [made various erroneous suggestions] can the West plausibly be said to need a 'new ethic'. What it needs, for the most part, is not so much a 'new ethic' as adherence to a perfectly familiar ethic. For the major sources of our ecological disasters - apart from ignorance - are greed and shortsightedness, which amount to much the same thing. . . There is no novelty in the view that greed is evil; no need of a new ethic to tell us as much. (p. 187) 'The view that the West now needs. . . a new concept of nature' is similarly dismissed (p. 186, cf. p. 72). But in his paper [1*] (i.e. 'Attitudes to Nature', Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures, Vol. 8, Macmillan, London 1975), which is said to be an attempt to bring together and to reformulate some of the basic philosophical themes of [1], Passmore's answer is Yes, and quite different themes, inconsistent with those of [1], are advanced: �176 R. and V. Routley [T]he general conditions I have laid down . . . have not been satisfied in most of the traditional philosophies of nature. To that degree it is true, I think, that we do need a 'new metaphysics' which is genuinely not anthropocentric. . . . A 'new metaphysics', if it is not to falsify the facts, will have to be naturalistic, but not reductionist. The working out of such a metaphysics is, in my judgement, the most important task which lies ahead of philosophy. ([1*], pp. 260-1) A new ethic accompanies this new metaphysics. The emergence of new moral attitudes to nature is bound up, then, with the emergence of a more realistic philosophy of nature. That is the only adequate foundation for effective ecological concern. ([1*], p. 264) This is a far cry from the theme of [1] that ecological problems can be solved within the traditions of the West. 13 Put differently, the causal linkage can bypass intermediate generations, especially given action at a temporal distance: the chain account implies that there are no moral constraints in initiating such causal linkages. The chain picture accordingly seems to presuppose an unsatisfactory Humean model of causation, demanding contiguity and excluding action at a distance. 14 Golding we shall concede to Passmore, though even here the case is not clearcut. For Golding writes towards the end of his article ([12], p. 96): My discussion, until this point, has proceeded on the view that we have obligations to future generations. But do we? I am not sure that the question can be answered in the affirmative with any certainty. I shall conclude this note with a very brief discussion of some of the difficulties. All of Passmore's material on Golding is drawn from this latter and, as Golding says, 'speculative' discussion. 15 There is no textual citation for Bentham at all for the chapter of [1] concerned, viz. Ch. 4, 'Conservation'. 16 As Passmore himself at first concedes ([1], p. 84): If, as Bentham tells us, in deciding how to act men ought to take account of the effects of their actions on every sentient being, they obviously ought to take account of the pleasure and pains of the as yet unborn. 17 Neither rightness nor probable lightness in the hedonistic senses correspond to these notions in the ordinary sense; so at least [13] argues, following much anti-utilitarian literature. 18 On this irrationality different theories agree: the rational procedure, for example according to the minimax rule for decision-making under uncertainty, is to minimize that outcome which maximizes harm. 19 Discount, or bank, rates in the economists' sense are usually set to follow the market (cf. P. A. Samuelson, Economics, 7th ed., McGraw-Hill, New York 1967, p. 351). Thus the rates have little moral relevance. 20 Cf. Rawls [5], p. 287: 'From a moral point of view there are no grounds for discounting future well-being on the basis of pure time preference.' 21 What the probabilities would be depends on the theory of probability adopted: a Carnapian theory, e.g., would lead back to the unconstrained position. �Obligations to the Future 177 22 A real possibility is one which there is evidence for believing could eventuate. A real possibility requires producible evidence for its consideration. The contrast is with mere logical possibility. 23 Thus, to take a simple special case, economists dismiss distant future people from their assessments of utility, welfare, etc., on the basis of their non-existence; cf. Ng ('the utility of a non-existent person is zero') and Harsanyi ('only existing people [not even "nonexisting potential individuals"] can have real utility levels since they are the only ones able to enjoy objects with a positive utility, suffer from objects with a negative utility, and feel indifferent to objects with zero utility') (see Appendix B of Y. K. Ng, 'Preference, Welfare, and Social Welfare', paper presented at the Colloquium on Preference, Choice and Value Theory, RSSS, Australian National University, August 1977, pp. 24, 26-27). Non-existent people have no experiences, no preferences; distant future people do not exist; therefore distant future people have no utility assignments - so the sorites goes. But future people at least will have wants, preferences, and so on, and these have to be taken into account in adequate utility assessments (which should be assessed over afuture time horizon), no matter how much it may complicate or defeat calculations. 24 There are problems about formulating universalizability satisfactorily, but they hardly affect the point. The requisite universalizability can in fact be satisfactorily brought out from the semantical analysis of deontic notions such as obligation, and indeed argued for on the basis of such an analysis which is universal in form. The lawlikeness requirement, which can be similarly defended, is essentially that imposed on genuine scientific laws by logical empiricists (e.g. Carnap and Hempel), that such laws should contain no proper names or the like, no reference to specific locations or times. 25 Such a principle is explicit both in classical utilitarianism (e.g. Sidgwick [11], p. 414), and in a range of contract and other theories from Kant and Rousseau toRawls ([5], p. 293). How the principle is argued for will depend heavily, however, on the underlying theory; and we do not want to make our use depend heavily on particular ethical theories. 26 See esp. R. Lanoue, NuclearPlants:The MoreTheyBuild, The More You Pay, Centerfor Study of Responsive Law, Washington DC 1976; also [14], pp. 212 ff. 27 On all these points see R. Grossman and G. Daneker, Guide to Jobs and Energy, Environmentalists for Full Employment, Washington DC 1977, pp. 1-7, and also the details supplied in substantiating the interesting case of Commoner [7]. On the absorption of available capital by the nuclear industry, see as well [18], p. 23. On the employment issues, see too H. E. Daly in [9], p. 149. A more fundamental challenge to the poverty argument appears in I. Illich, Energy and Equality, Calder & Boyars, London 1974, where it is argued that the sort of development nuclear energy represents is exactly the opposite of what the poor need. 28 For much more detail on the inappropriateness see E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, Blond & Briggs, London 1973. As to the capital and other requirements, see [2], p. 48, and also [7] and [9]. For an illuminating look at the sort of development high-energy technology will tend to promote in the so-called underdeveloped countries, see the paper of Waiko and other papers in the Melanesian Environment (ed. by J. H. Winslow), Australian National University Press, Canberra 1977. 29 This fact is implicitly recognized in [2], p. 56. 30 A useful survey is given in A. Lovins, Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken, Friends of the Earth Australia, 1977 (reprinted from Foreign Affairs, October 1976); see also [17], [6], [7], [14], pp. 233 ff., and Schumacher, op. cit. 31 This is also explained in [2], p. 56. 32 An argument like this is suggested in Passmore [1], Chs. 4 and 7, with respect to the question of saving resources. In Passmore this argument for the overriding importance of passing on contemporary culture is underpinned by what appears to be a future- �178 R. and V. Routley directed ethical version of the Hidden Hand argument of economics - that, by a coincidence which if correct would indeed be fortunate, the best way to take care of the future (and perhaps even the only way to do so, since do-good intervention is almost certain to go wrong) is to take proper care of the present and immediate future. The argument has all the defects of the related Chain Argument discussed above and others. 33 See [14], p. 66, p. 191, and also [7]. 34 For such arguments see esp. M. Flood and R. Grove-White, Nuclear Prospects. A Comment on the Individual, the State and Nuclear Power, Friends of the Earth, Council for the Protection of Rural England and National Council for Civil Liberties, London 1976. 35 For a recent sketch of one such alternative which is outside the framework of the conventional option of centralized bureaucratic socialism, see E. Callenbach's novel, Ecotopia, Banyan Tree Books, Berkeley, California 1975. For the outline of a liberation socialist alternative see Radical Technology (ed. by G. Boyle and P. Harper), Undercurrents Limited, London 1976, and references therein. 36 Some earlier contract theories also did. Burke's contract (in E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Dent, London 1910, pp. 93-94) 'becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are not yet born'. Thus Burke's contract certainly appears to lead to obligations to distant future generations. Needless to say, there are metaphysical difficulties, which however Burke never considers, about contracts between parties at widely separated temporal locations. 37 Several of the preceding points we owe to M. W. Jackson. 38 Resources such as soil fertility and petroleum could even be a primary social goods on Rawls's very hazy general account of these goods ([5], pp. 62, 97): are these 'something a rational man wants whatever else he wants'? The primary social goods should presumably be those which are necessary for the good and just life -which will however vary with culture. 39 We have benefited from discussion with Ian Hughes and Frank Muller and useful comments on the paper from Brian Martin and Derek Browne. REFERENCES [1] J. Passmore, Man's Responsibility for Nature, Duckworth, London 1974. [2] Ranger Uranium Environmental Inquiry First Report, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra 1977. [3] A. M. Weinberg, 'Social Institutions and Nuclear Energy", Science, Vol. 177 (July 1972), pp. 27-34. • [4] R. Routley, 'Exploring Meinong's Jungle II. Existence is Existence Now', Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic (to appear). [5] J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1971. [6] Nuclear Power and the Environment. Sixth Report of the British Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, London 1976. [7] B. Commoner, The Poverty of Power, Knopf, New York 1976. [8] G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1903. [9] B. Commoner, H. Boksenbaum and M. Corr (Eds.), Energy and Human Welfare - A Critical Analysis, Vol. III, Macmillan, New York 1975. �Obligations to the Future 179 [10] J. Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, Vol. 1, published under the superintendence of J. Bowring, with an intro. by J. H. Burton; William Tait, Edinburgh 1843. [11] H. Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, Macmillan, London 1962 (reissue). [12] M. P. Golding, 'Obligations to Future Generations', Monist, Vol. 56 (1972), pp. 85-99. [13] R. and V. Routley, 'An Expensive Repair Kit for Utilitarianism', presented at the Colloquium on Preference, Choice and Value Theory, RSSS, Australian National University, August 1977. [14] R. Nader and J. Abbotts, The Menace of Atomic Energy, Outback Press, Melbourne 1977. [15] B. L. Cohen, 'The Disposal of Radioactive Wastes from Fission Reactors', Scientific American, Vol. 236 (June 1977), pp. 22-31. [16] S. McCracken, 'The Waragainst the Atom' .Commentary (September 1977), pp. 33-47. [17] A. B. Lovins and J. H. Price, Non-Nuclear Futures: The Case for an Ethical Energy Strategy, Friends of the Earth International, San Francisco 1975. [18] A. Roberts, "The Politics of Nuclear Power', Arena, No. 41 (1976), pp. 22-47. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Published Papers Description An account of the resource Sylvan formally published very little of his nuclear ethics and politics, although a nuclear imaginary is present throughout his ouevre. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document Inquiry, 21, 133-79 Nuclear Energy and Obligations to the Future R. and V. Routley Plumwood Mountain, Braidwood, Australia The paper considers the morality of nuclear energy development as it concerns future people, especially the creation of highly toxic nuclear wastes requiring longterm storage. On the basis of an example with many parallel moral features it is argued that the imposition of such costs and risks on the future is morally unacceptable. The paper goes on to examine in detail possible ways of escaping this conclusion, especially the escape route of denying that moral obligations of the appropriate type apply to future people. The bulk of the paper comprises discussion of this philosophical issue, including many arguments against assigning obligations to the future drawn both from analyses of obligation and from features of the future such as uncertainty and indeterminacy. A further escape through appeal to moral conflict is also considered, and in particular two conflict arguments, the Poverty and Lights-going-out arguments are briefly discussed. Both these escape routes are rejected and it is concluded that if the same standards of behaviour are applied to the future as to the present, nuclear energy development is morally unacceptable. I. The Bus Example Suppose we consider a bus, a bus which we hope is to make a very long journey. This bus, a third world bus, carries both passengers and freight. The bus sets down and picks up many different passengers in the course of its long journey and the drivers change many times, but because of the way the bus line is managed and the poor service on the route it is nearly always full to overcrowded, with passengers hanging off the back, and as in Afghanistan, passengers riding on the roof, and chickens and goats in the freight compartment. Early in the bus's journey someone consigns on it, to a far distant destination, a package containing a highly toxic and explosive gas. This is packaged in a very thin container, which as the consigner well knows is unlikely to contain the gas for the full distance for which it is consigned, and certainly will not do so if the bus should encounter any trouble, for example if there is a breakdown and the interior of the bus becomes very hot, if the bus should strike a very large bump or pothole of the sort commonly found on some of the bad roads it has to traverse, or if some 1 134 R. and V. Routley passenger should interfere deliberately or inadvertently with the cargo or perhaps try to steal some of the freight, as also frequently happens. All of these things, let us suppose, have happened on some of the bus's previous journeys. If the container should break the resulting disaster would probably kill at least some of the people and animals on the bus, while others could be maimed or contract serious diseases. There does not seem much doubt about what most of us would say about the morality of the consigner's action, and there is certainly no doubt about what the passengers would say. The consigner's action in putting the safety of the occupants of the bus at risk is appalling. What could excuse such an action, what sort of circumstances might justify it, and what sort of case could the consigner reasonably put up? The consigner might say that it is by no means certain that the gas will escape; he himself is an optimist and therefore feels that such unfavourable possible outcomes should be ignored. In any case the bus might have an accident and the passengers be killed long before the container gets a chance to leak; or the passengers might change to another bus and leave the lethal parcel behind. He might say that it is the responsibility of the passengers and the driver to ensure that the journey is a smooth one, and that if they fail to do so, the results are not his fault. He might say that the journey is such a long one that many of the passengers may have become mere mindless vegetables or degenerate wretches about whose fate no decent person need concern himself, or that they might not care about losing their lives or health or possessions anyway by that time. Most of these excuses will seem little more than a bad joke, and certainly would not usually be reckoned any sort of justification. The main argument the consigner of the lethal parcel employs, however, is that his own pressing needs justify his actions. He has no option but to consign his potentially lethal parcel, he says, since the firm he owns, and which has produced the material as a by-product, is in bad financial straits and cannot afford to produce a better container or to stop the production of the gas. If the firm goes out of business, the consigner says, his wife will leave him, and he will lose his family happiness, the comfortable way of life to which he has become accustomed and sees now as a necessity; his employees will lose their jobs and have to look for others; not only will the firm's customers be inconvenienced but he, the consigner, will have to break some business contracts; the inhabitants of the local village through loss of spending and cancellation of the Multiplier Effect will suffer finan- Obligations to the Future 135 cial hardship, and, worst of all, the tiny flow of droplets that the poor of the village might receive (theoretically at any rate) as a result of the trickling down of these good things would dry up entirely. In short, some basic and some perhaps uncomfortable changes will be needed in the village. Even if the consigner's story were accepted at face value - and it would be wise to look critically at his story - only someone whose moral sensibilities had been paralysed by the disease of galloping economism could see such a set of considerations, based on 'needs', comfort, and the goal of local prosperity, as justifying the consigner's action. One is not generally entitled to thus simply transfer the risks and costs arising from one's own life onto other uninvolved parties, to get oneself out of a hole of one's own making by creating harm or risk of harm to someone else who has had no share in creating the situation. To create serious risks and costs, especially risks to life or health for such others, simply to avoid having to make some changes to a comfortable life style, or even for a somewhat better reason, is usually thought deserving of moral condemnation, and sometimes considered a crime; for example, the action of a company in creating risks to the lives or health of its workers or customers to prevent itself from going bankrupt. What the consigner says may be an explanation of his behaviour, but it is not a justification. The problem raised by nuclear waste disposal is by no means a perfect analogy to the bus case, since, for example, the passengers on the nuclear bus cannot get off the bus or easily throw out the lethal package. In many crucial moral respects, however, the nuclear waste storage problem as it affects future people, the passengers in the bus we are considering, resembles the consignment of the faultily packaged lethal gas. Not only are rather similar moral principles involved, but a rather similar set of arguments to the lamentable excuses the consigner presents have been seriously put up to justify nuclear development, the difference being that in the nuclear case these arguments have been widely accepted. There is also some parallel in the risks involved; there is no known safe way to package the highly toxic wastes generated by nuclear plants that will be spread around the world if large-scale nuclear development goes ahead.1 The wastes problem will not be a slight one, with each one of the more than 2,000 reactors envisaged by the end of the century, producing on average annual wastes containing one thousand times the radioactivity of the Hiroshima bomb.2 The wastes include not merely the spent fuels and their radioactive by-products, but also everything they contaminate, from fuel containers to the thousands of widely distributed decommissioned nuclear 136 R. and V. Routley reactors which will have to be abandoned, still in a highly radioactive condition, after the expiry of their expected lifetimes of about thirty years, and which have been estimated to require perhaps one and a half million years to reach safe levels of radioactivity.3 The wastes must be kept suitably isolated from the environment for their entire active lifetime; for fission products the required storage period averages a thousand years or so, and for the actinides (transuranic elements) which include plutonium, there is a half-million to a million-year storage problem.4 Serious problems have arisen with both short-term and proposed longterm methods of storage, even with the comparatively small quantities of waste that have been produced over the last twenty years.5 With present known short-term surface methods of storage there is a continued need for human intervention to keep the material isolated from the environment, while with proposed longer-term methods such as storage in salt mines or granite to the risk of human interference there are added the risks of leakage, e.g. through water seepage, and of disturbance, for example through climatic change, earth movements, etc. The risks are significant: no reasonable person with even a limited acquaintance with the history of human affairs over the last 3,000 years could be confident of safe storage by methods involving human intervention over the enormous time periods involved. No one with even a slight knowledge of the geological and climatic history of the earth over the last million years, a period which has seen a number of ice ages and great fluctuations in climate for example, could be confident that the waste material could be safely stored for the vast periods of time required. Much of this waste is highly toxic; for example, even a beachball sized quantity of plutonium appropriately distributed is enough to give every person on the planet lung cancer - so that a leak of even a small part of this waste material could involve huge loss of life, widespread disease and genetic damage, and contamination of immense areas of land.6 Given the enormous costs which could be involved for the future, it is plainly grossly inadequ'ate'to merely speculate concerning untested, but possibly or even probably, safe methods for disposal of wastes. Yet none of the proposed methods has been properly tested, and they may prove to involve all sorts of unforeseen difficulties and risks when an attempt is made to put them into practice on a commercial scale. Only a method that could provide a rigorous guarantee of safety over the storage period, that placed safety beyond reasonable doubt, would be acceptable. It is difficult to see how such rigorous guarantees could be given concerning either the Obligations to the Future 137 geological or future human factors. But even if an economically viable, rigorously safe long-term storage method could be devised, there is the problem of guaranteeing that it would be universally and invariably used. The assumption that it would be, especially if, as seems likely, such a method proved expensive economically and politically, seems to presuppose a level of efficiency, perfection, and concern for the future not previously encountered in human affairs, and certainly not conspicuous in the nuclear industry.7 Again, unless we assume continuous and faultless guarding of long-term storage sites through perhaps a million years of possible future human activity, weapons-grade radioactive material will be accessible, over much of the million-year storage period, to any party who is in a position to retrieve it. Our behaviour in creating this nightmare situation for the future is certainly no better than that of the consigner in the bus example. Industrialized countries, in order to get out of a mess of their own making essentially the creation of economies dependent on an abundance" of non-renewable energy in a situation where it is in fact in limited supply opt for a 'solution' which may enable them to avoid the making of uncomfortable changes during the lifetime of those now living, at the expense of passing heavy burdens on to the inhabitants of the earth at a future time burdens in the shape of costs and risks which, just as in the bus case, may adversely affect the life and health of future people and their opportunity to lead a decent life.8 It is sometimes suggested that analogies like the bus example are defective; that morally they are crucially different from the nuclear case, since future people, unlike the passengers in the bus, will benefit directly from nuclear development, which will provide an abundance of energy for the indefinite future. But this is incorrect. Nuclear fission creates wastes which may remain toxic for a million years, but even with the breeder reactor it could be an energy source for perhaps only 150 years. It will do nothing for the energy problems of the people of the distant future whose lives could be seriously affected by the wastes. Thus perhaps 30,000 generations of future people could be forced to bear significant risks, without any corresponding benefits, in order to provide for the extravagant energy use of only five generations. Nor is the risk of direct harm from the escape or misuse of radioactive materials the only burden the nuclear solution imposes on the future. Because the energy provided by nuclear fission is merely a stop-gap, it seems probable that in due course the same problem, that of making a 138 R. and V. Routley transition to renewable sources of energy, will have to be faced again by a future population which will probably, again as a result of our actions, be very much worse placed to cope with it.9 For they may well have to face the change to renewable resources in an over-populated world not only burdened with the legacy of our nuclear wastes, but also in a world in which, if the nuclear proponents' dream of global industrialization is realized, more and more of the global population will have become dependent on high energy consumption and associated technology and heavy resource use, and will have lost or reduced its ability to survive without it. It will, moreover, probably be a world which is largely depleted of non-renewable resources, and in which such renewable resources as forests and soils as remain, resources which will have to form a very important part of the basis of life, are in a run-down condition. Such points tell against the idea that future people must be, if not direct beneficiaries of nuclear fission energy, at least indirect beneficiaries. The 'solution' then is to buy time for contemporary industrial society at a price which not only creates serious problems for future people but which reduces their ability to cope with those problems. Just as in the bus case, contemporary industrial society proposes to get itself out of a hole of its own making by creating risk of harm, and by transferring costs and risks, to someone else who has had no part in producing the situation and who will obtain no clear benefit. It has clear alternatives to this action. That it does not take them is due essentially to its unwillingness to avoid changing wasteful patterns of consumption and to its desire to protect the interests of those who benefit from them. If we apply to the nuclear situation the same standards of behaviour and moral principles that we acknowledge (in principle if perhaps often not in fact) in the contemporary world, it will not be easy to avoid the conclusion that the situation involves injustice with respect to future people on a grand scale. It seems to us that there are only two plausible moves that might enable the avoidance of such a conclusion. First, it might be argued that the moral principles and obligations which we acknowledge for the contemporary world and the immediate future do not apply because the recipients of our nuclear parcel are in the non-immediate future. Secondly, an attempt might be made to appeal to overriding circumstances; for to reject the consigner's action in the circumstances outlined is not of course to say that there are no circumstances in which such an action might possibly be justifiable, or at least where the case is less clearcut. It is the same with the nuclear case. Just as in the case of the consigner of the Obligations to the Future 139 package there is a need to consider what these justifying circumstances might be, and whether they apply in the present case. We turn now to the first of these possible escape routes for the proponent of nuclear development, to the philosophical question of our obligations to the future. II. Obligations to the Distant Future The area in which these philosophical problems arise is that of the distant (i.e. non-immediate) future, that is, the future with which people alive today will make no direct contact; the immediate future provides comparatively few problems for moral theories. The issues involved, although of far more than academic interest, have not received any great attention in recent philosophical literature, despite the fact that the question of obligations to future people presents tests which a number of ethical theories fail to pass, and also raises a number of questions in political philosophy concerning the adequacy of accepted institutions which leave out of account the interests of future people. Moral philosophers have predictably differed on the issue. But contrary to the picture painted in a recent, widely read, and influential work discussing it, Passmore's Man's Responsibility for Nature, a good many philosophers who have explicitly considered the question have come down in favour of the same consideration being given to the rights and interests of future people as to those of contemporary or immediately future people. Other philosophers have tended to fall into three categories - those who acknowledge obligations to the future but who do not take them seriously or who assign them less weight, those who deny, or who are committed by their general moral position to denying, that there are moral obligations beyond the immediate future, and those like Passmore and Golding who come down, with admirable philosophical caution, on both sides of the issue, but with the weight of the argument favouring the view underlying prevailing economic and political institutions, that there are no moral obligations to the future beyond those to the next generation. • According to the most extreme of these positions against moral obligations to the future, our behaviour with respect to the future is morally unconstrained; there are no moral restrictions on acting or failing to act deriving from the effect of our actions on future people. Of those philosophers who say, or whose views imply, that we don't have obligations to the (non-immediate) future, i.e. those who have opted for the uncon- 140 R. and V. Routley strained position, many have based this view on accounts of moral obligation which are built on relations which presuppose some degree of temporal or spatial contiguity. Thus moral obligation is seen as grounded on or as presupposing various relations which could not hold between people widely separated in time (or sometimes in space). For example, obligation is seen as grounded in relations which are proximate or of short duration and also non-transitive. Among such suggested bases or grounds of moral obligation, or requirements for moral obligation, which would rule out obligations to the non-immediate future are these: First, there are those accounts which require that someone to whom a moral obligation is held be able to claim his rights or entitlement. People in the distant future will not be able to claim rights and entitlements as against us, and of course they can do nothing to enforce any claims they might have for their rights against us. Secondly, there are those accounts which base moral obligations on social or legal convention, for example a convention which would require punishment of offenders or at least some kind of social enforcement. But plainly these and other conventions will not hold invariantly over change in society and amendment of legal conventions and so will not be invariant over time. Also future people have no way of enforcing their interests or punishing offenders, and there could be no guarantee that any contemporary institution would do it for them. Both the view that moral obligation requires the context of a moral community and the view that it is contractually based appear to rule out the distant future as a field of moral obligation, as they not only require a commonality, or some sort of common basis, which cannot be guaranteed in the case of the distant future, but also a possibility of interchange or reciprocity of action which cannot apply to the future. Where the basis of moral obligation is seen as mutual exchange, the interests of future people must be set aside because they cannot change the past and cannot be parties to any mutual contract. The exclusion of moral obligations to the distant future also follows from those views which attempt to ground moral obligations in non-transitive relations of short duration such as sympathy and love. There are some difficulties also about love and sympathy for (non-existent) people in the far distant future about whose personal qualities and characteristics one must know very little and who may well be committed to a life-style for which one has no sympathy. On the current showing in the case of nuclear energy it would be easy to conclude that contemporary society lacks both love and sympathy for future people; and it would appear to follow from this that contemporary Obligations to the Future 141 people have no obligations to future people and can harm them as it suits them. What all these views have in common is a naturalistic picture of obligation as something acquired, either individually or institutionally, something which is conditional on doing something or failing to do something (e.g. participating in the moral community, contracting), or having some characteristic one can fail to have (e.g. love, sympathy, empathy).10 Because obligation therefore becomes conditional, features usually thought to characterize it, such as universality of application and necessitation (i.e. the binding features), are lost, especially where there is a choice of whether or not to do the thing required to acquire the obligation, and so of whether to acquire it. The criteria for acquisition suggested are such as to exclude people in the distant future. However, the view that there are no moral constraints with respect to future people, that one is free to act as one likes with respect to them, is a very difficult one to sustain. Consider the example of a scientific group which, for no particular reason other than to test a particular piece of technology, places in orbit a cobalt bomb which is to be set off by a triggering device designed to go off several hundred years from the time of its despatch. No presently living person and none of their immediate descendants would be affected, but the population of the earth in the distant future would be wiped out as a direct and predictable result of the action. The unconstrained position clearly implies that this is an acceptable moral enterprise, that whatever else we might legitimately criticize in the scientists' experiment, perhaps its being unduly expensive or badly designed, we cannot lodge a moral protest about the damage it will do to future people. The unconstrained position also endorses as morally acceptable the following sorts of examples: A firm discovers it can make a handsome profit from mining, processing, and manufacturing a new type of material which, although it causes no problems for present people or their immediate descendants, will over a period of hundreds of years decay into a substance which will cause an enormous epidemic of cancer among the inhabitants of the earth at that time. According to the unconstrained view the firm is free to act in its own interests, without any consideration for the harm it does to future people. Such counterexamples to the unconstrained view might seem childishly obvious. Yet the unconstrained position concerning the future from which they follow is far from being a straw man; not only have a number of philosophers writing on the issue endorsed this position, but it is the clear 142 R. and V. Routley implication of many currently popular views of the basis of moral obligation, as well as of economic theory. It does not appear, on the other hand, that those who opt for the unconstrained position have considered such examples and endorsed them as morally acceptable, despite their being clearly implied by their position. We suspect that when it is brought out that the unconstrained position admits such counterexamples, that being free to act implies, among other things being free to inflict pointless harm, most of those who opted for the unconstrained position would want to assert that it was not what they intended. What those who have put forward the unconstrained position seem to have had in mind in denying moral obligation is rather that future people can look after themselves, that we are not responsible for their lives. The view that the future can take care of itself also seems to assume a future causally independent of the present. But it is not. It is not as if, in cases such as those discussed above and the nuclear case, the future is simply being left alone to take care of itself. Present people are influencing it, and in doing so must acquire many of the same sorts of moral responsibilities as they do in causally affecting the present and immediate future. The thesis seems thus to assume an incorrect model of an independent and unrelated future. Also, to say that we are not responsible for the lives of future people does not amount to the same as saying that we are free to do as we like with respect to them, that there are no moral constraints on our action involving them. In just the same way, the fact that one does not have, or has not acquired, an obligation to some stranger with whom one has never been involved - that one has no responsibility for his life - does not imply that one is free to do what one likes with respect to him, for example to rob him or to pursue some course of action of advantage to oneself which could seriously harm him. These difficulties for the unconstrained position arise in part from the failure to make an important distinction between, on the one hand, acquired or assumed obligations towards somebody, for which some act of acquisition or assumption is required as a qualifying condition, and on the other hand moral constraints, which require, for example, that one should not act so as to damage or harm someone, and for which no act of acquisition is required. There is a considerable difference in the level and kind of responsibility involved. In the first case one must do something or be something which one can fail to do or be, e.g. have loves, sympathy, be contracted. In the second case responsibility arises as a result of being a causal agent aware of the consequences or probable consequences of his Obligations to the Future 143 action, and thus does not have to be especially acquired or assumed. Thus there is no problem about how the latter class, moral constraints, can apply to the distant future in cases where it may be difficult or impossible for acquisition or assumption conditions to be satisfied. They apply as a result of the ability to produce causal effects on the distant future of a reasonably predictable nature. Thus also moral constraints can apply to what does not (yet) exist, just as actions can cause results that do not (yet) exist. While it may be the case that there would need to be an acquired or assumed obligation in order for it to be claimed that contemporary people must make special sacrifices of an heroic kind for future people, or even to help them especially, only moral constraints are needed in order for us to be constrained from harming them. Thus, to return to the bus example, the consigner cannot argue in justification of his action that he has never assumed or acquired responsibility for the passengers, that he does not know them and therefore has no love or sympathy for them, and that they are not part of his moral community, in short that he has no special obligations to help them. All that one needs to argue in respect of both the bus and the nuclear case is that there are moral constraints against harming, not that there are specially acquired obligations to take responsibility for the lives of the people involved. The confusion of moral constraints with acquired obligation, and the attempt therewith to view all constraints as acquired and to write off non-acquired constraints, is facilitated through the use of the term 'moral obligation' in philosophy to indicate any type of deontic constraint, while in natural language it is used to indicate something which has to be assumed or acquired. Hence the equation and at least one root of the unconstrained position, that is of the belief that there are no moral constraints concerning the distant future. The unconstrained view tends to give way, under the weight of counterexamples, to a more qualified, and sometimes ambivalent position. Passmore's position in [1] is a striking example of the second ambivalent position. On the one hand Passmore regularly gives the impression of one championing future people; for example, in the final sentence of [1] he says, concerning men a century hence: My sole concern is that we should do nothing which will reduce their freedom of thought and action, whether by destroying.the natural world which makes that freedom possible or the social traditions which permit and encourage it. 144 R. and V. Routley Earlier (esp. pp. 84-85) Passmore appears to endorse the principle 'that we ought not to act so as certainly to harm posterity' and claims (p. 98) that, even where there are uncertainties, 'these uncertainties do not justify negligence'. Nevertheless, though obligations concerning non-immediate posterity are thus admitted, the main thrust of Passmore's argument is entirely different, being in favour of the unconstrained position according to which we have no obligations to non-immediate posterity. Thus his conclusion (p. 91): So whether we approach the problem of obligations to posterity by way of Bentham and Sidgwick, Rawls or Golding, we are led to something like the same conclusion: our obligations are to immediate posterity, we ought to try to improve the world so that we shall be able to hand it over to our immediate successors in a better condition, and that is all.11 Passmore's position is, to all appearances, simply inconsistent. There are two ways one might try to render it consistent, but neither is readily available to Passmore. The first is by taking advantage of the distinction between moral constraints and acquired obligations, but a basis for this distinction is not evident in Passmore's work and indeed the distinction is antithetical to the analyses of obligation that Passmore tries to synthesize with his own analysis in terms of loves. The second, sceptical, route to consistency is by way of the argument that we shall consider shortly, that there is always gross uncertainty with respect to the distant future, uncertainty which relieves us in practice of any moral constraints regarding the distant future. But though Passmore's writing strongly suggests this uncertainty argument (especially his sympathetic discussion of the Premier of Queensland's argument against conservationists [p. 77]), he also rules it out with the claim that uncertainties do not justify negligence.12 Many of the accounts of moral obligation that give rise to the unconstrained position are fused in Passmore's work, again not entirely consistently, since the different accounts exploited do not give uniform results. Thus the primary account of obligation is said to be in terms of loves though the account is never satisfactorily formulated or developed - and it is suggested that because our loves do not extend into the distant future, neither do our obligations. This sentimental account of obligation will obviously lead to different results from utilitarian accounts of obligation, which however Passmore appeals to in his discussion of wilderness. In yet other places in [1], furthermore, social contract and moral community Obligations to the Future 145 views are appealed to - see, e.g., the treatment of animals, of preservation, and of duties to nature. In the case of obligations to future people, however, Passmore does try to sketch an argument - what we call the convergence argument - that all the accounts lead in the end to the unconstrained position. As well as the convergence argument, and various uncertainty arguments to be considered later, Passmore appears to endorse several other arguments in favour of his theme that there are in practice no obligations to the distant future. In particular, he suggests that such obligations would in practice be otiose. Everything that needs to be accounted for can be encompassed through the chain picture of obligation as linking successive generations, under which each generation has obligations, based on loves, only to the succeeding generation. We outline three objections to this chain account. First, it is inadequate to treat constraints concerning the future as if they applied only between generations, as if there were no question of constraints on individuals as opposed to whole generations, since individuals can create causal effects, e.g. harm, on the future in a way which may create individual responsibility, and which can't necessarily be sheeted home to an entire generation. Secondly, such chains, since they are non-transitive, cannot yield direct obligations to the distant future. But for this very reason the chain picture cannot be adequate, as examples again show. For the picture is unable to explain several of the cases that have to be dealt with, e.g. the examples already discussed which show that we can have a direct effect on the distant future without affecting the next generation, who may not even be able to influence matters.13 Thirdly, improvements for immediate successors may be achieved at the expense of disadvantages to people of the more distant future. Improving the world for immediate successors is quite compatible with, and may even in some circumstances be most easily achieved by, ruining it for less immediate successors. Such cases can hardly be written off as 'never-never land' examples, since many cases of environmental exploitation might be seen as of just this type, e.g. not just the nuclear case but also the exhaustion of non-renewable resources and the long-term depletion of renewable resources such as soils and forests through overcropping. If then such obvious injustices to future people arising from the favouring or exclusive concern with immediate successors are to be avoided, obligations to the future will have to be seen as in some way fairly distributed over time, and not merely as accruing to particular generations in the way the chain picture suggests. 146 R. and V. Routley Passmore tries to represent all obligations to the distant future in terms of heroic self-sacrifice, something which cannot of course be morally required. But in view of the distinctions between constraints and acquired obligation and between obligation and supererogation, this is just to misrepresent the position of these obligations. For example, one is no more engaging in heroic self-sacrifice by not forcing future people into an unviable life position or by refraining from causing them direct harm, than one is resorting to heroic self-sacrifice in refraining from beating and robbing some stranger and leaving him to starve. Passmore's most sustained argument for the unconstrained position is a convergence argument, that different analyses of obligations, including his own, lead to the one conclusion. This style of argument is hardly convincing when there are well-known accounts of obligation which do not lead to the intended conclusion, e.g. deontological accounts such as those of Kant and of modern European schools, and teleological accounts such as those of Moore (in [8]). But such unfavourable positions are either rapidly passed over or ignored in Passmore's historical treatment and narrow selection of historical figures. The style of argument becomes even less persuasive when it is discovered that the accounts of the main authorities appealed to, Bentham, Sidgwick, and Rawls,14 do not lead, without serious distortion, to the intended conclusion. Indeed Passmore has twisted the historical and textual evidence to suit his case, as we now try to indicate. Consider Bentham first. Passmore's assumption, for which no textual evidence is cited, ls is that no Benthamite calculation can take account of a future more extensive than the immediate future (cf. pp. 87-88). The assumption seems to be based simply on the fact that Bentham remarked that 'the value of the pleasure or pain to each person to be considered in any estimate will be greater or less in virtue of the following circumstances'. '3. Its certainty or uncertainty. 4. Its propinquity or remoteness' ([10], p. 16). But this does nothing to show that future persons are discounted: the certainty and propinquity do not concern persons, but the utilities of the persons concerned. As regards which persons are concerned in any calculation Bentham is quite explicit, detailing how to take an exact account. . . of the general tendency of any act.. . .5 . Take an account of the number of persons whose interests appear to be concerned; and repeat the above process [summation of values of pleasure and of pain] with respect to each. ([10], p. 16) Obligations to the Future 147 It follows that Bentham's calculation takes account of everyone (and, in his larger scheme, every sentient creature) whose interests appear to be concerned: if the interests of people in the distant future appear to be concerned - as they are in conservation issues - they are to be included in the calculation. And there is independent evidence16 that in Bentham's view the principle of utility was not temporally restricted: 'that is useful which, taking all times and all persons into consideration, leaves a balance of happiness' ([10], pp. 17-18, our italics). Thus the future cut-off that Passmore has attributed to Bentham is contradicted by Bentham's own account. The case of Sidgwick is more complex, because there is isolated oscillation in his application of utilitarianism between use of utility and of (something like) expected utility (see [11], pp. 381,414): Sidgwick's utilitarianism is, in its general characterization, essentially that of Bentham: the conduct which . . . is objectively right is that which will produce the greatest amount of happiness on the whole; that is, taking into account all those whose happiness is affected by the conduct. ([11], p. 411) All includes all sentient beings, both existing and to exist, as Sidgwick goes on to explain (p. 414). In particular, in answer to the question 'How far are we to consider the interests of posterity when they seem to conflict with those of existing human beings?' Sidgwick writes ([11], p. 414, our italics): It seems, however, clear that the time at which a man exists cannot affect the value of his happiness from a universal point of view; and that the interests of posterity must concern a Utilitarian as much as those of his contemporaries, except in so far as the effect of his actions on posterity - and even the existence of human beings to be affected - must necessarily be more uncertain. But Passmore manages, first of all, to give a different sense to what Sidgwick is saying by adjusting the quotation, by omitting the clause we have italicized, which equalizes the degree of concern for present and future persons, and by italicizing the whole except-clause, thereby placing much greater emphasis than Sidgwick does on uncertainty. For according to Sidgwick's impartiality principle, 'the mere difference in time is not a 148 R. and V. Routley reasonable ground for having more regard to the consciousness of one -amount than to that of another' ([11], p. 381; see also p. 124). The apparent tension in Sidgwick's theory as to whether uncertainty should be taken into account is readily removed by resort to a modern distinction between values and expected values (i.e. probability weighted values); utilitarian rightness is defined as before in terms of the net happiness of all concerned over all time without mention of uncertainty or probabilities, but it is distinguished from probable rightness (given present information), in the utilitarian sense,17 which is defined in terms of the expected net happiness of those concerned, using present probabilities. It is the latter notion, of probable rightness, that practical reasoning is commonly concerned with and that decision theory studies; and it is this that Passmore supposes Sidgwick is using ([1], p. 84). But it is evident that the utilitarian determination of probable rightness, like that of rightness, will sometimes take into account the distant future - as Sidgwick's discussion of utilitarian determination of optimum population (immediately following his remark on uncertainty) does. So how does Passmore contrive to reverse matters, to have Sidgwick's position lead to his own unconstrained conclusion? The answer is: By inserting an additional assumption of his own - which Sidgwick would certainly have rejected - that the uncertainties entitle us to ignore the distant future. What Passmore has implicitly assumed in his claim ([1], p. 85) that 'utilitarian principles [such as Sidgwick's] are not strong enough' 'to justify the kinds of sacrifice some conservationists now call upon us to make' is his own thesis that 'The uncertainty of harms we are hoping to prevent would in general entitle us to ignore them.. .'. From a decision-theory viewpoint this is simply irrational18 unless the probabilities of damage are approaching zero. We will deal with the essentially sceptical uncertainty arguments on which Passmore's position depends shortly: here it is enough to observe that Sidgwick's position does not lead to anything like that which Passmore attributes to him - without uncertainty assumptions which Sidgwick would have rejected (for he thought that future people'will certainly have pleasure and suffer pain). We can also begin to gauge from Passmore's treatment of nineteenthcentury utilitarians, such as Bentham and Sidgwick, the extent of the distortion which underlies his more general historical case for the unconstrained position which, so he claims, represents accurately enough what, over the last two centuries, men have seen as their duty to posterity as a whole. . . . ([1], p. 91) Obligations to the Future 149 The treatment accorded Rawls in only marginally more satisfactory. Passmore supposes that Rawls's theory of justice leads directly to the unconstrained position ([1], p. 87 and p. 91), whereas Rawls claims ([5], p. 293) that we have obligations to future people just as to present ones. But the situation is more complicated than Rawls's claim would indicate, as we now try to explain in a summary way (more detail is given in the Appendix). For, in order to justify this claim on his theory (with its present time-of-entry interpretation), Rawls has to invoke additional and dubious motivational assumptions; even so the theory which thus results does not yield the intended conclusion, but a conclusion inconsistent with Rawls's claim. However, by changing the time-of-entry interpretation to an omnitemporal one, Rawls's claim does result from the theory so amended. Moreover, the amended theory also yields, by exactly Rawls's argument for a just saving rate, a resource conservation policy, and also a case against nuclear development. Accordingly Passmore's other claims regarding Rawls are mistaken, e.g. that the theory cannot justify a policy of resource conservation. Rawls does not emerge unscathed either. As on the issue of whether his contract is a necessary condition for obligations, so on obligations which the contract yields to the distant future, Rawls is far from consistent. Furthermore, institutions such as qualified market and voting systems are recommended as just though from a future perspective their results are far from that. Rawls, then, does not take obligations to the future with full seriousness. In sum, it is not true that the theory of Rawls, any more than the theories of the historical figures actually discussed by Passmore, unequivocally supports the unconstrained position. III. Uncertainty and Indeterminacy Arguments Although there are grave difficulties for the unconstrained position, qualification leads to a more defensible position. According to the qualified position we are not entirely unconstrained with respect to the distant future: there are obligations, but these are not so important as those to the present, and the interests of distant future people cannot weigh very much in the scale against those of the present and immediate future. The interests of future people then, except in unusual cases, count for very much less than the interests of present people. Hence such things as nuclear development and various exploitative activities which benefit present 150 R. and V. Routley people should proceed, even if people of the distant future are disadvantaged by them. The qualified position appears to be widely held and is implicit in most modern economic theories, where the position of a decrease in weight of future costs and benefits (and so of future interests) is obtained by application over time of an (opportunity cost) discount rate. The attempt to apply economics as a moral theory, something that is becoming increasingly common, can lead then to the qualified position. What is objectionable in such an approach is that economics must operate within the bounds of moral (deontic) constraints, just as in practice it operates within legal constraints, and cannot determine what those constraints are. There are, moreover, alternative economic theories and simply to adopt one which discounts the future is to beg all the questions at issue. The discounting move often has the same result as the unconstrained position; if, for instance, we consider the cancer example and consider costs as payable compensation, it is evident that, over a sufficiently long period of time, discounting at current prices would lead to the conclusion that there are no recoverable damages and so, in economic terms, no constraints. In short, even certain damage to future people could be written off. One way to achieve the bias against future people is by the application of discount rates which are set in accord with the current economic horizons of no more than about fifteen years,19 and application of such rates would simply beg the question against the interests and rights of future people. Where there is certain future damage of a morally forbidden type the whole method of discounting is simply inapplicable, and its use would violate moral constraints.20 Another argument for the qualified position, which avoids the objections from cases of certain damage, comes from probability considerations.The distant future, it is argued, is much more uncertain than the present and immediate future, so that probabilities are consequently lower, perhaps even approaching or coinciding with zero for any hypothesis concerning the distant future.21 But then if we take account of probabilities in the obvious way, by simply multiplying them against costs and benefits, it is evident that the interests of future people, except in cases where there is an unusually high degree of certainty, must count for (very much) less than those of present and neighbouring people where (much) higher probabilities obtain. So in the case of conflict between the present and the future where it is a question of weighing certain benefits to the people of the present and the immediate future against a much lower Obligations to the Future 151 probability of indeterminate costs to an indeterminate number of distant future people, the issue would normally be decided in favour of the present, assuming that anything like similar costs and benefits were involved. But of course it can't be assumed that anything like similarly weighted costs and benefits are involved in the nuclear case, especially if it is a question of risking poisoning some of the earth for half a million or so years, with consequent risk of serious harm to thousands of generations of future people, in order to obtain quite doubtful or trivial benefits for some present people, in the shape of the opportunity to continue unnecessarily high energy use. And even if the costs and benefits were comparable or evenly weighted, such an argument would be defective, since an analogous argument would show that the consigner's action is acceptable provided the benefit, e.g. the profit he stood to gain from imposing significant risks on other people, was sufficiently large. Such a cost-benefit approach to moral and decision problems, with or without the probability frills, is quite inadequate where different parties are concerned, or for dealing with cases of conflict of interest or moral problems where deontic constraints are involved, and commonly yields counterintuitive results. For example, it would follow on such principles that it is permissible for a firm to injure, or very likely injure, some innocent party provided the firm stands to make a sufficiently large gain from it. But the costs and benefits involved are not transferable in any simple or general way from one party to another. Transfers of this kind, of costs and benefits involving different parties, commonly raise moral issues - e.g. is x entitled to benefit himself by imposing costs ony ? - which are not susceptible to a simple cost-benefit approach of the sort adopted by some proponents of nuclear energy, who attempt to dismiss the costs to future people with the soothing remark that any development involves costs as well as benefits. The transfer point is enough to invalidate the comparison, heavily relied on by McCracken [16] in building a case for the acceptability of the nuclear risk, between nuclear risks and those from cigarette smoking. In the latter case those who supposedly benefit from the activity are also, to an overwhelming extent* those who bear the serious health costs and risks involved. In contrast the users and supposed beneficiaries of nuclear energy will be risking not only, or even primarily, their own lives and health, but also those of others who may be non-beneficiaries and who may be spatially or temporally removed, and these risks will not be in any direct way related to a person's extent of use. The transfer objection is essentially the same as that to the utilitarian's 152 R. and V. Routley happiness sums as a way of solving moral conflict between different parties, and the introduction of probability considerations does not change the principles involved but merely complicates analyses. One might further object to the probability argument that probabilities involving distant future situations are not always less than those concerning the immediate future in the way the argument supposes, and that the outcomes of some moral problems such as the bus example do not depend on a high level of probability anyway. In some sorts of cases it is enough, as the bus example reveals, that a significant risk is created; such cases do not depend critically on high probability assignments. Uncertainty arguments in various forms are the most common and important ones used by philosophers and others to argue for the position that we cannot be expected to take serious account of the effects of our actions on the distant future. There are two strands to the uncertainty argument, capable of separation, but frequently entangled. Both arguments are mistaken, the first on a priori grounds, the second on a posteriori grounds. The first argument is a generalized uncertainty argument which runs as follows: In contrast to the exact information we can obtain about the present, the information we can obtain about the effects of our actions on the distant future is unreliable, woolly, and highly speculative. But we cannot base assessments of how we should act on information of this kind, especially when accurate information is obtainable about the present which would indicate different action. Therefore we must regretfully ignore the uncertain effects of our actions on the distant future. More formally and crudely: One only has obligations to the future if these obligations are based on reliable information; there is no reliable information at present as regards the distant future; therefore one has no obligations to the distant future. The first argument is essentially a variation on a sceptical argument in epistemology concerning our knowledge of the future (formally, replace 'obligations' by 'knowledge' in the crude statement of the argument above). The main ploy is to considerably overestimate and overstate the degree of certainty available with respect to the present and immediate future, and the degree of certainty which is required as the basis for moral consideration both with respect to the present and with respect to the future. Associated with this is the attempt to suggest a sharp division as regards certainty between the present and immediate future on the one hand and the distant future on the other. We shall not find, we suggest, that there is any such sharp or simple division between the distant future and Obligations to the Future 153 the adjacent future and present, at least with respect to those things in the present which are normally subject to moral constraints. We can and constantly do act on the basis of such 'unreliable' information as the sceptic as regards the future conveniently labels 'uncertainty'; for scepticproof certainty is rarely, or never, available with respect to much of the present and immediate future. In moral situations in the present, action often takes account of risk and probability, even quite low probabilities. A good example is again the bus case. We do not need to know for certain that the container will break and the lethal gas escape. In fact it does not even have to be probable, in the relevant sense of more probable than not, in order for us to condemn the consigner's action. It is enough that there is a significant risk of harm in this sort of case. It does not matter if the decreased well-being of the consigner is certain and the prospects of the passengers quite uncertain; the resolution of the problem is still clearly in favour of the so-called 'speculative' and 'unreliable'. But if we do not require certainty of action to apply moral constraints in contemporary affairs, why should we require a much higher standard of certainty in the future? Why should we require epistemic standards for the future which the more familiar sphere of moral action concerning the present and adjacent future does not need to meet? The insistence on certainty as a necessary condition before moral consideration can be given to the distant future, then, amounts to an epistemic double standard. But such an epistemic double standard, proposed in explaining the difference between the present and the future and to justify ignoring future peoples' interests, in fact cannot itself provide an explanation of the differences, since it already presupposes different standards of certainty appropriate to each class, which difference is in turn in need of justification. The second uncertainty argument is a practical uncertainty argument, that whatever our theoretical obligations to the future, we cannot in practice take the interests of future people into account, because uncertainty about the distant future is so gross that we cannot determine what the likely consequences of actions upon it will be and therefore, however good our intentions to the people of the distant future, in practice we have no choice but to ignore their interests. Uncertainty is gross where certain incompatible hypotheses are as good as one another and there is no rational ground for choosing between them. The second uncertainty argument can also be put in this way: If moral principles are, like other principles, implicational in form, that is of such forms as 'if* has character h then x is wrong, for every (action) x', then what the argument claims is 154 R. and V. Routley that we can never obtain the information about future actions which would enable us to detach the antecedent of the implication. So even if moral principles theoretically apply to future people, in practice they cannot be applied to obtain clear conclusions or directions concerning contemporary action of the 'It is wrong to do x' type. Many of the assumptions of the second argument have to be conceded. If the distant future really is so grossly uncertain that in every case it is impossible to determine in any way that is better than chance what the effects of present action will be, and whether any given action will help or hinder future people, then moral principles, although they may apply theoretically to the future, will not be applicable in practice for obtaining any clear conclusions about how to act. Hence the distant future will impose no practical moral constraints on action. However, the argument is factually incorrect in assuming that the future is always so grossly uncertain or indeterminate. Admittedly there is often a high degree of uncertainty concerning the distant future, but as a matter of (contingent) fact it is not always so gross or sweeping as the argument has to assume. There are some areas where uncertainty is not so great as to exclude constraints on action, especially when account is taken of the point, noticed in connection with the first argument, that complete certainty is commonly not required for moral constraints and that all that may be needed in some cases is the creation of"a significant risk. Again there is considerable uncertainty about many factors which are not highly, or at all, morally relevant, but this does not extend to many factors which are of much greater importance to moral issues. For example, we may not have any idea what the fashions will be in a hundred years in girls' names or men's footwear, or what brands of ice cream people will be eating if any, but we do have excellent reason to believe, especially if we consider 3,000 years of history, that what people there are in a hundred years are likely to have material and psychic needs not entirely unlike our own, that they will need a healthy biosphere for a good life; that like us they will not be immune to radiation; that their welfare will not be enhanced by a high incidence of cancer or genetic defects, by the destruction of resources, or the elimination from the face of the earth of that wonderful variety of non-human life which at present makes it such a rich and interesting place. For this sort of reason, the second uncertainty argument should be rejected. While it is true that there are many areas in which the morally relevant information needed is uncertain or unavailable, and in which we cannot therefore determine satisfactorily how to act, there are certainly others in Obligations to the Future 155 which uncertainty in morally relevant areas is not so great as to preclude moral constraints on action, where we ascertain if not absolute certainties at least probabilities of the same sort of order as are considered sufficient for the application of moral principles in parallel contemporary cases, especially where spatially remote people are involved. The case of nuclear waste storage, and of uncertainty of the effects of it on future people, seems to be of the latter sort. Here there is no gross indeterminacy or uncertainty; it is simply not true that incompatible hypotheses about what may happen are as good as each other. It is plain that nuclear waste storage does impose significant risks of harm on future people, and, as we can see from the bus example, the significant risk of harm is enough in cases of this type to make moral constraints applicable. In terms of the defects of the preceding uncertainty arguments, we can see the corresponding defects in a number of widely employed uncertainty arguments used to write off probable harm to future people as outside the scope of proper consideration. Most of these popular moves employ both of the uncertainty arguments as suits the case, switching from one to the other in a way that is again reminiscent of sceptical moves. For example, we may be told that we cannot really take account of future people because we cannot be sure that they will exist or that their tastes and wants will not be completely different from our own, to the point where they will not suffer from our exhaustion of resources or from the things that would affect us (cf. Passmore [1]). But this is to insist upon complete certainty of a sort beyond what is required for the present and immediate future, where there is also commonly no guarantee that some disaster will not overtake those we are morally committed to. Again we may be told that there is no guarantee that future people will be worthy of any efforts on our part, because they may be morons or forever plugged into enjoyment- or other machines (Golding [12]). Even if one is prepared to accept the elitist approach presupposed - according to which only those who meet certain properly civilized or intellectual standards are eligible for moral consideration - what we are being handed in such arguments as a serious defeating consideration is again a mere outside possibility - like the sceptic who says that the solid-looking desk in front of us is perhaps only a facade, not because he has any particular reason for doing so, but because he hasn't looked around the back, drilled holes in it, etc. Neither the contemporary nor the historical situation gives any positive reason for supposing that a lapse into universal moronity or universal pleasure-machine escapism is a serious possibility, as opposed to a logical possibility. We can contrast 156 R. and V. Routley with these mere logical possibilities the very real historically supportable risks of escape of nuclear waste or decline of a civilization through destruction of its resource base. The possibilities just considered in these uncertainty arguments of sceptical character are not real possibilities. Another argument which may consider a real possibility, but still does not succeed in showing that it is acceptable to proceed with an action which would appear to be harmful to future people, is often introduced in the nuclear waste case. This is the argument that future people may discover a rigorously safe and permanent storage method for nuclear wastes before they are damaged by escaped waste material. Let us grant for the sake of the argument that this is a real possibility (though physical arguments may show that it is not). This still does not affect the fact that there is a significant risk of serious damage and that the creation of a significant risk is enough to rule out an action of this type as morally impermissible. In just the same way, future people may discover a cure for cancer, and the fact that this appears to be a real and not merely a logical possibility, does not make the action of the firm in the example discussed above, of producing a substance likely to cause cancer in future people, morally admissible. The fact that there was a real possibility of future people avoiding the harm would show that actions of these sorts were admissible only if what was required for inadmissibility was certainty of harm or a very high probability of it. In such cases, before such actions could be considered admissible, what would be required is far more than a possibility, real or not22 - it is at least the availability of an applicable, safe, and rigorously tested, not merely speculative, technique for achieving it, something that future people could reasonably be expected to apply to protect themselves. The strategy of most of these uncertainty arguments is fairly clear then, and may be brought out by looking yet again at the bus example, where the consigner says that he cannot be expected to take account of the effect of his actions on the passengers because they may find an effective way to deal with his parcel or some lucky or unlucky accident may occur, e.g. the bus may break down and they may all change to a different bus leaving the parcel behind, or the bus may crash, killing all the passengers before the container gets a chance to leak. These are all possibilities, of course, but there is no positive reason to believe that they are any more than that, that is they are not real possibilities. The strategy is to stress such outside possibilities in order to create the false impression that there is gross uncertainty about the future, that the real possibility that the container will Obligations to the Future 157 break should be treated in the same way as these mere logical possibilities, that uncertainty about the future is so great as to preclude the consigners' taking account of the passengers' welfare and of the real possibility of harm from his parcel, and thereby excuse his action. A related strategy is to stress a real possibility, such as finding a cure for cancer, and thereby imply that this removes the case for applying moral constraints .This move implicitly makes the assumptions of the first argument, that certainty, or at least a very high probability, of harm is required before an action can be judged morally inadmissible, and the point of stressing the real possibility of avoidance of damage is to show that this allegedly required high degree of certainty or probability cannot be attained. That is, the strategy draws attention to some real uncertainty implying that this is sufficient to defeat the application of moral constraints. But, as we have seen, this is often not so. An argument closely related to the uncertainty arguments is based on the non-existence and indeterminacy of the future.23 An item is indeterminate in a given respect if its properties in that respect are, as a matter of logic, not settled (nor are they settlable in a non-arbitrary fashion). The respects in which future items are indeterminate are well enough known for a few examples to serve as reminders: all the following are indeterminate: the population of Australia at 2001, its distribution, its age structure, the preferences of its members for folk music, wilderness, etc., the size and shape of Wollongong, the average number of rooms in its houses and in its office blocks, and so on. Philosophical discussion of such indeterminacy is as old as Aristotle's sea battle and as modern as truth-value gaps and fuzzy logics, and many positions have been adopted on the existence and determinacy of future items. Nevertheless theories that there are obligations to the future are not sensitive to the metaphysical position adopted concerning the existence or non-existence of the future. Any theory which denied obligations to the future on the metaphysical grounds that the future did not exist, and did not have properties, so that the present could not be related to it, would be committed to denying such obvious facts as that the present could causally influence the future, that present people could be great-grandparents of purely future people, and so on, and hence would have to be rejected on independent grounds. This is not to say that there are not important problems about the existence or non-existence of future items, problems which are perhaps most straightforwardly handled by a Meinongian position which allows that items which do not exist may have properties. The non-existence of the future 158 R. and V. Routley does raise problems for standard theories which buy the Ontological Assumption (the thesis that what does not exist does not have properties), especially given the natural (and correct) inclination to say that the future does not (now) exist; but such theories can adopt various strategies for coping with these problems (e.g. the adoption of a platonistic position according to which the future does now exist, or the allowance for certain sorts of relations between existents at different times), although the satisfactoriness of these strategies is open to question (cf. [4]). Thus whether or not the Ontological Assumption is assumed and however it is applied, it will be allowed that future items will have properties even if they do not have them now, and that is enough to provide the basis for moral concern about the future. Thus the thesis of obligations to the future does not presuppose any special metaphysical position on the existence of the future. If the non-existence of future items creates no special problems for obligations to the future, the same is not true of their indeterminacy. Whether the indeterminacy of future items is seen as a logical feature of the future which results from the non-existence of purely future items or whether one adopts a (mistaken) platonistic view of the future as existing and sees the indeterminacy as an epistemological one resulting from our inability to know the character of these entities - that is, we cannot completely know the future .though it exists and has a definite characterwhichever view we take indeterminacy still creates major difficulties for certain ethical theories and their treatment of the future. The difficulties arise for theories which appear to require a high level of determinacy with respect to the number and character of future items, in particular calculus-type theories such as utilitarianism in its usual forms, where the calculations are critically dependent on such information as numbers, totals, and averages, information which so far as the future is concerned is generally indeterminate. The fact that this numerical information is typically indeterminate means that insofar as head-count utilitarianism requires determinate information on numbers, it is in a similar position to theories discussed earlier; it may apply theoretically to future people, but since the calculations cannot be applied to them their interests will be left out of account. And, in fact, utilitarianism for the most part does not, and perhaps cannot, take future creatures and their interests seriously; there is little discussion as to how the difficulties or impossibility of calculations regarding the open future are to be obtained. Non-platonistic utilitarianism is in logical difficulty on this matter, while platonis- Obligations to the Future 159 tic utilitarianism - which faces a range of other objections - is inapplicable because of epistemic indeterminacy. We have yet another case of a theory of the sort that applies theoretically but in practice doesn't take the future seriously. But far from this showing that future people's interests should be left out of account, what these considerations show are deficiencies in these sorts of theories, which require excessive determinacy of information. This kind of information is commonly equally unavailable for the accepted areas of moral constraint, the present and immediate future; and the resolution of moral issues is often not heavily dependent on knowledge of such specific determinate features as numbers or other determinate features. For example, we do not need to know how many people there will be on the bus, how intelligent they are, what their preferences are or how badly they will be injured, in order to reach the conclusion that the consigner's action in despatching his parcel is a bad one. Furthermore, it is only the ability of moral considerations to continue to apply in the absence of determinate information about such things as numbers that makes it possible to take account of the possible effects of action, as the risks associated with action - something which is quite essential even for the present if moral considerations are to apply in the normal and accepted way. For it is essential in order to apply moral considerations in the accepted way that we consider alternative worlds, in order to take account of options, risks, and alternative outcomes; but these alternative or counterfactual worlds are not in so different a position from the future with respect to determinacy; for example, there is indeterminacy with respect to the number of people who may be harmed in the bus case or in apossible nuclear reactor melt-down. These alternative worlds, like the distant future, are indeterminate in some respects, but not totally indeterminate. It might still be thought that the indeterminacy of the future, for example with respect to number and exact character, would at least prevent the interest of future people being taken into account where there is a conflict with the present. Since their numbers are indeterminate and their interests unknown, how can we weigh their competing claims against those of the present and immediate future where this information is available in a more or less accurate form? The question is raised particularly by problems of sharing fixed quantities of resources among present and future people, when the numbers of the latter are indeterminate. Such problems are indeed difficult, but they are not resolved by ignoring the claims of the future, any more than the problems raised by the need to take account in decision-making of factors difficult to quantify are resolved by ignoring 160 R. and V. Routley such factors. Nor are such distributional problems as large and representative a class of moral problems concerning the future as the tendency to focus on them would suggest. It should be conceded then that there will be cases where the indeterminacy of aspects of the future will make conflicts very difficult or indeed impossible to resolve - a realistic ethical theory will not deliver a decision procedure - but there will equally be other conflict cases where the level of indeterminacy does not hinder resolution of the issue, e.g. the bus example which is a conflict case of a type. In particular, there will be many cases which are not solved by weighing numbers, numbers of interests, or whatever, cases for which one needs to know only the most general probable characteristics of future people. Moreover, even where numbers are relevant often only bounds will be required, exact numerical counts only being required where, for instance, margins are narrow; e.g. issues may be resolved as in parliament where a detailed vote (or division) is only required when the issue is close. It is certainly not necessary then to have complete determinacy to resolve all cases of conflict. The question we must ask then is what features of future people could disqualify them from moral consideration or reduce their claims to it to below those of present people? The answer is: in principle None. Prima facie moral principles are universalizable, and lawlike, in that they apply independently of position in space or in time, for example.24 But universalizability of principles is an outcome of those ethical theories which are capable of dealing satisfactorily with the present; in other words, a theory that did not allow properly for the future would be found to have defects as regards the present, to deal unjustly or unfairly with some present people, e.g. those remotely located, those outside some select subgroup such as (white-skinned) humans, etc. The only candidates for characteristics that would fairly rule out future people are the logical features we have been looking at, uncertainty and indeterminacy; what we have argued is that it would be far too sweeping to see these features as affecting the moral claims of future people in a general way. These special features only affect certain sorts of cases (e.g. the determination of best probable or practical course of action given only present information). In particular they do not affect cases of the sort being considered, the nuclear one, where highly determinate or certain information about the numbers and characteristics of the class likely to be harmed or certainty of damage are not required. To establish obligations to the future a full universalizability principle is not needed: it is enough to require that the temporal position of a person Obligations to the Future 161 cannot affect his entitlement to just and fair treatment, to full moral consideration;25 inversely that it is without basis to discriminate morally against a person in virtue of his temporal position. As a result of this universalizability, there is the same obligation to future people as to the present; and thus there is the same obligation to take account of them and their interests in what we do, to be careful in our actions, to take account of the probability (and not just the certainty) of our actions' causing harm or damage, and to see, other things being equal, that we do not act so as to rob future people of what is necessary for the chance of a good life. Uncertainty and indeterminacy do not free us of these obligations. If, in a closely comparable case concerning the present, the creation of a significant risk is enough to rule out an action as immoral, and there are no independent grounds for requiring greater certainty of harm in the future case under consideration, then futurity alone will not provide adequate grounds for proceeding with the action, thus discriminating against future people. Accordingly we cannot escape, through appeal to futurity, the conclusion tentatively reached in our first section, that proposals for nuclear development in the present state of technology for future waste disposal are immoral. IV. Overriding Consideration Arguments In the first part we noticed that the consigner's action could not be justified by purely economistic arguments, such as that his profits would rise, the firm or the village would be more prosperous, or by appealing to the fact that some possibly uncomfortable changes would otherwise be needed. We also observed that the principle on which this assessment was based, that one was not usually entitled to create a serious risk to others for these sorts of reasons, applied more generally and, in particular, applied to the nuclear case. For this reason the economistic arguments which are thus most commonly advanced to promote nuclear development - e.g. cheapness, efficiency, profitability for electricity utilities, and the need otherwise for uncomfortable changes such as restructuring of employment, investment, and consumption-do not even begin to show that the nuclear alternative is an acceptable one. Even if these economistic assumptions about benefits to present people were correct (and there is reason to doubt that most of them are),26 the arguments would fail because economics must operate within the framework of moral constraints, and not vice versa. 162 R. and V. Routley What one does have to consider, however, are moral conflict arguments, that is arguments to the effect that, unless the prima facie unacceptable alternative is taken, some even more unacceptable alternative is the only possible outcome, and will ensue. For example, in the bus case, the consigner may argue that his action is justified because unless it is taken the village will starve. It is by no means clear that even such a justification as this would be sufficient, especially where the risk to the passengers is high, as the case seems to become one of transfer of costs and risks onto others; but such a moral situation would no longer be so clearcut, and one would perhaps hesitate to condemn any action taken in such circumstances. Some of the arguments advanced to show moral conflict are based on competing duties to present people, and others on competing obligations to future people, both of which are taken to override the obligations not to impose on the future significant risk of serious harm. The structure of such moral conflict arguments is based crucially on the presentation of a genuine and exhaustive set of alternatives (or at least practical alternatives), and upon showing that the only alternatives to admittedly morally undesirable actions are even more undesirable ones. If some practical alternative which is not morally worse than the action to be justified is overlooked, suppressed, or neglected in the argument-for example, if in the bus case it turns out that the villagers have another option to starving or to the sending off of the parcel, namely earning a living in some other way - then the argument is defective and cannot readily be patched. We want to argue that suppression of practicable alternatives has occurred in the argument, designed to show that the alternatives to the nuclear option are even worse than the option itself, and that there are other factual defects in these arguments as well. In short, the arguments depend essentially on the presentation of false dichotomies. The first argument, the poverty argument, is that there is an overriding obligation to the poor, both the poor of the third world and the poor of industrialized countries. Failure to develop nuclear energy, it is often claimed, would amount to denying them the opportunity to reach the standard of affluence we currently enjoy and would create unemployment and poverty in the industrialized nations. The unemployment and poverty argument does not stand up to examination either for the poor of the industrial countries or for those of the third world. There is good evidence that large-scale nuclear energy will help to increase unemployment and poverty in the industrial world, through the Obligations to the Future 163 diversion of great amounts of available capital into an industry which is not only an exceptionally poor provider of direct employment, but also helps to reduce available jobs through encouraging substitution of energy use for labour use. 27 The argument that nuclear energy is needed for the third world is even less convincing. Nuclear energy is both politically and economically inappropriate for the third world, since it requires massive amounts of capital, requires numbers of imported scientists and engineers, and creates negligible employment, while politically it increases foreign dependence, adds to centralized entrenched power and reduces the chance for change in the oppressive political structures which are a large part of the problem.28 The fact that nuclear energy is not in the interests of people of the third world does not, of course, mean that it is not in the interests of, and wanted by, their rulers, the westernized and often military elites in whose interests the economies of these countries are usually organized; but it is not paternalistic to examine critically the demands these ruling elites may make in the name of the poor. The poverty argument then is a fraud. Nuclear energy will not be used to help the poor.29 Both for the third world and for the industrialized countries there are well-known energy-conserving alternatives and the practical option of developing other energy sources,30 alternatives which are morally acceptable and socially preferable to nuclear development, and which have far better prospects for helping the poor.31 The second major argument advanced to show moral conflict appeals to a set of supposedly overriding and competing obligations to future people. We have, it is said, a duty to pass on the immensely valuable things and institutions which our culture has developed. Unless our high-technological, high-energy industrial society is continued and fostered, our valuable institutions and traditions will fall into decay or be swept away. The argument is essentially that without nuclear power, without the continued level of material wealth it alone is assumed to make possible, the lights of our civilization will go out.32 . The lights-going-out argument raises rather sharply questions as to what is valuable in our society, and of what characteristics are necessary for a good society. These are questions which deserve much fuller treatment than we can allot them here, but a few brief points should be made. The argument adopts an extremely uncritical position with respect to existing high-technology societies, apparently assuming that they are uniformly and uniquely valuable; it also assumes that technological society is unmodifiable, that it can't be changed in the direction of energy 164 R. and V. Routley conservation or alternative energy sources without collapse. Such a society has to be accepted and assessed as a whole, and virtually unlimited supplies of energy are essential to maintain this whole. These assumptions are hard to accept. The assumption that technological society's energy patterns are unmodifiable is especially so - after all, it has survived events such as world wars which have required major social and technological restructuring and consumption modification. If western society's demands for energy are totally unmodifiable without collapse, not only would it be committed to a programme of increasing destruction, but one might ask what use its culture could be to future people who would very likely, as a consequence of this destruction, lack the resource base which the argument assumes to be essential in the case of contemporary society. There is also difficulty with the assumption of uniform valuableness; but if this is rejected the question becomes not: what is necessary to maintain existing high-technological society and its political institutions? but rather: what is necessary to maintain what is valuable in that society and the political institutions which are needed to maintain those valuable things? While it may be easy to argue that high energy consumption is necessary to maintain the political and economic status quo, it is not so easy to argue that it is essential to maintain what is valuable, and it is what is valuable, presumably, that we have a duty to pass on to the future. The evidence, e.g. from history, is that no very high level of material affluence or energy consumption is needed to maintain what is valuable. There is good reason in fact to believe that a society with much lower energy and resource consumption would better foster what is valuable than our own. But even if a radical change in these directions is independently desirable, as we believe it is, it is not necessary to presuppose such a change, in the short term at least, in order to see that the assumptions of the lights-going-out argument are wrong. No enormous reduction of wellbeing is required to consume less energy than at present, and certainly far less than the large increase over present levels of consumption which is assumed in the usual economic case for nuclear energy.33 What the nuclear strategy is really designed to do then is not to prevent the lights going out in western civilization, but to enable the lights to go on burning all the time - to maintain and even increase the wattage output of the Energy Extravaganza. In fact there is good reason to think that, far from the high energy consumption society fostering what is valuable, it will, especially if energy Obligations to the Future 165 is obtained by nuclear-fission means, be positively inimical to it. A society which has become heavily dependent upon an extremely high centralized, controlled, and garrisoned, capital- and expertise-intensive energy source, must be one which is highly susceptible to entrenchment of power, and one in which the forces which control this energy source, whether capitalist or bureaucratic, can exert enormous power over the political system and over people's lives, even more than they do at present. Very persuasive arguments have been advanced by civil liberties groups and others in a number of countries to suggest that such a society would tend to become authoritarian, if only as an outcome of its response to the threat posed by dissident groups in the nuclear situation.34 There are reasons to believe then that with nuclear development what we would be passing on to future generations would be some of the worst aspects of our society (e.g. the consumerism, growing concentration of power, destruction of the natural environment, and latent authoritarianism), while certain valuable aspects would be lost or threatened. Political freedom is a high price to pay for consumerism and energy extravagance. Again, as in the case of the poverty arguments, clear alternatives which do not involve such unacceptable consequences are available. The alternative to the high technology-nuclear option is not a return to the cave, the loss of all that is valuable, but the development of alternative technologies and life-styles which offer far greater scope for the maintenance and further development of what is valuable in our society than the highly centralized nuclear option.35 The lights-going-out argument, as a moral conflict argument, accordingly fails, because it also is based on a false dichotomy. Thus both the escape routes, the appeal to moral conflict and to the appeal to futurity, are closed. If then we apply the same standards of morality to the future as we acknowledge for the present - as we have argued we should - the conclusion that the proposal to develop nuclear energy on a large scale is a crime against the future is inevitable, since both the escape routes are closed. There are, of course, also many other grounds for ruling it out as morally unacceptable, for saying that it-is not only a crime against the distant future but also a crime against the present and immediate future. These other grounds for moral concern about nuclear energy, as it affects the present and immediate future, include problems arising from the possibility of catastrophic releases of radioactive fuel into the environment or of waste material following an accident such as reactor melt-down, of unscheduled discharges of radiation into the environment from a plant fault, of proli- 166 R. and V. Routley feration of nuclear weapons, and of deliberate release or threat of release of radioactive materials as a measure of terrorism or of extortion. All these are important issues, of much moral interest. What we want to claim, however, is that on the basis of its effects on the future alone, the nuclear option is morally unacceptable. Appendix Passmore's Treatment ofRawls, and What Really Happens on Rawls's Theory Passmore takes it that Rawls's theory yields an unconstrained position but, according to Rawls, the theory leads to quite the opposite result; namely, persons in different generations [and not merely neighbouring generations] have duties and obligations to one another just as contemporaries do. The present generation cannot do as it pleases but is bound by the principles that would be chosen in the original position to define justice between persons at different moments of time.. . . The derivation of these duties and obligations may seem at first a somewhat far-fetched application of the central doctrine. Nevertheless these requirements would be acknowledged in the original position [where the parties do not know to which generation they belong], and so the conception of justice as fairness covers these matters without any change in its basic idea. ([5], p. 293; the second insert is drawn from p. 287) Through judicious use of the veil of ignorance and the time of entry of parties to the original contract position, Rawls's contract theory, unlike simpler explicit contract theories, can yield definite obligations to distant future people,36 for example, we ought to save at a just rate for future people. But, as Rawls remarks (p. 284), 'the question of justice between generations . . . subjects any ethical theory to severe if not impossible tests'. It is doubtful that Rawls's theory as formulated passes the tests; for the theory as formulated does not yield the stated conclusion, but a conclusion inconsistent with the thesis that there are the same obligations to future people as to contemporaries. Exactly how these obligations arise from the initial agreement depends critically on the interpretation of the time of Obligations to the Future 167 entry of the parties into the agreement. Insofar as Rawls insists upon the present-time-of-entry interpretation (p. 139), he has to introduce supplementary motivational assumptions in order to (try to) secure the desired bondings between generations, in particular to ensure that the generation of the original position saves for any later generation, even their immediate successors ([5], p. 140 and p. 292). Rawls falls back on-what is as we have seen inadequate to the task, since it does not exclude one generation damaging another remote generation in a way that bypasses mutually successive generations - 'ties of sentiment between successive generations' (p. 292): to this limited extent Passmore has a point, for such a social contract on its own (without additional assumptions about the motives of the parties to the agreement) does not furnish obligations even to our immediate successors. This is indicative also of the unsatisfactory instability of Rawls's theory under changes, its sensitivity to the way the original agreement is set up, to the motivation of parties, their time of entry, what they can know, etc. To arrive at a more adequate account of obligations to the distant future under Rawls's theory, let us adopt, to avoid the additional, dubious and unsatisfactory, motivational assumptions Rawls invokes, one of the alternative - and non -equivalent - time-of-entry interpretations that Rawls lists (p. 146), that of persons alive at some time in simultaneous agreement. Let us call this, following Rawls's notation (on p. 140), interpretation 4b (it is perhaps unnecessary to assume for 4b any more than 4a that all people need be involved: it may be enough given the equivalencizing effect of the veil of ignorance that some are, and as with the particular quantifier it is quite unnecessary to be specific about numbers). Then of course the parties, since they are, for all they know, of different generations, will presumably agree on a just savings rate, and also to other just distribution principles, simply on the basis of Rawlsian rationality, i.e. advancing their own interests, without additional motivation assumptions. This more appealing omnitemporal interpretation of time of entry into the agreement, which gives a superior account of obligation to the future consistent with Rawls's claim, Rawls in some places puts down as less than best (p. 292) but in his most detailed account of the original position simply dismisses (p. 139): To conceive of the original position [as a gathering of people living at different times] would be to stretch fantasy too far; the conception would cease to be a natural guide to intuition. 168 R. and V. Rout ley This we question: it would be a better guide to intuition than a position (like 4a) which brings out intuitively wrong results; it is a more satisfactory guide, for example, to justice between generations than the present-timeof-entry interpretation, which fails conspicuously to allow for the range of potential persons (all of whom are supposed to qualify on Rawls's account for just treatment, cf. § 77). Moreover, it stretches fantasy no further than science fiction or than some earlier contract accounts.36 But it does require changes in the way the original position is conceived, and it does generate metaphysical difficulties for orthodox ontological views (though not to the same extent for the Meinongian view we prefer); for, to consider the latter, either time travel is possible or the original hypothetical position is an impossible situation, with people who live at different times assembled at the same time. The difficulties - of such an impossible meeting help to reveal that what Rawls's theory offers is but a colourful representation of obligations in terms of a contract agreed upon at a meeting. The metaphysical difficulties do not concern merely possible people, because all those involved are sometime-actual people; nor are there really serious difficulties generated by the fact that very many of these people do not exist, i.e. exist now. The more serious difficulties are either those of time travel, e.g. that future parties relocated into the present may be able to interfere with their own history, or, if time travel is ruled out logically or otherwise, that future parties may be advantaged (or disadvantaged) by their knowledge of history and technology, and that accordingly fairness is lost. As there is considerable freedom in how we choose to (re)arrange the original position, we shall suppose that time travel is rejected as a means of entering the original position. For much less than travel is required; some sort of limited communicational network which filters out, for example, all historical data (and all cultural or species dependent material) would suffice; and in any case if time travel were not excluded essentially the present-time-of-entry interpretation would serve, though fairness would again be put in doubt. The filtered communicational hook-up by which the omnitemporal position is engineered still has - if fairness is to be seen to be built into the decision making - to be combined with a reinterpreted veil of ignorance, so that parties do not know where they are located temporally any more than they know who they are characterwise. This implies, among other things, limitations on the parties' knowledge of factual matters, such as available technology and world and local history; for otherwise parties could work out their location, temporal or spatial. For example, if some party knew, as Rawls supposes, Obligations to the Future 169 the general social facts, then he would presumably be aware of the history of his time and so of where history ends, that is of the date of his generation, his time (his present), and so be aware of his temporal location. These are already problems for Rawls's so-called 'present-time-ofentry interpretation' - it is, rather, a variable-time-of-entry interpretation - given that the parties may be, as Rawls occasionally admits (e.g. p. 287), of any one generation, not necessarily the present: either they really do have to be ofthepresent time or they cannot be assumed to know as much as Rawls supposes.37 There is, however, no reason why the veil of ignorance should not be extended so as to avoid this problem; and virtually any extension that solves the problem for the variable-time-of-entry interpretation should serve, so it seems, for the omnitemporal one. We shall assume then that the parties know nothing which discloses their respective locations (i.e. in effect we write in conditions for universalizability of principles decided upon). There are still gaps between the assumptions of the omnitemporal position as roughly sketched and the desired conclusion concerning obligations to the future, but (the matter is beginning to look non-trivially provable given not widely implausible assumptions and) the intuitive arguments are as clear as those in [5], indeed they simply restate arguments to obligations given by Rawls. Rawls's theory, under interpretation 4b, admits of nice application to the problems of just distribution of material resources and of nuclear power. The just distribution, or rate of usage, of material resources38 over time is an important conservation issue to which Rawls's theory seems to apply, just as readily, and in a similar fashion, to that in which it applies to the issue of a just rate of savings. In fact the argument from the original position for a just rate of saving - whatever its adequacy - can by simply mimicked to yield an argument for just distribution of resources over generations. Thus, for example: persons in the original position are to ask themselves how much they would be willing to save [i.e. conserve] at each stage of advance on the assumption that all other generations are to save at the same rate [conserve resources to the same extent]. . . . In effect, then, they must choose a just savings principle [resources distribution principle] that assigns an appropriate rate of accumulation to [degree of resource conservation at] each level of advance. ([5], p. 287; our bracketed options give the alternative argument) 170 R. and V. Routley Just as 'they try to piece together a just savings schedule' (p. 289), so they can try to piece together a just resource distribution policy. Just as a case for resource conservation can be made out by appeal to the original position, since it is going to be against the interests of, to the disadvantage of, later parties to find themselves in a resource depleted situation (thus, on Rawlsian assumptions, they will bargain hard for a share of resources), so, interestingly, a case against a rapid programme of nuclear power development can be devised. The basis of a case against large-scale nuclear development is implicit in Rawls's contract theory under interpretation 4b, though naturally the theory is not applied in this sort of way by Rawls. To state the case in its crude but powerful form: people from later generations in the original position are bound to take it as against their interests to simply carry the waste can for energy consumed by an earlier generation. (We have already argued that they will find no convincing overriding considerations that make it worth their while to carry the waste can.) Thus not only has Passmore misrepresented the obligations to the future that Rawls's theory admits; he is also wrong in suggesting (p. 87 and p. 91) that Rawls's theory cannot justify a policy of resource conservation which includes reductions in present consumption. There is, in this connection, an accumulation of errors in Passmore, some of which spill over to Rawls, which it is worth trying to set out. First, Passmore claims ([1], p. 86; cf. also p. 90) that 'Rawls does not so much mention the saving of natural resources'. In fact the 'husbanding of natural resources' is very briefly considered ([5], p. 271). It is true, however, that Rawls does not reveal any of the considerable power that his theory, properly interpreted, has for natural resource conservation, as implying a just distribution of natural resources over time. Secondly, Passmore attempts ([1], pp. 87 ff.) to represent the calls of conservationists for a reduction in present resource usage and for a more just distribution as a call for heroic self-sacrifices; this is part of his more general attempt to represent every moral constraint with respect to the non-immediate future as a matter of self-sacrifice. 'Rawls's theory', Passmore says (on p. 87), 'leaves no room for heroic sacrifice', and so, he infers, leaves no room for conservation. Not only is the conclusion false, but the premiss also: Rawls's theory allows for supererogation, as Rawls explains ([5], p. 117). But resource conservation is, like refraining from nuclear development, not a question of heroic self-sacrifice; it is in part a question of obligations or duties to the distant future. And Rawls's theory allows not only for obligations as well as supererogation, but also for natural duties. Rawls's Obligations to the Future 171 contract, unlike the contracts of what is usually meant by a 'contract theory', is by no means exhaustive of the moral sphere: But even this wider [contract] theory fails to embrace all moral relationships, since it would seem to include only our relations with other persons and to leave out of account how we are to conduct ourselves towards,animals and the rest of nature. I do not contend that the contract notion offers a way to approach these questions which are certainly of the first importance; and I shall have to put them aside, (p. 17) The important class of obligations beyond the scope of the contract theory surely generates obligations between persons which even the wider contract theory likewise cannot explain. The upshot is that such a contract account, even if sufficient for the determination of obligations, is not necessary. To this extent Rawls' s theory is not a full social contract theory at all. However, Rawls appears to lose sight of the fact that his contract theory delivers only a sufficient condition when he claims, for example (p. 298), that 'one feature of the contract doctrine is that it places an upper bound on how much a generation can be asked to save for the welfare of later generations'. For greater savings may sometimes be required to meet obligations beyond those that the contract doctrine delivers. In short, Rawls appears to have slipped into assuming, inconsistently, that his contract theory is a necessary condition. Although Rawls's theory caters for justice between generations and allows the derivation of important obligations to people in the distant future, the full theory is far from consistent on these matters and there are significant respects in which Rawls does not take justice to the future seriously. The most conspicuous symptoms of this are that justice to the future is reduced to a special case, justice between generations, and that the only aspect of justice between generations that Rawls actually considers is a just savings rate; there is, for example, no proper examination of the just distribution of resources among generations, though these resources, Rawls believes, provide the material base of the just institutions that he wants to see maintained. In fact Rawls strongly recommends a system of markets as a just means for the allocation of most goods and services, recognizing their well-known limitations only in the usual perfunctory fashion ([5], pp. 270 ff.). Yet market systems are limited by a narrow time horizon, and are quite ill-equipped to allocate resources in a just fashion 172 R. and V. Rout ley over a time span of several generations. Similarly Rawls's endorsement of democratic voting procedures as in many cases a just method of determining procedures depends upon the assumptions that everyone with ah interest is represented. But given his own assumptions about obligations to the future and in respect of potential persons this is evidently not the case. Catering in a just fashion for the interests of future people poses serious problems for any method of decision that depends upon people being present to represent their own interests. Some of the more conservative, indeed reactionary, economic assumptions in Rawls emerge with the assumption that all that is required for justice between generations is a just savings rate, that all we need to pass on to the future are the things that guarantee appropriate savings such as capital, factories, and machines. But the transmission of these things is quite insufficient for justice to the future, and neither necessary nor sufficient as a foundation for a good life for future generations. What is required for justice is the transmission in due measure of what is valuable. Rawls has, however, taken value accumulation as capital accumulation, thereby importing one of the grossest economic assumptions, that capital reflects value. But of course the accumulation of capital may conflict with the preservation of what is valuable. It is for this sort of reason (and thus, in essence, because of the introduction of supplementary economistic theses which are not part of the pure contract theory) that Rawls's theory is a reactionary one from an environmental point of view; on the theory as presented (i.e. the contract theory plus all the supplementary assumptions) there is no need to preserve such things as wilderness or natural beauty. The savings doctrine supposes that everything of value for transmission to the future is negotiable in the market or tradeable; but then transmission of savings can by no means guarantee that some valuable things, not properly represented in market systems, are not eliminated or not passed on, thereby making future people worse off. It becomes evident in this way, too, how culturally-bound Rawls's idea of ensuring justice to future generations through savings is. It is not just that the idea does not apply, without a complete overhaul, to non-industrial societies such as those of hunter-gatherers; it does not apply to genuinely post-industrial societies either. Consideration of such alternative societies suggests that whafis required, in place of capital accumulation, is that we pass on what is necessary for a good life, that we ensure that the basics are fairly distributed over time and not eroded, e.g. that in the case of the forest people that the forest is maintained. The narrowness of Rawls's picture, Obligations to the Future 173 which makes no due allowance for social or cultural diversity (from the original contractual position on) or for individual diversity arises in part from his underlying and especially narrow socio-economic assumption as to what people want: What men want is meaningful work in free association with others, these associations regulating their relations to one another within a framework of just basic institutions. ([5], p. 290) This may be what many Harvard men want; but as a statement of what men want it supplies neither sufficient nor even necessary conditions.39 NOTES 1 Thus according to the Fox Report ([2], p. 110; our italics). There is at present no generally accepted means by which high level waste can be permanently isolated from the environment and remain safe for very long periods. . . . Permanent disposal of high-level solid wastes in stable geological formations is regarded as the most likely solution, but has yet to be demonstrated as feasible. It is not certain that such methods and disposal sites will entirely prevent radioactive releases following disturbances caused by natural processes or human activity. The Fox Report also quoted approvingly ([2], p. 187; our italics) the conclusion of the British (Flowers) Report [6]: There should be no commitment to a large programme of nuclear fission power until it has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that a method exist s to ensure the safe containment of long-lived, highly radioactive waste for the indefinite future. Although the absence of a satisfactory storage method has been conceded by some leading proponents of nuclear development, e.g. Weinberg ([3], pp. 32-33), it is now disputed by others. In particular, the headline for Cohen [15], which reads 'A substantial body of evidence indicates that the high level radioactive wastes generated by U.S. nuclear power plants can be stored satisfactorily in deep geological formations', has suggested to many readers - what it was no doubt intended to suggest- that there is really no problem about the disposal of radioactive wastes after all. Cohen presents, however, no new hard evidence, no evidence not already available to the British and Australian Commissions ([2] and [6]). Moreover the evidence Cohen does outline fails conspicuously to measure up to the standards rightly required by the Flowers and Fox Reports. Does Cohen offer a commercial-scale procedure for waste disposal which can be demonstrated as safe? Far from it: 174 R. and V. Routley The detailed procedures for handling the high-level wastes are not yet definite, but present indications are that. . . . (Cohen [1], p. 24; our italics) Does Cohen 'demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt' the long-term safety of burial of wastes, deep underground? Again, far from it: On the face of it such an approach appears to be reasonably safe. . . . (p. 24; our italics) Cohen has apparently not realized what is required. At issue here are not so much scientific or empirical issues as questions of methodology, of standards of evidence required for claims of safety, and above all, of values, since claims of safety, for example, involve implicit evaluations concerning what counts as an acceptable risk, an admissible cost, etc. In the headline 'a substantial body of evidence . . . indicates that. . . wastes . . . can be stored satisfactorily' the key words (italicized) are evaluative or elastic, and the strategy of Cohen's case is to adopt very low standards for their application. But in view of what is at stake it is hardly acceptable to do this, to dress up in this way what are essentially optimistic assurances and untested speculations about storage, which in any case do little to meet the difficulties and uncertainties that have been widely pointed out as regards precisely the storage proposals Cohen outlines, namely human or natural interference or disturbance. 2 See [18], pp. 24-25. 3 On all these points, see [14], esp. p. 141. According to the Fox Report ([2], p. 110): Parts of the reactor structure will be highly radioactive and their disposal could be very difficult. There is at present no experience of dismantling a full size reactor. 4 See, in particular, The Union of Concerned Scientists, The Nuclear Fuel Cycle, Friends of the Earth Energy Paper, San Francisco 1973, p. 47; also [3], p. 32 and [14], p. 149. 5 As the discussion in [14], pp. 153-7, explains. 6 Cf. [17], pp. 35-36, [18] and, for much detail, J. R. Goffman and A. R. Tamplin, Poisoned Power, Rodale Press, Emmau Pa. 1971. 7 On the pollution and waste disposal record of the infant nuclear industry, see [14] and [17]. The record of many countries on pollution control, where in many cases available technologies for reducing or removing pollution are not applied because they are considered too expensive or because they adversely affect the interests of some powerful group, provides clear historical evidence that the problem of nuclear waste disposal would not end simply with the devising of a 'safe' technology for disposal, even if one could be devised which provided a sufficient guarantee of safety and was commercially feasible. The fact that present economic and political arrangements are overwhelmingly weighted in favour of the interests and concerns of (some) contemporary humans makes it not unrealistic to expect the long-term nuclear waste disposal, if it involved any significant cost at all, when public concern about the issue died down, would be seen to conflict with the interests of contemporary groups, and that these latter interests would in many cases be favoured. Nor, as the history of movements such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament shows, could generalized public concern in the absence of direct personal interest, be relied upon to be sustained for long enough to ensure implementation of costly or troublesome long-term disposal methods - even in those places where public concern exists and is a politically significant force. It must be stressed then that the problem is not merely one of disposal technique. Historical and other evidence points to the conclusion that many of the most important risks associated with nuclear waste disposal are not of the kind which might be amenable Obligations to the Future 175 to technical solutions in the laboratory. A realistic assessment of potential costs to the future from nuclear development cannot overlook these important non-technical risk factors. 8 Of course the effect on people is not the only factor which has to be taken into consideration in arriving at a moral judgment. Nuclear radiation, unlike most ethical theories, does not confine its scope to human life. But since the harm nuclear development is likely to cause to non-human life can hardly improve its case, it suffices if the case against it can be made out solely in terms of its effects on human life in the conventional way. 9 Proponents of nuclear power often try to give the impression that future people will not just bear costs from nuclear development but will also be beneficiaries, because nuclear powerprovides an 'abundant' or even 'unlimited' source of energy; thus Weinberg ([3], p. 34): 'an all but infinite source of relatively cheap and clean energy'. A good example of an attempt to create the impression that 'abundant' and 'cheap' energy from nuclear fission will be available to 'our descendants', i.e. all future people, is found in the last paragraph of Cohen [15]. Such claims are most misleading, since fission power even with the breeder reactor has only about the same prospective lifetime as coal-produced electricity (a point that can be derived using data in A. Parker, 'World Energy Resources: A Survey', Energy Policy, Vol. 3 [1975], pp. 58-66), and it is quite illegitimate to assume that nuclear fusion, for which there are still major unsolved problems, will have a viable, clean technology by the time fission runs out, or, for that matter, that it ever will. Thus while some few generations of the immediate future may obtain some benefits as well as costs, there is a very substantial chance that tho se of the more distant future will obtain nothing but costs. 10 These feelings, of which Smith's and Hume's sympathy is representative, are but the feeling echoes of obligation. At most, sympathy explains the feeling of obligation or lack of it, and this provides little guide as to whether there is an obligation or not - unless one interprets moral sympathy, the feeling of having a obligation, or being obligated, itself as a sufficient indication of obligation, in which case moral sympathy is a non-explanatory correlate in the feelings department of obligation itself and cannot be truly explanatory of the ground of it; unless, in short, moral sympathy reduces to an emotive rewrite of moral obligation. 11 Elsewhere in [1] Passmore is especially exercised that our institutions and intellectual traditions - presumably only the better ones - should be passed on to posterity, and that we should strive to make the world a better place, if not eventually an ideal one. 12 This is not the only philosophically important issue in environmental ethics on which Passmore is inconsistent. Consider his: 'over-arching intention: to consider whether the solution of ecological problems demands a moral or metaphysical revolution' (p. x), whether the West needs a new ethic and a new metaphysics. Passmore's answer in [1] is an emphatic No. Only insofar as Western moralists have [made various erroneous suggestions] can the West plausibly be said to need a 'new ethic'. What it needs, for the most part, is not so much a 'new ethic' as adherence to a perfectly familiar ethic. For the major sources of our ecological disasters - apart from ignorance - are greed and shortsightedness, which amount to much the same thing. . . There is no novelty in the view that greed is evil; no need of a new ethic to tell us as much. (p. 187) 'The view that the West now needs. . . a new concept of nature' is similarly dismissed (p. 186, cf. p. 72). But in his paper [1*] (i.e. 'Attitudes to Nature', Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures, Vol. 8, Macmillan, London 1975), which is said to be an attempt to bring together and to reformulate some of the basic philosophical themes of [1], Passmore's answer is Yes, and quite different themes, inconsistent with those of [1], are advanced: 176 R. and V. Routley [T]he general conditions I have laid down . . . have not been satisfied in most of the traditional philosophies of nature. To that degree it is true, I think, that we do need a 'new metaphysics' which is genuinely not anthropocentric. . . . A 'new metaphysics', if it is not to falsify the facts, will have to be naturalistic, but not reductionist. The working out of such a metaphysics is, in my judgement, the most important task which lies ahead of philosophy. ([1*], pp. 260-1) A new ethic accompanies this new metaphysics. The emergence of new moral attitudes to nature is bound up, then, with the emergence of a more realistic philosophy of nature. That is the only adequate foundation for effective ecological concern. ([1*], p. 264) This is a far cry from the theme of [1] that ecological problems can be solved within the traditions of the West. 13 Put differently, the causal linkage can bypass intermediate generations, especially given action at a temporal distance: the chain account implies that there are no moral constraints in initiating such causal linkages. The chain picture accordingly seems to presuppose an unsatisfactory Humean model of causation, demanding contiguity and excluding action at a distance. 14 Golding we shall concede to Passmore, though even here the case is not clearcut. For Golding writes towards the end of his article ([12], p. 96): My discussion, until this point, has proceeded on the view that we have obligations to future generations. But do we? I am not sure that the question can be answered in the affirmative with any certainty. I shall conclude this note with a very brief discussion of some of the difficulties. All of Passmore's material on Golding is drawn from this latter and, as Golding says, 'speculative' discussion. 15 There is no textual citation for Bentham at all for the chapter of [1] concerned, viz. Ch. 4, 'Conservation'. 16 As Passmore himself at first concedes ([1], p. 84): If, as Bentham tells us, in deciding how to act men ought to take account of the effects of their actions on every sentient being, they obviously ought to take account of the pleasure and pains of the as yet unborn. 17 Neither rightness nor probable lightness in the hedonistic senses correspond to these notions in the ordinary sense; so at least [13] argues, following much anti-utilitarian literature. 18 On this irrationality different theories agree: the rational procedure, for example according to the minimax rule for decision-making under uncertainty, is to minimize that outcome which maximizes harm. 19 Discount, or bank, rates in the economists' sense are usually set to follow the market (cf. P. A. Samuelson, Economics, 7th ed., McGraw-Hill, New York 1967, p. 351). Thus the rates have little moral relevance. 20 Cf. Rawls [5], p. 287: 'From a moral point of view there are no grounds for discounting future well-being on the basis of pure time preference.' 21 What the probabilities would be depends on the theory of probability adopted: a Carnapian theory, e.g., would lead back to the unconstrained position. Obligations to the Future 177 22 A real possibility is one which there is evidence for believing could eventuate. A real possibility requires producible evidence for its consideration. The contrast is with mere logical possibility. 23 Thus, to take a simple special case, economists dismiss distant future people from their assessments of utility, welfare, etc., on the basis of their non-existence; cf. Ng ('the utility of a non-existent person is zero') and Harsanyi ('only existing people [not even "nonexisting potential individuals"] can have real utility levels since they are the only ones able to enjoy objects with a positive utility, suffer from objects with a negative utility, and feel indifferent to objects with zero utility') (see Appendix B of Y. K. Ng, 'Preference, Welfare, and Social Welfare', paper presented at the Colloquium on Preference, Choice and Value Theory, RSSS, Australian National University, August 1977, pp. 24, 26-27). Non-existent people have no experiences, no preferences; distant future people do not exist; therefore distant future people have no utility assignments - so the sorites goes. But future people at least will have wants, preferences, and so on, and these have to be taken into account in adequate utility assessments (which should be assessed over afuture time horizon), no matter how much it may complicate or defeat calculations. 24 There are problems about formulating universalizability satisfactorily, but they hardly affect the point. The requisite universalizability can in fact be satisfactorily brought out from the semantical analysis of deontic notions such as obligation, and indeed argued for on the basis of such an analysis which is universal in form. The lawlikeness requirement, which can be similarly defended, is essentially that imposed on genuine scientific laws by logical empiricists (e.g. Carnap and Hempel), that such laws should contain no proper names or the like, no reference to specific locations or times. 25 Such a principle is explicit both in classical utilitarianism (e.g. Sidgwick [11], p. 414), and in a range of contract and other theories from Kant and Rousseau toRawls ([5], p. 293). How the principle is argued for will depend heavily, however, on the underlying theory; and we do not want to make our use depend heavily on particular ethical theories. 26 See esp. R. Lanoue, NuclearPlants:The MoreTheyBuild, The More You Pay, Centerfor Study of Responsive Law, Washington DC 1976; also [14], pp. 212 ff. 27 On all these points see R. Grossman and G. Daneker, Guide to Jobs and Energy, Environmentalists for Full Employment, Washington DC 1977, pp. 1-7, and also the details supplied in substantiating the interesting case of Commoner [7]. On the absorption of available capital by the nuclear industry, see as well [18], p. 23. On the employment issues, see too H. E. Daly in [9], p. 149. A more fundamental challenge to the poverty argument appears in I. Illich, Energy and Equality, Calder & Boyars, London 1974, where it is argued that the sort of development nuclear energy represents is exactly the opposite of what the poor need. 28 For much more detail on the inappropriateness see E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, Blond & Briggs, London 1973. As to the capital and other requirements, see [2], p. 48, and also [7] and [9]. For an illuminating look at the sort of development high-energy technology will tend to promote in the so-called underdeveloped countries, see the paper of Waiko and other papers in the Melanesian Environment (ed. by J. H. Winslow), Australian National University Press, Canberra 1977. 29 This fact is implicitly recognized in [2], p. 56. 30 A useful survey is given in A. Lovins, Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken, Friends of the Earth Australia, 1977 (reprinted from Foreign Affairs, October 1976); see also [17], [6], [7], [14], pp. 233 ff., and Schumacher, op. cit. 31 This is also explained in [2], p. 56. 32 An argument like this is suggested in Passmore [1], Chs. 4 and 7, with respect to the question of saving resources. In Passmore this argument for the overriding importance of passing on contemporary culture is underpinned by what appears to be a future- 178 R. and V. Routley directed ethical version of the Hidden Hand argument of economics - that, by a coincidence which if correct would indeed be fortunate, the best way to take care of the future (and perhaps even the only way to do so, since do-good intervention is almost certain to go wrong) is to take proper care of the present and immediate future. The argument has all the defects of the related Chain Argument discussed above and others. 33 See [14], p. 66, p. 191, and also [7]. 34 For such arguments see esp. M. Flood and R. Grove-White, Nuclear Prospects. A Comment on the Individual, the State and Nuclear Power, Friends of the Earth, Council for the Protection of Rural England and National Council for Civil Liberties, London 1976. 35 For a recent sketch of one such alternative which is outside the framework of the conventional option of centralized bureaucratic socialism, see E. Callenbach's novel, Ecotopia, Banyan Tree Books, Berkeley, California 1975. For the outline of a liberation socialist alternative see Radical Technology (ed. by G. Boyle and P. Harper), Undercurrents Limited, London 1976, and references therein. 36 Some earlier contract theories also did. Burke's contract (in E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Dent, London 1910, pp. 93-94) 'becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are not yet born'. Thus Burke's contract certainly appears to lead to obligations to distant future generations. Needless to say, there are metaphysical difficulties, which however Burke never considers, about contracts between parties at widely separated temporal locations. 37 Several of the preceding points we owe to M. W. Jackson. 38 Resources such as soil fertility and petroleum could even be a primary social goods on Rawls's very hazy general account of these goods ([5], pp. 62, 97): are these 'something a rational man wants whatever else he wants'? The primary social goods should presumably be those which are necessary for the good and just life -which will however vary with culture. 39 We have benefited from discussion with Ian Hughes and Frank Muller and useful comments on the paper from Brian Martin and Derek Browne. REFERENCES [1] J. Passmore, Man's Responsibility for Nature, Duckworth, London 1974. [2] Ranger Uranium Environmental Inquiry First Report, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra 1977. [3] A. M. Weinberg, 'Social Institutions and Nuclear Energy", Science, Vol. 177 (July 1972), pp. 27-34. • [4] R. Routley, 'Exploring Meinong's Jungle II. Existence is Existence Now', Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic (to appear). [5] J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1971. [6] Nuclear Power and the Environment. Sixth Report of the British Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, London 1976. [7] B. Commoner, The Poverty of Power, Knopf, New York 1976. [8] G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1903. [9] B. Commoner, H. Boksenbaum and M. Corr (Eds.), Energy and Human Welfare - A Critical Analysis, Vol. III, Macmillan, New York 1975. Obligations to the Future 179 [10] J. Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, Vol. 1, published under the superintendence of J. Bowring, with an intro. by J. H. Burton; William Tait, Edinburgh 1843. [11] H. Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, Macmillan, London 1962 (reissue). [12] M. P. Golding, 'Obligations to Future Generations', Monist, Vol. 56 (1972), pp. 85-99. [13] R. and V. Routley, 'An Expensive Repair Kit for Utilitarianism', presented at the Colloquium on Preference, Choice and Value Theory, RSSS, Australian National University, August 1977. [14] R. Nader and J. Abbotts, The Menace of Atomic Energy, Outback Press, Melbourne 1977. [15] B. L. Cohen, 'The Disposal of Radioactive Wastes from Fission Reactors', Scientific American, Vol. 236 (June 1977), pp. 22-31. [16] S. McCracken, 'The Waragainst the Atom' .Commentary (September 1977), pp. 33-47. [17] A. B. Lovins and J. H. Price, Non-Nuclear Futures: The Case for an Ethical Energy Strategy, Friends of the Earth International, San Francisco 1975. [18] A. Roberts, "The Politics of Nuclear Power', Arena, No. 41 (1976), pp. 22-47.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Nuclear energy and obligations to the future Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Routley</a> <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=val+routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Val Routley</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Prometheus Books. <a href="https://manuscripts.library.uq.edu.au/index.php/uqfl291" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Richard Sylvan Papers, UQFL291</a>. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1981 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Manuscript https://www.antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/c89ac283cca67c1d1891cadce5f43e34.pdf 7497b1a142a2ee74e689488a2bfa234a PDF Text Text Inquiry, 21, 133-79 Nuclear Energy and Obligations to the Future R. and V. Routley Plumwood Mountain, Braidwood, Australia The paper considers the morality of nuclear energy development as it concerns future people, especially the creation of highly toxic nuclear wastes requiring longterm storage. On the basis of an example with many parallel moral features it is argued that the imposition of such costs and risks on the future is morally unacceptable. The paper goes on to examine in detail possible ways of escaping this conclusion, especially the escape route of denying that moral obligations of the appropriate type apply to future people. The bulk of the paper comprises discussion of this philosophical issue, including many arguments against assigning obligations to the future drawn both from analyses of obligation and from features of the future such as uncertainty and indeterminacy. A further escape through appeal to moral conflict is also considered, and in particular two conflict arguments, the Poverty and Lights-going-out arguments are briefly discussed. Both these escape routes are rejected and it is concluded that if the same standards of behaviour are applied to the future as to the present, nuclear energy development is morally unacceptable. I. The Bus Example Suppose we consider a bus, a bus which we hope is to make a very long journey. This bus, a third world bus, carries both passengers and freight. The bus sets down and picks up many different passengers in the course of its long journey and the drivers change many times, but because of the way the bus line is managed and the poor service on the route it is nearly always full to overcrowded, with passengers hanging off the back, and as in Afghanistan, passengers riding on the roof, and chickens and goats in the freight compartment. Early in the bus's journey someone consigns on it, to a far distant destination, a package containing a highly toxic and explosive gas. This is packaged in a very thin container, which as the consigner well knows is unlikely to contain the gas for the full distance for which it is consigned, and certainly will not do so if the bus should encounter any trouble, for example if there is a breakdown and the interior of the bus becomes very hot, if the bus should strike a very large bump or pothole of the sort commonly found on some of the bad roads it has to traverse, or if some 1 �134 R. and V. Routley passenger should interfere deliberately or inadvertently with the cargo or perhaps try to steal some of the freight, as also frequently happens. All of these things, let us suppose, have happened on some of the bus's previous journeys. If the container should break the resulting disaster would probably kill at least some of the people and animals on the bus, while others could be maimed or contract serious diseases. There does not seem much doubt about what most of us would say about the morality of the consigner's action, and there is certainly no doubt about what the passengers would say. The consigner's action in putting the safety of the occupants of the bus at risk is appalling. What could excuse such an action, what sort of circumstances might justify it, and what sort of case could the consigner reasonably put up? The consigner might say that it is by no means certain that the gas will escape; he himself is an optimist and therefore feels that such unfavourable possible outcomes should be ignored. In any case the bus might have an accident and the passengers be killed long before the container gets a chance to leak; or the passengers might change to another bus and leave the lethal parcel behind. He might say that it is the responsibility of the passengers and the driver to ensure that the journey is a smooth one, and that if they fail to do so, the results are not his fault. He might say that the journey is such a long one that many of the passengers may have become mere mindless vegetables or degenerate wretches about whose fate no decent person need concern himself, or that they might not care about losing their lives or health or possessions anyway by that time. Most of these excuses will seem little more than a bad joke, and certainly would not usually be reckoned any sort of justification. The main argument the consigner of the lethal parcel employs, however, is that his own pressing needs justify his actions. He has no option but to consign his potentially lethal parcel, he says, since the firm he owns, and which has produced the material as a by-product, is in bad financial straits and cannot afford to produce a better container or to stop the production of the gas. If the firm goes out of business, the consigner says, his wife will leave him, and he will lose his family happiness, the comfortable way of life to which he has become accustomed and sees now as a necessity; his employees will lose their jobs and have to look for others; not only will the firm's customers be inconvenienced but he, the consigner, will have to break some business contracts; the inhabitants of the local village through loss of spending and cancellation of the Multiplier Effect will suffer finan- �Obligations to the Future 135 cial hardship, and, worst of all, the tiny flow of droplets that the poor of the village might receive (theoretically at any rate) as a result of the trickling down of these good things would dry up entirely. In short, some basic and some perhaps uncomfortable changes will be needed in the village. Even if the consigner's story were accepted at face value - and it would be wise to look critically at his story - only someone whose moral sensibilities had been paralysed by the disease of galloping economism could see such a set of considerations, based on 'needs', comfort, and the goal of local prosperity, as justifying the consigner's action. One is not generally entitled to thus simply transfer the risks and costs arising from one's own life onto other uninvolved parties, to get oneself out of a hole of one's own making by creating harm or risk of harm to someone else who has had no share in creating the situation. To create serious risks and costs, especially risks to life or health for such others, simply to avoid having to make some changes to a comfortable life style, or even for a somewhat better reason, is usually thought deserving of moral condemnation, and sometimes considered a crime; for example, the action of a company in creating risks to the lives or health of its workers or customers to prevent itself from going bankrupt. What the consigner says may be an explanation of his behaviour, but it is not a justification. The problem raised by nuclear waste disposal is by no means a perfect analogy to the bus case, since, for example, the passengers on the nuclear bus cannot get off the bus or easily throw out the lethal package. In many crucial moral respects, however, the nuclear waste storage problem as it affects future people, the passengers in the bus we are considering, resembles the consignment of the faultily packaged lethal gas. Not only are rather similar moral principles involved, but a rather similar set of arguments to the lamentable excuses the consigner presents have been seriously put up to justify nuclear development, the difference being that in the nuclear case these arguments have been widely accepted. There is also some parallel in the risks involved; there is no known safe way to package the highly toxic wastes generated by nuclear plants that will be spread around the world if large-scale nuclear development goes ahead.1 The wastes problem will not be a slight one, with each one of the more than 2,000 reactors envisaged by the end of the century, producing on average annual wastes containing one thousand times the radioactivity of the Hiroshima bomb.2 The wastes include not merely the spent fuels and their radioactive by-products, but also everything they contaminate, from fuel containers to the thousands of widely distributed decommissioned nuclear �136 R. and V. Routley reactors which will have to be abandoned, still in a highly radioactive condition, after the expiry of their expected lifetimes of about thirty years, and which have been estimated to require perhaps one and a half million years to reach safe levels of radioactivity.3 The wastes must be kept suitably isolated from the environment for their entire active lifetime; for fission products the required storage period averages a thousand years or so, and for the actinides (transuranic elements) which include plutonium, there is a half-million to a million-year storage problem.4 Serious problems have arisen with both short-term and proposed longterm methods of storage, even with the comparatively small quantities of waste that have been produced over the last twenty years.5 With present known short-term surface methods of storage there is a continued need for human intervention to keep the material isolated from the environment, while with proposed longer-term methods such as storage in salt mines or granite to the risk of human interference there are added the risks of leakage, e.g. through water seepage, and of disturbance, for example through climatic change, earth movements, etc. The risks are significant: no reasonable person with even a limited acquaintance with the history of human affairs over the last 3,000 years could be confident of safe storage by methods involving human intervention over the enormous time periods involved. No one with even a slight knowledge of the geological and climatic history of the earth over the last million years, a period which has seen a number of ice ages and great fluctuations in climate for example, could be confident that the waste material could be safely stored for the vast periods of time required. Much of this waste is highly toxic; for example, even a beachball sized quantity of plutonium appropriately distributed is enough to give every person on the planet lung cancer - so that a leak of even a small part of this waste material could involve huge loss of life, widespread disease and genetic damage, and contamination of immense areas of land.6 Given the enormous costs which could be involved for the future, it is plainly grossly inadequ'ate'to merely speculate concerning untested, but possibly or even probably, safe methods for disposal of wastes. Yet none of the proposed methods has been properly tested, and they may prove to involve all sorts of unforeseen difficulties and risks when an attempt is made to put them into practice on a commercial scale. Only a method that could provide a rigorous guarantee of safety over the storage period, that placed safety beyond reasonable doubt, would be acceptable. It is difficult to see how such rigorous guarantees could be given concerning either the �Obligations to the Future 137 geological or future human factors. But even if an economically viable, rigorously safe long-term storage method could be devised, there is the problem of guaranteeing that it would be universally and invariably used. The assumption that it would be, especially if, as seems likely, such a method proved expensive economically and politically, seems to presuppose a level of efficiency, perfection, and concern for the future not previously encountered in human affairs, and certainly not conspicuous in the nuclear industry.7 Again, unless we assume continuous and faultless guarding of long-term storage sites through perhaps a million years of possible future human activity, weapons-grade radioactive material will be accessible, over much of the million-year storage period, to any party who is in a position to retrieve it. Our behaviour in creating this nightmare situation for the future is certainly no better than that of the consigner in the bus example. Industrialized countries, in order to get out of a mess of their own making essentially the creation of economies dependent on an abundance" of non-renewable energy in a situation where it is in fact in limited supply opt for a 'solution' which may enable them to avoid the making of uncomfortable changes during the lifetime of those now living, at the expense of passing heavy burdens on to the inhabitants of the earth at a future time burdens in the shape of costs and risks which, just as in the bus case, may adversely affect the life and health of future people and their opportunity to lead a decent life.8 It is sometimes suggested that analogies like the bus example are defective; that morally they are crucially different from the nuclear case, since future people, unlike the passengers in the bus, will benefit directly from nuclear development, which will provide an abundance of energy for the indefinite future. But this is incorrect. Nuclear fission creates wastes which may remain toxic for a million years, but even with the breeder reactor it could be an energy source for perhaps only 150 years. It will do nothing for the energy problems of the people of the distant future whose lives could be seriously affected by the wastes. Thus perhaps 30,000 generations of future people could be forced to bear significant risks, without any corresponding benefits, in order to provide for the extravagant energy use of only five generations. Nor is the risk of direct harm from the escape or misuse of radioactive materials the only burden the nuclear solution imposes on the future. Because the energy provided by nuclear fission is merely a stop-gap, it seems probable that in due course the same problem, that of making a �138 R. and V. Routley transition to renewable sources of energy, will have to be faced again by a future population which will probably, again as a result of our actions, be very much worse placed to cope with it.9 For they may well have to face the change to renewable resources in an over-populated world not only burdened with the legacy of our nuclear wastes, but also in a world in which, if the nuclear proponents' dream of global industrialization is realized, more and more of the global population will have become dependent on high energy consumption and associated technology and heavy resource use, and will have lost or reduced its ability to survive without it. It will, moreover, probably be a world which is largely depleted of non-renewable resources, and in which such renewable resources as forests and soils as remain, resources which will have to form a very important part of the basis of life, are in a run-down condition. Such points tell against the idea that future people must be, if not direct beneficiaries of nuclear fission energy, at least indirect beneficiaries. The 'solution' then is to buy time for contemporary industrial society at a price which not only creates serious problems for future people but which reduces their ability to cope with those problems. Just as in the bus case, contemporary industrial society proposes to get itself out of a hole of its own making by creating risk of harm, and by transferring costs and risks, to someone else who has had no part in producing the situation and who will obtain no clear benefit. It has clear alternatives to this action. That it does not take them is due essentially to its unwillingness to avoid changing wasteful patterns of consumption and to its desire to protect the interests of those who benefit from them. If we apply to the nuclear situation the same standards of behaviour and moral principles that we acknowledge (in principle if perhaps often not in fact) in the contemporary world, it will not be easy to avoid the conclusion that the situation involves injustice with respect to future people on a grand scale. It seems to us that there are only two plausible moves that might enable the avoidance of such a conclusion. First, it might be argued that the moral principles and obligations which we acknowledge for the contemporary world and the immediate future do not apply because the recipients of our nuclear parcel are in the non-immediate future. Secondly, an attempt might be made to appeal to overriding circumstances; for to reject the consigner's action in the circumstances outlined is not of course to say that there are no circumstances in which such an action might possibly be justifiable, or at least where the case is less clearcut. It is the same with the nuclear case. Just as in the case of the consigner of the �Obligations to the Future 139 package there is a need to consider what these justifying circumstances might be, and whether they apply in the present case. We turn now to the first of these possible escape routes for the proponent of nuclear development, to the philosophical question of our obligations to the future. II. Obligations to the Distant Future The area in which these philosophical problems arise is that of the distant (i.e. non-immediate) future, that is, the future with which people alive today will make no direct contact; the immediate future provides comparatively few problems for moral theories. The issues involved, although of far more than academic interest, have not received any great attention in recent philosophical literature, despite the fact that the question of obligations to future people presents tests which a number of ethical theories fail to pass, and also raises a number of questions in political philosophy concerning the adequacy of accepted institutions which leave out of account the interests of future people. Moral philosophers have predictably differed on the issue. But contrary to the picture painted in a recent, widely read, and influential work discussing it, Passmore's Man's Responsibility for Nature, a good many philosophers who have explicitly considered the question have come down in favour of the same consideration being given to the rights and interests of future people as to those of contemporary or immediately future people. Other philosophers have tended to fall into three categories - those who acknowledge obligations to the future but who do not take them seriously or who assign them less weight, those who deny, or who are committed by their general moral position to denying, that there are moral obligations beyond the immediate future, and those like Passmore and Golding who come down, with admirable philosophical caution, on both sides of the issue, but with the weight of the argument favouring the view underlying prevailing economic and political institutions, that there are no moral obligations to the future beyond those to the next generation. • According to the most extreme of these positions against moral obligations to the future, our behaviour with respect to the future is morally unconstrained; there are no moral restrictions on acting or failing to act deriving from the effect of our actions on future people. Of those philosophers who say, or whose views imply, that we don't have obligations to the (non-immediate) future, i.e. those who have opted for the uncon- �140 R. and V. Routley strained position, many have based this view on accounts of moral obligation which are built on relations which presuppose some degree of temporal or spatial contiguity. Thus moral obligation is seen as grounded on or as presupposing various relations which could not hold between people widely separated in time (or sometimes in space). For example, obligation is seen as grounded in relations which are proximate or of short duration and also non-transitive. Among such suggested bases or grounds of moral obligation, or requirements for moral obligation, which would rule out obligations to the non-immediate future are these: First, there are those accounts which require that someone to whom a moral obligation is held be able to claim his rights or entitlement. People in the distant future will not be able to claim rights and entitlements as against us, and of course they can do nothing to enforce any claims they might have for their rights against us. Secondly, there are those accounts which base moral obligations on social or legal convention, for example a convention which would require punishment of offenders or at least some kind of social enforcement. But plainly these and other conventions will not hold invariantly over change in society and amendment of legal conventions and so will not be invariant over time. Also future people have no way of enforcing their interests or punishing offenders, and there could be no guarantee that any contemporary institution would do it for them. Both the view that moral obligation requires the context of a moral community and the view that it is contractually based appear to rule out the distant future as a field of moral obligation, as they not only require a commonality, or some sort of common basis, which cannot be guaranteed in the case of the distant future, but also a possibility of interchange or reciprocity of action which cannot apply to the future. Where the basis of moral obligation is seen as mutual exchange, the interests of future people must be set aside because they cannot change the past and cannot be parties to any mutual contract. The exclusion of moral obligations to the distant future also follows from those views which attempt to ground moral obligations in non-transitive relations of short duration such as sympathy and love. There are some difficulties also about love and sympathy for (non-existent) people in the far distant future about whose personal qualities and characteristics one must know very little and who may well be committed to a life-style for which one has no sympathy. On the current showing in the case of nuclear energy it would be easy to conclude that contemporary society lacks both love and sympathy for future people; and it would appear to follow from this that contemporary �Obligations to the Future 141 people have no obligations to future people and can harm them as it suits them. What all these views have in common is a naturalistic picture of obligation as something acquired, either individually or institutionally, something which is conditional on doing something or failing to do something (e.g. participating in the moral community, contracting), or having some characteristic one can fail to have (e.g. love, sympathy, empathy).10 Because obligation therefore becomes conditional, features usually thought to characterize it, such as universality of application and necessitation (i.e. the binding features), are lost, especially where there is a choice of whether or not to do the thing required to acquire the obligation, and so of whether to acquire it. The criteria for acquisition suggested are such as to exclude people in the distant future. However, the view that there are no moral constraints with respect to future people, that one is free to act as one likes with respect to them, is a very difficult one to sustain. Consider the example of a scientific group which, for no particular reason other than to test a particular piece of technology, places in orbit a cobalt bomb which is to be set off by a triggering device designed to go off several hundred years from the time of its despatch. No presently living person and none of their immediate descendants would be affected, but the population of the earth in the distant future would be wiped out as a direct and predictable result of the action. The unconstrained position clearly implies that this is an acceptable moral enterprise, that whatever else we might legitimately criticize in the scientists' experiment, perhaps its being unduly expensive or badly designed, we cannot lodge a moral protest about the damage it will do to future people. The unconstrained position also endorses as morally acceptable the following sorts of examples: A firm discovers it can make a handsome profit from mining, processing, and manufacturing a new type of material which, although it causes no problems for present people or their immediate descendants, will over a period of hundreds of years decay into a substance which will cause an enormous epidemic of cancer among the inhabitants of the earth at that time. According to the unconstrained view the firm is free to act in its own interests, without any consideration for the harm it does to future people. Such counterexamples to the unconstrained view might seem childishly obvious. Yet the unconstrained position concerning the future from which they follow is far from being a straw man; not only have a number of philosophers writing on the issue endorsed this position, but it is the clear �142 R. and V. Routley implication of many currently popular views of the basis of moral obligation, as well as of economic theory. It does not appear, on the other hand, that those who opt for the unconstrained position have considered such examples and endorsed them as morally acceptable, despite their being clearly implied by their position. We suspect that when it is brought out that the unconstrained position admits such counterexamples, that being free to act implies, among other things being free to inflict pointless harm, most of those who opted for the unconstrained position would want to assert that it was not what they intended. What those who have put forward the unconstrained position seem to have had in mind in denying moral obligation is rather that future people can look after themselves, that we are not responsible for their lives. The view that the future can take care of itself also seems to assume a future causally independent of the present. But it is not. It is not as if, in cases such as those discussed above and the nuclear case, the future is simply being left alone to take care of itself. Present people are influencing it, and in doing so must acquire many of the same sorts of moral responsibilities as they do in causally affecting the present and immediate future. The thesis seems thus to assume an incorrect model of an independent and unrelated future. Also, to say that we are not responsible for the lives of future people does not amount to the same as saying that we are free to do as we like with respect to them, that there are no moral constraints on our action involving them. In just the same way, the fact that one does not have, or has not acquired, an obligation to some stranger with whom one has never been involved - that one has no responsibility for his life - does not imply that one is free to do what one likes with respect to him, for example to rob him or to pursue some course of action of advantage to oneself which could seriously harm him. These difficulties for the unconstrained position arise in part from the failure to make an important distinction between, on the one hand, acquired or assumed obligations towards somebody, for which some act of acquisition or assumption is required as a qualifying condition, and on the other hand moral constraints, which require, for example, that one should not act so as to damage or harm someone, and for which no act of acquisition is required. There is a considerable difference in the level and kind of responsibility involved. In the first case one must do something or be something which one can fail to do or be, e.g. have loves, sympathy, be contracted. In the second case responsibility arises as a result of being a causal agent aware of the consequences or probable consequences of his �Obligations to the Future 143 action, and thus does not have to be especially acquired or assumed. Thus there is no problem about how the latter class, moral constraints, can apply to the distant future in cases where it may be difficult or impossible for acquisition or assumption conditions to be satisfied. They apply as a result of the ability to produce causal effects on the distant future of a reasonably predictable nature. Thus also moral constraints can apply to what does not (yet) exist, just as actions can cause results that do not (yet) exist. While it may be the case that there would need to be an acquired or assumed obligation in order for it to be claimed that contemporary people must make special sacrifices of an heroic kind for future people, or even to help them especially, only moral constraints are needed in order for us to be constrained from harming them. Thus, to return to the bus example, the consigner cannot argue in justification of his action that he has never assumed or acquired responsibility for the passengers, that he does not know them and therefore has no love or sympathy for them, and that they are not part of his moral community, in short that he has no special obligations to help them. All that one needs to argue in respect of both the bus and the nuclear case is that there are moral constraints against harming, not that there are specially acquired obligations to take responsibility for the lives of the people involved. The confusion of moral constraints with acquired obligation, and the attempt therewith to view all constraints as acquired and to write off non-acquired constraints, is facilitated through the use of the term 'moral obligation' in philosophy to indicate any type of deontic constraint, while in natural language it is used to indicate something which has to be assumed or acquired. Hence the equation and at least one root of the unconstrained position, that is of the belief that there are no moral constraints concerning the distant future. The unconstrained view tends to give way, under the weight of counterexamples, to a more qualified, and sometimes ambivalent position. Passmore's position in [1] is a striking example of the second ambivalent position. On the one hand Passmore regularly gives the impression of one championing future people; for example, in the final sentence of [1] he says, concerning men a century hence: My sole concern is that we should do nothing which will reduce their freedom of thought and action, whether by destroying.the natural world which makes that freedom possible or the social traditions which permit and encourage it. �144 R. and V. Routley Earlier (esp. pp. 84-85) Passmore appears to endorse the principle 'that we ought not to act so as certainly to harm posterity' and claims (p. 98) that, even where there are uncertainties, 'these uncertainties do not justify negligence'. Nevertheless, though obligations concerning non-immediate posterity are thus admitted, the main thrust of Passmore's argument is entirely different, being in favour of the unconstrained position according to which we have no obligations to non-immediate posterity. Thus his conclusion (p. 91): So whether we approach the problem of obligations to posterity by way of Bentham and Sidgwick, Rawls or Golding, we are led to something like the same conclusion: our obligations are to immediate posterity, we ought to try to improve the world so that we shall be able to hand it over to our immediate successors in a better condition, and that is all.11 Passmore's position is, to all appearances, simply inconsistent. There are two ways one might try to render it consistent, but neither is readily available to Passmore. The first is by taking advantage of the distinction between moral constraints and acquired obligations, but a basis for this distinction is not evident in Passmore's work and indeed the distinction is antithetical to the analyses of obligation that Passmore tries to synthesize with his own analysis in terms of loves. The second, sceptical, route to consistency is by way of the argument that we shall consider shortly, that there is always gross uncertainty with respect to the distant future, uncertainty which relieves us in practice of any moral constraints regarding the distant future. But though Passmore's writing strongly suggests this uncertainty argument (especially his sympathetic discussion of the Premier of Queensland's argument against conservationists [p. 77]), he also rules it out with the claim that uncertainties do not justify negligence.12 Many of the accounts of moral obligation that give rise to the unconstrained position are fused in Passmore's work, again not entirely consistently, since the different accounts exploited do not give uniform results. Thus the primary account of obligation is said to be in terms of loves though the account is never satisfactorily formulated or developed - and it is suggested that because our loves do not extend into the distant future, neither do our obligations. This sentimental account of obligation will obviously lead to different results from utilitarian accounts of obligation, which however Passmore appeals to in his discussion of wilderness. In yet other places in [1], furthermore, social contract and moral community �Obligations to the Future 145 views are appealed to - see, e.g., the treatment of animals, of preservation, and of duties to nature. In the case of obligations to future people, however, Passmore does try to sketch an argument - what we call the convergence argument - that all the accounts lead in the end to the unconstrained position. As well as the convergence argument, and various uncertainty arguments to be considered later, Passmore appears to endorse several other arguments in favour of his theme that there are in practice no obligations to the distant future. In particular, he suggests that such obligations would in practice be otiose. Everything that needs to be accounted for can be encompassed through the chain picture of obligation as linking successive generations, under which each generation has obligations, based on loves, only to the succeeding generation. We outline three objections to this chain account. First, it is inadequate to treat constraints concerning the future as if they applied only between generations, as if there were no question of constraints on individuals as opposed to whole generations, since individuals can create causal effects, e.g. harm, on the future in a way which may create individual responsibility, and which can't necessarily be sheeted home to an entire generation. Secondly, such chains, since they are non-transitive, cannot yield direct obligations to the distant future. But for this very reason the chain picture cannot be adequate, as examples again show. For the picture is unable to explain several of the cases that have to be dealt with, e.g. the examples already discussed which show that we can have a direct effect on the distant future without affecting the next generation, who may not even be able to influence matters.13 Thirdly, improvements for immediate successors may be achieved at the expense of disadvantages to people of the more distant future. Improving the world for immediate successors is quite compatible with, and may even in some circumstances be most easily achieved by, ruining it for less immediate successors. Such cases can hardly be written off as 'never-never land' examples, since many cases of environmental exploitation might be seen as of just this type, e.g. not just the nuclear case but also the exhaustion of non-renewable resources and the long-term depletion of renewable resources such as soils and forests through overcropping. If then such obvious injustices to future people arising from the favouring or exclusive concern with immediate successors are to be avoided, obligations to the future will have to be seen as in some way fairly distributed over time, and not merely as accruing to particular generations in the way the chain picture suggests. �146 R. and V. Routley Passmore tries to represent all obligations to the distant future in terms of heroic self-sacrifice, something which cannot of course be morally required. But in view of the distinctions between constraints and acquired obligation and between obligation and supererogation, this is just to misrepresent the position of these obligations. For example, one is no more engaging in heroic self-sacrifice by not forcing future people into an unviable life position or by refraining from causing them direct harm, than one is resorting to heroic self-sacrifice in refraining from beating and robbing some stranger and leaving him to starve. Passmore's most sustained argument for the unconstrained position is a convergence argument, that different analyses of obligations, including his own, lead to the one conclusion. This style of argument is hardly convincing when there are well-known accounts of obligation which do not lead to the intended conclusion, e.g. deontological accounts such as those of Kant and of modern European schools, and teleological accounts such as those of Moore (in [8]). But such unfavourable positions are either rapidly passed over or ignored in Passmore's historical treatment and narrow selection of historical figures. The style of argument becomes even less persuasive when it is discovered that the accounts of the main authorities appealed to, Bentham, Sidgwick, and Rawls,14 do not lead, without serious distortion, to the intended conclusion. Indeed Passmore has twisted the historical and textual evidence to suit his case, as we now try to indicate. Consider Bentham first. Passmore's assumption, for which no textual evidence is cited, ls is that no Benthamite calculation can take account of a future more extensive than the immediate future (cf. pp. 87-88). The assumption seems to be based simply on the fact that Bentham remarked that 'the value of the pleasure or pain to each person to be considered in any estimate will be greater or less in virtue of the following circumstances'. '3. Its certainty or uncertainty. 4. Its propinquity or remoteness' ([10], p. 16). But this does nothing to show that future persons are discounted: the certainty and propinquity do not concern persons, but the utilities of the persons concerned. As regards which persons are concerned in any calculation Bentham is quite explicit, detailing how to take an exact account. . . of the general tendency of any act.. . .5 . Take an account of the number of persons whose interests appear to be concerned; and repeat the above process [summation of values of pleasure and of pain] with respect to each. ([10], p. 16) �Obligations to the Future 147 It follows that Bentham's calculation takes account of everyone (and, in his larger scheme, every sentient creature) whose interests appear to be concerned: if the interests of people in the distant future appear to be concerned - as they are in conservation issues - they are to be included in the calculation. And there is independent evidence16 that in Bentham's view the principle of utility was not temporally restricted: 'that is useful which, taking all times and all persons into consideration, leaves a balance of happiness' ([10], pp. 17-18, our italics). Thus the future cut-off that Passmore has attributed to Bentham is contradicted by Bentham's own account. The case of Sidgwick is more complex, because there is isolated oscillation in his application of utilitarianism between use of utility and of (something like) expected utility (see [11], pp. 381,414): Sidgwick's utilitarianism is, in its general characterization, essentially that of Bentham: the conduct which . . . is objectively right is that which will produce the greatest amount of happiness on the whole; that is, taking into account all those whose happiness is affected by the conduct. ([11], p. 411) All includes all sentient beings, both existing and to exist, as Sidgwick goes on to explain (p. 414). In particular, in answer to the question 'How far are we to consider the interests of posterity when they seem to conflict with those of existing human beings?' Sidgwick writes ([11], p. 414, our italics): It seems, however, clear that the time at which a man exists cannot affect the value of his happiness from a universal point of view; and that the interests of posterity must concern a Utilitarian as much as those of his contemporaries, except in so far as the effect of his actions on posterity - and even the existence of human beings to be affected - must necessarily be more uncertain. But Passmore manages, first of all, to give a different sense to what Sidgwick is saying by adjusting the quotation, by omitting the clause we have italicized, which equalizes the degree of concern for present and future persons, and by italicizing the whole except-clause, thereby placing much greater emphasis than Sidgwick does on uncertainty. For according to Sidgwick's impartiality principle, 'the mere difference in time is not a �148 R. and V. Routley reasonable ground for having more regard to the consciousness of one -amount than to that of another' ([11], p. 381; see also p. 124). The apparent tension in Sidgwick's theory as to whether uncertainty should be taken into account is readily removed by resort to a modern distinction between values and expected values (i.e. probability weighted values); utilitarian rightness is defined as before in terms of the net happiness of all concerned over all time without mention of uncertainty or probabilities, but it is distinguished from probable rightness (given present information), in the utilitarian sense,17 which is defined in terms of the expected net happiness of those concerned, using present probabilities. It is the latter notion, of probable rightness, that practical reasoning is commonly concerned with and that decision theory studies; and it is this that Passmore supposes Sidgwick is using ([1], p. 84). But it is evident that the utilitarian determination of probable rightness, like that of rightness, will sometimes take into account the distant future - as Sidgwick's discussion of utilitarian determination of optimum population (immediately following his remark on uncertainty) does. So how does Passmore contrive to reverse matters, to have Sidgwick's position lead to his own unconstrained conclusion? The answer is: By inserting an additional assumption of his own - which Sidgwick would certainly have rejected - that the uncertainties entitle us to ignore the distant future. What Passmore has implicitly assumed in his claim ([1], p. 85) that 'utilitarian principles [such as Sidgwick's] are not strong enough' 'to justify the kinds of sacrifice some conservationists now call upon us to make' is his own thesis that 'The uncertainty of harms we are hoping to prevent would in general entitle us to ignore them.. .'. From a decision-theory viewpoint this is simply irrational18 unless the probabilities of damage are approaching zero. We will deal with the essentially sceptical uncertainty arguments on which Passmore's position depends shortly: here it is enough to observe that Sidgwick's position does not lead to anything like that which Passmore attributes to him - without uncertainty assumptions which Sidgwick would have rejected (for he thought that future people'will certainly have pleasure and suffer pain). We can also begin to gauge from Passmore's treatment of nineteenthcentury utilitarians, such as Bentham and Sidgwick, the extent of the distortion which underlies his more general historical case for the unconstrained position which, so he claims, represents accurately enough what, over the last two centuries, men have seen as their duty to posterity as a whole. . . . ([1], p. 91) �Obligations to the Future 149 The treatment accorded Rawls in only marginally more satisfactory. Passmore supposes that Rawls's theory of justice leads directly to the unconstrained position ([1], p. 87 and p. 91), whereas Rawls claims ([5], p. 293) that we have obligations to future people just as to present ones. But the situation is more complicated than Rawls's claim would indicate, as we now try to explain in a summary way (more detail is given in the Appendix). For, in order to justify this claim on his theory (with its present time-of-entry interpretation), Rawls has to invoke additional and dubious motivational assumptions; even so the theory which thus results does not yield the intended conclusion, but a conclusion inconsistent with Rawls's claim. However, by changing the time-of-entry interpretation to an omnitemporal one, Rawls's claim does result from the theory so amended. Moreover, the amended theory also yields, by exactly Rawls's argument for a just saving rate, a resource conservation policy, and also a case against nuclear development. Accordingly Passmore's other claims regarding Rawls are mistaken, e.g. that the theory cannot justify a policy of resource conservation. Rawls does not emerge unscathed either. As on the issue of whether his contract is a necessary condition for obligations, so on obligations which the contract yields to the distant future, Rawls is far from consistent. Furthermore, institutions such as qualified market and voting systems are recommended as just though from a future perspective their results are far from that. Rawls, then, does not take obligations to the future with full seriousness. In sum, it is not true that the theory of Rawls, any more than the theories of the historical figures actually discussed by Passmore, unequivocally supports the unconstrained position. III. Uncertainty and Indeterminacy Arguments Although there are grave difficulties for the unconstrained position, qualification leads to a more defensible position. According to the qualified position we are not entirely unconstrained with respect to the distant future: there are obligations, but these are not so important as those to the present, and the interests of distant future people cannot weigh very much in the scale against those of the present and immediate future. The interests of future people then, except in unusual cases, count for very much less than the interests of present people. Hence such things as nuclear development and various exploitative activities which benefit present �150 R. and V. Routley people should proceed, even if people of the distant future are disadvantaged by them. The qualified position appears to be widely held and is implicit in most modern economic theories, where the position of a decrease in weight of future costs and benefits (and so of future interests) is obtained by application over time of an (opportunity cost) discount rate. The attempt to apply economics as a moral theory, something that is becoming increasingly common, can lead then to the qualified position. What is objectionable in such an approach is that economics must operate within the bounds of moral (deontic) constraints, just as in practice it operates within legal constraints, and cannot determine what those constraints are. There are, moreover, alternative economic theories and simply to adopt one which discounts the future is to beg all the questions at issue. The discounting move often has the same result as the unconstrained position; if, for instance, we consider the cancer example and consider costs as payable compensation, it is evident that, over a sufficiently long period of time, discounting at current prices would lead to the conclusion that there are no recoverable damages and so, in economic terms, no constraints. In short, even certain damage to future people could be written off. One way to achieve the bias against future people is by the application of discount rates which are set in accord with the current economic horizons of no more than about fifteen years,19 and application of such rates would simply beg the question against the interests and rights of future people. Where there is certain future damage of a morally forbidden type the whole method of discounting is simply inapplicable, and its use would violate moral constraints.20 Another argument for the qualified position, which avoids the objections from cases of certain damage, comes from probability considerations.The distant future, it is argued, is much more uncertain than the present and immediate future, so that probabilities are consequently lower, perhaps even approaching or coinciding with zero for any hypothesis concerning the distant future.21 But then if we take account of probabilities in the obvious way, by simply multiplying them against costs and benefits, it is evident that the interests of future people, except in cases where there is an unusually high degree of certainty, must count for (very much) less than those of present and neighbouring people where (much) higher probabilities obtain. So in the case of conflict between the present and the future where it is a question of weighing certain benefits to the people of the present and the immediate future against a much lower �Obligations to the Future 151 probability of indeterminate costs to an indeterminate number of distant future people, the issue would normally be decided in favour of the present, assuming that anything like similar costs and benefits were involved. But of course it can't be assumed that anything like similarly weighted costs and benefits are involved in the nuclear case, especially if it is a question of risking poisoning some of the earth for half a million or so years, with consequent risk of serious harm to thousands of generations of future people, in order to obtain quite doubtful or trivial benefits for some present people, in the shape of the opportunity to continue unnecessarily high energy use. And even if the costs and benefits were comparable or evenly weighted, such an argument would be defective, since an analogous argument would show that the consigner's action is acceptable provided the benefit, e.g. the profit he stood to gain from imposing significant risks on other people, was sufficiently large. Such a cost-benefit approach to moral and decision problems, with or without the probability frills, is quite inadequate where different parties are concerned, or for dealing with cases of conflict of interest or moral problems where deontic constraints are involved, and commonly yields counterintuitive results. For example, it would follow on such principles that it is permissible for a firm to injure, or very likely injure, some innocent party provided the firm stands to make a sufficiently large gain from it. But the costs and benefits involved are not transferable in any simple or general way from one party to another. Transfers of this kind, of costs and benefits involving different parties, commonly raise moral issues - e.g. is x entitled to benefit himself by imposing costs ony ? - which are not susceptible to a simple cost-benefit approach of the sort adopted by some proponents of nuclear energy, who attempt to dismiss the costs to future people with the soothing remark that any development involves costs as well as benefits. The transfer point is enough to invalidate the comparison, heavily relied on by McCracken [16] in building a case for the acceptability of the nuclear risk, between nuclear risks and those from cigarette smoking. In the latter case those who supposedly benefit from the activity are also, to an overwhelming extent* those who bear the serious health costs and risks involved. In contrast the users and supposed beneficiaries of nuclear energy will be risking not only, or even primarily, their own lives and health, but also those of others who may be non-beneficiaries and who may be spatially or temporally removed, and these risks will not be in any direct way related to a person's extent of use. The transfer objection is essentially the same as that to the utilitarian's �152 R. and V. Routley happiness sums as a way of solving moral conflict between different parties, and the introduction of probability considerations does not change the principles involved but merely complicates analyses. One might further object to the probability argument that probabilities involving distant future situations are not always less than those concerning the immediate future in the way the argument supposes, and that the outcomes of some moral problems such as the bus example do not depend on a high level of probability anyway. In some sorts of cases it is enough, as the bus example reveals, that a significant risk is created; such cases do not depend critically on high probability assignments. Uncertainty arguments in various forms are the most common and important ones used by philosophers and others to argue for the position that we cannot be expected to take serious account of the effects of our actions on the distant future. There are two strands to the uncertainty argument, capable of separation, but frequently entangled. Both arguments are mistaken, the first on a priori grounds, the second on a posteriori grounds. The first argument is a generalized uncertainty argument which runs as follows: In contrast to the exact information we can obtain about the present, the information we can obtain about the effects of our actions on the distant future is unreliable, woolly, and highly speculative. But we cannot base assessments of how we should act on information of this kind, especially when accurate information is obtainable about the present which would indicate different action. Therefore we must regretfully ignore the uncertain effects of our actions on the distant future. More formally and crudely: One only has obligations to the future if these obligations are based on reliable information; there is no reliable information at present as regards the distant future; therefore one has no obligations to the distant future. The first argument is essentially a variation on a sceptical argument in epistemology concerning our knowledge of the future (formally, replace 'obligations' by 'knowledge' in the crude statement of the argument above). The main ploy is to considerably overestimate and overstate the degree of certainty available with respect to the present and immediate future, and the degree of certainty which is required as the basis for moral consideration both with respect to the present and with respect to the future. Associated with this is the attempt to suggest a sharp division as regards certainty between the present and immediate future on the one hand and the distant future on the other. We shall not find, we suggest, that there is any such sharp or simple division between the distant future and �Obligations to the Future 153 the adjacent future and present, at least with respect to those things in the present which are normally subject to moral constraints. We can and constantly do act on the basis of such 'unreliable' information as the sceptic as regards the future conveniently labels 'uncertainty'; for scepticproof certainty is rarely, or never, available with respect to much of the present and immediate future. In moral situations in the present, action often takes account of risk and probability, even quite low probabilities. A good example is again the bus case. We do not need to know for certain that the container will break and the lethal gas escape. In fact it does not even have to be probable, in the relevant sense of more probable than not, in order for us to condemn the consigner's action. It is enough that there is a significant risk of harm in this sort of case. It does not matter if the decreased well-being of the consigner is certain and the prospects of the passengers quite uncertain; the resolution of the problem is still clearly in favour of the so-called 'speculative' and 'unreliable'. But if we do not require certainty of action to apply moral constraints in contemporary affairs, why should we require a much higher standard of certainty in the future? Why should we require epistemic standards for the future which the more familiar sphere of moral action concerning the present and adjacent future does not need to meet? The insistence on certainty as a necessary condition before moral consideration can be given to the distant future, then, amounts to an epistemic double standard. But such an epistemic double standard, proposed in explaining the difference between the present and the future and to justify ignoring future peoples' interests, in fact cannot itself provide an explanation of the differences, since it already presupposes different standards of certainty appropriate to each class, which difference is in turn in need of justification. The second uncertainty argument is a practical uncertainty argument, that whatever our theoretical obligations to the future, we cannot in practice take the interests of future people into account, because uncertainty about the distant future is so gross that we cannot determine what the likely consequences of actions upon it will be and therefore, however good our intentions to the people of the distant future, in practice we have no choice but to ignore their interests. Uncertainty is gross where certain incompatible hypotheses are as good as one another and there is no rational ground for choosing between them. The second uncertainty argument can also be put in this way: If moral principles are, like other principles, implicational in form, that is of such forms as 'if* has character h then x is wrong, for every (action) x', then what the argument claims is �154 R. and V. Routley that we can never obtain the information about future actions which would enable us to detach the antecedent of the implication. So even if moral principles theoretically apply to future people, in practice they cannot be applied to obtain clear conclusions or directions concerning contemporary action of the 'It is wrong to do x' type. Many of the assumptions of the second argument have to be conceded. If the distant future really is so grossly uncertain that in every case it is impossible to determine in any way that is better than chance what the effects of present action will be, and whether any given action will help or hinder future people, then moral principles, although they may apply theoretically to the future, will not be applicable in practice for obtaining any clear conclusions about how to act. Hence the distant future will impose no practical moral constraints on action. However, the argument is factually incorrect in assuming that the future is always so grossly uncertain or indeterminate. Admittedly there is often a high degree of uncertainty concerning the distant future, but as a matter of (contingent) fact it is not always so gross or sweeping as the argument has to assume. There are some areas where uncertainty is not so great as to exclude constraints on action, especially when account is taken of the point, noticed in connection with the first argument, that complete certainty is commonly not required for moral constraints and that all that may be needed in some cases is the creation of"a significant risk. Again there is considerable uncertainty about many factors which are not highly, or at all, morally relevant, but this does not extend to many factors which are of much greater importance to moral issues. For example, we may not have any idea what the fashions will be in a hundred years in girls' names or men's footwear, or what brands of ice cream people will be eating if any, but we do have excellent reason to believe, especially if we consider 3,000 years of history, that what people there are in a hundred years are likely to have material and psychic needs not entirely unlike our own, that they will need a healthy biosphere for a good life; that like us they will not be immune to radiation; that their welfare will not be enhanced by a high incidence of cancer or genetic defects, by the destruction of resources, or the elimination from the face of the earth of that wonderful variety of non-human life which at present makes it such a rich and interesting place. For this sort of reason, the second uncertainty argument should be rejected. While it is true that there are many areas in which the morally relevant information needed is uncertain or unavailable, and in which we cannot therefore determine satisfactorily how to act, there are certainly others in �Obligations to the Future 155 which uncertainty in morally relevant areas is not so great as to preclude moral constraints on action, where we ascertain if not absolute certainties at least probabilities of the same sort of order as are considered sufficient for the application of moral principles in parallel contemporary cases, especially where spatially remote people are involved. The case of nuclear waste storage, and of uncertainty of the effects of it on future people, seems to be of the latter sort. Here there is no gross indeterminacy or uncertainty; it is simply not true that incompatible hypotheses about what may happen are as good as each other. It is plain that nuclear waste storage does impose significant risks of harm on future people, and, as we can see from the bus example, the significant risk of harm is enough in cases of this type to make moral constraints applicable. In terms of the defects of the preceding uncertainty arguments, we can see the corresponding defects in a number of widely employed uncertainty arguments used to write off probable harm to future people as outside the scope of proper consideration. Most of these popular moves employ both of the uncertainty arguments as suits the case, switching from one to the other in a way that is again reminiscent of sceptical moves. For example, we may be told that we cannot really take account of future people because we cannot be sure that they will exist or that their tastes and wants will not be completely different from our own, to the point where they will not suffer from our exhaustion of resources or from the things that would affect us (cf. Passmore [1]). But this is to insist upon complete certainty of a sort beyond what is required for the present and immediate future, where there is also commonly no guarantee that some disaster will not overtake those we are morally committed to. Again we may be told that there is no guarantee that future people will be worthy of any efforts on our part, because they may be morons or forever plugged into enjoyment- or other machines (Golding [12]). Even if one is prepared to accept the elitist approach presupposed - according to which only those who meet certain properly civilized or intellectual standards are eligible for moral consideration - what we are being handed in such arguments as a serious defeating consideration is again a mere outside possibility - like the sceptic who says that the solid-looking desk in front of us is perhaps only a facade, not because he has any particular reason for doing so, but because he hasn't looked around the back, drilled holes in it, etc. Neither the contemporary nor the historical situation gives any positive reason for supposing that a lapse into universal moronity or universal pleasure-machine escapism is a serious possibility, as opposed to a logical possibility. We can contrast �156 R. and V. Routley with these mere logical possibilities the very real historically supportable risks of escape of nuclear waste or decline of a civilization through destruction of its resource base. The possibilities just considered in these uncertainty arguments of sceptical character are not real possibilities. Another argument which may consider a real possibility, but still does not succeed in showing that it is acceptable to proceed with an action which would appear to be harmful to future people, is often introduced in the nuclear waste case. This is the argument that future people may discover a rigorously safe and permanent storage method for nuclear wastes before they are damaged by escaped waste material. Let us grant for the sake of the argument that this is a real possibility (though physical arguments may show that it is not). This still does not affect the fact that there is a significant risk of serious damage and that the creation of a significant risk is enough to rule out an action of this type as morally impermissible. In just the same way, future people may discover a cure for cancer, and the fact that this appears to be a real and not merely a logical possibility, does not make the action of the firm in the example discussed above, of producing a substance likely to cause cancer in future people, morally admissible. The fact that there was a real possibility of future people avoiding the harm would show that actions of these sorts were admissible only if what was required for inadmissibility was certainty of harm or a very high probability of it. In such cases, before such actions could be considered admissible, what would be required is far more than a possibility, real or not22 - it is at least the availability of an applicable, safe, and rigorously tested, not merely speculative, technique for achieving it, something that future people could reasonably be expected to apply to protect themselves. The strategy of most of these uncertainty arguments is fairly clear then, and may be brought out by looking yet again at the bus example, where the consigner says that he cannot be expected to take account of the effect of his actions on the passengers because they may find an effective way to deal with his parcel or some lucky or unlucky accident may occur, e.g. the bus may break down and they may all change to a different bus leaving the parcel behind, or the bus may crash, killing all the passengers before the container gets a chance to leak. These are all possibilities, of course, but there is no positive reason to believe that they are any more than that, that is they are not real possibilities. The strategy is to stress such outside possibilities in order to create the false impression that there is gross uncertainty about the future, that the real possibility that the container will �Obligations to the Future 157 break should be treated in the same way as these mere logical possibilities, that uncertainty about the future is so great as to preclude the consigners' taking account of the passengers' welfare and of the real possibility of harm from his parcel, and thereby excuse his action. A related strategy is to stress a real possibility, such as finding a cure for cancer, and thereby imply that this removes the case for applying moral constraints .This move implicitly makes the assumptions of the first argument, that certainty, or at least a very high probability, of harm is required before an action can be judged morally inadmissible, and the point of stressing the real possibility of avoidance of damage is to show that this allegedly required high degree of certainty or probability cannot be attained. That is, the strategy draws attention to some real uncertainty implying that this is sufficient to defeat the application of moral constraints. But, as we have seen, this is often not so. An argument closely related to the uncertainty arguments is based on the non-existence and indeterminacy of the future.23 An item is indeterminate in a given respect if its properties in that respect are, as a matter of logic, not settled (nor are they settlable in a non-arbitrary fashion). The respects in which future items are indeterminate are well enough known for a few examples to serve as reminders: all the following are indeterminate: the population of Australia at 2001, its distribution, its age structure, the preferences of its members for folk music, wilderness, etc., the size and shape of Wollongong, the average number of rooms in its houses and in its office blocks, and so on. Philosophical discussion of such indeterminacy is as old as Aristotle's sea battle and as modern as truth-value gaps and fuzzy logics, and many positions have been adopted on the existence and determinacy of future items. Nevertheless theories that there are obligations to the future are not sensitive to the metaphysical position adopted concerning the existence or non-existence of the future. Any theory which denied obligations to the future on the metaphysical grounds that the future did not exist, and did not have properties, so that the present could not be related to it, would be committed to denying such obvious facts as that the present could causally influence the future, that present people could be great-grandparents of purely future people, and so on, and hence would have to be rejected on independent grounds. This is not to say that there are not important problems about the existence or non-existence of future items, problems which are perhaps most straightforwardly handled by a Meinongian position which allows that items which do not exist may have properties. The non-existence of the future �158 R. and V. Routley does raise problems for standard theories which buy the Ontological Assumption (the thesis that what does not exist does not have properties), especially given the natural (and correct) inclination to say that the future does not (now) exist; but such theories can adopt various strategies for coping with these problems (e.g. the adoption of a platonistic position according to which the future does now exist, or the allowance for certain sorts of relations between existents at different times), although the satisfactoriness of these strategies is open to question (cf. [4]). Thus whether or not the Ontological Assumption is assumed and however it is applied, it will be allowed that future items will have properties even if they do not have them now, and that is enough to provide the basis for moral concern about the future. Thus the thesis of obligations to the future does not presuppose any special metaphysical position on the existence of the future. If the non-existence of future items creates no special problems for obligations to the future, the same is not true of their indeterminacy. Whether the indeterminacy of future items is seen as a logical feature of the future which results from the non-existence of purely future items or whether one adopts a (mistaken) platonistic view of the future as existing and sees the indeterminacy as an epistemological one resulting from our inability to know the character of these entities - that is, we cannot completely know the future .though it exists and has a definite characterwhichever view we take indeterminacy still creates major difficulties for certain ethical theories and their treatment of the future. The difficulties arise for theories which appear to require a high level of determinacy with respect to the number and character of future items, in particular calculus-type theories such as utilitarianism in its usual forms, where the calculations are critically dependent on such information as numbers, totals, and averages, information which so far as the future is concerned is generally indeterminate. The fact that this numerical information is typically indeterminate means that insofar as head-count utilitarianism requires determinate information on numbers, it is in a similar position to theories discussed earlier; it may apply theoretically to future people, but since the calculations cannot be applied to them their interests will be left out of account. And, in fact, utilitarianism for the most part does not, and perhaps cannot, take future creatures and their interests seriously; there is little discussion as to how the difficulties or impossibility of calculations regarding the open future are to be obtained. Non-platonistic utilitarianism is in logical difficulty on this matter, while platonis- �Obligations to the Future 159 tic utilitarianism - which faces a range of other objections - is inapplicable because of epistemic indeterminacy. We have yet another case of a theory of the sort that applies theoretically but in practice doesn't take the future seriously. But far from this showing that future people's interests should be left out of account, what these considerations show are deficiencies in these sorts of theories, which require excessive determinacy of information. This kind of information is commonly equally unavailable for the accepted areas of moral constraint, the present and immediate future; and the resolution of moral issues is often not heavily dependent on knowledge of such specific determinate features as numbers or other determinate features. For example, we do not need to know how many people there will be on the bus, how intelligent they are, what their preferences are or how badly they will be injured, in order to reach the conclusion that the consigner's action in despatching his parcel is a bad one. Furthermore, it is only the ability of moral considerations to continue to apply in the absence of determinate information about such things as numbers that makes it possible to take account of the possible effects of action, as the risks associated with action - something which is quite essential even for the present if moral considerations are to apply in the normal and accepted way. For it is essential in order to apply moral considerations in the accepted way that we consider alternative worlds, in order to take account of options, risks, and alternative outcomes; but these alternative or counterfactual worlds are not in so different a position from the future with respect to determinacy; for example, there is indeterminacy with respect to the number of people who may be harmed in the bus case or in apossible nuclear reactor melt-down. These alternative worlds, like the distant future, are indeterminate in some respects, but not totally indeterminate. It might still be thought that the indeterminacy of the future, for example with respect to number and exact character, would at least prevent the interest of future people being taken into account where there is a conflict with the present. Since their numbers are indeterminate and their interests unknown, how can we weigh their competing claims against those of the present and immediate future where this information is available in a more or less accurate form? The question is raised particularly by problems of sharing fixed quantities of resources among present and future people, when the numbers of the latter are indeterminate. Such problems are indeed difficult, but they are not resolved by ignoring the claims of the future, any more than the problems raised by the need to take account in decision-making of factors difficult to quantify are resolved by ignoring �160 R. and V. Routley such factors. Nor are such distributional problems as large and representative a class of moral problems concerning the future as the tendency to focus on them would suggest. It should be conceded then that there will be cases where the indeterminacy of aspects of the future will make conflicts very difficult or indeed impossible to resolve - a realistic ethical theory will not deliver a decision procedure - but there will equally be other conflict cases where the level of indeterminacy does not hinder resolution of the issue, e.g. the bus example which is a conflict case of a type. In particular, there will be many cases which are not solved by weighing numbers, numbers of interests, or whatever, cases for which one needs to know only the most general probable characteristics of future people. Moreover, even where numbers are relevant often only bounds will be required, exact numerical counts only being required where, for instance, margins are narrow; e.g. issues may be resolved as in parliament where a detailed vote (or division) is only required when the issue is close. It is certainly not necessary then to have complete determinacy to resolve all cases of conflict. The question we must ask then is what features of future people could disqualify them from moral consideration or reduce their claims to it to below those of present people? The answer is: in principle None. Prima facie moral principles are universalizable, and lawlike, in that they apply independently of position in space or in time, for example.24 But universalizability of principles is an outcome of those ethical theories which are capable of dealing satisfactorily with the present; in other words, a theory that did not allow properly for the future would be found to have defects as regards the present, to deal unjustly or unfairly with some present people, e.g. those remotely located, those outside some select subgroup such as (white-skinned) humans, etc. The only candidates for characteristics that would fairly rule out future people are the logical features we have been looking at, uncertainty and indeterminacy; what we have argued is that it would be far too sweeping to see these features as affecting the moral claims of future people in a general way. These special features only affect certain sorts of cases (e.g. the determination of best probable or practical course of action given only present information). In particular they do not affect cases of the sort being considered, the nuclear one, where highly determinate or certain information about the numbers and characteristics of the class likely to be harmed or certainty of damage are not required. To establish obligations to the future a full universalizability principle is not needed: it is enough to require that the temporal position of a person �Obligations to the Future 161 cannot affect his entitlement to just and fair treatment, to full moral consideration;25 inversely that it is without basis to discriminate morally against a person in virtue of his temporal position. As a result of this universalizability, there is the same obligation to future people as to the present; and thus there is the same obligation to take account of them and their interests in what we do, to be careful in our actions, to take account of the probability (and not just the certainty) of our actions' causing harm or damage, and to see, other things being equal, that we do not act so as to rob future people of what is necessary for the chance of a good life. Uncertainty and indeterminacy do not free us of these obligations. If, in a closely comparable case concerning the present, the creation of a significant risk is enough to rule out an action as immoral, and there are no independent grounds for requiring greater certainty of harm in the future case under consideration, then futurity alone will not provide adequate grounds for proceeding with the action, thus discriminating against future people. Accordingly we cannot escape, through appeal to futurity, the conclusion tentatively reached in our first section, that proposals for nuclear development in the present state of technology for future waste disposal are immoral. IV. Overriding Consideration Arguments In the first part we noticed that the consigner's action could not be justified by purely economistic arguments, such as that his profits would rise, the firm or the village would be more prosperous, or by appealing to the fact that some possibly uncomfortable changes would otherwise be needed. We also observed that the principle on which this assessment was based, that one was not usually entitled to create a serious risk to others for these sorts of reasons, applied more generally and, in particular, applied to the nuclear case. For this reason the economistic arguments which are thus most commonly advanced to promote nuclear development - e.g. cheapness, efficiency, profitability for electricity utilities, and the need otherwise for uncomfortable changes such as restructuring of employment, investment, and consumption-do not even begin to show that the nuclear alternative is an acceptable one. Even if these economistic assumptions about benefits to present people were correct (and there is reason to doubt that most of them are),26 the arguments would fail because economics must operate within the framework of moral constraints, and not vice versa. �162 R. and V. Routley What one does have to consider, however, are moral conflict arguments, that is arguments to the effect that, unless the prima facie unacceptable alternative is taken, some even more unacceptable alternative is the only possible outcome, and will ensue. For example, in the bus case, the consigner may argue that his action is justified because unless it is taken the village will starve. It is by no means clear that even such a justification as this would be sufficient, especially where the risk to the passengers is high, as the case seems to become one of transfer of costs and risks onto others; but such a moral situation would no longer be so clearcut, and one would perhaps hesitate to condemn any action taken in such circumstances. Some of the arguments advanced to show moral conflict are based on competing duties to present people, and others on competing obligations to future people, both of which are taken to override the obligations not to impose on the future significant risk of serious harm. The structure of such moral conflict arguments is based crucially on the presentation of a genuine and exhaustive set of alternatives (or at least practical alternatives), and upon showing that the only alternatives to admittedly morally undesirable actions are even more undesirable ones. If some practical alternative which is not morally worse than the action to be justified is overlooked, suppressed, or neglected in the argument-for example, if in the bus case it turns out that the villagers have another option to starving or to the sending off of the parcel, namely earning a living in some other way - then the argument is defective and cannot readily be patched. We want to argue that suppression of practicable alternatives has occurred in the argument, designed to show that the alternatives to the nuclear option are even worse than the option itself, and that there are other factual defects in these arguments as well. In short, the arguments depend essentially on the presentation of false dichotomies. The first argument, the poverty argument, is that there is an overriding obligation to the poor, both the poor of the third world and the poor of industrialized countries. Failure to develop nuclear energy, it is often claimed, would amount to denying them the opportunity to reach the standard of affluence we currently enjoy and would create unemployment and poverty in the industrialized nations. The unemployment and poverty argument does not stand up to examination either for the poor of the industrial countries or for those of the third world. There is good evidence that large-scale nuclear energy will help to increase unemployment and poverty in the industrial world, through the �Obligations to the Future 163 diversion of great amounts of available capital into an industry which is not only an exceptionally poor provider of direct employment, but also helps to reduce available jobs through encouraging substitution of energy use for labour use. 27 The argument that nuclear energy is needed for the third world is even less convincing. Nuclear energy is both politically and economically inappropriate for the third world, since it requires massive amounts of capital, requires numbers of imported scientists and engineers, and creates negligible employment, while politically it increases foreign dependence, adds to centralized entrenched power and reduces the chance for change in the oppressive political structures which are a large part of the problem.28 The fact that nuclear energy is not in the interests of people of the third world does not, of course, mean that it is not in the interests of, and wanted by, their rulers, the westernized and often military elites in whose interests the economies of these countries are usually organized; but it is not paternalistic to examine critically the demands these ruling elites may make in the name of the poor. The poverty argument then is a fraud. Nuclear energy will not be used to help the poor.29 Both for the third world and for the industrialized countries there are well-known energy-conserving alternatives and the practical option of developing other energy sources,30 alternatives which are morally acceptable and socially preferable to nuclear development, and which have far better prospects for helping the poor.31 The second major argument advanced to show moral conflict appeals to a set of supposedly overriding and competing obligations to future people. We have, it is said, a duty to pass on the immensely valuable things and institutions which our culture has developed. Unless our high-technological, high-energy industrial society is continued and fostered, our valuable institutions and traditions will fall into decay or be swept away. The argument is essentially that without nuclear power, without the continued level of material wealth it alone is assumed to make possible, the lights of our civilization will go out.32 . The lights-going-out argument raises rather sharply questions as to what is valuable in our society, and of what characteristics are necessary for a good society. These are questions which deserve much fuller treatment than we can allot them here, but a few brief points should be made. The argument adopts an extremely uncritical position with respect to existing high-technology societies, apparently assuming that they are uniformly and uniquely valuable; it also assumes that technological society is unmodifiable, that it can't be changed in the direction of energy �164 R. and V. Routley conservation or alternative energy sources without collapse. Such a society has to be accepted and assessed as a whole, and virtually unlimited supplies of energy are essential to maintain this whole. These assumptions are hard to accept. The assumption that technological society's energy patterns are unmodifiable is especially so - after all, it has survived events such as world wars which have required major social and technological restructuring and consumption modification. If western society's demands for energy are totally unmodifiable without collapse, not only would it be committed to a programme of increasing destruction, but one might ask what use its culture could be to future people who would very likely, as a consequence of this destruction, lack the resource base which the argument assumes to be essential in the case of contemporary society. There is also difficulty with the assumption of uniform valuableness; but if this is rejected the question becomes not: what is necessary to maintain existing high-technological society and its political institutions? but rather: what is necessary to maintain what is valuable in that society and the political institutions which are needed to maintain those valuable things? While it may be easy to argue that high energy consumption is necessary to maintain the political and economic status quo, it is not so easy to argue that it is essential to maintain what is valuable, and it is what is valuable, presumably, that we have a duty to pass on to the future. The evidence, e.g. from history, is that no very high level of material affluence or energy consumption is needed to maintain what is valuable. There is good reason in fact to believe that a society with much lower energy and resource consumption would better foster what is valuable than our own. But even if a radical change in these directions is independently desirable, as we believe it is, it is not necessary to presuppose such a change, in the short term at least, in order to see that the assumptions of the lights-going-out argument are wrong. No enormous reduction of wellbeing is required to consume less energy than at present, and certainly far less than the large increase over present levels of consumption which is assumed in the usual economic case for nuclear energy.33 What the nuclear strategy is really designed to do then is not to prevent the lights going out in western civilization, but to enable the lights to go on burning all the time - to maintain and even increase the wattage output of the Energy Extravaganza. In fact there is good reason to think that, far from the high energy consumption society fostering what is valuable, it will, especially if energy �Obligations to the Future 165 is obtained by nuclear-fission means, be positively inimical to it. A society which has become heavily dependent upon an extremely high centralized, controlled, and garrisoned, capital- and expertise-intensive energy source, must be one which is highly susceptible to entrenchment of power, and one in which the forces which control this energy source, whether capitalist or bureaucratic, can exert enormous power over the political system and over people's lives, even more than they do at present. Very persuasive arguments have been advanced by civil liberties groups and others in a number of countries to suggest that such a society would tend to become authoritarian, if only as an outcome of its response to the threat posed by dissident groups in the nuclear situation.34 There are reasons to believe then that with nuclear development what we would be passing on to future generations would be some of the worst aspects of our society (e.g. the consumerism, growing concentration of power, destruction of the natural environment, and latent authoritarianism), while certain valuable aspects would be lost or threatened. Political freedom is a high price to pay for consumerism and energy extravagance. Again, as in the case of the poverty arguments, clear alternatives which do not involve such unacceptable consequences are available. The alternative to the high technology-nuclear option is not a return to the cave, the loss of all that is valuable, but the development of alternative technologies and life-styles which offer far greater scope for the maintenance and further development of what is valuable in our society than the highly centralized nuclear option.35 The lights-going-out argument, as a moral conflict argument, accordingly fails, because it also is based on a false dichotomy. Thus both the escape routes, the appeal to moral conflict and to the appeal to futurity, are closed. If then we apply the same standards of morality to the future as we acknowledge for the present - as we have argued we should - the conclusion that the proposal to develop nuclear energy on a large scale is a crime against the future is inevitable, since both the escape routes are closed. There are, of course, also many other grounds for ruling it out as morally unacceptable, for saying that it-is not only a crime against the distant future but also a crime against the present and immediate future. These other grounds for moral concern about nuclear energy, as it affects the present and immediate future, include problems arising from the possibility of catastrophic releases of radioactive fuel into the environment or of waste material following an accident such as reactor melt-down, of unscheduled discharges of radiation into the environment from a plant fault, of proli- �166 R. and V. Routley feration of nuclear weapons, and of deliberate release or threat of release of radioactive materials as a measure of terrorism or of extortion. All these are important issues, of much moral interest. What we want to claim, however, is that on the basis of its effects on the future alone, the nuclear option is morally unacceptable. Appendix Passmore's Treatment ofRawls, and What Really Happens on Rawls's Theory Passmore takes it that Rawls's theory yields an unconstrained position but, according to Rawls, the theory leads to quite the opposite result; namely, persons in different generations [and not merely neighbouring generations] have duties and obligations to one another just as contemporaries do. The present generation cannot do as it pleases but is bound by the principles that would be chosen in the original position to define justice between persons at different moments of time.. . . The derivation of these duties and obligations may seem at first a somewhat far-fetched application of the central doctrine. Nevertheless these requirements would be acknowledged in the original position [where the parties do not know to which generation they belong], and so the conception of justice as fairness covers these matters without any change in its basic idea. ([5], p. 293; the second insert is drawn from p. 287) Through judicious use of the veil of ignorance and the time of entry of parties to the original contract position, Rawls's contract theory, unlike simpler explicit contract theories, can yield definite obligations to distant future people,36 for example, we ought to save at a just rate for future people. But, as Rawls remarks (p. 284), 'the question of justice between generations . . . subjects any ethical theory to severe if not impossible tests'. It is doubtful that Rawls's theory as formulated passes the tests; for the theory as formulated does not yield the stated conclusion, but a conclusion inconsistent with the thesis that there are the same obligations to future people as to contemporaries. Exactly how these obligations arise from the initial agreement depends critically on the interpretation of the time of �Obligations to the Future 167 entry of the parties into the agreement. Insofar as Rawls insists upon the present-time-of-entry interpretation (p. 139), he has to introduce supplementary motivational assumptions in order to (try to) secure the desired bondings between generations, in particular to ensure that the generation of the original position saves for any later generation, even their immediate successors ([5], p. 140 and p. 292). Rawls falls back on-what is as we have seen inadequate to the task, since it does not exclude one generation damaging another remote generation in a way that bypasses mutually successive generations - 'ties of sentiment between successive generations' (p. 292): to this limited extent Passmore has a point, for such a social contract on its own (without additional assumptions about the motives of the parties to the agreement) does not furnish obligations even to our immediate successors. This is indicative also of the unsatisfactory instability of Rawls's theory under changes, its sensitivity to the way the original agreement is set up, to the motivation of parties, their time of entry, what they can know, etc. To arrive at a more adequate account of obligations to the distant future under Rawls's theory, let us adopt, to avoid the additional, dubious and unsatisfactory, motivational assumptions Rawls invokes, one of the alternative - and non -equivalent - time-of-entry interpretations that Rawls lists (p. 146), that of persons alive at some time in simultaneous agreement. Let us call this, following Rawls's notation (on p. 140), interpretation 4b (it is perhaps unnecessary to assume for 4b any more than 4a that all people need be involved: it may be enough given the equivalencizing effect of the veil of ignorance that some are, and as with the particular quantifier it is quite unnecessary to be specific about numbers). Then of course the parties, since they are, for all they know, of different generations, will presumably agree on a just savings rate, and also to other just distribution principles, simply on the basis of Rawlsian rationality, i.e. advancing their own interests, without additional motivation assumptions. This more appealing omnitemporal interpretation of time of entry into the agreement, which gives a superior account of obligation to the future consistent with Rawls's claim, Rawls in some places puts down as less than best (p. 292) but in his most detailed account of the original position simply dismisses (p. 139): To conceive of the original position [as a gathering of people living at different times] would be to stretch fantasy too far; the conception would cease to be a natural guide to intuition. �168 R. and V. Rout ley This we question: it would be a better guide to intuition than a position (like 4a) which brings out intuitively wrong results; it is a more satisfactory guide, for example, to justice between generations than the present-timeof-entry interpretation, which fails conspicuously to allow for the range of potential persons (all of whom are supposed to qualify on Rawls's account for just treatment, cf. § 77). Moreover, it stretches fantasy no further than science fiction or than some earlier contract accounts.36 But it does require changes in the way the original position is conceived, and it does generate metaphysical difficulties for orthodox ontological views (though not to the same extent for the Meinongian view we prefer); for, to consider the latter, either time travel is possible or the original hypothetical position is an impossible situation, with people who live at different times assembled at the same time. The difficulties - of such an impossible meeting help to reveal that what Rawls's theory offers is but a colourful representation of obligations in terms of a contract agreed upon at a meeting. The metaphysical difficulties do not concern merely possible people, because all those involved are sometime-actual people; nor are there really serious difficulties generated by the fact that very many of these people do not exist, i.e. exist now. The more serious difficulties are either those of time travel, e.g. that future parties relocated into the present may be able to interfere with their own history, or, if time travel is ruled out logically or otherwise, that future parties may be advantaged (or disadvantaged) by their knowledge of history and technology, and that accordingly fairness is lost. As there is considerable freedom in how we choose to (re)arrange the original position, we shall suppose that time travel is rejected as a means of entering the original position. For much less than travel is required; some sort of limited communicational network which filters out, for example, all historical data (and all cultural or species dependent material) would suffice; and in any case if time travel were not excluded essentially the present-time-of-entry interpretation would serve, though fairness would again be put in doubt. The filtered communicational hook-up by which the omnitemporal position is engineered still has - if fairness is to be seen to be built into the decision making - to be combined with a reinterpreted veil of ignorance, so that parties do not know where they are located temporally any more than they know who they are characterwise. This implies, among other things, limitations on the parties' knowledge of factual matters, such as available technology and world and local history; for otherwise parties could work out their location, temporal or spatial. For example, if some party knew, as Rawls supposes, �Obligations to the Future 169 the general social facts, then he would presumably be aware of the history of his time and so of where history ends, that is of the date of his generation, his time (his present), and so be aware of his temporal location. These are already problems for Rawls's so-called 'present-time-ofentry interpretation' - it is, rather, a variable-time-of-entry interpretation - given that the parties may be, as Rawls occasionally admits (e.g. p. 287), of any one generation, not necessarily the present: either they really do have to be ofthepresent time or they cannot be assumed to know as much as Rawls supposes.37 There is, however, no reason why the veil of ignorance should not be extended so as to avoid this problem; and virtually any extension that solves the problem for the variable-time-of-entry interpretation should serve, so it seems, for the omnitemporal one. We shall assume then that the parties know nothing which discloses their respective locations (i.e. in effect we write in conditions for universalizability of principles decided upon). There are still gaps between the assumptions of the omnitemporal position as roughly sketched and the desired conclusion concerning obligations to the future, but (the matter is beginning to look non-trivially provable given not widely implausible assumptions and) the intuitive arguments are as clear as those in [5], indeed they simply restate arguments to obligations given by Rawls. Rawls's theory, under interpretation 4b, admits of nice application to the problems of just distribution of material resources and of nuclear power. The just distribution, or rate of usage, of material resources38 over time is an important conservation issue to which Rawls's theory seems to apply, just as readily, and in a similar fashion, to that in which it applies to the issue of a just rate of savings. In fact the argument from the original position for a just rate of saving - whatever its adequacy - can by simply mimicked to yield an argument for just distribution of resources over generations. Thus, for example: persons in the original position are to ask themselves how much they would be willing to save [i.e. conserve] at each stage of advance on the assumption that all other generations are to save at the same rate [conserve resources to the same extent]. . . . In effect, then, they must choose a just savings principle [resources distribution principle] that assigns an appropriate rate of accumulation to [degree of resource conservation at] each level of advance. ([5], p. 287; our bracketed options give the alternative argument) �170 R. and V. Routley Just as 'they try to piece together a just savings schedule' (p. 289), so they can try to piece together a just resource distribution policy. Just as a case for resource conservation can be made out by appeal to the original position, since it is going to be against the interests of, to the disadvantage of, later parties to find themselves in a resource depleted situation (thus, on Rawlsian assumptions, they will bargain hard for a share of resources), so, interestingly, a case against a rapid programme of nuclear power development can be devised. The basis of a case against large-scale nuclear development is implicit in Rawls's contract theory under interpretation 4b, though naturally the theory is not applied in this sort of way by Rawls. To state the case in its crude but powerful form: people from later generations in the original position are bound to take it as against their interests to simply carry the waste can for energy consumed by an earlier generation. (We have already argued that they will find no convincing overriding considerations that make it worth their while to carry the waste can.) Thus not only has Passmore misrepresented the obligations to the future that Rawls's theory admits; he is also wrong in suggesting (p. 87 and p. 91) that Rawls's theory cannot justify a policy of resource conservation which includes reductions in present consumption. There is, in this connection, an accumulation of errors in Passmore, some of which spill over to Rawls, which it is worth trying to set out. First, Passmore claims ([1], p. 86; cf. also p. 90) that 'Rawls does not so much mention the saving of natural resources'. In fact the 'husbanding of natural resources' is very briefly considered ([5], p. 271). It is true, however, that Rawls does not reveal any of the considerable power that his theory, properly interpreted, has for natural resource conservation, as implying a just distribution of natural resources over time. Secondly, Passmore attempts ([1], pp. 87 ff.) to represent the calls of conservationists for a reduction in present resource usage and for a more just distribution as a call for heroic self-sacrifices; this is part of his more general attempt to represent every moral constraint with respect to the non-immediate future as a matter of self-sacrifice. 