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Dr Tom Kerns
North Seattle Community College
from The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle Review
November 15, 2002
Volume 49, Issue 12, Page B0
A Moral Code for a Finite World
by
Herschel Elliott and Richard D Lamm
- What if global
warming is a reality, and expanding human activity is causing irreparable
harm to the ecosystem? What if the demands of a growing human
population and an expanding global economy are causing our oceans
to warm up, our ice caps
to melt, our supply of edible fish to decrease, our rain forests
to disappear, our coral reefs to die, our soils to be eroded, our air and
water to
be polluted, and our weather to include a growing number of floods
and droughts? What if it
is sheer hubris to believe that our species can grow without limits?
What if the finite nature of the earth's resources imposes limits
on what human beings
can morally do? What if our present moral code is ecologically unsustainable?
- A widely cited
article from the journal Science gives us one answer. Garrett Hardin's "The Tragedy of the Commons" (1968)
demonstrated that when natural resources are held in common -- freely
available to everyone
for the
taking -- the incentives that normally direct human activity lead
people to steadily increase their exploitation of the resources until they
are
inadequate to meet
human needs. The exploiters generally do not intend to cause any
harm; they are merely taking care of their own needs, or those of others
in want.
Nevertheless,
the entire system moves inexorably to disaster. Everyone in the
world shares in the resulting tragedy of the commons.
- Today, our standard of living, our economic system,
and the political stability of our planet all require the increasing use
of energy and
natural resources.
In addition, much of our political, economic, and social thinking assumes
a continuous expansion of economic activity, with little or no restraint
on our use of resources.
We all feel entitled to grow richer every year. Social justice requires
an expanding pie to share with those who are less fortunate. Progress
is growth; the economies
of developed nations require steady increases in consumption.
- What if such a scenario is unsustainable? What if we
need an ethics for a finite world, an ethics of the commons?
- It is not important that you agree with the premise.
What is important is that you help debate the alternatives. An ethics of
the commons
would require a change
in the criteria by which moral claims are justified.
- You may believe that current rates of population growth
and economic expansion can go on forever -- but debate with us what alternative
ethical theories would
arise if they cannot. Our thesis is that any ethical system is
mistaken and immoral if its practice would cause an environmental collapse.
- Many people assume that moral laws and principles are
absolutely certain, that we can know the final moral truth. If moral knowledge
is certain,
then factual
evidence is irrelevant, for it cannot limit or refute what is
morally certain.
- Our ethics and concepts of human rights have been formulated
for a world of a priori reasoning and unchanging conclusions.
Kant
spoke for that
absolutist ethical
tradition when he argued that only knowledge that is absolutely
certain can justify the slavish obedience that moral law demands.
He thought
he had found rational
grounds to justify the universal and unchanging character of
moral law. Moral knowledge, he concluded, is a priori and certain.
It
tells us,
for example, that
murder, lying, and stealing are wrong. The fact that those
acts may sometimes seem to benefit someone cannot diminish the absolute
certainty
that they
are wrong. Thus, for example, it is a contradiction to state
that murder
can sometimes
be right, for, by its very nature, murder is wrong.
- Many human rights are positive rights that involve the
exploitation of resources. (Negative rights restrain governments and don't
require resources.
For example,
governments shouldn't restrict our freedom of speech or tell
us how to pray.) Wherever in the world a child is born, that
child
has all
the
inherent human
rights -- including the right to have food, housing, and medical
care, which others must provide. When positive rights are accorded
equally
to everyone, they
first allow and then support constant growth, of both population
and the exploitation of natural resources.
- That leads to a pragmatic refutation of the belief that
moral knowledge is certain and infallible. If a growing population
faces a scarcity
of resources, then an
ethics of universal human rights with equality and justice
for all will fail. Those who survive will inevitably live
by a different
ethics.
- Once the resources necessary to satisfy all human needs
become insufficient, our options will be bracketed by two extremes.
One is to ration resources
so that everyone may share the inadequate supplies equally
and justly.
- The other is to have people act like players in a game
of musical chairs. In conditions of scarcity, there will
be
more people
than chairs, so
some people
will be left standing when the music stops. Some -- the
self-sacrificing altruists -- will refuse to take the
food that others need,
and so will perish. Others,
however, will not play by the rules. Rejecting the ethics
of a universal and unconditional moral law, they will
fight to
get the
resources
they and their
children need to live.
- Under neither extreme, nor all the options in between,
does it make sense to analyze the problem through the
lens of
human rights.
