🚀 go-pugleaf

Dean Alaska writes:

In article <60120@dime.cs.umass.edu> yodaiken@chelm.cs.umass.edu (victor yodaiken) writes:
>>
>>
>>Agreed. Where we disagree is on whether there is an ordering on different
>>types of fairness. I don't believe that the destruction of a rain forest
>>is "worse" than the torture of a political dissident  by Gil's 
>>buddies in China or the lead poisoning of a city kid in East St. Louis. 
>>To call for social justice without recognizing the dangers of environmental
>>degradation is futile, but it is presumptious to insist that the life of
>>another person is less important on some absolute scale than the survival
>>of bears or hoot owls. 
>>
>>
>We do run into problems when we compare apples to oranges.  It might easily
>be accepted that for a person to sacrifice himself to save the rest of his
>family is not a sacrifice in vain.  Similarly, for an individual to 
>sacrifice for _his_ species survival might also be seen as worthwhile,
>though probably not for libertarians.  But an individual to be sacrificed
>to save a _different_ species?

What if the individual in question is not yet born?

I would argue that the sacrifice which humans have to make to secure ecological
justice is a sacrifice of land area and use (and pressures on the ocean), 
phased over time so that a reduced birth rate alone suffices. In biological
terms this is a sacrifice of our intermediate-term absolute fitness, but not 
at the cost of a big mortality increase (indeed, it reduces the risk of human 
dieoffs due to overpopulation and environmental degradation, and it very 
probably *increases* our absolute fitness in the long term over what it would
become otherwise, by protecting the biological foundations of all the carrying 
capacities of the planet.) I do think that we must adopt policies which 
generate a steady, firm pressure to move things in that direction over the
next five to ten generations (but not so rapidly as to be severely 
dislocating).  There will be opposition to this because it will squeeze 
standards of living and individual profits. 

BTW there *have* been people who effectivly "sacrificed" themselves for other
species. Fossey and Adamson (I think his name was... "Born Free") come to
mind. There are likely to be more in future. Judi Bari came close to being
a sacrifice for coast redwood trees. Chico Mendez is a runner up, but there
was personal economic incentive involved in his cause, so maybe it wasn't
quite "for a different species".

	*	*	*	*	*	*	*	*

Ecological justice in no way automatically leads to social justice, any 
more than social justice automatically leads to the most efficient market
allocations though it can be compatible with them (remembering that the 
wealth distribution is independent of the market's ability to allocate). 
Just as social justice imposes an *independent* constraint on the social 
system, over and above efficiency of markets, so does ecological justice. 
In effect, it demands a fairer distribution of fundamental resource wealth
between human society and other species. To push the economic analogy, 
wilderness recovery is redistributive justice. Social justice continues to
be a concern within the allocation of human wealth and incomes even after
ecological justice is attained, just as market efficiency continues to be
a concern even after social justice is attained. This is the meaning of the
">>" sign in the inequality:

Ecological Justice >> Social Justice >> Individual Subjective Utility 
(market efficiency)

[The idea of these sorts of ">>" ethical inequalities is due to John Rawls.
(_A Theory of Justice_) They were first applied to environmental ethics by 
Holmes Ralston.] 

Again, this is the sense in which I insist that ecological justice is "higher"
than social justice or markets. It is not a sense which weighs an individual
timber executive against an individual spotted owl, any more than the income 
tax + social programs weighs an individual wealthy person against an individual
poor person. Social justice (among other things) restructures wealth and income
*systematically*. Ecological justice also does this *systematically*, but 
between our species and all others. In both cases, a fundamental requirement
of *fairness* is being met. Also, in both cases, the way to do this (I would
argue, after Rawls re social justice) is via a *contract* mechanism -- i.e. 
by laws and regulations and the structure of government -- rather than by a 
predefined *measure* mechanism -- i.e. "utility", subjective or otherwise, 
or market price. 

Just as cost/benefit doesn't apply to social justice (e.g suppose we knew 
that a certain form of slavery would make one's own group or even society 
as a whole wealthier than a free society, the benefit would not outweigh the
social injustice) so it also doesn't apply to ecological justice (the excessive
benefit of humanity -- even if real -- at the expense of all other species 
does not outweigh the ecological injustice.) Note that neither social justice
nor ecological justice requires *equality* of wealth among individuals or 
niches, only a cap to inequality, a minimum standard of living as a safety net
for humans, a MAR for nonhumans enough to allow normal evolution to proceed. 
Justice does not require that we guarantee success either to individuals or
to nonhumans -- it *does* require that the system not be accutely biased so 
as to systematically disadvantage people or create a mass extinction among 
disadvantaged species (disadvanged through human doing). It disallows 
structural poverty and structural mass extinctions. 

As we have a "social contract" to define social justice independent of and
prior to the operation of markets, so we need an "ecological contract" to
define ecological justice prior to the operation of social justice. The
Earth Charter was a feeble step in the direction of spelling out that 
ecological contract, one which preserved the deepest injustice of the current
system, the idea that humans have absolute sovereignty over all other species
living where they do. This flaw, like the blindness of the founding fathers
of the US social contract towards slavery, threatens to blow the contract 
apart someday.

Let's hope the final resolution isn't as bloody as the US Civil War.

In the meantime, even while this terrible contradiction rules, the effective 
ecological contract we must operate under is one which produces a large-scale,
slow but steady, inexorable wilderness recovery over the entire planet. There 
is an excellent opportunity at hand to begin this in the US very soon.

------------
Alan McGowen