🚀 go-pugleaf

Kevin Brown writes:

In article <149181066@hpindda.cup.hp.com> alanm@hpindda.cup.hp.com (Alan McGowen) writes:

>I admit that I cannot justify anthropocentrism in any objective fashion.
>That's because anthropocentrism, like ecocentrism, is a value system.
>But I can at least give you a non-circular basis: anthropocentrism is
>*instinctive*, in that it has instinct as its root.  Can you say the same
>of ecocentrism?  Are you hard-wired to value other species as much, if
>not more, than the human species?  Most people aren't.

"Instinct" doesn't *dictate* ethics. Humans are prefectly capable of
adopting ethics that override instinct utterly, for example the Japanese
Kamakazi Corp (all volunteer) in WWII, or the marine who throws himself
on a grenade to save a buddy. Human ethics is not "hard-wired".

The manner in which our genes influence ethics is much subtler than that.
They give us emotional capacities and propensities and attention mechanisms
that may serve to reinforce a cultural ethic or that may be sources of 
discomfort under an cultural ethic, but they don't uniquely determine the 
symbolic content of the ethic. 

Biology is *not* destiny. It is more like a path of least resistance. Humans
do not always follow the path of least resistance, and do not always prize 
it above all other paths. Indeed, Freud thought that the basis of all 
civilization was an ethics which overrides instinct to a degree [_Civilization
and Its Discontents_]. I'm not sure I agree with that, but it shows that 
Brown's idea that an ethics has to tow the instinctive line is far from
universally accepted as well as contradicted by specific examples.

However, it is not even clear that ecocentrism has to be a significantly 
harder path than any of the anthropocentric ethics that have dominated in
history. It is very much unclear that it would be harder than the kind
of anthropocentrism that would become necessary in a highly degraded world
which needs to be minutely managed by humans to ensure daily survival. 

Anthropocentrism pursued as a short-term goal *is* nickel-and-diming the
biosphere to death, and it is not a foregone conclusion that the 
intensifications of anthropocentric ethics that this path will require 
in the future, in an increasingly artificial, micromanaged, and 
fault-intolerant world, will not eventually exceed ecocentrism in
discomfort level. In fact, it would appear that for some people, this has 
perhaps already happened. 

As I've tried to point out to the technocentrics in the past, the first
"limiting resource" on the path of unending growth may not be energy or
some mineral -- it may be a limit to the human capacity to adapt to the 
changes we have brought about. 

Ecocentric ethics, by ensuring a world in which we *know* humans are adaptive,
does not risk this failure. 

>>As I said in the following sentence, ecological justice is not primarily
>>about relations with individual organisms. It's about our effects on whole
>>ecosystems, populations and species.
>
>But at *some* point you *have* to deal with individuals, because it is
>at that level that actions occur.  If your scheme cannot ultimately be
>reduced to that level, then it is unimplementable!
>
>Can you answer the question of whether or not I should kill the cockroach
>that I might see crawling across my floor?  If your ethical system does not
>yield an answer to such questions, then it is *powerless*, for (as you have
>said yourself) it is at *that* level that we humans have "nickel-and-dimed"
>the ecosystem.

No, the level of detail generally needed is the number of humans using an 
area and how they are using it on average, not the question of whether an
individual cockroach is killed by an individual human foot.

I agree that there is a *major* problem here, but it is an educational 
problem. Until people have some basic grasp of the biology involved, ethical
conundrums like this will continue to be brought up to confuse the issue.

It's exactly as if I were to argue that we need an ethics to help prevent
homelessness, and Brown were to say -- "OK, are you willing to give up your
home for that person over there?" This is a pseudoformulation of the problem.
The reasonable formulation is one which combats structural causes of poverty
and homelessness and institutes programs to ameliorate conditions for those
who are currently homeless. My role in that (as I am not an expert in any of
those areas) will frankly just be one of contributing to the revenues needed
via taxes.

Likewise in the "me vs griz" pseudoproblem (i.e. which of us is more important)
the correct formulation is "how do we ensure that there is enough habitat for
griz and that the bears recover most of their original range in time?" The
answer to that is a wilderness recovery system, which gradually regenerates
habitat and reintroduces bears. Ecocentrism has nothing to do with offering
oneself to bears for supper.

>Now, *my* value system says that it's okay to trash ecosystems provided that
>we don't endanger ourselves in the process.  *Your* value system says that
>it's not.  

