Abstract
The topic of this chapter is how Ethics and Earth Ecology relate to each other. Given the dynamics of the Earth’s ecological system, ethics takes the meaning of an emergent layer of quality control on human’s actions in the organic global Earth environment. Fittingly, the paper starts out with a brief account of how System Dynamics characterizes the behavior of complex large-scale systems and how the characterization applies to the Earth’s biosphere. Chaos and subsequent emergence play a central role in this characterization. They provide the scene on which human behavior has to evolve, using, in particular, intelligence as the ability to imagine, estimate, plan, influence, and to some extent control the Earth’s development. The human interaction with the Earth’s ecological system obviously needs direction toward insuring sustainability of its actions, and preferably even generating a high global quality (QoL) of the symbiosis of humans with their environment. The paper, therefore, develops a theory of ecological ethics based on insights from medical ethics and the striving toward achieving individual human health. This approach leads to the identification of classes of “diseases of ethics” and their incidence on Earth’s global health. It motivates the unequivocal choice for a new type of humanism extended to the Earth’s global ecology, as the basis for this “emerging” ethics. The paper then ends with applying these ideas specifically to the future organization of economics in a healthy, sustainable way, and the discussion of potential measures to achieve this.
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Notes
- 1.
The “behavioral” point of view is typically the level at which understanding can be achieved between a lay person, who only knows about appearances, and a specialist, who knows about internals. For example, the depletion of the ozone layer has produced effects that can be experienced by anybody, while the mechanisms involved require specialized knowledge of chemistry. The potential lack of understanding between lay observers and scientists is a major obstacle to sensible ecological policies. It can only be bridged by what I call semantic alignment, i.e., agreeing on how effects can be understood from their outside appearance, without knowledge of the underlying mechanisms.
- 2.
A butterfly beats its wings somewhere on a Pacific Island, producing a cyclone a couple of months later. It may be true that if that butterfly had not beaten its wings, the cyclone would not have arisen in the same way, but the same can be said from an almost infinite number of possible parallel “causes” (like other butterflies). The cyclone can be influenced by myriad “causes” like wind directions, clouds, temperature differences, etc.
- 3.
In system theory, a world is defined as the global object of study. In our case, it is the Earth as a global ecological system. However, due to the intrinsic limitations of the possibility of analysis, the whole Earth cannot remotely be captured in its full complexity. Every study will be limited to a schematic view on it, based on a limited number of assumptions and focusing only on certain, mostly “emergent” aspects.
- 4.
It is remarkable that many modern scientists and philosophers believe in generalized causality and evolution being deterministic because basic physical laws appear deterministic. This turns out to be a serious systemic—and scientific—error: these natural laws are deterministic only if infinite precision in space and time were possible. It also amounts to a logical mistake: it is not because causality can be observed in a number of cases that all dynamic evolution is necessarily causal.
- 5.
Perhaps not on the detailed local evolution of its constituents, which can often not even be assessed. For example, in a kettle of boiling water the tracks of individual molecules of water appear fully random, although one knows that after a while every molecule has disappeared in the atmosphere. Similarly with the fate of individual atoms or molecules in a human body, although the constituency of specific organs will be pretty stable over a relatively large time.
- 6.
Fast relative to the underlying processes.
- 7.
The relation between chaos and emergence may be difficult to understand, but the notions are two sides of the same coin. An organism will only then be relatively successful if (1) it reproduces exponentially (a chaotic effect), but, on the other hand, (2) it reproduces itself as an ordered organism (otherwise it would not be recognizable: an emergent effect).
- 8.
Often a “bowl model” is used to explain the evolution from one equilibrium to another, with a “tipping point” seen as the crossing of the boundary of the bowl. In one or two dimensions, this is an appealing model. It is very unlikely to be valid when many more dimensions and generalized chaos is the case, except for phenomena where the few-dimension model is indeed credible, which are exactly the situations the proponents of the bowl model use to prove their case.
- 9.
In logic parlance, it determines necessary, not sufficient conditions. In a large distributed system, many more parameters are influential than those one is able to account for.
- 10.
Quality evaluation of an ethical system is a kind of “ethics of ethics,” as it is an effort to evaluate various ways to realize quality, including actual behavior. In the design world, it consists in evaluating the quality rules and practices of a company, while the actual ethics is whatever designers practice.