'Rawls's theory', Passmore says (on p. 87), 'leaves no room for heroic sacrifice', and so, he infers, leaves no room for conservation. Not only is the conclusion false, but the premiss also: Rawls's theory allows for supererogation, as Rawls explains ([5], p. 117). But resource conservation is, like refraining from nuclear development, not a question of heroic self-sacrifice; it is in part a question of obligations or duties to the distant future. And Rawls's theory allows not only for obligations as well as supererogation, but also for natural duties. Rawls's �Obligations to the Future 171 contract, unlike the contracts of what is usually meant by a 'contract theory', is by no means exhaustive of the moral sphere: But even this wider [contract] theory fails to embrace all moral relationships, since it would seem to include only our relations with other persons and to leave out of account how we are to conduct ourselves towards,animals and the rest of nature. I do not contend that the contract notion offers a way to approach these questions which are certainly of the first importance; and I shall have to put them aside, (p. 17) The important class of obligations beyond the scope of the contract theory surely generates obligations between persons which even the wider contract theory likewise cannot explain. The upshot is that such a contract account, even if sufficient for the determination of obligations, is not necessary. To this extent Rawls' s theory is not a full social contract theory at all. However, Rawls appears to lose sight of the fact that his contract theory delivers only a sufficient condition when he claims, for example (p. 298), that 'one feature of the contract doctrine is that it places an upper bound on how much a generation can be asked to save for the welfare of later generations'. For greater savings may sometimes be required to meet obligations beyond those that the contract doctrine delivers. In short, Rawls appears to have slipped into assuming, inconsistently, that his contract theory is a necessary condition. Although Rawls's theory caters for justice between generations and allows the derivation of important obligations to people in the distant future, the full theory is far from consistent on these matters and there are significant respects in which Rawls does not take justice to the future seriously. The most conspicuous symptoms of this are that justice to the future is reduced to a special case, justice between generations, and that the only aspect of justice between generations that Rawls actually considers is a just savings rate; there is, for example, no proper examination of the just distribution of resources among generations, though these resources, Rawls believes, provide the material base of the just institutions that he wants to see maintained. In fact Rawls strongly recommends a system of markets as a just means for the allocation of most goods and services, recognizing their well-known limitations only in the usual perfunctory fashion ([5], pp. 270 ff.). Yet market systems are limited by a narrow time horizon, and are quite ill-equipped to allocate resources in a just fashion �172 R. and V. Rout ley over a time span of several generations. Similarly Rawls's endorsement of democratic voting procedures as in many cases a just method of determining procedures depends upon the assumptions that everyone with ah interest is represented. But given his own assumptions about obligations to the future and in respect of potential persons this is evidently not the case. Catering in a just fashion for the interests of future people poses serious problems for any method of decision that depends upon people being present to represent their own interests. Some of the more conservative, indeed reactionary, economic assumptions in Rawls emerge with the assumption that all that is required for justice between generations is a just savings rate, that all we need to pass on to the future are the things that guarantee appropriate savings such as capital, factories, and machines. But the transmission of these things is quite insufficient for justice to the future, and neither necessary nor sufficient as a foundation for a good life for future generations. What is required for justice is the transmission in due measure of what is valuable. Rawls has, however, taken value accumulation as capital accumulation, thereby importing one of the grossest economic assumptions, that capital reflects value. But of course the accumulation of capital may conflict with the preservation of what is valuable. It is for this sort of reason (and thus, in essence, because of the introduction of supplementary economistic theses which are not part of the pure contract theory) that Rawls's theory is a reactionary one from an environmental point of view; on the theory as presented (i.e. the contract theory plus all the supplementary assumptions) there is no need to preserve such things as wilderness or natural beauty. The savings doctrine supposes that everything of value for transmission to the future is negotiable in the market or tradeable; but then transmission of savings can by no means guarantee that some valuable things, not properly represented in market systems, are not eliminated or not passed on, thereby making future people worse off. It becomes evident in this way, too, how culturally-bound Rawls's idea of ensuring justice to future generations through savings is. It is not just that the idea does not apply, without a complete overhaul, to non-industrial societies such as those of hunter-gatherers; it does not apply to genuinely post-industrial societies either. Consideration of such alternative societies suggests that whafis required, in place of capital accumulation, is that we pass on what is necessary for a good life, that we ensure that the basics are fairly distributed over time and not eroded, e.g. that in the case of the forest people that the forest is maintained. The narrowness of Rawls's picture, �Obligations to the Future 173 which makes no due allowance for social or cultural diversity (from the original contractual position on) or for individual diversity arises in part from his underlying and especially narrow socio-economic assumption as to what people want: What men want is meaningful work in free association with others, these associations regulating their relations to one another within a framework of just basic institutions. ([5], p. 290) This may be what many Harvard men want; but as a statement of what men want it supplies neither sufficient nor even necessary conditions.39 NOTES 1 Thus according to the Fox Report ([2], p. 110; our italics). There is at present no generally accepted means by which high level waste can be permanently isolated from the environment and remain safe for very long periods. . . . Permanent disposal of high-level solid wastes in stable geological formations is regarded as the most likely solution, but has yet to be demonstrated as feasible. It is not certain that such methods and disposal sites will entirely prevent radioactive releases following disturbances caused by natural processes or human activity. The Fox Report also quoted approvingly ([2], p. 187; our italics) the conclusion of the British (Flowers) Report [6]: There should be no commitment to a large programme of nuclear fission power until it has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that a method exist s to ensure the safe containment of long-lived, highly radioactive waste for the indefinite future. Although the absence of a satisfactory storage method has been conceded by some leading proponents of nuclear development, e.g. Weinberg ([3], pp. 32-33), it is now disputed by others. In particular, the headline for Cohen [15], which reads 'A substantial body of evidence indicates that the high level radioactive wastes generated by U.S. nuclear power plants can be stored satisfactorily in deep geological formations', has suggested to many readers - what it was no doubt intended to suggest- that there is really no problem about the disposal of radioactive wastes after all. Cohen presents, however, no new hard evidence, no evidence not already available to the British and Australian Commissions ([2] and [6]). Moreover the evidence Cohen does outline fails conspicuously to measure up to the standards rightly required by the Flowers and Fox Reports. Does Cohen offer a commercial-scale procedure for waste disposal which can be demonstrated as safe? Far from it: �174 R. and V. Routley The detailed procedures for handling the high-level wastes are not yet definite, but present indications are that. . . . (Cohen [1], p. 24; our italics) Does Cohen 'demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt' the long-term safety of burial of wastes, deep underground? Again, far from it: On the face of it such an approach appears to be reasonably safe. . . . (p. 24; our italics) Cohen has apparently not realized what is required. At issue here are not so much scientific or empirical issues as questions of methodology, of standards of evidence required for claims of safety, and above all, of values, since claims of safety, for example, involve implicit evaluations concerning what counts as an acceptable risk, an admissible cost, etc. In the headline 'a substantial body of evidence . . . indicates that. . . wastes . . . can be stored satisfactorily' the key words (italicized) are evaluative or elastic, and the strategy of Cohen's case is to adopt very low standards for their application. But in view of what is at stake it is hardly acceptable to do this, to dress up in this way what are essentially optimistic assurances and untested speculations about storage, which in any case do little to meet the difficulties and uncertainties that have been widely pointed out as regards precisely the storage proposals Cohen outlines, namely human or natural interference or disturbance. 2 See [18], pp. 24-25. 3 On all these points, see [14], esp. p. 141. According to the Fox Report ([2], p. 110): Parts of the reactor structure will be highly radioactive and their disposal could be very difficult. There is at present no experience of dismantling a full size reactor. 4 See, in particular, The Union of Concerned Scientists, The Nuclear Fuel Cycle, Friends of the Earth Energy Paper, San Francisco 1973, p. 47; also [3], p. 32 and [14], p. 149. 5 As the discussion in [14], pp. 153-7, explains. 6 Cf. [17], pp. 35-36, [18] and, for much detail, J. R. Goffman and A. R. Tamplin, Poisoned Power, Rodale Press, Emmau Pa. 1971. 7 On the pollution and waste disposal record of the infant nuclear industry, see [14] and [17]. The record of many countries on pollution control, where in many cases available technologies for reducing or removing pollution are not applied because they are considered too expensive or because they adversely affect the interests of some powerful group, provides clear historical evidence that the problem of nuclear waste disposal would not end simply with the devising of a 'safe' technology for disposal, even if one could be devised which provided a sufficient guarantee of safety and was commercially feasible. The fact that present economic and political arrangements are overwhelmingly weighted in favour of the interests and concerns of (some) contemporary humans makes it not unrealistic to expect the long-term nuclear waste disposal, if it involved any significant cost at all, when public concern about the issue died down, would be seen to conflict with the interests of contemporary groups, and that these latter interests would in many cases be favoured. Nor, as the history of movements such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament shows, could generalized public concern in the absence of direct personal interest, be relied upon to be sustained for long enough to ensure implementation of costly or troublesome long-term disposal methods - even in those places where public concern exists and is a politically significant force. It must be stressed then that the problem is not merely one of disposal technique. Historical and other evidence points to the conclusion that many of the most important risks associated with nuclear waste disposal are not of the kind which might be amenable �Obligations to the Future 175 to technical solutions in the laboratory. A realistic assessment of potential costs to the future from nuclear development cannot overlook these important non-technical risk factors. 8 Of course the effect on people is not the only factor which has to be taken into consideration in arriving at a moral judgment. Nuclear radiation, unlike most ethical theories, does not confine its scope to human life. But since the harm nuclear development is likely to cause to non-human life can hardly improve its case, it suffices if the case against it can be made out solely in terms of its effects on human life in the conventional way. 9 Proponents of nuclear power often try to give the impression that future people will not just bear costs from nuclear development but will also be beneficiaries, because nuclear powerprovides an 'abundant' or even 'unlimited' source of energy; thus Weinberg ([3], p. 34): 'an all but infinite source of relatively cheap and clean energy'. A good example of an attempt to create the impression that 'abundant' and 'cheap' energy from nuclear fission will be available to 'our descendants', i.e. all future people, is found in the last paragraph of Cohen [15]. Such claims are most misleading, since fission power even with the breeder reactor has only about the same prospective lifetime as coal-produced electricity (a point that can be derived using data in A. Parker, 'World Energy Resources: A Survey', Energy Policy, Vol. 3 [1975], pp. 58-66), and it is quite illegitimate to assume that nuclear fusion, for which there are still major unsolved problems, will have a viable, clean technology by the time fission runs out, or, for that matter, that it ever will. Thus while some few generations of the immediate future may obtain some benefits as well as costs, there is a very substantial chance that tho se of the more distant future will obtain nothing but costs. 10 These feelings, of which Smith's and Hume's sympathy is representative, are but the feeling echoes of obligation. At most, sympathy explains the feeling of obligation or lack of it, and this provides little guide as to whether there is an obligation or not - unless one interprets moral sympathy, the feeling of having a obligation, or being obligated, itself as a sufficient indication of obligation, in which case moral sympathy is a non-explanatory correlate in the feelings department of obligation itself and cannot be truly explanatory of the ground of it; unless, in short, moral sympathy reduces to an emotive rewrite of moral obligation. 11 Elsewhere in [1] Passmore is especially exercised that our institutions and intellectual traditions - presumably only the better ones - should be passed on to posterity, and that we should strive to make the world a better place, if not eventually an ideal one. 12 This is not the only philosophically important issue in environmental ethics on which Passmore is inconsistent. Consider his: 'over-arching intention: to consider whether the solution of ecological problems demands a moral or metaphysical revolution' (p. x), whether the West needs a new ethic and a new metaphysics. Passmore's answer in [1] is an emphatic No. Only insofar as Western moralists have [made various erroneous suggestions] can the West plausibly be said to need a 'new ethic'. What it needs, for the most part, is not so much a 'new ethic' as adherence to a perfectly familiar ethic. For the major sources of our ecological disasters - apart from ignorance - are greed and shortsightedness, which amount to much the same thing. . . There is no novelty in the view that greed is evil; no need of a new ethic to tell us as much. (p. 187) 'The view that the West now needs. . . a new concept of nature' is similarly dismissed (p. 186, cf. p. 72). But in his paper [1*] (i.e. 'Attitudes to Nature', Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures, Vol. 8, Macmillan, London 1975), which is said to be an attempt to bring together and to reformulate some of the basic philosophical themes of [1], Passmore's answer is Yes, and quite different themes, inconsistent with those of [1], are advanced: �176 R. and V. Routley [T]he general conditions I have laid down . . . have not been satisfied in most of the traditional philosophies of nature. To that degree it is true, I think, that we do need a 'new metaphysics' which is genuinely not anthropocentric. . . . A 'new metaphysics', if it is not to falsify the facts, will have to be naturalistic, but not reductionist. The working out of such a metaphysics is, in my judgement, the most important task which lies ahead of philosophy. ([1*], pp. 260-1) A new ethic accompanies this new metaphysics. The emergence of new moral attitudes to nature is bound up, then, with the emergence of a more realistic philosophy of nature. That is the only adequate foundation for effective ecological concern. ([1*], p. 264) This is a far cry from the theme of [1] that ecological problems can be solved within the traditions of the West. 13 Put differently, the causal linkage can bypass intermediate generations, especially given action at a temporal distance: the chain account implies that there are no moral constraints in initiating such causal linkages. The chain picture accordingly seems to presuppose an unsatisfactory Humean model of causation, demanding contiguity and excluding action at a distance. 14 Golding we shall concede to Passmore, though even here the case is not clearcut. For Golding writes towards the end of his article ([12], p. 96): My discussion, until this point, has proceeded on the view that we have obligations to future generations. But do we? I am not sure that the question can be answered in the affirmative with any certainty. I shall conclude this note with a very brief discussion of some of the difficulties. All of Passmore's material on Golding is drawn from this latter and, as Golding says, 'speculative' discussion. 15 There is no textual citation for Bentham at all for the chapter of [1] concerned, viz. Ch. 4, 'Conservation'. 16 As Passmore himself at first concedes ([1], p. 84): If, as Bentham tells us, in deciding how to act men ought to take account of the effects of their actions on every sentient being, they obviously ought to take account of the pleasure and pains of the as yet unborn. 17 Neither rightness nor probable lightness in the hedonistic senses correspond to these notions in the ordinary sense; so at least [13] argues, following much anti-utilitarian literature. 18 On this irrationality different theories agree: the rational procedure, for example according to the minimax rule for decision-making under uncertainty, is to minimize that outcome which maximizes harm. 19 Discount, or bank, rates in the economists' sense are usually set to follow the market (cf. P. A. Samuelson, Economics, 7th ed., McGraw-Hill, New York 1967, p. 351). Thus the rates have little moral relevance. 20 Cf. Rawls [5], p. 287: 'From a moral point of view there are no grounds for discounting future well-being on the basis of pure time preference.' 21 What the probabilities would be depends on the theory of probability adopted: a Carnapian theory, e.g., would lead back to the unconstrained position. �Obligations to the Future 177 22 A real possibility is one which there is evidence for believing could eventuate. A real possibility requires producible evidence for its consideration. The contrast is with mere logical possibility. 23 Thus, to take a simple special case, economists dismiss distant future people from their assessments of utility, welfare, etc., on the basis of their non-existence; cf. Ng ('the utility of a non-existent person is zero') and Harsanyi ('only existing people [not even "nonexisting potential individuals"] can have real utility levels since they are the only ones able to enjoy objects with a positive utility, suffer from objects with a negative utility, and feel indifferent to objects with zero utility') (see Appendix B of Y. K. Ng, 'Preference, Welfare, and Social Welfare', paper presented at the Colloquium on Preference, Choice and Value Theory, RSSS, Australian National University, August 1977, pp. 24, 26-27). Non-existent people have no experiences, no preferences; distant future people do not exist; therefore distant future people have no utility assignments - so the sorites goes. But future people at least will have wants, preferences, and so on, and these have to be taken into account in adequate utility assessments (which should be assessed over afuture time horizon), no matter how much it may complicate or defeat calculations. 24 There are problems about formulating universalizability satisfactorily, but they hardly affect the point. The requisite universalizability can in fact be satisfactorily brought out from the semantical analysis of deontic notions such as obligation, and indeed argued for on the basis of such an analysis which is universal in form. The lawlikeness requirement, which can be similarly defended, is essentially that imposed on genuine scientific laws by logical empiricists (e.g. Carnap and Hempel), that such laws should contain no proper names or the like, no reference to specific locations or times. 25 Such a principle is explicit both in classical utilitarianism (e.g. Sidgwick [11], p. 414), and in a range of contract and other theories from Kant and Rousseau toRawls ([5], p. 293). How the principle is argued for will depend heavily, however, on the underlying theory; and we do not want to make our use depend heavily on particular ethical theories. 26 See esp. R. Lanoue, NuclearPlants:The MoreTheyBuild, The More You Pay, Centerfor Study of Responsive Law, Washington DC 1976; also [14], pp. 212 ff. 27 On all these points see R. Grossman and G. Daneker, Guide to Jobs and Energy, Environmentalists for Full Employment, Washington DC 1977, pp. 1-7, and also the details supplied in substantiating the interesting case of Commoner [7]. On the absorption of available capital by the nuclear industry, see as well [18], p. 23. On the employment issues, see too H. E. Daly in [9], p. 149. A more fundamental challenge to the poverty argument appears in I. Illich, Energy and Equality, Calder & Boyars, London 1974, where it is argued that the sort of development nuclear energy represents is exactly the opposite of what the poor need. 28 For much more detail on the inappropriateness see E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, Blond & Briggs, London 1973. As to the capital and other requirements, see [2], p. 48, and also [7] and [9]. For an illuminating look at the sort of development high-energy technology will tend to promote in the so-called underdeveloped countries, see the paper of Waiko and other papers in the Melanesian Environment (ed. by J. H. Winslow), Australian National University Press, Canberra 1977. 29 This fact is implicitly recognized in [2], p. 56. 30 A useful survey is given in A. Lovins, Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken, Friends of the Earth Australia, 1977 (reprinted from Foreign Affairs, October 1976); see also [17], [6], [7], [14], pp. 233 ff., and Schumacher, op. cit. 31 This is also explained in [2], p. 56. 32 An argument like this is suggested in Passmore [1], Chs. 4 and 7, with respect to the question of saving resources. In Passmore this argument for the overriding importance of passing on contemporary culture is underpinned by what appears to be a future- �178 R. and V. Routley directed ethical version of the Hidden Hand argument of economics - that, by a coincidence which if correct would indeed be fortunate, the best way to take care of the future (and perhaps even the only way to do so, since do-good intervention is almost certain to go wrong) is to take proper care of the present and immediate future. The argument has all the defects of the related Chain Argument discussed above and others. 33 See [14], p. 66, p. 191, and also [7]. 34 For such arguments see esp. M. Flood and R. Grove-White, Nuclear Prospects. A Comment on the Individual, the State and Nuclear Power, Friends of the Earth, Council for the Protection of Rural England and National Council for Civil Liberties, London 1976. 35 For a recent sketch of one such alternative which is outside the framework of the conventional option of centralized bureaucratic socialism, see E. Callenbach's novel, Ecotopia, Banyan Tree Books, Berkeley, California 1975. For the outline of a liberation socialist alternative see Radical Technology (ed. by G. Boyle and P. Harper), Undercurrents Limited, London 1976, and references therein. 36 Some earlier contract theories also did. Burke's contract (in E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Dent, London 1910, pp. 93-94) 'becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are not yet born'. Thus Burke's contract certainly appears to lead to obligations to distant future generations. Needless to say, there are metaphysical difficulties, which however Burke never considers, about contracts between parties at widely separated temporal locations. 37 Several of the preceding points we owe to M. W. Jackson. 38 Resources such as soil fertility and petroleum could even be a primary social goods on Rawls's very hazy general account of these goods ([5], pp. 62, 97): are these 'something a rational man wants whatever else he wants'? The primary social goods should presumably be those which are necessary for the good and just life -which will however vary with culture. 39 We have benefited from discussion with Ian Hughes and Frank Muller and useful comments on the paper from Brian Martin and Derek Browne. REFERENCES [1] J. Passmore, Man's Responsibility for Nature, Duckworth, London 1974. [2] Ranger Uranium Environmental Inquiry First Report, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra 1977. [3] A. M. Weinberg, 'Social Institutions and Nuclear Energy", Science, Vol. 177 (July 1972), pp. 27-34. • [4] R. Routley, 'Exploring Meinong's Jungle II. Existence is Existence Now', Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic (to appear). [5] J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1971. [6] Nuclear Power and the Environment. Sixth Report of the British Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, London 1976. [7] B. Commoner, The Poverty of Power, Knopf, New York 1976. [8] G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1903. [9] B. Commoner, H. Boksenbaum and M. Corr (Eds.), Energy and Human Welfare - A Critical Analysis, Vol. III, Macmillan, New York 1975. �Obligations to the Future 179 [10] J. Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, Vol. 1, published under the superintendence of J. Bowring, with an intro. by J. H. Burton; William Tait, Edinburgh 1843. [11] H. Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, Macmillan, London 1962 (reissue). [12] M. P. Golding, 'Obligations to Future Generations', Monist, Vol. 56 (1972), pp. 85-99. [13] R. and V. Routley, 'An Expensive Repair Kit for Utilitarianism', presented at the Colloquium on Preference, Choice and Value Theory, RSSS, Australian National University, August 1977. [14] R. Nader and J. Abbotts, The Menace of Atomic Energy, Outback Press, Melbourne 1977. [15] B. L. Cohen, 'The Disposal of Radioactive Wastes from Fission Reactors', Scientific American, Vol. 236 (June 1977), pp. 22-31. [16] S. McCracken, 'The Waragainst the Atom' .Commentary (September 1977), pp. 33-47. [17] A. B. Lovins and J. H. Price, Non-Nuclear Futures: The Case for an Ethical Energy Strategy, Friends of the Earth International, San Francisco 1975. [18] A. Roberts, "The Politics of Nuclear Power', Arena, No. 41 (1976), pp. 22-47. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Published Papers Description An account of the resource Sylvan formally published very little of his nuclear ethics and politics, although a nuclear imaginary is present throughout his ouevre. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Biographical Text test Text Any textual data included in the document Inquiry, 21, 133-79 Nuclear Energy and Obligations to the Future R. and V. Routley Plumwood Mountain, Braidwood, Australia The paper considers the morality of nuclear energy development as it concerns future people, especially the creation of highly toxic nuclear wastes requiring longterm storage. On the basis of an example with many parallel moral features it is argued that the imposition of such costs and risks on the future is morally unacceptable. The paper goes on to examine in detail possible ways of escaping this conclusion, especially the escape route of denying that moral obligations of the appropriate type apply to future people. The bulk of the paper comprises discussion of this philosophical issue, including many arguments against assigning obligations to the future drawn both from analyses of obligation and from features of the future such as uncertainty and indeterminacy. A further escape through appeal to moral conflict is also considered, and in particular two conflict arguments, the Poverty and Lights-going-out arguments are briefly discussed. Both these escape routes are rejected and it is concluded that if the same standards of behaviour are applied to the future as to the present, nuclear energy development is morally unacceptable. I. The Bus Example Suppose we consider a bus, a bus which we hope is to make a very long journey. This bus, a third world bus, carries both passengers and freight. The bus sets down and picks up many different passengers in the course of its long journey and the drivers change many times, but because of the way the bus line is managed and the poor service on the route it is nearly always full to overcrowded, with passengers hanging off the back, and as in Afghanistan, passengers riding on the roof, and chickens and goats in the freight compartment. Early in the bus's journey someone consigns on it, to a far distant destination, a package containing a highly toxic and explosive gas. This is packaged in a very thin container, which as the consigner well knows is unlikely to contain the gas for the full distance for which it is consigned, and certainly will not do so if the bus should encounter any trouble, for example if there is a breakdown and the interior of the bus becomes very hot, if the bus should strike a very large bump or pothole of the sort commonly found on some of the bad roads it has to traverse, or if some 1 134 R. and V. Routley passenger should interfere deliberately or inadvertently with the cargo or perhaps try to steal some of the freight, as also frequently happens. All of these things, let us suppose, have happened on some of the bus's previous journeys. If the container should break the resulting disaster would probably kill at least some of the people and animals on the bus, while others could be maimed or contract serious diseases. There does not seem much doubt about what most of us would say about the morality of the consigner's action, and there is certainly no doubt about what the passengers would say. The consigner's action in putting the safety of the occupants of the bus at risk is appalling. What could excuse such an action, what sort of circumstances might justify it, and what sort of case could the consigner reasonably put up? The consigner might say that it is by no means certain that the gas will escape; he himself is an optimist and therefore feels that such unfavourable possible outcomes should be ignored. In any case the bus might have an accident and the passengers be killed long before the container gets a chance to leak; or the passengers might change to another bus and leave the lethal parcel behind. He might say that it is the responsibility of the passengers and the driver to ensure that the journey is a smooth one, and that if they fail to do so, the results are not his fault. He might say that the journey is such a long one that many of the passengers may have become mere mindless vegetables or degenerate wretches about whose fate no decent person need concern himself, or that they might not care about losing their lives or health or possessions anyway by that time. Most of these excuses will seem little more than a bad joke, and certainly would not usually be reckoned any sort of justification. The main argument the consigner of the lethal parcel employs, however, is that his own pressing needs justify his actions. He has no option but to consign his potentially lethal parcel, he says, since the firm he owns, and which has produced the material as a by-product, is in bad financial straits and cannot afford to produce a better container or to stop the production of the gas. If the firm goes out of business, the consigner says, his wife will leave him, and he will lose his family happiness, the comfortable way of life to which he has become accustomed and sees now as a necessity; his employees will lose their jobs and have to look for others; not only will the firm's customers be inconvenienced but he, the consigner, will have to break some business contracts; the inhabitants of the local village through loss of spending and cancellation of the Multiplier Effect will suffer finan- Obligations to the Future 135 cial hardship, and, worst of all, the tiny flow of droplets that the poor of the village might receive (theoretically at any rate) as a result of the trickling down of these good things would dry up entirely. In short, some basic and some perhaps uncomfortable changes will be needed in the village. Even if the consigner's story were accepted at face value - and it would be wise to look critically at his story - only someone whose moral sensibilities had been paralysed by the disease of galloping economism could see such a set of considerations, based on 'needs', comfort, and the goal of local prosperity, as justifying the consigner's action. One is not generally entitled to thus simply transfer the risks and costs arising from one's own life onto other uninvolved parties, to get oneself out of a hole of one's own making by creating harm or risk of harm to someone else who has had no share in creating the situation. To create serious risks and costs, especially risks to life or health for such others, simply to avoid having to make some changes to a comfortable life style, or even for a somewhat better reason, is usually thought deserving of moral condemnation, and sometimes considered a crime; for example, the action of a company in creating risks to the lives or health of its workers or customers to prevent itself from going bankrupt. What the consigner says may be an explanation of his behaviour, but it is not a justification. The problem raised by nuclear waste disposal is by no means a perfect analogy to the bus case, since, for example, the passengers on the nuclear bus cannot get off the bus or easily throw out the lethal package. In many crucial moral respects, however, the nuclear waste storage problem as it affects future people, the passengers in the bus we are considering, resembles the consignment of the faultily packaged lethal gas. Not only are rather similar moral principles involved, but a rather similar set of arguments to the lamentable excuses the consigner presents have been seriously put up to justify nuclear development, the difference being that in the nuclear case these arguments have been widely accepted. There is also some parallel in the risks involved; there is no known safe way to package the highly toxic wastes generated by nuclear plants that will be spread around the world if large-scale nuclear development goes ahead.1 The wastes problem will not be a slight one, with each one of the more than 2,000 reactors envisaged by the end of the century, producing on average annual wastes containing one thousand times the radioactivity of the Hiroshima bomb.2 The wastes include not merely the spent fuels and their radioactive by-products, but also everything they contaminate, from fuel containers to the thousands of widely distributed decommissioned nuclear 136 R. and V. Routley reactors which will have to be abandoned, still in a highly radioactive condition, after the expiry of their expected lifetimes of about thirty years, and which have been estimated to require perhaps one and a half million years to reach safe levels of radioactivity.3 The wastes must be kept suitably isolated from the environment for their entire active lifetime; for fission products the required storage period averages a thousand years or so, and for the actinides (transuranic elements) which include plutonium, there is a half-million to a million-year storage problem.4 Serious problems have arisen with both short-term and proposed longterm methods of storage, even with the comparatively small quantities of waste that have been produced over the last twenty years.5 With present known short-term surface methods of storage there is a continued need for human intervention to keep the material isolated from the environment, while with proposed longer-term methods such as storage in salt mines or granite to the risk of human interference there are added the risks of leakage, e.g. through water seepage, and of disturbance, for example through climatic change, earth movements, etc. The risks are significant: no reasonable person with even a limited acquaintance with the history of human affairs over the last 3,000 years could be confident of safe storage by methods involving human intervention over the enormous time periods involved. No one with even a slight knowledge of the geological and climatic history of the earth over the last million years, a period which has seen a number of ice ages and great fluctuations in climate for example, could be confident that the waste material could be safely stored for the vast periods of time required. Much of this waste is highly toxic; for example, even a beachball sized quantity of plutonium appropriately distributed is enough to give every person on the planet lung cancer - so that a leak of even a small part of this waste material could involve huge loss of life, widespread disease and genetic damage, and contamination of immense areas of land.6 Given the enormous costs which could be involved for the future, it is plainly grossly inadequ'ate'to merely speculate concerning untested, but possibly or even probably, safe methods for disposal of wastes. Yet none of the proposed methods has been properly tested, and they may prove to involve all sorts of unforeseen difficulties and risks when an attempt is made to put them into practice on a commercial scale. Only a method that could provide a rigorous guarantee of safety over the storage period, that placed safety beyond reasonable doubt, would be acceptable. It is difficult to see how such rigorous guarantees could be given concerning either the Obligations to the Future 137 geological or future human factors. But even if an economically viable, rigorously safe long-term storage method could be devised, there is the problem of guaranteeing that it would be universally and invariably used. The assumption that it would be, especially if, as seems likely, such a method proved expensive economically and politically, seems to presuppose a level of efficiency, perfection, and concern for the future not previously encountered in human affairs, and certainly not conspicuous in the nuclear industry.7 Again, unless we assume continuous and faultless guarding of long-term storage sites through perhaps a million years of possible future human activity, weapons-grade radioactive material will be accessible, over much of the million-year storage period, to any party who is in a position to retrieve it. Our behaviour in creating this nightmare situation for the future is certainly no better than that of the consigner in the bus example. Industrialized countries, in order to get out of a mess of their own making essentially the creation of economies dependent on an abundance" of non-renewable energy in a situation where it is in fact in limited supply opt for a 'solution' which may enable them to avoid the making of uncomfortable changes during the lifetime of those now living, at the expense of passing heavy burdens on to the inhabitants of the earth at a future time burdens in the shape of costs and risks which, just as in the bus case, may adversely affect the life and health of future people and their opportunity to lead a decent life.8 It is sometimes suggested that analogies like the bus example are defective; that morally they are crucially different from the nuclear case, since future people, unlike the passengers in the bus, will benefit directly from nuclear development, which will provide an abundance of energy for the indefinite future. But this is incorrect. Nuclear fission creates wastes which may remain toxic for a million years, but even with the breeder reactor it could be an energy source for perhaps only 150 years. It will do nothing for the energy problems of the people of the distant future whose lives could be seriously affected by the wastes. Thus perhaps 30,000 generations of future people could be forced to bear significant risks, without any corresponding benefits, in order to provide for the extravagant energy use of only five generations. Nor is the risk of direct harm from the escape or misuse of radioactive materials the only burden the nuclear solution imposes on the future. Because the energy provided by nuclear fission is merely a stop-gap, it seems probable that in due course the same problem, that of making a 138 R. and V. Routley transition to renewable sources of energy, will have to be faced again by a future population which will probably, again as a result of our actions, be very much worse placed to cope with it.9 For they may well have to face the change to renewable resources in an over-populated world not only burdened with the legacy of our nuclear wastes, but also in a world in which, if the nuclear proponents' dream of global industrialization is realized, more and more of the global population will have become dependent on high energy consumption and associated technology and heavy resource use, and will have lost or reduced its ability to survive without it. It will, moreover, probably be a world which is largely depleted of non-renewable resources, and in which such renewable resources as forests and soils as remain, resources which will have to form a very important part of the basis of life, are in a run-down condition. Such points tell against the idea that future people must be, if not direct beneficiaries of nuclear fission energy, at least indirect beneficiaries. The 'solution' then is to buy time for contemporary industrial society at a price which not only creates serious problems for future people but which reduces their ability to cope with those problems. Just as in the bus case, contemporary industrial society proposes to get itself out of a hole of its own making by creating risk of harm, and by transferring costs and risks, to someone else who has had no part in producing the situation and who will obtain no clear benefit. It has clear alternatives to this action. That it does not take them is due essentially to its unwillingness to avoid changing wasteful patterns of consumption and to its desire to protect the interests of those who benefit from them. If we apply to the nuclear situation the same standards of behaviour and moral principles that we acknowledge (in principle if perhaps often not in fact) in the contemporary world, it will not be easy to avoid the conclusion that the situation involves injustice with respect to future people on a grand scale. It seems to us that there are only two plausible moves that might enable the avoidance of such a conclusion. First, it might be argued that the moral principles and obligations which we acknowledge for the contemporary world and the immediate future do not apply because the recipients of our nuclear parcel are in the non-immediate future. Secondly, an attempt might be made to appeal to overriding circumstances; for to reject the consigner's action in the circumstances outlined is not of course to say that there are no circumstances in which such an action might possibly be justifiable, or at least where the case is less clearcut. It is the same with the nuclear case. Just as in the case of the consigner of the Obligations to the Future 139 package there is a need to consider what these justifying circumstances might be, and whether they apply in the present case. We turn now to the first of these possible escape routes for the proponent of nuclear development, to the philosophical question of our obligations to the future. II. Obligations to the Distant Future The area in which these philosophical problems arise is that of the distant (i.e. non-immediate) future, that is, the future with which people alive today will make no direct contact; the immediate future provides comparatively few problems for moral theories. The issues involved, although of far more than academic interest, have not received any great attention in recent philosophical literature, despite the fact that the question of obligations to future people presents tests which a number of ethical theories fail to pass, and also raises a number of questions in political philosophy concerning the adequacy of accepted institutions which leave out of account the interests of future people. Moral philosophers have predictably differed on the issue. But contrary to the picture painted in a recent, widely read, and influential work discussing it, Passmore's Man's Responsibility for Nature, a good many philosophers who have explicitly considered the question have come down in favour of the same consideration being given to the rights and interests of future people as to those of contemporary or immediately future people. Other philosophers have tended to fall into three categories - those who acknowledge obligations to the future but who do not take them seriously or who assign them less weight, those who deny, or who are committed by their general moral position to denying, that there are moral obligations beyond the immediate future, and those like Passmore and Golding who come down, with admirable philosophical caution, on both sides of the issue, but with the weight of the argument favouring the view underlying prevailing economic and political institutions, that there are no moral obligations to the future beyond those to the next generation. • According to the most extreme of these positions against moral obligations to the future, our behaviour with respect to the future is morally unconstrained; there are no moral restrictions on acting or failing to act deriving from the effect of our actions on future people. Of those philosophers who say, or whose views imply, that we don't have obligations to the (non-immediate) future, i.e. those who have opted for the uncon- 140 R. and V. Routley strained position, many have based this view on accounts of moral obligation which are built on relations which presuppose some degree of temporal or spatial contiguity. Thus moral obligation is seen as grounded on or as presupposing various relations which could not hold between people widely separated in time (or sometimes in space). For example, obligation is seen as grounded in relations which are proximate or of short duration and also non-transitive. Among such suggested bases or grounds of moral obligation, or requirements for moral obligation, which would rule out obligations to the non-immediate future are these: First, there are those accounts which require that someone to whom a moral obligation is held be able to claim his rights or entitlement. People in the distant future will not be able to claim rights and entitlements as against us, and of course they can do nothing to enforce any claims they might have for their rights against us. Secondly, there are those accounts which base moral obligations on social or legal convention, for example a convention which would require punishment of offenders or at least some kind of social enforcement. But plainly these and other conventions will not hold invariantly over change in society and amendment of legal conventions and so will not be invariant over time. Also future people have no way of enforcing their interests or punishing offenders, and there could be no guarantee that any contemporary institution would do it for them. Both the view that moral obligation requires the context of a moral community and the view that it is contractually based appear to rule out the distant future as a field of moral obligation, as they not only require a commonality, or some sort of common basis, which cannot be guaranteed in the case of the distant future, but also a possibility of interchange or reciprocity of action which cannot apply to the future. Where the basis of moral obligation is seen as mutual exchange, the interests of future people must be set aside because they cannot change the past and cannot be parties to any mutual contract. The exclusion of moral obligations to the distant future also follows from those views which attempt to ground moral obligations in non-transitive relations of short duration such as sympathy and love. There are some difficulties also about love and sympathy for (non-existent) people in the far distant future about whose personal qualities and characteristics one must know very little and who may well be committed to a life-style for which one has no sympathy. On the current showing in the case of nuclear energy it would be easy to conclude that contemporary society lacks both love and sympathy for future people; and it would appear to follow from this that contemporary Obligations to the Future 141 people have no obligations to future people and can harm them as it suits them. What all these views have in common is a naturalistic picture of obligation as something acquired, either individually or institutionally, something which is conditional on doing something or failing to do something (e.g. participating in the moral community, contracting), or having some characteristic one can fail to have (e.g. love, sympathy, empathy).10 Because obligation therefore becomes conditional, features usually thought to characterize it, such as universality of application and necessitation (i.e. the binding features), are lost, especially where there is a choice of whether or not to do the thing required to acquire the obligation, and so of whether to acquire it. The criteria for acquisition suggested are such as to exclude people in the distant future. However, the view that there are no moral constraints with respect to future people, that one is free to act as one likes with respect to them, is a very difficult one to sustain. Consider the example of a scientific group which, for no particular reason other than to test a particular piece of technology, places in orbit a cobalt bomb which is to be set off by a triggering device designed to go off several hundred years from the time of its despatch. No presently living person and none of their immediate descendants would be affected, but the population of the earth in the distant future would be wiped out as a direct and predictable result of the action. The unconstrained position clearly implies that this is an acceptable moral enterprise, that whatever else we might legitimately criticize in the scientists' experiment, perhaps its being unduly expensive or badly designed, we cannot lodge a moral protest about the damage it will do to future people. The unconstrained position also endorses as morally acceptable the following sorts of examples: A firm discovers it can make a handsome profit from mining, processing, and manufacturing a new type of material which, although it causes no problems for present people or their immediate descendants, will over a period of hundreds of years decay into a substance which will cause an enormous epidemic of cancer among the inhabitants of the earth at that time. According to the unconstrained view the firm is free to act in its own interests, without any consideration for the harm it does to future people. Such counterexamples to the unconstrained view might seem childishly obvious. Yet the unconstrained position concerning the future from which they follow is far from being a straw man; not only have a number of philosophers writing on the issue endorsed this position, but it is the clear 142 R. and V. Routley implication of many currently popular views of the basis of moral obligation, as well as of economic theory. It does not appear, on the other hand, that those who opt for the unconstrained position have considered such examples and endorsed them as morally acceptable, despite their being clearly implied by their position. We suspect that when it is brought out that the unconstrained position admits such counterexamples, that being free to act implies, among other things being free to inflict pointless harm, most of those who opted for the unconstrained position would want to assert that it was not what they intended. What those who have put forward the unconstrained position seem to have had in mind in denying moral obligation is rather that future people can look after themselves, that we are not responsible for their lives. The view that the future can take care of itself also seems to assume a future causally independent of the present. But it is not. It is not as if, in cases such as those discussed above and the nuclear case, the future is simply being left alone to take care of itself. Present people are influencing it, and in doing so must acquire many of the same sorts of moral responsibilities as they do in causally affecting the present and immediate future. The thesis seems thus to assume an incorrect model of an independent and unrelated future. Also, to say that we are not responsible for the lives of future people does not amount to the same as saying that we are free to do as we like with respect to them, that there are no moral constraints on our action involving them. In just the same way, the fact that one does not have, or has not acquired, an obligation to some stranger with whom one has never been involved - that one has no responsibility for his life - does not imply that one is free to do what one likes with respect to him, for example to rob him or to pursue some course of action of advantage to oneself which could seriously harm him. These difficulties for the unconstrained position arise in part from the failure to make an important distinction between, on the one hand, acquired or assumed obligations towards somebody, for which some act of acquisition or assumption is required as a qualifying condition, and on the other hand moral constraints, which require, for example, that one should not act so as to damage or harm someone, and for which no act of acquisition is required. There is a considerable difference in the level and kind of responsibility involved. In the first case one must do something or be something which one can fail to do or be, e.g. have loves, sympathy, be contracted. In the second case responsibility arises as a result of being a causal agent aware of the consequences or probable consequences of his Obligations to the Future 143 action, and thus does not have to be especially acquired or assumed. Thus there is no problem about how the latter class, moral constraints, can apply to the distant future in cases where it may be difficult or impossible for acquisition or assumption conditions to be satisfied. They apply as a result of the ability to produce causal effects on the distant future of a reasonably predictable nature. Thus also moral constraints can apply to what does not (yet) exist, just as actions can cause results that do not (yet) exist. While it may be the case that there would need to be an acquired or assumed obligation in order for it to be claimed that contemporary people must make special sacrifices of an heroic kind for future people, or even to help them especially, only moral constraints are needed in order for us to be constrained from harming them. Thus, to return to the bus example, the consigner cannot argue in justification of his action that he has never assumed or acquired responsibility for the passengers, that he does not know them and therefore has no love or sympathy for them, and that they are not part of his moral community, in short that he has no special obligations to help them. All that one needs to argue in respect of both the bus and the nuclear case is that there are moral constraints against harming, not that there are specially acquired obligations to take responsibility for the lives of the people involved. The confusion of moral constraints with acquired obligation, and the attempt therewith to view all constraints as acquired and to write off non-acquired constraints, is facilitated through the use of the term 'moral obligation' in philosophy to indicate any type of deontic constraint, while in natural language it is used to indicate something which has to be assumed or acquired. Hence the equation and at least one root of the unconstrained position, that is of the belief that there are no moral constraints concerning the distant future. The unconstrained view tends to give way, under the weight of counterexamples, to a more qualified, and sometimes ambivalent position. Passmore's position in [1] is a striking example of the second ambivalent position. On the one hand Passmore regularly gives the impression of one championing future people; for example, in the final sentence of [1] he says, concerning men a century hence: My sole concern is that we should do nothing which will reduce their freedom of thought and action, whether by destroying.the natural world which makes that freedom possible or the social traditions which permit and encourage it. 144 R. and V. Routley Earlier (esp. pp. 84-85) Passmore appears to endorse the principle 'that we ought not to act so as certainly to harm posterity' and claims (p. 98) that, even where there are uncertainties, 'these uncertainties do not justify negligence'. Nevertheless, though obligations concerning non-immediate posterity are thus admitted, the main thrust of Passmore's argument is entirely different, being in favour of the unconstrained position according to which we have no obligations to non-immediate posterity. Thus his conclusion (p. 91): So whether we approach the problem of obligations to posterity by way of Bentham and Sidgwick, Rawls or Golding, we are led to something like the same conclusion: our obligations are to immediate posterity, we ought to try to improve the world so that we shall be able to hand it over to our immediate successors in a better condition, and that is all.11 Passmore's position is, to all appearances, simply inconsistent. There are two ways one might try to render it consistent, but neither is readily available to Passmore. The first is by taking advantage of the distinction between moral constraints and acquired obligations, but a basis for this distinction is not evident in Passmore's work and indeed the distinction is antithetical to the analyses of obligation that Passmore tries to synthesize with his own analysis in terms of loves. The second, sceptical, route to consistency is by way of the argument that we shall consider shortly, that there is always gross uncertainty with respect to the distant future, uncertainty which relieves us in practice of any moral constraints regarding the distant future. But though Passmore's writing strongly suggests this uncertainty argument (especially his sympathetic discussion of the Premier of Queensland's argument against conservationists [p. 77]), he also rules it out with the claim that uncertainties do not justify negligence.12 Many of the accounts of moral obligation that give rise to the unconstrained position are fused in Passmore's work, again not entirely consistently, since the different accounts exploited do not give uniform results. Thus the primary account of obligation is said to be in terms of loves though the account is never satisfactorily formulated or developed - and it is suggested that because our loves do not extend into the distant future, neither do our obligations. This sentimental account of obligation will obviously lead to different results from utilitarian accounts of obligation, which however Passmore appeals to in his discussion of wilderness. In yet other places in [1], furthermore, social contract and moral community Obligations to the Future 145 views are appealed to - see, e.g., the treatment of animals, of preservation, and of duties to nature. In the case of obligations to future people, however, Passmore does try to sketch an argument - what we call the convergence argument - that all the accounts lead in the end to the unconstrained position. As well as the convergence argument, and various uncertainty arguments to be considered later, Passmore appears to endorse several other arguments in favour of his theme that there are in practice no obligations to the distant future. In particular, he suggests that such obligations would in practice be otiose. Everything that needs to be accounted for can be encompassed through the chain picture of obligation as linking successive generations, under which each generation has obligations, based on loves, only to the succeeding generation. We outline three objections to this chain account. First, it is inadequate to treat constraints concerning the future as if they applied only between generations, as if there were no question of constraints on individuals as opposed to whole generations, since individuals can create causal effects, e.g. harm, on the future in a way which may create individual responsibility, and which can't necessarily be sheeted home to an entire generation. Secondly, such chains, since they are non-transitive, cannot yield direct obligations to the distant future. But for this very reason the chain picture cannot be adequate, as examples again show. For the picture is unable to explain several of the cases that have to be dealt with, e.g. the examples already discussed which show that we can have a direct effect on the distant future without affecting the next generation, who may not even be able to influence matters.13 Thirdly, improvements for immediate successors may be achieved at the expense of disadvantages to people of the more distant future. Improving the world for immediate successors is quite compatible with, and may even in some circumstances be most easily achieved by, ruining it for less immediate successors. Such cases can hardly be written off as 'never-never land' examples, since many cases of environmental exploitation might be seen as of just this type, e.g. not just the nuclear case but also the exhaustion of non-renewable resources and the long-term depletion of renewable resources such as soils and forests through overcropping. If then such obvious injustices to future people arising from the favouring or exclusive concern with immediate successors are to be avoided, obligations to the future will have to be seen as in some way fairly distributed over time, and not merely as accruing to particular generations in the way the chain picture suggests. 146 R. and V. Routley Passmore tries to represent all obligations to the distant future in terms of heroic self-sacrifice, something which cannot of course be morally required. But in view of the distinctions between constraints and acquired obligation and between obligation and supererogation, this is just to misrepresent the position of these obligations. For example, one is no more engaging in heroic self-sacrifice by not forcing future people into an unviable life position or by refraining from causing them direct harm, than one is resorting to heroic self-sacrifice in refraining from beating and robbing some stranger and leaving him to starve. Passmore's most sustained argument for the unconstrained position is a convergence argument, that different analyses of obligations, including his own, lead to the one conclusion. This style of argument is hardly convincing when there are well-known accounts of obligation which do not lead to the intended conclusion, e.g. deontological accounts such as those of Kant and of modern European schools, and teleological accounts such as those of Moore (in [8]). But such unfavourable positions are either rapidly passed over or ignored in Passmore's historical treatment and narrow selection of historical figures. The style of argument becomes even less persuasive when it is discovered that the accounts of the main authorities appealed to, Bentham, Sidgwick, and Rawls,14 do not lead, without serious distortion, to the intended conclusion. Indeed Passmore has twisted the historical and textual evidence to suit his case, as we now try to indicate. Consider Bentham first. Passmore's assumption, for which no textual evidence is cited, ls is that no Benthamite calculation can take account of a future more extensive than the immediate future (cf. pp. 87-88). The assumption seems to be based simply on the fact that Bentham remarked that 'the value of the pleasure or pain to each person to be considered in any estimate will be greater or less in virtue of the following circumstances'. '3. Its certainty or uncertainty. 4. Its propinquity or remoteness' ([10], p. 16). But this does nothing to show that future persons are discounted: the certainty and propinquity do not concern persons, but the utilities of the persons concerned. As regards which persons are concerned in any calculation Bentham is quite explicit, detailing how to take an exact account. . . of the general tendency of any act.. . .5 . Take an account of the number of persons whose interests appear to be concerned; and repeat the above process [summation of values of pleasure and of pain] with respect to each. ([10], p. 16) Obligations to the Future 147 It follows that Bentham's calculation takes account of everyone (and, in his larger scheme, every sentient creature) whose interests appear to be concerned: if the interests of people in the distant future appear to be concerned - as they are in conservation issues - they are to be included in the calculation. And there is independent evidence16 that in Bentham's view the principle of utility was not temporally restricted: 'that is useful which, taking all times and all persons into consideration, leaves a balance of happiness' ([10], pp. 17-18, our italics). Thus the future cut-off that Passmore has attributed to Bentham is contradicted by Bentham's own account. The case of Sidgwick is more complex, because there is isolated oscillation in his application of utilitarianism between use of utility and of (something like) expected utility (see [11], pp. 381,414): Sidgwick's utilitarianism is, in its general characterization, essentially that of Bentham: the conduct which . . . is objectively right is that which will produce the greatest amount of happiness on the whole; that is, taking into account all those whose happiness is affected by the conduct. ([11], p. 411) All includes all sentient beings, both existing and to exist, as Sidgwick goes on to explain (p. 414). In particular, in answer to the question 'How far are we to consider the interests of posterity when they seem to conflict with those of existing human beings?' Sidgwick writes ([11], p. 414, our italics): It seems, however, clear that the time at which a man exists cannot affect the value of his happiness from a universal point of view; and that the interests of posterity must concern a Utilitarian as much as those of his contemporaries, except in so far as the effect of his actions on posterity - and even the existence of human beings to be affected - must necessarily be more uncertain. But Passmore manages, first of all, to give a different sense to what Sidgwick is saying by adjusting the quotation, by omitting the clause we have italicized, which equalizes the degree of concern for present and future persons, and by italicizing the whole except-clause, thereby placing much greater emphasis than Sidgwick does on uncertainty. For according to Sidgwick's impartiality principle, 'the mere difference in time is not a 148 R. and V. Routley reasonable ground for having more regard to the consciousness of one -amount than to that of another' ([11], p. 381; see also p. 124). The apparent tension in Sidgwick's theory as to whether uncertainty should be taken into account is readily removed by resort to a modern distinction between values and expected values (i.e. probability weighted values); utilitarian rightness is defined as before in terms of the net happiness of all concerned over all time without mention of uncertainty or probabilities, but it is distinguished from probable rightness (given present information), in the utilitarian sense,17 which is defined in terms of the expected net happiness of those concerned, using present probabilities. It is the latter notion, of probable rightness, that practical reasoning is commonly concerned with and that decision theory studies; and it is this that Passmore supposes Sidgwick is using ([1], p. 84). But it is evident that the utilitarian determination of probable rightness, like that of rightness, will sometimes take into account the distant future - as Sidgwick's discussion of utilitarian determination of optimum population (immediately following his remark on uncertainty) does. So how does Passmore contrive to reverse matters, to have Sidgwick's position lead to his own unconstrained conclusion? The answer is: By inserting an additional assumption of his own - which Sidgwick would certainly have rejected - that the uncertainties entitle us to ignore the distant future. What Passmore has implicitly assumed in his claim ([1], p. 85) that 'utilitarian principles [such as Sidgwick's] are not strong enough' 'to justify the kinds of sacrifice some conservationists now call upon us to make' is his own thesis that 'The uncertainty of harms we are hoping to prevent would in general entitle us to ignore them.. .'. From a decision-theory viewpoint this is simply irrational18 unless the probabilities of damage are approaching zero. We will deal with the essentially sceptical uncertainty arguments on which Passmore's position depends shortly: here it is enough to observe that Sidgwick's position does not lead to anything like that which Passmore attributes to him - without uncertainty assumptions which Sidgwick would have rejected (for he thought that future people'will certainly have pleasure and suffer pain). We can also begin to gauge from Passmore's treatment of nineteenthcentury utilitarians, such as Bentham and Sidgwick, the extent of the distortion which underlies his more general historical case for the unconstrained position which, so he claims, represents accurately enough what, over the last two centuries, men have seen as their duty to posterity as a whole. . . . ([1], p. 91) Obligations to the Future 149 The treatment accorded Rawls in only marginally more satisfactory. Passmore supposes that Rawls's theory of justice leads directly to the unconstrained position ([1], p. 87 and p. 91), whereas Rawls claims ([5], p. 293) that we have obligations to future people just as to present ones. But the situation is more complicated than Rawls's claim would indicate, as we now try to explain in a summary way (more detail is given in the Appendix). For, in order to justify this claim on his theory (with its present time-of-entry interpretation), Rawls has to invoke additional and dubious motivational assumptions; even so the theory which thus results does not yield the intended conclusion, but a conclusion inconsistent with Rawls's claim. However, by changing the time-of-entry interpretation to an omnitemporal one, Rawls's claim does result from the theory so amended. Moreover, the amended theory also yields, by exactly Rawls's argument for a just saving rate, a resource conservation policy, and also a case against nuclear development. Accordingly Passmore's other claims regarding Rawls are mistaken, e.g. that the theory cannot justify a policy of resource conservation. Rawls does not emerge unscathed either. As on the issue of whether his contract is a necessary condition for obligations, so on obligations which the contract yields to the distant future, Rawls is far from consistent. Furthermore, institutions such as qualified market and voting systems are recommended as just though from a future perspective their results are far from that. Rawls, then, does not take obligations to the future with full seriousness. In sum, it is not true that the theory of Rawls, any more than the theories of the historical figures actually discussed by Passmore, unequivocally supports the unconstrained position. III. Uncertainty and Indeterminacy Arguments Although there are grave difficulties for the unconstrained position, qualification leads to a more defensible position. According to the qualified position we are not entirely unconstrained with respect to the distant future: there are obligations, but these are not so important as those to the present, and the interests of distant future people cannot weigh very much in the scale against those of the present and immediate future. The interests of future people then, except in unusual cases, count for very much less than the interests of present people. Hence such things as nuclear development and various exploitative activities which benefit present 150 R. and V. Routley people should proceed, even if people of the distant future are disadvantaged by them. The qualified position appears to be widely held and is implicit in most modern economic theories, where the position of a decrease in weight of future costs and benefits (and so of future interests) is obtained by application over time of an (opportunity cost) discount rate. The attempt to apply economics as a moral theory, something that is becoming increasingly common, can lead then to the qualified position. What is objectionable in such an approach is that economics must operate within the bounds of moral (deontic) constraints, just as in practice it operates within legal constraints, and cannot determine what those constraints are. There are, moreover, alternative economic theories and simply to adopt one which discounts the future is to beg all the questions at issue. The discounting move often has the same result as the unconstrained position; if, for instance, we consider the cancer example and consider costs as payable compensation, it is evident that, over a sufficiently long period of time, discounting at current prices would lead to the conclusion that there are no recoverable damages and so, in economic terms, no constraints. In short, even certain damage to future people could be written off. One way to achieve the bias against future people is by the application of discount rates which are set in accord with the current economic horizons of no more than about fifteen years,19 and application of such rates would simply beg the question against the interests and rights of future people. Where there is certain future damage of a morally forbidden type the whole method of discounting is simply inapplicable, and its use would violate moral constraints.20 Another argument for the qualified position, which avoids the objections from cases of certain damage, comes from probability considerations.The distant future, it is argued, is much more uncertain than the present and immediate future, so that probabilities are consequently lower, perhaps even approaching or coinciding with zero for any hypothesis concerning the distant future.21 But then if we take account of probabilities in the obvious way, by simply multiplying them against costs and benefits, it is evident that the interests of future people, except in cases where there is an unusually high degree of certainty, must count for (very much) less than those of present and neighbouring people where (much) higher probabilities obtain. So in the case of conflict between the present and the future where it is a question of weighing certain benefits to the people of the present and the immediate future against a much lower Obligations to the Future 151 probability of indeterminate costs to an indeterminate number of distant future people, the issue would normally be decided in favour of the present, assuming that anything like similar costs and benefits were involved. But of course it can't be assumed that anything like similarly weighted costs and benefits are involved in the nuclear case, especially if it is a question of risking poisoning some of the earth for half a million or so years, with consequent risk of serious harm to thousands of generations of future people, in order to obtain quite doubtful or trivial benefits for some present people, in the shape of the opportunity to continue unnecessarily high energy use. And even if the costs and benefits were comparable or evenly weighted, such an argument would be defective, since an analogous argument would show that the consigner's action is acceptable provided the benefit, e.g. the profit he stood to gain from imposing significant risks on other people, was sufficiently large. Such a cost-benefit approach to moral and decision problems, with or without the probability frills, is quite inadequate where different parties are concerned, or for dealing with cases of conflict of interest or moral problems where deontic constraints are involved, and commonly yields counterintuitive results. For example, it would follow on such principles that it is permissible for a firm to injure, or very likely injure, some innocent party provided the firm stands to make a sufficiently large gain from it. But the costs and benefits involved are not transferable in any simple or general way from one party to another. Transfers of this kind, of costs and benefits involving different parties, commonly raise moral issues - e.g. is x entitled to benefit himself by imposing costs ony ? - which are not susceptible to a simple cost-benefit approach of the sort adopted by some proponents of nuclear energy, who attempt to dismiss the costs to future people with the soothing remark that any development involves costs as well as benefits. The transfer point is enough to invalidate the comparison, heavily relied on by McCracken [16] in building a case for the acceptability of the nuclear risk, between nuclear risks and those from cigarette smoking. In the latter case those who supposedly benefit from the activity are also, to an overwhelming extent* those who bear the serious health costs and risks involved. In contrast the users and supposed beneficiaries of nuclear energy will be risking not only, or even primarily, their own lives and health, but also those of others who may be non-beneficiaries and who may be spatially or temporally removed, and these risks will not be in any direct way related to a person's extent of use. The transfer objection is essentially the same as that to the utilitarian's 152 R. and V. Routley happiness sums as a way of solving moral conflict between different parties, and the introduction of probability considerations does not change the principles involved but merely complicates analyses. One might further object to the probability argument that probabilities involving distant future situations are not always less than those concerning the immediate future in the way the argument supposes, and that the outcomes of some moral problems such as the bus example do not depend on a high level of probability anyway. In some sorts of cases it is enough, as the bus example reveals, that a significant risk is created; such cases do not depend critically on high probability assignments. Uncertainty arguments in various forms are the most common and important ones used by philosophers and others to argue for the position that we cannot be expected to take serious account of the effects of our actions on the distant future. There are two strands to the uncertainty argument, capable of separation, but frequently entangled. Both arguments are mistaken, the first on a priori grounds, the second on a posteriori grounds. The first argument is a generalized uncertainty argument which runs as follows: In contrast to the exact information we can obtain about the present, the information we can obtain about the effects of our actions on the distant future is unreliable, woolly, and highly speculative. But we cannot base assessments of how we should act on information of this kind, especially when accurate information is obtainable about the present which would indicate different action. Therefore we must regretfully ignore the uncertain effects of our actions on the distant future. More formally and crudely: One only has obligations to the future if these obligations are based on reliable information; there is no reliable information at present as regards the distant future; therefore one has no obligations to the distant future. The first argument is essentially a variation on a sceptical argument in epistemology concerning our knowledge of the future (formally, replace 'obligations' by 'knowledge' in the crude statement of the argument above). The main ploy is to considerably overestimate and overstate the degree of certainty available with respect to the present and immediate future, and the degree of certainty which is required as the basis for moral consideration both with respect to the present and with respect to the future. Associated with this is the attempt to suggest a sharp division as regards certainty between the present and immediate future on the one hand and the distant future on the other. We shall not find, we suggest, that there is any such sharp or simple division between the distant future and Obligations to the Future 153 the adjacent future and present, at least with respect to those things in the present which are normally subject to moral constraints. We can and constantly do act on the basis of such 'unreliable' information as the sceptic as regards the future conveniently labels 'uncertainty'; for scepticproof certainty is rarely, or never, available with respect to much of the present and immediate future. In moral situations in the present, action often takes account of risk and probability, even quite low probabilities. A good example is again the bus case. We do not need to know for certain that the container will break and the lethal gas escape. In fact it does not even have to be probable, in the relevant sense of more probable than not, in order for us to condemn the consigner's action. It is enough that there is a significant risk of harm in this sort of case. It does not matter if the decreased well-being of the consigner is certain and the prospects of the passengers quite uncertain; the resolution of the problem is still clearly in favour of the so-called 'speculative' and 'unreliable'. But if we do not require certainty of action to apply moral constraints in contemporary affairs, why should we require a much higher standard of certainty in the future? Why should we require epistemic standards for the future which the more familiar sphere of moral action concerning the present and adjacent future does not need to meet? The insistence on certainty as a necessary condition before moral consideration can be given to the distant future, then, amounts to an epistemic double standard. But such an epistemic double standard, proposed in explaining the difference between the present and the future and to justify ignoring future peoples' interests, in fact cannot itself provide an explanation of the differences, since it already presupposes different standards of certainty appropriate to each class, which difference is in turn in need of justification. The second uncertainty argument is a practical uncertainty argument, that whatever our theoretical obligations to the future, we cannot in practice take the interests of future people into account, because uncertainty about the distant future is so gross that we cannot determine what the likely consequences of actions upon it will be and therefore, however good our intentions to the people of the distant future, in practice we have no choice but to ignore their interests. Uncertainty is gross where certain incompatible hypotheses are as good as one another and there is no rational ground for choosing between them. The second uncertainty argument can also be put in this way: If moral principles are, like other principles, implicational in form, that is of such forms as 'if* has character h then x is wrong, for every (action) x', then what the argument claims is 154 R. and V. Routley that we can never obtain the information about future actions which would enable us to detach the antecedent of the implication. So even if moral principles theoretically apply to future people, in practice they cannot be applied to obtain clear conclusions or directions concerning contemporary action of the 'It is wrong to do x' type. Many of the assumptions of the second argument have to be conceded. If the distant future really is so grossly uncertain that in every case it is impossible to determine in any way that is better than chance what the effects of present action will be, and whether any given action will help or hinder future people, then moral principles, although they may apply theoretically to the future, will not be applicable in practice for obtaining any clear conclusions about how to act. Hence the distant future will impose no practical moral constraints on action. However, the argument is factually incorrect in assuming that the future is always so grossly uncertain or indeterminate. Admittedly there is often a high degree of uncertainty concerning the distant future, but as a matter of (contingent) fact it is not always so gross or sweeping as the argument has to assume. There are some areas where uncertainty is not so great as to exclude constraints on action, especially when account is taken of the point, noticed in connection with the first argument, that complete certainty is commonly not required for moral constraints and that all that may be needed in some cases is the creation of"a significant risk. Again there is considerable uncertainty about many factors which are not highly, or at all, morally relevant, but this does not extend to many factors which are of much greater importance to moral issues. For example, we may not have any idea what the fashions will be in a hundred years in girls' names or men's footwear, or what brands of ice cream people will be eating if any, but we do have excellent reason to believe, especially if we consider 3,000 years of history, that what people there are in a hundred years are likely to have material and psychic needs not entirely unlike our own, that they will need a healthy biosphere for a good life; that like us they will not be immune to radiation; that their welfare will not be enhanced by a high incidence of cancer or genetic defects, by the destruction of resources, or the elimination from the face of the earth of that wonderful variety of non-human life which at present makes it such a rich and interesting place. For this sort of reason, the second uncertainty argument should be rejected. While it is true that there are many areas in which the morally relevant information needed is uncertain or unavailable, and in which we cannot therefore determine satisfactorily how to act, there are certainly others in Obligations to the Future 155 which uncertainty in morally relevant areas is not so great as to preclude moral constraints on action, where we ascertain if not absolute certainties at least probabilities of the same sort of order as are considered sufficient for the application of moral principles in parallel contemporary cases, especially where spatially remote people are involved. The case of nuclear waste storage, and of uncertainty of the effects of it on future people, seems to be of the latter sort. Here there is no gross indeterminacy or uncertainty; it is simply not true that incompatible hypotheses about what may happen are as good as each other. It is plain that nuclear waste storage does impose significant risks of harm on future people, and, as we can see from the bus example, the significant risk of harm is enough in cases of this type to make moral constraints applicable. In terms of the defects of the preceding uncertainty arguments, we can see the corresponding defects in a number of widely employed uncertainty arguments used to write off probable harm to future people as outside the scope of proper consideration. Most of these popular moves employ both of the uncertainty arguments as suits the case, switching from one to the other in a way that is again reminiscent of sceptical moves. For example, we may be told that we cannot really take account of future people because we cannot be sure that they will exist or that their tastes and wants will not be completely different from our own, to the point where they will not suffer from our exhaustion of resources or from the things that would affect us (cf. Passmore [1]). But this is to insist upon complete certainty of a sort beyond what is required for the present and immediate future, where there is also commonly no guarantee that some disaster will not overtake those we are morally committed to. Again we may be told that there is no guarantee that future people will be worthy of any efforts on our part, because they may be morons or forever plugged into enjoyment- or other machines (Golding [12]). Even if one is prepared to accept the elitist approach presupposed - according to which only those who meet certain properly civilized or intellectual standards are eligible for moral consideration - what we are being handed in such arguments as a serious defeating consideration is again a mere outside possibility - like the sceptic who says that the solid-looking desk in front of us is perhaps only a facade, not because he has any particular reason for doing so, but because he hasn't looked around the back, drilled holes in it, etc. Neither the contemporary nor the historical situation gives any positive reason for supposing that a lapse into universal moronity or universal pleasure-machine escapism is a serious possibility, as opposed to a logical possibility. We can contrast 156 R. and V. Routley with these mere logical possibilities the very real historically supportable risks of escape of nuclear waste or decline of a civilization through destruction of its resource base. The possibilities just considered in these uncertainty arguments of sceptical character are not real possibilities. Another argument which may consider a real possibility, but still does not succeed in showing that it is acceptable to proceed with an action which would appear to be harmful to future people, is often introduced in the nuclear waste case. This is the argument that future people may discover a rigorously safe and permanent storage method for nuclear wastes before they are damaged by escaped waste material. Let us grant for the sake of the argument that this is a real possibility (though physical arguments may show that it is not). This still does not affect the fact that there is a significant risk of serious damage and that the creation of a significant risk is enough to rule out an action of this type as morally impermissible. In just the same way, future people may discover a cure for cancer, and the fact that this appears to be a real and not merely a logical possibility, does not make the action of the firm in the example discussed above, of producing a substance likely to cause cancer in future people, morally admissible. The fact that there was a real possibility of future people avoiding the harm would show that actions of these sorts were admissible only if what was required for inadmissibility was certainty of harm or a very high probability of it. In such cases, before such actions could be considered admissible, what would be required is far more than a possibility, real or not22 - it is at least the availability of an applicable, safe, and rigorously tested, not merely speculative, technique for achieving it, something that future people could reasonably be expected to apply to protect themselves. The strategy of most of these uncertainty arguments is fairly clear then, and may be brought out by looking yet again at the bus example, where the consigner says that he cannot be expected to take account of the effect of his actions on the passengers because they may find an effective way to deal with his parcel or some lucky or unlucky accident may occur, e.g. the bus may break down and they may all change to a different bus leaving the parcel behind, or the bus may crash, killing all the passengers before the container gets a chance to leak. These are all possibilities, of course, but there is no positive reason to believe that they are any more than that, that is they are not real possibilities. The strategy is to stress such outside possibilities in order to create the false impression that there is gross uncertainty about the future, that the real possibility that the container will Obligations to the Future 157 break should be treated in the same way as these mere logical possibilities, that uncertainty about the future is so great as to preclude the consigners' taking account of the passengers' welfare and of the real possibility of harm from his parcel, and thereby excuse his action. A related strategy is to stress a real possibility, such as finding a cure for cancer, and thereby imply that this removes the case for applying moral constraints .This move implicitly makes the assumptions of the first argument, that certainty, or at least a very high probability, of harm is required before an action can be judged morally inadmissible, and the point of stressing the real possibility of avoidance of damage is to show that this allegedly required high degree of certainty or probability cannot be attained. That is, the strategy draws attention to some real uncertainty implying that this is sufficient to defeat the application of moral constraints. But, as we have seen, this is often not so. An argument closely related to the uncertainty arguments is based on the non-existence and indeterminacy of the future.23 An item is indeterminate in a given respect if its properties in that respect are, as a matter of logic, not settled (nor are they settlable in a non-arbitrary fashion). The respects in which future items are indeterminate are well enough known for a few examples to serve as reminders: all the following are indeterminate: the population of Australia at 2001, its distribution, its age structure, the preferences of its members for folk music, wilderness, etc., the size and shape of Wollongong, the average number of rooms in its houses and in its office blocks, and so on. Philosophical discussion of such indeterminacy is as old as Aristotle's sea battle and as modern as truth-value gaps and fuzzy logics, and many positions have been adopted on the existence and determinacy of future items. Nevertheless theories that there are obligations to the future are not sensitive to the metaphysical position adopted concerning the existence or non-existence of the future. Any theory which denied obligations to the future on the metaphysical grounds that the future did not exist, and did not have properties, so that the present could not be related to it, would be committed to denying such obvious facts as that the present could causally influence the future, that present people could be great-grandparents of purely future people, and so on, and hence would have to be rejected on independent grounds. This is not to say that there are not important problems about the existence or non-existence of future items, problems which are perhaps most straightforwardly handled by a Meinongian position which allows that items which do not exist may have properties. The non-existence of the future 158 R. and V. Routley does raise problems for standard theories which buy the Ontological Assumption (the thesis that what does not exist does not have properties), especially given the natural (and correct) inclination to say that the future does not (now) exist; but such theories can adopt various strategies for coping with these problems (e.g. the adoption of a platonistic position according to which the future does now exist, or the allowance for certain sorts of relations between existents at different times), although the satisfactoriness of these strategies is open to question (cf. [4]). Thus whether or not the Ontological Assumption is assumed and however it is applied, it will be allowed that future items will have properties even if they do not have them now, and that is enough to provide the basis for moral concern about the future. Thus the thesis of obligations to the future does not presuppose any special metaphysical position on the existence of the future. If the non-existence of future items creates no special problems for obligations to the future, the same is not true of their indeterminacy. Whether the indeterminacy of future items is seen as a logical feature of the future which results from the non-existence of purely future items or whether one adopts a (mistaken) platonistic view of the future as existing and sees the indeterminacy as an epistemological one resulting from our inability to know the character of these entities - that is, we cannot completely know the future .though it exists and has a definite characterwhichever view we take indeterminacy still creates major difficulties for certain ethical theories and their treatment of the future. The difficulties arise for theories which appear to require a high level of determinacy with respect to the number and character of future items, in particular calculus-type theories such as utilitarianism in its usual forms, where the calculations are critically dependent on such information as numbers, totals, and averages, information which so far as the future is concerned is generally indeterminate. The fact that this numerical information is typically indeterminate means that insofar as head-count utilitarianism requires determinate information on numbers, it is in a similar position to theories discussed earlier; it may apply theoretically to future people, but since the calculations cannot be applied to them their interests will be left out of account. And, in fact, utilitarianism for the most part does not, and perhaps cannot, take future creatures and their interests seriously; there is little discussion as to how the difficulties or impossibility of calculations regarding the open future are to be obtained. Non-platonistic utilitarianism is in logical difficulty on this matter, while platonis- Obligations to the Future 159 tic utilitarianism - which faces a range of other objections - is inapplicable because of epistemic indeterminacy. We have yet another case of a theory of the sort that applies theoretically but in practice doesn't take the future seriously. But far from this showing that future people's interests should be left out of account, what these considerations show are deficiencies in these sorts of theories, which require excessive determinacy of information. This kind of information is commonly equally unavailable for the accepted areas of moral constraint, the present and immediate future; and the resolution of moral issues is often not heavily dependent on knowledge of such specific determinate features as numbers or other determinate features. For example, we do not need to know how many people there will be on the bus, how intelligent they are, what their preferences are or how badly they will be injured, in order to reach the conclusion that the consigner's action in despatching his parcel is a bad one. Furthermore, it is only the ability of moral considerations to continue to apply in the absence of determinate information about such things as numbers that makes it possible to take account of the possible effects of action, as the risks associated with action - something which is quite essential even for the present if moral considerations are to apply in the normal and accepted way. For it is essential in order to apply moral considerations in the accepted way that we consider alternative worlds, in order to take account of options, risks, and alternative outcomes; but these alternative or counterfactual worlds are not in so different a position from the future with respect to determinacy; for example, there is indeterminacy with respect to the number of people who may be harmed in the bus case or in apossible nuclear reactor melt-down. These alternative worlds, like the distant future, are indeterminate in some respects, but not totally indeterminate. It might still be thought that the indeterminacy of the future, for example with respect to number and exact character, would at least prevent the interest of future people being taken into account where there is a conflict with the present. Since their numbers are indeterminate and their interests unknown, how can we weigh their competing claims against those of the present and immediate future where this information is available in a more or less accurate form? The question is raised particularly by problems of sharing fixed quantities of resources among present and future people, when the numbers of the latter are indeterminate. Such problems are indeed difficult, but they are not resolved by ignoring the claims of the future, any more than the problems raised by the need to take account in decision-making of factors difficult to quantify are resolved by ignoring 160 R. and V. Routley such factors. Nor are such distributional problems as large and representative a class of moral problems concerning the future as the tendency to focus on them would suggest. It should be conceded then that there will be cases where the indeterminacy of aspects of the future will make conflicts very difficult or indeed impossible to resolve - a realistic ethical theory will not deliver a decision procedure - but there will equally be other conflict cases where the level of indeterminacy does not hinder resolution of the issue, e.g. the bus example which is a conflict case of a type. In particular, there will be many cases which are not solved by weighing numbers, numbers of interests, or whatever, cases for which one needs to know only the most general probable characteristics of future people. Moreover, even where numbers are relevant often only bounds will be required, exact numerical counts only being required where, for instance, margins are narrow; e.g. issues may be resolved as in parliament where a detailed vote (or division) is only required when the issue is close. It is certainly not necessary then to have complete determinacy to resolve all cases of conflict. The question we must ask then is what features of future people could disqualify them from moral consideration or reduce their claims to it to below those of present people? The answer is: in principle None. Prima facie moral principles are universalizable, and lawlike, in that they apply independently of position in space or in time, for example.24 But universalizability of principles is an outcome of those ethical theories which are capable of dealing satisfactorily with the present; in other words, a theory that did not allow properly for the future would be found to have defects as regards the present, to deal unjustly or unfairly with some present people, e.g. those remotely located, those outside some select subgroup such as (white-skinned) humans, etc. The only candidates for characteristics that would fairly rule out future people are the logical features we have been looking at, uncertainty and indeterminacy; what we have argued is that it would be far too sweeping to see these features as affecting the moral claims of future people in a general way. These special features only affect certain sorts of cases (e.g. the determination of best probable or practical course of action given only present information). In particular they do not affect cases of the sort being considered, the nuclear one, where highly determinate or certain information about the numbers and characteristics of the class likely to be harmed or certainty of damage are not required. To establish obligations to the future a full universalizability principle is not needed: it is enough to require that the temporal position of a person Obligations to the Future 161 cannot affect his entitlement to just and fair treatment, to full moral consideration;25 inversely that it is without basis to discriminate morally against a person in virtue of his temporal position. As a result of this universalizability, there is the same obligation to future people as to the present; and thus there is the same obligation to take account of them and their interests in what we do, to be careful in our actions, to take account of the probability (and not just the certainty) of our actions' causing harm or damage, and to see, other things being equal, that we do not act so as to rob future people of what is necessary for the chance of a good life. Uncertainty and indeterminacy do not free us of these obligations. If, in a closely comparable case concerning the present, the creation of a significant risk is enough to rule out an action as immoral, and there are no independent grounds for requiring greater certainty of harm in the future case under consideration, then futurity alone will not provide adequate grounds for proceeding with the action, thus discriminating against future people. Accordingly we cannot escape, through appeal to futurity, the conclusion tentatively reached in our first section, that proposals for nuclear development in the present state of technology for future waste disposal are immoral. IV. Overriding Consideration Arguments In the first part we noticed that the consigner's action could not be justified by purely economistic arguments, such as that his profits would rise, the firm or the village would be more prosperous, or by appealing to the fact that some possibly uncomfortable changes would otherwise be needed. We also observed that the principle on which this assessment was based, that one was not usually entitled to create a serious risk to others for these sorts of reasons, applied more generally and, in particular, applied to the nuclear case. For this reason the economistic arguments which are thus most commonly advanced to promote nuclear development - e.g. cheapness, efficiency, profitability for electricity utilities, and the need otherwise for uncomfortable changes such as restructuring of employment, investment, and consumption-do not even begin to show that the nuclear alternative is an acceptable one. Even if these economistic assumptions about benefits to present people were correct (and there is reason to doubt that most of them are),26 the arguments would fail because economics must operate within the framework of moral constraints, and not vice versa. 162 R. and V. Routley What one does have to consider, however, are moral conflict arguments, that is arguments to the effect that, unless the prima facie unacceptable alternative is taken, some even more unacceptable alternative is the only possible outcome, and will ensue. For example, in the bus case, the consigner may argue that his action is justified because unless it is taken the village will starve. It is by no means clear that even such a justification as this would be sufficient, especially where the risk to the passengers is high, as the case seems to become one of transfer of costs and risks onto others; but such a moral situation would no longer be so clearcut, and one would perhaps hesitate to condemn any action taken in such circumstances. Some of the arguments advanced to show moral conflict are based on competing duties to present people, and others on competing obligations to future people, both of which are taken to override the obligations not to impose on the future significant risk of serious harm. The structure of such moral conflict arguments is based crucially on the presentation of a genuine and exhaustive set of alternatives (or at least practical alternatives), and upon showing that the only alternatives to admittedly morally undesirable actions are even more undesirable ones. If some practical alternative which is not morally worse than the action to be justified is overlooked, suppressed, or neglected in the argument-for example, if in the bus case it turns out that the villagers have another option to starving or to the sending off of the parcel, namely earning a living in some other way - then the argument is defective and cannot readily be patched. We want to argue that suppression of practicable alternatives has occurred in the argument, designed to show that the alternatives to the nuclear option are even worse than the option itself, and that there are other factual defects in these arguments as well. In short, the arguments depend essentially on the presentation of false dichotomies. The first argument, the poverty argument, is that there is an overriding obligation to the poor, both the poor of the third world and the poor of industrialized countries. Failure to develop nuclear energy, it is often claimed, would amount to denying them the opportunity to reach the standard of affluence we currently enjoy and would create unemployment and poverty in the industrialized nations. The unemployment and poverty argument does not stand up to examination either for the poor of the industrial countries or for those of the third world. There is good evidence that large-scale nuclear energy will help to increase unemployment and poverty in the industrial world, through the Obligations to the Future 163 diversion of great amounts of available capital into an industry which is not only an exceptionally poor provider of direct employment, but also helps to reduce available jobs through encouraging substitution of energy use for labour use. 27 The argument that nuclear energy is needed for the third world is even less convincing. Nuclear energy is both politically and economically inappropriate for the third world, since it requires massive amounts of capital, requires numbers of imported scientists and engineers, and creates negligible employment, while politically it increases foreign dependence, adds to centralized entrenched power and reduces the chance for change in the oppressive political structures which are a large part of the problem.28 The fact that nuclear energy is not in the interests of people of the third world does not, of course, mean that it is not in the interests of, and wanted by, their rulers, the westernized and often military elites in whose interests the economies of these countries are usually organized; but it is not paternalistic to examine critically the demands these ruling elites may make in the name of the poor. The poverty argument then is a fraud. Nuclear energy will not be used to help the poor.29 Both for the third world and for the industrialized countries there are well-known energy-conserving alternatives and the practical option of developing other energy sources,30 alternatives which are morally acceptable and socially preferable to nuclear development, and which have far better prospects for helping the poor.31 The second major argument advanced to show moral conflict appeals to a set of supposedly overriding and competing obligations to future people. We have, it is said, a duty to pass on the immensely valuable things and institutions which our culture has developed. Unless our high-technological, high-energy industrial society is continued and fostered, our valuable institutions and traditions will fall into decay or be swept away. The argument is essentially that without nuclear power, without the continued level of material wealth it alone is assumed to make possible, the lights of our civilization will go out.32 . The lights-going-out argument raises rather sharply questions as to what is valuable in our society, and of what characteristics are necessary for a good society. These are questions which deserve much fuller treatment than we can allot them here, but a few brief points should be made. The argument adopts an extremely uncritical position with respect to existing high-technology societies, apparently assuming that they are uniformly and uniquely valuable; it also assumes that technological society is unmodifiable, that it can't be changed in the direction of energy 164 R. and V. Routley conservation or alternative energy sources without collapse. Such a society has to be accepted and assessed as a whole, and virtually unlimited supplies of energy are essential to maintain this whole. These assumptions are hard to accept. The assumption that technological society's energy patterns are unmodifiable is especially so - after all, it has survived events such as world wars which have required major social and technological restructuring and consumption modification. If western society's demands for energy are totally unmodifiable without collapse, not only would it be committed to a programme of increasing destruction, but one might ask what use its culture could be to future people who would very likely, as a consequence of this destruction, lack the resource base which the argument assumes to be essential in the case of contemporary society. There is also difficulty with the assumption of uniform valuableness; but if this is rejected the question becomes not: what is necessary to maintain existing high-technological society and its political institutions? but rather: what is necessary to maintain what is valuable in that society and the political institutions which are needed to maintain those valuable things? While it may be easy to argue that high energy consumption is necessary to maintain the political and economic status quo, it is not so easy to argue that it is essential to maintain what is valuable, and it is what is valuable, presumably, that we have a duty to pass on to the future. The evidence, e.g. from history, is that no very high level of material affluence or energy consumption is needed to maintain what is valuable. There is good reason in fact to believe that a society with much lower energy and resource consumption would better foster what is valuable than our own. But even if a radical change in these directions is independently desirable, as we believe it is, it is not necessary to presuppose such a change, in the short term at least, in order to see that the assumptions of the lights-going-out argument are wrong. No enormous reduction of wellbeing is required to consume less energy than at present, and certainly far less than the large increase over present levels of consumption which is assumed in the usual economic case for nuclear energy.33 What the nuclear strategy is really designed to do then is not to prevent the lights going out in western civilization, but to enable the lights to go on burning all the time - to maintain and even increase the wattage output of the Energy Extravaganza. In fact there is good reason to think that, far from the high energy consumption society fostering what is valuable, it will, especially if energy Obligations to the Future 165 is obtained by nuclear-fission means, be positively inimical to it. A society which has become heavily dependent upon an extremely high centralized, controlled, and garrisoned, capital- and expertise-intensive energy source, must be one which is highly susceptible to entrenchment of power, and one in which the forces which control this energy source, whether capitalist or bureaucratic, can exert enormous power over the political system and over people's lives, even more than they do at present. Very persuasive arguments have been advanced by civil liberties groups and others in a number of countries to suggest that such a society would tend to become authoritarian, if only as an outcome of its response to the threat posed by dissident groups in the nuclear situation.34 There are reasons to believe then that with nuclear development what we would be passing on to future generations would be some of the worst aspects of our society (e.g. the consumerism, growing concentration of power, destruction of the natural environment, and latent authoritarianism), while certain valuable aspects would be lost or threatened. Political freedom is a high price to pay for consumerism and energy extravagance. Again, as in the case of the poverty arguments, clear alternatives which do not involve such unacceptable consequences are available. The alternative to the high technology-nuclear option is not a return to the cave, the loss of all that is valuable, but the development of alternative technologies and life-styles which offer far greater scope for the maintenance and further development of what is valuable in our society than the highly centralized nuclear option.35 The lights-going-out argument, as a moral conflict argument, accordingly fails, because it also is based on a false dichotomy. Thus both the escape routes, the appeal to moral conflict and to the appeal to futurity, are closed. If then we apply the same standards of morality to the future as we acknowledge for the present - as we have argued we should - the conclusion that the proposal to develop nuclear energy on a large scale is a crime against the future is inevitable, since both the escape routes are closed. There are, of course, also many other grounds for ruling it out as morally unacceptable, for saying that it-is not only a crime against the distant future but also a crime against the present and immediate future. These other grounds for moral concern about nuclear energy, as it affects the present and immediate future, include problems arising from the possibility of catastrophic releases of radioactive fuel into the environment or of waste material following an accident such as reactor melt-down, of unscheduled discharges of radiation into the environment from a plant fault, of proli- 166 R. and V. Routley feration of nuclear weapons, and of deliberate release or threat of release of radioactive materials as a measure of terrorism or of extortion. All these are important issues, of much moral interest. What we want to claim, however, is that on the basis of its effects on the future alone, the nuclear option is morally unacceptable. Appendix Passmore's Treatment ofRawls, and What Really Happens on Rawls's Theory Passmore takes it that Rawls's theory yields an unconstrained position but, according to Rawls, the theory leads to quite the opposite result; namely, persons in different generations [and not merely neighbouring generations] have duties and obligations to one another just as contemporaries do. The present generation cannot do as it pleases but is bound by the principles that would be chosen in the original position to define justice between persons at different moments of time.. . . The derivation of these duties and obligations may seem at first a somewhat far-fetched application of the central doctrine. Nevertheless these requirements would be acknowledged in the original position [where the parties do not know to which generation they belong], and so the conception of justice as fairness covers these matters without any change in its basic idea. ([5], p. 293; the second insert is drawn from p. 287) Through judicious use of the veil of ignorance and the time of entry of parties to the original contract position, Rawls's contract theory, unlike simpler explicit contract theories, can yield definite obligations to distant future people,36 for example, we ought to save at a just rate for future people. But, as Rawls remarks (p. 284), 'the question of justice between generations . . . subjects any ethical theory to severe if not impossible tests'. It is doubtful that Rawls's theory as formulated passes the tests; for the theory as formulated does not yield the stated conclusion, but a conclusion inconsistent with the thesis that there are the same obligations to future people as to contemporaries. Exactly how these obligations arise from the initial agreement depends critically on the interpretation of the time of Obligations to the Future 167 entry of the parties into the agreement. Insofar as Rawls insists upon the present-time-of-entry interpretation (p. 139), he has to introduce supplementary motivational assumptions in order to (try to) secure the desired bondings between generations, in particular to ensure that the generation of the original position saves for any later generation, even their immediate successors ([5], p. 140 and p. 292). Rawls falls back on-what is as we have seen inadequate to the task, since it does not exclude one generation damaging another remote generation in a way that bypasses mutually successive generations - 'ties of sentiment between successive generations' (p. 292): to this limited extent Passmore has a point, for such a social contract on its own (without additional assumptions about the motives of the parties to the agreement) does not furnish obligations even to our immediate successors. This is indicative also of the unsatisfactory instability of Rawls's theory under changes, its sensitivity to the way the original agreement is set up, to the motivation of parties, their time of entry, what they can know, etc. To arrive at a more adequate account of obligations to the distant future under Rawls's theory, let us adopt, to avoid the additional, dubious and unsatisfactory, motivational assumptions Rawls invokes, one of the alternative - and non -equivalent - time-of-entry interpretations that Rawls lists (p. 146), that of persons alive at some time in simultaneous agreement. Let us call this, following Rawls's notation (on p. 140), interpretation 4b (it is perhaps unnecessary to assume for 4b any more than 4a that all people need be involved: it may be enough given the equivalencizing effect of the veil of ignorance that some are, and as with the particular quantifier it is quite unnecessary to be specific about numbers). Then of course the parties, since they are, for all they know, of different generations, will presumably agree on a just savings rate, and also to other just distribution principles, simply on the basis of Rawlsian rationality, i.e. advancing their own interests, without additional motivation assumptions. This more appealing omnitemporal interpretation of time of entry into the agreement, which gives a superior account of obligation to the future consistent with Rawls's claim, Rawls in some places puts down as less than best (p. 292) but in his most detailed account of the original position simply dismisses (p. 139): To conceive of the original position [as a gathering of people living at different times] would be to stretch fantasy too far; the conception would cease to be a natural guide to intuition. 168 R. and V. Rout ley This we question: it would be a better guide to intuition than a position (like 4a) which brings out intuitively wrong results; it is a more satisfactory guide, for example, to justice between generations than the present-timeof-entry interpretation, which fails conspicuously to allow for the range of potential persons (all of whom are supposed to qualify on Rawls's account for just treatment, cf. § 77). Moreover, it stretches fantasy no further than science fiction or than some earlier contract accounts.36 But it does require changes in the way the original position is conceived, and it does generate metaphysical difficulties for orthodox ontological views (though not to the same extent for the Meinongian view we prefer); for, to consider the latter, either time travel is possible or the original hypothetical position is an impossible situation, with people who live at different times assembled at the same time. The difficulties - of such an impossible meeting help to reveal that what Rawls's theory offers is but a colourful representation of obligations in terms of a contract agreed upon at a meeting. The metaphysical difficulties do not concern merely possible people, because all those involved are sometime-actual people; nor are there really serious difficulties generated by the fact that very many of these people do not exist, i.e. exist now. The more serious difficulties are either those of time travel, e.g. that future parties relocated into the present may be able to interfere with their own history, or, if time travel is ruled out logically or otherwise, that future parties may be advantaged (or disadvantaged) by their knowledge of history and technology, and that accordingly fairness is lost. As there is considerable freedom in how we choose to (re)arrange the original position, we shall suppose that time travel is rejected as a means of entering the original position. For much less than travel is required; some sort of limited communicational network which filters out, for example, all historical data (and all cultural or species dependent material) would suffice; and in any case if time travel were not excluded essentially the present-time-of-entry interpretation would serve, though fairness would again be put in doubt. The filtered communicational hook-up by which the omnitemporal position is engineered still has - if fairness is to be seen to be built into the decision making - to be combined with a reinterpreted veil of ignorance, so that parties do not know where they are located temporally any more than they know who they are characterwise. This implies, among other things, limitations on the parties' knowledge of factual matters, such as available technology and world and local history; for otherwise parties could work out their location, temporal or spatial. For example, if some party knew, as Rawls supposes, Obligations to the Future 169 the general social facts, then he would presumably be aware of the history of his time and so of where history ends, that is of the date of his generation, his time (his present), and so be aware of his temporal location. These are already problems for Rawls's so-called 'present-time-ofentry interpretation' - it is, rather, a variable-time-of-entry interpretation - given that the parties may be, as Rawls occasionally admits (e.g. p. 287), of any one generation, not necessarily the present: either they really do have to be ofthepresent time or they cannot be assumed to know as much as Rawls supposes.37 There is, however, no reason why the veil of ignorance should not be extended so as to avoid this problem; and virtually any extension that solves the problem for the variable-time-of-entry interpretation should serve, so it seems, for the omnitemporal one. We shall assume then that the parties know nothing which discloses their respective locations (i.e. in effect we write in conditions for universalizability of principles decided upon). There are still gaps between the assumptions of the omnitemporal position as roughly sketched and the desired conclusion concerning obligations to the future, but (the matter is beginning to look non-trivially provable given not widely implausible assumptions and) the intuitive arguments are as clear as those in [5], indeed they simply restate arguments to obligations given by Rawls. Rawls's theory, under interpretation 4b, admits of nice application to the problems of just distribution of material resources and of nuclear power. The just distribution, or rate of usage, of material resources38 over time is an important conservation issue to which Rawls's theory seems to apply, just as readily, and in a similar fashion, to that in which it applies to the issue of a just rate of savings. In fact the argument from the original position for a just rate of saving - whatever its adequacy - can by simply mimicked to yield an argument for just distribution of resources over generations. Thus, for example: persons in the original position are to ask themselves how much they would be willing to save [i.e. conserve] at each stage of advance on the assumption that all other generations are to save at the same rate [conserve resources to the same extent]. . . . In effect, then, they must choose a just savings principle [resources distribution principle] that assigns an appropriate rate of accumulation to [degree of resource conservation at] each level of advance. ([5], p. 287; our bracketed options give the alternative argument) 170 R. and V. Routley Just as 'they try to piece together a just savings schedule' (p. 289), so they can try to piece together a just resource distribution policy. Just as a case for resource conservation can be made out by appeal to the original position, since it is going to be against the interests of, to the disadvantage of, later parties to find themselves in a resource depleted situation (thus, on Rawlsian assumptions, they will bargain hard for a share of resources), so, interestingly, a case against a rapid programme of nuclear power development can be devised. The basis of a case against large-scale nuclear development is implicit in Rawls's contract theory under interpretation 4b, though naturally the theory is not applied in this sort of way by Rawls. To state the case in its crude but powerful form: people from later generations in the original position are bound to take it as against their interests to simply carry the waste can for energy consumed by an earlier generation. (We have already argued that they will find no convincing overriding considerations that make it worth their while to carry the waste can.) Thus not only has Passmore misrepresented the obligations to the future that Rawls's theory admits; he is also wrong in suggesting (p. 87 and p. 91) that Rawls's theory cannot justify a policy of resource conservation which includes reductions in present consumption. There is, in this connection, an accumulation of errors in Passmore, some of which spill over to Rawls, which it is worth trying to set out. First, Passmore claims ([1], p. 86; cf. also p. 90) that 'Rawls does not so much mention the saving of natural resources'. In fact the 'husbanding of natural resources' is very briefly considered ([5], p. 271). It is true, however, that Rawls does not reveal any of the considerable power that his theory, properly interpreted, has for natural resource conservation, as implying a just distribution of natural resources over time. Secondly, Passmore attempts ([1], pp. 87 ff.) to represent the calls of conservationists for a reduction in present resource usage and for a more just distribution as a call for heroic self-sacrifices; this is part of his more general attempt to represent every moral constraint with respect to the non-immediate future as a matter of self-sacrifice. 'Rawls's theory', Passmore says (on p. 87), 'leaves no room for heroic sacrifice', and so, he infers, leaves no room for conservation. Not only is the conclusion false, but the premiss also: Rawls's theory allows for supererogation, as Rawls explains ([5], p. 117). But resource conservation is, like refraining from nuclear development, not a question of heroic self-sacrifice; it is in part a question of obligations or duties to the distant future. And Rawls's theory allows not only for obligations as well as supererogation, but also for natural duties. Rawls's Obligations to the Future 171 contract, unlike the contracts of what is usually meant by a 'contract theory', is by no means exhaustive of the moral sphere: But even this wider [contract] theory fails to embrace all moral relationships, since it would seem to include only our relations with other persons and to leave out of account how we are to conduct ourselves towards,animals and the rest of nature. I do not contend that the contract notion offers a way to approach these questions which are certainly of the first importance; and I shall have to put them aside, (p. 17) The important class of obligations beyond the scope of the contract theory surely generates obligations between persons which even the wider contract theory likewise cannot explain. The upshot is that such a contract account, even if sufficient for the determination of obligations, is not necessary. To this extent Rawls' s theory is not a full social contract theory at all. However, Rawls appears to lose sight of the fact that his contract theory delivers only a sufficient condition when he claims, for example (p. 298), that 'one feature of the contract doctrine is that it places an upper bound on how much a generation can be asked to save for the welfare of later generations'. For greater savings may sometimes be required to meet obligations beyond those that the contract doctrine delivers. In short, Rawls appears to have slipped into assuming, inconsistently, that his contract theory is a necessary condition. Although Rawls's theory caters for justice between generations and allows the derivation of important obligations to people in the distant future, the full theory is far from consistent on these matters and there are significant respects in which Rawls does not take justice to the future seriously. The most conspicuous symptoms of this are that justice to the future is reduced to a special case, justice between generations, and that the only aspect of justice between generations that Rawls actually considers is a just savings rate; there is, for example, no proper examination of the just distribution of resources among generations, though these resources, Rawls believes, provide the material base of the just institutions that he wants to see maintained. In fact Rawls strongly recommends a system of markets as a just means for the allocation of most goods and services, recognizing their well-known limitations only in the usual perfunctory fashion ([5], pp. 270 ff.). Yet market systems are limited by a narrow time horizon, and are quite ill-equipped to allocate resources in a just fashion 172 R. and V. Rout ley over a time span of several generations. Similarly Rawls's endorsement of democratic voting procedures as in many cases a just method of determining procedures depends upon the assumptions that everyone with ah interest is represented. But given his own assumptions about obligations to the future and in respect of potential persons this is evidently not the case. Catering in a just fashion for the interests of future people poses serious problems for any method of decision that depends upon people being present to represent their own interests. Some of the more conservative, indeed reactionary, economic assumptions in Rawls emerge with the assumption that all that is required for justice between generations is a just savings rate, that all we need to pass on to the future are the things that guarantee appropriate savings such as capital, factories, and machines. But the transmission of these things is quite insufficient for justice to the future, and neither necessary nor sufficient as a foundation for a good life for future generations. What is required for justice is the transmission in due measure of what is valuable. Rawls has, however, taken value accumulation as capital accumulation, thereby importing one of the grossest economic assumptions, that capital reflects value. But of course the accumulation of capital may conflict with the preservation of what is valuable. It is for this sort of reason (and thus, in essence, because of the introduction of supplementary economistic theses which are not part of the pure contract theory) that Rawls's theory is a reactionary one from an environmental point of view; on the theory as presented (i.e. the contract theory plus all the supplementary assumptions) there is no need to preserve such things as wilderness or natural beauty. The savings doctrine supposes that everything of value for transmission to the future is negotiable in the market or tradeable; but then transmission of savings can by no means guarantee that some valuable things, not properly represented in market systems, are not eliminated or not passed on, thereby making future people worse off. It becomes evident in this way, too, how culturally-bound Rawls's idea of ensuring justice to future generations through savings is. It is not just that the idea does not apply, without a complete overhaul, to non-industrial societies such as those of hunter-gatherers; it does not apply to genuinely post-industrial societies either. Consideration of such alternative societies suggests that whafis required, in place of capital accumulation, is that we pass on what is necessary for a good life, that we ensure that the basics are fairly distributed over time and not eroded, e.g. that in the case of the forest people that the forest is maintained. The narrowness of Rawls's picture, Obligations to the Future 173 which makes no due allowance for social or cultural diversity (from the original contractual position on) or for individual diversity arises in part from his underlying and especially narrow socio-economic assumption as to what people want: What men want is meaningful work in free association with others, these associations regulating their relations to one another within a framework of just basic institutions. ([5], p. 290) This may be what many Harvard men want; but as a statement of what men want it supplies neither sufficient nor even necessary conditions.39 NOTES 1 Thus according to the Fox Report ([2], p. 110; our italics). There is at present no generally accepted means by which high level waste can be permanently isolated from the environment and remain safe for very long periods. . . . Permanent disposal of high-level solid wastes in stable geological formations is regarded as the most likely solution, but has yet to be demonstrated as feasible. It is not certain that such methods and disposal sites will entirely prevent radioactive releases following disturbances caused by natural processes or human activity. The Fox Report also quoted approvingly ([2], p. 187; our italics) the conclusion of the British (Flowers) Report [6]: There should be no commitment to a large programme of nuclear fission power until it has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that a method exist s to ensure the safe containment of long-lived, highly radioactive waste for the indefinite future. Although the absence of a satisfactory storage method has been conceded by some leading proponents of nuclear development, e.g. Weinberg ([3], pp. 32-33), it is now disputed by others. In particular, the headline for Cohen [15], which reads 'A substantial body of evidence indicates that the high level radioactive wastes generated by U.S. nuclear power plants can be stored satisfactorily in deep geological formations', has suggested to many readers - what it was no doubt intended to suggest- that there is really no problem about the disposal of radioactive wastes after all. Cohen presents, however, no new hard evidence, no evidence not already available to the British and Australian Commissions ([2] and [6]). Moreover the evidence Cohen does outline fails conspicuously to measure up to the standards rightly required by the Flowers and Fox Reports. Does Cohen offer a commercial-scale procedure for waste disposal which can be demonstrated as safe? Far from it: 174 R. and V. Routley The detailed procedures for handling the high-level wastes are not yet definite, but present indications are that. . . . (Cohen [1], p. 24; our italics) Does Cohen 'demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt' the long-term safety of burial of wastes, deep underground? Again, far from it: On the face of it such an approach appears to be reasonably safe. . . . (p. 24; our italics) Cohen has apparently not realized what is required. At issue here are not so much scientific or empirical issues as questions of methodology, of standards of evidence required for claims of safety, and above all, of values, since claims of safety, for example, involve implicit evaluations concerning what counts as an acceptable risk, an admissible cost, etc. In the headline 'a substantial body of evidence . . . indicates that. . . wastes . . . can be stored satisfactorily' the key words (italicized) are evaluative or elastic, and the strategy of Cohen's case is to adopt very low standards for their application. But in view of what is at stake it is hardly acceptable to do this, to dress up in this way what are essentially optimistic assurances and untested speculations about storage, which in any case do little to meet the difficulties and uncertainties that have been widely pointed out as regards precisely the storage proposals Cohen outlines, namely human or natural interference or disturbance. 2 See [18], pp. 24-25. 3 On all these points, see [14], esp. p. 141. According to the Fox Report ([2], p. 110): Parts of the reactor structure will be highly radioactive and their disposal could be very difficult. There is at present no experience of dismantling a full size reactor. 4 See, in particular, The Union of Concerned Scientists, The Nuclear Fuel Cycle, Friends of the Earth Energy Paper, San Francisco 1973, p. 47; also [3], p. 32 and [14], p. 149. 5 As the discussion in [14], pp. 153-7, explains. 6 Cf. [17], pp. 35-36, [18] and, for much detail, J. R. Goffman and A. R. Tamplin, Poisoned Power, Rodale Press, Emmau Pa. 1971. 7 On the pollution and waste disposal record of the infant nuclear industry, see [14] and [17]. The record of many countries on pollution control, where in many cases available technologies for reducing or removing pollution are not applied because they are considered too expensive or because they adversely affect the interests of some powerful group, provides clear historical evidence that the problem of nuclear waste disposal would not end simply with the devising of a 'safe' technology for disposal, even if one could be devised which provided a sufficient guarantee of safety and was commercially feasible. The fact that present economic and political arrangements are overwhelmingly weighted in favour of the interests and concerns of (some) contemporary humans makes it not unrealistic to expect the long-term nuclear waste disposal, if it involved any significant cost at all, when public concern about the issue died down, would be seen to conflict with the interests of contemporary groups, and that these latter interests would in many cases be favoured. Nor, as the history of movements such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament shows, could generalized public concern in the absence of direct personal interest, be relied upon to be sustained for long enough to ensure implementation of costly or troublesome long-term disposal methods - even in those places where public concern exists and is a politically significant force. It must be stressed then that the problem is not merely one of disposal technique. Historical and other evidence points to the conclusion that many of the most important risks associated with nuclear waste disposal are not of the kind which might be amenable Obligations to the Future 175 to technical solutions in the laboratory. A realistic assessment of potential costs to the future from nuclear development cannot overlook these important non-technical risk factors. 8 Of course the effect on people is not the only factor which has to be taken into consideration in arriving at a moral judgment. Nuclear radiation, unlike most ethical theories, does not confine its scope to human life. But since the harm nuclear development is likely to cause to non-human life can hardly improve its case, it suffices if the case against it can be made out solely in terms of its effects on human life in the conventional way. 9 Proponents of nuclear power often try to give the impression that future people will not just bear costs from nuclear development but will also be beneficiaries, because nuclear powerprovides an 'abundant' or even 'unlimited' source of energy; thus Weinberg ([3], p. 34): 'an all but infinite source of relatively cheap and clean energy'. A good example of an attempt to create the impression that 'abundant' and 'cheap' energy from nuclear fission will be available to 'our descendants', i.e. all future people, is found in the last paragraph of Cohen [15]. Such claims are most misleading, since fission power even with the breeder reactor has only about the same prospective lifetime as coal-produced electricity (a point that can be derived using data in A. Parker, 'World Energy Resources: A Survey', Energy Policy, Vol. 3 [1975], pp. 58-66), and it is quite illegitimate to assume that nuclear fusion, for which there are still major unsolved problems, will have a viable, clean technology by the time fission runs out, or, for that matter, that it ever will. Thus while some few generations of the immediate future may obtain some benefits as well as costs, there is a very substantial chance that tho se of the more distant future will obtain nothing but costs. 10 These feelings, of which Smith's and Hume's sympathy is representative, are but the feeling echoes of obligation. At most, sympathy explains the feeling of obligation or lack of it, and this provides little guide as to whether there is an obligation or not - unless one interprets moral sympathy, the feeling of having a obligation, or being obligated, itself as a sufficient indication of obligation, in which case moral sympathy is a non-explanatory correlate in the feelings department of obligation itself and cannot be truly explanatory of the ground of it; unless, in short, moral sympathy reduces to an emotive rewrite of moral obligation. 11 Elsewhere in [1] Passmore is especially exercised that our institutions and intellectual traditions - presumably only the better ones - should be passed on to posterity, and that we should strive to make the world a better place, if not eventually an ideal one. 12 This is not the only philosophically important issue in environmental ethics on which Passmore is inconsistent. Consider his: 'over-arching intention: to consider whether the solution of ecological problems demands a moral or metaphysical revolution' (p. x), whether the West needs a new ethic and a new metaphysics. Passmore's answer in [1] is an emphatic No. Only insofar as Western moralists have [made various erroneous suggestions] can the West plausibly be said to need a 'new ethic'. What it needs, for the most part, is not so much a 'new ethic' as adherence to a perfectly familiar ethic. For the major sources of our ecological disasters - apart from ignorance - are greed and shortsightedness, which amount to much the same thing. . . There is no novelty in the view that greed is evil; no need of a new ethic to tell us as much. (p. 187) 'The view that the West now needs. . . a new concept of nature' is similarly dismissed (p. 186, cf. p. 72). But in his paper [1*] (i.e. 'Attitudes to Nature', Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures, Vol. 8, Macmillan, London 1975), which is said to be an attempt to bring together and to reformulate some of the basic philosophical themes of [1], Passmore's answer is Yes, and quite different themes, inconsistent with those of [1], are advanced: 176 R. and V. Routley [T]he general conditions I have laid down . . . have not been satisfied in most of the traditional philosophies of nature. To that degree it is true, I think, that we do need a 'new metaphysics' which is genuinely not anthropocentric. . . . A 'new metaphysics', if it is not to falsify the facts, will have to be naturalistic, but not reductionist. The working out of such a metaphysics is, in my judgement, the most important task which lies ahead of philosophy. ([1*], pp. 260-1) A new ethic accompanies this new metaphysics. The emergence of new moral attitudes to nature is bound up, then, with the emergence of a more realistic philosophy of nature. That is the only adequate foundation for effective ecological concern. ([1*], p. 264) This is a far cry from the theme of [1] that ecological problems can be solved within the traditions of the West. 13 Put differently, the causal linkage can bypass intermediate generations, especially given action at a temporal distance: the chain account implies that there are no moral constraints in initiating such causal linkages. The chain picture accordingly seems to presuppose an unsatisfactory Humean model of causation, demanding contiguity and excluding action at a distance. 14 Golding we shall concede to Passmore, though even here the case is not clearcut. For Golding writes towards the end of his article ([12], p. 96): My discussion, until this point, has proceeded on the view that we have obligations to future generations. But do we? I am not sure that the question can be answered in the affirmative with any certainty. I shall conclude this note with a very brief discussion of some of the difficulties. All of Passmore's material on Golding is drawn from this latter and, as Golding says, 'speculative' discussion. 15 There is no textual citation for Bentham at all for the chapter of [1] concerned, viz. Ch. 4, 'Conservation'. 16 As Passmore himself at first concedes ([1], p. 84): If, as Bentham tells us, in deciding how to act men ought to take account of the effects of their actions on every sentient being, they obviously ought to take account of the pleasure and pains of the as yet unborn. 17 Neither rightness nor probable lightness in the hedonistic senses correspond to these notions in the ordinary sense; so at least [13] argues, following much anti-utilitarian literature. 18 On this irrationality different theories agree: the rational procedure, for example according to the minimax rule for decision-making under uncertainty, is to minimize that outcome which maximizes harm. 19 Discount, or bank, rates in the economists' sense are usually set to follow the market (cf. P. A. Samuelson, Economics, 7th ed., McGraw-Hill, New York 1967, p. 351). Thus the rates have little moral relevance. 20 Cf. Rawls [5], p. 287: 'From a moral point of view there are no grounds for discounting future well-being on the basis of pure time preference.' 21 What the probabilities would be depends on the theory of probability adopted: a Carnapian theory, e.g., would lead back to the unconstrained position. Obligations to the Future 177 22 A real possibility is one which there is evidence for believing could eventuate. A real possibility requires producible evidence for its consideration. The contrast is with mere logical possibility. 23 Thus, to take a simple special case, economists dismiss distant future people from their assessments of utility, welfare, etc., on the basis of their non-existence; cf. Ng ('the utility of a non-existent person is zero') and Harsanyi ('only existing people [not even "nonexisting potential individuals"] can have real utility levels since they are the only ones able to enjoy objects with a positive utility, suffer from objects with a negative utility, and feel indifferent to objects with zero utility') (see Appendix B of Y. K. Ng, 'Preference, Welfare, and Social Welfare', paper presented at the Colloquium on Preference, Choice and Value Theory, RSSS, Australian National University, August 1977, pp. 24, 26-27). Non-existent people have no experiences, no preferences; distant future people do not exist; therefore distant future people have no utility assignments - so the sorites goes. But future people at least will have wants, preferences, and so on, and these have to be taken into account in adequate utility assessments (which should be assessed over afuture time horizon), no matter how much it may complicate or defeat calculations. 24 There are problems about formulating universalizability satisfactorily, but they hardly affect the point. The requisite universalizability can in fact be satisfactorily brought out from the semantical analysis of deontic notions such as obligation, and indeed argued for on the basis of such an analysis which is universal in form. The lawlikeness requirement, which can be similarly defended, is essentially that imposed on genuine scientific laws by logical empiricists (e.g. Carnap and Hempel), that such laws should contain no proper names or the like, no reference to specific locations or times. 25 Such a principle is explicit both in classical utilitarianism (e.g. Sidgwick [11], p. 414), and in a range of contract and other theories from Kant and Rousseau toRawls ([5], p. 293). How the principle is argued for will depend heavily, however, on the underlying theory; and we do not want to make our use depend heavily on particular ethical theories. 26 See esp. R. Lanoue, NuclearPlants:The MoreTheyBuild, The More You Pay, Centerfor Study of Responsive Law, Washington DC 1976; also [14], pp. 212 ff. 27 On all these points see R. Grossman and G. Daneker, Guide to Jobs and Energy, Environmentalists for Full Employment, Washington DC 1977, pp. 1-7, and also the details supplied in substantiating the interesting case of Commoner [7]. On the absorption of available capital by the nuclear industry, see as well [18], p. 23. On the employment issues, see too H. E. Daly in [9], p. 149. A more fundamental challenge to the poverty argument appears in I. Illich, Energy and Equality, Calder & Boyars, London 1974, where it is argued that the sort of development nuclear energy represents is exactly the opposite of what the poor need. 28 For much more detail on the inappropriateness see E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, Blond & Briggs, London 1973. As to the capital and other requirements, see [2], p. 48, and also [7] and [9]. For an illuminating look at the sort of development high-energy technology will tend to promote in the so-called underdeveloped countries, see the paper of Waiko and other papers in the Melanesian Environment (ed. by J. H. Winslow), Australian National University Press, Canberra 1977. 29 This fact is implicitly recognized in [2], p. 56. 30 A useful survey is given in A. Lovins, Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken, Friends of the Earth Australia, 1977 (reprinted from Foreign Affairs, October 1976); see also [17], [6], [7], [14], pp. 233 ff., and Schumacher, op. cit. 31 This is also explained in [2], p. 56. 32 An argument like this is suggested in Passmore [1], Chs. 4 and 7, with respect to the question of saving resources. In Passmore this argument for the overriding importance of passing on contemporary culture is underpinned by what appears to be a future- 178 R. and V. Routley directed ethical version of the Hidden Hand argument of economics - that, by a coincidence which if correct would indeed be fortunate, the best way to take care of the future (and perhaps even the only way to do so, since do-good intervention is almost certain to go wrong) is to take proper care of the present and immediate future. The argument has all the defects of the related Chain Argument discussed above and others. 33 See [14], p. 66, p. 191, and also [7]. 34 For such arguments see esp. M. Flood and R. Grove-White, Nuclear Prospects. A Comment on the Individual, the State and Nuclear Power, Friends of the Earth, Council for the Protection of Rural England and National Council for Civil Liberties, London 1976. 35 For a recent sketch of one such alternative which is outside the framework of the conventional option of centralized bureaucratic socialism, see E. Callenbach's novel, Ecotopia, Banyan Tree Books, Berkeley, California 1975. For the outline of a liberation socialist alternative see Radical Technology (ed. by G. Boyle and P. Harper), Undercurrents Limited, London 1976, and references therein. 36 Some earlier contract theories also did. Burke's contract (in E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Dent, London 1910, pp. 93-94) 'becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are not yet born'. Thus Burke's contract certainly appears to lead to obligations to distant future generations. Needless to say, there are metaphysical difficulties, which however Burke never considers, about contracts between parties at widely separated temporal locations. 37 Several of the preceding points we owe to M. W. Jackson. 38 Resources such as soil fertility and petroleum could even be a primary social goods on Rawls's very hazy general account of these goods ([5], pp. 62, 97): are these 'something a rational man wants whatever else he wants'? The primary social goods should presumably be those which are necessary for the good and just life -which will however vary with culture. 39 We have benefited from discussion with Ian Hughes and Frank Muller and useful comments on the paper from Brian Martin and Derek Browne. REFERENCES [1] J. Passmore, Man's Responsibility for Nature, Duckworth, London 1974. [2] Ranger Uranium Environmental Inquiry First Report, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra 1977. [3] A. M. Weinberg, 'Social Institutions and Nuclear Energy", Science, Vol. 177 (July 1972), pp. 27-34. • [4] R. Routley, 'Exploring Meinong's Jungle II. Existence is Existence Now', Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic (to appear). [5] J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1971. [6] Nuclear Power and the Environment. Sixth Report of the British Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, London 1976. [7] B. Commoner, The Poverty of Power, Knopf, New York 1976. [8] G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1903. [9] B. Commoner, H. Boksenbaum and M. Corr (Eds.), Energy and Human Welfare - A Critical Analysis, Vol. III, Macmillan, New York 1975. Obligations to the Future 179 [10] J. Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, Vol. 1, published under the superintendence of J. Bowring, with an intro. by J. H. Burton; William Tait, Edinburgh 1843. [11] H. Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, Macmillan, London 1962 (reissue). [12] M. P. Golding, 'Obligations to Future Generations', Monist, Vol. 56 (1972), pp. 85-99. [13] R. and V. Routley, 'An Expensive Repair Kit for Utilitarianism', presented at the Colloquium on Preference, Choice and Value Theory, RSSS, Australian National University, August 1977. [14] R. Nader and J. Abbotts, The Menace of Atomic Energy, Outback Press, Melbourne 1977. [15] B. L. Cohen, 'The Disposal of Radioactive Wastes from Fission Reactors', Scientific American, Vol. 236 (June 1977), pp. 22-31. [16] S. McCracken, 'The Waragainst the Atom' .Commentary (September 1977), pp. 33-47. [17] A. B. Lovins and J. H. Price, Non-Nuclear Futures: The Case for an Ethical Energy Strategy, Friends of the Earth International, San Francisco 1975. [18] A. Roberts, "The Politics of Nuclear Power', Arena, No. 41 (1976), pp. 22-47.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Nuclear energy and obligations to the future Type The nature or genre of the resource Journal Article Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">R. Routley</a> V. Routley Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource January 1, 1978 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Manuscript https://www.antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/ed8352051a1e549600f0284f6200d6d0.pdf fd3cb0d6d36d314a2139ba942ebcae87 PDF Text Text RICHARD ROUTLEY metaphysical fallout from nuclear predicament the string of nuclear prophets has produced a series of philosophically oriented works on nuclear war ’ The series is important for its deeper penetration mto the main nuclear predicament, down to metaphysical levels; m this, the series contrasts with the superficialities of much of the political commentary. The most widely circulated and influential text of the series is undoudbtedly that of the slightest of the ’prophets&dquo;, A Schell’s The Fate of the Earth. This skillful piece of mediasome of the apparently Anders So, conveniently, main assumptions of Schell and Anders can often be considered together. To criticize their assumptions is not of course to belittle their work. In particular, Schell’s little book, for all its political shortcomings, is having a significant and much needed effect m shifting attitudes towards nuclear arrangements. It is especially valuable for its vivid and horrifying scenarios of the aftermath of nuclear attack Unfortunately it also exhibits, both philosophically and factually, severe defects. philosophy unncannily redeploys deep phenomenological themes of Some of it is simply rubbish- to take one example, consider the claim that &dquo;without ... a worldwide program of action for preserving the [human] species, .. nothing else that we undertake together can make any practical or moral sense ...&dquo; (p.173, rearranged). This should certainly be rejected philosophically; for there is no separate moral issue of such overwhelming importance that all other issues become morally neutral. Moral issues remain moral issues they do not cease to be so when compared with more important moral issues (as Schell effectively acknowledges elsewhere, e g �p.130). And the claim should be questioned on more factual grounds. Humans form a highly resilient species, like rats a survivor species, unlikely to be entirely exterminated under presently arranged nuclear holocausts. The example was selected, however, because it leads into, indeed presupposes, two of the major defective assumptions in the work of Schell and Anders: S 1. Nuclear war will eliminate I~fe, human life at least, (the extinction assumption) and on earth S2. In the absence of humans, very many notions, not only those of mortality and values, but those of time and space for example, make no sense: or, to put it mto a more sympathefic philosophical form, these notions depend for their sense on an actual human context (the extravagant anthropocentric assumption).22 of S2 which gave Anders’ and Schell’s works of their apparent philosophical depth, and certainly induce much philosophical puzzlement through the paradoxical propositions generated. But the frequent applications of S2 It is applications some S1.3 For without total extinction there will be humans about, to make past and future, to do good end evil, and to go on making sense! depend essentially on Granted, assumption S1 by no means ruled out as a real possibility, as the technological means appear available to make it true (to render Homo Sapiens extinct).4 Granted, the prospect of large-scale nuclear war does threaten leading is centers of Western civilization with obliteration. Even so, S1 unlikely m the light of present-admittedly inadequate-information Even m Canada, which lies on the polar appears route of Soviet missiles, human life should be able to continue in certain northern areas (according to Canadian medical studies). Schell’s argument to S1 is extremely flimsy. It de- pends, for example, 20 on an unjustified extrapolation from the Northern to the Southern Hemisphere, but for the most part it does that very North American thing of contracting the world to North America. (All that matters, all worthwhile civilization, is in the USA, or at least, to be more char~table, in North America and Europe, which will also be wiped out, e , its entire human population will be eliminated in a nuclear holocaust.) Some of the data Schell relies upon, for example the effect of nuclear explosions on the ozone layer, was significantly out of date even when he wrote Other effects than ozone destruction, such as variations in the ultraviolet radiation and temperature levels, apparently extrapolate even less well from North to South A factually superior study of nuclear �produced at about the same time as Schell’s, by and others, indicates that part of the Southern Hemisphere, such as New Zealand and southern latitudes of Latin Amenca, could escape relatively unscathed from even the most massive northern exchanges. disaster Preddy Doomsday prophets may appear to have gained new purchase through recent (if belated) scientific forecasts of a nuclear winter following upon nuclear war But although these forecasts certainly add a new, and alarming, ecological dimension to the very damaging consequences of large-scale nuclear war, they do not sustain the extinction assumpt~on.55 On the available evidence, human life will continue, though no doubt with new complications and simplifications, for example in many southern mid-latitude coastal regions outside zones of radiation fallout More generally, life will go on, though likely seriously and irreversibly impoverished through loss of valuable nonhuman systems and creatures. Nuclear prophets usually see the world (though with most of it carried along) as already set, in crucial respects, on the route to nuclear catastrophe. Much of the way taken is seen as both inevitable and irreversible Thus both Anders and Schell insist upon the &dquo;impossibility of unlearning&dquo; the means of manufacturing nuclear bombs. It would seem that extinction, which they both foresee, would furnish a good medium for unlearning nuclear technology (something very like this emerges from van Damken’s theory of an earlier &dquo;h~gh&dquo; technology). In virtue of S2, they would, however, exclude such a possibility as a case of unlearning, contending wrongly that the notion no longer made sense. But what they again want to suggest with the i m possibility-of -u n learning message is the inevitability of the development and eventual use of the technology-as if having learned the means all else was determined, and manufacture and use ceased to be a matter of choice. Certainly such views have been advanced6, but they are not tenable There are many examples of technological advances that have not been taken advantage of, and there are even cases of technological developments that have been manufactured but not marketed or used. There is not something very special about nuclear apparatus that puts it beyond the scope of such generalizations. Both Schell and Anders do claim that there are very special things about nuclear weapons, notably that they do not allow Even if this were true just of nuclear 11 experiment it is certainly not of smaller weapons-it weapons-and would not rebut the previous argument against the inevitability of nuclear weapons. And in fact Anders and (even) Schell &dquo; 21 �hedge their claims about testing, and the limits to nuclear scientific work, to large-scale weapons and independent experiments which do not interfere with observers and those outside the &dquo;laboratories.&dquo; Again they have latched onto major prints, m particular, we have at present no way of testing the cumulative effects of large-scale nuclear weapons in concert, e.g. for more holistic effects, such as fireballs or firestorms, or changes m coupled atmospheric circulation and radiation fields. Short of a large-scale nuclear war, and likely enough with it, these crucial effects must remain largely untested and hypothetical in character. Nontheless enough data can be assembled to carry through informative modellings, which point to the improbability of S1, and so undermine applications of S2. The penetration of human chauvinism, as thing peculiar to Schell and Anders, but is m S2, a product of West- is not some- philosophy, European philosophy especially. This chauvinism is unfortunately alive and still well, Anders version of S2 being just one striking illustration (cf. AA p. 252ff.). It has also deeply penetrated Anglo-American philosophy, and has been extended under the influence of Wittgenstein’s ern work, where even the necessary truths of mathematics are taken to be a product of human conventions, and would vanish with humans! Such are the alleged implications of extinction : but the fact is that the truths of arithmetic are m no way dependent on the existence of humans or humanoids or of gods or giraffes. As with necessary truths and falsehoods so with contingents ones: very many propositions about the world do not depend upon in any way for their truth-value or content on humans or their communities. _ 22 In Schell, human chauvinism is dished up in a particularly powerful and obnoxious Kantian form. Thoughts and propositions, time and tenses, history and memories, values and morality all depend on the life-giving presence of human beings-past or future or merely potential humans are not enough. Thus, according to Schell (p 140, e.g), &dquo; . the thought ’Humanity is now extinct’ is an impossible one for a rational person, because as soon as it is, we are not In imagining any other event, we look ahead to a moment that is still within the stream of human tame....&dquo; The thought is however perfectly possible for humans; we can have it right now. Though we no doubt have it falsely, a later rational creature may well be able to have it truly. Schell erroneously denies that: there is no &dquo;later&dquo; &dquo;outside the human tenses of past, present, and future ... &dquo; (p 140) .7 Human extinction eliminates &dquo;the creature that divides time into past, present and �future&dquo; annihilation cannot &dquo;come to pass&dquo; (p.143). But it false that the tenses are human: the tenses depend simply on a local time ordering (perceptible to many creatures other than humans, but not depending at all on that perceptibility for its viability) relating other times to the present, to now (also a human-independent location, evident to other creatures, and borne witness to by such sequences as the passing seasons). Annihilation may also too easily come to pass, for many humans m the North at least, as it came to pass in recent geological times that humans began to exist upon earth Before that there was a time before there were any human beings. so is Anders’ argument for the demise of time, that &dquo;what has been will no longer be even what has been,&dquo; is also explicitly (and narrowly) verificatiomst: &dquo;for what would the difference be between what has only been and what has never been, if there is no one to remember the things that have been (AA p.245). There would still remain many sorts of differences; for one, the history recorded m many other organisms would be different Temporal themes do not lack wlegitimacy because not registered [or verified] by anyone&dquo;; truth, significance, still less meaning, are not matters of human verification. elsewhere, the human chauvinism is mixed with distorting metaphysical assumptions of our Western heritage, m particular, verificationism and ontological assumptions (to the effect that there are severe difficulties m talking about what does not exist Thus, for example, Schell takes over dubious metaphysics from Freud, according to whom ’nt is mdeed impossible to imagine our own death: and whenever we attempt to do so, we can perceive that we are m fact still present as spectators&dquo; (p 138) The second clause goes a good distance towards refuting the first In fact there is no great difficulty in describing counterfactual situations which undermine both of Freud’s claims. The same goes for Schell’s extensions of human chauvinism into one of its main traditional strongholds, value theory: &dquo; . the simple and basic fact (sic!) that before there can be good or evil, service or harm, lamenting or rejoicing, there must be life.&dquo; human life (p.171 ) These are no facts, but deeply entrenched philosophical dogmas (which have been exposed and criticized elsewhere, e.g , HC). Here, as other will disappear with the extinction of humans: trivially there will be no more humans (unless humans re-evolve or are recreated), and thus no more human communities, human institutions, human activities, human emotions, and so forth But it is already gomg too far to sug- Naturally 23 many things �gest, as no Anders does, that there will accordingly be &dquo;no love, no struggle, no pain, no hope, no comfort, sacrifice, no image, no song...&dquo; For there are, and may thought, no continue to exist, other creatures than humans with emotion, struggles, songs... Nor will the ending of all such human ventures, if it comes to pass, show that all past human ventures have been &dquo;all in vain,&dquo; meaningless, and already so to say dead The decay of the solar system, or the heat-death of the universe even, will not show that worthwhile human activities were not worthwhile.9 Several of the other notions and themes common to Schell and Anders derive from their shared assumptions S1 and S2. It is these that underlie the biblical notion (in Revelations) of a Second Death, redeployed by both. &dquo;The death of mankind,&dquo; under S1 , is reckoned a &dquo;second death,&dquo; because by S2 and S1 remamng life is rendered meaningless and already ’ seems to be dead (AA p.244, S p 166) and is already overhung with death&dquo; (S p.166). Thus, too, more trivially, a person faces &dquo;a second death,&dquo; not merely one’s own but m addition that greater death of the species and all future generations (S p 166. p.1 15). However, even if nuclear extinction came to pass, the stronger notion would not be vindicated, because it depends on the fallacious inference to the meaninglessness of preceding life and on the very questionable representation of this meaninglessness as a sort of death. There is no such Second Death: creatures die just once, perhaps all at about the same time. The idea of a Second Death lacks even a solid metaphysical base. From S1 , together with the minor principle that the extinction absolute does not differ m degree, comes the unibeing versality of peril theme that &dquo;we are all exposed to peril m the same degree,&dquo; which is accordingly &dquo;d~sgmsed~ and &dquo;difficult to recognize,&dquo; because there is no contrast (AE p 64; S p.150). This theme falls with S1. In any event, not all peoples are equally imperilled by the nuclear situation, the Indians of southern Patagonia being rather better placed than the Germans of northern Europe Nor are all people equally locked into the situation or incapacitated by it; the prospects are different in different countries and places. an Nor, likewise, are all people equally responsible, a pernicious theme which Schell (m contrast to Anders) repeatedly filtrates. This is the Pogo theme, according to whichS3. co, 24 in- Responsibility for the present nuclear predIcament (flasreally) dlstnbutes onto everybody, It belongs to every hu- man lií the world ’o ...i �But there is also, mixed in, a weaker, more plausible claim that gives the lie to the stronger one, namely, that we have some responsibility (the Nazi situation is compared) An especially blatant example of the Pogo theme’ runs as follows: &dquo;... the world’s political leaders though they now menace the earth with nuclear weapons, do so only with our permission, and even at our bidding. At least, this is true for democracies&dquo; (pp.229-30). The theme is elaborated elsewhere: &dquo;... we are the authors of that distinction (For the populations of the superpowers this is true in a positive sense, since we pay for extinction and support the governments that pose the threat of it, while for the peoples of the non-nucleararmed world it is true only m the negative sense that they fail to try to do anything about the danger)&dquo; (p.152). But this is ... of an argument indicting representative government, by revealing its insensitivity and unresponsiveness to many of the populace they allegedly govern, not to mention those affected by its activities who are not represented at all (namely foreigners). But Schell conveniently neglects all such points: &dquo;... we are all potential mass killers. The moral cost of more nuclear armaments is that it makes all of us underwriters of the slaughter of hundreds of millions&dquo; (p 152) And again [at] perpetrators ... we convey the steady message .. that life not only is not sacred but it is worthless; that ... it had been judged acceptable for everyone to be killed&dquo; (p 153) Little of this is true. Those who campaign against nuclear arrangements, vote against nuclear-committed parties so far as is possible, and the like, are certainly not the authors of potential destruction, and responsibility for the nuclear situation does not simply distribute onto them. Nor does the responsibilityor the unlikely opinions as to worth Schell illegitimately attributes to everyone-fall on those who have done less. Responsibility for decisions taken in &dquo;literal democracies&dquo; even by representatives (m the unlikely event of this happening m the case of anything as important as defense) cannot be traced back to those represented, since among many other things, a representative is only representative of a party which offers a complex and often ill-characterized package of policies, and a voter may vote for zero or more policies of this package. Only m the (uncommon) event of a clear single issue referendum, which is adopted, can responsibility, still of a qualified sort, be sheeted home, to those who voted for it, not to everyone in the community. While S3 is false, there is an important related theme that is much more plausible, namely, that the present nuclear situation generates responsibilities for every socially involved person. 25 When moreover the Pogo assumption is disentangled from �the accompanyng themes, part of what results along the right lines: namely, is decidedly S4 The controllers [not to be confused, in Schell’s fashion, with all of us] have failed to change our pre-nuclear mstltutlons. The sovereign system Is out of step with the nuclear age, the one-earth system, etc. (the whole earth theme). Though Schell remains relatively clear about the serious defects of the state and the frequently immoral purposes for which the state is used, unfortunately he often loses sight of this important theme (indicated pp.187-8) Yet S4 forms part of Schell’s critique of the state which is, by and large, scattered and fragmentary. Schell arrives at the conclusion that the nation-state has outlasted its usefulness, and that new political institutions more &dquo;consonant with the global reality&dquo; are required as a matter of urgency. But he evades what he admits is the major task, making out viable alternatives. 12 At most he makes some passing gestures, some pointing towards the Way Up to world political control Solutions to the nuclear arms dilemma come, if not easily, m a similar simplistic way, from Top Down: those who can must appeal to the Top, to those who govern (cf. p.230). Schell places his hope m treaties for arms reduction and limitations, such as SALT, and m world government, through the United Nations (see p.225ff. and especially p 227, bottom paragraph) Given the record of these organizations and treaties, the negotiations and regulators, it is by now a pathetic faith. Nor is a serious need felt for further analysis of the nuclear situation, to investigate the origins of nuclear technology, to explore the roots of nuclear blindness, to consider effective changes to military-mdustrial organization and ways of life. 26 But some of the requisite deeper analysis of the nuclear situation and, more generally, of the roots of war can be found in Anders and elsewhere. 13 The roots of the nuclear predicament are not confined to the ideologically-aligned arrangements of nation-states, but penetrate also into key components of those states, their military, their controlling classes, and their supporting bureaucracies Both within the arrangements of states, what accounts in part for the arrangements, and in key components of the states, a conspicuous and crucial feature is the drive for power and domination (and, often, the accompanyng privilege). 14 Thus the push for [nuclear] superiority by the super-states, to be achieved through military-oriented science and technology, which involves and enables domination,in several interrelated forms The main �the large nation-state, where enough surplus be accumulated (from at home and from abroad, and bled from nature) to proceed with military and bureaucratic ambitions and to found the high-technology research and development means to ever more expendable power and power-base product can is energy. 15 In changing the structural arrangements to eliminate the proof nuclear war, it is not ultimately enough just to downspect the main power-base, the nation-state: it is also imporgrade tant to alter key components of the state, and, more sweepingly, to remove trouble-making patterns embedded m all these social and political arrangements, namely, patterns of domination-patterns manifested not only in state political organization, but in white-coloured relations, male-female relations, human-animal relations, human-nature relations-to remove, m short, chauvinistic relations. However, not everything needs to be accomplished at once: the cluster of damaging power and domination relations tied into war can be tackled separately There the problems can largely be narrowed to certain problems of states and certain key components of states In what analysis he does offer of the problem with states, Schell repeats the familiar false contrast of state expediency with morality, as a contrast between &dquo;raison d’etat&dquo; and the Socratic-Christian ethics The teaching that &dquo;the end justifies the means is the basis on which governments, in all times, have licensed themselves to commit crimes of every sort&dquo; (p 134). So &dquo;states may do virtually anything whatever m the name of [their] survival.&dquo; Schell then argues, however, that extinction nullifies end-means justification by destroying every end; but again the argument is far from sound, and depends on human chauvinism (as under S2) combined with ontological assumptions. Even if all humans were extinguished (as under S1 ) ends could remain, for instance, for nonhumans such as animals and extraterrestrials, actual or not. The end-means argument can, however, be repaired to remove such objections: instead it is claimed that extinction 27 nullifies end-means justification by frustrating the realization of every relevant end-meaning by &dquo;relevant,&dquo; in this context, those ends the realization of which the state appeals to m justification of its nuclear policies. 16 A nuclear war, even without human extinction but with severe enough losses, would undoubtedly frustrate the realization of relevant state ends So even from an expediency perspective, super-state policies are open to severe criticism, for example, as motivationally irrational in the nuclear risks taken. �As to the part of the state and (state) sovereignty m war, Schell leaves us in no doubt. A sovereign state is virtually defined as one that enjoys the right and power to go to war m defense or pursuit of its interests (p 187) War arises from how things are, from the arrangement of political affairs via jealous nation-states (p.188). Indeed there is a two-way linkage between having sovereignty and capacity to wage war. On the one side, sovereignty is, Schell contends, necessary for people to organize for war. On the other side, without war it is impossible to preserve sovereignty Neither of these contentions is transparently clear as it stands. The first is damaged by civil war and the like, the second by the persistence of small nonmilitary states. Now that the macro-state system is entrenched, it is, however, easy for conservatives (m particular) to argue from the &dquo;realties&dquo; of international life, which includes self-interest, aggression, fear, hatred. It is on this basis that peace arrangements are readily dismissed as unrealistic, utopian, even (amusingly) as extremist (cf. p.185). Schell’s further theme that nuclear war is not war threatens, however, to undermine his case against the sovereign state: for example, his ends-means argument and the argument based on its nuclear-war making capacity. Fortunately the not-war theme needs much qualification, and starts out from an erroneous characterization of war as &dquo;a violent means employed by a nation to achieve an end&dquo; (p.189): but this is neither necessary nor sufficient for war. What is correct is that nuclear wars are very different from previous conventional (cf. WP). Schell goes on to claim that war requires an end which nuclear &dquo;war&dquo; does not have. But nuclear attacks can certainly have ends (even if large nuclear wars cannot be won in the older sense: but not all wars or games are won). It is also claimed that war depends on weakness, on one side being defeated on a decision by arms. But in a nuclear &dquo;war&dquo; this doesn’t happen, &dquo;no one’s strength fails until both sides have been annihilated&dquo; (p.190). But what these sorts of considerations contribute to showing is again not that nuclear wars are not wars, but that they are not wars of certain sorts, e.g., not just wars (because they fail on such criteria as reasonable prospect of success and improvement), not rational wars (in a good sense), and so on. That conventional wars have persisted into nuclear times does damage to Schell’s argument that nuclear weapons have also ruined &dquo;conventional&dquo; wars, and his connected theme that the demise of war has left no means to finally settle disputes between nations, for the final court has been removed (pp 192-193). The theme depends on a pair of mistaken propositions: that conwars 28 �cerning the demise of conventional war, and the idea that war of some sort has to be the final &dquo;court of appeal&dquo; between nations (for there are other types of contests that could serve, and there is also the possibility of more cooperative behaviour, e.g. joint referenda) The theme also imports the social-Darwinian assumption of Clausewicz (the &dquo;log~c of war&dquo; theme) that war has to proceed to the technological limit-as if war and violence were thoroughly natural activities, independent of recognized social settings (for winning, surrender, etc.), and ruleless activities. On the contrary, wars are parasitic on social organizations such as states and are governed by a range of understandings, conventions and rules. They are a social phenomenon, with a rule structure, if not a 29 logic. Much capital has been made not merely from the logic of war&dquo; but from what is now called &dquo;the logic of deterrence&dquo; and the &dquo;logic of nuclear [strategic] planning.