That is precisely why your value system inexorably leads to degradation 
of the biosphere. Your value system is inherently unstable, as it points
in different directions on different time scales. If it did not, tragedy
of the commons problems could not arise in your value system. 

There is nothing unique to humanity in this. Individual fitness maximization
can lead to a "tragedy of the commons" for *any* species which is not 
externally regulated by ecological limits so as to prevent it. Ecocentrism
is a concious adoption of the equivalent of ecological limits to compensate 
for the fact that we are no longer naturally regulated in this way. It's a
specific solution -- one only open to a species with foresight -- to a general
problem, which is otherwise solved by the coevolution of niches (limits to 
growth) or, if that fails, by extinction. It produces the same sort of effect 
as a coevolutionary equilibrium, so I call it one, though of course we don't
acquire ecocentrism by changes to our genes, but to our cultures.

>There *is* no "correct" or "incorrect" value system because value
>systems are inherently subjective.

Extinction is not subjective. Value systems are adaptations.  They may succeed
or fail. And what is adaptive in the short-term may prove lethal in the long
term. That too is not subjective. We could go down to extinction upholding
the autonomy of ethics from reality, but all that this "autonomy" doctrine
would prove in the end would be its own maladaptedness. We would then be 
Epistemologically Correct fossils.

An *adaptation* does not have to be inherited genetically, BTW. Many of 
the adaptations which are the most important traits of humans are inherited
both genetically and culturally, eg. language. To say that a trait is 
adaptive is to say that it contributes to the fitness of some level of 
organization in some way and is heritable, not to specify the mechanism of 
inheritance. I would contend that Schrodinger's equation is an adaptive
trait, though the mechanism by which the student inherits it is very 
different from the one by which straight or curly hair is inherited. It's 
also important to understand that "fitness" is not a single number. Indeed,
my entire argument revolves around the fact that a trait -- anthropocentric 
ethics -- that increases immediate individual relative fitness -- may *not*
be adaptive in the biological sense. It may be an evolutionary trap, which 
reduces total absolute fitness later on, through degrading the environment 
or making suitable mates ever harder to find, etc.  In the extreme case, 
such a trap might inexorably carry a species straight to extinction. 
Anthropocentrism has the makings of such a trap. Ecocentrism is the way 
to avoid such a trap without doing excessive violence to our nature. It 
is far more likely to prove adaptive than anthropocentrism.

The *only* sense in which an ethics can be "correct" or "incorrect" is the 
sense of its adaptedness. That is the whole point of an ethics. And that 
is *not* a subjective question. 

This bears repeating at every opportunity, since the need to repeat it 
shows how little evolutionary biology has penetrated popular thought as yet, 
even in places like "sci.*" boards. *An* *Ethics* *can* *be* *adaptive* *or*
*maladaptive*. And which it is is *not* purely a matter of human fiat. 

And it is worth remembering that there are no guarantees of survival in 
evolution. If Brown were right that anthropocentrism is "hard-wired",
and we could not change our ways at all, that might well *reduce* our 
lifespan as a species -- once the world were different enough from 
that in which our (supposedly) hard-wired ethics had arisen. However,
behavioral and social flexibility is the great human forte -- our 
primary adaptive complex -- so this is not likely to be an insuperable
obstacle. Most of the obstacles we will face are not instinctual ones 
at all, but entrenched economic interests that are much more a product 
of historical and social contingency than of human biology.

The right will tell you that this is all "instinct" because they want you 
to believe that you have no hope of changing it. The extinction of numerous
Pacific Northwest species is not an inevitable product of human instinct,
but, if we were to allow it, would be a specific result of specific timber 
companies' desire to maximize their immediate profits at the expense of the 
public forests. This is very preventable, i.e. stop selling timber on that
public land. That change in policy is about to happen, and the right is 
about to discover that their sacred "instinct" for naked, mindless greed 
will not be able to stop that change. Some neocortical functions in our
new president will override their limbic systems, as they cannot manage
it themselves.

Likewise, we can institute a wilderness recovery system almost entirely
by changing policy on public lands (some of the policy changes needed, 
such as increased user fees in certain areas, are very likely to be 
adopted soon). Changes in zoning in surrounding areas and a slow, methodical,
return of degraded private lands to recovery via zoning changes and purchase 
over the next 5 to 10 generations could do the rest. This will reverse the 
degradation of the landscape and can do it in a manner that will not require 
a single person to offer himself voluntarily to Griz as an ecocentric dinner.

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