The
flaw in
an ethical
system of universal human rights, unqualified moral
obligations, and equal justice for all can be stated in its logically
simplest form:
If to try to live by those
principles under conditions of scarcity causes it to
be impossible to live at all, then the practice of
that
ethics
will cease.
Scarcity renders
such formulations
useless and ultimately causes such an ethics to become
extinct.
- We have described not a world that we want to see,
but one that we fear might come to be. Humans cannot
have
a moral
duty to
deliver the impossible,
or to
supply something if the act of supplying it harms
the ecosystem to
the point where life on earth becomes unsustainable.
Moral codes, no matter
how logical
and well reasoned, and human rights, no matter how
compassionate, must make sense within the limitations
of the ecosystem;
we cannot disregard
the factual consequences
of our ethics. If acting morally compromises the
ecosystem, then moral behavior must be rethought. Ethics cannot
demand a level
of resource
use that the ecosystem
cannot tolerate.
- The consequences of human behavior change as the
population grows. Most human activities have a
point of moral
reversal, before
which they may
cause great
benefit and little harm, but after which they may
cause so much harm as to overwhelm their benefits.
Here are
a few
representative examples,
the first of which is
often cited when considering Garrett Hardin's work:
- In a nearly empty lifeboat, rescuing a drowning
shipwreck victim causes benefit: It saves the life of the victim, and it
adds another person to help
manage the
boat. But in a lifeboat loaded to the
gunwales, rescuing another victim makes the boat sink and causes only harm:
Everyone drowns.
- When the number of cars on a road is small, traveling
by private car is a great convenience to all. But as the cars multiply,
a point of reversal
occurs: The
road now contains so many cars that
such travel is inconvenient. The number of private cars may increase to
the point where everyone comes to a halt. Thus,
in some conditions, car travel benefits
all. In other conditions, car travel makes it impossible for anyone to
move. It can also pump so much carbon dioxide
into the atmosphere that it alters
the world's climate.
- Economic growth can be beneficial when land, fuel,
water, and other needed resources are abundant. But it becomes harmful when
those resources become
scarce, or when
exploitation causes ecological
collapse. Every finite environment has a turning point, at which further
economic growth
would produce so much trash and pollution
that it would change from producing
benefit to causing harm. After that point is reached, additional growth only
increases scarcity and decreases overall
productivity. In conditions of scarcity,
economic growth has a negative impact.
- Every environment is finite. Technology can extend
but not eliminate limits. An acre of land can support only a few mature
sugar maples; only
so many radishes
can grow in a five-foot row of
dirt. Similar constraints operate in human affairs. When the population
in any environment is small and natural resources
plentiful,
every additional person increases
the welfare of all. As more and more people are added, they need increasingly
to exploit the finite resources of the
environment. At a certain point, the
members of an increasing population become so crowded
that they stop benefiting each
other; by damaging the environment that supports everyone, by limiting
the space available to each person, and by increasing
the amount of waste and pollution,
their activity begins to cause harm. That is,
population growth changes from
good to bad. And if the population continues to expand, its material demands
may so severely damage the environment as to
cause
a tragedy of the commons -- the
collapse of both environment and society.
- Those cases illustrate the fact that many
activities are right -- morally justified
-- when only
a limited number
of people
do them.
The same
activities become wrong
-- immoral -- when populations increase,
and more and more resources are exploited.
- Few people seem to understand the nature
of steady growth. Any rate of growth
has a doubling
time:
the period of
time it takes
for a
given quantity
to double.
It is a logical inevitability -- not
a matter subject to debate -- that
it takes
only a
relatively few
doublings for even a
small number
to equal
or exceed any
finite quantity, even a large one.
- One way to look at the impact of growth
is to think of a resource that would
last 100
years
if people
consumed it
at a constant
rate. If the
rate of consumption
increased 5 percent each year, the
resource would last only 36 years.
A supply adequate
for 1,000
years at
a
constant rate would
last 79
years at a 5-percent
rate of growth; a 10,000-year supply
would last only 125 years at the
same rate. Just
as no trees
grow
to the sky,
no growth
rate is
ultimately
sustainable.
- Because the natural resources available
for human use are finite, exponential
growth will use them
up in
a relatively
small number
of doublings.
The only possible questions are
those of timing: When will the resources
be too
depleted
to
support the population? When will
human society, which
is now
built on perpetual growth, fail?
