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Posts Tagged ‘complexity’

Climate change is an ethical and justice challenge: consequently it will never be solved

October 14, 2018

Climate change and ecological destruction are often framed as ethical challenges, to be solved by a new ethics or a better notion of justice. While I agree that ecological destruction is an ethical challenge, I suggest that this means it will not be solved in the time frame available.

This occurs for four reasons. First there is no basis for ethics which is not already ethical; therefore it is highly improbable we can have an agreed ethics take form across the globe in the needed time frame. Second, we live in complex systems which are unpredictable and not completely knowable, so the results of ethically intended actions are uncertain. Third we influence the meaning of what is good or bad through the context we perceive or bring to the events; given complexity and given cultural variety, the chances of agreeing on a context for these acts and events is small. Four, because context is important and caught in group-dynamics, ethics always gets caught up in the politics between groups, is influenced by those politics and their history, and there is no non-political space in which to discuss ecological destruction.

I prefer to talk about ‘ecological destruction’ rather than ‘climate change’ because, while people can disagree about climate change, there is less chance of disagreement about ecological destruction: it is pretty obvious, almost everywhere, with new highways, new dense housing, destruction of agricultural fields, destruction of forests, accumulation of waste, pollution of seas and over-fishing. We face far more ecological challenges than just climate change. Climate change is a subset of the consequences of ecological destruction and the dumping of products defined as waste, into the air, the ocean or vital water tables. The fact that we live in complex systems also means that deleterious effects in one system, spill out into others, and eventually cannot be kept local; we all interact with each other and the rest of the ecology. Everything is interdependent. Without plants we cannot survive. Without drinkable water we cannot survive. Without breathable air we cannot survive. These are basics for almost everything on earth.

However, given climate change is a moral issue, this decline in human liveability is not necessarily a bad thing. You have to already take the moral position that human survival, or that not harming fellow humans (in some circumstances), is good or the basis of virtue. You could decide that humans should be eliminated for the greater good; that they (or a subset of humans) are destructive parasites who should be exterminated. You might decide that only those humans with some qualification (intelligence, religious purity, dedication to the party, or wealthy, for example) should survive as they are ‘the best’ and the exemplification of what is moral. This is not unusual, most ethical systems do discriminate ethically between different people. Children do not have exactly the same ‘rights and responsibilities’ as adults. People defined as immoral or criminal usually face sanctions, and lessened ethical responsibility from the virtuous – indeed the virtuous may have be said to have the responsibility to harm the immoral.

No moral basis
If human survival is not a fundamental part of morality, then what is? ‘Care?’ why should care be thought of as good? Some moralities argue that care is a corruption, that care encourages bad habits and laziness, or that true care involves violently correcting behaviour defined as ‘bad’. Care is already a moral proposition, not the beginning of a morality. ‘Obedience to God’s rules?’ Assuming that we could agree on what God’s rules were, then why is obedience to God good? Could it be that God is a tyrant and we need to disobey to discover moral reality? Could it be that God expects us to solve problems ourselves, as the rules presumably have a basis other than the mere whim of God – if not why should we assume that whim is good? The idea that we should obey God is already a moral proposition. ‘We should do our best?’ Sounds great, but what is ‘best?’ Is our version of the best, actually the best? what if someone else says it is not the best, or their best contradicts ours? Why does following our inner guide/instincts lead to the best – what if it does not? Should we bring ‘the greatest good to the greatest number?’ leaving aside that this does not resolve what is good, then why is it good to consider the greatest number? Perhaps some minorities need a good that conflicts with the good of the greatest number? Again the proposition assumes the moral position that the more people gain the good, then the better it is – which could be ethically challengeable. Some other people think that taking good and evil as undecidable and therefor not worrying about it is the root of virtue, but who decides this is good? What evidence is there that personal peace is better than personal indecision? Valuing personal peace above all else, is already a moral proposition. Some people may even define what appears as ecological destruction as ecological improvement, partly because it is bringing the natural world under human control. What is destructive or not, is in itself an ethical question which runs into this problem of ethical presuppositions.

There is no way of resolving these dilemmas that I am aware of, and the presence of differing moralities and irresolvable questions, seems to demonstrate this. Moral uniformity, historically seems to depend on violence, and why should we accept that as good?

