Environmental ethics - a world record for misplaced concern

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.