- The mathematics makes it clear:
Any human activity that uses
matter or
energy must
reach a steady
state (or a
periodic cycle of boom
and bust,
which over the
long run is the same thing).
If not, it inevitably will cease
to exist. The moral of the story
is obvious: Any system of economics
or
ethics
that requires or even
allows steady growth in the exploitation
of resources is designed to collapse.
It is a
recipe for disaster.
- It is self-deception
for anyone to believe that historical
evidence contradicts mathematical necessity.
The
fact that the food supply
since the time
of Malthus has increased
faster than
the human population
does not refute Malthus's
general
thesis: that an increasing
population must, at
some time, need more
food, water, and other vital resources
than
the finite
earth or creative
technology
can supply
in perpetuity. In other
words, the finitude
of the earth makes it
inevitable that any behavior causing
growth
in population or in the
use of resources
-- including human moral,
political, and economic behavior -- will
sooner or later
be constrained by scarcity.
- Unlike current
ethics, the ethics of the commons builds
on the
assumption of impending
scarcity.
Scarcity requires
double-entry
bookkeeping:
Whenever someone
gains goods or services
that use matter
or energy, someone
else must lose matter or energy.
If the starving people
of a distant
nation
get food aid from the
United States, then the United States
loses that amount of
food; it also loses
the
fertility
of the
soil that
produced
the food.
To a point,
that
arrangement is appropriate
and workable. Soon,
however, helping one group of starving
people may
well mean
that we cannot
help
others. Everything
that a government
does prevents it from
doing something else.
When you have to balance a budget,
you
can say
yes to some important
services only by saying no to others.
Similarly, the ethics
of the
commons must rely on
trade-offs, not rights. It must specify
who or
what
gains, and
who or what
loses.
- Indeed, in a
finite world full of mutually dependent
beings,
you never
can do
just one thing. Every
human activity that
uses matter
or energy
pulls with it
a tangled skein of
unexpected consequences. Conditions
of crowding and scarcity
can cause moral acts
to change from
beneficial
to harmful, or
even disastrous;
acts that once were
moral can become immoral. We
must constantly
assess
the complex of
consequences, intended
or not, to
see if the overall
benefit of seemingly
moral acts outweighs
their overall harm.
- As Hardin suggested, the
collapse of any common
resource can
be avoided only by
limiting its
use. The ethics
of the commons
builds
on his
idea that the best
and most humane way of
avoiding the tragedy
of the commons
is mutual constraint,
mutually agreed
on
and mutually
enforced.
- Most important,
the ethics of the commons must
prevent a downward
spiral to scarcity.
One
of its first
principles is that the
human population
must reach and
maintain a stable state -- a
state in which
population growth
does not slowly but inexorably
diminish the
quality of, and
even
the
prospect for,
human life. Another
principle is that human exploitation
of natural resources
must remain safely
below the maximum levels
that a healthy
and resilient
ecosystem
can sustain.
A third is
the provision
of a margin of safety that prevents
natural
disasters
like storms,
floods, droughts,
earthquakes,
and volcanic
eruptions from causing
unsupportable
scarcity.
- Not to limit
human behavior in accordance
with those
principles
would be not only myopic, but
also
ultimately
a moral failure. To let excess
human fertility
or excess demand
for material
goods and services
cause
a shortage
of
natural resources
is as
immoral as
theft and
murder, and
for the same
reasons: They
deprive others of their property,
the fruits
of their labors, their
quality
of life, or
even their
lives.
- The ethics of
the commons is a pragmatic
ethics.
It denies
the
illusion
that human moral behavior
occurs
in a never-never
land,
where human
rights and
duties remain unchanging,
and scarcity
can never cancel
moral duties.
It does
not allow
a priori
moral arguments to dictate
behavior
that must inevitably
become extinct.
It accepts
the necessity of constraints on
both production
and reproduction.
As we learn
how
best to protect
the
current and
future health
of the earth's ecosystems,
the
ethics of
the commons can steadily
make
human life
more worth living.
- As populations
increase and
environments deteriorate, the
moral laws that
humans have relied
on for so long
can
no
longer solve
the most
pressing problems
of the modern
world. Human
rights
are an inadequate
and inappropriate
basis
on
which to distribute
scarce resources,
and we must
propose and debate
new ethical principles.
Herschel Elliott
is an emeritus
associate professor
of philosophy
at the University
of Florida.
Richard D.
Lamm, a former governor
of Colorado,
is a university
professor
at the University
of
Denver and
executive director
of its Center
for Public
Policy and
Contemporary Issues.
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