&dquo; The message that is usually supposed to emerge is that the massive arrangements the world is now entangled in are perfectly logical, sound, rational. However, this represents little more than a cheap semantical trick. Logic in no way justifies the present arrangements, or anything like them, or renders them reasonable. There are logics of decision (as presented, e.g., for the classical case in Jeffrey) which can be applied in strategic planting; but they do not yeld specific results without desirability measures being assigned to alternative outcomes, that is without values being pumped in, extralogically. There are various ways these value assignments may be determined, to meet moral requirements or not: but in nuclear strategic planning they have invariably been settled on the basis of expediency 17 . For the most part, however, &dquo;logic of&dquo; tends to be used very loosely, as a word of general commendation, to cover something like &dquo;reasomng and rational considerations entering into the policy or strategy of.&dquo; In these terms, Schell, who like others enjoys playing with the term &dquo;logic of,&dquo; should write of &dquo;the illogic of deterrence,&dquo; for he emphasizes its unreasonableness. For instance, he stresses (p.213) the disparity between the supposed rationality of threatening use of nuclear weapons and the irrationality (even from a national interest viewpoint) of actually using them should the threat fail- 18 yet the success of deterrence doctrine depends on the credibility of the threat of this unjustifiable and irrational use. Indeed Schell wants to go still further and locate a contradiction in deterrence (e g. pp.2012) ; but the argument depends on an interesting confusion of contradiction with cancellation,’9 along with the assumption �that deterrence involves cancellation. Nuclear deterrence may well be irrational, it is immoral, but it is not inconsistent. The Australian National University NOTES *This is a revised version of "Appendix 1 On the fate of mankind and the earth, according to Schell, and to Anders" of my monograph referred to as WP, where several points, only touched upon in this review, are further developed References are by way of authors names or else through obvious acronyms, given in the list of references which follows 1 The distinguishing term is from Foley’s Nuclear Prophets. where many leading anti-nuclear prophets are assessed One well-known prophet not so considered there is Jaspers, presumably because his main work comes out in entirely the wrong direction It gives heavy philosophical attire to the better-dead-than-red abomination A main argument against Jaspers so presented is simple However bad being red might become (at present it is debatably worse than living under some of the totalitarian regimes the free West props up), it still gives humans a further chance for good lives, since regimes fall or can be toppled but the total annihilation removes that all- important opportunity 2 A detailed comparison of Schell and Anders’ of S2 is made in Foley JS remarkably similar versions 3 Should S2 appeal, as it may. to suitable communities of humans. S1 will require reformulation in similar terms, and the argument that follows needs minor adjustment, with appropriate groups replacing individuals 4. Thus the Last Person environmental ethics (as HC for instance, the remote death of the Sun, but assumes new urgency It is this sort of argument that connects environmental ethics and nuclear ethics. at a deeper metaphysical level The Bomb and Bulldozer are out of the same technological Pandora’s box. explams), is no argument, important in longer merely hypothetical, awaiting, Nuclear technology is not the only route to human extinction, nor the only Pandora’s box. Biological and chemical means are perhaps even more effective, and certainly can be more selective in what gets extinguished. Nuclear extinction would presumably require a different and more massive 30 exchange than is usually assumed in nuclear war scenarios. with heavy targeting in particular of Southern Hemisphere sites (including internationally-recognized nuclear-free zones). �5 Nor do recent scientific studies claim as much The most intrepid of these studies, Erlich and others, only contends that in certain worst-case circumstances, "the possibility of the extinction of Homo sapiens cannot be excluded" (p 1299). The study admits that, in the scenario described, "it seems unlikely Homo sapiens would be forced to extinction immediately," and the difficulties indicated in the way of long-term human survival are exaggerated In many of the drastic effects predicted for Northern midlatitudes very much milder forms in equivalent Southern latitudes For example, temperatures for regions with maritime climates appear likely to vary by only a few degrees and perhaps negligibly for many agricultural purposes after 100 days (cf. Turco and others, p 1287 case 29, and p 1286) Similarly the extent of nuclear darkness and of surface ultraviolet radiation will be appreciably less in the South and perhaps minor for many crucial purposes. such as photosynthesis and human outdoor activity. after 100 days (cf the data in Benton and Partridge) particular, are reflected in No doubt some scientifically respectable sections of the environmental and peace movements have an interest in exaggerating the probable effects of nuclear holocaust for life on earth, much as many heads of states and strategists have an interest in minimizing them And there is certainly substantial margin for error and for variation in conclusions drawn For Crutzen (p 59) is right that "analysis of the environmental effects of a global thermonuclear war remain uncertain because of a lack of information on various important processes [among other things] The environment might become extremely hostile, because of hitherto overlooked changes in the composition of the atmosphere," again among other things Such uncertainty bodes considerable caution as rational The way to err is clear 6 Not worth, military merely by technological determinists of Marxist persuasion Hackformer US general, argues by straight induction that if the US a has a weapon it will use it appalling theme that humans create past, present and repeated elsewhere, e.g . p 173. 7 The 8 For a detailed refutation of these assumptions, is here (AA pp perseverance, criticized 9 Anders see future (etc ) is JB 244-5) relying upon a version of the argument from in detail in Routley and Griffin interesting converse of this theme is sometimes advanced, that no responsible. the whole thing is out of control The technological version of this no-responsibility theme is discussed below (fn 15) More satisfactory is the theme that nuclear arrangements are out of political 10 An one is in terms of vested interests in keeping nuclear going, which enable responsibility to be distributed The vested interests, which bear considerable responsibility. include the military weapons industry, and research and academic communities (cf Barnaby) Under pressures for re-election especially, politicians give in to these powerful groups, so losing control of political processes The argument is flawed at its final stage For many influential politicians either belong to or represent vested interests Thus. though there is no doubt some "lack of control," political processes tend rather to reflect vested interests than to run out of political control control, but for reasons, things 31 11 Another example of spreading the responsibility runs as follows "The self-extinction of our species is not an act that anyone describes as sane or �sensible, nevertheless, it is an act that, without quite admitting it to ourselves, we plan In certain circumstances to commit (p 185) Even for most of the planners, extinction is presumably not part of "the plan," but an unintended consequence, and most of us have little or no role in the planning : enough of us even campaign against the planning. Further "the world chose the course of attempting to refashion the system of sovereignty to accommodate nuclear weapons" (p 194) the world? This connects the course with the faulty ideological argument from defence of fundamentals, e g , for liberty, for the "free enterprise" (USA) nation, and against socialism 12. A more detailed discussion is given in WP8, where too the the state from nuclear dilemmas is elaborated case against explanation is elaborated in Foley, some of the themes are straightforwardly in Martin The incomplete list of items given, to be investigated in a deeper analysis of the nuclear situation, paraphrases Foley JS p.164 13 Anders’ presented more These motivating drives form a part of a larger integrated package. comprising maximization drives for power, knowledge, control, wealth, enfor the "newer" Enlightenment (but Faustian) ergy, speed, satisfaction, virtues. Frequently there are attempts (the human failing for excessive neatness and simplicity manifested) to reduce the package to one main component, preference-satisfaction. for instance, or utility And the type of drive is justified (especially for those who have it, but also as rational, which again it is not) Rationality, the deeply entrenched myth has it, consists in maximization of a suitable mix of these virtues 14 Maximization of the objects of the drives runs, however, into limitation theorems and associated paradoxes The maximization of self-interest (individual or national) runs into Newcomb’s paradox and special cases of it such as Prisoner’s Dilemma situations The maximization of power, as symbolized in the Christian-Islamic God. encounters the paradox of omnipotence, the parallel maximization of knowledge, paradoxes of omniscience. There are no consistent objects which are omnipotent or omniscient The drive for maximum consistency, often taken to be the epitome of rationality. also leads to inconsistency in the case of more important theories, such as arithmetic and set theory (by virtue of Godel s theorem and associated limitative theorems) 15 R & D, drives the though directed by military requirements and the arms race, also arms race Its role is partly disguised by the myth of neutral science 32 There have been attempts, not only by those committed to technological determinism, to involve technology more deeply as the main, or single, source of the nuclear fix (thus especially Mumford, in part thereby anticipating Commoner’sparallel indictment of technology-choice in the ecological fix) It is technology, the mega-machine, running out of control, that has brought us to this predicament, the nuclear abyss. Sometimes this serves to exonerate states and their key components and those who control them, for they are simply caught up by this out-of-control machine, but sometimes the state itself is seen as a machine also running out of control But the technological determinism, like other varieties of stronger (nonanalytic) determinism, is false Nuclear technology was selected and proceeded with, after a well-known political dispute involving distinguished scientists, it was deliberated, funded and promoted, while other alternatives were not �of the nuclear age were not inevitable. but dechosen certain liberately by components of the large nation-states And much as they need not have been chosen, so they do not have to be persisted with The fashionable inevitability determinism themes admit not only of refutation by bringing out the many choices made in persisting with often recalcitrant technologies They also admit of being made to look ridiculous If the Bomb is determined, as part of human evolution, then if it functions (as it probably will, a matter also determined), it will serve as a human population control device, a matter also determined That is. the Bomb has its fixed evolutionary place in human population regulation 1 Damaging technologies 16 This reformulation main 17 qualification can proposed by N Griffin, who suggested that the be inferred from Schell’s context was the usual game theory setting sees to this almost autothen assumed that each player plays to maximize his or her matically, own advantage Thus too the presumption in Walzer, p.277, that "the logic of deterrence" is based on eye-for-eye and tooth-for-tooth assumptions Selecting for it is 18 Even the irrationality of retaliatory (or first-strike) use has been contested, e.g., it has been wishfully thought that America will rise like a phoenix from the radioactive ashes. There is moreover a simple solution to Schell’s problem of the "missing motive" for retaliating to a large strike (p 204), namely, not a future retributive one, but an ideological one eliminate the prospect of the future dominance of the rival ideology. Such a motive has been offered for the conjectured targeting of Latin America 19 An appears confusion of negation with cancellation or obliteration thinking, where US missiles are supposed incoming USSR missiles analogous in recent US "star-war" to " negate" Moral paradoxes of deterrence take a different direction For although inupon perhaps questionable interconnections of intensional functors. One type of paradox (considered in WP 5, where the immorality of deterrence is argued) derives from a policy of credibly threatening war without, however. intending to proceed to war. though credible threats [appear to] imply an intention to proceed Another style derives from acclaimed intention to reduce the number of nuclear missiles when the persistent practice, which implies an intention, is to increase the number This paradox is technically removed&mdash;how satisfactorily is another matter&mdash; by a distinction between long-term aims and immediate practice, a timehonoured method of removing contradictions by conveniently discerned temporal distinctions volving negation, they depend REFERENCES 33 G Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, C H Beck. Munchen, 1956, referred to as AA. �G Anders, Endzeit und Zeitenende: Gendanken tion, C H Beck, Munchen, 1972, referred to as AE F. Barnaby, "Will there be a Nuclear War," in zur atomaren Situa- Australia and Nuclear War, (ed M Denborough), Croom Helm, Australia, 1983, 2-37. I J Benton and G W Partridge,"’Twilight at Noon Overstated," Ambio 13 (1984) 49-51 B. Commoner, The New York, 1972 Closing Circle: Nature, PJ Crutzen, "Darkness after a Man and Technology, Knopf, Nuclear War," Ambio 13 (1984) 52-4. M. Denborough (ed ), Australia and Nuclear War Croom Helm, Australia, 1983. P R Erlich and others, "Long-term Biological Consequences of Nuclear War," Science 222 (1983) 1293-1300 Jonathan Schell Genius&mdash;Philosopher&mdash;Rewrite Man," type1982, referred to as JS Brisbane, script, G Foley, G Foley, Nuclear Prophets. The True and the False, typescript, Brisbane, 1983 D. Hackworth, "A Soldier’s Report," Australia and Nuclear War, (ed M Denborough), Croom Helm, Australia, 1983, 209-12 K Jaspers. The Future of Mankind. (trans Chicago E B Ashton). University of Press, 1961 B Martin, Grass Roots ham, 1984 L Mumford, The 1970 Myth Strategy Against War, Freedom Press, Notting- of the Machine, 2 vols., Harcourt Brace. New York, Preddey and others, Future contingencies 4. Nuclear Disasters. A Report to the Commission for the Future, Government Printer, Wellington, G F New Zealand, 1982 Routley and N. Griffin. ’’Unravelling the Meanings of Life," Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy 3, Australian National University, CanR. berra, 1982 R Routley, Exploring Meinong’s Jungle and Beyond, Research School of Social Sciences. Australian National University, 1980, referred to as JB R Routley. War and Peace I. On the Ethics of Large-Scale Nuclear War and Nuclear Deterrence and the Political Fall-Out, Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy 5, Australian National University, 1984, referred to as WP R and V Routley, "Human Chauvinism and Environmental Ethics," in Environmental Philosophy (ed D Mannison and others), Research School of Social Science, Australian National University, 1980, referred to as HC J Schell, The Fate of the Knopf, Earth, New York, 1982, referred to K P Turco and others, "Nuclear Winter, Global Consequences of Nuclear Explosions." Science 222 (1983) 1283-92 34 M Walzer, Just and Unjust as S F Multiple Wars Basic Books, New York, 1977. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Published Papers Description An account of the resource Sylvan formally published very little of his nuclear ethics and politics, although a nuclear imaginary is present throughout his ouevre. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document RICHARD ROUTLEY metaphysical fallout from nuclear predicament the string of nuclear prophets has produced a series of philosophically oriented works on nuclear war ’ The series is important for its deeper penetration mto the main nuclear predicament, down to metaphysical levels; m this, the series contrasts with the superficialities of much of the political commentary. The most widely circulated and influential text of the series is undoudbtedly that of the slightest of the ’prophets&dquo;, A Schell’s The Fate of the Earth. This skillful piece of mediasome of the apparently Anders So, conveniently, main assumptions of Schell and Anders can often be considered together. To criticize their assumptions is not of course to belittle their work. In particular, Schell’s little book, for all its political shortcomings, is having a significant and much needed effect m shifting attitudes towards nuclear arrangements. It is especially valuable for its vivid and horrifying scenarios of the aftermath of nuclear attack Unfortunately it also exhibits, both philosophically and factually, severe defects. philosophy unncannily redeploys deep phenomenological themes of Some of it is simply rubbish- to take one example, consider the claim that &dquo;without ... a worldwide program of action for preserving the [human] species, .. nothing else that we undertake together can make any practical or moral sense ...&dquo; (p.173, rearranged). This should certainly be rejected philosophically; for there is no separate moral issue of such overwhelming importance that all other issues become morally neutral. Moral issues remain moral issues they do not cease to be so when compared with more important moral issues (as Schell effectively acknowledges elsewhere, e g p.130). And the claim should be questioned on more factual grounds. Humans form a highly resilient species, like rats a survivor species, unlikely to be entirely exterminated under presently arranged nuclear holocausts. The example was selected, however, because it leads into, indeed presupposes, two of the major defective assumptions in the work of Schell and Anders: S 1. Nuclear war will eliminate I~fe, human life at least, (the extinction assumption) and on earth S2. In the absence of humans, very many notions, not only those of mortality and values, but those of time and space for example, make no sense: or, to put it mto a more sympathefic philosophical form, these notions depend for their sense on an actual human context (the extravagant anthropocentric assumption).22 of S2 which gave Anders’ and Schell’s works of their apparent philosophical depth, and certainly induce much philosophical puzzlement through the paradoxical propositions generated. But the frequent applications of S2 It is applications some S1.3 For without total extinction there will be humans about, to make past and future, to do good end evil, and to go on making sense! depend essentially on Granted, assumption S1 by no means ruled out as a real possibility, as the technological means appear available to make it true (to render Homo Sapiens extinct).4 Granted, the prospect of large-scale nuclear war does threaten leading is centers of Western civilization with obliteration. Even so, S1 unlikely m the light of present-admittedly inadequate-information Even m Canada, which lies on the polar appears route of Soviet missiles, human life should be able to continue in certain northern areas (according to Canadian medical studies). Schell’s argument to S1 is extremely flimsy. It de- pends, for example, 20 on an unjustified extrapolation from the Northern to the Southern Hemisphere, but for the most part it does that very North American thing of contracting the world to North America. (All that matters, all worthwhile civilization, is in the USA, or at least, to be more char~table, in North America and Europe, which will also be wiped out, e , its entire human population will be eliminated in a nuclear holocaust.) Some of the data Schell relies upon, for example the effect of nuclear explosions on the ozone layer, was significantly out of date even when he wrote Other effects than ozone destruction, such as variations in the ultraviolet radiation and temperature levels, apparently extrapolate even less well from North to South A factually superior study of nuclear produced at about the same time as Schell’s, by and others, indicates that part of the Southern Hemisphere, such as New Zealand and southern latitudes of Latin Amenca, could escape relatively unscathed from even the most massive northern exchanges. disaster Preddy Doomsday prophets may appear to have gained new purchase through recent (if belated) scientific forecasts of a nuclear winter following upon nuclear war But although these forecasts certainly add a new, and alarming, ecological dimension to the very damaging consequences of large-scale nuclear war, they do not sustain the extinction assumpt~on.55 On the available evidence, human life will continue, though no doubt with new complications and simplifications, for example in many southern mid-latitude coastal regions outside zones of radiation fallout More generally, life will go on, though likely seriously and irreversibly impoverished through loss of valuable nonhuman systems and creatures. Nuclear prophets usually see the world (though with most of it carried along) as already set, in crucial respects, on the route to nuclear catastrophe. Much of the way taken is seen as both inevitable and irreversible Thus both Anders and Schell insist upon the &dquo;impossibility of unlearning&dquo; the means of manufacturing nuclear bombs. It would seem that extinction, which they both foresee, would furnish a good medium for unlearning nuclear technology (something very like this emerges from van Damken’s theory of an earlier &dquo;h~gh&dquo; technology). In virtue of S2, they would, however, exclude such a possibility as a case of unlearning, contending wrongly that the notion no longer made sense. But what they again want to suggest with the i m possibility-of -u n learning message is the inevitability of the development and eventual use of the technology-as if having learned the means all else was determined, and manufacture and use ceased to be a matter of choice. Certainly such views have been advanced6, but they are not tenable There are many examples of technological advances that have not been taken advantage of, and there are even cases of technological developments that have been manufactured but not marketed or used. There is not something very special about nuclear apparatus that puts it beyond the scope of such generalizations. Both Schell and Anders do claim that there are very special things about nuclear weapons, notably that they do not allow Even if this were true just of nuclear 11 experiment it is certainly not of smaller weapons-it weapons-and would not rebut the previous argument against the inevitability of nuclear weapons. And in fact Anders and (even) Schell &dquo; 21 hedge their claims about testing, and the limits to nuclear scientific work, to large-scale weapons and independent experiments which do not interfere with observers and those outside the &dquo;laboratories.&dquo; Again they have latched onto major prints, m particular, we have at present no way of testing the cumulative effects of large-scale nuclear weapons in concert, e.g. for more holistic effects, such as fireballs or firestorms, or changes m coupled atmospheric circulation and radiation fields. Short of a large-scale nuclear war, and likely enough with it, these crucial effects must remain largely untested and hypothetical in character. Nontheless enough data can be assembled to carry through informative modellings, which point to the improbability of S1, and so undermine applications of S2. The penetration of human chauvinism, as thing peculiar to Schell and Anders, but is m S2, a product of West- is not some- philosophy, European philosophy especially. This chauvinism is unfortunately alive and still well, Anders version of S2 being just one striking illustration (cf. AA p. 252ff.). It has also deeply penetrated Anglo-American philosophy, and has been extended under the influence of Wittgenstein’s ern work, where even the necessary truths of mathematics are taken to be a product of human conventions, and would vanish with humans! Such are the alleged implications of extinction : but the fact is that the truths of arithmetic are m no way dependent on the existence of humans or humanoids or of gods or giraffes. As with necessary truths and falsehoods so with contingents ones: very many propositions about the world do not depend upon in any way for their truth-value or content on humans or their communities. _ 22 In Schell, human chauvinism is dished up in a particularly powerful and obnoxious Kantian form. Thoughts and propositions, time and tenses, history and memories, values and morality all depend on the life-giving presence of human beings-past or future or merely potential humans are not enough. Thus, according to Schell (p 140, e.g), &dquo; . the thought ’Humanity is now extinct’ is an impossible one for a rational person, because as soon as it is, we are not In imagining any other event, we look ahead to a moment that is still within the stream of human tame....&dquo; The thought is however perfectly possible for humans; we can have it right now. Though we no doubt have it falsely, a later rational creature may well be able to have it truly. Schell erroneously denies that: there is no &dquo;later&dquo; &dquo;outside the human tenses of past, present, and future ... &dquo; (p 140) .7 Human extinction eliminates &dquo;the creature that divides time into past, present and future&dquo; annihilation cannot &dquo;come to pass&dquo; (p.143). But it false that the tenses are human: the tenses depend simply on a local time ordering (perceptible to many creatures other than humans, but not depending at all on that perceptibility for its viability) relating other times to the present, to now (also a human-independent location, evident to other creatures, and borne witness to by such sequences as the passing seasons). Annihilation may also too easily come to pass, for many humans m the North at least, as it came to pass in recent geological times that humans began to exist upon earth Before that there was a time before there were any human beings. so is Anders’ argument for the demise of time, that &dquo;what has been will no longer be even what has been,&dquo; is also explicitly (and narrowly) verificatiomst: &dquo;for what would the difference be between what has only been and what has never been, if there is no one to remember the things that have been (AA p.245). There would still remain many sorts of differences; for one, the history recorded m many other organisms would be different Temporal themes do not lack wlegitimacy because not registered [or verified] by anyone&dquo;; truth, significance, still less meaning, are not matters of human verification. elsewhere, the human chauvinism is mixed with distorting metaphysical assumptions of our Western heritage, m particular, verificationism and ontological assumptions (to the effect that there are severe difficulties m talking about what does not exist Thus, for example, Schell takes over dubious metaphysics from Freud, according to whom ’nt is mdeed impossible to imagine our own death: and whenever we attempt to do so, we can perceive that we are m fact still present as spectators&dquo; (p 138) The second clause goes a good distance towards refuting the first In fact there is no great difficulty in describing counterfactual situations which undermine both of Freud’s claims. The same goes for Schell’s extensions of human chauvinism into one of its main traditional strongholds, value theory: &dquo; . the simple and basic fact (sic!) that before there can be good or evil, service or harm, lamenting or rejoicing, there must be life.&dquo; human life (p.171 ) These are no facts, but deeply entrenched philosophical dogmas (which have been exposed and criticized elsewhere, e.g , HC). Here, as other will disappear with the extinction of humans: trivially there will be no more humans (unless humans re-evolve or are recreated), and thus no more human communities, human institutions, human activities, human emotions, and so forth But it is already gomg too far to sug- Naturally 23 many things gest, as no Anders does, that there will accordingly be &dquo;no love, no struggle, no pain, no hope, no comfort, sacrifice, no image, no song...&dquo; For there are, and may thought, no continue to exist, other creatures than humans with emotion, struggles, songs... Nor will the ending of all such human ventures, if it comes to pass, show that all past human ventures have been &dquo;all in vain,&dquo; meaningless, and already so to say dead The decay of the solar system, or the heat-death of the universe even, will not show that worthwhile human activities were not worthwhile.9 Several of the other notions and themes common to Schell and Anders derive from their shared assumptions S1 and S2. It is these that underlie the biblical notion (in Revelations) of a Second Death, redeployed by both. &dquo;The death of mankind,&dquo; under S1 , is reckoned a &dquo;second death,&dquo; because by S2 and S1 remamng life is rendered meaningless and already ’ seems to be dead (AA p.244, S p 166) and is already overhung with death&dquo; (S p.166). Thus, too, more trivially, a person faces &dquo;a second death,&dquo; not merely one’s own but m addition that greater death of the species and all future generations (S p 166. p.1 15). However, even if nuclear extinction came to pass, the stronger notion would not be vindicated, because it depends on the fallacious inference to the meaninglessness of preceding life and on the very questionable representation of this meaninglessness as a sort of death. There is no such Second Death: creatures die just once, perhaps all at about the same time. The idea of a Second Death lacks even a solid metaphysical base. From S1 , together with the minor principle that the extinction absolute does not differ m degree, comes the unibeing versality of peril theme that &dquo;we are all exposed to peril m the same degree,&dquo; which is accordingly &dquo;d~sgmsed~ and &dquo;difficult to recognize,&dquo; because there is no contrast (AE p 64; S p.150). This theme falls with S1. In any event, not all peoples are equally imperilled by the nuclear situation, the Indians of southern Patagonia being rather better placed than the Germans of northern Europe Nor are all people equally locked into the situation or incapacitated by it; the prospects are different in different countries and places. an Nor, likewise, are all people equally responsible, a pernicious theme which Schell (m contrast to Anders) repeatedly filtrates. This is the Pogo theme, according to whichS3. co, 24 in- Responsibility for the present nuclear predIcament (flasreally) dlstnbutes onto everybody, It belongs to every hu- man lií the world ’o ...i But there is also, mixed in, a weaker, more plausible claim that gives the lie to the stronger one, namely, that we have some responsibility (the Nazi situation is compared) An especially blatant example of the Pogo theme’ runs as follows: &dquo;... the world’s political leaders though they now menace the earth with nuclear weapons, do so only with our permission, and even at our bidding. At least, this is true for democracies&dquo; (pp.229-30). The theme is elaborated elsewhere: &dquo;... we are the authors of that distinction (For the populations of the superpowers this is true in a positive sense, since we pay for extinction and support the governments that pose the threat of it, while for the peoples of the non-nucleararmed world it is true only m the negative sense that they fail to try to do anything about the danger)&dquo; (p.152). But this is ... of an argument indicting representative government, by revealing its insensitivity and unresponsiveness to many of the populace they allegedly govern, not to mention those affected by its activities who are not represented at all (namely foreigners). But Schell conveniently neglects all such points: &dquo;... we are all potential mass killers. The moral cost of more nuclear armaments is that it makes all of us underwriters of the slaughter of hundreds of millions&dquo; (p 152) And again [at] perpetrators ... we convey the steady message .. that life not only is not sacred but it is worthless; that ... it had been judged acceptable for everyone to be killed&dquo; (p 153) Little of this is true. Those who campaign against nuclear arrangements, vote against nuclear-committed parties so far as is possible, and the like, are certainly not the authors of potential destruction, and responsibility for the nuclear situation does not simply distribute onto them. Nor does the responsibilityor the unlikely opinions as to worth Schell illegitimately attributes to everyone-fall on those who have done less. Responsibility for decisions taken in &dquo;literal democracies&dquo; even by representatives (m the unlikely event of this happening m the case of anything as important as defense) cannot be traced back to those represented, since among many other things, a representative is only representative of a party which offers a complex and often ill-characterized package of policies, and a voter may vote for zero or more policies of this package. Only m the (uncommon) event of a clear single issue referendum, which is adopted, can responsibility, still of a qualified sort, be sheeted home, to those who voted for it, not to everyone in the community. While S3 is false, there is an important related theme that is much more plausible, namely, that the present nuclear situation generates responsibilities for every socially involved person. 25 When moreover the Pogo assumption is disentangled from the accompanyng themes, part of what results along the right lines: namely, is decidedly S4 The controllers [not to be confused, in Schell’s fashion, with all of us] have failed to change our pre-nuclear mstltutlons. The sovereign system Is out of step with the nuclear age, the one-earth system, etc. (the whole earth theme). Though Schell remains relatively clear about the serious defects of the state and the frequently immoral purposes for which the state is used, unfortunately he often loses sight of this important theme (indicated pp.187-8) Yet S4 forms part of Schell’s critique of the state which is, by and large, scattered and fragmentary. Schell arrives at the conclusion that the nation-state has outlasted its usefulness, and that new political institutions more &dquo;consonant with the global reality&dquo; are required as a matter of urgency. But he evades what he admits is the major task, making out viable alternatives. 12 At most he makes some passing gestures, some pointing towards the Way Up to world political control Solutions to the nuclear arms dilemma come, if not easily, m a similar simplistic way, from Top Down: those who can must appeal to the Top, to those who govern (cf. p.230). Schell places his hope m treaties for arms reduction and limitations, such as SALT, and m world government, through the United Nations (see p.225ff. and especially p 227, bottom paragraph) Given the record of these organizations and treaties, the negotiations and regulators, it is by now a pathetic faith. Nor is a serious need felt for further analysis of the nuclear situation, to investigate the origins of nuclear technology, to explore the roots of nuclear blindness, to consider effective changes to military-mdustrial organization and ways of life. 26 But some of the requisite deeper analysis of the nuclear situation and, more generally, of the roots of war can be found in Anders and elsewhere. 13 The roots of the nuclear predicament are not confined to the ideologically-aligned arrangements of nation-states, but penetrate also into key components of those states, their military, their controlling classes, and their supporting bureaucracies Both within the arrangements of states, what accounts in part for the arrangements, and in key components of the states, a conspicuous and crucial feature is the drive for power and domination (and, often, the accompanyng privilege). 14 Thus the push for [nuclear] superiority by the super-states, to be achieved through military-oriented science and technology, which involves and enables domination,in several interrelated forms The main the large nation-state, where enough surplus be accumulated (from at home and from abroad, and bled from nature) to proceed with military and bureaucratic ambitions and to found the high-technology research and development means to ever more expendable power and power-base product can is energy. 15 In changing the structural arrangements to eliminate the proof nuclear war, it is not ultimately enough just to downspect the main power-base, the nation-state: it is also imporgrade tant to alter key components of the state, and, more sweepingly, to remove trouble-making patterns embedded m all these social and political arrangements, namely, patterns of domination-patterns manifested not only in state political organization, but in white-coloured relations, male-female relations, human-animal relations, human-nature relations-to remove, m short, chauvinistic relations. However, not everything needs to be accomplished at once: the cluster of damaging power and domination relations tied into war can be tackled separately There the problems can largely be narrowed to certain problems of states and certain key components of states In what analysis he does offer of the problem with states, Schell repeats the familiar false contrast of state expediency with morality, as a contrast between &dquo;raison d’etat&dquo; and the Socratic-Christian ethics The teaching that &dquo;the end justifies the means is the basis on which governments, in all times, have licensed themselves to commit crimes of every sort&dquo; (p 134). So &dquo;states may do virtually anything whatever m the name of [their] survival.&dquo; Schell then argues, however, that extinction nullifies end-means justification by destroying every end; but again the argument is far from sound, and depends on human chauvinism (as under S2) combined with ontological assumptions. Even if all humans were extinguished (as under S1 ) ends could remain, for instance, for nonhumans such as animals and extraterrestrials, actual or not. The end-means argument can, however, be repaired to remove such objections: instead it is claimed that extinction 27 nullifies end-means justification by frustrating the realization of every relevant end-meaning by &dquo;relevant,&dquo; in this context, those ends the realization of which the state appeals to m justification of its nuclear policies. 16 A nuclear war, even without human extinction but with severe enough losses, would undoubtedly frustrate the realization of relevant state ends So even from an expediency perspective, super-state policies are open to severe criticism, for example, as motivationally irrational in the nuclear risks taken. As to the part of the state and (state) sovereignty m war, Schell leaves us in no doubt. A sovereign state is virtually defined as one that enjoys the right and power to go to war m defense or pursuit of its interests (p 187) War arises from how things are, from the arrangement of political affairs via jealous nation-states (p.188). Indeed there is a two-way linkage between having sovereignty and capacity to wage war. On the one side, sovereignty is, Schell contends, necessary for people to organize for war. On the other side, without war it is impossible to preserve sovereignty Neither of these contentions is transparently clear as it stands. The first is damaged by civil war and the like, the second by the persistence of small nonmilitary states. Now that the macro-state system is entrenched, it is, however, easy for conservatives (m particular) to argue from the &dquo;realties&dquo; of international life, which includes self-interest, aggression, fear, hatred. It is on this basis that peace arrangements are readily dismissed as unrealistic, utopian, even (amusingly) as extremist (cf. p.185). Schell’s further theme that nuclear war is not war threatens, however, to undermine his case against the sovereign state: for example, his ends-means argument and the argument based on its nuclear-war making capacity. Fortunately the not-war theme needs much qualification, and starts out from an erroneous characterization of war as &dquo;a violent means employed by a nation to achieve an end&dquo; (p.189): but this is neither necessary nor sufficient for war. What is correct is that nuclear wars are very different from previous conventional (cf. WP). Schell goes on to claim that war requires an end which nuclear &dquo;war&dquo; does not have. But nuclear attacks can certainly have ends (even if large nuclear wars cannot be won in the older sense: but not all wars or games are won). It is also claimed that war depends on weakness, on one side being defeated on a decision by arms. But in a nuclear &dquo;war&dquo; this doesn’t happen, &dquo;no one’s strength fails until both sides have been annihilated&dquo; (p.190). But what these sorts of considerations contribute to showing is again not that nuclear wars are not wars, but that they are not wars of certain sorts, e.g., not just wars (because they fail on such criteria as reasonable prospect of success and improvement), not rational wars (in a good sense), and so on. That conventional wars have persisted into nuclear times does damage to Schell’s argument that nuclear weapons have also ruined &dquo;conventional&dquo; wars, and his connected theme that the demise of war has left no means to finally settle disputes between nations, for the final court has been removed (pp 192-193). The theme depends on a pair of mistaken propositions: that conwars 28 cerning the demise of conventional war, and the idea that war of some sort has to be the final &dquo;court of appeal&dquo; between nations (for there are other types of contests that could serve, and there is also the possibility of more cooperative behaviour, e.g. joint referenda) The theme also imports the social-Darwinian assumption of Clausewicz (the &dquo;log~c of war&dquo; theme) that war has to proceed to the technological limit-as if war and violence were thoroughly natural activities, independent of recognized social settings (for winning, surrender, etc.), and ruleless activities. On the contrary, wars are parasitic on social organizations such as states and are governed by a range of understandings, conventions and rules. They are a social phenomenon, with a rule structure, if not a 29 logic. Much capital has been made not merely from the logic of war&dquo; but from what is now called &dquo;the logic of deterrence&dquo; and the &dquo;logic of nuclear [strategic] planning.&dquo; The message that is usually supposed to emerge is that the massive arrangements the world is now entangled in are perfectly logical, sound, rational. However, this represents little more than a cheap semantical trick. Logic in no way justifies the present arrangements, or anything like them, or renders them reasonable. There are logics of decision (as presented, e.g., for the classical case in Jeffrey) which can be applied in strategic planting; but they do not yeld specific results without desirability measures being assigned to alternative outcomes, that is without values being pumped in, extralogically. There are various ways these value assignments may be determined, to meet moral requirements or not: but in nuclear strategic planning they have invariably been settled on the basis of expediency 17 . For the most part, however, &dquo;logic of&dquo; tends to be used very loosely, as a word of general commendation, to cover something like &dquo;reasomng and rational considerations entering into the policy or strategy of.&dquo; In these terms, Schell, who like others enjoys playing with the term &dquo;logic of,&dquo; should write of &dquo;the illogic of deterrence,&dquo; for he emphasizes its unreasonableness. For instance, he stresses (p.213) the disparity between the supposed rationality of threatening use of nuclear weapons and the irrationality (even from a national interest viewpoint) of actually using them should the threat fail- 18 yet the success of deterrence doctrine depends on the credibility of the threat of this unjustifiable and irrational use. Indeed Schell wants to go still further and locate a contradiction in deterrence (e g. pp.2012) ; but the argument depends on an interesting confusion of contradiction with cancellation,’9 along with the assumption that deterrence involves cancellation. Nuclear deterrence may well be irrational, it is immoral, but it is not inconsistent. The Australian National University NOTES *This is a revised version of "Appendix 1 On the fate of mankind and the earth, according to Schell, and to Anders" of my monograph referred to as WP, where several points, only touched upon in this review, are further developed References are by way of authors names or else through obvious acronyms, given in the list of references which follows 1 The distinguishing term is from Foley’s Nuclear Prophets. where many leading anti-nuclear prophets are assessed One well-known prophet not so considered there is Jaspers, presumably because his main work comes out in entirely the wrong direction It gives heavy philosophical attire to the better-dead-than-red abomination A main argument against Jaspers so presented is simple However bad being red might become (at present it is debatably worse than living under some of the totalitarian regimes the free West props up), it still gives humans a further chance for good lives, since regimes fall or can be toppled but the total annihilation removes that all- important opportunity 2 A detailed comparison of Schell and Anders’ of S2 is made in Foley JS remarkably similar versions 3 Should S2 appeal, as it may. to suitable communities of humans. S1 will require reformulation in similar terms, and the argument that follows needs minor adjustment, with appropriate groups replacing individuals 4. Thus the Last Person environmental ethics (as HC for instance, the remote death of the Sun, but assumes new urgency It is this sort of argument that connects environmental ethics and nuclear ethics. at a deeper metaphysical level The Bomb and Bulldozer are out of the same technological Pandora’s box. explams), is no argument, important in longer merely hypothetical, awaiting, Nuclear technology is not the only route to human extinction, nor the only Pandora’s box. Biological and chemical means are perhaps even more effective, and certainly can be more selective in what gets extinguished. Nuclear extinction would presumably require a different and more massive 30 exchange than is usually assumed in nuclear war scenarios. with heavy targeting in particular of Southern Hemisphere sites (including internationally-recognized nuclear-free zones). 5 Nor do recent scientific studies claim as much The most intrepid of these studies, Erlich and others, only contends that in certain worst-case circumstances, "the possibility of the extinction of Homo sapiens cannot be excluded" (p 1299). The study admits that, in the scenario described, "it seems unlikely Homo sapiens would be forced to extinction immediately," and the difficulties indicated in the way of long-term human survival are exaggerated In many of the drastic effects predicted for Northern midlatitudes very much milder forms in equivalent Southern latitudes For example, temperatures for regions with maritime climates appear likely to vary by only a few degrees and perhaps negligibly for many agricultural purposes after 100 days (cf. Turco and others, p 1287 case 29, and p 1286) Similarly the extent of nuclear darkness and of surface ultraviolet radiation will be appreciably less in the South and perhaps minor for many crucial purposes. such as photosynthesis and human outdoor activity. after 100 days (cf the data in Benton and Partridge) particular, are reflected in No doubt some scientifically respectable sections of the environmental and peace movements have an interest in exaggerating the probable effects of nuclear holocaust for life on earth, much as many heads of states and strategists have an interest in minimizing them And there is certainly substantial margin for error and for variation in conclusions drawn For Crutzen (p 59) is right that "analysis of the environmental effects of a global thermonuclear war remain uncertain because of a lack of information on various important processes [among other things] The environment might become extremely hostile, because of hitherto overlooked changes in the composition of the atmosphere," again among other things Such uncertainty bodes considerable caution as rational The way to err is clear 6 Not worth, military merely by technological determinists of Marxist persuasion Hackformer US general, argues by straight induction that if the US a has a weapon it will use it appalling theme that humans create past, present and repeated elsewhere, e.g . p 173. 7 The 8 For a detailed refutation of these assumptions, is here (AA pp perseverance, criticized 9 Anders see future (etc ) is JB 244-5) relying upon a version of the argument from in detail in Routley and Griffin interesting converse of this theme is sometimes advanced, that no responsible. the whole thing is out of control The technological version of this no-responsibility theme is discussed below (fn 15) More satisfactory is the theme that nuclear arrangements are out of political 10 An one is in terms of vested interests in keeping nuclear going, which enable responsibility to be distributed The vested interests, which bear considerable responsibility. include the military weapons industry, and research and academic communities (cf Barnaby) Under pressures for re-election especially, politicians give in to these powerful groups, so losing control of political processes The argument is flawed at its final stage For many influential politicians either belong to or represent vested interests Thus. though there is no doubt some "lack of control," political processes tend rather to reflect vested interests than to run out of political control control, but for reasons, things 31 11 Another example of spreading the responsibility runs as follows "The self-extinction of our species is not an act that anyone describes as sane or sensible, nevertheless, it is an act that, without quite admitting it to ourselves, we plan In certain circumstances to commit (p 185) Even for most of the planners, extinction is presumably not part of "the plan," but an unintended consequence, and most of us have little or no role in the planning : enough of us even campaign against the planning. Further "the world chose the course of attempting to refashion the system of sovereignty to accommodate nuclear weapons" (p 194) the world? This connects the course with the faulty ideological argument from defence of fundamentals, e g , for liberty, for the "free enterprise" (USA) nation, and against socialism 12. A more detailed discussion is given in WP8, where too the the state from nuclear dilemmas is elaborated case against explanation is elaborated in Foley, some of the themes are straightforwardly in Martin The incomplete list of items given, to be investigated in a deeper analysis of the nuclear situation, paraphrases Foley JS p.164 13 Anders’ presented more These motivating drives form a part of a larger integrated package. comprising maximization drives for power, knowledge, control, wealth, enfor the "newer" Enlightenment (but Faustian) ergy, speed, satisfaction, virtues. Frequently there are attempts (the human failing for excessive neatness and simplicity manifested) to reduce the package to one main component, preference-satisfaction. for instance, or utility And the type of drive is justified (especially for those who have it, but also as rational, which again it is not) Rationality, the deeply entrenched myth has it, consists in maximization of a suitable mix of these virtues 14 Maximization of the objects of the drives runs, however, into limitation theorems and associated paradoxes The maximization of self-interest (individual or national) runs into Newcomb’s paradox and special cases of it such as Prisoner’s Dilemma situations The maximization of power, as symbolized in the Christian-Islamic God. encounters the paradox of omnipotence, the parallel maximization of knowledge, paradoxes of omniscience. There are no consistent objects which are omnipotent or omniscient The drive for maximum consistency, often taken to be the epitome of rationality. also leads to inconsistency in the case of more important theories, such as arithmetic and set theory (by virtue of Godel s theorem and associated limitative theorems) 15 R & D, drives the though directed by military requirements and the arms race, also arms race Its role is partly disguised by the myth of neutral science 32 There have been attempts, not only by those committed to technological determinism, to involve technology more deeply as the main, or single, source of the nuclear fix (thus especially Mumford, in part thereby anticipating Commoner’sparallel indictment of technology-choice in the ecological fix) It is technology, the mega-machine, running out of control, that has brought us to this predicament, the nuclear abyss. Sometimes this serves to exonerate states and their key components and those who control them, for they are simply caught up by this out-of-control machine, but sometimes the state itself is seen as a machine also running out of control But the technological determinism, like other varieties of stronger (nonanalytic) determinism, is false Nuclear technology was selected and proceeded with, after a well-known political dispute involving distinguished scientists, it was deliberated, funded and promoted, while other alternatives were not of the nuclear age were not inevitable. but dechosen certain liberately by components of the large nation-states And much as they need not have been chosen, so they do not have to be persisted with The fashionable inevitability determinism themes admit not only of refutation by bringing out the many choices made in persisting with often recalcitrant technologies They also admit of being made to look ridiculous If the Bomb is determined, as part of human evolution, then if it functions (as it probably will, a matter also determined), it will serve as a human population control device, a matter also determined That is. the Bomb has its fixed evolutionary place in human population regulation 1 Damaging technologies 16 This reformulation main 17 qualification can proposed by N Griffin, who suggested that the be inferred from Schell’s context was the usual game theory setting sees to this almost autothen assumed that each player plays to maximize his or her matically, own advantage Thus too the presumption in Walzer, p.277, that "the logic of deterrence" is based on eye-for-eye and tooth-for-tooth assumptions Selecting for it is 18 Even the irrationality of retaliatory (or first-strike) use has been contested, e.g., it has been wishfully thought that America will rise like a phoenix from the radioactive ashes. There is moreover a simple solution to Schell’s problem of the "missing motive" for retaliating to a large strike (p 204), namely, not a future retributive one, but an ideological one eliminate the prospect of the future dominance of the rival ideology. Such a motive has been offered for the conjectured targeting of Latin America 19 An appears confusion of negation with cancellation or obliteration thinking, where US missiles are supposed incoming USSR missiles analogous in recent US "star-war" to " negate" Moral paradoxes of deterrence take a different direction For although inupon perhaps questionable interconnections of intensional functors. One type of paradox (considered in WP 5, where the immorality of deterrence is argued) derives from a policy of credibly threatening war without, however. intending to proceed to war. though credible threats [appear to] imply an intention to proceed Another style derives from acclaimed intention to reduce the number of nuclear missiles when the persistent practice, which implies an intention, is to increase the number This paradox is technically removed&mdash;how satisfactorily is another matter&mdash; by a distinction between long-term aims and immediate practice, a timehonoured method of removing contradictions by conveniently discerned temporal distinctions volving negation, they depend REFERENCES 33 G Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, C H Beck. Munchen, 1956, referred to as AA. G Anders, Endzeit und Zeitenende: Gendanken tion, C H Beck, Munchen, 1972, referred to as AE F. Barnaby, "Will there be a Nuclear War," in zur atomaren Situa- Australia and Nuclear War, (ed M Denborough), Croom Helm, Australia, 1983, 2-37. I J Benton and G W Partridge,"’Twilight at Noon Overstated," Ambio 13 (1984) 49-51 B. Commoner, The New York, 1972 Closing Circle: Nature, PJ Crutzen, "Darkness after a Man and Technology, Knopf, Nuclear War," Ambio 13 (1984) 52-4. M. Denborough (ed ), Australia and Nuclear War Croom Helm, Australia, 1983. P R Erlich and others, "Long-term Biological Consequences of Nuclear War," Science 222 (1983) 1293-1300 Jonathan Schell Genius&mdash;Philosopher&mdash;Rewrite Man," type1982, referred to as JS Brisbane, script, G Foley, G Foley, Nuclear Prophets. The True and the False, typescript, Brisbane, 1983 D. Hackworth, "A Soldier’s Report," Australia and Nuclear War, (ed M Denborough), Croom Helm, Australia, 1983, 209-12 K Jaspers. The Future of Mankind. (trans Chicago E B Ashton). University of Press, 1961 B Martin, Grass Roots ham, 1984 L Mumford, The 1970 Myth Strategy Against War, Freedom Press, Notting- of the Machine, 2 vols., Harcourt Brace. New York, Preddey and others, Future contingencies 4. Nuclear Disasters. A Report to the Commission for the Future, Government Printer, Wellington, G F New Zealand, 1982 Routley and N. Griffin. ’’Unravelling the Meanings of Life," Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy 3, Australian National University, CanR. berra, 1982 R Routley, Exploring Meinong’s Jungle and Beyond, Research School of Social Sciences. Australian National University, 1980, referred to as JB R Routley. War and Peace I. On the Ethics of Large-Scale Nuclear War and Nuclear Deterrence and the Political Fall-Out, Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy 5, Australian National University, 1984, referred to as WP R and V Routley, "Human Chauvinism and Environmental Ethics," in Environmental Philosophy (ed D Mannison and others), Research School of Social Science, Australian National University, 1980, referred to as HC J Schell, The Fate of the Knopf, Earth, New York, 1982, referred to K P Turco and others, "Nuclear Winter, Global Consequences of Nuclear Explosions." Science 222 (1983) 1283-92 34 M Walzer, Just and Unjust as S F Multiple Wars Basic Books, New York, 1977.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Metaphysical fallout from the nuclear predicament Type The nature or genre of the resource Journal Article Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Routley</a> Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Manuscript https://www.antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/448d8517e9ca68f07df1452eec947883.pdf 5534af9a9b545e7a7587c7c0c0504e3a PDF Text Text ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Draft Papers Description An account of the resource Sylvan's literary executor encountered an archive in which “all his projects were current", since manuscripts were undated and unattributed. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Draft of Nuclear Power—Some Ethical, Social and Political Dimensions Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Routley</a> <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=val+routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Val Routley</a> Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://manuscripts.library.uq.edu.au/index.php/uqfl291" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Richard Sylvan Papers, UQFL291</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Manuscript https://www.antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/a712372fc5eb6f4fbc060ed2fdbafa53.pdf 201a8b138801518733d5f3bcd3bc60e3 PDF Text Text The Research Schoot oi Sociai Sciences Post Office Box 4 Canberra ACT 2600 Telegrams & cables NATUNiv Canberra Telex AA 62694 sopAC Telephone 062-49 5111 Department of Philosophy reference 10 February 1981. The Editor, A.N.U. Reporter Dear Editor, In the eyes of many the A.N.U. had already abandoned any semblance of neutrality on the issue of nuclear power and uranium mining ^me time ago, especially by the use of official university resources for the promotion of Professor Ringwood and his pro-nuclear position. Now we have the news that the A.N.U. has even more thoroughly compromised its neutrality on the issue through the purchase of /2(^0,00^ -weath'TKf shares in uranium mining. In view of the university's use of its funds and other resources to sponsor nuclear development, the initials A.N.U. could perhaps be better taken to stand for Australian Nuclear University. This suggests some possible ways in which the many people within the university who object to uranium mining and nuclear development could protest and express their awareness of and distaste for its pronuclear character, for example: * Sign published work with the home address to avoid the embarrassment of being associated with this thoroughly compromised institution, adding a note to explain why. * Sign published work 'Australian Nuclear University', appending a footnote to explain why this name is more appropriate. * Substitute 'Australian Nuclear University' on letterheads, envelopes, in letters to colleagues, and in other appropriate places, so that the character of the university and its political commitments become more widely known. No doubt others will be able to think of many appropriate variations on the theme, Yours, Richard Routley. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Notes, Correspondences and Marginalia Description An account of the resource In one obituary, Sylvan's handwriting was said to have "looked like the oscilloscope for a patient in intensive care", and thus "not for the timid". Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document The Research Schoot oi Sociai Sciences Post Office Box 4 Canberra ACT 2600 Telegrams & cables NATUNiv Canberra Telex AA 62694 sopAC Telephone 062-49 5111 Department of Philosophy reference 10 February 1981. The Editor, A.N.U. Reporter Dear Editor, In the eyes of many the A.N.U. had already abandoned any semblance of neutrality on the issue of nuclear power and uranium mining ^me time ago, especially by the use of official university resources for the promotion of Professor Ringwood and his pro-nuclear position. Now we have the news that the A.N.U. has even more thoroughly compromised its neutrality on the issue through the purchase of /2(^0,00^ -weath'TKf shares in uranium mining. In view of the university's use of its funds and other resources to sponsor nuclear development, the initials A.N.U. could perhaps be better taken to stand for Australian Nuclear University. This suggests some possible ways in which the many people within the university who object to uranium mining and nuclear development could protest and express their awareness of and distaste for its pronuclear character, for example: * Sign published work with the home address to avoid the embarrassment of being associated with this thoroughly compromised institution, adding a note to explain why. * Sign published work 'Australian Nuclear University', appending a footnote to explain why this name is more appropriate. * Substitute 'Australian Nuclear University' on letterheads, envelopes, in letters to colleagues, and in other appropriate places, so that the character of the university and its political commitments become more widely known. No doubt others will be able to think of many appropriate variations on the theme, Yours, Richard Routley.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Box 98, Item 1865: Richard Routley to The Editor, ANU Reporter, 10 Feb 1981 Subject The topic of the resource Typescript letter, with emendations. Letter on a Australian National University letter head. Richard Routley (later Sylvan) writes about ANU’s "…abandoned any semblance of neutrality on the issue of nuclear and uranium mining…", through the promotion of Professor Ringwood and "his pro-nuclear position", and the purchase of shares in uranium mining. Sylvan suggests some possible ways staff could protest. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Routley</a> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 98, Item 1865 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a> Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource February 10, 1981 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Letter, [1] leaf. 2.12 MB. Type The nature or genre of the resource Correspondences Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:2e5219e">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:2e5219e</a> Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Australian National University - Far Bookcase - Second Bay - Second Shelf - Pile 1 Australian National University Office Australian National University Office > Far Bookcase > Second Bay > Second Shelf > Pile 1 Box 98: Richard's Professional Work-refereeing - examining - reports etc and Philosophy of Language https://www.antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/1ef873397db9176610ec09df90503ccb.pdf 05d94d591b5ca14ea4549ac3c3755d09 PDF Text Text WORKING DRAFT ON THE ETHICS OF LARGE-SCALE NUCLEAR WAR AND WAR-DETERRENCE AND THE POLITICAL FALL-OUT Because of their projected effects - which are said to differ from those of the even largest difference in kind - generated, encounters. exchanges either at all wars nuclear large-scale World (the wars conventional Wars) raise to as and not or nearly so forcefully, by previous human military Certainly exchanges such as nuclear wars involve, such constitute a questions ethical deterrence nuclear investigation is and threatened presupposes, are neither envisaged nor fully accommodated by traditional theories of just wars. reflection as even required, if Much new philosohical well-tested and rather old-fashioned moral principles will serve as ethical base. Nuclear wars - though a fine class of nonexistent object, is existence whose however best confined to other (already uncomfortably neighbouring) possible worlds - have several distinctive properties and come in several varieties. particular, limited nuclear wars which (of tactical or strategic subvarieties) contrast with large-scale nuclear wars, LN-type-wars, large quantities of nuclear devices over a sizeable region; two main parameters: are need A large-scale nuclear war involves the explosion of however be unlimited not which In quantity it is a function of of explosive) and distribution. (megatonnage Such a war differs markedly from a limited (or tactical or strategic) nuclear war which is limited - by assumption, the chances of escalation are however very real 3 - to much smaller quantities of explosives characteristically circumscribed, installations in a given region. wars and their prevention, and where the targets are confined to military Though the focus in what follows is upon e.g. limited in nuclear principle LN wars are by no means a separate �Page 2 issue, since a nuclear arsenal is escalation of such are wars a and prerequisite, high probabilities of assumptions of reasonable usual (given the follow-up or second strike, etc.) §1. is What different old of appropriateness and models wars:____ the nuclear about theories resulting war. of limited model of war that A dominates much thinking, including [even] strategic thinking, is the two party 4 (or even two person) game or, a complication of that, the clan or tribe battle . A picture of war built up, especially as a result of medieval discussion of just war, which inapplicable. for such technological have advances The traditional theory, hardly surprisingly, phenomena Dresden and Tokyo. mass as bombing inappropriate rendered no made the and allowance large cities, such as occurred with of And nuclear bombing, with its many further crucial effects beyond mass bombing, adds further new dimensions. Yet it is Important, for the argument to anchors, historical linkages and to be aware of what counted as war (the semantics of the matter^), and of when, and why, wars and military actions Firstly, retain were accounted unjust war is essentially a matter of states and their control: or wrong. to elaborate the OED account, war is ’hostile contention by means of armed forces, carried on between nations, states, or rulers, or between parties in the same nation or state’ for control of the state : literal, but transferred, antagonists or players; other metaphoric, forces comprising senses of etc.? States armed the ’war’ noun not the protagonists, are soldiers are are the means of contention or combat, and combat or forceful (typically violent) exchange is the actual experience. function of remove states: Thus wars are external or internal (civil), states or their rule. but always, a An obvious way then to eliminate wars is to in short, wars are an outcome of political structure, and are �Page 3 altering the structure . by removed This is an initial reason why the radical argument against nuclear wars and deterrence devolves into an argument the (self-legitimised) war-declarers and war-makers, against states. the traditional theory, wars were restricted to external against In fact on which wars, were construed as the right of states or their rulers (princes) for certain political purposes, the argument being that private persons with grievences had access the while courts, did not states legitimate (wars were, so to speak, the international But this is itself a very analogue of the law courts). the 9 to statist conception of the semantics is not so restrictive and permits place of wars; internal wars, for example, to end wars. Let us however - to bring out what is different now - confine attention a basic and most familiar case, external wars between two states or set (axes) of states, two-player external wars. games competitive could be won. It was assumed be well no winning strategy. waste of the Northern huge surrounding areas of countryside. hemisphere and not like a draw, or like the strange out for the simultaneously knock each other element, emphasis the inevitable is disputes, removed: be pointfully fought. Certainly, elements of gamesmenship had a role count.) in for, deterrence, earlier wars, (So where two boxers situation on pure deterrence; that are most elaborately prepared for (exercised never the settled with main protagonists substantially obliterated^, and all is is there Thus too the point of main players very substantially worse off than at the outset of the "play". it like An LN war could involve destruction of all war as traditionally seen, to settle serious interstate nothing wars, that With LN wars it no longer holds; main Western metropolitan agglomerations in laying firstly That assumption still held good for massive armed exchanges such as the World Wars. may to Hence another newer the phenomenon of wars etc.), but which can bluff, and the other it was not but pure �Page 4 deterrence. to principle important, Most military next, traditional and targets military gross ways to uninvolved parties sacrifice effects nuclear of large nuclear wars cannot (presented horrifying in be confined in be could This exchanges. feature is for, as we shall see, wars that spill over in fundamental as regards just wars; special wars any The morality. to pretension explosives, especially in mass, mean however that legitimately detail in confined. popular These effects special sources such as Schell) include radioactivity, ozone destruction, shockwaves, fireball or firestorm devastation, etc., etc . . .. The moral situation, and the tendency of moral §2. entirely in the context of war. submerged case of war to maintain a firm grasp on the expediency. What is to considerations become It is particularly important in the distinction between morality done in war, especially for local or national advantage, may be very different from what ought morally to be done, whether the latter ought not to be done codes and conventions of war, or otherwise in war is done, despite modern . military conventions and the like, for one (alleged) advantage or another. live in a rather barbarous age: go unremarked, if so numbing, codes the history gets written (accurately) that is. tends 13 to induce a and Militarily we will the horrors of the twentieth century military thinking and strategic planning is A , Much that 12 the using determined and not Furthermore certain moral that a range of morally excluded actions, such as wiping our rural populations, become real ("moral’') possibilities, to be reckoned, for example, into consequentialist calculations of maximising expediency. The reason is that strategic planning is characteristically based on expediency (and extent displaces morality). so to that For each side in a military encounter determines its "strategy" by considering only its own advantages and disadvantages, its own gains and losses as a result of alternative possible moves, not, as it ought, �Page 5 those of the other side(s) as well. Indeed it has been contended that war should be planned and conducted way, no-holds-barred-combat fought to the maximal (local) advantage, without a limits, moral or other (except insofar as technology limits the means of etc., themselves). Such is the And Clausowicz tries to repeated. argue, through 14 an be broken by player each in from And the argument is inconclusive; c Thus too an It would follow for the players from the can choose 15 A state engaged in war - this will no doubt include nuclear nowadays war sees itself as entirely bound by constraints of morality: to be mere prudence on the part no-immoral-holds-barred of approach those they attacked to take - seldom it is taken account of the may well encounter, especially from the So each group potentially engaged in war forces other side. the question not as to what it ought to do in morally permissible situations, but also both what it ought really do and what it can do in the morally flawed finds enforced) escalate, and, for example, agree to abide by arranged practices, types to of weapons, etc. only The that the idea of a limited war is some sort of contradiction in terms. But it is not. not escalation externally for advantage. turn extraordinarily narrow motivational base is assumed. argument incremental ), that there can be no limit. assumption is that any merely selected (as distinct will force, so-called "classic" view of Clausowicz, oft argument (but really "the bald man" fallacy limit this itself in. But last the question does not then situations it reduce to one of expediency. There is expediency, involves. no question of morality giving or having to give way to for instance under extreme circumstances such as prospect of LN war For it is not as if shaky considerations of morality are bound to to �Page 6 give not only firm ground of expediency when the chips are down: the to way does this in fact often enough not happen in crises situations, but the fact that is both morality and expediency fall within the same, equally shaky or solid, Expediency does not (meticulously) deliver us from domain of value theory. fact, but simply takes narrowly-construed local advantage or power as to value what is valuable, as what matters; family, that urges values local - of self, region or nation - are what really count and override or class, clan, it are to be maximized at the expense of remote or considerations. foreign By morality requires, as a matter of its proper characterisation, a much contrast, more universal distribution of value thereby the through imposes, requirements general of universalizable intersubstitutivity resultant equillbity fairness, of the same results not holding when x and y are interchanged, under Not evaluations 16. certain principles, justice. and and principles, The deep expediency derives from the failure of interreplacement, of unsatisfactoriness so and only can expediency be given a deontic presentation, as expediency through such slogans as "might is right", but theories or utility do not have to be positions of expediency utilitarianism proper — morality, which if can utility meet not is locally intersubstltutivity Thus confined. requirements of unlike the war game theory, does not assign different weights which, to (say) the individual utility of Americans as opposed to Russians — is not to be dismissed as considering only expediency. There are however significant moral differences, between and utilitarians 17 deontologists especially, which serve to further complicate the moral picture Thus utilitarian approaches have seemed to justify ugly strategies and practices render as morally regards deontological principles would not permit (even with the convenient law of double effects). But this is permissible enemy best already or civilians, bending to of to that the effect some �Page 8 Characteristically, national interest is taken to differently, to override morality impose Irresistible ethical claims that dominate more ordinary ethical considerations (such as even the immorality of killing millions). as or, Schell puts it, Thus, ’What is being claimed is that one or two countries have the right to jeopardise all countries and their descendents in the name certain of beliefs’ (II, p.70). But morally national interest can do neither of those things. simply the The first is substitution of expediency for morality, which entirely lacks moral justification, while second, the the alleged moral dominance of national fails in important classes of cases, including, so the argument will Interests, go, the case of LN war. States may insist upon operating on a selfish national interest basis, let it not pretended be expediency (’’group governments. Morality it is a moral basis as distinct from one of There is no that egoism’’). works in the special dispensation moral For example, what ought be to as regards x semantically, what would happen as regards x in all ideal worlds; no difference x is an individual or States such as Israel (in its recent organisation. behaving whether just as immorally as brigands individual invasion or mass killers: difference. Certainly there are grounds on which states or claimed been conceded special moral dispensations; or for same way for groups as for individuals: there is no logical difference in the pattern of justification, or obligation. but are no more than that and do not stand up to criticism. of analysis is, analysed and it makes system, group or of are Lebanon) there is no moral their agents have but the excuses offered A satisfactory moral theory cannot furnish two (Incompatible) moralities, a state or public one and a private or individual citizen one - state expediency and individual morality - �Page 7 partisanship - since utilitarians would the reject description practices of permitted under their principles as ’ugly’ - and an objective in what follows is to avoid metaethlcal partisanship, to achieve metaethical, though of course moral, neutrality. argument can begin. several And morally there is a large area of consensus Virtually all positions cities major in agree that the 18 not from which obliteration of a LN war would be wrong - indeed morally outrageous. Where there is dissension, as there may be among nuclear strategists who seem to feel qualms no 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 necessary, then try to work down again. until moral repugnance is encountered; The fact remains however that things have got substantially out of perspective, Strategic thinking, in particular, has tended to abandon, or suppress morally. moral considerations (as indeed many theories of the state also pretend to do). Naturally the fact of broad consensus as to the morality of the matter does not mean that there are none who would welcome such outrageous happenings, that total nuclear destruction of the North even, would be Consider the world empire. be realised. rising southern (hemisphere) no one’s While the superpowers of the north remain SS’s dream Thus his best strategy, exchange in the North. There advantage. strongman, SS, who has visions of will can be to a encourage point an all-out then in securing institutional arrangements so that potential SS’s do not accumulate much especially given the that is to anticipate: has its limitations, structural adjustments. hardly rid of southern waters of US having submarines and southern lands of US bases, is to try nuclear to power, apparent instability of crucial world arrangements. the present point is that (the fact of) moral and is an inadequate But consensus constraint without accompanying �Page 9 19 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. derivative A group or organisation or in consideration can but role, bound be by moral principles. special these are derivative principles, good for any such institution, which fit within and answer general in y by state interests) when x and person its of virtue citizen damage to For back to 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) its of citizens: its (at charter does not legitimate emergent allegedly moral principles which conveniently coincide with those of state expediency. particular, In state is not (morally) entitled to risk the lives of many of its a own citizens and of other peoples and creatures for its own ends, even its for own survival. §3. Arguments to the Immorality of LN wars. can which set be since aside, the concede that war per se is not a crime. but pacifist positions immorality of LN wars follows at once - Not all wars are immoral, though states. aristocratic Among young men admissible wars are the external tournaments or of or warriors who volunteer as soldiers where the action does not spill over onto noncombatants, and some early and medieval wars, few even wars may be pointless or inferior ways of settling political issues inoffensive between All no combatants even were killed in war. where Since the establishment of such induction practices as conscription and recruitment of the near-destitute, have largely ceased to take these inoffensive forms: far removed from the ideal ecotopian literature war-tournament (where type, that its position is dubious). immoral, but few to such an extent as LN wars. wars modern massive wars are features now only in Most sorts of wars are �Page 10 argument The first key to (1KA) the of (and wars LN of immorality sufficiently large-scale wars generally) takes the following form: Pi. The deliberate killing in mass of noncombatants is wrong. Pli. LN wars involve the killing in mass of noncombatants. (KA) What involves what is wrong is wrong. Piii . LN wars are wrong. J Supplementary remarks are called for:- Firstly, the (1KA) is one just representative of a Characteristically, in Western culture, it is arguments of that thought argument given of type. mass this taken But the focus can be off the killing: destruction of a first variation on (KA) replaces ’killing the is basis of may each be attacked of its premisses. wrong is as There slack by a has in effect been Let us consider these in that what involves are, in particular, such those generated by Good Samaritan arguments, which purport to show that some proper obligations involve wrongdoing. too noncombatants’ wrong, often expanded to a "distribution of obligation over entailment" principle, has been challenged. problems (and The principle, Piii, used in the argument, reverse order. what of Other variations will emerge in the discussion. but The argument is valid, on mass Thus concerning ’huge destruction of lifestyle of uninvolved or not clause directly involved creatures’. attacked) in of lifestyle nonhumans and humans alike that an LN war will bring is sufficiently evil. suitable of killing about the worst thing that can happen (after the killing of police). is humans set particular a notion of involvement; linked to paradox-free entailment 20 But the problems derive from with a tighter Involvement connective, , the problems disappear, and Piii stands. �Page 11 As against Pii, it may be legitimately argued against directed nuclear that military targets. wars can encounters be But given the character of nuclear weapons, LN wars could in no way be confined to such targets. merely the likelihood that many missiles explode off target. not the other effects of large-scale nuclear bombings, for example down-wind fallout There is There are all the radioactive military targets, which in the case of US and European from targets especially will effect large concentrations of people, Including therein perhaps uninvolved countries such as Canada. There may be an attempt to avoid the problem of massive civilian casualties by appeal to such dubious principles as the doctrine of double effect (or side 21 effect) If missiles were characteristically was which intended only to destroy an reliably underground unmanned unfortunately went off course and destroyed a large city, it the that Such claims should be rejected: not wrongness lessened could make a difference; for firing the city. the and one missile silo could be claimed mass destruction is legitimised under the double effect (unintended) principle. target, on the action would be wrong, and by the given intention. the Nonetheless the circumstances for they may mitigate attitudes to those responsible missile, since it was not as if they had deliberately aimed at The double effect principle confuses [diminution of] the allocation of responsibility for an act with the [diminution of] wrongness of the act. As against Pi, and as regards the middle term of Pi argued that there is an important equivocation. the bracketed term, killing ’deliberate’. While it will and Pii, it may be The equivocation is induced by be that admitted deliberate of genuine innocents is impermissble , it will be contended firstly that they noncombatants, insofar as innocent, directly many being are distinguishable, involved in are by no means all military effort, whether just as �Page 12 taxpayers or as suppliers of goods farmers or services used innocent. second The point Because Pii so amended in less defensible, and/or other reasons, discussed. leave to out the "modifier" ’deliberate’. of the perpetrators. it What is important for the present purposes is the moral status of what is done, not that motives e.g. military, a much narrower - and less defensible - version of premiss Pll already concerns best the and secondly LN wars do not involve the or bootmakers or entertainers; deliberate killing of those properly excluded as is by mixed with the So ’deliberate’ is out, equivocation is avoided, 22 Pii stands, and so does Pl. For not does Pi ’deliberate’, or ’intentional’ or the like. require the qualification Admittedly also ’noncombatant’ is a fuzzy term, but none the worse for that, and there is no problem serious in marking out a class of clear noncombatants, people who are not directly involved in the command and action chains. practice, deriving from There is, moreover, Catholicism, of no need to the adopt stating an initial version of Pi in terms of innocents - at least as problematic 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, art arguments for the premisses, though for the substantive moral premiss Pi they are of the characteristically nonconclusive moral sort vary somewhat with the underlying ethical theory. and will tend seriously understate the point) minimal respect owed to them as persons doing so 23 The argument from historical requirements on just wars from convergence. conclusion that fails to treat them with the §4. The to For example, one argument for Pi, and for objecting to the killing of noncombatants, is the Kantian one, (to there that and the argument LN wars cannot be justly waged - and �Page 13 accordingly are unjustified - is not merely something dreamed up by contemporary opponents The same conclusion falls out of various traditional requirements, worked etc). out America or of the capitalist State (and communistically inspired, of times mdeieval in just for variant on the key argument (1KA). was justly that not it be One of the requirements gives but a wars. For a necessary condition for fighting a war the that case noncombatants are bound to be killed (cf. numbers large [innocent] of Barnes, p.775). A just war requires just means, that the war should be fought morally by which implies in particular that there is no indiscriminate killing of noncombatants. The implied principle was escapsulated in a principle legitimate of means, (between combatants and others) which ’prohibits all actions discrimination directly Intended to take the lives of p.312) 24 civilians and of (PL, noncombatants’ LN wars, where not only military installations are targeted, violate . U. . 25 this requirement Overlapping the requirement of just means is that of proportion being that of net evil to net good): ’the damage to be inflicted and costs Incurred by the war must be proportionate to the good expected up arms’ (PL, p.312). disproportionate to moral goods proportionality requirement is criterion of by the which achieved in doctrine "improvement" through war : not are of that nationally way. confined, overall consequences of abstaining improvement "puts wrongs to rights": "ameliorative" conditions and war according to the first, justly the ’X wages war bad, from war’ (Barnes, p.72). ’A nation wages war are Entangled with the justly upon y if the overall consequences of war are better, or less the taking is not difficult to see that LN wars violate this It the damage and costs, requirement: (the proportionality only than Similarly if the for that nation or the wronged nation it is supporting have a decent �Page 14 chance of being better after the fighting ends’ (Wakin, p.20). way LN war can in no satisfy these conditions, as scenarios depicting the aftermath of such wars reveal. Some of the lesser requirements for a just war are infringed wars; LN It seems that there can for example, that of reasonable expectation of success. be no reasonable expectation of success in an LN by war, the whatever prospects of success with more limited nuclear exchanges. (limited) What is less clearcut is the question of whether LN wars conflict with the requirements of just cause or due fault and of right intention. For this depends on the sensitive issue of the weight assigned to what are seen as basic rights human and fundamental values, and the extent to which just wars can be ideologically justified. the mainstream justified position and wars definitively excluded however, in puzzling of medieval "humanitarian" by the over decisive against LN wars. theory wars (cf. traditional was opposed to While ideologically Barnes, p.778), these were not theory. There is merit, little dubiously effective requirements, when so many are Finally, these arguments from historical requirements do not violate prescriptive requirements: the argument is not a simple argument from historical authority, but also premisses uses requirements imposed (and used) were justified. the to effect that the As they are. In the Christian tradition there were two main strands of reflection on the moral rightness or justness of wars 9A , the just war theory and a rival pacificist strand, prominent in early Christianity, but submerged from Augustine on until contemporary times. Both exclude nuclear wars, one strand because they are inevitably unjust, the other because they are wars and This is the involve violence beginning of the convergence argument against nuclear wars: such wars are excluded from all ethical perspectives, once expediency is 27 that duly �Page 15 The detailed argument They are morally wrong however you look at it. removed. is an exhaustive case by case one, from each type of moral theory. can details For deontological and contractual theories lead back be shortcut. to requirements for a just war, violate. Fortunately which it has already shown, been In fact conditions for just wars were sometimes arrived at or defended through principles of such moral theories, so that a good deal of the work argumentative already has brand utilitarian of finally accomplished; for such and is adopted, not is far to have effect in shown pleasure, reason The wars Involves such massive that this dominates genuine alternative to LN war is better or 28 outlined against overwhelming moral case against such wars. wars LN do not exhaust the For there are other moral principles (derivative in some of the theories just considered) which the waging of war would violate. in are accomplished in utilitarian fashion, so that any they The arguments given LN that utility maximisation is however seek: infliction of pain and colossal removal of however others requisite latter point holds also as LN wars are excluded on utilitarian grounds. convergence assessments The done. been regards utilitarianism, where Lackey whatever wars LN an LN Among such principles are conservative ones, that we have an obligation to maintain the earth in proper shape and not degrade its systems, that we have a responsibility to future generations, to whom we are accountable, to "pass the world on" not in substantially worse condition it". Such conservative principles than we "received - however they are finally satisfactorily formulated - are bound to be violated in the event of an LN war. §5. The shift to nuclear lobby nuclear arguments deterrence: to its immorality. The has a way of halting, and if not defeating, certainly deflating, arguments against the immorality of LN wars, namely there is no actual �Page 16 such any In engagement wars. different from engagement in war: LN being done is, it is claimed, quite is What is deterrence indeed important most precisely in preventing such wars from ever occurring, as well as in maintaining (other) fundamental [Western] values. obtaining desiderata. both is deterrence pronouncements, claims The reasons:- A first reason is that Indeed it is the only there are is much for more than deterrence can account neither for strategy military Western disarmament to expected be On deterrence. 29 the despite For if it and sometimes even a drive for superiority. this, actual nuclear of In fact there has been a were "sufficiency" to deter would be an adequate goal. quest that, evidence the - the only - military goal. not way dubious, for several decidedly too practical nor weapons for Pure orthodox Nor has deterrence set in motion the process of . to armaments reduce "its" under contrary, to levels impulse there sufficient has for been almost unlimited acceleration in building arms (PL, p.318, quotes inserted). Another of deterrence reason for the type serious that is doubt being concerns other reasons also, connected with pure deterrence The reasons include the for nuclear war and with to For original (its threatening posture deterrence for, the propaganda that must be promulgated to maintain credibility with a population whose interests are being etc. conditions the "cold war", the probability of a LN war has increased considerably in the last 30 years. calls factor: to that extent, at least, enhanced its prospects of occurring. and setting) probability practised, which involves full-scale preparation for nuclear war, has prepared the occur, the The "sacrificed" for objectives, situation has now been reached where many theorists think there is a high probability at least of an LN war this century, i.e. certainly military be before 2000. It can argued - though there seems no way to make any such a probability argument at all tight, and it may be demonstrable that it cannot be made tight - �Page 17 that there is a non-negligible probability of an LN war before 2000. If it is wrong that X should occur, then it is also wrong that Cl. be But highly probably that should it X occur, and it is wrong to increase the probability that X occur. This is the first several of connecting doxastic mapping principles moral considerations against LN war into arguments against deterrence of LN war by the perverse practice of preparing for it and thereby helping "to the sense of raising the probability). (in it bring about" But like most principles in ethics, Cl requires complication to avoid defeat by counterexamples. The second part of Cl encounters apparent trouble where clash of principles occurs. Thus it may be argued that it is permissible to increase the probability that X occurs to avoid a greater Consider for example the pilot who increases the probability evil. that the passenger plane he is flying crashes in order to aircraft troubled does not make hit city apartment buildings 30 . sure Such a defeating condition does not apply in the case of nuclear deterrence where is there (though of principles) wrongness of a practice is not offset or removed by clash a the that its role in avoiding greater evil. It can be argued that it is; argument from the previous such is part of success of the deterrence. point of the popular This inductive argument deserves little more credence than the racing driver’s argument, perhaps from similar that because he hasn’t had a fatal crash yet (despite some base, time a close calls), he won’t. There are, furthermore, reasons for concluding continue to work. of will not One is the deterrence depends upon judgements regarding the other side, which may be mistaken: perception deterrence that what strategy ’each is is at rational", the mercy what kind the of of other’s damage is �Page 18 one "unacceptable", how "convincing" Not p.313). threat side’s other’ the (PL. as rational, regards limited but there must be severe doubts as to whether rational principles war, As to the last consider, for example, the are operating effectively. idea to is there evidence that one side (the USA) has misjudged the only other side’s (the USSR’s) perception of what is nuclear is (already erroneous to, as held in high places of power) that LN war can be alluded survived in rudimentary shelters, and also won. Deterrence consists in preventing something (often some wrong) by threats including 31 OED) . (cf. fright For most people without not Immoral destruction of New York.) deterrence, that is his graphic descriptions But though deterrence per deterrence from suchmeans is of course not immoral. publishing in them LN expense, trouble and wastage of preparing to enormous And deterrence by engage in them. was the all or scenarios vivid portraying the horror or LN wars would serve adequately to deter wars, fear by complete se is the of (Schell nuclear permissible, war preparation of the object to be prevented, is not, where this object Itself is not permissible. The argument for this is through the principle C2. If X is wrong then complete preparation of X is wrong. Hence since LN wars are wrong and war-deterrence implies of LN wars is wrong. war—deterrence X is just as bad as doing X: Y. preparation, It is not being claimed that preparing for Y and Z may both be wrong and Z (much) worse than , 32 What is wrong is by no means uniformly evil Principle C2 principles: a part is way succeeds or down the line in a series of connecting principle of the same sort that it higher in the series is that connecting X with attempted X: X complete not 33 . But if X is wrong then attempted X is wrong, whether the series ends; it cuts off well before mere �Page 19 intentionality, contrary to the claims example, it does various of religious For positions. not follow that if X is wrong then the contemplation of X is wrong or that mere non-action-oriented consideration of carrying out X is wrong. The applies point nightmares. or war, equally sexual fantasies, power fantasies, and nuclear to In particular there is nothing reflecting upon it, as we are: wrong nuclear nuclear wars, even if their horrors don't bear thinking on, are not unthinkable, and in thinkable. contemplating with some senses are all too Indeed one of the reasons why the connecting principles hold is that each involves decidedly increased probability of the evil outcome it connects Accompanying the increased probability are certain sets of reprehensible with. these are not those attitudes tied to the action the evil outcome involves; mere passive contemplation of 34 this War-deterrence involves not only war preparation, but announcement of accompanied by threats and a threatening posture. For some party, the potential enemy, has to be frightened, if deterrence is to succeed. This aspect of (war-) deterrence yields a further connecting principle, If X is wrong then threatening X is also wrong. C3. is wrong to do ... then the declared Intent put to that Intending to do wrong is wrong, and so also is favourable circumstances for one’s alternatively be argued semantically: (e.g. into Intending position committing 35 . rape) The is practice is also wrong. to prevail. if a world with X 'What Ramsey: is wrong to threaten ...’ (quoted in Walzer p.272) reason is that if putting something into practice wrong Thus too is do wrong The never unless point ideal can then neither is a world in which X is only conditionally blocked, in which X may well occur. �Page 20 By detachment from the connecting principles - one sound one would but logically, defensible three ones is good measure - nuclear deterrence by preparation for and threat of LN war is This wrong. also reveals suffice Deterrence wrong. of this type the suggestion that the morality of the whole why deterrence thing depended on war itself never occurring was so bizarre: connections between war and war-deterrence. the out is it left War-deterrence should not be practised any more than nuclear war itself should be engaged in - unless directions can be drastically changed (e.g. its at least limited, per impossible in the case of nuclear, to purely military targets). There are other concomitant reasons for the Firstly, with dissatisfaction deterrence. it has provided (nuclear peace, as there is no shortage of peace small-scale conventional wars) is at least a tenuous peace, which is not stable, liable but upset at any stage by a range of factors, including error (both to It does not offer genuine peace, of the sort required for human and technical). a international life, but only a fragile "peace of a sort" (PL, p.316). stable Secondly, there is enormous cost, the because on expenditure it moral excludes Bishops put their point in a surprising opportunity urgent other by Marxist cost of deterrence, The US moral priorities. way: in terms of ’the between what is spent for destructive capacity and what is needed contradiction for constructive development’ (PL, p.316). §6. The and super-states; arguments to persuasive prudential practical, the the resulting arguments (that have war persuaded justifiability of nuclear war preparation in basic argument is simply an elaboration, build-up nuclear situation. moral-fix nuclear of immorality to argument Not preparation; many the or theorists) present of the only are there there to are the circumstances. also moral The state-uplift, of that for the �Page 21 escalation of weapons at the local level, for acquiring a gun or for stocking-up the armoury [and every bit as doubtful as that argument]. neighbourhood that nuclear preparation, first danger: of nuclear destruction. blackmail, ’so we have been told, against guards all atomic blackmail and foreign domination; The two together, go since if did we double the and second of not the fear we might adopt a policy of appeasement or surrender and so avoid the destruction’ (Walzer, p.273). In fact it is supposed to guard against more than there is a crucial third element, namely, loss of basic rights (freedom, these; equality, etc.) and fundamental values (preservation of etc.) and ways of life integrated with these. truth, dignity, human This further set of elements is linked to the danger of foreign domination - which is really a separate from It is risk blackmail. of element Though foreign 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 infringement of basic values can occur without foreign domination, e.g. of by internal change government or governmental approach, by the increased security and control a nuclear state demands, etc. values, through Nuclear destruction can also involve loss of destruction but the converse does not hold. basic of the material base of the cherished life-style; It should be observed that not all the values concerned are equally fundamental: one of the main values of deterrence theory, the resistance to and of containment "communism", is questionable this in regard. The theme is, in short, NA. Because of multiple (connected) states) which have nuclear dangers from another state (or other weapons, a state - any state that is too large to rely upon other states - is obliged to invest in [matching] nuclear weapons. �Page 22 Hence, by detachment, a nation-state, such as USA, ought to order the of nuclear armoury that it something have in has, or, weakening the theme to meet objections concerning excess, "overkill", capacity, at least a solid core of the nuclear devices it has. out whether the obligation is a moral one, Sorting because for instance of the character of the values supposedly being merely or one protected, of prudential reason - it is presumably somewhat more than mere expediency - can be set aside for the present. On the same basis it can be argued that unilateral disarmament against a dangerous nuclear opponent would be prudentially irrational. It can be freely admitted that what is prudentially required is, like the common strategies of the prisoners’ dilemma situation and of certain competitive games, a suboptimal strategy; sufficient trust, that a superior strategy for adversaries, if etc., could be achieved, would be a cooperative arrangement. Joint agreement would be better not merely in removing the moral dilemma, but in a range of other respects: it would be much less risky, expensive, draining of resources and destructive of the environment, etc. However for the present and the foreseeable future the prospects of cooperation appear, so we are repeatedly told, unfortunately rather remote: or the only sure insurance is nuclear if one is a smaller nation, a larger ally who has an arsenal. force (Here a level of trust is called for which is far from foolproof, and which contrasts strongly with the lack of trust displayed elsewhere.) The nuclear theme for a middling or lesser power is a bit different from NA and ends rather as follows: MA. Because ..., a state that cannot rely on obliged ally. its own nuclear resources is to accommodate the nuclear installations and facilities of a protecting �Page 23 Principle MA is not very plausible, nor are the for substitutes obvious Not only MA but also NA, is now coming under question by disarmament it ° . who groups, more challenge the basic assumptions of the underlying general retaliatory model that Safely lies in weapons, and 1) More weapons imply more security ii) 37 Certainly, for more isolated states, such as New Zealand, lies attack submarines). more of a in excluding nuclear facilities from safety nuclear (including visits from nuclear Europeans are arguing in a similar way, that the present system is risk [liability] than a protection (p.251, Thompson); nuclear installations, Europe cannot be the envisaged and without for theatre a limited nuclear war it is now seen as by US (but not Soviet) strategists. Once i) and ii) are questioned, other assumptions of the retaliatory model and its variants come up for examination, namely iii) iv) Whether the proper response to danger is armament, in particular Whether the proper response is through nuclear armament, as opposed to other military responses (such as conventional arms), and generalising on part of Hi), v) Whether military approaches/procedures (through armaments, etc.) the proper is method, or should be the method, of conflict resolution at the international level. It is plausibly argued against military procedures that at no ordinary level do we set about meeting danger or settling disputes by acquiring lethal weapons and threatening to use them - except perhaps warranted, frontier ethics. But on an out-dated, and never really this takes us into the issue of alternative defence systems, an important matter beginning to obtain the contemporary 38 explanation it deserves, but one that already anticipates subsequent questioning �Page 24 While the state system is intact, of the framework of nation-states. not and exceptional inevitable: according military to is are to be expected and are likely permanent place in the procedures ’force has [a] ... force nation-state system’ Ramsey (p.xv) who uses this as part of his case for a nuclear war doctrine. far Assembling the arguments so to as the nuclear fix:- referred hereafter developed engage to sections) it is and immoral, in war-deterrence, for prudential reasons (as argued using NA This dilemma is no idle construction and MA). dilemma, deontic States both ought not to engage in war-deterrence, because (as argued in previous ought the yields (concocted to demonstrate of paraconsistent logic), but a serious real-life dilemma, the outlines virtues of which are repeatedly encountered in texts on nuclear war and its aspects The nuclear fix is in part simply a more intense dilemma beyond produced purely by itself^, war military typically transport, (since targets rely on or version of deontic the civilian ones). e.g. arrangements, military rail The main dilemma arises from a War is required for defence of the state and values it upholds (or pretends to uphold); also involves immoral acts and evil consequences. also seen be ’some The doctrine "just of justifications of war evil alm are consequences to morally war’ (Walls, p.260). dilemmas, e.g. most difficult war" the aegis War and preparedness for war also generate subsidiary a severe tension between freedom and problems justified. show that actions deemed normally forbidden by moral mandates are now permissible when performed under of but war as attempting a reconciliation by trying to show that under certain circumstances these really Thus 39 at least war which spreads inevitably combination of the retaliatory model with the features of war. can the of war Involves authority: defending a ’one of the free society without �Page 25 destroying the values that give it meaning and validity’ (PL, p.324). The essential feature of a moral dilemma is that both A and the negation of A are well essential role of moral dilemmas is not widely or literature 41 The place and (or differently, obligatory), for some suitable A. wrong . positions Moreover understood utilitarianism like cannot ethical in at all easily accommodate moral dilemmas or the data which gives rise to them - but then such positions do not really offer reportive accounts of wrong and obligation anyway. Contrary to utilitarian perceptions a dilemma does not any have necessarily moral solution, though there may be better and worse ways out. Reactions and responses that are characteristic of the from nuclear moral dilemmas There is an unsteadiness, an uncertainty as to what to fix. do, which way to proceed, which principles in watered-down form to temporary Thus, crutch. for world’ best" 42 as a of way "morally never our exercising moral , that is in a morally-strapped world. ethical Bishops who the of ’strictly conditional’ moral fix. Deterrence has a strictly temporary role but can be responsibility a shift "morally in a fallen to a ’moral "second acceptability’ try to escape ’the paradox of deterrence’, i.e. while acceptability, good", A similar deterrence we as (as from good to acceptable) is made by the US Catholic functor speak grasp example, the Bishop of London contends that the possession of nuclear weapons ’while acceptable" emerge the object must and strictly be to move beyond deterrence, of from the conditional ’towards a world free of the threat of deterrence’ (PL, p.317), out of the nuclear fix. To make matters worse the nuclear fix is is, not furthermore, a fix of (more something they happened into, by affluent) states’ accident. The initial nuclear involvement was deliberately chosen, primarily by USA, and the own making. It escalation has by and large also been deliberately chosen, again �Page 26 In these respects the situation is like that often by the USA. who person deliberately lets perself to be involved in two incompatible relations, and that currency, of adoption nuclear is the that nuclear build-up. The recent (1980) programme is to be in addition to existing are (which Soviet USA Initiated nuclear armament, and has frequently led escalation, and apparently still does. resources some weaponry, and nuclear build-up, in North America occurred on a defensive basis in response to fact with It is a myth, though one builds up conflicting obligations thereby. The the of generally United strategic be already in excess of to agreed States’ Russia’s, and which always have been so) (Thompson, p.21). The present dilemma is then a direct outcome advanced of state policy, especially by capitalist nations, and not merely a response to the Soviets (or state socialism). There is a two-way connection between world political arrangements and nation-states the nuclear fix. On the one hand, situation increasingly is political arrangements / Q ; seen political these arrangements are an evident source of the dilemma with the result through that nuclear as indicating the inadequacy of present world on the other, the nuclear fix tends to lock political arrangements into the statist form (into statist arrangements of an increasingly centralist cast). peace The espoused purpose of nuclear weapons may be to keep the (!) and to defend national interests, but there are other reasons such as perpetuating the system of sovereign states and politically confrontation. The argument to the theme that advantageous the very nuclear situation arising from the statist arrangements and interrelationals (economic conflicting rivalries, ideologies, etc.) tends to, and is used to, lock the world into the present arrangements of sovereign states and zones of interest, is practical state one. Consider first, the matter from a piecemeal the Soviet side where the �Page 27 pattern of national control and military economic reorientation 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 controlled carefully ... and ... selective release of ’official information’ (Thompson, p.20). Secondly, there is evidence of entrenchment of the arrangements, by the SALT negotiations: of rules not regarded as threatening US in place by The Soviet invasion interests", and so the US is not "vital What was different, what particularly worried about Afghanistan and its people. it held penalty for breaking the rules is the threat of annihilation). (the Thirdly, there are cases, such as the Afghanistan example. is shown there are fixed superpowers and a (growing) nuclear club of nations all governed by a negotiated set deterrence as was worried about and made nuclear threats concerning, were adjacent Western these lay within the US zone of interest. oil supplies: 44 and complicates other dilemmas The nuclear fix enhances contemporary sovereign state, in particular the deep tensions between national security and the operation of liberal-democratic arrangements (e.g. liberty, popular control of institutions, etc). personal subsidiary dilemmas, as for example the obligations to a nuclear conflicting obligations the by induced as state, a or doctor It also spotlights other more extent role-induced or a individual nuclear of (political) one’s dilemmas armaments such as one’s processor or researcher (the question of political obligations is considered in Appendix 2). §7. Ways out of the moral dilemmas: [initial] political fall-out from the �Page 28 conclusions. ethical all the ways are ways of limitation, and they Virtually all Involve in one way or another limitations on nuclear arms or are limitations on the powers of states. and deployed the they way The limitations may be 45 reached by agreement and negotiation and more or less voluntarily agreed , to or they may be imposed, or worst of all, they may emerge from an initial war. As with other fixes produced by are there suggested structure there and relations power and extra—state approaches. "realistic", attempts All to cow, as unilateral disarmament. is it states the or alter the remove them altogether, allegedly familiar, the seriously do which and "practical" nuclear problem - e.g. disarmament by they do not tamper with that - are inter-state; But in fact there is nothing very sacred not even a very long-standing arrangement, nor, as a matter or empirical fact, is one. states, of and the same goes for less "realistic" proposals, such the state; nation-state; arrangements which ways are of resolve neutral arms limitations, etc. sacred structural out which do not interfere with these arrangements, ways inter-state approaches, the it form about the political of particularly a stable We are certainly free - in more liberal states, it should be everywhere - to theorise as to its demise and replacement by alternative arrangements. Extra-state approaches take one of two routes, the way up, to genuine 46 power, or the way down, through fractionation or deunionisation international of states. not to The ways up and down are by no means one and the same; necessarily world government Were law-courts. remedy, namely intra-state incompatible. the through to Some of the important machinery, for the way up operate, courts legal but they are is assigned action, already there sufficient that medieval the international authority and power, the in theorists saw to all disputes could be extended to interstate disputes, and the just war �Page 29 between states S and T superseded by the just case of S versus T. one statist, more legalistic of trying to get to grips with the nuclear way problem, and accordingly is often mentioned, though dismissed 47 in , orthodox The Way Up is mostly passing in strategic texts on thermonuclear war. It is however beginning to be much more sympathetically considered by those who take rather than strategic viewpoint. moral a There is a renewed emphasis on world order, in reaching ’towards a morally integrated international system’; element be to and ’the missing of world order today is the absence of a properly constituted political The Way Down - though, like The Way authority’ (PL, p.320). by Up, no means new, turning back to the anarchist positions of a century ago - is, by contrast, scarcely mentioned in the orthodox discussions, but is making an appearance (a which is comeback) in some more radical discussions. A main argument for The Way Up is to supposed underpin statist just arrangements a repetition in first the argument from (generous) variations upon the Prisoners’ that of place, namely the Dilemma, the as such Tragedy of the Commons, that authority and coercion - in the form of the state are requiried to ensure best solutions, ecological order. especially regards of part the sort of super-state. of the "tragedy" is destruction when to assume in fact assumptions 48 of a commons by nuclear war, the solution is now said to be some Of course, this begins to undermine an earlier application argument, since states will lose their sovereignty, and political obligation to states will be correspondingly weakened. is and order So with the "tragedy of nation-states", where the players are not herdsmen but nation-states, and one of the prospects good public But all this that these "tragedy" arguments are good ones in the first place, they are not but are only sound under quite restrictive �Page 30 There are many problems with the Way Up, both theoretical and practical.An theoretical hitch is that the Way Up merely repeats statist arrangments initial at a level up, by way contingency, of super-state It arrangements. only is through a of there being no rival Intelligent civilisations nearby, that the problems of interstate relations not are repeated level a The up. major practical hitch is that there is no prospect at all of getting such a "solution" to work in time to serve its intended interstate future the For purpose. ideological differences, including especially differences as to how political arrangements should be effected, exclude world operative hostilities. government of prospect any an or world legal system capable of resolving nuclear In some ways, perhaps, this is just World well. as government be extremely monolithic, would entrench bureaucracy with all its damaging would features, and could easily tend to totalitarianism. on nuclear foreseeable the It would impose certainly an exploitative economic system which would do immense damage to world many remaining natural systems. The Way Up thus presupposes an unlikely, undesirable, level ideological, indeed requisite unity of political paradigmatic, cannot be and and expected unity economic separation with some in of nuclear main crucial respects, Moreover, given the Northern cultures, deadlines. When not even nuclear weapons limitations can be worked out how much less likely much more sweeping sovereignty, could be agreements, negotiated? Involving genuine There an is is limitations almost endless that it of state series of blockages and deadlocks in the way of such state reconciliation. The nuclear fix emerging from nation-state arrangements - combined with the apparent impotence of interstate relations to alleviate the situation, indeed with the ability only to push the world further into the situation and nearer to �Page 31 nuclear now is - "brink" taken to indicate (from yet a further angle) the inadequacy of nation-state political arrangements, and has given new impetus resolutions. extra-state other of consideration to The thesis that the nuclear problem indicates the radical unsatisfactoriness of national sovereignty and the present system namely in Schell. ’full-scale nation states has even reached the best-seller book stands, of According to Schell the nuclear situation should they operate' ... which himself avoids these reality and in ’workfing] out the practical steps by which 'awesome (III, p.92). Schell However urgent tasks, which, imposed on us by history, constitute the political work of our age’^9, history consonant with the global can reorganise its political life’ mankind ... a of the foundations of political thought’ required to reexamination make ’the world’s political institutions ... in to lead So, not feeling the pressures of overimpressed by the realities of (unstable) nation-states, do most or political theorists. But, having rashly ventured this far, we can hardly avoid some of these tasks. The central argument arising from the nuclear fix, for questioning political arrangements and seriously current considering changing them (in theory at least), takes the following shape:- H1. Political arrangements should answer back to certain requirements and justified in terms of doing so. are These requirements include such things as enabling good and meaningful lives for those who operate under the arrangements, at least where (as certainly in the West) the basic material conditions for such lives are met. H2. these Because of the nuclear fix, nation-state arrangements have ceased to requirements. For guarantee the prospect of arrangements. nation-states, good and at meaningful meet least in the North can no longer lives to those under their A life's meaningfulness is certainly diminished if it ends before �Page 32 its prime in a nuclear disaster; yet there is a non-negligible probability that many such lives may terminate, less than fulfilled, in this way. Therefore, Nation-state arrangements have forfeited their justification, H3. should and be changed. There is enough evidence that power brokers who control states, both more powerful states and lesser states (sometimes with some claim to popular mandate, often without), have lost sight of - or worse don’t care about - the point of political arrangments, of what justifies or is supposed to justify their states. The situation has been reached where ’nuclear powers, or higher value This is already illustrated by states in nonnuclear military situations: have much forfeited of what claim Vietnam Israel, many and the principles of just warfare have been blatantly violated repeatedly, as have many states put statesmen, on national sovereignty than they do on human survival’ (Schell’s conclusion, p.76). other their they Such principles. other had to external respect or internal political obedience. It could just be, of course, that there are no alternatives, or no possibly better But alternatives. alternatives there are, as we have seen, though but little work has been expended on working out the range of alternatives or features (except perhaps for the option of world government). As to whether all such alternatives can be dismissed, for instance as lacking feasibility, difficult to be all sure without being dogmatic: operate, once adjusted, very far on organising is humans, for under substantially different arrangments. But, once again, nuclear deadlines do not appear proceed it alternatives have been given very little opportunity to work, and we know very little about how instance, their to give sufficient time to and trying out alternative arrangments, even those of the more accessible Way Down. Thus alternative political and social �Page 33 while theoretically feasible and certainly a longer-term goal, do arrangements, not presently offer a satisfactory practical response to the nuclear fix. There is no need to insist upon a dilemma to single-track the of out nuclear We can not only quite the contrary. exclusion of all others: the way afford to be fairly catholic about "second best" approaches pursued and whatever to be working or looks like helping, within reorganised ethical seems Indeed, (and other) constraints: situation, methods, should we as such urgency, the the of direness the and nondemocratlc very (and down certainly negotiations on arms limitations between main nuclear states. The direction of most hope is given be fairly catholic and not inflexibly commited to narrow bogged unrepresentative) direction embrace for especially new. not has progress however come into view; the The political means of the Way Out are what they have been on almost every larger liberal or that issue humanitarian has from outside state governmental apparatus by organised pressure from mattered; within or without upon it, characteristically Bottom-Up Such Top-Down. familiar and practically never considerations are but part of the more general, and very effective, case against reliance upon states for a range of things they are now supposed required, to more supply, effectively but can almost Invariably be obtained, where which and less expensively without (and them their monopolies). In the case of security it is states, with very few exceptions, that have imposed, or acquiesed in, military solutions involving nuclear installations and The nuclear weapons. frequently from across nations. installations opposition local and the to neighbourhood These groups have been and establishing, for escalating groups, successful the time nuclear fix has come some of them now federated in blocking being, some some nuclear nuclear-free �Page 34 The patchwork grass-roots movement against nuclear is strongest neighbourhoods. in which Europe, - as the movement realised, and what gave it impetus - a is leading theatre, on US American touching thinking, strategic American nuclear installations in Europe will make it a contrary it probable seems nuclear limited a war that Europe safer much become will place: safer on the if the anti-nuclear movements succeed in having these installations removed and rendered nuclear-free. not is extremely doubtful that increasing NATO and It shores. for Europe The chances of grossly immoral conduct will thereby also be considerably reduced. What the movements must press for is accordingly clear it is in broad outline: what they have been pushing for, nuclear reduction and disarmament. But the argument also makes it clearer how far this should go, namely all the way to nuclear unilateral disarmament if necessary, certainly to local disarmament across progressively larger parts of the planet’s surface. is its demoted, importance and the necessity of For once the state its maintenance properly downgraded and reliance on its decision-making diminished in favour of localised decision-making (say) - once all that happens or is allowed for, one major component in the nuclear fix is removed, namely the worry about sovereignty. the of that sovereignty has of been assigned a mistaken weakest links in the moral fix structure. In the weigh-up that should occur in charting a way out of moral dilemma, much more Important elements features state The state, and accompanying features such as misplaced nationalism, importance. are Maintenance loss than the state are those things the state is supposed to safeguard such of as individual and local welfare and autonomy, but they are better ensured by the removal of nuclear weapons. The nuclear circumstances threaten the loss of basic values, autonomy, for in particular, main reasons are familiar; such as welfare and many creatures and regions, and the potential loss is in general �Page 35 much greater than in a nuclear-free situation (even should party remain armed with nuclear weapons). for example, the production (because of nuclear another ideological There are also subsidiary reasons; weapons reduces local both welfare of the opportunity costs of weapons manufacture) and autonomy (because of the accompanying security measures). Thus the nuclear fix is resolved, theoretically at loss of the state. any rate, by risking But, although that is the best way out at least cost in the circumstances, it will be strongly resisted in practice, since those who hold power hold it, in one way or another, under the auspices of state. FOOTNOTES 1. The US Catholic Bishops 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 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 (the paper was Initially drafted independently of PL). To illustrate the differences that emerge with removal of the religious backdrop and its acoutrements, consider 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 head (forms of violence) as if they stood and fell together, e.g. abortion and nuclear war. 2. 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 is in no way alters the immorality of LN wars, as will emerge. 3. ’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 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 LN war by its probability given a �Page 36 limited nuclear war. Given the character of weapons development and present communication arrangements, the idea of a purely nuclear exchange between the superpowers, perhaps in the European "theatre", is really a myth. But limited wars are not the present focus. 4. 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 are not just unsporting, in that no notice is given, etc. They are unjust in a much deeper way. 5. 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 world properly meaning ’war’’. (OED) 6. But of course there can be something quite analogous to war between clans, multinational firms, even nature, etc. (To this extent, a strict definition of ’war’ is being insisted upon.) So the diffusion of power structures has to extend beyond just the break-down of states. 7. Thus the ubiquitous war against Nature of modern times, which features just as large in marxists as in capitalists. As could have been guessed, someone - it was James - suggested chanelling 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 is through war games and other games of competitive cast. Again specious arguments enter for bringing out the "best" in human males. 8. War can be seen as a structural problem of state arrangments, to be removed along with these (otherwise defective) arrangements. Wars arise from political organisation of states - a situational fix. 9. 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! 10. There is however the degenerate idea of war as 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" is said to "win". But this is an extremely tenuous sense of winning. Moreover any such war is radically unjust, because of violation of the traditional requirement of proportionality, and for other reasons developed in the text. 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). �Page 37 Unfortunately as documented in Scheer, significant officials who are responsible for the nuclear destiny of the U.S.A. - and so of the world think that the devastation of nuclear war can be survived and that a global nuclear war can actually be won! 11. In practice they often were not, they drained limited economies, they layed waste countryside (though to a minor extent by nuclear or chemical or modern mining standards), impoverishing Inhabitants, etc. 12. For as Nagel contents (early on), there are moral restrictions on the conduct of warfare which are not legalistic only and which are neither arbitrary not merely conventional nor a matter of usefulness. These themes run entirely counter to the classic theory of war of Clausowicz - a theory outlined in Walzer. 13. As Nagel remarks. 14. The progressive escalation argument is an incremental Sorites. This is part of the so-called "logic of war". 15. As Walzer argues, p.24. 16. The severe limitations of those also come from the failure person from inside the homeland which excessive applications of 17. Thus the differences between Nagel on the one side, and Brandt and the other, in Cohen et al. 18. The pattern of moral argument has much in common with procedure in anarchist political discussion. 19. There are other arguments against two (or Routley and Plumwood. 20. For details see Routley and Plumwood. 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 forseen and/or intimately tied to the intended consequences. The doctrine is pernicious allowing those who adjust their intention suitably 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 effects, effects have no responsibility for the resultant effect on American and Canadian cities! 22. Despite Nagel’s suggestion (pp.158). 23. Of course there are counterarguments too, and not merely from military in the case of small numbers of obstructive noncombatants. One is a variation of 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 argument like the lesser virtues, nationalism and patriotimsm, of replacement - try for example swapping a by one from outside as regards treatment patriotism can engender. multiple) morality Hare lines: on see �Page 38 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. The principle can be argued to in various ways. One (not entirely conclusive) way is Nagel’s way, from the requirements of directness and relevance in combat, the underlying 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) 25. The situation with limited nuclear wars where the targets are essentially military ones, and noncombatants are unaccountably killed "indirectly' is 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. 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). 26. Throughout the OED equations,reflecting common usage, of just with right or correct, and unjust with morally wrong, are adopted. 27. 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 Twentieth Century 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). 28. An argument of this sort is developed in more detail, though not in complete generality, in Goodin. 29. As to the first point, there is not only overkill capacity and the drive for superiority (often represented via "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 sharpline has been drawn between conventional and nuclear weapons: on these and other related points see further Lackey 82, p.l91ff., and also Thompson and Smith. 30. The example was supplied by D. 31. Deterrence also commonly includes elements of mendacity, deception, misinformation. There is a grain of truth in the claim that ’deterrence is primarily about what the other side thinks, not what we think’ (Pym quoted morally Johnson. �Page 39 in Thompson, p.19). simply 32. Nor are degrees of wrongness required: ordered as regards worseness. 33. Can this be done semantically in terms of closeness/worseness The attempted X world is close to the X world? 34. There is a need for further clarification here. Passive spectatorship of evil events where one is in a position to make a difference is quite another thing, from contemplation of other worlds where evil occurs. 35. It is this principle especially that forces Ramsey, a Protestant theologian who is a nuclear hawk, into the tight position he ends in, which as Walzer explains, really leaves no room to move. For in virtue of C3 it must be allowed that the threatened wars are permissible to carry out. Ramsey tries to limit these to military exchanges. But to be effective as a deterrent, the exchange permitted must both threaten and also, in view of C3, not threaten nonmilitary targets, collateral non-combatant populations. It appears that Ramsey’s position, if worked out, would be inconsistent. wrongs can be partially of worlds? Principle C3 is also invoked by the US Catholic Bishops: see 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. 36. As is widely known, inadmissible 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 jobs. 37. Cf. 38. It was considered long ago in China by the alternative systems, see especially Sharp. 39. 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 demurfs] because of moral qualms’ (p.xil). 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). the last article in Thompson. Mohists. For contemporary Similarly the Catholic Bishops present the situation in terms of a moral dilemma: they speak of ’the political paradox of deterrence ... the dilemma of how to prevent the use of nuclear weapons ... (PL, p.313). 40. 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. �Page 40 41. There are exceptions of course, e.g. Sartre; and Nagel’s final example is very instructive. For a full theory of moral dilemmas see however Routley and Plumwood. 42. Reported in The Economist; reprinted in The 1983, Weekend Magazine p.2. 43. This is no longer a radical theme but is widely promulgated. The source of the nuclear problem comes from state arrangements: it is ’... a world of sovereign states ... which brought the world to the present dangerous situation’. (PL, p.313) 44. It is not alone responsible for these other dilemmas. Large-scale nuclear power and other types of warfare and security arrangements also contribute. 45. 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 considered. Animals, by contrast, are smart enough to settle disputes by means much more like these. 46. Americans, for example, tend to forget that their State (like USSR) is a union, of fairly recent origin; and that a State of the Union message could consider the dissolution of the union. 47. 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. 48. See further Routley and especially Griffin. 49. Schell does not make it clear whether he is thinking of the Way Up or the Way Down, but some of the names he drops suggest the Way Up. So can some 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.76, III), as if the natural or original state were an undivided one? Routley and Australian, material referred February to 12- therein, 13 and �Page 41 APPENDIX 1; Remarks on J. Schell’s THE FATE OF THE EARTH. Schell’s book is an important and influential document, which is significant having a and urgently needed effect in shifting attitudes towards nuclear. It is especially valuable for aftermath example defects. is Some exhibits, also it just nothing else that we undertake together can make any sense ...’ the of both for rubbish, a world-wide program of action for preserving the [human] ’without ... species ... moral scenarios horrifying Unfortunately severe philosophically and factually, and vivid attack. nuclear of its (p.104, Humans rearranged). however like rabbits in are Australia, virtually beyond human power to extirpate. or practical The claim presupposes two of the major defective assumptions of the book: 51. That nuclear war will eliminate life, human life, at least, on earth total extermination assumption); (the and 52. That very many notions, not only those of morality and value, but those of time and space, make no sense in the absence of humans, or, to put it into a more sympathetic philosophical form, in the absence of an actual context human (the anthropocentric assumption). The frequent applications of S2, which philosophical depth and induce give the book some of its apparent suitable puzzlement through their paradoxical without total extermination aspects, depend essentially on SI; there will be humans, about to make past and future, good and evil, go on making sense! Now although the factual assumption SI is possibility, unlikely. example, it appears in Schell’s argument on an unjustified no means ruled out as a light of present (inadequate) knowledge most the to by SI is extremely extrapolation from Hemisphere, but for the most part it does that very flimsy. It depends, for the Northern to the Southern North American thing, of �Page 42 the contracting North to world (All that matters, all worthwhile America. civilization, is in USA, or at least, to be more charitable, and Europe, also be wiped out, i.e. will which eliminated in the nuclear holocaust). the example out of date. America North its human population will be Some of the data Schell relies upon, for of nuclear explosions on the ozone layer, is significantly Other effects than ozone destruction transfer even less well South. to North effect in from A factually superior study of nuclear disaster that Schell’s, Preddy and others, indicates that parts of the Southern Hemisphere, New Zealand and Southern Africa and America could escape relatively unscathed even from most massive northern exchanges. The penetration of human chauvinism as in S2 is not something Schell but product a is of truths necessary mathematics of and in Wittgenstein ’s philosophy, where even the are a product of human conventions and would In Schell human chauvinism is dished up in a particularly vanish with humans!). powerful obnoxious Kantian Thoughts form. tenses, values and morality, all depend in the and propositions, time and presence life-giving of human - past or future or merely potential humans are not enough, persons that beings are not humans are certainly not enough. ’... e.g.): Thus according to (II, Schell p.74, the thought "Humanity is not extinct" is an impossible one for a rational person, because as soon as it is, we are not. In imagining any other we look ahead to a moment that is still within the stream of human time, event, ...’. right to philosophy especially, which is still European unfortunately alive and well (e.g. peculiar The thought is however perfectly possible for humans; now. Though we (p.74)l. ’... outside can have it no doubt have it falsely a later rational creature may well be able to have it truly. "later" we the Schell erroneously denies human tenses of past, that: there is no present, and future ...’ Human extinction eliminates ’the creature that divides time into past, �Page 43 present future’: and so annihilation cannot ’come to pass’ (p.77). simply false that the tenses are human: the tenses depend on But it is time local a (perceptible to many creatures other than humans, but not depending at ordering all on 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). too easily come And annihilation may also 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 that there was a time before there were any human beings. earth. Before Here as elsewhere the human chauvinism is mixed with other distorting metaphysical assumptions of Western our heritage, verlficationism and Implicit ontic 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; do so, we (p.77/4?). In can perceive that we are in attempt and whenever we fact still present as spectators" The second clause goes a good distance towards refuting first. the fact there is no great problem in describing counterfactual situations which undermine both Freud’s claims. chauvinism into one of The same goes for Schell’s extensions human of its main traditional strongholds, value theory: the simple and basic fact [sic!] that before there can be good or evil, or to service harm, lamenting or rejoicing there must be life’, human life (p.103). are no facts, but entrenched philosophical assumptions which have been ’... These exposed 2 and criticised elsewhere . Another obnoxious theme, which Schell repeatedly infiltrates, is the Pogo theme, which S3. Distributes responsibility for the present really) onto everyone, every human in the world. nuclear situation (fiasco, An especially blatant example 3 �Page 44 the world’s political runs as follows: menace leaders ... though the earth with nuclear weapons, do so only with our permission, and even at our bidding. theme At least, this is true elsewhere elaborated is ’... for democracies’ pay 4 we are the authors of the destruction . while for the peoples of the non-nuclear-armed world it sense to an argument of all The moral cost of only true in the sensitivity nuclear of representative And again ’... we is it armaments that of us underwriters of the slaughter of hundreds of millions - ’. And again ’[as] perpetrators ... is not sacred but is worthless; be killed’ (p.88). vote the against of the populace they allegedly govern. many are potential mass—killers. makes is that they fail to try to do anything about the danger)’ (p.87). But this is more of government since extinction and support the governments that pose the threat of it, for negative The III). (p.106, (For the populations of the superpowers this is true in a positive sense, we now they we convey the steady messsage ... it ... that ... Little of this is true. that life is acceptable for everyone to Those who campaign against nuclear, against nuclear-committed parties so far as is possible, and the like, are certainly not the authors of potential destruction, and responsibility nuclear situation does not simply distribute onto them. - or the unlikely opinions as to worth Schell everyone - fall on those who have done less. for the Nor does responsibility illegitimately attributes to 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 many other things, a representative of a party is only which offers a complex and often ill-characterised package of policies, and a voter may vote for zero package. representative or more policies of this Only in the (unlikely) event of a clear single issue referendum, which is adopted, can responsibility, still of a qualified sort, be sheeted home, to �Page 45 those who voted for it, not every one in the community. When however the Pogo assumption is disentangled from the following theme what results is decidedly along the right lines: The controllers [not to be confused, in Schell’s fashion, with all of S4. have failed to change our pre-nuclear institutions. The sovereign system is out HI) (p.51, of step with nuclear age, the one-earth system, etc. earth us] (the whole Unfortunately Schell often loses sight of this important theme. theme). S4 forms part of Schell’s critique of the state which is, by an large, scattered and fragmentary. As we saw, in §7, Schell arrives at the conclusion that the nation-state has outlasted its usefulness, and that new institutions political more ’consonant the global reality’ are required as a matter of urgency. evades what he admits is the major task, making viable out But he alternatives. most he makes some passing suggestions, some of which point to the Way Up. he remains clear about are the serious defects of the state and the At What frequently immoral purposes for which the state is used. At one stage he contrasts what he calls Socratic-Christian ethics with that of state, where ’the end [state] justifies the means . .., the raison d’etre of government, is the basis on which themselves to commit crimes of governments, every in sort’. anything whatever in the name of [their] survival’. that all So times, licensed ’states may do virtually Schell then argues however, extinction nullifies end-means justification by destroying every end; that argument is far from sound, and depends again on extreme (S2) have combined with ontic assumptions. under system SI) ends could remain, e.g. human but chauvinism Even if all humans were extinguished (as for nonhumans (actual or not). �Page 46 As to the part of the state and (state) sovereignty in war, in us Schell leaves A sovereign state is virtually defined as one that enjoys the no doubt. right and power to go to war in defence or pursuit of its interests (III, p.51). War from how things are: arises jealous nation states (p.51). and sovereignty from the arrangement of political affairs via Indeed there is a two-way linkage between On the one side, sovereignty is, Schell capacity to wage war. contends, necessary for people to organise for war. is impossible to preserve sovereignty. it war transparently clear as they stand. having On the other side, without Neither of these contentions is Now that the state system in entrenched, it however easy for conservatives (in particular) to argue from the "realities" is of international life, which include self-interest, is It on basis this that peace arrangements aggression, readily are hatred. fear, dismissed as unrealistic, utopian, even (amusingly) as extremist. Schell’s further theme that nuclear "war" is not war threatens to undermine his case erroneous an sovereign characterisation nation to achieve an end’ (III, sufficient for p.52): war as ’a violent means employed by a of but neither considerations but not all wars or games are won). It they fail (even on one side being defeated on a But in nuclear "war" this doesn’t happen, ’no one’s strength But what these sorts contribute to showing is not that nuclear wars are not wars, but that they are not wars of certain sorts, e.g., not just wars because nor LN falls until both sides have been annihilated* (III, p.52). of necessary if is also claimed that war depends on weakness; by arms. is But nuclear attacks can certainly have ends cannot be won in the older sense: decision this It is then claimed that war requires an end which nuclear war. "war" does not have. wars state based, for example, on its nuclear war But the not-war theme needs much qualification, and starts out making capacity. from the against on such criteria as reasonable when LN wars prospect of success and �Page 47 improvement, not rational wars (in a good sense), and so on. wars nuclear weapons have also ruined "conventional" wars, and that demise the war of not just on his connected the mistaken has removed been proposition The (p.52). concerning the conventional war and the mistaken proposition that war of some sort the theme has left no means to finally settle disputes between nations, for the final court of appeal depends conventional nuclear times does damage to Schell’s argument that into persisted have That theme demise has to of be "court of appeal" between nations (for, as observed, there are other final types of contests that could serve, and there is also the cooperative behaviour, e.g. joint referenda); possibility of more it also imports the assumption of Clausowicz (criticised earlier) 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 ruleless. wars contrary, are parasitic on On the social organisations such as states and are They are a social governed by a range of understandings, conventions and rules. phenomenon, with a rule structure if not a logic. Much capital has been made from what is called "the and the "logic logic of deterrence" The message that is usually of nuclear (strategic) planning". supposed to come through is that the massive nuclear arraangements the world now entangled in are perfectly logical, sound, reasonable, rational. this represents little more than a cheap semantical the justifies reasonable. can be present arrangements, or trick. anything in strategic planning; values no in way in Jeffrey) which but is does not yield specific results without desirability measures being assigned to alternative without However like them, or renders them There is a logic of decision (as presented e.g. applied Logic is being pumped in, extralogically . outcomes, that is There are varaious ways these value assignments may be determined, to meet moral requirements or not; but in �Page 48 nuclear planning strategic (Selecting the usual expediency. automatically; is have invariably been settled on the basis of game theory setting based something cover strategy of’. term almost Thus too the presumption in Walzer, p.277, that the logic of on eye-for-eye and tooth-for-tooth assumptions.) ’logic of’ tends to be used very generously, as a word of general to this to sees for it is then assumed that each player plays to maximize his or her own advantage. deterrence they like In fact commendation, ’rational considerations entering into the policy or In these terms, Schell, who like others enjoys playing with the ’logic of’, should write of ’the illoglc of deterrence’, for he emphasizes (III, p.80) 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: doctrine depends irrational use. deterrence (e.g. on credibility of the yet the threat of of success this deterrence unjustifiable and Indeed Schell wants to go further and locate a contradiction in HI, pp.67-8): but the argument depends on an interesting confusion of contradiction with cancellation, which deterrence is supposed to (etc.) is involve. FOOTNOTES 1. The appalling theme that humans create past, present and repeated, e.g. p.104 top. 2. See e.g. ’Human chauvinism and environmental ethics’ in Environmental Philosophy (editor Mannison and others), Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1980. 3. Another example of spreading the responsibility runs as follows (Schell p.46, III): we plan to exterminate species in certain circumstance, though we don’t quite admit this to ourselves, as sane or sensible (or rational?). Further (p.55 III), ’the world ... chose the course of attempting to refashion the system of sovereignty to accommodate nuclear weapons’: the world? Connected with this is the argument from defence of fundamentals [ideology] - e.g. for liberty, the (USA) nation, and against socialism. In the course of this yet another fallacious assumption is rolled out: ’The means to the end are not limited, for the end itself sets the limits in each future �Page 49 case’ [?] 4. 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). 5. There is however a simple solution to Schell’s problem of the missing motive, namely an ideological one: remove the rival ideology from future dominance. �Page 50 APPENDIX 2: Strategies and the Matter of Collective and Individual Responsibility What one does depends, naturally, on where one lives and what sort of power it is. responsibility work to entirely to an In present circumstances states have and states, there ends: responsibilities these no individual, or (smaller scale) is collective responsibility to work out a policy or people on stance matters such as While such a non-responsibility nuclear and still less to act on such a stance. (or opt-out) theme no doubt suits many evident There are however some persuasive out their policies. arguments that this is where the responsibility accrue one means what as what strategy a state should adopt depends on where it is located much has, and — many for some, themselves, especially more authoritarian power-holders, for others - it does involve opting out of moral responsibilities, responsibilities acquired by virtue of being a person within the framework of certain social arrangments. Now there is no doubt that individuals and a group can out. They can neglect their moral responsibilities; in doing so. being this, do can opt but they are not justified Against this claim, which is based ultimately upon each person’s caught in a web of responsibility-inducing social relations, whether they like it or not, there are some neat arguments which appear to permit opting out. One goes as follows: 1. The (ordinary) individual, difference to what happens. 2. Such difference. 3. individuals, or or group, has no possibility of making a make a Therefore groups, have no obligation to try to Hence Such individuals, or groups, are not morally responsible, for instance when things go wrong. �Page 51 There are two main assumptions resisted; this in argument, both which of be firstly, a variant of the ought implies can theme , and secondly, the assumption that individuals can’t make a difference. cannot individuals competitive highly that true What an individuals do. full of hopeful free-riders, a person may communities, encouter a familiar impasse: is on their own, together they can. much accomplish it While individual can achieve depends on what sufficiently many other In should that he or she acts M-ly (e.g. against morally, nuclear arrangements, present destruction) at considerable personal cost with no Such an impasse no guarantee that others will also act M-ly. 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 at directed difference, many individuals also have the option of some making more individualistic action in such disobedience. important An forms as or deployment) Evidently, various or parts redirection however, work more effectively go slows, political form of individual resistance, already adopted in Canada and north-western USA is refusal to pay defence boycotts, thereof of such (e.g. taxes, income taxes nuclear for directed weapons Instance towards production to peace and funds. all these more individualistic forms of political activity if individuals integrate their activities since the impacts aggregate (and appear after a certain stage to exponentiate). There are arguments of some weight that individuals are under some sort moral obligation to take political action to disaffiliate themselves from what contributes to the prospects of nuclear depends on the of sort of state war. What type of action this is one resides in, e.g., whether it is a nuclear �Page 52 power, whether it provides nuclear issues complicating as or bases facilities, and such on kind of preventive action the state is likely to what One argument - it is one of a type take in return. etc., be can that 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 making weapons the such for The war. argument here not applies principles (like that of §5), for instance that the manufacture of such weapoons increases the risk of such war. right and to connecting deployment But if it is not morally right to be making such weapons then those who live in a state that is doing so to disaffiliate themselves from such substantive without The argument is but the assumptions opt-outers and do-nothingers assumption, ought defence production, and disaffiliation 2 includes not paying for such production through defence taxes . not be morally appear reasonable and defensible. Such arguments not only insofar as they put to contribute national for those 3 take action, even limited action such as redirection of taxes . in some fashion to moral obligations; political obligations. And political limited, by moral constraints. are already answer for then moral obligations override obligations are already significantly The nuclear situation does not so much bring out new limits on political obligation, as emphasize the obligations who There is however no dilemma under any theory which takes political obligations to back spot the objectives, they also raise serious questions and perhaps dilemmas as regards political obligations would on limited, and respects in which those introduce further moral considerations against sponsorship of national defence arrangements. �Page 53 An obligation to try war does not commit one to more than this: for an to an obligation, for example, work to But alternative national defence policy which avoids nuclear elements. no doubt this would be a good thing to try to contribute to. one nuclear spending part of one’s working life contributing indirectly to it, not by to disaffiliate oneself from preparation for attempts depends commitments, and on forth. so where lives, one For not only the level are Once of again, one’s pacificist types different what policy of appropriate for different nations and regions, but there are more reorientation superficial and deeper reorientations that can be worked out and promoted, schemes that "conventional" leave e.g. warfare apparatus more or less Intact, and deeper (ecological) schemes that change that. The US Bishops, for example, present a shallower set of goals for such power as the USA, which includes such as preventing the objectives working development and deployment of destabilizing nuclear weapons systems and for better of already operational systems (see PL, p.317). control super a For those whose very limited political Influence is exerted in considerably lesser even the shallow goals may look quite different: there are no weapons (except perhaps those of another power planted on local territory) better control. The view from the very minor to in or redeploy to powers in the Antipodes is furthermore different from that of the medium powers in Europe. prospect powers is There some the Antipodes of avoiding the more immediate effects of an LN war, while there is little such prospect in Europe (cf. Preddy 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 elements of what is valuable in world civilization. Local and regional self-interest would also suggest steps towards self-preservation that been initiated. have not �Page 54 What is broadly required in the Andipodes is a work out once removal of American bases alliance, which is in any case of questionable merit; and withdrawal of American rightss for nuclear-carrying equipment to access ports, air bases and other facilities, so as to remove pursuit of more a evenhanded policy targets; nuclear is That much easy, in principle. difficult to ensure is that economic and cultural collapse does not follow an LN war in the North. independence Secondly then the building of Increased in the Antipodes is required. sustainable of life its exercise unless combined with and Preddey it others is own. ’the region must also other desirable objectives: unlikely - the structural readjustment aims of moving for example, in estimated that 25 per cent of GDP would have to be included Australia the costs would be less. desirable have For a small region that looks a very costly diverted to build up New Zealand’s economic independence. which socio-economic It is not enough to make the region a nuclear-free zone not worth targeting militarily: a local of nonalignment (something quite small powers elsewhere have managed to achieve). More to Firstly, withdrawal from the American goals are glimpsed. the matter straightforward the were For a larger region If, furthermore - what seems combined with the independently whole region towards a multicultural conserver society and diverting "defence" spending to connected self-management and civil be considerably lessened. They only appear great in the setting of an on-going consumer-defence socleity. In any case where life itself defence goals, would is concerned, the costs do not appear excessive. FOOTNOTES 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. �Page 55 Seatie 2. An argument of this type was deployed by Bishop support of his refusal to pay defence taxes. 3. This dilemma and option is now removed 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 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 therby 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 and/or ought to oppose. Hunthaassen of in �Page 56 REFERENCES Berg, Reinhabiting a Separate 1979. P. M. Cohen, Nagel, Scanlan Princeton, 1974. Country, (editors) Planet War and Drum, Moral San Francisco, Responsibility , R.E. Goodin, ’Disarming nuclear apologists’, typescript, 1982. R.E. Goodin, ’Disarmament as a moral certalnuity’, typescript, 1983. P(hilip) Green, Deadly Logic: The Theory of Nuclear Deterrence, Ohio State University Press, Columbus, 1966. N. Griffin, ’Lifeboat USA', typescript, 1982. Ground Zero Organisation, Nuclear War: New York, 1982. R. Jeffrey, The Logic of Decision H. Kahn, On Thermonuclear War. What’s In It For You? Pocket Book (editor D.P. Lackey, ’Ethics and nuclear deterrence*, in Moral James Rachels), Harper and Row, New York, 1979. D.P. Lackey, 'Missiles and morals: a utilitarian look at nuclear deterrence’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 11 (1982) pp.189-213. J.C. Problems Murray, Morality and Modern War, T. Nagel, ’War and Massacre' in Cohen et al, pp.3-24. J. Narvesen, '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) pp.306-328 [hereafter referred to as PL, for ’New Draft of Pastoral Letter’]. G.F. Preddey and others, Future Contingencies 4. Nuclear Disasters, A Report to the Commision for the Future, Government Printer, Wellington, New Zealand, 1982. T. Regan (editor), Matters of Life and 1980. R. Routley and V. Routley, Alternatives, (1982). R. Routley and V. Plumwood, 'Moral dilemmas and (edit. notions’ in Paraconsistent Logic, Philosophla Verlag, 1983. 'The Death, Random irrefutability of the G. House, New anarchism’, York, Social logic of deontic Priest and others) �Page 57 R. Scheer, With Enough Shovels: House, New York, 1982. J. Schell, ’Reflections (Nuclear Arms - Parts I-III)’, 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 (Kopf, New York, 1982). References in the text are to the original articles. All references by parts labels ’I’-’III’ are to these articles. T.C . Reagan, Bush and Nuclear Sharp, Exploring Nonviolent Alternatives, Boston, 1971. T. Taylor, Nuremburg and Vietnam: R.W.. M.M.. M. R.A. S. Random Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, Harvard University Press, 1980. G. E.P.. War, Thompson and D. New York, 1981. An American Tragedy, Smith, Protest and Survive, Monthly Review Press, Tucker, The Just War, Wakin (editor), War, Morality and the Military Profession, Boulder, Colorado, 1979. Westview, Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, Basic Books, New York, 1977. Wasserstrom (editor) California, 1970. War and Morality, Wadsworth, Zuckerman, Nuclear Illusion and Reality, Collins, London, 1982. Belmont, � 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. 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Text Any textual data included in the document WORKING DRAFT ON THE ETHICS OF LARGE-SCALE NUCLEAR WAR AND WAR-DETERRENCE AND THE POLITICAL FALL-OUT Because of their projected effects - which are said to differ from those of the even largest difference in kind - generated, encounters. exchanges either at all wars nuclear large-scale World (the wars conventional Wars) raise to as and not or nearly so forcefully, by previous human military Certainly exchanges such as nuclear wars involve, such constitute a questions ethical deterrence nuclear investigation is and threatened presupposes, are neither envisaged nor fully accommodated by traditional theories of just wars. reflection as even required, if Much new philosohical well-tested and rather old-fashioned moral principles will serve as ethical base. Nuclear wars - though a fine class of nonexistent object, is existence whose however best confined to other (already uncomfortably neighbouring) possible worlds - have several distinctive properties and come in several varieties. particular, limited nuclear wars which (of tactical or strategic subvarieties) contrast with large-scale nuclear wars, LN-type-wars, large quantities of nuclear devices over a sizeable region; two main parameters: are need A large-scale nuclear war involves the explosion of however be unlimited not which In quantity it is a function of of explosive) and distribution. (megatonnage Such a war differs markedly from a limited (or tactical or strategic) nuclear war which is limited - by assumption, the chances of escalation are however very real 3 - to much smaller quantities of explosives characteristically circumscribed, installations in a given region. wars and their prevention, and where the targets are confined to military Though the focus in what follows is upon e.g. limited in nuclear principle LN wars are by no means a separate Page 2 issue, since a nuclear arsenal is escalation of such are wars a and prerequisite, high probabilities of assumptions of reasonable usual (given the follow-up or second strike, etc.) §1. is What different old of appropriateness and models wars:____ the nuclear about theories resulting war. of limited model of war that A dominates much thinking, including [even] strategic thinking, is the two party 4 (or even two person) game or, a complication of that, the clan or tribe battle . A picture of war built up, especially as a result of medieval discussion of just war, which inapplicable. for such technological have advances The traditional theory, hardly surprisingly, phenomena Dresden and Tokyo. mass as bombing inappropriate rendered no made the and allowance large cities, such as occurred with of And nuclear bombing, with its many further crucial effects beyond mass bombing, adds further new dimensions. Yet it is Important, for the argument to anchors, historical linkages and to be aware of what counted as war (the semantics of the matter^), and of when, and why, wars and military actions Firstly, retain were accounted unjust war is essentially a matter of states and their control: or wrong. to elaborate the OED account, war is ’hostile contention by means of armed forces, carried on between nations, states, or rulers, or between parties in the same nation or state’ for control of the state : literal, but transferred, antagonists or players; other metaphoric, forces comprising senses of etc.? States armed the ’war’ noun not the protagonists, are soldiers are are the means of contention or combat, and combat or forceful (typically violent) exchange is the actual experience. function of remove states: Thus wars are external or internal (civil), states or their rule. but always, a An obvious way then to eliminate wars is to in short, wars are an outcome of political structure, and are Page 3 altering the structure . by removed This is an initial reason why the radical argument against nuclear wars and deterrence devolves into an argument the (self-legitimised) war-declarers and war-makers, against states. the traditional theory, wars were restricted to external against In fact on which wars, were construed as the right of states or their rulers (princes) for certain political purposes, the argument being that private persons with grievences had access the while courts, did not states legitimate (wars were, so to speak, the international But this is itself a very analogue of the law courts). the 9 to statist conception of the semantics is not so restrictive and permits place of wars; internal wars, for example, to end wars. Let us however - to bring out what is different now - confine attention a basic and most familiar case, external wars between two states or set (axes) of states, two-player external wars. games competitive could be won. It was assumed be well no winning strategy. waste of the Northern huge surrounding areas of countryside. hemisphere and not like a draw, or like the strange out for the simultaneously knock each other element, emphasis the inevitable is disputes, removed: be pointfully fought. Certainly, elements of gamesmenship had a role count.) in for, deterrence, earlier wars, (So where two boxers situation on pure deterrence; that are most elaborately prepared for (exercised never the settled with main protagonists substantially obliterated^, and all is is there Thus too the point of main players very substantially worse off than at the outset of the "play". it like An LN war could involve destruction of all war as traditionally seen, to settle serious interstate nothing wars, that With LN wars it no longer holds; main Western metropolitan agglomerations in laying firstly That assumption still held good for massive armed exchanges such as the World Wars. may to Hence another newer the phenomenon of wars etc.), but which can bluff, and the other it was not but pure Page 4 deterrence. to principle important, Most military next, traditional and targets military gross ways to uninvolved parties sacrifice effects nuclear of large nuclear wars cannot (presented horrifying in be confined in be could This exchanges. feature is for, as we shall see, wars that spill over in fundamental as regards just wars; special wars any The morality. to pretension explosives, especially in mass, mean however that legitimately detail in confined. popular These effects special sources such as Schell) include radioactivity, ozone destruction, shockwaves, fireball or firestorm devastation, etc., etc . . .. The moral situation, and the tendency of moral §2. entirely in the context of war. submerged case of war to maintain a firm grasp on the expediency. What is to considerations become It is particularly important in the distinction between morality done in war, especially for local or national advantage, may be very different from what ought morally to be done, whether the latter ought not to be done codes and conventions of war, or otherwise in war is done, despite modern . military conventions and the like, for one (alleged) advantage or another. live in a rather barbarous age: go unremarked, if so numbing, codes the history gets written (accurately) that is. tends 13 to induce a and Militarily we will the horrors of the twentieth century military thinking and strategic planning is A , Much that 12 the using determined and not Furthermore certain moral that a range of morally excluded actions, such as wiping our rural populations, become real ("moral’') possibilities, to be reckoned, for example, into consequentialist calculations of maximising expediency. The reason is that strategic planning is characteristically based on expediency (and extent displaces morality). so to that For each side in a military encounter determines its "strategy" by considering only its own advantages and disadvantages, its own gains and losses as a result of alternative possible moves, not, as it ought, Page 5 those of the other side(s) as well. Indeed it has been contended that war should be planned and conducted way, no-holds-barred-combat fought to the maximal (local) advantage, without a limits, moral or other (except insofar as technology limits the means of etc., themselves). Such is the And Clausowicz tries to repeated. argue, through 14 an be broken by player each in from And the argument is inconclusive; c Thus too an It would follow for the players from the can choose 15 A state engaged in war - this will no doubt include nuclear nowadays war sees itself as entirely bound by constraints of morality: to be mere prudence on the part no-immoral-holds-barred of approach those they attacked to take - seldom it is taken account of the may well encounter, especially from the So each group potentially engaged in war forces other side. the question not as to what it ought to do in morally permissible situations, but also both what it ought really do and what it can do in the morally flawed finds enforced) escalate, and, for example, agree to abide by arranged practices, types to of weapons, etc. only The that the idea of a limited war is some sort of contradiction in terms. But it is not. not escalation externally for advantage. turn extraordinarily narrow motivational base is assumed. argument incremental ), that there can be no limit. assumption is that any merely selected (as distinct will force, so-called "classic" view of Clausowicz, oft argument (but really "the bald man" fallacy limit this itself in. But last the question does not then situations it reduce to one of expediency. There is expediency, involves. no question of morality giving or having to give way to for instance under extreme circumstances such as prospect of LN war For it is not as if shaky considerations of morality are bound to to Page 6 give not only firm ground of expediency when the chips are down: the to way does this in fact often enough not happen in crises situations, but the fact that is both morality and expediency fall within the same, equally shaky or solid, Expediency does not (meticulously) deliver us from domain of value theory. fact, but simply takes narrowly-construed local advantage or power as to value what is valuable, as what matters; family, that urges values local - of self, region or nation - are what really count and override or class, clan, it are to be maximized at the expense of remote or considerations. foreign By morality requires, as a matter of its proper characterisation, a much contrast, more universal distribution of value thereby the through imposes, requirements general of universalizable intersubstitutivity resultant equillbity fairness, of the same results not holding when x and y are interchanged, under Not evaluations 16. certain principles, justice. and and principles, The deep expediency derives from the failure of interreplacement, of unsatisfactoriness so and only can expediency be given a deontic presentation, as expediency through such slogans as "might is right", but theories or utility do not have to be positions of expediency utilitarianism proper — morality, which if can utility meet not is locally intersubstltutivity Thus confined. requirements of unlike the war game theory, does not assign different weights which, to (say) the individual utility of Americans as opposed to Russians — is not to be dismissed as considering only expediency. There are however significant moral differences, between and utilitarians 17 deontologists especially, which serve to further complicate the moral picture Thus utilitarian approaches have seemed to justify ugly strategies and practices render as morally regards deontological principles would not permit (even with the convenient law of double effects). But this is permissible enemy best already or civilians, bending to of to that the effect some Page 8 Characteristically, national interest is taken to differently, to override morality impose Irresistible ethical claims that dominate more ordinary ethical considerations (such as even the immorality of killing millions). as or, Schell puts it, Thus, ’What is being claimed is that one or two countries have the right to jeopardise all countries and their descendents in the name certain of beliefs’ (II, p.70). But morally national interest can do neither of those things. simply the The first is substitution of expediency for morality, which entirely lacks moral justification, while second, the the alleged moral dominance of national fails in important classes of cases, including, so the argument will Interests, go, the case of LN war. States may insist upon operating on a selfish national interest basis, let it not pretended be expediency (’’group governments. Morality it is a moral basis as distinct from one of There is no that egoism’’). works in the special dispensation moral For example, what ought be to as regards x semantically, what would happen as regards x in all ideal worlds; no difference x is an individual or States such as Israel (in its recent organisation. behaving whether just as immorally as brigands individual invasion or mass killers: difference. Certainly there are grounds on which states or claimed been conceded special moral dispensations; or for same way for groups as for individuals: there is no logical difference in the pattern of justification, or obligation. but are no more than that and do not stand up to criticism. of analysis is, analysed and it makes system, group or of are Lebanon) there is no moral their agents have but the excuses offered A satisfactory moral theory cannot furnish two (Incompatible) moralities, a state or public one and a private or individual citizen one - state expediency and individual morality - Page 7 partisanship - since utilitarians would the reject description practices of permitted under their principles as ’ugly’ - and an objective in what follows is to avoid metaethlcal partisanship, to achieve metaethical, though of course moral, neutrality. argument can begin. several And morally there is a large area of consensus Virtually all positions cities major in agree that the 18 not from which obliteration of a LN war would be wrong - indeed morally outrageous. Where there is dissension, as there may be among nuclear strategists who seem to feel qualms no 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 necessary, then try to work down again. until moral repugnance is encountered; The fact remains however that things have got substantially out of perspective, Strategic thinking, in particular, has tended to abandon, or suppress morally. moral considerations (as indeed many theories of the state also pretend to do). Naturally the fact of broad consensus as to the morality of the matter does not mean that there are none who would welcome such outrageous happenings, that total nuclear destruction of the North even, would be Consider the world empire. be realised. rising southern (hemisphere) no one’s While the superpowers of the north remain SS’s dream Thus his best strategy, exchange in the North. There advantage. strongman, SS, who has visions of will can be to a encourage point an all-out then in securing institutional arrangements so that potential SS’s do not accumulate much especially given the that is to anticipate: has its limitations, structural adjustments. hardly rid of southern waters of US having submarines and southern lands of US bases, is to try nuclear to power, apparent instability of crucial world arrangements. the present point is that (the fact of) moral and is an inadequate But consensus constraint without accompanying Page 9 19 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. derivative A group or organisation or in consideration can but role, bound be by moral principles. special these are derivative principles, good for any such institution, which fit within and answer general in y by state interests) when x and person its of virtue citizen damage to For back to 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) its of citizens: its (at charter does not legitimate emergent allegedly moral principles which conveniently coincide with those of state expediency. particular, In state is not (morally) entitled to risk the lives of many of its a own citizens and of other peoples and creatures for its own ends, even its for own survival. §3. Arguments to the Immorality of LN wars. can which set be since aside, the concede that war per se is not a crime. but pacifist positions immorality of LN wars follows at once - Not all wars are immoral, though states. aristocratic Among young men admissible wars are the external tournaments or of or warriors who volunteer as soldiers where the action does not spill over onto noncombatants, and some early and medieval wars, few even wars may be pointless or inferior ways of settling political issues inoffensive between All no combatants even were killed in war. where Since the establishment of such induction practices as conscription and recruitment of the near-destitute, have largely ceased to take these inoffensive forms: far removed from the ideal ecotopian literature war-tournament (where type, that its position is dubious). immoral, but few to such an extent as LN wars. wars modern massive wars are features now only in Most sorts of wars are Page 10 argument The first key to (1KA) the of (and wars LN of immorality sufficiently large-scale wars generally) takes the following form: Pi. The deliberate killing in mass of noncombatants is wrong. Pli. LN wars involve the killing in mass of noncombatants. (KA) What involves what is wrong is wrong. Piii . LN wars are wrong. J Supplementary remarks are called for:- Firstly, the (1KA) is one just representative of a Characteristically, in Western culture, it is arguments of that thought argument given of type. mass this taken But the focus can be off the killing: destruction of a first variation on (KA) replaces ’killing the is basis of may each be attacked of its premisses. wrong is as There slack by a has in effect been Let us consider these in that what involves are, in particular, such those generated by Good Samaritan arguments, which purport to show that some proper obligations involve wrongdoing. too noncombatants’ wrong, often expanded to a "distribution of obligation over entailment" principle, has been challenged. problems (and The principle, Piii, used in the argument, reverse order. what of Other variations will emerge in the discussion. but The argument is valid, on mass Thus concerning ’huge destruction of lifestyle of uninvolved or not clause directly involved creatures’. attacked) in of lifestyle nonhumans and humans alike that an LN war will bring is sufficiently evil. suitable of killing about the worst thing that can happen (after the killing of police). is humans set particular a notion of involvement; linked to paradox-free entailment 20 But the problems derive from with a tighter Involvement connective, , the problems disappear, and Piii stands. Page 11 As against Pii, it may be legitimately argued against directed nuclear that military targets. wars can encounters be But given the character of nuclear weapons, LN wars could in no way be confined to such targets. merely the likelihood that many missiles explode off target. not the other effects of large-scale nuclear bombings, for example down-wind fallout There is There are all the radioactive military targets, which in the case of US and European from targets especially will effect large concentrations of people, Including therein perhaps uninvolved countries such as Canada. There may be an attempt to avoid the problem of massive civilian casualties by appeal to such dubious principles as the doctrine of double effect (or side 21 effect) If missiles were characteristically was which intended only to destroy an reliably underground unmanned unfortunately went off course and destroyed a large city, it the that Such claims should be rejected: not wrongness lessened could make a difference; for firing the city. the and one missile silo could be claimed mass destruction is legitimised under the double effect (unintended) principle. target, on the action would be wrong, and by the given intention. the Nonetheless the circumstances for they may mitigate attitudes to those responsible missile, since it was not as if they had deliberately aimed at The double effect principle confuses [diminution of] the allocation of responsibility for an act with the [diminution of] wrongness of the act. As against Pi, and as regards the middle term of Pi argued that there is an important equivocation. the bracketed term, killing ’deliberate’. While it will and Pii, it may be The equivocation is induced by be that admitted deliberate of genuine innocents is impermissble , it will be contended firstly that they noncombatants, insofar as innocent, directly many being are distinguishable, involved in are by no means all military effort, whether just as Page 12 taxpayers or as suppliers of goods farmers or services used innocent. second The point Because Pii so amended in less defensible, and/or other reasons, discussed. leave to out the "modifier" ’deliberate’. of the perpetrators. it What is important for the present purposes is the moral status of what is done, not that motives e.g. military, a much narrower - and less defensible - version of premiss Pll already concerns best the and secondly LN wars do not involve the or bootmakers or entertainers; deliberate killing of those properly excluded as is by mixed with the So ’deliberate’ is out, equivocation is avoided, 22 Pii stands, and so does Pl. For not does Pi ’deliberate’, or ’intentional’ or the like. require the qualification Admittedly also ’noncombatant’ is a fuzzy term, but none the worse for that, and there is no problem serious in marking out a class of clear noncombatants, people who are not directly involved in the command and action chains. practice, deriving from There is, moreover, Catholicism, of no need to the adopt stating an initial version of Pi in terms of innocents - at least as problematic 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, art arguments for the premisses, though for the substantive moral premiss Pi they are of the characteristically nonconclusive moral sort vary somewhat with the underlying ethical theory. and will tend seriously understate the point) minimal respect owed to them as persons doing so 23 The argument from historical requirements on just wars from convergence. conclusion that fails to treat them with the §4. The to For example, one argument for Pi, and for objecting to the killing of noncombatants, is the Kantian one, (to there that and the argument LN wars cannot be justly waged - and Page 13 accordingly are unjustified - is not merely something dreamed up by contemporary opponents The same conclusion falls out of various traditional requirements, worked etc). out America or of the capitalist State (and communistically inspired, of times mdeieval in just for variant on the key argument (1KA). was justly that not it be One of the requirements gives but a wars. For a necessary condition for fighting a war the that case noncombatants are bound to be killed (cf. numbers large [innocent] of Barnes, p.775). A just war requires just means, that the war should be fought morally by which implies in particular that there is no indiscriminate killing of noncombatants. The implied principle was escapsulated in a principle legitimate of means, (between combatants and others) which ’prohibits all actions discrimination directly Intended to take the lives of p.312) 24 civilians and of (PL, noncombatants’ LN wars, where not only military installations are targeted, violate . U. . 25 this requirement Overlapping the requirement of just means is that of proportion being that of net evil to net good): ’the damage to be inflicted and costs Incurred by the war must be proportionate to the good expected up arms’ (PL, p.312). disproportionate to moral goods proportionality requirement is criterion of by the which achieved in doctrine "improvement" through war : not are of that nationally way. confined, overall consequences of abstaining improvement "puts wrongs to rights": "ameliorative" conditions and war according to the first, justly the ’X wages war bad, from war’ (Barnes, p.72). ’A nation wages war are Entangled with the justly upon y if the overall consequences of war are better, or less the taking is not difficult to see that LN wars violate this It the damage and costs, requirement: (the proportionality only than Similarly if the for that nation or the wronged nation it is supporting have a decent Page 14 chance of being better after the fighting ends’ (Wakin, p.20). way LN war can in no satisfy these conditions, as scenarios depicting the aftermath of such wars reveal. Some of the lesser requirements for a just war are infringed wars; LN It seems that there can for example, that of reasonable expectation of success. be no reasonable expectation of success in an LN by war, the whatever prospects of success with more limited nuclear exchanges. (limited) What is less clearcut is the question of whether LN wars conflict with the requirements of just cause or due fault and of right intention. For this depends on the sensitive issue of the weight assigned to what are seen as basic rights human and fundamental values, and the extent to which just wars can be ideologically justified. the mainstream justified position and wars definitively excluded however, in puzzling of medieval "humanitarian" by the over decisive against LN wars. theory wars (cf. traditional was opposed to While ideologically Barnes, p.778), these were not theory. There is merit, little dubiously effective requirements, when so many are Finally, these arguments from historical requirements do not violate prescriptive requirements: the argument is not a simple argument from historical authority, but also premisses uses requirements imposed (and used) were justified. the to effect that the As they are. In the Christian tradition there were two main strands of reflection on the moral rightness or justness of wars 9A , the just war theory and a rival pacificist strand, prominent in early Christianity, but submerged from Augustine on until contemporary times. Both exclude nuclear wars, one strand because they are inevitably unjust, the other because they are wars and This is the involve violence beginning of the convergence argument against nuclear wars: such wars are excluded from all ethical perspectives, once expediency is 27 that duly Page 15 The detailed argument They are morally wrong however you look at it. removed. is an exhaustive case by case one, from each type of moral theory. can details For deontological and contractual theories lead back be shortcut. to requirements for a just war, violate. Fortunately which it has already shown, been In fact conditions for just wars were sometimes arrived at or defended through principles of such moral theories, so that a good deal of the work argumentative already has brand utilitarian of finally accomplished; for such and is adopted, not is far to have effect in shown pleasure, reason The wars Involves such massive that this dominates genuine alternative to LN war is better or 28 outlined against overwhelming moral case against such wars. wars LN do not exhaust the For there are other moral principles (derivative in some of the theories just considered) which the waging of war would violate. in are accomplished in utilitarian fashion, so that any they The arguments given LN that utility maximisation is however seek: infliction of pain and colossal removal of however others requisite latter point holds also as LN wars are excluded on utilitarian grounds. convergence assessments The done. been regards utilitarianism, where Lackey whatever wars LN an LN Among such principles are conservative ones, that we have an obligation to maintain the earth in proper shape and not degrade its systems, that we have a responsibility to future generations, to whom we are accountable, to "pass the world on" not in substantially worse condition it". Such conservative principles than we "received - however they are finally satisfactorily formulated - are bound to be violated in the event of an LN war. §5. The shift to nuclear lobby nuclear arguments deterrence: to its immorality. The has a way of halting, and if not defeating, certainly deflating, arguments against the immorality of LN wars, namely there is no actual Page 16 such any In engagement wars. different from engagement in war: LN being done is, it is claimed, quite is What is deterrence indeed important most precisely in preventing such wars from ever occurring, as well as in maintaining (other) fundamental [Western] values. obtaining desiderata. both is deterrence pronouncements, claims The reasons:- A first reason is that Indeed it is the only there are is much for more than deterrence can account neither for strategy military Western disarmament to expected be On deterrence. 29 the despite For if it and sometimes even a drive for superiority. this, actual nuclear of In fact there has been a were "sufficiency" to deter would be an adequate goal. quest that, evidence the - the only - military goal. not way dubious, for several decidedly too practical nor weapons for Pure orthodox Nor has deterrence set in motion the process of . to armaments reduce "its" under contrary, to levels impulse there sufficient has for been almost unlimited acceleration in building arms (PL, p.318, quotes inserted). Another of deterrence reason for the type serious that is doubt being concerns other reasons also, connected with pure deterrence The reasons include the for nuclear war and with to For original (its threatening posture deterrence for, the propaganda that must be promulgated to maintain credibility with a population whose interests are being etc. conditions the "cold war", the probability of a LN war has increased considerably in the last 30 years. calls factor: to that extent, at least, enhanced its prospects of occurring. and setting) probability practised, which involves full-scale preparation for nuclear war, has prepared the occur, the The "sacrificed" for objectives, situation has now been reached where many theorists think there is a high probability at least of an LN war this century, i.e. certainly military be before 2000. It can argued - though there seems no way to make any such a probability argument at all tight, and it may be demonstrable that it cannot be made tight - Page 17 that there is a non-negligible probability of an LN war before 2000. If it is wrong that X should occur, then it is also wrong that Cl. be But highly probably that should it X occur, and it is wrong to increase the probability that X occur. This is the first several of connecting doxastic mapping principles moral considerations against LN war into arguments against deterrence of LN war by the perverse practice of preparing for it and thereby helping "to the sense of raising the probability). (in it bring about" But like most principles in ethics, Cl requires complication to avoid defeat by counterexamples. The second part of Cl encounters apparent trouble where clash of principles occurs. Thus it may be argued that it is permissible to increase the probability that X occurs to avoid a greater Consider for example the pilot who increases the probability evil. that the passenger plane he is flying crashes in order to aircraft troubled does not make hit city apartment buildings 30 . sure Such a defeating condition does not apply in the case of nuclear deterrence where is there (though of principles) wrongness of a practice is not offset or removed by clash a the that its role in avoiding greater evil. It can be argued that it is; argument from the previous such is part of success of the deterrence. point of the popular This inductive argument deserves little more credence than the racing driver’s argument, perhaps from similar that because he hasn’t had a fatal crash yet (despite some base, time a close calls), he won’t. There are, furthermore, reasons for concluding continue to work. of will not One is the deterrence depends upon judgements regarding the other side, which may be mistaken: perception deterrence that what strategy ’each is is at rational", the mercy what kind the of of other’s damage is Page 18 one "unacceptable", how "convincing" Not p.313). threat side’s other’ the (PL. as rational, regards limited but there must be severe doubts as to whether rational principles war, As to the last consider, for example, the are operating effectively. idea to is there evidence that one side (the USA) has misjudged the only other side’s (the USSR’s) perception of what is nuclear is (already erroneous to, as held in high places of power) that LN war can be alluded survived in rudimentary shelters, and also won. Deterrence consists in preventing something (often some wrong) by threats including 31 OED) . (cf. fright For most people without not Immoral destruction of New York.) deterrence, that is his graphic descriptions But though deterrence per deterrence from suchmeans is of course not immoral. publishing in them LN expense, trouble and wastage of preparing to enormous And deterrence by engage in them. was the all or scenarios vivid portraying the horror or LN wars would serve adequately to deter wars, fear by complete se is the of (Schell nuclear permissible, war preparation of the object to be prevented, is not, where this object Itself is not permissible. The argument for this is through the principle C2. If X is wrong then complete preparation of X is wrong. Hence since LN wars are wrong and war-deterrence implies of LN wars is wrong. war—deterrence X is just as bad as doing X: Y. preparation, It is not being claimed that preparing for Y and Z may both be wrong and Z (much) worse than , 32 What is wrong is by no means uniformly evil Principle C2 principles: a part is way succeeds or down the line in a series of connecting principle of the same sort that it higher in the series is that connecting X with attempted X: X complete not 33 . But if X is wrong then attempted X is wrong, whether the series ends; it cuts off well before mere Page 19 intentionality, contrary to the claims example, it does various of religious For positions. not follow that if X is wrong then the contemplation of X is wrong or that mere non-action-oriented consideration of carrying out X is wrong. The applies point nightmares. or war, equally sexual fantasies, power fantasies, and nuclear to In particular there is nothing reflecting upon it, as we are: wrong nuclear nuclear wars, even if their horrors don't bear thinking on, are not unthinkable, and in thinkable. contemplating with some senses are all too Indeed one of the reasons why the connecting principles hold is that each involves decidedly increased probability of the evil outcome it connects Accompanying the increased probability are certain sets of reprehensible with. these are not those attitudes tied to the action the evil outcome involves; mere passive contemplation of 34 this War-deterrence involves not only war preparation, but announcement of accompanied by threats and a threatening posture. For some party, the potential enemy, has to be frightened, if deterrence is to succeed. This aspect of (war-) deterrence yields a further connecting principle, If X is wrong then threatening X is also wrong. C3. is wrong to do ... then the declared Intent put to that Intending to do wrong is wrong, and so also is favourable circumstances for one’s alternatively be argued semantically: (e.g. into Intending position committing 35 . rape) The is practice is also wrong. to prevail. if a world with X 'What Ramsey: is wrong to threaten ...’ (quoted in Walzer p.272) reason is that if putting something into practice wrong Thus too is do wrong The never unless point ideal can then neither is a world in which X is only conditionally blocked, in which X may well occur. Page 20 By detachment from the connecting principles - one sound one would but logically, defensible three ones is good measure - nuclear deterrence by preparation for and threat of LN war is This wrong. also reveals suffice Deterrence wrong. of this type the suggestion that the morality of the whole why deterrence thing depended on war itself never occurring was so bizarre: connections between war and war-deterrence. the out is it left War-deterrence should not be practised any more than nuclear war itself should be engaged in - unless directions can be drastically changed (e.g. its at least limited, per impossible in the case of nuclear, to purely military targets). There are other concomitant reasons for the Firstly, with dissatisfaction deterrence. it has provided (nuclear peace, as there is no shortage of peace small-scale conventional wars) is at least a tenuous peace, which is not stable, liable but upset at any stage by a range of factors, including error (both to It does not offer genuine peace, of the sort required for human and technical). a international life, but only a fragile "peace of a sort" (PL, p.316). stable Secondly, there is enormous cost, the because on expenditure it moral excludes Bishops put their point in a surprising opportunity urgent other by Marxist cost of deterrence, The US moral priorities. way: in terms of ’the between what is spent for destructive capacity and what is needed contradiction for constructive development’ (PL, p.316). §6. The and super-states; arguments to persuasive prudential practical, the the resulting arguments (that have war persuaded justifiability of nuclear war preparation in basic argument is simply an elaboration, build-up nuclear situation. moral-fix nuclear of immorality to argument Not preparation; many the or theorists) present of the only are there there to are the circumstances. also moral The state-uplift, of that for the Page 21 escalation of weapons at the local level, for acquiring a gun or for stocking-up the armoury [and every bit as doubtful as that argument]. neighbourhood that nuclear preparation, first danger: of nuclear destruction. blackmail, ’so we have been told, against guards all atomic blackmail and foreign domination; The two together, go since if did we double the and second of not the fear we might adopt a policy of appeasement or surrender and so avoid the destruction’ (Walzer, p.273). In fact it is supposed to guard against more than there is a crucial third element, namely, loss of basic rights (freedom, these; equality, etc.) and fundamental values (preservation of etc.) and ways of life integrated with these. truth, dignity, human This further set of elements is linked to the danger of foreign domination - which is really a separate from It is risk blackmail. of element Though foreign 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 infringement of basic values can occur without foreign domination, e.g. of by internal change government or governmental approach, by the increased security and control a nuclear state demands, etc. values, through Nuclear destruction can also involve loss of destruction but the converse does not hold. basic of the material base of the cherished life-style; It should be observed that not all the values concerned are equally fundamental: one of the main values of deterrence theory, the resistance to and of containment "communism", is questionable this in regard. The theme is, in short, NA. Because of multiple (connected) states) which have nuclear dangers from another state (or other weapons, a state - any state that is too large to rely upon other states - is obliged to invest in [matching] nuclear weapons. Page 22 Hence, by detachment, a nation-state, such as USA, ought to order the of nuclear armoury that it something have in has, or, weakening the theme to meet objections concerning excess, "overkill", capacity, at least a solid core of the nuclear devices it has. out whether the obligation is a moral one, Sorting because for instance of the character of the values supposedly being merely or one protected, of prudential reason - it is presumably somewhat more than mere expediency - can be set aside for the present. On the same basis it can be argued that unilateral disarmament against a dangerous nuclear opponent would be prudentially irrational. It can be freely admitted that what is prudentially required is, like the common strategies of the prisoners’ dilemma situation and of certain competitive games, a suboptimal strategy; sufficient trust, that a superior strategy for adversaries, if etc., could be achieved, would be a cooperative arrangement. Joint agreement would be better not merely in removing the moral dilemma, but in a range of other respects: it would be much less risky, expensive, draining of resources and destructive of the environment, etc. However for the present and the foreseeable future the prospects of cooperation appear, so we are repeatedly told, unfortunately rather remote: or the only sure insurance is nuclear if one is a smaller nation, a larger ally who has an arsenal. force (Here a level of trust is called for which is far from foolproof, and which contrasts strongly with the lack of trust displayed elsewhere.) The nuclear theme for a middling or lesser power is a bit different from NA and ends rather as follows: MA. Because ..., a state that cannot rely on obliged ally. its own nuclear resources is to accommodate the nuclear installations and facilities of a protecting Page 23 Principle MA is not very plausible, nor are the for substitutes obvious Not only MA but also NA, is now coming under question by disarmament it ° . who groups, more challenge the basic assumptions of the underlying general retaliatory model that Safely lies in weapons, and 1) More weapons imply more security ii) 37 Certainly, for more isolated states, such as New Zealand, lies attack submarines). more of a in excluding nuclear facilities from safety nuclear (including visits from nuclear Europeans are arguing in a similar way, that the present system is risk [liability] than a protection (p.251, Thompson); nuclear installations, Europe cannot be the envisaged and without for theatre a limited nuclear war it is now seen as by US (but not Soviet) strategists. Once i) and ii) are questioned, other assumptions of the retaliatory model and its variants come up for examination, namely iii) iv) Whether the proper response to danger is armament, in particular Whether the proper response is through nuclear armament, as opposed to other military responses (such as conventional arms), and generalising on part of Hi), v) Whether military approaches/procedures (through armaments, etc.) the proper is method, or should be the method, of conflict resolution at the international level. It is plausibly argued against military procedures that at no ordinary level do we set about meeting danger or settling disputes by acquiring lethal weapons and threatening to use them - except perhaps warranted, frontier ethics. But on an out-dated, and never really this takes us into the issue of alternative defence systems, an important matter beginning to obtain the contemporary 38 explanation it deserves, but one that already anticipates subsequent questioning Page 24 While the state system is intact, of the framework of nation-states. not and exceptional inevitable: according military to is are to be expected and are likely permanent place in the procedures ’force has [a] ... force nation-state system’ Ramsey (p.xv) who uses this as part of his case for a nuclear war doctrine. far Assembling the arguments so to as the nuclear fix:- referred hereafter developed engage to sections) it is and immoral, in war-deterrence, for prudential reasons (as argued using NA This dilemma is no idle construction and MA). dilemma, deontic States both ought not to engage in war-deterrence, because (as argued in previous ought the yields (concocted to demonstrate of paraconsistent logic), but a serious real-life dilemma, the outlines virtues of which are repeatedly encountered in texts on nuclear war and its aspects The nuclear fix is in part simply a more intense dilemma beyond produced purely by itself^, war military typically transport, (since targets rely on or version of deontic the civilian ones). e.g. arrangements, military rail The main dilemma arises from a War is required for defence of the state and values it upholds (or pretends to uphold); also involves immoral acts and evil consequences. also seen be ’some The doctrine "just of justifications of war evil alm are consequences to morally war’ (Walls, p.260). dilemmas, e.g. most difficult war" the aegis War and preparedness for war also generate subsidiary a severe tension between freedom and problems justified. show that actions deemed normally forbidden by moral mandates are now permissible when performed under of but war as attempting a reconciliation by trying to show that under certain circumstances these really Thus 39 at least war which spreads inevitably combination of the retaliatory model with the features of war. can the of war Involves authority: defending a ’one of the free society without Page 25 destroying the values that give it meaning and validity’ (PL, p.324). The essential feature of a moral dilemma is that both A and the negation of A are well essential role of moral dilemmas is not widely or literature 41 The place and (or differently, obligatory), for some suitable A. wrong . positions Moreover understood utilitarianism like cannot ethical in at all easily accommodate moral dilemmas or the data which gives rise to them - but then such positions do not really offer reportive accounts of wrong and obligation anyway. Contrary to utilitarian perceptions a dilemma does not any have necessarily moral solution, though there may be better and worse ways out. Reactions and responses that are characteristic of the from nuclear moral dilemmas There is an unsteadiness, an uncertainty as to what to fix. do, which way to proceed, which principles in watered-down form to temporary Thus, crutch. for world’ best" 42 as a of way "morally never our exercising moral , that is in a morally-strapped world. ethical Bishops who the of ’strictly conditional’ moral fix. Deterrence has a strictly temporary role but can be responsibility a shift "morally in a fallen to a ’moral "second acceptability’ try to escape ’the paradox of deterrence’, i.e. while acceptability, good", A similar deterrence we as (as from good to acceptable) is made by the US Catholic functor speak grasp example, the Bishop of London contends that the possession of nuclear weapons ’while acceptable" emerge the object must and strictly be to move beyond deterrence, of from the conditional ’towards a world free of the threat of deterrence’ (PL, p.317), out of the nuclear fix. To make matters worse the nuclear fix is is, not furthermore, a fix of (more something they happened into, by affluent) states’ accident. The initial nuclear involvement was deliberately chosen, primarily by USA, and the own making. It escalation has by and large also been deliberately chosen, again Page 26 In these respects the situation is like that often by the USA. who person deliberately lets perself to be involved in two incompatible relations, and that currency, of adoption nuclear is the that nuclear build-up. The recent (1980) programme is to be in addition to existing are (which Soviet USA Initiated nuclear armament, and has frequently led escalation, and apparently still does. resources some weaponry, and nuclear build-up, in North America occurred on a defensive basis in response to fact with It is a myth, though one builds up conflicting obligations thereby. The the of generally United strategic be already in excess of to agreed States’ Russia’s, and which always have been so) (Thompson, p.21). The present dilemma is then a direct outcome advanced of state policy, especially by capitalist nations, and not merely a response to the Soviets (or state socialism). There is a two-way connection between world political arrangements and nation-states the nuclear fix. On the one hand, situation increasingly is political arrangements / Q ; seen political these arrangements are an evident source of the dilemma with the result through that nuclear as indicating the inadequacy of present world on the other, the nuclear fix tends to lock political arrangements into the statist form (into statist arrangements of an increasingly centralist cast). peace The espoused purpose of nuclear weapons may be to keep the (!) and to defend national interests, but there are other reasons such as perpetuating the system of sovereign states and politically confrontation. The argument to the theme that advantageous the very nuclear situation arising from the statist arrangements and interrelationals (economic conflicting rivalries, ideologies, etc.) tends to, and is used to, lock the world into the present arrangements of sovereign states and zones of interest, is practical state one. Consider first, the matter from a piecemeal the Soviet side where the Page 27 pattern of national control and military economic reorientation 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 controlled carefully ... and ... selective release of ’official information’ (Thompson, p.20). Secondly, there is evidence of entrenchment of the arrangements, by the SALT negotiations: of rules not regarded as threatening US in place by The Soviet invasion interests", and so the US is not "vital What was different, what particularly worried about Afghanistan and its people. it held penalty for breaking the rules is the threat of annihilation). (the Thirdly, there are cases, such as the Afghanistan example. is shown there are fixed superpowers and a (growing) nuclear club of nations all governed by a negotiated set deterrence as was worried about and made nuclear threats concerning, were adjacent Western these lay within the US zone of interest. oil supplies: 44 and complicates other dilemmas The nuclear fix enhances contemporary sovereign state, in particular the deep tensions between national security and the operation of liberal-democratic arrangements (e.g. liberty, popular control of institutions, etc). personal subsidiary dilemmas, as for example the obligations to a nuclear conflicting obligations the by induced as state, a or doctor It also spotlights other more extent role-induced or a individual nuclear of (political) one’s dilemmas armaments such as one’s processor or researcher (the question of political obligations is considered in Appendix 2). §7. Ways out of the moral dilemmas: [initial] political fall-out from the Page 28 conclusions. ethical all the ways are ways of limitation, and they Virtually all Involve in one way or another limitations on nuclear arms or are limitations on the powers of states. and deployed the they way The limitations may be 45 reached by agreement and negotiation and more or less voluntarily agreed , to or they may be imposed, or worst of all, they may emerge from an initial war. As with other fixes produced by are there suggested structure there and relations power and extra—state approaches. "realistic", attempts All to cow, as unilateral disarmament. is it states the or alter the remove them altogether, allegedly familiar, the seriously do which and "practical" nuclear problem - e.g. disarmament by they do not tamper with that - are inter-state; But in fact there is nothing very sacred not even a very long-standing arrangement, nor, as a matter or empirical fact, is one. states, of and the same goes for less "realistic" proposals, such the state; nation-state; arrangements which ways are of resolve neutral arms limitations, etc. sacred structural out which do not interfere with these arrangements, ways inter-state approaches, the it form about the political of particularly a stable We are certainly free - in more liberal states, it should be everywhere - to theorise as to its demise and replacement by alternative arrangements. Extra-state approaches take one of two routes, the way up, to genuine 46 power, or the way down, through fractionation or deunionisation international of states. not to The ways up and down are by no means one and the same; necessarily world government Were law-courts. remedy, namely intra-state incompatible. the through to Some of the important machinery, for the way up operate, courts legal but they are is assigned action, already there sufficient that medieval the international authority and power, the in theorists saw to all disputes could be extended to interstate disputes, and the just war Page 29 between states S and T superseded by the just case of S versus T. one statist, more legalistic of trying to get to grips with the nuclear way problem, and accordingly is often mentioned, though dismissed 47 in , orthodox The Way Up is mostly passing in strategic texts on thermonuclear war. It is however beginning to be much more sympathetically considered by those who take rather than strategic viewpoint. moral a There is a renewed emphasis on world order, in reaching ’towards a morally integrated international system’; element be to and ’the missing of world order today is the absence of a properly constituted political The Way Down - though, like The Way authority’ (PL, p.320). by Up, no means new, turning back to the anarchist positions of a century ago - is, by contrast, scarcely mentioned in the orthodox discussions, but is making an appearance (a which is comeback) in some more radical discussions. A main argument for The Way Up is to supposed underpin statist just arrangements a repetition in first the argument from (generous) variations upon the Prisoners’ that of place, namely the Dilemma, the as such Tragedy of the Commons, that authority and coercion - in the form of the state are requiried to ensure best solutions, ecological order. especially regards of part the sort of super-state. of the "tragedy" is destruction when to assume in fact assumptions 48 of a commons by nuclear war, the solution is now said to be some Of course, this begins to undermine an earlier application argument, since states will lose their sovereignty, and political obligation to states will be correspondingly weakened. is and order So with the "tragedy of nation-states", where the players are not herdsmen but nation-states, and one of the prospects good public But all this that these "tragedy" arguments are good ones in the first place, they are not but are only sound under quite restrictive Page 30 There are many problems with the Way Up, both theoretical and practical.An theoretical hitch is that the Way Up merely repeats statist arrangments initial at a level up, by way contingency, of super-state It arrangements. only is through a of there being no rival Intelligent civilisations nearby, that the problems of interstate relations not are repeated level a The up. major practical hitch is that there is no prospect at all of getting such a "solution" to work in time to serve its intended interstate future the For purpose. ideological differences, including especially differences as to how political arrangements should be effected, exclude world operative hostilities. government of prospect any an or world legal system capable of resolving nuclear In some ways, perhaps, this is just World well. as government be extremely monolithic, would entrench bureaucracy with all its damaging would features, and could easily tend to totalitarianism. on nuclear foreseeable the It would impose certainly an exploitative economic system which would do immense damage to world many remaining natural systems. The Way Up thus presupposes an unlikely, undesirable, level ideological, indeed requisite unity of political paradigmatic, cannot be and and expected unity economic separation with some in of nuclear main crucial respects, Moreover, given the Northern cultures, deadlines. When not even nuclear weapons limitations can be worked out how much less likely much more sweeping sovereignty, could be agreements, negotiated? Involving genuine There an is is limitations almost endless that it of state series of blockages and deadlocks in the way of such state reconciliation. The nuclear fix emerging from nation-state arrangements - combined with the apparent impotence of interstate relations to alleviate the situation, indeed with the ability only to push the world further into the situation and nearer to Page 31 nuclear now is - "brink" taken to indicate (from yet a further angle) the inadequacy of nation-state political arrangements, and has given new impetus resolutions. extra-state other of consideration to The thesis that the nuclear problem indicates the radical unsatisfactoriness of national sovereignty and the present system namely in Schell. ’full-scale nation states has even reached the best-seller book stands, of According to Schell the nuclear situation should they operate' ... which himself avoids these reality and in ’workfing] out the practical steps by which 'awesome (III, p.92). Schell However urgent tasks, which, imposed on us by history, constitute the political work of our age’^9, history consonant with the global can reorganise its political life’ mankind ... a of the foundations of political thought’ required to reexamination make ’the world’s political institutions ... in to lead So, not feeling the pressures of overimpressed by the realities of (unstable) nation-states, do most or political theorists. But, having rashly ventured this far, we can hardly avoid some of these tasks. The central argument arising from the nuclear fix, for questioning political arrangements and seriously current considering changing them (in theory at least), takes the following shape:- H1. Political arrangements should answer back to certain requirements and justified in terms of doing so. are These requirements include such things as enabling good and meaningful lives for those who operate under the arrangements, at least where (as certainly in the West) the basic material conditions for such lives are met. H2. these Because of the nuclear fix, nation-state arrangements have ceased to requirements. For guarantee the prospect of arrangements. nation-states, good and at meaningful meet least in the North can no longer lives to those under their A life's meaningfulness is certainly diminished if it ends before Page 32 its prime in a nuclear disaster; yet there is a non-negligible probability that many such lives may terminate, less than fulfilled, in this way. Therefore, Nation-state arrangements have forfeited their justification, H3. should and be changed. There is enough evidence that power brokers who control states, both more powerful states and lesser states (sometimes with some claim to popular mandate, often without), have lost sight of - or worse don’t care about - the point of political arrangments, of what justifies or is supposed to justify their states. The situation has been reached where ’nuclear powers, or higher value This is already illustrated by states in nonnuclear military situations: have much forfeited of what claim Vietnam Israel, many and the principles of just warfare have been blatantly violated repeatedly, as have many states put statesmen, on national sovereignty than they do on human survival’ (Schell’s conclusion, p.76). other their they Such principles. other had to external respect or internal political obedience. It could just be, of course, that there are no alternatives, or no possibly better But alternatives. alternatives there are, as we have seen, though but little work has been expended on working out the range of alternatives or features (except perhaps for the option of world government). As to whether all such alternatives can be dismissed, for instance as lacking feasibility, difficult to be all sure without being dogmatic: operate, once adjusted, very far on organising is humans, for under substantially different arrangments. But, once again, nuclear deadlines do not appear proceed it alternatives have been given very little opportunity to work, and we know very little about how instance, their to give sufficient time to and trying out alternative arrangments, even those of the more accessible Way Down. Thus alternative political and social Page 33 while theoretically feasible and certainly a longer-term goal, do arrangements, not presently offer a satisfactory practical response to the nuclear fix. There is no need to insist upon a dilemma to single-track the of out nuclear We can not only quite the contrary. exclusion of all others: the way afford to be fairly catholic about "second best" approaches pursued and whatever to be working or looks like helping, within reorganised ethical seems Indeed, (and other) constraints: situation, methods, should we as such urgency, the the of direness the and nondemocratlc very (and down certainly negotiations on arms limitations between main nuclear states. The direction of most hope is given be fairly catholic and not inflexibly commited to narrow bogged unrepresentative) direction embrace for especially new. not has progress however come into view; the The political means of the Way Out are what they have been on almost every larger liberal or that issue humanitarian has from outside state governmental apparatus by organised pressure from mattered; within or without upon it, characteristically Bottom-Up Such Top-Down. familiar and practically never considerations are but part of the more general, and very effective, case against reliance upon states for a range of things they are now supposed required, to more supply, effectively but can almost Invariably be obtained, where which and less expensively without (and them their monopolies). In the case of security it is states, with very few exceptions, that have imposed, or acquiesed in, military solutions involving nuclear installations and The nuclear weapons. frequently from across nations. installations opposition local and the to neighbourhood These groups have been and establishing, for escalating groups, successful the time nuclear fix has come some of them now federated in blocking being, some some nuclear nuclear-free Page 34 The patchwork grass-roots movement against nuclear is strongest neighbourhoods. in which Europe, - as the movement realised, and what gave it impetus - a is leading theatre, on US American touching thinking, strategic American nuclear installations in Europe will make it a contrary it probable seems nuclear limited a war that Europe safer much become will place: safer on the if the anti-nuclear movements succeed in having these installations removed and rendered nuclear-free. not is extremely doubtful that increasing NATO and It shores. for Europe The chances of grossly immoral conduct will thereby also be considerably reduced. What the movements must press for is accordingly clear it is in broad outline: what they have been pushing for, nuclear reduction and disarmament. But the argument also makes it clearer how far this should go, namely all the way to nuclear unilateral disarmament if necessary, certainly to local disarmament across progressively larger parts of the planet’s surface. is its demoted, importance and the necessity of For once the state its maintenance properly downgraded and reliance on its decision-making diminished in favour of localised decision-making (say) - once all that happens or is allowed for, one major component in the nuclear fix is removed, namely the worry about sovereignty. the of that sovereignty has of been assigned a mistaken weakest links in the moral fix structure. In the weigh-up that should occur in charting a way out of moral dilemma, much more Important elements features state The state, and accompanying features such as misplaced nationalism, importance. are Maintenance loss than the state are those things the state is supposed to safeguard such of as individual and local welfare and autonomy, but they are better ensured by the removal of nuclear weapons. The nuclear circumstances threaten the loss of basic values, autonomy, for in particular, main reasons are familiar; such as welfare and many creatures and regions, and the potential loss is in general Page 35 much greater than in a nuclear-free situation (even should party remain armed with nuclear weapons). for example, the production (because of nuclear another ideological There are also subsidiary reasons; weapons reduces local both welfare of the opportunity costs of weapons manufacture) and autonomy (because of the accompanying security measures). Thus the nuclear fix is resolved, theoretically at loss of the state. any rate, by risking But, although that is the best way out at least cost in the circumstances, it will be strongly resisted in practice, since those who hold power hold it, in one way or another, under the auspices of state. FOOTNOTES 1. The US Catholic Bishops 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 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 (the paper was Initially drafted independently of PL). To illustrate the differences that emerge with removal of the religious backdrop and its acoutrements, consider 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 head (forms of violence) as if they stood and fell together, e.g. abortion and nuclear war. 2. 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 is in no way alters the immorality of LN wars, as will emerge. 3. ’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 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 LN war by its probability given a Page 36 limited nuclear war. Given the character of weapons development and present communication arrangements, the idea of a purely nuclear exchange between the superpowers, perhaps in the European "theatre", is really a myth. But limited wars are not the present focus. 4. 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 are not just unsporting, in that no notice is given, etc. They are unjust in a much deeper way. 5. 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 world properly meaning ’war’’. (OED) 6. But of course there can be something quite analogous to war between clans, multinational firms, even nature, etc. (To this extent, a strict definition of ’war’ is being insisted upon.) So the diffusion of power structures has to extend beyond just the break-down of states. 7. Thus the ubiquitous war against Nature of modern times, which features just as large in marxists as in capitalists. As could have been guessed, someone - it was James - suggested chanelling 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 is through war games and other games of competitive cast. Again specious arguments enter for bringing out the "best" in human males. 8. War can be seen as a structural problem of state arrangments, to be removed along with these (otherwise defective) arrangements. Wars arise from political organisation of states - a situational fix. 9. 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! 10. There is however the degenerate idea of war as 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" is said to "win". But this is an extremely tenuous sense of winning. Moreover any such war is radically unjust, because of violation of the traditional requirement of proportionality, and for other reasons developed in the text. 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). Page 37 Unfortunately as documented in Scheer, significant officials who are responsible for the nuclear destiny of the U.S.A. - and so of the world think that the devastation of nuclear war can be survived and that a global nuclear war can actually be won! 11. In practice they often were not, they drained limited economies, they layed waste countryside (though to a minor extent by nuclear or chemical or modern mining standards), impoverishing Inhabitants, etc. 12. For as Nagel contents (early on), there are moral restrictions on the conduct of warfare which are not legalistic only and which are neither arbitrary not merely conventional nor a matter of usefulness. These themes run entirely counter to the classic theory of war of Clausowicz - a theory outlined in Walzer. 13. As Nagel remarks. 14. The progressive escalation argument is an incremental Sorites. This is part of the so-called "logic of war". 15. As Walzer argues, p.24. 16. The severe limitations of those also come from the failure person from inside the homeland which excessive applications of 17. Thus the differences between Nagel on the one side, and Brandt and the other, in Cohen et al. 18. The pattern of moral argument has much in common with procedure in anarchist political discussion. 19. There are other arguments against two (or Routley and Plumwood. 20. For details see Routley and Plumwood. 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 forseen and/or intimately tied to the intended consequences. The doctrine is pernicious allowing those who adjust their intention suitably 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 effects, effects have no responsibility for the resultant effect on American and Canadian cities! 22. Despite Nagel’s suggestion (pp.158). 23. Of course there are counterarguments too, and not merely from military in the case of small numbers of obstructive noncombatants. One is a variation of 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 argument like the lesser virtues, nationalism and patriotimsm, of replacement - try for example swapping a by one from outside as regards treatment patriotism can engender. multiple) morality Hare lines: on see Page 38 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. The principle can be argued to in various ways. One (not entirely conclusive) way is Nagel’s way, from the requirements of directness and relevance in combat, the underlying 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) 25. The situation with limited nuclear wars where the targets are essentially military ones, and noncombatants are unaccountably killed "indirectly' is 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. 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). 26. Throughout the OED equations,reflecting common usage, of just with right or correct, and unjust with morally wrong, are adopted. 27. 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 Twentieth Century 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). 28. An argument of this sort is developed in more detail, though not in complete generality, in Goodin. 29. As to the first point, there is not only overkill capacity and the drive for superiority (often represented via "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 sharpline has been drawn between conventional and nuclear weapons: on these and other related points see further Lackey 82, p.l91ff., and also Thompson and Smith. 30. The example was supplied by D. 31. Deterrence also commonly includes elements of mendacity, deception, misinformation. There is a grain of truth in the claim that ’deterrence is primarily about what the other side thinks, not what we think’ (Pym quoted morally Johnson. Page 39 in Thompson, p.19). simply 32. Nor are degrees of wrongness required: ordered as regards worseness. 33. Can this be done semantically in terms of closeness/worseness The attempted X world is close to the X world? 34. There is a need for further clarification here. Passive spectatorship of evil events where one is in a position to make a difference is quite another thing, from contemplation of other worlds where evil occurs. 35. It is this principle especially that forces Ramsey, a Protestant theologian who is a nuclear hawk, into the tight position he ends in, which as Walzer explains, really leaves no room to move. For in virtue of C3 it must be allowed that the threatened wars are permissible to carry out. Ramsey tries to limit these to military exchanges. But to be effective as a deterrent, the exchange permitted must both threaten and also, in view of C3, not threaten nonmilitary targets, collateral non-combatant populations. It appears that Ramsey’s position, if worked out, would be inconsistent. wrongs can be partially of worlds? Principle C3 is also invoked by the US Catholic Bishops: see 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. 36. As is widely known, inadmissible 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 jobs. 37. Cf. 38. It was considered long ago in China by the alternative systems, see especially Sharp. 39. 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 demurfs] because of moral qualms’ (p.xil). 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). the last article in Thompson. Mohists. For contemporary Similarly the Catholic Bishops present the situation in terms of a moral dilemma: they speak of ’the political paradox of deterrence ... the dilemma of how to prevent the use of nuclear weapons ... (PL, p.313). 40. 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. Page 40 41. There are exceptions of course, e.g. Sartre; and Nagel’s final example is very instructive. For a full theory of moral dilemmas see however Routley and Plumwood. 42. Reported in The Economist; reprinted in The 1983, Weekend Magazine p.2. 43. This is no longer a radical theme but is widely promulgated. The source of the nuclear problem comes from state arrangements: it is ’... a world of sovereign states ... which brought the world to the present dangerous situation’. (PL, p.313) 44. It is not alone responsible for these other dilemmas. Large-scale nuclear power and other types of warfare and security arrangements also contribute. 45. 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 considered. Animals, by contrast, are smart enough to settle disputes by means much more like these. 46. Americans, for example, tend to forget that their State (like USSR) is a union, of fairly recent origin; and that a State of the Union message could consider the dissolution of the union. 47. 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. 48. See further Routley and especially Griffin. 49. Schell does not make it clear whether he is thinking of the Way Up or the Way Down, but some of the names he drops suggest the Way Up. So can some 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.76, III), as if the natural or original state were an undivided one? Routley and Australian, material referred February to 12- therein, 13 and Page 41 APPENDIX 1; Remarks on J. Schell’s THE FATE OF THE EARTH. Schell’s book is an important and influential document, which is significant having a and urgently needed effect in shifting attitudes towards nuclear. It is especially valuable for aftermath example defects. is Some exhibits, also it just nothing else that we undertake together can make any sense ...’ the of both for rubbish, a world-wide program of action for preserving the [human] ’without ... species ... moral scenarios horrifying Unfortunately severe philosophically and factually, and vivid attack. nuclear of its (p.104, Humans rearranged). however like rabbits in are Australia, virtually beyond human power to extirpate. or practical The claim presupposes two of the major defective assumptions of the book: 51. That nuclear war will eliminate life, human life, at least, on earth total extermination assumption); (the and 52. That very many notions, not only those of morality and value, but those of time and space, make no sense in the absence of humans, or, to put it into a more sympathetic philosophical form, in the absence of an actual context human (the anthropocentric assumption). The frequent applications of S2, which philosophical depth and induce give the book some of its apparent suitable puzzlement through their paradoxical without total extermination aspects, depend essentially on SI; there will be humans, about to make past and future, good and evil, go on making sense! Now although the factual assumption SI is possibility, unlikely. example, it appears in Schell’s argument on an unjustified no means ruled out as a light of present (inadequate) knowledge most the to by SI is extremely extrapolation from Hemisphere, but for the most part it does that very flimsy. It depends, for the Northern to the Southern North American thing, of Page 42 the contracting North to world (All that matters, all worthwhile America. civilization, is in USA, or at least, to be more charitable, and Europe, also be wiped out, i.e. will which eliminated in the nuclear holocaust). the example out of date. America North its human population will be Some of the data Schell relies upon, for of nuclear explosions on the ozone layer, is significantly Other effects than ozone destruction transfer even less well South. to North effect in from A factually superior study of nuclear disaster that Schell’s, Preddy and others, indicates that parts of the Southern Hemisphere, New Zealand and Southern Africa and America could escape relatively unscathed even from most massive northern exchanges. The penetration of human chauvinism as in S2 is not something Schell but product a is of truths necessary mathematics of and in Wittgenstein ’s philosophy, where even the are a product of human conventions and would In Schell human chauvinism is dished up in a particularly vanish with humans!). powerful obnoxious Kantian Thoughts form. tenses, values and morality, all depend in the and propositions, time and presence life-giving of human - past or future or merely potential humans are not enough, persons that beings are not humans are certainly not enough. ’... e.g.): Thus according to (II, Schell p.74, the thought "Humanity is not extinct" is an impossible one for a rational person, because as soon as it is, we are not. In imagining any other we look ahead to a moment that is still within the stream of human time, event, ...’. right to philosophy especially, which is still European unfortunately alive and well (e.g. peculiar The thought is however perfectly possible for humans; now. Though we (p.74)l. ’... outside can have it no doubt have it falsely a later rational creature may well be able to have it truly. "later" we the Schell erroneously denies human tenses of past, that: there is no present, and future ...’ Human extinction eliminates ’the creature that divides time into past, Page 43 present future’: and so annihilation cannot ’come to pass’ (p.77). simply false that the tenses are human: the tenses depend on But it is time local a (perceptible to many creatures other than humans, but not depending at ordering all on 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). too easily come And annihilation may also 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 that there was a time before there were any human beings. earth. Before Here as elsewhere the human chauvinism is mixed with other distorting metaphysical assumptions of Western our heritage, verlficationism and Implicit ontic 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; do so, we (p.77/4?). In can perceive that we are in attempt and whenever we fact still present as spectators" The second clause goes a good distance towards refuting first. the fact there is no great problem in describing counterfactual situations which undermine both Freud’s claims. chauvinism into one of The same goes for Schell’s extensions human of its main traditional strongholds, value theory: the simple and basic fact [sic!] that before there can be good or evil, or to service harm, lamenting or rejoicing there must be life’, human life (p.103). are no facts, but entrenched philosophical assumptions which have been ’... These exposed 2 and criticised elsewhere . Another obnoxious theme, which Schell repeatedly infiltrates, is the Pogo theme, which S3. Distributes responsibility for the present really) onto everyone, every human in the world. nuclear situation (fiasco, An especially blatant example 3 Page 44 the world’s political runs as follows: menace leaders ... though the earth with nuclear weapons, do so only with our permission, and even at our bidding. theme At least, this is true elsewhere elaborated is ’... for democracies’ pay 4 we are the authors of the destruction . while for the peoples of the non-nuclear-armed world it sense to an argument of all The moral cost of only true in the sensitivity nuclear of representative And again ’... we is it armaments that of us underwriters of the slaughter of hundreds of millions - ’. And again ’[as] perpetrators ... is not sacred but is worthless; be killed’ (p.88). vote the against of the populace they allegedly govern. many are potential mass—killers. makes is that they fail to try to do anything about the danger)’ (p.87). But this is more of government since extinction and support the governments that pose the threat of it, for negative The III). (p.106, (For the populations of the superpowers this is true in a positive sense, we now they we convey the steady messsage ... it ... that ... Little of this is true. that life is acceptable for everyone to Those who campaign against nuclear, against nuclear-committed parties so far as is possible, and the like, are certainly not the authors of potential destruction, and responsibility nuclear situation does not simply distribute onto them. - or the unlikely opinions as to worth Schell everyone - fall on those who have done less. for the Nor does responsibility illegitimately attributes to 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 many other things, a representative of a party is only which offers a complex and often ill-characterised package of policies, and a voter may vote for zero package. representative or more policies of this Only in the (unlikely) event of a clear single issue referendum, which is adopted, can responsibility, still of a qualified sort, be sheeted home, to Page 45 those who voted for it, not every one in the community. When however the Pogo assumption is disentangled from the following theme what results is decidedly along the right lines: The controllers [not to be confused, in Schell’s fashion, with all of S4. have failed to change our pre-nuclear institutions. The sovereign system is out HI) (p.51, of step with nuclear age, the one-earth system, etc. earth us] (the whole Unfortunately Schell often loses sight of this important theme. theme). S4 forms part of Schell’s critique of the state which is, by an large, scattered and fragmentary. As we saw, in §7, Schell arrives at the conclusion that the nation-state has outlasted its usefulness, and that new institutions political more ’consonant the global reality’ are required as a matter of urgency. evades what he admits is the major task, making viable out But he alternatives. most he makes some passing suggestions, some of which point to the Way Up. he remains clear about are the serious defects of the state and the At What frequently immoral purposes for which the state is used. At one stage he contrasts what he calls Socratic-Christian ethics with that of state, where ’the end [state] justifies the means . .., the raison d’etre of government, is the basis on which themselves to commit crimes of governments, every in sort’. anything whatever in the name of [their] survival’. that all So times, licensed ’states may do virtually Schell then argues however, extinction nullifies end-means justification by destroying every end; that argument is far from sound, and depends again on extreme (S2) have combined with ontic assumptions. under system SI) ends could remain, e.g. human but chauvinism Even if all humans were extinguished (as for nonhumans (actual or not). Page 46 As to the part of the state and (state) sovereignty in war, in us Schell leaves A sovereign state is virtually defined as one that enjoys the no doubt. right and power to go to war in defence or pursuit of its interests (III, p.51). War from how things are: arises jealous nation states (p.51). and sovereignty from the arrangement of political affairs via Indeed there is a two-way linkage between On the one side, sovereignty is, Schell capacity to wage war. contends, necessary for people to organise for war. is impossible to preserve sovereignty. it war transparently clear as they stand. having On the other side, without Neither of these contentions is Now that the state system in entrenched, it however easy for conservatives (in particular) to argue from the "realities" is of international life, which include self-interest, is It on basis this that peace arrangements aggression, readily are hatred. fear, dismissed as unrealistic, utopian, even (amusingly) as extremist. Schell’s further theme that nuclear "war" is not war threatens to undermine his case erroneous an sovereign characterisation nation to achieve an end’ (III, sufficient for p.52): war as ’a violent means employed by a of but neither considerations but not all wars or games are won). It they fail (even on one side being defeated on a But in nuclear "war" this doesn’t happen, ’no one’s strength But what these sorts contribute to showing is not that nuclear wars are not wars, but that they are not wars of certain sorts, e.g., not just wars because nor LN falls until both sides have been annihilated* (III, p.52). of necessary if is also claimed that war depends on weakness; by arms. is But nuclear attacks can certainly have ends cannot be won in the older sense: decision this It is then claimed that war requires an end which nuclear war. "war" does not have. wars state based, for example, on its nuclear war But the not-war theme needs much qualification, and starts out making capacity. from the against on such criteria as reasonable when LN wars prospect of success and Page 47 improvement, not rational wars (in a good sense), and so on. wars nuclear weapons have also ruined "conventional" wars, and that demise the war of not just on his connected the mistaken has removed been proposition The (p.52). concerning the conventional war and the mistaken proposition that war of some sort the theme has left no means to finally settle disputes between nations, for the final court of appeal depends conventional nuclear times does damage to Schell’s argument that into persisted have That theme demise has to of be "court of appeal" between nations (for, as observed, there are other final types of contests that could serve, and there is also the cooperative behaviour, e.g. joint referenda); possibility of more it also imports the assumption of Clausowicz (criticised earlier) 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 ruleless. wars contrary, are parasitic on On the social organisations such as states and are They are a social governed by a range of understandings, conventions and rules. phenomenon, with a rule structure if not a logic. Much capital has been made from what is called "the and the "logic logic of deterrence" The message that is usually of nuclear (strategic) planning". supposed to come through is that the massive nuclear arraangements the world now entangled in are perfectly logical, sound, reasonable, rational. this represents little more than a cheap semantical the justifies reasonable. can be present arrangements, or trick. anything in strategic planning; values no in way in Jeffrey) which but is does not yield specific results without desirability measures being assigned to alternative without However like them, or renders them There is a logic of decision (as presented e.g. applied Logic is being pumped in, extralogically . outcomes, that is There are varaious ways these value assignments may be determined, to meet moral requirements or not; but in Page 48 nuclear planning strategic (Selecting the usual expediency. automatically; is have invariably been settled on the basis of game theory setting based something cover strategy of’. term almost Thus too the presumption in Walzer, p.277, that the logic of on eye-for-eye and tooth-for-tooth assumptions.) ’logic of’ tends to be used very generously, as a word of general to this to sees for it is then assumed that each player plays to maximize his or her own advantage. deterrence they like In fact commendation, ’rational considerations entering into the policy or In these terms, Schell, who like others enjoys playing with the ’logic of’, should write of ’the illoglc of deterrence’, for he emphasizes (III, p.80) 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: doctrine depends irrational use. deterrence (e.g. on credibility of the yet the threat of of success this deterrence unjustifiable and Indeed Schell wants to go further and locate a contradiction in HI, pp.67-8): but the argument depends on an interesting confusion of contradiction with cancellation, which deterrence is supposed to (etc.) is involve. FOOTNOTES 1. The appalling theme that humans create past, present and repeated, e.g. p.104 top. 2. See e.g. ’Human chauvinism and environmental ethics’ in Environmental Philosophy (editor Mannison and others), Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1980. 3. Another example of spreading the responsibility runs as follows (Schell p.46, III): we plan to exterminate species in certain circumstance, though we don’t quite admit this to ourselves, as sane or sensible (or rational?). Further (p.55 III), ’the world ... chose the course of attempting to refashion the system of sovereignty to accommodate nuclear weapons’: the world? Connected with this is the argument from defence of fundamentals [ideology] - e.g. for liberty, the (USA) nation, and against socialism. In the course of this yet another fallacious assumption is rolled out: ’The means to the end are not limited, for the end itself sets the limits in each future Page 49 case’ [?] 4. 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). 5. There is however a simple solution to Schell’s problem of the missing motive, namely an ideological one: remove the rival ideology from future dominance. Page 50 APPENDIX 2: Strategies and the Matter of Collective and Individual Responsibility What one does depends, naturally, on where one lives and what sort of power it is. responsibility work to entirely to an In present circumstances states have and states, there ends: responsibilities these no individual, or (smaller scale) is collective responsibility to work out a policy or people on stance matters such as While such a non-responsibility nuclear and still less to act on such a stance. (or opt-out) theme no doubt suits many evident There are however some persuasive out their policies. arguments that this is where the responsibility accrue one means what as what strategy a state should adopt depends on where it is located much has, and — many for some, themselves, especially more authoritarian power-holders, for others - it does involve opting out of moral responsibilities, responsibilities acquired by virtue of being a person within the framework of certain social arrangments. Now there is no doubt that individuals and a group can out. They can neglect their moral responsibilities; in doing so. being this, do can opt but they are not justified Against this claim, which is based ultimately upon each person’s caught in a web of responsibility-inducing social relations, whether they like it or not, there are some neat arguments which appear to permit opting out. One goes as follows: 1. The (ordinary) individual, difference to what happens. 2. Such difference. 3. individuals, or or group, has no possibility of making a make a Therefore groups, have no obligation to try to Hence Such individuals, or groups, are not morally responsible, for instance when things go wrong. Page 51 There are two main assumptions resisted; this in argument, both which of be firstly, a variant of the ought implies can theme , and secondly, the assumption that individuals can’t make a difference. cannot individuals competitive highly that true What an individuals do. full of hopeful free-riders, a person may communities, encouter a familiar impasse: is on their own, together they can. much accomplish it While individual can achieve depends on what sufficiently many other In should that he or she acts M-ly (e.g. against morally, nuclear arrangements, present destruction) at considerable personal cost with no Such an impasse no guarantee that others will also act M-ly. 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 at directed difference, many individuals also have the option of some making more individualistic action in such disobedience. important An forms as or deployment) Evidently, various or parts redirection however, work more effectively go slows, political form of individual resistance, already adopted in Canada and north-western USA is refusal to pay defence boycotts, thereof of such (e.g. taxes, income taxes nuclear for directed weapons Instance towards production to peace and funds. all these more individualistic forms of political activity if individuals integrate their activities since the impacts aggregate (and appear after a certain stage to exponentiate). There are arguments of some weight that individuals are under some sort moral obligation to take political action to disaffiliate themselves from what contributes to the prospects of nuclear depends on the of sort of state war. What type of action this is one resides in, e.g., whether it is a nuclear Page 52 power, whether it provides nuclear issues complicating as or bases facilities, and such on kind of preventive action the state is likely to what One argument - it is one of a type take in return. etc., be can that 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 making weapons the such for The war. argument here not applies principles (like that of §5), for instance that the manufacture of such weapoons increases the risk of such war. right and to connecting deployment But if it is not morally right to be making such weapons then those who live in a state that is doing so to disaffiliate themselves from such substantive without The argument is but the assumptions opt-outers and do-nothingers assumption, ought defence production, and disaffiliation 2 includes not paying for such production through defence taxes . not be morally appear reasonable and defensible. Such arguments not only insofar as they put to contribute national for those 3 take action, even limited action such as redirection of taxes . in some fashion to moral obligations; political obligations. And political limited, by moral constraints. are already answer for then moral obligations override obligations are already significantly The nuclear situation does not so much bring out new limits on political obligation, as emphasize the obligations who There is however no dilemma under any theory which takes political obligations to back spot the objectives, they also raise serious questions and perhaps dilemmas as regards political obligations would on limited, and respects in which those introduce further moral considerations against sponsorship of national defence arrangements. Page 53 An obligation to try war does not commit one to more than this: for an to an obligation, for example, work to But alternative national defence policy which avoids nuclear elements. no doubt this would be a good thing to try to contribute to. one nuclear spending part of one’s working life contributing indirectly to it, not by to disaffiliate oneself from preparation for attempts depends commitments, and on forth. so where lives, one For not only the level are Once of again, one’s pacificist types different what policy of appropriate for different nations and regions, but there are more reorientation superficial and deeper reorientations that can be worked out and promoted, schemes that "conventional" leave e.g. warfare apparatus more or less Intact, and deeper (ecological) schemes that change that. The US Bishops, for example, present a shallower set of goals for such power as the USA, which includes such as preventing the objectives working development and deployment of destabilizing nuclear weapons systems and for better of already operational systems (see PL, p.317). control super a For those whose very limited political Influence is exerted in considerably lesser even the shallow goals may look quite different: there are no weapons (except perhaps those of another power planted on local territory) better control. The view from the very minor to in or redeploy to powers in the Antipodes is furthermore different from that of the medium powers in Europe. prospect powers is There some the Antipodes of avoiding the more immediate effects of an LN war, while there is little such prospect in Europe (cf. Preddy 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 elements of what is valuable in world civilization. Local and regional self-interest would also suggest steps towards self-preservation that been initiated. have not Page 54 What is broadly required in the Andipodes is a work out once removal of American bases alliance, which is in any case of questionable merit; and withdrawal of American rightss for nuclear-carrying equipment to access ports, air bases and other facilities, so as to remove pursuit of more a evenhanded policy targets; nuclear is That much easy, in principle. difficult to ensure is that economic and cultural collapse does not follow an LN war in the North. independence Secondly then the building of Increased in the Antipodes is required. sustainable of life its exercise unless combined with and Preddey it others is own. ’the region must also other desirable objectives: unlikely - the structural readjustment aims of moving for example, in estimated that 25 per cent of GDP would have to be included Australia the costs would be less. desirable have For a small region that looks a very costly diverted to build up New Zealand’s economic independence. which socio-economic It is not enough to make the region a nuclear-free zone not worth targeting militarily: a local of nonalignment (something quite small powers elsewhere have managed to achieve). More to Firstly, withdrawal from the American goals are glimpsed. the matter straightforward the were For a larger region If, furthermore - what seems combined with the independently whole region towards a multicultural conserver society and diverting "defence" spending to connected self-management and civil be considerably lessened. They only appear great in the setting of an on-going consumer-defence socleity. In any case where life itself defence goals, would is concerned, the costs do not appear excessive. FOOTNOTES 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. Page 55 Seatie 2. An argument of this type was deployed by Bishop support of his refusal to pay defence taxes. 3. This dilemma and option is now removed 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 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 therby 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 and/or ought to oppose. Hunthaassen of in Page 56 REFERENCES Berg, Reinhabiting a Separate 1979. P. M. Cohen, Nagel, Scanlan Princeton, 1974. Country, (editors) Planet War and Drum, Moral San Francisco, Responsibility , R.E. Goodin, ’Disarming nuclear apologists’, typescript, 1982. R.E. Goodin, ’Disarmament as a moral certalnuity’, typescript, 1983. P(hilip) Green, Deadly Logic: The Theory of Nuclear Deterrence, Ohio State University Press, Columbus, 1966. N. Griffin, ’Lifeboat USA', typescript, 1982. Ground Zero Organisation, Nuclear War: New York, 1982. R. Jeffrey, The Logic of Decision H. Kahn, On Thermonuclear War. What’s In It For You? Pocket Book (editor D.P. Lackey, ’Ethics and nuclear deterrence*, in Moral James Rachels), Harper and Row, New York, 1979. D.P. Lackey, 'Missiles and morals: a utilitarian look at nuclear deterrence’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 11 (1982) pp.189-213. J.C. Problems Murray, Morality and Modern War, T. Nagel, ’War and Massacre' in Cohen et al, pp.3-24. J. Narvesen, '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) pp.306-328 [hereafter referred to as PL, for ’New Draft of Pastoral Letter’]. G.F. Preddey and others, Future Contingencies 4. Nuclear Disasters, A Report to the Commision for the Future, Government Printer, Wellington, New Zealand, 1982. T. Regan (editor), Matters of Life and 1980. R. Routley and V. Routley, Alternatives, (1982). R. Routley and V. Plumwood, 'Moral dilemmas and (edit. notions’ in Paraconsistent Logic, Philosophla Verlag, 1983. 'The Death, Random irrefutability of the G. House, New anarchism’, York, Social logic of deontic Priest and others) Page 57 R. Scheer, With Enough Shovels: House, New York, 1982. J. Schell, ’Reflections (Nuclear Arms - Parts I-III)’, 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 (Kopf, New York, 1982). References in the text are to the original articles. All references by parts labels ’I’-’III’ are to these articles. T.C . Reagan, Bush and Nuclear Sharp, Exploring Nonviolent Alternatives, Boston, 1971. T. Taylor, Nuremburg and Vietnam: R.W.. M.M.. M. R.A. S. Random Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, Harvard University Press, 1980. G. E.P.. War, Thompson and D. New York, 1981. An American Tragedy, Smith, Protest and Survive, Monthly Review Press, Tucker, The Just War, Wakin (editor), War, Morality and the Military Profession, Boulder, Colorado, 1979. Westview, Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, Basic Books, New York, 1977. Wasserstrom (editor) California, 1970. War and Morality, Wadsworth, Zuckerman, Nuclear Illusion and Reality, Collins, London, 1982. Belmont,  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 6: Working draft of On the ethics of large-scale nuclear war and war-deterrence and the political fall-out Subject The topic of the resource Typescript working draft. 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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:f4d8642">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:f4d8642</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 listed in manuscript finding aid Box 97: Paper - Extracts - Articles and Chapters by Richard Sylvan 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/403a5bad32513aec7b1fe527b51f07f8.pdf 282dfe629ac7145e12fea896a7354838 PDF Text Text I NUCLEAR POWER - ETHICAL, I. SOCIAL AND POLITICAL DIMENSIONS 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 view, sometimes called the Alternative Environmental Paradigm (the New Paradigm) differs on almost every point, and, according to sociologists m ways summarised in the following table 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. �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: 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 pronomic 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 O 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 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, 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 11a 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. 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 waste storage 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 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 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, 15a 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. 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.^3 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 teject 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 16 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 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, 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 Assiiipp.fl. 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 conditiohs 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. 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 : ECONOMISTIC 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. 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 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 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 v �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 £1 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 morons or forever plugged into enjoyment or other machines. prepared to accept the elitist approach presupposed - 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. 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, 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. universalizab ili ty, 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 �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 �24. 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 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 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" 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 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 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 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 ’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).~ 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 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 £1 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 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; (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 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 36 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 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 independeritly 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 n 38 , , fatal and nonfatal injury as workers in the coal industry . Furthermore, the various (often serious) hazards encountered in working in some sectors 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. �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 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. 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 (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.39 In West Germany the ’politics of nuclear repression is even more evident and more advanced: Behind what must be one of the most impregnable fortifications this side of the East-West German border, work has just begun on building West Germany’s latest nuclear power station. Much �31.1 of the perimeter of the 75-acre site, at Brokdorf in the marshlands of the lower Elbe, is screened by a concrete wall 10 feet high, surmounted by coils of barbed wire. The rest, regarded as ’strategically observable’, is girdled by a ditch 10 feet wide and filled with water. Approach roads to the site are patrolled by dozens of policemen and the compound itself is guarded by 600 men from a private security organization and by 30 dogs. Such developments 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 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 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. 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. The assumption that technological society’s energy patterns are unmodifiable is especially so - after all it has survived events such as world wars which have required major social and technological restructuring and consumption modification. If western society’s demands for energy are totally unmodifiable without collapse, not only would it be committed to a 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 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 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 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 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. �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 unrest, etc.). Therefore nuclear power is desirable. part of US energy policy, economics textbooks. The first premiss is and the second premiss is supplied by standard 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’, benefit-cost ratio’, etc. ’having most favourable 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. the cancellation of nuclear plant orders, can decisively, unless Much data, beginning with 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. Komanoff 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.50 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 Act5'1'), 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, under Price-Anderson Act the 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) leads version of the Old Paradigm, called the Modified Old Paradigm. to the modern 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, as well as 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. use, avoidance of shortages, rationing, Since alternative power sources, such as coal, could serve the same 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 53 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 �42. 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 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, 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). conditions complex decision rules (such as the Arrow-Horowicz rule) which take account of both best possible and worst possible outcomes under reduce to the maximin rule. Under these each option Whichever energy option is selected under the maximin 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 proposed, maximin enjoys a privileged for decision under uncertainty have been of which has associated rejection rules. each rules, such as the risk- added Some of these reasoning criticised by Goodin (pp.507-8), the riskiness of a policy in terms of the increment of which ’assesses 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 dubious, rational decision procedure appears to 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 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 alternatives rule * simply abandon a coal-fired plant’” (p.506). a nuclear reactor The compare-the- 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, vulnerable, also yield harm-avoidance and protecting-the- 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. It is then, contemporary corporate capitalism, 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. 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 small and is largely confined to the Soviet Union 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 These companies were great expansion of the electrical utilities in the US. 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 picture changed : ’high costs of construction combined with low capacity factors and poor reliability have wiped out the cost advantage that nuclear power’ 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 J 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 with relevant governments) substantial interests in European held (usually along 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 activities’. and activities ... have gone to promote nuclear �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 n°w^ 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 its social Modification, but that the practices (of corporate capitalism and associated third world imperialism) involve much that is ethically unacceptable, whether percepts;for principles such as by older, modified, or alternative those assembled under fairness 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 �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 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 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 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 61 needs ) as unchallengeable, and the issue to be one of which technology can �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 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 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 61 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" 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 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, Economics, 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 ov' 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. �r 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 on 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 the1 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: (ii3) 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 In this report, a is nuclear power and b is either activities clearly p. 288. 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 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 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. 15, where references are also cited. 39. Goodin, p. 433. 40. On all these points see R. Grossman and G. Daneker, Guide to Jots and Energy3 Environmentalists for Full Employment, Washington DC, 1977, pp.1-7, and also the details supplied in substantiating the interesting case of Commoner, fx------ On the absorption of available capital by the nuclear industry, see as well p. 23. A. Roberts, ’The politics of nuclear power’, Arena No. 41 (1976) 22-47, On the employment issues, see too Daly, in Commoner and others, p. 149. �7 A more fundamental challenge to the poverty argument appears in I. Illich, Energy and Equality3 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 Beautiful3 Blond and Briggs, London, 1973. As to the capital and other requirements, see Fox Report, p.48, and also Commoner, and Commoner and others. 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 TTze 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 Taken3 Friends of the Earth Australia, 1977 (reprinted from Foreign Affairs3 October 1976); see a|so Nader & Abbotts, p.233 ff., Lovins and Price, Commoner, and Schumacher, op.czt. 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 individual3 the State and Nuclear Power3 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). �47. 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. See Kalmanoff, p. 50. See Comey. 51. Ref. to what it has to say about Price Anderson Act. 52. Full ref to SF onargument from ignorance etc. On decision theory see also, 53. These e.g. Elster, p. 377. 54. A recent theme in much economic literature is that Bayesian decision 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 For elaboration of some of the important 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 can 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. 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) (where further references are cited). �S ta te s o c ia lis m , a s p r a c tis e d in m ost o f th e ’’E a s te rn b lo c ” , d if f e r s a s to econom ic o r g a n is a tio n , th e m a rk e t in p a r t i c u l a r b e in g re p la c e d sy stem by a command s y s te m ) B ut s in c e th e r e i s v i r t u a l l y no d e b a te c o n fin e s o f s t a t e s o c ia lis m , th a t m in o r v a r ia n t on th e Old P arad ig m . by from th e O ld P arad ig m r e a l l y o n ly c e n tr a l p la n n in g (a m a rk e t o v e r a n u c le a r f u tu r e w ith in th e n eed n o t b e d e lin e a te d h e re . JU rt X O 3 Pi X X rt r1 X 3 X rt 03 CL. 03 CD 0 X l-h CD y CD O y cd 03 X rt X O rt pi & Pi rt X O y X y 0 X O (TO *<! CD X-Z" rt (0 X O y 1-+1 03 3 0 CD X Pi CD P y 03 0 CD /—s O Pi y y x CL 0 y l-h X CL CD 3 CD CD X n q CT4 Pi X Pi y 0 CD y. CD x X CD CD y X OQ pi y rt CD X Cl. cr4 Iz5 pi rt y y CD 22 pi rt y y CD 0 y 03 rt rt X CD X4 O CD y rt y y cd O c X rt X y Pi pl X X X CD cd CL. rt CD H« H4 * H 3 02 0 y y 0 CD 03 y CD 03 tn pi y rt * y 03 CD y <j CD 03 cd Pi rt x y X y CD CD y 3 X y <3 X i-J O y M 23 > 03 O O X P5 rt X O y Pi * 1- CD rj CD CL x pi CD C~3 n 0 3 3 y * CT y H4 pi CD H4 H4 CD X H- n 3 pi H4 i— 4 1 02 0 Pl H4 CD CD 0 CD y rt y pi H4 H« 02 CD y. C/2 O OQ rt CD rj 1 Pi 03 X O X Pl 03 X CD CD Ch Cl. 03 y y rj O > X r1 H0CD y Pi rt X CD y pi y 0 y4 H« CD Pi X tzl O y 1 y4 * H CD pi h- y CD 0 pi rt y y CD HO y4 Hy CD Pl Hy CD CD rt u X y 03 rt X rt y rt X O y 03 0 rti t-h X O X Pl X x rt 3 X O pi y y y. rt * 0 y H y 0 cl. C CD OQ y > O < CD h- O Hx) Pi rt X Pi y rt X y rh X y CD y rt X Pi * 1Z X CD y rt 03 z—s CD 03 rt y y 0 rt y y CD 03 CD y X rt Pi rt X > x 0 y rt Q X rt X N 03 rt y y CD rt cd y y y rt (D x-' 02 *H y < O 1—4 <2 CD 3 3 O y PX CD y x o X x X x 0 O y y 0 <2 Hcn X) M era pi I—4 H« y CD CD CL. y CD 0 H« y rt CD y CD 02 rt X y D4 H4 H« CD S X pi 02 y pi pr FT y CD Cl. pi rt 03 y Cl. rh rh O O y y y 2 0 C CD pi Pl 03 C3 y y4 CL. X CD <2 2 B CD y rt cn pi l-h CD 3 rt (D ft fl> *<! rt P3 03 h- y <2 H- y CD Pl CD y t— 4 02 pl rt 0 CD CD y. H« Pl rt I—4 O CD 0 H4 t-4 CD X X l-h rh CD y Cl. CD y y pi rt x X Pl 03 X CD 03 X t-h 1 y4 CD X y CL. X <2 X X o o 2! 0 s X- pi rt y y pi x OQ y 0 3 rt y4 0 y 0 3 X CD cd /—x CD 22 Pi rt y y pi X y rt y * H y 03 X (D Pl X ^~x cn CD X t-h 1 y CD pi X Hcn pi rt X O y pi X pi rt CD y 3 3 O y 1 CD X O X) 3 CD y rt x—✓ CL. CD pi X 03 y 0 y ora CD y 03 CD 0 03 y 03 y o pi CD y CL. <3 pi X y CD 0. CD y < X y 0 y 3 CD y rt pi rt CD y X Pi X 2: 2 <2 fa H4 % y CD H- O y rt y. y4 y 0 y y pi rt 3 CD y y y rt CD 0 y «<; y 3 Pi y CD y rt pi y CD y 0 rt X O y pi 0 3 X y O cn < > X (=1 M 0 n 3 X Pl y pi CL. X ora Pi y pi CL. X OQ 3 XI Cn 0 0 X Pl X y rt pi 0 0 3 X y > rt Pl X 1CD y 1X 1y 10 m 1□ Pi 1 1X •<3 CD y rj CD 1rt 1X �REFERENCES USED Works especially useful for further investigation of the ethical issues raised by nuclear development are indicated with an asterisk (* ). t I /S. Congrove and A. Duff, ’Environmentalism, middle-class radicalism and politics’, Sociological Review 28(2) (1980), 333-51. A. R. Cotton, Jr. , and R. E. Dunlj/p, ’A new ecological paradigm for post­ f / exuberant sociology’ American Behavioural Scientist 24 (1980). 15-47. v/r Report : Vr Ranger Uranium En/ynmental Inquiry First Report, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1977. E. Goodin, ’No moral ni^k^S ’, Ethics 90 (1980), 417-49. Gyorgy and friends, No /Juk^ : everyone’s guide to nuclear power, South End Press, Boston, Mass., 1979 / R. Nader and J. Abbotts, The Menace of Atomic Energy, Melbourne, 1977. / / D. * Mannison, M. McRobbie and R. Routley (editors), Environmental Philosophy, RSSS, Australian National University, 1980. ! N. Myers, The Sinking Ark, x. & Outback Press, / K. * Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1979. S. Shrader-Frechette, Nuclear Power and Public Policy, Reid^l, Dordrecht, 1980 (referred to as SF). 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 NUCLEAR POWER - ETHICAL, I. SOCIAL AND POLITICAL DIMENSIONS 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 view, sometimes called the Alternative Environmental Paradigm (the New Paradigm) differs on almost every point, and, according to sociologists m ways summarised in the following table 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. 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: 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 pronomic 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 O 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 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, 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 11a 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. 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 waste storage 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 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 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, 15a 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. 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.^3 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 teject 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 16 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 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, 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 Assiiipp.fl. 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 conditiohs 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. 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 : ECONOMISTIC 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. 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 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 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 v 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 £1 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 morons or forever plugged into enjoyment or other machines. prepared to accept the elitist approach presupposed - 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. 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, 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. universalizab ili ty, 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 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 24. 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 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 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" 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 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 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 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 ’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).~ 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 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 £1 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 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; (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 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 36 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 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 independeritly 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 n 38 , , fatal and nonfatal injury as workers in the coal industry . Furthermore, the various (often serious) hazards encountered in working in some sectors 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. 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 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. 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 (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.39 In West Germany the ’politics of nuclear repression is even more evident and more advanced: Behind what must be one of the most impregnable fortifications this side of the East-West German border, work has just begun on building West Germany’s latest nuclear power station. Much 31.1 of the perimeter of the 75-acre site, at Brokdorf in the marshlands of the lower Elbe, is screened by a concrete wall 10 feet high, surmounted by coils of barbed wire. The rest, regarded as ’strategically observable’, is girdled by a ditch 10 feet wide and filled with water. Approach roads to the site are patrolled by dozens of policemen and the compound itself is guarded by 600 men from a private security organization and by 30 dogs. Such developments 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 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 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. 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. The assumption that technological society’s energy patterns are unmodifiable is especially so - after all it has survived events such as world wars which have required major social and technological restructuring and consumption modification. If western society’s demands for energy are totally unmodifiable without collapse, not only would it be committed to a 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 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 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 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 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. 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 unrest, etc.). Therefore nuclear power is desirable. part of US energy policy, economics textbooks. The first premiss is and the second premiss is supplied by standard 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’, benefit-cost ratio’, etc. ’having most favourable 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. the cancellation of nuclear plant orders, can decisively, unless Much data, beginning with 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. Komanoff 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.50 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 Act5'1'), 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, under Price-Anderson Act the 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) leads version of the Old Paradigm, called the Modified Old Paradigm. to the modern 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, as well as 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. use, avoidance of shortages, rationing, Since alternative power sources, such as coal, could serve the same 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 53 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 42. 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 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, 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). conditions complex decision rules (such as the Arrow-Horowicz rule) which take account of both best possible and worst possible outcomes under reduce to the maximin rule. Under these each option Whichever energy option is selected under the maximin 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 proposed, maximin enjoys a privileged for decision under uncertainty have been of which has associated rejection rules. each rules, such as the risk- added Some of these reasoning criticised by Goodin (pp.507-8), the riskiness of a policy in terms of the increment of which ’assesses 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 dubious, rational decision procedure appears to 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 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 alternatives rule * simply abandon a coal-fired plant’” (p.506). a nuclear reactor The compare-the- 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, vulnerable, also yield harm-avoidance and protecting-the- 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. It is then, contemporary corporate capitalism, 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. 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 small and is largely confined to the Soviet Union 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 These companies were great expansion of the electrical utilities in the US. 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 picture changed : ’high costs of construction combined with low capacity factors and poor reliability have wiped out the cost advantage that nuclear power’ 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 J 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 with relevant governments) substantial interests in European held (usually along 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 activities’. and activities ... have gone to promote nuclear 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 n°w^ 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 its social Modification, but that the practices (of corporate capitalism and associated third world imperialism) involve much that is ethically unacceptable, whether percepts;for principles such as by older, modified, or alternative those assembled under fairness 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 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 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 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 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 61 needs ) as unchallengeable, and the issue to be one of which technology can 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 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 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 61 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" 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 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, Economics, 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 ov' 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. r 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 on 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 the1 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: (ii3) 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 In this report, a is nuclear power and b is either activities clearly p. 288. 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 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 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. 15, where references are also cited. 39. Goodin, p. 433. 40. On all these points see R. Grossman and G. Daneker, Guide to Jots and Energy3 Environmentalists for Full Employment, Washington DC, 1977, pp.1-7, and also the details supplied in substantiating the interesting case of Commoner, fx------ On the absorption of available capital by the nuclear industry, see as well p. 23. A. Roberts, ’The politics of nuclear power’, Arena No. 41 (1976) 22-47, On the employment issues, see too Daly, in Commoner and others, p. 149. 7 A more fundamental challenge to the poverty argument appears in I. Illich, Energy and Equality3 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 Beautiful3 Blond and Briggs, London, 1973. As to the capital and other requirements, see Fox Report, p.48, and also Commoner, and Commoner and others. 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 TTze 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 Taken3 Friends of the Earth Australia, 1977 (reprinted from Foreign Affairs3 October 1976); see a|so Nader & Abbotts, p.233 ff., Lovins and Price, Commoner, and Schumacher, op.czt. 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 individual3 the State and Nuclear Power3 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). 47. 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. See Kalmanoff, p. 50. See Comey. 51. Ref. to what it has to say about Price Anderson Act. 52. Full ref to SF onargument from ignorance etc. On decision theory see also, 53. These e.g. Elster, p. 377. 54. A recent theme in much economic literature is that Bayesian decision 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 For elaboration of some of the important 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 can 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. 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) (where further references are cited). S ta te s o c ia lis m , a s p r a c tis e d in m ost o f th e ’’E a s te rn b lo c ” , d if f e r s a s to econom ic o r g a n is a tio n , th e m a rk e t in p a r t i c u l a r b e in g re p la c e d sy stem by a command s y s te m ) B ut s in c e th e r e i s v i r t u a l l y no d e b a te c o n fin e s o f s t a t e s o c ia lis m , th a t m in o r v a r ia n t on th e Old P arad ig m . by from th e O ld P arad ig m r e a l l y o n ly c e n tr a l p la n n in g (a m a rk e t o v e r a n u c le a r f u tu r e w ith in th e n eed n o t b e d e lin e a te d h e re . JU rt X O 3 Pi X X rt r1 X 3 X rt 03 CL. 03 CD 0 X l-h CD y CD O y cd 03 X rt X O rt pi & Pi rt X O y X y 0 X O (TO *<! CD X-Z" rt (0 X O y 1-+1 03 3 0 CD X Pi CD P y 03 0 CD /—s O Pi y y x CL 0 y l-h X CL CD 3 CD CD X n q CT4 Pi X Pi y 0 CD y. 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CD y < X y 0 y 3 CD y rt pi rt CD y X Pi X 2: 2 <2 fa H4 % y CD H- O y rt y. y4 y 0 y y pi rt 3 CD y y y rt CD 0 y «<; y 3 Pi y CD y rt pi y CD y 0 rt X O y pi 0 3 X y O cn < > X (=1 M 0 n 3 X Pl y pi CL. X ora Pi y pi CL. X OQ 3 XI Cn 0 0 X Pl X y rt pi 0 0 3 X y > rt Pl X 1CD y 1X 1y 10 m 1□ Pi 1 1X •<3 CD y rj CD 1rt 1X REFERENCES USED Works especially useful for further investigation of the ethical issues raised by nuclear development are indicated with an asterisk (* ). t I /S. Congrove and A. Duff, ’Environmentalism, middle-class radicalism and politics’, Sociological Review 28(2) (1980), 333-51. A. R. Cotton, Jr. , and R. E. Dunlj/p, ’A new ecological paradigm for post­ f / exuberant sociology’ American Behavioural Scientist 24 (1980). 15-47. v/r Report : Vr Ranger Uranium En/ynmental Inquiry First Report, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1977. E. Goodin, ’No moral ni^k^S ’, Ethics 90 (1980), 417-49. Gyorgy and friends, No /Juk^ : everyone’s guide to nuclear power, South End Press, Boston, Mass., 1979 / R. Nader and J. Abbotts, The Menace of Atomic Energy, Melbourne, 1977. / / D. * Mannison, M. McRobbie and R. Routley (editors), Environmental Philosophy, RSSS, Australian National University, 1980. ! N. Myers, The Sinking Ark, x. & Outback Press, / K. * Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1979. S. Shrader-Frechette, Nuclear Power and Public Policy, Reid^l, Dordrecht, 1980 (referred to as SF). 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 1: Draft of Nuclear power - ethical, social and political dimensions Subject The topic of the resource Typescript of draft, corrections with whiteout and handwritten emendations, undated. First page includes correct typescript cut-out pasted on page. 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. 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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:5f472ad">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:5f472ad</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 not listed in manuscript finding aid Box 97: Paper - Extracts - Articles and Chapters by Richard Sylvan https://www.antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/4120878f06ef8ee9f658fcc5da962087.pdf ee2f993c5c9ca4bd98005f0f33595402 PDF Text Text PROSPECTS FOR REGIONAL PHILOSOPHIES IN AUSTRALASIA Philosophy, especially academic philosophy but also folk philosophy, like other intellectual and higher cultural activity In Australasia, has long been indeed dominated, Europe, the largely swamped, by Northern now increasingly from North America. cultural and other resulting controlling such populations, But it does not have to stay that way. a initially the migration Given the ethnic result was imported, baggage influences, patterns, of composition virtually from the inevitable. Suitable policies, a good philosophy policy, could change things. The culture, thought is of regional a philosophy, In 1923, a New Zealand hardly a new one. regional a matching perhaps correspondent to the newly-launched Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy mentioned the possibility of ’a new kind or temper of philosophy under these southern skies’ which the Journal might such a reaching role not community). (or, for merely And foster.The Journal that matter, professional although some actively has pursued philosophers things however hardly fulfilled but have changed solid foundation for a new regionalism in philosophy, its a pronounced wider Australasian in Australia, that of alm laying a possibility of a new temper of philosophy has hardly been realised. There is little in the way of a new kind and which the southern skies were intended to include: but few distinguishing features, ’no distinctively New temper of Zealand XAJPP, March 1923, p.74. same volume, p.292ff; his Appendix 1. philosophy under New Zealand characteristics, have shown up skies, in New Zealand The question was taken up by the Editor in the discussion is considered below, especially in �philosophy’. 2 The situation of colonial dominance that used to prevail in and philosophers. Australia, importer of philosophy, New Zealand remains a substantial net where virtually all chairs, and many philosophy, were filled by academics from the North, other academic and considered and Given the usual in courses designed, power and influence of professors in small departments, covered in tends to persist in New Zealand, where no established chairs are occupied by locals/ topics posts especially appointments made, the heavy Northern orientation of philosophy taught and researched in New Zealand is not surprising. oldest of The Northern control is perhaps most strikingly exhibited at the New Zealand universities, the University of Otago, where the Philosophy Department has been substantially captured by a British School and increasingly looks event, like an offshoot of the University of London/ In any the overwhelming Anglo-American dominance of New Zealand philosophy - also a feature only in slightly lesser degree of Australian philosophy - can be confirmed by a content survey of the courses offered and research papers written at New Zealand universities. Even when local people have been appointed to positions in Australasia, 2 , S.A. Grave, A_ History of Philosophy in Australia, Queensland University Press, 1984, p.l. Page references are to the manuscript. The paper draws heavily on this history. 3 This claim was correct at the time of presentation of the paper (August 198':!). With the recent loss of a chair at Wellington, the claim requires qualification, but the pattern of domination persists. In the 1983 Commonwealth University Handbook listing, 6 of the 8 members of the Department held their main degree, Ph.D., from London, and one of the remainder from Exeter. Only one member of the Department, soon to retire, falls outside the nexus. �3 they have been brought up on a solid diet of Anglo-American material, and they have often been reforged or finished in the North as well. of requirements post-World War philosophy by remain full the II in were conveniently seen Oxford B.Phil. of products finished candidates universities expansion the of Australasian this Many degree. mill: cultural in Oxford were hard to beat In particular, the the in to departments the of case of philosophy the mid 70s when they applied for until indeed out of period major positions, such was the (unwarranted) prestige of Oxford and the regrettable, but still continuing, "cultural cringe". despite Nonetheless, been occurring scene in dominance, Northern the Antipodes, be will (as the indicated). especially on is It worth significant the Australian asking changes have philosophical whether Australian philosophy is moving towards the sort of change that occurred in USA more than 100 year; ago when the Harvard Philosophy Department was brought (or bought) together, and its go'den age' began. ’ American philosophy was never quite the same again, and became its own thing. There are now new forces operating which could help to move Australian philosophy in such a direction. the widespread regionalism, other 6 ^See B. which applies choices; local fashioning emergence, of national and particularly to in science cultural stark and in and culture, alternative ideological contrast, technology there There is of a choice along is policies, the new with centralised which not only Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy; Cambridge, Massachusetts 1860-1930, Yale University Press, 1977, Parts 2 and 3. 6 On this bio-regionalism, see especially, Fourth World News, vol. 1, and K. Sale, Human Scale, Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, New York, 1980. 1983, �provides model a for reflection regional in directly bears on parts of the philosophy of science. soon appear, there are also some also Unfortunately, as will to regional serious obstacles but policy philosophy philosophies and to the very idea of a regional philosophy. USA, long an importer of culture from Europe, has recently become a net culture, of exporter components of higher philosophical not from lower of Oxford following has suit, but culture, evidently taken). should Are not balance of payments, especially in philosophy? Yes, reasons there achieve also of the American turn philosophy (witness such as culture output if Australasia, certainly a better there are why cultural reasons. In the first place, the change in the cultural position of the USA went with, and relations. If little prospect for perhaps in part derived from, vast changes in economic power economic of most dominance entails Australasia’s cultural dominance, since culture, there there is is no serious that prospect Australasia will ever emulate or attain American economic eminence (at least nuclear destruction of not without flow of commodities, not only increasingly of Americans, of former group, Northern cultural they. As priorities, contain they long component also whose and disruption of the entire­ Secondly, as observed, Antipodean large a fellow-travellers, include research Northern academics, substantial additional of a teaching and is bent to It is unlikely that this Influential segment, especially Northern concerns. the North, cultural and other). universities contingent the will (become commitments, as so apart Antipodeans they are in a bind locally acclimatised as do from the not situation; isolated drastically to) person. alter give up Nor their its should cultural for it can be persuasively argued that they would be better off, as far as quality and product goes, stocking �/ / A 5 o’ ( universities their with American teaching components and researching American-oriented concerns. One simple numerical argument that Antipodean universities would be better off with Americans in the main, takes the following lines:- The (higher graduates degree) of Australasian and American are significantly not culturally distinguished, at least in subjects such as philosophy. now the quality academics number of Austroamerican graduates; produced per of number higher say there is 1 per every n graduates. preponderance of graduates will be Americans, Consider degree The (great) just by virtue of their vastly greater population and their more extensive system of university education. So also then, just by ratio considerations, the great preponderance of quality academics from an drawn upper percentiles they interested universities. Austroamerican base among those in Such quality, an Clearly, quality products. would argument be does be American, will appointing not work to more show as will Antipodeans, Americans that, for the were their to similar reasons, American universities should be full of Chinese or Indian professors, for two Asians reasons; and first Americans, there are especially significant in cultural disciplines such differences as between philosophy; and secondly, their university systems do not deliver such great quotas of higher degree or high quality graduates, at least in philosophy. The ratio of U.S. philosophy graduautes with doctorates as compared with Australian exceeded 30 to 1 in each of the years 1974 to 1980. In 1977 it was 110 to 1. New Zealand compares even less favourably with U.S. output. For details see Digest of Education Statistics (U.S. National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, 1976, 1977-78, 1979, 1980, 1981 and 1982); University Statistics, (Australian Bureau of Statistics, Canberra, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, ‘1979, 1980); Education Statistics of New Zealand, (N.Z. Department of Education, Wellington, 1974, '1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980). �The conclusion of the numerical argument will not be a popular one. The anti Amei icanism felt in portions of the Australasian community extends into the universities; and recently there been has increasing Insistence, especially by the now aging younger Turks that university positions should be This at the same time as these Turks often preach of an reserved for locals. international community of scholars, presumably then with "free” interchange, etc. They cannot have it all ways.^ So long continues, as the economically; the present centre will free-flow dominate they will have more large to them if it interchange the than us, periphery and is (centrally-determined) of ideas and culturally jobs here personnel as should well as go by and quality in this high cultural business that we seek, as mostly claim. Now anyway, it that arguments. is widely there is enough recognised, something For we are not lower-down drastically wrong hierarchical with these ladders sorts of flooded with high-quality Northerners who would 8 A reverse flow of the better orthodox academics from Australasia to America should also be expected (outside times of university contraction). According to assumptions of this brain drain argument, which is based on labour market considerations, appointment and lifestyle conditions for academics are generally better in USA than Australia and much better than those in economically-depressed New Zealand (e.g. higher salaries, better standard of living, superior research conditions, etc.). So, other things being equal, able academics from the Antipodes will relocate in USA as academic positions become available. The argument also helps explain why Antipodean universities cannot expect, for the most part, to attract really top-drawer Northerners for very long. Of course, economically irrelevant factors do induce interference; e.g. perverse commitments to odd-ball Antipodean intellectual enterprises which reduce market acceptability, or pre-industrial ties to place or persons or lifestyle which unduly restrict mobility (such as local roots, family attachments, even distaste for American urban lifestyles). �regularly drive out local contenders for positions, if we only preferred the Northerners when they were quite visibly superior: rather we are inundated by Americans with inflated references, who have the messages of the centre better do, locals than higher-echelon remote and Northern Northern (often biassed) fields appointment locals whose shortcomings are known better. the Northern centres too, tend greener look to committees dusty than As is beginning to be recognised retain their higher-quality products, tend to to and allow them to be exiled to the periphery only if they somehow fall foul of the system (e.g. of the academic system for political or personal reasons). the often Northern centres have intellectually their disposed of Too inferior products in the periphery. All this makes the position look doubly bad. We ought, appointing Northerners, especially Americans, even seems, to be if they are overrated in it their references, and usually not out of the top drawer, in order to maximize quality. And yet doing so does not achieve the desired quality result, and breeds discontent elsewhere, especially among the aging Turks. Fortunately shaky arguments; and obtain we from this awkward and that is the way of regionalism. sufficient subtitutable for us. before is a way out there elaborate cultural distance,so that situation these and We do our own things; they are not simply Then the shaky numerical argument does fall down. the emerging proposal there are other But influential . . This is easier in the cultural than the technological sphere. However it is also possible technologically: (stronger) theses of technological determinism, and so of cultural determinism, are false. We can choose different options, technologically, as well as culturally. 9 �8 arguments to dispose of, and the disposal bears on the proposal. There is, to begin with, far been conceded: have so elements of which the argument for excellence, that there is an objective commodity, quality or excellence, which we all more or less which is agree about, proportionately in the North, and which is what academic institutions crave and more abundant seek and what appointments aim to capture, indeed maximize. That at least is the type of myth most of us have encountered; and many of us now know it is a in myth, fact appointments profit, a that dangerous myth. way, more any Most that don’t places organisations aim but rather seek to satisfice on a mix of factors, quality is to try even just to make maximize of which assessed only one, and not often the highest ranking one. Ability to fit into some sort of program, teaching or research, is another, and commonly more Important factor; and there is no good reason why such a program should not sometimes be a regionally oriented one. So given the prevailing practices, argument from excellence does not exclude regional philosophy programs. And, in any event, there are enough local candidates of sufficient worth to proceed with regional programs without sacrifice clearcut of excellence. Local enterprise need entail no loss of excellence, and could well increase it. The deeper-cutting objection is that there is something seriously amiss with the idea of objective objective importance; criticism as bracketed out notions the that of excellence, these objective and notions values with are open more contextual-relativisation the to connected the generally, component of same that notion of sorts of they valuing: have the �’S- 9 framework or viewpoint within rather a to which these values relate.^ narrow such paradigm, intellectual While those operating as Oxbridge ordinary language philosophy or Sydney materialism say, can bracket out the viewpoint,. since it Incorporated is operational the in paradigm, and so at arrive seemingly objective quality judgements, the judgements are not preserved (e.g. in truth va1ue) when Marxist viewpoints. quality or worth Consider, of a other to transposed for forest, frameworks, the comparison, made variously by of a holistically-inclined judgements a deep environmental who seemingly because pretend that environmental such it is not done by members of as or to rhe an ecologist, philosopher, language, Marxist, and Californian environmental philosophers. philosophers idealistic Compare judgements as to the industrial forester, and a recreational officer. quality e.g. work by ordinary There are even cannot be judged, the main philosophical peer group at Harvard and like institutions. As this judgements of begins to the. reveal, importance judgements of work of quality are not Independent of done or problems tackled. importance of problems and issues is highly paradigm dependent. But the For example, problems such as those of quant if ying-in and of possible worlds and of de re thought, which assume immense importance for fashionable referential theories within the mainstream empiricist paradigm, vanish outside that restricted viewpoint. Now observe to relative that most insignificance judgements as to What follows also begins to bring out what is omitted in a main theme of R.S. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance, Bodley Head, London, 1974. Note that defusing the notion of objective excellence does not lead to subjectivism. To avoid the customary false dichotomy, compare the notion of validity (usually ceded to themselves these days by classical logicians) with that of quality. �10 what are the important problems and what constitutes important work - matters helping quality determine - is relative to their concerned are exported to the Antipodes importance down shipped are paradigmatic from the and placement, through the Their North.11 paradigms the main channels already indicated. We are free to reject these paradigms and select alternatives, and there are, it can be argued, good reasons to do just that, much as there are to reasons good choose different energy technology (or different military technology) from that generally favoured in the North which the North is eager to export southwards. Similar which points against alternatively might argument, apply that be -marketed mass-produced and cosmopolitan. The argument called people sophisticated from cosmopolitan/international the the Peter everywhere Holland; international Stuyvesant smoke this argument superior product cigarette-sophistication is is based on the assumption that philosophy is a ’cosmopolitan subject’, that is is not the sort of enterprise for which place and people are significant as they are for poetry assumption has only to be presented to be questioned. for one important thing, that philosophy is a or the novel.12 The It takes for granted, finished product sort (a propositional theory), not a process of production also. of a certain But in the Often enough fashionability is mistaken for importance. As to the unsatisfactory way in which such "important" problems are commonly set, see F. Dyson, ’Unfashionable pursuits’, The Mathematical Intelligencer 5 (1983) 47-54. 12 Grave, op.cit., p.2: ------- the term ’cosmopolitan subject' used there comes from Donegan. As to the significance of place and people for literature, see further C. Partridge, The Making of New Cultures, Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam, 1982. �11 process of production the place and people involved (e.g. in discussion) are ot material. if And the product Is like a work of like art, a d literature, not and 1 just theorems and arguments assembled piece of in an internationally-approved format, 13 then again the historical setting matters, since philosophy, more no than literature, does not in emerge a vacuum. Plato s philosophy could not have emerged in ancient Australia, and if cribbed in mid 20th century Oxford would surely have been marked down or rejected. It is important not to be sidetracked into issues ~ resembling problems in aesthetics extent sets that do not need to of themes and arguments be contested, such as whether and what produced in one place and setting could have been produced in another. A nonnuclear technology of some sort could be adopted prospect in but Europe that New apparently will Zealand, nonnuclear energy strategy. rasters here. Dialethic in not contrast be, with whereas there Australia, is will reasonable pursue a It is the doing, and not what could be done, that logic, which invalidates methodology of much Anglo-American philosophy, could the technique perhaps be done in and the North (though there would be substantial cultural resistance): it is not being 13tLike a paper in the biological sciences. But here again technique methodology, which may both be regional, are crucially important. x4Related points can be made using less extreme examples, e.g. and concerning modern American work. Consider, for Instance such texts as W.V. Quine’s Word ajll—(Wiley, Now York, 1960) or R. Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia (Basic Books, New York, 1974). The assumptions taken for granted" the arguments involved, etc., are especially American: it is not just the style. The acceptability of arguments and positions is dependent on place and received paradigm. �12 done there, and is not likely to be done in the Anglo-American sphere.15 this extent, logical can Antipodeans techniques, do choose their their own international/cosmopolitan argument, own distinctive distinctive technology thing. stated in a form that would be To and The telling, fails. Of course it can be argued, it is being argued, that Antipodeans don’t need to be, or even oughtn’t to be pursuing their own energy or logic policies and apparatus. But meeting these considerations takes us to a whole new set of issues concerning the merit of various policies and programs, diversity, etc. - far beyond the cosmopolitan argument. the point of The new arguments, to which we shall return, are not a lot more convincing however than comparable arguments concerning cooking: that we don’t devising our own cuisine or wine styles. need to be or oughtn’t to be British, or at least cosmopolitan, cooking is adequate: we should stick to that and buy it off the shelf from the North, ideally importing the cooks also. Do we have good reasons to think that British philosophy is better, these days, than British cooking? Antipodeans are free, in principle then, to pursue their own paradigms; and to do so they will by and large want to, and mostly have to, appoint their own people, people they have educated - not saboteurs or people who have (had) 15 Much as communist anarchism, a live possibility for communes and perhaps communities in Australia, is culturally excluded in North America, owing to the extreme possessive individualism of that culture. On dialethic logic, see G. Priest and R. Routley, On Paraconsistency, Research Papers in Logic, #13, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1983. �13 to be re-educated, from elsewhere, in particular from the North. Intellectual paradigms features of the local pursued tie with cultural paradigms, with distinctive culture? In a at loose way, least, they may tie in with the philosophy will not usually though works of But will the link, culture in the integral fashion that novels (as distinct from more technical works) sometimes do. Indeed, certain to a cultural limited extent, features, not they restricted to hastens to though add. this But is style, compared with acceptability, what philosophical particular programs, that help mark philosophy in Australia as ’unimportant Grave considers do already link. ’an Australian product’ - matters truth, philosophy’ in do matter, and are he not Independent - or independent so far as their perception goes in the case truth and correctness of - from underlying broad theory or received paradigm. However the marks which can be extracted from Grave, significant though they are, do not serve to distinguish the Australian product, the first two being features Australian philosophy exhibits in lesser degree than the more adventurous and polemical philosophy of Greek antiquity. by Passmore as ’most typical of Australian philosophy’, The first, described is a 'diversity of approach and readiness to put forward an unconventional or unfashionable point ’Nothing need be conceded to strong cultural relativity themes, though they would support the case. It is enough that our theories remain radically incomplete and that there can accordingly be rival theories as to what is true. Similarly, however philosophy is conceived - as the search for truth, explanation, understanding and wisdom (all of these and more, really), or as, more vaguely, inquiry of a certain sort - there can be, and will be, competing accounts; so a pluralistic theory is inevitable in giving a fuller view. �view’, 17 of something philosophy, some (with which typical more of philosophy ancient notable exceptions) than exhibits an Canada, is that Africa, South adventurous compared with other recent diverse. and provincial and The second, and ... the line-up between Australian more manifestoed character’ of Australian philosophy, being "Oxbridge colonies", England, far from Australian philosophy isolated: others mark surprising, materialism , departments the and Melbourne (both confrontation concerning the them concern extraordinary discussed the political by is is ’the ’the most notable example ... Wittgensteinian among such as philosophy Andersonian This example Sydney, if it was not the Andersonian philosophy Itself’ (p.2). is austere What may be uniformity reflecting that often attributed to the land Itself. nearer true Australian fervour generated engagement Grave), some growing the and relevant/paraconsistent program, by by with the local (’adversarial’) style leading to sharp criticism by Americans. Connected with these first philosophy, century two as Cambridge marks of much are further characteristics of much 18th century Scottish philosophy and philosophy: namely directness, Australian turn-of-this- unwillingness to muffle points, surface clarity, and, some would unkindly add (in the hope perhaps of locating a genuine difference), bluntness, unsubtlety and crudity. 17 Both preceding quotations, while included as such in Grave’s Introduction, are from J. Passmore, ’Philosophy’, in The Pattern of Australian Culture (ed. A.L. McLeod), Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y., 1963, pp.131-168. The same annotation also applies to the third mark. 18 Ihough again for the most part that influenced by Sydney rather than that originating in Melbourne. To some extent this reflects the different historical influences shaping Sydney and Melbourne philosophy: roughly, Scottish as opposed to Continental antecedents. �15 third The and the fourth but again very different, marks are hardly distinguishing features of Australian philosophy as Grave, who wouldn't them marks at all, in effect observes. Intellectual is areas, the The third, which applies well to other of contrast Australian the reputation the anti-intellectual national stereotype of Australians as a people to physical achievement nark ia especially isolation of a academic rather than feature of philosophy indifference or even hostility to, to intellectual Anglo-American Australasia in subtlety'. 'devoted fourth The philosophy; from, in Inquiry', with 'center of philosophical Indeed of Australia as a philosophy, call namely its and the general the sort of imported philosophy (e.g. that of Nietzsche and the existentialists) generating Interest in literary and arts circles. The failure of such marks to entirely separate out Australian philosophy does not For matter. thing, one separated by its research projects. confused with nationalism, nor Australian the produce as encouraged; and in most the new other more regional things, regionalism sufficiently For another, regionalism should not be positions such as materialism or Wellington modal!sm with national philosophies. philosophy, is is is an undesirable commonly linked, Sydneyside Nationalism in trait, not in other to be cultural things, with the breakdown of nations and contraction of state power.19 19c See, e.g., London, 1957. Sale, op.cit., and L. Kohr, The Breakdown of Nations, RKP, The Editor of the new 1923 AJPP did however take seriously the notion of National Philosophy, of (what must have surprised some New Zealand readers) an Australian Philosophy; some of the issu< s there raised (p.292ff) are addressed in Appendix 1. �To get back to where we were: emerging proposal the is this, that we start - or better much Increase - doing our own distinctive things, and that we team up so. to do there are In fact that begin several suggestions to emerge, concerning research and teaching, publications and appointments, study These are not just that we do our own selection leave and sponsored visitors. of topics and people, and style and decide methods, our priorities, own instead of having these foisted upon us - not just, that is, that we play our own games (whether invented here or taken over from the North) and not theirs, Rules and Rugby instead of Gridiron and Basketball - but that we abandon the individual competitive model of cultural achievement, sold to us and fostered by the North, in favour of a group cooperative approach (elements of which are already modelled in Antipodean social clubs). The thoughts here are digging example, ditch more separately. rapidly simple and On familiar. the side is the it Is well-known that two people cooperating can dig a and enjoyably than two people working on the ditch Cooperative work tends to pay off - in philosophy or elsewhere - in terms of output, quality, and enjoyment in the doing. experience one shows that we successfully with several reasons periphery cannot the centre on achievements for this. highly competitive in the One in On the other side, individually compete very their programs. is the communication situation. There are Despite the predominantly individualistic nature of American academic �17 enterprise, 20 communication much in the attainment of and access to work is jointly based, individualism myth, unpublished material. nationalistic are and the assignment of credit for it. considerations same verbally conveyed. tend to time and as There an outsider). through face-to-face Here There are a mix of reasons (e.g. Polish results, Russians will cite a Russian who the the several clever people will be again people at the periphery tend to lose out. there despite Then again communications are important in obtaining rapid publication of the idea or result, Again For, verbal and builds on the work of many; when the time is ripe for some idea or result, able to hit on it. upon rapid results depends Poles tend to promote. achieves a result at about is the fact that seminars so that local much is results conveyed will be There is the fact of limited reading, and that people at the centre concentrate when they read on material from the centre by central people, so that published items and results from the periphery will often not be noticed, and may well lose out to central competitors even if they achieve central publication. receive, merit There is also the fact that people at the centre tend to for merit, more publication than people towards the periphery. and communication opportunities Here economic factors do begin to enter; consider the size and distribution of the academic market (there are, e.g., a great many more academic philosophers in North America than in the whole rest of the world), control of publishing outlets and journals (with few exceptions 20 Reflecting other features of the culture and enterprise of the centre which are not so deeply embedded in Australasia: see further R. Routley, ’Culture, philosophy, and approaches to the natural environment - an Australian perspective', in The Environment, Ethics and Ecology (ed. D. Bennett), The Faculties, Australian National University, 1984, and also 'Culture and the roots of social and political divergence, with emphasis on the Australian/American contrast’, typescript, Canberra, 1983; both referred to subsequently as ’Culture’. �18 all Northern), ere. However economic power does not, and need not, determine culture - we can shut off the Northern philosophical propaganda shut off our television sets If we really want to. way we by Impressed being middle-men philosophical those And we can stop make who in much the living a by importing the Northern stuff. So what do we do? We adapt to the cultural-philosophical level, of those things, that have been suggested In the newer regionalism. some regional awakeningand importer.. andimitators doctrines and and local For We alm at not remain slavish We do on commentators the North. example, and we peddlars don’t spend of, our trying totease out what Davidson or Dummett or Kripke meant by in the hope that or that To be through. of, positions from academic lives this local self-reliance. several sure, I some pale Northern light suggesting am not we that will perhaps emulate filter appalling the ignorance of people from the North who visit the Antipodes and know little or nothing about eminent through what has been done or visitors, their Australian the bags heavy National is being done here;21 with cultural (now University so that we have accoutrements, main the trekking centre for Investigation of relevant logics) and informing us that, or relying crucially on the assumption that, a contradiction entails every proposition. that these Northerners know often little positions and advances is the Antipodes is inferiority colonies; 21 of cultural another is the and Intellectual narrow or nothing about One reason distinctive the prevailing assumption of life (predominantly in these local) and former limited the southern reading Regrettably, the ignorance extends to many locals. In particular those _nrected with Sydney materialism appear remarkably ill-informed as to’ basic features of other Australasian programs. �undertaken by Northern luminaries. But, having despite been given cause, sufficient we shouldn’t cut ourselves off from Northern paradigms and influences (we could hardly manage to anyway, propaganda is different). so we should stay informed of, but not imitators these continuing traditions: of, or part of, their enterprises. m older Northern traditions, So far from cutting these nowhere, loose In any case, regional cultures are rooted just as the people are largely European stock. from (and older We can reasonably use what we need from these likely traditions and traditions, minority) from starting afresh and the local variations that have already appeared are what we want to develop and perhaps mutate, as again with wine styles. Part of the things, encourage proposal then that Northern paradigms. increasingly rather than working with and so shape newer try to to create fortunately, features of of cultural the larger culture.22 do we need to make the story up - though helping to shape is part of what the proposal is about. is a different and Much of more difficult already indicated in Grave’s survey of Australian philosophy. 22 local For there are research programs already initiated, which have the Australia - New Zealand has own our It is not as if we have to build from nothing, to do - very great advantage of being grounded in the future do pale northern reflections very difficult - entirely original work, components. Nor, we and develop our own research programs, Antipodean paradigms, wnat is is the story, proposition - for is All one really to do is to bring out programs he has already indicated and provide some See Culture, op.cit. �20 To pull the investigation down to a more concrete elaboration and commentary. I shall sketch some more prominent cooperative programs - by no means level, the only programs - and remark on some relevant features of them. The longest running and best known program is, without much doubt, of naturalism, Australian and which aims to see the that world, natural and everything else, as suitably encompassed within the framework of the world of (physical) science. program The is generally back traced to Anderson’s empiricist metaphysics,^^ and is now best exhibited in Armstrong’s work. contains as a major materialism, subprogram Sydney Adelaide which subsequently died out there. such famous components as central state version of failures in program initiated and nowadays Faced functionalism. reduction plans, like it it takes in, identity theme and more derivatively, physicalisms all now in The latter program has included the mental-material contingent materialism, its a It incorporates with a a conspicuous "scientifically" trimmed theory of universals, and an account of natural laws as relations of universals, both components of the developing Sydney realism. Parts of the naturalism program, especially materialism and central state reductionism and the unified science ideal, have had counterparts in the North, but the program has, for the most part, despite export efforts, smoothly, moreover, and earthy, so retained its distinctively it never caught on in New Zealand. into Australian culture. far as Australian character philosophy can ""^Anderson’s metaphysics was however - The program fits It is similarly down-to-earth, be, without the fancy ideas or effete far more opposed to reductions than what has succeeded it. For an account of Anderson’s philosophy, and a history and account of Australian naturalism and materialism, see especially Grave, op.cit. �idealism of European philosophy or the spirituality and suppressed puritanism with much which pragmatism). of yet And and commitments, North American does it though it is thinking not simmers shrink from metaphysical explicit it is not from the basically empiricist, nowadays, (including positivistic (rejecting a verification principle, in particular). It is a city program, based broadcast mainly University of Sydney to other metropolitan universities; but the program does extend outside the universities a bit (a tiny bit) to the larger metropolitan culture. No th America, the broader Russell, so in Australasia, little professional philosophy Impinges on + community, Popper AusLralasia As in and would be or Kuhn quite even on being an the wider academic (To exceptional. achievement, one community, turn worth this working work by around for.) now reaches in The naturalism program used to Perth, and in Canberra, as well as a core of opposition there. has outliers stretch Apart from notable exceptions, more than a rather through to Adelaide; the program has never had precarious hold, it the in Melbourne:nor, more same hold, to or surprisingly, 24, Jn Canada, for example, while most academics from other disciplines would know of, and perhaps a little about, Russell, far fewer would know of Wittgenstein (though he is becoming known to lit. crit. groups), and virtually none would know of Quine. (The sampling Is subjective.) On the fairly recent ’triumph of professionalism’ in philosophy in USA, see Kuklick, op.cit., p.565ff. Kuklick brings out well some of the more disastrous features of professionalism, but does not sufficiently notice that the virtuous features resulting from some professionalisation can be synthesized with broader philosophical activity. 25 The exceptions include Ellis's distinctive program, which can be accounted part of the broader naturalist program, and at Monash the work of F. Jackson and, earlier, of H. Munro in value theory. �22 has it had heavyweight criticism from there (or indeed much external criticism from elsewhere), Melbourne out. the old confrontation of major city philosophies having died is more philosophy stricken than Sydney; Melbourne by dominated Continental a philosophy; then, a fashions: Northern recently, more philosophy; remarkable religion philosophy, much more than Sydney, has been of procession historically oriented and more Quine, Davidson and and language ordinary Wittgenstein, turnabout, idealism earlier extensional reduction; now perhaps Lewis,iKripke and Dummett? one The program reaches that beyond confines the of the cities in Australia - which is after all a metropolitan dominated culture, the vast land always being the other - a rather Australian environmentalism, is diffuse program, which has connections with the Colleges of Advanced Education in the country towns and the communes on the North Coast. So far the program is as much distinguished is. environmental Europe by what positions are specifically having it a not is as feature of what it Serious the New World, of transformed most its and deeper the Old World, and environment and natural having little wild untouched country left, and little sensitivity accordingly to issues Europe that such as tend admit European those to concern of the wilderness. built shallow approaches superficiality environmentalism outside continues North environmental human-transformed and (and The main encourage to America. environment, techno-fix dominate North much Issues situations). of American the New in issues And World environmentalism differs significantly however from Antipodean environmentalism, most obviously in the religious-spiritual component respects as well (see further Culture). of the former, but in several other �23 More positively, there are three strands to Australian environmentalism:Firstly, there is an extended utilitarianism, differing little in theory from Bentham’s enlarged position, which insists upon counting in the utilities of creatures. all sentient figured though prominently it This in animal focussed has position, developed from a British base, has animal liberation movements: and welfare and on domestic animals, animals used in and research hunted (wild) animals, it has also become entangled in issues of bio-research more generally such as genetic engineering. or much interested in, endangered species, the conversion of forests, animal pain and pleasure. except deal. Secondly, utilitarian forests and differs insofar as these have a and which American Thirdly, naturalism.26 inadequate there is a wider and a deeper ecological position, which is recognises irreducible which finds value elsewhere intrinsic value ecosystems, especially wild and natural systems. from lands, bearing on and so deeper concerns get an psychological states, sentience or the disappearance of wild Wider and deeper environmental concerns appear only spinoff from animal welfare, as a not etc., It is not however concerned with, and spiritualism is there of from an extension than in trees and This position of American course as almost everywhere, a reactionary component, critical of the other strands, which Insists that all that needs to be accomplished on the environmental front can be achieved within older established (European) ethical and political frameworks. Whereas materialism is based in Sydney, environmentalism is centred in Melbourne and Canberra, but also includes Brisbane and Perth. Also centred in described more fully elsewhere: see, in particular, <ed- D- Mannison and others), RSSS, Australian National University, 1980. It has been �Canberra, and reaching across the country, with good connections in Melbourne, few but in Sydney, is the materialism and environmental further from input affecting program other which program, elsewhere. and and is of Includes more to extends essentially philosophy, centres New in metaphysics, with respectively, the theory value a Zealand , program, logic especially in the Whereas but one metaphysics. Australia than has been also any The other described 27 The main logic perhaps which program areas major their core programs have epistemology relevant/paraconsistent program. relevant/paraconsistent. grounded research program evident program. in New Zealand from the work of A program emanating located mainly in Wellington, philosophy is also a Prior and now it might be. called the extended modal program. The impact of the program on philosophy is perhaps best seen in Cresswell’s work. Australian philosophy used to be known, for its hard-headed empiricism; not known and still is in some quarters, regrettably New Zealand philosophy is mostly for anything much, except perhaps, in UK, that Prior brought his 27 Again, like all the Australian programs, both those mentioned and others, in Grave, op.cit. But see further, R. Routley, ’Research in Logic in Australia, New Zealand and Oceania’, Research Papers in Logic #14, Australian National University, 1983 (which also considers other programs in logic); G. Priest and R. Routley, op. cit.; and R. Routley, R.K. Meyer and others, Relevant Logics and Their Rivals, Ridgeview, California, 1982. 28 See especially M.J. Cresswell, Logics and Languages, Methuen, London, 1973; but see also work by Goldblatt and by Hughes referred to in Research in Logic, op.cit. Also described there is an original version of the modal program (transparent intensional logic) elaborated by Tichy at Otago. �25 unusual adaption of Russellian philosophy from that remote place. Neither of these impressions is particularly accurate; both are rather out-of-date. But the aim of work of the present type is, of course, not just to correct these impressions, not just to reflect or report on culture - for what one would like to reflect upon is not sufficiently there - but also to help manufacture elements of a culture, to make an image. To resist the already flourishing North, we should increase our efforts to programs, and perhaps other sunrise projects; further 29 the to build teaching and research around the programs selected for promotion, elaboration, and criticism, to orient appointments, especially of involved local people, to 29 Among sunrise projects in Australian philosophy so far suggested (not all of them feasible) are these: Australian feminism, Antipodean social and political alternatives, peace studies, indigenous regional philosophies (especially Aboriginal, Melanesian, and Polynesian). Another promising field, with practical consequences, for local initiative is the philosophy of education, where material produced by R.S. Peters has dominated the market, with stultifying effects it is now alleged. As foreshadowed with the notion of "sunrise projects", much of the rhetoric, and argument, concerning science and technology policy (presented in the case of Australia in Jones, op.cit.) can be taken over to apply to X policy, where X is some subject discipline, such as philosophy. �/ 26 on Why bother? these programs. Why not simply buy our philosophy, like almost all our technology, off the shelf, from the North? There are several arguments for not doing this, in more than a limited fashion, which are now sketched. There is, firstly, Northern products, the inferiority despite their and built-in attractive packaging. obsolence of most putting too fine a point on it, many of the imported intellectual goods are shoddy, and Without only work for a very limited range of applications (e.g. the vicinity Antipodean of contradictions philosophy dilemmas). or undoubtedly derives from Much they’re hopeless in that shoddy is wrong intellectual with goods 30 In fact something like the last has been the policy of the LSE Philosophy Department, where the only outside appointment over a long period was that of Lakatos (hardly a person far removed ideologically). As observed, it now looks like the practice of the Otago Department also; and apparently it used to be a tendency at Melbourne. But in most places the practice is condemned as nepotistic or parochial, and overridden by the call for "new (Northern) blood". However there can be significant differences between nepotistic appointments and those strengthening local programs. It is at this stage, among others that administrative measures do matter; for example, to ensure that suitable locally-engaged locals gain employment rather than Northern stooges, to direct funds into on-going local programs rather than imported fashions, etc. There are various ways appropriate administrative details can be handled, locally or nationally; but nothing draconian, such as wholesale exclusion of noncitizens, is required. Observe, indeed, that no restriction of academic appointments to nationals (in Canadian style) or the like is being advocated. Anyone who arrives at a conclusion of that sort from what has been argued has misunderstood the case in crucial respects. As a matter of simple mathematics, restricting appointment fields characteristically reduces both quality of candidates available (however quality is assessed) and range of possibilities open for future research; and no such restrictions are advocated. The author has witnessed the debilitating effects of field restrictions at the Australian National University and elsewhere. 31 Some of these centre also. arguments support change (perhaps revolutionary) at the �27 Yet buying this material is encouraged by hard-sell imported from the North. cultural ambassadors from the North, who are often enough paid Lo visit. is part of Northern the philosophical imperialism from the North — colonialism that - the Antipodes too willing This the successor suffers, or, to more remarkable, encourages I Secondly, there is the inappropriateness of much of the Northern product, especially considered as a metaphysics, environmental package, concerns. to instance, for cover, well as as The European North has no satisfactory land or environmental ethic fit for Antipodean circumstances, and the deeper American package too is spiritually-loaded mainstream for Australian In political theory, American work is much too individualistic and culture. competition-based, and the European product, especially the Marxist form, unsuited being both too precious and for local too high-tech is circumstances, especially again for more environmentally-perceptive people. features of telling also Thirdly, import world’s markets power structures against substitution and comparative advantage, regionalism; namely, and pressures and fashions, (including the Old Boy’s are appealing avoidance of the removal of overseas control and network in jobs, policies, etc.), and gaining of local control, employment of local people, etc. Fourthly, 32 there are arguments for cultural diversity, applied to The point is elaborated in Culture. At a more practical level Northern products are again often unsuitable, though for different reasons. For example, the transfer of American agricultural methods and equipment to the thin poor soils of the Antipodes has had disastrous effects, at last beginning to be recognised. �28 philosophy as complexity, sheer part of intellectual diversity, stability, culture: etc.33 arguments In fact, built into the whole notion of 'culture’ transfers. dense, Naturally we want a rich, weeds and many We obtain not only good products, being introduced. Indian maize and European cultivars, but European pests and American weeds. selectiveness and control are essential, as richness, the garden analogy But not only seeds and plants but productive garden. pests are from This is why previous against haphazard procedures. The proposal is not for, nor would the case sustain, a narrow localism, with local products, whatever their quality, heroes, replacing Northern ones. local fashions, and local cq|t That is certainly not the preferred way of the newer regionalism, which tends to do without fashions and heroes and which seeks durable quality in products, low environmental impact, and so on; nor is it the way of technology policy. Rather, as with technology policy, we select niches which are not occupied or satisfactorily filled, where we difference, and use and develop local skills and methods. has to outlets, be selective etc.). given our resource But granting regionalism, base (of can make a Indeed the policy philosophers, publishing to what extent should components, for instance people, books and other teaching elements, theories and ideas, be imported and to what extent should they be produced, trained, conceived locally? The possibility of selectiveness in different components means that many mixes are possible. particular mix. There is no need to insist, so far at least, on a The case for the present is mainly for a regional shift, for 33c See, for instance, A.A. Mazrui, A World Federation of Cultures: An African Perspective, Free Press, New York, 1976. ------ -- ---------- --- �a significantly greater degree of local autonomy and production. But it will do local favour. no harm Negatively, elements Indicate to of a mix removal of the Locke-Berkelcy-Hume undue (a that finds much the suggestion is that we try to eradicate much of the Oxford style of teaching and doing philosophy. as Q/ on emphasis standard British That includes such things empiricism British focus); of the centred on quasi-historleal approach with however no proper attention to sources; of reinforcement of the prevailing Anglo-American status quo. The heavy particular, has mostly been a very conservative one. the main movements philosophy, but emanating also the from England, Moore-Wittgenstein Oxford influence, in More generally, many of especially practice, ordinary have language been very protective of the Northern status quo; they tend to leave things very much as they are, and recommend just this. 35 Positively, the proposal is that we achieve further disassociation from the Anglo-American empiricist past in two 34 Does it sound familiar? Outside philosophy, it should. For example, we have now been told by the Americans that our defence role, unlike theirs, is regional, not global: this is supposed to shed great light on our previously confused defence policies. 35 The point is laboured in E. Gellner, Words_ and Things, Victor Gollancz, London, 1959. But even ordinary language philosophy, though conservative, and though it much contracted the proper range of philosophical investigations, had its liberating elements, e.g. removal of some of the narrowness and more cramping assumptions induced by technical jargon. Nor has the social impact changed much with the subsequent decline, since 1959, of ordinary language philosophy, the increasing insolvency of Oxbridge philosophy, and its consequent limited take-over by right-wing Ivy League American philosophy. By contrast, the less economically influential growth of redbrick and applied philosophy in some of the British redbrick and polytechnic institutes has touched no more than the surface of Oxbridge practice. �30 by ways: local emphasizing framework, by and diversifying move that projects of range the outside constricting that traditions philosophical selectively drawn upon, to include not only neglected Continental strands and but also parts of Eastern thought, The philosophy. is idea that Pacific ethnic material and Australasian plurality of such a especially sources, in teaching, will assist in removing narrower cultural biasses, such as British parochialism, enable more and discrimination be obtained. to Then too we should be better able to see the ranges of theories that are open to us in the Antipodes and how to advance our own programs. There remain some things we should want to see whatever mixes are chosen One crucial issue is the removal of Northern in different Antipodean regions. bias from papers and publications, research seminars and lectures, letters of This Northern bias is a disposition to cite and discuss reference, and so on. the projects and works irrespective and discussion the of to of Northern quality ignore of the authors, their works the more of authors, local irrespective of the quality of their contribution. defer to write oi not been opinions of worth, importance, It etc. better, topic again under largely It is the disposition to authors from prestigious Northern institutions, accept their the to contribution the famous is and to uncritically the disposition to lecture as though work produced locally either does not exist or has influential philosopl e s, are, (thus if ensuring anything, more that it Inclined is to not). Northern And Australasian bias than many overseas intellectuals, who are perhaps less concerned to be seen as belonging to the Northern mainstream. bias affects not only the The reduction, and eventual removal, practice of Individual of Northern philosophers, but the policies of selection and review committees as well as of editors and referees �31 of local reorientation, innovations It journals. with better, involves, philosophers Antipodean so they among can cite work initiatives and developments - things that would b< content in courses leave, and so on. taught, more time spent at intellectual to know local getting local things, other or point out work and regional assisted by greater local local institutions on study �32 APPENDIX 1. considering the corresponding initial Lebensanchauung’ argument Philosophy both Anderson, as is truth and its theory may not a that be or confirmation independent of national sympathies or prejudices'. mean Science’. The ’are falsification Granted: but that does not fostered, etc., held, and Weltanschauung Christian a as senses two ’a scheme of the universe’, that of ridiculous (Australian) distinguished between distinction In the first, (p.292). that is German the Philosophy’, National a Francis AJPP, ’the to ’an Australian of possibility ’the of Editor In On the earlier idea of a National Philosophy for Australia. in one region but not others, as intultionism was for long in in Holland, or Cartesianism in France. In a second 'more intimate and personal’ way, 'a nation like an individual may develop a certain temperamental attitude to the problems of existence, which we may A nation’s philosophy, like its art ... call its philosophy of life. and its literature, is a mode of expression for the national It is a specialised form of the national genius ....’ short, part of the evolving national culture. is by no entirely means from separate (pp.292-3). It is, in the first place, But, initial the consciousness. sense, a in this philosophy comprising not merely a fairly comprehensive theory but also an integrated set of attitudes (like an operational paradigm). are such items as accounted ’the national consciousness’ and units single philosophy, like particularly Furthermore, only by concession meriting Australian distinctive (in definite of literature, has any sense): does not Australian descriptors. many such 'the Australian landscape' strands things to form it, some rather not loose families. Anderson does not find, really hope to find in ’a modern industrialised community’ - with its modular parts interchangeable with those of others - a national philosophy of life, with a difference. In fact he �33 claims to find a (somewhat) trite moral base to build on, humour, fair and courage particularly phllosphical. at least various apart of but life, regional is So far, not; this problems about nothing does however not local as research Identifying and trouble derives from the extravagant claim that with Goodness these and - distinctive, all or there exclude programs). legitimating being So a far, national But shortly Anderson is plunged into inconsistency: the philosophy, so good. do at there could a national philosophy, then, (such philosophies from rational but dealing', 'traditions ... of the Beauty - then of values eternal and only Philosophy' (p.295 with rearrangement). the then 'if Australia has nothing to Spirit, has she the Ideals nothing to of Truth, with do But, as Australia has nothing per se to do with these - as is virtually conceded, these values involving a 'wider sweep' than any national boundaries ~ "she" has nothing to do with Philosophy, contradicting the possibility of a National Philosophy. Though the contradiction is easily avoided by rescinding the extravagant claim, the ideal of a National Philosophy should be allowed to rest in peace: nationalism has had its time. Richard Routley^ Research School of Social Sciences Australian National University or With thanks to R. Elliot, W. Godfrey-Smith, S. Grave and L. Mirlin, to several members of the audience at the presentation of the paper at the 1983 Australasian Association of Philosophy Conference, University of Adelaide, to several referees for this Journal, and, not least, to the present Editor. �..A PROSPECTS FOR REGIONAL PHILOSOPHIES IN AUSTRALASIA Philosophy, especially academic philosophy but also folk intellectual other dominated, indeed Europe, swamped, largely by Northern now increasingly from North America. a such populations, have to stay that way. like higher cultural activity in Australasia, has long been and influences, composition of result was virtually inevitable. Suitable policies, from initially Given the migration patterns, the cultural and other baggage imported, the ethnic ruling philosophy, a good philosophy the resulting But it does not policy, could change things. The thought of a regional philosophy, perhaps matching a regional In 1923, a New Zealand correspondent to the newly-launched is hardly a new one. Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy mentioned the ’a new kind or culture, temper philosophy of possibility of under these southern skies’ which the Journal might foster.1 The Journal has however hardly fulfilled such a role (or, for that matter, actively pursued professional philosophers but a wider things some have changed in its pronounced aim of reaching not merely Australasian Australia, community). laying a solid foundation for a new regionalism in philosophy, that possibility of a new temper hardly been realised. but few of philosophy had There is little in the way of a new kind and temper of philosophy under New Zealand skies, which the southern skies include: although And features, distinctive ‘no were distinctively characteristics, have shown up in New Zealand philosophy’2. intended New Zealand New Zealand remains 1. AJPP, March 1923, p.74. The question was taken up by the Editor same volume, p.292.ff; his discussion is considered below. 2. S.A. Grave, A History pf Philosophy in Australia, Queensland Press, 1983, p.l. Page references are to the manuscript. 1 to in the University �v, •? 1 nSOphy of a substantial net importer of dominance colonial but also philosophy, inns been , philosophers. and used to prevail in Australia, where virtually all that chairs, and many other academic posts in philosophy, were the from no established chairs are where most strikingly exhibited at the of orientation Northern New Zealand is not surprising. in academics small courses designed, topics covered and considered and especially in appointments made, the heavy researched Zealand, New by filled Given the usual power and influence of professors in occupied by locals. departments, in persists North, situation The oldest of philosophy taught and (The Northern control is perhaps Zealand New universities, the University of Otago, where the Philosophy Department has been virtually captured by a British School and looks increasingly like an offshoot of the London School q, of In Economics.) kC-f" Ct event the overwhelming Anglo-American dominance of New any Zealand philosophy — also a feature only in slightly lesser degree of Australian philosophy - confirmed by a content survey of the courses offered and be can research papers written at New Zealand universities. to Even when local people have been appointed they have been generally forged requirements brought or up on finished the North as B.Phil. hard well. In particular, the to beat case of philosophy by the Many departments of philosophy remain full of products degree. of this cultural mill: were Australasia, of the Australasian universities in the major period of post-World War II expansion were conveniently seen to in the Oxford in solid diet of Anglo-American material, and a in positions indeed until the mid 70s candidates finished out when they applied for positions, in such Oxford was the (unwarranted) prestige of Oxford and the continuing "cultural cringe". Nonetheless, despite the Northern dominance, significant changes have been occurring in the Antipodes, especially on the Australian philosophical scene (as will be indicated). It is worth asking whether Australian philosophy is 2 moving �hiiosophy towards the sort of change that occurred in USA more than 100 years ago when the Harvard Philosophy Department was brought (or bought) together, and its age "golden American philosophy was never quite the same again, and became its began. own thing. There are Australian philosophy now new operating forces in such a direction. which help could to move There is the widespread emergence, particularly in alternative culture, of a new (bio-)regionalism^, which to cultural and ideological choice along with other local choices; applies and in stark contrast, there is the centralised fashioning of national science and technology which not only provides a model for reflection in regional philosophy policies, but policy also directly bears on parts of the of philosophy science. Unfortunately there are also some serious obstacles to regional philosophies and to the very idea of a regional philosophy. USA, long an importer of culture from Europe, has of certainly of lower components of higher culture such as philosophy exporter philosophical culture, output from Oxford has culture, taken). recently but evidently (witness Are become net also any of turn American the there a reasons why Australasia, if not following suit, should not achieve a better cultural balance of payments, especially Yes, there are reasons. in philosophy? In the first place, the change in the cultural position of the USA went with, and perhaps part derived from, vast in changes economic^power relations. dominance entails cultural dominance, there Australasia’s is little prospect in If economic for most of culture, since there is no serious prospect that Australasia will ever emulate or attain American economic eminence (at least not without nuclear 3. See B. Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy; Cambridge, Massachusetts 1860-1930, Yale University Press, 1977, Parts 2 and 3. 4. See especially, Fourth World News, vol. 1, 1983, and Scale, Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, New York, 1980. 3 K. Sale, Human �-uilosopM but also has long '’een destruction of the North, and disruption of cultural entire flow of commodities, Secondly, as observed, Antipodean universities not only other). and the contain a large component of Northern academics, increasingly of Americans, they also include a substantial additional contingent of fellow-travellers, whose research and teaching is bent to Northern concerns. influential jL segment, 4A4X y e unlikely that this (become so locally will group, former the It is Gy I acclimatised as to) give up its Northern^cultural commitments, isolated person. Nor apart the from As long as Antipodeans do not drastically should they. alter their cultural priorities, they are in a bind situation; for it can be persuasively argued that they would be better off, as far as quality and product goes, stocking their universities with American teaching components and researching American-oriented concerns. One simple numerical argument that Antipodean universities would be off with Americans in the main, takes the following lines:graduates Australasian of and American, are A distinguished, at least in subjects such as philosophy. academics of quality produced per number of say there is 1 per every n graduates. graduates; The (higher degree) significantly not culturally Consider now the number higher degree Austroamerican The (great) preponderance of graduates will be Americans, just by virtue of their vastly and better their more extensive system of university education. greater population So also then, just by ratio considerations, the great preponderance of quality academics drawn from an Austroamerican base will be American, as will the upper percentiles among those quality products. be 5. appointing Clearly, Antipodeans, were they interested in quality, more Americans to their universities. would Such an argument does not As indicated in Appendix 1, the ratio of philosophy graduates with doctorates is in the order of 30 to 1 for USA as compared with Australia. And, ; > is well-known, the extent of university education is much greater in USA than in Australasia: indeed Australia is in this respect the worst educated of the developed nations, as OECD figures have made plain (see, e.g., B. Jones, Sleepers Awake, Penguin, 1982, p. ). Co***) fa /o �.. w. also folk work to show that, for similar reasons, American universities should be full or Chinese Indian professors, two reasons; for cultural differences between Asians and as philosophy; such of first there are significant especially Americans, disciplines in and secondly, their university systems do not deliver such great quotas of higher degree or high quality graduates, at least in philosophy. The conclusion of the numerical argument will not be a popular one. The anti Americanism felt in portions of the Australasian community extends into the and recently there has been increasing insistence, especially universities; the aging now younger Turks that university positions should be reserved for This at the same time as these Turks often preach of locals. community of scholars, by presumably^/ then an international "free" interchange, etc. They cannot have it ail ways. So long as there is a free—flow interchange of will centre dominate the ideas personnel, and periphery culturally as well as economically; will have more than us, and jobs here should go by and large to them if the they it is quality in this high cultural business that we seek, as we mostly claim. Now it is widely enough recognised, lower-down hierarchical ladders anyway, that there is something drastically wrong with these sorts of arguments. are not flooded with high-quality Northerners local contenders who better. retain have appointment the messages of out the centre better than locals do, and higher—echelon (often Northern committees than dusty locals whose shortcomings are known As is beginning to be recognised too, their drive rather we are inundated by Americans with inflated remote Northern fields tend to look greener to biassed) regularly for positions, if we only preferred the Northerners when they were quite visibly superior: references, would who For we higher-quality products, periphery only if they somehow fall foul 5 and of Northern the allow the them system centres to (e.s5. tend to be exiled to the the academic �philosophy» folk w also • it All this makes the position look doubly bad. /Wejought, appointing especially Northerners, Americans, yet And doing so to seems, to order maximize does not achieve the desired quality result, and J? breeds discontent elsewhere, especially among the aging Turks. Cx-z'J2-^ Fortunately there is a way out from this awkward situation and these arguments; and that the is us. the Then shaky shaky way of regionalism. (^We) do our own things; obtain sufficient cultural distance, for be if they are overrated in even their references, and usually not out of the top drawer, in quality. /■jxc*</-C-vuaxt so that they are not numerical argument simply does fall down. and sul^itutable But before we elaborate the emerging proposal there are other influential arguments to dispose of, and the disposal bears on the proposal. There is, to begin with, the argument for have so far been conceded: all more or institutions maximize. most of crave and seek excellence, elements of which that there is an objective commodity, quality or less__agree and what about, which appointments is what academic to capture, indeed aim That at least is the type of myth most of us have encountered; ow know it is a myth, in fact a dangerous myth. Host places don’t even try to make appointments that way, any more that organisations aim just maximize profit, but rather seek some Ability to fit sort of program, teaching or research, is another, and commonly more important factor; 6. to to satisfice on a mix of factors, of which assessed qualityjis only one, and not the highest ranking one. into and and there is no good reason why such a program should not This is easier in the cultural than the technological sphere. However it is also possible technologically: (stronger) theses of technological determinism, and so of cultural determinism, are false. We can choose different options, technologically, as well as culturally. �sometimes be a regionally oriented one. So like Mii 1 OSOphy * 1 prevailing given the practices, argument from excellence does not exclude regional philosophy programs. The deeper-cutting objection is that there the with that objective importancej criticism as excellence, objective of idea notions these notions objective of is something and with the are open to values more seriously connected notion of the same sorts generally, that they have viewpoint rather narrow to which these intellectual of the framework bracketed out the contextual—relativisation component of valuing: or amiss relate.? While those operating within a values paradigm, as such ordinary Oxbridge language philosophy or Sydney materialism say, can bracket out the viewpoint, since it is objective incorporated in the operational paradigm, and so arrive at seemingly quality judgements, the judgements are not preserved (e.g. in truth value) when transposed Consider, to frameworks, other e.g. idealistic or for comparison, the judgements as to the quality or worth of a forest made variously by a deep ecologist, an industrial forester, and officer. viewpoints. Marxist Compare environmental judgements as by philosopher, Califorman—environmentalist to the quality There recreational of a holistically-inclined Marxist language, ordinary philosophers. a are philosophers who even pretend that such environmental work cannot be judged, seemingly because not done by institutions. members of such is ■F the importance of work quality done or importance of problems and issues is highly paradigm problems it of the main philosophical peer group at Harvard and like As this begins to reveal, judgements of judgements and as those are not problems independent tackled. dependent. For of But the example, of quantifying-in and of possible worlds and of de re What follows also begins to bring out what is om^Qitted in a main R.S. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance, 197 . -- theme of �thought which assume immense importance within mainstream the for referential fashionable theories paradigm, vanish to relative insignificance empiricist outside that restricted viewpoint. Now observe that most judgements as to what are the important problems and what constitutes important work - matters helping determine quality - are shipped relative to their down from placement, paradigmatic the Their North. and the importance is paradigms concerned are exported to the Antipodes through the main channels already indicated. We are free to reject these paradigms and select alternatives, and there are, it can be argued, good reasons to do just that, much as there are good reasons different energy technology different (or military technology) choose to that from generally favoured in the North which the North is eager to export southwards. Similar points apply against the cosmopolitan/international argument might which alternatively be called the Peter Stuyvesant international argument, that sophisticated people everywhere smoke this superior -marketed from Holland; product mass-produced cigarette-sophistication is cosmopolitan. and The argument is based on the assumption that philosophy is a ’cosmopolitan subject’, that is is not the sort of enterprise for which place and people are significant as they are for poetry or the novel.8 The assumption has only questioned. to be production also. like a process of But in the process of production the place and people involved And if the product is like a work in discussion) are material. of art, a piece of literature, and not just theorems and arguments assembled in an internationally-approved format, Q then again the historical setting since philosophy, no more than literature, does not emerge in a vacuum. 8. be It takes for granted, for one important thing, that philosophy is a finished product of a certain sort (a propositional theory), not (e.g. to presented matters, Plato's Grave, op.cit, p.2: the term ’cosmopolitan subject’ is said to come from Donegan. As to the significance of place and people for literature, see further C. Partridge, The Making of New Cultures, Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam, 1982. 8 �philosophy could not have emerged in ancient Australia, and if cribbed in mid 20th century Oxford would surely have been marked down or rejected.111 It is important not to be sidetracked into issues - resembling problems aesthetics - that do not need to be contested, such as whether and what extent sets of themes and arguments produced in one place and setting could produced in in another. have been A nonnuclear technology of some sort could be adopted in Europe but apparently will not be, whereas there is reasonable prospect that New Zealand, in contrast with Australia, will pursue a nonnuclear energy strategy. It is the doing* and not what could logic, which be substantial cultural resistance): to be done in the Anglo-American their done, that matters Dialethic here. invalidates the technique and methodology of much philosophy done in the North, could perhaps choose be own distinctive thing. distinctive done in the North (though there would be it is not being done there, and is not likely sphere.11 To this extent, Antipodeans can technology and logical techniques, do their own The international/cosmopolitan argument, stated in a form that would be telling, fails. 9. Like a paper Ln the biological sciences. But here again technique methodology, which may both be regional, are crucially important. 10. Related points can be made concerning modern American work. Consider, for instance such texts as W.V. Quine's Word and Object, (Wiley, New York, 1960) or R. Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia (Basic Books, New York, 1974). The assumptions taken for granted, the arguments involved, etc., are especially American: it is not just the style. The acceptability of arguments and positions is dependent on place and received paradigm. 11. Much as communist anarchism, a live possibility for communes and perhaps communities in Australia, is culturally excluded in North America, owing to the extreme individualism of that culture. 9 and �tUK KLUJLUNAL Hi JLLUbUrdltb IN AUblKALAbLA Of course it can be argued, it is being argued, that Antipodeans don’t need to be, or even oughtn’t to be pursuing their own energy or logic policies and But meeting these considerations takes us to apparatus. concerning issues merit the of a we shall return, our own cuisine cooking is adequate: that we don't or wine styles. arguments, The new need to be or oughtn’t to to be British, or at least cosmopolitan, we should stick to that and buy it off the shelf from ideally importing the cooks also. North, of are not a lot more convincing however than comparable arguments concerning cooking: devising set policies and programs, the point of various diversity, etc.— far beyond the cosmopolitan argument. which new whole the Do we have good reasons to think that British philosophy is better, these days, than British cooking? 12 Antipodeans are free in principle, then, to and to pursue their own paradigms; do so they will by and large want to, and mostly have to, appoint their own people, people they have educated - not saboteurs or people who to be re-educated, from elsewhere, in particular from the North. (had) have But will their intellectual paradigms tie with cultural paradigms, with distinctive features of the local 7 culture. In a loose way, at least, they may link, though works of philosophy will not usually tie in with the culture in the integral fashion that novels (as distinct from more technical works) sometimes do. Grave considers two cultural features, not restricted to particular philosophical programs, that help mark philosophy in Australia as ’an Australian product’ - ’unimportant though this is compared with what matters in philosophy’ he hastens to add. But style, acceptability, truth, do matter, and are not independent - or independent mofar as their perception goes in the case of truth and 12. correctness13 - from One correspondent (name supplied) suggested I ’might note the stultifying crap produced by R.S. Peters Inc. and marketed as philosophy of education’. Certainly, as Grave’s discussion (op.cit. p.318) reveals, Peters’ influence in this area has been very substantial: this indicates another field for local initiative. saco-s. -fo (K t* th- �STS FOR REGIONAL PHILOSOPHIES IN AUSTRALASIA underlying broad theory or received paradigm. However the marks Grave cautiously advances do not serve to distinguish the Australian product, being features philosophy exhibits in lesser Australian degree than the more adventurous and polemical philosophy antiquity. Greek first, described by Passmore as ’most typical of Australian philosophy’, is The a ’diversity of approach and readiness unfashionable point of view’, put to forward much something more an unconventional typical or classical of The second, and more surprising, mark is the manifestoed characte^ philosophy. of of Australian philosophy, 'the most notable example ... between Wittgensteinian Melbourne and Andersonian Sydney, philosophy Andersonian itself' (p.2). This example being ... if is it the line-up was not the far from isolated: others among them concern the fervour generated by "Australian materialism", the extraordinary discussed by political Grave), engagement and the by some growing philosophy confrontation departments concerning (both the relevant/paraconsistent program, with the local ("adversarial") style leading to sharp criticism by Americans. Grave The third and especially the fourth marks are, as notes, hardly distinguishing marks, namely the contrast of the Australian reputation in philosophy with that in other subjects and the anti-intellectual national stereotype, and the separation of the academic philosophy from the sort of mostly-imported philosophy of interest in literary and arty-crafty circles. 13. Nothing need be conceded to strong cultural relativity themes, though they would support the case. It is enough that our theories remain radically incomplete and that there can accordingly be rival theories as to what is true. Similarly, however philosophy is conceived, as the search for truth, explanation, understanding (all of these really), or as inquiry of a certain sort, there can be - will be - competing accounts. 11 �— ruK REGIONAL PHILOSOPHIES IN AUSTRALAQi A The failure of the marks to adequately separate off Australian from the particular local examples) does not matter. (apart Australian produce is sufficiently separated another, by projects. For regionalism should not be confused with nationalism, nor more regional positions such as Sydneyside materialism or Wellington Nationalism philosophies. in philosophy, undesirable trait, not to be encouraged: cultural other For one thing, the research its philosophy as in modalism most with national things, is an other and the new regionalism is linked, in with the breakdown of nations and contraction of state things, power. 14 To get back to where we were: - better much increase - doing our own distinctive things, and that we team or In fact there are several suggestions that begin to up to do so. just the emerging proposal is this, thatQ^e/start emerge; not that we do our own selection, decide our own priorities, instead of having these foisted upon us; invented instead here of competitive or taken Gridiron model in favour of a not just, that is, that we play our own and over from Basketball, games, whether the North and not theirs, Rules and Rugby but that we abandon the individual of cultural achievement sold to us and fostered by the North group cooperative approach (elements of which are already modelled in Antipodean social clubs). 14. See, e.g., Sale, op.cit., and L. London, 1957. Kohr, The Breakdown of Nations, RKP, The Editor of the new 1923 AJPP did however take seriously the notion of National Philosophy, of an Australian Philosophy; some of the issues there raised (p.292ff) are addressed in Appendix 2. 12 �p_FOR regional PHILOSOPHIES in AUSTRAtacta The thoughts here are example: ditch-digging more ditch rapidly the On than enjoyably and two people On the other side, experience cannot individually achievements in their programs. situation. communi ation working complete very shows depends results builds on Despite the For, despite, the individualism the work of in obtaining we that highly myth rapid publication of competitive predominantly much in the attainment work is jointly based, Then again communications the idea or the are tend to lose There are nationalistic considerations (e.g. fact achieves There is the fact that much is conveyed verbally and through face-to-face seminars so that local is and result, and the Here again people at the periphery a result at about the same time as an outsider). There the when the time is ripe for some idea or result, many: There are a mix of reasons:- conveyed. in One is the Poles tend to promote Polish results, Russians will cite a Russian who be ditch rapid verbal communication and access to unpublished upon assignment of credit for it. out. the There are several reasons for this. several clever people will be able to hit on it. important on successfully with the centre on individualistic nature of American academic enterprise,15 material. the is it is well-known that two people cooperating can dig a enjoyment in the doing. of side one Cooperative work tends to pay off in terms of output, quality, and separately. periphery familiar. and simple results will of limited reading, and that people at the centre tend to concentrate when they read on material from the centre by central people, so that published items and results from the periphery will often not be noticed, and may well lose out to 15. central competitors even if they achieve Reflecting other features of the culture and enterprise of the centre which are not so deeply embedded in Australasia: see further R. Routley, ’Culture, philosophy, and approaches to the natural environment - an Australian perspective’, and ’Culture and the roots of political divergence: the Australian/American contrast’, typescripts, Canberra, 1983; both referred to subsequently as ’Culture’. 13 �^2^Sl2IWL_PHILOSOPHTro T. central publication. There is also the fact that people at the centre to merit for merit, more publication and communication opportunities than receive, Here economic factors such as people towards the periphery. market tend (there are, a e.g., many great size of academic more academic philosophers in North America than in the whole rest of the world), control of publishing outlets etc. journals, (with few exceptions all Northern), do begin to enter. economic power does not, and need not, determine culture -^we)can shut philosophical Northern we sets if propaganda want really to. in we And and However off the much the way we shut off our television can stop being impressed by those philosophical middle-men who make a living by importing the Northern stuff. So what do we do? We adapt to the cultural-philosophical level, several of things, that have been suggested in the new (bio-)regionalism. those some regional awakening and local self-management. We do not We aim at slavish remain importers and imitators of, and local commentators on and peddlars of, doctrines and positions from the North. to trying tease out For example, we don’t spend our academic what Wittgenstein or Dummett16 or Quine meant by this or that in the hope that some pale Northern light will perhaps filter through. be lives To I am not suggesting that we emulate the appalling ignorance of people sure, from the North who visit the Antipodes and know little or nothing about what has been done or is being done here; so that we have eminent visitors, their bags heavy with cultural accroutrements, trekking University (now the main for centre through investigation the Australian of relevant logics) and informing us that, or relying crucially on the assumption that, a entails 16. every proposition. National contradiction One reason that these Northerners often know little Nor do we really need C. Martin (an American, formerly professor at Sydney University, now at Calgary) coming by to tell us there are severe difficulties in making Dummett’s stuff work or even cohere (though it’s nice to see him again). 14 �^~^-^S2NAL PHiLosn 1 or nothing about distinctive positions and advances prevailing of assumption the is Antipodes is the the inferiority of cultural and intellectual life in these former southern colonies; another is the narrow (predominantly local) and limited reading undertaken by Northern luminaries. But, despite having been given sufficient cause, we shouldn’t cut ourselves off We can reasonably use what we need from these anyway). so from Northern paradigms and influences (we could hardly manage to entirely we should enterprises. stay informed In any case, but of, imitators not cultures regional continuing are in just as the people are largely European stock. traditions, or part of, their of, rooted older minority) and traditions, Northern So far from cutting loose from these traditions and starting afresh from nowhere, these likely traditions: older (and the local variations that have emerged, are what we want to develop and perhaps mutate, as again with wine styles. The proposal is encourage then develop and paradigms, rather than paradigms we that do increasingly own our working with pale nor-thorn reflections research of fortunately, being do we programs already grounded in need to features make New Zealand is a different and which initiated, of the to pull have larger For the very great culture.17 Nor, more Australia difficult proposition - is already All one really has to do out programs he has already indicated and provide some elaboration and commentary. 17. components. Much of the story, for indicated in Grave’s survey of Australian philosophy. is Northern the story up - though helping to shape the future is part of what the proposal is about. - of It is not as if we have to build from nothing, to do - what is very are advantage things, own research programs, and so shape new Antipodean our difficult - entirely original work, to try to create cultural there local To pull the investigation down to See Culture, op.cit. 15 a more concrete level, I �PHTr mo____ shall list some more prominent programs — not the only ones — and remark on some features of them. The longest running and best known program is, without much doubt, that AusfcraATan naturalism, which is generally traced back to Anderson’s empiricist and which aims to see the natural world, and everything else, metaphysics, encompassed suitably program a and Smart in Adelaide which has since died out there. has included such famous components as the mental-material theme and central materialism, state derivatively, a version of functionalism. failures conspicuous scientifically relations of as the frame work of the world of /physical scienc^f. within It contains as a major subprogram Sydney materialism, Place of its in nowadays and Faced like plans, reduction The latter program contingent it all it by initiated identity in, more physicalisms with takes incorporates now a trimmed theory of universals, and an account of natural laws as universals. Parts of the program, especially materialism and central state reductionism and the unified science ideal, have had counterparts in the North, but the program has, for the most part, retained its distinctively Australian character (it never caught on in smoothly, moreover, into Australian culture. New Zealand). The program It is similarly down—to—earth, and earthy, so far as philosophy can be, without the fancy ideas or effete of idealism European philosophy or the spirituality and suppressed puritanism with which much of North American thinking simmers (including nowadays, yet fits pragmatism). And it does not shrink from explicit metaphysical commitments, and though it is basically empiricist, it is positivistic not (rejecting a verification principle, in particular). 18. Anderson’s metaphysics was far more opposed to reductions than what has succeeded it. For an account of Anderson’s philosophy, and a history and account of Australian naturalism and materialism, see especially Grave, op.cit. 16 �It is a city, primarily «G4t-y o£ Sydney, based program, but the program does extend outside universities a bit (a tiny bit) to the larger metropolitan the As in North America, so in Australasia, little professional philosophy impinges on broader community1920 , or even on the wider academic community the work by Russell, Popper and Kuhn being exceptional. Australasia would be an quite Perth, and has outliers in Apart from notable exceptions, one achievement, naturalism program used to stretch through to elsewhere), the old from worth it the program has never had there now for.) reaches in The to (or indeed the same hold, or nor, surprisingly, has it had much external criticism from confrontation of major city philosophies having died out. more religion stricken Melbourne philosophy, much more than Sydney, has been dominated by a procession of Northern fashions: more working around Canberra, as well as a core of opposition there. Melbourne philosophy is more historically oriented and than Sydney; this turn Adelaide; more than a rather precarious hold, in Melbourne: heavyweight criticism (To recently, earlier idealism and Continental philosophy; Wittgenstein, ordinary language philosophy; turnabout, Quine, Davidson and extensional reduction; then, a remarkable now perhaps Lewis, Kripke and Dummett? 19. In Canada while most academics from other disciplines would know of, and perhaps a little about, Russell, far fewer would know of Wittgenstein (though he is becoming known to lit. crit. groups), and virtually none would know of Quine. (Subjective sampling). On the ’triumph of professionalism’ in philosophy in USA, see Kuklick, op.cit., p.565ff. Kuklick brings out well some of the more disastrous features of professionalism, but does not sufficiently notice that the virtuous features resulting from some professionalisation can be synthesized with broader philosophical activity. 20. Ellis’s work, and more recently the work of F. Jackson and others (e.g in value theory, H. Munro), which can be accounted part of the broader naturalist program. 17 *• I culture. �The one program that reaches beyond the confines of the cities in Australia - is which a metropolitan dominated culture, the vast land always all after environmentalism, being the other - is Australian which has the Colleges of Advanced Education in the country with connections towns and the communes on the North Coast. So far distinguished by what it is not as what it is. of most transformed Europe World, to untouched country left, and little sensitivity accordingly those the and built approaches. human-transformed environment, specifically, issues as such that issues admit shallow European superficiality continues to dominate much of the New And World environmentalism outside North America. differs much as The main environmental issues in Europe tend to concern wilderness. of is and having little wild environment natural its program the Serious and deeper environmental positions are a feature of the New World, the Old having program, diffuse rather a significantly North environmentalism American however from Antipodean environmentalism, most obviously in the religious-spiritual of component former, the in but other several respects as well (see further Culture). Australian More positively, there are three strands to there Firstly, is an extended utilitarianism, differing little from Bentham’s enlarged position, which insists upon counting the This creatures. environmentalism#*- position, developed from a of utilities British base, prominently in animal welfare and animal liberation movements: on focussed animals, domestic animals used in as engineering. genetic interested in, conversion of endangered forests, pain and pleasure. spinoff from It species, is the not of figured it has wild generally with, or much the lands, etc., except insofar as these have a bearing on animal Wider and deeper environmental concerns animal more concerned disappearance sentient and hunted (wild) research however has though animals, it has also become entangled in issues of bio-research such all welfare, and 18 appear only as a so deeper concerns get an inadequate deal. �Secondly, there is a wider and utilitarian and ecological deeper a especially wild and in value trees is is not forests and and This position differs from natural systems. American spiritualism and from an extension of American there which which recognises irreducible value elsewhere than sentience or psychological states, which finds intrinsic ecosystems, position, Thirdly, naturalism. of course, as almost everywhere, a reactionary component, critical of the other strands, which insists that all that needs to be accomplished environmental front be can achieved within older established on the ethical and political frameworks. Whereas materialism is based in Canberra and Sydney, environmentalism Melbourne, but also includes Brisbane and Perth. none in Sydney, is the relevant/paraconsistent materialism and environmental programs have further input from relevant/paraconsistent affecting epistemology program and a in in logic metaphysics, respectively, program, other major areas of philosophy, especially metaphysics. which perhaps includes more centres in Australia than any Melbourne, Whereas the program. theory value essentially is core their in Also centred in Canberra, and reaching across the country, with good connections but centred is other but with the one The program program, and which extends to New Zealand, has also been described elsewhere.* 22 21. It has been described more fully elsewhere: see, in particular, Environmental Philosophy (ed. D. Mannison and others), RSSS, Australian National University, 1980. 22. Again, like all the Australian programs, both those mentionedand others, in Grave, op.cit. But see further, R. Routley, ’Research in Logic in Australia, New Zealand and Oceania’, Research Papers in Logic #14, Australian National University, 1983; G. Priest and R. Routley, On Paraconsistency, Research Papers in Logic #13, 1983; R. Routley and others, Relevant Logics and Their PJLvals, Ridgeview, California, 1983. 19 �The main research program evident in New Zealand philosophy is also a logic A program. grounded program emanating from the work of Prior and now located mainly in Wellington, it might be called the extended modal program. of the on program The impact is perhaps best seen in Cresswell’s Logics and philosophy Languages. Australian philosophy used to be known, and still is in some quarters, its hard-headed empiricism; regrettably New Zealand philosophy is mostly not known for anything much, except perhaps, in UK, that Prior brought adaption of philosophy Russellian work the of present type that remote place. from impressions is particularly accurate; of for is, his Neither of these both are rather out-of-date. of course, not just unusual to But the aim correct these impressions, not just to reflect or report on culture - for what one would to reflect upon is not sufficiently there - like but also to help manufacture elements of a culture, to make an image. To resist the North, we should increase our efforts to further the flourishing already programs, and perhaps other sunrise projects, to build teaching and research around the programs selected for promotion, elaboration, and criticism, to orient appointments, programs. 23 24 Why bother? technology, especially of involved local people, off the shelf, from the North? There is, firstly, the inferiority built-in and despite their attractive packaging. 23. limited range of applications (e.g. obsolence 25 of Northern Without putting too fine a point for a they're hopeless in the vicinity of Methuen, London, 1973. See also work by Goldblatt and by to in Research in Logic, op.cit. 20 our There are several arguments for not on it, many of the imported intellectual goods are shoddy, and only work very these Why not simply buy our philosophy, like almost all doing this, in more than a limited fashion, which are now sketched. products, to Hughes referred �contradictions or dilemmas). Much that is wrong with philosophy Antipodean undoubtedly derives from shoddy intellectual goods imported from the North. Yet buying this material is encouraged by hard-sell cultural the North, who are often enough paid to visit. from ambassadors This is part of the philosophical imperialism from the North - the successor to Northern colonialism that - the Antipodes too willingfysuffers , or, more remarkable, encourages! Secondly, there is the inappropriateness of much of the especially considered as a package, metaphysics, environmental concerns. land or for instance, The European North to Northern cover, has no as product, well as satisfactory environmental ethic fit for Antipodean circumstances, and the American 24. In fact something like the last has been the policy of the LSE. Philosophy Department, where the only outside appointment over a long period was that of Lakatos (hardly a person far removed ideologically). As observed, it now loc s like the practice of the Otago Department also: and apparently it used to be a tendency at Melbourne. But in most places the practice^ is condemned as nepotistic or parochial, and overridden by the call for new (Northern) blood". It is at this stage, among others that administrative measures do matter; for example, to ensure that suitable locally-engaged locals gain employment rather than Northern stooges, in order to inject funds for on-going or new programs, etc. Among sunrise projects in Australian philosophy so far suggested are these: Australian feminism, Antipodean social alternatives, indigenous regiona philosophies (especially Aboriginal, Melanesian, and Polynesian). As foreshadowed with the notion "sunrise projects", much of the rhetoric, and arguments, concerning science policy can be taken over to aPP-Y to > policy, where X is some subject discipline, such as philosophy. 25. Some of these arguments change support centre also. 21 (perhaps revolutionary) at the �I too product is spiritually-loaded theory, political Australian mainstream for culture. 26 In work is much too individualistic, and the European American product, especially the Marxist form, unsuited too and for high-tech, local circumstances, especially again for more environmentally-perceptive people. Thirdly, also telling against comparative advantage, are appealing features of and markets and substitution import (including removal fashions, the Old Boy’s of overseas of the world’s avoidance namely, regionalism; control and structures power network in jobs, policies, etc.) and local control, employment of local people, etc. Fourthly, there are arguments for cultural diversity, applied to philosophy as part of intellectual arguments from richness, complexity, sheer culture: into diversity, stability, etc.26 27 In fact, the garden analogy built notion of garden. ’culture’ transfers. introduced. We obtain not only but good whole we want a rich, dense, productive Naturally But not only seeds and plants the and weeds products, cultivars, but European pests and American weeds. many pests are being maize and European Indian This is why selectiveness and control are essential, as against previous haphazard procedures. The proposal is not for, nor would the case sustain, a narrow localism. The suggestion is for carefully selective penetration of intellectual areas. with technology policy, we select niches which are not occupied As or satisfactorily filled, where we can make a difference, and use and develop local skills and methods. base Indeed the policy has to be selective (of philosophers, publishing outlets, etc.). what extent should components, for instance people, our resource But granting regionalism, to books 26. The point is elaborated in Culture. 27. See, for instance, A.A. Mazrui, A World Federation African Perspective, Free Press, New York, 1976. 22 given and of other teaching Cultures: An �elements, theories and ideas, be imported and to trained, produced, conceived locally? The extent what possibility different components means that many mixes are possible. insist, so far at least, on they be of selectLveness in There is no need to The case for the present is a particular mix. of local But it will do no harm to indicate elements of a mix that finds much local merely for a regional shift, autonomy and production. Negatively, favour. for significantly a undue emphasis is suggestion the on the (also a Cambridge focus); proper conservative that we try to get rid of the Oxford That includes such things as removal of quasi-historical with one. generally More practice, have the proposal is no however The heavy Oxford influence, in particular, has mostly been many been that a very of the main movements emanating from but also the Moore - later very protective of the Northern status quo; they tend to leave things very much as they Positively, approach of reinforcement of the prevailing Anglo-American England, especially ordinary language philosophy, Wittgenstein degree British empiricism centred on Locke-Berkeley-Hume of the attention to sources; status quo. greater 28 style of teaching and doing philosophy. the should are, and recommend just this. 29 we achieve further disassociation from the Anglo-American empiricist past by widening the range of philosophical traditions 28. Does it sound familiar? Outside philosophy, it should. For example, we have now been told by the Americans that our defence role, unlike theirs, is regional, not global: this is supposed to shed great light on our previously confused defence policies. 29. The point is laboured in E. Gellner, Words and Things, Victor Collancz, London, 1959. But even ordinary language philosophy, though it much contracted the proper range of philosophical investigations, had its liberating elements, e.g. removal of some of the narrowness and more cramping assumptions induced by technical jargon. �drawn upon, to include not only thought, Eastern neglected in parts of but also Pacific ethnic material and Australasian philosophy. The idea is that such a plurality assist and strands continental sources, of especially in will teaching, removing narrower cultural biasses and enable more discrimination to Then too we should be better able to see the be obtained. ranges theories of that are open to us in the Antipodes and how to advance our own programs. APPENDIX 1. Notes investigation of on the philosophical supply situation. Sociological the philosophy labour market in Australia and New Zealand has yet to be attempted. of But a picture some the underlying elements simple numerical argument of the text can be gained from the following table: TABLE 1. Ph.Ds in Philosophy: a USA/Australian comparison USA Number (Male/Female) 1977 330 (264/66) 1978 283 (235/48) 1979 285 (204/54) Australia Number 9 1980 4 1981 4 Notes: 1. New Zealand Number The breakdown of the USA numbers by sexes is (male/female) given. Similar figures do not appear to be available for Australia. 2. The US figures are for the academic year ending in the e.g. 1978 covers the Northern Year academic year 1977-78. shown, Southern figures are for the calendar year shown. In applying table 1 some simplifying assumptions are made. candidates for appointment to regular university It is positions assumed now that require a �9 find trite a moral fair dealing'), but nothing at all distinctive. national philosophy, exclude there being programs). So Australia has at least various life, of regional far, then, all is well. the inconsistency: of humour, courage and base to build on ('traditions ... trouble derives but So far, then, there be (such as local research But shortly the Editor is plunged into from the extravagant claim that Philosophy' (p.295; with rearrangement). sweep' than any national boundaries — these "she values is a Though the easily avoided by rescinding the extravagant claim, the ideal of a National Philosophy should be allowed to rest in had its time. involving has nothing to do with Philosophy, contradicting the possibility of a National Philosophy. contradiction do But, as Australia has nothing per se to do with these - as is virtually conceded, 'wider 'if nothing to do with these - the eternal values of the Spirit, the Ideals of Truth, Goodness and Beauty - then and only then has she nothing to with a this does not however is not: philosophies can peace: nationalism has �PROSPECTS FOR REGIONAL PHILOSOPHIES IN AUSTRALASIA Philosophy, especially academic philosophy but also folk philosophy, like intellectual and higher cultural activity in Australasia, has long been (Uhfi swainped, by Northern increayngly from North America. Europe, now inltutal i!t largely indeed dominated, the from patterns, of composition ethnic resulting uU-HT; populations, such a result was virtually does not initially the migration Given imported, baggage and/other Influences, the But it inevitable. Suitable policies, a good philosophy policy, have to stay that way. could change things. I he of thought is cultuie, hardly a regional a new one. philosophy, In 1923, a matching perhaps a regional correspondent to the New Zealand newly-1aunched Aust r a1asIan Journa1 of Psychology and Philosophy mentioned the possibility of 'a new kind or temper of philosophy under these southern skies’ which the 11 o *5 SIK reaching for (or, not community). soi id might Journal, merely foundation that for a matter, professional although And The foster. some Journal has actively pursued philosophers things new regionalism however hardly but have changed in philosophy, its a fulfilled pronounced wider of aim Australasian in Australia, laying a that possibility of a new Lemper of phiLosophy has hardly been realised. There is little in the way of a new kind and temper of philosophy southern skies were intended to include: distinctively New Zealand skies, which the but few distinguishing features, ’no under characteristics, New have Zealand shown up in New Zealand The question was taken up by the Editor in the discussion is considered below, especially in p/ces 1 �pin losophy' .- New Zealand remains a substantial net The situation of colonial dominance that used to prevail in and philosophers. Aus 11.11. la, wheie virtually all chairs, were filled by academics philosophy, Importer of philosophy, and many from the North, posts academic other in tends to persist in New Zealand, where no established chairs are occupied by locals.\ Given the usual power and Influence of professors topics coveted considered and in small and in courses designed, departments, especially appointments made, the heavy Northern orientation of philosophy taught and researched in New Zealand is not The Northern control is perhaps most strikingly exhibited at the surprising. oldest of New Zealand Philosophy Department event , the the University of has been substantially captured by a like increasingly looks universities, an offshoot of overwhelming Anglo-American the Otago, where the British School and University of London.In any dominance of New Zealand philosophy 1 so <1 feature only in slightly lesser degree of Australian philosophy — can be confirmed by a content survey of the courses offered and research papers written at Now Zealand universities. Even when local people have been appointed to positions in Australasia, they have been brought up on a solid diet of Anglo-American material, and they have often been reforged or finished in the North as well. In particular, the S.A. Grave, A History of Philosophy in Australia, Queensland University Piess, 1)84, p.l. Page references are to the manuscript. The paper draws/ heavily on this history. / / was correct at the t^me of presentation of J ' J/ ' v/i th the recent loss of^Xiair at Wellington, the qualification, but the pattern of domination persists. the pager (August claimrequires *ln the 1981 Commonwealth University Handbook listing, 6 of the 8 members of the Department held their main degree, Ph.D., from London, and one of the remainder from Exeter. Only one member of the Department, soon to retire, falls outside the nexus. �of requirements the major period post­ of li expansion were conveniently seen to in the case of philosophy by World War the in the Australasian universities B.Phil, Oxford products of Many degree. fill's cultural mill: in Oxford were hard (unwarranted) departments of indeed until philosophy full remain of the mid 70s candidates finished to beat out when they applied for positions, such was the prestige of Oxford and the regrettable, but still continuing, "cultural cringe". Nonetheless, been occurring scene (as in Northern it indicated). significant dominance, especially on the Antipodes, be will the despite the Australian worth is asking changes have philosophical Australian whether phiLosophy is moving towards the sort of change that occurred in USA more than 100 years ago when the Harvard Philosophy Department was brought (or bought) together, its "golden and age" began.’ American the same again, and became its own thing. philosophy was never quite There are now new forces operating which could help to move Australian philosophy in such a direction. the widespread regionalism/' other provides a which applies choices; local fashioning emergence, of national model for and particularly cultural to in in alternative and there are of choice along ideological contrast, there and technology policies, reflection in regional also some is philosophy directly bears on parts of the philosophy of science. soon appear, culture, stark science serious obstacles There is the a new with centralised which not only policy but also Unfortunately, as will to regional philosophies and to the very idea of a regional philosophy. See B. Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy; Cambridge, Massachusetts 1860-1930, Yale University Press, 1977 , Parts 2 and 3. On this bio-regionalism, see especially, Fourth World News, vol. 1, and K. Sale, Hitman Scale, Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, New York, 1930. 1983, �1 other seek b,1! (Iu<i'!iy fs to satisfice on a mix of factors, of which assessed only one, and not often the highest ranking one. Ability to fit program, teaching or research, is another, and commonly more lnto 8ort iiipo/iant factor; and so H ! linGS bc a regionally reason why such a program should not is no good there So given prevailing practices, oriented one. the argument from excellence does not exclude regional philosophy programs. in my event, there are enough local candidates of sufficient worth to proceed >‘-giona] w!I;i And, programs without sacrifice clearcut excellence. of Local enterprise need entail no loss of excellence, and could well increase it. btP'! 1 s" v • 1 i! ■ 1 b'J objection is that cutting of excellence, objective obJt( ■ * importance; that criticism is of notions llL'J' ' ' 1 '".ll_ ff".l these there is something seriously amiss and notions objective values with open are more contextual-re lativisation a rather narrow intellectual the to generally, of component paradigm, notion same sorts they that of of have the valuing: While those operating framework or viewpoint to which these values relate.10 within connected the as such ordinary Oxbridge language philosophy or Sydney materialism say, can bracket out the viewpoint, '1 's incorporated in the operat ional paradigm, and so arrive at set !! :s’’1 y objective quality judgements, the judgements are not preserved (e.g. m truth Marxist value) when viewpoints. transposed ConsidcZ to for other frameworks, comparison, the e.g. idealistic judgements as to or the quality or worth of a forestWade variously by a deep ecologist, an industrial forester, and a recreational officer. Compare judgements as to the quality of What fol lows also begins to bring out what is omitted in a main theme if R.S. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motor Cyc1e Maintenance, Bodley Head, Lond 1974. Note that efusing the notion of objective excellence does not lea^ subjectivism. T avoid the customary false dichotomy , compare the noti validity (usuall Ci1 led to themselves these days by classical logicians' with that of quality^/. �9 a ho 1 i s i /c a I 1 y-i nc I. i ned Marxi st, philosophers it group As because the of problems such '!lt » is importance of are be cannot even judged, main philosophical work are not of quality peer done problems or independent of But tackled. issues is highly paradigm dependent. the For example, those of qu in t i f y i ng-i n and of poss l b Le worlds and of de re importance for immense mainsti -am empiricist restricted that ire judgements reveal, to which assume the language, There work by members of the not done problems and import nice of whit is ordinary philosophers. environmental such that by like institutions. begins this outside it Harvard and judgements witiiiii pretend who philosopher, environmental Californian and seemi ng 1y environmental the important fashionable referential theories paradigm, vanish to relative insignificance Now observe viewpoint. that most judgements as to problems and what constitutes importkj/t work - matters tbechelping, determine quality - are shipped down from the North. is relative to their paradigmatic placement, and Their importance the paradigms concerned are exported to the Antipodes through the main channels already indicated. fri'e to reject be .argued, choose that these paradigms and select alternatives, good reasons different generally energy favoured to do just technology in the that, much as (or different North the which We are and there are, it can there are military North is good reasons technology) eager to to from export southwards. against which might alternatively be the called cosmopolitan/internalional the Peter Stuyvesant argument international r argument , everrywhere smoke that mass-produced and -marketed The argument ' cosmopol i t in subject', pJL Jo-Zj cvnYy' c. Pi ^e/S3)r?'5"?. is based that is a from i s not Holland; this superior product.. cigarette-sophist lest ion on the assumption that pM the sort of enterprise for wht f '/is c^ra- �10 poetry for assumpt ion has only important sori (a to be presented propositional to be questioned. that philosophy thing, theory), not a is a 1 i terature , and work not just. theorems i nternati ona11y-approved format,12 ’ philosophy, since no more than It and The takes for granted, finished product of a certain (e.g. involved the if And novel.11 the process of production also. process of production the place and people mater i a I or of in discussion) art , a rg urn e n t s But in the like a piece assembled in are of an then again the historical setting ma t ters , literature, does not emerge in a vacuum. Plato's philosophy could not have emerged in ancient Australia, and if cribbed in mid 20th century Oxford would surely have been marked down or rejected. fmpoi taut not 1 in aesthet ics extent sets ol adopted in prospect themes nonnucleai Europe that do not that been produced New to be sidetracked need and arguments in another. but to be contested, produced . such as whether and what in one place and setting could A nonnuclear technology of some sort could be apparently will Zealand, into issues — resembling problems in not contrast It is J be, with whereas there Australia, is will reasonable pursue a >t what could be done, that Eravi.’, op.cit., p.2: the term 'cosmopolitan subject' used there comes fioni Donegan. As to the significance of place and people for literature, see fin ! hi’i C. Partridge, The Making of New Cultures, Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam, bike i paper in the biological sciences. But here again technique methodology, which may both be regional, are crucially important. and 13 ■pies, e.g. concerning modem American work. Consider, for instance such texts as W.V. Quine's Word _ (bi ley, New York, 1.960) or R. Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia (Basic Books, New York, 1974). The assumptions taken Tor granted, the arguments involved, etc., are especially American: it is not just the style. £9_c-ePta^j 1 i ty of arguments and positions is dependent on place and r e c e 1 v ed par a d I gm . �11 .71 a L t < • r s here . Dialethic much Anglo-American methodology of which logic, invalidates philosophy, could the and technique perhaps be done in the North (though there1 would be substantial cultural resistance): it is not being done there, this extent, and is not likely Antipodeans can their choose the! r own international/cosmopo11 tan argument, s tit ed techniques, Of course do it can the Anglo-American sphere.To to be done in be argued, o wn distinctive dis tine t ive and technology The thing. in a form that would be telling, it is being argued, that Antipodeans don’t need to be, or even oughtn't to be pursuing their own energy or logic policies and apparatus. of But meeting these considerations takes us to a whole new set issues concerning the merit of various policies and programs, diversity, etc. - far beyond the cosmopolitan argument. which we shall return, arguments concerning are not a cooking: the. point of The new arguments, to lot more convincing however than comparable that we don't, devising our own cuisine or wine, styles. need to be or oughtn't to be British, or at least cosmopolitan, cooking is adequate: we. should stick, to that and buy it off the shelf from the North, ideally importing the cooks also. Do we have good reasons to think that British philosophy is better, these days, than British cooking? Antipodeans are free, in principle then, to pursue their own paradigms; and to do so they will by and large want to, and mostly have to, appoint their own people, people they have educated - not saboteurs or people who have (had) 14, Much as communist anarchism, a live possibility for communes and perhaps communities in Australia, is culturally excluded in North America, owing to tiie extreme possessive individualism of that culture. On dialethic logic, see G. Priest and R. Routley, On Paraconsistency, Research Papers In Logic, #13, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1983. �12 elsuJhere, in particular from the North. parad igms features of the I oca 1 though works of integral do. cultural paradigms, with distinctive culture? way, philosophy will to not usually programs, unimportant Independent features, not But or at least, with tie in style, I5 do already restricted with link, they may culture in the link. the truth, far considers Grave particular philosophical 'an Australian wha t matters acceptabilit/, so to Australia as compared is independent mJ correctness they philosophy in this though add. - extent, help mark that to limited a cultural certain truth tic 4 fashion that novels (as distinct from more technical works) sometimes Indeed, hastens perused But will the do product' he in philosophy’ and matter, are not percept ion from under lyi/g broad theory or received paradigm. CG'n £)Q_ However the marks Grave U-y ut Ivin ecu/, A do not features serve to the distinguish philosophy Australian Australian exhibits in s i g n i f 1 c a n t though they are, product, lesser the degree adventurous and polemical philosophy of Greek antiquity. by Passmore as 'most typical of Australian first two than the being more The first, described philosophy' , is a 'diversity of approach and readiness to put forward an unconventional or unfashionable point of v iew' ,' (> philosophy, something wh ich more (with typical some of notable ancient philosophy exceptions) than exhibits Australian an austere 15 Nothing need be conceded to strong cultural relativity themes, though they would support the case. It is enough that our theories remain radically incom|> 1 e te and th.11 there can accordingly be rival theories as to what is true. Similarly, however philosophy is conceived - as the search for truth, explan it. ion, understanding and wisdom (all of these and more, really), or as, more vaguely, inquiry of a certain soil - there can be, and will, be, competing accounts; so a pluralistic theory is inevitable in giving a fuller view. Both preceding quotations, while included as such in Grave's Introduction, are It™ J. Passmore, 'Philosophy', in The Pattern of Australian Culture fed. ' " 'lcL«'0O, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y., 1963 , pp.131-163. The same annotation also applies to the third mark. �13 uni1ormit y re fI ec t i ng more and that often at/rlbuted sorprising , most 'the philosophy, WittgensteLnian Andersonian notable Melbourne philosophy i s ^’the mark ... example and itself manifestoed character’ Andersonian Sydney, This example (p.2). the ... being 'The second, itself. Land to the is line-up it if Australian of the not was far between isolated: from ited by "Australian materialism", ■ discussed by Grave), relevant/pa raconsis tent to sharp criticism by and growing the program, with Americans. philosophy departments confrontation (both concerning the local ('adversarial’) style leading Connected with these first marks two furl her character 1st les of much Australian philosophy, as of much unkindly unwillingness add (in the mu file poi n t s , hope of locating A are 8th century turi^-of- this-century Cambridge philosophy! di rec tness , the namely surface clarity/and, some would difference), bluntness, genuine unsubtlety and crudity. third and the Jour th marks yklvnnci'^/ are very different- ~~ A Anglo-American philosophy; namely Australasia from, and its general the isolation of academic philosophy indifference or even hostility to, in the sort tZ7 1 7 Though:for the most p< that influenced by Sydney rather than that originating 1 n^JJpl bourne. "this reflects the different historical i nJ 1 u_e 11 c e s -rhrriT Sydney and Melbourne philosophy.f-oj-’ a-h4 y Scottish dZTf-rrf- Contineryfal antecedents. A 1 Cj? V A" I r V �of (e.g. philosophy imported of that Nietzsche and the existentialists) 8eneratlng Interest in literary and arts circlls. rhe philosophy failure does of not such marks matter. to one For lts Australian !cts- .nother, Australian is produce regionalism >ot more regional positions such as . •lism «fth national philosophies. ChlnJ, is an undesirable trait, > as In Na‘ the thing, r< nationa11 out separate "Ot in other cultural » 'S^nked, with the breakdown of nations and contraction of state power.18 * * : ............ merging proposal loin 1,1 181,1 irch in iiors- °f COP1CS 1 : ■ >d«. ind 18t< 1 “t”>n UB not 8 suggestions lecide , , Sale, that that begin to our own priorities, that is, that we play our th North) and not theirs, Gridiron and Basketball - but that we abandon the individual competitive model of cultural achievement, 18Q< aec > e.g., London, 1957. we that we do our own selection just, fr< RU1< that > Pt bllcatlons and appointments, study 1 styl this, oir own distinctive things, and 11 1 is op.cit., and L. ?’011 r > sold to us and fostered Tlu>_ breakdown of Nations , RKP , Ihe Editor of the new.1923 AJPP did however take seriously the notion of National Philosophy, of (what must have surprised some New Zealand readers) an Australian Philosophy; some of the issui s there raised (p.292ff) are addressed in Appendix 2. �In favour of a group cooperative approach (elements of which are by the .Iort.ii, already modelled in Antipodean social clubs). ihe thoughts here are simple and familiar. digging example: more rapidly On the one side is the ditch- it is well-known that two people cooperating c.an and enjoyably than two people working Cooperalive work ten Is to pay off output, quality, and enjoyment the in doing. on dig a ditch :he ditch separately. or el ewhere in terms of On the ot her side, experience shows that we in the periphery cannot individually cmip^el ete very successfully with the centre on achievements in ior this. the attainment nature of results of depends acce:;:i to unpublished material. There are several reasons Despite the highly competitive Ono is the communication situation. p r s ’ i omi nan tIy ind i vi iua 1is t ic in their programs. American academic upon enterprise,^ much verbal rapid communication and For, despite the individualism myth, work is joint ly based, and builds on the work of many; when the time is ripe for some- several clever people will idea or result, communications result:, an I periphery the tend na t i oiri 1 is t 1 c are to Important assignment lose out. considerations Russians will obtaining in of credit Again (e.g. for is th e facc~ I o- f ace scm 1 nars so that fact Poles that Local rapid Here it. much results tend Then again the publication of there is a mix Russian who achieves a The re be able to hit on it. to again result at or at the There are people of reasons:- promote idea Polish results, about the same time as is conveyed verbally and will be conveyed. through There is the IH'llecling other features oi Ihe culture and enterprise of the centre which are not so deeply embedded in Australasia: see further R. Routley, Culture, philosophy, and approaches to the natural environment an Austral I in perspective', in The Environment, Ethics and Ecology (ed. D. Bennett), The Faculties, Aust raIian National University, 1984, and also Culture and the roots of political divergence: the Australian/American contrast , typescript , Canberra, 1981; both referred to subsequently as ' Cu J ture ’ . �fact Limited of when 1.11 e y pub 1 i shed may reading, read on and that material from L terns and results we J I I ose out There publication. receive, to merit also for merit, the from the central is people at more by to tend central concentrate so people, that periphery wi 11, often not be noticed, and fact that publication towards the periphery. thin people centre competitors the the centre even they if the at people achieve Here economic tend centre communication and central to opportunities factors do begin to enter; ket (there are, e.g., a grept many more academic philosophers in North America than in the whole rest of the world), control of publishing outlets and journals (with few exceptions all Northern), etc. culture - we can shut off way we being However economic power does not, and need not, determine the Northern shut off our television impressed by sets if philosophical those philosophical propaganda in much the we really want middle-men to. who And we can stop make a living by importing the Northern stuff. So what do we do? We adapt to of the cultural-philosophical level, several those things, that have been suggested in the newer regionalism. some regional importers and doctrines and awakening and self-reliance. of, and local from the North. imitators positions local We do commentators For not remain on example, We aim at we and slavish peddlars of, spend our don't academic Lives trying to tease out what Davidson or Dumrnett or Kripke meant by this or through. that To in the be hope sure, I that am some pale not Northern light sugg esting that we will perhaps emulate the filter appalling ignorance of people from the No r t h who visit the Antipodes and know little or nothing about what has been done or Jis being done here;^ so that we Regrettably, the Ignorance extends to many locals. In particular, infected with Sydney materialism appear remarkably ill-informed as to features oi other Australasian programs. have those basic �17 vi: Hors, Australian the through investigation of heavy bags their cultural with University National the (now main relevant logics) and Informing us that, or relying crucially positions '■ n advances is ind ! ioiity colo!IJ( often Northerners these for centre One reason on tnu assumption that, a contradiction entails every proposition. that trekking accroutrements, cultural of and intellectual narrow nothing or is the t.he Antipodes the is another little know about distinctive prevailing assumption of life these in (predominantly local) and former the southern limited reading undertaken by Northern luminaries. despite /having But, ourselves off to anyway: been fro/ Northern paradigms and az I propaganda is different). of, or part of, in ' their enterprises. c u t ’ *1 k ’ these nowliere* 1 oose 1.r om (and older shouldn’t cut Influences (we could hardly manage We can reasonably use what we need from In any case, regional cultures are rooted ■ 1 we cause, so we should stay informed of, but not imitators continuing traditions: tiics< sufficient given these likely traditions minority) a nd rgely European stock. start! ng afresh traditions, and the from local variations that have already appeared are what we want to develop and perhaps mutate, as again with wine styles. 