Doing Ethics

How do we know our duty? The answer given by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) continues to be the foundation of deontological ethics. Kant lived a century after Isaac Newton explained the mechanics of the world without relying on divine intervention (except for the act of creation), which may be why Kant shunned religious reasoning despite being a Christian. Kant claimed to rely on reason alone in asserting that our duty is simply to do what is rational.

More than a century and a half later, when colonized societies in Africa and Asia were struggling for independence, Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) transformed the Hindu idea of duty, which is rooted in the caste traditions of Indian culture, into an imperative to seek truth-power (satyagraha) through non-violent action (ahimsa). For Gandhi, too, our duty is rational.

Kant argued that reason enables us to do our duty because it reflects the moral law within us. Doing our duty means acting on our conscience, which Kant saw as our rational nature. Actions are ethical, he asserted, when we do with a good will what reason reveals to be right. This does not mean acting to achieve the best consequences. Instead, it means acting rationally with good intentions.

For Kant, an ethical principle is rational if we all, as rational beings, agree that it may be applied without any exceptions. Such a categorical imperative, he argued, is the opposite of hypothetical thinking, which involves conditional statements, such as: "I would take an action, if I thought it would have primarily beneficial consequences."

Kant reasoned that acting in a way which has universal application requires respecting the dignity of every person. Our autonomy is linked to our rationality, which is distinctly human. Therefore, we contradict ourselves and act irrationally, if we treat other persons as less than ends in themselves, by using them as means to gain our own ends.[1]

Moral philosophers rely on Kant’s deontological argument on behalf of our rationality and autonomy to justify asserting the rights of individuals. Chapter 7 considers this argument and the development of human rights law.

[1] Kant’s categorical “is often stated in two forms: 1) Act only on that maxim [ethical presumption] through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law. 2) Act as to use humanity, both in your own person and in the person of every other, always at the same time as an end, never as a means.” See Robert Traer and Harlan Stelmach, Doing Ethics in a Diverse World, chapter 4, for a more detailed presentation.

Labels: dee.4.1

Given the complexity of the real economy, “the task of developing new economic models must be an intensely interdisciplinary activity. Any realistic evaluation of the costs of doing business in this economy will require the use of models in which economic systems, or parts, are treated as open systems that mutually interact within the single system of the whole biosphere.”[1]

We must transform our growth economy into a green economy. Only a joint effort by business and government leaders, at the prodding of citizens, will lead to the economic and political changes needed to make our industrial society environmentally sustainable. William McDonough and Michael Braungart, who make their living by creating sustainable products, buildings, and communities, are convinced that this is our future.

“We believe that humans can incorporate the best of technology and culture so that our civilized places reflect a new view. Buildings, systems, neighborhoods, and even whole cities can be entwined with surrounding ecosystems in ways that are mutually enriching. We agree that it is important to leave some natural places to thrive on their own, without undue human interference or habitation. But we also believe that industry can be so safe, effective, enriching, and intelligent that it need not be fenced off from other human activity.”[2]

McDonough and Braungart affirm that we will have an environmentally sustainable and productive economy when people and industries are committed to creating:
· Buildings that, like trees, produce more energy than they consume and purify their own waste water.
· Factories that produce effluents that are drinking water.
· Products that, when their useful life is over, do not become useless waste but can be tossed onto the ground to decompose and become food for plants and animals and nutrients for soil; or, alternately, that can return to industrial cycles to supply high-quality raw materials for new products.
· Billions, even trillions, of dollars’ worth of materials accrued for human and natural purposes each year.
· Transportation that improves the quality of life while delivering goods and services.[3]

[1] Robert Nadeau and Menas Kafatos, The Non-Local Universe, 206.
[2] William McDonough and Michael Braungart, Cradle to Cradle, 87.
[3] Ibid., 90-91.

Unfortunately, “Instead of recognizing that the human economy is a dependent subset of the biosphere, many economists still assume that economic growth and liberalization, with wealth creation, is the key to affording adequate environmental management. Environmental quality is believed to be most effectively achieved through market forces, even as social and environmental costs are ‘externalized’.”[1]

To ensure that economic development is ecologically sustainable, perhaps our long term goal should be a steady-state economy―an economic system that would “maintain constant stocks of wealth and people at levels that are sufficient for a long and good life.”[2] John Stuart Mill, who supported political and economic freedom, argued that: “a stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement. There would be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress…when minds cease to be engrossed by the art of getting on.”[3]

What might such an economy be like? “Material well-being would almost certainly be indexed by the quality of the existing inventory of goods, rather than by the rate of physical turnover. Planned obsolescence would be eliminated. Excessive consumption and waste would become causes of embarrassment, rather than symbols of prestige.”[4]

This would mean discarding the Gross National Product (GNP) and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) indices[5] used to measure economic growth, for these do not measure economic wellbeing but only the quantity of economic activity. “GNP reflects all expenditures, including many corrective measures such as policing, prisons, hospital services, homeless shelters, lawsuits, and every form of pollution and waste….The onwards-and-upwards rise of GNP presumes that the more people spend, the better their lives must become. But GNP makes no distinction between desirables and undesirables; it only distinguishes more from less.”[6]

The Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI)[7] and the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW)[8] offer alternative ways of measuring economic success. “Computation of the ISEW begins with personal consumption, but then adjusts this in relation to income distribution. (Our assumption is that the well-being of the society as a whole is affected by the condition of the poorest.) The index then adds for household services, chiefly the contribution of housewives. It subtracts for ‘defensive costs,’ that is, costs that result from economic growth and the social changes, such as urbanization, that accompany it. (For example, the cost of commuting to work should not be viewed as an addition to welfare just because it adds to the GNP.) This applies also to the cost of pollution. Since it is an index of sustainable welfare, it subtracts for the reduction of natural capital, and adds or subtracts for change in the net international position.”[9]

Also, we need to construct “economic models that provide a better cost accounting of the short- and long-term impacts of real-world economic activities and that privilege, through taxation and incentives, the development and implementation of nonpolluting technologies and processes.”[10]

[1] Anthony J. McMichael, Colin D. Butler, and Carl Folke, “New Visions for Addressing Sustainability,” in Donald Kennedy, ed., Science Magazine’s State of the Planet: 2006-2007 (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2006), 164.
[2] Herman E. Daly and Joshua Farley, Ecological Economics, 55. For example, “[T]he state of Kerala in India shows that many social needs can be met without significant economic growth. The per capita income of Kerala is about the same as that for India as a whole. But, with regard to infant mortality and life expectancy, it ranks well in comparison with highly industrialized nations. At the same time it has greatly reduced its rate of population growth without resorting to authoritarian measures. It has achieved this by educating its people, and especially its women, about health and population issues, providing inexpensive care to all, and meeting other basic needs.” John B. Cobb, Jr., “Toward a Just and Sustainable Economic Order,” in Andrew Light and Holmes Rolston III, eds., Environmental Ethics, 365.
[3] John S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, Book IV, Chapter VI (1848), in Herman E. Daly and Joshua Farley, Ecological Economics, 54, and online at http://www.econlib.org/library/Mill/mlPbl.html.
[4] D. Hayes, Repairs, Reuse, Recycling – First Steps to a Sustainable Society (Washington, DC: The Worldwatch Institute, Paper 23, 1978), in Charles J. Kibert, Jan Sendzimir, and G. Bradley Guy, “Defining an Ecology of Construction,” Charles J. Kibert, Jan Sendzimir, and G. Bradley Guy, eds., Construction Ecology, 16.
[5] “In December 1991, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), an agency within the Department of Commerce, began to emphasize gross domestic product (GDP) over gross national product (GNP) as the most comprehensive measure of production in the U.S. The difference between GNP and GDP lies in the treatment of income from foreign sources. GNP measures the value of goods and services produced by US nationals, while GDP measures the value of goods and services produced within the boundaries of the US.” “The Difference between GNP and GDP,” online at http://www.cals.ncsu.edu/course/are012/readings/gdp&lead.html.
[6] “The United States’ per capita GNP registered an increase of 38 percent during the period 1980-1998, yet a decline in GPI of 25 percent.” Norman Myers and Jennifer Kent, Perverse Subsidies, 15.
[7] “Genuine Progress Indicator,” Redefining Progress: The Nature of Economics, online at http://www.rprogress.org/sustainability_indicators/genuine_progress_indicator.htm.
[8] “Improving and Promoting the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare,” International Institute for Sustainable Development, online at http://www.iisd.org/measure/compendium/DisplayInitiative.aspx?id=1.
[9] John B. Cobb, Jr., “Toward a Just and Sustainable Economic Order,” in Andrew Light and Holmes Rolston III, eds., Environmental Ethics, 365.
[10] Robert Nadeau and Menas Kafatos, The Non-Local Universe, 205.

Economist Duncan K. Foley wrote A Guide to Economic Theory “to give people more confidence in their own moral judgments” about economics.[1] He argues that simply promoting self-interest will not lead to the best world for the greatest number of persons, and that globalized trade will not “solve the problems of poverty and inequality.”[2] Nor will an economic theory based on an uncritical view of self-interest and open markets resolve the environmental crisis.

Economist Paul Krugman agrees, quoting Franklin D. Roosevelt to make the point: “We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals. We know now that it is bad economics.”[3] Krugman says, “These words apply perfectly to climate change. It’s in the interest of most people (and especially their descendants) that somebody do something to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, but each individual would like that somebody to be somebody else. Leave it up to the free market, and in a few generations Florida will be underwater.”[4]

What are we to do? Our analysis supports four ethical and economic presumptions. First, our goal should be an environmentally sustainable economy.[5] We have a duty to protect our habitat, whether we understand this only as a duty to other people, or also as a duty to other species. In addition, I have argued that we have a duty to give our descendents moral consideration, because we feel our ancestors had a duty to consider our wellbeing in making decisions about the environment.[6]

Therefore, we must ensure economic policies that value ecosystem functions and biodiversity, as well as efficiency, by supporting laws that effectively regulate our use of finite nature resources. The harvest of renewable resources (such as fish and forests) should be limited to less than the optimal scale, so these populations may replenish. The extraction of nonrenewable natural resources that are being depleted (such as oil) should be taxed to fund the development of alternative ways to meet the same need with other materials.

Second, we should pay as we go for the costs of environmental externalities. We cannot rely on an “invisible hand” to repair the environmental damage due to economic development. Moreover, if we accept that our moral community includes future generations as well as the living, we have a duty to limit the adverse impact of our economy on the environment.[7]
Therefore, we should include in our economic accounting the investment needed to:
· Develop substitutes for nonrenewable resources being depleted.
· Treat waste that exceeds the environment’s absorption capacity.
· Restore degraded environments.[8]
Environmental costs should be assessed by law to the business that generates them or, if this is not feasible, to the country under whose jurisdiction the business is operating.[9]

Third, environmental policies should affirm the precautionary principle, “which states that when a practice or product raises potentially significant threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary action should be taken to restrict or eliminate it.”[10] This ethical principle puts the burden of proof for an action, which may likely harm the environment or human life, on those who propose to take the action, rather than on those who caution against it.
Reasoning on the basis of the precautionary principle involves rejecting the claim that environmental issues should be decided simply by predicting likely consequences. The precautionary principle asserts that we have a duty to do no harm to the environment when consequential predictions are not sufficiently confirmed by scientific evidence to address the risks of taking an action.

Ecosystems are poorly understood and thus unpredictable, so to be on the safe side economic policies should leave a margin for error. For instance, harvesting a renewable resource, such as fish or trees, should be limited to less than the predicted optimal scale, as this estimate is inherently imprecise.

Acting on the precautionary principle also requires protecting ecosystem processes from market pricing. The emergent properties of ecosystems (“fund-services resources”) are of great value for life, and the consequences of damaging these processes are unpredictable. Although market pricing is efficient for manufactured goods, it does not adequately protect ecosystem benefits. (The value of a forest, for example, is not simply the market value of its cut lumber.) Governments must ensure protection for the integrity of ecosystems.[11]

Fourth, economic power should be constrained by the rule of law. Both economic freedom and political freedom require decision-making with checks and balances, so that power is distributed and limited. This basic principle of civics is an ethical imperative as well.

At the global level this will require new international treaties that place the activities of international economic institutions, such as the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO, under the political control of the United Nations. As this change would also strengthen national governments, it might foster a political process with greater checks and balances, which is the only effective way to promote economic trade and also protect the natural environment.

