Environmental ethics - a world record for misplaced concern

How worried do you reckon that people in developing nations - that are dying from hunger and other readily causes at the rate of 30,000 per day - are about global warming?

It seems like a stupid question because the answer is so obvious. But the answer is all important. It demonstrates why the supposed “number one” ethical concern of our generation (global warming) is, in the main, misguided self-interest dressed up as a moral crusade.

Hundreds of millions of people are already living in environmental conditions that are far worse than anything that will occur as a result of greenhouse warming - even according to the grimmest projections by Green groups.

And our response? As a nation, we are now obsessed with fussing about speculative future harm, while failing to come even close to meeting the international benchmark of donating 0.7 per cent of Gross National Income to the developing world.

This gross distortion in our ethical priorities is so acute that it can’t simply be explained as a judgment problem; something that will be corrected as we become more enlightened. It is deeper than that.

It highlights the overwhelmingly self-interested nature of the human species, which is exactly the reason that, if climate warning projections are right, we so managed to mess up the planet.

Scientists, social commentators and politicians are increasing engaged in the complex process of sifting through the conflicting climate data to ascertain just how much environmental degradation will occur in the foreseeable future.

The report by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states that increased temperatures will result in more storms, heat waves and rises in sea-levels. This might lead to geographical dislocation as millions of people move inland, and of course require a more expansive summer wardrobe.

The likes of Australian of the year Tim Flannery are talking down the supposedly conservative nature of the report by the UN. But the debate is piffle. Will sea-levels go up 18cm, 43cm or even 59cm? Is it going to get 1.1C hotter or up to 6.4C? For the perspective of net human flourishing the answer is close to immaterial.

Take the most catastrophic global warning outcome possible, and on a scale of human misery it is negligible compared to the abject destitution that hundreds of millions of, albeit distant people, are currently experiencing. Their environment is already largely incapable of supporting human life.

Flannery says that climate change is the most pressing issue confronting humanity. That might be so for affluent misguided Australians but the reaches of moral concern don’t stop at the territorial seas of the Australian coastline.

There are lots of ethical theories doing the rounds of philosophy departments. Some ethicists prefer theories based on abstract notions such as rights, others, like myself, are only concerned about maximising good consequences - even if it means trumping the occasional right. Irrespective of which theory one endorses, there is one incontestable ethical truth: the interests of each person count equally.

There is no logical or normative basis for ranking the interests of one person higher than another. An argument along the lines that “I am more important than you” is inherently discriminatory and morally vacuous. Moreover, it is incontestable that certain harm carries more weight than speculative harm in any moral calculus.

These universal moral truths, coupled with the fact that present day preventable suffering grossly exceeds the most dire predictions of climatologists stemming from global warning, exposes the intractable ethical shortcomings of the environmental movement.

The predictable response to my argument is that we should multi-task and fix both: world poverty and the environment. This is code for moral nihilism. It is a sure-fire way of continuing to consign more distant people to early unmarked graves from readily preventable causes.

Concern for others, like economic resources, is finite. We have to be very strategic in how we empty our sympathy gland. The history of human kind shows this.

To avoid charges of moral bankruptcy the Green movement has to do more than make the glib statement that we should fix everything. To underpin its principal cause, it needs to spell out in definite terms the argument that will move self-obsessed Westerners to take seriously the pitiable plight of distant people so that the 1 per cent of GDP that the Stern Report stated was necessary to fix the environment is more than matched by money flowing to hungry parts of Africa.

The answer needs to be better than shallow comments that environmental concerns relate to future generations and hence reveal a capacity for the current population to put ethics above self-interest. Greenhouse warning concerns have only resonated with the mainstream populace since climatologists have started making predictions of adverse climate events in our lifetime. Pretty much no one cared when the bad stuff was meant to happen hundreds of years into the future.

In truth we don’t care an inch about future people. Current practices show that we would ditch them in an instant if it meant even slightly limiting our way of life.

Concrete proof of this is that we live in a community where the only post-womb environment that is experienced by one in four embryos is the bottom of an abortionist’s bucket. This equates to approximately 90,000 future people being exterminated annually in Australia, normally for the economic convenience of the mother.

And finally, it’s time to consign the spurious Green mantra that people in developing nations will also benefit from curbing global warning into the non-recycling bin. In the 90 seconds that it took you to read this article 30 of them have just died. In the same time, the sea-levels haven’t risen a milli-fraction.

So by all means people should be encouraged to go Green, but first they need to cure pressing ethical problems: world hunger, followed by eradicating the massive gratuitous suffering we inflict on animals. Until that’s done, the Green movement will remain ethically barren - like the sand which is main anti-resource of the developing world.