1,111 things, ol L-K‘ Proposal is then that encourage and develop our own Antlpodean paradigmfl, ’• rather H is increasingly research programs, than working not as we H ™ very Sreat a nt own local and so shape newer - to bui Id from nothing, to of do to try to create cultural programs ilready Initiated, which have the of being grounded 2I . ’ See Cuiture, op.cit. our with pale northern reflections “ entirely ori Inal work, are res< lrcl do in features of the larger culture.212 �18 Nor, do we need fortunately, - Australia part 1 j u'■ o! c New Zealand to do * more difficult the story, for proposition - is All one really To pull the investigation down to a more concrete sketch some more prominent cooperative programs - by no means on Ly programs - and remark on some rel evant features of them. ‘L?. longest running and PdJ 111 .... .IdJL and 1 r sin , science. (physical) best known program is, which ’ 1 >r program The c'.ipi r i <-ist metaphysics,... and state version of tr famed as materialism, both back and world, and* 22 Faced plans, like il takes it initiated in, identity theme more physicalisms all now Anderson's It in The latter program has included there. nowadays to program the mental-material contingent ’1reduction theory of uiiivcisals, that in Armstrong's work. a functionalism. ,n natural traced subpro components central generally is is now best exhibited Adelaide which subsequently died out famous the see to aims without much doubt, as suitably encompassed within the framework of the world of e[se, incorporates a derivatively, with and a conspicuous "scientifically" and an account of natural laws as relations of universals, components of the developing Sydney realism. Parts of the nd central state reduction^sm and y matei science ideal, have had counterparts in the North, but the program t!!l has, Much of about. to bring out programs he has already indicated and provide some is I. shall Jlie such is different and is a elaboration and commentary. level, proposal chough helping to shape in Grave's survey of Australian philosophy. already indicated has the what of the story up - to make for the most part, retained its distinctively Australian character 22 > An Arson's metaphysics was however far more opposed to reductions than whal has succeeded it. For an account of Anderson's philosophy, and a history and account op.cit. of Australian naturalism and materialism, see especially Grave r y , �19 respite export efforts, it never caught on in New Zealand. It is similarly down-to-earth, - earthy, and so far as whlch much of American North does not n city r ‘ from >23 or ' positivistic the University would be quite ropolitan culture. of the ,ider turn achievement, h one to through 1 notable community, icademic ■ an exceptions, the As in tonal philosophy impinges on 11 even on 8t from from mainly ' t£ny hit) to t ia, Apart not is it universltles; but the program does extend outside th lstrala81a metaphysical explicit in particular). broadcast program, based it ink piricist, (rejecting a verification principle, ’s effete nowadays, (including simmers thinking ba* 18 £t !t ideas or fancy the without philosophy or the spirituality and suppressed puritanistn 111901 01 Eu 01 Wlth be, philosophy can The program fits program worth this working lelaide; it work by around for.) now reaches in The to 1 core of opposition there. has never had the same hold, or ’or example, while most academics from other disciplines would °f’ and perhaps a little about, Russell, far fewer would know of iH;! - i'1 (though fie is becoming known to lit. crit. groups), and virtually none would know of Quine. (The sampling is subjective.) kHOW On the hL'?-’ fairly recent 'triumph of professionalism' in philosophy in USA, see b--’65ff. Kuklick brings out well some of the more r/Hls ''^Oures ol professionalism, but does not sufficiently notice that 7 1* 1 features resulting from some pro fess tonalisation can be synthesized with broader philosophical activity. �20 more i rather precarious hold, than in Melbourne: 4 nor, more surprisingly, has it. had heavyweight criticism from there (or indeed much external criticism from elsewhere), the old confrontation of major city philosophies having died Melbourne out. than stricken Continental procession a then, philosophy; fashions: recently, remarkable a Northern of more philosophy; oriented historically and more reLigion philosophy, much more than Sydney, Sydney; Melbourne by dominated is more philosophy earlier Wittgenstein, Quine, turnabout, has been idealism and language ordinary and Davidson extensional reduction; now perhaps Lewis, Kripke and Dumrnett? one The program beyond reaches that confines the of the cities in Australia - which is after all a metropolitan dominated culture, the vast land always the other being a Australian environmentalism, is - rather diffuse of Advanced Education in the towns and country much distinguished environmental by what positions are it a is not as feature of transformed the New most specifically having little wild untouched country left, and such as issues Europe that tend admit Ihii opt*.in to having those concern shallow the wilderness. built approaches superficiality environmentalism of outside (and continues North and it what Europe to So far the program is as the communes on the North Coast. is. World, its of natural America. deeper Old World, and environment and environmental human-trans formed to the and little sensitivity accordingly The main encourage Serious environment, techno-fix dominate North much issues situations). of American the New in Issues And World environmentalism differs significantly however from Antipodean environmentalism, most obviously ' ‘ihe exceptions include Ellis's distinctive program, which can be accounted part of the broader naturalist program, and at Monash the work of F. Jackson and, earlier, of il. Munro in value theory. �21 in the religious-spiritual component of the former but several in other respects as well (see further Culture). More there positively, are an is there enviton.nentallsmfirstly, strands three Australian to utilitarianism, extended differing 1‘' in theory from Bentham's enlarged position, which insists upon counting In the utilities of all Iris figured prominently In animal welfare and animal liberation British base, movements: This position, developed from a sentient creatures. though and it has focussed bio-research more generally such as genetic engineering. endangered species, or much interested in, concerned with, animals used in it has also become entangled in issues of animals, researm and hunted (wild) domestic animals, on It is not however the disappearance of wild lands, the conversion of forests, etc., except insofar as these have a bearing on animal pain and pleasure. Wider and deeper environmental concerns appear only as a spinoff from animal welfare, and so deeper concerns get an inadequate deal. Secondly, there is a wider and a deeper ecological position, which is not utilitarian and which recognises irreducible value elsewhere than sentience or forests and differs ecosystems, American from nature 1 Ism. s t a t es , p s y c h o 1 og i c. a 1 as Thirdly, which finds especially there is reactionary component, critical of needs that to be accomplished natural wild and spiritualism on and of intrinsic value from course, an as the other strands, the environmental systems. in trees This position of American extens ion everywhere, almost and a which insists that all front can be achieved within older estab I tshed (European) ethical and political frameworks. Whereas materialism is based in Sydney, environmentalism is centred in has been described more fully elsewhere: see, in particular, cn La 1 Philosophy (ed. D. Mannison and others), RSSS, Australian National University, 1980. It: �22 ;llld Canberra, but also Includes '11 ’*!) '111 Brisbane and Perth. Also centred in Canberra, and reaching across the country, with good connections Ln Melbourne, !ew b,lt in materialism and epistemology from reLevant/paraconsistent other affecting program wh i ch program, a nd programs have environmental input perhaps wh ich is program areas major program. relevant/paraconsistent the is Sydney, New in Zealand, respectively, the program, one logic especially centres more to extends a essentially but The metaphysics. Australia than also been has with in metaphysics, theory value philosophy, of includes and their core the Whereas any other described , 26 elsewhere. n 1 *n ! !H logic grounded research program program. A impact of the in New Zealand philosophy program emanating ton, Inc evident program on it might from the work of is also Prior and a now be called the extended modal program. philosophy is perhaps best seen in Cresswell’s work.27 Australian philosophy used for its hard-headed known fo1 empiricism; to be known, is in some quarters, regrettably New Zealand philosophy is mostly anything much, except unu.-,u.i] adaption o! and still t rh ps, in UK, that Prior brought Russellian philosophy from that remote place. his Neither of ...‘,ain, like al] the Australian programs, both those mentioned and others, {_’rave> op.cit. But see further, R. Routley, 'Research in Logic in KTU!,ral;a ’ NeW Ze Jceania' , R search Papers in Logic #14, Australian National University, 1983 (which also considers other programs in logic)* G- Priest and R. Routley, op. cit.; and R. Routley, R.K. Meyer and others’, -J- -£?C2JLL s a nd e i r Rivals, Ridgev lew, California , 1982. 2 7 c. , „-,,,Se,e especially N.J. Cresswell, Logics and , ' —o---......... .. Languages, Methuen, ucuuu^u, London, iy/3; but see also -1 — ----’ 1by Goldblatt - . . ■ and- -by Hughes --------------------work referred to in Research in Logic, op.cit. Also described there is <an original ,1....1 version of the modal program (transparent intensional logic) elaborated by Tlchy at Otago. �2J these impressions is particularly accurate; both are rather out-of-date. work of l!::i impress Lons, the present type is, of course, not just to reflect or report not just But to correct these on culture - for what one would like to reflect upon is not sufficiently there - but also to help manufacture elements of a culture, to make an image. io resist the North, we should Increase our efforts to further the sunrise projectsbuild f e,lr ding .Jiid research and criticism, iround tin’ programs selected for promotion, elaboration, to orient: appointments, especially of involved local people, to 28. 4 ...nong sunrise projects in Australian philosophy so far suggested (not all °* Ihiin feasible) are these: Australian feminism, Antipodean social and political. alternatives, peace studies, indigenous regional philosophies (especially Aboriginal, Melanesian, and Polynesian). Another promising field, witli practical consequences, for local initiative is the philosophy of education, where material produced by R.S. Peters has dominated the market, with stultifying effects It is now alleged. As foreshadowed with the notion of "sunrise projects", much of the rhetoric, cl nd a i gum on t, concerning science and technology policy (presented in the case of Australia in Jones, op.cit.) can be taken over to apply to X policy, where X is some subject discipline, such as philosophy. �24 i 2 9, these programs." Why bother? for not doing this, there Northern in more than a limited fashion, which are now sketched. the firstly, is, products, point on despite vicinity it, many of Antipodean of the imported obsolence of most Without putting too intellectual goods are shoddy, and packaging. dilemmas). or undoubtedly imported from Idle North. built-in range of applications (e.g. contradictions philosophy and inferiority their attractive only work for a very limited tiie simply buy our philosophy, like almost technology, off the shelf, from the North? There are several, arguments I oui fine a Why not derives from they’re hopeless in that Much shoddy is with wrong goods intellectual Yet buying this material is encouraged by hard-sell cultural ambassadors from the North, who are often enough paid to visit. This In fact something like the last has been the policy of the LSE Philosophy Department, where the only outside appointment over a long period was that of Lakatos (hardly a person far removed ideologically). As observed, it now looks like the practice of the Otago Department also; and apparently it used to be a tendency at Melbourne. But in most, places the practice is condemned as nepotistic or parochial, and overridden by the call for "new (Northern) blood . however there can be significant differences between nepotistic appointments and those strengthening local programs. Is ;,t this stage, among others that administrative measures do matter; for example, to ensure that suitable locally-engaged locals gain employment rather than Northern stooges, to direct funds into on-going local programs rather thin Imported fashions, etc. There are various ways appropriate administrative details can be handled, locally or nationally; but nothing draconian, such as wholesale exclusion of noncitizens, is required. Observe, indeed, that no restriction of academic appointments to nationals (in Canadian style) or the like is being advocated. Anyone who arrives at a conclusion of that sort from what has been argued has misunderstood the case in crucial respects. As a matter of simple mathematics, restricting appointment fields characteristically reduces both quality of candidates available (however quality is assessed) and range of possibilities open for future research; and no such restrictions are advocated. The author has witnessed the debilitating effects of field restrictions at the Australian National University and elsewhere. 30p Borne of centre also. t hesi! arguments support change (perhaps revolutionary) at the �25 is part Northern of philosophical the - colonialism Imperialism the that from the too Antipodes the successor North - suffers, willing to more- or, remarkable, encourages! Secondly, especially there is the inappropriateness of much of the Northern product, considered as metaphysics, environmental for package, a cover, to as well as The European North has no satisfactory concerns. land or environmental ethic instance, fit for Antipodean circumstances, the deeper and American pack ige is too spiritually-loaded for mainstream Australian culture. 31 In political is work the European product, and competition-based, unsuited being American theory, both too precious and much individualistic too especially the Marxist too high-tech for local form, and is circumstances, especially again for more environmentally-perceptive people. also thirdly, features of import woi Id's markets power substitution and structures against telling pressures and the (including and comparative advantage, regionalism; namely, fashions, Old Boy’s removal, of network in are appealing of the overseas control and avoidance jobs, policies, etc.), and gaining of local control, employment of local people, etc. Fourthly, there philosophy as complexity, sheer part are of arguments intellectual diversity, stability, for cultural arguments culture: 32 etc. “ diversity, In fact, from applied to richness, the garden analogy i’he point is elaborated in Culture. At a more practical level Northern products arc; again often unsuitable, though for different reasons. For example, the transfer of American agricultural methods and equipment to the thin poor soils of the Antipodes has bad disastrous effects, at last beginning to be recognised. See, for instance, A.A. Mazrui, A World Federat ion of Cultures: An African Per spec live, Free Press, New York, 1976. �Into the whole notion of 'culture’ built dense, garden. productive transfers. Naturally we want a rich, But not only seeds and plants but weeds and many being introduced. pests are We obtain not only good cultivars, but European pests and European and selectiveness are control products, Indian maize and American weeds. This is why as essantLal, against haphazard previous procedures. i'he proposal with local Is not whatever products, their quality, replacing Northern ones. heroes, the case sustain, nor would for, That local a narrow localisiiri^ fashions, and local. cMl t is certainly not the preferred wai of the newer regionalism, which tends to do without fashions and heroes and leeks impact, and so on; low environmental durable quality in products, nor is the way ol technology policy. Rather, as with technology policy, we select niches which are or not occupied filled, satisfactorily where to outlets, be selective etc.). given our base resource (of can make a Indeed the policy difference, and use and develop local skills and methods. has we philosophers, publishing to what extent should components, But granting regionalism, for instance people, books and other teaching elements, theories and ideas, be imported and locally? I’he to what extent should they be particular mix. There is no need The case for the present trained, conceived in different components means that possibility of selectiveness many mixes are possible. produced, to insist, so far at least, on a is mainly for a regional shift, for a significantly greater degree of local, autonomy and production But it will do no harm to indicate elements of a mix that finds much Docs it sound familiar? Outside philosophy, it should. For example, we have now been told by the Americans that our defence role, unlike theirs, is regional, not global: this is supposed to shed great light on our previously confused defence policies. �27 local the suggestion Negatively, favour. is that we try to eradicate much of the Oxford style of Leaching and doing philosophy. as undue removal of Berke1ey-Hume with the (a however no standard emphasis on British focus); attention proper empiricism British to of of sources; movements emanating from England, they are, pi the Northern status quo; recommend and this. just 1 approach the of influence, in More generally, many of especially the protective ol ord Locke- on reinforcement heavy particular, his mostly been a very conservative one. main centred quasi-historical the us the Includes such things That -lice, language ordinary have been very to leave things very much as they tend Positively, the proposal is that we achieve further disassociation from the Anglo-American empiricist past in two ways: by framework, emphasizing by and to Eastern thought, philosophy. teaching, will parochialism, The idea assist and projects diversifying selectively drawn upon, parts of local is the include not but also that that move range constricting that philosophical of traditions only neglected Continental strands and Pacific ethnic such a outside material and plural i ty of sources, Australasian especially in in removing narrower cultural biasses, such as British enable more discrimination to be obtained. Then too we should be better able to see the ranges of theories that are open to us in the Antipodes and how to advance our own programs. 36 I'he point is laboured in E. Gellner, Words and Things, Victor Gollancz, London, 1959. But even ordinary language? philosophy, though conservative, and though it much contracted the proper range of philosophical investigations, had its liberating elements, e.g. removal of some of the narrowness and more cramping assumptions induced by technical jargon. Nor lias the social impact changed much with the subsequent/ decline, since 1959, o 1 ordinary language philosophy, the Increasing insolvency of Oxbridge philosophy, and its consequent limited take-over by right-wing Ivy League American philosophy. By contrast, the less economically influential growth of redbrick and applied philosophy in some of the British r-fttl and polytechnic institutes his touched no more than the surface of Oxbridge Practice. T �There remain some things we should want to see whatever mixes are chosen in iiiiereni Antipodean regions. bias from papers and publications, research seminars and lectures, letters of reference, and so on. the works and irrespective discussion write not Northern to their of the ignore authors, works the contribution of famous more authors, local their lecture as or been under largely again etc. It and to uncritically the disposition is to to though work produced locally either does not exist or has influential philosophers, importance, worth, topic It is the disposition the quality of their contribution. opinions of better, the the to authors from prestigious Northern institutions, to accept of quality the and irrespective of defer This Northern bias is a disposition to cite and discuss projects of One crucial issue is the removal of Northern are, (thus if ensuring more anything, it that inclined Northern to Australasian And not). is than bias many overseas intellectuals, who are perhaps less concerned to be seen as belonging to tl-'l Northern mainstream. bias effects policies of ot local not only practice the of individual, philosophers, but the selection and review committees as well as of editors and referees journals. reorientation, with It developments ~ things taught, more so they that philosophers can would cite be other among involves, Antipodean it ions \ better, courses The reduction, and eventual removal, of Northern getting to work or local assisted time spent at local by intellectual things, know local point greater out local work and regional content in institutions on study leave, and so on. APPENDIX 1. Background notes on the philosophy supply situation. Sociological investigation of the philosophy labour market in Australia and New Zealand has 1° be numerical attempted. But a picture of some elements underlying the argument of the text can be gained from the following table: simple �29 TABLE 1. Ph.Ds In Philosophy: a USA ~ Australasian comparison USA Number (Male/Female) Aust ra1i a New Zealand 1974 413 (346/67) 6 0 19 75 375 (318/57) 5 0 1976 382 (319/63) 8 0 197 7 330 (264/66) 3 2 (1/1) 1978 2 83 (235/48) 5 5 (4/1) 1979 285 (204/54) 9 3 (2/1) 1980 2 4 6 (187/59) 4 N.A. 1981 N.A. 4 0 Notes: 1. The breakdown of the USA and New Zealand numbers by sexes (male/female) is given. SimiLar figures do not appear to be available for Australia. 2. The US figures are for the academic year ending in the Year shown, e.g. 1978 covers the Northern academic year 1977-78. Southern figures are for the calendar year shown. Sources: Di gest__of__ Education Statistics, US National Center for Education Statistics; University Statistics, Australian Bureau of Census Statistics; New Zealand Education Statistics. Comments: 1. The contraction of US doctoral, production and the concomitant rise in female representation, are clearly indicated. The Australian figures are likely too small to reflect such trends and responses to the academic market. 2. Nome of Llr* Australasian numbers include Americans; likewise the American figures provide no nationality breakdown. 3. There is no information available on the number of Australians proceeding to higher degrees in philosophy outside. Australia. Tn applying table 1 some simplifying assumptions are made. assumed tbit candidates for appointment to regular For example, it is university positions now would t.ave a doctorate or- the equivalent (until recently a B.Phll was taken as a near well). equivalent It is of a assumed, North what American seems to Ph.D. take publications the case, that could the serve as number of �30 Austi il is Lans proceeding to higher degrees in philosophy abroad is relatively Smail, and no more than the order of Ph.Ds. upsetting applications of table without say, Is no compiled I, that Australasian graduates match, information on academic vacancies in philosophy in Aust ra1 ia < r New Zealand Az matter to I di j oil,1'. on the lumbers of vacancies, on how the positions It would however be a routine, nationalities, sexes, etc. by what re1 It can be assumed, Lhe upper half of American graduates in standard attained. There if taken locally. some of assemble data, this which is considerable of ' incc to the planning of philosophy programs. Un considering 'the Editor In a National Philosophy', the (Australian) possibility r* , /r <( I initial AJPP^ d istinguished two senses corresponding to 'the the of of a National Phi 1osophy for Australia. the earlier APPENDIX 2. I G e rm an distinction b etwee n W e11 a n sc hauung I I the first, that of 'a scheme of the universe', ridiculous as con f i rm.a t ion a or Christian Sc ience . fa 1 sificationV Granted: but 'are Lebensanchauung7 a nd The In n Ihilos>phy I hlLos is as is argument independent that does not mean (p.292). that^Jirutly national of that a and sympathies its or theory may not be held, in one region but not. others, as intuitionism was for long in in Holland, or 'a nation second a in France. In like an individual may 'more develop ternperament a 1 attitude to the problems of existence, which we may life. is a mode of form of A nation's philosophy, expression for the national (.'VO I V I up, like its art and the national consciousness. But, a and certain . . call its Its 1i terature, It is a specialised short, genius intimate part of the by no means sepa ra t e from t he initial sense, a philosophy comprising no t merely a fairly comprehensive theory but also an integrated set of attitudes (like an .. �taaead up ysaa 03 queSt’AVjqxe •Xqdosoypqd aqp •auipy syj puq si.q uiw i p?uo j q i?u pa/Aoyyv eq pynoqs Xqdosoypqj yeuopyuN i' jo jvapy Suppupasaa yeuoppe^ e Xq papyoAB jo Xppypqpssod Xypsua sp uoy p ap pt?jyuoa aqy Supyappujpuoa op Supqyou si?q „aqsM - sapiBpunoq puojpuu Xuu ui.qy sanyuA asaqy ‘papaauoa XyyunyjpA sj spysaysny sc ‘ynq oqy eq p ‘uquya qf'noqj, ‘Xqdosoyyqj qi)M jdaews yappn, sv - asaqy qypw op op • (yuauia8ui?aat?aa qypi 1 op »?u j a [ OAiip as and Supqyou suq .Xqdosoyjqj qypw op oy Supqyou asaqy aqy jo senjBA yEuaaya eqp Xynvaq put? s teupoof) ‘qynai jo syvapy aqy ‘yyapdg eqs suq uaqp Xyuo pus uaq y uipeyo yuB§BAi?ayxo Y ST XOPT pg— aqy Xyyaoqs ons) yuaoy se saop spq j ‘uaqp uio j j 1 oq peej uy ^OAyya spp qpiM op op Supqyou st?q up yi?a ysny saAyjap apqnoap shot iua pv aqy op ast?q ‘/7^uTlBap apuj y 1? 'oiu/ay p a y^ u qd J0| Xqdoso ‘ojU yiuot you ‘Xqdosoypqd put? yuqj you aSeanoa sunny a saoqjo jo V \il\ ; j | saop qans :(usuas ‘ yp op spuuays Xut? • sjoydpaasap uvpjuaysny op pup j 1? ,Xy p uniuuioa pas r [t?j .1 p mi] tn you a^JI j1 ( Suyaq oaaqj apnyaxa aaAunoq Xqdosojpqd yBUopyuu 1? cjq^n&V^iaoqy TIB yi? yuyqr^u pnq ? qpjM •aauaaajjyp :Xauayspsuoaup oyup paSunyd ------------------------ —ogl J1 • (siur?a2oad qaaoasaa / [ ] an—k-4——q- eSyotyy ‘ auj apqdosoypqd y^uopSaa ! you sp pnq ‘ajpy jo ysuay y ‘aejJ og 7m* yh io Pljnq aq asoqp qyjtt uyqt?a2uc4]aaayu syaud aeynpoiu spy qypM uaapoui b4 up puyj oy od/q Xpyeaa you saop ‘pupJ •suyyiiuBj osooy aoqyea uiaoj s^ifiiy Xue up) aAipaupyspp Xyau ynap yat?d you aiuos uupyeaysny syyun aySups payunoaar? tadi?aspur?y ueypuaysny aqy, pin? 1 aanyuaoy y. [ ay j [i.uojjiu 4ssausnopasuoa nujiipaiu jo • (ui8p peavd yuiio j yuaado aqp, st? siuayj qans eat? uopssaauoa Xq Xyuo ‘ aaouiaaqyanj IC �•jojppq juasajd sip 04 ‘jseay jou ‘ pue ‘p.’ujnor syqj joj saojajaj ppjoAas 04 ‘apieyapy jo XijsjaAjun ‘oauajajuoo Xqdosoyjqj J° uornnj aossy ur yse p?a 4 sny £861 3tn jaded aqj jo uoyjejuasajd aip 31? aauajpne aip jo sjoqiuaui yejaAas 04 ‘uiyjyw -q pue oab.10 *s ‘ tpi y uis-Xaj j poo • m ‘loyyya pj 04 squuqi f □c Xrjy sjaAjufl '[vuoiqoN ueyyeajsny saauayas -yeyaos jo yooqas qaaeasan gcXaj4noH *8 �4 USA, expoi ter cul Lure, of certainly of higher culture philosophical output from components Australasia, as culture, philosophy has Oxford not in philosophy? but also evidently (witness the Are there taken). should suit, payments, especially balance of lower of such following not if has recently become a net importer of culture from Europe, m Long achieve a American turn reasons why cultural better there are reasons. Yes, of In the first place, the change in the cultural position of the USA went with, and perhaps economic dominance most of not only increasingly of former Northern they. prioi sties, that little prospect for there the contain also fellow-travellers, whose It is unlikely that group, (become will commitments, as Long so there is is serious no prospect in a bind and disruption of the Secondly, component Include that academics, Northern of and additional is teaching this influential segment, from not situation; acclimatised the isolated drastically as bent to especially to) give person. Nor alter entire Antipodean as observed, a substantial research locally apart Antipoduans’ do they are I hey would be North, large a they cultural As since culture, Americans, Northern concerns. the If cultural dominance, cultural and other). universities of in economic power relations. ever emulate or attain American economic eminence (at least commodities, cont ingent changes nuclear destruction of without flow of entails Australasia's Australasia will not from, vast part derived in their up its should cultural for it can be persuasively argued better off, as far as quality and product goes, stocking their universities with American teaching components and researching Americanoriented concerns. One simple arg urn e n t nurn er1c a I th it Antipodean universities would be better off with Americans in the main, takes the following lines:- The (higher degree) graduates of Australasian culturally distinguished, at and American are not significantly least in subjects such as philosophy. Consider �now the number quality of academics produced number per of higher uates. preponderance of The (great) just, by virtue of their vastly graduates will be Americans, greater population and degree their more extensive system of university education.'7 So also then, just by ratio considerations, the great preponderance of quality academics drawn an from percentiles among uppei interested they universities. in those quality quality, Such an base Austroamerlean argument does appointing not as will Clearly, Antipodeans, products. be would be American, will work to more show Americans that, for the were their to similar reasons, American universities should be full of Chinese or Indian professors, for two Asians reasons; and first there are especially Americans, significant in cultural disciplines such differences as between philosophy; and secondly, their university systems do not deliver such great quotas of higher degree or high quality graduates, at least in philosophy. fhe conclusion of the numerical argument will not be a popular one. anti-Americanism felt the universities; especially by and recently the Australasian community extends into there has been increasing insistence, the now aging younger Turks that university positions should be reserved for locals. international in portions of The This at the same time as these Turks often preach of an community of scholars, presumably then with "free" interchange, X' indicated in Appendix 1, where assumptions made In the argument are defended, the ratio of US philosophy graduates with doctorates as compared with Australian exceeds 30 to 1. And, as Is well-known, the extent of university education is much greater in USA than in Australasia: indeed Australia is in this respect among the ______ worst educated of the developed nations, as OECD figures have made plain (see, e.g., B. Jones, Sleepers Wake!, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1.982, Chapter 7). ■ �6 etc. I'hey cannot have it all ways.'' So as long the cont inues, present centre will they wi! I economically; large to the it them if is free-flow Interchange the dominate than us, have more jobs (centrally-determined) quality well as should here personnel and culturally periphery and ideas of go by as and in this high cultural business that we seek, as mostly claim. Now anyway, It is there that arguments. widely For is ire we regularly drive out enough recognised, drastically something not lower-down flooded wrong with high-quality local contenders for positions, ladders hierarchical with these sorts Northerners who of would if we only preferred the Northerners when they were quite visibly superior: rather we are inundated by Americans with inflated references, who have the messages of the centre better tbur local;; echelon wnocf do, (often and remote Northern Northern shortcomings biassed) are known the Northern centres tend fields tend appointment better. to look committees A.s is beginning greener to than dusty higherlocals to be recognised to retain their higher-quality products, too, and allow A reverse flow of the better orthodox academics from Australasia to America should also be expected (outside times of university contraction). According to issumptions of this brain drain argument, which is based on labour market considerations, appointment and lifestyle conditions for academics are general ly better in USA than Australia and much better than those in economicaLly-depressed New Zealand (e.g. higher salaries, better standard of living, superior research conditions, etc.). So, other things being equal, able academics from the Antipodes will relocate in USA as academic positions become available. The argument also helps explain why Antipodean universities cannot, expect, for the most part., t.o attract really top-drawer Northerners for very long. Of course, economically irrelevant factors do induce interference; e.g. perverse commitments to odd-ball Antipodean intellectual enterprises which reduce market acceptability, or pre-industrial ties to place or persons or lifestyle which unduly restrict mobility (such as local roots, family attachments, even distaste for American urban lifestyles). �7 them exiled be to the to periphery only if they fali somehow the foul of Too system (e.g. of the academic system for political or personal reasons) . often the Nori hern have centres disposed their of inferior intellectually products In the periphery. this makes the All appointing especially Americans, Northerners, their references, and usually not out And yet. quality. it seems, position look doubly bad. We ought, even if are overrated they of the top drawer, to be in in order to maximize doing so does not achieve the desired quality result, and breeds discontent elsewhere, especially among the aging Turks. there fortunately is cultural sufficient obtain lor us. subtitutabIe before way out this from t is the wraj ' and a We do our own Lonal Lsm. distance,' so and situation that they are these things; not simply Then the shaky numerical argument does fall down. elaborate we awkward the emerging proposal are there other But influential arguments to dispose of, and the disposal bears on the proposal. There have so is, to begin with, far been conceded: exce Hence, which the argument for excellence, that we all more or there is an objective commodity, quality or less agree seek and what appointments aim to capture, the type of myth most ol myth, In fact appointments about, which is proportionately in the North, and which is what academic more abundant a that institutions crave and indeed maximize. That at least is us have encountered; and many of us now know it is a dangerous way, elements of which any Most myth. more that places don't organisations aim even just try to to make maximize 9- M Iliis is easier in the cultural than the technological sphere. However it is also possible technologically: (stronger) theses of technological determinism, and so of cultural determinism, are false. We can choose different options, technologically, as well as culturally. �->) ) ./ A- u I PROSPECTS FOR REGIONAL PHILOSOPHIES IN AUSTRALASIA Philosophy, especially academic philosophy but also folk philosophy, 1 ike other intellectual and higher cultural activity in Australasia, has long been dominated, largely swamped, by Northern now increasingly from North America. Europe, the indeed and cultural resulting baggage other controlling such But it does not have to stay that way. a initially from the migration patterns, Given the ethnic result was imported, populations, influences, of composition virtually the inevitable. Suitable policies, a good philosophy policy, could change things. The culture, thought is of hardly a a philosophy, regional perhaps In 1923, a New Zealand new one. a matching regional correspondent to the newly-launched Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy mentioned the possibility of ’a new kind or temper of philosophy under these southern skies’ which the Journal might such a role reaching (or, not community). for merely And The Journal foster.1 matter, that professional although some actively pursued philosophers things however hardly has but have changed solid foundation for a new regionalism in philosophy, its a fulfilled pronounced wider Australasian in Australia, that of aim laying a possibility of a new temper of philosophy has hardly been realised. There is little in the way of a new kind and temper of philosophy under New Zealand southern skies were intended to include: distinctively New Zealand AJPP, March 1923, p.74. same volume, p.292ff; his Appendix 2/ 7 skies, which the but few distinguishing features, ’no characteristics, have shown up in New Zealand The question was taken up by the Editor in the discussion is considered below, especially in �2 philosophy’. New Zealand remains a substantial net importer of philosophy, The situation of colonial dominance that used to prevail in and philosophers. Australia, where virtually all chairs, and many philosophy, were filled by academics from the North, and considered and Given the usual in courses designed, power and influence of professors in small departments, covered in tends to persist in New Zealand, where no established chairs are occupied by locals/ topics posts academic other especially appointments made, the heavy Northern orientation of philosophy taught and researched in New Zealand is not surprising. oldest of The Northern control is perhaps most strikingly exhibited at the New Zealand the universities, University of Otago, where the Philosophy Department has been substantially captured by a British School and increasingly looks event, like an offshoot of the University of London/ In any the overwhelming Anglo-American dominance of New Zealand philosophy - also a feature only in slightly lesser degree of Australian philosophy - can be confirmed by a content survey of the courses offered and research papers written at New Zealand universities. Even when local people have been appointed to positions in Australasia, 2 S.A. Grave, A History of Philosophy in Australia, Queensland University Press, 1984, p.l. Page references are to the manuscript. The paper draws heavily on this history. 3 This claim was correct at the time of presentation of the paper (August 1983). With the recent loss of a chair at Wellington, the claim requires qualification, but the pattern of domination persists. 4In the 1983 Commonwealth University Handbook listing, 6 of the 8 members of the Department held their main degree, Ph.D., from London, and one of the remainder from Exeter. Only one member of the Department, soon to retire, falls outside the nexus. �3 they have been brought up on a solid diet of Anglo-American material, and they In particular, the have often been reforged or finished in the North as well. post-World War philosophy by remain full candidates the of requirements II universities in were conveniently seen expansion Oxford the of Australasian of products finished B.Phil. this Many degree. cultural to in departments out period the of of case of philosophy the mid 70s when they applied for until indeed mill: to beat in Oxford were hard major the positions, such was the (unwarranted) prestige of Oxford and the regrettable, but still continuing, "cultural cringe". Nonetheless, (as will indicated). be dominance, Northern in the Antipodes, been occurring scene the despite especially on worth is It significant have changes the Australian philosophical whether asking Australian philosophy is moving towards the sort of change that occurred in USA more than 100 years ago when the Harvard Philosophy Department was brought (or bought) together, and its "golden age" American philosophy was never quite began.'' the same again, and became its own thing. There are now new forces operating which could help to move Australian philosophy in such a direction. the widespread regionalism,6 other 5See B. which applies choices; local fashioning emergence, of national and particularly to in science cultural in and alternative culture, ideological stark contrast, and technology there There is of a choice along is policies, the which new with centralised not only Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy; Cambridge, Massachusetts 1860-1930, Yale University Press, 1977, Parts 2 and 3. 6 On this bio-regionalism, see especially, Fourth World News, vol. I, and K. Sale, Human Scale, Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, New York, 1980. 1983, �4 a provides for model reflection philosophy regional in directly bears on parts of the philosophy of science. there are also some soon appear, policy Unfortunately, as will to regional serious obstacles also but philosophies and to the very idea of a regional philosophy. USA, long an importer of culture from Europe, has recently become a net culture, of exporter components of higher philosophical Australasia, from output if not Oxford following but evidently philosophy (witness such as culture culture, lower of certainly taken). has should suit, not balance of payments, especially in philosophy? the American there Are also achieve reasons better a turn why cultural there are reasons. Yes, of In the first place, the change in the cultural position of the USA went with, and perhaps in part derived from, vast changes in economic power relations. economic dominance most Australasia’s of entails cultural dominance, culture, since there there is is little prospect serious no prospect If for that Australasia will ever emulate or attain American economic eminence (at least nuclear destruction of not without the North, flow of commodities, cultural and other). universities not only increasingly of Americans, contingent of former Northern they. group, cultural As priorities, long component also include whose research they disruption of the entire as observed, Antipodean Secondly, large fellow-travellers, Northern academics, substantial additional of a and teaching is bent to It is unlikely that this influential segment, especially Northern concerns. the a contain and will commitments, as so (become apart Antipodeans they are in a bind locally acclimatised do from the not situation; isolated drastically as to) person. alter give up its Nor should their cultural for it can be persuasively argued that they would be better off, as far as quality and product goes, stocking �5 universities their American with and components teaching researching American-oriented concerns. that argument numerical simple One Antipodean universities would be better off with Americans in the main, takes the following lines:- The (higher degree) of graduates Australasian culturally distinguished, now the number of produced 0 population and then, So also just not number per of say there is 1 per every n graduates. preponderance of graduates will be Americans, greater are American significantly at least in subjects such as philosophy. quality academics Austroamerican graduates; and their more by ratio Consider higher degree The (great) just by virtue of their vastly extensive system of university education. considerations, the great preponderance of quality academics drawn from an Austroamerican base will be American, as will the upper percentiles among those quality products. Clearly, Antipodeans, were they interested in quality, would be appointing more Americans to their universities. Such an argument does not work to show that, for similar reasons, American universities should be full of Chinese or Indian professors, for two Asians reasons; and first Americans, there are especially significant in cultural disciplines such differences as between philosophy; and secondly, their university systems do not deliver such great quotas of higher degree or high quality graduates, at least in philosophy. As indicated in Appendix 1, where assumptions made in the argument are defended, the ratio of US philosophy graduates with doctorates as compared with Australian exceeds 30 to 1. And, as is well-known, the extent of university education is much greater in USA than in Australasia: indeed Australia is in this respect among the worst educated of the developed nations, as OECD figures have made plain (see, e.g., B. Jones, Sleepers Wake’, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1982, Chapter 7). / �6 The conclusion of the numerical argument will not be a popular one. The anti-Americanism felt in portions of the Australasian community extends into the universities; and recently has there been insistence, increasing especially by the now aging younger Turks that university positions should be This at the same time as these Turks often preach of an reserved for locals. international community of scholars, presumably then with "free" interchange, etc. They cannot have it all ways.^ So long as the continues, economically; the present centre will free-flow dominate they will have more large to them if it interchange the than us, periphery and of ideas culturally jobs here is (centrally-determined) quality in personnel and as should well as go by and this high cultural business that we seek, as mostly claim. Now anyway, it that arguments. is widely there For we is enough recognised something are not lower-down drastically wrong hierarchical with these ladders sorts of flooded with high-quality Northerners who would g A reverse flow of the better orthodox academics from Australasia to America should also be expected (outside times of university contraction). According to assumptions of this brain drain argument, which is based on labour market considerations, appointment and lifestyle conditions for academics are generally better in USA than Australia and much better than those in economically-depressed New Zealand (e.g. higher salaries, better standard of living, superior research conditions, etc.). So, other things being equal, able academics from the Antipodes will relocate in USA as academic positions become available. The argument also helps explain why Antipodean universities cannot expect, for the most part, to attract really top-drawer Northerners for very long. Of course, economically irrelevant factors do induce interference; e.g. perverse commitments to odd-ball Antipodean intellectual enterprises which reduce market acceptability, or pre-industrial ties to place or persons or lifestyle which unduly restrict mobility (such as local roots, family attachments, even distaste for American urban lifestyles). �7 regularly drive out local contenders for positions, if we only preferred the Northerners when they were quite visibly superior: rather we are inundated by Americans with inflated references, who have the messages of the centre better do, locals than higher-echelon remote and Northern (often Northern biassed) fields appointment the Northern centres greener look to committees than dusty retain their higher-quality products, tend to to As is beginning to be recognised locals whose shortcomings are known better. too, tend and allow them to be exiled to the periphery only if they somehow fall foul of the system (e.g. of the academic system for political or personal reasons). often Northern the centres have disposed o their intellectually Too inferior products in the periphery. to be especially Americans, even if they are overrated in All this makes the position look doubly bad. We ought, appointing Northerners, it seems, their references, and usually not out of the top drawer, in order to maximize And yet quality. doing so does not achieve the desired quality result, and breeds discontent elsewhere, especially among the aging Turks. Fortunately shaky arguments; and obtain there 9 we way out from this sufficient elaborate cultural distance,9 situation and awkward and that is the way of regionalism. subtitutable for us. before is a so that We do our own things; they are Then the shaky numerical argument does fall the emerging proposal there these are other not simply down. But influential This is easier in the cultural than the technological, sphere. However it is also possible technologically: (stronger) theses of technological determinism, and so of cultural determinism, are false. We can choose different options, technologically, as well as culturally. �8 arguments to dispose of, and the disposal bears on the proposal. There is, have so to begin with, far been conceded: the argument for excellence, that elements of which there is an objective commodity, quality or excellence, which we all more or less agree about, which is proportionately more abundant in the North, and which is what academic institutions crave and indeed maximize. seek and what appointments aim to capture, That at least is the type of myth most of us have encountered; and many of us now know it is a myth, in fact appointments dangerous a that any way, myth. more that don’t places Most organisations aim just profit, but rather seek to satisfice on a mix of factors, quality is make maximize to of which assessed and not often the highest ranking one. only one, to try even Ability to fit into some sort of program, teaching or research, is another, and commonly more important factor; and there is no good reason why such a program should not sometimes be a regionally oriented one. the So given prevailing practices, argument from excellence does not exclude regional philosophy programs. And, in any event, there are enough local candidates of sufficient worth to proceed with regional programs without clearcut sacrifice of excellence. Local enterprise need entail no loss of excellence, and could well increase it. The deeper-cutting objection is that there is something seriously amiss with the idea of objective objective importance; criticism as bracketed out notions the that of excellence, these objective and notions values with are open more contextual-relativisation the to connected the generally, component of same that notion of sorts of they valuing: have the �9 framework or viewpoint to which these values relate.While those operating within rather a narrow intellectual paradigm, as such ordinary Oxbridge language philosophy or Sydney materialism say, can bracket out the viewpoint, since incorporated is it the in operational paradigm, and arrive so at seemingly objective quality judgements, the judgements are not preserved (e.g. in truth value) when Marxist viewpoints. quality or worth for Consider, of to transposed a other the comparison, made forest, frameworks, variously industrial forester, and a recreational officer. quality of a holistically-inclined by who seemingly because pretend that a deep the ecologist, philosopher, environmental it is not done by members to or an Compare judgements as to the environmental such as judgements language, Marxist, and Californian environmental philosophers. philosophers idealistic e.g. of work by ordinary There are even be cannot judged, the main philosophical peer group at Harvard and like institutions. As this judgements of begins to the reveal, importance judgements of quality are not independent of of work done or problems tackled. importance of problems and issues is highly paradigm dependent. But the For example, problems such as those of quantifying-in and of possible worlds and of de re thought, which assume immense importance for fashionable referential theories within the mainstream empiricist paradigm, vanish outside that restricted viewpoint. Now observe to relative insignificance that most judgements as to What follows also begins to bring out what is omitted in a main theme of R.S. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance, Bodley Head, London, 1974. Note that defusing the notion of objective excellence does not lead to subjectivism. To avoid the customary false dichotomy, compare the notion of validity (usually ceded to themselves these days by classical logicians) with that of quality. �10 what are the Important problems and what constitutes important work - matters helping quality determine is relative to their are exported to the Antipodes importance concerned shipped are - from down the paradigmatic placement, through the North.11 and Their paradigms the main channels already indicated. We are free to reject these paradigms and select alternatives, and there are, it can be argued, good reasons to do just that, much as there are good reasons choose to energy technology different (or different military technology) from that generally favoured in the North which the North is eager to export southwards. points Similar which might argument, apply against alternatively that sophisticated people -marketed mass-produced and cosmopolitan. The argument called be from is based cosmopolitan/international the the Peter everywhere Holland; international Stuyvesant smoke this argument superior product cigarette-sophistication is on the assumption that philosophy is a ’cosmopolitan subject’, that is is not the sort of enterprise for which place and people are significant as they are for or poetry assumption has only to be presented to be questioned. for one important thing, that philosophy is a the novel.12 It takes for granted, finished product sort (a propositional theory), not a process of production also. 110ften enough fashionability is mistaken for The importance. of a certain But in the As to the unsatisfactory way in which such '’important" problems are commonly set, see F. Dyson, ’Unfashionable pursuits’, The Mathematical Intelligencer 5 (1983) 47-5?. -----12 Grave, op.cit., p.2: the term ’cosmopolitan subject’ used there comes from Donegan. As to the significance of place and people for literature, see further C. Partridge, The Making of New Cultures, Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam, 1982. ---------------------------- �11 process of production the place and people involved (e.g. material. And literature, the if and not product just is theorems more no philosophy, than work a and of art, arguments like a assembled piece of in an then again the historical setting matters, internationally-approved format, since like in discussion) are literature, not does emerge in a vacuum. Plato’s philosophy could not have emerged in ancient Australia, and if cribbed in mid 20th century Oxford would surely have been marked down or rejected.^ It is important not to be sidetracked into issues - resembling problems in aesthetics - that extent sets do not need to be contested, of themes and arguments such as whether and what produced in one place and setting could have been produced in another. A nonnuclear technology of some sort could be adopted prospect in Europe but that New apparently will Zealand, nonnuclear energy strategy. matters here. Dial ethic in not contrast whereas be, with there Australia, is will reasonable pursue a It is the doing, and not what could be done, that logic, which invalidates methodology of much Anglo-American philosophy, could the technique perhaps be done in and the North (though there would be substantial cultural resistance): it is not being 13 Like a paper in the biological sciences. But here again technique and methodology, which may both be regional, are crucially important. Related points can be made using less extreme examples, e.g. concerning modern American work. Consider, for instance such texts as W.V. Quine’s Word and Object, (Wiley, New York, 1960) or R. Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia (Basic Books, New York, 1974). The assumptions taken for granted, the arguments involved, etc., are especially American: it is not just the style. The acceptability of arguments and positions is dependent on place and received paradigm. �12 and is not likely to be done in the Anglo-American sphere.to done there, this extent, logical Antipodeans techniques, can do choose their their own international/cosmopolitan argument, own distinctive distinctive technology thing. stated tn a form that would be and The telling, fails. Of course it can be argued, it is being argued, that Antipodeans don’t need to be, or even oughtn’t to be pursuing their own energy or logic policies and apparatus. But meeting these considerations takes us to a whole new set of issues concerning the merit of various policies and programs, diversity, etc. - far beyond the cosmopolitan argument. the point of The new arguments, to which we shall return, are not a lot more convincing however than comparable arguments concerning cooking: that we don’t devising our own cuisine or wine styles. need to be or oughtn’t to be British, or at least cosmopolitan, cooking is adequate: we should stick to that and buy it off the shelf from the North, ideally importing the cooks also. Do we have good reasons to think that British philosophy is better, these days, than British cooking? Antipodeans are free, in principle then, to pursue their own paradigms; and to do so they will by and large want to, and mostly have to, appoint their own people, people they have educated - not saboteurs or people who have (had) Much as communist anarchism, a live possibility for communes and perhaps communities in Australia, is culturally excluded in North America, owing to the extreme possessive individualism of that culture. On dialethic logic, see G. Priest and R. Routley, On Paraconsistency, Research Papers in Logic, #13, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1983. �13 to be re-educated, from elsewhere, in particular from the North. But will the intellectual paradigms pursued tie with cultural paradigms, with distinctive features of local the culture? In a loose way, at they may least, tie in with the though works of philosophy will not usually link, culture in the integral fashion that novels (as distinct from more technical works) sometimes do. Indeed, certain to a cultural limited extent, features, not they restricted to particular programs, that help mark philosophy in Australia as ’unimportant hastens to though add. this But is style, compared Grave considers do already link. with acceptability, what ’an Australian product’ - matters truth, philosophical he philosophy’ in do matter, and are not independent - or independent so far as their perception goes in the case of truth and correctness16 - from underlying broad theory or received paradigm. However the marks which can be extracted from Grave, significant though they are, do not serve to distinguish the Australian product, the first two being features Australian philosophy exhibits in lesser degree than the more adventurous and polemical philosophy of Greek antiquity. by Passmore as ’most typical of Australian philosophy’, The first, described is a ’diversity of approach and readiness to put forward an unconventional or unfashionable point 16 Nothing need be conceded to strong cultural relativity themes, though they would support the case. It is enough that our theories remain radically incomplete and that there can accordingly be rival theories as to what is true. Similarly, however philosophy is conceived - as the search for truth, explanation, understanding and wisdom (all of these and more, really), or as, more vaguely, inquiry of a certain sort - there can be, and will be, competing accounts; so a pluralistic theory is inevitable in giving a fuller view. �14 of view*, 17 philosophy, something which more typical some (with of exceptions) notable exhibits an Canada, is that Africa, South adventurous compared with other recent and provincial and diverse. second, The ... the between line-up Australian and surprising, mark far from isolated: others Melbourne Wittgensteinian "Australian materialism", philosophy departments the (both confrontation concerning the among them concern extraordinary discussed the political by is is ’the ’the most notable example ... Andersonian and Sydney, if it was not the Andersonian philosophy itself’ (p.2). is such as philosophy England, manifestoed character* of Australian philosophy, being "Oxbridge colonies", more austere What may be uniformity reflecting that often attributed to the land itself. nearer true Australian than philosophy ancient This example fervour generated engagement Grave), the and relevant/paraconsistent program, by by some growing with the local (’adversarial*) style leading to sharp criticism by Americans. Connected with these first philosophy, century two marks J as of much Cambridge further are characteristics of much 18th century Scottish philosophy and philosophy: points, surface clarity, and, namely directness, Australian turn-of-this- unwillingness to muffle some would unkindly add (in the hope perhaps of locating a genuine difference), bluntness, unsubtlety and crudity. Both preceding quotations, while included as such in Grave’s Introduction, are from J. Passmore, ’Philosophy’, in The Pattern of Australian Culture (ed. A.L. McLeod), Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y., 1963, pp.131-168. The same annotation also applies to the third mark. 18 Though again for the most part that influenced by Sydney rather than that originating in Melbourne. To some extent this reflects the different historical influences shaping Sydney and Melbourne philosophy: roughly, Scottish as opposed to Continental antecedents. �15 The third and the fourth marks are but very different, again hardly distinguishing features of Australian philosophy as Grave, who wouldn’t them marks at all, in effect observes. areas, intellectual the of Australian the anti-intellectual national stereotype of Australians as a people to physical mark is achievement especially of isolation a academic rather than feature of philosophy indifference or even hostility to, in reputation ’center of philosophical inquiry’, with indeed of Australia as a philosophy, The third, which applies well to other contrast the is call to intellectual Anglo-American Australasia in subtlety’. the namely general its and fourth The philosophy; from, ’devoted the sort of imported philosophy (e.g. that of Nietzsche and the existentialists) generating interest in literary and arts circles. The failure of such marks to entirely separate out Australian philosophy does not matter. For thing, one the separated by its research projects. confused with nationalism, nor Australian For another, produce such as materialism or Wellington modalism with national philosophies. philosophy, as encouraged; and in most the new other is things, regionalism is an undesirable commonly sufficiently regionalism should not regional positions more is linked, be Sydneyside Nationalism in trait, not in other to be cultural things, with the breakdown of nations and contraction of state power. 19 See, e.g., London, 1957. Sale, op.cit., and L. Kohr, The Breakdown of Nations, RKP, The Editor of the new 1923 AJPP did however take seriously the notion of National Philosophy, of (what must have surprised some New Zealand readers) an Australian Philosophy; some of the issues there raised (p.292ff) are addressed in Appendix 2. 1 �16 * To get back to where we were: * emerging proposal the is this, that we s.rsrt - or better much increase - doing our own distinctive things, and that we team up to do so. Tn fact there are several suggestions that begin to emerge, concerning research and teaching, publications and appointments, study leave and sponsored visitors. These are not just that we do our own selection of topics and style and people, and methods, decide priorities, own our instead of having these foisted upon us - not just, that is, that we play our own games (whether invented here or taken over from the North) and not theirs, Rules and Rugby instead of Gridiron and Basketball - but that we abandon the individual competitive model of cultural achievement, sold to us and fostered by the North, in favour of a group cooperative approach (elements of which are already modelled in Antipodean social clubs). The ditch-digging example: ditch more separately. rapidly simple and familiar. On the one side is the it is well-known that two people cooperating can dig a and enjoyably than two people working on the ditch Cooperative work tends to pay off - in philosophy or elsewhere - in terms of output, experience are here thoughts shows that we successfully with several reasons quality, and enjoyment in the doing. in the the centre for this. periphery cannot on achievements One highly competitive predominantly On the other side, individually compete very in their programs. is the communication situation. There are Despite the individualistic nature of American academic �1. <3 �enterprise, 20 ' much communication in the and individualism myth, attainment of results access to work is jointly based, unpublished upon rapid depends material. For, verbal despite the and builds on the work of many; when the time is ripe for some idea or result, several clever people will be Then again communications are important in obtaining rapid able to hit on it. publication of the idea or result, and the assignment of credit for it. again people at the periphery tend to lose out. Again there are nationalistic considerations There are a mix of reasons (e.g. Polish results, Russians will cite a Russian who the same verbally conveyed. tend time and as an outsider). through face-to-face There is seminars Here the so Poles achieves a fact that that local tend to promote result at much is results about conveyed will be There is the fact of limited reading, and that people at the centre to concentrate when they read on material from the centre by central people, so that published items and results from the periphery will often not be noticed, and may well lose out to central central publication. receive, merit competitors even if they achieve There is also the fact that people at the centre tend to for merit, more publication than people towards the periphery. and communication opportunities Here economic factors do begin to enter; consider the size and distribution of the academic market (there are, e.g., a great many more academic philosophers in North America than in the whole rest of the world), control of publishing outlets and journals (with few exceptions 20 Reflecting other features of the culture and enterprise of the centre which are not so deeply embedded in Australasia: see further R. Routley, ’Culture, philosophy, and approaches to the natural environment - an Australian perspective’, in The Environment, Ethics and Ecology (ed. D. Bennett), The Faculties,^ Australian National University, 1984, and also ’Culture and the roots of political divergence)^ the Australian/American contrast’, typescript, Canberra, 1983; both referred to subsequently as ’Culture’. . . // / - �18 However economic power does not, and need not, determine etc. all Northern), culture - we can shut off the Northern philosophical propaganda shut off way we being sets if we really want to. our television by impressed middle-men philosophical those the And we can stop a make who in much living by importing the Northern stuff. So what do we do? We adapt to the cultural-philosophical level, We aim at of those things, that have been suggested in the newer regionalism. some awakening and regional importers and doctrines and imitators local of, positions from and We do not remain slavish self-reliance. on commentators local the North. For several example, peddlars and don’t we spend of, our academic lives trying to tease out what Davidson or Dummett or Kripke meant by this in the hope that or that To through. be sure, I some pale Northern light will am not suggesting we that perhaps emulate filter appalling the ignorance of people from the North who visit the Antipodes and know little or nothing about what has been done or is eminent with through visitors, the their Australian bags heavy National being done here; cultural University (now so that we have accroutrements, the main trekking centre for investigation of relevant logics) and informing us that, or relying crucially on the assumption that, a contradiction entails every proposition. that these Northerners often know little positions and advances is the Antipodes is inferiority colonies; 21 of cultural another is the and intellectual narrow or nothing about One reason distinctive the prevailing assumption of life (predominantly in these local) and former limited the southern reading Regrettably, the ignorance extends to many locals. In particular, those infected with Sydney materialism appear remarkably ill-informed as to basic features of other Australasian programs. �19 undertaken by Northern luminaries. But, having despite been given sufficient we cause, shouldn’t cut ourselves off from Northern paradigms and influences (we could hardly manage to anyway: propaganda is different). so we should stay informed of, but not imitators these continuing traditions: of, or part of, far from cutting these nowhere, In any case, their enterprises. in older Northern traditions, So loose regional cultures are rooted just as the people are largely European stock. from these (and older We can reasonably use what we need from likely traditions and starting afresh and traditions, minority) the from local variations that have already appeared are what we want to develop and perhaps mutate, as again with wine styles. Part things, of the proposal then we that increasingly Northern paradigms. what is very great Nor, our own local rather than working with pale northern reflections of It is not as if we have to build from nothing, very difficult - entirely original work, components. do and so shape newer encourage and develop our own research programs, Antipodean paradigms, 22 is to to do - to create cultural try For there are research programs already initiated, which have the advantage fortunately, of being grounded do we need in to make features of the the story up - shape the future is part of what the proposal is about. larger culture. though helping to Much of the story, for Australia - New Zealand is a different and more difficult proposition - is already indicated in Grave’s survey of Australian philosophy. All one really has to do is to bring out programs he has already indicated and provide some 22 See Culture, op.cit. �20 To pull the investigation down to a more concrete elaboration and commentary. level, I shall sketch some more prominent cooperative programs - by no means the only programs - and remark on some relevant features of them. The longest running and best known program is, without much doubt, of Australian naturalism, and which aims to see natural the that world, and everything else, as suitably encompassed within the framework of the world of (physical) science. empiricist metaphysics, contains as program The 23 is generally materialism, Adelaide which subsequently died out there. such famous state version of failures in materialism, and functionalism. its a Anderson’s program initiated nowadays Faced reduction trimmed theory of universals, plans, like it it takes all now Tt in The latter program has included the mental-material contingent components as central to and is now best exhibited in Armstrong’s work. subprogram Sydney a major back traced in, identity theme and more derivatively, physicalisms incorporates a with a conspicuous "scientifically" and an account of natural laws as relations of universals, both components of the developing Sydney realism. Parts of the naturalism program, especially materialism and central state reductionism and the unified science ideal, have had counterparts in the North, but the program has, for the most part, despite export efforts, smoothly, moreover, and 23 earthy, so retained its distinctively it never caught on in New Zealand. into Australian culture. far as Australian character - The program fits It is similarly down-to-earth, philosophy can be, without the fancy ideas or effete Anderson’s metaphysics was however far more opposed to reductions than what has succeeded it. For an account of Anderson’s philosophy, and a history and account of Australian naturalism and materialism, see especially Grave, op.cit. �21 idealism of European philosophy or the spirituality and suppressed puritanism with which much pragmatism). commitments, of And and North it yet though it not does is (including simmers thinking American shrink from basically empiricist, explicit nowadays, metaphysical it is not from the positivistic (rejecting a verification principle, in particular). It is a city program, based broadcast mainly University of Sydney to other metropolitan universities; but the program does extend outside the universities a bit (a tiny bit) to the larger metropolitan culture. North America, the broader Russell, so in Australasia, community,or Popper Australasia would and be Kuhn quite little professional philosophy impinges on even on being an As in the wider academic community, (To exceptional. achievement, through one to turn worth this working work by around for.) now reaches in The naturalism program used to Perth, and has outliers in Canberra, as well as a core of opposition there. stretch Apart from notable exceptions, Adelaide; the program has never had more than a rather precarious hold, in Melbourne: 25 it the same hold, to or nor, more surprisingly, 24 In Canada, for example, while most academics from other disciplines would know of, and perhaps a little about, Russell, far fewer would know of Wittgenstein (though he is becoming known to lit. crit. groups), and virtually none would know of Quine. (The sampling is subjective.) On the fairly recent ’triumph of professionalism* in philosophy in USA, see Kuklick, op.cit., p.565ff. Kuklick brings out well some of the more disastrous features of professionalism, but does not sufficiently notice that the virtuous features resulting from some professionalisation can be synthesized with broader philosophical activity. 25 The exceptions include Ellis’s distinctive program, which can be accounted part of the broader naturalist program, and at Monash the work of F. Jackson and, earlier, of H. Munro in value theory. �22 has it had heavyweight criticism from there (or indeed much external criticism from elsewhere), the old confrontation of major city philosophies having died out. philosophy Melbourne is more historically oriented stricken than Sydney; Melbourne by dominated procession a a then, philosophy; been idealism and fashions: Northern earlier Wittgenstein, recently, remarkable religion philosophy, much more than Sydney, has of more philosophy; Continental and more turnabout, ordinary Davidson Quine, and language extensional reduction; now perhaps Lewis, Kripke and Dummett? one The program that reaches the beyond of confines the cities in Australia - which is after all a metropolitan dominated culture, the vast land always being the other Australian environmentalism, - is a rather diffuse program, which has connections with the Colleges of Advanced Education in the country towns and the communes on the North Coast. much distinguished environmental Europe by what positions it are a specifically having as not is feature of what So far the program is as it Serious and is. the New World, of transformed most its deeper the Old World, and environment and natural having little wild untouched country left, and little sensitivity accordingly to issues Europe that such as tend admit European to those of concern the wilderness. built shallow approaches superficiality environmentalism outside and (and continues North The main environmental human-transformed encourage to America. environment, situations). techno-fix dominate North much issues of American the New in issues And World environmentalism differs significantly however from Antipodean environmentalism, most obviously in the religious-spiritual component respects as well (see further Culture). of the former, but in several other �23 More positively, there are three strands to Australian environmentalism:- Firstly, there is an extended utilitarianism, differing little in theory from Bentham’s enlarged position, which insists upon counting in the utilities of all sentient figured though creatures. prominently it has position, This in animal from a British base, has animal liberation movements: and research and and welfare on domestic focussed developed animals animals, used in hunted (wild) animals, it has also become entangled in issues of bio-research more generally such as genetic engineering. or much interested in, endangered species, etc., except the conversion of forests, Secondly, not utilitarian forests and differs naturalism. and which ecosystems, from irreducible recognises which finds especially wild and American 26 lands, bearing on these have a an inadequate there is a wider and a deeper ecological position, which is psychological states, sentience or insofar as and so deeper concerns get spinoff from animal welfare, deal. the disappearance of wild Wider and deeper environmental concerns appear only animal pain and pleasure. as a It is not however concerned with, Thirdly, and spiritualism is there of value elsewhere intrinsic value natural from course, an as systems. in trees and This position of American extension almost than everywhere, a reactionary component, critical of the other strands, which insists that all that needs to be accomplished on the environmental front can be achieved within older established (European) ethical and political frameworks. Whereas materialism is based in Sydney, environmentalism is centred in Melbourne and Canberra, but also includes Brisbane and Perth. Also centred in 26 It has been described more Environmental Philosophy (ed. D. National University, 1980. fully elsewhere: see, in particular, Mannison and others), RSSS, Australian �Canberra, and reaching across the country, with good connections in Melbourne, but in few Sydney, and materialism program other which program, elsewhere. and major perhaps which philosophy, more includes to centres New in metaphysics, with respectively, the theory value essentially is of extends and their core logic a especially in Zealand , program, one but metaphysics. Australia than also been has the Whereas any The other described ?7 The main logic grounded research program evident program. of the in New Zealand philosophy is also A program emanating from the work of Prior and located mainly in Wellington, The impact programs have program areas program. relevant/paraconsistent epistemology from relevant/paraconsistent affecting the environmental input further is it might be called the extended modal a now program. program on philosophy is perhaps best seen in Cresswell’s work. Australian philosophy used to be known, for its hard-headed empiricism; not known and still is in some quarters, regrettably New Zealand philosophy is mostly for anything much, except perhaps, in UK, that Prior brought his 27 Again, like all the Australian programs, both those mentioned and others, in Grave, op.cit. But see further, R. Routley, ’Research in Logic in Australia, New Zealand and Oceania’, Research Papers in Logic #14, Australian National University, 1983 (which also considers other programs in logic); G. riest and R. Routley, op. cit.; and R. Routley, R.K. Meyer and others, Relevant Logics and Their Rivals, Ridgeview, California, 1982. 28 See especially M.J. Cresswell, Logics and Languages, Methuen, London, 1973; but see also work by Goldblatt and by Hughes referred to in Research in Logic, op.cit. Also described there is an original version of the modal program (transparent intensional logic) elaborated by Tlchy at Otago. �25 unusual adaption of Russellian philosophy from that remote place. Neither of these impressions is particularly accurate; both are rather out-of-date. the aim of work of the present type is, of course, impressions, not just to reflect or report But not just to correct these on culture - for what one would like to reflect upon is not sufficiently there - but also to help manufacture elements of a culture, to make an image. To resist the North, we should increase our efforts to further the nq already flourishing programs, and perhaps other sunrise projects; to build teaching and research around the programs selected for promotion, elaboration, and criticism, to orient appointments, especially of involved local people, to 29 Among sunrise projects in Australian philosophy so far suggested (not all of them feasible) are these: Australian feminism, Antipodean social and political alternatives, peace studies, indigenous regional philosophies (especially Aboriginal, Melanesian, and Polynesian). Another promising field, with practical consequences, for local initiative is the philosophy of education, where material produced by R.S. Peters has dominated the market, with stultifying effects it is now alleged. As foreshadowed with the notion of "sunrise projects", much of the rhetoric, and argument, concerning science and technology policy (presented in the case of Australia in Jones, op.cit.) can be taken over to apply to X policy, where X is some subject discipline, such as philosophy. �26 on Why bother? these programs. Why not simply buy our philosophy, like almost all our technology, off the shelf, from the North? There are several arguments for not doing this, in more than a limited fashion, which are now sketched. There is, firstly, Northern products, fine a the inferiority and built-in Without despite their attractive packaging. most of putting too point on it, many of the imported intellectual goods are shoddy, and only work for a very limited range of applications (e.g. the obsolence vicinity Antipodean of contradictions philosophy or undoubtedly dilemmas). derives from Much they’re hopeless in that shoddy is wrong intellectual with goods 30 In fact something like the last has been the policy of the LSE Philosophy Department, where the only outside appointment over a long period was that of Lakatos (hardly a person far removed ideologically). As observed, it now looks like the practice of the Otago Department also; and apparently it used to be a tendency at Melbourne. But in most places the practice is condemned as nepotistic or parochial, and overridden by the call for "new (Northern! blood". However there can be significant differences between nepotistic appointments and those strengthening local programs. It is at this stage, among others that administrative measures do matter; for example, to ensure that suitable locally-engaged locals gain employment rather than Northern stooges, to direct funds into on-going local programs rather than imported fashions, etc. There are various ways appropriate administrative details can be handled, locally or nationally; but nothing draconian, such as wholesale exclusion of noncitizens, is required. Observe, indeed, that no restriction of academic appointments to nationals (in Canadian style) or the like is being advocated. Anyone who arrives at a conclusion of that sort from what has been argued has misunderstood the case in crucial respects. As a matter of simple mathematics, restricting appointment fields characteristically reduces both quality of candidates available (however quality is assessed) and range of possibilities open for future research; and no such restrictions are advocated. The author has witnessed the debilitating effects of field restrictions at the Australian National University and elsewhere. 31 Some of these arguments centre also. support change (perhaps revolutionary) at the �Yet buying this material is encouraged by hard-sell imported from the North. cultural ambassadors from the North, who are often enough paid to visit. is part Northern of the philosophical imperialism colonialism that - the This from the North - the successor Antipodes too suffers, willing or, to more remarkable, encourages! Secondly, there is the inappropriateness of much of the Northern product, especially considered metaphysics, as package, a environmental concerns. for instance, to cover, well as as The European North has no satisfactory land or environmental ethic fit for Antipodean circumstances, and the deeper American package is too spiritually-loaded for mainstream Australian culture. 32 In political theory, work is much too individualistic the European product, especially the Marxist form, and competition-based, American unsuited being both too precious and for local too high-tech and is circumstances, especially again for more environmentally-perceptive people. Thirdly, features of telling also import comparative advantage, and regionalism; namely, substitution world’s markets and pressures power structures against and fashions, (including the Old Boy’s removal network in are appealing avoidance of the of overseas control and jobs, policies, etc.), and gaining of local control, employment of local people, etc. Fourthly, 32 there are arguments for cultural diversity, applied to The point is elaborated in Culture. At a more practical level Northern products are again often unsuitable, though for different reasons. For example, the transfer of American agricultural methods and equipment to the thin poor soils of the Antipodes has had disastrous effects, at last beginning to be recognised. �28 part philosophy as complexity, sheer diversity, of culture: intellectual stability, arguments In fact, etc. built into the whole notion of 'culture’ transfers. dense, productive garden. the garden analogy Naturally we want a rich, But not only seeds and plants but weeds and many We pests are being introduced. obtain not only good products, Indian maize This is why and European cultivars, but European pests and American weeds. selectiveness and control richness, from essential, are as against haphazard previous procedures. The proposal is not for, nor would the case sustain, a narrow localism, with local products, whatever their quality, heroes, replacing Northern ones. local fashions, and local cult That is certainly not the preferred way of the newer regionalism, which tends to do without fashions and heroes and which seeks durable quality in products, is it the way of low environmental impact, and so on|^ nor technology policy. Rather, as with technology policy, select niches which are not occupied or satisfactorily filled, make a difference, policy has to be publishing outlets, components, and ideas, and use and develop local skills and methods. selective etc.). given resource our But granting base (of can Indeed the philosophers, regionalism, to what extent should for instance people, books and other teaching elements, theories and to what extent should they be produced, trained, be imported conceived locally? The possibility of selectiveness means that many mixes are possible. least, on a particular mix. 33 where we we There in different is no need to insist, components so far at The case for the present is mainly for a regional See, for instance, A.A. Mazrui, A World Federation of Cultures: An African Perspective, Free Press, New York, 1976. �29 shift, for a significantly greater degree of local autonomy and production.^ But it will do no harm to Negatively, local favour. indicate elements of a mix that the suggestion is that we try to eradicate much of That includes such things the Oxford style of teaching and doing philosophy. removal as of the Locke-Berkeley-Hume emphasis undue (a finds much standard on British British focus); empiricism of centred on quasi-historical the approach with however no proper attention to sources; of reinforcement of the prevailing Anglo-American status quo. The heavy particular, has mostly been a very conservative one. the main movements philosophy, but emanating also the from England, Moore-Wittgenstein Oxford influence, in More generally, many of especially practice, ordinary have language been very protective of the Northern status quo; they tend to leave things very much as they are, and recommend just this. Positively, the proposal is that we achieve further disassociation from the Anglo-American empiricist past in two 34 Does it sound familiar? Outside philosophy, it should. For example, we have now been told by the Americans that our defence role, unlike theirs, is regional, not global: this is supposed to shed great light on our previously confused defence policies. 35 The point is laboured in E. Gellner, Words and Things, Victor Gollancz, London, 1959. But even ordinary language philosophy, though conservative, and though it much contracted the proper range of philosophical investigations, had its liberating elements, e.g. removal of some of the narrowness and more cramping assumptions induced by technical jargon. Nor has the social impact changed much with the subsequent decline, since 1959, of ordinary language philosophy, the increasing insolvency of Oxbridge philosophy, and its consequent limited take-over by right-wing Ivy League American philosophy. By contrast, the less economically influential growth of redbrick and applied philosophy in some of the British redbrick and polytechnic institutes has touched no more than the surface of Oxbridge practice. �30 local emphasizing by ways: framework, and projects range the diversifying by move that outside of that constricting philosophical traditions selectively drawn upon, to include not only neglected Continental strands and but also parts of Eastern thought, philosophy. idea The is that Australasian Pacific ethnic material and plurality of such a especially sources, in teaching, will assist in removing narrower cultural biasses, such as British enable more and parochialism, be obtained. to discrimination Then too we should be better able to see the ranges of theories that are open to us in the Antipodes and how to advance our own programs. There remain some things we should want to see whatever mixes are chosen in different Antipodean regions. One crucial issue is the removal of Northern bias from papers and publications, research seminars and lectures, letters of reference, and so on. the and works irrespective discussion This Northern bias is a disposition to cite and discuss projects of and Northern quality the to of ignore of the authors, their works the more contribution of the to authors, local irrespective of the quality of their contribution. defer to famous better, the under topic again largely It is the disposition to authors from prestigious Northern institutions, and to uncritically accept their opinions of worth, importance, It etc. is the disposition to write or lecture as though work produced locally either does not exist or has not been influential philosophers, are, (thus if ensuring anything, more that it inclined is to not). Northern And Australasian bias than many overseas intellectuals, who are perhaps less concerned to be seen as belonging to the Northern mainstream. bias affects not only the The reduction, and eventual removal, of Northern practice of individual philosophers, but the policies of selection and review committees as well as of editors and referees �of local reorientation, innovations It journals. among involves, Antipodean philosophers with so better, they can cite other getting local work things, intellectual to know local work and or point out regional Initiatives and developments - things that would be assisted by greater local content in courses taught, more time spent at local institutions on study leave, and so on. APPENDIX 1. Background notes on the philosophy supply situation. Sociological investigation of the philosophy labour market in Australia and New Zealand has yet to be attempted. But a picture of some elements underlying the numerical argument of the text can be gained from the following table: simple �32 TABLE 1. Ph.Ds in Philosophy: a USA - Australasian comparison USA Number (Male./Female) Australia New Zealand 1974 413 (346/67) 6 0 1975 375 (318/57) 5 0 1976 382 (319/63) 8 0 1977 330 (264/66) 3 2 (1/1) 1978 283 (235/48) 5 5 (4/1) 1979 285 (204/54) 9 3 (2/1) 1980 246 (187/59) 4 N.A. 1981 N.A. 4 0 Notes: 1. The breakdown of the USA and New Zealand numbers by sexes (male/female) is given. Similar figures do not appear to be available for Australia. 2. The US figures are for the academic year ending in the Year shown, e.g. 1978 covers the Northern academic year 1977-78. Southern figures are for the calendar year shown. Sources: Digest of Education Statistics, US National Center for Education Statistics; University Statistics, Australian Bureau of Census Statistics; New Zealand Education Statistics. Comments: 1. The contraction of US doctoral production and the concomitant rise in female representation, are clearly indicated. The Australian figures are likely too small to reflect such trends and responses to the academic market. 2. Some of the Australasian numbers include Americans; likewise the American figures provide no nationality breakdown. 3. There is no information available on the number of Australians proceeding to higher degrees in philosophy outside Australia. In applying table 1 some simplifying assumptions are made. assumed that For example, it is candidates for appointment to regular university positions now would have a doctorate or the equivalent (until recently a B.Phil was taken as �a near of equivalent It well). a North what assumed, is American Ph.D.; seems take to could publications case, the that serve as the number of Australasians proceeding to higher degrees in philosophy abroad is relatively small, and no more than the order of Ph.Ds. taken locally. without upsetting applications of table 1, It can be assumed, that Australasian graduates match, say, the upper half of American graduates in standard attained. There is no compiled information on academic vacancies in philosophy in Australia or New Zealand - on the numbers of vacancies, on how the positions It would however be a routine, are filled, by what nationalities, sexes, etc. if tedious, matter to assemble some of this data, is of considerable which relevance to the planning of philosophy programs. 4. On the earlier idea of a National Philosophy for Australia. APPENDIX 2. considering Editor the of initial to corresponding Lebensanchauung ’ ’an Australian argument is possibility ’the AJPP, Francis Philosophy is as truth and its between as that a theory may not be held, (Australian) two senses Weltanschauung and 'a scheme of the universe’, that of a Christian confirmation independent of national sympathies or prejudices’. mean distinguished Anderson, ridiculous the Philosophy’, distinction In the first, (p.292). both National a German ’the that of In or Science’. falsification The ’are Granted: but that does not fostered, etc., in one region but not others, as intuitionism was for long in in Holland, or Cartesianism in France. In a second ’more intimate and personal’ way, ’a nation like an individual may develop a certain temperamental attitude to the problems of existence, which we may ... call its philosophy of life. and its literature, is a mode of A nation’s philosophy, expression for the national like its art consciousness. �34 (pp.292-3). It is a specialised form of the national genius ....’ short, part of the evolving national culture. is from by entirely means no separate in the first place, But, the It is, initial sense, in this philosophy a comprising not merely a fairly comprehensive theory but also an integrated set Furthermore, only by concession of attitudes (like an operational paradigm). units single accounted philosophy, of meriting distinctive definite literature, Australian like particularly ’the Australian landscape’ ’the national consciousness’ and are such items as (in many has any sense): does not Australian descriptors. such strands things to form it, not some rather loose families. Anderson not does find, really to hope find ’a in modern industrialised community’ - with its modular parts interchangeable with those of others - a national philosophy of with life, a difference. claims to find a (somewhat) trite moral base to build on, humour, courage and fair particularly philosphical. at least various apart of life, regional is but dealing’, So far, not; philosophies then, this nothing however not local research identifying and trouble derives from the extravagant claim that with Goodness these and - ’traditions ... of distinctive, all or there exclude So programs). legitimating a being far, national But shortly Anderson is plunged into inconsistency: the philosophy, so good. do at he there could a national philosophy, does as (such problems about from rational but fact Tn the Beauty eternal - then of values and only Philosophy’ (p.295 with rearrangement). the then But, to do with these - as is virtually conceded, ’if Australia has nothing to Spirit, has she the Ideals nothing to of Truth, do with as Australia has nothing per se these values involving a ’wider sweep’ than any national boundaries - "she" has nothing to do with Philosophy, contradicting the possibility of a National Philosophy. Though the �35 contradiction is easily avoided by rescinding the extravagant claim, the ideal of a National Philosophy should be allowed to rest in peace: nationalism has had its time. -r /I ZR. Routley^ Research School of Social Sciences Australian National University With thanks to R. Elliot, W. Godfrey-Smith, S. Grave and L. Mirlin, to several members of the audience at the presentation of the paper at the 19R3 Australasian Association of Philosophy Conference, University of Adelaide, to several referees for this Journal, and, not least, to the present Editor. �PROSPECTS FOR REGIONAL PHILOSOPHIES IN AUSTRALASIA Philosophy, especially academic philosophy but also folk philosophy, like has long been other intellectual and higher cultural activity in Australasia, indeed dominated, swamped, Northern by increasingly from North America. Europe, now the largely and cultural baggage other imported, influences, Given the initially the migration ethnic patterns, composition of resulting ruling populations, such a result was virtually inevitable. does not have to stay that way. from the But it Suitable policies, a good philosophy policy, could change things. The of thought culture, is a philosophy, regional hardly a new one. In 1923, matching perhaps a regional correspondent to the a New Zealand newly-launched Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy mentioned the possibility of ’a new kind or temper of philosophy under these southern skies’ which Journal might the such a reaching role for (or, not community). that although And matter, professional merely solid foundation foster.The Journal has for a some actively pursued philosophers things new regionalism however hardly but have changed in philosophy, its a fulfilled pronounced wider aim of Australasian in Australia, laying a that possibility of a new temper of philosophy has hardly been realised. There is little in the way the southern skies were intended to include: but few distinguishing features, ’no a new kind distinctively ^AJPP, March same volume, Appendix 2. and New temper of philosophy under New Zealand skies, which of Zealand 1923, p.74. p.292.ff; his characteristics, The have question was discussion is shown up in New Zealand taken up by the Editor in the considered below, especially in �2 philosophy’. 9 New Zealand remains a substantial net importer of philosophy, The situation of colonial dominance that used to prevail in and philosophers. Australia, where virtually and chairs, all many other philosophy, were filled by academics from the North, posts academic in tends to persist in New Zealand, where no established chairs are occupied by locals.Given the. usual power and influence of professors in small departments, topics covered and considered and in courses designed, especially appointments made, the heavy Northern orientation of philosophy taught and researched in New Zealand is not The Northern control is perhaps most strikingly exhibited at the surprising. oldest of New Zealand universities, University the of Otago, where the Philosophy Department has been substantially captured by a British School and increasingly looks event, the like an offshoot of overwhelming Anglo-American the University of London.In any dominance of New Zealand philosophy also a feature only in slightly lesser degree of Australian philosophy - can be confirmed by a content survey of the courses offered and research papers written at New Zealand universities. Even when local people have been appointed to positions in Australasia, they have been brought up on a solid diet of Anglo-American material, and they have often been reforged or finished in the North as well. In particular, the 2, S.A. Grave, A History of Philosophy in Australia, Queensland University Press, 1983, p.l. Page references are to the manuscript. The paper draws heavily on this history. ^This claim was correct at the time of presentation of 1983). With the recent loss of chair at Wellington, qualification, but the pattern of domination persists. the the paper (August claim may require 4In the 1983 Commonwealth University Handbook listing, 6 of the 8 members of the Department held their main degree, Ph.D., from London, and one of the remainder from Exeter. Only one member of the Department, soon to retire, falls outside the nexus. �3 requirements in the Australasian universities of period of the major post­ World War II expansion were conveniently seen to in the case of philosophy by the Oxford B.Phil. Many degree. of departments philosophy remain full of products of this cultural mill: indeed until the mid 70s candidates finished in Oxford were hard to beat out when they applied for positions, such was the prestige of Oxford and (unwarranted) the regrettable, continuing, but still "cultural cringe". Nonetheless, been in occurring scene the Northern the Antipodes, be will (as despite especially on indicated). significant dominance, is It the Australian worth asking changes have philosophical Australian whether philosophy is moving towards the sort of change that occurred in USA more than 100 years ago when the Harvard Philosophy Department was brought (or bought) and together, its "golden age" began.American the same again, and became its own thing. philosophy was never quite There are nouT new forces operating which could help to move Australian philosophy in such a direction. the widespread regionalism,0 other local fashioning provides a emergence, which applies choices; of national model for and particularly to in cultural stark science reflection and in in alternative and technology regional there there are also some of choice along is policies, philosophy directly bears on parts of the philosophy of science. soon appear, culture, ideological contrast, serious obstacles There is the a new with centralised which not only policy but also Unfortunately, as will to regional philosophies and to the very idea of a regional philosophy. See B. Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy; Cambridge, Massachusetts 1860-1930, Yale University Press, 1977, Parts 2 and 3. 60n this bio-regionalism, see especially, Fourth World News, vol. 1, and K. Sale, Human Scale, Cox^ard, McCann and Geoghegan, New York, 1980. 1983, �USA, long an importer of culture from Europe, of exporter culture, certainly components of higher culture philosophical output Australasia, not if from such as Oxford following philosophy should not but achieve also the American there Are Yes, in philosophy? evidently (witness taken). has suit, payments, especially balance of culture, lower of has recently become a net a reasons better of turn why cultural there are reasons. In the first place, the change in the cultural position of the USA went with, and perhaps in part derived entails economic dominance most Australasia’s of from, vast changes in economic power relations. cultural dominance, since culture, there there is is little prospect serious no prospect If for that Australasia will ever emulate or attain American economic eminence (at least nuclear destruction of not without the North, flow of commodities, cultural and other). universities not only increasingly of Americans, contingent of former group, Northern cultural As they. priorities, that they whose entire as observed, Antipodean Northern academics, of include a research and additional substantial teaching is bent to It is unlikely that this influential segment, especially will (become commitments, long component also fellow-travellers, Northern concerns. the Secondly, large a contain and disruption of the as so apart Antipoduans they are in a bind locally acclimatised as do from not situation; the isolated drastically to) give up Nor person. alter their its should cultural for it can be persuasively argued they would be better off, as far as quality and product goes, stocking their universities with American teaching components and researching Americanoriented concerns. One simple numerical argument that Antipodean universities would be better off with Americans in the main, takes the following lines:- The (higher degree) graduates of Australasian culturally distinguished, at and American are not significantly least in subjects such as philosophy. Consider �5 now number the quality of Austroamerican graduates; academics of higher per number produced say there is 1 per every n graduates. degree The (great) preponderance of graduates will be Americans, just by virtue of their vastly greater population and their more extensive system of university education. So also then, just by ratio considerations, the great preponderance of quality academics from an drawn percentiles among upper they interested universities. Austroamerican base those quality products. quality, in an Such be American, will would argument does CLearly, Antipodeans, appointing be not as will work to more show Americans that, for the were their to similar reasons, American universities should be full of Chinese or Indian professors, for two Asians reasons; and first Americans, there are especially significant in cultural differences disciplines such as between philosophy; and secondly, their university systems do not deliver such great quotas of higher degree or high quality graduates, at least in philosophy. The conclusion of the numerical argument will not be a popular one. anti-Americanism felt the universities; The in portions of the Australasian community extends into and recently there has been increasing insistence, especially by the now aging younger Turks that university positions should be reserved for locals. This at the same time as these Turks often preach of an international community of scholars, presumably then with "free" interchange, As indicated in Appendix 1, where assumptions made in the argument are defended, the ratio of US philosophy graduates with doctorates as compared with Australian exceeds 30 to 1. And, as is well-known, the extent of university education is much greater in USA than in Australasia: indeed Australia is in this respect among the worst educated of the developed nations, as OECD figures have made plain (see, e.g., B. Jones, Sleepers Wake', Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1982, Chapter 7). �6 etc. They cannot have it all ways.3 So long the continues, the present centre will as they will economically; them if large to it is free-flow the dominate have more interchange than us, periphery and ideas of and culturally jobs here personnel as well as should go by and (centrally-determined) quality in this high cultural business that we seek, as mostly claim. it Now anyway, is that arguments. widely there For we is are enough recognised, something not lower-down drastically wrong hierarchical with these ladders sorts flooded with high-quality Northerners who regularly drive out local contenders for positions, of would if we only preferred the Northerners when they were quite visibly superior: rather we are inundated by Americans with inflated references, who have the messages of the centre better than locals echelon do, (often and remote Northern Northern whose shortcomings biassed) fields tend appointment are known better. to look greener to committees than dusty higherlocals As is beginning to be recognised too, the Northern centres tend to retain their higher-quality products, and allow g A reverse flow of the better orthodox academics from Australasia to America should also be expected (outside times of university contraction). According to assumptions of this brain, drain argument, which is based on labour market considerations, appointment and lifestyle conditions for academics are generally better in USA than Australia and much better than those in economically-depressed New Zealand (e.g. higher salaries, better standard of living, superior research conditions, etc.). So, other things being equal, able academics from the Antipodes will relocate in USA as academic positions become available. The argument also helps explain why Antipodean universities cannot expect, for the most part, to attract really top-drawer Northerners for very long. Of course, economically irrelevant factors do induce interference; e.g. perverse commitments to odd-ball Antipodean intellectual enterprises which reduce market acceptability, or pre-industrial ties to place or persons or lifestyle which unduly restrict mobility (such as local roots, family attachments, even distaste for American urban lifestyles). �7 them be to exiled the to periphery only if they fall somehow foul of the system (e.g. of the academic system for political or personal reasons). often Northern the have centres disposed of their intellectually Too inferior products in the periphery. All this makes the appointing Northerners, position look doubly bad. We ought, especially Americans, even if they are overrated their references, and usually not out of the top drawer, quality. And yet to be it seems, in in order to maximize doing so does not achieve the desired quality result, and breeds discontent elsewhere, especially among the aging Turks. there Fortunately obtain way out a from this awkward and that is the way of regionalism. shaky arguments; and is cultural sufficient distance,9 so that situation and these We do our own things; they are not simply subtitutable for us. Then the shaky numerical argument does fall down. before the we elaborate emerging proposal there are other But influential arguments to dispose of, and the disposal bears on the proposal. There is, have so to begin with, far been conceded: the argument for excellence, that excellence, which we all more or elements of which there is an objective commodity, quality or less agree about, which is proportionately more abundant in the North, and which is what academic institutions crave and seek and what appointments aim to capture, indeed maximize. That at least is the type of myth most of us have encountered; and many of us now know it is a myth, in fact appointments a that dangerous way, any Most myth. more that places don’t organisations aim even just try to to make maximize 9 This is easier in the cultural than the technological sphere. However it is also possible technologically: (stronger) theses of technological determinism, and so of cultural determinism, are false. We can choose different options, technologically, as well as culturally. �8 profit, but quality is to satisfice on a mix of factors, of which assessed rather seek only one, and not often the highest ranking one. Ability to fit into some sort of program, teaching or research, is another, and commonly more important factor; is no good reason why such a program should not and there So given prevailing practices, sometimes be a regionally oriented one. the argument from excellence does not exclude regional philosophy programs. And, in any event, there are enough local candidates of sufficient worth to proceed regional with programs without sacrifice clearcut of Local excellence. enterprise need entail no loss of excellence, and could well increase it. The deeper-cutting objection is that there is something seriously amiss with the idea of objective objective importance; criticism as bracketed out notions the that of excellence, and notions these values objective with are open more contextual-relativisation connected the to the generally, component of notion of sorts of same they that valuing: have the framework or viewpoint to which these values relate.10 While those operating within as a rather narrow intellectual paradigm, such ordinary Oxbridge language philosophy or Sydney materialism say, can bracket out the viewpoint, since it is incorporated in the operational paradigm, and so arrive at seemingly objective quality judgements, the judgements are not preserved (e.g. in truth Marxist value) when viewpoints. transposed Consider, to for other frameworks, comparison, the e.g. idealistic judgements as to or the quality or worth of a forest,made variously by a deep ecologist, an industrial forester, and a recreational officer. Compare judgements as to the quality of What follows also begins to bring out what is omitted in a main theme of R.S. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance, Bodley Head, London, 1974. Note that defusing the notion of objective excellence does not lead to subjectivism. To avoid the customary false dichotomy, compare the notion of validity (usually ceded to themselves these days by classical logicians with that of quality). �9 a holistically-inclined Marxist, and environmental Californian philosophers pretend who seemingly because it philosopher, environmental such language, are There work judged, be. cannot even of the main philosophical by members is not done ordinary philosophers. environmental that by peer group at Harvard and like institutions. this As judgements begins the of to reveal, judgements of quality are not independent of work of importance or done But tackled. problems importance of problems and issues is highly paradigm dependent. the For example, problems such as those of quantifying-in and of possible worlds and of de re thought, which assume immense importance for fashionable referential within the mainstream empiricist restricted that outside theories paradigm, vanish to relative insignificance viewpoint. Now observe that most judgements as to what are the important problems and what constitutes important work - matters helping determine quality - are shipped down from the North. Their Importance is relative to their paradigmatic placement, and the paradigms concerned are exported to the Antipodes through the main channels already indicated. We are free to reject these paradigms and select alternatives, and there are, it can good reasons be argued, choose that different generally energy favoured to do just technology in the that, much as (or different North the which there are good reasons military North is from technology) eager to to export southwards. Similar which might argument, points apply against alternatively that be mass-produced and cosmopolitan. The argument -marketed 'cosmopolitan subject', called people sophisticated the from is based cosmopolitan/international the Peter everywhere Holland; Stuyvesant smoke this argument international superior product cigarette-sophistication is on the assumption that philosophy is a that is is not the sort of enterprise for which place �10 and people are significant as they assumption has only to be presented important thing, for one for are poetry the or to be questioned. novel. is a finished product of a certain that philosophy process of production the place and people involved (e.g. And literature, the if and not product philosophy, no more 12 than work a like theorems just internationally-approved format, since is The It takes for granted, sort (a propositional theory), not a process of production also. material. 11 of in discussion) are art, arguments and But in the like a piece assembled in of an then again the historical setting matters, literature, not does emerge in a vacuum. Plato’s philosophy could not have emerged in ancient Australia, and if cribbed in mid 20th century Oxford would surely have been marked down or rejected. It is important not to be sidetracked do not in aesthetics - that extent sets of themes need to and arguments into issues - resembling problems be contested, such as whether and what produced in one place and setting could have been produced in another. A nonnuclear technology of some sort could be adopted prospect in Europe that New but apparently will Zealand, nonnuclear energy strategy. in not contrast be, with whereas there Australia, is will reasonable pursue a It is the doing, and not what could be done, that Grave, op.cit., p.2: the term ’cosmopolitan subject’ used there comes from Donegan. As to the significance of place and people for literature, see further C. Partridge, The Making of New Cultures, Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam, 1982. 12 Like a paper in the biological sciences. But here again technique methodology, which may both be regional, are crucially important. 13 and Related points can be made using less extreme examples, e.g. concerning modern American work. Consider, for instance such texts as W.V. Quine’s Word and Object, (Wiley, New York, 1960) or R. Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia (Basic Books, New York, 1974). The assumptions taken for granted, the arguments involved, etc., are especially American: it is not just the style. The acceptability of arguments and positions is dependent on place and received paradigm. �11 here. matters Dialethic which logic, the invalidates methodology of much Anglo-American philosophy, could technique and perhaps be done in the North (though there would be substantial cultural resistance): it is not being and is not likely to be done in the Anglo-American sphere.To done there, this extent, Antipodeans do techniques, logical can choose their international/cosmopolitan argument, distinctive own their distinctive own technology thing. and The stated in a form that would be telling, fails. Of course it can be argued, it is being argued, that Antipodeans don't need to be, or even oughtn't to be pursuing their own energy or logic policies and apparatus. But meeting these considerations takes us to a whole new set of issues concerning the merit of various policies and programs, diversity, etc. - far beyond the cosmopolitan argument. which we shaLl return, arguments concerning the point of The new arguments, to are not a lot more convincing however than comparable cooking: that we don't devising our own cuisine or wine styles. need to be or oughtn't to be British, or at least cosmopolitan, cooking is adequate: we should stick to that and buy it off the shelf from the North, ideally importing the cooks also. Do we have good reasons to think that British philosophy is better, these days, than British cooking? Antipodeans are free, in principle then, to pursue their own paradigms; and to do so they will by and large want to, and mostly have to, appoint their own people, people they have educated - not saboteurs or people who have (had) Much as communist anarchism, a live possibility for communes and perhaps communities in Australia, is culturally excluded in North America, owing to the extreme possessive individualism of that culture. On dialethic logic, see G. Priest and R. Routley, On Paraconsistency, Research Papers in Logic, #13, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1983. �12 to be re-educated, from elsewhere, in particular from the North. intellectual paradigms the of features local But will the perused tie with cultural paradigms, with distinctive In a culture? though works of philosophy will loose not usually at way, they may link, least, culture in tie in with the the integral fashion that novels (as distinct from more technical works) sometimes do. Indeed, cultural certain programs, - to limited extent, features, not they do restricted already link. add. But style, independent - or independent acceptability, truth, philosophical ’an Australian compared with what matters is this though considers Grave particular to help mark philosophy in Australia as that 'unimportant hastens a to product' in philosophy' do matter, and are he not so far as their perception goes in the case of truth and correctness^3 - from underlying broad theory or received paradigm. However the marks Grave cautiously advances, significant though they are, do not serve features to the distinguish Australian philosophy Australian exhibits in product, lesser the degree adventurous and polemical philosophy of Greek antiquity. by Passmore as 'most typical of first two the than being more The first, described Australian philosophy', is a 'diversity of approach and readiness to put forward an unconventional or unfashionable point of view', philosophy, something which more (with typical some of notable ancient philosophy exceptions) than exhibits Australian a.i austere Nothing need be conceded to strong cultural relativity themes, though they would support the case. It is enough that our theories remain radically incomplete and that there can accordingly be rival theories as to what is true. Similarly, however philosophy is conceived - as the search for truth, explanation, understanding and wisdom (all of these and more, really), or as, more vaguely, inquiry of a certain sort - there can be, and will be, competing accounts; so a pluralistic theory is inevitable in giving a fuller view. l^Both preceding quotations, while included as such in Grave's Introduction, are from J. Passmore, 'Philosophy', in The Pattern of Australian Culture (ed. A.L. McLeod), Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y., 1963, pp.131-168. The same annotation also applies to the third mark. �13 uniformity reflecting that often attributed to the land itself. and surprising, more most 'the philosophy, Wittgensteinian extraordinary discussed by itself’ Grave) , criticism by sharp and political relevant/paraconsistent to example ... Andersonian (p.2). This of character' manifestoed the the __ being if Sydney, example is Australian line-up it was far from between the not isolated: them concern the fervour generated by "Australian materialism", others among the notable Melbourne philosophy Andersonian is mark The second, engagement the and by some growing philosophy departments confrontation (both concerning the program, with the local ('adversarial') style leading Connected Americans. these with first two marks are further characteristics of much Australian philosophy, as of much 18th century Scottish philosophy and directness, unkindly turn of unwillingness (in add the this century Cambridge philosophy:17 to muffle points, hope of locating a namely surface clarity and, some would difference), bluntness, genuine unsubtlety and crudity. The third and the fourth marks advanced Grave in philosophy. effect notes, hardly are very different, but again as distinguishing features of Australian The third, which applies well to other intellectual areas, is the contrast of the Australian reputation in philosophy indeed of Australia as a center of philosophical inquiry’, with the anti—intellectual national stereotype of Australians as a people ’devoted to physical achievement rather than to intellectual subtlety’. Anglo-American philosophy; namely The the fourth mark is especially a feature of isolation of academic philosophy Australasia from, and its general indifference or even hostility to, in the sort 17 • though for the most part that influenced by Sydney rather than that originating in Melbourne. This again reflects the different historical influences bearing in Sydney and Melbourne philosophy: roughly, Scottish versus Continental antecedents. �14 of imported philosophy (e.g. that Nietzsche of and the existentialists) generating interest in literary and arts circles. The failure philosophy sufficiently matter. not does separated For its by to marks such of adequately one the thing, out separate research projects. Australian For another, Australian produce is regionalism should not be confused with nationalism, nor more regional positions such as Sydneyside materialism modalism Wellington or with Nationalism in philosophy, as in most other things, not to be the and encouraged; new regionalism philosophies. national is an undesirable trait, is linked, in other cultural things, with the breakdown of nations and contraction of state power. -A ■A To get back * to where we were: A the A emerging proposal is this, that we start - or better much increase - doing our own distinctive things, and that we team up to do so. In fact there are several suggestions that begin to emerge, concerning research and teaching, publications and appointments, study These are not just that we do our own selection leave and sponsored visitors. topics of and people, and style and methods, decide instead of having these foisted upon us - not just, our own priorities, that is, that we play our own games (whether invented here or taken over from the North) and not theirs, Rules and Rugby instead of Gridiron and Basketball - but. that we abandon the individual competitive model of cultural achievement, sold to us and fostered 18 See, e.g., London, 1957. Sale, op.cit., and L. Kohr, The Breakdown of Nations, RKP, The Editor of the new 1923 AJPP did however take seriously the notion of National Philosophy, of (what must have surprised some New Zealand readers) an Australian Philosophy; some of the issues there raised (p.292ff) are addressed in Appendix 2. �15 by the North, in favour of a group cooperative approach (elements of which are already modelled in Antipodean social clubs). The thoughts here are simple and familiar. digging example: it is well-known that two people cooperating can dig a ditch and enjoyably more rapidly On the one side is the ditch­ than two people working on the ditch separately. Cooperative work tends to pay off - in philosophy or elsewhere - in terms of output, and enjoyment quality, in the doing. On the other side, experience shows that we in the periphery cannot individually complete very successfully with the centre on achievements in their programs. for this. the nature of American academic attainment of depends results access to unpublished material. and periphery nationalistic are the tend verbal rapid communication and For, despite the individualism myth, work is several clever people will be able to hit on it. idea or result, communications upon enterprise,^ much and builds on the work of many; when the time is ripe for some- jointly based, result, Despite the highly competitive One is the communication situation. predominantly individualistic in There are several reasons to important assignment lose out. considerations in obtaining of credit Again (e.g. for rapid it. publication of Here there is a mix PoLes tend Then again to again the people of reasons:promote idea or at the There are Polish results, Russians will cite a Russian who achieves a result at about the same time as an outsider). There face-to-face seminars 19 is the fact that much is conveyed verbally and through so that local results will be conveyed. There is the Reflecting other features of the culture and enterprise of the centre which are not so deeply embedded in Australasia: see further R. Routley, 'Culture, philosophy, and approaches to the natural environment an Australian perspective’, in The Environment, Ethics and Ecology (ed. D. Bennett), The Faculties, Australian National University, 1984, and also 'Culture and the roots of political divergence: the Australian/American contrast’, typescript, Canberra, 1983; both referred to subsequently as 'Culture'. �16 limited fact of they when reading, on read and that people at the from material the centre central by centre tend to concentrate peopLe, that so published items and results from the periphery will often not be noticed, and may well out lose to There publication. is the also for merit, receive, merit competitors central more fact that publication than people towards the periphery. if even people and they achieve the at centre communication central tend to opportunities Here economic factors do begin to enter; consider the size and distribution of the academic market (there are, e.g., a great many more academic philosophers in North America than in the whole rest of the world), control of publishing outlets and journals (with few exceptions all Northern), etc. culture — we can way we shut off the Northern philosophical propaganda in much the shut off our television impressed being However economic power does not, and need not, determine by philosophical those to. sets if we really want middle-men And we can stop make who a living by importing the Northern stuff. So what do we do? We adapt to the cultural-philosophical level, several of those things, that have been suggested in the newer regionalism. some regional importers and doctrines and awakening and self-reliance. of, and local from the North. imitators positions local We do not remain commentators For We aim at on example, we and slavish peddlars don’t spend of, our academic lives trying to tease out what Davidson or Dummett or Kripke meant by this or that through. To in the be hope that sure, I am some pale Northern light will perhaps not suggesting that we emulate the filter appalling ignorance of people from the North who visit the Antipodes and know little or nothing about what has been done or is being done here;^^ so that we have Regrettably, the ignorance extends to many locals. In particular, those infected with Sydney materialism appear remarkably ill-informed as to basic features of other Australasian programs. �17 eminent their visitors, the through bags National Australian cultural with heavy University accroutrements, (now the main trekking centre for investigation of relevant logics) and Informing us that, or relying crucially on the assumption that, a contradiction entails every proposition. that advances is positions and inferiority cultural of another colonies; is know often Northerners these little is the the Antipodes intellectual and the nothing or distinctive prevailing assumption of the in life these (predominantly local) narrow about One reason former and southern limited reading undertaken by Northern luminaries. But, despite having been sufficient given cause, we shouldn’t cut ourselves off from Northern paradigms and influences (we could hardly manage We can reasonably use what we need from propoganda is different). to anyway: so we should stay informed of, but not imitators these continuing traditions: of, or part of, In any case, their enterprises. the people are largely European stock. in older Northern traditions, just as So far from nowhere, cutting these loose from (and older these likely regional cultures are rooted traditions minority) and starting afresh traditions, and the from local variations that have already appeared are what we want to develop and perhaps mutate, as again with wine styles. Part of the proposal Is then that things, encourage and develop our own Antipodean Northern paradigms, paradigms. rather It is we increasingly research programs, very great 71 our own local and so shape newer than working with pale northern reflections not as if we have to - what is very difficult - entirely original work, components. do build from nothing, to of do to try to create cultural For there are research programs already initiated, which have the advantage of See Culture, op.cit. being grounded in features of the larger culture."1 �18 Nor, the do we need fortunately, future is part to make the story up - though helping to shape of what the Australia - New Zealand proposal Much of about. is different and more difficult is a is All one really to bring out programs he has already indicated and provide some to do is elaboration and commentary. level, for proposition - already indicated in Grave’s survey of Australian philosophy. has the story, To pull the investigation down to a more concrete I shall sketch some more prominent cooperative programs - by no means the only programs - and remark on some relevant features of them. The longest running and best known program is, without much doubt, of Australian naturalism, and which aims see to natural the that world, and everything else, as suitably encompassed within the framework of the world of (physical) science. The program is generally traced as a major subprogram Sydney materialism, Adelaide which subsequently died out there. such famous components central state version of failures functionalism. its in a reduction and nowadays Faced plans, like it It in The latter program has included takes it all now Anderson’s program initiated as the mental-material contingent materialism, to in Armstrong’s work. empiricist metaphysics,-- and is now best exhibited contains back in, identity theme and more derivatively, physicalisms incorporates a with a conspicuous "scientifically" trimmed theory of universals, and an account of natural laws as relations of universals, both components of the developing Sydney realism. Parts of the naturalism program, especially materialism and central state reductionism and the unified science ideal, have had counterparts in the North, but the program has, for the most part, retained its distinctively Australian character 22 Anderson’s metaphysics was however far more opposed to reductions than what has succeeded it. For an account of Anderson’s philosophy, and a history and account op.cit. of Australian naturalism and materialism, see especially Grave, �19 - despite export efforts, it never caught on in New Zealand. smoothly, moreover, and philosophy can far as so earthy, into Australian culture. The program fits It is similarly down-to-earth, be, without ideas or the fancy effete idealism of European philosophy or the spirituality and suppressed puritanism much which with pragmatism). North of And commitments, and American it yet it though not does is simmers thinking basically shrink from metaphysical explicit empiricist, nowadays, (including is it not positivistic (rejecting a verification principle, in particular). It is a city based program, broadcast mainly from the University of Sydney to other metropolitan universities; but the program does extend outside the universities a bit (a tiny bit) to the larger metropolitan culture. North America, the broader Russell, so in Australasia, little professional philosophy impinges on community,’-^ Popper and would naturalism program Perth, and has outliers Apart notable be or Kuhn Australasia from As in quite used to even on being an the wider exceptional. achievement, stretch through one academic (To community, turn worth to Adelaide; this working it work by around for.) now reaches in The to in Canberra, as well as a core of opposition there. exceptions, the program has never had the same hold, or In Canada, for example, while most academics from other disciplines would know of, and perhaps a little about, Russell, far fewer would know of Wittgenstein (though he is becoming known to lit. crit. groups), and virtually none would know of Quine. (The sampling is subjective.) On the fairly recent ’triumph of professionalism’ in philosophy in USA, see Kuklick, op.cit., p.565ff. Iluklick brings out well some of the more disastrous features of professionalism, but does not sufficiently notice that the virtuous features resulting from some professionalisation can be synthesized with broader philosophical activity. �20 0 more than a rather precarious hold, f in Melbourne:^2 4 * nor, more surprisingly, has it had heavyweight criticism from there (or indeed much external criticism the old confrontation of major city philosophies having died from elsewhere), Melbourne out. is more philosophy stricken than Sydney; Melbourne by dominated a procession philosophy; Continental then, philosophy; religion philosophy, much more than Sydney, has Northern of earlier fashions: recently, more remarkable a and more historically oriented and Davidson Quine, turnabout, idealism ordinary Wittgenstein, been and language extensional reduction; now perhaps Lewis, Kripke and Dummett? The one program that reaches the beyond confines of the cities in Australia - which is after all a metropolitan dominated culture, the vast land always the other being - Australian environmentalism, is a rather diffuse program, which has connections with the Colleges of Advanced Education in the the communes on the North Coast. country towns and much distinguished environmental Europe by what positions specifically it are a having is not as feature of transformed what So far the program is as it is. the New World, most its of Serious the natural and deeper Old World, and environment and having little wild untouched country left, and little sensitivity accordingly to such as issues Europe that tend admit European to those of concern shallow built approaches superficiality environmentalism the wilderness. outside (and continues North and The main environmental human-transformed encourage to America. environment, situations). techno-fix dominate North much issues of American the New in issues And World environmentalism differs significantly however from Antipodean environmentalism, most obviously 2A rhe exceptions include Ellis’s distinctive program, which can be accounted part of the broader naturalist program, and at Monash the work of F. Jackson and, earlier, of H. Munro in value theory. �21 in the religious-spiritual component of the former, in but several other respects as well (see further Culture). positively, More environmentalism:- there Firstly, three are an is there strands extended Australian to utilitarianism, differing little in theory from Bentham’s enlarged position, which insists upon counting in the utilities of all sentient creatures. British base, has figured prominently in animal welfare and animal liberation though and movements: This position, developed from a it has on domestic animals, focussed animals used in research and hunted (wild) animals, it has also become entangled in issues of bio-research more generally such as genetic or much interested in, concerned with, engineering. endangered species, It is not however the disappearance of wild lands, the conversion of forests, etc., except insofar as these have a bearing on animal pain and pleasure. Wider and deeper environmental concerns appear only as a spinoff from animal welfare, and so deeper concerns get an inadequate deal. Secondly, there is a wider and a deeper ecological position, which is not utilitarian and which recognises irreducible value elsewhere than forests and differs ecosystems, especially wild and American from naturalism. which finds states, psychological sentience or 25 Thirdly, spiritualism there is and of intrinsic value natural systems. from course, an as in trees This position of American extension everywhere, almost and a reactionary component, critical of the other strands, which insists that all that needs to be accomplished on the environmental front can be achieved within older established (European) ethical and political frameworks. Whereas materialism is based in Sydney, environmentalism is centred in It has been described more fully elsewhere: see, in particular, Environmental Philosophy (ed. D. Mannison and others), RSSS, Australian National University, 1980. �22 Melbourne and Canberra, but also includes Brisbane and Perth. Also centred in Canberra, and reaching across the country, with good connections in Melbourne, but in few Sydney, materialism and from program other which program, and logic program perhaps includes extends their core value more to centres New respectively, the especially philosophy, in the with Logic a Whereas in metaphysics, theory essentially is of areas major which and program. program, but one metaphysics. The Australia than also been described in New Zealand philosophy is also a Zealand, has any other 26 elsewhere The programs have epistemology relevant/paraconsistent affecting relevant/paraconsistent environmental input further the is main grounded research program program. A program emanating located mainly in Wellington, The impact of the evident program on from the it might be called work of Prior and now the extended modal program. philosophy is perhaps best seen in Cresswell’s 27 work. “ Australian philosophy used for its not hard-headed empiricism; known for to be known, and still is in some quarters, regrettably New Zealand philosophy is mostly anything much, except perhaps, in UK, that Prior brought unusual adaption of Russellian philosophy from that remote place. his Neither of 26 Again, like all the Australian programs, both those mentioned and others, in Grave, op.cit. But see further, R. Routley, 'Research in Logic in Australia, New Zealand and Oceania', Research Papers in Logic #14, Australian National University, 1983 (which also considers other programs in logic); G. Priest and R. Routley, op. cit.; and R. Routley, R.K. Meyer and others, Relevant Logics and Their Rivals, Ridgeview, California, 1982. 27 See especially M.J. Cresswel.1, Logics and Languages, Methuen, London, 1973; but see also work by Goldblatt and by Hughes referred to in Research in Logic, op.cit. Also described there is an original version of the modal program (transparent intensional logic) elaborated by Tichy at Otago. �23 these impressions is particularly accurate; both are rather out-of-date. But the aim of work of the present type is, of course, not just to correct these impressions, not just to reflect or report on culture - for what one would like to reflect upon is not sufficiently there - but also to help manufacture elements of a culture, to make an image. To resist the already flourishing North, we should increase our efforts to further the programs, and perhaps other sunrise projects;*'^ to build teaching and research around the programs selected for promotion, elaboration, and criticism, to orient appointments, especially of involved local people, to Among sunrise projects in Australian philosophy so far suggested (not all of them feasible) are these: Australian feminism, Antipodean social and political alternatives, peace studies, indigenous regional philosophies (especially Aboriginal, Melanesian, and Polynesian). Another promising field, with practical consequences, for local initiative is the philosophy of education, where material produced by R.S. Peters has dominated the market, with stultifying effects it is now alleged. As foreshadowed with the notion of "sunrise projects", much of the rhetoric, and argument, concerning science and technology policy (presented in the case of Australia in Jones, op.cit.) can be taken over to apply to X policy, where X is some subject discipline, such as philosophy. �24 these programs. 79 Why bother? Why not simply buy our philosophy, like almost all our technology, off the shelf, from the North? There are several arguments for not doing this, in more than a limited fashion, which are now sketched. There Northern fine a is, firstly, products, the despite inferiority their attractive and built-in packaging. of most Without putting too point on it, many of the imported intellectual goods are shoddy, and only work for a very limited range of applications (e.g. the obsolence vicinity Antipodean of contradictions philosophy undoubtedly imported from the North. dilemmas). or derives from Much shoddy they’re hopeless in that is wrong intellectual with goods Yet buying this material is encouraged by hard-sell cultural ambassadors from the North, who are often enough paid to visit. This 29 In fact something like the last has been the policy of the LSE Philosophy Department, where the only outside appointment over a long period was that of Lakatos (hardly a person far removed ideologically). As observed, it now looks like the practice of the Otago Department also; and apparently it used to be a tendency at Melbourne. But in most places the practice is condemned as nepotistic or parochial, and overridden by the call for "new (Northern) blood . However there can be significant differences between nepotistic appointments and those strengthening local programs. It is at this stage, among others that administrative measures do matter; for example, to ensure that suitable locally-engaged locals gain employment rather than Northern stooges, to direct funds into on-going local programs rather than imported fashions, etc. There are various ways appropriate administrative details can be handled, locally or nationally; but nothing draconian, such as wholesale exclusion of noncitizens, is required. Observe, indeed, that no restriction of academic appointments to nationals (in Canadian style) or the like is being advocated. Anyone who arrives at a conclusion of that sort from what has been argued has misunderstood the case in crucial respects. As a matter of simple mathematics, restricting appointment fields characteristically reduces both quality of candidates available (however quality is assessed) and range of possibilities open for future research; and no such restrictions are advocated. The author has witnessed the debilitating effects of field restrictions at the Australian National University and elsewhere. 30t, c Some of centre also. , these arguments support change (perhaps revolutionary) at the �25 is part of Northern philosophical the colonialism the that - imperialism North - from the too Antipodes willing the successor suffers, or, to more remarkable, encourages! Secondly, there is the inappropriateness of much of the Northern product, especially considered as metaphysics, environmental for package, a to cover, well as as The European North has no satisfactory concerns. land or environmental ethic instance, fit for Antipodean circumstances, and the deeper American package is too spiritually-loaded for mainstream Australian culture. In political American work is much too individualistic the European product, especially the Marxist form, and competition-based, unsuited being theory, both too precious and too high-tech for local and is circumstances, especially again for more environmentally-perceptive people. features of telling also Thirdly, import world’s markets power structures against substitution and pressures and comparative advantage, regionalism; namely, and fashions, (including the Old Boy’s are appealing avoidance of the removal of overseas control and network in jobs, policies, etc.), and gaining of local control, employment of local people, etc. Fourthly, there arguments are philosophy as complexity, sheer diversity, part of intellectual stability, for cultural culture: 39 etc. “ diversity, arguments In fact, from applied to richness, the garden analogy 31 The point is elaborated in Culture. At a more practical level Northern products are again often unsuitable, though for different reasons. For example, the transfer of American agricultural methods and equipment to the thin poor soils of the Antipodes has had disastrous effects, at last beginning to be recognised. “See, for instance, A.A. Mazrui, A World Federation of Cultures: An African Perspective, Free Press, New York, 1976. �26 built into the whole notion of ’culture' transfers. dense, But not only seeds and plants but weeds and many productive garden. pests are We being introduced. and European and are control obtain not only good products, European pests cultivars, but selectiveness Naturally we want a rich, Indian maize and American weeds. as essential, against This is why haphazard previous procedures. The proposal with local is not for, nor would the case sustain, a narrow localism, products, whatever local their quality, heroes, replacing Northern ones. fashions, and local cult That is certainly not the preferred way of the newer regionalism, which tends to do without fashions and heroes and seeks durable quality in products, way of technology policy. which are difference, has to outlets, be not occupied impact, and so on; low environmental Rather, as with technology policy, we select niches satisfactorily or where filled, given etc.). our resource But granting regionalism, base (of we can make a Indeed the policy and use and develop local skills and methods. selective nor is the philosophers, publishing to what extent should components, for instance people, books and other teaching elements, theories and ideas, be imported and Locally? The to what extent should they be produced, trained, conceived possibility of selectiveness in different components means that many mixes are possible. particular mix. There is no need to insist, so far at least, on a The case for the present is mainly for a regional shift, for a significantly greater degree of local autonomy and production.^ But it will do no harm to indicate elements of a mix that finds much Does it sound familiar? Outside philosophy, it should. For example, we have now been told by the Americans that our defence role, unlike theirs, is regional, not global: this is supposed to shed great light on our previously confused defence policies. �27 the suggestion is that we try to eradicate much of Negatively, local favour. the Oxford style of teaching and doing philosophy. as removal Berkeley-Hume with (a however prevailing undue the of no standard on British focus); attention proper status Anglo-American empiricism British emphasis to quo. That includes such things of of heavy The particular, has mostly been a very conservative one. the movements main philosophy, but from emanating also the England, protective of the Northern status quo; they are, recommend and this. just reinforcement Oxford Locke- approach the of in influence, More generally, many of especially Moore-Wittgenstein on quasi-historical the sources; centred practice, ordinary have language been very they tend to leave things very much as the Positively, proposal is that we achieve further disassociation from the Anglo-American empiricist past in two ways: by framework, emphasizing and by local projects diversifying the that move range outside of constricting that philosophical traditions selectively drawn upon, to include not only neglected Continental strands and parts of Eastern thought, philosophy. The idea is but also that Pacific ethnic such a material and plurality of sources, Australasian especially in teaching, will assist in removing narrower cultural biasses, such as British parochialism, and enable more discrimination to be obtained. Then too we should be better able to see the ranges of theories that are open to us in the Antipodes and how to advance our own programs. 34 The point is laboured in E. Gellner, Words and Things, Victor Gollancz, London, 1959. But even ordinary language philosophy, though conservative, and though it much contracted the proper range of philosophical investigations, had its liberating elements, e.g. removal of some of the narrowness and more cramping assumptions induced by technical jargon. Nor has the social impact changed much with the subsequent decline, since 1959, of ordinary language philosophy, the increasing insolvency of Oxbridge philosophy, and its consequent limited take-over by right-wing Ivy League American philosophy. By contrast, the less economically influential growth of redbrick and applied philosophy in some of the British radical and polytechnic institutes has touched no more than the surface of Oxbridge practice. �28 There remain some things we should want to see whatever mixes are chosen One crucial issue is the removal of Northern in different Antipodean regions. bias from papers and publications, research seminars and lectures, letters of This Northern bias is a disposition to cite and discuss reference, and so on. the and works of irrespective discussion projects and of quality the ignore to authors, Northern of their contribution works the more the of irrespective of the quality of their contribution. accept opinions of worth, their been (thus Influential philosophers, under topic largely again It is etc. to uncritically and the disposition to though work produced locally either does not exist or has write or lecture as not importance, better, It is the disposition to to authors from prestigious Northern institutions, defer the to authors, local the famous are, ensuring anything, if that it inclined more is not). And Northern to Australasian bias than many overseas intellectuals, who are perhaps less concerned to be seen as belonging to the Northern mainstream. bias effects not The reduction, and eventual removal, of Northern practice the only of individual philosophers, but the policies of selection and review committees as well as of editors and referees of It journals. local reorientation, with innovations better, development - involves, among Antipodean philosophers things so they that can would cite be getting local assisted things, other work by intellectual to know local work and out regional or point greater local content in courses taught, more time spent at local institutions on study leave, and so on. APPENDIX 1. Background notes on the philosophy supply situation. Sociological investigation of the philosophy labour market in Australia and New Zealand has yet to be attempted. But a picture of some elements underlying the numerical argument of the text can be gained from the following table: simple �29 TABLE 1. Ph.Ds in Philosophy: a USA - Australasian comparison USA Number (Male/Female) Australia New Zealand 1974 413 (346/67) 6 0 1975 375 (318/57) 5 0 1976 382 (319/63) 8 0 1977 330 (264/66) 3 2 (1/1) 1978 283 (235/43) 5 5 (4/1) 1979 285 (204/54) 9 3 (2/1) 1980 246 (187/59) 4 N. A. 1981 N.A. 4 0 Notes: 1. The breakdown of the USA and New Zealand numbers by sexes (male/female) is given. Similar figures do not appear to be available for Australia. 2. The US figures are. for the academic year ending in the Year shown, e.g. 1978 covers the Northern academic year 1977-78. Southern figures are for the calendar year shown. Sources: Digest of Education Statistics, US National Center for Education Statistics; University Statistics, Australian Bureau of Census Statistics; New Zealand Education Statistics. Comments: 1. The contraction of US doctoral production and the concomitant rise in female representation, are clearly indicated. The Australian figures are likely too small to reflect such trends and responses to the academic market. 2. Some of the Australasian numbers include Americans; likewise the American figures provide no nationality breakdown. 3. There is no information available on the number of Australians proceeding to higher degrees in philosophy outside Australia. In applying table 1 some simplifying assumptions are made. assumed that candidates for appointment For example, it is to regular university positions now would have a doctorate or the equivalent (until recently a B.Phil was taken as a near well). equivalent It is of a assumed, North what American seems to Ph.D.; take publications the case, that serve as the number of could �30 Australasians proceeding to higher degrees in philosophy abroad is relatively small, and no more than the order of Ph.Ds. taken locally. It can be assumed, without upsetting applications of table 1, that Australasian graduates match, say, the upper half of American graduates in standard attained. There is no compiled information on academic vacancies in philosophy in Australia or New Zealand - on the numbers of vacancies, on how the positions It would however be a routine, are filled, by what nationalities, sexes, etc. if matter tedious some of assemble to data, this is of considerable which relevlance to the planning of philosophy programs. APPENDIX 2. On the earlier considering the Editor of the idea of a National of possibility initial German distinction a National AJPP distinguished two between Weltanschauung and Philosophy for Australia. Philosophy’, the (Australian) corresponding senses In Lebensanchauung’ to (p.292). 'the In the first, that of ’a scheme of the universe’, ’an Australian Philosophy is as as ridiculous confirmation prejud ices’. Holland, personal’ Science’. falsification, or Granted: fostered, etc ., in Christian a ’are The is argument of independent truth, that national and sympathies its or but that does not mean that a theory may not be held, in one region but not others, as intuitionism was for long in or way, Cartesianism ’a nation in France. like an In a second individual may ’more develop intimate a and certain temperamental attitude to the problems of existence, which we may ... call its philosophy of life. A nation’s philosophy, like its art and its literature, is a mode of expression for the national consciousness. form of evolving the national genius national culture. ....’ But, (pp.292-3). in the first It is, place, It is a specialised in short, this is part of the by no means entirely separate from the initial sense, a philosophy comprising not merely a fairly comprehensive theory but also an integrated set of attitudes (like an �31 operational paradigm). Furthermore, only by concession are such items as ’the national consciousness’ and 'the Australian landscape’ of meriting definite Australian descriptors. literature, has many strands to it, accounted single units philosophy, Australian like some not particularly distinctive (in any sense): such things form rather loose families. Editor The does not find, does not really hope to in find ’a modern industrialised community’ - with its modular parts interchangeable with those of others - a claims find to and courage a fair trite life, with a difference. build on (’traditions but nothing at all distinctive. philosophy of national moral dealing’), base to In fact ... of humour, So far, be a national philosophy, at least of life, but is not; there can he then, this does not however exclude there being various regional philosophies (such as local research programs). plunged that into ’if So far, inconsistency: then, the all is well. trouble derives But shortly from the the Editor is extravagant claim Australia has nothing to do with these - the eternal values of the Spirit, the Ideals of Truth, Goodness and Beauty - then and only then has she nothing to do with Philosophy’ (p.295; with rearrangement). But, as Australia has nothing per se to do with these - as is virtually conceded, these values involving a 'wider sweep’ do with Philosophy, Though the than any national boundaries - "she" has nothing to contradicting the contradiction is easily possibility of avoided by a National Philosophy. the extravagant rescinding claim, the ideal of a National Philosophy should be allowed to rest in peace: nationalism has had its time. �32 R. Routley35 Research School of Social Sciences Australian National University 35 With thanks to R. Elliot, W. Godfrey-Smith, S. Grave and L. Mirlin, to several members of the audience at the presentation of the paper at the 1983 Australasian Association of Philosophy Conference, University of Adelaide, to several referees for this Journal, and, not least, to the present Editor. �t •r ■ PROSPECTS FOR REGIONAL PHILOSOPHIES IN AUSTRALASIA Philosophy, especially academic philosophy but also folk philosophy, like other intellectual and higher cultural activity in Australasia, has long been dominated, indeed Europe, now the largely swamped, by Northern Given increasingly from North America. cultural and other baggage the imported, influences, initially the migration patterns, composition ethnic resulting ruling populations, such a result was virtually inevitable. does not have to stay that way. from of the But it Suitable policies, a good philosophy policy, could change things. thought The of a is hardly a new one. culture, In 1923, a matching perhaps philosophy, regional regional a New Zealand correspondent to the newly-launched Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy mentioned the possibility of ’a new kind or temper of philosophy under these southern skies’ which the such a reaching Journal might role (or, not community). for merely And that matter, professional although however hardly The Journal has foster.1 actively philosophers some things solid foundation for a new regionalism its pursued have changed pronounced aim wider a but in Australia, in philosophy, and temper of southern skies were intended distinctively 1AJPP, March same volume, Appendix 2. New Zealand 1923, p.74. p.292.ff; his philosophy under to include: but characteristics, The question was discussion is laying a that possibility of a New Zealan few distiri have of Australasian new temper of philosophy has hardly been realised. There is of a new kind fulfilled shown up le in the way ies, which the y features, ’ no in New Zealand taken up by the Editor in the considered below, especially in �2 7 philosophy’. New Zealand remains a substantial net importer of philosophy, The situation of colonial dominance that used to prevail in and philosophers. Australia, where virtually chairs, all and many philosophy, were filled by academics from the North, power and influence of professors in small departments, and covered considered and in tends to persist in New Zealand, where no established chairs are occupied by locals.2 3 topics posts academic other Given the usual in courses designed, especially appointments made, the heavy Northern orientation of philosophy taught and researched in New Zealand is not The Northern control is perhaps most strikingly exhibited at the surprising. oldest of New Zealand universities, the University of Otago, where the Philosophy Department has been substantially captured by a British School and increasingly looks event, the like an offshoot of overwhelming Anglo-American the University of London.4 dominance of New Zealand In any philosophy also a feature only in slightly lesser degree of Australian philosophy - can be confirmed by a content survey of the courses offered and research papers written at New Zealand universities. Even when local people have been appointed to positions in Australasia, they have been brought up on a solid diet of Anglo-American material, and they have often been reforged or finished in the North as well. * In particular, the 2 S.A. Grave, A History of Philosophy in Australia, Queensland University Press, 1983, p.l. Page references are to the manuscript. The paper draws heavily on this history. 3 This claim was correct at the 1983). With the recent loss of qualification, but the pattern of 4In the 1983 presentation of the paper (August Wellington, the claim may require mination persists. Commonwealth University Handbook listing, 6 of the 8 members of the Department held their main degree, Ph.D., from -the London/?and one of the remainder from. Exeter). Only one member of the Department, soon to retire, falls outside me nexus. �3 requirements of the Australasian universities in the major period of post­ World War II expansion were conveniently seen to in the case of philosophy by Many degree. B.Phil. the Oxford of departments philosophy remain full of products of this cultural mill: indeed until the mid 70s candidates finished in Oxford were hard to beat out when they applied for positions, such was the prestige of Oxford and (unwarranted) the regrettable, but still continuing, "cultural cringe". Nonetheless, in been occurring scene will (as despite the Northern the Antipodes, be especially on indicated). significant dominance, worth is It changes have the Australian philosophical asking whether Australian philosophy is moving towards the sort of change that occurred in USA more than 100 years ago when the Harvard Philosophy Department was brought (or bought) together, its "golden and age" began.American philosophy was never quite the same again, and became its own thing. There are now new forces operating which could help to move Australian philosophy in such a direction. the widespread emergence, particularly in alternative There is culture, of choice along a new £ which regionalism, other choices; local fashioning provides applies of a national model for and to in cultural stark science reflection and in and ideological contrast, technology regional there policies, philosophy directly bears on parts of the philosophy of science. soon appear, there are also some is serious obstacles the with centralised which not only policy but also Unfortunately, as will to regional philosophies and to the very idea of a regional philosophy. ^See B. Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy; Cambridge, Massachusetts 1860-1930, Yale University Press, 1977, Parts 2 and 3. On this bio-regionalism, see especially, Fourth World News, vol. 1, and K. Sale, Human Scale, Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, New York, 1980. 1983, �USA, long an importer of culture from Europe, has recently become a net components of philosophical following not culture, taken). suit, should evidently but Are reasons there achieve not also the gAmerican (witness philosophy has Oxford from output lower of such as higher culture if Australasia, balance of certainly culture, of exporter a better turn why cultural Yes, there are reasons. payments, especially in philosophy? of In the first place, the change in the cultural position of the USA went with, and perhaps in part derived economic of most dominance entails Australasia’s changes in economic power relations. from, vast there is cultural dominance, culture, there since is little prospect serious no prospect If for that Australasia will ever emulate or attain American economic eminence (at least not without nuclear destruction of the North, flow of commodities, cultural and other). universities not only increasingly of of contingent Americans, former group, Northern cultural they. As priorities, a they also component include whose research of Northern academics, substantial a and teaching additional is bent to It is unlikely that this influential segment, especially (become so will commitments, long entire Secondly, as observed, Antipodean large fellow-travellers, Northern concerns. the contain and disruption of the as apart Antipodeans they are in a bind locally acclimatised do from the not situation; isolated drastically as to) give up Nor person. alter their its should cultural for it can be persuasively argued that they would be better off, as far as quality and product goes, stocking their universities with American teaching components and researching American- oriented concerns. One simple numerical argument that Antipodean universities would be better off with Americans in the main, takes the following lines:- The (higher degree) graduates of Australasian culturally distinguished, and American are not significantly at least in subjects such as philosophy. Consider �now number the of quality Austroamerican graduates; academics produced of per number degree higher say there is 1 per every n graduates. The (great) preponderance of graduates will be Americans, just by virtue of their vastly greater population and their more extensive system of university education.7 So also then, just by ratio considerations, the great preponderance of quality academics from an drawn upper percentiles among they interested universities. Austroamerican base an Such would argument appointing be does not as will Clearly, Antipodeans, those quality products. quality, in will be American, work to more show Americans that, for to the were their similar reasons, American universities should be full of Chinese or Indian professors, for two Asians reasons; and first Americans, there are especially significant in cultural differences disciplines such as between philosophy; and secondly, their university systems do not deliver such great quotas of higher degree or high quality graduates, at least in philosophy. The conclusion of the numerical argument will not be a popular one. anti-Americanism felt the universities; The in portions of the Australasian community extends into and recently there has been increasing insistence, especially by the now aging younger Turks that university positions should be reserved for locals. This at the same time as these Turks often preach of an international community of scholars, presumably then with "free" interchange, As indicated in Appendix 1, whereassumptions made in the argument are . defended, the ratio of US philosophy graduates with doctorates as compared with Australian exceeds 30 to 1. And, as is weM-known, the extent of university education is much greater in USA than! in Australasia: indeed Australia is in this respect among the worst edlated of the developed nations, as OECD figures have made plain (see, e.g. Jb. Jones, Sleepers Wake^^ Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1982, Chapter I I J / > �6 etc. They cannot have it all ways.3 So long continues, the present centre will as the dominate they will have more economically; them if large to free-flow than us, and and culturally periphery the ideas of interchange personnel well as as should go by and jobs here (centrally-determined) quality in this high cultural it is business that we seek, as mostly claim. Now anyway, it is there that arguments. For enough widely is we are recognised, something not lower-down drastically wrong hierarchical with these ladders sorts of flooded with high-quality Northerners who would regularly drive out local contenders for positions, if we only preferred the Northerners when they were quite visibly superior: rather we are inundated by Americans with inflated references, who have the messages of the centre better than locals echelon do, (often and remote Northern fields tend Northern biassed) appointment to look greener to higher- committees than dusty locals As is beginning to be recognised too, whose shortcomings are known better. the Northern centres tend to retain their higher-quality products, and allow them to be exiled to the periphery only if they somehow fall foul of system (e.g. of the academic system for political or personal reasons). 8A reverse flow of the better or the Too //K odox academics from Australasia to A Leica should also be expected (outside mes of university contraction). Acci yrding _____d argument, which is based on labour] larket to assumptions of this brain considerations, appointment and lifestyle conditions for academics arej etter in USA than Australia and much better than those in economically—depressed New jhejr salaries, better standard of living, superio Zealand (e.g. high' research conditions, etc.) things being £equal, able academic from the Antipodes will rel;||jBate in USA as academic positions become avai ble. The argument also help^^xplain why Antipodean ui 'versifies cannot ex :, for the most part, to attract really top-drawer Nojrt Nortl srners for very long.'T' Of course, economically illy irrelevant irrele factors do in^Tu® interference; e.g. perverse t«gTua itsl to oddJball Antipodean intellectual enterprises which reduce commitment -ceLtabilit*^ or pre-industrial ties to place or persons or lifestyle market acc which imsmulaiS-y L_ _ restrict mobility (such as local roots, family attachments, even distaste for American urban lifestyles). �7 often Northern the centres have disposed of intellectually their inferior products in the periphery. All this makes the especially Americans, Northerners, appointing position look doubly bad. We ought, it seems, to be even if they are overrated their references, and usually not out of the top drawer, And yet quality. in in order to maximize doing so does not achieve the desired quality result, and breeds discontent elsewhere, especially among the aging Turks. Fortunately there obtain cultural sufficient subtitutable for us. we before from this awkward and that is the way of regionalism. shaky arguments; and way out is a elaborate distance,so that situation and these We do our own things; they are not simply Then the shaky numerical argument does fall down. the emerging proposal there are other But influential arguments to dispose of, and the disposal bears on the proposal. to begin with, There is, have so far been conceded: the argument for excellence, that excellence, which we all more or elements of which there is an objective commodity, quality or less agree about, which is proportionately more abundant in the North, and which is what academic institutions crave and seek and what appointments aim to capture, indeed maximize. That at least is the type of myth most of us have encountered; and many of us now know it is a myth, in fact appointments profit, but a that dangerous way, rather seek any myth. more Most that places don’t organisations aim even try just to to make maximize to satisfice on a mix of factors, of which assessed quality is only one, and not often the highest ranking one. Ability to fit ^This is easier in the cultural than the technological sphere. However it is also possible technologically: (stronger) theses of technological determinism, and so of cultural determinism, are false. We can choose different options, technologically, as well as culturally. �8 into some sort of program, teaching or research, is another, and commonly more important factor; is no good reason why such a program should not and there sometimes be a regionally oriented one. So given prevailing practices, the And, argument from excellence does not exclude regional philosophy programs. in any event, there are enough local candidates of sufficient worth to proceed with regional programs clearcut without of/ excellence. sacrifice Local Jl enterprise need entail no loss of excellence, and could increase it. A The deeper-cutting with idea the objection is that there is something seriously amiss objective of objective importance; criticism as bracketed out notions the that excellence, these with more values contextual—relativisation a rather generally, component paradigm, intellectual narrow the to framework or viewpoint to which these values relate.10 within connected the open are notions objective of and of sorts of same they that of notion have the valuing: While those operating as such Oxbridge ordinary language philosophy or Sydney materialism say, can bracket out the viewpoint, since it is incorporated in the operational paradigm, and so arrive at seemingly objective quality judgements, the judgements are not preserved (e.g. in truth Marxist value) when viewpoints. transposed Consider, to for other frameworks, comparison, the e.g. idealistic judgements as to or the quality or worth of a forest^made variously by a deep ecologist, an industrial forester, and a recreational officer. a holistically-inclined Marxist, and philosophers Californian who pretend Compare judgements as to the quality of philosopher, environmental environmental that such by philosophers. environmental work language, ordinary There cannot are be even judged, hat follows also> Begins to bring out what is omitted in a main theme of R.S.JPirsig, _______ Zen and __ , d/e Art Motor Cycle Maintenance, Bodley H^lad , London, __ of — ---— the notion of objective excellence doe , Note that defSwring not lead to ivism. To avoid the customary false dichotomy, compare e notion of validity (usually ceded to themselves these days by classical lo cians). cw �9 seemingly because it of the main philosophical by members is not done peer group at Harvard and like institutions. As this begins the of judgements to reveal, judgements importance work of of quality are not independent of done or problems tackled. importance of problems and issues is highly paradigm dependent. the But For example, problems suet/ as those of quantifying-in and of possible worlds and of de re thought^ ^ich assume immense importance for fashionable referential theories within the mainstream empiricist paradigm, vanish to relative insignificance outside that restricted viewpoint. that most Now observe judgements as to what are the important problems and what constitutes important work - matters helping determine quality - are shipped down from the North. Their importance is relative to their paradigmatic placement, and the paradigms concerned are exported to the Antipodes through the main channels already indicated. We are free to reject these paradigms and select alternatives, and there are, it can be argued, good reasons choose different that generally energy favoured just that, much as to do technology the in (or different the which North there are good reasons to military technology) North is eager to from export southwards. Similar which might argument, points apply against alternatively that be sophisticated mass-produced and cosmopolitan. The argument 'cosmopolitan subject’, called people -marketed the from is based cosmopolitan/international the Peter everywhere Holland; Stuyvesant smoke this argument international superior product cigarette-sophistication is on the assumption that philosophy is a that is is not the sort of enterprise for which place �10 and people are as significant they are for poetry or that philosophy important thing, is a finished product of a certain sort (a propositional theory), not a process of production also. process of production the place and people involved (e.g. material. And and literature, the if not since no philosophy, format, 12 than more work a like theorems just internationally-approved is product The novel. It takes for granted, assumption has only to be presented to be questioned. for one the and of art, But in the in discussion) are like a piece assembled arguments in of an then again the historical setting matters, literature, does not emerge in a vacuum. Plato’s philosophy could not have emerged in ancient Australia, and if cribbed & 13 in mid 20th century Oxford would surely have been marked down or rejected. It is important not to be sidetracked into issues - resembling problems in aesthetics - that do not need to be contested, such as whether and what extent sets of themes and arguments produced in one place and setting could have been produced in another. A nonnuclear technology of some sort could be adopted in Europe but apparently will not be, whereas there is reasonable prospect that New Zealand, strategy. ^Grave, in It is contrast with the doing, op.cit., p.2: Australia, will and not what could the term pursue a be done, ’cosmopolitan subject’ nonnuclear energy that matters here. used there comes from Donegan. As to the significance of place and people for literature, see further C. Partridge, The Making of New Cultures, Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam, 1982. xz,Like a paper in the biological sciences. But here again technique methodology, which may both be regional, are crucially important. 1 3 Related and points can be made using less extreme examples, e.g. concerning modern American work. Consider, for instance such texts as W.V. Quine’s Word and Object, (Wiley, New York, 1960) or R. Nozick*s Anarchy, State and Utopia (Basic Books, New York, 1974). The assumptions taken for granted, the arguments involved, etc., are especially American: it is not just the style. The acceptability of arguments and positions is dependent on place and received paradigm. �11 logic, Dialethic which invalidates Anglo-American philosophy, the could perhaps technique and methodology of in the North (though be done much there would be substantial cultural resistance): it is not being done there, and is not likely Antipodeans techniques, to be in choose can do done the their Anglo-American own their own distinctive sphere.^ distinctive thing. The To technology this extent, and logical international/cosmopolitan argument, stated in a form that would be telling, fails. Of course it can be argued, it is being argued, that Antipodeans don’t need to be, or even oughtn’t to be pursuing their own energy or logic policies and apparatus. But meeting these considerations takes us to a whole new set of issues concerning the merit of various policies and programs, the point of diversity, etc. - far beyond the cosmopolitan argument. The new arguments, to which we shall return, are not a lot more convincing however than comparable arguments concerning cooking: that we don’t devising our own cuisine or wine styles. need to be or oughtn’t to be British, or at least cosmopolitan, cooking is adequate: we should stick to that and buy it off the shelf from the North, ideally importing the cooks also. Do we that British philosophy is have good reasons to think than British cooking? Antipodeans are free^in principle^ then, to pursue their own paradigms; and to do so they will by and large want to, and mostly have to, appoint their own people, people they have educated - not saboteurs or people who have (had ) to be re-educated, from el where, in particular from the North. But will •^Much as co communities the extreme nist anarchism, a live possibility for communes and perhaps Australia, is culturally excluded in North America, owing to ndividualism of that culture. On dialethic logic, see G. Priest and R. Routley, On Paraconsistency, Research Papers in Logic, #13, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1983. �12 paradigms^, tie their intellectual of features the cultur local though works of with cultural In a loose way, philosophy wi not usually with paradigms, least, at distinctive they may link, tie in with the culture in the _______ ____ z sometimes distinct from_______________ more technical works) integral fashion that novels A> a. /sn-X'etL do.^ Grave considers certain cultural features, not restricted to particular programs, philosophical Australian product’ help that in philosophy Australia as ’ an - ’unimportant though this is compared with what matters But style, acceptability, truth, do matter, in philosophy' he hastens to add. and are mark not independent - or independent so far as their perception goes in the case of truth and correctness15 - from underlying broad theory or received paradigm. However the marks Grave cautiously advances, significant though they are, do not features serve to distinguish the philosophy Australian Australian exhibits in the product, lesser degree adventurous and polemical philosophy of Greek antiquity. by Passmore as 'most typical first two than the being more The first, described of Australian philosophy’, is a ’diversity of approach and readiness to put forward an unconventional or unfashionable point view',1^ of philosophy, something which more (with typical some of notable ancient philosophy exceptions) than exhibits uniformity reflecting that often attributed to the land itself. Australian an austere The second, 15Nothing need be conceded to trong cultural relativity themes, ough they would support the case L Iia L tour '/is enough that theories remain radically _ y bei incomplete and that there/^/^n accordingly b rival theories as what is is true. Similarly, however^ phy is j concaved ~as the sea or truth, seian/Mrore, really), or a explanation, uifierstanding^ these inquiry of a certain sort^Fthere can bez45^will be be, ^/competing accounts; so a pluralistic theory is inevitable in giving a fuller view. 1 Both preceding quotations, while included as such in Grave’s Introduction, are from J. Passmore, ’Philosophy', in The Pattern of Australian Culture (ed. A.L. McLeod), Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y., 1963, pp.131-168. The same annotation also applies to the third mark. �Ke surprising, more and ’the philosophy, Wittgensteinian mark most notable political extraordinary by discussed Andersonian itself’ (p.2). ... being This the example is line-up it was far from if Sydney, Australian between the not isolated: them concern the fervour generated by "Australian materialism", others among the .. example and Melbourne Andersonian philosophy of character’ Grave), engagement and by some philosophy departments confrontation growing the (both concerning the relevant/paraconsistent program, with the local (’adversarial’) style leading to criticism by sharp Americans. with Connected these firs two marks are . —■--------------- ------ furthe part. of much characteristics Australian Aiilosophy y(^ho for hat influenced by jSydney rather than originating in Melb the most namely directness, unwillingne to muffle points, surface clarity /occj/ unkindly add, untne , unsubtjety and crudity.> The third and t A fourth marks as Grave i effect notes, hardly distinguishing features of Australian philosophy. areas, is third, which applies well to other intellectual the contrast of the Australian reputation in philosophy indeed of Australia as national The a ’center of philosophical inquiry’, with the anti-intellectual stereotype achievement Australians than rather especially a of feature of as intellectual to a people subtlety’. Anglo-American philosophy; ’devoted The namely physical to fourth the mark is isolation of academic philosophy in Australasia from, and its general indifference or even hostility to, the sort of imported philosophy (e.g. that of Nietzsche and the existentialists) generating interest in literary and arts circles. The philosophy failure does of not marks such matter. sufficiently separated by its For to adequately one thing, separate the research projects. out Australian For another, Australian produce is regionalism should not be confused with nationalism, nor more regional positions such as Sydneyside materialism or Wellington modalism with national philosophies. �14 as in mojjt other things, Nationalism in philoso^iy, to not be encouragedand the new regionalism is an undesirable trait, is linked, in other cultural things, with the breakdown of nations and contraction of state power. * To get back * * to where we were: * * the emerging proposal is this, that we start - or better much increase - doing our own distinctive things, and that we team up to do In fact so. there are several suggestions that begin to emerge, concerning research and teaching, publications and appointments, study leave and sponsored visitors. These are not just that we do our own selection of topics and people, and style and methods, decide instead of having these foisted upon us - not just, our own priorities, that is, that we play our own games (whether invented here or taken over from the North) and not theirs, Rules and Rugby instead of Gridiron and Basketball - but that we abandon the individual competitive model of cultural achievement, sold to us and fostered by the North, in favour of a group cooperative approach (elements of which are already modelled in Antipodean social clubs). The thoughts here are simple and familiar. digging example: it is well-known that two people cooperating can dig a ditch more rapidly and enjoyably 17 See, e.g., London, 1957. On the one side is the ditch­ Sale, than two op.cit., people working on the ditch separately. and L. Kohr, The Breakdown of Nations, RKP, The Editor of the new 1923 AJPP did however take seriously the notion of National Philosophy, of (what must have surprised some New Zealand readers) an Australian Philosophy; some of the issues there raised (p.292ff) are addressed in Appendix 2. �15 Cooperative work tends to pay off - in philosophy or elsewhere - in terms of output, quality, and enjoyment in the doing. On the other side, experience shows that we in the periphery cannot individually complete very successfully with the centre on achievements in their programs. predominantly individualistic the in Despite the highly competitive One is the communication situation. for this. attainment nature of results of depends There are several reasons American academic enterprise,much upon verbal rapid and communication For, despite the individualism myth, work is access to unpublished material. jointly based, and builds on the work of manyji^hen the time is ripe for some idea or result, several clever people will be able to hit on it. communications are nationalistic important considerations in obtaining rapid (e.g. Poles tend publication of to promote Then again the Polish idea or results, Russians will cite a Russian who achieves a result at about the same time as an outsider). There face-to-face seminars fact of when limited read they is the fact that much is conveyed verbally and through so that and that reading, on local results will be conveyed. material from people at the the centre centre by There is the tend to concentrate central people, so that published items and results from the periphery will often not be noticed, and may well lose publication. receive, 18 merit out There to is central also for merit, competitors the more fact that publication even if people they at the achieve centre and communication central tend to opportunities Reflecting other features of the culture and enterprise of the centre which are not so deeply embedded in Australasia: see further R. Routley, ’Culture, philosophy, and approaches to the natural environment - an Australian perspective’, in The Environment, Ethics and Ecology (Ed. D. Bennett), The Faculties, Australian National University, 1984, and also ’Culture and the roots of political divergence: the Australian/American contrast’, typescript, Canberra, 1983; both referred to subsequently as ’Culture’ . �16 than people towards the periphery. the size and Here economic factors do begin to enter;, distribution of the academic market e.g., a great (there are, many more academic phzilosophe s in North America than in the whole rest of the world), control of outlets and journalj^ (with few exceptions all Northern)^etc. economic power does and not, not, need determine culture - we can shut off the Northern philosophical propaganda in much the way we shut off our television sets if we really want to. stop being impressed by And we can those philosophical middle-men who make a living by importing the Northern stuff. So what do we do? We adapt to the cultural-philosophical level, several h of those things, that have been suggested in the regionalism. We aim at some A regional importers awakening and doctrines and and local imitators positions of, from self-reliance. and local the North. We do commentators For on example , we slavish remain not and peddlars don’t spend of, our academic lives trying to tease out what Davidson or Dummett or Kripke meant by this or that through. To in the hope that be sure, I am some pale Northern light will perhaps not suggesting that emulate the filter appalling �17 But, des xLte having been given sufficient cause, we shouldn’t cut ourselves off 'from Northern paradigms and influences (we could hardly manage A anyway). to We A traditions: use what we need these from continuing o we should stay informed of, but not imitators of, or part of, In enterprises. their reasonably can just as Northern traditions, from cutting from loose case, any regional are rooted in the people are largely European stock. these traditions and (and likely minority) traditions, these older cultures older So far starting afresh from nowhere, and the local variations that have already appeared are what we want to develop and perhaps mutate, as again with wine styles. of Part the proposal then is that encourage and develop our own things, Antipodean paradigms, Northern paradigms. rather It we research programs, very great Nor, the locaY and so shape nefer is not as if we have to build from nothing, to do to try to create cultural For there are research programs already initiated, which have the advantage of fortunately, future our own than working with pale northern reflections of - what is very difficult - entirely original work, components. do increasingly is being grounded in features of the larger culture. do we need to make the story up - though helping to shape part of what the Australia - New Zealand proposal is about. Much of is a different and more difficult already indicated in Grave’s survey of Australian philosophy. the story, for proposition - is All one really has to do is to bring out programs he has already indicated and provide some elaboration and commentary. level, I shall To pull the investigation down to a more concrete fooyxizci/li/esketch some more prominent programs - by no means the only A programs - and remark on some relevant features of them. 19 See Culture, op.cit. �18 The longest running and best known program is, without much doubt, of Australian naturalism, and which aims see to the that world, natural and everything else, as suitably encompassed within the framework of the world of science. (physical) The as generally is subprogram Sydney materialism, a major Adelaide which subsequently died out there. such famous components central state version of failures in to Anderson’s functionalism and nowadays like Faced reduction in The latter program has included takes all now it plans, it It program initiated a identity theme as the mental-material contingent materialism, its back traced and is now best exhibited in Armstrong’s work. empiricist metaphysics, contains program and more derivatively, in, with physicalisms incorporates a conspicuous "scientifically" a trimmed theory of universals, and an account/of natural laws as relations of universals, both components of the develop®®^ Sydney reali naturalism program, sm. Parts of the especially materialism and central state reductionism and the unified science ideal, have had counterparts in the North, but the program l^s, for the most part, retained its distinctively Austr^/ian character /(“despite export efforts, it never caught on in New Zealand^7 The program fits smoothly, moreover, and earthy, so into Australian culture. far as It is similarly down-to-earth, philosophy can be, without the fancy ideas or effete idealism of European philosophy or the spirituality and suppressed puritanism with which pragmatism). commitments, much of And and North yet though it it American does thinking not shrink (including simmers from is basically empiricist, explicit it is not nowadays, metaphysical positivistic (rejecting a verification principle, in particular). 20 Anderson’s metaphysics was however far more opposed to reductions than what has succeeded it. For an account of Anderson’s philosophy, and a history and account op.cit. of Australian naturalism and materialism, see especially Grave, �19 It is a city program, based broadcast from mainly the University of Sydney to other metropolitan universities; but the program does extend outside the universities a bit (a tiny bit) to the larger metropolitan culture. North America, the broader Russell, so in Australasia, little professional philosophy impinges on community, Popper and 21 naturalism program Perth, and has outliers from notable used even on being quite would be or Kuhn Australasia Apart As in to an the wider academic community, exceptional. achievement, stretch through one (To turn worth to Adelaide; in around this working work by for.) The it now reaches to in Canberra, as well as a core of opposition there. exceptions, the program has never had the more than a rather precarious hold, same hold, or nor, more surprisingly, in Melbourne: has it had heavyweight criticism from there (or indeed much external criticism from elsewhere), out. the old confrontation of major city philosophies having died Melbourne philosophy is more historically oriented stricken than Sydney; Melbourne dominated Continental philosophy; by a procession philosophy; then, a of more remarkable and more religion philosophy, much more than Sydney, has Northern recently, turnabout, fashions: earlier Wittgenstein, Quine, idealism ordinary Davidson and been and language extensional reduction; now perhaps Lewis, Kripke and Dummett? 21 In Canada, for example, while most academics from other disciplines would know of, and perhaps a little about, Russell, far fewer would know of Wittgenstein (though he is becoming known to lit. crit. groups), and virtually none would know of Quine. (The sampling is subjective.) On the fairly recent ’triumph of professionalism’ in philosophy in USA, see Kuklick, op.cit., p.565ff. Kuklick brings out well some of the more disastrous features of professionalism, but does not sufficiently notice that the virtuous features resulting from some professionalisation can be synthesized with broader philosophical activity. 22 The exceptions Include Ellis’s distinctive program, which can be accounted part of the broader naturalist program, and at Monash the work of F. Jackson and, earlier, of H. Munro in value theory. �20 one The reaches that program beyond the of confines the cities in Australia - which is after all a metropolitan dominated culture, the vast land always the other being Australian environmentalism, is - a rather diffuse program, which has connections with the Colleges of Advanced Education in the country towns and the communes on the North Coast. So far the program is as much distinguished is. environmental Europe by what positions specifically feature of are a having not as is it it what the New World, most of transformed Serious deeper and the Old World, its natural environment and and having little wild untouched country left, and little sensitivity accordingly to such as issues Europe that tend admit those of to concern shallow outside environmentalism the built approaches superficiality European The main wilderness. continues North issues human-transformed environment, and (and environmental encourage techno-fix dominate to America. North issues situations). of much the New in And World environmentalism American differs significantly however from Antipodean environmentalism, most obviously in the religious-spiritual of component the former, but in several other respects as well (see further Culture). positively, More environmentalism:- Firstly, there there three are an is strands to extended utilitarianism, Australian/ differing little in theory from Bentham’s enlarged position, which insists upon counting) the utilities British base, movements: of all sentient creatures. This position, developed from a has figured prominently in animal welfare and animal liberation and though it has focussed on domestic animals, animals used in research and hunted (wild) animals, it has also become entangled in issues of bio-research more generally such as genetic engineering. concerned with, or much interested in, endangered species, It is not however the disappearance of wild lands, the conversion of forests, etc., except insofar as these have a bearing on animal pain and pleasure. Wider and deeper environmental concerns �21 appear only as a spinoff from animal welfare, inadequate deal. Secondly, there is a wider and a deeper ecological position, and so deeper concerns get an which is not utilitarian and which recognises irreducible value elsewhere than sentience or forests and differs natural systems. ecosystems, especially wild and from spiritualism American Thirdly, naturalism. there intrinsic value which finds psychological states, and of is from an course, extension almost as in trees and This position of American everywhere, a reactionary component, critical of the other strands, which insists that all that be to needs on accomplished the environmental can be front achieved within older established (European) ethical and political frameworks. Whereas materialism is based in Sydney, environmentalism is centred in Melbourne and Canberra, but also includes Brisbane and Perth. Also centred in Canberra, and reaching across the country, with good connections in Melbourne, but few in Sydney, materialism and further environmental input from relevant/paraconsistent affecting program program other hich the is major perhaps relevant/paraconsistent programs have and epistemology program areas of includes and which extends is their core value philosophy, centres a the with respectively, the logic especially in Whereas in metaphysics, theory essentially more program. program, but metaphysics Australia than any one The other to New Zealand, has also been described elsewhere. 23 It has been described more fully elsewhere: see, in particular, Environmental Philosophy (ed. D. Mannison and others), RSSS, Australian National University, 1980. o/ Again, like all the Australian programs, both those mentioned and others, in Grave, op.cit. But see further/ R. Routley, ’Research in Logic in Australia, New Zealand and Oceania’, Research Papers in Logic #14, Australian National University, 1983 (which alto considers other programs in logic); G. Priest and R. Routley, op. cit.^and R. Routley, R.K. Meyer and others, Relevant Logics and Their Rivals, Ridgeview, California, 1982. �22 The main research grounded logic program program. of the in New Zealand philosophy is also A program emanating located mainly in Wellington, The impact evident from the work of Prior and a now it might be called the extended modal program. program on philosophy is perhaps best seen in Cresswell's work.2 Australian philosophy used to be known, for its is in some quarters, regrettably New Zealand philosophy is mostly hard-headed empiricism; not known and still for anything much, except perhaps, in UK, that Prior brought unusual adaption of Russellian philosophy from that remote place. his Neither of these impressions is particularly accurate; both are rather out-of-date. But the alm of work of the present type is, of course, not just to correct these impressions, not just to reflect or report on culture - for what one would like to reflect upon is not sufficiently there - but also to help manufacture elements of a culture, to make an image. To resist the already flourishing North, we should increase our efforts to further the programs, and perhaps other sunrige projects;26 to build* 7 ,^fjee especially M.J. Cresswell, _&ics and ^.anguages, Methuen, London, 1973; but see also work by Goldblatt, rra by Hugtrfs--referred to in Research in Logic, op.cit. Also described i h ifi anvoriginal version of the modal program (transparent intensional logic) elaborated by Tichy at Otago. 7A °Among sunrise projects in Australian philosophy so far suggested (not all of them feasible) are these: Australian feminism, Antipodean social and political alternatives, peace studies, indigenous regional philosophies (especially Aboriginal, Melanesian, and Polynesian). Another promising field, with practical consequences, for local initiative is the philosophy of education, where material produced yby R.S. Peters has dominated the market, with stultifying effects it is now Alleged. y As foreshadowed with the notion, "sunrise projects", much of the rhetoric, and argument, concerning science and technology policy (presented in the case of Australia in Jones, op.cit.) can be taken over to apply to X policy, where X is some subject discipline, such as philosophy. A �23 teaching and research around the programs selected for promotion, elaboration, and criticism, to orient appointments, especially of involved local people, to Why not simply buy our philosophy, like almost Why bother? these programs. all our technology, off the shelf, from the North? There are several arguments for not doing this, in more than a limited fashion, which are now sketched/. ° is, There firstly, the inferiority and built-in obsolence of Northern A products, despite their attractive packaging. Without putting too fine a point on it, many of the imported intellectual goods are shoddy, and only work for a very limited range of applications vicinity of contradictions or dilemmas). philosophy undoubtedly derives from (e.g. they’re hopeless in the Much that is wrong with Antipodean shoddy intellectual goods imported from 27 In fact something like the last has been the polictf of the LSE Philosophy Department, where the only outside appointment over a Aong period was that of Lakatos (hardly a person far removed ideologically)/. As observed, it now looks like the practice of the Otago Department also; and apparently it used to be a tendency at Melbourne. But in most places the practice is condemned as nepotistic or parochial, and overridden by the call for "new (Northern) blood'. However there can be significant differences between nepotistic appointments and those strengthening local programs. It is at this for example, to rather than Northern stc/oges, rather than imported fashions, administrative details draconian, do matter; employment n-going local programs ious ways appropriate Observe^ that no Canadian style) or the like is being advocated. conclusion of that sort from what has been argued has misunderstood the in crucial respects. As a t matter of simple mathematics, appointment fields characteristically reduces both quality of available (however quality i assessed) range of possibilities open future research; d no s h restrictioi/s are advocated. The author witnessed the se times disastrous eff s of field restrictions at Australian National University. — Some of centre also. 2g ___ these arguments support change (perhaps revolutionary) at the �24 the North. Yet buying this material is by hard-sell encouraged ambassadors from the North, who are often enough paid to visit. of the philosophical imperialism from the North that colonialism - the Antipodes too willing cultural This is part the successor to Northern suffers, or, remarkable, more encourages! Secondly, there is the inappropriateness of much of the Northern product, especially considered as metaphysics, environmental a for package, concerns. instance, to cover, as well as The European North has no satisfactory land or environmental ethic fit for Antipodean circumstances, and the deeper American package is too spiritually-loaded for mainstream Australian culture. 29 In political competition-based, unsuited being theory, American work is too much individualistic the European product, especially the Marxist form, and both too precious and too high-tech for local and is circumstances, especially again for more environmentally-perceptive people. Thirdly, features of telling also Import against substitution and comparative advantage, regionalism; namely, world’s markets and pressures and fashions, are appealing avoidance of the removal of overseas control anra power structures (including the Old Boy’s network in jobs, policies, etc.) and gaining of local control, employment of local people, etc. Fourthly, philosophy as there part are of arguments intellectual for cultural culture: diversity, arguments from applied to richness, . . / The point is elaborated in Culture. At a more practical level Northern products are again often unsuitable, though for different reasons. For example, the transfer of American agricultural methods and equipment to /the thin poor soils of the Antipodes has had disastrous effects, at ttfast beginning to be recognised. v—* 29 �25 complexity, sheer diversity, stability, etc. 30 In fact, built into the whole notion of ’culture’ transfers. dense, productive garden. We obtain not only good products, and European cultivars, but European pests and Naturally we want a rich, But not only seeds and plants but weeds and many pests are being introduced. selectiveness the garden analogy control are essential, and American weeds. as against Indian maize This is why previous haphazard / / procedures. The proposal is not for, nor would the case sustain as with technology policy, satisfactorily filled, local we select niches which a narrow localism are where we can make a difference, and skills and methods. Indeed the policy has to be not occupied or use and develop selective given our 30 See, for instance, A.A. Mazrui, A World Federation of Cultures: An African Perspective, Free Press, New York, 1976. 31 Does it sound familiar? Outside philosophy, it should. For example, we have now been told by the Americans that our defence role, unlike theirs, is regional, not global: this is supposed to shed great light on our previously confused defence policies. �26 That includes such things as Oxford style of teaching and doing philosophy. removal of the undue emphasis on British empiricism centred on Locke-BerkeleyHume (a standard British focus); of the quasi-historical approach with however no proper attention to quo. American status sources; reinforcement/of The heavy Oxford influence^ very conservative been a of emanating from England, the prevailing in particular, has mostly More generally; many of one. Anglo- the main movements especially ordinary language philosophy, but also the Moore-Wittgenstein practice, have been very protective of the Northern status quo; they tend to leave things very much as they are, and recommend just this. 32 Positively, the proposal is that we achieve further disassociation from the Anglo-American empiricist past in two ways: by emphasizing local projects that move outside that constricting framework, and by diversifying the range philosophical of traditions selectively drawn upon, include to not only neglected Continental strands and parts of Eastern thought, but also Pacific ethnic material and Australasian philosophy. The idea is that such a plurality of sources, especially in teaching, will assist in removing narrower cultural biasses, such as British parochialism, and enable more discrimination to be obtained. theories that Then too are open we to us should in be better the Antipodes able and to how see the ranges of to advance our own programs. 32 The point is laboured in E. Gellner, Words and Things, Victor Gollancz, London, 1959. But even ordinary language philosophy, though conservative, and though it much contracted the proper range of philosophical investigations, had its liberating elements, e.g. removal of some of the narrowness and more cramping assumptions induced by technical jargon. Nor has the social impact changed much with the subsequent decline, since 1959, of ordinary language philosophy, the increasing insolvency of Oxbridge philosophy, and its consequent limited take-over by righ^:-wing Ivy League American philosophy. By contrast, the less economically ^g/ljiential growth of radical and applied philosophy in some of the British r-aH icad, and polytechnic institutes has touched no more than the surface of Oxbridge practice. ��27 There remain some things we should want to see whatever mixes are chosen One crucial issue is the removal of Northern in different Ai^ipodean regions. bias from pap/rs and publications, research seminars and lectures, letters of referencez\o/ so on. the works and irrespective discussion This Northern bias is a disposition to cite and discuss of projects of and quality the of the ignore to authors, Northern their works the more contributyon of famous to the local/ authors, irrespective of the quality of their contribution. better, the topic again under largely It is the disposition to write or lecture as though work produced locally either does not exist or has not been influential philosophers, are, ensuring (thus if anything, that more it inclined is to not). Northern And Australasian bias than many overseas intellectuals, who are perhaps less concerned to be seen as belonging to the Northern The reduction, and eventual removal, of Northern tream. bias effects of fe/ec/'/ Inly -the policies and practice / * W cours * 2S philosophers, individual eferees of local journals. but the It involves, among other work\nd innovations better, so they can tg to point of i/Quc. that would be assisted by greater local out A taught, more time spent at local institutions on study oq/ leave, and so for-th. xS? c* /I x APPENDIX 1. Background notes on the philosophy supply situation. Sociological investigation of the philosophy labour market in Australia and New Zealand has o yet to be attempted. But a picture of some elements underlying the numerical argument of the text can be gained from the following table: simple �28 TABLE 1. Ph.Ds in Philosophy: a USA - Australasian comparison USA Number (Male/Female) New Zealand Australia 1974 413 (346/67) 6 0 1975 375 (318/57) 5 0 1976 382 (319/63) 8 0 1977 330 (264/66) 3 2 (1/1) 1978 283 (235^/48) 5 5 (4/1) 1979 285 (20-754) 9 3 (2/1) 4 N.A. 4 0 1980 N.A. 1981 1. The breakdown of the USA and New Zealand numbers by sexes (male/female) is given.- , Similar figures do not appear to be available for Australia, 2. The US figures are for the academic year ending in the Year shown, e.g. 1978 covers the Northern academic yeai 1977-78. Southern figures are for the calendar year shown Digest of Education Statistfcs, US National Center for Education Statistics; University STA1 STICS, Australian Bureau of Census Statistics; New Zealand Education Statistics. Sources: -41/ Comments: 1. The contraction of US doctoral female 0^. r representation, production and are cooarHn-itant Australian likely too small to reflect 2. the rise figures in are to the academic market. Some of the Australasian raaembers include Americans; likewise the American figures provide no nationality breakdown. 3 % There is no information available on the number’ proceeding to higher degrees in philosophy outside Australia. of Australians �29 For example, it is In applying table 1 some simplifying assumptions are made. assumed to regular university positions now for appointment that candidates would have a doctorate or the equivalent (until recently a B.Phil was taken as a near of equivalent well). It is a assumed, Ph.D.; North American seems what to take publications the case, serve as the number of could that Australasians proceeding to higher degrees in philosophy abroad is relatively small, and no more than the order of Ph.Ds. taken locally. It can be assumed, without upsetting applications of table 1, that Australasian graduates match, say, the upper half of American graduates in standard attained. There is no compiled information /n academic vacancies in philosophy in / of Australia or New Zealand -Mln the numbers, on how the positions are filled, by A what nationalities, sexes, etc. It would however be a routine, if tedious matter to assemble some of this data, which is of considerable relevlance to the planning of philosophy programs. On the earlier idea of a National Philosophy for Australia. APPENDIX 2. ’the considering Editor of the possibility initial of National a AJPP distinguished two German distinction between Weltanschauung and Philosophy*, senses the In (Australian) corresponding Lebensanchauung’ to ’the (p.292). In the first, that of ’a scheme of the universe’, ’an Australian Philosophy is as ridiculous as confirmation prejudices’. a Christian or Holland, personal’ falsification, ’are The argument independent is of that truth, national and sympathies its or Granted: but that does not mean that a theory may not be held, fostered, etc., in Science’. or way, in one region but not others, as intuitionism was for long in Cartesianism ’a nation in France. like an In a individual second may ’more develop intimate a and certain temperamental attitude to the problems of existence, which we may ... call its philosophy of life. A nation’s philosophy, like its art and its literature, �30 is a mode of expression for the national consciousness. form of (pp.292-3). the national genius evolving culture. national in But, the It is, first place, It is a specialised in short, part of the this is by no means entirely separate from the initial sense, a philosophy comprising not merely a fairly comprehensive theory but also an integrated set of attitudes (like an operational paradigm). Furthermore, only by concession are such items as ’the national consciousness’ and ’the Australian landscape’ of meriting definite Australian descriptors. literature, has many strands to it, accounted single units like philosophy, Australian some not particularly distinctive (in any sense): such things form rather loose families. The Editor does not find, does not really hope to in find ’a modern industrialised community’ - with its modular parts interchangeable with those of others - a claims courage to find and national a philosophy of trite moral fair dealing'), base life, to build In fact with a difference. on (’traditions but nothing at all distinctive. he ... of humour, So far, there can be a national philosophy, at least of life, but is not; then, this does not however exclude there being various regional philosophies (such as local research programs). plunged that into So then, far, Inconsistency: the all is well. trouble derives But shortly the Editor is from the extravagant claim ’if Australia has nothing to do with these - the eternal values of the Spirit, the Ideals of Truth, Goodness and Beauty - then and only then has she nothing to do with Philosophy' (p.295; with rearrangement). But, as Australia has nothing per se to do with these - as is virtually conceded, these values involving a 'wider sweep' do with Philosophy, Though the than any national boundaries - "she" has nothing to contradicting the contradiction is easily possibility of a National Philosophy. avoided by rescinding claim, the ideal of a National Philosophy should be allowed nationalism has had its time. the extravagant to rest in peace: �31 R. Routley 33 Research School of Social Sciences Australian National University 3^with thanks to R. Elliot, W. Godfrey-Smith, S. Grave and L. ? irlin, to several members of the audience at the presentation of the paper a: the 1983 to Australasian Association of Philosophy Conference, University of\Adelaide, ’ several referees for this Journal, and, not least, to the present ijai tor. � 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 PROSPECTS FOR REGIONAL PHILOSOPHIES IN AUSTRALASIA Philosophy, especially academic philosophy but also folk philosophy, like other intellectual and higher cultural activity In Australasia, has long been indeed dominated, Europe, the largely swamped, by Northern now increasingly from North America. cultural and other resulting controlling such populations, But it does not have to stay that way. a initially the migration Given the ethnic result was imported, baggage influences, patterns, of composition virtually from the inevitable. Suitable policies, a good philosophy policy, could change things. The culture, thought is of regional a philosophy, In 1923, a New Zealand hardly a new one. regional a matching perhaps correspondent to the newly-launched Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy mentioned the possibility of ’a new kind or temper of philosophy under these southern skies’ which the Journal might such a reaching role not community). (or, for merely And foster.The Journal that matter, professional although some actively has pursued philosophers things however hardly fulfilled but have changed solid foundation for a new regionalism in philosophy, its a pronounced wider Australasian in Australia, that of alm laying a possibility of a new temper of philosophy has hardly been realised. There is little in the way of a new kind and which the southern skies were intended to include: but few distinguishing features, ’no distinctively New temper of Zealand XAJPP, March 1923, p.74. same volume, p.292ff; his Appendix 1. philosophy under New Zealand characteristics, have shown up skies, in New Zealand The question was taken up by the Editor in the discussion is considered below, especially in philosophy’. 