“The primacy of the political over the economic, combined with weakening global economic institutions [such as the World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO], would make possible economic decentralization. It would be possible for nations and even regions within nations to develop relatively self-sufficient economies. They would then trade with one another only as this did not weaken their capacity to meet their own basic needs. They would cooperate in establishing larger markets for goods that cannot be efficiently produced for smaller ones.”[12]

In this new political and economic order, environmental problems would be the responsibility of those making decisions on the same scale as the problem. Garbage collection takes place in municipalities, and thus should be managed by local authorities. “By contrast, global warming is fundamentally a global problem, because emissions anywhere affect the climate everywhere. Here we really do need global policy.”[13]

Growing wealth disparity should be checked at all levels of the economy, and this means replacing the rhetoric of “free trade” with procedures that ensure fair trade.[14] Both employees and the environment should be protected by laws that are effective and fair. Workers ought to be guaranteed a living wage and safe working conditions, and producing and trading goods should be subject to regulations that ensure environmental sustainability.[15] This means international as well as national constraints on the economy.

Our primary focus, however, should be local. Seeing the world as a global economy through the lens of neoclassical economics has hidden for too long an alternative view of the world as a biosphere of diverse political and economic communities. Embracing this new view now matters.

“For example, most of the rapid deforestation of the planet is for the sake of export, either of lumber or of beef that can be raised on formerly forested land. If the focus of attention is on the local economy, the value of the standing forest counts for more. In this and other ways, in regions which were not heavily oriented to export, the people would often be concerned that their region continue to provide a habitable home to their children, and they would be more likely to adopt sustainable relations to the environment.”[16]

[i] Peter Steinfels, “Economics: The Invisible Hand of the Market,” The New York Times, (Nov. 25, 2006), A11.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Paul Krugman, “Gore’s Derangement Syndrome,” The New York Times (Oct. 15, 2007), online at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/15/opinion/15krugman.html.
[4] “The solution to such conflicts between self-interest and the common good is to provide individuals with an incentive to do the right thing.” Ibid.
[5] Chapter 10 discusses the concept of sustainability.
[6] This follows, if we extend the reasoning of the Golden Rule to future generations. See chapter 4.
[7] John C. Bogle, founder of the Vanguard Mutual Fund, condemns the “shocking misuse of our world’s natural resources, as if they were ours to waste rather than ours to preserve as a social trust for future generations.” John C. Bogle, The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism, xvi.
[8] The loss of natural capital may be captured by severance and waste disposal fees on producers, and these funds should be dedicated to seeking substitute resources and more efficient ways of absorbing and recycling waste. Natural capital is: “Stocks or funds provided by nature (biotic or abiotic) that yield a valuable flow into the future of either natural resources or natural services.” Herman E. Daly and Joshua Farley, Ecological Economics, 437.
[9] Herman E. Daly and Joshua Farley, Ecological Economics, 333.
[10] The International Forum on Globalization (IFG), online at http://www.ifg.org/about.htm.
[11] “Recognizing the social and ecological value of [such] a resource leads to its equitable and sustainable use. In contrast, assessing [such] a resource only in terms of market price creates patterns of nonsustainable and inequitable use.” Vandana Shiva, Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2002), 6.
[12] “Since much of the unsustainability of the present economy stems from the appropriation of the resources of the poor countries by the richer ones, the ending of the present global economic system would counter this.” John B. Cobb, Jr., “Toward a Just and Sustainable Economic Order,” in Andrew Light and Holmes Rolston III, eds., Environmental Ethics, 367.
[13] Herman E. Daly and Joshua Farley, Ecological Economics, 363. The idea of dealing with problems at the lowest level of decision-making that can solve them is called “the principle of subsidiarity.” The European Union has adopted this principle for implementing policy decisions. See Peter Singer, One World, 199-200.
[14] For a brief account of the Fair Trade movement, see Robert Traer and Harlan Stelmach, Doing Ethics in a Diverse World, 254-256. See http://www.globalexchange.org/ and Sharon Cullars, “Fair Trade: Spreading the Wealth,” OneWorld.net (May 27, 2008), online at http://us.oneworld.net/article/view/160684/1/.
[15] Treaties, such as NAFTA, should be evaluated using these criteria. Trade is on balance beneficial, if it is fair and subject to political constraints that protect the natural environment.
[16] John B. Cobb, Jr., “Toward a Just and Sustainable Economic Order,” in Andrew Light and Holmes Rolston III, eds., Environmental Ethics, 367.

Labels: dee.3.9

Neoclassical economic theory affirms the utilitarian goal of producing the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Do the consequences of economic globalization and the decisions of international institutions that support globalization meet this ethical standard?

Continuing poverty has a direct impact on the environment, for the poorest of the poor destroy their environment to survive when they are desperate. In many countries the poor have been pushed to marginal lands, and there have cut trees for wood and planted crops that can only be grown inefficiently. This unsustainable economic activity damages the local environment, and reduces the capacity of the earth’s ecosystems to replenish and recover.

Also, WTO policies promoting economic growth and trade have required national governments to set aside laws intended to limit environmental externalities. “While technically countries are allowed to pass environmental legislation, the WTO frequently declares such laws barriers to trade.”[1] For example, “Challenged by Venezuela, the United States was forced to allow the import of gasoline that does not comply with US Clean Air Act regulations.”[2]

WTO support for global trade has benefits, but has also made it harder for countries to regulate businesses in order to protect nature.[3] “[T]he need to compete for market share reduces national incentives to legislate against externalities in what is known as standards-lowering competition (a race to the bottom). The country that does the poorest job of internalizing all social and environmental costs of production into its prices gets a competitive [absolute] advantage in international trade. More of world production shifts to countries that do the poor job of counting costs―a sure recipe for reducing the efficiency of global production.”[4]

To sum up, support for economic globalization and neoclassical economics by the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO has exacerbated environmental problems by:
· Stimulating environmentally destructive economic development.
· Decreasing the ability of national governments to protect the environment.
· Undermining local control over the use of natural resources.
· Supporting corporate power and the ideology of economic growth.[5] To address these environmental issues, we have to change our global economic system.

[1] Herman E. Daly and Joshua Farley, Ecological Economics, 328.
[2] Ibid. The WTO also ruled against the US Endangered Species Act, “which prohibits the import of shrimp from countries that do not mandate turtle excluder devices.”
[3] Peter Singer argues that the WTO does “place economic consideration ahead of concerns for other issues, such as environmental protection and animal welfare, that arise from how the product is made.” He also asserts that “the WTO is undemocratic both in theory and practice, firstly because a procedure requiring unanimous consent to any change is not a form of democracy, secondly because the dispute panels and the Appellate Body are not responsible to either the majority of members or the majority of the planet’s adult population, and thirdly because the organization is disproportionately influenced by the major trading powers.” Singer does not conclude that the WTO has made “the rich richer and the poor poorer,” but thinks that the operations of the WTO “in practice reduce the scope of national sovereignty.” Peter Singer, One World, 90.
[4] Herman E. Daly and Joshua Farley, Ecological Economics, 329.
[5] James Gustave Speth, Red Sky at Morning, 145. Speth also argues that economic globalization stimulates transportation and energy development, contributes to the commodification of natural resources, and spreads invasive species resulting in greater biological homogenization.

Labels: dee.3.8

In the last half of the twentieth century international institutions were created by the most powerful national governments to promote human welfare through economic development. The purposes of the IMF include facilitating international trade, promoting high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reducing poverty.[1] The World Bank was charged with the duty, “by wise and prudent lending, to promote a policy of expansion of the world’s economy.”[2] The WTO was created to reduce tariffs and other barriers to multinational trade.[3]

These institutions, however, have uncritically promoted neoclassical economics. In 1991, Lawrence Summers, as chief economist at the World Bank, suggested that “the bank should encourage the world’s dirty industries to move to developing countries. The forgone earnings of workers sickened or killed by pollution would be lower in low-wage countries, he noted, while people in poor countries also cared less about a clean environment. ‘The economic logic of dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable,’ he wrote.”[4]

A 2007 report on the World Bank concludes: “The World Bank, financed by rich nations to reduce poverty in poor ones, has long neglected agriculture in impoverished sub-Saharan Africa, where most people depend on the farm economy for their livelihoods.”[5] Imposing neoclassical economics via international intervention and regulation has not, in fact, contributed to the common good of the people in sub-Saharan Africa.

Critics of the IMF and the World Bank argue that these institutions “are no longer serving the national interests of their member countries, according to their charters.”[6] Renato Ruggiero, former director-general of the WTO, has admitted that the purpose of the WTO is no longer to facilitate multilateral trade, but to create a globalized economy. “We are no longer writing the rules of interaction among separate national economies,” he acknowledged in 1996, because the WTO is involved in “writing the constitution of a single global economy.”[7]

What are the ethical issues here? Actions of the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO have undercut the authority of national governments and strengthened transnational corporations, which has made it harder for countries to protect their natural environments. Also, the economic policies of these institutions have not alleviated the chronic poverty of hundreds of millions of people, and have increased the disparity between rich and poor.

The total number of people in the world living on less than a dollar a day has declined between 1990 and 2002, although it remains at about 1.1 billion. But this decline in poverty is largely due to the rapid development of China’s economy, which was achieved largely without World Bank assistance and regulation. Poor countries that have relied on World Bank loans―and have accepted conditions promoting free trade and requiring cuts in public spending for health and education―have generally not made progress in alleviating poverty.[8]

The consequences of WTO regulation are also discouraging. WTO rules prohibit national trade policies that promote small businesses, if the effect of such national policies may be interpreted as discriminating against foreign corporations, even though such policies are needed for small businesses to compete with transnational corporations. The WTO also requires participating nations to protect intellectual property rights for twenty years, which puts domestic firms at a disadvantage in competing with foreign corporations that own most of these patents.[9]

[1] The International Monetary Fund, online at http://www.imf.org/.
[2] John Maynard Keynes, quoted in Herman E. Daly and Joshua Farley, Ecological Economics, 318.
[3] “The WTO began life on 1 January 1995, but its trading system is half a century older. Since 1948, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) had provided the rules for the system.” “What is the World Trade Organization?”, The World Trade Organization, online at http://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/whatis_e/tif_e/fact1_e.htm.
[4] Editorial, “Cleaning Up China,” The New York Times (Sep. 24, 2007), online at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/24/opinion/24mon1.html. “Mr. Summers later apologized, saying his words were ‘sardonic counterpoint,’ meant to spur new thinking about the environment and development.” Summers was Secretary of the Treasury during the Clinton administration and president of Harvard University from 2001-2006.
[5] Celia W. Dugger, “World Bank Neglects African Farming, Report Says,” The New York Times (Oct. 15, 2007), online at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/15/world/africa/15worldbank.html.
[6] Herman E. Daly and Joshua Farley, Ecological Economics, 320.
[7] Renato Ruggiero, from a speech to the United Conference on trade and development’s (UNCTAD) Trade and Development Board in October 1996, online at http://r0.unctad.org/en/special/tb4305.htm, quoted in Herman E. Daly and Joshua Farley, Ecological Economics, 320.
[8] Peter S. Goodman, “World Bank Reports Poverty Programs Ineffective,” The Washington Post (7 Dec. 2006), online at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/07/AR2006120700427.html. This internal report of the World Bank verifies the criticism leveled at the World Bank “by activists who accuse it of an ideological bias toward market reforms and a callous disregard for the people bearing the brunt of such policies.”
[9] “This trade is ‘free’ in the sense that the firms engaged in it are free from interference or restriction by governments. But the people of each region are not free not to trade. They cannot live without importing the necessities for their livelihood, however unfavorable the terms of trade may be.” This makes them vulnerable to price increases, especially for the food they need, as is happening in 2007 and 2008. So, what is the answer? “An alternative ideal is one in which relatively small regions are relatively self-sufficient economically. People of such regions can then make basic decisions about themselves and about the rules by which they are governed. They are free to trade or not according to the terms of trade that are attractive to them. Not to trade means to deny themselves many desirable goods, but it does not threaten their healthy survival.” John B. Cobb, Jr., “Toward a Just and Sustainable Economic Order,” in Andrew Light and Holmes Rolston III, eds., Environmental Ethics, 366.

