This World Is Not Real

Like I said in my last post, the paleontologists came to the same conclusion the biologists did: it is essential that we care about biodiversity, and doing so requires a moral discussion on the order of ending slavery, declaring free speech, or striving for gender equality. All things that aren't really in their field! But they are in the field of moral philosophy, which is what I read next.

The moral philosophers I read sounded a lot like the environmentalists, except they hadn't concluded anything yet. They lamented humanity's lost connection to nature, but said the role of philosophy is in getting people to choose how much culture and nature they want, based on what science and economics tell them will happen. The thing is, science tells us environmental degradation, left unchecked, will ruin all of the cultural advancements we've made. Political theory says that in crowded environments where resources must be tightly controlled, democracy is unlikely: submarines, spaceships and the like are all military dictatorships. So we need to take this into account. But it seems like ethicists are more around to help people figure out what they want than to tell them what they should do. Which makes sense, but it's somewhat disappointing; one discomfiting thing about growing from a child to an adult is becoming your own moral authority, then realizing all our rules were just made up by other adults.

Ethical dilemmas in environmentalism are still possible, like when an elk was stuck in a tar pit in a US national park, and calling out for help before it was ripped to pieces by wolves. The consensus seems to be that humans should alleviate as much suffering that they are responsible for as possible, while respecting the wildness of animals. But what if the elk is from a locally threatened population, reduced by hunting, pushed to this dangerous habitat by encroaching settlement? What about the wolf's right to eat? He may be endangered as well. Merely extending human ethics to wild animals belittles or sabotages the harsh Darwinian realities of wild life, but the suffering that humans cause other animals is complicated and requires consensus built through discussion and moral prioritizing.

How do we make these decisions, though? It has to do with how we see ourselves as a species. I read some more philosophy that dealt with humans specifically, asking questions about whether or not we're special and if so, what we should do about it. From a certain perspective, we have escaped the Darwinian trap. Changes in our own behaviour are dictated by cultural, not biological evolution. We have self-reflective capacities we have yet to ascribe to any other species. And we have the power to affect the planet to an extent not shared by any other macro-organism.

Philosophers of human life generally agree that we have the choice not to follow natural selection in the same way that an amoeba does. We can choose to self-impose limits on the effect we have on the planet. If overpopulation would have disastrous socio-political consequences, it's in our best interests to do so. The most optimistic of them said that we are the only species that can prolong the Earth's window for supporting life, beyond what would naturally occur, because our science can help us engineer the climate. So we have the capacity to be the most positive species on the planet!

Offsetting this optimism was a strange and fascinating argument from astrophysicist J. Richard Gott. He attempted to determine whether humans would continue to increase in number and sophistication; whether we were a true exception. Dealing as astrophysicists do in competing theoretical explanations where scientific tests are impossible, all he could conclude was whether or not we should believe that we are exceptions, whether it was likely or not. He found that it was very unlikely, given the current population explosion, that it would continue. He made it clear that he didn't think humans would necessarily go extinct soon, but that they were unlikely to keep increasing.

The way he did this was argue that if the life we are living was picked at random from all of the human lives that have happened and will happen in the future, ours is most likely to be chronologically somewhere in the middle. Assuming we were thrown into one of the lives, it would be unlikely to be one of the first 5% of human lives, or one of the last 5%. And yet humans have existed in relatively modest numbers until the last few hundred years. So Gott argues that we should be sceptical of any potential future that imagines the population will continue to grow or even stay this high for a long period of time, since a significant percentage (10%?) of the human lives ever estimated to have existed are being lived right now.

This is a weird type of argument I was not familiar with, and one that seems likely to be wrong at first glance. After all, you could have made the same argument at any point in human history, and with hindsight you'd always be wrong. But it isn't claiming to predict anything, it's just saying that we shouldn't base our decisions on the theoretically unlikely event that the human population will continue to increase or stay at current levels for a long time. That conclusion actually seems pretty reasonable, despite the fact that humans continue to seem like an exception. We may well be, but we seem to be approaching the carrying capacity of an increasingly fragile Earth. And we are not yet close to colonizing other worlds, so this is a hard limit (technology-dependent) for now.

So far I'd seen environmentalists, biologists, paleontologists, and philosophers weigh on the problem of the loss of biodiversity. One thing they all had in common was they recommend immediate action, and the second thing they had in common was passing the buck of actually enacting the necessary change to the political and economic spheres. So I knew I needed to learn more about that; not only what we need to change, but the ways the current system makes change difficult.