2 The situation of colonial dominance that used to prevail in and philosophers. Australia, importer of philosophy, New Zealand remains a substantial net where virtually all chairs, and many philosophy, were filled by academics from the North, other academic and considered and Given the usual in courses designed, power and influence of professors in small departments, covered in tends to persist in New Zealand, where no established chairs are occupied by locals/ topics posts especially appointments made, the heavy Northern orientation of philosophy taught and researched in New Zealand is not surprising. oldest of The Northern control is perhaps most strikingly exhibited at the New Zealand universities, the University of Otago, where the Philosophy Department has been substantially captured by a British School and increasingly looks event, like an offshoot of the University of London/ In any the overwhelming Anglo-American dominance of New Zealand philosophy - also a feature only in slightly lesser degree of Australian philosophy - can be confirmed by a content survey of the courses offered and research papers written at New Zealand universities. Even when local people have been appointed to positions in Australasia, 2 , S.A. Grave, A_ History of Philosophy in Australia, Queensland University Press, 1984, p.l. Page references are to the manuscript. The paper draws heavily on this history. 3 This claim was correct at the time of presentation of the paper (August 198':!). With the recent loss of a chair at Wellington, the claim requires qualification, but the pattern of domination persists. In the 1983 Commonwealth University Handbook listing, 6 of the 8 members of the Department held their main degree, Ph.D., from London, and one of the remainder from Exeter. Only one member of the Department, soon to retire, falls outside the nexus. 3 they have been brought up on a solid diet of Anglo-American material, and they have often been reforged or finished in the North as well. of requirements post-World War philosophy by remain full the II in were conveniently seen Oxford B.Phil. of products finished candidates universities expansion the of Australasian this Many degree. mill: cultural in Oxford were hard to beat In particular, the the in to departments the of case of philosophy the mid 70s when they applied for until indeed out of period major positions, such was the (unwarranted) prestige of Oxford and the regrettable, but still continuing, "cultural cringe". despite Nonetheless, been occurring scene in dominance, Northern the Antipodes, be will (as the indicated). especially on is It worth significant the Australian asking changes have philosophical whether Australian philosophy is moving towards the sort of change that occurred in USA more than 100 year; ago when the Harvard Philosophy Department was brought (or bought) together, and its go'den age' began. ’ American philosophy was never quite the same again, and became its own thing. There are now new forces operating which could help to move Australian philosophy in such a direction. the widespread regionalism, other 6 ^See B. which applies choices; local fashioning emergence, of national and particularly to in science cultural stark and in and culture, alternative ideological contrast, technology there There is of a choice along is policies, the new with centralised which not only Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy; Cambridge, Massachusetts 1860-1930, Yale University Press, 1977, Parts 2 and 3. 6 On this bio-regionalism, see especially, Fourth World News, vol. 1, and K. Sale, Human Scale, Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, New York, 1980. 1983, provides model a for reflection regional in directly bears on parts of the philosophy of science. soon appear, there are also some also Unfortunately, as will to regional serious obstacles but policy philosophy philosophies and to the very idea of a regional philosophy. USA, long an importer of culture from Europe, has recently become a net culture, of exporter components of higher philosophical not from lower of Oxford following has suit, but culture, evidently taken). should Are not balance of payments, especially in philosophy? Yes, reasons there achieve also of the American turn philosophy (witness such as culture output if Australasia, certainly a better there are why cultural reasons. In the first place, the change in the cultural position of the USA went with, and relations. If little prospect for perhaps in part derived from, vast changes in economic power economic of most dominance entails Australasia’s cultural dominance, since culture, there there is is no serious that prospect Australasia will ever emulate or attain American economic eminence (at least nuclear destruction of not without flow of commodities, not only increasingly of Americans, of former group, Northern cultural they. As priorities, contain they long component also whose and disruption of the entire­ Secondly, as observed, Antipodean large a fellow-travellers, include research Northern academics, substantial additional of a teaching and is bent to It is unlikely that this Influential segment, especially Northern concerns. the North, cultural and other). universities contingent the will (become commitments, as so apart Antipodeans they are in a bind locally acclimatised as do from the not situation; isolated drastically to) person. alter give up Nor their its should cultural for it can be persuasively argued that they would be better off, as far as quality and product goes, stocking / / A 5 o’ ( universities their with American teaching components and researching American-oriented concerns. One simple numerical argument that Antipodean universities would be better off with Americans in the main, takes the following lines:- The (higher graduates degree) of Australasian and American are significantly not culturally distinguished, at least in subjects such as philosophy. now the quality academics number of Austroamerican graduates; produced per of number higher say there is 1 per every n graduates. preponderance of graduates will be Americans, Consider degree The (great) just by virtue of their vastly greater population and their more extensive system of university education. So also then, just by ratio considerations, the great preponderance of quality academics from an drawn upper percentiles they interested universities. Austroamerican base among those in Such quality, an Clearly, quality products. would argument be does be American, will appointing not work to more show as will Antipodeans, Americans that, for the were their to similar reasons, American universities should be full of Chinese or Indian professors, for two Asians reasons; and first Americans, there are especially significant in cultural disciplines such differences as between philosophy; and secondly, their university systems do not deliver such great quotas of higher degree or high quality graduates, at least in philosophy. The ratio of U.S. philosophy graduautes with doctorates as compared with Australian exceeded 30 to 1 in each of the years 1974 to 1980. In 1977 it was 110 to 1. New Zealand compares even less favourably with U.S. output. For details see Digest of Education Statistics (U.S. National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, 1976, 1977-78, 1979, 1980, 1981 and 1982); University Statistics, (Australian Bureau of Statistics, Canberra, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, ‘1979, 1980); Education Statistics of New Zealand, (N.Z. Department of Education, Wellington, 1974, '1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980). The conclusion of the numerical argument will not be a popular one. The anti Amei icanism felt in portions of the Australasian community extends into the universities; and recently there been has increasing Insistence, especially by the now aging younger Turks that university positions should be This at the same time as these Turks often preach of an reserved for locals. international community of scholars, presumably then with "free” interchange, etc. They cannot have it all ways.^ So long continues, as the economically; the present centre will free-flow dominate they will have more large to them if it interchange the than us, periphery and is (centrally-determined) of ideas and culturally jobs here personnel as should well as go by and quality in this high cultural business that we seek, as mostly claim. Now anyway, it that arguments. is widely there is enough recognised, something For we are not lower-down drastically wrong hierarchical with these ladders sorts of flooded with high-quality Northerners who would 8 A reverse flow of the better orthodox academics from Australasia to America should also be expected (outside times of university contraction). According to assumptions of this brain drain argument, which is based on labour market considerations, appointment and lifestyle conditions for academics are generally better in USA than Australia and much better than those in economically-depressed New Zealand (e.g. higher salaries, better standard of living, superior research conditions, etc.). So, other things being equal, able academics from the Antipodes will relocate in USA as academic positions become available. The argument also helps explain why Antipodean universities cannot expect, for the most part, to attract really top-drawer Northerners for very long. Of course, economically irrelevant factors do induce interference; e.g. perverse commitments to odd-ball Antipodean intellectual enterprises which reduce market acceptability, or pre-industrial ties to place or persons or lifestyle which unduly restrict mobility (such as local roots, family attachments, even distaste for American urban lifestyles). regularly drive out local contenders for positions, if we only preferred the Northerners when they were quite visibly superior: rather we are inundated by Americans with inflated references, who have the messages of the centre better do, locals than higher-echelon remote and Northern Northern (often biassed) fields appointment locals whose shortcomings are known better. the Northern centres too, tend greener look to committees dusty than As is beginning to be recognised retain their higher-quality products, tend to to and allow them to be exiled to the periphery only if they somehow fall foul of the system (e.g. of the academic system for political or personal reasons). the often Northern centres have intellectually their disposed of Too inferior products in the periphery. All this makes the position look doubly bad. We ought, appointing Northerners, especially Americans, even seems, to be if they are overrated in it their references, and usually not out of the top drawer, in order to maximize quality. And yet doing so does not achieve the desired quality result, and breeds discontent elsewhere, especially among the aging Turks. Fortunately shaky arguments; and obtain we from this awkward and that is the way of regionalism. sufficient subtitutable for us. before is a way out there elaborate cultural distance,so that situation these and We do our own things; they are not simply Then the shaky numerical argument does fall down. the emerging proposal there are other But influential . . This is easier in the cultural than the technological sphere. However it is also possible technologically: (stronger) theses of technological determinism, and so of cultural determinism, are false. We can choose different options, technologically, as well as culturally. 9 8 arguments to dispose of, and the disposal bears on the proposal. There is, to begin with, far been conceded: have so elements of which the argument for excellence, that there is an objective commodity, quality or excellence, which we all more or less which is agree about, proportionately in the North, and which is what academic institutions crave and more abundant seek and what appointments aim to capture, indeed maximize. That at least is the type of myth most of us have encountered; and many of us now know it is a in myth, fact appointments profit, a that dangerous myth. way, more any Most that don’t places organisations aim but rather seek to satisfice on a mix of factors, quality is to try even just to make maximize of which assessed only one, and not often the highest ranking one. Ability to fit into some sort of program, teaching or research, is another, and commonly more Important factor; and there is no good reason why such a program should not sometimes be a regionally oriented one. So given the prevailing practices, argument from excellence does not exclude regional philosophy programs. And, in any event, there are enough local candidates of sufficient worth to proceed with regional programs without sacrifice clearcut of excellence. Local enterprise need entail no loss of excellence, and could well increase it. The deeper-cutting objection is that there is something seriously amiss with the idea of objective objective importance; criticism as bracketed out notions the that of excellence, these objective and notions values with are open more contextual-relativisation the to connected the generally, component of same that notion of sorts of they valuing: have the ’S- 9 framework or viewpoint within rather a to which these values relate.^ narrow such paradigm, intellectual While those operating as Oxbridge ordinary language philosophy or Sydney materialism say, can bracket out the viewpoint,. since it Incorporated is operational the in paradigm, and so at arrive seemingly objective quality judgements, the judgements are not preserved (e.g. in truth va1ue) when Marxist viewpoints. quality or worth Consider, of a other to transposed for forest, frameworks, the comparison, made variously by of a holistically-inclined judgements a deep environmental who seemingly because pretend that environmental such it is not done by members of as or to rhe an ecologist, philosopher, language, Marxist, and Californian environmental philosophers. philosophers idealistic Compare judgements as to the industrial forester, and a recreational officer. quality e.g. work by ordinary There are even cannot be judged, the main philosophical peer group at Harvard and like institutions. As this judgements of begins to the. reveal, importance judgements of work of quality are not Independent of done or problems tackled. importance of problems and issues is highly paradigm dependent. But the For example, problems such as those of quant if ying-in and of possible worlds and of de re thought, which assume immense importance for fashionable referential theories within the mainstream empiricist paradigm, vanish outside that restricted viewpoint. Now observe to relative that most insignificance judgements as to What follows also begins to bring out what is omitted in a main theme of R.S. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance, Bodley Head, London, 1974. Note that defusing the notion of objective excellence does not lead to subjectivism. To avoid the customary false dichotomy, compare the notion of validity (usually ceded to themselves these days by classical logicians) with that of quality. 10 what are the important problems and what constitutes important work - matters helping quality determine - is relative to their concerned are exported to the Antipodes importance down shipped are paradigmatic from the and placement, through the Their North.11 paradigms the main channels already indicated. We are free to reject these paradigms and select alternatives, and there are, it can be argued, good reasons to do just that, much as there are to reasons good choose different energy technology (or different military technology) from that generally favoured in the North which the North is eager to export southwards. Similar which points against alternatively might argument, apply that be -marketed mass-produced and cosmopolitan. The argument called people sophisticated from cosmopolitan/international the the Peter everywhere Holland; international Stuyvesant smoke this argument superior product cigarette-sophistication is is based on the assumption that philosophy is a ’cosmopolitan subject’, that is is not the sort of enterprise for which place and people are significant as they are for poetry assumption has only to be presented to be questioned. for one important thing, that philosophy is a or the novel.12 The It takes for granted, finished product sort (a propositional theory), not a process of production also. of a certain But in the Often enough fashionability is mistaken for importance. As to the unsatisfactory way in which such "important" problems are commonly set, see F. Dyson, ’Unfashionable pursuits’, The Mathematical Intelligencer 5 (1983) 47-54. 12 Grave, op.cit., p.2: ------- the term ’cosmopolitan subject' used there comes from Donegan. As to the significance of place and people for literature, see further C. Partridge, The Making of New Cultures, Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam, 1982. 11 process of production the place and people involved (e.g. in discussion) are ot material. if And the product Is like a work of like art, a d literature, not and 1 just theorems and arguments assembled piece of in an internationally-approved format, 13 then again the historical setting matters, since philosophy, more no than literature, does not in emerge a vacuum. Plato s philosophy could not have emerged in ancient Australia, and if cribbed in mid 20th century Oxford would surely have been marked down or rejected. It is important not to be sidetracked into issues ~ resembling problems in aesthetics extent sets that do not need to of themes and arguments be contested, such as whether and what produced in one place and setting could have been produced in another. A nonnuclear technology of some sort could be adopted prospect in but Europe that New apparently will Zealand, nonnuclear energy strategy. rasters here. Dialethic in not contrast be, with whereas there Australia, is will reasonable pursue a It is the doing, and not what could be done, that logic, which invalidates methodology of much Anglo-American philosophy, could the technique perhaps be done in and the North (though there would be substantial cultural resistance): it is not being 13tLike a paper in the biological sciences. But here again technique methodology, which may both be regional, are crucially important. x4Related points can be made using less extreme examples, e.g. and concerning modern American work. Consider, for Instance such texts as W.V. Quine’s Word ajll—(Wiley, Now York, 1960) or R. Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia (Basic Books, New York, 1974). The assumptions taken for granted" the arguments involved, etc., are especially American: it is not just the style. The acceptability of arguments and positions is dependent on place and received paradigm. 12 done there, and is not likely to be done in the Anglo-American sphere.15 this extent, logical can Antipodeans techniques, do choose their their own international/cosmopolitan argument, own distinctive distinctive technology thing. stated in a form that would be To and The telling, fails. Of course it can be argued, it is being argued, that Antipodeans don’t need to be, or even oughtn’t to be pursuing their own energy or logic policies and apparatus. But meeting these considerations takes us to a whole new set of issues concerning the merit of various policies and programs, diversity, etc. - far beyond the cosmopolitan argument. the point of The new arguments, to which we shall return, are not a lot more convincing however than comparable arguments concerning cooking: that we don’t devising our own cuisine or wine styles. need to be or oughtn’t to be British, or at least cosmopolitan, cooking is adequate: we should stick to that and buy it off the shelf from the North, ideally importing the cooks also. Do we have good reasons to think that British philosophy is better, these days, than British cooking? Antipodeans are free, in principle then, to pursue their own paradigms; and to do so they will by and large want to, and mostly have to, appoint their own people, people they have educated - not saboteurs or people who have (had) 15 Much as communist anarchism, a live possibility for communes and perhaps communities in Australia, is culturally excluded in North America, owing to the extreme possessive individualism of that culture. On dialethic logic, see G. Priest and R. Routley, On Paraconsistency, Research Papers in Logic, #13, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1983. 13 to be re-educated, from elsewhere, in particular from the North. Intellectual paradigms features of the local pursued tie with cultural paradigms, with distinctive culture? In a at loose way, least, they may tie in with the philosophy will not usually though works of But will the link, culture in the integral fashion that novels (as distinct from more technical works) sometimes do. Indeed, certain to a cultural limited extent, features, not they restricted to hastens to though add. this But is style, compared with acceptability, what philosophical particular programs, that help mark philosophy in Australia as ’unimportant Grave considers do already link. ’an Australian product’ - matters truth, philosophy’ in do matter, and are he not Independent - or independent so far as their perception goes in the case truth and correctness of - from underlying broad theory or received paradigm. However the marks which can be extracted from Grave, significant though they are, do not serve to distinguish the Australian product, the first two being features Australian philosophy exhibits in lesser degree than the more adventurous and polemical philosophy of Greek antiquity. by Passmore as ’most typical of Australian philosophy’, The first, described is a 'diversity of approach and readiness to put forward an unconventional or unfashionable point ’Nothing need be conceded to strong cultural relativity themes, though they would support the case. It is enough that our theories remain radically incomplete and that there can accordingly be rival theories as to what is true. Similarly, however philosophy is conceived - as the search for truth, explanation, understanding and wisdom (all of these and more, really), or as, more vaguely, inquiry of a certain sort - there can be, and will be, competing accounts; so a pluralistic theory is inevitable in giving a fuller view. view’, 17 of something philosophy, some (with which typical more of philosophy ancient notable exceptions) than exhibits an Canada, is that Africa, South adventurous compared with other recent diverse. and provincial and The second, and ... the line-up between Australian more manifestoed character’ of Australian philosophy, being "Oxbridge colonies", England, far from Australian philosophy isolated: others mark surprising, materialism , departments the and Melbourne (both confrontation concerning the them concern extraordinary discussed the political by is is ’the ’the most notable example ... Wittgensteinian among such as philosophy Andersonian This example Sydney, if it was not the Andersonian philosophy Itself’ (p.2). is austere What may be uniformity reflecting that often attributed to the land Itself. nearer true Australian fervour generated engagement Grave), some growing the and relevant/paraconsistent program, by by with the local (’adversarial’) style leading to sharp criticism by Americans. Connected with these first philosophy, century two as Cambridge marks of much are further characteristics of much 18th century Scottish philosophy and philosophy: namely directness, Australian turn-of-this- unwillingness to muffle points, surface clarity, and, some would unkindly add (in the hope perhaps of locating a genuine difference), bluntness, unsubtlety and crudity. 17 Both preceding quotations, while included as such in Grave’s Introduction, are from J. Passmore, ’Philosophy’, in The Pattern of Australian Culture (ed. A.L. McLeod), Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y., 1963, pp.131-168. The same annotation also applies to the third mark. 18 Ihough again for the most part that influenced by Sydney rather than that originating in Melbourne. To some extent this reflects the different historical influences shaping Sydney and Melbourne philosophy: roughly, Scottish as opposed to Continental antecedents. 15 third The and the fourth but again very different, marks are hardly distinguishing features of Australian philosophy as Grave, who wouldn't them marks at all, in effect observes. Intellectual is areas, the The third, which applies well to other of contrast Australian the reputation the anti-intellectual national stereotype of Australians as a people to physical achievement nark ia especially isolation of a academic rather than feature of philosophy indifference or even hostility to, to intellectual Anglo-American Australasia in subtlety'. 'devoted fourth The philosophy; from, in Inquiry', with 'center of philosophical Indeed of Australia as a philosophy, call namely its and the general the sort of imported philosophy (e.g. that of Nietzsche and the existentialists) generating Interest in literary and arts circles. The failure of such marks to entirely separate out Australian philosophy does not For matter. thing, one separated by its research projects. confused with nationalism, nor Australian the produce as encouraged; and in most the new other more regional things, regionalism sufficiently For another, regionalism should not be positions such as materialism or Wellington modal!sm with national philosophies. philosophy, is is is an undesirable commonly linked, Sydneyside Nationalism in trait, not in other to be cultural things, with the breakdown of nations and contraction of state power.19 19c See, e.g., London, 1957. Sale, op.cit., and L. Kohr, The Breakdown of Nations, RKP, The Editor of the new 1923 AJPP did however take seriously the notion of National Philosophy, of (what must have surprised some New Zealand readers) an Australian Philosophy; some of the issu< s there raised (p.292ff) are addressed in Appendix 1. To get back to where we were: emerging proposal the is this, that we start - or better much Increase - doing our own distinctive things, and that we team up so. to do there are In fact that begin several suggestions to emerge, concerning research and teaching, publications and appointments, study These are not just that we do our own selection leave and sponsored visitors. of topics and people, and style and decide methods, our priorities, own instead of having these foisted upon us - not just, that is, that we play our own games (whether invented here or taken over from the North) and not theirs, Rules and Rugby instead of Gridiron and Basketball - but that we abandon the individual competitive model of cultural achievement, sold to us and fostered by the North, in favour of a group cooperative approach (elements of which are already modelled in Antipodean social clubs). The thoughts here are digging example, ditch more separately. rapidly simple and On familiar. the side is the it Is well-known that two people cooperating can dig a and enjoyably than two people working on the ditch Cooperative work tends to pay off - in philosophy or elsewhere - in terms of output, quality, and enjoyment in the doing. experience one shows that we successfully with several reasons periphery cannot the centre on achievements for this. highly competitive in the One in On the other side, individually compete very their programs. is the communication situation. There are Despite the predominantly individualistic nature of American academic 17 enterprise, 20 communication much in the attainment of and access to work is jointly based, individualism myth, unpublished material. nationalistic are and the assignment of credit for it. considerations same verbally conveyed. tend to time and as There an outsider). through face-to-face Here There are a mix of reasons (e.g. Polish results, Russians will cite a Russian who the the several clever people will be again people at the periphery tend to lose out. there despite Then again communications are important in obtaining rapid publication of the idea or result, Again For, verbal and builds on the work of many; when the time is ripe for some idea or result, able to hit on it. upon rapid results depends Poles tend to promote. achieves a result at about is the fact that seminars so that local much is results conveyed will be There is the fact of limited reading, and that people at the centre concentrate when they read on material from the centre by central people, so that published items and results from the periphery will often not be noticed, and may well lose out to central competitors even if they achieve central publication. receive, merit There is also the fact that people at the centre tend to for merit, more publication than people towards the periphery. and communication opportunities Here economic factors do begin to enter; consider the size and distribution of the academic market (there are, e.g., a great many more academic philosophers in North America than in the whole rest of the world), control of publishing outlets and journals (with few exceptions 20 Reflecting other features of the culture and enterprise of the centre which are not so deeply embedded in Australasia: see further R. Routley, ’Culture, philosophy, and approaches to the natural environment - an Australian perspective', in The Environment, Ethics and Ecology (ed. D. Bennett), The Faculties, Australian National University, 1984, and also 'Culture and the roots of social and political divergence, with emphasis on the Australian/American contrast’, typescript, Canberra, 1983; both referred to subsequently as ’Culture’. 18 all Northern), ere. However economic power does not, and need not, determine culture - we can shut off the Northern philosophical propaganda shut off our television sets If we really want to. way we by Impressed being middle-men philosophical those And we can stop make who in much the living a by importing the Northern stuff. So what do we do? We adapt to the cultural-philosophical level, of those things, that have been suggested In the newer regionalism. some regional awakeningand importer.. andimitators doctrines and and local For We alm at not remain slavish We do on commentators the North. example, and we peddlars don’t spend of, our trying totease out what Davidson or Dummett or Kripke meant by in the hope that or that To be through. of, positions from academic lives this local self-reliance. several sure, I some pale Northern light suggesting am not we that will perhaps emulate filter appalling the ignorance of people from the North who visit the Antipodes and know little or nothing about eminent through what has been done or visitors, their Australian the bags heavy National is being done here;21 with cultural (now University so that we have accoutrements, main the trekking centre for Investigation of relevant logics) and informing us that, or relying crucially on the assumption that, a contradiction entails every proposition. that these Northerners know often little positions and advances is the Antipodes is inferiority colonies; 21 of cultural another is the and Intellectual narrow or nothing about One reason distinctive the prevailing assumption of life (predominantly in these local) and former limited the southern reading Regrettably, the ignorance extends to many locals. In particular those _nrected with Sydney materialism appear remarkably ill-informed as to’ basic features of other Australasian programs. undertaken by Northern luminaries. But, having despite been given cause, sufficient we shouldn’t cut ourselves off from Northern paradigms and influences (we could hardly manage to anyway, propaganda is different). so we should stay informed of, but not imitators these continuing traditions: of, or part of, their enterprises. m older Northern traditions, So far from cutting these nowhere, loose In any case, regional cultures are rooted just as the people are largely European stock. from (and older We can reasonably use what we need from these likely traditions and traditions, minority) from starting afresh and the local variations that have already appeared are what we want to develop and perhaps mutate, as again with wine styles. Part of the things, encourage proposal then that Northern paradigms. increasingly rather than working with and so shape newer try to to create fortunately, features of of cultural the larger culture.22 do we need to make the story up - though helping to shape is part of what the proposal is about. is a different and Much of more difficult already indicated in Grave’s survey of Australian philosophy. 22 local For there are research programs already initiated, which have the Australia - New Zealand has own our It is not as if we have to build from nothing, to do - very great advantage of being grounded in the future do pale northern reflections very difficult - entirely original work, components. Nor, we and develop our own research programs, Antipodean paradigms, wnat is is the story, proposition - for is All one really to do is to bring out programs he has already indicated and provide some See Culture, op.cit. 20 To pull the investigation down to a more concrete elaboration and commentary. I shall sketch some more prominent cooperative programs - by no means level, the only programs - and remark on some relevant features of them. The longest running and best known program is, without much doubt, of naturalism, Australian and which aims to see the that world, natural and everything else, as suitably encompassed within the framework of the world of (physical) science. program The is generally back traced to Anderson’s empiricist metaphysics,^^ and is now best exhibited in Armstrong’s work. contains as a major materialism, subprogram Sydney Adelaide which subsequently died out there. such famous components as central state version of failures in program initiated and nowadays Faced functionalism. reduction plans, like it it takes in, identity theme and more derivatively, physicalisms all now in The latter program has included the mental-material contingent materialism, its a It incorporates with a a conspicuous "scientifically" trimmed theory of universals, and an account of natural laws as relations of universals, both components of the developing Sydney realism. Parts of the naturalism program, especially materialism and central state reductionism and the unified science ideal, have had counterparts in the North, but the program has, for the most part, despite export efforts, smoothly, moreover, and earthy, so retained its distinctively it never caught on in New Zealand. into Australian culture. far as Australian character philosophy can ""^Anderson’s metaphysics was however - The program fits It is similarly down-to-earth, be, without the fancy ideas or effete far more opposed to reductions than what has succeeded it. For an account of Anderson’s philosophy, and a history and account of Australian naturalism and materialism, see especially Grave, op.cit. idealism of European philosophy or the spirituality and suppressed puritanism with much which pragmatism). of yet And and commitments, North American does it though it is thinking not simmers shrink from metaphysical explicit it is not from the basically empiricist, nowadays, (including positivistic (rejecting a verification principle, in particular). It is a city program, based broadcast mainly University of Sydney to other metropolitan universities; but the program does extend outside the universities a bit (a tiny bit) to the larger metropolitan culture. No th America, the broader Russell, so in Australasia, little professional philosophy Impinges on + community, Popper AusLralasia As in and would be or Kuhn quite even on being an the wider academic (To exceptional. achievement, one community, turn worth this working work by around for.) now reaches in The naturalism program used to Perth, and in Canberra, as well as a core of opposition there. has outliers stretch Apart from notable exceptions, more than a rather through to Adelaide; the program has never had precarious hold, it the in Melbourne:nor, more same hold, to or surprisingly, 24, Jn Canada, for example, while most academics from other disciplines would know of, and perhaps a little about, Russell, far fewer would know of Wittgenstein (though he is becoming known to lit. crit. groups), and virtually none would know of Quine. (The sampling Is subjective.) On the fairly recent ’triumph of professionalism’ in philosophy in USA, see Kuklick, op.cit., p.565ff. Kuklick brings out well some of the more disastrous features of professionalism, but does not sufficiently notice that the virtuous features resulting from some professionalisation can be synthesized with broader philosophical activity. 25 The exceptions include Ellis's distinctive program, which can be accounted part of the broader naturalist program, and at Monash the work of F. Jackson and, earlier, of H. Munro in value theory. 22 has it had heavyweight criticism from there (or indeed much external criticism from elsewhere), Melbourne out. the old confrontation of major city philosophies having died is more philosophy stricken than Sydney; Melbourne by dominated Continental a philosophy; then, a fashions: Northern recently, more philosophy; remarkable religion philosophy, much more than Sydney, has been of procession historically oriented and more Quine, Davidson and and language ordinary Wittgenstein, turnabout, idealism earlier extensional reduction; now perhaps Lewis,iKripke and Dummett? one The program reaches that beyond confines the of the cities in Australia - which is after all a metropolitan dominated culture, the vast land always being the other - a rather Australian environmentalism, is diffuse program, which has connections with the Colleges of Advanced Education in the country towns and the communes on the North Coast. So far the program is as much distinguished is. environmental Europe by what positions are specifically having it a not is as feature of what it Serious the New World, of transformed most its and deeper the Old World, and environment and natural having little wild untouched country left, and little sensitivity accordingly to issues Europe that such as tend admit European those to concern of the wilderness. built shallow approaches superficiality environmentalism outside continues North environmental human-transformed and (and The main encourage to America. environment, techno-fix dominate North much Issues situations). of American the New in issues And World environmentalism differs significantly however from Antipodean environmentalism, most obviously in the religious-spiritual component respects as well (see further Culture). of the former, but in several other 23 More positively, there are three strands to Australian environmentalism:Firstly, there is an extended utilitarianism, differing little in theory from Bentham’s enlarged position, which insists upon counting in the utilities of creatures. all sentient figured though prominently it This in animal focussed has position, developed from a British base, has animal liberation movements: and welfare and on domestic animals, animals used in and research hunted (wild) animals, it has also become entangled in issues of bio-research more generally such as genetic engineering. or much interested in, endangered species, the conversion of forests, animal pain and pleasure. except deal. Secondly, utilitarian forests and differs insofar as these have a and which American Thirdly, naturalism.26 inadequate there is a wider and a deeper ecological position, which is recognises irreducible which finds value elsewhere intrinsic value ecosystems, especially wild and natural systems. from lands, bearing on and so deeper concerns get an psychological states, sentience or the disappearance of wild Wider and deeper environmental concerns appear only spinoff from animal welfare, as a not etc., It is not however concerned with, and spiritualism is there of from an extension than in trees and This position of American course as almost everywhere, a reactionary component, critical of the other strands, which Insists that all that needs to be accomplished on the environmental front can be achieved within older established (European) ethical and political frameworks. Whereas materialism is based in Sydney, environmentalism is centred in Melbourne and Canberra, but also includes Brisbane and Perth. Also centred in described more fully elsewhere: see, in particular, <ed- D- Mannison and others), RSSS, Australian National University, 1980. It has been Canberra, and reaching across the country, with good connections in Melbourne, few but in Sydney, is the materialism and environmental further from input affecting program other which program, elsewhere. and and is of Includes more to extends essentially philosophy, centres New in metaphysics, with respectively, the theory value a Zealand , program, logic especially in the Whereas but one metaphysics. Australia than has been also any The other described 27 The main logic perhaps which program areas major their core programs have epistemology relevant/paraconsistent program. relevant/paraconsistent. grounded research program evident program. in New Zealand from the work of A program emanating located mainly in Wellington, philosophy is also a Prior and now it might be. called the extended modal program. The impact of the program on philosophy is perhaps best seen in Cresswell’s work. Australian philosophy used to be known, for its hard-headed empiricism; not known and still is in some quarters, regrettably New Zealand philosophy is mostly for anything much, except perhaps, in UK, that Prior brought his 27 Again, like all the Australian programs, both those mentioned and others, in Grave, op.cit. But see further, R. Routley, ’Research in Logic in Australia, New Zealand and Oceania’, Research Papers in Logic #14, Australian National University, 1983 (which also considers other programs in logic); G. Priest and R. Routley, op. cit.; and R. Routley, R.K. Meyer and others, Relevant Logics and Their Rivals, Ridgeview, California, 1982. 28 See especially M.J. Cresswell, Logics and Languages, Methuen, London, 1973; but see also work by Goldblatt and by Hughes referred to in Research in Logic, op.cit. Also described there is an original version of the modal program (transparent intensional logic) elaborated by Tichy at Otago. 25 unusual adaption of Russellian philosophy from that remote place. Neither of these impressions is particularly accurate; both are rather out-of-date. But the aim of work of the present type is, of course, not just to correct these impressions, not just to reflect or report on culture - for what one would like to reflect upon is not sufficiently there - but also to help manufacture elements of a culture, to make an image. To resist the already flourishing North, we should increase our efforts to programs, and perhaps other sunrise projects; further 29 the to build teaching and research around the programs selected for promotion, elaboration, and criticism, to orient appointments, especially of involved local people, to 29 Among sunrise projects in Australian philosophy so far suggested (not all of them feasible) are these: Australian feminism, Antipodean social and political alternatives, peace studies, indigenous regional philosophies (especially Aboriginal, Melanesian, and Polynesian). Another promising field, with practical consequences, for local initiative is the philosophy of education, where material produced by R.S. Peters has dominated the market, with stultifying effects it is now alleged. As foreshadowed with the notion of "sunrise projects", much of the rhetoric, and argument, concerning science and technology policy (presented in the case of Australia in Jones, op.cit.) can be taken over to apply to X policy, where X is some subject discipline, such as philosophy. / 26 on Why bother? these programs. Why not simply buy our philosophy, like almost all our technology, off the shelf, from the North? There are several arguments for not doing this, in more than a limited fashion, which are now sketched. There is, firstly, Northern products, the inferiority despite their and built-in attractive packaging. obsolence of most putting too fine a point on it, many of the imported intellectual goods are shoddy, and Without only work for a very limited range of applications (e.g. the vicinity Antipodean of contradictions philosophy dilemmas). or undoubtedly derives from Much they’re hopeless in that shoddy is wrong intellectual with goods 30 In fact something like the last has been the policy of the LSE Philosophy Department, where the only outside appointment over a long period was that of Lakatos (hardly a person far removed ideologically). As observed, it now looks like the practice of the Otago Department also; and apparently it used to be a tendency at Melbourne. But in most places the practice is condemned as nepotistic or parochial, and overridden by the call for "new (Northern) blood". However there can be significant differences between nepotistic appointments and those strengthening local programs. It is at this stage, among others that administrative measures do matter; for example, to ensure that suitable locally-engaged locals gain employment rather than Northern stooges, to direct funds into on-going local programs rather than imported fashions, etc. There are various ways appropriate administrative details can be handled, locally or nationally; but nothing draconian, such as wholesale exclusion of noncitizens, is required. Observe, indeed, that no restriction of academic appointments to nationals (in Canadian style) or the like is being advocated. Anyone who arrives at a conclusion of that sort from what has been argued has misunderstood the case in crucial respects. As a matter of simple mathematics, restricting appointment fields characteristically reduces both quality of candidates available (however quality is assessed) and range of possibilities open for future research; and no such restrictions are advocated. The author has witnessed the debilitating effects of field restrictions at the Australian National University and elsewhere. 31 Some of these centre also. arguments support change (perhaps revolutionary) at the 27 Yet buying this material is encouraged by hard-sell imported from the North. cultural ambassadors from the North, who are often enough paid Lo visit. is part of Northern the philosophical imperialism from the North — colonialism that - the Antipodes too willing This the successor suffers, or, to more remarkable, encourages I Secondly, there is the inappropriateness of much of the Northern product, especially considered as a metaphysics, environmental package, concerns. to instance, for cover, well as as The European North has no satisfactory land or environmental ethic fit for Antipodean circumstances, and the deeper American package too is spiritually-loaded mainstream for Australian In political theory, American work is much too individualistic and culture. competition-based, and the European product, especially the Marxist form, unsuited being both too precious and for local too high-tech is circumstances, especially again for more environmentally-perceptive people. features of telling also Thirdly, import world’s markets power structures against substitution and comparative advantage, regionalism; namely, and pressures and fashions, (including the Old Boy’s are appealing avoidance of the removal of overseas control and network in jobs, policies, etc.), and gaining of local control, employment of local people, etc. Fourthly, 32 there are arguments for cultural diversity, applied to The point is elaborated in Culture. At a more practical level Northern products are again often unsuitable, though for different reasons. For example, the transfer of American agricultural methods and equipment to the thin poor soils of the Antipodes has had disastrous effects, at last beginning to be recognised. 28 philosophy as complexity, sheer part of intellectual diversity, stability, culture: etc.33 arguments In fact, built into the whole notion of 'culture’ transfers. dense, Naturally we want a rich, weeds and many We obtain not only good products, being introduced. Indian maize and European cultivars, but European pests and American weeds. selectiveness and control are essential, as richness, the garden analogy But not only seeds and plants but productive garden. pests are from This is why previous against haphazard procedures. The proposal is not for, nor would the case sustain, a narrow localism, with local products, whatever their quality, heroes, replacing Northern ones. local fashions, and local cq|t That is certainly not the preferred way of the newer regionalism, which tends to do without fashions and heroes and which seeks durable quality in products, low environmental impact, and so on; nor is it the way of technology policy. Rather, as with technology policy, we select niches which are not occupied or satisfactorily filled, where we difference, and use and develop local skills and methods. has to outlets, be selective etc.). given our resource But granting regionalism, base (of can make a Indeed the policy philosophers, publishing to what extent should components, for instance people, books and other teaching elements, theories and ideas, be imported and to what extent should they be produced, trained, conceived locally? The possibility of selectiveness in different components means that many mixes are possible. particular mix. There is no need to insist, so far at least, on a The case for the present is mainly for a regional shift, for 33c See, for instance, A.A. Mazrui, A World Federation of Cultures: An African Perspective, Free Press, New York, 1976. ------ -- ---------- --- a significantly greater degree of local autonomy and production. But it will do local favour. no harm Negatively, elements Indicate to of a mix removal of the Locke-Berkelcy-Hume undue (a that finds much the suggestion is that we try to eradicate much of the Oxford style of teaching and doing philosophy. as Q/ on emphasis standard British That includes such things empiricism British focus); of the centred on quasi-historleal approach with however no proper attention to sources; of reinforcement of the prevailing Anglo-American status quo. The heavy particular, has mostly been a very conservative one. the main movements philosophy, but emanating also the from England, Moore-Wittgenstein Oxford influence, in More generally, many of especially practice, ordinary have language been very protective of the Northern status quo; they tend to leave things very much as they are, and recommend just this. 35 Positively, the proposal is that we achieve further disassociation from the Anglo-American empiricist past in two 34 Does it sound familiar? Outside philosophy, it should. For example, we have now been told by the Americans that our defence role, unlike theirs, is regional, not global: this is supposed to shed great light on our previously confused defence policies. 35 The point is laboured in E. Gellner, Words_ and Things, Victor Gollancz, London, 1959. But even ordinary language philosophy, though conservative, and though it much contracted the proper range of philosophical investigations, had its liberating elements, e.g. removal of some of the narrowness and more cramping assumptions induced by technical jargon. Nor has the social impact changed much with the subsequent decline, since 1959, of ordinary language philosophy, the increasing insolvency of Oxbridge philosophy, and its consequent limited take-over by right-wing Ivy League American philosophy. By contrast, the less economically influential growth of redbrick and applied philosophy in some of the British redbrick and polytechnic institutes has touched no more than the surface of Oxbridge practice. 30 by ways: local emphasizing framework, by and diversifying move that projects of range the outside constricting that traditions philosophical selectively drawn upon, to include not only neglected Continental strands and but also parts of Eastern thought, The philosophy. is idea that Pacific ethnic material and Australasian plurality of such a especially sources, in teaching, will assist in removing narrower cultural biasses, such as British parochialism, enable more and discrimination be obtained. to Then too we should be better able to see the ranges of theories that are open to us in the Antipodes and how to advance our own programs. There remain some things we should want to see whatever mixes are chosen One crucial issue is the removal of Northern in different Antipodean regions. bias from papers and publications, research seminars and lectures, letters of This Northern bias is a disposition to cite and discuss reference, and so on. the projects and works irrespective and discussion the of to of Northern quality ignore of the authors, their works the more of authors, local irrespective of the quality of their contribution. defer to write oi not been opinions of worth, importance, It etc. better, topic again under largely It is the disposition to authors from prestigious Northern institutions, accept their the to contribution the famous is and to uncritically the disposition to lecture as though work produced locally either does not exist or has influential philosopl e s, are, (thus if ensuring anything, more that it Inclined is to not). Northern And Australasian bias than many overseas intellectuals, who are perhaps less concerned to be seen as belonging to the Northern mainstream. bias affects not only the The reduction, and eventual removal, practice of Individual of Northern philosophers, but the policies of selection and review committees as well as of editors and referees 31 of local reorientation, innovations It journals. with better, involves, philosophers Antipodean so they among can cite work initiatives and developments - things that would b< content in courses leave, and so on. taught, more time spent at intellectual to know local getting local things, other or point out work and regional assisted by greater local local institutions on study 32 APPENDIX 1. considering the corresponding initial Lebensanchauung’ argument Philosophy both Anderson, as is truth and its theory may not a that be or confirmation independent of national sympathies or prejudices'. mean Science’. The ’are falsification Granted: but that does not fostered, etc., held, and Weltanschauung Christian a as senses two ’a scheme of the universe’, that of ridiculous (Australian) distinguished between distinction In the first, (p.292). that is German the Philosophy’, National a Francis AJPP, ’the to ’an Australian of possibility ’the of Editor In On the earlier idea of a National Philosophy for Australia. in one region but not others, as intultionism was for long in in Holland, or Cartesianism in France. In a second 'more intimate and personal’ way, 'a nation like an individual may develop a certain temperamental attitude to the problems of existence, which we may A nation’s philosophy, like its art ... call its philosophy of life. and its literature, is a mode of expression for the national It is a specialised form of the national genius ....’ short, part of the evolving national culture. is by no entirely means from separate (pp.292-3). It is, in the first place, But, initial the consciousness. sense, a in this philosophy comprising not merely a fairly comprehensive theory but also an integrated set of attitudes (like an operational paradigm). are such items as accounted ’the national consciousness’ and units single philosophy, like particularly Furthermore, only by concession meriting Australian distinctive (in definite of literature, has any sense): does not Australian descriptors. many such 'the Australian landscape' strands things to form it, some rather not loose families. Anderson does not find, really hope to find in ’a modern industrialised community’ - with its modular parts interchangeable with those of others - a national philosophy of life, with a difference. In fact he 33 claims to find a (somewhat) trite moral base to build on, humour, fair and courage particularly phllosphical. at least various apart of but life, regional is So far, not; this problems about nothing does however not local as research Identifying and trouble derives from the extravagant claim that with Goodness these and - distinctive, all or there exclude programs). legitimating being So a far, national But shortly Anderson is plunged into inconsistency: the philosophy, so good. do at there could a national philosophy, then, (such philosophies from rational but dealing', 'traditions ... of the Beauty - then of values eternal and only Philosophy' (p.295 with rearrangement). the then 'if Australia has nothing to Spirit, has she the Ideals nothing to of Truth, with do But, as Australia has nothing per se to do with these - as is virtually conceded, these values involving a 'wider sweep' than any national boundaries ~ "she" has nothing to do with Philosophy, contradicting the possibility of a National Philosophy. Though the contradiction is easily avoided by rescinding the extravagant claim, the ideal of a National Philosophy should be allowed to rest in peace: nationalism has had its time. Richard Routley^ Research School of Social Sciences Australian National University or With thanks to R. Elliot, W. Godfrey-Smith, S. Grave and L. Mirlin, to several members of the audience at the presentation of the paper at the 1983 Australasian Association of Philosophy Conference, University of Adelaide, to several referees for this Journal, and, not least, to the present Editor. ..A PROSPECTS FOR REGIONAL PHILOSOPHIES IN AUSTRALASIA Philosophy, especially academic philosophy but also folk intellectual other dominated, indeed Europe, swamped, largely by Northern now increasingly from North America. a such populations, have to stay that way. like higher cultural activity in Australasia, has long been and influences, composition of result was virtually inevitable. Suitable policies, from initially Given the migration patterns, the cultural and other baggage imported, the ethnic ruling philosophy, a good philosophy the resulting But it does not policy, could change things. The thought of a regional philosophy, perhaps matching a regional In 1923, a New Zealand correspondent to the newly-launched is hardly a new one. Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy mentioned the ’a new kind or culture, temper philosophy of possibility of under these southern skies’ which the Journal might foster.1 The Journal has however hardly fulfilled such a role (or, for that matter, actively pursued professional philosophers but a wider things some have changed in its pronounced aim of reaching not merely Australasian Australia, community). laying a solid foundation for a new regionalism in philosophy, that possibility of a new temper hardly been realised. but few of philosophy had There is little in the way of a new kind and temper of philosophy under New Zealand skies, which the southern skies include: although And features, distinctive ‘no were distinctively characteristics, have shown up in New Zealand philosophy’2. intended New Zealand New Zealand remains 1. AJPP, March 1923, p.74. The question was taken up by the Editor same volume, p.292.ff; his discussion is considered below. 2. S.A. Grave, A History pf Philosophy in Australia, Queensland Press, 1983, p.l. Page references are to the manuscript. 1 to in the University v, •? 1 nSOphy of a substantial net importer of dominance colonial but also philosophy, inns been , philosophers. and used to prevail in Australia, where virtually all that chairs, and many other academic posts in philosophy, were the from no established chairs are where most strikingly exhibited at the of orientation Northern New Zealand is not surprising. in academics small courses designed, topics covered and considered and especially in appointments made, the heavy researched Zealand, New by filled Given the usual power and influence of professors in occupied by locals. departments, in persists North, situation The oldest of philosophy taught and (The Northern control is perhaps Zealand New universities, the University of Otago, where the Philosophy Department has been virtually captured by a British School and looks increasingly like an offshoot of the London School q, of In Economics.) kC-f" Ct event the overwhelming Anglo-American dominance of New any Zealand philosophy — also a feature only in slightly lesser degree of Australian philosophy - confirmed by a content survey of the courses offered and be can research papers written at New Zealand universities. to Even when local people have been appointed they have been generally forged requirements brought or up on finished the North as B.Phil. hard well. In particular, the to beat case of philosophy by the Many departments of philosophy remain full of products degree. of this cultural mill: were Australasia, of the Australasian universities in the major period of post-World War II expansion were conveniently seen to in the Oxford in solid diet of Anglo-American material, and a in positions indeed until the mid 70s candidates finished out when they applied for positions, in such Oxford was the (unwarranted) prestige of Oxford and the continuing "cultural cringe". Nonetheless, despite the Northern dominance, significant changes have been occurring in the Antipodes, especially on the Australian philosophical scene (as will be indicated). It is worth asking whether Australian philosophy is 2 moving hiiosophy towards the sort of change that occurred in USA more than 100 years ago when the Harvard Philosophy Department was brought (or bought) together, and its age "golden American philosophy was never quite the same again, and became its began. own thing. There are Australian philosophy now new operating forces in such a direction. which help could to move There is the widespread emergence, particularly in alternative culture, of a new (bio-)regionalism^, which to cultural and ideological choice along with other local choices; applies and in stark contrast, there is the centralised fashioning of national science and technology which not only provides a model for reflection in regional philosophy policies, but policy also directly bears on parts of the of philosophy science. Unfortunately there are also some serious obstacles to regional philosophies and to the very idea of a regional philosophy. USA, long an importer of culture from Europe, has of certainly of lower components of higher culture such as philosophy exporter philosophical culture, output from Oxford has culture, taken). recently but evidently (witness Are become net also any of turn American the there a reasons why Australasia, if not following suit, should not achieve a better cultural balance of payments, especially Yes, there are reasons. in philosophy? In the first place, the change in the cultural position of the USA went with, and perhaps part derived from, vast in changes economic^power relations. dominance entails cultural dominance, there Australasia’s is little prospect in If economic for most of culture, since there is no serious prospect that Australasia will ever emulate or attain American economic eminence (at least not without nuclear 3. See B. Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy; Cambridge, Massachusetts 1860-1930, Yale University Press, 1977, Parts 2 and 3. 4. See especially, Fourth World News, vol. 1, 1983, and Scale, Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, New York, 1980. 3 K. Sale, Human -uilosopM but also has long '’een destruction of the North, and disruption of cultural entire flow of commodities, Secondly, as observed, Antipodean universities not only other). and the contain a large component of Northern academics, increasingly of Americans, they also include a substantial additional contingent of fellow-travellers, whose research and teaching is bent to Northern concerns. influential jL segment, 4A4X y e unlikely that this (become so locally will group, former the It is Gy I acclimatised as to) give up its Northern^cultural commitments, isolated person. Nor apart the from As long as Antipodeans do not drastically should they. alter their cultural priorities, they are in a bind situation; for it can be persuasively argued that they would be better off, as far as quality and product goes, stocking their universities with American teaching components and researching American-oriented concerns. One simple numerical argument that Antipodean universities would be off with Americans in the main, takes the following lines:graduates Australasian of and American, are A distinguished, at least in subjects such as philosophy. academics of quality produced per number of say there is 1 per every n graduates. graduates; The (higher degree) significantly not culturally Consider now the number higher degree Austroamerican The (great) preponderance of graduates will be Americans, just by virtue of their vastly and better their more extensive system of university education. greater population So also then, just by ratio considerations, the great preponderance of quality academics drawn from an Austroamerican base will be American, as will the upper percentiles among those quality products. be 5. appointing Clearly, Antipodeans, were they interested in quality, more Americans to their universities. would Such an argument does not As indicated in Appendix 1, the ratio of philosophy graduates with doctorates is in the order of 30 to 1 for USA as compared with Australia. And, ; > is well-known, the extent of university education is much greater in USA than in Australasia: indeed Australia is in this respect the worst educated of the developed nations, as OECD figures have made plain (see, e.g., B. Jones, Sleepers Awake, Penguin, 1982, p. ). Co***) fa /o .. w. also folk work to show that, for similar reasons, American universities should be full or Chinese Indian professors, two reasons; for cultural differences between Asians and as philosophy; such of first there are significant especially Americans, disciplines in and secondly, their university systems do not deliver such great quotas of higher degree or high quality graduates, at least in philosophy. The conclusion of the numerical argument will not be a popular one. The anti Americanism felt in portions of the Australasian community extends into the and recently there has been increasing insistence, especially universities; the aging now younger Turks that university positions should be reserved for This at the same time as these Turks often preach of locals. community of scholars, by presumably^/ then an international "free" interchange, etc. They cannot have it ail ways. So long as there is a free—flow interchange of will centre dominate the ideas personnel, and periphery culturally as well as economically; will have more than us, and jobs here should go by and large to them if the they it is quality in this high cultural business that we seek, as we mostly claim. Now it is widely enough recognised, lower-down hierarchical ladders anyway, that there is something drastically wrong with these sorts of arguments. are not flooded with high-quality Northerners local contenders who better. retain have appointment the messages of out the centre better than locals do, and higher—echelon (often Northern committees than dusty locals whose shortcomings are known As is beginning to be recognised too, their drive rather we are inundated by Americans with inflated remote Northern fields tend to look greener to biassed) regularly for positions, if we only preferred the Northerners when they were quite visibly superior: references, would who For we higher-quality products, periphery only if they somehow fall foul 5 and of Northern the allow the them system centres to (e.s5. tend to be exiled to the the academic philosophy» folk w also • it All this makes the position look doubly bad. /Wejought, appointing especially Northerners, Americans, yet And doing so to seems, to order maximize does not achieve the desired quality result, and J? breeds discontent elsewhere, especially among the aging Turks. Cx-z'J2-^ Fortunately there is a way out from this awkward situation and these arguments; and that the is us. the Then shaky shaky way of regionalism. (^We) do our own things; obtain sufficient cultural distance, for be if they are overrated in even their references, and usually not out of the top drawer, in quality. /■jxc*</-C-vuaxt so that they are not numerical argument simply does fall down. and sul^itutable But before we elaborate the emerging proposal there are other influential arguments to dispose of, and the disposal bears on the proposal. There is, to begin with, the argument for have so far been conceded: all more or institutions maximize. most of crave and seek excellence, elements of which that there is an objective commodity, quality or less__agree and what about, which appointments is what academic to capture, indeed aim That at least is the type of myth most of us have encountered; ow know it is a myth, in fact a dangerous myth. Host places don’t even try to make appointments that way, any more that organisations aim just maximize profit, but rather seek some Ability to fit sort of program, teaching or research, is another, and commonly more important factor; 6. to to satisfice on a mix of factors, of which assessed qualityjis only one, and not the highest ranking one. into and and there is no good reason why such a program should not This is easier in the cultural than the technological sphere. However it is also possible technologically: (stronger) theses of technological determinism, and so of cultural determinism, are false. We can choose different options, technologically, as well as culturally. sometimes be a regionally oriented one. So like Mii 1 OSOphy * 1 prevailing given the practices, argument from excellence does not exclude regional philosophy programs. The deeper-cutting objection is that there the with that objective importancej criticism as excellence, objective of idea notions these notions objective of is something and with the are open to values more seriously connected notion of the same sorts generally, that they have viewpoint rather narrow to which these intellectual of the framework bracketed out the contextual—relativisation component of valuing: or amiss relate.? While those operating within a values paradigm, as such ordinary Oxbridge language philosophy or Sydney materialism say, can bracket out the viewpoint, since it is objective incorporated in the operational paradigm, and so arrive at seemingly quality judgements, the judgements are not preserved (e.g. in truth value) when transposed Consider, to frameworks, other e.g. idealistic or for comparison, the judgements as to the quality or worth of a forest made variously by a deep ecologist, an industrial forester, and officer. viewpoints. Marxist Compare environmental judgements as by philosopher, Califorman—environmentalist to the quality There recreational of a holistically-inclined Marxist language, ordinary philosophers. a are philosophers who even pretend that such environmental work cannot be judged, seemingly because not done by institutions. members of such is ■F the importance of work quality done or importance of problems and issues is highly paradigm problems it of the main philosophical peer group at Harvard and like As this begins to reveal, judgements of judgements and as those are not problems independent tackled. dependent. For of But the example, of quantifying-in and of possible worlds and of de re What follows also begins to bring out what is om^Qitted in a main R.S. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance, 197 . -- theme of thought which assume immense importance within mainstream the for referential fashionable theories paradigm, vanish to relative insignificance empiricist outside that restricted viewpoint. Now observe that most judgements as to what are the important problems and what constitutes important work - matters helping determine quality - are shipped relative to their down from placement, paradigmatic the Their North. and the importance is paradigms concerned are exported to the Antipodes through the main channels already indicated. We are free to reject these paradigms and select alternatives, and there are, it can be argued, good reasons to do just that, much as there are good reasons different energy technology different (or military technology) choose to that from generally favoured in the North which the North is eager to export southwards. Similar points apply against the cosmopolitan/international argument might which alternatively be called the Peter Stuyvesant international argument, that sophisticated people everywhere smoke this superior -marketed from Holland; product mass-produced cigarette-sophistication is cosmopolitan. and The argument is based on the assumption that philosophy is a ’cosmopolitan subject’, that is is not the sort of enterprise for which place and people are significant as they are for poetry or the novel.8 The assumption has only questioned. to be production also. like a process of But in the process of production the place and people involved And if the product is like a work in discussion) are material. of art, a piece of literature, and not just theorems and arguments assembled in an internationally-approved format, Q then again the historical setting since philosophy, no more than literature, does not emerge in a vacuum. 8. be It takes for granted, for one important thing, that philosophy is a finished product of a certain sort (a propositional theory), not (e.g. to presented matters, Plato's Grave, op.cit, p.2: the term ’cosmopolitan subject’ is said to come from Donegan. As to the significance of place and people for literature, see further C. Partridge, The Making of New Cultures, Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam, 1982. 8 philosophy could not have emerged in ancient Australia, and if cribbed in mid 20th century Oxford would surely have been marked down or rejected.111 It is important not to be sidetracked into issues - resembling problems aesthetics - that do not need to be contested, such as whether and what extent sets of themes and arguments produced in one place and setting could produced in in another. have been A nonnuclear technology of some sort could be adopted in Europe but apparently will not be, whereas there is reasonable prospect that New Zealand, in contrast with Australia, will pursue a nonnuclear energy strategy. It is the doing* and not what could logic, which be substantial cultural resistance): to be done in the Anglo-American their done, that matters Dialethic here. invalidates the technique and methodology of much philosophy done in the North, could perhaps choose be own distinctive thing. distinctive done in the North (though there would be it is not being done there, and is not likely sphere.11 To this extent, Antipodeans can technology and logical techniques, do their own The international/cosmopolitan argument, stated in a form that would be telling, fails. 9. Like a paper Ln the biological sciences. But here again technique methodology, which may both be regional, are crucially important. 10. Related points can be made concerning modern American work. Consider, for instance such texts as W.V. Quine's Word and Object, (Wiley, New York, 1960) or R. Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia (Basic Books, New York, 1974). The assumptions taken for granted, the arguments involved, etc., are especially American: it is not just the style. The acceptability of arguments and positions is dependent on place and received paradigm. 11. Much as communist anarchism, a live possibility for communes and perhaps communities in Australia, is culturally excluded in North America, owing to the extreme individualism of that culture. 9 and tUK KLUJLUNAL Hi JLLUbUrdltb IN AUblKALAbLA Of course it can be argued, it is being argued, that Antipodeans don’t need to be, or even oughtn’t to be pursuing their own energy or logic policies and But meeting these considerations takes us to apparatus. concerning issues merit the of a we shall return, our own cuisine cooking is adequate: that we don't or wine styles. arguments, The new need to be or oughtn’t to to be British, or at least cosmopolitan, we should stick to that and buy it off the shelf from ideally importing the cooks also. North, of are not a lot more convincing however than comparable arguments concerning cooking: devising set policies and programs, the point of various diversity, etc.— far beyond the cosmopolitan argument. which new whole the Do we have good reasons to think that British philosophy is better, these days, than British cooking? 12 Antipodeans are free in principle, then, to and to pursue their own paradigms; do so they will by and large want to, and mostly have to, appoint their own people, people they have educated - not saboteurs or people who to be re-educated, from elsewhere, in particular from the North. (had) have But will their intellectual paradigms tie with cultural paradigms, with distinctive features of the local 7 culture. In a loose way, at least, they may link, though works of philosophy will not usually tie in with the culture in the integral fashion that novels (as distinct from more technical works) sometimes do. Grave considers two cultural features, not restricted to particular philosophical programs, that help mark philosophy in Australia as ’an Australian product’ - ’unimportant though this is compared with what matters in philosophy’ he hastens to add. But style, acceptability, truth, do matter, and are not independent - or independent mofar as their perception goes in the case of truth and 12. correctness13 - from One correspondent (name supplied) suggested I ’might note the stultifying crap produced by R.S. Peters Inc. and marketed as philosophy of education’. Certainly, as Grave’s discussion (op.cit. p.318) reveals, Peters’ influence in this area has been very substantial: this indicates another field for local initiative. saco-s. -fo (K t* th- STS FOR REGIONAL PHILOSOPHIES IN AUSTRALASIA underlying broad theory or received paradigm. However the marks Grave cautiously advances do not serve to distinguish the Australian product, being features philosophy exhibits in lesser Australian degree than the more adventurous and polemical philosophy antiquity. Greek first, described by Passmore as ’most typical of Australian philosophy’, is The a ’diversity of approach and readiness unfashionable point of view’, put to forward much something more an unconventional typical or classical of The second, and more surprising, mark is the manifestoed characte^ philosophy. of of Australian philosophy, 'the most notable example ... between Wittgensteinian Melbourne and Andersonian Sydney, philosophy Andersonian itself' (p.2). This example being ... if is it the line-up was not the far from isolated: others among them concern the fervour generated by "Australian materialism", the extraordinary discussed by political Grave), engagement and the by some growing philosophy confrontation departments concerning (both the relevant/paraconsistent program, with the local ("adversarial") style leading to sharp criticism by Americans. Grave The third and especially the fourth marks are, as notes, hardly distinguishing marks, namely the contrast of the Australian reputation in philosophy with that in other subjects and the anti-intellectual national stereotype, and the separation of the academic philosophy from the sort of mostly-imported philosophy of interest in literary and arty-crafty circles. 13. Nothing need be conceded to strong cultural relativity themes, though they would support the case. It is enough that our theories remain radically incomplete and that there can accordingly be rival theories as to what is true. Similarly, however philosophy is conceived, as the search for truth, explanation, understanding (all of these really), or as inquiry of a certain sort, there can be - will be - competing accounts. 11 — ruK REGIONAL PHILOSOPHIES IN AUSTRALAQi A The failure of the marks to adequately separate off Australian from the particular local examples) does not matter. (apart Australian produce is sufficiently separated another, by projects. For regionalism should not be confused with nationalism, nor more regional positions such as Sydneyside materialism or Wellington Nationalism philosophies. in philosophy, undesirable trait, not to be encouraged: cultural other For one thing, the research its philosophy as in modalism most with national things, is an other and the new regionalism is linked, in with the breakdown of nations and contraction of state things, power. 14 To get back to where we were: - better much increase - doing our own distinctive things, and that we team or In fact there are several suggestions that begin to up to do so. just the emerging proposal is this, thatQ^e/start emerge; not that we do our own selection, decide our own priorities, instead of having these foisted upon us; invented instead here of competitive or taken Gridiron model in favour of a not just, that is, that we play our own and over from Basketball, games, whether the North and not theirs, Rules and Rugby but that we abandon the individual of cultural achievement sold to us and fostered by the North group cooperative approach (elements of which are already modelled in Antipodean social clubs). 14. See, e.g., Sale, op.cit., and L. London, 1957. Kohr, The Breakdown of Nations, RKP, The Editor of the new 1923 AJPP did however take seriously the notion of National Philosophy, of an Australian Philosophy; some of the issues there raised (p.292ff) are addressed in Appendix 2. 12 p_FOR regional PHILOSOPHIES in AUSTRAtacta The thoughts here are example: ditch-digging more ditch rapidly the On than enjoyably and two people On the other side, experience cannot individually achievements in their programs. situation. communi ation working complete very shows depends results builds on Despite the For, despite, the individualism the work of in obtaining we that highly myth rapid publication of competitive predominantly much in the attainment work is jointly based, Then again communications the idea or the are tend to lose There are nationalistic considerations (e.g. fact achieves There is the fact that much is conveyed verbally and through face-to-face seminars so that local is and result, and the Here again people at the periphery a result at about the same time as an outsider). There the when the time is ripe for some idea or result, many: There are a mix of reasons:- conveyed. in One is the Poles tend to promote Polish results, Russians will cite a Russian who be ditch rapid verbal communication and access to unpublished upon assignment of credit for it. out. the There are several reasons for this. several clever people will be able to hit on it. important on successfully with the centre on individualistic nature of American academic enterprise,15 material. the is it is well-known that two people cooperating can dig a enjoyment in the doing. of side one Cooperative work tends to pay off in terms of output, quality, and separately. periphery familiar. and simple results will of limited reading, and that people at the centre tend to concentrate when they read on material from the centre by central people, so that published items and results from the periphery will often not be noticed, and may well lose out to 15. central competitors even if they achieve Reflecting other features of the culture and enterprise of the centre which are not so deeply embedded in Australasia: see further R. Routley, ’Culture, philosophy, and approaches to the natural environment - an Australian perspective’, and ’Culture and the roots of political divergence: the Australian/American contrast’, typescripts, Canberra, 1983; both referred to subsequently as ’Culture’. 13 ^2^Sl2IWL_PHILOSOPHTro T. central publication. There is also the fact that people at the centre to merit for merit, more publication and communication opportunities than receive, Here economic factors such as people towards the periphery. market tend (there are, a e.g., many great size of academic more academic philosophers in North America than in the whole rest of the world), control of publishing outlets etc. journals, (with few exceptions all Northern), do begin to enter. economic power does not, and need not, determine culture -^we)can shut philosophical Northern we sets if propaganda want really to. in we And and However off the much the way we shut off our television can stop being impressed by those philosophical middle-men who make a living by importing the Northern stuff. So what do we do? We adapt to the cultural-philosophical level, several of things, that have been suggested in the new (bio-)regionalism. those some regional awakening and local self-management. We do not We aim at slavish remain importers and imitators of, and local commentators on and peddlars of, doctrines and positions from the North. to trying tease out For example, we don’t spend our academic what Wittgenstein or Dummett16 or Quine meant by this or that in the hope that some pale Northern light will perhaps filter through. be lives To I am not suggesting that we emulate the appalling ignorance of people sure, from the North who visit the Antipodes and know little or nothing about what has been done or is being done here; so that we have eminent visitors, their bags heavy with cultural accroutrements, trekking University (now the main for centre through investigation the Australian of relevant logics) and informing us that, or relying crucially on the assumption that, a entails 16. every proposition. National contradiction One reason that these Northerners often know little Nor do we really need C. Martin (an American, formerly professor at Sydney University, now at Calgary) coming by to tell us there are severe difficulties in making Dummett’s stuff work or even cohere (though it’s nice to see him again). 14 ^~^-^S2NAL PHiLosn 1 or nothing about distinctive positions and advances prevailing of assumption the is Antipodes is the the inferiority of cultural and intellectual life in these former southern colonies; another is the narrow (predominantly local) and limited reading undertaken by Northern luminaries. But, despite having been given sufficient cause, we shouldn’t cut ourselves off We can reasonably use what we need from these anyway). so from Northern paradigms and influences (we could hardly manage to entirely we should enterprises. stay informed In any case, but of, imitators not cultures regional continuing are in just as the people are largely European stock. traditions, or part of, their of, rooted older minority) and traditions, Northern So far from cutting loose from these traditions and starting afresh from nowhere, these likely traditions: older (and the local variations that have emerged, are what we want to develop and perhaps mutate, as again with wine styles. The proposal is encourage then develop and paradigms, rather than paradigms we that do increasingly own our working with pale nor-thorn reflections research of fortunately, being do we programs already grounded in need to features make New Zealand is a different and which initiated, of the to pull have larger For the very great culture.17 Nor, more Australia difficult proposition - is already All one really has to do out programs he has already indicated and provide some elaboration and commentary. 17. components. Much of the story, for indicated in Grave’s survey of Australian philosophy. is Northern the story up - though helping to shape the future is part of what the proposal is about. - of It is not as if we have to build from nothing, to do - what is very are advantage things, own research programs, and so shape new Antipodean our difficult - entirely original work, to try to create cultural there local To pull the investigation down to See Culture, op.cit. 15 a more concrete level, I PHTr mo____ shall list some more prominent programs — not the only ones — and remark on some features of them. The longest running and best known program is, without much doubt, that AusfcraATan naturalism, which is generally traced back to Anderson’s empiricist and which aims to see the natural world, and everything else, metaphysics, encompassed suitably program a and Smart in Adelaide which has since died out there. has included such famous components as the mental-material theme and central materialism, state derivatively, a version of functionalism. failures conspicuous scientifically relations of as the frame work of the world of /physical scienc^f. within It contains as a major subprogram Sydney materialism, Place of its in nowadays and Faced like plans, reduction The latter program contingent it all it by initiated identity in, more physicalisms with takes incorporates now a trimmed theory of universals, and an account of natural laws as universals. Parts of the program, especially materialism and central state reductionism and the unified science ideal, have had counterparts in the North, but the program has, for the most part, retained its distinctively Australian character (it never caught on in smoothly, moreover, into Australian culture. New Zealand). The program It is similarly down—to—earth, and earthy, so far as philosophy can be, without the fancy ideas or effete of idealism European philosophy or the spirituality and suppressed puritanism with which much of North American thinking simmers (including nowadays, yet fits pragmatism). And it does not shrink from explicit metaphysical commitments, and though it is basically empiricist, it is positivistic not (rejecting a verification principle, in particular). 18. Anderson’s metaphysics was far more opposed to reductions than what has succeeded it. For an account of Anderson’s philosophy, and a history and account of Australian naturalism and materialism, see especially Grave, op.cit. 16 It is a city, primarily «G4t-y o£ Sydney, based program, but the program does extend outside universities a bit (a tiny bit) to the larger metropolitan the As in North America, so in Australasia, little professional philosophy impinges on broader community1920 , or even on the wider academic community the work by Russell, Popper and Kuhn being exceptional. Australasia would be an quite Perth, and has outliers in Apart from notable exceptions, one achievement, naturalism program used to stretch through to elsewhere), the old from worth it the program has never had there now for.) reaches in The to (or indeed the same hold, or nor, surprisingly, has it had much external criticism from confrontation of major city philosophies having died out. more religion stricken Melbourne philosophy, much more than Sydney, has been dominated by a procession of Northern fashions: more working around Canberra, as well as a core of opposition there. Melbourne philosophy is more historically oriented and than Sydney; this turn Adelaide; more than a rather precarious hold, in Melbourne: heavyweight criticism (To recently, earlier idealism and Continental philosophy; Wittgenstein, ordinary language philosophy; turnabout, Quine, Davidson and extensional reduction; then, a remarkable now perhaps Lewis, Kripke and Dummett? 19. In Canada while most academics from other disciplines would know of, and perhaps a little about, Russell, far fewer would know of Wittgenstein (though he is becoming known to lit. crit. groups), and virtually none would know of Quine. (Subjective sampling). On the ’triumph of professionalism’ in philosophy in USA, see Kuklick, op.cit., p.565ff. Kuklick brings out well some of the more disastrous features of professionalism, but does not sufficiently notice that the virtuous features resulting from some professionalisation can be synthesized with broader philosophical activity. 20. Ellis’s work, and more recently the work of F. Jackson and others (e.g in value theory, H. Munro), which can be accounted part of the broader naturalist program. 17 *• I culture. The one program that reaches beyond the confines of the cities in Australia - is which a metropolitan dominated culture, the vast land always all after environmentalism, being the other - is Australian which has the Colleges of Advanced Education in the country with connections towns and the communes on the North Coast. So far distinguished by what it is not as what it is. of most transformed Europe World, to untouched country left, and little sensitivity accordingly those the and built approaches. human-transformed environment, specifically, issues as such that issues admit shallow European superficiality continues to dominate much of the New And World environmentalism outside North America. differs much as The main environmental issues in Europe tend to concern wilderness. of is and having little wild environment natural its program the Serious and deeper environmental positions are a feature of the New World, the Old having program, diffuse rather a significantly North environmentalism American however from Antipodean environmentalism, most obviously in the religious-spiritual of component former, the in but other several respects as well (see further Culture). Australian More positively, there are three strands to there Firstly, is an extended utilitarianism, differing little from Bentham’s enlarged position, which insists upon counting the This creatures. environmentalism#*- position, developed from a of utilities British base, prominently in animal welfare and animal liberation movements: on focussed animals, domestic animals used in as engineering. genetic interested in, conversion of endangered forests, pain and pleasure. spinoff from It species, is the not of figured it has wild generally with, or much the lands, etc., except insofar as these have a bearing on animal Wider and deeper environmental concerns animal more concerned disappearance sentient and hunted (wild) research however has though animals, it has also become entangled in issues of bio-research such all welfare, and 18 appear only as a so deeper concerns get an inadequate deal. Secondly, there is a wider and utilitarian and ecological deeper a especially wild and in value trees is is not forests and and This position differs from natural systems. American spiritualism and from an extension of American there which which recognises irreducible value elsewhere than sentience or psychological states, which finds intrinsic ecosystems, position, Thirdly, naturalism. of course, as almost everywhere, a reactionary component, critical of the other strands, which insists that all that needs to be accomplished environmental front be can achieved within older established on the ethical and political frameworks. Whereas materialism is based in Canberra and Sydney, environmentalism Melbourne, but also includes Brisbane and Perth. none in Sydney, is the relevant/paraconsistent materialism and environmental programs have further input from relevant/paraconsistent affecting epistemology program and a in in logic metaphysics, respectively, program, other major areas of philosophy, especially metaphysics. which perhaps includes more centres in Australia than any Melbourne, Whereas the program. theory value essentially is core their in Also centred in Canberra, and reaching across the country, with good connections but centred is other but with the one The program program, and which extends to New Zealand, has also been described elsewhere.* 22 21. It has been described more fully elsewhere: see, in particular, Environmental Philosophy (ed. D. Mannison and others), RSSS, Australian National University, 1980. 22. Again, like all the Australian programs, both those mentionedand others, in Grave, op.cit. But see further, R. Routley, ’Research in Logic in Australia, New Zealand and Oceania’, Research Papers in Logic #14, Australian National University, 1983; G. Priest and R. Routley, On Paraconsistency, Research Papers in Logic #13, 1983; R. Routley and others, Relevant Logics and Their PJLvals, Ridgeview, California, 1983. 19 The main research program evident in New Zealand philosophy is also a logic A program. grounded program emanating from the work of Prior and now located mainly in Wellington, it might be called the extended modal program. of the on program The impact is perhaps best seen in Cresswell’s Logics and philosophy Languages. Australian philosophy used to be known, and still is in some quarters, its hard-headed empiricism; regrettably New Zealand philosophy is mostly not known for anything much, except perhaps, in UK, that Prior brought adaption of philosophy Russellian work the of present type that remote place. from impressions is particularly accurate; of for is, his Neither of these both are rather out-of-date. of course, not just unusual to But the aim correct these impressions, not just to reflect or report on culture - for what one would to reflect upon is not sufficiently there - like but also to help manufacture elements of a culture, to make an image. To resist the North, we should increase our efforts to further the flourishing already programs, and perhaps other sunrise projects, to build teaching and research around the programs selected for promotion, elaboration, and criticism, to orient appointments, programs. 23 24 Why bother? technology, especially of involved local people, off the shelf, from the North? There is, firstly, the inferiority built-in and despite their attractive packaging. 23. limited range of applications (e.g. obsolence 25 of Northern Without putting too fine a point for a they're hopeless in the vicinity of Methuen, London, 1973. See also work by Goldblatt and by to in Research in Logic, op.cit. 20 our There are several arguments for not on it, many of the imported intellectual goods are shoddy, and only work very these Why not simply buy our philosophy, like almost all doing this, in more than a limited fashion, which are now sketched. products, to Hughes referred contradictions or dilemmas). Much that is wrong with philosophy Antipodean undoubtedly derives from shoddy intellectual goods imported from the North. Yet buying this material is encouraged by hard-sell cultural the North, who are often enough paid to visit. from ambassadors This is part of the philosophical imperialism from the North - the successor to Northern colonialism that - the Antipodes too willingfysuffers , or, more remarkable, encourages! Secondly, there is the inappropriateness of much of the especially considered as a package, metaphysics, environmental concerns. land or for instance, The European North to Northern cover, has no as product, well as satisfactory environmental ethic fit for Antipodean circumstances, and the American 24. In fact something like the last has been the policy of the LSE. Philosophy Department, where the only outside appointment over a long period was that of Lakatos (hardly a person far removed ideologically). As observed, it now loc s like the practice of the Otago Department also: and apparently it used to be a tendency at Melbourne. But in most places the practice^ is condemned as nepotistic or parochial, and overridden by the call for new (Northern) blood". It is at this stage, among others that administrative measures do matter; for example, to ensure that suitable locally-engaged locals gain employment rather than Northern stooges, in order to inject funds for on-going or new programs, etc. Among sunrise projects in Australian philosophy so far suggested are these: Australian feminism, Antipodean social alternatives, indigenous regiona philosophies (especially Aboriginal, Melanesian, and Polynesian). As foreshadowed with the notion "sunrise projects", much of the rhetoric, and arguments, concerning science policy can be taken over to aPP-Y to > policy, where X is some subject discipline, such as philosophy. 25. Some of these arguments change support centre also. 21 (perhaps revolutionary) at the I too product is spiritually-loaded theory, political Australian mainstream for culture. 26 In work is much too individualistic, and the European American product, especially the Marxist form, unsuited too and for high-tech, local circumstances, especially again for more environmentally-perceptive people. Thirdly, also telling against comparative advantage, are appealing features of and markets and substitution import (including removal fashions, the Old Boy’s of overseas of the world’s avoidance namely, regionalism; control and structures power network in jobs, policies, etc.) and local control, employment of local people, etc. Fourthly, there are arguments for cultural diversity, applied to philosophy as part of intellectual arguments from richness, complexity, sheer culture: into diversity, stability, etc.26 27 In fact, the garden analogy built notion of garden. ’culture’ transfers. introduced. We obtain not only but good whole we want a rich, dense, productive Naturally But not only seeds and plants the and weeds products, cultivars, but European pests and American weeds. many pests are being maize and European Indian This is why selectiveness and control are essential, as against previous haphazard procedures. The proposal is not for, nor would the case sustain, a narrow localism. The suggestion is for carefully selective penetration of intellectual areas. with technology policy, we select niches which are not occupied As or satisfactorily filled, where we can make a difference, and use and develop local skills and methods. base Indeed the policy has to be selective (of philosophers, publishing outlets, etc.). what extent should components, for instance people, our resource But granting regionalism, to books 26. The point is elaborated in Culture. 27. See, for instance, A.A. Mazrui, A World Federation African Perspective, Free Press, New York, 1976. 22 given and of other teaching Cultures: An elements, theories and ideas, be imported and to trained, produced, conceived locally? The extent what possibility different components means that many mixes are possible. insist, so far at least, on they be of selectLveness in There is no need to The case for the present is a particular mix. of local But it will do no harm to indicate elements of a mix that finds much local merely for a regional shift, autonomy and production. Negatively, favour. for significantly a undue emphasis is suggestion the on the (also a Cambridge focus); proper conservative that we try to get rid of the Oxford That includes such things as removal of quasi-historical with one. generally More practice, have the proposal is no however The heavy Oxford influence, in particular, has mostly been many been that a very of the main movements emanating from but also the Moore - later very protective of the Northern status quo; they tend to leave things very much as they Positively, approach of reinforcement of the prevailing Anglo-American England, especially ordinary language philosophy, Wittgenstein degree British empiricism centred on Locke-Berkeley-Hume of the attention to sources; status quo. greater 28 style of teaching and doing philosophy. the should are, and recommend just this. 29 we achieve further disassociation from the Anglo-American empiricist past by widening the range of philosophical traditions 28. Does it sound familiar? Outside philosophy, it should. For example, we have now been told by the Americans that our defence role, unlike theirs, is regional, not global: this is supposed to shed great light on our previously confused defence policies. 29. The point is laboured in E. Gellner, Words and Things, Victor Collancz, London, 1959. But even ordinary language philosophy, though it much contracted the proper range of philosophical investigations, had its liberating elements, e.g. removal of some of the narrowness and more cramping assumptions induced by technical jargon. drawn upon, to include not only thought, Eastern neglected in parts of but also Pacific ethnic material and Australasian philosophy. The idea is that such a plurality assist and strands continental sources, of especially in will teaching, removing narrower cultural biasses and enable more discrimination to Then too we should be better able to see the be obtained. ranges theories of that are open to us in the Antipodes and how to advance our own programs. APPENDIX 1. Notes investigation of on the philosophical supply situation. Sociological the philosophy labour market in Australia and New Zealand has yet to be attempted. of But a picture some the underlying elements simple numerical argument of the text can be gained from the following table: TABLE 1. Ph.Ds in Philosophy: a USA/Australian comparison USA Number (Male/Female) 1977 330 (264/66) 1978 283 (235/48) 1979 285 (204/54) Australia Number 9 1980 4 1981 4 Notes: 1. New Zealand Number The breakdown of the USA numbers by sexes is (male/female) given. Similar figures do not appear to be available for Australia. 2. The US figures are for the academic year ending in the e.g. 1978 covers the Northern Year academic year 1977-78. shown, Southern figures are for the calendar year shown. In applying table 1 some simplifying assumptions are made. candidates for appointment to regular university It is positions assumed now that require a 9 find trite a moral fair dealing'), but nothing at all distinctive. national philosophy, exclude there being programs). So Australia has at least various life, of regional far, then, all is well. the inconsistency: of humour, courage and base to build on ('traditions ... trouble derives but So far, then, there be (such as local research But shortly the Editor is plunged into from the extravagant claim that Philosophy' (p.295; with rearrangement). sweep' than any national boundaries — these "she values is a Though the easily avoided by rescinding the extravagant claim, the ideal of a National Philosophy should be allowed to rest in had its time. involving has nothing to do with Philosophy, contradicting the possibility of a National Philosophy. contradiction do But, as Australia has nothing per se to do with these - as is virtually conceded, 'wider 'if nothing to do with these - the eternal values of the Spirit, the Ideals of Truth, Goodness and Beauty - then and only then has she nothing to with a this does not however is not: philosophies can peace: nationalism has PROSPECTS FOR REGIONAL PHILOSOPHIES IN AUSTRALASIA Philosophy, especially academic philosophy but also folk philosophy, like intellectual and higher cultural activity in Australasia, has long been (Uhfi swainped, by Northern increayngly from North America. Europe, now inltutal i!t largely indeed dominated, the from patterns, of composition ethnic resulting uU-HT; populations, such a result was virtually does not initially the migration Given imported, baggage and/other Influences, the But it inevitable. Suitable policies, a good philosophy policy, have to stay that way. could change things. I he of thought is cultuie, hardly a regional a new one. philosophy, In 1923, a matching perhaps a regional correspondent to the New Zealand newly-1aunched Aust r a1asIan Journa1 of Psychology and Philosophy mentioned the possibility of 'a new kind or temper of philosophy under these southern skies’ which the 11 o *5 SIK reaching for (or, not community). soi id might Journal, merely foundation that for a matter, professional although And The foster. some Journal has actively pursued philosophers things new regionalism however hardly but have changed in philosophy, its a fulfilled pronounced wider of aim Australasian in Australia, laying a that possibility of a new Lemper of phiLosophy has hardly been realised. There is little in the way of a new kind and temper of philosophy southern skies were intended to include: distinctively New Zealand skies, which the but few distinguishing features, ’no under characteristics, New have Zealand shown up in New Zealand The question was taken up by the Editor in the discussion is considered below, especially in p/ces 1 pin losophy' .- New Zealand remains a substantial net The situation of colonial dominance that used to prevail in and philosophers. Aus 11.11. la, wheie virtually all chairs, were filled by academics philosophy, Importer of philosophy, and many from the North, posts academic other in tends to persist in New Zealand, where no established chairs are occupied by locals.\ Given the usual power and Influence of professors topics coveted considered and in small and in courses designed, departments, especially appointments made, the heavy Northern orientation of philosophy taught and researched in New Zealand is not The Northern control is perhaps most strikingly exhibited at the surprising. oldest of New Zealand Philosophy Department event , the the University of has been substantially captured by a like increasingly looks universities, an offshoot of overwhelming Anglo-American the Otago, where the British School and University of London.In any dominance of New Zealand philosophy 1 so <1 feature only in slightly lesser degree of Australian philosophy — can be confirmed by a content survey of the courses offered and research papers written at Now Zealand universities. Even when local people have been appointed to positions in Australasia, they have been brought up on a solid diet of Anglo-American material, and they have often been reforged or finished in the North as well. In particular, the S.A. Grave, A History of Philosophy in Australia, Queensland University Piess, 1)84, p.l. Page references are to the manuscript. The paper draws/ heavily on this history. / / was correct at the t^me of presentation of J ' J/ ' v/i th the recent loss of^Xiair at Wellington, the qualification, but the pattern of domination persists. the pager (August claimrequires *ln the 1981 Commonwealth University Handbook listing, 6 of the 8 members of the Department held their main degree, Ph.D., from London, and one of the remainder from Exeter. Only one member of the Department, soon to retire, falls outside the nexus. of requirements the major period post­ of li expansion were conveniently seen to in the case of philosophy by World War the in the Australasian universities B.Phil, Oxford products of Many degree. fill's cultural mill: in Oxford were hard (unwarranted) departments of indeed until philosophy full remain of the mid 70s candidates finished to beat out when they applied for positions, such was the prestige of Oxford and the regrettable, but still continuing, "cultural cringe". Nonetheless, been occurring scene (as in Northern it indicated). significant dominance, especially on the Antipodes, be will the despite the Australian worth is asking changes have philosophical Australian whether phiLosophy is moving towards the sort of change that occurred in USA more than 100 years ago when the Harvard Philosophy Department was brought (or bought) together, its "golden and age" began.’ American the same again, and became its own thing. philosophy was never quite There are now new forces operating which could help to move Australian philosophy in such a direction. the widespread regionalism/' other provides a which applies choices; local fashioning emergence, of national model for and particularly cultural to in in alternative and there are of choice along ideological contrast, there and technology policies, reflection in regional also some is philosophy directly bears on parts of the philosophy of science. soon appear, culture, stark science serious obstacles There is the a new with centralised which not only policy but also Unfortunately, as will to regional philosophies and to the very idea of a regional philosophy. See B. Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy; Cambridge, Massachusetts 1860-1930, Yale University Press, 1977 , Parts 2 and 3. On this bio-regionalism, see especially, Fourth World News, vol. 1, and K. Sale, Hitman Scale, Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, New York, 1930. 1983, 1 other seek b,1! (Iu<i'!iy fs to satisfice on a mix of factors, of which assessed only one, and not often the highest ranking one. Ability to fit program, teaching or research, is another, and commonly more lnto 8ort iiipo/iant factor; and so H ! linGS bc a regionally reason why such a program should not is no good there So given prevailing practices, oriented one. the argument from excellence does not exclude regional philosophy programs. in my event, there are enough local candidates of sufficient worth to proceed >‘-giona] w!I;i And, programs without sacrifice clearcut excellence. of Local enterprise need entail no loss of excellence, and could well increase it. btP'! 1 s" v • 1 i! ■ 1 b'J objection is that cutting of excellence, objective obJt( ■ * importance; that criticism is of notions llL'J' ' ' 1 '".ll_ ff".l these there is something seriously amiss and notions objective values with open are more contextual-re lativisation a rather narrow intellectual the to generally, of component paradigm, notion same sorts they that of of have the valuing: While those operating framework or viewpoint to which these values relate.10 within connected the as such ordinary Oxbridge language philosophy or Sydney materialism say, can bracket out the viewpoint, '1 's incorporated in the operat ional paradigm, and so arrive at set !! :s’’1 y objective quality judgements, the judgements are not preserved (e.g. m truth Marxist value) when viewpoints. transposed ConsidcZ to for other frameworks, comparison, the e.g. idealistic judgements as to or the quality or worth of a forestWade variously by a deep ecologist, an industrial forester, and a recreational officer. Compare judgements as to the quality of What fol lows also begins to bring out what is omitted in a main theme if R.S. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motor Cyc1e Maintenance, Bodley Head, Lond 1974. Note that efusing the notion of objective excellence does not lea^ subjectivism. T avoid the customary false dichotomy , compare the noti validity (usuall Ci1 led to themselves these days by classical logicians' with that of quality^/. 9 a ho 1 i s i /c a I 1 y-i nc I. i ned Marxi st, philosophers it group As because the of problems such '!lt » is importance of are be cannot even judged, main philosophical work are not of quality peer done problems or independent of But tackled. issues is highly paradigm dependent. the For example, those of qu in t i f y i ng-i n and of poss l b Le worlds and of de re importance for immense mainsti -am empiricist restricted that ire judgements reveal, to which assume the language, There work by members of the not done problems and import nice of whit is ordinary philosophers. environmental such that by like institutions. begins this outside it Harvard and judgements witiiiii pretend who philosopher, environmental Californian and seemi ng 1y environmental the important fashionable referential theories paradigm, vanish to relative insignificance Now observe viewpoint. that most judgements as to problems and what constitutes importkj/t work - matters tbechelping, determine quality - are shipped down from the North. is relative to their paradigmatic placement, and Their importance the paradigms concerned are exported to the Antipodes through the main channels already indicated. fri'e to reject be .argued, choose that these paradigms and select alternatives, good reasons different generally energy favoured to do just technology in the that, much as (or different North the which We are and there are, it can there are military North is good reasons technology) eager to to from export southwards. against which might alternatively be the called cosmopolitan/internalional the Peter Stuyvesant argument international r argument , everrywhere smoke that mass-produced and -marketed The argument ' cosmopol i t in subject', pJL Jo-Zj cvnYy' c. Pi ^e/S3)r?'5"?. is based that is a from i s not Holland; this superior product.. cigarette-sophist lest ion on the assumption that pM the sort of enterprise for wht f '/is c^ra- 10 poetry for assumpt ion has only important sori (a to be presented propositional to be questioned. that philosophy thing, theory), not a is a 1 i terature , and work not just. theorems i nternati ona11y-approved format,12 ’ philosophy, since no more than It and The takes for granted, finished product of a certain (e.g. involved the if And novel.11 the process of production also. process of production the place and people mater i a I or of in discussion) art , a rg urn e n t s But in the like a piece assembled in are of an then again the historical setting ma t ters , literature, does not emerge in a vacuum. Plato's philosophy could not have emerged in ancient Australia, and if cribbed in mid 20th century Oxford would surely have been marked down or rejected. fmpoi taut not 1 in aesthet ics extent sets ol adopted in prospect themes nonnucleai Europe that do not that been produced New to be sidetracked need and arguments in another. but to be contested, produced . such as whether and what in one place and setting could A nonnuclear technology of some sort could be apparently will Zealand, into issues — resembling problems in not contrast It is J be, with whereas there Australia, is will reasonable pursue a >t what could be done, that Eravi.’, op.cit., p.2: the term 'cosmopolitan subject' used there comes fioni Donegan. As to the significance of place and people for literature, see fin ! hi’i C. Partridge, The Making of New Cultures, Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam, bike i paper in the biological sciences. But here again technique methodology, which may both be regional, are crucially important. and 13 ■pies, e.g. concerning modem American work. Consider, for instance such texts as W.V. Quine's Word _ (bi ley, New York, 1.960) or R. Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia (Basic Books, New York, 1974). The assumptions taken Tor granted, the arguments involved, etc., are especially American: it is not just the style. £9_c-ePta^j 1 i ty of arguments and positions is dependent on place and r e c e 1 v ed par a d I gm . 11 .71 a L t < • r s here . Dialethic much Anglo-American methodology of which logic, invalidates philosophy, could the and technique perhaps be done in the North (though there1 would be substantial cultural resistance): it is not being done there, this extent, and is not likely Antipodeans can their choose the! r own international/cosmopo11 tan argument, s tit ed techniques, Of course do it can the Anglo-American sphere.To to be done in be argued, o wn distinctive dis tine t ive and technology The thing. in a form that would be telling, it is being argued, that Antipodeans don’t need to be, or even oughtn't to be pursuing their own energy or logic policies and apparatus. of But meeting these considerations takes us to a whole new set issues concerning the merit of various policies and programs, diversity, etc. - far beyond the cosmopolitan argument. which we shall return, arguments concerning are not a cooking: the. point of The new arguments, to lot more convincing however than comparable that we don't, devising our own cuisine or wine, styles. need to be or oughtn't to be British, or at least cosmopolitan, cooking is adequate: we. should stick, to that and buy it off the shelf from the North, ideally importing the cooks also. Do we have good reasons to think that British philosophy is better, these days, than British cooking? Antipodeans are free, in principle then, to pursue their own paradigms; and to do so they will by and large want to, and mostly have to, appoint their own people, people they have educated - not saboteurs or people who have (had) 14, Much as communist anarchism, a live possibility for communes and perhaps communities in Australia, is culturally excluded in North America, owing to tiie extreme possessive individualism of that culture. On dialethic logic, see G. Priest and R. Routley, On Paraconsistency, Research Papers In Logic, #13, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1983. 12 elsuJhere, in particular from the North. parad igms features of the I oca 1 though works of integral do. cultural paradigms, with distinctive culture? way, philosophy will to not usually programs, unimportant Independent features, not But or at least, with tie in style, I5 do already restricted with link, they may culture in the link. the truth, far considers Grave particular philosophical 'an Australian wha t matters acceptabilit/, so to Australia as compared is independent mJ correctness they philosophy in this though add. - extent, help mark that to limited a cultural certain truth tic 4 fashion that novels (as distinct from more technical works) sometimes Indeed, hastens perused But will the do product' he in philosophy’ and matter, are not percept ion from under lyi/g broad theory or received paradigm. CG'n £)Q_ However the marks Grave U-y ut Ivin ecu/, A do not features serve to the distinguish philosophy Australian Australian exhibits in s i g n i f 1 c a n t though they are, product, lesser the degree adventurous and polemical philosophy of Greek antiquity. by Passmore as 'most typical of Australian first two than the being more The first, described philosophy' , is a 'diversity of approach and readiness to put forward an unconventional or unfashionable point of v iew' ,' (> philosophy, something wh ich more (with typical some of notable ancient philosophy exceptions) than exhibits Australian an austere 15 Nothing need be conceded to strong cultural relativity themes, though they would support the case. It is enough that our theories remain radically incom|> 1 e te and th.11 there can accordingly be rival theories as to what is true. Similarly, however philosophy is conceived - as the search for truth, explan it. ion, understanding and wisdom (all of these and more, really), or as, more vaguely, inquiry of a certain soil - there can be, and will, be, competing accounts; so a pluralistic theory is inevitable in giving a fuller view. Both preceding quotations, while included as such in Grave's Introduction, are It™ J. Passmore, 'Philosophy', in The Pattern of Australian Culture fed. ' " 'lcL«'0O, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y., 1963 , pp.131-163. The same annotation also applies to the third mark. 13 uni1ormit y re fI ec t i ng more and that often at/rlbuted sorprising , most 'the philosophy, WittgensteLnian Andersonian notable Melbourne philosophy i s ^’the mark ... example and itself manifestoed character’ Andersonian Sydney, This example (p.2). the ... being 'The second, itself. Land to the is line-up it if Australian of the not was far between isolated: from ited by "Australian materialism", ■ discussed by Grave), relevant/pa raconsis tent to sharp criticism by and growing the program, with Americans. philosophy departments confrontation (both concerning the local ('adversarial’) style leading Connected with these first marks two furl her character 1st les of much Australian philosophy, as of much unkindly unwillingness add (in the mu file poi n t s , hope of locating A are 8th century turi^-of- this-century Cambridge philosophy! di rec tness , the namely surface clarity/and, some would difference), bluntness, genuine unsubtlety and crudity. third and the Jour th marks yklvnnci'^/ are very different- ~~ A Anglo-American philosophy; namely Australasia from, and its general the isolation of academic philosophy indifference or even hostility to, in the sort tZ7 1 7 Though:for the most p< that influenced by Sydney rather than that originating 1 n^JJpl bourne. "this reflects the different historical i nJ 1 u_e 11 c e s -rhrriT Sydney and Melbourne philosophy.f-oj-’ a-h4 y Scottish dZTf-rrf- Contineryfal antecedents. A 1 Cj? V A" I r V of (e.g. philosophy imported of that Nietzsche and the existentialists) 8eneratlng Interest in literary and arts circlls. rhe philosophy failure does of not such marks matter. to one For lts Australian !cts- .nother, Australian is produce regionalism >ot more regional positions such as . •lism «fth national philosophies. ChlnJ, is an undesirable trait, > as In Na‘ the thing, r< nationa11 out separate "Ot in other cultural » 'S^nked, with the breakdown of nations and contraction of state power.18 * * : ............ merging proposal loin 1,1 181,1 irch in iiors- °f COP1CS 1 : ■ >d«. ind 18t< 1 “t”>n UB not 8 suggestions lecide , , Sale, that that begin to our own priorities, that is, that we play our th North) and not theirs, Gridiron and Basketball - but that we abandon the individual competitive model of cultural achievement, 18Q< aec > e.g., London, 1957. we that we do our own selection just, fr< RU1< that > Pt bllcatlons and appointments, study 1 styl this, oir own distinctive things, and 11 1 is op.cit., and L. ?’011 r > sold to us and fostered Tlu>_ breakdown of Nations , RKP , Ihe Editor of the new.1923 AJPP did however take seriously the notion of National Philosophy, of (what must have surprised some New Zealand readers) an Australian Philosophy; some of the issui s there raised (p.292ff) are addressed in Appendix 2. In favour of a group cooperative approach (elements of which are by the .Iort.ii, already modelled in Antipodean social clubs). ihe thoughts here are simple and familiar. digging example: more rapidly On the one side is the ditch- it is well-known that two people cooperating c.an and enjoyably than two people working Cooperalive work ten Is to pay off output, quality, and enjoyment the in doing. on dig a ditch :he ditch separately. or el ewhere in terms of On the ot her side, experience shows that we in the periphery cannot individually cmip^el ete very successfully with the centre on achievements in ior this. the attainment nature of results of depends acce:;:i to unpublished material. There are several reasons Despite the highly competitive Ono is the communication situation. p r s ’ i omi nan tIy ind i vi iua 1is t ic in their programs. American academic upon enterprise,^ much verbal rapid communication and For, despite the individualism myth, work is joint ly based, and builds on the work of many; when the time is ripe for some- several clever people will idea or result, communications result:, an I periphery the tend na t i oiri 1 is t 1 c are to Important assignment lose out. considerations Russians will obtaining in of credit Again (e.g. for is th e facc~ I o- f ace scm 1 nars so that fact Poles that Local rapid Here it. much results tend Then again the publication of there is a mix Russian who achieves a The re be able to hit on it. to again result at or at the There are people of reasons:- promote idea Polish results, about the same time as is conveyed verbally and will be conveyed. through There is the IH'llecling other features oi Ihe culture and enterprise of the centre which are not so deeply embedded in Australasia: see further R. Routley, Culture, philosophy, and approaches to the natural environment an Austral I in perspective', in The Environment, Ethics and Ecology (ed. D. Bennett), The Faculties, Aust raIian National University, 1984, and also Culture and the roots of political divergence: the Australian/American contrast , typescript , Canberra, 1981; both referred to subsequently as ' Cu J ture ’ . fact Limited of when 1.11 e y pub 1 i shed may reading, read on and that material from L terns and results we J I I ose out There publication. receive, to merit also for merit, the from the central is people at more by to tend central concentrate so people, that periphery wi 11, often not be noticed, and fact that publication towards the periphery. thin people centre competitors the the centre even they if the at people achieve Here economic tend centre communication and central to opportunities factors do begin to enter; ket (there are, e.g., a grept many more academic philosophers in North America than in the whole rest of the world), control of publishing outlets and journals (with few exceptions all Northern), etc. culture - we can shut off way we being However economic power does not, and need not, determine the Northern shut off our television impressed by sets if philosophical those philosophical propaganda in much the we really want middle-men to. who And we can stop make a living by importing the Northern stuff. So what do we do? We adapt to of the cultural-philosophical level, several those things, that have been suggested in the newer regionalism. some regional importers and doctrines and awakening and self-reliance. of, and local from the North. imitators positions local We do commentators For not remain on example, We aim at we and slavish peddlars of, spend our don't academic Lives trying to tease out what Davidson or Dumrnett or Kripke meant by this or through. that To in the be hope sure, I that am some pale not Northern light sugg esting that we will perhaps emulate the filter appalling ignorance of people from the No r t h who visit the Antipodes and know little or nothing about what has been done or Jis being done here;^ so that we Regrettably, the Ignorance extends to many locals. In particular, infected with Sydney materialism appear remarkably ill-informed as to features oi other Australasian programs. have those basic 17 vi: Hors, Australian the through investigation of heavy bags their cultural with University National the (now main relevant logics) and Informing us that, or relying crucially positions '■ n advances is ind ! ioiity colo!IJ( often Northerners these for centre One reason on tnu assumption that, a contradiction entails every proposition. that trekking accroutrements, cultural of and intellectual narrow nothing or is the t.he Antipodes the is another little know about distinctive prevailing assumption of life these in (predominantly local) and former the southern limited reading undertaken by Northern luminaries. despite /having But, ourselves off to anyway: been fro/ Northern paradigms and az I propaganda is different). of, or part of, in ' their enterprises. c u t ’ *1 k ’ these nowliere* 1 oose 1.r om (and older shouldn’t cut Influences (we could hardly manage We can reasonably use what we need from In any case, regional cultures are rooted ■ 1 we cause, so we should stay informed of, but not imitators continuing traditions: tiics< sufficient given these likely traditions minority) a nd rgely European stock. start! ng afresh traditions, and the from local variations that have already appeared are what we want to develop and perhaps mutate, as again with wine styles. 1,111 things, ol L-K‘ Proposal is then that encourage and develop our own Antlpodean paradigmfl, ’• rather H is increasingly research programs, than working not as we H ™ very Sreat a nt own local and so shape newer - to bui Id from nothing, to of do to try to create cultural programs ilready Initiated, which have the of being grounded 2I . ’ See Cuiture, op.cit. our with pale northern reflections “ entirely ori Inal work, are res< lrcl do in features of the larger culture.212 18 Nor, do we need fortunately, - Australia part 1 j u'■ o! c New Zealand to do * more difficult the story, for proposition - is All one really To pull the investigation down to a more concrete sketch some more prominent cooperative programs - by no means on Ly programs - and remark on some rel evant features of them. ‘L?. longest running and PdJ 111 .... .IdJL and 1 r sin , science. (physical) best known program is, which ’ 1 >r program The c'.ipi r i <-ist metaphysics,... and state version of tr famed as materialism, both back and world, and* 22 Faced plans, like il takes it initiated in, identity theme more physicalisms all now Anderson's It in The latter program has included there. nowadays to program the mental-material contingent ’1reduction theory of uiiivcisals, that in Armstrong's work. a functionalism. ,n natural traced subpro components central generally is is now best exhibited Adelaide which subsequently died out famous the see to aims without much doubt, as suitably encompassed within the framework of the world of e[se, incorporates a derivatively, with and a conspicuous "scientifically" and an account of natural laws as relations of universals, components of the developing Sydney realism. Parts of the nd central state reduction^sm and y matei science ideal, have had counterparts in the North, but the program t!!l has, Much of about. to bring out programs he has already indicated and provide some is I. shall Jlie such is different and is a elaboration and commentary. level, proposal chough helping to shape in Grave's survey of Australian philosophy. already indicated has the what of the story up - to make for the most part, retained its distinctively Australian character 22 > An Arson's metaphysics was however far more opposed to reductions than whal has succeeded it. For an account of Anderson's philosophy, and a history and account op.cit. of Australian naturalism and materialism, see especially Grave r y , 19 respite export efforts, it never caught on in New Zealand. It is similarly down-to-earth, - earthy, and so far as whlch much of American North does not n city r ‘ from >23 or ' positivistic the University would be quite ropolitan culture. of the ,ider turn achievement, h one to through 1 notable community, icademic ■ an exceptions, the As in tonal philosophy impinges on 11 even on 8t from from mainly ' t£ny hit) to t ia, Apart not is it universltles; but the program does extend outside th lstrala81a metaphysical explicit in particular). broadcast program, based it ink piricist, (rejecting a verification principle, ’s effete nowadays, (including simmers thinking ba* 18 £t !t ideas or fancy the without philosophy or the spirituality and suppressed puritanistn 111901 01 Eu 01 Wlth be, philosophy can The program fits program worth this working lelaide; it work by around for.) now reaches in The to 1 core of opposition there. has never had the same hold, or ’or example, while most academics from other disciplines would °f’ and perhaps a little about, Russell, far fewer would know of iH;! - i'1 (though fie is becoming known to lit. crit. groups), and virtually none would know of Quine. (The sampling is subjective.) kHOW On the hL'?-’ fairly recent 'triumph of professionalism' in philosophy in USA, see b--’65ff. Kuklick brings out well some of the more r/Hls ''^Oures ol professionalism, but does not sufficiently notice that 7 1* 1 features resulting from some pro fess tonalisation can be synthesized with broader philosophical activity. 20 more i rather precarious hold, than in Melbourne: 4 nor, more surprisingly, has it. had heavyweight criticism from there (or indeed much external criticism from elsewhere), the old confrontation of major city philosophies having died Melbourne out. than stricken Continental procession a then, philosophy; fashions: recently, remarkable a Northern of more philosophy; oriented historically and more reLigion philosophy, much more than Sydney, Sydney; Melbourne by dominated is more philosophy earlier Wittgenstein, Quine, turnabout, has been idealism and language ordinary and Davidson extensional reduction; now perhaps Lewis, Kripke and Dumrnett? one The program beyond reaches that confines the of the cities in Australia - which is after all a metropolitan dominated culture, the vast land always the other being a Australian environmentalism, is - rather diffuse of Advanced Education in the towns and country much distinguished environmental by what positions are it a is not as feature of transformed the New most specifically having little wild untouched country left, and such as issues Europe that tend admit Ihii opt*.in to having those concern shallow the wilderness. built approaches superficiality environmentalism of outside (and continues North and it what Europe to So far the program is as the communes on the North Coast. is. World, its of natural America. deeper Old World, and environment and environmental human-trans formed to the and little sensitivity accordingly The main encourage Serious environment, techno-fix dominate North much issues situations). of American the New in Issues And World environmentalism differs significantly however from Antipodean environmentalism, most obviously ' ‘ihe exceptions include Ellis's distinctive program, which can be accounted part of the broader naturalist program, and at Monash the work of F. Jackson and, earlier, of il. Munro in value theory. 21 in the religious-spiritual component of the former but several in other respects as well (see further Culture). More there positively, are an is there enviton.nentallsmfirstly, strands three Australian to utilitarianism, extended differing 1‘' in theory from Bentham's enlarged position, which insists upon counting In the utilities of all Iris figured prominently In animal welfare and animal liberation British base, movements: This position, developed from a sentient creatures. though and it has focussed bio-research more generally such as genetic engineering. endangered species, or much interested in, concerned with, animals used in it has also become entangled in issues of animals, researm and hunted (wild) domestic animals, on It is not however the disappearance of wild lands, the conversion of forests, etc., except insofar as these have a bearing on animal pain and pleasure. Wider and deeper environmental concerns appear only as a spinoff from animal welfare, and so deeper concerns get an inadequate deal. Secondly, there is a wider and a deeper ecological position, which is not utilitarian and which recognises irreducible value elsewhere than sentience or forests and differs ecosystems, American from nature 1 Ism. s t a t es , p s y c h o 1 og i c. a 1 as Thirdly, which finds especially there is reactionary component, critical of needs that to be accomplished natural wild and spiritualism on and of intrinsic value from course, an as the other strands, the environmental systems. in trees This position of American extens ion everywhere, almost and a which insists that all front can be achieved within older estab I tshed (European) ethical and political frameworks. Whereas materialism is based in Sydney, environmentalism is centred in has been described more fully elsewhere: see, in particular, cn La 1 Philosophy (ed. D. Mannison and others), RSSS, Australian National University, 1980. It: 22 ;llld Canberra, but also Includes '11 ’*!) '111 Brisbane and Perth. Also centred in Canberra, and reaching across the country, with good connections Ln Melbourne, !ew b,lt in materialism and epistemology from reLevant/paraconsistent other affecting program wh i ch program, a nd programs have environmental input perhaps wh ich is program areas major program. relevant/paraconsistent the is Sydney, New in Zealand, respectively, the program, one logic especially centres more to extends a essentially but The metaphysics. Australia than also been has with in metaphysics, theory value philosophy, of includes and their core the Whereas any other described , 26 elsewhere. n 1 *n ! !H logic grounded research program program. A impact of the in New Zealand philosophy program emanating ton, Inc evident program on it might from the work of is also Prior and a now be called the extended modal program. philosophy is perhaps best seen in Cresswell’s work.27 Australian philosophy used for its hard-headed known fo1 empiricism; to be known, is in some quarters, regrettably New Zealand philosophy is mostly anything much, except unu.-,u.i] adaption o! and still t rh ps, in UK, that Prior brought Russellian philosophy from that remote place. his Neither of ...‘,ain, like al] the Australian programs, both those mentioned and others, {_’rave> op.cit. But see further, R. Routley, 'Research in Logic in KTU!,ral;a ’ NeW Ze Jceania' , R search Papers in Logic #14, Australian National University, 1983 (which also considers other programs in logic)* G- Priest and R. Routley, op. cit.; and R. Routley, R.K. Meyer and others’, -J- -£?C2JLL s a nd e i r Rivals, Ridgev lew, California , 1982. 2 7 c. , „-,,,Se,e especially N.J. Cresswell, Logics and , ' —o---......... .. Languages, Methuen, ucuuu^u, London, iy/3; but see also -1 — ----’ 1by Goldblatt - . . ■ and- -by Hughes --------------------work referred to in Research in Logic, op.cit. Also described there is <an original ,1....1 version of the modal program (transparent intensional logic) elaborated by Tlchy at Otago. 2J these impressions is particularly accurate; both are rather out-of-date. work of l!::i impress Lons, the present type is, of course, not just to reflect or report not just But to correct these on culture - for what one would like to reflect upon is not sufficiently there - but also to help manufacture elements of a culture, to make an image. io resist the North, we should Increase our efforts to further the sunrise projectsbuild f e,lr ding .Jiid research and criticism, iround tin’ programs selected for promotion, elaboration, to orient: appointments, especially of involved local people, to 28. 4 ...nong sunrise projects in Australian philosophy so far suggested (not all °* Ihiin feasible) are these: Australian feminism, Antipodean social and political. alternatives, peace studies, indigenous regional philosophies (especially Aboriginal, Melanesian, and Polynesian). Another promising field, witli practical consequences, for local initiative is the philosophy of education, where material produced by R.S. Peters has dominated the market, with stultifying effects It is now alleged. As foreshadowed with the notion of "sunrise projects", much of the rhetoric, cl nd a i gum on t, concerning science and technology policy (presented in the case of Australia in Jones, op.cit.) can be taken over to apply to X policy, where X is some subject discipline, such as philosophy. 24 i 2 9, these programs." Why bother? for not doing this, there Northern in more than a limited fashion, which are now sketched. the firstly, is, products, point on despite vicinity it, many of Antipodean of the imported obsolence of most Without putting too intellectual goods are shoddy, and packaging. dilemmas). or undoubtedly imported from Idle North. built-in range of applications (e.g. contradictions philosophy and inferiority their attractive only work for a very limited tiie simply buy our philosophy, like almost technology, off the shelf, from the North? There are several, arguments I oui fine a Why not derives from they’re hopeless in that Much shoddy is with wrong goods intellectual Yet buying this material is encouraged by hard-sell cultural ambassadors from the North, who are often enough paid to visit. This In fact something like the last has been the policy of the LSE Philosophy Department, where the only outside appointment over a long period was that of Lakatos (hardly a person far removed ideologically). As observed, it now looks like the practice of the Otago Department also; and apparently it used to be a tendency at Melbourne. But in most, places the practice is condemned as nepotistic or parochial, and overridden by the call for "new (Northern) blood . however there can be significant differences between nepotistic appointments and those strengthening local programs. Is ;,t this stage, among others that administrative measures do matter; for example, to ensure that suitable locally-engaged locals gain employment rather than Northern stooges, to direct funds into on-going local programs rather thin Imported fashions, etc. There are various ways appropriate administrative details can be handled, locally or nationally; but nothing draconian, such as wholesale exclusion of noncitizens, is required. Observe, indeed, that no restriction of academic appointments to nationals (in Canadian style) or the like is being advocated. Anyone who arrives at a conclusion of that sort from what has been argued has misunderstood the case in crucial respects. As a matter of simple mathematics, restricting appointment fields characteristically reduces both quality of candidates available (however quality is assessed) and range of possibilities open for future research; and no such restrictions are advocated. The author has witnessed the debilitating effects of field restrictions at the Australian National University and elsewhere. 30p Borne of centre also. t hesi! arguments support change (perhaps revolutionary) at the 25 is part Northern of philosophical the - colonialism Imperialism the that from the too Antipodes the successor North - suffers, willing to more- or, remarkable, encourages! Secondly, especially there is the inappropriateness of much of the Northern product, considered as metaphysics, environmental for package, a cover, to as well as The European North has no satisfactory concerns. land or environmental ethic instance, fit for Antipodean circumstances, the deeper and American pack ige is too spiritually-loaded for mainstream Australian culture. 31 In political is work the European product, and competition-based, unsuited being American theory, both too precious and much individualistic too especially the Marxist too high-tech for local form, and is circumstances, especially again for more environmentally-perceptive people. also thirdly, features of import woi Id's markets power substitution and structures against telling pressures and the (including and comparative advantage, regionalism; namely, fashions, Old Boy’s removal, of network in are appealing of the overseas control and avoidance jobs, policies, etc.), and gaining of local control, employment of local people, etc. Fourthly, there philosophy as complexity, sheer part are of arguments intellectual diversity, stability, for cultural arguments culture: 32 etc. “ diversity, In fact, from applied to richness, the garden analogy i’he point is elaborated in Culture. At a more practical level Northern products arc; again often unsuitable, though for different reasons. For example, the transfer of American agricultural methods and equipment to the thin poor soils of the Antipodes has bad disastrous effects, at last beginning to be recognised. See, for instance, A.A. Mazrui, A World Federat ion of Cultures: An African Per spec live, Free Press, New York, 1976. Into the whole notion of 'culture’ built dense, garden. productive transfers. Naturally we want a rich, But not only seeds and plants but weeds and many being introduced. pests are We obtain not only good cultivars, but European pests and European and selectiveness are control products, Indian maize and American weeds. This is why as essantLal, against haphazard previous procedures. i'he proposal with local Is not whatever products, their quality, replacing Northern ones. heroes, the case sustain, nor would for, That local a narrow localisiiri^ fashions, and local. cMl t is certainly not the preferred wai of the newer regionalism, which tends to do without fashions and heroes and leeks impact, and so on; low environmental durable quality in products, nor is the way ol technology policy. Rather, as with technology policy, we select niches which are or not occupied filled, satisfactorily where to outlets, be selective etc.). given our base resource (of can make a Indeed the policy difference, and use and develop local skills and methods. has we philosophers, publishing to what extent should components, But granting regionalism, for instance people, books and other teaching elements, theories and ideas, be imported and locally? I’he to what extent should they be particular mix. There is no need The case for the present trained, conceived in different components means that possibility of selectiveness many mixes are possible. produced, to insist, so far at least, on a is mainly for a regional shift, for a significantly greater degree of local, autonomy and production But it will do no harm to indicate elements of a mix that finds much Docs it sound familiar? Outside philosophy, it should. For example, we have now been told by the Americans that our defence role, unlike theirs, is regional, not global: this is supposed to shed great light on our previously confused defence policies. 27 local the suggestion Negatively, favour. is that we try to eradicate much of the Oxford style of Leaching and doing philosophy. as undue removal of Berke1ey-Hume with the (a however no standard emphasis on British focus); attention proper empiricism British to of of sources; movements emanating from England, they are, pi the Northern status quo; recommend and this. just 1 approach the of influence, in More generally, many of especially the protective ol ord Locke- on reinforcement heavy particular, his mostly been a very conservative one. main centred quasi-historical the us the Includes such things That -lice, language ordinary have been very to leave things very much as they tend Positively, the proposal is that we achieve further disassociation from the Anglo-American empiricist past in two ways: by framework, emphasizing by and to Eastern thought, philosophy. teaching, will parochialism, The idea assist and projects diversifying selectively drawn upon, parts of local is the include not but also that that move range constricting that philosophical of traditions only neglected Continental strands and Pacific ethnic such a outside material and plural i ty of sources, Australasian especially in in removing narrower cultural biasses, such as British enable more discrimination to be obtained. Then too we should be better able to see the ranges of theories that are open to us in the Antipodes and how to advance our own programs. 36 I'he point is laboured in E. Gellner, Words and Things, Victor Gollancz, London, 1959. But even ordinary language? philosophy, though conservative, and though it much contracted the proper range of philosophical investigations, had its liberating elements, e.g. removal of some of the narrowness and more cramping assumptions induced by technical jargon. Nor lias the social impact changed much with the subsequent/ decline, since 1959, o 1 ordinary language philosophy, the Increasing insolvency of Oxbridge philosophy, and its consequent limited take-over by right-wing Ivy League American philosophy. By contrast, the less economically influential growth of redbrick and applied philosophy in some of the British r-fttl and polytechnic institutes his touched no more than the surface of Oxbridge Practice. T There remain some things we should want to see whatever mixes are chosen in iiiiereni Antipodean regions. bias from papers and publications, research seminars and lectures, letters of reference, and so on. the works and irrespective discussion write not Northern to their of the ignore authors, works the contribution of famous more authors, local their lecture as or been under largely again etc. It and to uncritically the disposition is to to though work produced locally either does not exist or has influential philosophers, importance, worth, topic It is the disposition the quality of their contribution. opinions of better, the the to authors from prestigious Northern institutions, to accept of quality the and irrespective of defer This Northern bias is a disposition to cite and discuss projects of One crucial issue is the removal of Northern are, (thus if ensuring more anything, it that inclined Northern to Australasian And not). is than bias many overseas intellectuals, who are perhaps less concerned to be seen as belonging to tl-'l Northern mainstream. bias effects policies of ot local not only practice the of individual, philosophers, but the selection and review committees as well as of editors and referees journals. reorientation, with It developments ~ things taught, more so they that philosophers can would cite be other among involves, Antipodean it ions \ better, courses The reduction, and eventual removal, of Northern getting to work or local assisted time spent at local by intellectual things, know local point greater out local work and regional content in institutions on study leave, and so on. APPENDIX 1. Background notes on the philosophy supply situation. Sociological investigation of the philosophy labour market in Australia and New Zealand has 1° be numerical attempted. But a picture of some elements underlying the argument of the text can be gained from the following table: simple 29 TABLE 1. Ph.Ds In Philosophy: a USA ~ Australasian comparison USA Number (Male/Female) Aust ra1i a New Zealand 1974 413 (346/67) 6 0 19 75 375 (318/57) 5 0 1976 382 (319/63) 8 0 197 7 330 (264/66) 3 2 (1/1) 1978 2 83 (235/48) 5 5 (4/1) 1979 285 (204/54) 9 3 (2/1) 1980 2 4 6 (187/59) 4 N.A. 1981 N.A. 4 0 Notes: 1. The breakdown of the USA and New Zealand numbers by sexes (male/female) is given. SimiLar figures do not appear to be available for Australia. 2. The US figures are for the academic year ending in the Year shown, e.g. 1978 covers the Northern academic year 1977-78. Southern figures are for the calendar year shown. Sources: Di gest__of__ Education Statistics, US National Center for Education Statistics; University Statistics, Australian Bureau of Census Statistics; New Zealand Education Statistics. Comments: 1. The contraction of US doctoral, production and the concomitant rise in female representation, are clearly indicated. The Australian figures are likely too small to reflect such trends and responses to the academic market. 2. Nome of Llr* Australasian numbers include Americans; likewise the American figures provide no nationality breakdown. 3. There is no information available on the number of Australians proceeding to higher degrees in philosophy outside. Australia. Tn applying table 1 some simplifying assumptions are made. assumed tbit candidates for appointment to regular For example, it is university positions now would t.ave a doctorate or- the equivalent (until recently a B.Phll was taken as a near well). equivalent It is of a assumed, North what American seems to Ph.D. take publications the case, that could the serve as number of 30 Austi il is Lans proceeding to higher degrees in philosophy abroad is relatively Smail, and no more than the order of Ph.Ds. upsetting applications of table without say, Is no compiled I, that Australasian graduates match, information on academic vacancies in philosophy in Aust ra1 ia < r New Zealand Az matter to I di j oil,1'. on the lumbers of vacancies, on how the positions It would however be a routine, nationalities, sexes, etc. by what re1 It can be assumed, Lhe upper half of American graduates in standard attained. There if taken locally. some of assemble data, this which is considerable of ' incc to the planning of philosophy programs. Un considering 'the Editor In a National Philosophy', the (Australian) possibility r* , /r <( I initial AJPP^ d istinguished two senses corresponding to 'the the of of a National Phi 1osophy for Australia. the earlier APPENDIX 2. I G e rm an distinction b etwee n W e11 a n sc hauung I I the first, that of 'a scheme of the universe', ridiculous as con f i rm.a t ion a or Christian Sc ience . fa 1 sificationV Granted: but 'are Lebensanchauung7 a nd The In n Ihilos>phy I hlLos is as is argument independent that does not mean (p.292). that^Jirutly national of that a and sympathies its or theory may not be held, in one region but not. others, as intuitionism was for long in in Holland, or 'a nation second a in France. In like an individual may 'more develop ternperament a 1 attitude to the problems of existence, which we may life. is a mode of form of A nation's philosophy, expression for the national (.'VO I V I up, like its art and the national consciousness. But, a and certain . . call its Its 1i terature, It is a specialised short, genius intimate part of the by no means sepa ra t e from t he initial sense, a philosophy comprising no t merely a fairly comprehensive theory but also an integrated set of attitudes (like an .. taaead up ysaa 03 queSt’AVjqxe •Xqdosoypqd aqp •auipy syj puq si.q uiw i p?uo j q i?u pa/Aoyyv eq pynoqs Xqdosoypqj yeuopyuN i' jo jvapy Suppupasaa yeuoppe^ e Xq papyoAB jo Xppypqpssod Xypsua sp uoy p ap pt?jyuoa aqy Supyappujpuoa op Supqyou si?q „aqsM - sapiBpunoq puojpuu Xuu ui.qy sanyuA asaqy ‘papaauoa XyyunyjpA sj spysaysny sc ‘ynq oqy eq p ‘uquya qf'noqj, ‘Xqdosoyyqj qi)M jdaews yappn, sv - asaqy qypw op op • (yuauia8ui?aat?aa qypi 1 op »?u j a [ OAiip as and Supqyou suq .Xqdosoyjqj qypw op oy Supqyou asaqy aqy jo senjBA yEuaaya eqp Xynvaq put? s teupoof) ‘qynai jo syvapy aqy ‘yyapdg eqs suq uaqp Xyuo pus uaq y uipeyo yuB§BAi?ayxo Y ST XOPT pg— aqy Xyyaoqs ons) yuaoy se saop spq j ‘uaqp uio j j 1 oq peej uy ^OAyya spp qpiM op op Supqyou st?q up yi?a ysny saAyjap apqnoap shot iua pv aqy op ast?q ‘/7^uTlBap apuj y 1? 'oiu/ay p a y^ u qd J0| Xqdoso ‘ojU yiuot you ‘Xqdosoypqd put? yuqj you aSeanoa sunny a saoqjo jo V \il\ ; j | saop qans :(usuas ‘ yp op spuuays Xut? • sjoydpaasap uvpjuaysny op pup j 1? ,Xy p uniuuioa pas r [t?j .1 p mi] tn you a^JI j1 ( Suyaq oaaqj apnyaxa aaAunoq Xqdosojpqd yBUopyuu 1? cjq^n&V^iaoqy TIB yi? yuyqr^u pnq ? qpjM •aauaaajjyp :Xauayspsuoaup oyup paSunyd ------------------------ —ogl J1 • (siur?a2oad qaaoasaa / [ ] an—k-4——q- eSyotyy ‘ auj apqdosoypqd y^uopSaa ! you sp pnq ‘ajpy jo ysuay y ‘aejJ og 7m* yh io Pljnq aq asoqp qyjtt uyqt?a2uc4]aaayu syaud aeynpoiu spy qypM uaapoui b4 up puyj oy od/q Xpyeaa you saop ‘pupJ •suyyiiuBj osooy aoqyea uiaoj s^ifiiy Xue up) aAipaupyspp Xyau ynap yat?d you aiuos uupyeaysny syyun aySups payunoaar? tadi?aspur?y ueypuaysny aqy, pin? 1 aanyuaoy y. [ ay j [i.uojjiu 4ssausnopasuoa nujiipaiu jo • (ui8p peavd yuiio j yuaado aqp, st? siuayj qans eat? uopssaauoa Xq Xyuo ‘ aaouiaaqyanj IC •jojppq juasajd sip 04 ‘jseay jou ‘ pue ‘p.’ujnor syqj joj saojajaj ppjoAas 04 ‘apieyapy jo XijsjaAjun ‘oauajajuoo Xqdosoyjqj J° uornnj aossy ur yse p?a 4 sny £861 3tn jaded aqj jo uoyjejuasajd aip 31? aauajpne aip jo sjoqiuaui yejaAas 04 ‘uiyjyw -q pue oab.10 *s ‘ tpi y uis-Xaj j poo • m ‘loyyya pj 04 squuqi f □c Xrjy sjaAjufl '[vuoiqoN ueyyeajsny saauayas -yeyaos jo yooqas qaaeasan gcXaj4noH *8 4 USA, expoi ter cul Lure, of certainly of higher culture philosophical output from components Australasia, as culture, philosophy has Oxford not in philosophy? but also evidently (witness the Are there taken). should suit, payments, especially balance of lower of such following not if has recently become a net importer of culture from Europe, m Long achieve a American turn reasons why cultural better there are reasons. Yes, of In the first place, the change in the cultural position of the USA went with, and perhaps economic dominance most of not only increasingly of former Northern they. prioi sties, that little prospect for there the contain also fellow-travellers, whose It is unlikely that group, (become will commitments, as Long so there is is serious no prospect in a bind and disruption of the Secondly, component Include that academics, Northern of and additional is teaching this influential segment, from not situation; acclimatised the isolated drastically as bent to especially to) give person. Nor alter entire Antipodean as observed, a substantial research locally apart Antipoduans’ do they are I hey would be North, large a they cultural As since culture, Americans, Northern concerns. the If cultural dominance, cultural and other). universities of in economic power relations. ever emulate or attain American economic eminence (at least commodities, cont ingent changes nuclear destruction of without flow of entails Australasia's Australasia will not from, vast part derived in their up its should cultural for it can be persuasively argued better off, as far as quality and product goes, stocking their universities with American teaching components and researching Americanoriented concerns. One simple arg urn e n t nurn er1c a I th it Antipodean universities would be better off with Americans in the main, takes the following lines:- The (higher degree) graduates of Australasian culturally distinguished, at and American are not significantly least in subjects such as philosophy. Consider now the number quality of academics produced number per of higher uates. preponderance of The (great) just, by virtue of their vastly graduates will be Americans, greater population and degree their more extensive system of university education.'7 So also then, just by ratio considerations, the great preponderance of quality academics drawn an from percentiles among uppei interested they universities. in those quality quality, Such an base Austroamerlean argument does appointing not as will Clearly, Antipodeans, products. be would be American, will work to more show Americans that, for the were their to similar reasons, American universities should be full of Chinese or Indian professors, for two Asians reasons; and first there are especially Americans, significant in cultural disciplines such differences as between philosophy; and secondly, their university systems do not deliver such great quotas of higher degree or high quality graduates, at least in philosophy. fhe conclusion of the numerical argument will not be a popular one. anti-Americanism felt the universities; especially by and recently the Australasian community extends into there has been increasing insistence, the now aging younger Turks that university positions should be reserved for locals. international in portions of The This at the same time as these Turks often preach of an community of scholars, presumably then with "free" interchange, X' indicated in Appendix 1, where assumptions made In the argument are defended, the ratio of US philosophy graduates with doctorates as compared with Australian exceeds 30 to 1. And, as Is well-known, the extent of university education is much greater in USA than in Australasia: indeed Australia is in this respect among the ______ worst educated of the developed nations, as OECD figures have made plain (see, e.g., B. Jones, Sleepers Wake!, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1.982, Chapter 7). ■ 6 etc. I'hey cannot have it all ways.'' So as long the cont inues, present centre will they wi! I economically; large to the it them if is free-flow Interchange the dominate than us, have more jobs (centrally-determined) quality well as should here personnel and culturally periphery and ideas of go by as and in this high cultural business that we seek, as mostly claim. Now anyway, It is there that arguments. widely For is ire we regularly drive out enough recognised, drastically something not lower-down flooded wrong with high-quality local contenders for positions, ladders hierarchical with these sorts Northerners who of would if we only preferred the Northerners when they were quite visibly superior: rather we are inundated by Americans with inflated references, who have the messages of the centre better tbur local;; echelon wnocf do, (often and remote Northern Northern shortcomings biassed) are known the Northern centres tend fields tend appointment better. to look committees A.s is beginning greener to than dusty higherlocals to be recognised to retain their higher-quality products, too, and allow A reverse flow of the better orthodox academics from Australasia to America should also be expected (outside times of university contraction). According to issumptions of this brain drain argument, which is based on labour market considerations, appointment and lifestyle conditions for academics are general ly better in USA than Australia and much better than those in economicaLly-depressed New Zealand (e.g. higher salaries, better standard of living, superior research conditions, etc.). So, other things being equal, able academics from the Antipodes will relocate in USA as academic positions become available. The argument also helps explain why Antipodean universities cannot, expect, for the most part., t.o attract really top-drawer Northerners for very long. Of course, economically irrelevant factors do induce interference; e.g. perverse commitments to odd-ball Antipodean intellectual enterprises which reduce market acceptability, or pre-industrial ties to place or persons or lifestyle which unduly restrict mobility (such as local roots, family attachments, even distaste for American urban lifestyles). 7 them exiled be to the to periphery only if they fali somehow the foul of Too system (e.g. of the academic system for political or personal reasons) . often the Nori hern have centres disposed their of inferior intellectually products In the periphery. this makes the All appointing especially Americans, Northerners, their references, and usually not out And yet. quality. it seems, position look doubly bad. We ought, even if are overrated they of the top drawer, to be in in order to maximize doing so does not achieve the desired quality result, and breeds discontent elsewhere, especially among the aging Turks. there fortunately is cultural sufficient obtain lor us. subtitutabIe before way out this from t is the wraj ' and a We do our own Lonal Lsm. distance,' so and situation that they are these things; not simply Then the shaky numerical argument does fall down. elaborate we awkward the emerging proposal are there other But influential arguments to dispose of, and the disposal bears on the proposal. There have so is, to begin with, far been conceded: exce Hence, which the argument for excellence, that we all more or there is an objective commodity, quality or less agree seek and what appointments aim to capture, the type of myth most ol myth, In fact appointments about, which is proportionately in the North, and which is what academic more abundant a that institutions crave and indeed maximize. That at least is us have encountered; and many of us now know it is a dangerous way, elements of which any Most myth. more that places don't organisations aim even just try to to make maximize 9- M Iliis is easier in the cultural than the technological sphere. However it is also possible technologically: (stronger) theses of technological determinism, and so of cultural determinism, are false. We can choose different options, technologically, as well as culturally. ->) ) ./ A- u I PROSPECTS FOR REGIONAL PHILOSOPHIES IN AUSTRALASIA Philosophy, especially academic philosophy but also folk philosophy, 1 ike other intellectual and higher cultural activity in Australasia, has long been dominated, largely swamped, by Northern now increasingly from North America. Europe, the indeed and cultural resulting baggage other controlling such But it does not have to stay that way. a initially from the migration patterns, Given the ethnic result was imported, populations, influences, of composition virtually the inevitable. Suitable policies, a good philosophy policy, could change things. The culture, thought is of hardly a a philosophy, regional perhaps In 1923, a New Zealand new one. a matching regional correspondent to the newly-launched Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy mentioned the possibility of ’a new kind or temper of philosophy under these southern skies’ which the Journal might such a role reaching (or, not community). for merely And The Journal foster.1 matter, that professional although some actively pursued philosophers things however hardly has but have changed solid foundation for a new regionalism in philosophy, its a fulfilled pronounced wider Australasian in Australia, that of aim laying a possibility of a new temper of philosophy has hardly been realised. There is little in the way of a new kind and temper of philosophy under New Zealand southern skies were intended to include: distinctively New Zealand AJPP, March 1923, p.74. same volume, p.292ff; his Appendix 2/ 7 skies, which the but few distinguishing features, ’no characteristics, have shown up in New Zealand The question was taken up by the Editor in the discussion is considered below, especially in 2 philosophy’. New Zealand remains a substantial net importer of philosophy, The situation of colonial dominance that used to prevail in and philosophers. Australia, where virtually all chairs, and many philosophy, were filled by academics from the North, and considered and Given the usual in courses designed, power and influence of professors in small departments, covered in tends to persist in New Zealand, where no established chairs are occupied by locals/ topics posts academic other especially appointments made, the heavy Northern orientation of philosophy taught and researched in New Zealand is not surprising. oldest of The Northern control is perhaps most strikingly exhibited at the New Zealand the universities, University of Otago, where the Philosophy Department has been substantially captured by a British School and increasingly looks event, like an offshoot of the University of London/ In any the overwhelming Anglo-American dominance of New Zealand philosophy - also a feature only in slightly lesser degree of Australian philosophy - can be confirmed by a content survey of the courses offered and research papers written at New Zealand universities. Even when local people have been appointed to positions in Australasia, 2 S.A. Grave, A History of Philosophy in Australia, Queensland University Press, 1984, p.l. Page references are to the manuscript. The paper draws heavily on this history. 3 This claim was correct at the time of presentation of the paper (August 1983). With the recent loss of a chair at Wellington, the claim requires qualification, but the pattern of domination persists. 4In the 1983 Commonwealth University Handbook listing, 6 of the 8 members of the Department held their main degree, Ph.D., from London, and one of the remainder from Exeter. Only one member of the Department, soon to retire, falls outside the nexus. 3 they have been brought up on a solid diet of Anglo-American material, and they In particular, the have often been reforged or finished in the North as well. post-World War philosophy by remain full candidates the of requirements II universities in were conveniently seen expansion Oxford the of Australasian of products finished B.Phil. this Many degree. cultural to in departments out period the of of case of philosophy the mid 70s when they applied for until indeed mill: to beat in Oxford were hard major the positions, such was the (unwarranted) prestige of Oxford and the regrettable, but still continuing, "cultural cringe". Nonetheless, (as will indicated). be dominance, Northern in the Antipodes, been occurring scene the despite especially on worth is It significant have changes the Australian philosophical whether asking Australian philosophy is moving towards the sort of change that occurred in USA more than 100 years ago when the Harvard Philosophy Department was brought (or bought) together, and its "golden age" American philosophy was never quite began.'' the same again, and became its own thing. There are now new forces operating which could help to move Australian philosophy in such a direction. the widespread regionalism,6 other 5See B. which applies choices; local fashioning emergence, of national and particularly to in science cultural in and alternative culture, ideological stark contrast, and technology there There is of a choice along is policies, the which new with centralised not only Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy; Cambridge, Massachusetts 1860-1930, Yale University Press, 1977, Parts 2 and 3. 6 On this bio-regionalism, see especially, Fourth World News, vol. I, and K. Sale, Human Scale, Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, New York, 1980. 1983, 4 a provides for model reflection philosophy regional in directly bears on parts of the philosophy of science. there are also some soon appear, policy Unfortunately, as will to regional serious obstacles also but philosophies and to the very idea of a regional philosophy. USA, long an importer of culture from Europe, has recently become a net culture, of exporter components of higher philosophical Australasia, from output if not Oxford following but evidently philosophy (witness such as culture culture, lower of certainly taken). has should suit, not balance of payments, especially in philosophy? the American there Are also achieve reasons better a turn why cultural there are reasons. Yes, of In the first place, the change in the cultural position of the USA went with, and perhaps in part derived from, vast changes in economic power relations. economic dominance most Australasia’s of entails cultural dominance, culture, since there there is is little prospect serious no prospect If for that Australasia will ever emulate or attain American economic eminence (at least nuclear destruction of not without the North, flow of commodities, cultural and other). universities not only increasingly of Americans, contingent of former Northern they. group, cultural As priorities, long component also include whose research they disruption of the entire as observed, Antipodean Secondly, large fellow-travellers, Northern academics, substantial additional of a and teaching is bent to It is unlikely that this influential segment, especially Northern concerns. the a contain and will commitments, as so (become apart Antipodeans they are in a bind locally acclimatised do from the not situation; isolated drastically as to) person. alter give up its Nor should their cultural for it can be persuasively argued that they would be better off, as far as quality and product goes, stocking 5 universities their American with and components teaching researching American-oriented concerns. that argument numerical simple One Antipodean universities would be better off with Americans in the main, takes the following lines:- The (higher degree) of graduates Australasian culturally distinguished, now the number of produced 0 population and then, So also just not number per of say there is 1 per every n graduates. preponderance of graduates will be Americans, greater are American significantly at least in subjects such as philosophy. quality academics Austroamerican graduates; and their more by ratio Consider higher degree The (great) just by virtue of their vastly extensive system of university education. considerations, the great preponderance of quality academics drawn from an Austroamerican base will be American, as will the upper percentiles among those quality products. Clearly, Antipodeans, were they interested in quality, would be appointing more Americans to their universities. Such an argument does not work to show that, for similar reasons, American universities should be full of Chinese or Indian professors, for two Asians reasons; and first Americans, there are especially significant in cultural disciplines such differences as between philosophy; and secondly, their university systems do not deliver such great quotas of higher degree or high quality graduates, at least in philosophy. As indicated in Appendix 1, where assumptions made in the argument are defended, the ratio of US philosophy graduates with doctorates as compared with Australian exceeds 30 to 1. And, as is well-known, the extent of university education is much greater in USA than in Australasia: indeed Australia is in this respect among the worst educated of the developed nations, as OECD figures have made plain (see, e.g., B. Jones, Sleepers Wake’, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1982, Chapter 7). / 6 The conclusion of the numerical argument will not be a popular one. The anti-Americanism felt in portions of the Australasian community extends into the universities; and recently has there been insistence, increasing especially by the now aging younger Turks that university positions should be This at the same time as these Turks often preach of an reserved for locals. international community of scholars, presumably then with "free" interchange, etc. They cannot have it all ways.^ So long as the continues, economically; the present centre will free-flow dominate they will have more large to them if it interchange the than us, periphery and of ideas culturally jobs here is (centrally-determined) quality in personnel and as should well as go by and this high cultural business that we seek, as mostly claim. Now anyway, it that arguments. is widely there For we is enough recognised something are not lower-down drastically wrong hierarchical with these ladders sorts of flooded with high-quality Northerners who would g A reverse flow of the better orthodox academics from Australasia to America should also be expected (outside times of university contraction). According to assumptions of this brain drain argument, which is based on labour market considerations, appointment and lifestyle conditions for academics are generally better in USA than Australia and much better than those in economically-depressed New Zealand (e.g. higher salaries, better standard of living, superior research conditions, etc.). So, other things being equal, able academics from the Antipodes will relocate in USA as academic positions become available. The argument also helps explain why Antipodean universities cannot expect, for the most part, to attract really top-drawer Northerners for very long. Of course, economically irrelevant factors do induce interference; e.g. perverse commitments to odd-ball Antipodean intellectual enterprises which reduce market acceptability, or pre-industrial ties to place or persons or lifestyle which unduly restrict mobility (such as local roots, family attachments, even distaste for American urban lifestyles). 7 regularly drive out local contenders for positions, if we only preferred the Northerners when they were quite visibly superior: rather we are inundated by Americans with inflated references, who have the messages of the centre better do, locals than higher-echelon remote and Northern (often Northern biassed) fields appointment the Northern centres greener look to committees than dusty retain their higher-quality products, tend to to As is beginning to be recognised locals whose shortcomings are known better. too, tend and allow them to be exiled to the periphery only if they somehow fall foul of the system (e.g. of the academic system for political or personal reasons). often Northern the centres have disposed o their intellectually Too inferior products in the periphery. to be especially Americans, even if they are overrated in All this makes the position look doubly bad. We ought, appointing Northerners, it seems, their references, and usually not out of the top drawer, in order to maximize And yet quality. doing so does not achieve the desired quality result, and breeds discontent elsewhere, especially among the aging Turks. Fortunately shaky arguments; and obtain there 9 we way out from this sufficient elaborate cultural distance,9 situation and awkward and that is the way of regionalism. subtitutable for us. before is a so that We do our own things; they are Then the shaky numerical argument does fall the emerging proposal there these are other not simply down. But influential This is easier in the cultural than the technological, sphere. However it is also possible technologically: (stronger) theses of technological determinism, and so of cultural determinism, are false. We can choose different options, technologically, as well as culturally. 8 arguments to dispose of, and the disposal bears on the proposal. There is, have so to begin with, far been conceded: the argument for excellence, that elements of which there is an objective commodity, quality or excellence, which we all more or less agree about, which is proportionately more abundant in the North, and which is what academic institutions crave and indeed maximize. seek and what appointments aim to capture, That at least is the type of myth most of us have encountered; and many of us now know it is a myth, in fact appointments dangerous a that any way, myth. more that don’t places Most organisations aim just profit, but rather seek to satisfice on a mix of factors, quality is make maximize to of which assessed and not often the highest ranking one. only one, to try even Ability to fit into some sort of program, teaching or research, is another, and commonly more important factor; and there is no good reason why such a program should not sometimes be a regionally oriented one. the So given prevailing practices, argument from excellence does not exclude regional philosophy programs. And, in any event, there are enough local candidates of sufficient worth to proceed with regional programs without clearcut sacrifice of excellence. Local enterprise need entail no loss of excellence, and could well increase it. The deeper-cutting objection is that there is something seriously amiss with the idea of objective objective importance; criticism as bracketed out notions the that of excellence, these objective and notions values with are open more contextual-relativisation the to connected the generally, component of same that notion of sorts of they valuing: have the 9 framework or viewpoint to which these values relate.While those operating within rather a narrow intellectual paradigm, as such ordinary Oxbridge language philosophy or Sydney materialism say, can bracket out the viewpoint, since incorporated is it the in operational paradigm, and arrive so at seemingly objective quality judgements, the judgements are not preserved (e.g. in truth value) when Marxist viewpoints. quality or worth for Consider, of to transposed a other the comparison, made forest, frameworks, variously industrial forester, and a recreational officer. quality of a holistically-inclined by who seemingly because pretend that a deep the ecologist, philosopher, environmental it is not done by members to or an Compare judgements as to the environmental such as judgements language, Marxist, and Californian environmental philosophers. philosophers idealistic e.g. of work by ordinary There are even be cannot judged, the main philosophical peer group at Harvard and like institutions. As this judgements of begins to the reveal, importance judgements of quality are not independent of of work done or problems tackled. importance of problems and issues is highly paradigm dependent. But the For example, problems such as those of quantifying-in and of possible worlds and of de re thought, which assume immense importance for fashionable referential theories within the mainstream empiricist paradigm, vanish outside that restricted viewpoint. Now observe to relative insignificance that most judgements as to What follows also begins to bring out what is omitted in a main theme of R.S. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance, Bodley Head, London, 1974. Note that defusing the notion of objective excellence does not lead to subjectivism. To avoid the customary false dichotomy, compare the notion of validity (usually ceded to themselves these days by classical logicians) with that of quality. 10 what are the Important problems and what constitutes important work - matters helping quality determine is relative to their are exported to the Antipodes importance concerned shipped are - from down the paradigmatic placement, through the North.11 and Their paradigms the main channels already indicated. We are free to reject these paradigms and select alternatives, and there are, it can be argued, good reasons to do just that, much as there are good reasons choose to energy technology different (or different military technology) from that generally favoured in the North which the North is eager to export southwards. points Similar which might argument, apply against alternatively that sophisticated people -marketed mass-produced and cosmopolitan. The argument called be from is based cosmopolitan/international the the Peter everywhere Holland; international Stuyvesant smoke this argument superior product cigarette-sophistication is on the assumption that philosophy is a ’cosmopolitan subject’, that is is not the sort of enterprise for which place and people are significant as they are for or poetry assumption has only to be presented to be questioned. for one important thing, that philosophy is a the novel.12 It takes for granted, finished product sort (a propositional theory), not a process of production also. 110ften enough fashionability is mistaken for The importance. of a certain But in the As to the unsatisfactory way in which such '’important" problems are commonly set, see F. Dyson, ’Unfashionable pursuits’, The Mathematical Intelligencer 5 (1983) 47-5?. -----12 Grave, op.cit., p.2: the term ’cosmopolitan subject’ used there comes from Donegan. As to the significance of place and people for literature, see further C. Partridge, The Making of New Cultures, Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam, 1982. ---------------------------- 11 process of production the place and people involved (e.g. material. And literature, the if and not product just is theorems more no philosophy, than work a and of art, arguments like a assembled piece of in an then again the historical setting matters, internationally-approved format, since like in discussion) are literature, not does emerge in a vacuum. Plato’s philosophy could not have emerged in ancient Australia, and if cribbed in mid 20th century Oxford would surely have been marked down or rejected.^ It is important not to be sidetracked into issues - resembling problems in aesthetics - that extent sets do not need to be contested, of themes and arguments such as whether and what produced in one place and setting could have been produced in another. A nonnuclear technology of some sort could be adopted prospect in Europe but that New apparently will Zealand, nonnuclear energy strategy. matters here. Dial ethic in not contrast whereas be, with there Australia, is will reasonable pursue a It is the doing, and not what could be done, that logic, which invalidates methodology of much Anglo-American philosophy, could the technique perhaps be done in and the North (though there would be substantial cultural resistance): it is not being 13 Like a paper in the biological sciences. But here again technique and methodology, which may both be regional, are crucially important. Related points can be made using less extreme examples, e.g. concerning modern American work. Consider, for instance such texts as W.V. Quine’s Word and Object, (Wiley, New York, 1960) or R. Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia (Basic Books, New York, 1974). The assumptions taken for granted, the arguments involved, etc., are especially American: it is not just the style. The acceptability of arguments and positions is dependent on place and received paradigm. 12 and is not likely to be done in the Anglo-American sphere.to done there, this extent, logical Antipodeans techniques, can do choose their their own international/cosmopolitan argument, own distinctive distinctive technology thing. stated tn a form that would be and The telling, fails. Of course it can be argued, it is being argued, that Antipodeans don’t need to be, or even oughtn’t to be pursuing their own energy or logic policies and apparatus. But meeting these considerations takes us to a whole new set of issues concerning the merit of various policies and programs, diversity, etc. - far beyond the cosmopolitan argument. the point of The new arguments, to which we shall return, are not a lot more convincing however than comparable arguments concerning cooking: that we don’t devising our own cuisine or wine styles. need to be or oughtn’t to be British, or at least cosmopolitan, cooking is adequate: we should stick to that and buy it off the shelf from the North, ideally importing the cooks also. Do we have good reasons to think that British philosophy is better, these days, than British cooking? Antipodeans are free, in principle then, to pursue their own paradigms; and to do so they will by and large want to, and mostly have to, appoint their own people, people they have educated - not saboteurs or people who have (had) Much as communist anarchism, a live possibility for communes and perhaps communities in Australia, is culturally excluded in North America, owing to the extreme possessive individualism of that culture. On dialethic logic, see G. Priest and R. Routley, On Paraconsistency, Research Papers in Logic, #13, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1983. 13 to be re-educated, from elsewhere, in particular from the North. But will the intellectual paradigms pursued tie with cultural paradigms, with distinctive features of local the culture? In a loose way, at they may least, tie in with the though works of philosophy will not usually link, culture in the integral fashion that novels (as distinct from more technical works) sometimes do. Indeed, certain to a cultural limited extent, features, not they restricted to particular programs, that help mark philosophy in Australia as ’unimportant hastens to though add. this But is style, compared Grave considers do already link. with acceptability, what ’an Australian product’ - matters truth, philosophical he philosophy’ in do matter, and are not independent - or independent so far as their perception goes in the case of truth and correctness16 - from underlying broad theory or received paradigm. However the marks which can be extracted from Grave, significant though they are, do not serve to distinguish the Australian product, the first two being features Australian philosophy exhibits in lesser degree than the more adventurous and polemical philosophy of Greek antiquity. by Passmore as ’most typical of Australian philosophy’, The first, described is a ’diversity of approach and readiness to put forward an unconventional or unfashionable point 16 Nothing need be conceded to strong cultural relativity themes, though they would support the case. It is enough that our theories remain radically incomplete and that there can accordingly be rival theories as to what is true. Similarly, however philosophy is conceived - as the search for truth, explanation, understanding and wisdom (all of these and more, really), or as, more vaguely, inquiry of a certain sort - there can be, and will be, competing accounts; so a pluralistic theory is inevitable in giving a fuller view. 14 of view*, 17 philosophy, something which more typical some (with of exceptions) notable exhibits an Canada, is that Africa, South adventurous compared with other recent and provincial and diverse. second, The ... the between line-up Australian and surprising, mark far from isolated: others Melbourne Wittgensteinian "Australian materialism", philosophy departments the (both confrontation concerning the among them concern extraordinary discussed the political by is is ’the ’the most notable example ... Andersonian and Sydney, if it was not the Andersonian philosophy itself’ (p.2). is such as philosophy England, manifestoed character* of Australian philosophy, being "Oxbridge colonies", more austere What may be uniformity reflecting that often attributed to the land itself. nearer true Australian than philosophy ancient This example fervour generated engagement Grave), the and relevant/paraconsistent program, by by some growing with the local (’adversarial*) style leading to sharp criticism by Americans. Connected with these first philosophy, century two marks J as of much Cambridge further are characteristics of much 18th century Scottish philosophy and philosophy: points, surface clarity, and, namely directness, Australian turn-of-this- unwillingness to muffle some would unkindly add (in the hope perhaps of locating a genuine difference), bluntness, unsubtlety and crudity. Both preceding quotations, while included as such in Grave’s Introduction, are from J. Passmore, ’Philosophy’, in The Pattern of Australian Culture (ed. A.L. McLeod), Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y., 1963, pp.131-168. The same annotation also applies to the third mark. 18 Though again for the most part that influenced by Sydney rather than that originating in Melbourne. To some extent this reflects the different historical influences shaping Sydney and Melbourne philosophy: roughly, Scottish as opposed to Continental antecedents. 15 The third and the fourth marks are but very different, again hardly distinguishing features of Australian philosophy as Grave, who wouldn’t them marks at all, in effect observes. areas, intellectual the of Australian the anti-intellectual national stereotype of Australians as a people to physical mark is achievement especially of isolation a academic rather than feature of philosophy indifference or even hostility to, in reputation ’center of philosophical inquiry’, with indeed of Australia as a philosophy, The third, which applies well to other contrast the is call to intellectual Anglo-American Australasia in subtlety’. the namely general its and fourth The philosophy; from, ’devoted the sort of imported philosophy (e.g. that of Nietzsche and the existentialists) generating interest in literary and arts circles. The failure of such marks to entirely separate out Australian philosophy does not matter. For thing, one the separated by its research projects. confused with nationalism, nor Australian For another, produce such as materialism or Wellington modalism with national philosophies. philosophy, as encouraged; and in most the new other is things, regionalism is an undesirable commonly sufficiently regionalism should not regional positions more is linked, be Sydneyside Nationalism in trait, not in other to be cultural things, with the breakdown of nations and contraction of state power. 19 See, e.g., London, 1957. Sale, op.cit., and L. Kohr, The Breakdown of Nations, RKP, The Editor of the new 1923 AJPP did however take seriously the notion of National Philosophy, of (what must have surprised some New Zealand readers) an Australian Philosophy; some of the issues there raised (p.292ff) are addressed in Appendix 2. 1 16 * To get back to where we were: * emerging proposal the is this, that we s.rsrt - or better much increase - doing our own distinctive things, and that we team up to do so. Tn fact there are several suggestions that begin to emerge, concerning research and teaching, publications and appointments, study leave and sponsored visitors. These are not just that we do our own selection of topics and style and people, and methods, decide priorities, own our instead of having these foisted upon us - not just, that is, that we play our own games (whether invented here or taken over from the North) and not theirs, Rules and Rugby instead of Gridiron and Basketball - but that we abandon the individual competitive model of cultural achievement, sold to us and fostered by the North, in favour of a group cooperative approach (elements of which are already modelled in Antipodean social clubs). The ditch-digging example: ditch more separately. rapidly simple and familiar. On the one side is the it is well-known that two people cooperating can dig a and enjoyably than two people working on the ditch Cooperative work tends to pay off - in philosophy or elsewhere - in terms of output, experience are here thoughts shows that we successfully with several reasons quality, and enjoyment in the doing. in the the centre for this. periphery cannot on achievements One highly competitive predominantly On the other side, individually compete very in their programs. is the communication situation. There are Despite the individualistic nature of American academic 1. <3 enterprise, 20 ' much communication in the and individualism myth, attainment of results access to work is jointly based, unpublished upon rapid depends material. For, verbal despite the and builds on the work of many; when the time is ripe for some idea or result, several clever people will be Then again communications are important in obtaining rapid able to hit on it. publication of the idea or result, and the assignment of credit for it. again people at the periphery tend to lose out. Again there are nationalistic considerations There are a mix of reasons (e.g. Polish results, Russians will cite a Russian who the same verbally conveyed. tend time and as an outsider). through face-to-face There is seminars Here the so Poles achieves a fact that that local tend to promote result at much is results about conveyed will be There is the fact of limited reading, and that people at the centre to concentrate when they read on material from the centre by central people, so that published items and results from the periphery will often not be noticed, and may well lose out to central central publication. receive, merit competitors even if they achieve There is also the fact that people at the centre tend to for merit, more publication than people towards the periphery. and communication opportunities Here economic factors do begin to enter; consider the size and distribution of the academic market (there are, e.g., a great many more academic philosophers in North America than in the whole rest of the world), control of publishing outlets and journals (with few exceptions 20 Reflecting other features of the culture and enterprise of the centre which are not so deeply embedded in Australasia: see further R. Routley, ’Culture, philosophy, and approaches to the natural environment - an Australian perspective’, in The Environment, Ethics and Ecology (ed. D. Bennett), The Faculties,^ Australian National University, 1984, and also ’Culture and the roots of political divergence)^ the Australian/American contrast’, typescript, Canberra, 1983; both referred to subsequently as ’Culture’. . . // / - 18 However economic power does not, and need not, determine etc. all Northern), culture - we can shut off the Northern philosophical propaganda shut off way we being sets if we really want to. our television by impressed middle-men philosophical those the And we can stop a make who in much living by importing the Northern stuff. So what do we do? We adapt to the cultural-philosophical level, We aim at of those things, that have been suggested in the newer regionalism. some awakening and regional importers and doctrines and imitators local of, positions from and We do not remain slavish self-reliance. on commentators local the North. For several example, peddlars and don’t we spend of, our academic lives trying to tease out what Davidson or Dummett or Kripke meant by this in the hope that or that To through. be sure, I some pale Northern light will am not suggesting we that perhaps emulate filter appalling the ignorance of people from the North who visit the Antipodes and know little or nothing about what has been done or is eminent with through visitors, the their Australian bags heavy National being done here; cultural University (now so that we have accroutrements, the main trekking centre for investigation of relevant logics) and informing us that, or relying crucially on the assumption that, a contradiction entails every proposition. that these Northerners often know little positions and advances is the Antipodes is inferiority colonies; 21 of cultural another is the and intellectual narrow or nothing about One reason distinctive the prevailing assumption of life (predominantly in these local) and former limited the southern reading Regrettably, the ignorance extends to many locals. In particular, those infected with Sydney materialism appear remarkably ill-informed as to basic features of other Australasian programs. 19 undertaken by Northern luminaries. But, having despite been given sufficient we cause, shouldn’t cut ourselves off from Northern paradigms and influences (we could hardly manage to anyway: propaganda is different). so we should stay informed of, but not imitators these continuing traditions: of, or part of, far from cutting these nowhere, In any case, their enterprises. in older Northern traditions, So loose regional cultures are rooted just as the people are largely European stock. from these (and older We can reasonably use what we need from likely traditions and starting afresh and traditions, minority) the from local variations that have already appeared are what we want to develop and perhaps mutate, as again with wine styles. Part things, of the proposal then we that increasingly Northern paradigms. what is very great Nor, our own local rather than working with pale northern reflections of It is not as if we have to build from nothing, very difficult - entirely original work, components. do and so shape newer encourage and develop our own research programs, Antipodean paradigms, 22 is to to do - to create cultural try For there are research programs already initiated, which have the advantage fortunately, of being grounded do we need in to make features of the the story up - shape the future is part of what the proposal is about. larger culture. though helping to Much of the story, for Australia - New Zealand is a different and more difficult proposition - is already indicated in Grave’s survey of Australian philosophy. All one really has to do is to bring out programs he has already indicated and provide some 22 See Culture, op.cit. 20 To pull the investigation down to a more concrete elaboration and commentary. level, I shall sketch some more prominent cooperative programs - by no means the only programs - and remark on some relevant features of them. The longest running and best known program is, without much doubt, of Australian naturalism, and which aims to see natural the that world, and everything else, as suitably encompassed within the framework of the world of (physical) science. empiricist metaphysics, contains as program The 23 is generally materialism, Adelaide which subsequently died out there. such famous state version of failures in materialism, and functionalism. its a Anderson’s program initiated nowadays Faced reduction trimmed theory of universals, plans, like it it takes all now Tt in The latter program has included the mental-material contingent components as central to and is now best exhibited in Armstrong’s work. subprogram Sydney a major back traced in, identity theme and more derivatively, physicalisms incorporates a with a conspicuous "scientifically" and an account of natural laws as relations of universals, both components of the developing Sydney realism. Parts of the naturalism program, especially materialism and central state reductionism and the unified science ideal, have had counterparts in the North, but the program has, for the most part, despite export efforts, smoothly, moreover, and 23 earthy, so retained its distinctively it never caught on in New Zealand. into Australian culture. far as Australian character - The program fits It is similarly down-to-earth, philosophy can be, without the fancy ideas or effete Anderson’s metaphysics was however far more opposed to reductions than what has succeeded it. For an account of Anderson’s philosophy, and a history and account of Australian naturalism and materialism, see especially Grave, op.cit. 21 idealism of European philosophy or the spirituality and suppressed puritanism with which much pragmatism). commitments, of And and North it yet though it not does is (including simmers thinking American shrink from basically empiricist, explicit nowadays, metaphysical it is not from the positivistic (rejecting a verification principle, in particular). It is a city program, based broadcast mainly University of Sydney to other metropolitan universities; but the program does extend outside the universities a bit (a tiny bit) to the larger metropolitan culture. North America, the broader Russell, so in Australasia, community,or Popper Australasia would and be Kuhn quite little professional philosophy impinges on even on being an As in the wider academic community, (To exceptional. achievement, through one to turn worth this working work by around for.) now reaches in The naturalism program used to Perth, and has outliers in Canberra, as well as a core of opposition there. stretch Apart from notable exceptions, Adelaide; the program has never had more than a rather precarious hold, in Melbourne: 25 it the same hold, to or nor, more surprisingly, 24 In Canada, for example, while most academics from other disciplines would know of, and perhaps a little about, Russell, far fewer would know of Wittgenstein (though he is becoming known to lit. crit. groups), and virtually none would know of Quine. (The sampling is subjective.) On the fairly recent ’triumph of professionalism* in philosophy in USA, see Kuklick, op.cit., p.565ff. Kuklick brings out well some of the more disastrous features of professionalism, but does not sufficiently notice that the virtuous features resulting from some professionalisation can be synthesized with broader philosophical activity. 25 The exceptions include Ellis’s distinctive program, which can be accounted part of the broader naturalist program, and at Monash the work of F. Jackson and, earlier, of H. Munro in value theory. 22 has it had heavyweight criticism from there (or indeed much external criticism from elsewhere), the old confrontation of major city philosophies having died out. philosophy Melbourne is more historically oriented stricken than Sydney; Melbourne by dominated procession a a then, philosophy; been idealism and fashions: Northern earlier Wittgenstein, recently, remarkable religion philosophy, much more than Sydney, has of more philosophy; Continental and more turnabout, ordinary Davidson Quine, and language extensional reduction; now perhaps Lewis, Kripke and Dummett? one The program that reaches the beyond of confines the cities in Australia - which is after all a metropolitan dominated culture, the vast land always being the other Australian environmentalism, - is a rather diffuse program, which has connections with the Colleges of Advanced Education in the country towns and the communes on the North Coast. much distinguished environmental Europe by what positions it are a specifically having as not is feature of what So far the program is as it Serious and is. the New World, of transformed most its deeper the Old World, and environment and natural having little wild untouched country left, and little sensitivity accordingly to issues Europe that such as tend admit European to those of concern the wilderness. built shallow approaches superficiality environmentalism outside and (and continues North The main environmental human-transformed encourage to America. environment, situations). techno-fix dominate North much issues of American the New in issues And World environmentalism differs significantly however from Antipodean environmentalism, most obviously in the religious-spiritual component respects as well (see further Culture). of the former, but in several other 23 More positively, there are three strands to Australian environmentalism:- Firstly, there is an extended utilitarianism, differing little in theory from Bentham’s enlarged position, which insists upon counting in the utilities of all sentient figured though creatures. prominently it has position, This in animal from a British base, has animal liberation movements: and research and and welfare on domestic focussed developed animals animals, used in hunted (wild) animals, it has also become entangled in issues of bio-research more generally such as genetic engineering. or much interested in, endangered species, etc., except the conversion of forests, Secondly, not utilitarian forests and differs naturalism. and which ecosystems, from irreducible recognises which finds especially wild and American 26 lands, bearing on these have a an inadequate there is a wider and a deeper ecological position, which is psychological states, sentience or insofar as and so deeper concerns get spinoff from animal welfare, deal. the disappearance of wild Wider and deeper environmental concerns appear only animal pain and pleasure. as a It is not however concerned with, Thirdly, and spiritualism is there of value elsewhere intrinsic value natural from course, an as systems. in trees and This position of American extension almost than everywhere, a reactionary component, critical of the other strands, which insists that all that needs to be accomplished on the environmental front can be achieved within older established (European) ethical and political frameworks. Whereas materialism is based in Sydney, environmentalism is centred in Melbourne and Canberra, but also includes Brisbane and Perth. Also centred in 26 It has been described more Environmental Philosophy (ed. D. National University, 1980. fully elsewhere: see, in particular, Mannison and others), RSSS, Australian Canberra, and reaching across the country, with good connections in Melbourne, but in few Sydney, and materialism program other which program, elsewhere. and major perhaps which philosophy, more includes to centres New in metaphysics, with respectively, the theory value essentially is of extends and their core logic a especially in Zealand , program, one but metaphysics. Australia than also been has the Whereas any The other described ?7 The main logic grounded research program evident program. of the in New Zealand philosophy is also A program emanating from the work of Prior and located mainly in Wellington, The impact programs have program areas program. relevant/paraconsistent epistemology from relevant/paraconsistent affecting the environmental input further is it might be called the extended modal a now program. program on philosophy is perhaps best seen in Cresswell’s work. Australian philosophy used to be known, for its hard-headed empiricism; not known and still is in some quarters, regrettably New Zealand philosophy is mostly for anything much, except perhaps, in UK, that Prior brought his 27 Again, like all the Australian programs, both those mentioned and others, in Grave, op.cit. But see further, R. Routley, ’Research in Logic in Australia, New Zealand and Oceania’, Research Papers in Logic #14, Australian National University, 1983 (which also considers other programs in logic); G. riest and R. Routley, op. cit.; and R. Routley, R.K. Meyer and others, Relevant Logics and Their Rivals, Ridgeview, California, 1982. 28 See especially M.J. Cresswell, Logics and Languages, Methuen, London, 1973; but see also work by Goldblatt and by Hughes referred to in Research in Logic, op.cit. Also described there is an original version of the modal program (transparent intensional logic) elaborated by Tlchy at Otago. 25 unusual adaption of Russellian philosophy from that remote place. Neither of these impressions is particularly accurate; both are rather out-of-date. the aim of work of the present type is, of course, impressions, not just to reflect or report But not just to correct these on culture - for what one would like to reflect upon is not sufficiently there - but also to help manufacture elements of a culture, to make an image. To resist the North, we should increase our efforts to further the nq already flourishing programs, and perhaps other sunrise projects; to build teaching and research around the programs selected for promotion, elaboration, and criticism, to orient appointments, especially of involved local people, to 29 Among sunrise projects in Australian philosophy so far suggested (not all of them feasible) are these: Australian feminism, Antipodean social and political alternatives, peace studies, indigenous regional philosophies (especially Aboriginal, Melanesian, and Polynesian). Another promising field, with practical consequences, for local initiative is the philosophy of education, where material produced by R.S. Peters has dominated the market, with stultifying effects it is now alleged. As foreshadowed with the notion of "sunrise projects", much of the rhetoric, and argument, concerning science and technology policy (presented in the case of Australia in Jones, op.cit.) can be taken over to apply to X policy, where X is some subject discipline, such as philosophy. 26 on Why bother? these programs. Why not simply buy our philosophy, like almost all our technology, off the shelf, from the North? There are several arguments for not doing this, in more than a limited fashion, which are now sketched. There is, firstly, Northern products, fine a the inferiority and built-in Without despite their attractive packaging. most of putting too point on it, many of the imported intellectual goods are shoddy, and only work for a very limited range of applications (e.g. the obsolence vicinity Antipodean of contradictions philosophy or undoubtedly dilemmas). derives from Much they’re hopeless in that shoddy is wrong intellectual with goods 30 In fact something like the last has been the policy of the LSE Philosophy Department, where the only outside appointment over a long period was that of Lakatos (hardly a person far removed ideologically). As observed, it now looks like the practice of the Otago Department also; and apparently it used to be a tendency at Melbourne. But in most places the practice is condemned as nepotistic or parochial, and overridden by the call for "new (Northern! blood". However there can be significant differences between nepotistic appointments and those strengthening local programs. It is at this stage, among others that administrative measures do matter; for example, to ensure that suitable locally-engaged locals gain employment rather than Northern stooges, to direct funds into on-going local programs rather than imported fashions, etc. There are various ways appropriate administrative details can be handled, locally or nationally; but nothing draconian, such as wholesale exclusion of noncitizens, is required. Observe, indeed, that no restriction of academic appointments to nationals (in Canadian style) or the like is being advocated. Anyone who arrives at a conclusion of that sort from what has been argued has misunderstood the case in crucial respects. As a matter of simple mathematics, restricting appointment fields characteristically reduces both quality of candidates available (however quality is assessed) and range of possibilities open for future research; and no such restrictions are advocated. The author has witnessed the debilitating effects of field restrictions at the Australian National University and elsewhere. 