Labels: dee.3.7

Consider the following three arguments concerning efficiency. First, neoclassical theories hold that economic efficiency requires market competition involving a large number of companies. The moral justification offered in support of market competition makes sense, because ensuring competition is fair to all and the overall consequences of competition are likely to be beneficial. Yet, globalization reduces competition, as only large businesses have the resources to compete in foreign markets. Moreover, these giant firms can lower their prices until small firms are forced into bankruptcy or into accepting a buyout.

“As a rule of thumb, many economists agree that if 40% of a given market is controlled by four firms, the market is no longer competitive. Such concentration is not at all unusual in the agricultural sector: in the US Midwest, four firms control well over 40% of the trade in most major agricultural commodities, and the top four agrochemical corporations reportedly control over 55% of the global market.”[1] In 1995, with unusual candor, the chairman of one of these firms admitted: “There is not one grain of anything in the world that is sold in the free market.”[2]

Second, neoclassical economists rail against central planning by governments as being inefficient. Why then should we assume that an economy dominated by the corporate planning of larger multinationals will be more efficient? Nobel laureate economist Ronald Coase argues that “firms are islands of central planning in a sea of market relationships.”[3] We should not expect larger corporations due to globalization to yield greater economic efficiency.

Third, neoclassical theories oppose regulatory controls over the market, claiming that government intervention is inefficient. Yet, globalization relies on regulations by international institutions, which undercut local and national decision-making. Three of these institutions now wield enormous power over international trade: the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Why are these ethical issues? Efficiency reduces waste, which means less environmental damage. In fact, however, transnational corporations are not only less efficient, but use their vast financial resources to resist environmental regulations imposed by national governments―by threatening to curtail investment in a nation, or by appealing to international institutions, like the WTO, to override a nation’s laws. Economic globalization is unjust as well as unsustainable.

[1] “Nonetheless, in 1999 the US government approved the merger of the two largest international grain trading corporations, Cargill and Continental Grain…[even though] over 80% of international trade [in grain] is controlled by ten firms.” Ibid., 324.
[2] Dwayne Andreas, Chairman of Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), quoted by Dan Carney in “Dwayne’s World,” Mother Jones (Jan. 1995), in Francis Moore Lappé and Anna Lappé, Hope’s Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2002), 300.
[3] Ibid., 325. See Ronald Coase, “The Nature of the Firm,” Economics 4:16 (1937): 386-405.

Labels: dee.3.6

The neoclassical economic theory of comparative advantage holds that trade between two countries should not be restricted by government tariffs (taxes) or other restraints because, in general, “free trade” will benefit both societies.[1] “If our country can produce some set of goods at lower cost than a foreign country, and if the foreign country can produce some other set of goods at a lower cost than we can produce them, then clearly it would be best for us to trade our relatively cheaper goods for their relatively cheaper goods. In this way both countries may gain from trade.”[2] This argument asserts that unregulated markets yield the common good.

Today, however, goods are not produced by countries, as the theory of comparative advantage assumes, but by corporations that are often transnational. The theory of comparative advantage also assumes that capital will be invested at home in the country of the investor, but now capital goes wherever there is absolute advantage for profit.

“A country has absolute advantage if it can produce the good in question at a lower absolute cost than its trading partners.” [3] To maximize profits, financial capital is invested where production costs are lowest. When trade takes place between two countries and one country has an absolute advantage in the goods traded, the other country will likely lose both income and jobs as financial capital is shifted to the country with absolute advantage in order to yield a higher return.[4]

Why is this relevant for environmental ethics? First, achieving absolute advantage usually involves minimizing the costs of extracting or processing natural resources and disposing of waste. Therefore, investors seeking absolute advantage in their pursuit of short term profits avoid countries with strong environmental protection policies, or use their influence to weaken the enforcement of these laws. This is why, in the past twenty years, “a large share of the world’s polluting industries have migrated to the largest low-wage country of all, China, helping to turn big swaths of its landscape into an environmental disaster zone.”[5]

Second, the theory of comparative advantage promises mutual benefits for countries involved in trade, but absolute advantage offers economic gain largely for investors. The pursuit of absolute advantage moves financial capital from one country to another, when there is greater profit to be realized, causing a loss of jobs and income in the first country that makes it even harder to protect or cleanup its environment.[6]

Economic globalization is the pursuit of absolute advantage everywhere. “Globalization is the effective erasure of national boundaries for economic purposes. National boundaries become totally porous with respect to goods and capital, and increasingly porous with respect to people, viewed in this context as cheap labor, or in some cases cheap human capital.”[7] The main beneficiaries of economic globalization are multinational corporations, which gain power over economic decision-making as national governments lose control over their economies.

Neoclassical economists, however, defend economic globalization by arguing that it has many benefits, including:
· More efficient use of resources and faster rates of global economic growth.
· Greater national specialization on the basis of competitive advantage.
· Global enforcement of trade-related intellectual property rights.
· Control over local and national affairs by international institutions.[8]
Some of these claims, however, actually contradict the principles of neoclassical economics.

[1] Economist Paul Krugman has observed that: “If there were an Economist’s Creed it would surely contain the affirmations ‘I believe in the Principle of Comparative Advantage,’ and ‘I believe in free trade.’” Paul Krugman, “Is Free Trade Passé?” Journal of Economic Perspectives (1987), 1(2): 131.
[2] Steven M. Suranovic, “The Theory of Comparative Advantage – Overview,” International Trade Theory and Policy, online at http://internationalecon.com/Trade/Tch40/T40-0.php.
[3] Herman E. Daly and Joshua Farley, Ecological Economics, 429. A country has comparative advantage “if it can produce the good in question more cheaply relative to other goods it produces than can its trading partners, regardless of absolute costs.”
[4] “Speaking the language of ‘free-trade’ and poverty alleviation, organizations like the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank impose a development model which seems designed to benefit transnational corporations over workers; foreign investors over local businesses; and wealthy countries over developing nations.” The International Forum on Globalization (IFG), http://www.ifg.org/about.htm.
[5] Editorial, “Cleaning Up China,” The New York Times (Sep. 24, 2007), online at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/24/opinion/24mon1.html.
[6] “The progressive reduction of barriers to trade between the United States and Mexico during the 1980s serves as an example of the problem. As tariffs were reduced, many US companies found it more economical to relocate production across the border. One reason they could produce more cheaply there was that they did not have to spend money on expensive waste disposal. They could dump their wastes into the Rio Grande.” The costs of the cleanup are now “to be borne primarily by the taxpayers and concerned citizens of Mexico and the United States, rather than by the polluters.” John B. Cobb, Jr., “Toward a Just and Sustainable Economic Order,” in Andrew Light and Holmes Rolston III, eds., Environmental Ethics, 361-362.
[7] Herman E. Daly and Joshua Farley, Ecological Economics, 317.
[8] Ibid., 323.

Labels: dee.3.5

Has the common good been realized by our growth economy? Increasing wealth disparity is evidence to the contrary. “According to the United Nations Human Development Report in 1999, the income differential between the fifth of the world’s population in the wealthiest countries and the fifth in the poorest was 30 to 1 in 1960, 60 to 1 in 1990, and 74 to 1 in 1995.”[1] In 2006 the wealth of the world's 475 billionaires exceeded the income of the poorest three billion people on earth, and this disparity is growing.[2]

Economic inequity is also rising in the US. “Virtually all of the growth in wealth between 1983 and 1989 in the US went to the top 20%. The bottom 80% was excluded from this growth, and the bottom 40% saw their wealth decline in absolute terms.”[3] Ten years later, “the richest 1% of Americans controlled 95% of the country’s financial wealth….”[4] In addition, “There is a growing inequity in pay. From 1976 to 2006, the average salary of workers in the bottom 90 percent of the income distribution—nearly everybody—rose by only 2.3 percent, to $38,800, tax data show. Among the top 10 percent, average salaries rose 57 percent, to $195,000.”[5]

Why is this disparity an ethical concern? It favors speculation over rational investment,[6] and drives up prices. Investment funds that bet on rising prices for oil[7] and other commodities, and on currency exchange rates, have turned the economy into “a very gigantic version of Las Vegas.”[8] Even a fund manager, who benefits from this speculation, warns “that the widening divide among the richest and everyone else” is a problem: “We are clearly in a period of excess, and we have to swing back to the middle or the center cannot hold."[9]

Economist Robert J. Samuelson agrees that “productivity gains (improvements in efficiency) are going disproportionately to those at the top,” and that this growing inequality “threatens America’s social compact.”[10] By this “social compact” Samuelson means the implicit agreement among Americans to accept the authority of government and its lawfully imposed restrictions on individual freedom―which is expressed by individuals who obey the law, pay taxes, and participate in the political process.[11]

Two centuries ago Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were so concerned about economic disparity weakening democratic government, that they opposed legislation protecting inheritance rights. Now economic globalization is increasing wealth disparity and threatening democracy, as well as undermining efforts to protect the natural environment.[12]

[1] Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life, 150.
[2] The International Forum on Globalization (IFG), online at http://www.ifg.org/about.htm. For more information see the United Nations Development Programme's 1999 Human Development Report, online at http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/global/hdr1999/. In contrast, Peter Singer notes various findings about inequality in the world and concludes: “No evidence that I have found enables me to form a clear view about the overall impact of economic globalization on the poor.” Peter Singer, One World, 89.
[3] Herman E. Daly and Joshua Farley, Ecological Economics, 262. Historically, economic growth has been good for workers. “It is the rapid economic growth since the Industrial Revolution that has created a broad middle class in the United States and that accounts for much of what is great about American society today.” William Wolman and Anne Colamosca. The Judas Economy: The Triumph of Capital and the Betrayal of Work (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997), 160.
[4] Ibid., 395. See Lisa Lambert, “Poor Get Poorer as Recession Threat Looms: Report,” Reuters (Apr. 9, 2008), online at http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN0838901420080409.
[5] Editorial, “Is Trade the Problem?” The New York Times (Apr. 27, 2008), online at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/opinion/27sun1.html. “Outrageous executive pay and excesses in financial markets also play a big part. The richest 1 percent of the population has captured more than half of the nation’s total income growth since 1993.”
[6] In his critique of current economic policies, John C. Bogle, the founder of Vanguard Mutual Fund, quotes favorably the comment by John Maynard Keynes: “When the capital development of a country becomes the by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.” John C. Bogle, The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), xvii.
[7] See “Speculation behind OPEC Oil Price Hikes, Analysts Say,” The Earth Times (Oct. 17, 2007), online at http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/125881.html, and Susan Tompor, “Speculation Drives Oil Prices, Not Demand,” Detroit Free Press (Mar. 23, 2008), online at http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080323/COL07/803230648/1002/BUSINESS. Other economists, however, emphasize rising oil consumption and supply constraints. Paul Krugman, “Running Out of Planet to Exploit,” The New York Times (Apr. 21, 2008), online at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/21/opinion/21krugman.html.
[8] Gary Burtless, economist at the Brookings Institution, quoted in Jenny Anderson, “Wall Street Winners Get Billion-Dollar Paydays,” The New York Times (Apr. 16, 2008), online at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/16/business/16wall.html.
[9] William H. Gross, chief investment officer of the Pimco bond fund. Ibid.
[10] Robert J. Samuelson, “Trickle-Up Economics?” Newsweek (Oct. 2, 2006), 40.
[11] See the “Social Contract Theory,” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, online at http://www.iep.utm.edu/s/soc-cont.htm.
[12] See, for instance, Jeffrey R. Gates, Democracy at Risk: Rescuing Main Street from Wall Street – A Populist Visit for the 21st Century (New York: Perseus Books, 2000).