Complexity
In complexity we have multitudes of interactive systems which interact with each other. Nodes in these systems are constantly being modified by other nodes and events in the systems, or they are modifying their own behaviour and responses to events in the system. Sometimes the modifications are successful, or relatively harmless, and the new shape continues, sometimes they fail and it dies out. This is the basis of evolution, which happens all the time – there is no stability to ecologies.

The multitude of these links between nodes, are usually beyond full comprehension or enumeration by humans. Such systems are constantly in flux, often around recurrent positions, but they are open to sudden, rapid and unexpected change.

Complexity means that we cannot always predict the result of specific actions, especially when other people (and their reactions, and their attempts to ‘game’ the system) are involved, and when the situation is constantly changing and old points of balance are shifting. This change is something we face with ecological destruction. Patterns cannot remains stable. We can predict trends such as the more average global temperature increases, the more unstable the weather, and the more likely that violent weather events will occur. Similarly, the more destruction the more the unstable the ecology will become, and the more pollution the more unstable the ecology will become – unless it reaches the temporary stability of death.

Because so many events occur, are connected and are simultaneous, it may be impossible to tell what the full results of any particular action are. This is often expressed in the metaphor of the butterfly’s wing flaps eventually leading a major storm. Normally we would expect the multitude of butterfly actions to cancel each other out, and they may well do this most of the time, but not always. The reality is that small events can have major consequences, and we probably cannot tell which small events are significant until after the results have occurred. This lack of predictability means that we never have full control over complex system, we always have to adjust our actions given what occurs, should we try and work with the system.

This has particular consequences for ethics, in that the results of ethical actions, and ethical rules will not be predictable. The actions may be well-intentioned, but unexpected consequences are normal. If the consequences of an ethical action cannot be predicted, then how can it be guaranteed to be ethical? You can state that an ethical action is ethical irrespective of its results, but this is already an ethical position, and most people would probably not be completely indifferent to the results of their actions. The flux also means that propositions like the “categorical imperative” do not work, because we cannot assume situations are ‘the same’ or similar even in principle. Complexity means we cannot behave as we would want all others to behave in the same situation, because the situation could be unique. Besides perhaps different classes of people should behave with different intentions and different ethics. Why should ethics be uniform? Uniformity is already a moral decision.

Arguments about the results of actions and the similarity of situations are more or less inevitable.

Context
What this last statement implies is that the context of an event influences our understanding of the event. This is particularly the case given that we do not know all the connections and all the possible responses that parts of the system may make. We cannot list them all. We are always only partially understanding of the world we are living in, and this is influenced by the context we bring to those events. Possible contexts are modified by peoples’ connections to the events, and the cultural repertoire of possible responses and languages they have available. Given the 1000s of different cultures on Earth, and the multitude of different ways people are connected to the events and the people involved, then the possibility of agreement is low.

Politics
One important context is political conflict. One way of giving an ethical statement, ethical decision making, or an event, context is to frame it by your relationship to the people involved. If they are people you identify with, or consider an exemplar of what humans should be, then their statements are more persuasive and they are more likely to seem ethically good to you. If they seem outsiders or people you don’t identify with, or seem to be an exemplar of an out-group, then the less persuasive they will appear to be. Consequently ethics in always entangled in group conflict and group politics. This politics pre-exists and the groups involved may have different relationships to ecological destruction, and so have different politics towards that destruction, and towards other groups involved. Thus we frequently see people in favour of fossil fuels argue that developing countries need fossil fuels to develop, and that preventing the ecological destruction which comes with fossil fuels, prevents that development, and retains people in dire poverty and misery. What ethical right do already developed countries have to do that? What makes this poverty good? in this case developed countries may be considered evil for being concerned about ecology. Similarly developed countries may argue that most of the true destructiveness comes during development, and that while they are stabilising or reducing destruction, the level of destruction from developing countries will destroy us all. In this context, developing countries are wrong, or provide an excuse for inaction. The situation is already caught in the struggles for political dominance and safety in the world, as one reason for development is military security and a refusal to be dominated by the developed world again. There is a history of colonial despoliation involved here – although again to others, the despoliation can be defined (ethically) as bringing prosperity and development.

