I'm not entirely sure how to express this accurately, philosophically. But I've thought about this lately. In rhetoric revolving around the environment and issues surrounding it, I've noticed a kind of extension of care ethics that says simply "you should care about the environment and how you affect it because the earth's survival is contingent on your care." This is simplistic. But the arguments seem to want outsiders to its ideology to care because it is either morally wrong not to or detrimental to the whole human race (which is supposedly morally wrong). I hope I'm quantifying this correctly. I'm sure there are much stronger arguments than what I'm hearing because frequently people don't care and if we proposed compelling arguments, there may be different effects. May be.
I'm not sure this argument is quantifiable without statistical evidence, but it's contents does make sense. Quantifying it aside, it does ring true that we need to survive and for that to happen we need to care for the earth; however, if by earth you mean nature, it does not mean the Earth's survival depends on us. Nature will persist with us and without us.
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't say we need to survive. We desperately and instinctually want to. But your last point; I think we should bring up this point more to the incredulous folk. I get the impression most of the deniers of global warming deny it because if they acknowledge it as true, then that's some pretty scary stuff. Geological history is one of the best sources of evidence for this.
DeleteYou rightly identify an oddity of this argument -- its conclusion is that facts about the ecosystem and our relationship to it entail an obligation to have a certain feeling. We don't normally think of feelings as the sorts of things reason can command us to have. So perhaps there are some missing steps in the argument.
ReplyDeleteThis is a far way away for me in learning logic but would you be able to employ some kind of modal obligatory to this argument?
DeleteI think the insistence that people care is simply a recognition that people will only act if they are made to care, and one way to get people to care about something is to show them that their survival depends on it.
ReplyDeleteAnd care ethics can be good for that but there are those who keep denying. The believe-it-when-I-see-it kind of people and hopefully there is some sort of closed experiment we can do to simulate the long-term effects and that will be compelling evidence.
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