Labels: dee.3.4

Since World War II the richest and most powerful nations have been “cooperating for the sake of the growth of the global economy” on the assumption that this “massive shift of power from nations to transnational corporations” will yield the greatest good for the world’s peoples.[1] Emphasizing economic growth, “while on balance quite useful in a world with empty land, shoals of undisturbed fish, vast forests, and a robust ozone shield, helped create a more crowded and stressed one.”[2]

Economic theory “did not adjust to the changed conditions it helped to create; thereby it continued to legitimate, and indeed indirectly to cause, massive and rapid ecological change.”[3] Moreover, democratic institutions have “been weakened by three decades of market fundamentalism, privatization ideology and resentment of government.”[4]

In the last third of the twentieth century the environmental movement in the US fought back in Congress and in the courts.[5] Nonetheless, the “Bush administration, which favors energy production over energy conservation, has engineered a reversal of a generation of progress on environmentalism that threatens to leave the [hazardous wastes clean-up] Superfund program underfunded, air-quality standards compromised and global warming unchecked. These politics can be traced directly to that proud disdain for the public realm that is common to all market fundamentalists, Republican and Democratic alike.”[6]

The ethical measure of an economic policy is its contribution to the common good. This not only requires political decisions that protect the environment, but also economic policies that ensure a fair distribution of the economic benefits that are realized. Adam Smith argued that political freedom requires economic freedom, and this seems to be true. Yet, ethics also seems to require laws that protect political freedom by regulating economic freedom.

[1] The assumption is flawed because it continues to reflect an uncritical faith in the “invisible hand” of an unregulated marketplace. John B. Cobb, Jr., “Toward a Just and Sustainable Economic Order,” in Andrew Light and Holmes Rolston III, eds., Environmental Ethics, 359-360.
[2] J. R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun, 334-336, in Herman E. Daly and Joshua Farley, Ecological Economics, xx.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Benjamin Barber, “A Failure of Democracy, Not Capitalism,” The New York Times (July 29, 2002), A23, in James Gustave Speth, Red Sky at Morning, 111.
[5] “Since the 1960s the environmental movement has changed the world. It is arguably one of the most successful social movements in human history.” Louis P. Pojman and Paul Pojman, eds., “Introduction,” Environmental Ethics, 2.
[6] Benjamin Barber, “A Failure of Democracy, Not Capitalism,” The New York Times (July 29, 2002), A23, in James Gustave Speth, Red Sky at Morning, 111.

Labels: dee.3.3

First, many natural resources are nonrenewable and cannot be fully recycled. This includes metals and fossil fuels that are extracted from the earth.[1] The supply of these natural resources is finite, and in some cases is rapidly diminishing. Yet, in neoclassical economics, those mining these nonrenewable resources are not required to include in their costs any calculation of the investment required to find or create replacements, or to make that investment. These issues are simply left to the marketplace.

Both ethics and economics agree that we have a duty to allocate and use resources to ensure the common good. Chapter 4 argues that in using natural resources we have, as well, a duty to give moral consideration to future generations. Therefore, we need to ensure that those who profit from using nonrenewable resources at least fund investment in developing replacements. As markets do not impose this cost on producers, it must be assessed by law.

Second, renewable resources are being harvested beyond their optimal scale. Renewable resources (such as fish and forests) will not be used up, as long as these organisms are harvested at or below an optimal scale that allows their populations to replenish. Yet, nothing in an unregulated market prevents the loss of these renewable resources.[2] In fact, as renewable resources become scarce, those harvesting these natural resources tend to intensify their efforts in order to maximize their short term profit before a resource is depleted.

Harvesting renewable resources at greater than the optimal scale is wasteful, for this depletes a natural resource that otherwise is self-sustaining. This waste cannot be morally justified, when there is scarcity and the loss of resources allocates greater costs to others. Thus, governments need to restrict the harvesting of renewable resources to less than optimal scale.

Third, the waste absorption capacity of the environment has been exceeded. In neoclassical economics waste left in the environment is treated as an externality―a consequence external to the market economy that does not need to be included as a cost in determining the market value of an economic activity.[3] “When firms compete with each other in the free market, their decisions are not guided by environmental considerations. They can produce more cheaply when they dispose of their wastes in the least expensive way―for example, in the nearest river.”[4] So, they do.

Nature has evolved many ways of recycling waste, but the natural processes that purify air and water and reconstitute the soil take time and have limits. To protect these natural processes, we must support laws that require the effective treatment of waste before it is emitted into the environment. This not only makes good economic sense, but reflects our ethical duty to one another.

Fourth, the loss of ecosystem benefits due to economic exploitation is a real cost. Neoclassical economic theory has failed to recognize that renewable resources provide not merely stock-flow resources,[5] such as fish to eat and wood to use, but also fund-service resources[6] that have significant ecological benefits. For example, in addition to providing lumber that may be harvested, forests are ecosystems that:
· Absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen.
· Provide habitats for other organisms.
· Regulate rainfall and prevent soil erosion.

The loss of these ecological benefits[7] when forests are cut is presently contributing to global warming due to increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, which has significant economic costs. Yet, neoclassical economic theory ignores the loss of ecosystem benefits (by identifying these costs as externalities) in calculating the costs used to set the price of lumber.

[1] Most “recycling” is actually better identified as “downcycling,” because it “reduces the quality of a material over time” and may even “increase contamination of the biosphere.” For recycling to be effective products must be designed to be reused, which is generally not the case today. William McDonough and Michael Braungart, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things (New York: North Point Press, 2002), 56-57.
[2] “Since industry is the sector of the economy capable of continuing growth, growth-oriented policies emphasize the export of whatever is available in order to bring in the capital needed for industrialization. In many countries the available resource most desired by the global market is lumber. Accordingly, the earth as a whole is being rapidly deforested.” John B. Cobb, Jr., “Toward a Just and Sustainable Economic Order,” in Andrew Light and Holmes Rolston III, eds., Environmental Ethics, 362.
[3] An externality is defined formally as: “An unintended and uncompensated loss or gain in the welfare of one party resulting from an activity by another party.” Herman E. Daly and Joshua Farley, Ecological Economics, 433.
[4] John B. Cobb, Jr., “Toward a Just and Sustainable Economic Order,” in Andrew Light and Holmes Rolston III, eds., Environmental Ethics, 361.
[5] Stock-flow resources are: “Resources materially transformed into what they produce (material cause); can be used at virtually any rate desired (subject to the availability of fund-service resources required for their transformation); their productivity is measured by the number of physical units of the product into which they are transformed; can be stock-piled; are used up, rather than worn out.” For example, trees are a stock-flow resource, when logged for timber. Herman E. Daly and Joshua Farley, Ecological Economics, 440.
[6] Fund-service resources are: “Resources not materially transformed into what they produce (efficient cause); which can only be used at a given rate, and their productivity is measured as output per unit of time; cannot be stockpiled; and are worn out, rather than used up.” Forests provide many fund-service resources such as releasing oxygen into the atmospheres, providing habitats for other animals, and preventing soil from being eroded by rainfall. Herman E. Daly and Joshua Farley, Ecological Economics, 433.
[7] I agree with William McDonough and Michael Braungart that it is best not to call ecological benefits “fund-service resources,” as it is misleading to think of these natural processes as “services” for human beings. William McDonough and Michael Braungart, Cradle to Cradle, 80.

Labels: dee.3.2

Economics began as a discipline of moral philosophy concerned with the use of natural resources to produce and allocate goods and services for the common good. Moral philosophers reasoned that economics “should not be devoted to the most efficient means of producing material goods, but rather to the most efficient means of producing human wellbeing.”[1]

What has gone wrong? The short answer is that our economic system has hidden the real costs of economic growth including the enormous damage to our natural environment. It has always been true that: “All economic decisions have an environmental consequence, just as all environmental decisions have economic consequences.”[2] Yet, economists have ignored the environmental impact of economic growth.

To understand why our environmental crisis is an economic as well as an ethical crisis, we first look at how the real economy differs from the idealized economy of neoclassical economic theory. Then we consider how globalization in trade exacerbates the degradation of the environment and the depletion of natural resources, before suggesting revisions to economic theory and practice that may make our global economy environmentally sustainable.[3]

Modern economics began in 1776 with the publication of The Wealth of Nations by the Scottish moral philosopher, Adam Smith.[4] He argued that free trade would foster civil and political freedom, and that laws encouraging the pursuit of individual self-interest would result in the greater good. Smith offered two ethical arguments in support of his economic theory: that human dignity requires political and economic freedom, and that the consequences of a free market system are generally beneficial.

Every person, Smith wrote, “endeavors as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labors to render the annual value of society as great as he can.”[5] In the pursuit of self-interest, Smith believed, each individual is “led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.”[6]

Smith’s economic philosophy reflects the worldview of eighteenth century Newtonian mechanics, for Smith “conceived of the economy as a closed system in which interactions between parts (consumers, producers, distributors, etc.) are controlled by forces external to the parts (supply and demand).”[7] His belief that an “invisible hand” ensures the common good is an analogy to Newton’s law of gravity, which sustains the universe. “In the real economy,” however, “the invisible hand does not exist.”[8] There are relationships between supply, demand, and market prices, but there is no “invisible hand” that prevents economic growth from depleting natural resources and polluting the air, soil, and water.

“Here's the problem in a nutshell. Industrialism developed in a different world from the one we live in today: fewer people, less material well-being, plentiful natural resources. What emerged was a highly productive, take-make-waste system that assumed infinite resources and infinite sinks for industrial wastes. Industry [now] moves, mines, extracts, shovels, burns, wastes, pumps and disposes of four million pounds of material in order to provide one average, middle-class American family their needs for a year. Today, the rate of material throughput is endangering our prosperity, not enhancing it.”[9]

Fifteen hundred of the world’s leading scientists confirm this conclusion. “The earth is finite. Its ability to absorb wastes and destructive effluents is finite. Its ability to provide food and energy is finite. Its ability to provide for growing numbers of people is finite. And we are fast approaching many of the earth’s limits.”[10] Current economic practices “cannot be continued without the risk that vital global systems will be damaged beyond repair.”[11]

Therefore, we must address these economic and ethical issues:
· Many natural resources are nonrenewable and cannot be fully recycled.
· Renewable resources are being harvested beyond their optimal scale.
· The waste absorption capacity of the environment has been exceeded.
· The loss of ecosystem benefits due to economic exploitation is a real cost.

[1] Herman E. Daly and Joshua Farley, Ecological Economics, 396.
[2] Jim MacNeill quoted in Norman Myers and Jennifer Kent, Perverse Subsidies: How Tax Dollars Can Undercut the Environment and the Economy (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2001), 26.
[3] John B. Cobb, Jr. believes “the basic principles that govern the global economy today inherently lead to increasing injustice and unsustainability. Policies based on these principles concentrate wealth in fewer hands, leaving the poor more destitute. They transfer wealth from poorer to richer countries. And they speed the destruction of natural resources, especially in the poorer countries.” John B. Cobb, Jr., “Toward a Just and Sustainable Economic Order,” in Andrew Light and Holmes Rolston III, eds., Environmental Ethics, 359.
[4] The full title is An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
[5] Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Smith.
[6] Ibid. Smith believed the “invisible hand” would bring about “a distribution of the necessaries of life that is ‘nearly the same’ as it would have been if the world had been divided up equally among all its inhabitants.” Peter Singer, One World: The Ethics of Globalization (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 30.
[7] Robert Nadeau and Menas Kafatos, The Non-Local Universe, 199. Smith thought that “forces external to the individual units function as an invisible hand…[that] frees the units to pursue their best interests, moves the economy forward, and in general legislates the behavior of parts in the best interests of the whole.”
[8] Ibid., 207.
[9] Interface, Incorporated, “Why is Striving for Sustainability So Important”?, online at http://www.interfaceinc.com/goals/sustainability_overview.html.
[10] The statement is reprinted in Renewable Resource Journal (Summer 2001): 169, in James Gustave Speth, Red Sky at Morning, 17.
[11] Ibid.

Labels: dee.3.1

Is nature without value until there are humans to value it? Not if we understand the act of ascribing value as recognizing value, rather than creating value. We attribute value to our lives because we reason that human life has worth. Valuing is the subjective recognition of objective value.[1] If our (subjective) valuing of nature is reasonable, then nature has (objective) value.

Understanding that human beings have evolved and rely on the earth’s ecosystems makes it clear that human life is only part of the generative process we call nature. Furthermore, if there are good reasons for ascribing intrinsic worth to nature, then we have a duty towards nature, as it is, to act with care.[2] The evolutionary and ecological processes that led to human life―and thus to consciousness, knowledge, and ethics―have objective value not only after humans exist, but in the millennia of natural history that generated a profusion of organisms and ecosystems.

We may draw two inferences for ethics from this conclusion. First, we cannot limit our ethical reasoning to predicting likely consequences, as the consequentialist approach does not take into account the intrinsic worth of nature, but only values natural resources for their use value. Many moral philosophers assert that some form of consequential ethics is the best we can do. Nonetheless, if there are reasonable arguments for attributing intrinsic value to nature, then ethics requires considering what is best for the habitats we share with other species, and not simply calculating our best use of natural resources.