- 11.
Some people measure the performance of a car in terms of acceleration, reliability, or even just economy. Present-day measures of performance require the gauging of the car’s environmental impact, an issue one would not even have thought of 60 years ago!
- 12.
These categories are based on the recognition of two main logical types of classification, namely, structure versus semantics (or equivalently, aggregation versus generalization) and internal dynamics versus (emergent) control. Each of these carries its own type of disease.
- 13.
Humanism to be understood generically as an ethics based on the respect of the individual value of each human being extended here to respect for the value of the total Earth as an integrated organism, and not as a desire of humans to be “God” as incorrectly defined by some authors. Most, if not all, major religions in the world are profoundly humanistic, although the term has been misused to oppose religion, which certainly is a historical error, since the term is rooted in ancient religious thinking and the revival of the notion in the Renaissance. See also the Catholic stance in the Encyclical Laudato si.
- 14.
Globalization is not a choice, it is reality. Nature is global.
- 15.
Sometimes erroneously called “social Darwinism,” but there are many other varieties that posit the right of the strongest, in theory if not in actually practice.
- 16.
People will care for you if you care for them.
- 17.
Predators have a precarious existence. The cooperative mode is the mainstream method of survival of many species, even when unwittingly. For example, the symbiosis of plants and insects, or plants and mammals, not to talk of the symbiosis of mammals and bacteria, or plants and fungi, etc. Humans cooperate much more than they compete, if one considers all the cooperative effort that goes into education, household activities, care, culture, science, medicine, even in politics and business. We mainly compete to cooperate, but we also cooperate to compete although competition is mostly not the end goal, as it is in the Olympic Games—although even in that case one can argue that the end goal is the profit made by advertising agencies. Predation is not necessarily ecologically harmful, it is an element in keeping the ecological balance. It gets harmful when unchecked, and is then in danger of not only destroying the victims but the predators as well.
- 18.
It should be mentioned that the skeptical viewpoint is as old as philosophy, and perhaps its most essential ingredient, cf. Socrates’ view on the deficiencies of language and Lao Tzu’s warning on humans being “sorcerer’s apprentices” as related to the accomplishments of nature.
- 19.
As conceived by its originators like Erasmus and Thomas More.
- 20.
This is in stark contrast to a system where every action or transaction must be authorized by a central authority.
- 21.
Are we returning to a kind of Ancien Régime, whereby 2% of the population owns 98% of the wealth, while supply-side economists tell us irresponsibly that the remaining 98% of the population will profit from such a concentration because of a “trickle down” effect, the Earth’s resources are being squandered for profit of the few, and a large proportion of the population struggles to come by? We know from history to which kind of disasters this leads.
- 22.
Economic growth is strictly speaking not a systemic necessity, but we all know what a recession means in terms of societal disruption. Economic bubbles are caused by a chaotic run away of ill-advised actions, and, from an environmental point of view, investments in unsustainable depletion of nature or causing run-away pollution. Such investments are obnoxious and should be prevented by law. On the other hand, humanity has to put substantial effort in ecologically useful activities, hence creating economic growth in a desirable direction, which proves even more economically rewarding, since it involves a lot of people in meaningful activities, e.g., measured by the reward for their contributions. Nature does not get properly rewarded for its contributions, but people who exploit nature do, and this must change. But, similarly, people who contribute to nature’s and people’s well-being should get rewarded, which with nature profiting from it—that has to be the basis of economic growth.
- 23.
I am grateful to Michael von Hauff for pointing this out to me.
- 24.
Even Adam Smith stated that capital should not be hoarded, but invested in productive activities.
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Acknowledgements
My gratitude goes to Dr. Suparna Goswani for drawing my attention to the publication of Amar Bidhè. I am also grateful to Peter Wilderer for critical reading of this paper and discussions on its topics, and to Agnes Limmer, her staff, and the TUM-IAS staff for organizing the IESP meetings and assisting in the production of the resulting publications.
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Dewilde, P. (2022). On Ecological Ethics. In: Wilderer, P.A., Grambow, M., Molls, M., Oexle, K. (eds) Strategies for Sustainability of the Earth System. Strategies for Sustainability. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74458-8_3
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