31 Some of these arguments centre also. support change (perhaps revolutionary) at the Yet buying this material is encouraged by hard-sell imported from the North. cultural ambassadors from the North, who are often enough paid to visit. is part Northern of the philosophical imperialism colonialism that - the This from the North - the successor Antipodes too suffers, willing or, to more remarkable, encourages! Secondly, there is the inappropriateness of much of the Northern product, especially considered metaphysics, as package, a environmental concerns. for instance, to cover, well as as The European North has no satisfactory land or environmental ethic fit for Antipodean circumstances, and the deeper American package is too spiritually-loaded for mainstream Australian culture. 32 In political theory, work is much too individualistic the European product, especially the Marxist form, and competition-based, American unsuited being both too precious and for local too high-tech and is circumstances, especially again for more environmentally-perceptive people. Thirdly, features of telling also import comparative advantage, and regionalism; namely, substitution world’s markets and pressures power structures against and fashions, (including the Old Boy’s removal network in are appealing avoidance of the of overseas control and jobs, policies, etc.), and gaining of local control, employment of local people, etc. Fourthly, 32 there are arguments for cultural diversity, applied to The point is elaborated in Culture. At a more practical level Northern products are again often unsuitable, though for different reasons. For example, the transfer of American agricultural methods and equipment to the thin poor soils of the Antipodes has had disastrous effects, at last beginning to be recognised. 28 part philosophy as complexity, sheer diversity, of culture: intellectual stability, arguments In fact, etc. built into the whole notion of 'culture’ transfers. dense, productive garden. the garden analogy Naturally we want a rich, But not only seeds and plants but weeds and many We pests are being introduced. obtain not only good products, Indian maize This is why and European cultivars, but European pests and American weeds. selectiveness and control richness, from essential, are as against haphazard previous procedures. The proposal is not for, nor would the case sustain, a narrow localism, with local products, whatever their quality, heroes, replacing Northern ones. local fashions, and local cult That is certainly not the preferred way of the newer regionalism, which tends to do without fashions and heroes and which seeks durable quality in products, is it the way of low environmental impact, and so on|^ nor technology policy. Rather, as with technology policy, select niches which are not occupied or satisfactorily filled, make a difference, policy has to be publishing outlets, components, and ideas, and use and develop local skills and methods. selective etc.). given resource our But granting base (of can Indeed the philosophers, regionalism, to what extent should for instance people, books and other teaching elements, theories and to what extent should they be produced, trained, be imported conceived locally? The possibility of selectiveness means that many mixes are possible. least, on a particular mix. 33 where we we There in different is no need to insist, components so far at The case for the present is mainly for a regional See, for instance, A.A. Mazrui, A World Federation of Cultures: An African Perspective, Free Press, New York, 1976. 29 shift, for a significantly greater degree of local autonomy and production.^ But it will do no harm to Negatively, local favour. indicate elements of a mix that the suggestion is that we try to eradicate much of That includes such things the Oxford style of teaching and doing philosophy. removal as of the Locke-Berkeley-Hume emphasis undue (a finds much standard on British British focus); empiricism of centred on quasi-historical the approach with however no proper attention to sources; of reinforcement of the prevailing Anglo-American status quo. The heavy particular, has mostly been a very conservative one. the main movements philosophy, but emanating also the from England, Moore-Wittgenstein Oxford influence, in More generally, many of especially practice, ordinary have language been very protective of the Northern status quo; they tend to leave things very much as they are, and recommend just this. Positively, the proposal is that we achieve further disassociation from the Anglo-American empiricist past in two 34 Does it sound familiar? Outside philosophy, it should. For example, we have now been told by the Americans that our defence role, unlike theirs, is regional, not global: this is supposed to shed great light on our previously confused defence policies. 35 The point is laboured in E. Gellner, Words and Things, Victor Gollancz, London, 1959. But even ordinary language philosophy, though conservative, and though it much contracted the proper range of philosophical investigations, had its liberating elements, e.g. removal of some of the narrowness and more cramping assumptions induced by technical jargon. Nor has the social impact changed much with the subsequent decline, since 1959, of ordinary language philosophy, the increasing insolvency of Oxbridge philosophy, and its consequent limited take-over by right-wing Ivy League American philosophy. By contrast, the less economically influential growth of redbrick and applied philosophy in some of the British redbrick and polytechnic institutes has touched no more than the surface of Oxbridge practice. 30 local emphasizing by ways: framework, and projects range the diversifying by move that outside of that constricting philosophical traditions selectively drawn upon, to include not only neglected Continental strands and but also parts of Eastern thought, philosophy. idea The is that Australasian Pacific ethnic material and plurality of such a especially sources, in teaching, will assist in removing narrower cultural biasses, such as British enable more and parochialism, be obtained. to discrimination Then too we should be better able to see the ranges of theories that are open to us in the Antipodes and how to advance our own programs. There remain some things we should want to see whatever mixes are chosen in different Antipodean regions. One crucial issue is the removal of Northern bias from papers and publications, research seminars and lectures, letters of reference, and so on. the and works irrespective discussion This Northern bias is a disposition to cite and discuss projects of and Northern quality the to of ignore of the authors, their works the more contribution of the to authors, local irrespective of the quality of their contribution. defer to famous better, the under topic again largely It is the disposition to authors from prestigious Northern institutions, and to uncritically accept their opinions of worth, importance, It etc. is the disposition to write or lecture as though work produced locally either does not exist or has not been influential philosophers, are, (thus if ensuring anything, more that it inclined is to not). Northern And Australasian bias than many overseas intellectuals, who are perhaps less concerned to be seen as belonging to the Northern mainstream. bias affects not only the The reduction, and eventual removal, of Northern practice of individual philosophers, but the policies of selection and review committees as well as of editors and referees of local reorientation, innovations It journals. among involves, Antipodean philosophers with so better, they can cite other getting local work things, intellectual to know local work and or point out regional Initiatives and developments - things that would be assisted by greater local content in courses taught, more time spent at local institutions on study leave, and so on. APPENDIX 1. Background notes on the philosophy supply situation. Sociological investigation of the philosophy labour market in Australia and New Zealand has yet to be attempted. But a picture of some elements underlying the numerical argument of the text can be gained from the following table: simple 32 TABLE 1. Ph.Ds in Philosophy: a USA - Australasian comparison USA Number (Male./Female) Australia New Zealand 1974 413 (346/67) 6 0 1975 375 (318/57) 5 0 1976 382 (319/63) 8 0 1977 330 (264/66) 3 2 (1/1) 1978 283 (235/48) 5 5 (4/1) 1979 285 (204/54) 9 3 (2/1) 1980 246 (187/59) 4 N.A. 1981 N.A. 4 0 Notes: 1. The breakdown of the USA and New Zealand numbers by sexes (male/female) is given. Similar figures do not appear to be available for Australia. 2. The US figures are for the academic year ending in the Year shown, e.g. 1978 covers the Northern academic year 1977-78. Southern figures are for the calendar year shown. Sources: Digest of Education Statistics, US National Center for Education Statistics; University Statistics, Australian Bureau of Census Statistics; New Zealand Education Statistics. Comments: 1. The contraction of US doctoral production and the concomitant rise in female representation, are clearly indicated. The Australian figures are likely too small to reflect such trends and responses to the academic market. 2. Some of the Australasian numbers include Americans; likewise the American figures provide no nationality breakdown. 3. There is no information available on the number of Australians proceeding to higher degrees in philosophy outside Australia. In applying table 1 some simplifying assumptions are made. assumed that For example, it is candidates for appointment to regular university positions now would have a doctorate or the equivalent (until recently a B.Phil was taken as a near of equivalent It well). a North what assumed, is American Ph.D.; seems take to could publications case, the that serve as the number of Australasians proceeding to higher degrees in philosophy abroad is relatively small, and no more than the order of Ph.Ds. taken locally. without upsetting applications of table 1, It can be assumed, that Australasian graduates match, say, the upper half of American graduates in standard attained. There is no compiled information on academic vacancies in philosophy in Australia or New Zealand - on the numbers of vacancies, on how the positions It would however be a routine, are filled, by what nationalities, sexes, etc. if tedious, matter to assemble some of this data, is of considerable which relevance to the planning of philosophy programs. 4. On the earlier idea of a National Philosophy for Australia. APPENDIX 2. considering Editor the of initial to corresponding Lebensanchauung ’ ’an Australian argument is possibility ’the AJPP, Francis Philosophy is as truth and its between as that a theory may not be held, (Australian) two senses Weltanschauung and 'a scheme of the universe’, that of a Christian confirmation independent of national sympathies or prejudices’. mean distinguished Anderson, ridiculous the Philosophy’, distinction In the first, (p.292). both National a German ’the that of In or Science’. falsification The ’are Granted: but that does not fostered, etc., in one region but not others, as intuitionism was for long in in Holland, or Cartesianism in France. In a second ’more intimate and personal’ way, ’a nation like an individual may develop a certain temperamental attitude to the problems of existence, which we may ... call its philosophy of life. and its literature, is a mode of A nation’s philosophy, expression for the national like its art consciousness. 34 (pp.292-3). It is a specialised form of the national genius ....’ short, part of the evolving national culture. is from by entirely means no separate in the first place, But, the It is, initial sense, in this philosophy a comprising not merely a fairly comprehensive theory but also an integrated set Furthermore, only by concession of attitudes (like an operational paradigm). units single accounted philosophy, of meriting distinctive definite literature, Australian like particularly ’the Australian landscape’ ’the national consciousness’ and are such items as (in many has any sense): does not Australian descriptors. such strands things to form it, not some rather loose families. Anderson not does find, really to hope find ’a in modern industrialised community’ - with its modular parts interchangeable with those of others - a national philosophy of with life, a difference. claims to find a (somewhat) trite moral base to build on, humour, courage and fair particularly philosphical. at least various apart of life, regional is but dealing’, So far, not; philosophies then, this nothing however not local research identifying and trouble derives from the extravagant claim that with Goodness these and - ’traditions ... of distinctive, all or there exclude So programs). legitimating a being far, national But shortly Anderson is plunged into inconsistency: the philosophy, so good. do at he there could a national philosophy, does as (such problems about from rational but fact Tn the Beauty eternal - then of values and only Philosophy’ (p.295 with rearrangement). the then But, to do with these - as is virtually conceded, ’if Australia has nothing to Spirit, has she the Ideals nothing to of Truth, do with as Australia has nothing per se these values involving a ’wider sweep’ than any national boundaries - "she" has nothing to do with Philosophy, contradicting the possibility of a National Philosophy. Though the 35 contradiction is easily avoided by rescinding the extravagant claim, the ideal of a National Philosophy should be allowed to rest in peace: nationalism has had its time. -r /I ZR. Routley^ Research School of Social Sciences Australian National University With thanks to R. Elliot, W. Godfrey-Smith, S. Grave and L. Mirlin, to several members of the audience at the presentation of the paper at the 19R3 Australasian Association of Philosophy Conference, University of Adelaide, to several referees for this Journal, and, not least, to the present Editor. PROSPECTS FOR REGIONAL PHILOSOPHIES IN AUSTRALASIA Philosophy, especially academic philosophy but also folk philosophy, like has long been other intellectual and higher cultural activity in Australasia, indeed dominated, swamped, Northern by increasingly from North America. Europe, now the largely and cultural baggage other imported, influences, Given the initially the migration ethnic patterns, composition of resulting ruling populations, such a result was virtually inevitable. does not have to stay that way. from the But it Suitable policies, a good philosophy policy, could change things. The of thought culture, is a philosophy, regional hardly a new one. In 1923, matching perhaps a regional correspondent to the a New Zealand newly-launched Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy mentioned the possibility of ’a new kind or temper of philosophy under these southern skies’ which Journal might the such a reaching role for (or, not community). that although And matter, professional merely solid foundation foster.The Journal has for a some actively pursued philosophers things new regionalism however hardly but have changed in philosophy, its a fulfilled pronounced wider aim of Australasian in Australia, laying a that possibility of a new temper of philosophy has hardly been realised. There is little in the way the southern skies were intended to include: but few distinguishing features, ’no a new kind distinctively ^AJPP, March same volume, Appendix 2. and New temper of philosophy under New Zealand skies, which of Zealand 1923, p.74. p.292.ff; his characteristics, The have question was discussion is shown up in New Zealand taken up by the Editor in the considered below, especially in 2 philosophy’. 9 New Zealand remains a substantial net importer of philosophy, The situation of colonial dominance that used to prevail in and philosophers. Australia, where virtually and chairs, all many other philosophy, were filled by academics from the North, posts academic in tends to persist in New Zealand, where no established chairs are occupied by locals.Given the. usual power and influence of professors in small departments, topics covered and considered and in courses designed, especially appointments made, the heavy Northern orientation of philosophy taught and researched in New Zealand is not The Northern control is perhaps most strikingly exhibited at the surprising. oldest of New Zealand universities, University the of Otago, where the Philosophy Department has been substantially captured by a British School and increasingly looks event, the like an offshoot of overwhelming Anglo-American the University of London.In any dominance of New Zealand philosophy also a feature only in slightly lesser degree of Australian philosophy - can be confirmed by a content survey of the courses offered and research papers written at New Zealand universities. Even when local people have been appointed to positions in Australasia, they have been brought up on a solid diet of Anglo-American material, and they have often been reforged or finished in the North as well. In particular, the 2, S.A. Grave, A History of Philosophy in Australia, Queensland University Press, 1983, p.l. Page references are to the manuscript. The paper draws heavily on this history. ^This claim was correct at the time of presentation of 1983). With the recent loss of chair at Wellington, qualification, but the pattern of domination persists. the the paper (August claim may require 4In the 1983 Commonwealth University Handbook listing, 6 of the 8 members of the Department held their main degree, Ph.D., from London, and one of the remainder from Exeter. Only one member of the Department, soon to retire, falls outside the nexus. 3 requirements in the Australasian universities of period of the major post­ World War II expansion were conveniently seen to in the case of philosophy by the Oxford B.Phil. Many degree. of departments philosophy remain full of products of this cultural mill: indeed until the mid 70s candidates finished in Oxford were hard to beat out when they applied for positions, such was the prestige of Oxford and (unwarranted) the regrettable, continuing, but still "cultural cringe". Nonetheless, been in occurring scene the Northern the Antipodes, be will (as despite especially on indicated). significant dominance, is It the Australian worth asking changes have philosophical Australian whether philosophy is moving towards the sort of change that occurred in USA more than 100 years ago when the Harvard Philosophy Department was brought (or bought) and together, its "golden age" began.American the same again, and became its own thing. philosophy was never quite There are nouT new forces operating which could help to move Australian philosophy in such a direction. the widespread regionalism,0 other local fashioning provides a emergence, which applies choices; of national model for and particularly to in cultural stark science reflection and in in alternative and technology regional there there are also some of choice along is policies, philosophy directly bears on parts of the philosophy of science. soon appear, culture, ideological contrast, serious obstacles There is the a new with centralised which not only policy but also Unfortunately, as will to regional philosophies and to the very idea of a regional philosophy. See B. Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy; Cambridge, Massachusetts 1860-1930, Yale University Press, 1977, Parts 2 and 3. 60n this bio-regionalism, see especially, Fourth World News, vol. 1, and K. Sale, Human Scale, Cox^ard, McCann and Geoghegan, New York, 1980. 1983, USA, long an importer of culture from Europe, of exporter culture, certainly components of higher culture philosophical output Australasia, not if from such as Oxford following philosophy should not but achieve also the American there Are Yes, in philosophy? evidently (witness taken). has suit, payments, especially balance of culture, lower of has recently become a net a reasons better of turn why cultural there are reasons. In the first place, the change in the cultural position of the USA went with, and perhaps in part derived entails economic dominance most Australasia’s of from, vast changes in economic power relations. cultural dominance, since culture, there there is is little prospect serious no prospect If for that Australasia will ever emulate or attain American economic eminence (at least nuclear destruction of not without the North, flow of commodities, cultural and other). universities not only increasingly of Americans, contingent of former group, Northern cultural As they. priorities, that they whose entire as observed, Antipodean Northern academics, of include a research and additional substantial teaching is bent to It is unlikely that this influential segment, especially will (become commitments, long component also fellow-travellers, Northern concerns. the Secondly, large a contain and disruption of the as so apart Antipoduans they are in a bind locally acclimatised as do from not situation; the isolated drastically to) give up Nor person. alter their its should cultural for it can be persuasively argued they would be better off, as far as quality and product goes, stocking their universities with American teaching components and researching Americanoriented concerns. One simple numerical argument that Antipodean universities would be better off with Americans in the main, takes the following lines:- The (higher degree) graduates of Australasian culturally distinguished, at and American are not significantly least in subjects such as philosophy. Consider 5 now number the quality of Austroamerican graduates; academics of higher per number produced say there is 1 per every n graduates. degree The (great) preponderance of graduates will be Americans, just by virtue of their vastly greater population and their more extensive system of university education. So also then, just by ratio considerations, the great preponderance of quality academics from an drawn percentiles among upper they interested universities. Austroamerican base those quality products. quality, in an Such be American, will would argument does CLearly, Antipodeans, appointing be not as will work to more show Americans that, for the were their to similar reasons, American universities should be full of Chinese or Indian professors, for two Asians reasons; and first Americans, there are especially significant in cultural differences disciplines such as between philosophy; and secondly, their university systems do not deliver such great quotas of higher degree or high quality graduates, at least in philosophy. The conclusion of the numerical argument will not be a popular one. anti-Americanism felt the universities; The in portions of the Australasian community extends into and recently there has been increasing insistence, especially by the now aging younger Turks that university positions should be reserved for locals. This at the same time as these Turks often preach of an international community of scholars, presumably then with "free" interchange, As indicated in Appendix 1, where assumptions made in the argument are defended, the ratio of US philosophy graduates with doctorates as compared with Australian exceeds 30 to 1. And, as is well-known, the extent of university education is much greater in USA than in Australasia: indeed Australia is in this respect among the worst educated of the developed nations, as OECD figures have made plain (see, e.g., B. Jones, Sleepers Wake', Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1982, Chapter 7). 6 etc. They cannot have it all ways.3 So long the continues, the present centre will as they will economically; them if large to it is free-flow the dominate have more interchange than us, periphery and ideas of and culturally jobs here personnel as well as should go by and (centrally-determined) quality in this high cultural business that we seek, as mostly claim. it Now anyway, is that arguments. widely there For we is are enough recognised, something not lower-down drastically wrong hierarchical with these ladders sorts flooded with high-quality Northerners who regularly drive out local contenders for positions, of would if we only preferred the Northerners when they were quite visibly superior: rather we are inundated by Americans with inflated references, who have the messages of the centre better than locals echelon do, (often and remote Northern Northern whose shortcomings biassed) fields tend appointment are known better. to look greener to committees than dusty higherlocals As is beginning to be recognised too, the Northern centres tend to retain their higher-quality products, and allow g A reverse flow of the better orthodox academics from Australasia to America should also be expected (outside times of university contraction). According to assumptions of this brain, drain argument, which is based on labour market considerations, appointment and lifestyle conditions for academics are generally better in USA than Australia and much better than those in economically-depressed New Zealand (e.g. higher salaries, better standard of living, superior research conditions, etc.). So, other things being equal, able academics from the Antipodes will relocate in USA as academic positions become available. The argument also helps explain why Antipodean universities cannot expect, for the most part, to attract really top-drawer Northerners for very long. Of course, economically irrelevant factors do induce interference; e.g. perverse commitments to odd-ball Antipodean intellectual enterprises which reduce market acceptability, or pre-industrial ties to place or persons or lifestyle which unduly restrict mobility (such as local roots, family attachments, even distaste for American urban lifestyles). 7 them be to exiled the to periphery only if they fall somehow foul of the system (e.g. of the academic system for political or personal reasons). often Northern the have centres disposed of their intellectually Too inferior products in the periphery. All this makes the appointing Northerners, position look doubly bad. We ought, especially Americans, even if they are overrated their references, and usually not out of the top drawer, quality. And yet to be it seems, in in order to maximize doing so does not achieve the desired quality result, and breeds discontent elsewhere, especially among the aging Turks. there Fortunately obtain way out a from this awkward and that is the way of regionalism. shaky arguments; and is cultural sufficient distance,9 so that situation and these We do our own things; they are not simply subtitutable for us. Then the shaky numerical argument does fall down. before the we elaborate emerging proposal there are other But influential arguments to dispose of, and the disposal bears on the proposal. There is, have so to begin with, far been conceded: the argument for excellence, that excellence, which we all more or elements of which there is an objective commodity, quality or less agree about, which is proportionately more abundant in the North, and which is what academic institutions crave and seek and what appointments aim to capture, indeed maximize. That at least is the type of myth most of us have encountered; and many of us now know it is a myth, in fact appointments a that dangerous way, any Most myth. more that places don’t organisations aim even just try to to make maximize 9 This is easier in the cultural than the technological sphere. However it is also possible technologically: (stronger) theses of technological determinism, and so of cultural determinism, are false. We can choose different options, technologically, as well as culturally. 8 profit, but quality is to satisfice on a mix of factors, of which assessed rather seek only one, and not often the highest ranking one. Ability to fit into some sort of program, teaching or research, is another, and commonly more important factor; is no good reason why such a program should not and there So given prevailing practices, sometimes be a regionally oriented one. the argument from excellence does not exclude regional philosophy programs. And, in any event, there are enough local candidates of sufficient worth to proceed regional with programs without sacrifice clearcut of Local excellence. enterprise need entail no loss of excellence, and could well increase it. The deeper-cutting objection is that there is something seriously amiss with the idea of objective objective importance; criticism as bracketed out notions the that of excellence, and notions these values objective with are open more contextual-relativisation connected the to the generally, component of notion of sorts of same they that valuing: have the framework or viewpoint to which these values relate.10 While those operating within as a rather narrow intellectual paradigm, such ordinary Oxbridge language philosophy or Sydney materialism say, can bracket out the viewpoint, since it is incorporated in the operational paradigm, and so arrive at seemingly objective quality judgements, the judgements are not preserved (e.g. in truth Marxist value) when viewpoints. transposed Consider, to for other frameworks, comparison, the e.g. idealistic judgements as to or the quality or worth of a forest,made variously by a deep ecologist, an industrial forester, and a recreational officer. Compare judgements as to the quality of What follows also begins to bring out what is omitted in a main theme of R.S. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance, Bodley Head, London, 1974. Note that defusing the notion of objective excellence does not lead to subjectivism. To avoid the customary false dichotomy, compare the notion of validity (usually ceded to themselves these days by classical logicians with that of quality). 9 a holistically-inclined Marxist, and environmental Californian philosophers pretend who seemingly because it philosopher, environmental such language, are There work judged, be. cannot even of the main philosophical by members is not done ordinary philosophers. environmental that by peer group at Harvard and like institutions. this As judgements begins the of to reveal, judgements of quality are not independent of work of importance or done But tackled. problems importance of problems and issues is highly paradigm dependent. the For example, problems such as those of quantifying-in and of possible worlds and of de re thought, which assume immense importance for fashionable referential within the mainstream empiricist restricted that outside theories paradigm, vanish to relative insignificance viewpoint. Now observe that most judgements as to what are the important problems and what constitutes important work - matters helping determine quality - are shipped down from the North. Their Importance is relative to their paradigmatic placement, and the paradigms concerned are exported to the Antipodes through the main channels already indicated. We are free to reject these paradigms and select alternatives, and there are, it can good reasons be argued, choose that different generally energy favoured to do just technology in the that, much as (or different North the which there are good reasons military North is from technology) eager to to export southwards. Similar which might argument, points apply against alternatively that be mass-produced and cosmopolitan. The argument -marketed 'cosmopolitan subject', called people sophisticated the from is based cosmopolitan/international the Peter everywhere Holland; Stuyvesant smoke this argument international superior product cigarette-sophistication is on the assumption that philosophy is a that is is not the sort of enterprise for which place 10 and people are significant as they assumption has only to be presented important thing, for one for are poetry the or to be questioned. novel. is a finished product of a certain that philosophy process of production the place and people involved (e.g. And literature, the if and not product philosophy, no more 12 than work a like theorems just internationally-approved format, since is The It takes for granted, sort (a propositional theory), not a process of production also. material. 11 of in discussion) are art, arguments and But in the like a piece assembled in of an then again the historical setting matters, literature, not does emerge in a vacuum. Plato’s philosophy could not have emerged in ancient Australia, and if cribbed in mid 20th century Oxford would surely have been marked down or rejected. It is important not to be sidetracked do not in aesthetics - that extent sets of themes need to and arguments into issues - resembling problems be contested, such as whether and what produced in one place and setting could have been produced in another. A nonnuclear technology of some sort could be adopted prospect in Europe that New but apparently will Zealand, nonnuclear energy strategy. in not contrast be, with whereas there Australia, is will reasonable pursue a It is the doing, and not what could be done, that Grave, op.cit., p.2: the term ’cosmopolitan subject’ used there comes from Donegan. As to the significance of place and people for literature, see further C. Partridge, The Making of New Cultures, Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam, 1982. 12 Like a paper in the biological sciences. But here again technique methodology, which may both be regional, are crucially important. 13 and Related points can be made using less extreme examples, e.g. concerning modern American work. Consider, for instance such texts as W.V. Quine’s Word and Object, (Wiley, New York, 1960) or R. Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia (Basic Books, New York, 1974). The assumptions taken for granted, the arguments involved, etc., are especially American: it is not just the style. The acceptability of arguments and positions is dependent on place and received paradigm. 11 here. matters Dialethic which logic, the invalidates methodology of much Anglo-American philosophy, could technique and perhaps be done in the North (though there would be substantial cultural resistance): it is not being and is not likely to be done in the Anglo-American sphere.To done there, this extent, Antipodeans do techniques, logical can choose their international/cosmopolitan argument, distinctive own their distinctive own technology thing. and The stated in a form that would be telling, fails. Of course it can be argued, it is being argued, that Antipodeans don't need to be, or even oughtn't to be pursuing their own energy or logic policies and apparatus. But meeting these considerations takes us to a whole new set of issues concerning the merit of various policies and programs, diversity, etc. - far beyond the cosmopolitan argument. which we shaLl return, arguments concerning the point of The new arguments, to are not a lot more convincing however than comparable cooking: that we don't devising our own cuisine or wine styles. need to be or oughtn't to be British, or at least cosmopolitan, cooking is adequate: we should stick to that and buy it off the shelf from the North, ideally importing the cooks also. Do we have good reasons to think that British philosophy is better, these days, than British cooking? Antipodeans are free, in principle then, to pursue their own paradigms; and to do so they will by and large want to, and mostly have to, appoint their own people, people they have educated - not saboteurs or people who have (had) Much as communist anarchism, a live possibility for communes and perhaps communities in Australia, is culturally excluded in North America, owing to the extreme possessive individualism of that culture. On dialethic logic, see G. Priest and R. Routley, On Paraconsistency, Research Papers in Logic, #13, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1983. 12 to be re-educated, from elsewhere, in particular from the North. intellectual paradigms the of features local But will the perused tie with cultural paradigms, with distinctive In a culture? though works of philosophy will loose not usually at way, they may link, least, culture in tie in with the the integral fashion that novels (as distinct from more technical works) sometimes do. Indeed, cultural certain programs, - to limited extent, features, not they do restricted already link. add. But style, independent - or independent acceptability, truth, philosophical ’an Australian compared with what matters is this though considers Grave particular to help mark philosophy in Australia as that 'unimportant hastens a to product' in philosophy' do matter, and are he not so far as their perception goes in the case of truth and correctness^3 - from underlying broad theory or received paradigm. However the marks Grave cautiously advances, significant though they are, do not serve features to the distinguish Australian philosophy Australian exhibits in product, lesser the degree adventurous and polemical philosophy of Greek antiquity. by Passmore as 'most typical of first two the than being more The first, described Australian philosophy', is a 'diversity of approach and readiness to put forward an unconventional or unfashionable point of view', philosophy, something which more (with typical some of notable ancient philosophy exceptions) than exhibits Australian a.i austere Nothing need be conceded to strong cultural relativity themes, though they would support the case. It is enough that our theories remain radically incomplete and that there can accordingly be rival theories as to what is true. Similarly, however philosophy is conceived - as the search for truth, explanation, understanding and wisdom (all of these and more, really), or as, more vaguely, inquiry of a certain sort - there can be, and will be, competing accounts; so a pluralistic theory is inevitable in giving a fuller view. l^Both preceding quotations, while included as such in Grave's Introduction, are from J. Passmore, 'Philosophy', in The Pattern of Australian Culture (ed. A.L. McLeod), Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y., 1963, pp.131-168. The same annotation also applies to the third mark. 13 uniformity reflecting that often attributed to the land itself. and surprising, more most 'the philosophy, Wittgensteinian extraordinary discussed by itself’ Grave) , criticism by sharp and political relevant/paraconsistent to example ... Andersonian (p.2). This of character' manifestoed the the __ being if Sydney, example is Australian line-up it was far from between the not isolated: them concern the fervour generated by "Australian materialism", others among the notable Melbourne philosophy Andersonian is mark The second, engagement the and by some growing philosophy departments confrontation (both concerning the program, with the local ('adversarial') style leading Connected Americans. these with first two marks are further characteristics of much Australian philosophy, as of much 18th century Scottish philosophy and directness, unkindly turn of unwillingness (in add the this century Cambridge philosophy:17 to muffle points, hope of locating a namely surface clarity and, some would difference), bluntness, genuine unsubtlety and crudity. The third and the fourth marks advanced Grave in philosophy. effect notes, hardly are very different, but again as distinguishing features of Australian The third, which applies well to other intellectual areas, is the contrast of the Australian reputation in philosophy indeed of Australia as a center of philosophical inquiry’, with the anti—intellectual national stereotype of Australians as a people ’devoted to physical achievement rather than to intellectual subtlety’. Anglo-American philosophy; namely The the fourth mark is especially a feature of isolation of academic philosophy Australasia from, and its general indifference or even hostility to, in the sort 17 • though for the most part that influenced by Sydney rather than that originating in Melbourne. This again reflects the different historical influences bearing in Sydney and Melbourne philosophy: roughly, Scottish versus Continental antecedents. 14 of imported philosophy (e.g. that Nietzsche of and the existentialists) generating interest in literary and arts circles. The failure philosophy sufficiently matter. not does separated For its by to marks such of adequately one the thing, out separate research projects. Australian For another, Australian produce is regionalism should not be confused with nationalism, nor more regional positions such as Sydneyside materialism modalism Wellington or with Nationalism in philosophy, as in most other things, not to be the and encouraged; new regionalism philosophies. national is an undesirable trait, is linked, in other cultural things, with the breakdown of nations and contraction of state power. -A ■A To get back * to where we were: A the A emerging proposal is this, that we start - or better much increase - doing our own distinctive things, and that we team up to do so. In fact there are several suggestions that begin to emerge, concerning research and teaching, publications and appointments, study These are not just that we do our own selection leave and sponsored visitors. topics of and people, and style and methods, decide instead of having these foisted upon us - not just, our own priorities, that is, that we play our own games (whether invented here or taken over from the North) and not theirs, Rules and Rugby instead of Gridiron and Basketball - but. that we abandon the individual competitive model of cultural achievement, sold to us and fostered 18 See, e.g., London, 1957. Sale, op.cit., and L. Kohr, The Breakdown of Nations, RKP, The Editor of the new 1923 AJPP did however take seriously the notion of National Philosophy, of (what must have surprised some New Zealand readers) an Australian Philosophy; some of the issues there raised (p.292ff) are addressed in Appendix 2. 15 by the North, in favour of a group cooperative approach (elements of which are already modelled in Antipodean social clubs). The thoughts here are simple and familiar. digging example: it is well-known that two people cooperating can dig a ditch and enjoyably more rapidly On the one side is the ditch­ than two people working on the ditch separately. Cooperative work tends to pay off - in philosophy or elsewhere - in terms of output, and enjoyment quality, in the doing. On the other side, experience shows that we in the periphery cannot individually complete very successfully with the centre on achievements in their programs. for this. the nature of American academic attainment of depends results access to unpublished material. and periphery nationalistic are the tend verbal rapid communication and For, despite the individualism myth, work is several clever people will be able to hit on it. idea or result, communications upon enterprise,^ much and builds on the work of many; when the time is ripe for some- jointly based, result, Despite the highly competitive One is the communication situation. predominantly individualistic in There are several reasons to important assignment lose out. considerations in obtaining of credit Again (e.g. for rapid it. publication of Here there is a mix PoLes tend Then again to again the people of reasons:promote idea or at the There are Polish results, Russians will cite a Russian who achieves a result at about the same time as an outsider). There face-to-face seminars 19 is the fact that much is conveyed verbally and through so that local results will be conveyed. There is the Reflecting other features of the culture and enterprise of the centre which are not so deeply embedded in Australasia: see further R. Routley, 'Culture, philosophy, and approaches to the natural environment an Australian perspective’, in The Environment, Ethics and Ecology (ed. D. Bennett), The Faculties, Australian National University, 1984, and also 'Culture and the roots of political divergence: the Australian/American contrast’, typescript, Canberra, 1983; both referred to subsequently as 'Culture'. 16 limited fact of they when reading, on read and that people at the from material the centre central by centre tend to concentrate peopLe, that so published items and results from the periphery will often not be noticed, and may well out lose to There publication. is the also for merit, receive, merit competitors central more fact that publication than people towards the periphery. if even people and they achieve the at centre communication central tend to opportunities Here economic factors do begin to enter; consider the size and distribution of the academic market (there are, e.g., a great many more academic philosophers in North America than in the whole rest of the world), control of publishing outlets and journals (with few exceptions all Northern), etc. culture — we can way we shut off the Northern philosophical propaganda in much the shut off our television impressed being However economic power does not, and need not, determine by philosophical those to. sets if we really want middle-men And we can stop make who a living by importing the Northern stuff. So what do we do? We adapt to the cultural-philosophical level, several of those things, that have been suggested in the newer regionalism. some regional importers and doctrines and awakening and self-reliance. of, and local from the North. imitators positions local We do not remain commentators For We aim at on example, we and slavish peddlars don’t spend of, our academic lives trying to tease out what Davidson or Dummett or Kripke meant by this or that through. To in the be hope that sure, I am some pale Northern light will perhaps not suggesting that we emulate the filter appalling ignorance of people from the North who visit the Antipodes and know little or nothing about what has been done or is being done here;^^ so that we have Regrettably, the ignorance extends to many locals. In particular, those infected with Sydney materialism appear remarkably ill-informed as to basic features of other Australasian programs. 17 eminent their visitors, the through bags National Australian cultural with heavy University accroutrements, (now the main trekking centre for investigation of relevant logics) and Informing us that, or relying crucially on the assumption that, a contradiction entails every proposition. that advances is positions and inferiority cultural of another colonies; is know often Northerners these little is the the Antipodes intellectual and the nothing or distinctive prevailing assumption of the in life these (predominantly local) narrow about One reason former and southern limited reading undertaken by Northern luminaries. But, despite having been sufficient given cause, we shouldn’t cut ourselves off from Northern paradigms and influences (we could hardly manage We can reasonably use what we need from propoganda is different). to anyway: so we should stay informed of, but not imitators these continuing traditions: of, or part of, In any case, their enterprises. the people are largely European stock. in older Northern traditions, just as So far from nowhere, cutting these loose from (and older these likely regional cultures are rooted traditions minority) and starting afresh traditions, and the from local variations that have already appeared are what we want to develop and perhaps mutate, as again with wine styles. Part of the proposal Is then that things, encourage and develop our own Antipodean Northern paradigms, paradigms. rather It is we increasingly research programs, very great 71 our own local and so shape newer than working with pale northern reflections not as if we have to - what is very difficult - entirely original work, components. do build from nothing, to of do to try to create cultural For there are research programs already initiated, which have the advantage of See Culture, op.cit. being grounded in features of the larger culture."1 18 Nor, the do we need fortunately, future is part to make the story up - though helping to shape of what the Australia - New Zealand proposal Much of about. is different and more difficult is a is All one really to bring out programs he has already indicated and provide some to do is elaboration and commentary. level, for proposition - already indicated in Grave’s survey of Australian philosophy. has the story, To pull the investigation down to a more concrete I shall sketch some more prominent cooperative programs - by no means the only programs - and remark on some relevant features of them. The longest running and best known program is, without much doubt, of Australian naturalism, and which aims see to natural the that world, and everything else, as suitably encompassed within the framework of the world of (physical) science. The program is generally traced as a major subprogram Sydney materialism, Adelaide which subsequently died out there. such famous components central state version of failures functionalism. its in a reduction and nowadays Faced plans, like it It in The latter program has included takes it all now Anderson’s program initiated as the mental-material contingent materialism, to in Armstrong’s work. empiricist metaphysics,-- and is now best exhibited contains back in, identity theme and more derivatively, physicalisms incorporates a with a conspicuous "scientifically" trimmed theory of universals, and an account of natural laws as relations of universals, both components of the developing Sydney realism. Parts of the naturalism program, especially materialism and central state reductionism and the unified science ideal, have had counterparts in the North, but the program has, for the most part, retained its distinctively Australian character 22 Anderson’s metaphysics was however far more opposed to reductions than what has succeeded it. For an account of Anderson’s philosophy, and a history and account op.cit. of Australian naturalism and materialism, see especially Grave, 19 - despite export efforts, it never caught on in New Zealand. smoothly, moreover, and philosophy can far as so earthy, into Australian culture. The program fits It is similarly down-to-earth, be, without ideas or the fancy effete idealism of European philosophy or the spirituality and suppressed puritanism much which with pragmatism). North of And commitments, and American it yet it though not does is simmers thinking basically shrink from metaphysical explicit empiricist, nowadays, (including is it not positivistic (rejecting a verification principle, in particular). It is a city based program, broadcast mainly from the University of Sydney to other metropolitan universities; but the program does extend outside the universities a bit (a tiny bit) to the larger metropolitan culture. North America, the broader Russell, so in Australasia, little professional philosophy impinges on community,’-^ Popper and would naturalism program Perth, and has outliers Apart notable be or Kuhn Australasia from As in quite used to even on being an the wider exceptional. achievement, stretch through one academic (To community, turn worth to Adelaide; this working it work by around for.) now reaches in The to in Canberra, as well as a core of opposition there. exceptions, the program has never had the same hold, or In Canada, for example, while most academics from other disciplines would know of, and perhaps a little about, Russell, far fewer would know of Wittgenstein (though he is becoming known to lit. crit. groups), and virtually none would know of Quine. (The sampling is subjective.) On the fairly recent ’triumph of professionalism’ in philosophy in USA, see Kuklick, op.cit., p.565ff. Iluklick brings out well some of the more disastrous features of professionalism, but does not sufficiently notice that the virtuous features resulting from some professionalisation can be synthesized with broader philosophical activity. 20 0 more than a rather precarious hold, f in Melbourne:^2 4 * nor, more surprisingly, has it had heavyweight criticism from there (or indeed much external criticism the old confrontation of major city philosophies having died from elsewhere), Melbourne out. is more philosophy stricken than Sydney; Melbourne by dominated a procession philosophy; Continental then, philosophy; religion philosophy, much more than Sydney, has Northern of earlier fashions: recently, more remarkable a and more historically oriented and Davidson Quine, turnabout, idealism ordinary Wittgenstein, been and language extensional reduction; now perhaps Lewis, Kripke and Dummett? The one program that reaches the beyond confines of the cities in Australia - which is after all a metropolitan dominated culture, the vast land always the other being - Australian environmentalism, is a rather diffuse program, which has connections with the Colleges of Advanced Education in the the communes on the North Coast. country towns and much distinguished environmental Europe by what positions specifically it are a having is not as feature of transformed what So far the program is as it is. the New World, most its of Serious the natural and deeper Old World, and environment and having little wild untouched country left, and little sensitivity accordingly to such as issues Europe that tend admit European to those of concern shallow built approaches superficiality environmentalism the wilderness. outside (and continues North and The main environmental human-transformed encourage to America. environment, situations). techno-fix dominate North much issues of American the New in issues And World environmentalism differs significantly however from Antipodean environmentalism, most obviously 2A rhe exceptions include Ellis’s distinctive program, which can be accounted part of the broader naturalist program, and at Monash the work of F. Jackson and, earlier, of H. Munro in value theory. 21 in the religious-spiritual component of the former, in but several other respects as well (see further Culture). positively, More environmentalism:- there Firstly, three are an is there strands extended Australian to utilitarianism, differing little in theory from Bentham’s enlarged position, which insists upon counting in the utilities of all sentient creatures. British base, has figured prominently in animal welfare and animal liberation though and movements: This position, developed from a it has on domestic animals, focussed animals used in research and hunted (wild) animals, it has also become entangled in issues of bio-research more generally such as genetic or much interested in, concerned with, engineering. endangered species, It is not however the disappearance of wild lands, the conversion of forests, etc., except insofar as these have a bearing on animal pain and pleasure. Wider and deeper environmental concerns appear only as a spinoff from animal welfare, and so deeper concerns get an inadequate deal. Secondly, there is a wider and a deeper ecological position, which is not utilitarian and which recognises irreducible value elsewhere than forests and differs ecosystems, especially wild and American from naturalism. which finds states, psychological sentience or 25 Thirdly, spiritualism there is and of intrinsic value natural systems. from course, an as in trees This position of American extension everywhere, almost and a reactionary component, critical of the other strands, which insists that all that needs to be accomplished on the environmental front can be achieved within older established (European) ethical and political frameworks. Whereas materialism is based in Sydney, environmentalism is centred in It has been described more fully elsewhere: see, in particular, Environmental Philosophy (ed. D. Mannison and others), RSSS, Australian National University, 1980. 22 Melbourne and Canberra, but also includes Brisbane and Perth. Also centred in Canberra, and reaching across the country, with good connections in Melbourne, but in few Sydney, materialism and from program other which program, and logic program perhaps includes extends their core value more to centres New respectively, the especially philosophy, in the with Logic a Whereas in metaphysics, theory essentially is of areas major which and program. program, but one metaphysics. The Australia than also been described in New Zealand philosophy is also a Zealand, has any other 26 elsewhere The programs have epistemology relevant/paraconsistent affecting relevant/paraconsistent environmental input further the is main grounded research program program. A program emanating located mainly in Wellington, The impact of the evident program on from the it might be called work of Prior and now the extended modal program. philosophy is perhaps best seen in Cresswell’s 27 work. “ Australian philosophy used for its not hard-headed empiricism; known for to be known, and still is in some quarters, regrettably New Zealand philosophy is mostly anything much, except perhaps, in UK, that Prior brought unusual adaption of Russellian philosophy from that remote place. his Neither of 26 Again, like all the Australian programs, both those mentioned and others, in Grave, op.cit. But see further, R. Routley, 'Research in Logic in Australia, New Zealand and Oceania', Research Papers in Logic #14, Australian National University, 1983 (which also considers other programs in logic); G. Priest and R. Routley, op. cit.; and R. Routley, R.K. Meyer and others, Relevant Logics and Their Rivals, Ridgeview, California, 1982. 27 See especially M.J. Cresswel.1, Logics and Languages, Methuen, London, 1973; but see also work by Goldblatt and by Hughes referred to in Research in Logic, op.cit. Also described there is an original version of the modal program (transparent intensional logic) elaborated by Tichy at Otago. 23 these impressions is particularly accurate; both are rather out-of-date. But the aim of work of the present type is, of course, not just to correct these impressions, not just to reflect or report on culture - for what one would like to reflect upon is not sufficiently there - but also to help manufacture elements of a culture, to make an image. To resist the already flourishing North, we should increase our efforts to further the programs, and perhaps other sunrise projects;*'^ to build teaching and research around the programs selected for promotion, elaboration, and criticism, to orient appointments, especially of involved local people, to Among sunrise projects in Australian philosophy so far suggested (not all of them feasible) are these: Australian feminism, Antipodean social and political alternatives, peace studies, indigenous regional philosophies (especially Aboriginal, Melanesian, and Polynesian). Another promising field, with practical consequences, for local initiative is the philosophy of education, where material produced by R.S. Peters has dominated the market, with stultifying effects it is now alleged. As foreshadowed with the notion of "sunrise projects", much of the rhetoric, and argument, concerning science and technology policy (presented in the case of Australia in Jones, op.cit.) can be taken over to apply to X policy, where X is some subject discipline, such as philosophy. 24 these programs. 79 Why bother? Why not simply buy our philosophy, like almost all our technology, off the shelf, from the North? There are several arguments for not doing this, in more than a limited fashion, which are now sketched. There Northern fine a is, firstly, products, the despite inferiority their attractive and built-in packaging. of most Without putting too point on it, many of the imported intellectual goods are shoddy, and only work for a very limited range of applications (e.g. the obsolence vicinity Antipodean of contradictions philosophy undoubtedly imported from the North. dilemmas). or derives from Much shoddy they’re hopeless in that is wrong intellectual with goods Yet buying this material is encouraged by hard-sell cultural ambassadors from the North, who are often enough paid to visit. This 29 In fact something like the last has been the policy of the LSE Philosophy Department, where the only outside appointment over a long period was that of Lakatos (hardly a person far removed ideologically). As observed, it now looks like the practice of the Otago Department also; and apparently it used to be a tendency at Melbourne. But in most places the practice is condemned as nepotistic or parochial, and overridden by the call for "new (Northern) blood . However there can be significant differences between nepotistic appointments and those strengthening local programs. It is at this stage, among others that administrative measures do matter; for example, to ensure that suitable locally-engaged locals gain employment rather than Northern stooges, to direct funds into on-going local programs rather than imported fashions, etc. There are various ways appropriate administrative details can be handled, locally or nationally; but nothing draconian, such as wholesale exclusion of noncitizens, is required. Observe, indeed, that no restriction of academic appointments to nationals (in Canadian style) or the like is being advocated. Anyone who arrives at a conclusion of that sort from what has been argued has misunderstood the case in crucial respects. As a matter of simple mathematics, restricting appointment fields characteristically reduces both quality of candidates available (however quality is assessed) and range of possibilities open for future research; and no such restrictions are advocated. The author has witnessed the debilitating effects of field restrictions at the Australian National University and elsewhere. 30t, c Some of centre also. , these arguments support change (perhaps revolutionary) at the 25 is part of Northern philosophical the colonialism the that - imperialism North - from the too Antipodes willing the successor suffers, or, to more remarkable, encourages! Secondly, there is the inappropriateness of much of the Northern product, especially considered as metaphysics, environmental for package, a to cover, well as as The European North has no satisfactory concerns. land or environmental ethic instance, fit for Antipodean circumstances, and the deeper American package is too spiritually-loaded for mainstream Australian culture. In political American work is much too individualistic the European product, especially the Marxist form, and competition-based, unsuited being theory, both too precious and too high-tech for local and is circumstances, especially again for more environmentally-perceptive people. features of telling also Thirdly, import world’s markets power structures against substitution and pressures and comparative advantage, regionalism; namely, and fashions, (including the Old Boy’s are appealing avoidance of the removal of overseas control and network in jobs, policies, etc.), and gaining of local control, employment of local people, etc. Fourthly, there arguments are philosophy as complexity, sheer diversity, part of intellectual stability, for cultural culture: 39 etc. “ diversity, arguments In fact, from applied to richness, the garden analogy 31 The point is elaborated in Culture. At a more practical level Northern products are again often unsuitable, though for different reasons. For example, the transfer of American agricultural methods and equipment to the thin poor soils of the Antipodes has had disastrous effects, at last beginning to be recognised. “See, for instance, A.A. Mazrui, A World Federation of Cultures: An African Perspective, Free Press, New York, 1976. 26 built into the whole notion of ’culture' transfers. dense, But not only seeds and plants but weeds and many productive garden. pests are We being introduced. and European and are control obtain not only good products, European pests cultivars, but selectiveness Naturally we want a rich, Indian maize and American weeds. as essential, against This is why haphazard previous procedures. The proposal with local is not for, nor would the case sustain, a narrow localism, products, whatever local their quality, heroes, replacing Northern ones. fashions, and local cult That is certainly not the preferred way of the newer regionalism, which tends to do without fashions and heroes and seeks durable quality in products, way of technology policy. which are difference, has to outlets, be not occupied impact, and so on; low environmental Rather, as with technology policy, we select niches satisfactorily or where filled, given etc.). our resource But granting regionalism, base (of we can make a Indeed the policy and use and develop local skills and methods. selective nor is the philosophers, publishing to what extent should components, for instance people, books and other teaching elements, theories and ideas, be imported and Locally? The to what extent should they be produced, trained, conceived possibility of selectiveness in different components means that many mixes are possible. particular mix. There is no need to insist, so far at least, on a The case for the present is mainly for a regional shift, for a significantly greater degree of local autonomy and production.^ But it will do no harm to indicate elements of a mix that finds much Does it sound familiar? Outside philosophy, it should. For example, we have now been told by the Americans that our defence role, unlike theirs, is regional, not global: this is supposed to shed great light on our previously confused defence policies. 27 the suggestion is that we try to eradicate much of Negatively, local favour. the Oxford style of teaching and doing philosophy. as removal Berkeley-Hume with (a however prevailing undue the of no standard on British focus); attention proper status Anglo-American empiricism British emphasis to quo. That includes such things of of heavy The particular, has mostly been a very conservative one. the movements main philosophy, but from emanating also the England, protective of the Northern status quo; they are, recommend and this. just reinforcement Oxford Locke- approach the of in influence, More generally, many of especially Moore-Wittgenstein on quasi-historical the sources; centred practice, ordinary have language been very they tend to leave things very much as the Positively, proposal is that we achieve further disassociation from the Anglo-American empiricist past in two ways: by framework, emphasizing and by local projects diversifying the that move range outside of constricting that philosophical traditions selectively drawn upon, to include not only neglected Continental strands and parts of Eastern thought, philosophy. The idea is but also that Pacific ethnic such a material and plurality of sources, Australasian especially in teaching, will assist in removing narrower cultural biasses, such as British parochialism, and enable more discrimination to be obtained. Then too we should be better able to see the ranges of theories that are open to us in the Antipodes and how to advance our own programs. 34 The point is laboured in E. Gellner, Words and Things, Victor Gollancz, London, 1959. But even ordinary language philosophy, though conservative, and though it much contracted the proper range of philosophical investigations, had its liberating elements, e.g. removal of some of the narrowness and more cramping assumptions induced by technical jargon. Nor has the social impact changed much with the subsequent decline, since 1959, of ordinary language philosophy, the increasing insolvency of Oxbridge philosophy, and its consequent limited take-over by right-wing Ivy League American philosophy. By contrast, the less economically influential growth of redbrick and applied philosophy in some of the British radical and polytechnic institutes has touched no more than the surface of Oxbridge practice. 28 There remain some things we should want to see whatever mixes are chosen One crucial issue is the removal of Northern in different Antipodean regions. bias from papers and publications, research seminars and lectures, letters of This Northern bias is a disposition to cite and discuss reference, and so on. the and works of irrespective discussion projects and of quality the ignore to authors, Northern of their contribution works the more the of irrespective of the quality of their contribution. accept opinions of worth, their been (thus Influential philosophers, under topic largely again It is etc. to uncritically and the disposition to though work produced locally either does not exist or has write or lecture as not importance, better, It is the disposition to to authors from prestigious Northern institutions, defer the to authors, local the famous are, ensuring anything, if that it inclined more is not). And Northern to Australasian bias than many overseas intellectuals, who are perhaps less concerned to be seen as belonging to the Northern mainstream. bias effects not The reduction, and eventual removal, of Northern practice the only of individual philosophers, but the policies of selection and review committees as well as of editors and referees of It journals. local reorientation, with innovations better, development - involves, among Antipodean philosophers things so they that can would cite be getting local assisted things, other work by intellectual to know local work and out regional or point greater local content in courses taught, more time spent at local institutions on study leave, and so on. APPENDIX 1. Background notes on the philosophy supply situation. Sociological investigation of the philosophy labour market in Australia and New Zealand has yet to be attempted. But a picture of some elements underlying the numerical argument of the text can be gained from the following table: simple 29 TABLE 1. Ph.Ds in Philosophy: a USA - Australasian comparison USA Number (Male/Female) Australia New Zealand 1974 413 (346/67) 6 0 1975 375 (318/57) 5 0 1976 382 (319/63) 8 0 1977 330 (264/66) 3 2 (1/1) 1978 283 (235/43) 5 5 (4/1) 1979 285 (204/54) 9 3 (2/1) 1980 246 (187/59) 4 N. A. 1981 N.A. 4 0 Notes: 1. The breakdown of the USA and New Zealand numbers by sexes (male/female) is given. Similar figures do not appear to be available for Australia. 2. The US figures are. for the academic year ending in the Year shown, e.g. 1978 covers the Northern academic year 1977-78. Southern figures are for the calendar year shown. Sources: Digest of Education Statistics, US National Center for Education Statistics; University Statistics, Australian Bureau of Census Statistics; New Zealand Education Statistics. Comments: 1. The contraction of US doctoral production and the concomitant rise in female representation, are clearly indicated. The Australian figures are likely too small to reflect such trends and responses to the academic market. 2. Some of the Australasian numbers include Americans; likewise the American figures provide no nationality breakdown. 3. There is no information available on the number of Australians proceeding to higher degrees in philosophy outside Australia. In applying table 1 some simplifying assumptions are made. assumed that candidates for appointment For example, it is to regular university positions now would have a doctorate or the equivalent (until recently a B.Phil was taken as a near well). equivalent It is of a assumed, North what American seems to Ph.D.; take publications the case, that serve as the number of could 30 Australasians proceeding to higher degrees in philosophy abroad is relatively small, and no more than the order of Ph.Ds. taken locally. It can be assumed, without upsetting applications of table 1, that Australasian graduates match, say, the upper half of American graduates in standard attained. There is no compiled information on academic vacancies in philosophy in Australia or New Zealand - on the numbers of vacancies, on how the positions It would however be a routine, are filled, by what nationalities, sexes, etc. if matter tedious some of assemble to data, this is of considerable which relevlance to the planning of philosophy programs. APPENDIX 2. On the earlier considering the Editor of the idea of a National of possibility initial German distinction a National AJPP distinguished two between Weltanschauung and Philosophy for Australia. Philosophy’, the (Australian) corresponding senses In Lebensanchauung’ to (p.292). 'the In the first, that of ’a scheme of the universe’, ’an Australian Philosophy is as as ridiculous confirmation prejud ices’. Holland, personal’ Science’. falsification, or Granted: fostered, etc ., in Christian a ’are The is argument of independent truth, that national and sympathies its or but that does not mean that a theory may not be held, in one region but not others, as intuitionism was for long in or way, Cartesianism ’a nation in France. like an In a second individual may ’more develop intimate a and certain temperamental attitude to the problems of existence, which we may ... call its philosophy of life. A nation’s philosophy, like its art and its literature, is a mode of expression for the national consciousness. form of evolving the national genius national culture. ....’ But, (pp.292-3). in the first It is, place, It is a specialised in short, this is part of the by no means entirely separate from the initial sense, a philosophy comprising not merely a fairly comprehensive theory but also an integrated set of attitudes (like an 31 operational paradigm). Furthermore, only by concession are such items as ’the national consciousness’ and 'the Australian landscape’ of meriting definite Australian descriptors. literature, has many strands to it, accounted single units philosophy, Australian like some not particularly distinctive (in any sense): such things form rather loose families. Editor The does not find, does not really hope to in find ’a modern industrialised community’ - with its modular parts interchangeable with those of others - a claims find to and courage a fair trite life, with a difference. build on (’traditions but nothing at all distinctive. philosophy of national moral dealing’), base to In fact ... of humour, So far, be a national philosophy, at least of life, but is not; there can he then, this does not however exclude there being various regional philosophies (such as local research programs). plunged that into ’if So far, inconsistency: then, the all is well. trouble derives But shortly from the the Editor is extravagant claim Australia has nothing to do with these - the eternal values of the Spirit, the Ideals of Truth, Goodness and Beauty - then and only then has she nothing to do with Philosophy’ (p.295; with rearrangement). But, as Australia has nothing per se to do with these - as is virtually conceded, these values involving a 'wider sweep’ do with Philosophy, Though the than any national boundaries - "she" has nothing to contradicting the contradiction is easily possibility of avoided by a National Philosophy. the extravagant rescinding claim, the ideal of a National Philosophy should be allowed to rest in peace: nationalism has had its time. 32 R. Routley35 Research School of Social Sciences Australian National University 35 With thanks to R. Elliot, W. Godfrey-Smith, S. Grave and L. Mirlin, to several members of the audience at the presentation of the paper at the 1983 Australasian Association of Philosophy Conference, University of Adelaide, to several referees for this Journal, and, not least, to the present Editor. t •r ■ PROSPECTS FOR REGIONAL PHILOSOPHIES IN AUSTRALASIA Philosophy, especially academic philosophy but also folk philosophy, like other intellectual and higher cultural activity in Australasia, has long been dominated, indeed Europe, now the largely swamped, by Northern Given increasingly from North America. cultural and other baggage the imported, influences, initially the migration patterns, composition ethnic resulting ruling populations, such a result was virtually inevitable. does not have to stay that way. from of the But it Suitable policies, a good philosophy policy, could change things. thought The of a is hardly a new one. culture, In 1923, a matching perhaps philosophy, regional regional a New Zealand correspondent to the newly-launched Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy mentioned the possibility of ’a new kind or temper of philosophy under these southern skies’ which the such a reaching Journal might role (or, not community). for merely And that matter, professional although however hardly The Journal has foster.1 actively philosophers some things solid foundation for a new regionalism its pursued have changed pronounced aim wider a but in Australia, in philosophy, and temper of southern skies were intended distinctively 1AJPP, March same volume, Appendix 2. New Zealand 1923, p.74. p.292.ff; his philosophy under to include: but characteristics, The question was discussion is laying a that possibility of a New Zealan few distiri have of Australasian new temper of philosophy has hardly been realised. There is of a new kind fulfilled shown up le in the way ies, which the y features, ’ no in New Zealand taken up by the Editor in the considered below, especially in 2 7 philosophy’. New Zealand remains a substantial net importer of philosophy, The situation of colonial dominance that used to prevail in and philosophers. Australia, where virtually chairs, all and many philosophy, were filled by academics from the North, power and influence of professors in small departments, and covered considered and in tends to persist in New Zealand, where no established chairs are occupied by locals.2 3 topics posts academic other Given the usual in courses designed, especially appointments made, the heavy Northern orientation of philosophy taught and researched in New Zealand is not The Northern control is perhaps most strikingly exhibited at the surprising. oldest of New Zealand universities, the University of Otago, where the Philosophy Department has been substantially captured by a British School and increasingly looks event, the like an offshoot of overwhelming Anglo-American the University of London.4 dominance of New Zealand In any philosophy also a feature only in slightly lesser degree of Australian philosophy - can be confirmed by a content survey of the courses offered and research papers written at New Zealand universities. Even when local people have been appointed to positions in Australasia, they have been brought up on a solid diet of Anglo-American material, and they have often been reforged or finished in the North as well. * In particular, the 2 S.A. Grave, A History of Philosophy in Australia, Queensland University Press, 1983, p.l. Page references are to the manuscript. The paper draws heavily on this history. 3 This claim was correct at the 1983). With the recent loss of qualification, but the pattern of 4In the 1983 presentation of the paper (August Wellington, the claim may require mination persists. Commonwealth University Handbook listing, 6 of the 8 members of the Department held their main degree, Ph.D., from -the London/?and one of the remainder from. Exeter). Only one member of the Department, soon to retire, falls outside me nexus. 3 requirements of the Australasian universities in the major period of post­ World War II expansion were conveniently seen to in the case of philosophy by Many degree. B.Phil. the Oxford of departments philosophy remain full of products of this cultural mill: indeed until the mid 70s candidates finished in Oxford were hard to beat out when they applied for positions, such was the prestige of Oxford and (unwarranted) the regrettable, but still continuing, "cultural cringe". Nonetheless, in been occurring scene will (as despite the Northern the Antipodes, be especially on indicated). significant dominance, worth is It changes have the Australian philosophical asking whether Australian philosophy is moving towards the sort of change that occurred in USA more than 100 years ago when the Harvard Philosophy Department was brought (or bought) together, its "golden and age" began.American philosophy was never quite the same again, and became its own thing. There are now new forces operating which could help to move Australian philosophy in such a direction. the widespread emergence, particularly in alternative There is culture, of choice along a new £ which regionalism, other choices; local fashioning provides applies of a national model for and to in cultural stark science reflection and in and ideological contrast, technology regional there policies, philosophy directly bears on parts of the philosophy of science. soon appear, there are also some is serious obstacles the with centralised which not only policy but also Unfortunately, as will to regional philosophies and to the very idea of a regional philosophy. ^See B. Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy; Cambridge, Massachusetts 1860-1930, Yale University Press, 1977, Parts 2 and 3. On this bio-regionalism, see especially, Fourth World News, vol. 1, and K. Sale, Human Scale, Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, New York, 1980. 1983, USA, long an importer of culture from Europe, has recently become a net components of philosophical following not culture, taken). suit, should evidently but Are reasons there achieve not also the gAmerican (witness philosophy has Oxford from output lower of such as higher culture if Australasia, balance of certainly culture, of exporter a better turn why cultural Yes, there are reasons. payments, especially in philosophy? of In the first place, the change in the cultural position of the USA went with, and perhaps in part derived economic of most dominance entails Australasia’s changes in economic power relations. from, vast there is cultural dominance, culture, there since is little prospect serious no prospect If for that Australasia will ever emulate or attain American economic eminence (at least not without nuclear destruction of the North, flow of commodities, cultural and other). universities not only increasingly of of contingent Americans, former group, Northern cultural they. As priorities, a they also component include whose research of Northern academics, substantial a and teaching additional is bent to It is unlikely that this influential segment, especially (become so will commitments, long entire Secondly, as observed, Antipodean large fellow-travellers, Northern concerns. the contain and disruption of the as apart Antipodeans they are in a bind locally acclimatised do from the not situation; isolated drastically as to) give up Nor person. alter their its should cultural for it can be persuasively argued that they would be better off, as far as quality and product goes, stocking their universities with American teaching components and researching American- oriented concerns. One simple numerical argument that Antipodean universities would be better off with Americans in the main, takes the following lines:- The (higher degree) graduates of Australasian culturally distinguished, and American are not significantly at least in subjects such as philosophy. Consider now number the of quality Austroamerican graduates; academics produced of per number degree higher say there is 1 per every n graduates. The (great) preponderance of graduates will be Americans, just by virtue of their vastly greater population and their more extensive system of university education.7 So also then, just by ratio considerations, the great preponderance of quality academics from an drawn upper percentiles among they interested universities. Austroamerican base an Such would argument appointing be does not as will Clearly, Antipodeans, those quality products. quality, in will be American, work to more show Americans that, for to the were their similar reasons, American universities should be full of Chinese or Indian professors, for two Asians reasons; and first Americans, there are especially significant in cultural differences disciplines such as between philosophy; and secondly, their university systems do not deliver such great quotas of higher degree or high quality graduates, at least in philosophy. The conclusion of the numerical argument will not be a popular one. anti-Americanism felt the universities; The in portions of the Australasian community extends into and recently there has been increasing insistence, especially by the now aging younger Turks that university positions should be reserved for locals. This at the same time as these Turks often preach of an international community of scholars, presumably then with "free" interchange, As indicated in Appendix 1, whereassumptions made in the argument are . defended, the ratio of US philosophy graduates with doctorates as compared with Australian exceeds 30 to 1. And, as is weM-known, the extent of university education is much greater in USA than! in Australasia: indeed Australia is in this respect among the worst edlated of the developed nations, as OECD figures have made plain (see, e.g. Jb. Jones, Sleepers Wake^^ Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1982, Chapter I I J / > 6 etc. They cannot have it all ways.3 So long continues, the present centre will as the dominate they will have more economically; them if large to free-flow than us, and and culturally periphery the ideas of interchange personnel well as as should go by and jobs here (centrally-determined) quality in this high cultural it is business that we seek, as mostly claim. Now anyway, it is there that arguments. For enough widely is we are recognised, something not lower-down drastically wrong hierarchical with these ladders sorts of flooded with high-quality Northerners who would regularly drive out local contenders for positions, if we only preferred the Northerners when they were quite visibly superior: rather we are inundated by Americans with inflated references, who have the messages of the centre better than locals echelon do, (often and remote Northern fields tend Northern biassed) appointment to look greener to higher- committees than dusty locals As is beginning to be recognised too, whose shortcomings are known better. the Northern centres tend to retain their higher-quality products, and allow them to be exiled to the periphery only if they somehow fall foul of system (e.g. of the academic system for political or personal reasons). 8A reverse flow of the better or the Too //K odox academics from Australasia to A Leica should also be expected (outside mes of university contraction). Acci yrding _____d argument, which is based on labour] larket to assumptions of this brain considerations, appointment and lifestyle conditions for academics arej etter in USA than Australia and much better than those in economically—depressed New jhejr salaries, better standard of living, superio Zealand (e.g. high' research conditions, etc.) things being £equal, able academic from the Antipodes will rel;||jBate in USA as academic positions become avai ble. The argument also help^^xplain why Antipodean ui 'versifies cannot ex :, for the most part, to attract really top-drawer Nojrt Nortl srners for very long.'T' Of course, economically illy irrelevant irrele factors do in^Tu® interference; e.g. perverse t«gTua itsl to oddJball Antipodean intellectual enterprises which reduce commitment -ceLtabilit*^ or pre-industrial ties to place or persons or lifestyle market acc which imsmulaiS-y L_ _ restrict mobility (such as local roots, family attachments, even distaste for American urban lifestyles). 7 often Northern the centres have disposed of intellectually their inferior products in the periphery. All this makes the especially Americans, Northerners, appointing position look doubly bad. We ought, it seems, to be even if they are overrated their references, and usually not out of the top drawer, And yet quality. in in order to maximize doing so does not achieve the desired quality result, and breeds discontent elsewhere, especially among the aging Turks. Fortunately there obtain cultural sufficient subtitutable for us. we before from this awkward and that is the way of regionalism. shaky arguments; and way out is a elaborate distance,so that situation and these We do our own things; they are not simply Then the shaky numerical argument does fall down. the emerging proposal there are other But influential arguments to dispose of, and the disposal bears on the proposal. to begin with, There is, have so far been conceded: the argument for excellence, that excellence, which we all more or elements of which there is an objective commodity, quality or less agree about, which is proportionately more abundant in the North, and which is what academic institutions crave and seek and what appointments aim to capture, indeed maximize. That at least is the type of myth most of us have encountered; and many of us now know it is a myth, in fact appointments profit, but a that dangerous way, rather seek any myth. more Most that places don’t organisations aim even try just to to make maximize to satisfice on a mix of factors, of which assessed quality is only one, and not often the highest ranking one. Ability to fit ^This is easier in the cultural than the technological sphere. However it is also possible technologically: (stronger) theses of technological determinism, and so of cultural determinism, are false. We can choose different options, technologically, as well as culturally. 8 into some sort of program, teaching or research, is another, and commonly more important factor; is no good reason why such a program should not and there sometimes be a regionally oriented one. So given prevailing practices, the And, argument from excellence does not exclude regional philosophy programs. in any event, there are enough local candidates of sufficient worth to proceed with regional programs clearcut without of/ excellence. sacrifice Local Jl enterprise need entail no loss of excellence, and could increase it. A The deeper-cutting with idea the objection is that there is something seriously amiss objective of objective importance; criticism as bracketed out notions the that excellence, these with more values contextual—relativisation a rather generally, component paradigm, intellectual narrow the to framework or viewpoint to which these values relate.10 within connected the open are notions objective of and of sorts of same they that of notion have the valuing: While those operating as such Oxbridge ordinary language philosophy or Sydney materialism say, can bracket out the viewpoint, since it is incorporated in the operational paradigm, and so arrive at seemingly objective quality judgements, the judgements are not preserved (e.g. in truth Marxist value) when viewpoints. transposed Consider, to for other frameworks, comparison, the e.g. idealistic judgements as to or the quality or worth of a forest^made variously by a deep ecologist, an industrial forester, and a recreational officer. a holistically-inclined Marxist, and philosophers Californian who pretend Compare judgements as to the quality of philosopher, environmental environmental that such by philosophers. environmental work language, ordinary There cannot are be even judged, hat follows also> Begins to bring out what is omitted in a main theme of R.S.JPirsig, _______ Zen and __ , d/e Art Motor Cycle Maintenance, Bodley H^lad , London, __ of — ---— the notion of objective excellence doe , Note that defSwring not lead to ivism. To avoid the customary false dichotomy, compare e notion of validity (usually ceded to themselves these days by classical lo cians). cw 9 seemingly because it of the main philosophical by members is not done peer group at Harvard and like institutions. As this begins the of judgements to reveal, judgements importance work of of quality are not independent of done or problems tackled. importance of problems and issues is highly paradigm dependent. the But For example, problems suet/ as those of quantifying-in and of possible worlds and of de re thought^ ^ich assume immense importance for fashionable referential theories within the mainstream empiricist paradigm, vanish to relative insignificance outside that restricted viewpoint. that most Now observe judgements as to what are the important problems and what constitutes important work - matters helping determine quality - are shipped down from the North. Their importance is relative to their paradigmatic placement, and the paradigms concerned are exported to the Antipodes through the main channels already indicated. We are free to reject these paradigms and select alternatives, and there are, it can be argued, good reasons choose different that generally energy favoured just that, much as to do technology the in (or different the which North there are good reasons to military technology) North is eager to from export southwards. Similar which might argument, points apply against alternatively that be sophisticated mass-produced and cosmopolitan. The argument 'cosmopolitan subject’, called people -marketed the from is based cosmopolitan/international the Peter everywhere Holland; Stuyvesant smoke this argument international superior product cigarette-sophistication is on the assumption that philosophy is a that is is not the sort of enterprise for which place 10 and people are as significant they are for poetry or that philosophy important thing, is a finished product of a certain sort (a propositional theory), not a process of production also. process of production the place and people involved (e.g. material. And and literature, the if not since no philosophy, format, 12 than more work a like theorems just internationally-approved is product The novel. It takes for granted, assumption has only to be presented to be questioned. for one the and of art, But in the in discussion) are like a piece assembled arguments in of an then again the historical setting matters, literature, does not emerge in a vacuum. Plato’s philosophy could not have emerged in ancient Australia, and if cribbed & 13 in mid 20th century Oxford would surely have been marked down or rejected. It is important not to be sidetracked into issues - resembling problems in aesthetics - that do not need to be contested, such as whether and what extent sets of themes and arguments produced in one place and setting could have been produced in another. A nonnuclear technology of some sort could be adopted in Europe but apparently will not be, whereas there is reasonable prospect that New Zealand, strategy. ^Grave, in It is contrast with the doing, op.cit., p.2: Australia, will and not what could the term pursue a be done, ’cosmopolitan subject’ nonnuclear energy that matters here. used there comes from Donegan. As to the significance of place and people for literature, see further C. Partridge, The Making of New Cultures, Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam, 1982. xz,Like a paper in the biological sciences. But here again technique methodology, which may both be regional, are crucially important. 1 3 Related and points can be made using less extreme examples, e.g. concerning modern American work. Consider, for instance such texts as W.V. Quine’s Word and Object, (Wiley, New York, 1960) or R. Nozick*s Anarchy, State and Utopia (Basic Books, New York, 1974). The assumptions taken for granted, the arguments involved, etc., are especially American: it is not just the style. The acceptability of arguments and positions is dependent on place and received paradigm. 11 logic, Dialethic which invalidates Anglo-American philosophy, the could perhaps technique and methodology of in the North (though be done much there would be substantial cultural resistance): it is not being done there, and is not likely Antipodeans techniques, to be in choose can do done the their Anglo-American own their own distinctive sphere.^ distinctive thing. The To technology this extent, and logical international/cosmopolitan argument, stated in a form that would be telling, fails. Of course it can be argued, it is being argued, that Antipodeans don’t need to be, or even oughtn’t to be pursuing their own energy or logic policies and apparatus. But meeting these considerations takes us to a whole new set of issues concerning the merit of various policies and programs, the point of diversity, etc. - far beyond the cosmopolitan argument. The new arguments, to which we shall return, are not a lot more convincing however than comparable arguments concerning cooking: that we don’t devising our own cuisine or wine styles. need to be or oughtn’t to be British, or at least cosmopolitan, cooking is adequate: we should stick to that and buy it off the shelf from the North, ideally importing the cooks also. Do we that British philosophy is have good reasons to think than British cooking? Antipodeans are free^in principle^ then, to pursue their own paradigms; and to do so they will by and large want to, and mostly have to, appoint their own people, people they have educated - not saboteurs or people who have (had ) to be re-educated, from el where, in particular from the North. But will •^Much as co communities the extreme nist anarchism, a live possibility for communes and perhaps Australia, is culturally excluded in North America, owing to ndividualism of that culture. On dialethic logic, see G. Priest and R. Routley, On Paraconsistency, Research Papers in Logic, #13, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1983. 12 paradigms^, tie their intellectual of features the cultur local though works of with cultural In a loose way, philosophy wi not usually with paradigms, least, at distinctive they may link, tie in with the culture in the _______ ____ z sometimes distinct from_______________ more technical works) integral fashion that novels A> a. /sn-X'etL do.^ Grave considers certain cultural features, not restricted to particular programs, philosophical Australian product’ help that in philosophy Australia as ’ an - ’unimportant though this is compared with what matters But style, acceptability, truth, do matter, in philosophy' he hastens to add. and are mark not independent - or independent so far as their perception goes in the case of truth and correctness15 - from underlying broad theory or received paradigm. However the marks Grave cautiously advances, significant though they are, do not features serve to distinguish the philosophy Australian Australian exhibits in the product, lesser degree adventurous and polemical philosophy of Greek antiquity. by Passmore as 'most typical first two than the being more The first, described of Australian philosophy’, is a ’diversity of approach and readiness to put forward an unconventional or unfashionable point view',1^ of philosophy, something which more (with typical some of notable ancient philosophy exceptions) than exhibits uniformity reflecting that often attributed to the land itself. Australian an austere The second, 15Nothing need be conceded to trong cultural relativity themes, ough they would support the case L Iia L tour '/is enough that theories remain radically _ y bei incomplete and that there/^/^n accordingly b rival theories as what is is true. Similarly, however^ phy is j concaved ~as the sea or truth, seian/Mrore, really), or a explanation, uifierstanding^ these inquiry of a certain sort^Fthere can bez45^will be be, ^/competing accounts; so a pluralistic theory is inevitable in giving a fuller view. 1 Both preceding quotations, while included as such in Grave’s Introduction, are from J. Passmore, ’Philosophy', in The Pattern of Australian Culture (ed. A.L. McLeod), Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y., 1963, pp.131-168. The same annotation also applies to the third mark. Ke surprising, more and ’the philosophy, Wittgensteinian mark most notable political extraordinary by discussed Andersonian itself’ (p.2). ... being This the example is line-up it was far from if Sydney, Australian between the not isolated: them concern the fervour generated by "Australian materialism", others among the .. example and Melbourne Andersonian philosophy of character’ Grave), engagement and by some philosophy departments confrontation growing the (both concerning the relevant/paraconsistent program, with the local (’adversarial’) style leading to criticism by sharp Americans. with Connected these firs two marks are . —■--------------- ------ furthe part. of much characteristics Australian Aiilosophy y(^ho for hat influenced by jSydney rather than originating in Melb the most namely directness, unwillingne to muffle points, surface clarity /occj/ unkindly add, untne , unsubtjety and crudity.> The third and t A fourth marks as Grave i effect notes, hardly distinguishing features of Australian philosophy. areas, is third, which applies well to other intellectual the contrast of the Australian reputation in philosophy indeed of Australia as national The a ’center of philosophical inquiry’, with the anti-intellectual stereotype achievement Australians than rather especially a of feature of as intellectual to a people subtlety’. Anglo-American philosophy; ’devoted The namely physical to fourth the mark is isolation of academic philosophy in Australasia from, and its general indifference or even hostility to, the sort of imported philosophy (e.g. that of Nietzsche and the existentialists) generating interest in literary and arts circles. The philosophy failure does of not marks such matter. sufficiently separated by its For to adequately one thing, separate the research projects. out Australian For another, Australian produce is regionalism should not be confused with nationalism, nor more regional positions such as Sydneyside materialism or Wellington modalism with national philosophies. 14 as in mojjt other things, Nationalism in philoso^iy, to not be encouragedand the new regionalism is an undesirable trait, is linked, in other cultural things, with the breakdown of nations and contraction of state power. * To get back * * to where we were: * * the emerging proposal is this, that we start - or better much increase - doing our own distinctive things, and that we team up to do In fact so. there are several suggestions that begin to emerge, concerning research and teaching, publications and appointments, study leave and sponsored visitors. These are not just that we do our own selection of topics and people, and style and methods, decide instead of having these foisted upon us - not just, our own priorities, that is, that we play our own games (whether invented here or taken over from the North) and not theirs, Rules and Rugby instead of Gridiron and Basketball - but that we abandon the individual competitive model of cultural achievement, sold to us and fostered by the North, in favour of a group cooperative approach (elements of which are already modelled in Antipodean social clubs). The thoughts here are simple and familiar. digging example: it is well-known that two people cooperating can dig a ditch more rapidly and enjoyably 17 See, e.g., London, 1957. On the one side is the ditch­ Sale, than two op.cit., people working on the ditch separately. and L. Kohr, The Breakdown of Nations, RKP, The Editor of the new 1923 AJPP did however take seriously the notion of National Philosophy, of (what must have surprised some New Zealand readers) an Australian Philosophy; some of the issues there raised (p.292ff) are addressed in Appendix 2. 15 Cooperative work tends to pay off - in philosophy or elsewhere - in terms of output, quality, and enjoyment in the doing. On the other side, experience shows that we in the periphery cannot individually complete very successfully with the centre on achievements in their programs. predominantly individualistic the in Despite the highly competitive One is the communication situation. for this. attainment nature of results of depends There are several reasons American academic enterprise,much upon verbal rapid and communication For, despite the individualism myth, work is access to unpublished material. jointly based, and builds on the work of manyji^hen the time is ripe for some idea or result, several clever people will be able to hit on it. communications are nationalistic important considerations in obtaining rapid (e.g. Poles tend publication of to promote Then again the Polish idea or results, Russians will cite a Russian who achieves a result at about the same time as an outsider). There face-to-face seminars fact of when limited read they is the fact that much is conveyed verbally and through so that and that reading, on local results will be conveyed. material from people at the the centre centre by There is the tend to concentrate central people, so that published items and results from the periphery will often not be noticed, and may well lose publication. receive, 18 merit out There to is central also for merit, competitors the more fact that publication even if people they at the achieve centre and communication central tend to opportunities Reflecting other features of the culture and enterprise of the centre which are not so deeply embedded in Australasia: see further R. Routley, ’Culture, philosophy, and approaches to the natural environment - an Australian perspective’, in The Environment, Ethics and Ecology (Ed. D. Bennett), The Faculties, Australian National University, 1984, and also ’Culture and the roots of political divergence: the Australian/American contrast’, typescript, Canberra, 1983; both referred to subsequently as ’Culture’ . 16 than people towards the periphery. the size and Here economic factors do begin to enter;, distribution of the academic market e.g., a great (there are, many more academic phzilosophe s in North America than in the whole rest of the world), control of outlets and journalj^ (with few exceptions all Northern)^etc. economic power does and not, not, need determine culture - we can shut off the Northern philosophical propaganda in much the way we shut off our television sets if we really want to. stop being impressed by And we can those philosophical middle-men who make a living by importing the Northern stuff. So what do we do? We adapt to the cultural-philosophical level, several h of those things, that have been suggested in the regionalism. We aim at some A regional importers awakening and doctrines and and local imitators positions of, from self-reliance. and local the North. We do commentators For on example , we slavish remain not and peddlars don’t spend of, our academic lives trying to tease out what Davidson or Dummett or Kripke meant by this or that through. To in the hope that be sure, I am some pale Northern light will perhaps not suggesting that emulate the filter appalling 17 But, des xLte having been given sufficient cause, we shouldn’t cut ourselves off 'from Northern paradigms and influences (we could hardly manage A anyway). to We A traditions: use what we need these from continuing o we should stay informed of, but not imitators of, or part of, In enterprises. their reasonably can just as Northern traditions, from cutting from loose case, any regional are rooted in the people are largely European stock. these traditions and (and likely minority) traditions, these older cultures older So far starting afresh from nowhere, and the local variations that have already appeared are what we want to develop and perhaps mutate, as again with wine styles. of Part the proposal then is that encourage and develop our own things, Antipodean paradigms, Northern paradigms. rather It we research programs, very great Nor, the locaY and so shape nefer is not as if we have to build from nothing, to do to try to create cultural For there are research programs already initiated, which have the advantage of fortunately, future our own than working with pale northern reflections of - what is very difficult - entirely original work, components. do increasingly is being grounded in features of the larger culture. do we need to make the story up - though helping to shape part of what the Australia - New Zealand proposal is about. Much of is a different and more difficult already indicated in Grave’s survey of Australian philosophy. the story, for proposition - is All one really has to do is to bring out programs he has already indicated and provide some elaboration and commentary. level, I shall To pull the investigation down to a more concrete fooyxizci/li/esketch some more prominent programs - by no means the only A programs - and remark on some relevant features of them. 19 See Culture, op.cit. 18 The longest running and best known program is, without much doubt, of Australian naturalism, and which aims see to the that world, natural and everything else, as suitably encompassed within the framework of the world of science. (physical) The as generally is subprogram Sydney materialism, a major Adelaide which subsequently died out there. such famous components central state version of failures in to Anderson’s functionalism and nowadays like Faced reduction in The latter program has included takes all now it plans, it It program initiated a identity theme as the mental-material contingent materialism, its back traced and is now best exhibited in Armstrong’s work. empiricist metaphysics, contains program and more derivatively, in, with physicalisms incorporates a conspicuous "scientifically" a trimmed theory of universals, and an account/of natural laws as relations of universals, both components of the develop®®^ Sydney reali naturalism program, sm. Parts of the especially materialism and central state reductionism and the unified science ideal, have had counterparts in the North, but the program l^s, for the most part, retained its distinctively Austr^/ian character /(“despite export efforts, it never caught on in New Zealand^7 The program fits smoothly, moreover, and earthy, so into Australian culture. far as It is similarly down-to-earth, philosophy can be, without the fancy ideas or effete idealism of European philosophy or the spirituality and suppressed puritanism with which pragmatism). commitments, much of And and North yet though it it American does thinking not shrink (including simmers from is basically empiricist, explicit it is not nowadays, metaphysical positivistic (rejecting a verification principle, in particular). 20 Anderson’s metaphysics was however far more opposed to reductions than what has succeeded it. For an account of Anderson’s philosophy, and a history and account op.cit. of Australian naturalism and materialism, see especially Grave, 19 It is a city program, based broadcast from mainly the University of Sydney to other metropolitan universities; but the program does extend outside the universities a bit (a tiny bit) to the larger metropolitan culture. North America, the broader Russell, so in Australasia, little professional philosophy impinges on community, Popper and 21 naturalism program Perth, and has outliers from notable used even on being quite would be or Kuhn Australasia Apart As in to an the wider academic community, exceptional. achievement, stretch through one (To turn worth to Adelaide; in around this working work by for.) The it now reaches to in Canberra, as well as a core of opposition there. exceptions, the program has never had the more than a rather precarious hold, same hold, or nor, more surprisingly, in Melbourne: has it had heavyweight criticism from there (or indeed much external criticism from elsewhere), out. the old confrontation of major city philosophies having died Melbourne philosophy is more historically oriented stricken than Sydney; Melbourne dominated Continental philosophy; by a procession philosophy; then, a of more remarkable and more religion philosophy, much more than Sydney, has Northern recently, turnabout, fashions: earlier Wittgenstein, Quine, idealism ordinary Davidson and been and language extensional reduction; now perhaps Lewis, Kripke and Dummett? 21 In Canada, for example, while most academics from other disciplines would know of, and perhaps a little about, Russell, far fewer would know of Wittgenstein (though he is becoming known to lit. crit. groups), and virtually none would know of Quine. (The sampling is subjective.) On the fairly recent ’triumph of professionalism’ in philosophy in USA, see Kuklick, op.cit., p.565ff. Kuklick brings out well some of the more disastrous features of professionalism, but does not sufficiently notice that the virtuous features resulting from some professionalisation can be synthesized with broader philosophical activity. 22 The exceptions Include Ellis’s distinctive program, which can be accounted part of the broader naturalist program, and at Monash the work of F. Jackson and, earlier, of H. Munro in value theory. 20 one The reaches that program beyond the of confines the cities in Australia - which is after all a metropolitan dominated culture, the vast land always the other being Australian environmentalism, is - a rather diffuse program, which has connections with the Colleges of Advanced Education in the country towns and the communes on the North Coast. So far the program is as much distinguished is. environmental Europe by what positions specifically feature of are a having not as is it it what the New World, most of transformed Serious deeper and the Old World, its natural environment and and having little wild untouched country left, and little sensitivity accordingly to such as issues Europe that tend admit those of to concern shallow outside environmentalism the built approaches superficiality European The main wilderness. continues North issues human-transformed environment, and (and environmental encourage techno-fix dominate to America. North issues situations). of much the New in And World environmentalism American differs significantly however from Antipodean environmentalism, most obviously in the religious-spiritual of component the former, but in several other respects as well (see further Culture). positively, More environmentalism:- Firstly, there there three are an is strands to extended utilitarianism, Australian/ differing little in theory from Bentham’s enlarged position, which insists upon counting) the utilities British base, movements: of all sentient creatures. This position, developed from a has figured prominently in animal welfare and animal liberation and though it has focussed on domestic animals, animals used in research and hunted (wild) animals, it has also become entangled in issues of bio-research more generally such as genetic engineering. concerned with, or much interested in, endangered species, It is not however the disappearance of wild lands, the conversion of forests, etc., except insofar as these have a bearing on animal pain and pleasure. Wider and deeper environmental concerns 21 appear only as a spinoff from animal welfare, inadequate deal. Secondly, there is a wider and a deeper ecological position, and so deeper concerns get an which is not utilitarian and which recognises irreducible value elsewhere than sentience or forests and differs natural systems. ecosystems, especially wild and from spiritualism American Thirdly, naturalism. there intrinsic value which finds psychological states, and of is from an course, extension almost as in trees and This position of American everywhere, a reactionary component, critical of the other strands, which insists that all that be to needs on accomplished the environmental can be front achieved within older established (European) ethical and political frameworks. Whereas materialism is based in Sydney, environmentalism is centred in Melbourne and Canberra, but also includes Brisbane and Perth. Also centred in Canberra, and reaching across the country, with good connections in Melbourne, but few in Sydney, materialism and further environmental input from relevant/paraconsistent affecting program program other hich the is major perhaps relevant/paraconsistent programs have and epistemology program areas of includes and which extends is their core value philosophy, centres a the with respectively, the logic especially in Whereas in metaphysics, theory essentially more program. program, but metaphysics Australia than any one The other to New Zealand, has also been described elsewhere. 23 It has been described more fully elsewhere: see, in particular, Environmental Philosophy (ed. D. Mannison and others), RSSS, Australian National University, 1980. o/ Again, like all the Australian programs, both those mentioned and others, in Grave, op.cit. But see further/ R. Routley, ’Research in Logic in Australia, New Zealand and Oceania’, Research Papers in Logic #14, Australian National University, 1983 (which alto considers other programs in logic); G. Priest and R. Routley, op. cit.^and R. Routley, R.K. Meyer and others, Relevant Logics and Their Rivals, Ridgeview, California, 1982. 22 The main research grounded logic program program. of the in New Zealand philosophy is also A program emanating located mainly in Wellington, The impact evident from the work of Prior and a now it might be called the extended modal program. program on philosophy is perhaps best seen in Cresswell's work.2 Australian philosophy used to be known, for its is in some quarters, regrettably New Zealand philosophy is mostly hard-headed empiricism; not known and still for anything much, except perhaps, in UK, that Prior brought unusual adaption of Russellian philosophy from that remote place. his Neither of these impressions is particularly accurate; both are rather out-of-date. But the alm of work of the present type is, of course, not just to correct these impressions, not just to reflect or report on culture - for what one would like to reflect upon is not sufficiently there - but also to help manufacture elements of a culture, to make an image. To resist the already flourishing North, we should increase our efforts to further the programs, and perhaps other sunrige projects;26 to build* 7 ,^fjee especially M.J. Cresswell, _&ics and ^.anguages, Methuen, London, 1973; but see also work by Goldblatt, rra by Hugtrfs--referred to in Research in Logic, op.cit. Also described i h ifi anvoriginal version of the modal program (transparent intensional logic) elaborated by Tichy at Otago. 7A °Among sunrise projects in Australian philosophy so far suggested (not all of them feasible) are these: Australian feminism, Antipodean social and political alternatives, peace studies, indigenous regional philosophies (especially Aboriginal, Melanesian, and Polynesian). Another promising field, with practical consequences, for local initiative is the philosophy of education, where material produced yby R.S. Peters has dominated the market, with stultifying effects it is now Alleged. y As foreshadowed with the notion, "sunrise projects", much of the rhetoric, and argument, concerning science and technology policy (presented in the case of Australia in Jones, op.cit.) can be taken over to apply to X policy, where X is some subject discipline, such as philosophy. A 23 teaching and research around the programs selected for promotion, elaboration, and criticism, to orient appointments, especially of involved local people, to Why not simply buy our philosophy, like almost Why bother? these programs. all our technology, off the shelf, from the North? There are several arguments for not doing this, in more than a limited fashion, which are now sketched/. ° is, There firstly, the inferiority and built-in obsolence of Northern A products, despite their attractive packaging. Without putting too fine a point on it, many of the imported intellectual goods are shoddy, and only work for a very limited range of applications vicinity of contradictions or dilemmas). philosophy undoubtedly derives from (e.g. they’re hopeless in the Much that is wrong with Antipodean shoddy intellectual goods imported from 27 In fact something like the last has been the polictf of the LSE Philosophy Department, where the only outside appointment over a Aong period was that of Lakatos (hardly a person far removed ideologically)/. As observed, it now looks like the practice of the Otago Department also; and apparently it used to be a tendency at Melbourne. But in most places the practice is condemned as nepotistic or parochial, and overridden by the call for "new (Northern) blood'. However there can be significant differences between nepotistic appointments and those strengthening local programs. It is at this for example, to rather than Northern stc/oges, rather than imported fashions, administrative details draconian, do matter; employment n-going local programs ious ways appropriate Observe^ that no Canadian style) or the like is being advocated. conclusion of that sort from what has been argued has misunderstood the in crucial respects. As a t matter of simple mathematics, appointment fields characteristically reduces both quality of available (however quality i assessed) range of possibilities open future research; d no s h restrictioi/s are advocated. The author witnessed the se times disastrous eff s of field restrictions at Australian National University. — Some of centre also. 2g ___ these arguments support change (perhaps revolutionary) at the 24 the North. Yet buying this material is by hard-sell encouraged ambassadors from the North, who are often enough paid to visit. of the philosophical imperialism from the North that colonialism - the Antipodes too willing cultural This is part the successor to Northern suffers, or, remarkable, more encourages! Secondly, there is the inappropriateness of much of the Northern product, especially considered as metaphysics, environmental a for package, concerns. instance, to cover, as well as The European North has no satisfactory land or environmental ethic fit for Antipodean circumstances, and the deeper American package is too spiritually-loaded for mainstream Australian culture. 29 In political competition-based, unsuited being theory, American work is too much individualistic the European product, especially the Marxist form, and both too precious and too high-tech for local and is circumstances, especially again for more environmentally-perceptive people. Thirdly, features of telling also Import against substitution and comparative advantage, regionalism; namely, world’s markets and pressures and fashions, are appealing avoidance of the removal of overseas control anra power structures (including the Old Boy’s network in jobs, policies, etc.) and gaining of local control, employment of local people, etc. Fourthly, philosophy as there part are of arguments intellectual for cultural culture: diversity, arguments from applied to richness, . . / The point is elaborated in Culture. At a more practical level Northern products are again often unsuitable, though for different reasons. For example, the transfer of American agricultural methods and equipment to /the thin poor soils of the Antipodes has had disastrous effects, at ttfast beginning to be recognised. v—* 29 25 complexity, sheer diversity, stability, etc. 30 In fact, built into the whole notion of ’culture’ transfers. dense, productive garden. We obtain not only good products, and European cultivars, but European pests and Naturally we want a rich, But not only seeds and plants but weeds and many pests are being introduced. selectiveness the garden analogy control are essential, and American weeds. as against Indian maize This is why previous haphazard / / procedures. The proposal is not for, nor would the case sustain as with technology policy, satisfactorily filled, local we select niches which a narrow localism are where we can make a difference, and skills and methods. Indeed the policy has to be not occupied or use and develop selective given our 30 See, for instance, A.A. Mazrui, A World Federation of Cultures: An African Perspective, Free Press, New York, 1976. 31 Does it sound familiar? Outside philosophy, it should. For example, we have now been told by the Americans that our defence role, unlike theirs, is regional, not global: this is supposed to shed great light on our previously confused defence policies. 26 That includes such things as Oxford style of teaching and doing philosophy. removal of the undue emphasis on British empiricism centred on Locke-BerkeleyHume (a standard British focus); of the quasi-historical approach with however no proper attention to quo. American status sources; reinforcement/of The heavy Oxford influence^ very conservative been a of emanating from England, the prevailing in particular, has mostly More generally; many of one. Anglo- the main movements especially ordinary language philosophy, but also the Moore-Wittgenstein practice, have been very protective of the Northern status quo; they tend to leave things very much as they are, and recommend just this. 32 Positively, the proposal is that we achieve further disassociation from the Anglo-American empiricist past in two ways: by emphasizing local projects that move outside that constricting framework, and by diversifying the range philosophical of traditions selectively drawn upon, include to not only neglected Continental strands and parts of Eastern thought, but also Pacific ethnic material and Australasian philosophy. The idea is that such a plurality of sources, especially in teaching, will assist in removing narrower cultural biasses, such as British parochialism, and enable more discrimination to be obtained. theories that Then too are open we to us should in be better the Antipodes able and to how see the ranges of to advance our own programs. 32 The point is laboured in E. Gellner, Words and Things, Victor Gollancz, London, 1959. But even ordinary language philosophy, though conservative, and though it much contracted the proper range of philosophical investigations, had its liberating elements, e.g. removal of some of the narrowness and more cramping assumptions induced by technical jargon. Nor has the social impact changed much with the subsequent decline, since 1959, of ordinary language philosophy, the increasing insolvency of Oxbridge philosophy, and its consequent limited take-over by righ^:-wing Ivy League American philosophy. By contrast, the less economically ^g/ljiential growth of radical and applied philosophy in some of the British r-aH icad, and polytechnic institutes has touched no more than the surface of Oxbridge practice. 27 There remain some things we should want to see whatever mixes are chosen One crucial issue is the removal of Northern in different Ai^ipodean regions. bias from pap/rs and publications, research seminars and lectures, letters of referencez\o/ so on. the works and irrespective discussion This Northern bias is a disposition to cite and discuss of projects of and quality the of the ignore to authors, Northern their works the more contributyon of famous to the local/ authors, irrespective of the quality of their contribution. better, the topic again under largely It is the disposition to write or lecture as though work produced locally either does not exist or has not been influential philosophers, are, ensuring (thus if anything, that more it inclined is to not). Northern And Australasian bias than many overseas intellectuals, who are perhaps less concerned to be seen as belonging to the Northern The reduction, and eventual removal, of Northern tream. bias effects of fe/ec/'/ Inly -the policies and practice / * W cours * 2S philosophers, individual eferees of local journals. but the It involves, among other work\nd innovations better, so they can tg to point of i/Quc. that would be assisted by greater local out A taught, more time spent at local institutions on study oq/ leave, and so for-th. xS? c* /I x APPENDIX 1. Background notes on the philosophy supply situation. Sociological investigation of the philosophy labour market in Australia and New Zealand has o yet to be attempted. But a picture of some elements underlying the numerical argument of the text can be gained from the following table: simple 28 TABLE 1. Ph.Ds in Philosophy: a USA - Australasian comparison USA Number (Male/Female) New Zealand Australia 1974 413 (346/67) 6 0 1975 375 (318/57) 5 0 1976 382 (319/63) 8 0 1977 330 (264/66) 3 2 (1/1) 1978 283 (235^/48) 5 5 (4/1) 1979 285 (20-754) 9 3 (2/1) 4 N.A. 4 0 1980 N.A. 1981 1. The breakdown of the USA and New Zealand numbers by sexes (male/female) is given.- , Similar figures do not appear to be available for Australia, 2. The US figures are for the academic year ending in the Year shown, e.g. 1978 covers the Northern academic yeai 1977-78. Southern figures are for the calendar year shown Digest of Education Statistfcs, US National Center for Education Statistics; University STA1 STICS, Australian Bureau of Census Statistics; New Zealand Education Statistics. Sources: -41/ Comments: 1. The contraction of US doctoral female 0^. r representation, production and are cooarHn-itant Australian likely too small to reflect 2. the rise figures in are to the academic market. Some of the Australasian raaembers include Americans; likewise the American figures provide no nationality breakdown. 3 % There is no information available on the number’ proceeding to higher degrees in philosophy outside Australia. of Australians 29 For example, it is In applying table 1 some simplifying assumptions are made. assumed to regular university positions now for appointment that candidates would have a doctorate or the equivalent (until recently a B.Phil was taken as a near of equivalent well). It is a assumed, Ph.D.; North American seems what to take publications the case, serve as the number of could that Australasians proceeding to higher degrees in philosophy abroad is relatively small, and no more than the order of Ph.Ds. taken locally. It can be assumed, without upsetting applications of table 1, that Australasian graduates match, say, the upper half of American graduates in standard attained. There is no compiled information /n academic vacancies in philosophy in / of Australia or New Zealand -Mln the numbers, on how the positions are filled, by A what nationalities, sexes, etc. It would however be a routine, if tedious matter to assemble some of this data, which is of considerable relevlance to the planning of philosophy programs. On the earlier idea of a National Philosophy for Australia. APPENDIX 2. ’the considering Editor of the possibility initial of National a AJPP distinguished two German distinction between Weltanschauung and Philosophy*, senses the In (Australian) corresponding Lebensanchauung’ to ’the (p.292). In the first, that of ’a scheme of the universe’, ’an Australian Philosophy is as ridiculous as confirmation prejudices’. a Christian or Holland, personal’ falsification, ’are The argument independent is of that truth, national and sympathies its or Granted: but that does not mean that a theory may not be held, fostered, etc., in Science’. or way, in one region but not others, as intuitionism was for long in Cartesianism ’a nation in France. like an In a individual second may ’more develop intimate a and certain temperamental attitude to the problems of existence, which we may ... call its philosophy of life. A nation’s philosophy, like its art and its literature, 30 is a mode of expression for the national consciousness. form of (pp.292-3). the national genius evolving culture. national in But, the It is, first place, It is a specialised in short, part of the this is by no means entirely separate from the initial sense, a philosophy comprising not merely a fairly comprehensive theory but also an integrated set of attitudes (like an operational paradigm). Furthermore, only by concession are such items as ’the national consciousness’ and ’the Australian landscape’ of meriting definite Australian descriptors. literature, has many strands to it, accounted single units like philosophy, Australian some not particularly distinctive (in any sense): such things form rather loose families. The Editor does not find, does not really hope to in find ’a modern industrialised community’ - with its modular parts interchangeable with those of others - a claims courage to find and national a philosophy of trite moral fair dealing'), base life, to build In fact with a difference. on (’traditions but nothing at all distinctive. he ... of humour, So far, there can be a national philosophy, at least of life, but is not; then, this does not however exclude there being various regional philosophies (such as local research programs). plunged that into So then, far, Inconsistency: the all is well. trouble derives But shortly the Editor is from the extravagant claim ’if Australia has nothing to do with these - the eternal values of the Spirit, the Ideals of Truth, Goodness and Beauty - then and only then has she nothing to do with Philosophy' (p.295; with rearrangement). But, as Australia has nothing per se to do with these - as is virtually conceded, these values involving a 'wider sweep' do with Philosophy, Though the than any national boundaries - "she" has nothing to contradicting the contradiction is easily possibility of a National Philosophy. avoided by rescinding claim, the ideal of a National Philosophy should be allowed nationalism has had its time. the extravagant to rest in peace: 31 R. Routley 33 Research School of Social Sciences Australian National University 3^with thanks to R. Elliot, W. Godfrey-Smith, S. Grave and L. ? irlin, to several members of the audience at the presentation of the paper a: the 1983 to Australasian Association of Philosophy Conference, University of\Adelaide, ’ several referees for this Journal, and, not least, to the present ijai tor.  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 95, Item 1: Various drafts of Prospects for regional philosophies in Australasia Subject The topic of the resource Various typescript drafts, some with handwritten emendations. Paper published, Sylvan R (1985) 'Prospects for regional philosophies in Australasia', Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 63(2):188-204, https://doi.org/10.1080/00048408512341801. Description An account of the resource Unnumbered paper from collection, item number assigned by library staff. 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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:86ac5fc">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:86ac5fc</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 listed in manuscript finding aid Box 95: Paper - Extracts - Articles and Chapters by Richard Sylvan https://www.antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/70406ef7cfc803de88ef9fd9cea0686d.pdf 4ee8bd2d1def9dc91f7e4737d71124bf PDF Text Text . .. . , TOWARDS A SOCIAL THEORY FOR ECOTOPIA Participation in attempts at social change often has the .. effect of revealing to participants the structure of the soci e ty in which they live. It is hard to be a practical environmentalist th1/:: i v.: J _e:ng;a~eEl in or s1.,1pporting a range of environmental batt le s without observing that most environmental problems in our sort of soci a l system are generated basically by the domination of the society by J corporate interests, which have a strong interest in ma i ntaining an industrial and consumption system which appears to produce environmental problems as a matter of necessity. If one is not directly engaged in opposing the plans or activities of sawrnillers , miningcompanies, power and energy compan ie s, transport firms, chemic al and pesticide comp a nies, p a ckaging companies, real-estate developers and tourist-resor t promoters, to name a few, one is engaged in battling thei r political or bureaucratic advocates and protecto rs (nominally 'regulators') in the sh ape of forestry commissi on s, mining departments or authorities, hydro-electricity authorities, energy authori ties, transport corm iss ions, l and commissions, politicians and the l i ke. ' Usually t h e battles by citizen environ- /qsr1~j mental groups h ave littleAsuc c ess, and the chances o f success appear highly cor related with the degree of corporate domination within the political unit concerned. Even where environmental problems appear to a rise from the interests of non-corpor ate groups, for example workers or consumers, it can be conv incingly argued that the y are still primarily a reflection of corporate domination and st r ucturing of both the employment and consumption a n d life-s t yle choices ope n to peopl e , that is, of indirect cor po rate or capitalist influence in shaping the social structtlre values. : Environmental issues throw up sharply again the question as to whether it is possib le to devise a social structure which does not have this feature of direct or indirect cciporate domination, without ..--·--· ----·-·•··-•·--·-·--·-·· · · - - - - - - - - - - - - _... . --···------x- �2. r~placing it by some -1 other equally or e~e? __ more _undesirab_l _e ____~_ind of domina tion-=__s_~E~ as -/ bureaucratic or totalitarian domination-which is such that replacement would be unlikely to produce anything which could be described as a solution or improvement. Our belief is that we can devise a better system which dispenses with this disastrous element, and furthermore that we must do so if environmental problems, as well as a whole set of other problems which are also consequences of the same structure of domination, are to be resolved at any but a superficia½ temporary and inadequate level. wa ys to see the problem. or size. There are of course other We might see it as just one of technology But the technology we have seems to be a consequence of other features of our society, rather than the ca use ·_ al though it is certainly true that there is an inte~a ctive process and certain kinds of technology strengthen certain interests in the society over others~ :~S for smallness, we might remember that the industries of' I IISu} d... I , ::___ currently destroying the Border Ranges rainforesi~(' in relative terms) quite small. Or we might feel that we are in the grip~ of a runaway or out o f control machine - a point of view put forward first by Jacques Ellu./ [ ] • Or as Peter van Dresser very nicely puts it ''We have built a Frankenstein monster of industrial and commercial relationships which is almos t totally running our lives." True ~but the machine was was not built on random lines, and it systematically serves the interests of some groups at the expense of others. So the machine is not 'out of control' in one sense - it is doing the job it was designed for. ff-some environmentalists, espe ci ally of the more cons ervative kind, do believe that the system in which they live is basically sound, but that it consistently delivers mainly destructive results and decisions either because -th.2.- it is run by the wrong people ('Oh! for a statesman'; seeABorder Ranges sheet), or because we do not yet have go od mechanisms for �3. takin g accou nt of envir onme ntal inter ests, which .is seen as a new consi derat ion. Such an appro ach tends to overl ook the limit ation .C'.'f>·''}~i=t on resu lts throu gh. polit ical/ burea ucrat i c actio n or mecha nisms which resul t from the exist ing struc tu re of corpo rate domin ation of the socie ty, and to the exten t that it is succe ssful it would depen d upon reduc ing or balan cing that domi nation anywa y. ·- Some impro ved mecha nisms may enabl e some impro vemen ts in limit ed areas , but they will not be able to chang e a basic ally destr uctiv e lifestyle based on conti nuous and growi ng indu stria l produ ction and consu mptio n, and so unles s more basic chang es in the socia l struc ture are sough t, will proba bly only succe ed as delay ing tacti cs in the inevi t a ble destr uctio n of what remai ns of the natur al world and l , · ·¥;1 / >fr'J I a H lr-.rt r? t 1~ reaso nable socia l enviro nrnen t. · \'\ J rn this neces sarily rathe r A paper we want to try to devel op sorre of the basis for a socia l theor y which might be descr ibed as a form of Liber tar i an or SelfManag e d Socia lism. J~~~ \ ~- It migh t seem odd that anyon e shoul d advoc ate a basic ally +i.1/ liber taria n type of posit ion as neces sary for aAso lution to envir onmenta l probl ems, since envir onme nta lists are mostl y seen to be advoc ates of great er restr i cti ons, mor~_ rules and regul ation s, legis latio n, burea ucrat ic contr ol and plann ing, to restr ict and reduc e the damag e peopl e can do by their consw ning and produ cing activ ities . This restr ictiv e appro ach seems to be dicta ted to a large exten t by the failu re to quest ion the basic soci~l struc ture which makes peopl e ' s produ cing and consu ming so destr uctiv e in the first place . If a frame work o f essen tially damag ing life- style s is accep ted as 'natu ral' and uncha ngeab le, then of cours e envir onmenta l prote ction will seem to be a matte r of limit ing these sorts of a llege d freedo ms by furth er restr ictio n; but if the probl em is "-r se e n rathe r as one of struc: ;\ing socie ty so as to remov e the force s which make peop le's 1 ,... ~-y"\ .._ _ __ _ '"'"\ ... a · pro ucing and consu ming so destr uctiv e, the �3. 1. Pootnot e 1 from page 3. J_ We don't of course wish to suggest that working within the system is a just a waste of time, and we should watch it all But in each go while we sit back and wait for the revoluti on. 1 each hard that fgct of urgent battle it s easy to lose sight necessit y urgent won victory is on l y temporar y, to lose sightJcff will IJ_Ot they to; begin construc ting the sort of society in which imposing of This is not and canno.t be a matter be~ t emp o rary. some sort of Boy Scout 'Conserv ation Ethic' or minor changes in the directio n of energy savtng on a soci~y which produces environm ental degrada tion a~ a matt.er of its fundame ntal :?__!:_ructu_r.:-_ e . 0 2 �4. need for a restrictive approach is less obvious. The problem of how to reconcile environmental aims with the aim of a free society and with other goals is essentially one of obtaining an 1 ~ b 1 . J. environmenta ~ o f 1 1. f-e. -. . . society/way enign The restrictive approach then) is a cons equence of accepting C the existing se c. in/ f framework and,,\ attempts to graft environmental considerations onto a basically hostile structure restrictions. as further The situation might be compared to what happens when an attempt is made to enlarge an o ld theory which has encountered data it cannot _handle - the initial reaction is to try to maintain theoretical framework and ac count for the further the material by the 'enlargement' of the theor ~ usually through a series of ad hoe further assumptions or makeshift subsidiary theories which have the effect of restricting the application of the theory. We arrive at a vast and complicated structure , such as the Ptolemai c theory or certain fashionable mod ern logico-semantical theories of natural language, which for a time may appear adequate and succeed in delay,j the realisation that the original theory itself is in need of fundame ntal revision. The existing mass of environmental an d planning legislation and proliferation of bureaucratic procedures J---J- s uchf Environment al Impact Statements plays much the same role in modifying a fundamentally environmentally-hostile social struc tur e and life-style a s the addition o f further epicycles did in Ptolemaic the ory. X The env:ironmentalist who appreciates the need for basic change finds himself however confronted by rather unattr a ctive conventional choices. dom inat ed On the one hand capitalism offers a system wru'ch ,-s by private capital interests which depend crucially h;'resou r ces\and where unequa l economic �5. is seen ~ri d other power On the other side of the as ad essential condition for freedom. conventional choice we are presented with a system which does not appear t o offer an essentially different life style and which ,,~. . (_~ f f( I~ I 1: t/ 1 clearly endorses many of the ~ame values - industrialisation ~~~ogress, J 11 .i 111/, r / /4./,,-;..Jf p1J'. J i:,. ,·i,.{;,,<f,c'. ,, high technology 1,and so forth, as the capit alist o !tu/'lt, f-,c. e:_ . I In addition I the conventional Marxist alternative offers an account of t he role of the individual and society which provides many reasons for libertarian concern. We a re faced in fact with the option of opposing distortions, one offeri ng a distorted and re duced account of community and communal life forms, and the other of the individual and individual life forms. Although the pure, theoretical form of capitalism is supposed to operate on the basis of purely individual activity, decision and production, in existing forms of capitalism thi s has long since been abandoned in favour of a 'mi xed' economy, with community control through elected government and public sector activities ensuring that we collectively control the collective part o f our destinies, and that communi ty is represented as well l"r cJ At least that's/the mythology has it. as individuality. In practice however these communal life forms are v ery largely a sham, and do not amount to !eal recognition of c ommunity. Usually these forms are forced into an individual reductionist model so that the instead of 9, v _i ng,\ community control I~~J merely give a further set of individuals who then make the decisions ~, is the case with the institution of This government by Representative Individuals, for ,instance, which instead of providing community control over the framework, merely selects a further set of individuals who then control 'or manage' the community. · In Victorian times women who inherited property were obliged to have �6. a male executor to manage it for them. Later this was liberalised to allow them a say in selecting him. It is better to be able to choose an executor or managerth a n to have one imposed on you, but no one who has to operate under such a system should deceive themselves that they are really managing or controlling things themselves. l People in our soci~ty are of course largely blind to the fact that real con@unity control has quite a different form, a ~cl regard such individual reductionism in corr@unity decision - making inevitable. as natural and People now accept as normal political phenomena such a s systematical ly broken election promises, government manipulation of sources of information, deception and s1'!.ights of hand such as wa iting until public interest has died down or worn itself out before proceeding with unpopular moves, and so on. What these phenomena seem to indicate is that the amount of real communal control which can be exercised through the system of representativ e individuals is not very large, even if the fact that the political system tends largely to reflect the economic system and economic power rather than to control it 1 is ignored. The 'public sector' which is supposed to express the common will, is not community controlled either in any realistic sense. ' L ' I,{ '~ Thus bureaucra~ managing public resources or allegedly regulating industries normally operate largely in the interests of private corporations , as anyone who has worked on issues like forestry or nuclear power is aware. Crucial information is kept secre t from the cornmuni ty, ma de inaccessible, or handed out selectively> usually to commercial interests. ( we won't go through all the points that could beQ;sed here in detail - they are too well known - we just want to set the points in a certain light ~ Even where they compete with private corporations instead of me rely serving them, 'nationa- lised' public sector organisation s act like further corporations or powerful individuals, and there is very little real community �1 . -1,,.c) 1:,t---2i--t ~,t P.--t1 I , le-,__,~L-, {\ ~ c,.j- - . ~~ s-: ~ - -·· C~~ -~ ~ -c - ~ L-:.. ~..zx/\_, _~) \..A.,,\. • [ ..:....}--{c ~ c •1J,-.-,{',,/_,,t C _A A,i4- (_,~ l-r-:1 (f't-o-~---l)-v'--0 f) - - V'---'2, dl>--Cf- 0 'l[..z_ cZt,__...,...--14_)_1 ( , D .___ t ~ -r ,c.,.__ C~-z_ __ �7• control. Finall~ those individuals or corporations who control the means of production can exe rcise enormous power, both through these alle9ed 'community' institutions, and through their abi l ity to control what will be produced, how much, how and where, and their monopolisation of the abi~ity t? direct productive labour , -.;(K_,t:.\ their control of the pro ductio~, (\ control the in short ~ ,:· ._• c..::., .:'.' \' Those who . means of production are thus able to obtain a very large measure of control over the social framewor~ which comes to be structured largely in their interests. This domination through 4/. I structuring now extends to almost/areas of life, and has been documented independently in many areas, from the food we eat to the way we travel1 from the houses we live in.i to the way we re lax. The control does not of course, take the form of control of individual decisions at the individual level; they do not decide that you or I will purchase a purple~ a green car, for example, but the social i framework in which the places in which peo~le live and many other aspects of their lives are structured around cars is determined in their interests, and so is the kind of car the market provides. The fact that individuals are free at the individual level, and that such mechanisms operate at the level of controlling the largely (.•\ i! ~ i.A""\.'• I n.S invisi ble social framework which coT$,-a-ins and channels the choices /1l 1My the individual can make, explains why people retain the iJ/ 1,<;, ~ ,.1 1 ,\ freedom and of full control over the ir lives in such a system. These distortions are not merely occasional of 1 'abuses' or aberrati ons - they are structural features which occur systematically 1 in all capitalist societies which have free ~ublic life forms. rI'hey are the result of a reduction of communal life forms to various extensions of individual life forms;of the fact that communal life . rv IC ,_.. .l.{1\, 1 forms occur in a reduced and impoverished indi vidualist) ,A.H3fttr. The result ~tha t commun al control of the social framework is ~)j~~ et ineffective. and that some individuals and group s are able to I �8• obtain great power through their capture and control of the social forces of organisation and production. If capitalism offers a distorted,individualised account of community which allows for no genuine co,1,,,1u11ttl control over the social framework of li fe . on the Marxist side we are offered a matc hing and impoverished distorted account of individual which allows for no genuine individual control over individual life! Marxist~ very commonly present line account of ~cc.;cfj (f what is in effe_~t a r,~oduction A:,- - (.,,cl.. - - ~) /(. individuals - l(c role of t he individual is Iv) \ .1 -~f):Or- r,·(;e ~-& their concept constantly and revealingly illustrated by appealing to the individual as a unit in a production .- - 1 line. Accordi.ng to this account the individual IS I l.'v\:. l~ji/,1 1 ~ •. IJ,2 ,,K{1~•,i{uii. / L-_ t;:: 1 no·+h ing, the soc~fty h, _ is entirely a social product/,,\is no more than his role in the pro duction line, he has no separate 'self ' but only the characteri~tics he acq uir es as a re sult of his ...___. membership of a society or class ~ Indiv iduals are in effect to be . l ,\·~ We don't make any cla im to be Marx scholars, we shall be making (' heavy use i n elucidating and criticizing the a ccount, of the S . U. Gene ral Philosophy Department recent publication Paper Tigers Although this book will be a major target in much of what follows we would like to record that it ·seems to us a valuable piece of work, which does a great deal to illuminate the nature of the conventional ideological choice and expose their philosophical base~ . It is also an ad ])t i r ably clear piece of work (in contrast to most Marxist scholarshi~ which casts lig~t into many dark corners, including some which, from the point of view of the attractiveness of the Marxist a lte rnative , might perhaps better h ave been kept a little dimmer. . conten -t J.o n that The acco unt offered makes it clear that the ·(> (_ ~) S:l::-Fl-ee a p osition is 'totalitarian' is by no means a capitalist p lot but h as an important point. I I 3 Any per son can fill role in the production li ne as well as any other (Ste ve ns). Quote from �9. treated as cells in the group body, and the only legitimate formso f individual expression are through community life forms. ·c· ·L ,. · · rtf; ,- TIL), H t.'.•t1tf-• •'.r , (· r, ·1 , ~ • 1'1, 1, ,•,,U,/ ♦ :,4, ) The al t ernative to such a position - I~dividualism A - is . seen by Marxist s as the position underlying capitalism, which holds that indivi duals contain no social influences which are not ultimately re duced to individual forms o f influence. Individualism - which is taken as the alternative to the view pres e nted above - is seen as the source of c a pitalism and inevi tably lea d s to a ll the excesses and distorts of that ,\ system. Individ ualism must be stamped out r oo t and branch if '- L /;I ,~...-f. it• al·te,nutive to ca1;,alism is to be built 1fthe failures and admittedly authoritarian cha~acter of existing Marxist systems ii-tti.._,1·lif-·} are, according to this line of~traced to the failure to do a thorough e r1 o tl3 A job of stamping it out in spheres other than that of economic life. ! Indeed Individualism in this variety of Marxist theory seems to play much the same role as sex did in Christian theory - it is the source of all evil, and the f'I\ [' \- f ' mojification of the individual ego and its submission to the ~' group replaces the mortification of the flesh and its subjection to the spirit. f\ v' J (\ To condemn all individ_ualism because some distorti'ons of i t produce bad results is like condemning sex on a ccount of the objectionable nature of, sa~ prostitution. J./( ;d /, Ii I ), . -~ <; ~-.. :~ ., . ,, :.:. 1'11\ .~ ~ , I~\ t :, h Howeve r , on€=.ffiay.:-==inc-l-ineL::::to-·:··be' j t wo u 1 d be 10 ( I,.. , ' < /1 n a ive to s ee no connecti on between such a doctrine, and the actual p r act i ce of Marxist societies (as /lli(n/ r. Blackburn). Marxists do J (- ,J - Such a position must if followed out consist1 ently, be suspicious o f e v ery sort of individual independence and activity which cannot be subsum_.ed in some sort of collective interest, even something as simple and ap p arently non-capitalist as producing your own food becomes suspect (see for example the Kronstadt man i festo). It appears to provide a justification tc,,l �10. for any amount of suppression of individual views and dis s ent And where these are seen as being opposed to class interest. "~Yth1 '> (V if 1 ~ social products)-t:.My_.. appeaL to provid e if individuals are /' a justification for manipulation of individuals for collective e nds, as bad or worse th<3n the indirect manipulation for pri vate interests of capitalism. ,,Such a do c trine seem s indee-d to make life very easy for the capital is t, who does not have to exert himself greatly I its ,~1,uthortarian potential f or the individual. to demonstrate?, as a free individual, freedom For if there is no such th1ny -J and if there is no such thing cannot be taken f!:;,9JTI someone ; as individual choice, individual choices cannot be qbr c7d te d or is that individuals just trodden upon. don't matter, except of course insofar,_,, as the production line There are few people who can fail to is short of hands. be repelled by such a position once it is stated in its stark simplicity - which of course it usually is not. From an individual point of view such a situation would have many of the drawbacks of capitalism, and in some ways might even be worse - goals, modes of re ~hi ng them and suchlike would all be externally imposed on individuals. i r-£ ttr±-s==±s_ i 11 de. e-d·--ctre--nas±c-t-1a r x is L sociai- theury----:;:.md - - I ~--_,,,,.., ------- I ------ -- ever the v a r i a t i o n s ~-hl-e._ under the label------.-Marxisrn' / I ~ - - ---- / tf .f erqn --:::-......... ___1 ------h . . an - entiu::=~,tl:_to se e now- J:.bey can alL--na:ve s hard ----::-:---...._, ~t_ V • ,::i • --------1 ~--- ------- ---------- t h ore t i ~GU.Qd at i o Tl------~ ~ s ± e n _ Q J an En 1 i g h ten ea / !1 LX.i.Sln~ ~ e ~ _ Q l l t to k :, It is difficult to see how ~~ t ofAmora l to concern I ---------- ------~ 11S. ,.,,~ ( \."\. by the _Nf'W ,·...... \_, ~\.... .... ~J -..-.~~ with any ..:.- can be compatible . ~~ -'-/' concern for individuals and their fa te, as opposed for daiJ C ~ . or societies. It is difficult in fact to see how the.re_ can be room for any but the most �11. attenuated moral considerations at all i n such a view, since even the comparison of societies in te~~s of the sort of suffering they inflict on individuals i5 . th~ illegitimate. It does however seem to be individuals who su.t fer ,...__whQ__.a re ,)~ :; ~,_ ,--t :... , ,.. \ t ".I f b ..:. ' "'f . ·- . -~ exploited or ~ominated, so unless an attempt .. ( is made to give an al terna ti ve a(:count of these in t e rn1·s of I \ the Class Mind ; it is difficult to see how such a position tould even justify the choice of one soci·cil S~S}t?-,n. over the other on v ' moral grounds. If this is indeed the basic Marxist social theory - and whatever the variations available under the label 'Marxism• it is hard to see how they can all have an entirely different theoretical foundation - then the vision of an Enlightened 0 .._,..__ . ~t: L: • r ."" -, ( ·' ,! Marxi sm which has been held out to us by the New Left is a t-- mirage. The consequences of this system can be seen then as the 1 • ,iJ I Ov\ el , m:nt.~ of A u.r;C.'tf..lf-< j V f power - or individuals (as in capitalism) in favour of their having no power at all as individuals, but only through their membership of some collective, class or community. For anyone who does not accept the ,d reduction of legitimate indi1ual life forms to group life forms, such a system of power must be seen as oppressive. From the I point of view of the individual$ power to control his own life, Q S opposed to participating in controlling group life, to opt such a position app ea~ to be oph~ , for the exchange of one set J of masters for another, of one form of domination for another, ~ and possibly ~~worse formo C l J ./ following una ttrativ.e t er ,rs: ~ So then our choice appears in the _./ if capitalism allows some individuals ,\ to dominate over others and control collective life through the social framework, 1.1kr-, 11•, • • the Marxist alternative allows collective-. hc,,, C\ �12. control o f collective life, bu t also collective control of indi v id u a l life, allowing no ~ep,:-1, rate legitimate individu al {,c.....;_ life forms. If Marxist s are right in point in g t o the disas t rous I' i H'--' results o f covert domin ation of ,.,social f ramework by private capi talist interest the capita l ist is su rely also right in pointing to the oppressive character t o th e individual o f their 0 lternat ive. * Of course both sides would dt~Y that the problem can be set up this way , the capitalists bec auIB social framework to dominate the/ de11_1/ that there is a (because o f the i r reductionist - the Marxists, because th ey would deny 1, th at there is any legitimate f o rm of individua l control to lose in collective domination. a 3rd point of view. ,r - ~ ',(. f l( ,;,, ·K · It is di ffic ult t o accept that we are face d with such .J f J f:i, The problem i s seen esse ntially from -' -- - -· - --- - - (111 f 11/" ,j'(' unpalatab le choices . }(' / .; ii1C..- And indeed lo ~] ic and,, coit,tJ strate that we are not. to demon- There have been, and in a fe w places where l1es te rn cul tur--al destruction is not yet compl ete, the re rc, ,.:.,,1 1 soc iet ies which a r e not capitalistic , wh ich are anti1~.n capitalistis but where a vigorous individual\ is va lued o r not I dis cour ~ged and for ms o f independent individual economic activity n1 ;, y ,: ,· \ /1 ~j°> \ ,, \'( .{ .'~f. \j ( "· . T-~,i,.! ·-; , f ·, :~: '{!. ~-"1 '1 / ., I J, ,: f ::· and lead t o 1 cap ifo1, iSr.> · , in the way the Mar xi st critiaue it must, and which coexists wit h true co:u1munal ins is t s life-forms. 1 ~;0c:~ 1~•- :~ s~:h ~~~·~~ti~; •;~~p(:\~ ; ;e'd as individuals, co ll- ~-1abora ted \ ·; ··: 'I In such societ ies th ere is a form '\ of in di vidualism whi ch does not inevitably undermine the socie tie s . I proc eed and even dominate . ' ._._) in groups, or as whole communities, more or less as the . o~-;~·~ion demand~d~:,yw hile s ome of the , product .,' } ;>,d, :.'j ,~ ~ \ might be given to those who had no thing, it was not u s u a lly -J �13. regarded as a purely communal product unless commu~=ally use produce~b~ t was primarly for the of he who had t f J obtained it or his kin. (See HOWftt in t~e~ Aboriginal case; The t=orest Peo2-J.-~ ; for the rules _Wai-Wai ) , I,. some g ar dening societies too, such as that of Melanesia, individual eco n omic activity of a certain kind migh t even be th e dominan : t mode of production, yet the society is not capi t alist, and is even strongly opposed to the attitudes of ~apitalism.* The existence of such societies seems to show * See the failure of individually owned Waiko, 11 trade stfs [encouraged by the Australian adm i nistration] was ... mainly because such individualism , _t_u_,._t_i..__ _ _ _---=-p_r_o_f_i_t_a_c ___c_r_u_1_·n--"'-g_t_o__o_n_e person, was disapproved of by the villagers" , p.418. that it is possible to obtain both communal control of c o 111munal life and individual control of individual life, that the one does not necessarily drive out the other. It seems clear fhm the anthropol o gical facts that the Marxis t critique that individualism produc~ s capi t alism has failed to make some important d1'stinctions between kinds of individualism. It may of course claim to allow ade quately for individuals and distinguish a kind of 'individualism' which is legitimate in the Marxist view. On further inquiry it turns out to be the case that what is labell e d individual activity in :.:i 'q cl1 c .A s-2.s is the kind of secondary and derived life forms the individual may engage in as part of the group collectivity or class, as in the Marxist / distinction between what is called 'Individualism'and'Possessive Individ~1ism' (see MacPherson} But since this continues to �14. ,. ' M S 15 only legitimate forms of individual life are .t that the· those which can be reduced to collective life forms and that no dist1 n -:.. C:-, independent economic individual life forms I for example, are legitirnate 1 it is a dist,n.ction in net me on:i:y perpetuates the false J~hdnm~ .J .Jt iin fact : merely , now as the choice between Possessive Individualism (as in capitalism) and 'Legitimate The latter is however only another and misleading Individualism' .. name for the participa tton of the individual production units 111 the production line. Since it continues to admit no legitimate individual independent activity , espe cially economic activity, distinct from or not reducible to that of the group, it - cannot e xplain our anthropological facts that these so c 1c ties do al low some i,·1d7K',k·l~ ,d in divi dual life forms, am/ - JS v ---- including economic ones _merely as in attempt to dispel the .A uneasy feeling the . ,...------··· -- a- (t hrough confusing --. .. ,\ . - production line theory arouses in most of us , te i-minological . ' ,r -r,, , Marxises in fact shuffle. / dd.Sthe same trick with this sort of recognition of legitimate individualism as Social Democracy does with the reco0nition of the social - it offers a terminological label which pretends µ to recognise a distinct life form but iryfact reduces it to an .impoverished and limited subvoJ--i<=:1-J of the dominant life form. 77The Marxist cr.i tique appears to have confused · the recognition of distinct individual life forms - distinct that is from those of the collectivity - with the attempt to reduce all legitimate life forms to in dividual life forms or constructions from them. It has confused Individual i sm, in the sense of the recognition of individuals, with Individual Reductionism, which is the recognition of nothing els~ but individuals. It is not the former but the latter which underlies capitalism and its variations. On the economic level the Marxist critique has failed to recognize that not all forms of individual economic �15. 1(r activity lead , capitalism, and at the soci al that not all forms of individual power le~d to power over rrh e triba l s oc iet ies ~...; ~ ~ others. considered were examples of societies which had individu alism - distinct individual life forms and economic activity - without individual reduction- i j m ~ ') ,, 1((.1{ , 1l'J Individ u al reductionism produces distortions and gre~t inequality of power because the social forces and means of decision-making, of organi~ ation and of production, are turned into concentrated power for the selected individuals who . ff represenithose forces in the indi vidualisa/ forms. In the tribal societies we considered this did not happen - decision r . P making was not usually the preogative of an individual h~d ' A or chief, organisation and production were not directed and controlled by bureaucrats and powerful individual capitalis ~ or groups such as corporations. In societies which took a similar form, individuals would have secure ind i vidual use right s for certain limited purposes to the means of produc ti on , for example the land, which would give them the right to produce for their own needs but not the rights they have in a property system~ For example, they would not have the right to dispose of it as they saw fit, or the corresponding right to accumulate larger shares of the means of production than others, or the right which in practice arises from this last, to employ another person's labour. The mean'.,;" communJal ly, 11 of production wou/.-{ como, o m be seen as basically held t.c: al 1 for the use of each". Individuals would have, as individ uals, secure access rights to the communal means of production to produce for their own needs. Var ious forms of mixed individual, group and community production could develop, based on mutual interes~as people see fit, but the important point is that access rights to produce oould accrue to individuals as su ch. Provided th7 ao not encroach on �16. others, 1ndi vidudfs could set their own goals, decide (A,·hu.. t _,.\ they, as individuals need and like to work on, and pursue these goals in their own way at their own time. each could· In such a situation, pu~sue his own way, instead of all marching in <~ I tl' j. ,, step - the situ,it,;,1 in whic "'h all must pursue a .. -& . i ~ and collectively determined set of goals, at a collectively determined time, place and in a collectively determined wa~ would I be avoidedQ C!S""' Such a system would Ado tribal land tenure 3ys tems, involve two levels of decision-ma~ ~ing and of life forms. On the one hand decisions at the social framework level would be determined through communal decision-mak ing processes/ wh r( h would normally, ~nvol ve communal participati.,1:y 't---(__y •-<.. i :r ~ , ,t -1 ., ' \ ( forms ,...._ rather than i-04-i -v~:r-. methods. The sorts of decisions which would come up here concerning the use and creation of 1hL t{0_ means of production would be those that affected,\ community ( e.g. in the Melanesian case the; included the t/«2. issue of whether Acommunal for es t land cou}cl be wood chippe~ w~ -~l, could not be decided by individuals and holders), ( u't :I 1 ( / If .. 1u. "'-J; 1 f\ I' • , I :) / .. . , ' ) / f in our case, what sort of public transport systemsAto have, all sorts of social framework and infrastructur e questions, question~ abou t the sort of c c mmunally-ope rated production enterpri ___ses tc have/ and so on~ This sort of society could admit a form of vigorous individualism , capitalism. b ut it would not be and could not lead to The sort of individualism admitted here would be one which could coexist with a great deal of rich communal life, and which did not eliminate or reduce communal life forms. rrhe indi vid·;_,iJd s in such a society would have the rnJps to control their own lives, both as distinct individuals diff[-:.J-0.,,-ff.J _, as members of a cornmuni ty. and also, but 1 have would be the means to cont;.~\ ,~.~e ..li '-'.t s_ ~~-·othe; s !' C (r r": ,tu,-,. • (,~·{, ,_-,, 11; ,· i ifr ,.: .I- ,< /1 ,, (' ·, ( jJ~' ,.,_ F J ! '' //, ,., , < ~ (. ,• //, 7 r ..-_ ; , 7 2-f ' . .· ' "/',. 1 ., , /·;,, ""?(. , .1.·1~ . "· ·. . rr~~. What they woul~ !1ot . 4 , , 1 . ' lc . { ..rf,t '. < �17. The sort of po sition embodie d in these so r ts of societies is in many ways a very natural one. two levels - It allows for control at the social framework level is controlled communally, and the level o f p rod uction for i nd i vidual nee~s is controlled by individuals~ It i s the n a mixed picture. (but a very different one t o that whi ch appears in th e capitalistl' mixed econo my '). 4,1.,{ In such a picture, people ar e both individua~A· members of communiti es. For a f ree society in which peopl e control th c.. L1 own lives both sor t s of control are needed. (.( ,v· So, if y ou ask someone in China what occupation he would l i k e . to f ollow , he replies, according to report, that h e 0 has no des ire s of his own in this respect, he would l ike t o be whatever t h e community wa n t s or n eeds him to be . ,1 ., ( A very p ro pe r answer according to the th eo ry set out in ' P a per Tiger s '). If you ask someone here what he woul d like to be, you would very likely get th e reply that he woul d like to be what or ever he can find a job in,,\ if h e is inr t t) a mbitious, whate v er pays best or offers the best long-term monitary prospects ; i.e. whatever capitali sm needs him to be. (A good an swer also syst em) . acconli-1'1 '. 1 t o t h e In neither c ase does the answer indicate a person who is I (I in control of his own li fe, who do es what he wants to do, or J\- ·- · tk~ what he finds s_ati_~_fying . _ At the ,; be st A distortion:; L ---~ap.i tali sm a nd Marxism offer us, in each cas e on e kind of con fr ol wi thout t h e other, or the other l evel o nly I -J,;, I i mpo verished and \ qt"t-c•,li1. i:1/-r..rl. f orm. Bu t , \ ( \ \ \ ( , , I~ ,I C( i •Ii I ; I ii, an since the l e vels . j ' t ,/ ,._- tf ) I of con trol have a large level of interdependence1 . each 11,, 1 lev el of control become s in fi,:,~it irnpover irlr- d t :--· ,·· -._...,/ .. \S . h ·"l, -r c . v~' . wi 7'~ut its compl~=:.m ent....-;_,.. 'rhu s for example, mo st individual s 1 cannot live a fully free or satisfying individual life in a society structured at the frame work or inf~s t rat~r ·e �18. ·fo leve\ provide mainly dr~~~7 , repetitive work, or no work at all, and so on. Both sorts of control are necessary, and to achieve this a society must first control the social framework, including the means of production, communally, and second ; give each individual secure acce~to the means of production for his own use to enable the individual to control his own life at the individual level. Su6h a society would be 'self- managed' at both crucial levels. * (from page 17) Of course./,. - t hat is what these positions offer at their best,., f thi:-; ·---is an idealisa~i~ In practice most capitalist countries -• •--•--•·-•---•-•---•••---•--•--•-••-- --•--•---•••n------••-- do not offer even individual control (that is they do not have the individual freedoms appropriate to liberal capita l ism), and most communist countries do not practice genuine commun ity control or self-management on the social framework level (that is collective life Ain fact controlled by individuals in the ·:; ha pe of bureaucrats or politic al codu11 ,lie~-' .c An alternative of this basic ,., f c,· .-·;;'/t .... .J, -t" . I; 1 J fr1_ 1~ <- J_ ) • sort_,\ has been_ J by a few thinkers, mo~s::tiA recently in a modified form by Ernest '" ,, c , ~ , C~11lenbach~ in ~arly ,.- b<:t{::).k Ecotopia ,,.r/, '<i. r , and a c~l:so,\ by Bertrand Russer! in h-i-~ Roads to Freedom . have been the intention It may behind a few others,e.g. William Morris in _News from Nowhere (although there are serious discrepancies here, which we will ,, ~ ( "()•;\)_ ,,; mention later), and in ~the work of Proudh. on, and there are ~ some points i n common with some forms of anachism - again with A S ignificant d i 'i.<ilp{,{11(,C J we shall discuss later. Neverthelsss it seems to have l)e·en largely overlook· ·:ea, and we are normally . - A ~ con fr onted with a ba sic false d; dwt or"'y -capitalism in some 1 orm �19. versus some ve r·sion of ~a~x ,s t · socialism. This ba1!c fa lse dichotomy is backed up by a systematic series of false dicho t omies in the subsia'ary notions of each theory, 1\ which reinforc e and perpetua·. ~te the basic false dichotomy. ) There are at least r,1/--:;~,,, I(; /c.--u.._r · /\ sets of reasons why we a re conventionally presented with this <; .yst("t,.~ 1-i11c. false dichotomy. a third position is sytem~ at ically discounted~suppressed} by both sides of the conventional confrontation because it is very much in their inte r ests that it should be. The r~ esent co~batants i do very well out of a game where each can point to the opposition as the only option and can play off the drawbacks of the opposing system to counter dissatisfac t [on with it s o ~n - system - an ideological or theoretical version of the balance of power, to to speak ,, /n which tlJ t!- $/:d<1r quo is maintained by the tension between these two ideological cor,1 6 atants. The intrusion of a third position, especially one which seems to have many of the advantages of both sides and the drawbacks of neither, could spoil this strategy completely. As someone else, ;f we remember rightly, hasr~rnar ' ked, capitalism and Marxism are li ke two sides of an a:c h - they prop one another A up by the match1•'.J weight of the - dis cu-lvantages of each side. ~ Both sides, insof ar '-../ as they ad,1,:-l such an option {:!.- exists at all 1 strive to present it as either a subv;1r\ty of their own one. so<:_ 1Q( theory or as a subvc1.riety of the opposigng Thus Chom. sky in his introduction to Dan1 .el GL-Lq:-,;-.n' s _bnarchism in effect assumes a false choice between the means of production being cont rolled by individuals, and there being no individual control of the means of pr?duction and no distinc ~ individual economic activity. Thus that any position which is genuinely iu... Wti\• t.'~ -~e able to conclude a~t~ -capitalist must �ultimately be in agreement with the go\~ of the Marxist vari e ty of socialism, and is differing only about details like the position of the state. But the non - reductionist sort of position will not fit into such a simple and loaded classification which writes in the false dict:'Ptomy -· since it allows the mean.:~ of production to be, Q_Oth communally and individually (~-=-/"\ 1::-li\ i :~- - -1 ,....' , ' ' f r ~ - -" {J.r..i"ll~.J..:A cont ro 11 e dA It is L 11 e c t i ve l~ i_~ --d±ti~re~~~~~y_~~; ;: co controlled at the social framework level but is individually controlled at the level of the individual's production for his ow n needs. rrhe other option open to Cht,,1\. sky and co. is to characteriz e suc h an alternative as mend y a form (perhaps ,, ~ ~ {~~r as a p.: .: e t it-b<Y.1tgu, 01s ,fo rm, a charge remi 11.scc 1.(-.;1 that levelled I • ' • ' 1 1 o,,,[ against 1· 1.J.·( ,~ ~/ ../ . _., . -- ., .,, his followers ) ,I Proud!-,c n by Marx ' r;(tf...!:.::!,tf ( -,/,.,1 :·,!1,,r-J\ I capi talism/A in terms 'of th~ ~eary._s of production not being ,n r-t "h- c:, ., t collectively owned and allowing some individual economi c / ·, activity. But since this will lnake the tribal societies which do not fit into this loaded classification capitalist also, it il). hardly seems a convincing move. __ In the same vein B I.-~ ckburn •, 1· · , / ' ( •; 1? r ;,'?' .- <, ri-r 1:., _ rt/,)(( I<< ' values in the Social Sciences/ presehtr thEf only 11 1. 1 alternative t o capital.ism as Marxism, while 'Paper Tigers' ( __;tp,_;c,,1.r ) asser~' s that there is no th1 i-· d position - social p l1~ nomena are to be accounted for i n terms of one or other o f the two main social theories. Simi lar strategies are of cours ~. ,_ .' L_._ -· '-.__ adopted on the capitalist side, wh-e- vr-i--1-l--e rnploy-- the criterion is., of individual pro perty ownership ' a 1 t-e rna t-iveS.A· j ' ) (' v,1 ., ~\ v,. ('., \' \1 ·}.'. I ~'"' '-- : ·- . _ -1l"-' f:. ,➔ ~ t 11 h \ 1 ~efin~ 'so ci""alis~t / , ' • \__ .t. (._. \i1 I \) --- .... __..,,- /' _ ' ,,. ~ I . I/ - 1 '> _t ; i'. \ There are however more substan tial philosphica l r e ason s f or the false dictptomy, which lie in the basic reduction p os i t ions underlying capitalism and Marxism, 1,,-•, / •;; , ,/ 1c'?. • {_ .c ·( . t. /j Io 7;'t,J •/ i(,,: , I '/ I/ t:t,, d ~iR/o:,a,.J �21. The basic reduction underlyi ng the ideology of capitalism is the reduction of communal life forms to certain sorts of individual life forms, or mere rough~ J.y, of communities to individuals, while that underly ing Marx,sr:11 is a reduction of individual life forms to certain sorts of communal life forms, that is , of individuals to elements of certain sorts wholes . * * Burnheim in rpaper Tigers' points out that the usual contras ~f between individualism and reduction of ' i-l~_>f15'~--. \ in the sense of a !) ' • 1) dr 1.A,.-t.-ctt/.J' to parts of societies which are then 1,·1 -t- . c,t1 .__: ho·~c1•-·; ., treated is fu \ her individuals, is a f u/:;e_ <!l~a.ti:Gn"'. He points out t h h t Marxists want to reduce individuals to elem t n J s of only certain sor~-~ of wholes (v iz. classes, which are not then treated as f uf- /!1-.er indi vid~ls) . ever goe s on to set up a further, He then how- ore basic false dichotomy r'H between this position and a capitalist reduction to individuals. 1· ---- How are such reduktions justifjea? ,,"' appeal t The argume t involves / the subsidizations tvupport the reductions. systematic .:. lse dictatomie9---~i~h.__ justify / '-, ,./ as follows: ' " (1) capita~ // ( 2) /4 t ineifidualism -~~sus ind'i~idual c l,_; , ( / alter c· ~·/, .> f r~~nershipf /1 // / .j_,._, of ,,tc.,· '·- / / '-.C-~ <_ __.../ ~ ..... ; / / o ollectivism. proquction versus "',,, ~ ~ ·~- �22. According to the third theory, both these sets of reduction alternatives should be rejected. ! A non-reductionist position, accordin g to which there are legitimate in~i vidual life forms which are not reducible to soc ~ / life forms, and legitimate soc~ I life forms which are not reducible to individual life forms, can give a more adequate account of t he data than either of the reductions and s ynthesi ze much of the material eac.lt uses to support his case t.<-•!1 ; le ,',· I•~,·\// avoiding -~ difficulties the reductions engender. of the Individualism, in the sense of recognition of legitimate non-reducible individu~/ forms, is one th ir1J - the lif~ individual reduction position that all life f orms ultimately can be reduced to these, is a very different thing. How are th e. reductions justified·? The argument involves appeal to the subsidiary notions to support the reductions. The systematic false d;~otomies which justify them in argument are as follows: (1) capitalist ( 2) ;ndividualism - versus coll e ctivism. individual c' l<)1<..,2,t s--ly) of means of production versus '· ., • ) : ' Cl a-l--t erna ti ve ownership. versus ( 3) (a) indivi (L..c als as not SO'Cil~/ly determined at all (b) the individual is completely soc io. l ly determined. (4) {a) 'obse rvational data' as theory-free versus (.} 5,. ( b) 1 o bservational data' the or- y - depend ~_nt. t, (5) (a) individuals as completely free , versus (b) indiv iduals as complo tely determined (atl choices ,ndividuals make are in fact d etermined) . ( 6) (a) The free soc iety as one .in which individuals can control individual life, versus (b) the free society a s one in which people collectively determine collective life. All these false dkl1 0 tomies are reje.c ted by the nonreductionist postiion .. �2 3. (1) and (2) we have already partly dealt with. To j,.,i-1_1.I / ,. ;~ / sum up, the false dichotomy over fo L/3 the alternative of a mixed form of control of the m eaus of production which does not fit into the simple classification, which enables the form of :c ~ m,v-~Aily the infrastructure to be cG-Jd..ect~ controlled -<-0.!id H~ use of it to be individually-controlled, as advocated by the non-reductionist position. The presentation of the individual as not soc✓(~ ,,/;;_' ci I/ l determined P'~ at 11 appears quite freql.lntly in capitalist 7 ( 3) (a) , I' \' \ arguments, espec rct. lly in the economi"l c sphere. Most capitalist '-.. / e conomic a rguments depend upon taking ind i vidual choices as 'raw', as not in any way in £ lue n ced by o r dependent upon a social framework. They appear to presuppose an absolute indiv i dual who would make the same choic es in any society. Th~s for example env ironmentallsts who suggest that things like a~r tT condi tio~s are u 1-w1 ,:c_,.,:__~sct"1/ and wasteful of energy are ,n<? t with the response from status-qua supporting economists just choose to r~-..i:> 11~ H: \f 4 , 1 {, raw, and The choice is represented_ have air -cond itioners. a that peopl e rreducible - to interfere with it would be ...~~ .A. "' authorita~ because it is presented as a choice at the level of individua l li f e-control, instead of as a social framewor k dependent choice, A good e xamp le is McCracken [ ] . This is part of the strate gy of reduction to individuals through trying does not exist, or if it does, i s a lso chosen by the individual on the level of personal 'raw' choice - ('a legally elected government determined it'.). Environmentalists are always encountering the related, arg ument that a certain predicted level o f consumption, say for forest products, energy demand, �24. space, must be met , no matter how disastrous its environmental consequences'. 'Demand' is treated as expressing the individual~ raw needs or choices, which are ,coN.:.e.11J.ed as lacking a social context, and therefore, it is argued, as being essential to meet a ~d authoritarian not to meet. To deny such demands would be to abrogate individual freedom. rrhis is the basic argument for Cons1u1,:r ism, and it is widely employed by those who wish to promote industrial growth t o meet alleged cop (_.il.i,, 1 t: r-- ~ eeds ' reg a rdless of the consequences. Courses of action which fail to accommo date cons!-< 11-iu; i nl t hus ruled out, and are consumerism and its consequences repre s ented as necessary and inevitable. Of course many people,especially environmentalists, realise there is something wrong with this argument. do not just up a,vJ ' demand' expres~~~ays, People junk paper f or packaging, or energy capacity to power hea~ed swimming pools or electric toothbrushes. All these 'needs' are the product [ 1,.r7 -'·- of a certain sort of;\ social co ntext, which the Con sume .ri sin igno r es, or presents as inevitable, wh e n it is /lrgument not, or chosen by people ge1rally/when >r is not. The Consomerist Argument, then, is a pa.rt of the capitalist reduction choices to individual choices, which is pJrt of -the~ reduction of : so c ~I life forms to individual life forms. [Accompanying th=js r e duction is a picture of th e individ tt~ l s ~ s c ontaining no s 6 cial elements which are not i n some way f}-1· 1--<. l.·-~\. C --- ~ t,; :_+ ,. : -~: _,, ; c ..{ · ,) , ,.)_ --·· l ~reducible to p- roperties of individuals &'\, l] \ . (b) On the oth er side of the conventi on al battle we are presented with an equally distorted and reductionist picture o f the individual os completely so c. ; -= ally determined. I :f the capitalist picture presents social choices as just certain kinds of individual choices, the Marxist picture tells us that there are no individual choices which · at-e.. ,H·[ reducible, �2 5. orl exarnina,tion, to socja/ choices. Marxists ,uj}if- (r l- reject the 'J capitalist a ccount of the individual and society and ~s ~st on the importan ce of the social fram ewo rk, but in th e process eliminate# the i ndividu al . In 'Paper Tiger ~' two main arguments are presented for this positi o n . · (i) The Invariance Argument: This argument appears in several pap ers in the 'Paper Tigers' coll ection and seems to be central. Essentially it argues that the individual does not him- self d ete rmine his own choice unless the determination would b e invariant in any social framework. , Thu s Steve ns, SuchtiJ Chal;,1, ers, and Burnheim. and In Burnheim's paper the argument appears in the f orm of the demand for cor e an of self, which would be unchanged under any variation of social U11 k'.;:; co ntext or framework,~ t his can be provided 1 there is tJ;1( re,\/ s. 1,> as J 'the sear ch for the real self proves illusory' , 1 ) ,7 nd the pictu re of individuals as completely s-r, ,,,,;/l mi ned is e stab l ish~<l. deter- Of course if the de P1 J nd for our core Abefore i ndependent no n-reduc i ble individual self-hood were admitted). was correct, i t wou ld be very ea s y to demonst r ate the Ma rxist reducti on . Bu t the demand is far too stron g, and the argument is thoroughly fallacious; for it a~sumes that the relevant proper ties of individua l s mus t be purely individually determined befo re the re can be a non- reduqible indiv i dual. All that is required howe ve r is that the re should . be an i ndividual eleme:nt in their d etermination, a nd. thL:; would not lead to the expectation of an invct~t--~,,..it: class of I sel f i properties which were unchanged in ~QY soc i al context. The f allacy in th e argument is perhaps best illustrate d /1 ,'.' by an analogy. ;,£' J We know t hat the genetic inheritance of indivi duals ;\ can determine within a broad range wh a t they can become or cannot become, e.g. if they are genetically male they cannot become mothers, ,r:1""/;, (, ,,r:, ,,,,., (( •. / i· (:· ,.('' -.·; .--:. ,,-· ...,.. .f" . .,,,/'.,, �26. if they are genetica lly members of the c o rr o t fam i ly they and so on. will grow in a different way from 1egu"mes, .....__,, Any g i ven property an individual has will pro bably be the result of both genetic ~nd environmenta l factors, and will vary as So we cannot argue that individuals either factor is changed. are completely environmenta lly determined unless there i s a class of 'core' properties which are invariant under genetic Of course there are no such properties. change! But that is what the invariance argument demands - that before we can claim an independ~t individuality , 'a 'real self' other than the soc i4 tly determined self, there must be a class of purely self-determin ed properties which would be the same regardless of different social environments . There are, of course, no such prope !··ties, so, th e argument con c_.l udes fallw:;u~rd,1, there are no real individuals. is a mi x ture of soc ;cd/11 But if an individual's cha racter determined and individu a lly determined . .J f eatures, and if any one pro perty showed in fact the influen c e of both i n t~ ~es, then we could no t expect such invaricince. But t he case of social versus individual determination does in fact seem to b e in the crucial respect a good analogy to the genetic/envir onmental case - the social context, like the th genetic inheritance, deterines, in a broad way what the A individual Lan -Or cannot become, what he ca n CL.. do or choose , * * <! 1 The analogy also throws an interesTin on the individual' s i light on the Lysen Ko that genetic inheritance -:_,,·..!_,/ ·IJ,._ the theo:rJ 6,-,;1 L,d ft f ,!(_·k , J l.//,t/4,, k,dk,y;I C/ A ~ rh . flfi?i1~11_'-!f. 11.,',/'t"fllr;e.~ {·.,/{J _ the u(gts of the social reduction, as required in Marxi~t theories. I/~ ,.: ,/.l;"r,.i /.-.... lr l r,/' l ·:-n , :,,-,,-,. 2 '"'<· ...... /,•. ( ;rt',: ~' .O>' ,.'--,fZf ,'J(~, L;"'I ,:'" (~ . ..,. fc.: J ,,.;1 ,· /. ..,· 11/J " ''j,., lc.-,J c./ Pr~suP1l,4 7 affair. . . 1 constraint It acts a j A ...,. - -·· 1 ,(..' ( ! [ 0 . -•..., • ' , / u,.. vrt;.( /(C /J I '\\ ',"'·,..__ ____ __ p:t.h ~ • , I I/..-, ~ r\..i.- , I) _, /:: (·,/ - · ~t'"" (, / , II/1/Jt of development, and its influence will therefo r e be seen ( �27. in all the properties he displays, without1 of course, being the l/is actual complete determinant of those properties. development involves as well his own indi viduallj de termine d -f~L1/u:--r1 .,· in the same way that the actual development of aH individual with a certain genetic inher i tance also involves environmental fa ctors . This is the sort of picture of the individual in relation to h is social context which u..r1de-rl ;e. s the non- re:1uctionist position , and it is in most respect s a fai-r!J natural one. In contrast the two reductionist positions present, in term s of the analogy, a false d ic hotomy picture 1./ of t he individua l as comple tel yg·enet ic ally determined i-:!'11- -- ' ~-, ·t~ .--• - l ~ the one han d . (Marxism\ and as comp.J:_etely ,1'fl- environmental ly determined on the other (cap ita lism). (ii) The second set of arguments for the complete social de te rminat ion of the individual f is L papero presented in It is an interesti n g a nd ,, sugges tive but l ikewi s e fallacious argument , which proceeds fr om the assumed theory= ..c:=-_aepen d en t characte r o f al l data, to the conclusion that ' individual' obscrv.d r<' ;u, { C'< '~t obs e rvation, \ entire ly dependent on shared social ,.tr tifact s; 1 I.e. theor ie s, is a social and not an ind ividual phenomenon. {u e.nce and duct s . knowledge I tfw 11. , are social and no t individual pro- It is p ointed out that the phenomenol o gy and epistem- ology associated wi th capitalism - empiricism and th e individua lis t red ucti on - holds that observation al data is completely theory - indepe nden t, and this approach is correctly rej e ct~~ d as in compatible with th e, o f theory forma ._,___ r--- ti on /At1(l actual process fa lsification . Even if the o ther connections in the argument are admi tte d, we contin ue to be p resented with a f alse contrast, this time between obs ervation a~ completrly 'hard' or as �2 8. completely 'soft', a s compl etely theory - depe ndent, or as comple t e l y th eo ry - independe nt. Again the obvious p osi ti on s ee ms to b e overlooked by the opp os ing reduc tio nist c a mps. gi Ve L--t. The point n eeds more elabora tion than c..an b ....:. h· ,f l0 ½~ , but briefly, what i s o verlooke d in the a rgume nt is the po ssibility of saying that some observations are theorydependent, and some are not ,\ that is, that there 'so ft' da t a. cffe~ 'ha rd' and the comple te Su c h a position would explain wh a t theory-depen dent theses cannot explain,the unden~b/e fact that some theories are fals ,; fied. It can also explain - what t he e mpirici st position cannot - ~ hy theories are not nearly as f alsifi a bl e as t he e mp iricist takes them to be, and some not falsifiable at all, and why in many cases what is n ee ded is a c once pt ual shift, that is a shift to rei,1 h--rpreJ1,4f,;,, of the theory·-depend e.nt area of data along the li nes presen fo,l. b...J a dif ferent theory. The theory - depende nc e aspect might be s een a s gi ving a certain cl~~ (the 'so ft data'), or it d ependi~t data [' 01 mjh~ theory- be seen as giving certain t heory-depe nd e nt constraints on observati on, while still leaving room f o r a no n - the ory depende nt area to op.~rate within those constraints, t h at is, an area in which , ,n ~ peop le opercit1 11t , with J c/,fl c, (:~1f- theories can reac h agreement . (Neither of the two reduct ion ist theories can adequately expla in agreement and di~agreemen t be tween people h ol ding different of such a non-reductio nist account of theor i esV_/) observation an d theory would be that they are seen as both u 11d_ social and individual - scienceA knowledge have but they s sooQI elements ;;-l 1 1 occur at the individual level, they are both f1lfd . social ~nd ind iv idual products. AA similar account in all o f free-will and determinism would see individuals as partly 4.. • f r ee, a n d a s Pftly determined - . • the latter determination occ urri ng as constraints on individual action rather than as �29. giving an area of completely determined action and another different area of completely free action. i,..J., £ ~;(b) '1 he notion of freed(l.m and of a free society is A one of the most important suffering from systematic ambiguity . 1 Each position defines the notion in accordanc e with its own concept of individua l and society; thus the capitalis t position ck~hes freedom as the control by the individua l of his own life (with appropria te safeguard s), the Marxist as the con t rol by the collective or class of its own life and so on. The non-reduc tionist position would reject the notions of l, 'J C'{ ,r·1 freedom which each reduction position offers, and would see 1\, the choice as involving a false dichotomy . According to the non-reduc tionist position, to be free is to be free as an individua l and also as a member of a community , to be able to control one's own individua l life as an individua l, and also to be able to act freely with others in controllin g and determinin g the social framework . ;,< 'f. ¥- -~ --- ~ ~"I:-~ The false dichotomi es presented by the two-reduc tion cire.. reason positionsA clearly systemati c in nattire. for them lies in a logical assumption and approach which is com m on to both theories - the reduction positions are the result of extension alism 'm. 2~te:rlalisrn ') in logic and metaphysi cs,oper~ti ng both through the accounts of the subsidiary n otion ~ and resul6~ . i n the the basic reduction position of individua ls reduced to eleme nfr of cul u,,,~ sorts of social wholes versus social wholes as reduced to constructi ons out of certain sorts of elements. �29 . Those who do not appreciate that everything is connected to everything else, and that relevant logic particularly is connected to everything else, would probably be surprised to learn that the basis of these false dichot.01les lies in logical theory. The two ,{ reductionist positions apply in social theory a particular set of reductionist doctrines a bot.ft the whole-part relation. The individual reduction position which underlies basic capitalism is that the whole is reduced to no more than the sum of its parts the parts are the thing and the whole i s a mere fiction or certain sort of construction. The opposite reduction holds that the whole is the thing and that the parts are no more than components of the whole - the y have no real function or role of their own except to make up the whole. This is of course the approach which matches the Marxist reduction of individuals, and it results from buying~~l~same logical assumptions about wholes and parts and applying the reduction move in the opposite direction. The logical assumption behind the reductionist approach is that the social whole-part relation is extensional, as it is treated in standard mereology. <.? r o ./r:,.·_ .~"' '-··• ,. / :J.. ti ·, r• i J ("~ \., C l' l •'-·\.. ) C • . ~\__(_ ___ · '-- '-- 'c l ... • : ,: · - v•~,1-. .__,, :;>>··\- ', '.\ I (_,-..._ .... l-··"' '- �- It is the seeing of th e whole~ part relation as extensional which forces the choice be.tween seeing wholes as just aggregations of parts, as on t he capitalist side, and seeing parts as j ust bits of wholes, as on the Marx ist side. If the relation is extensional, then one or the other reduction is inevitable, so th at someone who w, she~ to reject one reduction, say the re duction of wholes to parts, Cf!JD -fi,'j is ob li ged to embrace the one, the reduction of parts to wholes so that the Marxist reduction of individuals is an outcome of sharing s uch an extensional outlook. With an intensional relation this choic e can be avoided, there can be both wholes and parts, each with properties not reducible to those of the oth er. Consider;for example, the /mplicational case where we represent the proposition that A as the class of sta temen ts implied by A, or equivalently the class of consequences of A. Then if the notion of consequence is treated e xtensi onally, for oF example as material implication, the joint consequences ~ A & BJ that r:F -1 i 42.., is the consequences~ proposition {A & B} will just be the sum of the separate con sequences of A and the separate consequences of B. That is {A & B} = {A} U {B}, or, in terms of wholes and parts, the whole {A & B} is just the extensional sum of the parts {A} and {B}, and is therefore reducible t o it in a straightforward and common sense. If on the other hand, the notion of cons£ },enc(;,. is treated 1 intensionally as in re levant implication, the n the joint conseque nces of A & B exceed and are not reducible to the sum of the separate consequences of A plus the separa te consequences of B. That is i' B} · not just and can 11c: t be reduc ed to the ,' The residue or sum of its part~ proposition A and proposition B. the whole proposition {A & difference between the joint consequences of A & Band the sum of their s _e parate consequences might then cal led an emergent fea t ure; ·\ k __:-. The relation between suc h emergence results from intensionality. reductionisrn · of the whole-part relation and extensional treatment ' ' .1 Cr./) N,!/- , !f,dvhr//l-7 '/)_ft. ('. . . J1l7'UJ 1 11 //i,c✓ t'1. d(c: -, { l • A • r:-.I /)c!tf.·c·.:JlA~/,-. 1/J)7 1. �of it is so close that the {A & B} for the ~ = {A} U {B} feature is sufficient • of the whole,-_- '_part relation. extensional~ In opposition to this 1 it is possible to develop a theory for an intensional whole_:-:._~ part relation in an intensional mereol og y which models the whole ·-- -~part relation in terms of an intensional implication relation such as entailment. It would be rather surprising if the social whole ~~ part relation . -- ,.,,.-- an extensional one which enabled simple summation except in were certain special cases. It is after all rather well-known that people can do in combination what they cannot do separately, not just in the to extensional sense in which they can sum their joint forces (e . g. I . lift a rock), but al.so in the more important sense which is no~_ extensional in which what they can produce i n cc-mbination may be far more than (and different from ) the sum of the separate efforts of each (e.g. in writing a joint paper). Such emergence seems especially to be a feature of activities which involve combined inte nsion ~ __,.lity l as many activities which are characteristically social seem to. The simple reduction of social wholes to sums of individual parts is the basic reduction of basic capitalism. The position is "({ f:t-•c· ,·1 ( , __ very important from a theoretical standpoint as the crucial r--e-l-e.v~nee point for the understanding of other positions / .just as are the Basic Reference Theory and Basic Empiricism to the understanding oV pos~tions ~ in epitemology . and logic. . 1, However as with the Basic Reference Theory and Basic Empiricism, the numerous difficulties the primitive form encounters lead to many refinements, elaborations and extensions, and there are few who now hold the basic primitive position. The reduction of social wholes to individuals view points is liberalised correspondingly - [thus it is no good identifying the position of �Jf.4. capitalism with the primitive reduction and attaching t~at, in the fashion of Bwnheirn. ref J. One lih.eralisrd reduction position, which appears to correspond to the extension of capitalism in Social !Je111ocracy, holds that social wholes can be reduced through anal:'.{Sing them in ten:ns of a theory concerning the assumed components and their interrelations. Thus the reduction is liberalised hyond a simple whole-part one, to provide a theoretical explanation and to take account of yet furt her features of wholes in terms of th e behaviour and interrelations of their compon e nts. Such a th eo ry would however be extensional, in accordance with the usual assumptions motivating this kind of reduction, so that the essential, non-reducible emergent features of the social will still be missed. The reduction - although i t will be ab le to take account of a more complex set of interrelations, between comp onents, will con tinue to be inadeouate and to leaitimise /\ (::, an impoverished version of communal life "orns ~ ".'here is ·' j strong logical case that such reductions cannot be made. This ~ is provided by such results as I] rrow' s the:erem ancl. pa ral lel results in voting theory. * The fact oi complex interdependence between the individual and the social whole also provides a strong prima facie case against a reduction, since if some characteristics o ~ individuals depend essentially on the social whole, the latter obviously plays an irreducible role. But some characteristics of individuals do seem to depend on and be modified by the social framework, tn the same vwy that the growth and species composition of the plants in a f)'lic<O rainforest is modified by a partly determined by the . climate ,\ * ~ See P.ou t.ley [ J' )The Impossibi lity of General ionist Social Theory.' 1\ Reduct- �and other matters which a r e determ ined by the biolo g ical commun it y . The irredu cibilit y of the social , of soci al levels of exp lanatio n and occ urrenc e seems to parall el very closely ~ the irr e duc l bi li ty of th e i.n tension al, and th e relat ed i rred ucibil ity of non-re ferenti al to refer e ntial occ urrenc es el the irredu cibilit v,. of commun a l in semant ics. seems to narall ) life forms to individ ual life forms . The non-re ducti onist t he sis in logic and metaph ysics, that objects have b oth e xten sion al and irreduc ible int e nsiona l prooer ties, . l;t -{ I, I "~'i oarall els in a Away that the non-re ductio nist thesis in social theory , that the proper ties of individ uals are determ ined by both individ ual and irreduc ible social forces, that is, are both individ u a l a nd social. There seems in fact to be a close and direct conn e ction betwee n the social and the int ension al - as we noted earlie r, on l y intensi onal relatio ns between the i ndivi dua l and the commun ity seem t o be ab le to c apture the e me r~en t feature s which charac teri.se the social. It seems impo ssibl e to charac terise the notion of a social commun ity withou t .~) ~ \ .'...,-' . ..J appeal ing t o inte n sional notions - .~ ims, shared p r op os es , shared commu nication and sha red values . Not a ll int ensio n al not ions are related to th e so c ia l of course , but if some are essent ial to it , as we have s uggeste d, then the d e ni a l or reducti on of the i nt e nsiona l, on e of th e l eadi n g thesis of the lo g ical and metaph ysical theorie s as s o c i a t ed with empiric ism, is the denial or reducti on of the basis of the social . �The proble ms and positi ons relati ng to th e attenp ted so reduc tion of the intens ional to the exte nsion al parall e l closel y and str,i,.. l<ingly those relati ng to the attemp ted reduc tion of the socia l to the indi vi- -dual that it is tempti ng to conclu de that they are in fact differ ent aspec ts of the ons sawe positi ons, that such interr elated pro bl ems and positi reapp earing in differ ent areas form a world view. :!?or a o fte n worke r in the mode1-n. philos ophic al produ ction line, it is diffic ult to see where and how the little piece of the puzzle he is workin g on fits in to the who le. * And as Smal le n.t.p .f :ound , journe ys of inqu iry to discov er conne ctions and overa ll signif icanc e are not encou raged. 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We suggest that it is not a coincidence, and that the following rough connections and correspondences hold which provide mappings between positions in different areas of intensional (in logic)- non- philosophy: referential (in semantics) - theoretical (in philosophy of ( 0 - extensional (in logic) - /t, v-J!,J Jl t:t I A referential science) - social ( in social theory) j observational (philosophy of individual (in social theory). science) ( in semantics)- Some of the routes connecting these concepts are fairly clear, others are less so. Some of them, for example the epistemological-logical connections, are elucidated in Beyond ] ~ ~ ploring ~einong's Jungle and . These correspondences give rise to the table on the previous page. This table should not be read as indicating that people who hold one of the positions on the line hold the others, or even that they logically should. For first most / of the connections have been overlooked, especially in this century, and second, the positions do not even ehtail one another because the ronnecting links are suppressed; and these , even if logically necessary, may be rejected by peGple who hold one but not another position in the line. Positions do however form closely linked ways of looking at the world they are world views. ~~st of the positions can be seen as modifications of or responses to~l , the basic reference world view position, within its own intellectual framework. This is especially true o f 1 's conventional ~pponent, Marxist socialism. In 3, the necessity and rationale for the ~arxist converse reduction is created by the acceptance of the main intellectual apparatus of the basic individual reductionist worldview, and ~~arxism �challenges ea! i talisrn very intellectual framework. ·1tHtd1 from within its own In contrast postion 5, the non- reductionist position, challenges 1 from a auite different s tandpo in t. The table should make it possible to distinguish clearly between two positions which, although entirely different, might on some theories (e.g. a r~arxist thecry) run some risk of confusion, that is, between the Libertarian Socialist position and the Social Democratic one. The difference parallels that between .the Fregean Double Referenre theory and the non-reductionist position regarding intensionality. Social De mocracy must be seen as an liberalisation or extension of basic capitalism, in the same way that the Double Reference theory is an extension of the Reference Theory which enables it to take account, albeit in a quite inadequate way, of much further material which the basic Referenm Theory cannot ,- .. ! ,.. handle. ~ . :> t•( ·f\ t1•~ l ..J,.J.._ .,,.._ ..;· ' ! ,·, '· / This is done through setting. up individualised substitutes fo;-- communal life forms, usually through the medium o:f so-called w- ~epresentative' or 'public' individualp institutions which control the 'publid sector and much of the social framework. ,';',i I ~!.:'• .I Given an individual reduction1),...(such as that of Mill, the major theorist of representative government) such representativeness appears inevitable, the only possible and logical way to handle communal life forms insofaras they can exist at all. is far From the standpoint of a different theory, it from inevitable; and the increasing destruction of communal life forms in :f:avour of such 'public' ones is dama g ing, impoverishing, and leads to great concentration of power. Social Democracy operates normally with a capitalist basis and grafts the 'public' sector on as an extension J just as the Double Re f erence theory operates with the Reference Theory for �the normal case and extends the theory to d ea l with difficult cases. The Double Reference Theory employs a substitute reference, the sense, for cases whe re the will not work, just as Social Democracy employs substitute individuals to represent community life forms for cases where a purely 'private' approach does not work. sense, is treated as a The second mode, the further sort of reference, just as the 'public' sector in Social Democracy is treated as a f urther sort of individual life form. Both these positions extend and liberalize the reduction of the basic position, rather than providing a genuine alternative to it. )'I. How do the reductions connect with the basic position .. of each theory? -----, I l_ /--------✓ ~- Each position uses its reduction to vindicate i t's own vision of a satisfactory societ~_L,{'~he capitalist �30. - reduction..---_:-· to-individuals position vindi cates capilalist ' . society through the following CJ1'v ' j\, /v I - Ayn Bandish type of argument:- If individuals are entirely self-made, and none of their properties are the result of the social framework, then the fact that some people are superior to others in certain respec ts must simply be due to their being inherently superior individuals in those respects. But if some individuals, by being more able than others, are able to acquire more power or more advantages for themselves, this is only right and ( C? 1,'f-isrn) Such inequality is unjust to no one, and prope~. I\ the result is the admirable one that the better are better rewarded and have more control over the shape of society. w, #1 Th~s the individualist reduction lead~ only a AH.:,. l\ with few further assumptions which not implausible, to a /\ position justi fyi ng inequality of power .. The Marxist position, equally, uses its reduction to vindicate ,ts vision of the social order, as one in which the individual can express himself or exercise power only through participation in the whole, the collectivity. Individuals can, in this soDq( and especially~ economic order, exercise n~ power as individuals, and power is held only by the collective, or class o rganisation . In contrast to these positions of inequality of power for the .individual on the one side, and of no power for the individual as such, on the other side, the non- reduc tionist theory co rresponds to a position of equality of power for individuals, both as individuals 9 n~ through the social framework. In its vision of the good society, individuals have equal power to determine the social framework, and equal power to control thsir own lives at the individual level . The social frame(,J c•rk 1 for example insti tutions1 should allow �31. life and deve lop each indiv idua l to maxi mize cont rol of his own comm unal his own disti nct pote ntial , as well as optim ise pote ntial . ccftr ol of comm unal life is commLJJl._~3 1, o.tic:l. that of indiv id ual life is indiv idua l. l Capi talis m is view ed as a disto rtion of indiv idua The oppo site uctio nism . life forms whic h is impo sed by indiv idua l-redA.>hrll'o ,,.1-,,:t._ c JJ ,• 6 · c i.l(,,t ( [nr.n:n,t:;,.J (dfi'f( ,:,..- /i h - f/,('_ h.·t ·fto abs orb th e pt\ attem 1 rrti~~J? h whic es a disto rtion r\ redu ction prod~ A ~+· 1 renc es in goQI~ indiv idua l comp letel y, to swal lo~ up, deny diffe and need s. This is an equal . dist o rt ion. iced The disto rtion s have some para llel wi t ~ othe ~not in rece nt w ~1 Cing . For exam ple / there is a para llel with the and oppo site forci ng of peop le's char acter s into disto rted the m expr essio n, sex role stere otyp e s whic h frus trate and deny thei r lives . and impo veris h and limi t thei r oppo rtuni ties and force d by the Ther e is a para llel also with the disto rtion s In the d. sepa ratio n of sexu ality and love notic ed by Freu that the same way the non- redu ction ist posi tion woul d hold t were ove rcom e good socie ty could be acA1e..,.: e cl only if the spli and the two sides reun ited:-\ ~~~•·:~~"gl~c i :~i:i~u :~\:~ ' ~~~•h :~ · ,, , . - -~ f\ s, and part of a disti nct 'self ' with disti nct need s and goal ,.,. . . .,,._~ I . . \vr. J. • r .} ,' / , . . , ,.: , . _ ,7 ;,t ' Both must be r ecogn ise d comm unity with common need s and goal s. ,\ IJ /. •· t -' I' j 1 in the struc ture of the s ocie ty. up some Such a non- redu ction ist posi tion can then take redu ction of the data that each side uses to supp ort its with out howe ver redu ction . 1,1cui- t i ~ J_ ___ t he pena l ties impo sed by the Thus it can claim s~pe rior expl anato ry powe r. as we have For exam ple, the non- redu ction ist posi ti o n can s of each othe r, po i nte d out, acce pt each side~ basic criti cisma11c{ -, also thei r it can re cogn ise the claim s of the indiv idua ls I . limi tatio ns. limi tatio ns , an d the claim s of the soci al its d criti que. It can admi t th e va l idity of much Marx ist-in spire �32 . For instance , it can agree that in capitalism people are frequently unaware of the real social determinants of their actions and values a nd see as free choices on the individual level what are in fact determined at the framework level. It can agree that the utility of the invisibility of the manipulated social framework to capitalism is to dis~uise the existence of other options and make a situation~ which is to the advantage of so~e gr oups, appear necessary or ine scapable , ~ * or to the advantage~and chosen by all. This is however not evidence for the Marxist theory as opposed to th e nonreductionist theory which it supports just as well or better/ 1 a nd it does not show that there is no such thin g as free individual choic e . S imil arly most of the valuabl e part of the Marxist critique of capitalism can be seen as evidence for the lack of re al communal control at the social framework level, rather than as .,or··· supporting the thesis ~hat that N,·11 /Je_: on!_y level on which anythi n r; really occurs. is Thus also the t heury can take accou nt of classes without bein~ stuck with the ~l g iditi es and difficulties of a class reduction or a class view of history . ., ,1, ·; ..\ •~ ~ ' I\'-\ \ ~~ Class explanations for ind ividual action can be used where they a.re required, but individual aL.+1cr1 C<.H o.lso be reco gnized and there is no need to explain all the a. r:t ions of in di v i cl u a 1 s in his t or y forces and so on . ,1 s u 1 t j_ mat e 1 y the pro c/cL d of c 1 as s Such a theory can also provide t h e basis for - what is lacking in Marxist theory - * For documentation of this thesis, see Conscio usness . t Captains of Thus also some, but not all, of the >.I... Marxist critµq~ of the last twenty years remains of value to the non-reductionist position . �32.1 a critique of socia l Democracy which distinguis hes i t clearly from Basic ( apitalism . Th e majo r the oretical feature of ,ocial Democracy is th e attemnt to take account of communal LLfe for rns and other cases wh1 eh obviously cannot be accoun ted for adequately in basic capitalism , in terms of an individua l subs tit w~s for them-as in the ' publ ic' sector , Governmen t by represent ative A Marxist-ty pe theory cannot take individua ls , and so on. adequate account of this individua lisation , because it is committed to seeing all the actions of individua ls as represent ative of class forces, so that the indivi dual ' captt!Ye ' of social life fo rms in Social Democracy ' becomes for them just their capture by various class forces. measures bt.d'('t<Gtcratic ' fv4:.,/c,i;a-n.. The welfare and so on of Social J ' Democracy must they be written down as cynical manoevres by the capitalis t with th e intention of keeping the working J.t ,u/._ classes quie t removin~ obvious sources of grievance , while I\ ' public ' sector activity is seen as merelJ re~ulatory for caoitalism . This may be an aspect, but it is not adequate as an a nal ysis . In reassessin g the Marxist critique in the light of the non-reduc tionist positio n, it is crucial to distinguis h , as the Marxist critique Joes not, between individua l reductioni sm a n d individua lism, in the broader sense of the recognitio n of individua ls and distinct nonreducible individua l life forms . Privatisat ion , Elitism , Encroachin g Individ ua li sm , etc. , the way in which what people can choose to consume, produce, and do , is g overned at the framework level by the machinery of �33. private profits, th e great inequalities of power an d of wearth resulting from that - all these are prod ucts of Individual reductionism, not of individualism as such . r.Jr.{. p.: r Jl ;'/f . jt:.. ;-- ,¥- 'Jf- -~ .,>f'.... A'--. .;i«: From a~philoso p hical viewpoint the reduction positions have their bas i s i n a part icular,and ~~dequate,but widespread logical and me taphy s ical theory. It would be surprising --...,_ how ever if these b a sic redrutions, wh oi~ distor.___.,.tions underlie n_ early all tHcc/.r,,r,1_ social thought, originated entirely i n a particular logic al theory . The logical theories ct.U--rt:,z. t at a particular time indirectly reflect social values and intellectual currents a t that time, like every other sort of theory, and do not stand in some unique way above and beyond them. If a different kind of logic has been needed, it would probably have been developed. The prev~knL c of this now established logical theory may explain why few now see through the reductions, but it does not entirely explain why they we r e developed. A / "" J'&"' /.