Second, ascribing intrinsic value to nature requires that we distinguish the world of human culture from the world of nature. In the world of culture, which is the traditional worldview of moral philosophy, we do not reason from what is to what ought to be. For example, murder in society is a fact, but no one suggests that it ought to be morally acceptable. Deriving what “ought to be” from what “is,” and reducing “the question of values to that of facts,” is known in moral philosophy as “the naturalistic fallacy.”[3]

Yet, as we contemplate the world of nature, and also ascribe intrinsic value to organisms and ecosystems, it is reasonable to infer that what is (in wild nature) is what ought to be. For example, predation in the natural world involves killing, which “ought to be” in the sense that we “ought to let it be,” because this is how life in ecosystems has evolved and survives.

“What is ethically puzzling, and exciting in the marriage and mutual transformation of ecological description and evaluation is that here an ought is not so much derived from an is as discovered simultaneously with it. As we progress from description of fauna and flora…of stability and dynamism, and move on to intricacy…to unity and harmony with oppositions in counterpoint and synthesis, to organisms evolved within and satisfactorily fitting their communities, arriving at length at beauty and goodness, it is difficult to say where the natural facts leave off and where the natural values appear.”[4]

Our environmental crisis is a conflict between the world of human culture and the world of nature. Our way of life is the problem, and thus also the solution. This crisis is due largely to our ethical failure, in the world of human culture, to grant moral consideration to the intrinsic worth of the world of nature.

How are we to resolve this problem? Rather than rejecting anthropocentric thinking for an ecocentric perspective, I argue that we must learn from both. An ecocentric perspective extends our moral community beyond ourselves to the world of nature, and anthropocentric reasoning defends the moral standards of social justice in the world of human culture.

[1] “A sentient valuer is not necessary for value. Another way is for there to be a value-generating system able to generate value.” Holmes Rolston III, “Value in Nature and the Nature of Value,” in Andrew Light and Holmes Rolston III, eds., Environmental Ethics, 152.
[2] “From ecology to ethics: the step is inevitable….[W]e live on a planet where the activities of one species have an impact on all processes of the biosphere….The old injunction against scientists uttering moral assertions, based on the notion that nature is devoid of intrinsic value or purpose, is misguided. Ecologists cannot, and ought not, refrain from making moral judgments.” From the “Afterword,” David R. Keller and Frank B. Golley, eds., The Philosophy of Ecology: From Science to Synthesis (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2000), 320.
[3] The fallacy was first identified by David Hume in the eighteenth century and then described by G. E. Moore in his book Principia Ethics (1903). “Naturalistic Fallacy,” International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design, ISCID Encyclopedia of Science and Philosophy, online at http://www.iscid.org/encyclopedia/Naturalistic_Fallacy.
[4] Holmes Rolston III, Environmental Ethics, 232. “We commit the subjectivist fallacy if we think all values lie in subjective experience, and, worse still, the anthropocentrist fallacy if we think all values lie in human options and preferences.” Holmes Rolston III, “Value in Nature and the Nature of Value,” in Andrew Light and Holmes Rolston III, eds., Environmental Ethics, 146.

Labels: dee.2.7

Science cannot verify that nature has a purpose, nor can scientific reasoning determine whether the natural world has intrinsic worth. Yet, scientific knowledge is relevant for addressing these questions by moral reasoning. The next three sections will consider the ethical implications of the following scientific conclusions:
· Nature generates diversity.
· Evolution is an emergent process of life.
· Ecosystems, as well as organisms, are self-organizing.
I argue from these considerations that it is reasonable to ascribe objective value to nature.

The “biosphere is profoundly generative―somehow fundamentally always creative.”[1] Life fills every niche of nature, and as the environment changes the dynamic process of evolution enables some species to adapt. Random genetic changes and competition play a crucial role, but organisms (including human beings) also coevolve.[2] If the result has value (as humans beings, we certainly think that we have value), and the process is necessary for the result, it seems reasonable to ascribe value to the natural means that has led to the valued result.

The main argument against attributing value to evolution points to the random genetic changes in leading to new traits that are selected due to their fitness. The claim is that what is random cannot be purposeful, as purpose gives value to human action. Yet, the lack of evidence for a purpose in nature itself does not prove that nature is merely random or without value.

“It is certainly true that there is randomness in evolutionary nature, but it is not random that there is diversity. Four billion species do not appear by accident. Rather, randomness is a diversity generator, mixed as it is with principles of the spontaneous generation of order...randomness is an advancement generator, supported, as advancement comes to be, by the trophic pyramid[3] in which lower ways of life are also conserved.”[4]

When we are unable to solve a problem, we sometimes try whatever we can think of, and this may lead us to a solution. Our own experience confirms that making random changes need not be without value. Similarly, in evolution: “Randomness guarantees the trial-and-error exploration of the potentialities of the system. Randomness sifts through new options for both diversity and advancement.”[5]

Both physics and biology now assert that “the old view of evolution as a linear progression from lower atomized organisms to more complex atomized organisms no longer seems appropriate. The more appropriate view could be that all organisms (parts) are emergent aspects of the self-organizing process of life (whole), and that the proper way to understand the parts is to examine their embedded relations to the whole.”[6]

That is, evolution generates not only organisms but diverse and complex ecosystems, and these natural processes have a “heading” toward “species diversification, support, and richness.”[7] Moral philosopher Holmes Rolston III writes: “Ecosystems are in some respects more to be admired than any of their component organisms because they are generated, continue to support, and integrate tens of thousands of member organisms. The ecosystem is as wonderful as anything it contains. In nature there may sometimes be clumsy, makeshift solutions. Still, everything is tested for adaptive fitness.”[8]

The counter-argument is that valuing ecosystems may result in “harmful consequences to human individuals or human projects and institutions.”[9] Yet, contrasting the value of humans and ecosystems ignores the scientific facts that humans can only live in ecosystems and are themselves ecosystems. Therefore, it makes sense to value these natural facts as well as our own purposes. This reasoning also supports ascribing value to biodiversity and the survival of other species, as well as the habitats that sustain all life.

“Moral consideration should first be directed toward the natural community or ecosystem as a whole, so that the overall good for the ecosystem is the primary goal of action. But this communal good should be supplemented by a consideration of natural individuals and species, so that in cases where ecosystemic well-being is not an issue, the protection of endangered species or natural individuals can be morally justified.”[10] I argue in chapter 4 that this is more reasonable than including only individual organisms in our moral community.[11]

I agree with Mary Midgley that we may have duties to plants and trees, as well as animals and species, because “as beings forming a small part of the fauna of this planet, we also exist in relation to that whole, and its fate cannot be a matter of moral indifference to us.”[12] I argue in chapter 7, however, that this need not mean ascribing rights to animals.[13]

Expanding our moral community will likely increase our conflicts of duty. Yet, conflicts are the stuff of ethics and law, so this is no reason to deny moral consideration to organisms and ecosystems. Moreover, the law has already extended our responsibility to include protecting endangered species and the integrity of ecosystems.[14]

Life is self-organizing at all levels. “Far more complex than any computer or robot, the common bacterium perceives and swims toward its food.”[15] In pursuit of their own survival, bacteria have made the earth’s environment viable for us and other life by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, producing oxygen, and “inventing every major kind of metabolic transformation on the planet.”[16]

A bacterium maintains its identity “by making sense of the world so as to remain viable.”[17] Also, to maintain its identity, a bacterium (like every organism) must constantly change its material composition by metabolizing nutrients from the environment.[18] Not even a bacterium is a survival machine. “If the organism must change its matter in order to maintain its identity, then the organism must aim beyond itself.”[19]

Having such an identity is certainly not the same as having autonomy or rationality, which are the human attributes that moral philosophers have argued justify limiting moral consideration to persons. Yet, such an identity distinguishes organisms from non-living natural resources, and is the evolutionary root of autonomy and reason.[20] “Every organism has a good-of-its-kind; it defends its own kind [its own way of life] as a good kind.”[21]

Every organism is oriented toward the future. “Thus life is facing forward as well as outward and extends ‘beyond’ its own immediacy in both directions at once.”[22] There are no conscious intentions in the actions of bacteria or most animals. Yet, the emergent properties of self-organization and sense-making, and the forward trajectory of every organism in seeking its own good, are evidence that all life has value for itself.

We can distinguish, as two forms of intrinsic worth, this intrinsic value for itself and the intrinsic value in itself, which we ascribe to rationality and autonomy: “The former is common to human and nonhuman nature (at least its biotic components) and is connected with their capacity to strive to maintain their functioning integrity. The latter is confined only to humans and is connected…with their unique type of consciousness, reason, and capacity for language.”[23]

This distinction allows us to affirm both the good of nature and the good of human culture. We recognize that a self-organizing natural system has intrinsic worth (for itself), but we also acknowledge the intrinsic worth (in itself) of the science that identifies this natural fact, and the ethics that ascribes value to it.

Rolston writes: “Ecology discovers simultaneously (1) what is taking place in ecosystems and (2) what biotic community means as an organizational mode enveloping organisms. Crossing over from science to ethics, we can discover (3) the values in such a community-system and (4) our duties toward it.”[24]

Why do we have a duty to care for ecosystems? “The ecologist finds that ecosystems objectively are satisfactory communities in the sense that, though not all organismic needs are gratified, enough are for species long to survive, and the critical ethicist finds (in a subjective judgment matching the objective process) that such ecosystems are imposing and satisfactory communities to which to attach duty.”[25]

