🚀 go-pugleaf

I (Alan McGowen) wrote:

>>Such inequalities of power are the very definition of social injustice.
>>For the record, I oppose that injustice -- I say this because people keep
>>asserting, in essence, that I do not oppose it. But I also oppose the injustice
>>inherent in the enormous inequality of exercised power between industrial 
>>civilization and the biosphere. This injustice is an even greater crime, 
>>because social injustice can repair itself in historical time if the 
>>biological matrix is healthy, while the effects of ecological injustice may
>>not be repairable in all of future human existence -- to say nothing of the 
>>affect on other species that share the Earth with us. 
>

Victor wrote:

>I think that these kinds of moral inequalities are of limited value. 
>Social injustice may "repair itself" over historical time, but this is
>an abstraction that is of little comfort to actual human beings who have
>just one short life. Over
>a long enough time span, any human action can be viewed as
>insignificant. When the sun novas, will it matter whether any Grizzlies
>survived the 20th century or whether there were death camps?  What matters
>is the lived experience of human beings, and it is clear that the ongoing
>destruction of the biosphere is leading to a radical or even terminal 
>impoverishment of the quality of human life. 
>There is no moral calculus that can tell us whether 90% species extinction
>is "worse" than the death of one child.  The ongoing destruction of the
>biosphere is wrong, ugly, stupid, and self-destructive. Period. Leave the 
>fake mathematics of comparitive misery to such charlatans as Sam Huntington.

All of the above tacitly accepts an anthropocentric utilitarianism which
I explicitly reject. My view is closer to "ecocentric utilitarianism",
in which the niche requirements of grizzlies have comparable weight with 
those of humans. Thus I disagree with the statement that "what matters is 
the lived experience of human beings". That matters to humans, because of 
our specific adaptations of sociality and individuality. Our niche must 
support that sociality and individuality: call that a need for social justice.
But our niche does not matter more than that of grizzlies.

An ecologically just arrangement is one in which there is habitat enough
for humans to support our niche requirements for social justice and cultural
continuity and habitat enough for grizzlies (e.g.) to support their niche
requirements and evolutionary persistence. Ecological justice is thus prior 
to social justice because it delimits the scope of social justice. Social 
justice may not legitimately demand ever increasing amounts of land for 
humans -- it may not legitimately demand absolute reproductive freedom of 
humans, for example, or absolute freedom to use land in any way we please.
That is overruled by the deeper demands of ecological justice. 

Ecological justice, in short, is something which functions for us like the
coevolved restrictions of niche which apply to all other species in an
ecosystem: it restricts the human niche; it limits human growth and human
power to a level which is compatible with the continuance of the grand
evolutionary enterprise of life in all its remaining diversity. Although
ecological justice is certainly compatible with the longest-term interests
of humanity, its requirements do not arise out of those interests but out of 
the evolutionary interests of all species. [By "interests" here I mean 
fitness needs simply, not only specifically human, socialized, symbolized, 
verbally communicable fitness needs. E.g. the owl's interest in the snag for
nesting and the duff to find dinner, and not just the human's interest in 
the timber for tables. And I also do *not* mean neural motivational systems
evolved to help secure fitness needs: plants have fitness needs and "interests"
in the evolutionary sense as well as animals do. My position is *not* that 
of animal liberationists ("neural chauvinists").]

The view that human fitness needs, and *only* human fitness needs, have
ethical weight is just a form of naked supremecism, no more defensible than
racial supremecism. 

Also, ecological justice is not primarily concerned with individual organisms,
but with the ecological functions provided by the occupants of the various 
*niches*. Its concern is that these niches be allowed enough of the total 
resource to have a normal, basic evolutionary opportunity, not necessarily a 
human-supported evolutionary guarantee. However, in our present human-caused
mass extinction crisis, ecological justice requires a kind of affirmative 
action (habitat restoration, reintroductions) to restore this basic fair 
chance. 

Thus ecological justice, like social justice, derives ultimately from a
deeper human ethical requirement for *fairness*. Developing *fairness* in
our relations with the biosphere, as well as with each other, is the key
to both kinds of justice, and to our own brightest human future.

Just wanted to make my position clear (with more than a little indebtedness
to John Rawls among others).

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

"Man does not live by gap analysis alone." -- Michael Soule.

"...not as lord and master but as plain citizen of the land
community..." -- Aldo Leopold (approximately).