‘Climate Justice’, does not solve these problems because, in practice, justice involves defining some people as evil (which automatically sets up politics), it cannot limit contexts, and the machinery of justice depends on violence or the threat of violence. If a person is defined as a criminal and either punished or forced to make recompense, that occurs because of the potential of the powerful to use violence to enforce the sentence. In the current world system, there is no organisation or collection of organisations, which can impose penalties, or generate a collective agreement on what justice is in all circumstances, for the kinds of reasons we discussed above. Climate Justice is simply likely to encourage more blame allocation and conflict.

Recap and conclusion

Ecological destruction is embedded in ethical interpretations. These ethical interpretations are influenced by, and undermined by:

The difficulty of establishing a universally agreed ethical basis for actions. Ethics problems are essentially irresolvable, and yet all action involves ethics.

The complexity which means we cannot predict the results of all actions, we cannot control the system and we cannot understand the system completely.

Context, or the meaning which influences meanings, mean that different people will bring different contexts to events and understand them differently, and treat them differently ethically.

Context includes politics between groups and the different ethical systems belonging to different groups. Ecological destruction is already tied into different interpretations and different developmental (and other) demands and conflicts.

Thus it is extremely unlikely that we will spontaneously develop a universal ethical system which will allow us to decide what actions to take to resolve ecological destruction, or stop ecological destruction. Indeed the ethical conflicts will probably further delay our ability to respond.

Ethics may well be the death of us.

Tags:climate change, complexity, disorder, ethics, social category theory
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Stratospheric Aerosol Injection

August 15, 2018

Stratospheric Aerosol Injection is a form of Geoengineering, which is being considered because the climate situation is getting desperate, with extremely high temperatures in the Antarctic, and massive bush fires around the world.

It involves injecting particles into the upper atmosphere. There are problems with using this technique to modify climate – some technical and some political and some both. This post describes some of them. It incorporates parts of an earlier post on this site.

1) We have to rely on models for our predictions and understanding of weather, climate and ecology, and models can be wrong.

2) The system we would be trying to modify is complex and not predictable in specific. So we do not know the exact results of putting the particles into the stratosphere – we would have to find out through doing.

3) The chances are high that some areas would suffer significant weather changes after the particles reached the stratosphere and these changes would not be uniform. The effects usually discussed are changes in rainfall. For example protecting Europe could lead to major drought in north Africa.

4) Geoengineering is based in social systems which are also complex systems, and GE could disrupt those systems and their balances.

5) For example, unintended bad weather effects could lead to massive people movements, which as we know can be considered potential ‘take overs’ and increase social stresses and tensions….

6) This together with unpredictability, might lead to accusations of weather warfare, whether it was or not, and this might then spill over into more orthodox forms of warfare.

7) GE is cheap in some sense, in that it might only cost billions a year to implement. While this suggests rogue corporations or states could begin GE, it also suggests that there could be fights over funding. Would those who contributed the most want the best results for their countries as opposed to others?

8) GE requires some form of international governance to avoid arguments, which has been shown to be hard to establish even with simpler objectives

9) I have not seen any viable self-supporting GE proposals. Nearly all of them require massive tax-payer subsidies, and some appear to need massive cross-national governance and regulation. We could give massive subsidies to private enterprise and hope they do they job without any oversight, but I doubt that will appeal even to the pro-corporate-power lobby. There is no apparent profit in Geoengineering, other than the potential to threaten people with bad weather. So it is unlikely that corporations would persist with it.

10) GE once begun must be continued, but warfare, or economic collapse could lead to rapid discontinuation, and hence extremely rapid climate change, which might further reduce biodiversity, as the change would be so rapid. Decline in biodiversity = decline in ecological stability.

11) It is extremely likely that once GE was implemented, people in power would breathe a sigh of relief and say “oh we don’t have to stop burning fossil fuels anymore”, so the situation gets worse, but they stay in power.

12) The rational solution to climate change is to lower emissions – we have known this since the 1980s at least. We have the technology to do this now, and it largely seems to work. That we don’t do this, shows we have a destructive set of social organisations and rivalries, and GE will be implemented within this destructive organisation and probably further destruction.

13) The assumption of GE is that it is easier to modify the complete climate and bio ecologies of the planet without serious unintended effects, than it is to lower emissions. This, in practice seems unlikely.

14) GE does not stop or ameliorate the results of high levels of CO2, thus ocean acidification and ocean death would continue – which would be calamitous.