[1] Stuart Kaufman, Investigations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 135. For example, see Julie Steenhuysen, “Thousands of New Marine Microbes Discovered,” Reuters (Oct. 4, 2007), online at http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSN0441498020071004.
[2] “When two species are ecologically intimate, closely influencing each other’s lives as do predators and prey or hosts and parasites, each normally becomes a major source of selection operating on the other; in such situations, coevolution occurs. As a species, human beings are ecologically intimate with lots of organisms, from cows and crop pests to mackerel and malarial mosquitoes, and coevolution affects us in many ways.” Paul R. Ehrlich, Human Natures: Genes, Cultures, and the Human Prospect (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), 61.
[3] A trophic pyramid, or hierarchy, consists of the steps in a food chain within an ecosystem. “Trophic Level,” Encyclopedia Britannica, online at http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9073499/trophic-level.
[4] Holmes Rolston III, Environmental Ethics, 207.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Robert Nadeau and Menas Kafatos, The Non-Local Universe, 109.
[7] Holmes Rolston III, Environmental Ethics, 175.
[8] Ibid., 174. J. Baird Callicott affirms that “the good of the biotic community is the ultimate measure of the moral value, the rightness of wrongness of actions,” and that “the effect upon ecological systems is the decisive factor in the determination of the ethical quality of actions.” J. Baird Callicott, “Animal Liberation: A Triangular Affair, Environmental Ethics 2 (1980): 320, in Eric Katz, “Is There a Place for Animals in the Moral Consideration of Nature?”, Andrew Light and Holmes Rolston III, eds., Environmental Ethics, 86. This position is in conflict with ascribing moral consideration to individual animals, which is central to advocacy for “animal rights” or “animal liberation.”
[9] Attributing moral consideration to ecosystems is seen as undermining the value of human beings, who must be valued in terms of their contribution to the natural community: “since the primary goal of moral action is the good of the natural community, and since human technology and population growth create many of the threats to environmental health, an [ecocentric or biocentric] environmental ethic may demand the elimination of much of the human race and human civilization.” Eric Katz, “Is There a Place for Animals in the Moral Consideration of Nature?”, in Andrew Light and Holmes Rolston III, eds., Environmental Ethics, 87.
[10] Ibid., 91. “The appropriate unit for moral concern is the fundamental unit of development and survival. Loving lions and hating jungles is misplaced affection. An ecologically informed society must love lions-in-jungles, organisms-in-ecosystems, or else fail in vision and courage.” Holmes Rolston III, Environmental Ethics, 176.
[11] Moral philosopher Paul W. Taylor argues for the intrinsic worth of nature and that all organisms, including humans, have equal intrinsic worth. “The inherent worth of an entity does not depend on its merits. To consider something as possessing inherent worth…is to place intrinsic value on the realization of its good.” Paul W. Taylor, “The Ethics of Respect for Nature,” in David Schmidtz and Elizabeth Willott, eds., Environmental Ethics, 91. As the good of humans includes caring for the earth in a unique way, I do not think it necessarily follows that the human “good” is the same in intrinsic worth as the “good” of every other organism. I do agree with Taylor, however, that extending moral consideration to animals does not necessarily mean granting them rights, for accepting duties to animals is another way of giving them moral and legal consideration. See Paul W. Taylor, Respect for Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986).
[12] Mary Midgley, Animals and Why They Matter, 91.
[x13] “The difficulties [of developing a rights-based environmental ethic] include reconciling the individualistic nature of moral rights with the more holistic view of nature emphasized by many of the leading environmental thinkers….It is difficult to see how the notion of the rights of the individual could find a home within a view that, emotive connotations to one side, might be fairly dubbed ‘environmental fascism.’” Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights, 361-362.
[14] Chapter 13 considers protecting endangered species and their habitats, and chapter 5 notes how the standard of ecosystem integrity is now being applied.
[15] Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, What is Life? (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), 92.
[16] Ibid., 90-92.
[17] Evan Thompson, Mind in Life, 146-147.
[18] This is true for all organisms, including human beings. “Every five days you get a new stomach lining. You get a new liver every two months. Your skin replaces itself every six weeks. Every year, ninety-eight percent of the atoms in your body are replaced. This nonstop chemical replacement, metabolism, is a sure sign of life.” Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, What is Life?, quoted in Evan Thompson, Mind in Life, 150-151.
[19] Evan Thompson, Mind in Life, 155.
[20] “Animals maintain a valued self-identity as they cope through the world. Valuing is intrinsic to animal life.” Holmes Rolston III, “Value in Nature and the Nature of Value,” in Andrew Light and Holmes Rolston III, eds., Environmental Ethics, 145.
[21] Ibid. “A plant, like any other organism, sentient or not, is a spontaneous, self-maintaining system, sustaining and reproducing itself, executing its program, making a way through the world, checking against performance by means of responsive capacities with which to measure success. Something more than physical causes, even when less than sentience, is operating; there is information superintending the causes; without it the organism would collapse into a sand heap. The information is used to preserve the plant identity.”
[x22] Hans Jonas, quoted in Evan Thompson, Mind in Life, 156.
[23] Keekok Lee, “The Source and Locus of Intrinsic Value: A Reexamination,” Andrew Light and Holmes Rolston IIII, eds., Environmental Ethics, 155.
[24] Holmes Rolston III, Environmental Ethics, 173. “The survival of the fittest shapes the ever more fit in their habitats. Each is for itself, but none is by itself; each is tested for optimal compliance in an intricately disciplined community. Every organism is an opportunist in the system but without opportunity except in the ongoing system.” Ibid., 219.
[25] Ibid., 167. Eugene Hargrove argues that such ecocentric arguments depreciate anthropocentric reasoning that ascribes value to nature for its beauty. Eugene Hargrove, “Weak Anthropocentric Intrinsic Value,” in Andrew Light and Holmes Rolston IIII, eds., Environmental Ethics, 181. Christopher D. Stone seems to differ with Hargrove: “A respect for nature may engender a preference for natural processes: for example, the natural flow of a river. Untouchedness strikes me…as a plausible good, and so does beauty.” Christopher D. Stone, Earth and Other Ethics, 96.

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Ecologists also verify that ecosystems have emergent properties: “such as energy transfer, nutrient cycling, gas regulation, climate regulation, and the water cycle. As is typical of emergent properties, ecosystem functions cannot be readily explained by even the most extensive knowledge of system components of ecosystem structure.”[1] Because emergent processes are not adequately understood, the consequences of damaging ecosystems are unpredictable.[2]

“While emergent cooperative behaviors within parts (organisms) that maintain conditions of survival in the whole (environment or ecosystem) appear to be everywhere present in nature, the conditions of observation are such that we distort results when we view any of these systems as isolated.”[3] No one view of the whole explains the whole.

The emergent processes of ecosystems are irreplaceable. “There are no plausible technological substitutes for soil fertility, clean fresh water, unspoiled landscapes, climatic stability, biological diversity, biological nutrient recycling and environmental waste assimilative capacity. The irreversible loss of species and ecosystems, and the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and of toxic metals and chemicals in the topsoil, ground water and in the silt of lake-bottoms and estuaries, are not reversible by any plausible technology that could appear in the next few decades.”[4]

Also, these emergent processes have resiliency.[5] “Ecosystems remain resilient in the face of change through high biodiversity of species, organized in complex webs of relationships. The many relationships are maintained through self-organizing processes, not top-down control.”[6] In an ecosystem, “each individual in a species acts independently, yet its activity patterns cooperatively mesh with the patterns of other species. Cooperation and competition are interlinked and held in balance.”[7] Also, diversity matters: “the more species that inhabit an ecosystem, such as a forest or lake, the more productive and stable is the ecosystem.”[8]

That is, ecosystems are relevant for doing environmental ethics because:
· Ecosystems sustain symbiotic and predatory relationships among organisms.
· Ecosystem processes are complex, self-organizing, diverse, and resilient.
· The emergent properties of an ecosystem are irreplaceable.
· The consequences of damaging ecosystems are unpredictable.
These lessons do not determine our ethical choices, but are the “environment” of these choices.

Adopting this worldview means considering possibilities or probabilities, rather than simply describing facts, as every environment is always changing due to its dynamic nature and our impact on it.[9] Therefore, our ability to predict the likely consequences of our actions is always limited. In the words of philosopher of science, Karl Popper, “The future is open.”[10]

Taking an ecosystem approach means shifting our focus from the parts to the whole, from structure to process, from objective claims to contingent descriptions, and from objects to relationships.[x11 In environmental ethics, this requires considering the identity of organisms within their environment and also the integrity of natural systems.

[1] Herman E. Daly and Joshua Farley, Ecological Economics: Principles and Applications (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2004), 431-432. “The concept of emergence essentially recognizes that an assemblage of parts in successive levels of organization in nature can result in wholes that display properties that cannot be explained in terms of the collection of parts.” Robert Nadeau and Menas Kafatos, The Non-Local Universe, 118.
[2] Also, nonlinear systems are unpredictable. In nature the flow of streams and the weather are good examples. “A system like this, in which the outcome is exquisitely dependent on the details of the initial conditions, is said to be chaotic.” James Trefil, Human Nature: A Blueprint for Managing the Earth – by People, for People (New York: Henry Hold and Company, 2004), 180-181.
[3] Robert Nadeau and Menas Kafatos. The Non-Local Universe, 118.
[4] Robert Ayers, quoted in Charles J. Kibert, Jan Sendzimir and G. Bradley Guy, “Defining an Ecology of Construction,” in Charles J. Kibert, Jan Sendzimir, and G. Bradley Guy, eds., Construction Ecology: Nature as the Basis for Green Buildings (New York: Spon Press, 2002), 16.
[5] Ecological theories now measure the resiliency of ecosystems rather than their stability, as disturbances are understood to be natural. See Ned Hettinger and Bill Throop, “Refocusing Ecocentrism: De-emphasizing Stability and Defending Wildness,” Environmental Ethics (Spring 1999), in Louis P. Pojman and Paul Pojman, eds., Environmental Ethics, 187-188.
[6] Ernest Lowe, “Foreward,” in Charles J. Kibert, Jan Sendzimir, and G. Bradley Guy, eds. Construction Ecology, xxiv. Italics added.
[7] Ibid. “Even very similar organisms in the same habitat display internal adaptive behaviors that serve to sustain the whole when food and other resources are in short supply. One such adaptive behavior involves the division of the habitat into ecological niches where the presence of one species does not harm the existence of another similar species.” Robert Nadeau and Menas Kafatos. The Non-Local Universe, 117.
[8] “By ‘productive,’ the scientists mean the amount of plant and animal tissue created each hour or year or any other given unit of time. By ‘stability’ they mean one or the other or both of two things: first, how narrowly the summed abundances of all species vary through time; and second, how quickly the ecosystem recovers from fire, drought, and other stresses that perturb it. Human beings understandably wish to live in the midst of diverse, productive, and stable ecosystem.” Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life, 108.
[9] For a more detailed description of this ecological worldview see Fritjof Capra, “The Role of Physics in the Current Change of Paradigms,” in Richard F. Kitchener, The World View of Contemporary Physics: Does It Need a New Metaphysics, (Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1988), 163, in Robert Nadeau and Menas Kafatos, The Non-Local Universe, 213.
[10] Karl Popper: “You cannot predict the future. The future is open.” Adam J. Chmielewski and Karl R. Popper, “The Future is Open: A Conservation with Sir Karl Popper,” Ian Jarvie and Sandra Pralong, eds,. Popper’s Open Society after Fifty Years: The Continuing Relevance of Karl Popper (London: Routledge, 1999), 32.
[11] Robert Nadeau and Menas Kafatos, The Non-Local Universe, 196-197.

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To consider how we should change our minds, we look to ecology: “The study of the relationships between and among organisms and their environment,” which “consists of both non-living factors and other organisms.”[1] Like every scientific discipline, ecology is a tradition of thought that includes diverse explanations. Throughout the twentieth century ecologists have debated whether the environment is best represented by organic models that emphasize a dynamic community, or economic models that analyze the whole in terms of its parts.[2]

The present environmental crisis as well as recent research has shifted the focus to ecosystems. Analyzing the environment as a living system involves assessing the relationships within the system as well as its emergent properties, which are not reducible to the functions of the parts of an ecosystem. Ecology now seeks to describe the integrity of an ecosystem.[3]

Many relationships within the environment are mutually beneficial (symbiotic). Fungi in the soil attach to the roots of trees to form structures called mycorrhizae, a relationship that benefits both the trees and the fungi. The trees supply carbohydrates to the fungi, and the fungi increase the ability of the root system to absorb water and minerals.[4] It is estimated that 95 percent of all plants on earth participate in this symbiotic relationship, and some species of trees would not survive without the assistance of fungi.[5]

We find in the environment of cells another important example of symbiosis, which is the result of coevolution.[6] The mitochondria, which are specialized structures that convert carbohydrates, fats, and proteins into a usable form of energy,[7] evolved from bacteria that were incorporated into the cells of organisms early in the evolution of life.[8] The fact that a typical cell in every animal, plant, or fungus has about two thousand mitochondria “powering” it,[9] suggests that this evolved symbiotic relationship is important for being fit to survive.

The ecological relationships of tree roots and fungi, and also mitochondria within every plant, fungi, and animal cell, illustrate mutually beneficial coevolution that is not accurately characterized using notions such as the “survival of the fittest” or “selfish genes.” So, we should not be surprised by the definition of an ecosystem as: “An ecological community together with its environment, functioning as a unit.”[10]

Ecosystems are everywhere. Many consist of “a community of plants and animals in an environment that supplies them with raw materials for life, i.e., chemical elements and water. The ecosystem is delimited by the climate, altitude, water and soil characteristics, and other physical conditions of the environment.”[11] Within an ecosystem, “Every species is bound to its community in the unique manner by which it variously consumes, is consumed, competes, and cooperates with other species. It also indirectly affects the community in the way it alters the soil, water, and air.”[12]

An ecosystem, however, may also be defined as: “the collection of biotic and abiotic components and processes that comprise and govern the behavior of some defined subset of the biosphere.”[13] And the biosphere may be understood as “a global ecosystem composed of living organisms (biota) and the abiotic (nonliving) factors from which they derive energy and nutrients.”[14] This description emphasizes the contribution of the parts to the whole.

Bacteria, for instance, which are the most abundant form of life on earth, play a crucial role in the complex processes of ecosystems. Without bacteria, we would not have nitrogen in our soil, and the ground would not sustain the trees that produce much of the oxygen we need to breathe and the crops we grow for food.[15] Hundreds of millions of bacteria live in our intestines, stomach, and mouth, and assist with our digestion.[16]

In fact, “The vast majority of the cells in your body are not your own; they belong to bacterial and other microorganismic species.”[17] Every person is a community of life and not simply an individual.[18] Even the crook of your elbow is “a special ecosystem, a bountiful home to no fewer than six tribes of bacteria” that help “to moisturize the skin by processing the raw fats it produces.”[19]

If “all organisms larger than bacteria are intrinsically communities,”[20] then we need to understand evolution more ecologically.[21] In every multi-cellular organism, there are bacteria participating in the life of the organism rather than “competing” with it for survival. Thus, evolution is more accurately described as a process of natural selection in which communities that are fit for changing environments are more likely to survive.