~r</'~·- ,i(1/"7° of reasons for the overlooking of the non-reductionist position lies in a s et of SC'C;r -·· • ( di;,,,1.,':r; fu;.__ t[ !{~.,- -✓ ..1.f;, ,1 0-k d',c.__ l -,- t;, ,1.,/-(;/(_) • . economic assumptions,\ common to the red_u ction posit.ions. p o.r..11½; 1 , '- 1 Our confidence that the non-reductionist position was a ~eal and A' not merely a theoretical pos s ib li ty or utopi aJt'f'aritcdJ; lay in the fact that the tribal societies we considered in the early part of the pape r had a structure which enabled Individualism a nd some individual economic actively to munal ly-controlle d social framework. with a u -n1.- Such societies clearly had structural features which meant that t hey did not have to make the U.Yt.palatable choice between the o prc) .S. ·ing disto :.:-tions o f totally collective o r totally individualisti c.. life. control of There are other advantageous characteristics also which (>-,l.. fl'/ are common to such socie t ies, L/1.d racteristics which (' �34. sophisticated ~0cttd despite the rising d eM•cracies to-day seek, but which ~DP and the 'high standard of living', which is supposed to provide justice and the good life for all / always The l ow level of environ- seem to be further off than before . ~" 1 P-, r,y mental d e struction cl /\ t-r; ~u( conscious life-style) · '·'-·~ and the environmenta lly- src;~{~i;.1 -_ . frctture.~ which ha~( often been noticed, t-... s ha l~? the almost total lack of in ;.,~uali ty and poverty-' the ")...•'-·◄ }'-'- \,._:, \ '-,__-\ V·' ,:. c.l-11,·, ·,•-7' high level of equa1, ·7 of power and relative lack of ~e\fe-r-R-me-Ft-t-r ,..._ domination; the considerable level of leisure ( o fte:ri, as SaA/eAl .f . /1 as pointed out, greater than that in modern western societies) and the frequerlly rich cultural and communal l ife [Ref. Sahlens?]. These features have been attributed to various things th e.. low level of technology, the communal living feature, the hunting -- 3ei fttc;..ing life- s-fJ Jc: and the norn a ti ic life ,~hich was 1 The first we can definitely ru le out. The mountain forests of Gr e ece were destroyed, the Middleof its rich topsoil and stri_: ppped of J1'HidZ by erosion, (r e f . Lowdermilk~b y a people with a 7 uite low (9 1 e v e l o:E technology by u,..;--- QWa standards, who also had a culture :). .,.._J.._ which was Mark .ea by great inequality -e-:r en s/cpJ<.:'...-.me nt. ...(_., \ ,.''1-/·, ,,_: .. Living ,Jt ;. d , 1)\ -(_ \. \ l ,y r ant e es/\ th e se features, as by no means gua .. a/ modern cities demonstrate · &Fra the success of communism appears .I t.t. c (J'(t t:< ( --1~1.rl; ,Je__ i I\ to be a consequentia l rather than;\. wh ile the no roadie life {;,Jic-<.u;f,:tl with the hunting/gath ering ,:S; style cannot be the whole story ~(J """'- t{ 7 I\ YI L ~ some societies which gardened also had or have I' these features feature seems to be one Th! f~ ) (e.g. Melanesia). of soC;Ct( structure. if t ·;-ut:-}s very good ner~,d for us, because we can hope to work for a di f ferent so C~Q/ structure, whereas we cannot r e alistically hope to obtain a collective and arrow, the woo :1en \t-1()-(_ ' . return to the bow or the hunting-gath ering way of life• ; �35 The structural feature which makes possible th e combination of collectivity and individuality and the other >v,v'-( ,, attr active features of tribal life, is, we suggest, the fact that the dominant mod e of production in su ch societies is that the producer of an item is, in general, also the person or group who uses or consumes it. People produce for their own needs, It and not , in general, for other people or for exchaDg_~. - is this feature which makes it possible for tribal people to live in a collective framework which is nevertheless not ---- oppressive to · individuality, for while the structure is collect- ,..,,...-- , , - - -----··- i vely determined and '\::ollecti vely h e l ~ ~ land, for ~~~_p_le_-,) ·h•. ri 1 fr: 11n .~, ('... ·i ht., ; r (' \:: n. their own it is p ossible for individuals or groups 1.\ needs,set . I goo , s, and how best to pursue them. J(\I This featureApr~ t-~ -cons umer identitv ; is in fact a feature which i s closely associated with, or even necessary to, a hunting-gathering way of life, but it is not confined to such a of life (that is , it is not af s0 su ff icient f or it) . l1t{J I(. C'lt The condition of producer-consumer identity oJ the/\ ckn ..:.r~f\;-/, f, ·<. \S - dominant)mode of produ -~tion~ the condition upon which the , . socJ~ty which is self-managed at all levels can be obtained. When production and consumption become S'e/!).Jr. f .;_ ,L and production f o r other people's :n:eds becomes the dominant mode of production, the choice between private or individual control of the means of production,or collective contr~= l/is forced on us and we are back again to ec,t other th an the producer mvst r u npalatable choices. ~~n .?om~ody· control production, decide and organise what will be produced and used, and control ~ r,\~+-t (-1 ,ml;; l;.r c (' other people's labour. / Whether the 'somebody' is l an individual or group of individuals ( as in CC/< ·fl{ 1t ·1 ;,,l· ) Cc,rnintu1t,t j et , or class collectively deciding what will be produced and how, we have the situation where not all individ uals can a_. �36. determine their . ctol\. what it produces. distinct needs or control tried- CLC•\ Iv 110,,.r - and A. The separation of production CinrL consumptio n then forces the choices which underlie the reductions and distortion s of capitalism and Marxism, and the resulting split between the individua l as Hte separate and individua l 21.s a mQmbt:?.-t· of a community . Capitalism and Marxist socialism have in common a commitmen t to this separation o f production and consumpti on, di ,ht_,,,1 r•r \ fragmenta tion of lcJJc,lr which reac_h ~s its resulting; and to the highest pitch . in the production line sys tems of modern indu,stry. Such systems of production were of course devised ancl implement ed first by capitalis ts, but were, as we know f~m Marx's works, greatly admired by Marx, who saw them as necessary to lift humanity f rom its previous condition of rural i db cy. { ~~eals itself clearly In this respect the Marxist posi tio~·';I\ as accepting a great deal of the intellectu al and eronomic framework o f c ~pitalism . ) I I The positive Marxist attj tud~ \ to the fragmentat ~on of labour is not just an optional extra tacked onto the theory because of Marx's own personal prejudice s. It is a feature of the theory, which basically views proauction in a fragmented way. *The theory arose * The Marxist picture of the tota i h~torical l y arnong1 and was supported primarily byJ the labour forces engaged in fragmented production in capitalis t enterpris es, rather than among independe nt workers. dependenc e of each individua l element on the other elements of the whole obviously is closely connected with a model of pro- d(cf.;.:. ,~ b.,.l c ,1 7 �37. ducers. The reduction positions appear in fact to be very closely connected with the way in which production l' IGH•; :/ is A andfupecia lly with the attitudes to the fragmenta tion for the Marxist reduction of individual to ~ of labour; of a class or collectivi~ C.:i . ._ ~- derives its motivation precisely from the acceptance of the capitalist production t<PP«rat~s . For the fragmentation of labour means that what the individual worker does makes sense only in the context of the total production of the collective. ,~}< Thus · the capitalist and Marxist both share a vision of work in terms of the production /i;1c, but interpret it differently. (The production line is an excellent repres- entation of the dominance of the fragmentation of labour, the assumption which both the reductionist positions accept) The capitalist view is production line o:f the for the purpose of production)of the workers or operators / extensions of the machines - their goals , their intentio ns are irrelevant, they are not part of the production. The object of the production line system~to be understood in terms of t he qoals of the Q,;,,,~-e~~--t ov;;:\h~f ~ A t~~~~~,~; of the goods. 'rhese are of course the characteristics of capitalist society and especially of typical work in capitalist society. Work is ((\:. ~, meaningless, directed from above by someone else , goals are external, to be understood in terms of the goals of individual capitalists or consumers) c\ c~ (~.,... J. I}:- b,___,. f'--.i'. r;L ~~ c:-~,.Js•.• The Marxist also has a production line image, but for him the work of the production line, which is not meaningful when each worker is viewed in isolation, c a n be understood in terms of the goal of the totality of wor kers. Each individual can make only a part of the ~hole, and everyone is needed to make the whole ,tern. /1 i :·:.,-:v--.\,·,__l ~ v ~ Work is mechanical, so �38. there is no place for individual differences and so on. There is plainly no place for 'individualism' in any shape or f . 1 1.ne. . t _..:orrn on th. e pro d uction Mind, rh e . i . mind, b1e goa 1 , is a C1 ass 1 to the workers on the production line. purpose of production must be viewed e n f, ;-(~.I ,,,, 1 The terms ''J /1 u.r/1(> f C sha r ed or goal of the whole group. k- But for those of us who regard the production line as a degraded and distorted form of labou~, to empl'?y ,-~~eh .·. _ ). __ (u.-1,~( c \.\ ' ,1 <I ; ~(I_ c,u,un,.,, (,,(,,~, d J,. /l(' y_, (-·.{4l' c:.. \ --- ' an image as the model of product io n and of society;\ is simply('.'' 1.T:'--~:'.L.:· amazing! For these are precisely the characteristics that make the production line an detested and oppressive form of work. The image - like the assumption of the ffrl-1"- Jmentation o f labour itself -:- betrays the basic capitalist origins of th e Marxist social model extremely clearly. In this as in other respects much Marxist thought is the basf :..ril.. capitalist parents. child of For the fragmentation of labour seen in one form in the production line was set up by cap i talists for their own b e nefit, and is neither more rewarding for the workers, or More productive for the consumers, than other forms of work. The non-reductionist position would simply reject the {Ill model o f work or of society, production l i ne asAappropriate Si nce the production line is not a form of work in which the 1,.._, .... ,c h 1>\-\~-1.. \ individual worker has (\ control - it is ,,the form in which he . ·1 ~ ~_:Sy,"s. ~has J...l..t..t..1..-~ ~r--=ne- control. The image of production, the non- reductionist position would employ would be that of a person or group of persons - making something f or hi .s 0UJ1L o. se. The work is purposeful and not undertaken for external re Lc,·cu l-L or exchange/the goals are inter l\t< producing a whole piece of work. ! I. The worker~ If he is working with a ?Np/,_ group of people, some differentAp1ay be doing different parts of the task, but all the work ers will share in the final product. _\,; . (. �39. In the non-reductionist position the intention or purpose of the work is ~ - that of the individual workers, that is~work is viewed in an intentional rather than in an mechanical way. Here is another important source of the reductionist positions which lies in the treatment of intensionality. cc,nJ1'cfL?,.r If WE\ work a:. s relation between the maker and the c.c made_, the three positions come out as follows: the relation between the individual 1. Capitalist: worker and the made object is not a ~®WHXfMi purposeful one, the purpose is someone else 's. In short the maker - made relation is rna.cl1r7t, n,\::o( , and extensional. The hired worker is an extension of the machine and th e purpose or int en tion '1--\l \ _.::,.·1 of the work is exter-te-€d to it. 2. Marxist: the relation between the individual worker and the made object is still seen as not purposeful, the purpose is in the w_tio l_s?. production line, the society. The maker - made relation, as such, is still viewed as extensional. 3. 3rd position: the relation between the maker and t he made is inteniional, it is purposeful, the goal is directly in the work itself. What differenh~t r work (e.g. under take n by a machine) mechanical and meaningful work is t he lack of intention in case of the former. The relation between t he creat iJe artist and what he makes - the only Ui!t- - sort o.fl\ in which capitalism admits this k1',1 cL of intentionality - is the ~ypical work A designs B _1 A case ♦ The model is: creates B. If the mechaniqal, extensional picture of the maker/ made relation is to be rejected, along with the unpalatable l reductionist choices which it creates, : it is essential to �4 0. i~fuse the individual worker back again into the picture as the creator and designer of whole objects, as the initiator anA. goal setter of h i s own work. This implies a theory which recognises irreducible individual life forms, and thus again, The fact that the a theory which is not Marxist in character . commitment to the fragmentation of l.a.bour cannot be dropped J.:.f h 1,;..,.. 1.,~t / from Marxist theory without ft eornplet~ reconstruction (so great as to render it no longer a Marxist theory) means that the Marxist position is, from the environmental point of view, At bottom it buys the same production apparatus a dead-- end. c..:,. an-a- capitalism, and therefore it can be expected that, even if the management of the firm is changed, it w i 11 turn . out essentially the same line of go~ds. y,,u~(! ,t ( l)J.Y l~-r b411c or ( Acl-1<1.:l; n· ·,!i'c.. the ,\ as Producer-consumer identity'>. O:' b~ Ii d, ,,rf) / mode of production does not of course mean that every individual produces everything he needs for himself entirely on his It means that people produce for their own needs, own. in the combinations they choose. Individuals could of course do so, and some harct-.Y soul s no doubt would want to; provided that they do not interfere with other people's equal entitlements or use more than their fair share of (';'{ IJ .,./.i (Lk,,1:.§ production-land or other commu~~( resources, there is no '\ reason why they should not. Many more pe o.ple, given free choice in the matter, would probably want to produce some I for their own or their households use~and some in common work with others for common needs or interests. /thittZ.-- S ince some activities are more bothAefficient and more enjoyably done with other people, and some are less r ,1 1 (Ji h~ so, it ee-e4-d be expected that most people would work in a mixed system of individual (I M c cllei: I , iN. or communal work ) perhaps varying the combintions at different stages of their lives. /\ �41. But there is a great deal of individual variation in the degree of contact with other people that is ~~~¥iN~ pleasing. Some people at the other end of the spectrum might want to do everything in conjunction with other people. What is essential however/ if the combinations are to be freely chosen, is that the individual option should be open. Freedom and independence is enhanced rather than destroyed by Choosing to work with others, b~t such a choice is free only if there is an option. People do not control their own lives if they cannot set their own goals and determine their own needs, choose what to work o n, with whom and when, how mu ch contact with other· people is op t imal, and so forth. Real control of one's life would be impossible .in a system which envisaged only most collective or communal production, as m0sxx~MiXMXX alternatives to capitalism do. The option o f individual ,, /I production, even if it should t urn out that it was not of t en ft;, ._,} used, is essential to ensure that people remained in control of their own lives ~~~~~i~~ in crucial respects. �We have already suggested that a s oc iety in which DIY as the c/1.Cttiu._ (u; 1tic. n-: ode of production would have the conditions which are necessary for and wo uld tend to lead to a truly free s o ciety, one 1 all levels both the oellcctive and the which was self-managed at / and the principle individual ., To complete the conditions self management . ~ of DIY must of course extend a lso through the rest of the institutional Ivan Illich has made a substantial start on suggesting strudure. what some self-managed in'i hfv1.l,c'iir might be like, and on exposing the institutions they are to replace~ although structure of the existing ct.,_!\.- t-he seems to lack a f\ vision of how they fit into a larger framework. This is not the only area ill which DIY would appear to deliver a superior society; t h ere are many ot h ers, 1 d · . t o concen t ra t e but we 1nten At the production here on those relevant to environmental issues. level the basic features of such society have already been suggested A c ommuna/ly control l ed infrastructure would by a number of people. provi de t he basis for prod uction of common basic needs and make these available on a fair basis to any individuals or gro ups who ,, to use them to produce for their own needs. wished __,, We want to stress that DIY is not a proposal for a return to a primitive life-style, ,· 1r 1 1 abandonment of technology, endless hours of grinding labour as a ff /)J y fou "e.~ eu>4..ld ;-i f1t.d- 6rL. ~ '/,"1TQ_ -fad>t(JtliJILCto/ .!'of>,U.d,c~t. k)<...ie.-J:J. It wo>1.h/ of course involve and subsi~te~c-~ _fa'.·1ne~>and so forth.). _ ,Jre.,·.:,,.J{..r- ,1c;.,__ /t!(i __,-!)._/ ,: L1,. t.J.l ~ , 7J,.,_,-J. if1..<- ifti ~------ ------------ - - ----- - - - d.,Pi-e.f"Tl11..-t result in a ·a ifferent life-styl~ a Akind of technolo gy1 and a different kind of ap proach to work. d ;l, ,,,'\ beneficial. Moit of these changes would appe3r to be / , f:. ( ~j !l e.( For example most peof~le could provide for theh- _l~c:l.__§_~c I /\ 1i·J1 '.7. standard in a more satisfqctory way than at present, with perhaps 1 li, f, ,· . l l -. ,-.,,,{_ 4 hours ..jk'V'{_l, .,-..i) 1 l· 1:,· ,:.:,./J /i..( f t, za•I I J ';,._.,• /-4.. per day of work, and probably 1-ers--S;,/as nt.Dre appropriate technology develops and for people wh o work in larger communal groups. 1 The typical feature of solutions to the problem in our society or Marxist soci ety is that~o nesolves one set of problems by creating a nother . oft~n more formR-ble , e. ._~· as one 'sol v:es' . the p~oblern of pciJt.:.r~ y . · in a rather inadequate way by utc,cdi 1-y cm environmental This £eatur~ is avoided to a reasonable probl~rns or some o t her problem. further problems created appear much the where system, DIY a in t ext e n that in the or y constructt_on parallels The situation less formibl e . thi~almost invariab~ ~ of kind t th eory th wrong where on~ has the or equally bad one hap!?3ns, a problem resolved in one area :r.eapr:ears as a worse �B (2) A crucial question for a DIY society is: sort of s ub s titu t ion s of labour can be made? what A be ginnin g on answering this question is s u ggested by construin g sub s t i tut ion ·~ -.-the. __ s..ub s t i _t _1Jt,j__prl' as the s u b s t it i on of an ·~ equivale nt economic oroduct. Thus su bstitui on in ,f- economics parallels and reflects identity theory in logic. [Expla in ~it uation in identity theory and intensional lo g ic]. The DIY economic system will plainly re q uire much greater r estriction on substitutivity of identic als , j ust as i t s corresponding intensional logical counterpart does. In contrast the economic theory of the existing system can be seen as extensional, it allows un restricted substitutio n, and the same way it leaves a hu~e range of important factors out of acc ount which are taken account of without diff i culty in a n in tensional system. Unrestricted exchange (or substitution) and the associated division of labour c reates these difficulties , in part thr ou gh the (!f, t rans fer of costs of product i ~ and be n e Lit s from consumption onto different par t ies, and in part through the fact t hat equivalent products~ in the weaker sense of the standard economic theory may !:1~?_!;_ be eq uiv alent in social and environmental respects . 1V\ •·- c(; ~1 '-' Moves such as environmental t:.___, p ricin g are i G . ~ efforts to qualify such substituU.on. �B. The most important de fections from pure DIY lie in qualLfied s ub stitutio ns, s ubs titut io n of on e pe r t:;on ' s labou r for a nother' s in particular. Labour exchan ge i s admissible provided it does not int erfere with o th er va lu es , e. g . does not dest r oy o r things the co mm unit y val ues. C 11 rrhe restrictions~ substitution may profitably be comp ,1,red with th ose in extens ional identity , whi ch excl ud e int e n sional conte~t-s as ille gi tima te for sub s titution.,e-x-tensimLo.i' i n d i..v i d-u.al--m-e-an-S �I Such an estimate would presuppose retaining some limited kinds ,vI 1 J · / • •' it\) of lar :)J t · -· :,:tc./L. ','\ production, perhaps communally owned., and operated perhaps by those who would use the product~or by people working on a \storage' system, for example, the mass production of cheap durable Cc,-- NPl basic clothing and housing as proposed tn ._~topia. __Jro suggest that hi/J ,~ <.,,., <-l1u.,/r..(,{.:. -1(ft(c_, /"<.rlcv-.__ • e/ DI Y should be the\ v · mode o~ production is also not to suggest 1 1 Vil\ " ~l ~-, ?- bLe__ that it should be the -~-- -- _,__ ·- - . mode of productioni the system ;: ,;,n J)} /t<.J<.. j can be liberalised, to allow for some limited kinds of exchange 1\ production and some limited kinds of free communal productio~without destroying its overall character, in the same way that the present system allows for certain limited kinds of DIY - 'Do-it-yourself' - product ion without lo..s.ing its overall character as a system of exchange f.rJJ .-· _ :;;) The'. Dr.'/ tf -~ fc,,11... /"" l ~ 1f,; production. ~A could also/be extended to allow people who wished to concentrate heavily on some project and needed a lot of free !1·11,~J time to 'store' basic credits o ver a time period. For example,, u ,:,ii(:/\_ in 'Communita s' ; . ," A in the late 1940' s/'Paul Goodman estimated that ;;- +l.1. plant, equipment a n d technology avai lable were used efficiently ~ ~ people could provide for their basic needs for an entire lifetime in two years, ,:, and could then organise the rest of their time freel y~ _,,1 ----- -·- c ~~ce~t;ated - ~~0 That is a high tech_. picture,, even allowing for the increase in productivity since he wrote•but the basic idea is ,J adaptable to a lower tech. one, albei t with a larger time period. MX<'S Most people though would probably prefer to provide for their basic ne~~ by production outside the basic community ·~ - ~ontrolled A - _,,- mass-production system.,1as in Ecotopia, obtaining both more pleasing goods and more satisfying work in doing so; and even many of those \,v o.~......-ttQi who w-c • -:-Gl to have a large amount of time free for the pursuit of some project might find the production of part of their own food on a daily basis an enjoyable and satisfying form of relaxation. �Production beyond that for basic needs is an optional extra which -,) people can pursue as and how they desi re. ( It will certainly be objected that such a system would not all ow sufficient leisure or free time. The sharp distinction between 'leisure' and 'work' is of course to a product of a system ' r-... where work is typically q l·1e,_;,_ nated tfl the sense that those who work on it do not control it and its gon./J are extetll(d. to to process in that the m6tivation for doing it is to obtain something other than the fina l product or the satisfaction of the work. working on wh at Someone who is he enjoys do ing and finds satisfying to do to produce for his own need~does not draw a sharp distinction between 'work' and 1 leisure 1 • Furthermore it would appear that such a society could allow for a great deal more 'leisure' in the sense of time not spe nt on the basic needs for living, than the present one and such leisure would be in principle avai lable to all, which is not the case in the present system. The price which would be _paid for free time would however be quite different. The price of free time for non-production Uc~ J ities e.g . intellectual or artistic projects, or just to contemplate the universe, would not be the price of inequalityJo f being able to rely on other peqie lower down the scale to do the basic need:; production in an alienated way. The pri ce would be simplicity of life. In the same way the price of indepen dence from other people is not a private income which enables one to made use of the labou r of others, but an \ {'.:. - :, ~:, I( ,c~,\ independent, self-reliant mode of ~roduction. The ob;,J e c tion that such I\ a society would extinguish the intel lectual and creative lights which are alleg edly fostered so well in this society does no t hold water, t but it is sure to be made much of because a major justification for 1,, equa lity and for production for exchange is that i s is supposed to \)t --? - release some specially gifted individuals w-~ \ sufficient full-time leisure to pursue such things.] /lcf. 1 ,,/J r. c , 1cf,1 rr,, �A DIY system will of course be pronounced by economists to be 'inefficient' and therefore denounced as one which 'lowered living standards'~ t1c,1 It is fairly well known to Rconomists that efficiency is a relative and evaluative notion that is that if it is 4f measuredAthe total output of value per unit of imput then the term 'value' cannot be explicated in terms of the market as just 1'141 what the market deliver s without ernplOYJtt he J_ . t1Clfu--(Qi;111c fallacy. It is not sufficiently often realised that it is also a relatiV istic notion, that is, that it is relative to the socio-economic framework I adopted, and that appeal s to 'e ff iciency' ~n t err> i S of the present system are really appeals back to a fo~m of individual reductionism. It is not a question of abandoning the concept of efficiency, but of realisation of the dependenc e on a J·t 1 U1 f 1") C; r - econonomic base. For some things which are efficient to produce in the present centralised structure based on a high degree of fragmentation of labour would be extremely inefficient to produce in a DIY system, and some things which are inefficient to produce in the present system would be efficient to produce in a DIY system. Centrai; \cftion depends upon fragmentation of labour, and therefore on the social and political choices which are forced by it. A DIY system would have a radical form of decentralisation as a natural consequence for people who have regai~ed control of their productive force would <"( ~ naturally combine in smaller decentralised groups a.n d suited their needs and interests. Th~s in a DIY system smaller scale or ga nic gardening, which makes use of local organic material instead of wasting them, would be more efficient than gardening which depended upon imputs from a high energy, cf11fr4./,· ru/ fertilise,·-plant, for instance,.If the people who wanted to use something hcttl time producing it, then anything requiring a large measure of transport or manufacture elsewh ere away from the in effi cient compared with a n (, .te of use would tend to be Q/~rnat ive way of doing something which �could be produced or made locally from local materials and which did t unpleasan t work processes . materials would then be t>l i{( t\ )i,f U-/ .", f l <( In general ' 1 available loc al -i lt (') L }·n ore efficient to use thar, which /\ required a high level of manufactu re, low technical processes would 1 usua lly tend to be more efficient than high level ones, and .so on. These chan ges are strengths· pre· c;seiy the sources of its environme nt; and other and to suggest that such a system can sim; 1J be written off as 'inefficie nt' to try to wri te a social framework into economics and absolute in a quite invalid way. A DIY society would be as naturally decentral ised as ours is natural l y c entralised ~ The role of this kind of radical decentral isation in reducing enviro nment al impact through encouragem ent of a decentralised small- S,cE)_/e;. low impact technology has o ften been pointed o ut. Another consequen ce which i s not so often remarked on but is equally important is the role of s uch decentral isation in enabling a natural accounting of many sorts ~f environme ntal costs occ urin g as a result of productio n. Local production for local needs means that normally the environme ntal costs associated with production are borne by the local population whic h uses and produces the items concerned . There is thus a strong natural basis for taking such costs as the destructio n of local ame nity into account as part of the perceived cost of producing that destructiv e sort of item. Accounting of costs which takes account of environme ntal values is extremely difficult to do in a n a tural way in a system which spreads costs around in a widesprea d 1 The dividing line between self-manag ed technology and the opposite does not however entirely coincide with the high tech/low tech For example, good two-way commun ications system coul~ ~ distinctio n. have an invaluable role in cre at ing a network of flexible cornrnuni t i,_ es, other than the spatially local community , in which individua ls could Computers could, as Illich points ou~be used to participa te. further and create such a network of communiti es and cit'-<__ invaluable aids in self-manag ed education medical and legal systems J IAJh...(l,t--(1_ they could be used to overcome the ~onoDolis ations of skills, knowledge , In ::,_ short some and informatio n by professio nalg and technocra ts. power, instead of of co uld serve decentral isation high-techn olo gJ being used to increase the concentra tion of power as in the present system . �fashion as centralised integrated production - for example, the commonly encountered situation of concentrated major benefit going to a small numbf~r of people and s ma l ler but very widespread costs accruing to a very large number of people. This situation typifies the subtle way in which environmental degradation occurs in such systems. If the environmental costs of production occur in the same region as and accrue to the same people as the benefits, we could expect that the environment costs of producing certain destructive items would be much less easily overlooked or shrugged off. A DIY system would be 'pluralistic' in the sense that it could provide for a very large range of different diversity in gords and needs. life-styles and a great There are however a number of bu~lt-in .i. -n1.t' ;,· : •. ..,/f features which would work strongly against environmen~llyAdestructive life-styles .. It is important to realise that these features are the result of DIY and are not obtained simply by the feature of comr:u.mo..l control of the means of production. 1 , , Consume. rism and Waste~ --·-· ·--, ... ~ ~ I] feature of DIY _,..,. rs a built-in defence against the complex of problems known as consumerism{ t ha~is 1 the taking o f satisfaction in accumulating unneeded goods). �Consumerism arises primarily when people find little which they do not control, satisfaction in their work, and which is frequently, for most peopl~repetitious and boring a 1 iv, ~~J and undertaken only to mak:1 ., or for reward s mainly 12 1', t J. 111.)( Satisfaction must be found outside to the production process. the production process, in consuming the products of other people's labour . Such consumption is the reward of work, and the consumer society rewards its members for the unpleasantness of their work mainly in terms of opportunities for increased consumption . In lead to a situation where goals contrast, since DIY wc ,dd. were mostly internal to work, satisfaction in such a society would be obtained though the work process itself and not in a never-ending chase for satisfaction through consumption. Reward s would be through the production process I not !_rom work ·- lying just in the product. Work would be undertaken in part because it was satisfying itself, As any self- and not usually tu_st to obtain the final product. builder knows, even apparently mundane projects such as building o n e's own hous e can become,if the worker can control his own labour and match what he does to his needs, a source of great satisfaction and of self-expression. 1 In this situation people express themselves a nd their individuality through what they make, not through consumption of mass-produced items e.g. buying a new model car . of the make the individual thin'k fits his /n1ccge . 11 In a DIY system, these sorts of satisfactions are available to everyone, not just a few people selected and designated as "gifted" or "creative 11 , and allowed to work creatively, as in capitalism. Secondly, there are in fact very substantial limits to the extent to which one could be an indiscriminate consumer in a DIY society Je cD~1Jone wanted to , lonsum e rism depends upon other people 's labour to If people have to make their g ood s themselves a crc;cial extent. (for example 1 if you have to go and work in a bicycle works for a while /1 ._,.,. t.' ' ,...., J'/ ;.. ;\). . . ~ -· .. ' 0-11"'. t: , rL. .... t ,.....___ \:: • _ 1 • •, • _• - , / ) ,:,..:_ .. ,, .... -t ~ l_ -~A. ,_\. \ 1. . • C /- 1 ·,._ ).•.•.•. 0\1 r . . tl ·'t-y \\ . _/_ �if you want a bicycle), then there will be a serious trade -of f b e twe en work time and consumption, which would act as a built - in The more goods are accumulated, the less brake to overconsumpt ion. time one would have to use them . leisure would have fe~r~oods. People who want large amounts of Many people even in the present society , standard " - ·fh,., ·t . givife) such a choice, might in fact prefer a "lower l1vii1j /;(e i.r > tt n m1 h.-r The work situation in and more free time for their own pursuits. capitalism encourage consumerism in man_y ways, one of the most important being that people do !:"lot usually have a choice to obtain shorter work hours, have fewer consumer goods and more leAsure or more time for their own projects. They have to work certain hours, they h a ve a surplus, so they might as well use it to obtain the customary rewards. DIY would allow the 1wd,hi"J of work in a flexible way to needs, rff-' for more free time, which and e ncourage such a tradeAof fewer go ods could be spent on non-consumer pr ojec ts. \ Thirdly, a DIY society would be a noh-waste socie ty. No one would work to make things he did not really need when there were othe r I thi n gs he could be doing I ) ( instead. ' ', '--: ,. , - .,-, : , ' A.: ,◄ \ ) As Brian Martin has pointed ou~many presently environmenta ] y damaging systems, such as the private car system, would tend to disappear if people has to make their own, repair them, and help the roads. Buses, bicycles and horses, or other transport systems would b e more efficient in such a society. One cannot imagine people in a DIY society.work ing for a month a year, for example, in a packaging factory to make a lot o f unnecessary package s th~yhad to throw away as soon as the item was unwrapped/and then/fur ther had dispose of by their own efforts. The goods they / would manufacture for themselves would be as durable as they could be made, and would be made to be easily repaired. Materials would be made to go as far as they possibly could - technology would be developed which would do as much as possible with as little as possible " �could not be manufactured in a l~cal area would tend to be replaced [0, th ose which did not have these characteristics. Since high- ..~;.f . _ l ,_ \\/ technology materials eq\1aLly- have the characteristics, the y would t e nd to be replaced by low tech materials, with consequent benefit to the environment. fNlf The DIY society would Abe a low-consumption/low resource-use Since waste represents unnecessary and avoidable .1.. ·: u- (\J ,-.. r 1": ·-:- l c, b,~ , ..,. k I uld avoid it. labour/wo own their controlled who people labour, no-waste society . ~ t c ,....t (A. I,._• .. •J - " . • --- , • 2. Poverty a nd ~nequality . l t present the main capitalist argument for never-ending growth and the production of environmentally b,,f i.f ,1fl(}_ ( C Jj(~ damaging ~E:J~goods is that it is necess ary to help the poor. This is supposed to occur through "Trickle Down", a process whereby people at the top of t he must 3et far more than they need hcnp reach those at t he bottom of the he a p. so that a few drops can A more ;n.efficien t or envi6nmentally damaging system for providing ,{ for the poor can hardly be conceived. Different people have many different ab ili ties and capaci ~e_i but people who are not very young or very old and are in a norma! state (l, J '\ , ' ; / ; ' .,/ ;, -' f • ,' 1·, ,,· f ,· ( of health 1are basically fairly equal in their ability to provide I for themselves the basics they need for a g ood life. At present V poor p e o p ~ poverty and inequality come about primaril y are prevented from providing themselves with what they need in a s ati sfactory way. (Three cheers for Winstanley!) They are prevented b e cause the right to use the means of production is made scarce, ,I: (usually by private property), and the skills to use efficieJly are A also made scarce ( usually by the bureacra tic cJqfl-1) 1 Restriction in access to use of the means of production is also tt.t. ( I J1J l I Ji!. l( / {;J L , Rr 1( a main source of 1nequality throughAso on, since the restrictions are used to disadvantage thrue people not in certain favoured categories. 2 f \ ,_. h,_.• 2 ' • \ I >/- , The point is driven here in all of Il l ichs work especially Dese-Fe#trg Society /and 'Energy and Equity' and of course the older school of (\~ ,_',A.· . .._, , anarchist w_i ll also stres s ed it. ~l'..ti 'fhc,N,:~---- .1 --\ l·j ...,• _ '\ �A syst em of comm unal con trol of the of prod ucti on tn:,[( 11.J with ~cces s r ig hts for all who wan t them a~:V in DIYJ 1 toge ther with the free disp,v ~~~1· of t ~{_ skil ls to use them pres entl y "' wou ld remo ve this maJ· or sour ce of pov erty with out the need for was tefu l ,.I inef f i.cie nt and c: 1111 ,'rt-1111:~1tl&lj dam agin g econ omic grow th. �The pure DIY society would 1 i t t 1 e r o o m f o r h :t e r a r c.1h yl and from a t he g uid e wou ld that division of to be sort e qual the of access social picture would hiera r chy and and fact that without allowin g the of pleasure, Such a position would be able th at but to not misse s th e presuppos e The mark. l evel allow for t o needs, or the ( , for f alse individual a bilities their a social dif fe rences differences, capacities, power it a nd be a s ociety. they 'level' in ability, that and people have th at this level objection does presupposes not only ,, /-,,, ( d i ffer e nces in ability of be t ween kind of capitalist ability d iversity and that framework a rea s; Such in present i n dicat e s pow e r a nd and and so in a bili ty on, an d as relie s a the inequality on areas. level the justification for on inequality a nd false dichotomy an absolute f ram ewo rk levels based on a needs. in oth e r inequality on justification for inequalities equal level of conservative premiss as of the in e q ua 1 r i g h t . a nd }a b·±--1-i.ty::=t:#> s take i n c on t r o 1. .,. , ·1 whatever at both indi vi dual as differences of this level, system could s oci e t i es , ability in all What pow e r people's typical i l legitimately uses level, equal source of pro f i t , The capitalist argument framework framework goals become a picture the provide goods is not required. to me e t Equality a t p eo ple have a n their own lives, can Equality on on. of power ·{-(, th a t social produc t i on, 'egalitarian' two equality o f th e d iffere nt on the ar i si ng p owe r soci e ty would provide. can allow a d e qua tely c apacit i es. account Exc el len ce in such a egalitarianism is based equal it differences so urc e do not so of problem of how to allow for in e qu a lities . an d of individual frame work people and people h a v e capitalist obj e ct i on such a elitism; thes e two-lev e l the means framework, without the The be equality on to resolve i nequ a1 i t i e s ot her equality individual production and a f or labour. r e quired would is, forming the ob vi o usly be one which had ver y false equalit y assumption �:, /. 2. In practice equality on the social framework level would guarantee a reasonable level of equality on the individual level, since great differences lisation CJ r of in this the means of production, accumulation of other people's labour, would reduce differences area can arise only when monopo- are possible. Equality of that ex a mple Jane likes and asfemale Thorea u ) It is that it it should do can only be achieved if differences carpentry, household an especially fine house; universe , but in material goods or i t is of cour~e undesirable this kind equal i ty and Anne on the other hand Suppose builds herself and her (whom we may envisage likes to contemplate the and wants only a minimum level of basic needs i mpos s ible to obtain absolute equality without satisfied. either preventing Jane from doing work she likes and exercising her the benefit of hersel f for without in the demand ~_ ?c i..?-1__ or needs for to. equality, f r am e w o r k ... 1 e v e 1 , production and skills and others, or, what is equally undesirable forcing or pressing Anne than she wants no t to work more and consume more What is then, legitimate and necessary is ~q -~~it._y ___Q_f __ p_ o_w_e r:, e q ua 1i t y a t t he 1ev e 1 of at the i n d iv :i. d u a 1 consumption. Social Democracy often claims , 1 e v e 1 o f " p u b 1 i. c ri 1i f e • to deliver equality at the This claim should be rejected however because:(1) i t does not provide equal access . product lo n , ( 1 . ·. .- .. to the common means treats th 1 s as an in di v id u a 1 mat t er ~------------·-- ---···'/ ra t her /I than as one for /· of . \--------,) m 1 s taken 1 y \. but so. in interests and needs are denied or discouraged. abilities, for and Social framework in people's living standards, would not guarantee absolute equality ac h ievem e nts, or employment social framework control �,., ;; } 3 /I . (2) the individua l isation of comm LJ. n c1 / life forms inequalities of power at (3) is only, and in fact opportunity is all' confusion. in though equality of opportunity such equality occurs in any case, the concept of to a equality this case defecti v e, S l:\ C.<?- to do so.* priv ; leged and through equal i t is based on an 'each- the rest of the except in an Alice-in-Wonderland sense, even if the opportunities for equal for each person but clearly not _.§.Q The opportunity to be selec ted as on e of a powerful elite which controls population does not, equality, very limited extent Each person might have the theoretical opportunity to become Prime Min ister or win the lottery, can hope to great the framework level. the claim to provide equality specious; leads • (which provide selection were in fact they are not in Social Democracy). Real equality of opportunity and power requires ways o f making decisions and exercising power in which all can participate to an equal extent. X ,,,.- * Such 'equality of opp ortunit y' arguments for the egalitarian character of Social Democracy are a similar swindl e based on a scope confusion. So, for example, 'everyone has an equal opportunity to do i t ' (win the lottery, become Prime Minister) is ambiguous between (1) (x) Q fx and (2) ◊(x)fx. �.,,l ·- ) _J ~·I \ t~ \ '- J I I -.J 1 ! .• '1 l ;b ) ) <, I .~ ( .~ ·' .J , ..J I ) J J ' :, r' J r' . ) (J ) ) J ) ) r<'O ) -·{ ·1 { ,..l --l-- ( ~- ; -j / ...;, s I -~ I f _i I >' .:";) 1-- .r '/t,\/ -tp ~ j ) . _) -----s ~ ) ·•J I ',I :5 ' ...... j ' l j .J <,} .J ~ . . ~-i , ) . ..> . ...J ), j 4 ) ', -t) j \ l ~ ✓ , J_ . .{ ..) '1 l u) ·.;, r ? ' I', \~ .., ) " ~ I (,> I I I . j - ) A ; '1 _( c..J\ JJ( ~ t C, _) ~ lJ 0 ) 'l .. ) ) ~) .J -~ ) 'J ) . -(7 I vj t } 1) •..J ,J f ) I > ) ) ) ,.. ' .,) ( :1 c..-i <+,) (_,) c) _.,. ) 'i _,.) .. L ) l I r' ·-(f r ... r-• :, d ..I ) } ~ •.J -; ) .) _j ,--,. -1 . I ·t j } ',) (1 ) j ( ·" ·'},, ', ) -~ ~ " ) t -· l ,'l; __l, ) -,! ... J ) ( ) ) L . J J ..J , ) _) ,,\ ~ ' ) I ...) ,.\ t~I $ ...) .) 7XJ J ) . ), -.), _.._ J ~ - ),,1 .J.. f) --r' ) ___,,,. J .,~ 'j < -- J (~ (-::; r j ,_, ~ ) l - .J t _) _.) '-..I ( ·~. _,,,, ) ~· ) .....l r' .1 r I -..,c7 \' 2 ' ~ I) ) '/ t-! f, \ \; r, l ~ \ I ·') · "I ...,.. 1-=; ) 7 \, ( .1.-- " .J .( '.J :~ 'f ~~ ) "; :},..) ·,"-' \ (> -✓ ,.,,., ) ----... uJ 'i ~I 1, ) --.J~ ,J J ,.:' " ·1 ':./ ") ) ~ ~ ·r '; -~ __.) tJ ,., ' J,, \ ~ ,_) ; .) J r: \ _c ) , - J 01 ,.. ) ...) < 1 ;_;, ( ).... 7 .. ,) 'l 1 )' t:: • - j '.'j ,!) I I J ' .J,) l .J I _) I ) 7 I ) • .J ) } ..:.) ,, _..) ') ~--.... ' ,) :( I 1 ? ··'I ·1 ..J J ~} ·1 ' ( • .> c-: :.,.._ ~<r \.~ ....,_ .) J ,j ,,, -i ) ) --·r-:i I ,) (( '( . -> - \·· --< .J ' l I ) " ) l / .. �j r··s ~ \'\ ~ ~ \t I I ~ I cuts straight through the problem which plagued Anarchist thought - \ the problem of how production is to be organised , whether it was ... .., ·, , \ to be communist ic as Kro p otkin wanted wi t.h each person w, rt(l;-.,_1 to ,_ ""-' ;j \) 1 " " ........ ~ ...\) the best of his ability and taking according to his needs from the c01Tu11on store, or collecti \.,, i..st, as Bahu11, :1 ~ ~ . \) J ..._, , 'l ~ \ \I ' The adoption of a system I -~ . )( ·•·i·-.._ .\.. I I., \ ~ t r e mun e... ·"rat.ion in the fonn of wages according to the amount of .--------------= ~ DD1 r~~, £ ,~, ,:7 ,r-c-.jo r /'o ., 1'7 71 u [/ 7 ✓·~work done;41 , allows a pluralist ic and flexible approach;- and, is A A certainly ( ,'1Y1/?"1!,/41(i I / ruHl others wanted, with I [j/l,' t with the first, 1 and perhaps the second, as hU ,.·. the organisat ional 1\ of subgroups within the total society. Each of these systems has serious disadvanta ges ~f applied organising principles for the total society. system, as Kro;>d41'n pointed out, would restore wage-slave ~y, and lead to systems and kinds of work not greatly different from that in capitalis t society. The communist system Kropot1::. 1,1 proposed was an attempt to get away f·rom exc h ange pro d uction · l an d appears to h a ve b e en a n attempt to production and consumpti on, which in the collecti ·/ ist system remained split, thus Kropotl(,>1 writes "Common possession of -,1,, the necessarie s for production implies the common eJoyment of the /\ fruits of the common productio n". This seems to be an attempt to reunite production and consumptio n at the level of the total community 1 i.e. to a pply PCI at the community level. Unfortuna tely it cannot be effective at that leve l, because such common production and cons umption also, implies identical production goals a nd identical interests . But to a ssume this at the total community level is unr e asonable, and ult i mately 1~pressiv e. It ties e1d1 personfu production to every oth e r~ n e ed and g o ~~ a nd each person' s n ee d t o 1 rrhe term "communis t" cannot of course accurately be applied to the systems it is popularly applied to to-day. �to everyone elsis production, in a way which would plainly not allow the sort of individual life control, the freedom to .~>1:eh one's i: work to one's godl ·i, and vice--versa, which a true.ly free socity rm s t 1\ allow. So for example, a person who wanted to work little and 1ri:·:,i,,f a si{( ple life with few gOl:cCs in order to have :free time for some 1 projec~would be unable to do so under this system, he would be pressured into working "to the contribute to the common well-being to the fullest extent of his capacities" He would in effect have to remove his own non-consumer gord to provide for someone else, desire to consume at a much higher level. I<ropott in' s suggestic,t would plainly have required a very l a rge measure of soc i al conformity and indirect social control or pressure to succeed. Kropotl ~ of course envisaged that people would willingly submerge their own ,} gooi .s in the common goo/ because of his view of the human nature. u',l~C 1-ti~ness of Nevertheless his system appeared to invole to a larg e extent compulsory self- nlJ n ~·-,;,t! ,·/\( / , which is very different from not allowing one person to exploit another. He did of course envisage that collabora tion in his common work system would be freely and c1ose~ but since he nev~r appeared to envisage any a l ternative, it is hard to know wh~t this comes to. This problem is of course resolved by a sy s tem allowing flexible The collecti y .ist principle - that the worker /\ . entitled to the A fru i ts of his labour - is retained ih such a system, but without the problems of production for exchange and witho ut the wage-slavery tha t drove the critics of that form of organisation to a communist alternative. The communist difficulty that people's work is to the needs of others in a way which makes a self-managed life /) I Y difficult and would impose conformity, is resolved also. .P-G~I · allows flexible production groups to form based on common go·;/.s and needs, and allows each to be the judge of his own needs to direct �his own work. i ~' !:' k'. \j . People with common go,ik., and interests and needs mayA !i,ute to form such groups bu t (e.g. a hous e hold or a commune). society is not envisaged as one big household, as appears to be in Kropotlc i / 1' ' s s y stern. Kropo6:. 1 11 would have rejected this of course, since he wished to argue that there could be no individual entitlement even to the fruits of one's own labour but only so:_cial ones. In many ways his arguments to the effect that no person do anything on his own, a re reminisc~ nt of the Marxist arguments for total social determination of individuals, a ·~.scussed later. His argument that there can be no such thing as an individual entitlement is not clearly stated in • 'Anarchist Commun\ sn\:' Quote. The passage in effect assumes that work of previous generations has been benificial, an assumption which seems to derive from Kropotl~ i'il. 's fervent belief in modern progress. It ignores the fact that the clearing of the forest has often been, and has long since become in most cases, the excessive clearing of the forest, that the results of the work of our ancestors is not only soil improvements but also soil erosion, that perhaps our predecessors have not left us the best of all possible worlds in respect of natural wealth. At best then the work of the past can be seen as a mixed blessing. This does a good deal to undermine Kropot~1~j argument which assumes that any i n d ividual working on his own project has received help from past human's but if it is a/50 hinderance, exactly what the existence of past human work is supposed to show is notAclear. Kropot~~ wanted to argue that people who created wealth entirely by their own efforts were entit led to what they created, but that in fact this was impossible. No one could create wealth or indeed do anything, entirely on their own, because their is always dependence on other people at some point, therefore all wealth was enti1tBly �sou ;~i and should be shared in common. distingu ish W~S The argumen t fails to of relative independ ence and appears to rest on a high redefin ition of 'on your own' . If someone clears and digs his own vegetab le patch, manures it himself with his own wastes and by green manuring , it see~s hard to suggest that he does not have il 1;/r /, ,/ some special claim on the carrots he has sown and, or that his 1 A g rowing of them for his own use is a selfish action which deprives others of their due. It might be objected that the carrot varietie s he has sown are the product of vegetab le improvem ent by untold generati ons of his predece ssors. But that does not seem to be a good reason for the claim that he has no special claim on the carrots, an:zinore than the fact that the author of a book did not invent from ·, scratch the language in which it is written shows that he is not the real author of his work and does not have any special entitlem ents to make certain kinds of decision s regardin g it, because it is a product. Work can be distingu ished is primaril y that of some person or group, even where they have made some use of the precedin g work of others. Kropotk,~ 's argumen t would show that no one could ever do anything on his own, and depends upon adopting a quite excessiv e standard for producti on being someone 's own - that it should owe nothing wh__~-atever to the efforts of any other human being instead of, what is more reasonab le, that it should be primari ly(In the case of the authorsh ip of a book even th r~ standard is probably excessiv e) . •. No _ one acts in a social vacuum there is always a framewor k or backgrou nd, but that does show everything is a social product. rrhis to ,,di ci;;.. 5 c.1,}';.111 0,. ,J - _ might suggest that Anarchis m adopted the reductio n C i :._ i which underlie s Marxist so~ism . would be mistaken however. Such an impressi on Kropotki n .:;and other leading anarchi sts constan tly emphasis ed the importan ce and autonomy of the individu al and stressed that their aim was the optimum developm ent and maximum �liberty of the individual the maximisation of individual initiative and so on. It is quite clear that they did not subscribe to the Marx ist reduction of individuals to bits of t:r:- l lecti ves or classes, which they saw quite rightly, as ~ irnical to liberty. The Marxist reduction is quite expl icitly rejecte d in Malat'e Jtlc'1 (an important and ,~K;~ ,Jc. ·,p , 'rl tLc h i"tl'Jk '- f.: "l. . 0 1tu .r d~, :>'t c..>1'1··{- ·,_ ,-- ) 1 who also stressed the importance of individuals. ~ n ki nds of tribes ~-, , , 1 Often peo~hder (or gathered) as ina.":i-vj_duals, or t h e ri ght }yu=rt(-- ' ' ---~ ~ in col laborative ~ g r ~ of various sizes or were--~ ~ a_.,t:r::-itie were I .." ><- [ '-,--~.•, 1;1ore · ~r less a~ t he occasi~anded ( H ~-~ 1 I t ~ f groups -or:,,tr ib al hunting procedure w o u l ~ be shared among the g - ~ of t ~ l tribe, but in ~ i v i d u a l c a se usually, a lthough some ~ ~ ' might be given regar~eing l. 6se who had mostly the resulting produce was -·1z__for the use of he veo obtained it as -~ k i.00-_(.s.e.eJT ow i t t far d ~i_J_s._in_ t b r=> A11 s t r a J ian_char.g.e..cLoneA- It seems that the non-reductionist position we have sketched is in fact the unde r lying philosophical base of most of the main stream of anarchist thought from Proudho.rr through to Ma kd-a-1.}1-✓.>_ _ ,, that part I ,,u 1 which was prepared to desc; ,?L itself as 'libertarian s61\ lism 1 • There was also of course, the so called 'individualist' position of and a number of Anarchists which is clearly an individuali s t reduction position, and to that extent quite distinct from the main tradition. 1 Footnote on 'News from Nowhere' �(7. It is perhaps surp r ising that despite such a basic outlook traditiona l anarchist thought remained stuck with an entirely communist propos ed · for the organisation of production in which the personal 'intiati ve' and 'individual' autonomy and originality so stressed by anarchist thinkers would have to be directed ,n the Jji/1(~ ;---f.> of production entirely to commun.-~al or sh ared aims and needs as the Marist positions, so in practice in the area of production in this system despite its different th .eo;-i1:-~t~_::.cr/ base ;}om Marxism _. ,n //J>,r ,, i >1-::i;•d~;1, at any rate individual expression woul be confined to communal life forms. The positi on c onlVl. be said therefore to have worked out a consistent position en the issue of the control of individual life and in lifl king i t _.i theory of production with its overall view of the individual and the cormnuni ty. have resolved . There seem to be several reasons why traditional an a rchist thought problem . This part of problem a DIY system could ~A~~ arrived at a convincing reso lution of this First)anarchisrn never developed its philosophical foundations and philosophical identity property in the way t hat Marxism was able to do, and hence was always subject to corrupt ion by the influe nc e of that position. As Mai:a:kxx fltk11'--r.·Jhc_ puts is (quote) Second, tr aditional anarchism was unable to resolve the problem of individual production in a convin cing way because it brought the capit a list production machine and the fragmentation of labour it invol~d, 1\ ,jA as well as nearly all the associated Enl;?tenment values of Modernity !) 3-1,• c/c; ,h ;._f-) j, ., Science, Progress, Profess ·.1c-rd ,\i,,, the Conquest of Natu.~ re and so on. . , 'v' This is espei $ally clear in Kropotk1n· 's work. Although anarchism advocated regional decentralisation and was f 3 r more critical of the division of labour than the Marxist school( see Kropot~1 ,1 's remat~s on the rnanu f acture of r; "' h0cu,/ S i ) it s till held that the fragmentation i of labour (which Kropoth' u; describes as 'our modern integrated system of prod~ction')was politically neutral and held the key to progress and the good life for all. The sort of critique of this method of �production and of its associated values are encounters today seemed 1 to be entirely absent from anarchist thought. Given such assumptions the possibility of individuals and groups freely determining the production gou ls and needs and achieving them for themselves as in DIY disappears. The capitalist production app /:nrh1 s is not of course as we now realise only to well, neutral with respect to social structur~and the sort of social options it rules out are precisely the ones needed to resolve the anarchist dilemma of the freedom of the individual in the sphere of production. The result of failing to resolve the problem in a convincing way was always a serious source of conflict within anarchist ranks. (.'., It is clear from Malatsta's writing that by the early decade of the '\ century it had reached substantial proportions, and considerable effort was dirtcted towards resolving it. 2 To as certain extent the failure to resolve the problem may have contributed to the decline of anarchism, since the position then lost much of its appeal for peasants and the independent workers who formed a major part of its constituency. 1 Although it is not missing from some contemporary anarchist thought, see Brown 'Smallcreep's Day'. 2 M~latesta thought that individual production from the producer's own needs was theoretically admissible provided the producer had only He thought however that no an equal share of communal resources. one would be able to produce entirely for themselves at a reasonable The obvious option standard,an assumption which seems to be false. o f partially individual and politicaly communal production was for He also believed that it would be impossible some reason overlooked. to get an equal division of land because not all was equally This problem is readily overcome using modern watered and so on. land system assessment techniques in which scores are allote~ for different characteris~-t.ics. �57.2 Nonetheless in outlining features a DIY society there is much that can be taken from anarchist and near. t so urces. 1 a n arc h is For instance, the details of the cooperation of network$ of communities in main,~ tTaining .__. _.. such infrastructure or railway systems, quarantine arrangements, and such like 1 can be taken over largely intact. What cannot be extracted, however, from traditional anarchist sources i s much that is satisfactory concerning the attitudes to the natural world that a DIY society would find appropriate, 2 1 What need not be taken are some of the more controv ersi al features of anar chism , in particular the usual proposals for the (Tion) administration of justice. There is no reason in a DIY framework why a community, or set of communities j _n co:opara t ion, sho uld not evo 1 ve their own ( deprofe s s ional--- i sed) legal forms. What wil l vanish, as in anarchism.are rulers, nations and I' states, and more gene rally, hierar chial power structures. However, a community will have an organisational structure, and its political organisation may include components of what would not inappropriately be called ' government' . 2 The us u a 1 an arch i s t view , e s p e c i a 11 y s t ro n g in Kr op o t k i rt , was one of transformation of nature for human end.s. view was quite exceptional. ~orris ' � 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 . .. . , TOWARDS A SOCIAL THEORY FOR ECOTOPIA Participation in attempts at social change often has the .. effect of revealing to participants the structure of the soci e ty in which they live. It is hard to be a practical environmentalist th1/:: i v.: J _e:ng;a~eEl in or s1.,1pporting a range of environmental batt le s without observing that most environmental problems in our sort of soci a l system are generated basically by the domination of the society by J corporate interests, which have a strong interest in ma i ntaining an industrial and consumption system which appears to produce environmental problems as a matter of necessity. If one is not directly engaged in opposing the plans or activities of sawrnillers , miningcompanies, power and energy compan ie s, transport firms, chemic al and pesticide comp a nies, p a ckaging companies, real-estate developers and tourist-resor t promoters, to name a few, one is engaged in battling thei r political or bureaucratic advocates and protecto rs (nominally 'regulators') in the sh ape of forestry commissi on s, mining departments or authorities, hydro-electricity authorities, energy authori ties, transport corm iss ions, l and commissions, politicians and the l i ke. ' Usually t h e battles by citizen environ- /qsr1~j mental groups h ave littleAsuc c ess, and the chances o f success appear highly cor related with the degree of corporate domination within the political unit concerned. Even where environmental problems appear to a rise from the interests of non-corpor ate groups, for example workers or consumers, it can be conv incingly argued that the y are still primarily a reflection of corporate domination and st r ucturing of both the employment and consumption a n d life-s t yle choices ope n to peopl e , that is, of indirect cor po rate or capitalist influence in shaping the social structtlre values. : Environmental issues throw up sharply again the question as to whether it is possib le to devise a social structure which does not have this feature of direct or indirect cciporate domination, without ..--·--· ----·-·•··-•·--·-·--·-·· · · - - - - - - - - - - - - _... . --···------x- 2. r~placing it by some -1 other equally or e~e? __ more _undesirab_l _e ____~_ind of domina tion-=__s_~E~ as -/ bureaucratic or totalitarian domination-which is such that replacement would be unlikely to produce anything which could be described as a solution or improvement. Our belief is that we can devise a better system which dispenses with this disastrous element, and furthermore that we must do so if environmental problems, as well as a whole set of other problems which are also consequences of the same structure of domination, are to be resolved at any but a superficia½ temporary and inadequate level. wa ys to see the problem. or size. There are of course other We might see it as just one of technology But the technology we have seems to be a consequence of other features of our society, rather than the ca use ·_ al though it is certainly true that there is an inte~a ctive process and certain kinds of technology strengthen certain interests in the society over others~ :~S for smallness, we might remember that the industries of' I IISu} d... I , ::___ currently destroying the Border Ranges rainforesi~(' in relative terms) quite small. Or we might feel that we are in the grip~ of a runaway or out o f control machine - a point of view put forward first by Jacques Ellu./ [ ] • Or as Peter van Dresser very nicely puts it ''We have built a Frankenstein monster of industrial and commercial relationships which is almos t totally running our lives." True ~but the machine was was not built on random lines, and it systematically serves the interests of some groups at the expense of others. So the machine is not 'out of control' in one sense - it is doing the job it was designed for. ff-some environmentalists, espe ci ally of the more cons ervative kind, do believe that the system in which they live is basically sound, but that it consistently delivers mainly destructive results and decisions either because -th.2.- it is run by the wrong people ('Oh! for a statesman'; seeABorder Ranges sheet), or because we do not yet have go od mechanisms for 3. takin g accou nt of envir onme ntal inter ests, which .is seen as a new consi derat ion. Such an appro ach tends to overl ook the limit ation .C'.'f>·''}~i=t on resu lts throu gh. polit ical/ burea ucrat i c actio n or mecha nisms which resul t from the exist ing struc tu re of corpo rate domin ation of the socie ty, and to the exten t that it is succe ssful it would depen d upon reduc ing or balan cing that domi nation anywa y. ·- Some impro ved mecha nisms may enabl e some impro vemen ts in limit ed areas , but they will not be able to chang e a basic ally destr uctiv e lifestyle based on conti nuous and growi ng indu stria l produ ction and consu mptio n, and so unles s more basic chang es in the socia l struc ture are sough t, will proba bly only succe ed as delay ing tacti cs in the inevi t a ble destr uctio n of what remai ns of the natur al world and l , · ·¥;1 / >fr'J I a H lr-.rt r? t 1~ reaso nable socia l enviro nrnen t. · \'\ J rn this neces sarily rathe r A paper we want to try to devel op sorre of the basis for a socia l theor y which might be descr ibed as a form of Liber tar i an or SelfManag e d Socia lism. J~~~ \ ~- It migh t seem odd that anyon e shoul d advoc ate a basic ally +i.1/ liber taria n type of posit ion as neces sary for aAso lution to envir onmenta l probl ems, since envir onme nta lists are mostl y seen to be advoc ates of great er restr i cti ons, mor~_ rules and regul ation s, legis latio n, burea ucrat ic contr ol and plann ing, to restr ict and reduc e the damag e peopl e can do by their consw ning and produ cing activ ities . This restr ictiv e appro ach seems to be dicta ted to a large exten t by the failu re to quest ion the basic soci~l struc ture which makes peopl e ' s produ cing and consu ming so destr uctiv e in the first place . If a frame work o f essen tially damag ing life- style s is accep ted as 'natu ral' and uncha ngeab le, then of cours e envir onmenta l prote ction will seem to be a matte r of limit ing these sorts of a llege d freedo ms by furth er restr ictio n; but if the probl em is "-r se e n rathe r as one of struc: ;\ing socie ty so as to remov e the force s which make peop le's 1 ,... ~-y"\ .._ _ __ _ '"'"\ ... a · pro ucing and consu ming so destr uctiv e, the 3. 1. Pootnot e 1 from page 3. J_ We don't of course wish to suggest that working within the system is a just a waste of time, and we should watch it all But in each go while we sit back and wait for the revoluti on. 1 each hard that fgct of urgent battle it s easy to lose sight necessit y urgent won victory is on l y temporar y, to lose sightJcff will IJ_Ot they to; begin construc ting the sort of society in which imposing of This is not and canno.t be a matter be~ t emp o rary. some sort of Boy Scout 'Conserv ation Ethic' or minor changes in the directio n of energy savtng on a soci~y which produces environm ental degrada tion a~ a matt.er of its fundame ntal :?__!:_ructu_r.:-_ e . 0 2 4. need for a restrictive approach is less obvious. The problem of how to reconcile environmental aims with the aim of a free society and with other goals is essentially one of obtaining an 1 ~ b 1 . J. environmenta ~ o f 1 1. f-e. -. . . society/way enign The restrictive approach then) is a cons equence of accepting C the existing se c. in/ f framework and,,\ attempts to graft environmental considerations onto a basically hostile structure restrictions. as further The situation might be compared to what happens when an attempt is made to enlarge an o ld theory which has encountered data it cannot _handle - the initial reaction is to try to maintain theoretical framework and ac count for the further the material by the 'enlargement' of the theor ~ usually through a series of ad hoe further assumptions or makeshift subsidiary theories which have the effect of restricting the application of the theory. We arrive at a vast and complicated structure , such as the Ptolemai c theory or certain fashionable mod ern logico-semantical theories of natural language, which for a time may appear adequate and succeed in delay,j the realisation that the original theory itself is in need of fundame ntal revision. The existing mass of environmental an d planning legislation and proliferation of bureaucratic procedures J---J- s uchf Environment al Impact Statements plays much the same role in modifying a fundamentally environmentally-hostile social struc tur e and life-style a s the addition o f further epicycles did in Ptolemaic the ory. X The env:ironmentalist who appreciates the need for basic change finds himself however confronted by rather unattr a ctive conventional choices. dom inat ed On the one hand capitalism offers a system wru'ch ,-s by private capital interests which depend crucially h;'resou r ces\and where unequa l economic 5. is seen ~ri d other power On the other side of the as ad essential condition for freedom. conventional choice we are presented with a system which does not appear t o offer an essentially different life style and which ,,~. . (_~ f f( I~ I 1: t/ 1 clearly endorses many of the ~ame values - industrialisation ~~~ogress, J 11 .i 111/, r / /4./,,-;..Jf p1J'. J i:,. ,·i,.{;,,<f,c'. ,, high technology 1,and so forth, as the capit alist o !tu/'lt, f-,c. e:_ . I In addition I the conventional Marxist alternative offers an account of t he role of the individual and society which provides many reasons for libertarian concern. We a re faced in fact with the option of opposing distortions, one offeri ng a distorted and re duced account of community and communal life forms, and the other of the individual and individual life forms. Although the pure, theoretical form of capitalism is supposed to operate on the basis of purely individual activity, decision and production, in existing forms of capitalism thi s has long since been abandoned in favour of a 'mi xed' economy, with community control through elected government and public sector activities ensuring that we collectively control the collective part o f our destinies, and that communi ty is represented as well l"r cJ At least that's/the mythology has it. as individuality. In practice however these communal life forms are v ery largely a sham, and do not amount to !eal recognition of c ommunity. Usually these forms are forced into an individual reductionist model so that the instead of 9, v _i ng,\ community control I~~J merely give a further set of individuals who then make the decisions ~, is the case with the institution of This government by Representative Individuals, for ,instance, which instead of providing community control over the framework, merely selects a further set of individuals who then control 'or manage' the community. · In Victorian times women who inherited property were obliged to have 6. a male executor to manage it for them. Later this was liberalised to allow them a say in selecting him. It is better to be able to choose an executor or managerth a n to have one imposed on you, but no one who has to operate under such a system should deceive themselves that they are really managing or controlling things themselves. l People in our soci~ty are of course largely blind to the fact that real con@unity control has quite a different form, a ~cl regard such individual reductionism in corr@unity decision - making inevitable. as natural and People now accept as normal political phenomena such a s systematical ly broken election promises, government manipulation of sources of information, deception and s1'!.ights of hand such as wa iting until public interest has died down or worn itself out before proceeding with unpopular moves, and so on. What these phenomena seem to indicate is that the amount of real communal control which can be exercised through the system of representativ e individuals is not very large, even if the fact that the political system tends largely to reflect the economic system and economic power rather than to control it 1 is ignored. The 'public sector' which is supposed to express the common will, is not community controlled either in any realistic sense. ' L ' I,{ '~ Thus bureaucra~ managing public resources or allegedly regulating industries normally operate largely in the interests of private corporations , as anyone who has worked on issues like forestry or nuclear power is aware. Crucial information is kept secre t from the cornmuni ty, ma de inaccessible, or handed out selectively> usually to commercial interests. ( we won't go through all the points that could beQ;sed here in detail - they are too well known - we just want to set the points in a certain light ~ Even where they compete with private corporations instead of me rely serving them, 'nationa- lised' public sector organisation s act like further corporations or powerful individuals, and there is very little real community 1 . -1,,.c) 1:,t---2i--t ~,t P.--t1 I , le-,__,~L-, {\ ~ c,.j- - . ~~ s-: ~ - -·· C~~ -~ ~ -c - ~ L-:.. ~..zx/\_, _~) \..A.,,\. • [ ..:....}--{c ~ c •1J,-.-,{',,/_,,t C _A A,i4- (_,~ l-r-:1 (f't-o-~---l)-v'--0 f) - - V'---'2, dl>--Cf- 0 'l[..z_ cZt,__...,...--14_)_1 ( , D .___ t ~ -r ,c.,.__ C~-z_ __ 7• control. Finall~ those individuals or corporations who control the means of production can exe rcise enormous power, both through these alle9ed 'community' institutions, and through their abi l ity to control what will be produced, how much, how and where, and their monopolisation of the abi~ity t? direct productive labour , -.;(K_,t:.\ their control of the pro ductio~, (\ control the in short ~ ,:· ._• c..::., .:'.' \' Those who . means of production are thus able to obtain a very large measure of control over the social framewor~ which comes to be structured largely in their interests. This domination through 4/. I structuring now extends to almost/areas of life, and has been documented independently in many areas, from the food we eat to the way we travel1 from the houses we live in.i to the way we re lax. The control does not of course, take the form of control of individual decisions at the individual level; they do not decide that you or I will purchase a purple~ a green car, for example, but the social i framework in which the places in which peo~le live and many other aspects of their lives are structured around cars is determined in their interests, and so is the kind of car the market provides. The fact that individuals are free at the individual level, and that such mechanisms operate at the level of controlling the largely (.•\ i! ~ i.A""\.'• I n.S invisi ble social framework which coT$,-a-ins and channels the choices /1l 1My the individual can make, explains why people retain the iJ/ 1,<;, ~ ,.1 1 ,\ freedom and of full control over the ir lives in such a system. These distortions are not merely occasional of 1 'abuses' or aberrati ons - they are structural features which occur systematically 1 in all capitalist societies which have free ~ublic life forms. rI'hey are the result of a reduction of communal life forms to various extensions of individual life forms;of the fact that communal life . rv IC ,_.. .l.{1\, 1 forms occur in a reduced and impoverished indi vidualist) ,A.H3fttr. The result ~tha t commun al control of the social framework is ~)j~~ et ineffective. and that some individuals and group s are able to I 8• obtain great power through their capture and control of the social forces of organisation and production. If capitalism offers a distorted,individualised account of community which allows for no genuine co,1,,,1u11ttl control over the social framework of li fe . on the Marxist side we are offered a matc hing and impoverished distorted account of individual which allows for no genuine individual control over individual life! Marxist~ very commonly present line account of ~cc.;cfj (f what is in effe_~t a r,~oduction A:,- - (.,,cl.. - - ~) /(. individuals - l(c role of t he individual is Iv) \ .1 -~f):Or- r,·(;e ~-& their concept constantly and revealingly illustrated by appealing to the individual as a unit in a production .- - 1 line. Accordi.ng to this account the individual IS I l.'v\:. l~ji/,1 1 ~ •. IJ,2 ,,K{1~•,i{uii. / L-_ t;:: 1 no·+h ing, the soc~fty h, _ is entirely a social product/,,\is no more than his role in the pro duction line, he has no separate 'self ' but only the characteri~tics he acq uir es as a re sult of his ...___. membership of a society or class ~ Indiv iduals are in effect to be . l ,\·~ We don't make any cla im to be Marx scholars, we shall be making (' heavy use i n elucidating and criticizing the a ccount, of the S . U. Gene ral Philosophy Department recent publication Paper Tigers Although this book will be a major target in much of what follows we would like to record that it ·seems to us a valuable piece of work, which does a great deal to illuminate the nature of the conventional ideological choice and expose their philosophical base~ . It is also an ad ])t i r ably clear piece of work (in contrast to most Marxist scholarshi~ which casts lig~t into many dark corners, including some which, from the point of view of the attractiveness of the Marxist a lte rnative , might perhaps better h ave been kept a little dimmer. . conten -t J.o n that The acco unt offered makes it clear that the ·(> (_ ~) S:l::-Fl-ee a p osition is 'totalitarian' is by no means a capitalist p lot but h as an important point. I I 3 Any per son can fill role in the production li ne as well as any other (Ste ve ns). Quote from 9. treated as cells in the group body, and the only legitimate formso f individual expression are through community life forms. ·c· ·L ,. · · rtf; ,- TIL), H t.'.•t1tf-• •'.r , (· r, ·1 , ~ • 1'1, 1, ,•,,U,/ ♦ :,4, ) The al t ernative to such a position - I~dividualism A - is . seen by Marxist s as the position underlying capitalism, which holds that indivi duals contain no social influences which are not ultimately re duced to individual forms o f influence. Individualism - which is taken as the alternative to the view pres e nted above - is seen as the source of c a pitalism and inevi tably lea d s to a ll the excesses and distorts of that ,\ system. Individ ualism must be stamped out r oo t and branch if '- L /;I ,~...-f. it• al·te,nutive to ca1;,alism is to be built 1fthe failures and admittedly authoritarian cha~acter of existing Marxist systems ii-tti.._,1·lif-·} are, according to this line of~traced to the failure to do a thorough e r1 o tl3 A job of stamping it out in spheres other than that of economic life. ! Indeed Individualism in this variety of Marxist theory seems to play much the same role as sex did in Christian theory - it is the source of all evil, and the f'I\ [' \- f ' mojification of the individual ego and its submission to the ~' group replaces the mortification of the flesh and its subjection to the spirit. f\ v' J (\ To condemn all individ_ualism because some distorti'ons of i t produce bad results is like condemning sex on a ccount of the objectionable nature of, sa~ prostitution. J./( ;d /, Ii I ), . -~ <; ~-.. :~ ., . ,, :.:. 1'11\ .~ ~ , I~\ t :, h Howeve r , on€=.ffiay.:-==inc-l-ineL::::to-·:··be' j t wo u 1 d be 10 ( I,.. , ' < /1 n a ive to s ee no connecti on between such a doctrine, and the actual p r act i ce of Marxist societies (as /lli(n/ r. Blackburn). Marxists do J (- ,J - Such a position must if followed out consist1 ently, be suspicious o f e v ery sort of individual independence and activity which cannot be subsum_.ed in some sort of collective interest, even something as simple and ap p arently non-capitalist as producing your own food becomes suspect (see for example the Kronstadt man i festo). It appears to provide a justification tc,,l 10. for any amount of suppression of individual views and dis s ent And where these are seen as being opposed to class interest. "~Yth1 '> (V if 1 ~ social products)-t:.My_.. appeaL to provid e if individuals are /' a justification for manipulation of individuals for collective e nds, as bad or worse th<3n the indirect manipulation for pri vate interests of capitalism. ,,Such a do c trine seem s indee-d to make life very easy for the capital is t, who does not have to exert himself greatly I its ,~1,uthortarian potential f or the individual. to demonstrate?, as a free individual, freedom For if there is no such th1ny -J and if there is no such thing cannot be taken f!:;,9JTI someone ; as individual choice, individual choices cannot be qbr c7d te d or is that individuals just trodden upon. don't matter, except of course insofar,_,, as the production line There are few people who can fail to is short of hands. be repelled by such a position once it is stated in its stark simplicity - which of course it usually is not. From an individual point of view such a situation would have many of the drawbacks of capitalism, and in some ways might even be worse - goals, modes of re ~hi ng them and suchlike would all be externally imposed on individuals. i r-£ ttr±-s==±s_ i 11 de. e-d·--ctre--nas±c-t-1a r x is L sociai- theury----:;:.md - - I ~--_,,,,.., ------- I ------ -- ever the v a r i a t i o n s ~-hl-e._ under the label------.-Marxisrn' / I ~ - - ---- / tf .f erqn --:::-......... ___1 ------h . . an - entiu::=~,tl:_to se e now- J:.bey can alL--na:ve s hard ----::-:---...._, ~t_ V • ,::i • --------1 ~--- ------- ---------- t h ore t i ~GU.Qd at i o Tl------~ ~ s ± e n _ Q J an En 1 i g h ten ea / !1 LX.i.Sln~ ~ e ~ _ Q l l t to k :, It is difficult to see how ~~ t ofAmora l to concern I ---------- ------~ 11S. ,.,,~ ( \."\. by the _Nf'W ,·...... \_, ~\.... .... ~J -..-.~~ with any ..:.- can be compatible . ~~ -'-/' concern for individuals and their fa te, as opposed for daiJ C ~ . or societies. It is difficult in fact to see how the.re_ can be room for any but the most 11. attenuated moral considerations at all i n such a view, since even the comparison of societies in te~~s of the sort of suffering they inflict on individuals i5 . th~ illegitimate. It does however seem to be individuals who su.t fer ,...__whQ__.a re ,)~ :; ~,_ ,--t :... , ,.. \ t ".I f b ..:. ' "'f . ·- . -~ exploited or ~ominated, so unless an attempt .. ( is made to give an al terna ti ve a(:count of these in t e rn1·s of I \ the Class Mind ; it is difficult to see how such a position tould even justify the choice of one soci·cil S~S}t?-,n. over the other on v ' moral grounds. If this is indeed the basic Marxist social theory - and whatever the variations available under the label 'Marxism• it is hard to see how they can all have an entirely different theoretical foundation - then the vision of an Enlightened 0 .._,..__ . ~t: L: • r ."" -, ( ·' ,! Marxi sm which has been held out to us by the New Left is a t-- mirage. The consequences of this system can be seen then as the 1 • ,iJ I Ov\ el , m:nt.~ of A u.r;C.'tf..lf-< j V f power - or individuals (as in capitalism) in favour of their having no power at all as individuals, but only through their membership of some collective, class or community. For anyone who does not accept the ,d reduction of legitimate indi1ual life forms to group life forms, such a system of power must be seen as oppressive. From the I point of view of the individual$ power to control his own life, Q S opposed to participating in controlling group life, to opt such a position app ea~ to be oph~ , for the exchange of one set J of masters for another, of one form of domination for another, ~ and possibly ~~worse formo C l J ./ following una ttrativ.e t er ,rs: ~ So then our choice appears in the _./ if capitalism allows some individuals ,\ to dominate over others and control collective life through the social framework, 1.1kr-, 11•, • • the Marxist alternative allows collective-. hc,,, C\ 12. control o f collective life, bu t also collective control of indi v id u a l life, allowing no ~ep,:-1, rate legitimate individu al {,c.....;_ life forms. If Marxist s are right in point in g t o the disas t rous I' i H'--' results o f covert domin ation of ,.,social f ramework by private capi talist interest the capita l ist is su rely also right in pointing to the oppressive character t o th e individual o f their 0 lternat ive. * Of course both sides would dt~Y that the problem can be set up this way , the capitalists bec auIB social framework to dominate the/ de11_1/ that there is a (because o f the i r reductionist - the Marxists, because th ey would deny 1, th at there is any legitimate f o rm of individua l control to lose in collective domination. a 3rd point of view. ,r - ~ ',(. f l( ,;,, ·K · It is di ffic ult t o accept that we are face d with such .J f J f:i, The problem i s seen esse ntially from -' -- - -· - --- - - (111 f 11/" ,j'(' unpalatab le choices . }(' / .; ii1C..- And indeed lo ~] ic and,, coit,tJ strate that we are not. to demon- There have been, and in a fe w places where l1es te rn cul tur--al destruction is not yet compl ete, the re rc, ,.:.,,1 1 soc iet ies which a r e not capitalistic , wh ich are anti1~.n capitalistis but where a vigorous individual\ is va lued o r not I dis cour ~ged and for ms o f independent individual economic activity n1 ;, y ,: ,· \ /1 ~j°> \ ,, \'( .{ .'~f. \j ( "· . T-~,i,.! ·-; , f ·, :~: '{!. ~-"1 '1 / ., I J, ,: f ::· and lead t o 1 cap ifo1, iSr.> · , in the way the Mar xi st critiaue it must, and which coexists wit h true co:u1munal ins is t s life-forms. 1 ~;0c:~ 1~•- :~ s~:h ~~~·~~ti~; •;~~p(:\~ ; ;e'd as individuals, co ll- ~-1abora ted \ ·; ··: 'I In such societ ies th ere is a form '\ of in di vidualism whi ch does not inevitably undermine the socie tie s . I proc eed and even dominate . ' ._._) in groups, or as whole communities, more or less as the . o~-;~·~ion demand~d~:,yw hile s ome of the , product .,' } ;>,d, :.'j ,~ ~ \ might be given to those who had no thing, it was not u s u a lly -J 13. regarded as a purely communal product unless commu~=ally use produce~b~ t was primarly for the of he who had t f J obtained it or his kin. (See HOWftt in t~e~ Aboriginal case; The t=orest Peo2-J.-~ ; for the rules _Wai-Wai ) , I,. some g ar dening societies too, such as that of Melanesia, individual eco n omic activity of a certain kind migh t even be th e dominan : t mode of production, yet the society is not capi t alist, and is even strongly opposed to the attitudes of ~apitalism.* The existence of such societies seems to show * See the failure of individually owned Waiko, 11 trade stfs [encouraged by the Australian adm i nistration] was ... mainly because such individualism , _t_u_,._t_i..__ _ _ _---=-p_r_o_f_i_t_a_c ___c_r_u_1_·n--"'-g_t_o__o_n_e person, was disapproved of by the villagers" , p.418. that it is possible to obtain both communal control of c o 111munal life and individual control of individual life, that the one does not necessarily drive out the other. It seems clear fhm the anthropol o gical facts that the Marxis t critique that individualism produc~ s capi t alism has failed to make some important d1'stinctions between kinds of individualism. It may of course claim to allow ade quately for individuals and distinguish a kind of 'individualism' which is legitimate in the Marxist view. On further inquiry it turns out to be the case that what is labell e d individual activity in :.:i 'q cl1 c .A s-2.s is the kind of secondary and derived life forms the individual may engage in as part of the group collectivity or class, as in the Marxist / distinction between what is called 'Individualism'and'Possessive Individ~1ism' (see MacPherson} But since this continues to 14. ,. ' M S 15 only legitimate forms of individual life are .t that the· those which can be reduced to collective life forms and that no dist1 n -:.. C:-, independent economic individual life forms I for example, are legitirnate 1 it is a dist,n.ction in net me on:i:y perpetuates the false J~hdnm~ .J .Jt iin fact : merely , now as the choice between Possessive Individualism (as in capitalism) and 'Legitimate The latter is however only another and misleading Individualism' .. name for the participa tton of the individual production units 111 the production line. Since it continues to admit no legitimate individual independent activity , espe cially economic activity, distinct from or not reducible to that of the group, it - cannot e xplain our anthropological facts that these so c 1c ties do al low some i,·1d7K',k·l~ ,d in divi dual life forms, am/ - JS v ---- including economic ones _merely as in attempt to dispel the .A uneasy feeling the . ,...------··· -- a- (t hrough confusing --. .. ,\ . - production line theory arouses in most of us , te i-minological . ' ,r -r,, , Marxises in fact shuffle. / dd.Sthe same trick with this sort of recognition of legitimate individualism as Social Democracy does with the reco0nition of the social - it offers a terminological label which pretends µ to recognise a distinct life form but iryfact reduces it to an .impoverished and limited subvoJ--i<=:1-J of the dominant life form. 77The Marxist cr.i tique appears to have confused · the recognition of distinct individual life forms - distinct that is from those of the collectivity - with the attempt to reduce all legitimate life forms to in dividual life forms or constructions from them. It has confused Individual i sm, in the sense of the recognition of individuals, with Individual Reductionism, which is the recognition of nothing els~ but individuals. It is not the former but the latter which underlies capitalism and its variations. On the economic level the Marxist critique has failed to recognize that not all forms of individual economic 15. 1(r activity lead , capitalism, and at the soci al that not all forms of individual power le~d to power over rrh e triba l s oc iet ies ~...; ~ ~ others. considered were examples of societies which had individu alism - distinct individual life forms and economic activity - without individual reduction- i j m ~ ') ,, 1((.1{ , 1l'J Individ u al reductionism produces distortions and gre~t inequality of power because the social forces and means of decision-making, of organi~ ation and of production, are turned into concentrated power for the selected individuals who . ff represenithose forces in the indi vidualisa/ forms. In the tribal societies we considered this did not happen - decision r . P making was not usually the preogative of an individual h~d ' A or chief, organisation and production were not directed and controlled by bureaucrats and powerful individual capitalis ~ or groups such as corporations. In societies which took a similar form, individuals would have secure ind i vidual use right s for certain limited purposes to the means of produc ti on , for example the land, which would give them the right to produce for their own needs but not the rights they have in a property system~ For example, they would not have the right to dispose of it as they saw fit, or the corresponding right to accumulate larger shares of the means of production than others, or the right which in practice arises from this last, to employ another person's labour. The mean'.,;" communJal ly, 11 of production wou/.-{ como, o m be seen as basically held t.c: al 1 for the use of each". Individuals would have, as individ uals, secure access rights to the communal means of production to produce for their own needs. Var ious forms of mixed individual, group and community production could develop, based on mutual interes~as people see fit, but the important point is that access rights to produce oould accrue to individuals as su ch. Provided th7 ao not encroach on 16. others, 1ndi vidudfs could set their own goals, decide (A,·hu.. t _,.\ they, as individuals need and like to work on, and pursue these goals in their own way at their own time. each could· In such a situation, pu~sue his own way, instead of all marching in <~ I tl' j. ,, step - the situ,it,;,1 in whic "'h all must pursue a .. -& . i ~ and collectively determined set of goals, at a collectively determined time, place and in a collectively determined wa~ would I be avoidedQ C!S""' Such a system would Ado tribal land tenure 3ys tems, involve two levels of decision-ma~ ~ing and of life forms. On the one hand decisions at the social framework level would be determined through communal decision-mak ing processes/ wh r( h would normally, ~nvol ve communal participati.,1:y 't---(__y •-<.. i :r ~ , ,t -1 ., ' \ ( forms ,...._ rather than i-04-i -v~:r-. methods. The sorts of decisions which would come up here concerning the use and creation of 1hL t{0_ means of production would be those that affected,\ community ( e.g. in the Melanesian case the; included the t/«2. issue of whether Acommunal for es t land cou}cl be wood chippe~ w~ -~l, could not be decided by individuals and holders), ( u't :I 1 ( / If .. 1u. "'-J; 1 f\ I' • , I :) / .. . , ' ) / f in our case, what sort of public transport systemsAto have, all sorts of social framework and infrastructur e questions, question~ abou t the sort of c c mmunally-ope rated production enterpri ___ses tc have/ and so on~ This sort of society could admit a form of vigorous individualism , capitalism. b ut it would not be and could not lead to The sort of individualism admitted here would be one which could coexist with a great deal of rich communal life, and which did not eliminate or reduce communal life forms. rrhe indi vid·;_,iJd s in such a society would have the rnJps to control their own lives, both as distinct individuals diff[-:.J-0.,,-ff.J _, as members of a cornmuni ty. and also, but 1 have would be the means to cont;.~\ ,~.~e ..li '-'.t s_ ~~-·othe; s !' C (r r": ,tu,-,. • (,~·{, ,_-,, 11; ,· i ifr ,.: .I- ,< /1 ,, (' ·, ( jJ~' ,.,_ F J ! '' //, ,., , < ~ (. ,• //, 7 r ..-_ ; , 7 2-f ' . .· ' "/',. 1 ., , /·;,, ""?(. , .1.·1~ . "· ·. . rr~~. What they woul~ !1ot . 4 , , 1 . ' lc . { ..rf,t '. < 17. The sort of po sition embodie d in these so r ts of societies is in many ways a very natural one. two levels - It allows for control at the social framework level is controlled communally, and the level o f p rod uction for i nd i vidual nee~s is controlled by individuals~ It i s the n a mixed picture. (but a very different one t o that whi ch appears in th e capitalistl' mixed econo my '). 4,1.,{ In such a picture, people ar e both individua~A· members of communiti es. For a f ree society in which peopl e control th c.. L1 own lives both sor t s of control are needed. (.( ,v· So, if y ou ask someone in China what occupation he would l i k e . to f ollow , he replies, according to report, that h e 0 has no des ire s of his own in this respect, he would l ike t o be whatever t h e community wa n t s or n eeds him to be . ,1 ., ( A very p ro pe r answer according to the th eo ry set out in ' P a per Tiger s '). If you ask someone here what he woul d like to be, you would very likely get th e reply that he woul d like to be what or ever he can find a job in,,\ if h e is inr t t) a mbitious, whate v er pays best or offers the best long-term monitary prospects ; i.e. whatever capitali sm needs him to be. (A good an swer also syst em) . acconli-1'1 '. 1 t o t h e In neither c ase does the answer indicate a person who is I (I in control of his own li fe, who do es what he wants to do, or J\- ·- · tk~ what he finds s_ati_~_fying . _ At the ,; be st A distortion:; L ---~ap.i tali sm a nd Marxism offer us, in each cas e on e kind of con fr ol wi thout t h e other, or the other l evel o nly I -J,;, I i mpo verished and \ qt"t-c•,li1. i:1/-r..rl. f orm. Bu t , \ ( \ \ \ ( , , I~ ,I C( i •Ii I ; I ii, an since the l e vels . j ' t ,/ ,._- tf ) I of con trol have a large level of interdependence1 . each 11,, 1 lev el of control become s in fi,:,~it irnpover irlr- d t :--· ,·· -._...,/ .. \S . h ·"l, -r c . v~' . wi 7'~ut its compl~=:.m ent....-;_,.. 'rhu s for example, mo st individual s 1 cannot live a fully free or satisfying individual life in a society structured at the frame work or inf~s t rat~r ·e 18. ·fo leve\ provide mainly dr~~~7 , repetitive work, or no work at all, and so on. Both sorts of control are necessary, and to achieve this a society must first control the social framework, including the means of production, communally, and second ; give each individual secure acce~to the means of production for his own use to enable the individual to control his own life at the individual level. Su6h a society would be 'self- managed' at both crucial levels. * (from page 17) Of course./,. - t hat is what these positions offer at their best,., f thi:-; ·---is an idealisa~i~ In practice most capitalist countries -• •--•--•·-•---•-•---•••---•--•--•-••-- --•--•---•••n------••-- do not offer even individual control (that is they do not have the individual freedoms appropriate to liberal capita l ism), and most communist countries do not practice genuine commun ity control or self-management on the social framework level (that is collective life Ain fact controlled by individuals in the ·:; ha pe of bureaucrats or politic al codu11 ,lie~-' .c An alternative of this basic ,., f c,· .-·;;'/t .... .J, -t" . I; 1 J fr1_ 1~ <- J_ ) • sort_,\ has been_ J by a few thinkers, mo~s::tiA recently in a modified form by Ernest '" ,, c , ~ , C~11lenbach~ in ~arly ,.- b<:t{::).k Ecotopia ,,.r/, '<i. r , and a c~l:so,\ by Bertrand Russer! in h-i-~ Roads to Freedom . have been the intention It may behind a few others,e.g. William Morris in _News from Nowhere (although there are serious discrepancies here, which we will ,, ~ ( "()•;\)_ ,,; mention later), and in ~the work of Proudh. on, and there are ~ some points i n common with some forms of anachism - again with A S ignificant d i 'i.<ilp{,{11(,C J we shall discuss later. Neverthelsss it seems to have l)e·en largely overlook· ·:ea, and we are normally . - A ~ con fr onted with a ba sic false d; dwt or"'y -capitalism in some 1 orm 19. versus some ve r·sion of ~a~x ,s t · socialism. This ba1!c fa lse dichotomy is backed up by a systematic series of false dicho t omies in the subsia'ary notions of each theory, 1\ which reinforc e and perpetua·. ~te the basic false dichotomy. ) There are at least r,1/--:;~,,, I(; /c.--u.._r · /\ sets of reasons why we a re conventionally presented with this <; .yst("t,.~ 1-i11c. false dichotomy. a third position is sytem~ at ically discounted~suppressed} by both sides of the conventional confrontation because it is very much in their inte r ests that it should be. The r~ esent co~batants i do very well out of a game where each can point to the opposition as the only option and can play off the drawbacks of the opposing system to counter dissatisfac t [on with it s o ~n - system - an ideological or theoretical version of the balance of power, to to speak ,, /n which tlJ t!- $/:d<1r quo is maintained by the tension between these two ideological cor,1 6 atants. The intrusion of a third position, especially one which seems to have many of the advantages of both sides and the drawbacks of neither, could spoil this strategy completely. As someone else, ;f we remember rightly, hasr~rnar ' ked, capitalism and Marxism are li ke two sides of an a:c h - they prop one another A up by the match1•'.J weight of the - dis cu-lvantages of each side. ~ Both sides, insof ar '-../ as they ad,1,:-l such an option {:!.- exists at all 1 strive to present it as either a subv;1r\ty of their own one. so<:_ 1Q( theory or as a subvc1.riety of the opposigng Thus Chom. sky in his introduction to Dan1 .el GL-Lq:-,;-.n' s _bnarchism in effect assumes a false choice between the means of production being cont rolled by individuals, and there being no individual control of the means of pr?duction and no distinc ~ individual economic activity. Thus that any position which is genuinely iu... Wti\• t.'~ -~e able to conclude a~t~ -capitalist must ultimately be in agreement with the go\~ of the Marxist vari e ty of socialism, and is differing only about details like the position of the state. But the non - reductionist sort of position will not fit into such a simple and loaded classification which writes in the false dict:'Ptomy -· since it allows the mean.:~ of production to be, Q_Oth communally and individually (~-=-/"\ 1::-li\ i :~- - -1 ,....' , ' ' f r ~ - -" {J.r..i"ll~.J..:A cont ro 11 e dA It is L 11 e c t i ve l~ i_~ --d±ti~re~~~~~y_~~; ;: co controlled at the social framework level but is individually controlled at the level of the individual's production for his ow n needs. rrhe other option open to Cht,,1\. sky and co. is to characteriz e suc h an alternative as mend y a form (perhaps ,, ~ ~ {~~r as a p.: .: e t it-b<Y.1tgu, 01s ,fo rm, a charge remi 11.scc 1.(-.;1 that levelled I • ' • ' 1 1 o,,,[ against 1· 1.J.·( ,~ ~/ ../ . _., . -- ., .,, his followers ) ,I Proud!-,c n by Marx ' r;(tf...!:.::!,tf ( -,/,.,1 :·,!1,,r-J\ I capi talism/A in terms 'of th~ ~eary._s of production not being ,n r-t "h- c:, ., t collectively owned and allowing some individual economi c / ·, activity. But since this will lnake the tribal societies which do not fit into this loaded classification capitalist also, it il). hardly seems a convincing move. __ In the same vein B I.-~ ckburn •, 1· · , / ' ( •; 1? r ;,'?' .- <, ri-r 1:., _ rt/,)(( I<< ' values in the Social Sciences/ presehtr thEf only 11 1. 1 alternative t o capital.ism as Marxism, while 'Paper Tigers' ( __;tp,_;c,,1.r ) asser~' s that there is no th1 i-· d position - social p l1~ nomena are to be accounted for i n terms of one or other o f the two main social theories. Simi lar strategies are of cours ~. ,_ .' L_._ -· '-.__ adopted on the capitalist side, wh-e- vr-i--1-l--e rnploy-- the criterion is., of individual pro perty ownership ' a 1 t-e rna t-iveS.A· j ' ) (' v,1 ., ~\ v,. ('., \' \1 ·}.'. I ~'"' '-- : ·- . _ -1l"-' f:. ,➔ ~ t 11 h \ 1 ~efin~ 'so ci""alis~t / , ' • \__ .t. (._. \i1 I \) --- .... __..,,- /' _ ' ,,. ~ I . I/ - 1 '> _t ; i'. \ There are however more substan tial philosphica l r e ason s f or the false dictptomy, which lie in the basic reduction p os i t ions underlying capitalism and Marxism, 1,,-•, / •;; , ,/ 1c'?. • {_ .c ·( . t. /j Io 7;'t,J •/ i(,,: , I '/ I/ t:t,, d ~iR/o:,a,.J 21. The basic reduction underlyi ng the ideology of capitalism is the reduction of communal life forms to certain sorts of individual life forms, or mere rough~ J.y, of communities to individuals, while that underly ing Marx,sr:11 is a reduction of individual life forms to certain sorts of communal life forms, that is , of individuals to elements of certain sorts wholes . * * Burnheim in rpaper Tigers' points out that the usual contras ~f between individualism and reduction of ' i-l~_>f15'~--. \ in the sense of a !) ' • 1) dr 1.A,.-t.-ctt/.J' to parts of societies which are then 1,·1 -t- . c,t1 .__: ho·~c1•-·; ., treated is fu \ her individuals, is a f u/:;e_ <!l~a.ti:Gn"'. He points out t h h t Marxists want to reduce individuals to elem t n J s of only certain sor~-~ of wholes (v iz. classes, which are not then treated as f uf- /!1-.er indi vid~ls) . ever goe s on to set up a further, He then how- ore basic false dichotomy r'H between this position and a capitalist reduction to individuals. 1· ---- How are such reduktions justifjea? ,,"' appeal t The argume t involves / the subsidizations tvupport the reductions. systematic .:. lse dictatomie9---~i~h.__ justify / '-, ,./ as follows: ' " (1) capita~ // ( 2) /4 t ineifidualism -~~sus ind'i~idual c l,_; , ( / alter c· ~·/, .> f r~~nershipf /1 // / .j_,._, of ,,tc.,· '·- / / '-.C-~ <_ __.../ ~ ..... ; / / o ollectivism. proquction versus "',,, ~ ~ ·~- 22. According to the third theory, both these sets of reduction alternatives should be rejected. ! A non-reductionist position, accordin g to which there are legitimate in~i vidual life forms which are not reducible to soc ~ / life forms, and legitimate soc~ I life forms which are not reducible to individual life forms, can give a more adequate account of t he data than either of the reductions and s ynthesi ze much of the material eac.lt uses to support his case t.<-•!1 ; le ,',· I•~,·\// avoiding -~ difficulties the reductions engender. of the Individualism, in the sense of recognition of legitimate non-reducible individu~/ forms, is one th ir1J - the lif~ individual reduction position that all life f orms ultimately can be reduced to these, is a very different thing. How are th e. reductions justified·? The argument involves appeal to the subsidiary notions to support the reductions. The systematic false d;~otomies which justify them in argument are as follows: (1) capitalist ( 2) ;ndividualism - versus coll e ctivism. individual c' l<)1<..,2,t s--ly) of means of production versus '· ., • ) : ' Cl a-l--t erna ti ve ownership. versus ( 3) (a) indivi (L..c als as not SO'Cil~/ly determined at all (b) the individual is completely soc io. l ly determined. (4) {a) 'obse rvational data' as theory-free versus (.} 5,. ( b) 1 o bservational data' the or- y - depend ~_nt. t, (5) (a) individuals as completely free , versus (b) indiv iduals as complo tely determined (atl choices ,ndividuals make are in fact d etermined) . ( 6) (a) The free soc iety as one .in which individuals can control individual life, versus (b) the free society a s one in which people collectively determine collective life. All these false dkl1 0 tomies are reje.c ted by the nonreductionist postiion .. 2 3. (1) and (2) we have already partly dealt with. To j,.,i-1_1.I / ,. ;~ / sum up, the false dichotomy over fo L/3 the alternative of a mixed form of control of the m eaus of production which does not fit into the simple classification, which enables the form of :c ~ m,v-~Aily the infrastructure to be cG-Jd..ect~ controlled -<-0.!id H~ use of it to be individually-controlled, as advocated by the non-reductionist position. The presentation of the individual as not soc✓(~ ,,/;;_' ci I/ l determined P'~ at 11 appears quite freql.lntly in capitalist 7 ( 3) (a) , I' \' \ arguments, espec rct. lly in the economi"l c sphere. Most capitalist '-.. / e conomic a rguments depend upon taking ind i vidual choices as 'raw', as not in any way in £ lue n ced by o r dependent upon a social framework. They appear to presuppose an absolute indiv i dual who would make the same choic es in any society. Th~s for example env ironmentallsts who suggest that things like a~r tT condi tio~s are u 1-w1 ,:c_,.,:__~sct"1/ and wasteful of energy are ,n<? t with the response from status-qua supporting economists just choose to r~-..i:> 11~ H: \f 4 , 1 {, raw, and The choice is represented_ have air -cond itioners. a that peopl e rreducible - to interfere with it would be ...~~ .A. "' authorita~ because it is presented as a choice at the level of individua l li f e-control, instead of as a social framewor k dependent choice, A good e xamp le is McCracken [ ] . This is part of the strate gy of reduction to individuals through trying does not exist, or if it does, i s a lso chosen by the individual on the level of personal 'raw' choice - ('a legally elected government determined it'.). Environmentalists are always encountering the related, arg ument that a certain predicted level o f consumption, say for forest products, energy demand, 24. space, must be met , no matter how disastrous its environmental consequences'. 'Demand' is treated as expressing the individual~ raw needs or choices, which are ,coN.:.e.11J.ed as lacking a social context, and therefore, it is argued, as being essential to meet a ~d authoritarian not to meet. To deny such demands would be to abrogate individual freedom. rrhis is the basic argument for Cons1u1,:r ism, and it is widely employed by those who wish to promote industrial growth t o meet alleged cop (_.il.i,, 1 t: r-- ~ eeds ' reg a rdless of the consequences. Courses of action which fail to accommo date cons!-< 11-iu; i nl t hus ruled out, and are consumerism and its consequences repre s ented as necessary and inevitable. Of course many people,especially environmentalists, realise there is something wrong with this argument. do not just up a,vJ ' demand' expres~~~ays, People junk paper f or packaging, or energy capacity to power hea~ed swimming pools or electric toothbrushes. All these 'needs' are the product [ 1,.r7 -'·- of a certain sort of;\ social co ntext, which the Con sume .ri sin igno r es, or presents as inevitable, wh e n it is /lrgument not, or chosen by people ge1rally/when >r is not. The Consomerist Argument, then, is a pa.rt of the capitalist reduction choices to individual choices, which is pJrt of -the~ reduction of : so c ~I life forms to individual life forms. [Accompanying th=js r e duction is a picture of th e individ tt~ l s ~ s c ontaining no s 6 cial elements which are not i n some way f}-1· 1--<. l.·-~\. C --- ~ t,; :_+ ,. : -~: _,, ; c ..{ · ,) , ,.)_ --·· l ~reducible to p- roperties of individuals &'\, l] \ . (b) On the oth er side of the conventi on al battle we are presented with an equally distorted and reductionist picture o f the individual os completely so c. ; -= ally determined. I :f the capitalist picture presents social choices as just certain kinds of individual choices, the Marxist picture tells us that there are no individual choices which · at-e.. ,H·[ reducible, 2 5. orl exarnina,tion, to socja/ choices. Marxists ,uj}if- (r l- reject the 'J capitalist a ccount of the individual and society and ~s ~st on the importan ce of the social fram ewo rk, but in th e process eliminate# the i ndividu al . In 'Paper Tiger ~' two main arguments are presented for this positi o n . · (i) The Invariance Argument: This argument appears in several pap ers in the 'Paper Tigers' coll ection and seems to be central. Essentially it argues that the individual does not him- self d ete rmine his own choice unless the determination would b e invariant in any social framework. , Thu s Steve ns, SuchtiJ Chal;,1, ers, and Burnheim. and In Burnheim's paper the argument appears in the f orm of the demand for cor e an of self, which would be unchanged under any variation of social U11 k'.;:; co ntext or framework,~ t his can be provided 1 there is tJ;1( re,\/ s. 1,> as J 'the sear ch for the real self proves illusory' , 1 ) ,7 nd the pictu re of individuals as completely s-r, ,,,,;/l mi ned is e stab l ish~<l. deter- Of course if the de P1 J nd for our core Abefore i ndependent no n-reduc i ble individual self-hood were admitted). was correct, i t wou ld be very ea s y to demonst r ate the Ma rxist reducti on . Bu t the demand is far too stron g, and the argument is thoroughly fallacious; for it a~sumes that the relevant proper ties of individua l s mus t be purely individually determined befo re the re can be a non- reduqible indiv i dual. All that is required howe ve r is that the re should . be an i ndividual eleme:nt in their d etermination, a nd. thL:; would not lead to the expectation of an invct~t--~,,..it: class of I sel f i properties which were unchanged in ~QY soc i al context. The f allacy in th e argument is perhaps best illustrate d /1 ,'.' by an analogy. ;,£' J We know t hat the genetic inheritance of indivi duals ;\ can determine within a broad range wh a t they can become or cannot become, e.g. if they are genetically male they cannot become mothers, ,r:1""/;, (, ,,r:, ,,,,., (( •. / i· (:· ,.('' -.·; .--:. ,,-· ...,.. .f" . .,,,/'.,, 26. if they are genetica lly members of the c o rr o t fam i ly they and so on. will grow in a different way from 1egu"mes, .....__,, Any g i ven property an individual has will pro bably be the result of both genetic ~nd environmenta l factors, and will vary as So we cannot argue that individuals either factor is changed. are completely environmenta lly determined unless there i s a class of 'core' properties which are invariant under genetic Of course there are no such properties. change! But that is what the invariance argument demands - that before we can claim an independ~t individuality , 'a 'real self' other than the soc i4 tly determined self, there must be a class of purely self-determin ed properties which would be the same regardless of different social environments . There are, of course, no such prope !··ties, so, th e argument con c_.l udes fallw:;u~rd,1, there are no real individuals. is a mi x ture of soc ;cd/11 But if an individual's cha racter determined and individu a lly determined . .J f eatures, and if any one pro perty showed in fact the influen c e of both i n t~ ~es, then we could no t expect such invaricince. But t he case of social versus individual determination does in fact seem to b e in the crucial respect a good analogy to the genetic/envir onmental case - the social context, like the th genetic inheritance, deterines, in a broad way what the A individual Lan -Or cannot become, what he ca n CL.. do or choose , * * <! 1 The analogy also throws an interesTin on the individual' s i light on the Lysen Ko that genetic inheritance -:_,,·..!_,/ ·IJ,._ the theo:rJ 6,-,;1 L,d ft f ,!(_·k , J l.//,t/4,, k,dk,y;I C/ A ~ rh . flfi?i1~11_'-!f. 11.,',/'t"fllr;e.~ {·.,/{J _ the u(gts of the social reduction, as required in Marxi~t theories. I/~ ,.: ,/.l;"r,.i /.-.... lr l r,/' l ·:-n , :,,-,,-,. 2 '"'<· ...... /,•. ( ;rt',: ~' .O>' ,.'--,fZf ,'J(~, L;"'I ,:'" (~ . ..,. fc.: J ,,.;1 ,· /. ..,· 11/J " ''j,., lc.-,J c./ Pr~suP1l,4 7 affair. . . 1 constraint It acts a j A ...,. - -·· 1 ,(..' ( ! [ 0 . -•..., • ' , / u,.. vrt;.( /(C /J I '\\ ',"'·,..__ ____ __ p:t.h ~ • , I I/..-, ~ r\..i.- , I) _, /:: (·,/ - · ~t'"" (, / , II/1/Jt of development, and its influence will therefo r e be seen ( 27. in all the properties he displays, without1 of course, being the l/is actual complete determinant of those properties. development involves as well his own indi viduallj de termine d -f~L1/u:--r1 .,· in the same way that the actual development of aH individual with a certain genetic inher i tance also involves environmental fa ctors . This is the sort of picture of the individual in relation to h is social context which u..r1de-rl ;e. s the non- re:1uctionist position , and it is in most respect s a fai-r!J natural one. In contrast the two reductionist positions present, in term s of the analogy, a false d ic hotomy picture 1./ of t he individua l as comple tel yg·enet ic ally determined i-:!'11- -- ' ~-, ·t~ .--• - l ~ the one han d . (Marxism\ and as comp.J:_etely ,1'fl- environmental ly determined on the other (cap ita lism). (ii) The second set of arguments for the complete social de te rminat ion of the individual f is L papero presented in It is an interesti n g a nd ,, sugges tive but l ikewi s e fallacious argument , which proceeds fr om the assumed theory= ..c:=-_aepen d en t characte r o f al l data, to the conclusion that ' individual' obscrv.d r<' ;u, { C'< '~t obs e rvation, \ entire ly dependent on shared social ,.tr tifact s; 1 I.e. theor ie s, is a social and not an ind ividual phenomenon. {u e.nce and duct s . knowledge I tfw 11. , are social and no t individual pro- It is p ointed out that the phenomenol o gy and epistem- ology associated wi th capitalism - empiricism and th e individua lis t red ucti on - holds that observation al data is completely theory - indepe nden t, and this approach is correctly rej e ct~~ d as in compatible with th e, o f theory forma ._,___ r--- ti on /At1(l actual process fa lsification . Even if the o ther connections in the argument are admi tte d, we contin ue to be p resented with a f alse contrast, this time between obs ervation a~ completrly 'hard' or as 2 8. completely 'soft', a s compl etely theory - depe ndent, or as comple t e l y th eo ry - independe nt. Again the obvious p osi ti on s ee ms to b e overlooked by the opp os ing reduc tio nist c a mps. gi Ve L--t. The point n eeds more elabora tion than c..an b ....:. h· ,f l0 ½~ , but briefly, what i s o verlooke d in the a rgume nt is the po ssibility of saying that some observations are theorydependent, and some are not ,\ that is, that there 'so ft' da t a. cffe~ 'ha rd' and the comple te Su c h a position would explain wh a t theory-depen dent theses cannot explain,the unden~b/e fact that some theories are fals ,; fied. It can also explain - what t he e mpirici st position cannot - ~ hy theories are not nearly as f alsifi a bl e as t he e mp iricist takes them to be, and some not falsifiable at all, and why in many cases what is n ee ded is a c once pt ual shift, that is a shift to rei,1 h--rpreJ1,4f,;,, of the theory·-depend e.nt area of data along the li nes presen fo,l. b...J a dif ferent theory. The theory - depende nc e aspect might be s een a s gi ving a certain cl~~ (the 'so ft data'), or it d ependi~t data [' 01 mjh~ theory- be seen as giving certain t heory-depe nd e nt constraints on observati on, while still leaving room f o r a no n - the ory depende nt area to op.~rate within those constraints, t h at is, an area in which , ,n ~ peop le opercit1 11t , with J c/,fl c, (:~1f- theories can reac h agreement . (Neither of the two reduct ion ist theories can adequately expla in agreement and di~agreemen t be tween people h ol ding different of such a non-reductio nist account of theor i esV_/) observation an d theory would be that they are seen as both u 11d_ social and individual - scienceA knowledge have but they s sooQI elements ;;-l 1 1 occur at the individual level, they are both f1lfd . social ~nd ind iv idual products. AA similar account in all o f free-will and determinism would see individuals as partly 4.. • f r ee, a n d a s Pftly determined - . • the latter determination occ urri ng as constraints on individual action rather than as 29. giving an area of completely determined action and another different area of completely free action. i,..J., £ ~;(b) '1 he notion of freed(l.m and of a free society is A one of the most important suffering from systematic ambiguity . 1 Each position defines the notion in accordanc e with its own concept of individua l and society; thus the capitalis t position ck~hes freedom as the control by the individua l of his own life (with appropria te safeguard s), the Marxist as the con t rol by the collective or class of its own life and so on. The non-reduc tionist position would reject the notions of l, 'J C'{ ,r·1 freedom which each reduction position offers, and would see 1\, the choice as involving a false dichotomy . According to the non-reduc tionist position, to be free is to be free as an individua l and also as a member of a community , to be able to control one's own individua l life as an individua l, and also to be able to act freely with others in controllin g and determinin g the social framework . ;,< 'f. ¥- -~ --- ~ ~"I:-~ The false dichotomi es presented by the two-reduc tion cire.. reason positionsA clearly systemati c in nattire. for them lies in a logical assumption and approach which is com m on to both theories - the reduction positions are the result of extension alism 'm. 2~te:rlalisrn ') in logic and metaphysi cs,oper~ti ng both through the accounts of the subsidiary n otion ~ and resul6~ . i n the the basic reduction position of individua ls reduced to eleme nfr of cul u,,,~ sorts of social wholes versus social wholes as reduced to constructi ons out of certain sorts of elements. 29 . Those who do not appreciate that everything is connected to everything else, and that relevant logic particularly is connected to everything else, would probably be surprised to learn that the basis of these false dichot.01les lies in logical theory. The two ,{ reductionist positions apply in social theory a particular set of reductionist doctrines a bot.ft the whole-part relation. The individual reduction position which underlies basic capitalism is that the whole is reduced to no more than the sum of its parts the parts are the thing and the whole i s a mere fiction or certain sort of construction. The opposite reduction holds that the whole is the thing and that the parts are no more than components of the whole - the y have no real function or role of their own except to make up the whole. This is of course the approach which matches the Marxist reduction of individuals, and it results from buying~~l~same logical assumptions about wholes and parts and applying the reduction move in the opposite direction. The logical assumption behind the reductionist approach is that the social whole-part relation is extensional, as it is treated in standard mereology. <.? r o ./r:,.·_ .~"' '-··• ,. / :J.. ti ·, r• i J ("~ \., C l' l •'-·\.. ) C • . ~\__(_ ___ · '-- '-- 'c l ... • : ,: · - v•~,1-. .__,, :;>>··\- ', '.\ I (_,-..._ .... l-··"' '- - It is the seeing of th e whole~ part relation as extensional which forces the choice be.tween seeing wholes as just aggregations of parts, as on t he capitalist side, and seeing parts as j ust bits of wholes, as on the Marx ist side. If the relation is extensional, then one or the other reduction is inevitable, so th at someone who w, she~ to reject one reduction, say the re duction of wholes to parts, Cf!JD -fi,'j is ob li ged to embrace the one, the reduction of parts to wholes so that the Marxist reduction of individuals is an outcome of sharing s uch an extensional outlook. With an intensional relation this choic e can be avoided, there can be both wholes and parts, each with properties not reducible to those of the oth er. Consider;for example, the /mplicational case where we represent the proposition that A as the class of sta temen ts implied by A, or equivalently the class of consequences of A. Then if the notion of consequence is treated e xtensi onally, for oF example as material implication, the joint consequences ~ A & BJ that r:F -1 i 42.., is the consequences~ proposition {A & B} will just be the sum of the separate con sequences of A and the separate consequences of B. That is {A & B} = {A} U {B}, or, in terms of wholes and parts, the whole {A & B} is just the extensional sum of the parts {A} and {B}, and is therefore reducible t o it in a straightforward and common sense. If on the other hand, the notion of cons£ },enc(;,. is treated 1 intensionally as in re levant implication, the n the joint conseque nces of A & B exceed and are not reducible to the sum of the separate consequences of A plus the separa te consequences of B. That is i' B} · not just and can 11c: t be reduc ed to the ,' The residue or sum of its part~ proposition A and proposition B. the whole proposition {A & difference between the joint consequences of A & Band the sum of their s _e parate consequences might then cal led an emergent fea t ure; ·\ k __:-. The relation between suc h emergence results from intensionality. reductionisrn · of the whole-part relation and extensional treatment ' ' .1 Cr./) N,!/- , !f,dvhr//l-7 '/)_ft. ('. . . J1l7'UJ 1 11 //i,c✓ t'1. d(c: -, { l • A • r:-.I /)c!tf.·c·.:JlA~/,-. 1/J)7 1. of it is so close that the {A & B} for the ~ = {A} U {B} feature is sufficient • of the whole,-_- '_part relation. extensional~ In opposition to this 1 it is possible to develop a theory for an intensional whole_:-:._~ part relation in an intensional mereol og y which models the whole ·-- -~part relation in terms of an intensional implication relation such as entailment. It would be rather surprising if the social whole ~~ part relation . -- ,.,,.-- an extensional one which enabled simple summation except in were certain special cases. It is after all rather well-known that people can do in combination what they cannot do separately, not just in the to extensional sense in which they can sum their joint forces (e . g. I . lift a rock), but al.so in the more important sense which is no~_ extensional in which what they can produce i n cc-mbination may be far more than (and different from ) the sum of the separate efforts of each (e.g. in writing a joint paper). Such emergence seems especially to be a feature of activities which involve combined inte nsion ~ __,.lity l as many activities which are characteristically social seem to. The simple reduction of social wholes to sums of individual parts is the basic reduction of basic capitalism. The position is "({ f:t-•c· ,·1 ( , __ very important from a theoretical standpoint as the crucial r--e-l-e.v~nee point for the understanding of other positions / .just as are the Basic Reference Theory and Basic Empiricism to the understanding oV pos~tions ~ in epitemology . and logic. . 1, However as with the Basic Reference Theory and Basic Empiricism, the numerous difficulties the primitive form encounters lead to many refinements, elaborations and extensions, and there are few who now hold the basic primitive position. The reduction of social wholes to individuals view points is liberalised correspondingly - [thus it is no good identifying the position of Jf.4. capitalism with the primitive reduction and attaching t~at, in the fashion of Bwnheirn. ref J. One lih.eralisrd reduction position, which appears to correspond to the extension of capitalism in Social !Je111ocracy, holds that social wholes can be reduced through anal:'.{Sing them in ten:ns of a theory concerning the assumed components and their interrelations. Thus the reduction is liberalised hyond a simple whole-part one, to provide a theoretical explanation and to take account of yet furt her features of wholes in terms of th e behaviour and interrelations of their compon e nts. Such a th eo ry would however be extensional, in accordance with the usual assumptions motivating this kind of reduction, so that the essential, non-reducible emergent features of the social will still be missed. The reduction - although i t will be ab le to take account of a more complex set of interrelations, between comp onents, will con tinue to be inadeouate and to leaitimise /\ (::, an impoverished version of communal life "orns ~ ".'here is ·' j strong logical case that such reductions cannot be made. This ~ is provided by such results as I] rrow' s the:erem ancl. pa ral lel results in voting theory. * The fact oi complex interdependence between the individual and the social whole also provides a strong prima facie case against a reduction, since if some characteristics o ~ individuals depend essentially on the social whole, the latter obviously plays an irreducible role. But some characteristics of individuals do seem to depend on and be modified by the social framework, tn the same vwy that the growth and species composition of the plants in a f)'lic<O rainforest is modified by a partly determined by the . climate ,\ * ~ See P.ou t.ley [ J' )The Impossibi lity of General ionist Social Theory.' 1\ Reduct- and other matters which a r e determ ined by the biolo g ical commun it y . The irredu cibilit y of the social , of soci al levels of exp lanatio n and occ urrenc e seems to parall el very closely ~ the irr e duc l bi li ty of th e i.n tension al, and th e relat ed i rred ucibil ity of non-re ferenti al to refer e ntial occ urrenc es el the irredu cibilit v,. of commun a l in semant ics. seems to narall ) life forms to individ ual life forms . The non-re ducti onist t he sis in logic and metaph ysics, that objects have b oth e xten sion al and irreduc ible int e nsiona l prooer ties, . l;t -{ I, I "~'i oarall els in a Away that the non-re ductio nist thesis in social theory , that the proper ties of individ uals are determ ined by both individ ual and irreduc ible social forces, that is, are both individ u a l a nd social. There seems in fact to be a close and direct conn e ction betwee n the social and the int ension al - as we noted earlie r, on l y intensi onal relatio ns between the i ndivi dua l and the commun ity seem t o be ab le to c apture the e me r~en t feature s which charac teri.se the social. It seems impo ssibl e to charac terise the notion of a social commun ity withou t .~) ~ \ .'...,-' . ..J appeal ing t o inte n sional notions - .~ ims, shared p r op os es , shared commu nication and sha red values . Not a ll int ensio n al not ions are related to th e so c ia l of course , but if some are essent ial to it , as we have s uggeste d, then the d e ni a l or reducti on of the i nt e nsiona l, on e of th e l eadi n g thesis of the lo g ical and metaph ysical theorie s as s o c i a t ed with empiric ism, is the denial or reducti on of the basis of the social . The proble ms and positi ons relati ng to th e attenp ted so reduc tion of the intens ional to the exte nsion al parall e l closel y and str,i,.. l<ingly those relati ng to the attemp ted reduc tion of the socia l to the indi vi- -dual that it is tempti ng to conclu de that they are in fact differ ent aspec ts of the ons sawe positi ons, that such interr elated pro bl ems and positi reapp earing in differ ent areas form a world view. :!?or a o fte n worke r in the mode1-n. philos ophic al produ ction line, it is diffic ult to see where and how the little piece of the puzzle he is workin g on fits in to the who le. * And as Smal le n.t.p .f :ound , journe ys of inqu iry to discov er conne ctions and overa ll signif icanc e are not encou raged. It becom es possib le to see er s as little more than a coinci dence the fact that the found of emp iricis m and of its logica l count erpart ~ the Refere nce -4:,..-- Theory ;, * Locke , Hume , :"'!il l, and so on-r were also the found ers Refere n c e Smal l creep 's Day. Los I(_ ~ r 1- - - - ---\,-·- ' ~ M . . . . . · h \} ----- -------....____ a.,,_P .. v, n . ~ '~ .;,. ·~ (\.-• ..__ 1_ ~,~ \r---c v, fZ..:.. \ .~~-.:.._~,~( ~ -:-i\. .., _... \.¼,·\J':, \ C ~-, ~--t---t ~(?'..I-" ('' \ ': ~ • --L(_ l (_ ; 1-z Y\ l.",--v ...... v~ !. . 'A· \ \ ~ ~ -H v--'1,,. , 0:-v-...i-h_ ~'""'- l) t\'I -+"'- l.. , .1·,·•, -~ ' ~°'o \.~ ~ (>..' -..:.... Ob 'i,• ' ..,' "·- 1\~' ·'- ,~ .. -.. . .,.\ 0 -(-,-( \ "'r-~s,.~ ...: ."' n,~\ _c....:i ...... Ct.C... 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We suggest that it is not a coincidence, and that the following rough connections and correspondences hold which provide mappings between positions in different areas of intensional (in logic)- non- philosophy: referential (in semantics) - theoretical (in philosophy of ( 0 - extensional (in logic) - /t, v-J!,J Jl t:t I A referential science) - social ( in social theory) j observational (philosophy of individual (in social theory). science) ( in semantics)- Some of the routes connecting these concepts are fairly clear, others are less so. Some of them, for example the epistemological-logical connections, are elucidated in Beyond ] ~ ~ ploring ~einong's Jungle and . These correspondences give rise to the table on the previous page. This table should not be read as indicating that people who hold one of the positions on the line hold the others, or even that they logically should. For first most / of the connections have been overlooked, especially in this century, and second, the positions do not even ehtail one another because the ronnecting links are suppressed; and these , even if logically necessary, may be rejected by peGple who hold one but not another position in the line. Positions do however form closely linked ways of looking at the world they are world views. ~~st of the positions can be seen as modifications of or responses to~l , the basic reference world view position, within its own intellectual framework. This is especially true o f 1 's conventional ~pponent, Marxist socialism. In 3, the necessity and rationale for the ~arxist converse reduction is created by the acceptance of the main intellectual apparatus of the basic individual reductionist worldview, and ~~arxism challenges ea! i talisrn very intellectual framework. ·1tHtd1 from within its own In contrast postion 5, the non- reductionist position, challenges 1 from a auite different s tandpo in t. The table should make it possible to distinguish clearly between two positions which, although entirely different, might on some theories (e.g. a r~arxist thecry) run some risk of confusion, that is, between the Libertarian Socialist position and the Social Democratic one. The difference parallels that between .the Fregean Double Referenre theory and the non-reductionist position regarding intensionality. Social De mocracy must be seen as an liberalisation or extension of basic capitalism, in the same way that the Double Reference theory is an extension of the Reference Theory which enables it to take account, albeit in a quite inadequate way, of much further material which the basic Referenm Theory cannot ,- .. ! ,.. handle. ~ . :> t•( ·f\ t1•~ l ..J,.J.._ .,,.._ ..;· ' ! ,·, '· / This is done through setting. up individualised substitutes fo;-- communal life forms, usually through the medium o:f so-called w- ~epresentative' or 'public' individualp institutions which control the 'publid sector and much of the social framework. ,';',i I ~!.:'• .I Given an individual reduction1),...(such as that of Mill, the major theorist of representative government) such representativeness appears inevitable, the only possible and logical way to handle communal life forms insofaras they can exist at all. is far From the standpoint of a different theory, it from inevitable; and the increasing destruction of communal life forms in :f:avour of such 'public' ones is dama g ing, impoverishing, and leads to great concentration of power. Social Democracy operates normally with a capitalist basis and grafts the 'public' sector on as an extension J just as the Double Re f erence theory operates with the Reference Theory for the normal case and extends the theory to d ea l with difficult cases. The Double Reference Theory employs a substitute reference, the sense, for cases whe re the will not work, just as Social Democracy employs substitute individuals to represent community life forms for cases where a purely 'private' approach does not work. sense, is treated as a The second mode, the further sort of reference, just as the 'public' sector in Social Democracy is treated as a f urther sort of individual life form. Both these positions extend and liberalize the reduction of the basic position, rather than providing a genuine alternative to it. )'I. How do the reductions connect with the basic position .. of each theory? -----, I l_ /--------✓ ~- Each position uses its reduction to vindicate i t's own vision of a satisfactory societ~_L,{'~he capitalist 30. - reduction..---_:-· to-individuals position vindi cates capilalist ' . society through the following CJ1'v ' j\, /v I - Ayn Bandish type of argument:- If individuals are entirely self-made, and none of their properties are the result of the social framework, then the fact that some people are superior to others in certain respec ts must simply be due to their being inherently superior individuals in those respects. But if some individuals, by being more able than others, are able to acquire more power or more advantages for themselves, this is only right and ( C? 1,'f-isrn) Such inequality is unjust to no one, and prope~. I\ the result is the admirable one that the better are better rewarded and have more control over the shape of society. w, #1 Th~s the individualist reduction lead~ only a AH.:,. l\ with few further assumptions which not implausible, to a /\ position justi fyi ng inequality of power .. The Marxist position, equally, uses its reduction to vindicate ,ts vision of the social order, as one in which the individual can express himself or exercise power only through participation in the whole, the collectivity. Individuals can, in this soDq( and especially~ economic order, exercise n~ power as individuals, and power is held only by the collective, or class o rganisation . In contrast to these positions of inequality of power for the .individual on the one side, and of no power for the individual as such, on the other side, the non- reduc tionist theory co rresponds to a position of equality of power for individuals, both as individuals 9 n~ through the social framework. In its vision of the good society, individuals have equal power to determine the social framework, and equal power to control thsir own lives at the individual level . The social frame(,J c•rk 1 for example insti tutions1 should allow 31. life and deve lop each indiv idua l to maxi mize cont rol of his own comm unal his own disti nct pote ntial , as well as optim ise pote ntial . ccftr ol of comm unal life is commLJJl._~3 1, o.tic:l. that of indiv id ual life is indiv idua l. l Capi talis m is view ed as a disto rtion of indiv idua The oppo site uctio nism . life forms whic h is impo sed by indiv idua l-redA.>hrll'o ,,.1-,,:t._ c JJ ,• 6 · c i.l(,,t ( [nr.n:n,t:;,.J (dfi'f( ,:,..- /i h - f/,('_ h.·t ·fto abs orb th e pt\ attem 1 rrti~~J? h whic es a disto rtion r\ redu ction prod~ A ~+· 1 renc es in goQI~ indiv idua l comp letel y, to swal lo~ up, deny diffe and need s. This is an equal . dist o rt ion. iced The disto rtion s have some para llel wi t ~ othe ~not in rece nt w ~1 Cing . For exam ple / there is a para llel with the and oppo site forci ng of peop le's char acter s into disto rted the m expr essio n, sex role stere otyp e s whic h frus trate and deny thei r lives . and impo veris h and limi t thei r oppo rtuni ties and force d by the Ther e is a para llel also with the disto rtion s In the d. sepa ratio n of sexu ality and love notic ed by Freu that the same way the non- redu ction ist posi tion woul d hold t were ove rcom e good socie ty could be acA1e..,.: e cl only if the spli and the two sides reun ited:-\ ~~~•·:~~"gl~c i :~i:i~u :~\:~ ' ~~~•h :~ · ,, , . - -~ f\ s, and part of a disti nct 'self ' with disti nct need s and goal ,.,. . . .,,._~ I . . \vr. J. • r .} ,' / , . . , ,.: , . _ ,7 ;,t ' Both must be r ecogn ise d comm unity with common need s and goal s. ,\ IJ /. •· t -' I' j 1 in the struc ture of the s ocie ty. up some Such a non- redu ction ist posi tion can then take redu ction of the data that each side uses to supp ort its with out howe ver redu ction . 1,1cui- t i ~ J_ ___ t he pena l ties impo sed by the Thus it can claim s~pe rior expl anato ry powe r. as we have For exam ple, the non- redu ction ist posi ti o n can s of each othe r, po i nte d out, acce pt each side~ basic criti cisma11c{ -, also thei r it can re cogn ise the claim s of the indiv idua ls I . limi tatio ns. limi tatio ns , an d the claim s of the soci al its d criti que. It can admi t th e va l idity of much Marx ist-in spire 32 . For instance , it can agree that in capitalism people are frequently unaware of the real social determinants of their actions and values a nd see as free choices on the individual level what are in fact determined at the framework level. It can agree that the utility of the invisibility of the manipulated social framework to capitalism is to dis~uise the existence of other options and make a situation~ which is to the advantage of so~e gr oups, appear necessary or ine scapable , ~ * or to the advantage~and chosen by all. This is however not evidence for the Marxist theory as opposed to th e nonreductionist theory which it supports just as well or better/ 1 a nd it does not show that there is no such thin g as free individual choic e . S imil arly most of the valuabl e part of the Marxist critique of capitalism can be seen as evidence for the lack of re al communal control at the social framework level, rather than as .,or··· supporting the thesis ~hat that N,·11 /Je_: on!_y level on which anythi n r; really occurs. is Thus also the t heury can take accou nt of classes without bein~ stuck with the ~l g iditi es and difficulties of a class reduction or a class view of history . ., ,1, ·; ..\ •~ ~ ' I\'-\ \ ~~ Class explanations for ind ividual action can be used where they a.re required, but individual aL.+1cr1 C<.H o.lso be reco gnized and there is no need to explain all the a. r:t ions of in di v i cl u a 1 s in his t or y forces and so on . ,1 s u 1 t j_ mat e 1 y the pro c/cL d of c 1 as s Such a theory can also provide t h e basis for - what is lacking in Marxist theory - * For documentation of this thesis, see Conscio usness . t Captains of Thus also some, but not all, of the >.I... Marxist critµq~ of the last twenty years remains of value to the non-reductionist position . 32.1 a critique of socia l Democracy which distinguis hes i t clearly from Basic ( apitalism . Th e majo r the oretical feature of ,ocial Democracy is th e attemnt to take account of communal LLfe for rns and other cases wh1 eh obviously cannot be accoun ted for adequately in basic capitalism , in terms of an individua l subs tit w~s for them-as in the ' publ ic' sector , Governmen t by represent ative A Marxist-ty pe theory cannot take individua ls , and so on. adequate account of this individua lisation , because it is committed to seeing all the actions of individua ls as represent ative of class forces, so that the indivi dual ' captt!Ye ' of social life fo rms in Social Democracy ' becomes for them just their capture by various class forces. measures bt.d'('t<Gtcratic ' fv4:.,/c,i;a-n.. The welfare and so on of Social J ' Democracy must they be written down as cynical manoevres by the capitalis t with th e intention of keeping the working J.t ,u/._ classes quie t removin~ obvious sources of grievance , while I\ ' public ' sector activity is seen as merelJ re~ulatory for caoitalism . This may be an aspect, but it is not adequate as an a nal ysis . In reassessin g the Marxist critique in the light of the non-reduc tionist positio n, it is crucial to distinguis h , as the Marxist critique Joes not, between individua l reductioni sm a n d individua lism, in the broader sense of the recognitio n of individua ls and distinct nonreducible individua l life forms . Privatisat ion , Elitism , Encroachin g Individ ua li sm , etc. , the way in which what people can choose to consume, produce, and do , is g overned at the framework level by the machinery of 33. private profits, th e great inequalities of power an d of wearth resulting from that - all these are prod ucts of Individual reductionism, not of individualism as such . r.Jr.{. p.: r Jl ;'/f . jt:.. ;-- ,¥- 'Jf- -~ .,>f'.... A'--. .;i«: From a~philoso p hical viewpoint the reduction positions have their bas i s i n a part icular,and ~~dequate,but widespread logical and me taphy s ical theory. It would be surprising --...,_ how ever if these b a sic redrutions, wh oi~ distor.___.,.tions underlie n_ early all tHcc/.r,,r,1_ social thought, originated entirely i n a particular logic al theory . The logical theories ct.U--rt:,z. t at a particular time indirectly reflect social values and intellectual currents a t that time, like every other sort of theory, and do not stand in some unique way above and beyond them. If a different kind of logic has been needed, it would probably have been developed. The prev~knL c of this now established logical theory may explain why few now see through the reductions, but it does not entirely explain why they we r e developed. A / "" J'&"' /.~r</'~·- ,i(1/"7° of reasons for the overlooking of the non-reductionist position lies in a s et of SC'C;r -·· • ( di;,,,1.,':r; fu;.__ t[ !{~.,- -✓ ..1.f;, ,1 0-k d',c.__ l -,- t;, ,1.,/-(;/(_) • . economic assumptions,\ common to the red_u ction posit.ions. p o.r..11½; 1 , '- 1 Our confidence that the non-reductionist position was a ~eal and A' not merely a theoretical pos s ib li ty or utopi aJt'f'aritcdJ; lay in the fact that the tribal societies we considered in the early part of the pape r had a structure which enabled Individualism a nd some individual economic actively to munal ly-controlle d social framework. with a u -n1.- Such societies clearly had structural features which meant that t hey did not have to make the U.Yt.palatable choice between the o prc) .S. ·ing disto :.:-tions o f totally collective o r totally individualisti c.. life. control of There are other advantageous characteristics also which (>-,l.. fl'/ are common to such socie t ies, L/1.d racteristics which (' 34. sophisticated ~0cttd despite the rising d eM•cracies to-day seek, but which ~DP and the 'high standard of living', which is supposed to provide justice and the good life for all / always The l ow level of environ- seem to be further off than before . ~" 1 P-, r,y mental d e struction cl /\ t-r; ~u( conscious life-style) · '·'-·~ and the environmenta lly- src;~{~i;.1 -_ . frctture.~ which ha~( often been noticed, t-... s ha l~? the almost total lack of in ;.,~uali ty and poverty-' the ")...•'-·◄ }'-'- \,._:, \ '-,__-\ V·' ,:. c.l-11,·, ·,•-7' high level of equa1, ·7 of power and relative lack of ~e\fe-r-R-me-Ft-t-r ,..._ domination; the considerable level of leisure ( o fte:ri, as SaA/eAl .f . /1 as pointed out, greater than that in modern western societies) and the frequerlly rich cultural and communal l ife [Ref. Sahlens?]. These features have been attributed to various things th e.. low level of technology, the communal living feature, the hunting -- 3ei fttc;..ing life- s-fJ Jc: and the norn a ti ic life ,~hich was 1 The first we can definitely ru le out. The mountain forests of Gr e ece were destroyed, the Middleof its rich topsoil and stri_: ppped of J1'HidZ by erosion, (r e f . Lowdermilk~b y a people with a 7 uite low (9 1 e v e l o:E technology by u,..;--- QWa standards, who also had a culture :). .,.._J.._ which was Mark .ea by great inequality -e-:r en s/cpJ<.:'...-.me nt. ...(_., \ ,.''1-/·, ,,_: .. Living ,Jt ;. d , 1)\ -(_ \. \ l ,y r ant e es/\ th e se features, as by no means gua .. a/ modern cities demonstrate · &Fra the success of communism appears .I t.t. c (J'(t t:< ( --1~1.rl; ,Je__ i I\ to be a consequentia l rather than;\. wh ile the no roadie life {;,Jic-<.u;f,:tl with the hunting/gath ering ,:S; style cannot be the whole story ~(J """'- t{ 7 I\ YI L ~ some societies which gardened also had or have I' these features feature seems to be one Th! f~ ) (e.g. Melanesia). of soC;Ct( structure. if t ·;-ut:-}s very good ner~,d for us, because we can hope to work for a di f ferent so C~Q/ structure, whereas we cannot r e alistically hope to obtain a collective and arrow, the woo :1en \t-1()-(_ ' . return to the bow or the hunting-gath ering way of life• ; 35 The structural feature which makes possible th e combination of collectivity and individuality and the other >v,v'-( ,, attr active features of tribal life, is, we suggest, the fact that the dominant mod e of production in su ch societies is that the producer of an item is, in general, also the person or group who uses or consumes it. People produce for their own needs, It and not , in general, for other people or for exchaDg_~. - is this feature which makes it possible for tribal people to live in a collective framework which is nevertheless not ---- oppressive to · individuality, for while the structure is collect- ,..,,...-- , , - - -----··- i vely determined and '\::ollecti vely h e l ~ ~ land, for ~~~_p_le_-,) ·h•. ri 1 fr: 11n .~, ('... ·i ht., ; r (' \:: n. their own it is p ossible for individuals or groups 1.\ needs,set . I goo , s, and how best to pursue them. J(\I This featureApr~ t-~ -cons umer identitv ; is in fact a feature which i s closely associated with, or even necessary to, a hunting-gathering way of life, but it is not confined to such a of life (that is , it is not af s0 su ff icient f or it) . l1t{J I(. C'lt The condition of producer-consumer identity oJ the/\ ckn ..:.r~f\;-/, f, ·<. \S - dominant)mode of produ -~tion~ the condition upon which the , . socJ~ty which is self-managed at all levels can be obtained. When production and consumption become S'e/!).Jr. f .;_ ,L and production f o r other people's :n:eds becomes the dominant mode of production, the choice between private or individual control of the means of production,or collective contr~= l/is forced on us and we are back again to ec,t other th an the producer mvst r u npalatable choices. ~~n .?om~ody· control production, decide and organise what will be produced and used, and control ~ r,\~+-t (-1 ,ml;; l;.r c (' other people's labour. / Whether the 'somebody' is l an individual or group of individuals ( as in CC/< ·fl{ 1t ·1 ;,,l· ) Cc,rnintu1t,t j et , or class collectively deciding what will be produced and how, we have the situation where not all individ uals can a_. 36. determine their . ctol\. what it produces. distinct needs or control tried- CLC•\ Iv 110,,.r - and A. The separation of production CinrL consumptio n then forces the choices which underlie the reductions and distortion s of capitalism and Marxism, and the resulting split between the individua l as Hte separate and individua l 21.s a mQmbt:?.-t· of a community . Capitalism and Marxist socialism have in common a commitmen t to this separation o f production and consumpti on, di ,ht_,,,1 r•r \ fragmenta tion of lcJJc,lr which reac_h ~s its resulting; and to the highest pitch . in the production line sys tems of modern indu,stry. Such systems of production were of course devised ancl implement ed first by capitalis ts, but were, as we know f~m Marx's works, greatly admired by Marx, who saw them as necessary to lift humanity f rom its previous condition of rural i db cy. { ~~eals itself clearly In this respect the Marxist posi tio~·';I\ as accepting a great deal of the intellectu al and eronomic framework o f c ~pitalism . ) I I The positive Marxist attj tud~ \ to the fragmentat ~on of labour is not just an optional extra tacked onto the theory because of Marx's own personal prejudice s. It is a feature of the theory, which basically views proauction in a fragmented way. *The theory arose * The Marxist picture of the tota i h~torical l y arnong1 and was supported primarily byJ the labour forces engaged in fragmented production in capitalis t enterpris es, rather than among independe nt workers. dependenc e of each individua l element on the other elements of the whole obviously is closely connected with a model of pro- d(cf.;.:. ,~ b.,.l c ,1 7 37. ducers. The reduction positions appear in fact to be very closely connected with the way in which production l' IGH•; :/ is A andfupecia lly with the attitudes to the fragmenta tion for the Marxist reduction of individual to ~ of labour; of a class or collectivi~ C.:i . ._ ~- derives its motivation precisely from the acceptance of the capitalist production t<PP«rat~s . For the fragmentation of labour means that what the individual worker does makes sense only in the context of the total production of the collective. ,~}< Thus · the capitalist and Marxist both share a vision of work in terms of the production /i;1c, but interpret it differently. (The production line is an excellent repres- entation of the dominance of the fragmentation of labour, the assumption which both the reductionist positions accept) The capitalist view is production line o:f the for the purpose of production)of the workers or operators / extensions of the machines - their goals , their intentio ns are irrelevant, they are not part of the production. The object of the production line system~to be understood in terms of t he qoals of the Q,;,,,~-e~~--t ov;;:\h~f ~ A t~~~~~,~; of the goods. 'rhese are of course the characteristics of capitalist society and especially of typical work in capitalist society. Work is ((\:. ~, meaningless, directed from above by someone else , goals are external, to be understood in terms of the goals of individual capitalists or consumers) c\ c~ (~.,... J. I}:- b,___,. f'--.i'. r;L ~~ c:-~,.Js•.• The Marxist also has a production line image, but for him the work of the production line, which is not meaningful when each worker is viewed in isolation, c a n be understood in terms of the goal of the totality of wor kers. Each individual can make only a part of the ~hole, and everyone is needed to make the whole ,tern. /1 i :·:.,-:v--.\,·,__l ~ v ~ Work is mechanical, so 38. there is no place for individual differences and so on. There is plainly no place for 'individualism' in any shape or f . 1 1.ne. . t _..:orrn on th. e pro d uction Mind, rh e . i . mind, b1e goa 1 , is a C1 ass 1 to the workers on the production line. purpose of production must be viewed e n f, ;-(~.I ,,,, 1 The terms ''J /1 u.r/1(> f C sha r ed or goal of the whole group. k- But for those of us who regard the production line as a degraded and distorted form of labou~, to empl'?y ,-~~eh .·. _ ). __ (u.-1,~( c \.\ ' ,1 <I ; ~(I_ c,u,un,.,, (,,(,,~, d J,. /l(' y_, (-·.{4l' c:.. \ --- ' an image as the model of product io n and of society;\ is simply('.'' 1.T:'--~:'.L.:· amazing! For these are precisely the characteristics that make the production line an detested and oppressive form of work. The image - like the assumption of the ffrl-1"- Jmentation o f labour itself -:- betrays the basic capitalist origins of th e Marxist social model extremely clearly. In this as in other respects much Marxist thought is the basf :..ril.. capitalist parents. child of For the fragmentation of labour seen in one form in the production line was set up by cap i talists for their own b e nefit, and is neither more rewarding for the workers, or More productive for the consumers, than other forms of work. The non-reductionist position would simply reject the {Ill model o f work or of society, production l i ne asAappropriate Si nce the production line is not a form of work in which the 1,.._, .... ,c h 1>\-\~-1.. \ individual worker has (\ control - it is ,,the form in which he . ·1 ~ ~_:Sy,"s. ~has J...l..t..t..1..-~ ~r--=ne- control. The image of production, the non- reductionist position would employ would be that of a person or group of persons - making something f or hi .s 0UJ1L o. se. The work is purposeful and not undertaken for external re Lc,·cu l-L or exchange/the goals are inter l\t< producing a whole piece of work. ! I. The worker~ If he is working with a ?Np/,_ group of people, some differentAp1ay be doing different parts of the task, but all the work ers will share in the final product. _\,; . (. 39. In the non-reductionist position the intention or purpose of the work is ~ - that of the individual workers, that is~work is viewed in an intentional rather than in an mechanical way. Here is another important source of the reductionist positions which lies in the treatment of intensionality. cc,nJ1'cfL?,.r If WE\ work a:. s relation between the maker and the c.c made_, the three positions come out as follows: the relation between the individual 1. Capitalist: worker and the made object is not a ~®WHXfMi purposeful one, the purpose is someone else 's. In short the maker - made relation is rna.cl1r7t, n,\::o( , and extensional. The hired worker is an extension of the machine and th e purpose or int en tion '1--\l \ _.::,.·1 of the work is exter-te-€d to it. 2. Marxist: the relation between the individual worker and the made object is still seen as not purposeful, the purpose is in the w_tio l_s?. production line, the society. The maker - made relation, as such, is still viewed as extensional. 3. 3rd position: the relation between the maker and t he made is inteniional, it is purposeful, the goal is directly in the work itself. What differenh~t r work (e.g. under take n by a machine) mechanical and meaningful work is t he lack of intention in case of the former. The relation between t he creat iJe artist and what he makes - the only Ui!t- - sort o.fl\ in which capitalism admits this k1',1 cL of intentionality - is the ~ypical work A designs B _1 A case ♦ The model is: creates B. If the mechaniqal, extensional picture of the maker/ made relation is to be rejected, along with the unpalatable l reductionist choices which it creates, : it is essential to 4 0. i~fuse the individual worker back again into the picture as the creator and designer of whole objects, as the initiator anA. goal setter of h i s own work. This implies a theory which recognises irreducible individual life forms, and thus again, The fact that the a theory which is not Marxist in character . commitment to the fragmentation of l.a.bour cannot be dropped J.:.f h 1,;..,.. 1.,~t / from Marxist theory without ft eornplet~ reconstruction (so great as to render it no longer a Marxist theory) means that the Marxist position is, from the environmental point of view, At bottom it buys the same production apparatus a dead-- end. c..:,. an-a- capitalism, and therefore it can be expected that, even if the management of the firm is changed, it w i 11 turn . out essentially the same line of go~ds. y,,u~(! ,t ( l)J.Y l~-r b411c or ( Acl-1<1.:l; n· ·,!i'c.. the ,\ as Producer-consumer identity'>. O:' b~ Ii d, ,,rf) / mode of production does not of course mean that every individual produces everything he needs for himself entirely on his It means that people produce for their own needs, own. in the combinations they choose. Individuals could of course do so, and some harct-.Y soul s no doubt would want to; provided that they do not interfere with other people's equal entitlements or use more than their fair share of (';'{ IJ .,./.i (Lk,,1:.§ production-land or other commu~~( resources, there is no '\ reason why they should not. Many more pe o.ple, given free choice in the matter, would probably want to produce some I for their own or their households use~and some in common work with others for common needs or interests. /thittZ.-- S ince some activities are more bothAefficient and more enjoyably done with other people, and some are less r ,1 1 (Ji h~ so, it ee-e4-d be expected that most people would work in a mixed system of individual (I M c cllei: I , iN. or communal work ) perhaps varying the combintions at different stages of their lives. /\ 41. But there is a great deal of individual variation in the degree of contact with other people that is ~~~¥iN~ pleasing. Some people at the other end of the spectrum might want to do everything in conjunction with other people. What is essential however/ if the combinations are to be freely chosen, is that the individual option should be open. Freedom and independence is enhanced rather than destroyed by Choosing to work with others, b~t such a choice is free only if there is an option. People do not control their own lives if they cannot set their own goals and determine their own needs, choose what to work o n, with whom and when, how mu ch contact with other· people is op t imal, and so forth. Real control of one's life would be impossible .in a system which envisaged only most collective or communal production, as m0sxx~MiXMXX alternatives to capitalism do. The option o f individual ,, /I production, even if it should t urn out that it was not of t en ft;, ._,} used, is essential to ensure that people remained in control of their own lives ~~~~~i~~ in crucial respects. We have already suggested that a s oc iety in which DIY as the c/1.Cttiu._ (u; 1tic. n-: ode of production would have the conditions which are necessary for and wo uld tend to lead to a truly free s o ciety, one 1 all levels both the oellcctive and the which was self-managed at / and the principle individual ., To complete the conditions self management . ~ of DIY must of course extend a lso through the rest of the institutional Ivan Illich has made a substantial start on suggesting strudure. what some self-managed in'i hfv1.l,c'iir might be like, and on exposing the institutions they are to replace~ although structure of the existing ct.,_!\.- t-he seems to lack a f\ vision of how they fit into a larger framework. This is not the only area ill which DIY would appear to deliver a superior society; t h ere are many ot h ers, 1 d · . t o concen t ra t e but we 1nten At the production here on those relevant to environmental issues. level the basic features of such society have already been suggested A c ommuna/ly control l ed infrastructure would by a number of people. provi de t he basis for prod uction of common basic needs and make these available on a fair basis to any individuals or gro ups who ,, to use them to produce for their own needs. wished __,, We want to stress that DIY is not a proposal for a return to a primitive life-style, ,· 1r 1 1 abandonment of technology, endless hours of grinding labour as a ff /)J y fou "e.~ eu>4..ld ;-i f1t.d- 6rL. ~ '/,"1TQ_ -fad>t(JtliJILCto/ .!'of>,U.d,c~t. k)<...ie.-J:J. It wo>1.h/ of course involve and subsi~te~c-~ _fa'.·1ne~>and so forth.). _ ,Jre.,·.:,,.J{..r- ,1c;.,__ /t!(i __,-!)._/ ,: L1,. t.J.l ~ , 7J,.,_,-J. if1..<- ifti ~------ ------------ - - ----- - - - d.,Pi-e.f"Tl11..-t result in a ·a ifferent life-styl~ a Akind of technolo gy1 and a different kind of ap proach to work. d ;l, ,,,'\ beneficial. Moit of these changes would appe3r to be / , f:. ( ~j !l e.( For example most peof~le could provide for theh- _l~c:l.__§_~c I /\ 1i·J1 '.7. standard in a more satisfqctory way than at present, with perhaps 1 li, f, ,· . l l -. ,-.,,,{_ 4 hours ..jk'V'{_l, .,-..i) 1 l· 1:,· ,:.:,./J /i..( f t, za•I I J ';,._.,• /-4.. per day of work, and probably 1-ers--S;,/as nt.Dre appropriate technology develops and for people wh o work in larger communal groups. 1 The typical feature of solutions to the problem in our society or Marxist soci ety is that~o nesolves one set of problems by creating a nother . oft~n more formR-ble , e. ._~· as one 'sol v:es' . the p~oblern of pciJt.:.r~ y . · in a rather inadequate way by utc,cdi 1-y cm environmental This £eatur~ is avoided to a reasonable probl~rns or some o t her problem. further problems created appear much the where system, DIY a in t ext e n that in the or y constructt_on parallels The situation less formibl e . thi~almost invariab~ ~ of kind t th eory th wrong where on~ has the or equally bad one hap!?3ns, a problem resolved in one area :r.eapr:ears as a worse B (2) A crucial question for a DIY society is: sort of s ub s titu t ion s of labour can be made? what A be ginnin g on answering this question is s u ggested by construin g sub s t i tut ion ·~ -.-the. __ s..ub s t i _t _1Jt,j__prl' as the s u b s t it i on of an ·~ equivale nt economic oroduct. Thus su bstitui on in ,f- economics parallels and reflects identity theory in logic. [Expla in ~it uation in identity theory and intensional lo g ic]. The DIY economic system will plainly re q uire much greater r estriction on substitutivity of identic als , j ust as i t s corresponding intensional logical counterpart does. In contrast the economic theory of the existing system can be seen as extensional, it allows un restricted substitutio n, and the same way it leaves a hu~e range of important factors out of acc ount which are taken account of without diff i culty in a n in tensional system. Unrestricted exchange (or substitution) and the associated division of labour c reates these difficulties , in part thr ou gh the (!f, t rans fer of costs of product i ~ and be n e Lit s from consumption onto different par t ies, and in part through the fact t hat equivalent products~ in the weaker sense of the standard economic theory may !:1~?_!;_ be eq uiv alent in social and environmental respects . 1V\ •·- c(; ~1 '-' Moves such as environmental t:.___, p ricin g are i G . ~ efforts to qualify such substituU.on. B. The most important de fections from pure DIY lie in qualLfied s ub stitutio ns, s ubs titut io n of on e pe r t:;on ' s labou r for a nother' s in particular. Labour exchan ge i s admissible provided it does not int erfere with o th er va lu es , e. g . does not dest r oy o r things the co mm unit y val ues. C 11 rrhe restrictions~ substitution may profitably be comp ,1,red with th ose in extens ional identity , whi ch excl ud e int e n sional conte~t-s as ille gi tima te for sub s titution.,e-x-tensimLo.i' i n d i..v i d-u.al--m-e-an-S I Such an estimate would presuppose retaining some limited kinds ,vI 1 J · / • •' it\) of lar :)J t · -· :,:tc./L. ','\ production, perhaps communally owned., and operated perhaps by those who would use the product~or by people working on a \storage' system, for example, the mass production of cheap durable Cc,-- NPl basic clothing and housing as proposed tn ._~topia. __Jro suggest that hi/J ,~ <.,,., <-l1u.,/r..(,{.:. -1(ft(c_, /"<.rlcv-.__ • e/ DI Y should be the\ v · mode o~ production is also not to suggest 1 1 Vil\ " ~l ~-, ?- bLe__ that it should be the -~-- -- _,__ ·- - . mode of productioni the system ;: ,;,n J)} /t<.J<.. j can be liberalised, to allow for some limited kinds of exchange 1\ production and some limited kinds of free communal productio~without destroying its overall character, in the same way that the present system allows for certain limited kinds of DIY - 'Do-it-yourself' - product ion without lo..s.ing its overall character as a system of exchange f.rJJ .-· _ :;;) The'. Dr.'/ tf -~ fc,,11... /"" l ~ 1f,; production. ~A could also/be extended to allow people who wished to concentrate heavily on some project and needed a lot of free !1·11,~J time to 'store' basic credits o ver a time period. For example,, u ,:,ii(:/\_ in 'Communita s' ; . ," A in the late 1940' s/'Paul Goodman estimated that ;;- +l.1. plant, equipment a n d technology avai lable were used efficiently ~ ~ people could provide for their basic needs for an entire lifetime in two years, ,:, and could then organise the rest of their time freel y~ _,,1 ----- -·- c ~~ce~t;ated - ~~0 That is a high tech_. picture,, even allowing for the increase in productivity since he wrote•but the basic idea is ,J adaptable to a lower tech. one, albei t with a larger time period. MX<'S Most people though would probably prefer to provide for their basic ne~~ by production outside the basic community ·~ - ~ontrolled A - _,,- mass-production system.,1as in Ecotopia, obtaining both more pleasing goods and more satisfying work in doing so; and even many of those \,v o.~......-ttQi who w-c • -:-Gl to have a large amount of time free for the pursuit of some project might find the production of part of their own food on a daily basis an enjoyable and satisfying form of relaxation. Production beyond that for basic needs is an optional extra which -,) people can pursue as and how they desi re. ( It will certainly be objected that such a system would not all ow sufficient leisure or free time. The sharp distinction between 'leisure' and 'work' is of course to a product of a system ' r-... where work is typically q l·1e,_;,_ nated tfl the sense that those who work on it do not control it and its gon./J are extetll(d. to to process in that the m6tivation for doing it is to obtain something other than the fina l product or the satisfaction of the work. working on wh at Someone who is he enjoys do ing and finds satisfying to do to produce for his own need~does not draw a sharp distinction between 'work' and 1 leisure 1 • Furthermore it would appear that such a society could allow for a great deal more 'leisure' in the sense of time not spe nt on the basic needs for living, than the present one and such leisure would be in principle avai lable to all, which is not the case in the present system. The price which would be _paid for free time would however be quite different. The price of free time for non-production Uc~ J ities e.g . intellectual or artistic projects, or just to contemplate the universe, would not be the price of inequalityJo f being able to rely on other peqie lower down the scale to do the basic need:; production in an alienated way. The pri ce would be simplicity of life. In the same way the price of indepen dence from other people is not a private income which enables one to made use of the labou r of others, but an \ {'.:. - :, ~:, I( ,c~,\ independent, self-reliant mode of ~roduction. The ob;,J e c tion that such I\ a society would extinguish the intel lectual and creative lights which are alleg edly fostered so well in this society does no t hold water, t but it is sure to be made much of because a major justification for 1,, equa lity and for production for exchange is that i s is supposed to \)t --? - release some specially gifted individuals w-~ \ sufficient full-time leisure to pursue such things.] /lcf. 1 ,,/J r. c , 1cf,1 rr,, A DIY system will of course be pronounced by economists to be 'inefficient' and therefore denounced as one which 'lowered living standards'~ t1c,1 It is fairly well known to Rconomists that efficiency is a relative and evaluative notion that is that if it is 4f measuredAthe total output of value per unit of imput then the term 'value' cannot be explicated in terms of the market as just 1'141 what the market deliver s without ernplOYJtt he J_ . t1Clfu--(Qi;111c fallacy. It is not sufficiently often realised that it is also a relatiV istic notion, that is, that it is relative to the socio-economic framework I adopted, and that appeal s to 'e ff iciency' ~n t err> i S of the present system are really appeals back to a fo~m of individual reductionism. It is not a question of abandoning the concept of efficiency, but of realisation of the dependenc e on a J·t 1 U1 f 1") C; r - econonomic base. For some things which are efficient to produce in the present centralised structure based on a high degree of fragmentation of labour would be extremely inefficient to produce in a DIY system, and some things which are inefficient to produce in the present system would be efficient to produce in a DIY system. Centrai; \cftion depends upon fragmentation of labour, and therefore on the social and political choices which are forced by it. A DIY system would have a radical form of decentralisation as a natural consequence for people who have regai~ed control of their productive force would <"( ~ naturally combine in smaller decentralised groups a.n d suited their needs and interests. Th~s in a DIY system smaller scale or ga nic gardening, which makes use of local organic material instead of wasting them, would be more efficient than gardening which depended upon imputs from a high energy, cf11fr4./,· ru/ fertilise,·-plant, for instance,.If the people who wanted to use something hcttl time producing it, then anything requiring a large measure of transport or manufacture elsewh ere away from the in effi cient compared with a n (, .te of use would tend to be Q/~rnat ive way of doing something which could be produced or made locally from local materials and which did t unpleasan t work processes . materials would then be t>l i{( t\ )i,f U-/ .", f l <( In general ' 1 available loc al -i lt (') L }·n ore efficient to use thar, which /\ required a high level of manufactu re, low technical processes would 1 usua lly tend to be more efficient than high level ones, and .so on. These chan ges are strengths· pre· c;seiy the sources of its environme nt; and other and to suggest that such a system can sim; 1J be written off as 'inefficie nt' to try to wri te a social framework into economics and absolute in a quite invalid way. A DIY society would be as naturally decentral ised as ours is natural l y c entralised ~ The role of this kind of radical decentral isation in reducing enviro nment al impact through encouragem ent of a decentralised small- S,cE)_/e;. low impact technology has o ften been pointed o ut. Another consequen ce which i s not so often remarked on but is equally important is the role of s uch decentral isation in enabling a natural accounting of many sorts ~f environme ntal costs occ urin g as a result of productio n. Local production for local needs means that normally the environme ntal costs associated with production are borne by the local population whic h uses and produces the items concerned . There is thus a strong natural basis for taking such costs as the destructio n of local ame nity into account as part of the perceived cost of producing that destructiv e sort of item. Accounting of costs which takes account of environme ntal values is extremely difficult to do in a n a tural way in a system which spreads costs around in a widesprea d 1 The dividing line between self-manag ed technology and the opposite does not however entirely coincide with the high tech/low tech For example, good two-way commun ications system coul~ ~ distinctio n. have an invaluable role in cre at ing a network of flexible cornrnuni t i,_ es, other than the spatially local community , in which individua ls could Computers could, as Illich points ou~be used to participa te. further and create such a network of communiti es and cit'-<__ invaluable aids in self-manag ed education medical and legal systems J IAJh...(l,t--(1_ they could be used to overcome the ~onoDolis ations of skills, knowledge , In ::,_ short some and informatio n by professio nalg and technocra ts. power, instead of of co uld serve decentral isation high-techn olo gJ being used to increase the concentra tion of power as in the present system . fashion as centralised integrated production - for example, the commonly encountered situation of concentrated major benefit going to a small numbf~r of people and s ma l ler but very widespread costs accruing to a very large number of people. This situation typifies the subtle way in which environmental degradation occurs in such systems. If the environmental costs of production occur in the same region as and accrue to the same people as the benefits, we could expect that the environment costs of producing certain destructive items would be much less easily overlooked or shrugged off. A DIY system would be 'pluralistic' in the sense that it could provide for a very large range of different diversity in gords and needs. life-styles and a great There are however a number of bu~lt-in .i. -n1.t' ;,· : •. ..,/f features which would work strongly against environmen~llyAdestructive life-styles .. It is important to realise that these features are the result of DIY and are not obtained simply by the feature of comr:u.mo..l control of the means of production. 1 , , Consume. rism and Waste~ --·-· ·--, ... ~ ~ I] feature of DIY _,..,. rs a built-in defence against the complex of problems known as consumerism{ t ha~is 1 the taking o f satisfaction in accumulating unneeded goods). Consumerism arises primarily when people find little which they do not control, satisfaction in their work, and which is frequently, for most peopl~repetitious and boring a 1 iv, ~~J and undertaken only to mak:1 ., or for reward s mainly 12 1', t J. 111.)( Satisfaction must be found outside to the production process. the production process, in consuming the products of other people's labour . Such consumption is the reward of work, and the consumer society rewards its members for the unpleasantness of their work mainly in terms of opportunities for increased consumption . In lead to a situation where goals contrast, since DIY wc ,dd. were mostly internal to work, satisfaction in such a society would be obtained though the work process itself and not in a never-ending chase for satisfaction through consumption. Reward s would be through the production process I not !_rom work ·- lying just in the product. Work would be undertaken in part because it was satisfying itself, As any self- and not usually tu_st to obtain the final product. builder knows, even apparently mundane projects such as building o n e's own hous e can become,if the worker can control his own labour and match what he does to his needs, a source of great satisfaction and of self-expression. 1 In this situation people express themselves a nd their individuality through what they make, not through consumption of mass-produced items e.g. buying a new model car . of the make the individual thin'k fits his /n1ccge . 11 In a DIY system, these sorts of satisfactions are available to everyone, not just a few people selected and designated as "gifted" or "creative 11 , and allowed to work creatively, as in capitalism. Secondly, there are in fact very substantial limits to the extent to which one could be an indiscriminate consumer in a DIY society Je cD~1Jone wanted to , lonsum e rism depends upon other people 's labour to If people have to make their g ood s themselves a crc;cial extent. (for example 1 if you have to go and work in a bicycle works for a while /1 ._,.,. t.' ' ,...., J'/ ;.. ;\). . . ~ -· .. ' 0-11"'. t: , rL. .... t ,.....___ \:: • _ 1 • •, • _• - , / ) ,:,..:_ .. ,, .... -t ~ l_ -~A. ,_\. \ 1. . • C /- 1 ·,._ ).•.•.•. 0\1 r . . tl ·'t-y \\ . _/_ if you want a bicycle), then there will be a serious trade -of f b e twe en work time and consumption, which would act as a built - in The more goods are accumulated, the less brake to overconsumpt ion. time one would have to use them . leisure would have fe~r~oods. People who want large amounts of Many people even in the present society , standard " - ·fh,., ·t . givife) such a choice, might in fact prefer a "lower l1vii1j /;(e i.r > tt n m1 h.-r The work situation in and more free time for their own pursuits. capitalism encourage consumerism in man_y ways, one of the most important being that people do !:"lot usually have a choice to obtain shorter work hours, have fewer consumer goods and more leAsure or more time for their own projects. They have to work certain hours, they h a ve a surplus, so they might as well use it to obtain the customary rewards. DIY would allow the 1wd,hi"J of work in a flexible way to needs, rff-' for more free time, which and e ncourage such a tradeAof fewer go ods could be spent on non-consumer pr ojec ts. \ Thirdly, a DIY society would be a noh-waste socie ty. No one would work to make things he did not really need when there were othe r I thi n gs he could be doing I ) ( instead. ' ', '--: ,. , - .,-, : , ' A.: ,◄ \ ) As Brian Martin has pointed ou~many presently environmenta ] y damaging systems, such as the private car system, would tend to disappear if people has to make their own, repair them, and help the roads. Buses, bicycles and horses, or other transport systems would b e more efficient in such a society. One cannot imagine people in a DIY society.work ing for a month a year, for example, in a packaging factory to make a lot o f unnecessary package s th~yhad to throw away as soon as the item was unwrapped/and then/fur ther had dispose of by their own efforts. The goods they / would manufacture for themselves would be as durable as they could be made, and would be made to be easily repaired. Materials would be made to go as far as they possibly could - technology would be developed which would do as much as possible with as little as possible " could not be manufactured in a l~cal area would tend to be replaced [0, th ose which did not have these characteristics. Since high- ..~;.f . _ l ,_ \\/ technology materials eq\1aLly- have the characteristics, the y would t e nd to be replaced by low tech materials, with consequent benefit to the environment. fNlf The DIY society would Abe a low-consumption/low resource-use Since waste represents unnecessary and avoidable .1.. ·: u- (\J ,-.. r 1": ·-:- l c, b,~ , ..,. k I uld avoid it. labour/wo own their controlled who people labour, no-waste society . ~ t c ,....t (A. I,._• .. •J - " . • --- , • 2. Poverty a nd ~nequality . l t present the main capitalist argument for never-ending growth and the production of environmentally b,,f i.f ,1fl(}_ ( C Jj(~ damaging ~E:J~goods is that it is necess ary to help the poor. This is supposed to occur through "Trickle Down", a process whereby people at the top of t he must 3et far more than they need hcnp reach those at t he bottom of the he a p. so that a few drops can A more ;n.efficien t or envi6nmentally damaging system for providing ,{ for the poor can hardly be conceived. Different people have many different ab ili ties and capaci ~e_i but people who are not very young or very old and are in a norma! state (l, J '\ , ' ; / ; ' .,/ ;, -' f • ,' 1·, ,,· f ,· ( of health 1are basically fairly equal in their ability to provide I for themselves the basics they need for a g ood life. At present V poor p e o p ~ poverty and inequality come about primaril y are prevented from providing themselves with what they need in a s ati sfactory way. (Three cheers for Winstanley!) They are prevented b e cause the right to use the means of production is made scarce, ,I: (usually by private property), and the skills to use efficieJly are A also made scarce ( usually by the bureacra tic cJqfl-1) 1 Restriction in access to use of the means of production is also tt.t. ( I J1J l I Ji!. l( / {;J L , Rr 1( a main source of 1nequality throughAso on, since the restrictions are used to disadvantage thrue people not in certain favoured categories. 2 f \ ,_. h,_.• 2 ' • \ I >/- , The point is driven here in all of Il l ichs work especially Dese-Fe#trg Society /and 'Energy and Equity' and of course the older school of (\~ ,_',A.· . .._, , anarchist w_i ll also stres s ed it. ~l'..ti 'fhc,N,:~---- .1 --\ l·j ...,• _ '\ A syst em of comm unal con trol of the of prod ucti on tn:,[( 11.J with ~cces s r ig hts for all who wan t them a~:V in DIYJ 1 toge ther with the free disp,v ~~~1· of t ~{_ skil ls to use them pres entl y "' wou ld remo ve this maJ· or sour ce of pov erty with out the need for was tefu l ,.I inef f i.cie nt and c: 1111 ,'rt-1111:~1tl&lj dam agin g econ omic grow th. The pure DIY society would 1 i t t 1 e r o o m f o r h :t e r a r c.1h yl and from a t he g uid e wou ld that division of to be sort e qual the of access social picture would hiera r chy and and fact that without allowin g the of pleasure, Such a position would be able th at but to not misse s th e presuppos e The mark. l evel allow for t o needs, or the ( , for f alse individual a bilities their a social dif fe rences differences, capacities, power it a nd be a s ociety. they 'level' in ability, that and people have th at this level objection does presupposes not only ,, /-,,, ( d i ffer e nces in ability of be t ween kind of capitalist ability d iversity and that framework a rea s; Such in present i n dicat e s pow e r a nd and and so in a bili ty on, an d as relie s a the inequality on areas. level the justification for on inequality a nd false dichotomy an absolute f ram ewo rk levels based on a needs. in oth e r inequality on justification for inequalities equal level of conservative premiss as of the in e q ua 1 r i g h t . a nd }a b·±--1-i.ty::=t:#> s take i n c on t r o 1. .,. , ·1 whatever at both indi vi dual as differences of this level, system could s oci e t i es , ability in all What pow e r people's typical i l legitimately uses level, equal source of pro f i t , The capitalist argument framework framework goals become a picture the provide goods is not required. to me e t Equality a t p eo ple have a n their own lives, can Equality on on. of power ·{-(, th a t social produc t i on, 'egalitarian' two equality o f th e d iffere nt on the ar i si ng p owe r soci e ty would provide. can allow a d e qua tely c apacit i es. account Exc el len ce in such a egalitarianism is based equal it differences so urc e do not so of problem of how to allow for in e qu a lities . an d of individual frame work people and people h a v e capitalist obj e ct i on such a elitism; thes e two-lev e l the means framework, without the The be equality on to resolve i nequ a1 i t i e s ot her equality individual production and a f or labour. r e quired would is, forming the ob vi o usly be one which had ver y false equalit y assumption :, /. 2. In practice equality on the social framework level would guarantee a reasonable level of equality on the individual level, since great differences lisation CJ r of in this the means of production, accumulation of other people's labour, would reduce differences area can arise only when monopo- are possible. Equality of that ex a mple Jane likes and asfemale Thorea u ) It is that it it should do can only be achieved if differences carpentry, household an especially fine house; universe , but in material goods or i t is of cour~e undesirable this kind equal i ty and Anne on the other hand Suppose builds herself and her (whom we may envisage likes to contemplate the and wants only a minimum level of basic needs i mpos s ible to obtain absolute equality without satisfied. either preventing Jane from doing work she likes and exercising her the benefit of hersel f for without in the demand ~_ ?c i..?-1__ or needs for to. equality, f r am e w o r k ... 1 e v e 1 , production and skills and others, or, what is equally undesirable forcing or pressing Anne than she wants no t to work more and consume more What is then, legitimate and necessary is ~q -~~it._y ___Q_f __ p_ o_w_e r:, e q ua 1i t y a t t he 1ev e 1 of at the i n d iv :i. d u a 1 consumption. Social Democracy often claims , 1 e v e 1 o f " p u b 1 i. c ri 1i f e • to deliver equality at the This claim should be rejected however because:(1) i t does not provide equal access . product lo n , ( 1 . ·. .- .. to the common means treats th 1 s as an in di v id u a 1 mat t er ~------------·-- ---···'/ ra t her /I than as one for /· of . \--------,) m 1 s taken 1 y \. but so. in interests and needs are denied or discouraged. abilities, for and Social framework in people's living standards, would not guarantee absolute equality ac h ievem e nts, or employment social framework control ,., ;; } 3 /I . (2) the individua l isation of comm LJ. n c1 / life forms inequalities of power at (3) is only, and in fact opportunity is all' confusion. in though equality of opportunity such equality occurs in any case, the concept of to a equality this case defecti v e, S l:\ C.<?- to do so.* priv ; leged and through equal i t is based on an 'each- the rest of the except in an Alice-in-Wonderland sense, even if the opportunities for equal for each person but clearly not _.§.Q The opportunity to be selec ted as on e of a powerful elite which controls population does not, equality, very limited extent Each person might have the theoretical opportunity to become Prime Min ister or win the lottery, can hope to great the framework level. the claim to provide equality specious; leads • (which provide selection were in fact they are not in Social Democracy). Real equality of opportunity and power requires ways o f making decisions and exercising power in which all can participate to an equal extent. X ,,,.- * Such 'equality of opp ortunit y' arguments for the egalitarian character of Social Democracy are a similar swindl e based on a scope confusion. So, for example, 'everyone has an equal opportunity to do i t ' (win the lottery, become Prime Minister) is ambiguous between (1) (x) Q fx and (2) ◊(x)fx. .,,l ·- ) _J ~·I \ t~ \ '- J I I -.J 1 ! .• '1 l ;b ) ) <, I .~ ( .~ ·' .J , ..J I ) J J ' :, r' J r' . ) (J ) ) J ) ) r<'O ) -·{ ·1 { ,..l --l-- ( ~- ; -j / ...;, s I -~ I f _i I >' .:";) 1-- .r '/t,\/ -tp ~ j ) . _) -----s ~ ) ·•J I ',I :5 ' ...... j ' l j .J <,} .J ~ . . ~-i , ) . ..> . ...J ), j 4 ) ', -t) j \ l ~ ✓ , J_ . .{ ..) '1 l u) ·.;, r ? ' I', \~ .., ) " ~ I (,> I I I . j - ) A ; '1 _( c..J\ JJ( ~ t C, _) ~ lJ 0 ) 'l .. ) ) ~) .J -~ ) 'J ) . -(7 I vj t } 1) •..J ,J f ) I > ) ) ) ,.. ' .,) ( :1 c..-i <+,) (_,) c) _.,. ) 'i _,.) .. L ) l I r' ·-(f r ... r-• :, d ..I ) } ~ •.J -; ) .) _j ,--,. -1 . I ·t j } ',) (1 ) j ( ·" ·'},, ', ) -~ ~ " ) t -· l ,'l; __l, ) -,! ... J ) ( ) ) L . J J ..J , ) _) ,,\ ~ ' ) I ...) ,.\ t~I $ ...) .) 7XJ J ) . ), -.), _.._ J ~ - ),,1 .J.. f) --r' ) ___,,,. J .,~ 'j < -- J (~ (-::; r j ,_, ~ ) l - .J t _) _.) '-..I ( ·~. _,,,, ) ~· ) .....l r' .1 r I -..,c7 \' 2 ' ~ I) ) '/ t-! f, \ \; r, l ~ \ I ·') · "I ...,.. 1-=; ) 7 \, ( .1.-- " .J .( '.J :~ 'f ~~ ) "; :},..) ·,"-' \ (> -✓ ,.,,., ) ----... uJ 'i ~I 1, ) --.J~ ,J J ,.:' " ·1 ':./ ") ) ~ ~ ·r '; -~ __.) tJ ,., ' J,, \ ~ ,_) ; .) J r: \ _c ) , - J 01 ,.. ) ...) < 1 ;_;, ( ).... 7 .. ,) 'l 1 )' t:: • - j '.'j ,!) I I J ' .J,) l .J I _) I ) 7 I ) • .J ) } ..:.) ,, _..) ') ~--.... ' ,) :( I 1 ? ··'I ·1 ..J J ~} ·1 ' ( • .> c-: :.,.._ ~<r \.~ ....,_ .) J ,j ,,, -i ) ) --·r-:i I ,) (( '( . -> - \·· --< .J ' l I ) " ) l / .. j r··s ~ \'\ ~ ~ \t I I ~ I cuts straight through the problem which plagued Anarchist thought - \ the problem of how production is to be organised , whether it was ... .., ·, , \ to be communist ic as Kro p otkin wanted wi t.h each person w, rt(l;-.,_1 to ,_ ""-' ;j \) 1 " " ........ ~ ...\) the best of his ability and taking according to his needs from the c01Tu11on store, or collecti \.,, i..st, as Bahu11, :1 ~ ~ . \) J ..._, , 'l ~ \ \I ' The adoption of a system I -~ . )( ·•·i·-.._ .\.. I I., \ ~ t r e mun e... ·"rat.ion in the fonn of wages according to the amount of .--------------= ~ DD1 r~~, £ ,~, ,:7 ,r-c-.jo r /'o ., 1'7 71 u [/ 7 ✓·~work done;41 , allows a pluralist ic and flexible approach;- and, is A A certainly ( ,'1Y1/?"1!,/41(i I / ruHl others wanted, with I [j/l,' t with the first, 1 and perhaps the second, as hU ,.·. the organisat ional 1\ of subgroups within the total society. Each of these systems has serious disadvanta ges ~f applied organising principles for the total society. system, as Kro;>d41'n pointed out, would restore wage-slave ~y, and lead to systems and kinds of work not greatly different from that in capitalis t society. The communist system Kropot1::. 1,1 proposed was an attempt to get away f·rom exc h ange pro d uction · l an d appears to h a ve b e en a n attempt to production and consumpti on, which in the collecti ·/ ist system remained split, thus Kropotl(,>1 writes "Common possession of -,1,, the necessarie s for production implies the common eJoyment of the /\ fruits of the common productio n". This seems to be an attempt to reunite production and consumptio n at the level of the total community 1 i.e. to a pply PCI at the community level. Unfortuna tely it cannot be effective at that leve l, because such common production and cons umption also, implies identical production goals a nd identical interests . But to a ssume this at the total community level is unr e asonable, and ult i mately 1~pressiv e. It ties e1d1 personfu production to every oth e r~ n e ed and g o ~~ a nd each person' s n ee d t o 1 rrhe term "communis t" cannot of course accurately be applied to the systems it is popularly applied to to-day. to everyone elsis production, in a way which would plainly not allow the sort of individual life control, the freedom to .~>1:eh one's i: work to one's godl ·i, and vice--versa, which a true.ly free socity rm s t 1\ allow. So for example, a person who wanted to work little and 1ri:·:,i,,f a si{( ple life with few gOl:cCs in order to have :free time for some 1 projec~would be unable to do so under this system, he would be pressured into working "to the contribute to the common well-being to the fullest extent of his capacities" He would in effect have to remove his own non-consumer gord to provide for someone else, desire to consume at a much higher level. I<ropott in' s suggestic,t would plainly have required a very l a rge measure of soc i al conformity and indirect social control or pressure to succeed. Kropotl ~ of course envisaged that people would willingly submerge their own ,} gooi .s in the common goo/ because of his view of the human nature. u',l~C 1-ti~ness of Nevertheless his system appeared to invole to a larg e extent compulsory self- nlJ n ~·-,;,t! ,·/\( / , which is very different from not allowing one person to exploit another. He did of course envisage that collabora tion in his common work system would be freely and c1ose~ but since he nev~r appeared to envisage any a l ternative, it is hard to know wh~t this comes to. This problem is of course resolved by a sy s tem allowing flexible The collecti y .ist principle - that the worker /\ . entitled to the A fru i ts of his labour - is retained ih such a system, but without the problems of production for exchange and witho ut the wage-slavery tha t drove the critics of that form of organisation to a communist alternative. The communist difficulty that people's work is to the needs of others in a way which makes a self-managed life /) I Y difficult and would impose conformity, is resolved also. .P-G~I · allows flexible production groups to form based on common go·;/.s and needs, and allows each to be the judge of his own needs to direct his own work. i ~' !:' k'. \j . People with common go,ik., and interests and needs mayA !i,ute to form such groups bu t (e.g. a hous e hold or a commune). society is not envisaged as one big household, as appears to be in Kropotlc i / 1' ' s s y stern. Kropo6:. 1 11 would have rejected this of course, since he wished to argue that there could be no individual entitlement even to the fruits of one's own labour but only so:_cial ones. In many ways his arguments to the effect that no person do anything on his own, a re reminisc~ nt of the Marxist arguments for total social determination of individuals, a ·~.scussed later. His argument that there can be no such thing as an individual entitlement is not clearly stated in • 'Anarchist Commun\ sn\:' Quote. The passage in effect assumes that work of previous generations has been benificial, an assumption which seems to derive from Kropotl~ i'il. 's fervent belief in modern progress. It ignores the fact that the clearing of the forest has often been, and has long since become in most cases, the excessive clearing of the forest, that the results of the work of our ancestors is not only soil improvements but also soil erosion, that perhaps our predecessors have not left us the best of all possible worlds in respect of natural wealth. At best then the work of the past can be seen as a mixed blessing. This does a good deal to undermine Kropot~1~j argument which assumes that any i n d ividual working on his own project has received help from past human's but if it is a/50 hinderance, exactly what the existence of past human work is supposed to show is notAclear. Kropot~~ wanted to argue that people who created wealth entirely by their own efforts were entit led to what they created, but that in fact this was impossible. No one could create wealth or indeed do anything, entirely on their own, because their is always dependence on other people at some point, therefore all wealth was enti1tBly sou ;~i and should be shared in common. distingu ish W~S The argumen t fails to of relative independ ence and appears to rest on a high redefin ition of 'on your own' . If someone clears and digs his own vegetab le patch, manures it himself with his own wastes and by green manuring , it see~s hard to suggest that he does not have il 1;/r /, ,/ some special claim on the carrots he has sown and, or that his 1 A g rowing of them for his own use is a selfish action which deprives others of their due. It might be objected that the carrot varietie s he has sown are the product of vegetab le improvem ent by untold generati ons of his predece ssors. But that does not seem to be a good reason for the claim that he has no special claim on the carrots, an:zinore than the fact that the author of a book did not invent from ·, scratch the language in which it is written shows that he is not the real author of his work and does not have any special entitlem ents to make certain kinds of decision s regardin g it, because it is a product. Work can be distingu ished is primaril y that of some person or group, even where they have made some use of the precedin g work of others. Kropotk,~ 's argumen t would show that no one could ever do anything on his own, and depends upon adopting a quite excessiv e standard for producti on being someone 's own - that it should owe nothing wh__~-atever to the efforts of any other human being instead of, what is more reasonab le, that it should be primari ly(In the case of the authorsh ip of a book even th r~ standard is probably excessiv e) . •. No _ one acts in a social vacuum there is always a framewor k or backgrou nd, but that does show everything is a social product. rrhis to ,,di ci;;.. 5 c.1,}';.111 0,. ,J - _ might suggest that Anarchis m adopted the reductio n C i :._ i which underlie s Marxist so~ism . would be mistaken however. Such an impressi on Kropotki n .:;and other leading anarchi sts constan tly emphasis ed the importan ce and autonomy of the individu al and stressed that their aim was the optimum developm ent and maximum liberty of the individual the maximisation of individual initiative and so on. It is quite clear that they did not subscribe to the Marx ist reduction of individuals to bits of t:r:- l lecti ves or classes, which they saw quite rightly, as ~ irnical to liberty. The Marxist reduction is quite expl icitly rejecte d in Malat'e Jtlc'1 (an important and ,~K;~ ,Jc. ·,p , 'rl tLc h i"tl'Jk '- f.: "l. . 0 1tu .r d~, :>'t c..>1'1··{- ·,_ ,-- ) 1 who also stressed the importance of individuals. ~ n ki nds of tribes ~-, , , 1 Often peo~hder (or gathered) as ina.":i-vj_duals, or t h e ri ght }yu=rt(-- ' ' ---~ ~ in col laborative ~ g r ~ of various sizes or were--~ ~ a_.,t:r::-itie were I .." ><- [ '-,--~.•, 1;1ore · ~r less a~ t he occasi~anded ( H ~-~ 1 I t ~ f groups -or:,,tr ib al hunting procedure w o u l ~ be shared among the g - ~ of t ~ l tribe, but in ~ i v i d u a l c a se usually, a lthough some ~ ~ ' might be given regar~eing l. 6se who had mostly the resulting produce was -·1z__for the use of he veo obtained it as -~ k i.00-_(.s.e.eJT ow i t t far d ~i_J_s._in_ t b r=> A11 s t r a J ian_char.g.e..cLoneA- It seems that the non-reductionist position we have sketched is in fact the unde r lying philosophical base of most of the main stream of anarchist thought from Proudho.rr through to Ma kd-a-1.}1-✓.>_ _ ,, that part I ,,u 1 which was prepared to desc; ,?L itself as 'libertarian s61\ lism 1 • There was also of course, the so called 'individualist' position of and a number of Anarchists which is clearly an individuali s t reduction position, and to that extent quite distinct from the main tradition. 1 Footnote on 'News from Nowhere' (7. It is perhaps surp r ising that despite such a basic outlook traditiona l anarchist thought remained stuck with an entirely communist propos ed · for the organisation of production in which the personal 'intiati ve' and 'individual' autonomy and originality so stressed by anarchist thinkers would have to be directed ,n the Jji/1(~ ;---f.> of production entirely to commun.-~al or sh ared aims and needs as the Marist positions, so in practice in the area of production in this system despite its different th .eo;-i1:-~t~_::.cr/ base ;}om Marxism _. ,n //J>,r ,, i >1-::i;•d~;1, at any rate individual expression woul be confined to communal life forms. The positi on c onlVl. be said therefore to have worked out a consistent position en the issue of the control of individual life and in lifl king i t _.i theory of production with its overall view of the individual and the cormnuni ty. have resolved . There seem to be several reasons why traditional an a rchist thought problem . This part of problem a DIY system could ~A~~ arrived at a convincing reso lution of this First)anarchisrn never developed its philosophical foundations and philosophical identity property in the way t hat Marxism was able to do, and hence was always subject to corrupt ion by the influe nc e of that position. As Mai:a:kxx fltk11'--r.·Jhc_ puts is (quote) Second, tr aditional anarchism was unable to resolve the problem of individual production in a convin cing way because it brought the capit a list production machine and the fragmentation of labour it invol~d, 1\ ,jA as well as nearly all the associated Enl;?tenment values of Modernity !) 3-1,• c/c; ,h ;._f-) j, ., Science, Progress, Profess ·.1c-rd ,\i,,, the Conquest of Natu.~ re and so on. . , 'v' This is espei $ally clear in Kropotk1n· 's work. Although anarchism advocated regional decentralisation and was f 3 r more critical of the division of labour than the Marxist school( see Kropot~1 ,1 's remat~s on the rnanu f acture of r; "' h0cu,/ S i ) it s till held that the fragmentation i of labour (which Kropoth' u; describes as 'our modern integrated system of prod~ction')was politically neutral and held the key to progress and the good life for all. The sort of critique of this method of production and of its associated values are encounters today seemed 1 to be entirely absent from anarchist thought. Given such assumptions the possibility of individuals and groups freely determining the production gou ls and needs and achieving them for themselves as in DIY disappears. The capitalist production app /:nrh1 s is not of course as we now realise only to well, neutral with respect to social structur~and the sort of social options it rules out are precisely the ones needed to resolve the anarchist dilemma of the freedom of the individual in the sphere of production. The result of failing to resolve the problem in a convincing way was always a serious source of conflict within anarchist ranks. (.'., It is clear from Malatsta's writing that by the early decade of the '\ century it had reached substantial proportions, and considerable effort was dirtcted towards resolving it. 2 To as certain extent the failure to resolve the problem may have contributed to the decline of anarchism, since the position then lost much of its appeal for peasants and the independent workers who formed a major part of its constituency. 1 Although it is not missing from some contemporary anarchist thought, see Brown 'Smallcreep's Day'. 2 M~latesta thought that individual production from the producer's own needs was theoretically admissible provided the producer had only He thought however that no an equal share of communal resources. one would be able to produce entirely for themselves at a reasonable The obvious option standard,an assumption which seems to be false. o f partially individual and politicaly communal production was for He also believed that it would be impossible some reason overlooked. to get an equal division of land because not all was equally This problem is readily overcome using modern watered and so on. land system assessment techniques in which scores are allote~ for different characteris~-t.ics. 57.2 Nonetheless in outlining features a DIY society there is much that can be taken from anarchist and near. t so urces. 1 a n arc h is For instance, the details of the cooperation of network$ of communities in main,~ tTaining .__. _.. such infrastructure or railway systems, quarantine arrangements, and such like 1 can be taken over largely intact. What cannot be extracted, however, from traditional anarchist sources i s much that is satisfactory concerning the attitudes to the natural world that a DIY society would find appropriate, 2 1 What need not be taken are some of the more controv ersi al features of anar chism , in particular the usual proposals for the (Tion) administration of justice. There is no reason in a DIY framework why a community, or set of communities j _n co:opara t ion, sho uld not evo 1 ve their own ( deprofe s s ional--- i sed) legal forms. What wil l vanish, as in anarchism.are rulers, nations and I' states, and more gene rally, hierar chial power structures. However, a community will have an organisational structure, and its political organisation may include components of what would not inappropriately be called ' government' . 2 The us u a 1 an arch i s t view , e s p e c i a 11 y s t ro n g in Kr op o t k i rt , was one of transformation of nature for human end.s. view was quite exceptional. ~orris '  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 89, Item 1900: Draft of Towards a social theory for ecotopia Subject The topic of the resource Typescript (photocopy) draft, with handwritten emendations. 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> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource <span>This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, </span><a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a><span>.</span> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource [79] leaves. 55.77 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:cbc0b65">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:cbc0b65</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 89, Item 1900</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> Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Australian National University - Far Bookcase - Second Bay - Second Shelf - Pile 4 Australian National University Office Australian National University Office > Far Bookcase > Second Bay > Second Shelf > Pile 4 Box 89: Older Green - GAIA - Greenhouse https://www.antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/2d934445390e1dac0464981d63d8a44b.pdf a9f58a819968cfdacb537761e77d478d PDF Text Text UAR AND PEACE I Abstract Several arguNents, constdered tn detatl, converge to show the tNNoraltty of (large-scale) nuclear war. By way of several connectLng prLncLples, the LNNoralLty extends to nuclear deterrence. By contrast, several other arguNents, especLally those froN baste rLghts and values, justLfy soNe kLnd of defence strategy norNalLy taken to Lnclude nuclear deterrence. So result both the nuclear fLx and several poLLtLcaLly sLgnLfLcant but Lll-understood subsLdLary dLleNNas. It Ls contended that the nuclear dLLeNNa Ls a fLx of states' own NakLng, and at bottoN a product of natLon-state arrangeNents. Uays out of the nucLear fLx are classLfLed, and LNportant ways assessed. A NultL-track Uay Out Ls canvassed. UnderlyLng NetaphysLcal Lssues, and questLons of LndLvLdual and colLectLve responsLbLLLty, are exaNLned Ln two appendLces. �UAR AHO PEACE I Abstract Several arguMents, cons~dered ~n deta~l, converge to show the ~MMoral~ty of (large-scale) nuclear war. By way of several connectLng prLncLples, the LMMoralLty extends to nuclear deterrence. By contrast, several other arguMents, especLally t ~ e froM basLc rLghts and values, just~fy soMe k~nd of defence strategy norMally taken to ~nclude nuclear deterrence. So result both the nuclear fLx and several polLtLcaLLy sLgnLfLcant but LLl-understood subsLdLary dLleMMas. It Ls contended that the nuclear dLLeMMa ~s a fLx of states' o~ MakLng, and at bottoM a product of natLon-state arrangeMents. Uays out of the nuclear fLx are cLassLfLed, and LMP'r\?)tant ways assessed. A MuLtL-track Uay Out Ls canvassed. UnderlyLng MetaphysLcal Lssues, and questLons of LndLvLdual and coLlectLve responsLbLLLty, are exaMLned Ln two appendLces. � 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 UAR AND PEACE I Abstract Several arguNents, constdered tn detatl, converge to show the tNNoraltty of (large-scale) nuclear war. By way of several connectLng prLncLples, the LNNoralLty extends to nuclear deterrence. By contrast, several other arguNents, especLally those froN baste rLghts and values, justLfy soNe kLnd of defence strategy norNalLy taken to Lnclude nuclear deterrence. So result both the nuclear fLx and several poLLtLcaLly sLgnLfLcant but Lll-understood subsLdLary dLleNNas. It Ls contended that the nuclear dLLeNNa Ls a fLx of states' own NakLng, and at bottoN a product of natLon-state arrangeNents. Uays out of the nucLear fLx are classLfLed, and LNportant ways assessed. A NultL-track Uay Out Ls canvassed. UnderlyLng NetaphysLcal Lssues, and questLons of LndLvLdual and colLectLve responsLbLLLty, are exaNLned Ln two appendLces. UAR AHO PEACE I Abstract Several arguMents, cons~dered ~n deta~l, converge to show the ~MMoral~ty of (large-scale) nuclear war. By way of several connectLng prLncLples, the LMMoralLty extends to nuclear deterrence. By contrast, several other arguMents, especLally t ~ e froM basLc rLghts and values, just~fy soMe k~nd of defence strategy norMally taken to ~nclude nuclear deterrence. So result both the nuclear fLx and several polLtLcaLLy sLgnLfLcant but LLl-understood subsLdLary dLleMMas. It Ls contended that the nuclear dLLeMMa ~s a fLx of states' o~ MakLng, and at bottoM a product of natLon-state arrangeMents. Uays out of the nuclear fLx are cLassLfLed, and LMP'r\?)tant ways assessed. A MuLtL-track Uay Out Ls canvassed. UnderlyLng MetaphysLcal Lssues, and questLons of LndLvLdual and coLlectLve responsLbLLLty, are exaMLned Ln two appendLces.  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 89, Item 1: Two drafts of War and Peace I abstract Subject The topic of the resource Two typescript drafts, one with handwritten emendations, the other with typed corrections. 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+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> 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 89, 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 <span>This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, </span><a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a><span>.</span> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource [2] leaves. 1.79 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:406aa75">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:406aa75</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 listed in manuscript finding aid Box 89: Older Green - GAIA - Greenhouse https://www.antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/94dbbe314c3a666c558816df0b3201bc.pdf 135af6157b7d49f9fd133871991691f6 PDF Text Text ::r ¾ ' 1 ~--~ ' ......_ ..... The worldwide peace movement faces a new era in 1984. -Since 1979, there has been a massive revival of the peace movement in response to the preparations for a limited nuclear war in Europe. Up to now the movement has concentrated successfully on consciousness ra1s1ng. J-bwever, the challenge now is to present practical new ideas to end the anns race. Mr. Allan McKnight has undertaken a comparison of the separate draft treaties tabled by the Soviet Union and the United States at the United Nations (UN) in 1962. ~ has now c001piled them into one practical draft plan, whkhis the most feasible to date because it is based on the actual proposals of the two world powers. The progran111e should ensure t~at the nations have sufficient non-nuclear arms to protect their citizens yet reduce the military expenditure dramatically and not present an invading threat to neighbouring countries. It is interesting to note that ~eden, ~itzerland and Yugoslavia have defence forces · structured in this ay but this has never received the publicity it deserves. The plan is based on 3 stages of mutual reductions. All measures of disannament would be balanced so that at no stage during the implementation would any nation gain military advantage. The treaty provides a timetable. It also provides for an establishment of a peace force and disannament organisation independent of the UN. Dr. Suter says that it is only when we perceive the alternative that we can see how important it is to give consideration to grand schemes for disannament. Mr. McKnight's book is available from the Law Council of Ns.J. 'U ~ 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 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 ::r ¾ ' 1 ~--~ ' ......_ ..... The worldwide peace movement faces a new era in 1984. -Since 1979, there has been a massive revival of the peace movement in response to the preparations for a limited nuclear war in Europe. Up to now the movement has concentrated successfully on consciousness ra1s1ng. J-bwever, the challenge now is to present practical new ideas to end the anns race. Mr. Allan McKnight has undertaken a comparison of the separate draft treaties tabled by the Soviet Union and the United States at the United Nations (UN) in 1962. ~ has now c001piled them into one practical draft plan, whkhis the most feasible to date because it is based on the actual proposals of the two world powers. The progran111e should ensure t~at the nations have sufficient non-nuclear arms to protect their citizens yet reduce the military expenditure dramatically and not present an invading threat to neighbouring countries. It is interesting to note that ~eden, ~itzerland and Yugoslavia have defence forces · structured in this ay but this has never received the publicity it deserves. The plan is based on 3 stages of mutual reductions. All measures of disannament would be balanced so that at no stage during the implementation would any nation gain military advantage. The treaty provides a timetable. It also provides for an establishment of a peace force and disannament organisation independent of the UN. Dr. Suter says that it is only when we perceive the alternative that we can see how important it is to give consideration to grand schemes for disannament. Mr. McKnight's book is available from the Law Council of Ns.J. 'U ~ 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 88, Item 1455: Reference card, summary of Suter K (1984) 'A practical plan for the world disarmament', Kurana Subject The topic of the resource Reference written on card index, with typescript summary taped to index. Description An account of the resource Card index part of item 1455, "Index card box - abstracts of articles on development". 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> 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 88, Item 1455 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] card. 1.32 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:03ccc9b">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:03ccc9b</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 listed on manuscript finding aid Box 88: Old Papers: Letters - Slog 1 Proofs - Misc. XCs https://www.antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/e28d878d6ede2424d09ed6f344f9e03e.pdf da96b3abe313a02f2ceb6b3934239299 PDF Text Text Diokno answers a lot of questions about the _type of military installations the US ,maintains in the Philippines, about the nuclear capability of the bases, the effects of the bases on Philippi~e national security, the likelihood of nuclear war, the authority of by which the US maintains the bases, and the legality of the bases agreement. There are currently five bases in the Philippines, and nuclear armed ships regularly call at one of them. The bases are prime targets for nuclear warfare (and unless the arms race is halted, Diokno predicts, nuclear war will break out before the end of the century; the more countries which gain nuclear weapons, the greater the changes of war). The ba ~es agreement was signed in 1947, with later amendments, but was never agreed to by the Filipino people. The agreement was accepted by Filipino leaders only because it was made a condition of Philippine independence. Today, the US-backed Marcos regime is unlikely to call for their removal., The bases exploit workers and Philippine resources, and in no way contribute to the 'country's development. Their presence gives America the power to intervene in the country's political life. Diokno quotes the declaration of principle.s of the Anti-Bases Coalition, which works for the dismantling of all US military bases in the Philippines. -:t ~ J ~' J1 �� 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 Diokno answers a lot of questions about the _type of military installations the US ,maintains in the Philippines, about the nuclear capability of the bases, the effects of the bases on Philippi~e national security, the likelihood of nuclear war, the authority of by which the US maintains the bases, and the legality of the bases agreement. There are currently five bases in the Philippines, and nuclear armed ships regularly call at one of them. The bases are prime targets for nuclear warfare (and unless the arms race is halted, Diokno predicts, nuclear war will break out before the end of the century; the more countries which gain nuclear weapons, the greater the changes of war). The ba ~es agreement was signed in 1947, with later amendments, but was never agreed to by the Filipino people. The agreement was accepted by Filipino leaders only because it was made a condition of Philippine independence. Today, the US-backed Marcos regime is unlikely to call for their removal., The bases exploit workers and Philippine resources, and in no way contribute to the 'country's development. Their presence gives America the power to intervene in the country's political life. Diokno quotes the declaration of principle.s of the Anti-Bases Coalition, which works for the dismantling of all US military bases in the Philippines. -:t ~ J ~' J1  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 88, Item 1455: Reference card, summary of Diokno J (1983) 'U.S. bases - a primer', Asian Exchange, 2-4:24 Subject The topic of the resource Reference written on card index, with typescript summary taped to index. Description An account of the resource Card index part of item 1455, "Index card box - abstracts of articles on development". 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> 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 88, Item 1455 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] card. 1.35 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:b40149f">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:b40149f</a>