15) The particles which people usually suggest we use are sulphites, these have the potential to further damage the ozone layer. There are plenty of other ecologically destructive actions GE does not ameliorate or stop.

16) People who support GE tend to be those who deny we should do anything about climate change, consequently the likelihood of point the points about continuing destruction, rather than lessening it, increases.

Short summary: Stratospheric Aerosol Injection is a largely uncontrollable, unpredictable process embedded in destructive social organisations, that will delay any chances of fixing climate change. Fixing climate change requires changing our social organisation and reducing emissions.

Tags:'nature', Anthropocene, complexity, Energy, geoengineering, technology
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Skepticism and Evident climate change

July 30, 2018

I guess everyone interested in climate change will have encountered people who state three things. One; that climate change is not evident, Two; that climate change has happened in the past and is part of the natural cycles, and Three; that we cannot predict exactly what will happen…

Changes that happen slowly are rarely evident to bare human sensory apparatus. We acclimatize, and declare it has always been this way – despite the record of above average temperatures we have been registering (and of course averages are undermined by people’s experience of variations, and by their desires to keep seeing normality and experience tranquility) People who move from cold countries to hot countries may soon feel that temperatures which would have once been ‘hot’ feel ‘cold’. Unaided senses may not always be accurate enough to detect climate change, that does not mean it is not happening. When we can detect climate change with unaided senses it will probably be too late.

After saying that Climate change is not evident, then people may point to previous incidents of climate change and imply it is relatively harmless, or that we cannot do anything about it, and it has nothing to do with us. While I think the idea that climate change has happened in the past is probably correct, the rest may not be.

I particularly have no idea how the concept that “the planet has been going through heating and cooling waves for millions of years” can be considered ‘evident’ in itself – especially if contemporary climate change is not evident. The concept of previous climate change is based on a whole lot of theory, interpretation and data gathering.

Most of that theory is part of the web of theory which also suggests that the current climate change (even if natural) will be rapid (in geological terms) and devastating for ecologies and human civilization.

Current climate change is also compounded with widespread ecological devastation from human sources (deforestation, over-fishing, chemical pollution, depletion of phosphorus etc.), all of which are likely to make the change even more violent and which were not present in previous ‘natural’ periods of change.

The further assertions that because the planet has had changes of climate many times before we should not be worried about it this time, do not seem evident at all to me. Especially as rapid climate change in the past does seem to have been harmful for species.

The third point about uncertainty of what will happen is true; the future is always uncertain. However, because the future is uncertain does not give us the right to assume that the least unpleasant events are the most likely. That is actually a refusal to accept uncertainty.

So what is evident? To me it is evident that we depend on ecologies, and creatures depend on each other (I do not live alone in a vacuum) – this is also backed up by many studies, which give what I would call evidence. Other people may deny this for whatever reasons. But if you accept that some kind of mutual dependence is evident, then continually messing up, destroying and injecting waste into these ecologies is evidently harmful to us all, and likely to result in catastrophic change past a certain point. So its probably best to stop doing it, and try something else. Harm may also result from these remedial actions, but that harm is not evident – it is supposition.

Is it evident that a bullet through the chest will kill me? No, not until it happens – and if it is evident, then there will probably be no me for it to be evident to. There is a level at which it may be best to work with some supposition.

Tags:'nature', Anthropocene, climate change, complexity, Disinformation, disorder, skepticism
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Max Weber and the unintended consequences of Protestantism

June 18, 2018

When writing about Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism two obvious things have to be born in mind (and I wouldn’t bother writing about them except a friend pointed to an article which completely ignored them). You need to understand what Weber understood by the ‘Protestant Ethic’, and explain how and why Weber connected it to ‘capitalism’. Weber did not write about the ‘Christian Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’, or the ‘Modernist Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’, but the ‘Protestant ethic and… ‘

The book is about the Ethic/ideology of Protestantism, and why this led to the formation of capitalism as an unintended consequence of the actions and dispositions protestant (really puritan) religion generated. It is a reply to those Marxists who insisted that economic behaviour and structures was the complete determinate of religious ideology. In counter argument Weber proposes we have a positive feedback loop (although he could not use those terms of course). In this argument Protestantism both was, and generated, a major break with the Christian past and previous economic formations processes. For Weber, Protestantism formed the generator and essence of capitalism or in other words its ‘spirit,’ or ‘internal rationality.’ It is also a mild criticism of that ‘spirit’ and of those people who think wealth is a sign of God’s blessing, and the consequences these views have built.

