Vegans and the Intrinsic Moral Community, Part 4

The final part:

So how do we specify adequate and coherent moral thought about our obligations to non-persons? Examining the ethics of sustainability will help us focus on the right answer. In the late 1960s a philosopher named Garrett Hardin publicized the so-called 'tragedy of the commons' as an illustration of a general problem called the prisoner's dilemma, in which the action that is collectively rational for a group does not map onto what is individually rational for each person involved.

Hardin's example was medieval English common land, which, with no private ownership, suffered from overgrazing, to the eventual ruin of all involved. This ruin occurred because, for medieval peasants owning cows that grazed on the commons (owned by no one), the benefits that each extra cow brings were reaped solely by its owner, but the costs of the extra strain it put on the grass (and water, etc.) were shared among all the users of what is held in common. In economic jargon, the costs were (partially) externalized - not borne by the producers of the product, but by others. There is never an economic incentive to internalize external costs.

So everyone selfishly had an incentive to raise as many cattle as possible, although they knew if everyone did as they did, it would ruin everyone. But voluntarily refraining from use simply puts you at a competitive disadvantage with someone who selfishly grazes more. So individually rational behavior deteriorates into collective ruin. Such prisoner’s dilemmas are exceedingly common, and help explain why the free market cannot form a coherent basis for ethical behavior.

Solutions to such prisoner’s dilemmas in real life, claim Hardin, are either privatization or more likely mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon - as clean air and water, e.g., can't be privatized. So, Hardin believes that the government must simply pass and enforce laws to coerce people to act in their own long-term interest, even when some suffer as a result. One version of this view amounts to a kind of longer-term utilitarianism, in which numerous humans are sacrificed at present to save more later on - or to prevent many would-be miserable ones from ever being born. But even long-term utilitarianism fails, as we shall see in examining sustainability.

In his "Lifeboat Ethics", Hardin generalized this approach to examine the conditions for the sustainability of the whole biosphere, especially as regards human (over)population. He asserts that feeding the starving when such practices are unsustainable is unjustified. In particular, if we feed people and they reproduce and their children starve and we feed them... We cannot do so forever, and sooner or later everyone will be starving. I.e., Malthus was right. As one commentator put it,

It is moral to haul shipwrecked swimmers out of the water until one more swimmer sinks the whole boat. The answer to how many swimmers we can save is a scientific question. Thus, scientific morals.

Of course, it’s not really that simple. A better commentary follows rules drawn from Hardin’s work:

(1) An acceptable system of ethics is contingent on its ability to preserve the ecosystems which sustain it.

(2) Biological necessity has a veto over the behavior which any set of moral beliefs can allow or require.

(3) Biological success is a necessary (though not a sufficient) condition for any acceptable ethical theory. In summary, no ethics can be grounded in biological impossibility; no ethics can be incoherent in that it requires ethical behavior that ends all further ethical behavior. Clearly any ethics which tries to do so is mistaken; it is wrong.

I believe that these last 3 laws are basically correct, with some caveats as to wording. But they don’t validly generate the conclusion that we must allow millions of people (or non-human animals, for that matter) to starve because at present we don’t know how to create a sustainable economy for their area. But of course, Singer’s utilitarianism is misguided too – as seen in part 2, it flagrantly violates the third law above. Both Hardin and Singer fail sufficiently to appreciate how technology and human cooperation can change the nature of the game.

The ‘demographic transition’ that occurs as literacy levels and other indicators (particularly female education, contraception, and other types of female empowerment) move form a Third to First World has always included a drop in birthrate, largely coincident with but lagging behind (by 30-50 years) a drop in death rate. So populations boom for a while as health care and food production get better and people live longer, then stabilize as birth rates fall. I believe that the necessary conditions for such a transition are predicated on high literacy and other education, the emancipation of women from solely traditional childbearing roles into active social / work life, and expectations of reasonable health and longevity for oneself and one’s children. So I think the first focus of responsibility around the world is to create such conditions everywhere. They are prerequisites for long-term sustainability and quality of life, and thus inculcating such virtues trumps trying to save every single starving person.

We need a rich tapestry of the virtues that constitute the highest form of human life, and to educate people into seeing their value, instead of simply allowing market forces and advertising to pervert the values and preferences of the masses into short-term prisoner’s dilemmas. Virtue ethics, rather than utilitarianism, hence guides inquiry into future obligations. It helps us realize that such values as conduce to human flourishing – people playing proper roles, and learning how to play those roles excellently - are virtues, which will be self-authenticating - they will be the preferences people have under conditions of free and informed inquiry, the values of a self-sustaining and self-correcting society. They will always have the *truth* as their overarching goal, not the maximization of profit or any other lesser end.

Effecting this transition to an entire society which values the truth about everything, from how much to consume to how much to read to how much to give to famine relief, crucially depends on our ability to apply our education; that is, it depends on technology, and new technology changes what is ‘sustainable’. And so it makes perfect sense, e.g., to save as many lives as possible in a truly transitioning economy, because even if their lives are unsustainable under conditions *at present*, *if* the transition continues, their lives will become sustainable in the future. So it becomes a matter of priorities: to a first approximation, we should save as many starving people as possible, *as long as* they could also be given health care and educated to an awareness of the basics of free inquiry, self-government and democratic rule with resources available.

And so I hold that our primary duty to any future Jane Doe is to assure that she will be born into a society with those values. And likewise, our responsibilities to non-persons depend on whatever our proper role in a properly functioning society would be – so a butcher should carve up animals, and is virtuous to do so; but a troubled teenager should not carve up the family pet – for that is not the proper role for either the teen or pet to play in a flourishing society.

Selfishness can be rationally defeated, because, in the end, one can defeat prisoner’s dilemmas with education - one can get people to see what is selfishly rational is collectively irrational, and in the end, will bring them down too. Prisoner’s dilemmas only work when people don’t understand the difference between collective and individual (selfish) rationality - when they do not know how to reach a sustainable consensus, to inculcate the virtues that lead to flourishing in lived society. Inculcating those values, for treating both other persons and the rest of our natural environment, rather than any narrow short-term utilitarian calculus, or a misguided emphasis on the impossible ascription of “rights” to non-persons, will lead to the eventual solution to the problem of specifying our duties towards the rest of creation.