[1] Bill Freedman, Environmental Ecology, 550.
[2] Writing at the beginning of the final quarter of the twentieth century, Donald Worster argues that the split between an “organic, communal ideal and a more pragmatic utilitarianism remains in doubt.” Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: The Roots of Ecology (San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 1977), 257.
[3] See Laura Westra, An Environmental Proposal for Ethics: The Principle of Integrity (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1994).
[4] “Tree Roots,” Iowa State University Extension, online at http://www.extension.iastate.edu/Pages/tree/roots.html.
[5] “Mycorrhiza,” online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycorrhizae.
[6] Harold Morowitz asserts that “all evolution is coevolution.” Harold J. Morowitz, The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 137.
[7] “Citric Acid Cycle,” online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citric_acid_cycle.
[8] “Cellular Respiration,” online at http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/C/CellularRespiration.html.
[9] “Mitochondria,” online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondria. “An estimated 6 trillion reactions are taking place in each cell every second.” Deepak Chopra, The Essential Ageless Body, Timeless Mind: The Essence of the Quantum Alternative to Growing Old (New York: Harmony Books, 2007), 18.
[10] Yahoo! Education, online at http://education.yahoo.com/reference/dictionary/entry/ecosystem.
[11] Yahoo! Education, online at
http://education.yahoo.com/reference/encyclopedia/entry/14890;_ylt=ApQPyGKZkvGjcMfSDLN.KsZTt8wF.
[12] Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life (London: Abacus, 2003), 11.
[13] Wikipedia, online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosystem.
[14] Encyclopedia Britannica, online at http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9117266/biosphere.
[15] Lynn Margulis, “Power to the Protoctists,” in Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Slanted Truths: Essays on Gaia, Symbiosis, and Evolution (New York: Springer-Verlag 1997), 79.
[16] Steven Rose, Lifelines, 2.
[17] “You yourself are a rainforest of a kind. There is a good chance that tiny spiderlike mites build nests at the base of your eyelashes. Fungal spores and hyphae on your toenails await the right conditions to sprout a Lilliputian forest.” Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life, 20.
[18] “[O]f all the organisms on Earth today, only prokaryotes (bacteria) are individuals. All other live beings (‘organisms’―such as animals, plants, and fungi) are metabolically complex communities of a multitude of tightly organized beings. That is, what we generally accept as an individual animal, such as a cow, is recognizable as a collection of various numbers and kinds of autopoietic [self-organizing] entities that, functioning together, form an emergent entity―the cow.” Lynn Margulis, “Big Trouble in Biology: Physiological Autopoiesis versus Mechanistic neo-Darwinism,” in Slanted Truths, 273.
[19] Nicholas Wade, “Bacteria Thrive in Inner Elbow; No Harm Done,” The New York Times (May 23, 2008), online at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/23/science/23gene.html.
[20] Ibid.
[21] “It now appears that microbes―also called microorganisms, germs, bugs, protozoans, and bacteria, depending on the context, are not only the building blocks of life, but occupy and are indispensable to every known living structure on the Earth today.” Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan, Microcosmos: Four Billion Years from Our Microbial Ancestors (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), 16, in Robert Nadeau and Menas Kafatos, The Non-Local Universe, 110.

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The claim that humans are “blindly programmed” is also overreaching, for there is ample evidence that all kinds of organisms, as well as humans, learn to change themselves and their environment. Animals have the ability to learn because the same genes that respond to signals from within also respond to experience in the environment that impacts the organism. “The reason that animals can learn is that they can alter their nervous systems on the basis of external experience. And the reason that they can do that is that experience itself can modify the expression of genes.”[1]

Most “animals are born not just with the ability to perceive and act but also with the ability to learn and to use past experience to improve subsequent behavior.”[2] For instance, sea slugs “can learn to ignore the irritating prods of curious experimenters.”[3] Honey bees are “prewired” to orient by the sun’s position on the horizon, but have to learn “the sun’s trajectory at the bee’s particular latitude at a particular time of the year.”[4]

Complex systems of communication are also present among animals. Bees “dance” in the hive to indicate to other bees where pollen is to be found and, after locating new sites suitable for nesting, refrain from communicating in the hive the direction of a new nesting site until the bees “agree” as to which potential site is best.[5]

Among some chimpanzees older chimps teach youngsters how to forage for food by using a stick to draw termites out of their nest. In other communities adult chimps use stones to crack open nuts, while younger chimps watch. As not all chimps do these things, we know that these traits are not caused by genes.[6] Diverse phenotypes (chimps using sticks, chimps using stones, and chimps using neither) are expressed by one genotype (chimpanzee). These various behaviors are taught and learned, which is what we mean by culture.[7]

In humans and other mammals changes in the brain take place as an organism responds to changing environments. This making, pruning, and rewiring of neural circuits is called neuroplasticity. “[F]rom the earliest stages of development, laying down brain circuits is an active rather than a passive process, directed by the interaction between experience and the environment.”[8] Until recently scientists thought that aging brought an end to neuroplasticity. “In the past two decades, however, an enormous amount of research has revealed that the brain never stops changing and adjusting.”[9]

Our experience changes our brains. “Without question the brains of adult mammals in general, and humans in particular, are endowed with a plasticity that enables them to continually adjust their behavior with experience. The development process does not tie down every conceivable synapse in a rigid and unalterable form, but leaves considerable scope for ongoing readjustment in the adult.”[10]

As a biological process, neuroplasticity is constrained by an organism’s genetic expression and natural development,[11] but humans have an extraordinary capacity to recover from some brain injuries.[12] Changes in our brains are largely the result “of what we do and what we experience of the outside world. In this sense, the very structure of our brain―the relative size of different regions, the strength of connections between one area and another―reflects the lives we have led.”[13] Exercise enhances brain function.[14] Doing changes our thinking.

We can also change our brains in significant ways by focusing our attention on the changes we want to make. “Paying attention matters. It matters not only for the size of the brain’s representation of this or that part of the body’s surface, of this or that muscle. It matters for the dynamic structure of the very circuits of the brain and for the brain’s ability to remake itself.”[15] Our minds can change our brains! This fact is crucial for doing ethics.

How we understand evolution affects our thinking about ethics, so we need to be clear about what we now know from recent science:
· Organisms evolve and change the environment that “selects” them.
· Organisms coevolve as well as eat one another and compete.
· Humans (and many other organisms) learn, communicate, and choose.
· Mammals change their brains and humans change their minds.
“In natural selection as we now understand it, cooperation appears to exist in complementary relation to competition.”[16] Social Darwinism is wrong. We are not “survival machines” for our genes. Mind matters.[17]

[1] Gary Marcus, The Birth of the Mind (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 98.
[2] Ibid., 22.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid., 23.
[5] The “language” of bees is transmitted genetically, but the dialects of some bird songs are transmitted culturally. Timothy Goldsmith, The Biological Roots of Human Nature, 103-104.
[6] “Each tool-using behavior recorded in Africa is limited to certain populations of chimps but has mostly continuous distribution within its range. This is just the pattern expected if the behavior had been spread culturally.” Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 30.
[7] Bijal Trivedi, “Chimps Shown Using Not Just a Tool but a ‘Tool Kit’,” National Geographic News, online at http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/10/1006_041006_chimps.html.
[8] “The basic principle is this: genetic signals play a large role in the initial structuring of the brain. The ultimate shape of the brain, however, is the outcome of an ongoing active process that occurs where lived experience meets both the inner and the outer environment.” Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind and the Brain, 117.
[9] “Brain Plasticity: What is It?” online at http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/plast.html.
[10] Timothy Goldsmith, The Biological Roots of Human Nature, 85. “Does the genome specify, in detail, all of the connections a developing nervous system makes within itself? A simple calculation shows that this is not possible. The human brain is estimated to contain about 1012 neurons and roughly 1015 synapses, but human chromosomes contain about 105 genes. Even if these estimates are off by one or two orders of magnitude, one can see that the instructions for wiring together the brain must be quite general in character. There is simply not enough information in the genetic code to specify in advance every synaptic connection, let along the finer details of neuron geometry.” Ibid., 74. See also Gerald M. Edelman, Second Nature: Brain Science and Human Knowledge (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 22.
[11] Ibid. “[C]ertain kinds of competence―perceptual, linguistic, social―do need to develop on schedule, or the deleterious consequences are reversed with difficulty, if at all. This is because the capacity for learning, like the development of body form, is subject to some genetic constraints.”
[12] The adult brain has “the power to repair damaged regions, to grow new neurons, to rezone regions that performed one task and have them assume a new task, [and] to change the circuitry that weaves neurons into the networks that allow us to remember, feel, suffer, think, imagine, and dream.” Sharon Begley, Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain, 8.
[13] Ibid., 8-9.
[14] “[E]xercise increases levels of serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine―important neurotransmitters that traffic in thoughts and emotions.” The neurons in the brain “connect to one another through ‘leaves’ on treelike branches, and exercise causes those branches to grow and bloom with new buds, thus enhancing brain function at a fundamental level.” John J. Ratey, MD, with Eric Hagerman, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2008), 5.
[15] Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind and the Brain, 224. For a pianist, “merely thinking about playing the piano leads to a measurable, physical change in the brain’s motor cortex,” and patients with depression by “thinking differently about the thoughts that threaten to send them back into the abyss of despair…have dialed up activity in one region of the brain and quieted it in another, reducing their risk of relapse.” Sharon Begley, Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain, 9.
[16] “This is particularly obvious in predator-prey relationships and the manner in which different predators have evolved to favor different prey and hunting strategies in a particular ecological niche. What is privileged in the struggle for survival is not competition between parts. It is complementary relationships between parts and wholes that result in emergent self-regulating properties that are greater than the sum of parts and that serve to perpetuate the existence of the whole.” Robert Nadeau and Menas Kafatos, The Non-Local Universe, 207.
[17] The phrase “mind matters” is part of the titles of chapters 8-10 in Robert Nadeau and Menas Kafatos, The Non-Local Universe.

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When Charles Darwin described evolution as the result of “natural selection,” he was drawing an analogy to the breeding of animals, which involves artificial selection. It was well known that animal breeders could make changes in a species by breeding stock with certain traits. Darwin’s hypothesis was that changes also occur spontaneously in nature, and that changes contributing to the survival of an organism in its environment are more likely to be passed on to the next generation.

Darwin proposed that natural selection might account not only for changes within a species, but also for the evolution of diverse species. Thus, the word selection had a different meaning for Darwin than for animal breeders, as they select animals for breeding with the purpose of improving a trait. Darwin identified natural selection as a natural process resulting in the greater survival of organisms that are fit for their environment.[1]

Many organisms in an environment are predatory. Herbivores eat plants, and carnivores eat herbivores and smaller carnivores. This obvious fact and Darwin’s theory about why the more fit survive in nature were used as evidence to support a political and economic theory known as Social Darwinism. A moral philosopher was the first to characterize natural selection as “the survival of the fittest.”[2] The phrase was applied uncritically to rationalize the success of the rich and the suffering of the poor, without challenging the economic and political injustice that at least partly explains this disparity.[3]

Some scientists now see predation as primarily a process of coevolution.[4] “Predator and prey or parasite and host require a coevolution where both flourish, since the health of the predator or parasite is locked into the continuing existence, even the welfare, of prey and host.”[5] Such relationships involve complex patterns of fitness for an environment.[6] Once we understand nature as involving relationships and coevolution, we are less likely to think of humans as simply the most successful survivors of the natural struggle to survive.

Social Darwinism, nonetheless, continues to cast a shadow over environmental ethics. We find this thinking, for example, in the “lifeboat ethics” that makes an ecological argument “against helping the poor.”[7] Clearly, there are dangers in drawing ethical inferences from scientific theories. We should keep this in mind, as we consider how genetics has led to a revision of the Darwinian theory of evolution that is known as the neo-Darwinian synthesis.