So the Protestant and particularly the puritan ethic had the following consequences (and this is a bit of elaboration of Weber, and taken from other places).

1) Salvation became purely individual. You could not work together for salvation, such as say prayers for those in purgatory. Hence the idea that everything depends on the individual – and there is no such thing as supportive community with anyone other than believers.

2) Everything that happened is and was predestined, including your salvation or damnation. Nothing you did in the way of good works could make a difference to your future, only your strong faith, and separation from sin.

3) Poverty was a result of sin and God’s will, so the poor were beyond help through charity, only through their personal/individual conversion and God’s will. It was even considered sinful to give ‘indiscriminate charity’. The Poor had no legitimate demand on the rich, or anyone else, for help. This helped to break the social relations which operated against capital accumulation. It also led to punishing the poor through workhouses, which may have formed the template for the factory.

4) As you did not know whether you were saved or damned and good works did nothing, you looked for signs of God’s favour in this life such as wealth.

5) Work and capital accumulation became the measure for true ‘vocation’ rather than mysticism, open charity, love or prayer for others.

6) Eventually work became everything, and everything that was not work was an indicator of potential damnation – the devil makes work for idle hands – the poor must work, human life is work/labour. Time is money and must not be ‘wasted’…. etc. The Workhouse was considered good for the poor as well as preventing them from committing sin.

7) Nature was purely a resource for work and conversion into wealth. Unless land was ‘productive’ for good puritans it was valueless, and needing ownership and improvement to make productive. Hence, first people’s did not treat land as ‘property’ or ‘properly’ and it should belong to protestants by right of God.

With the loss of joyful activity, all that was left was work, money and condemnation of the sinful.

None of these results were intended by the original protestants, and only a fairly small portion of the population were ever driven puritans, but the ideology and the habits it inculcated had a major effect on the formation of modern life.

While this opened a pathway to allow the formation of a prosperous and plentiful mercantile middle class, as opposed to peasants and aristocrats, priests and warriors, the problem is (and I think that the criticism is implied by Weber), is that this protestant ethic is not a particularly pleasant foundation for a society. It destroys human sociability, mutuality, joy, spontaneity and connection to the Earth, and reduces all value to money and self-righteousness…. It is a very bleak basis for life and permeates the modern world.

Tags:complexity, economics, ethics, religion
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Bitcoin and its costs

June 7, 2018

Bit coin is usually put forward as a piece of criminal activity or as a triumph of libertarian economics.

It has two main problems, which reflect neither of these positions..

1) It is amazingly slow. The transaction rate is so slow that it constantly grinds to a halt with high demand. As far as I know, this problem cannot be solved without increasing the intensity of the second problem.

2) It has extraordinary energy consumption. I quote from an article appended below: “A fluctuating bitcoin price, along with increases in computer efficiency, has slowed the cryptocurrency’s energy footprint growth rate to ‘just’ 20 percent per month so far in this year. If that keeps up, bitcoin would consume all the world’s electricity by January 2021.”

Bitcoin is clearly destructive….

The energy usage is a cost of bit coin transactions which has to be paid for so it means that bitcoins should have a constant drain in value. This cost works like the signorage on medieval coins (the charge for turning gold or silver into coins), because bitcoin exchange is the only ‘value’ being produced. This drain on value is probably not a good deal, and probably can only be funded in an apparently non detrimental way as long as new bitcoin users appear, and bid for coins. This makes bitcoin a Ponzi scheme which will eventually collapse, given the limits on transactions, and the eventual limit on new participants compared to old participants.

The problem for non-users is the pollution from energy consumption, which is (if the article is correct) apparently huge. That pollution is a cost that appears to be being socialised or shuffled onto everyone, even if those being enriched hope that they can get rich enough to avoid the problems it generates. It is also possible that taxpayers will end up funding the energy costs, which is also probably not a good idea.

In the long term unless the energy consumption can be reduced (and the slow speed increased) bitcoin does cost too much to maintain.

https://grist.org/article/bitcoins-energy-use-got-studied-and-you-libertarian-nerds-look-even-worse-than-usual/amp/

Tags:complexity, economics, free markets, technology
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Thinking on the spot: Algorithms and Environment

June 1, 2018

I may, or may not, be asked to participate in a radio show/podcast about algorithms and the environment….

This is my initial spur of the moment thinking…

I’d start by talking about the difficulties of getting algorithms for a complex system. The whole point of complex systems is that they are unpredictable in specific, while possibly being predictable in terms of trends. For example, we cannot predict the weather absolutely accurately for a specific place in 3 months, but we can predict that average temperatures will continue to rise. Initial conditions are important to outcomes in complex systems, but there are always prior conditions (ie there is a way in which initial conditions do not exist), and because so much is happening and linking to each other, there are always problems determining what is important to the model, and what the consequences of an action were. Another problem with complexity (as far as I understand it) is that it can only be modelled to a limited extent by any system which is not the system itself.

Then the model tends to be taken for reality, so we act as if we knew something and are working directly on that system, rather than working on a model which may increasingly diverge from reality with the passing of time….

Then there is the issue of power relations. We know that one simple way of proceeding with Climate change, is to phase out coal and other fossil fuels and increase the use of renewable energies. However, we can’t even do this transition at the speed we need to because of established power relations and habit (power is often the ability to trigger established pathways of behaviour) – and we cannot guarantee there will be no unexpected side effects even if we could. For example, we may not succeed in replicating something like our current social life with renewables or we construct them in such a way that it harms the environment.

We also seem to need to absorb greenhouse gases as well as cut back on emissions, but absorption can be used to delay reduction (again through power relations), and there is, as yet, no yet established way of dealing with the GHG that have been removed which is safe or long term. Algorithms cannot successfully model the effects of things we don’t know how to do…

On top of that there is the potential power consumption of the algorithms – while hopefully this will not be too bad there is some evidence that bitcoin (which is a complex algorithm of a kind) could end up being the most energy hungry thing on the planet…. In which case our efforts to save ourselves could intensify the crisis.

Now, to be clear, I’m not saying that computational algorithms are never of use, but that they tend to be used without testing because they depend on fictional stories which have a high level of conviction, and are treated as if they are the reality we are working with and not as models of that reality. If the model / algorithm tends to advantage some group more than others, and the appliers belong to people loyal to that group, then it will probably be harder to curb if incorrect, and be more likely to be taken for correct. The same is probably true if the model reinforces some precious group belief. The point of this is that models tend to become political, (consciously or unconsciously) because the axioms seem like common sense.

According to some theories humans tend to confuse the ‘map’ for the ‘terrain’ (to use the General Semantics slogan) almost all the time unless its visibly and hopelessly not serving them and there is an easy alternative. If so, that could be one reason why science is so difficult and so relatively rare, and so easy to ‘corrupt’ when it becomes corporate science.

If we are going to model what we do in the world then we absolutely need something like computer modelling, but we also need to emphasise that these models are unlikely to ever be totally accurate, always are going to require modification and change, will get caught in politics and could always be wrong.

If we don’t do this then the aids to helping us model what we are doing and need to do, could well make things worse.

Tags:Anthropocene, complexity, Energy, knowledge, technology
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Economics of waste again

May 29, 2018

Why do humans pollute?

Firstly, because these particular people don’t think ecologically or systemically. They think that dumping their individual or organisation waste products into the environment will not harm anything that much. They may ask, ‘how much difference can one person/organisation make?’ The answer is, over years, and with other people thinking and acting similarly, a lot.

Secondly, pollution can be encouraged by society when the costs of polluting are not factored into the economic process. If it is cheaper to pollute, there is no penalty for polluting, and it does not seem to harm them directly then people will pollute. The more that profit becomes a god the more people are likely to cut costs by polluting. The freer the market, the more intense the pollution, as those who can buy the laws and ethics make the laws and ethics.

Thirdly, if one group has conquered another and they can direct their pollution at the weaker group then they will often do so. I suspect this comes from both the brutal joy in displaying power, the aim of further weakening the conquered, and a lack of consideration for others -especially ‘the weak’. It was traditional for the wealthy to live on the top of a hill and sewerage to flow down and accumulate, and the most polluting factories and mines tend not to be in wealthy areas.