Darwin proposed the theory of natural selection before scientists were able to confirm the presence and role of genes. Now the scientific discipline of genetics explains how the traits of an organism are transmitted to subsequent generations, and also how changes may occur among genes that will affect the traits of an organism.[8]

It is important to emphasize that genes function in their environment as parts of chromosomes in a cell within an organism. “How, when and to what extent any gene is expressed―that is, how its sequence is translated into a functioning protein―depends on signals from the cell in which it is embedded. As this cell is itself at any one time in receipt of and responding to signals, not just from a single gene, but from many others which are simultaneously switched on or off, the expression of any single gene is influenced by what is happening in the whole of the rest of the genome.”[9]

A gene is not an entity that simply produces a trait. Genes are part of a process that constructs proteins, and these depend not only on the amino-acid sequence dictated by a gene, but also “on their environment, on the presence of water, ions and sometimes other small molecules, and on acidity or alkalinity.”10] Genes contain information about development, but the expression of genetic information depends on the environment.

It may be surprising that “the environment” plays a crucial role at all levels of life, but this seems to be how nature is. “For individual gene-sized sequences of DNA, the environment is constituted by the rest of the genome and the cellular machinery in which it is embedded; for the cell, it is the buffered milieu in which it floats; for the organism, it is the external physical, living and social worlds. Which features of the external world constitute ‘the environment’ differ from species to species; every organism thus has an environment tailored to its needs.”[11]

The active engagement of organisms and genes with their environments makes a summary like “the survival of the fittest” far too simple. Also, we should challenge statements such as: “We [humans] are survival machines―robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.”[12] Although made by the noted scientist, Richard Dawkins, this statement is misleading. The word selfish, expressing an analogy to caring only for oneself, does not reflect the process by which genes are expressed through interactions in the environment of a cell, which occur within the environment of the organism as the organism interacts with it.

[1] Twentieth century biologist Theodosis Dobzhansky asserts: “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” Quoted in Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (New York: Free Press, 2006), 141.
[2] The philosopher was Herbert Spencer. Mary Midgley, The Ethical Primate, 6.
[3] Also, the eugenics movement adopted this slogan to support human breeding to try to improve and purify the human race. See “Modern History Sourcebook: Herbert Spencer: Social Darwinism, 1857,” online at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/spencer-darwin.html.
[4] “Painting a new picture on the conflict side, even before the rise of ecology, biologists concluded that to portray a gladiatorial survival of the fittest was a distorted account; they prefer a model of the better adapted. Although conflict is part of the picture, the organism has a situated environmental fitness. The plants in a forest may adapt to each other in ways that reduce competition. Plant growth seasons and flowering are staggered; plants evolve differing degrees of tolerance to light, moisture, and soil conditions. Animals eat different foods, or use a food resource in sequential stages. All share energy pathways. Fitness includes many characteristics that are not competitive for resources or detrimental to neighbors….” Holmes Rolston III, Environmental Ethics: Duties to and Values in the Natural World (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1988), 164.
[5] “It seems doubtful that ‘plant defenses’ are that and nothing more. Plants regulate but do not eliminate the insects and animals that have coevolved with them.” Holmes Rolston III, Environmental Ethics, 165.
[6] For example, parasitic wasps lay their eggs in caterpillars, and after these eggs hatch in a caterpillar the larvae feed on it. The wasps find the caterpillars by following the scent of a chemical, which is present in the caterpillar feces but is also secreted by the plant, when caterpillars feed on it. Together, parasitic wasps and the plants that caterpillars feed on have evolved a relationship that benefits the wasps and the plants. The caterpillars do not seem to benefit, yet enough of them survive to reproduce, so they, too, are fit for this environment. See Steven Rose, Lifelines, 227.
[7] Garrett Hardin, “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case against Helping the Poor,” Psychology Today (Sep. 1974), online at http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_lifeboat_ethics_case_against_helping_poor.html.
[8] “Evolution is a fact that is now established beyond reasonable doubt. So is its main mechanism by natural selection acting on accidental genetic modifications devoid of intentionality. The findings of molecular biology can leave no doubt in this respect.” Christian de Duve, Life Evolving: Molecules, Mind, and Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 289.
[9] Steven Rose, Lifelines, 131.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid., 140. For a critique of Dawkin’s position see “Genocentrism” in Evan Thompson, Mind in Life, 173-194.
[12] Richard Dawkins, quoted in Midgley, The Ethical Primate, 5. Unfortunately, economic and political influences, “which shape our metaphors, constrain our analogies and provide the foundations for our theories and hypothesis-making,” support “biology’s currently dominant reductionist mode of thinking.” Steven Rose, Lifelines, 70.

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“It is often claimed that science stands mute on questions of values: that science can help us to achieve what we value once our priorities are fixed, but can play no role in fixing these weightings. That claim is certainly incorrect. Science plays a key role in these matters. For what we value depends on what we believe, and what we believe is strong influenced by science.”[1] This is as true for us today, as it was for Aristotle and Kant. What we believe about the world depends on what we know, and the most recent studies in science reveal not only how our brains work, but also the limits of our ability to know the world as it is.

Biologists now verify that our brains construct our perceptions. Our neurological system does not simply record data. “Perception is not a process of passive absorption, but of active construction.”[2] The human brain has complex feedback systems that filter and interpret sensory experience, and these systems are affected by our experience.[3] “Your understanding of reality is constructed in large part according to your expectations and beliefs, which are based on all your past experiences, which are held in the cortex as predictive memory.”[4]

This means that no matter how objective we may try to be, our knowledge will also be subjective.[5] “No observations can be made at all, without some initial predispositions to notice some things rather than others.”[6] Our worldview is always our worldview.
Physicists also confirm that our perceptions affect what we experience. The theory of quantum mechanics holds that we create what we experience by selecting from among the many possibilities that may be made actual. “The observer does not create what is not potentially there, but does participate in the extraction from the mass of existing potentialities individual items that have interest and meaning to the perceiving self.”[7]

Furthermore, quantum mechanics has verified experimentally that we live in a nonlocal universe. We are unable to understand the total reality of a particular event, because the entire universe is entangled.[8] Whatever we know, we know only from within the entangled relationships that constitute our sense of reality.[9] Yet, these entangled relationships also transcend our “local” knowing.[10] Thus, our observations cannot fully disclose reality, for perceiving one aspect of what is happening hides complementary aspects that we might otherwise see.[11]

This scientific view of the limitations of our understanding “in no way denies the existence of a real physical world, but rather rejects an objectivist conception of our relation to it. The world is never given to us as a brute fact detachable from our conceptual frameworks. Rather, it shows up in all the describable ways it does thanks to the structure of our subjectivity and our intentional activities.”[12]

The mind emerges from the natural world, so we are unable to stand apart from the world to observe it.[13] As conscious beings living in a world that is affected by our observations, we shape ourselves and our world as we seek to understand both.[14] Our knowledge always only approximates reality.

These scientific insights have three critical implications for ethics. First, we must take into account the effect of our consciousness on what we observe and describe.[15] The “transition from the ‘possible’ to the ‘actual’ takes place during the act of observation.”[16] In actuality, “the world comes into being through our knowledge of it.”[17] If we address environmental issues from within the environment, which is our habitat, we will see that we are the environmental crisis.

Second, because we shape what we know, our responsibility in making ethical decisions is crucial. “Living is a process of sense-making, of bringing forth significance and value.”[18] Our knowledge may be limited, but acting on our knowledge makes sense both of the world and our own lives. Therefore, we are the only solution to the environmental crisis.

Third, current science reveals that every conceptualization is a human construction and not simply reality.[19] This means that the dichotomy in traditional ethics between humans (as rational and autonomous beings) and other living organisms is a way of seeing the world, and not simply the way life is. Seeing the world from the perspective of teleological ethics may make it harder to appreciate the reasoning of deontological ethics. Each ethical theory actualizes some of the potentialities of life, but obscures other possible ways of understanding the world.[20]

Science confirms that moral consideration is not a fact, but a human decision. Traditional ethics has limited the moral community to humans and their institutions. On the basis of current science, however, we may decide that it is rational to ascribe moral consideration to organisms, species, and ecosystems. We are responsible for realizing the moral potentiality of nature.


[1] Henry P. Stapp, Mindful Universe: Quantum Mechanics and the Participating Observer (New York: Springer, 2007), 5.
[2] Sandra Blakeslee and Matthew Blakeslee, The Body has a Mind of Its Own, 41.
[3] Rita Carter, Exploring Consciousness (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), 128.
[4] Ibid. “Anatomists have found that in most areas of the cortex, for every fiber carrying information up the hierarchy, there are as many as ten fibers carrying processed information back down the hierarchy.”
[5] Robert Nadeau and Menas Kafatos, The Non-Local Universe, 175.
[6] Anthony O’Hear, Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 24.
[7] Henry P. Stapp, Mindful Universe, 8. “Science is what we know, and what we know is only what our observations tell us. It is unscientific to ask what is ‘really’ out there, what lies behind the observations. Physical laws as embodied in the equations of quantum physics, then, ceased describing the physical world itself. They described, instead, our knowledge of that world. Physics shifted from an ontological goal―learning what is―to an epistemological one: determining what is known, or knowable.” Jeffrey M. Schwartz. The Mind and the Brain, 273-274.
[8] “[T]he stark division between mind and world sanctioned by classical [Newtonian] physics is not in accord with our [current] scientific worldview. When nonlocality is factored into our understanding of the relationship between parts and wholes in physics and biology, then mind, or human consciousness, must be viewed as an emergent phenomenon in a seamlessly interconnected whole called the cosmos.” Robert Nadeau and Menas Kafatos, The Non-Local Universe, 5.
[9] Erwin Schrödinger explains: “Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is, in a certain sense, the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance.” Quoted in Ken Wilber, ed., Quantum Questions (Boulder, CO: Shambala, 1984), 97, in Robert Nadeau and Menas Kafatos, The Non-Local Universe, 216.
[10] “And no scientific description of the physical substrate of a thought or feeling, no matter how complete, can account for the actual experience of a thought or feeling as an emergent aspect of global brain function.” Ibid., 143.
[11] This is known as the principle of complementarity. “What is dramatically different about this new situation is that we are forced to recognize that our knowledge of the physical system cannot in principle be complete or total. Although we have in quantum mechanics complementary constructs that describe the entire situation, the experimental situation precludes simultaneous application of complementary aspects of the complete description. The choice of which is applied is inevitably part of the results we get. The conceptual context of our descriptions may remain classical. But we are obliged to use a new logical framework based on a new epistemological foundation to make sense out of the observed results.” Robert Nadeau and Menas Kafatos, The Non-Local Universe, 93.
[12] Evan Thompson, Mind in Life, 82. “Objectivism takes things for granted, without asking how they are disclosable to human experience and knowledge, or how they come to be disclosed with the meaning of significance they have. Objectivism in biology, for example, takes the organism for granted as a ready-made object out there in the world. No concern is shown for how the category ‘organism’ is constituted for us in scientific experience.” Ibid., 164.
[13] “The point here is not that the world would not exist if not for consciousness. Rather, it is that we have no grip on what reality means apart from what is disclosed to us as real, and such disclosure necessarily involves the intentional activity of consciousness.” Ibid., 21.
[14] “If nonlocality is an indisputable fact of nature, indeterminacy is also an indisputable fact of nature.” Robert Nadeau and Menas Kafatos, The Non-Local Universe, 179.
[15] This means that we should not seek “to disclose the real essence of phenomena, but only to track down as far as possible relations between the multifold aspects of our experience.” Niels Bohr, quoted in Henry P. Stapp, Mindful Universe, 86.
[16] Werner Heisenberg, quoted in Henry P. Stapp, Mindful Universe, 95.
[17] Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind and the Brain, 263. Henry Stapp argues: “Quantum theory rehabilitates the basic premise of moral philosophy. It entails that certain actions that a person can take are influenced by his stream of consciousness, which is not strictly controlled by any known law of nature.” Quoted in Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind and the Brain, 374.
[18] Evan Thompson, Mind in Life, 158.
[19] Moral philosophers often refer to this issue as the social construction of nature. “Weaker forms of constructivism argue that ‘nature’ and ‘the environment’ have been interpreted in a variety of different ways at different times; and that ‘nature’ is inescapably viewed through a cultural lens.” Clare Palmer, “An Overview of Environmental Ethics,” in Andrew Light and Holmes Rolston III, eds., Environmental Ethics, 33.
[20] This is the philosophical implication of the scientific principle of complementarity.

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