A relatively equitable society, with friendly relations with its neighbours, that did not value money above all else would probably not have as many pollution problems. If people also thought ecologically, realised that individual actions were rarely individual or unique, did not emit more than the ecology could process and turn back into ‘goods’, realised that all such processes are uncertain, ‘complex’, unpredictable, often irreversible, and cumulative and that you need to factor in lots of ‘slack’ for systems to stay relatively stable, then it would almost certainly not be poisoning itself, and would make polluters take responsibility for their waste.

Can this happen without some kind of revolution in the capitalist west? I don’t know. Let’s hope so. Otherwise our lives will be driven not by constructive production, but the production of waste.

Tags:complexity, economics, ethics, free markets, mentalities
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Donut Economics

May 17, 2018

Kate Raworth’s ‘donut’ presents a relatively new way of looking at the economy, which has attained some fame. See the picture below.

As you approach the hole in the middle, you have an economy which does not satisfy people’s needs such as water, food, housing, relative equity, liberty, education and so on.

As you approach the edge of the image you begin to destroy the ecologies of the planet that the economy depends upon, producing events such as biodiversity loss, climate change, disruption of nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, destruction of fertile land, and so on.

Whereas without such a diagram, the capitalist economy is perceived as a matter of self-contained markets isolated from ecology, she argues that the aim of economics should be to satisfy people’s needs without destroying that planetary ecology.

Normal economic theory, can argue that inequality decreases as growth increases, and that growth cleans up economies, because the economic model looks at the world in isolated ways. Some economies appear to clean up ecologies, but they do so at the expense of other ecologies, and businesses are always happy to lower the costs of pollution and increase profit when offered an opportunity.

People may object that it is impossible to meet the needs of everyone – especially while respecting the planetary boundaries, but at least in this model it appears as something which can be discussed as a major concern. Just as we can ask “What is the economy for? What is it about?” and get a reasonably useful answer.

The old economics had an extremely confining view of human nature, it was humanity stripped of everything but the profit motive. This was a decision originally taken to distinguish economics from other fields such as history or philosophy, and to make things simpler, but it became the model of humanity. Under it we are *just* individual profit seekers. We only cooperate in order to make personal profit, we naturally destroy for profit, we have fixed preferences which we neutrally evaluate, and we have no purpose, happiness or virtue other than wealth seeking.

This view is simply not true, or adequate. Humans co-operate as naturally as they compete. We are social as much as individual, we do not naturally only value money and we do not destroy what we share. We are creatures with many purposes and many aims. Wealth is usually only important to the extent it brings about those other purposes and we are not made happy by consumption.
Raworth’s model, to me, is reasonably obvious and elegant and allows humans to be complex. It is not reductive.

It does have a few problems.

1) It does not explicitly recognise that the current economy is a mode of power, situated within frameworks of power relations, and that historical evidence appears to show that those who benefit from this mode of power will do almost anything to preserve it – including wreck the earth.

Nearly all forms of organisation are nowadays reduced to economic/capitalistic organisations. Media and information is controlled by capitalists, the law is controlled by capitalists, the State is controlled by capitalists, education is controlled by capitalists, and so on. Paying attention to the “bottom line” (measured in terms of money) is a mantra that both permeates society, and ignores reality.

It will be hard to move against inertia and the active power dedicated to preserving existing hierarchy. The model does not easily provide for the distortions that power puts into economics – any more than standard economics does. But as standard economics aims to preserve that power it is not a handicap for it, but a strength, as its users can pretend that inequality of outcome is always proportional to inequality of talent.

2) More importantly, the model does not provide a set of simple positive instructions for politicians. It does not give them an easy and painless set of action slogans and programs, whereas conventional economics does.

Conventional economics says: business is always good and always delivers, you must increase growth, nature is limitless or unimportant, commons don’t work so sell them off to business, government is inefficient so hand it over to business, rich people are talented so give them more support and protection (and pick up the rewards), reduce taxes, stop government services, increase charges, abandon poor people as they are without virtue, and individual wealth and its owners should be worshiped.

Donut economics, just says don’t destroy the world, and let everyone participate. Neither is easy under the current power relations, and these actions do not reward players in the State. The model grinds to a halt.

It needs simple and positive directives.

So time to think what those might be….

Tags:'nature', Anthropocene, complexity, economics
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Ethics and Culture

April 23, 2018

Ethics is cultural, we are brought up to feel that certain things are wrong, and that we should behave in certain ways. It is also bound up with political relationships between groups – if a person is a member of our group, or someone we identify with then we are likely to treat them specially; usually (but not always) we will be more sympathetic, accept excuses, assume they are really right, be persuaded by their arguments, and so on. These seem to be matters of fact. But our responses to them are ethical.

Should ethics be cultural? Should ethics be political? This is instantly an ethical question, and thus irresolvable if my initial question as to whether any ethical propositions could exist that were not already ethical, although I suspect most people would not say ‘yes’ to either of these propositions…

it seems to me that agreement with local customs cannot be a basis for ethics. It seems to be a cop out. I would expect a an ethicist to challenge local customs. That they would be socratic in the sense of seeing whether those customs had any basis in reality or were coherent, or likely to produce the results that the holders’ intended. While arguing that ethics should produce the result it intends is another ethical statement, it seems to be one most people might agree with – although they don’t have to, its not compelling. My kind of ethicist would not be socratic in looking for a definition of the good or the just, because that leads to the unreal….

When I suggest that there is no basis for ethics which is not already ethical, I’m not suggesting that ethics is always coherent, although I may assume an ethical position that coherence is usually good. For example an ‘ethics of love’, may also generate violence, oppression and hatred (especially if it is applied via rules… but that is another argument for another time), and this may not seem compatible with its initial formulation. People with this ethics may be aware of these problems (as when Franciscans were brought into the inquisition), but these ethical people may attempt to suppress awareness of unintended consequences, in order to support their ethical systems, and produce even worse consequences and incoherencies….. And it seems ethicists might challenge that, although the challenge can always be denied.

Tags:complexity, disorder, ethics
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Ethics and its basis – Again….

April 22, 2018

My recurring question is whether it is possible to find a basis for ethics which is not already ethical?

Thus some people argue that we should obey God’s commands (let us ignore the fact that almost nobody obeys the complete commands of any religious text) but the idea that obeying God is ethical is already an ethical proposition which can be challenged by other ethical propositions.

The Utilitarian idea of the greatest good for the greatest number, depends on the ethical idea that ethics should benefit the many rather than the few, this also could be challenged by another ethical proposition.

The idea that we should behave in a situation in the way that we would want all such situations to be treated (‘the categorical imperative’), contains an ethical assumption that generality should override specific context. It could be argued that ethics must attend to context. (‘should’ and ‘must’ are almost always terms implying an ethics is going on).

The idea that ethical behaviour resides in a mean (Aristotelian arête ethics), is a proposition which implies that extremes are unethical (and come in binaries!)

Anti-cultural relativism, often seems to assume similarity is ethical and unsimilarity is not.

And so on.

I think people can argue that I am cheating here because I have not given a definition of ethics. But while definitions are helpful I don’t think it solves problems.

I’m not a Platonist, so I don’t believe that giving a definition always provides understanding, or is always possible.

Sometimes people know what they mean well enough…. But let us assume that ethics has to something to do with terms like virtue, good behaviour, right behaviour, morality and things like that. I may not know what ethics is, you (as reader) may, but I all I kind of know is how people use the word.

One gentleman discussing this issue with me gave the following definition:

By “ethical”, I mean “anything that pertains or is related to some system of ethical values and duties”.

I would also stipulate that, according to my own preferred use of terms, a system of values and duties is to be called “ethical” if — at a minimum — it is designed with the (implicit or explicit) goal of protecting (and even of increasing) the well-being of some sentient entities (human or non-human).

This encapsulates part of my problem with ethics as a “set of propositions” and illustrates my question… “Is it possible to find a basis for ethics which is not already ethical [i.e., value-laden]?”

Lets look at the beginning of this definition: “By ‘ethical’, I mean ‘anything that pertains or is related to some system of ethical values and duties’.”

I don’t have to say this is circular, and I certainly couldn’t do any better myself. ‘Ethics is about ethics.’ Obviously he moves on to illustrate what he means by ethics…

“a system of values and duties is to be called “ethical” if — at a minimum — it is designed with the (implicit or explicit) goal of protecting (and even of increasing) the well-being of some sentient entities (human or non-human).”

So he makes what seems to me to be an ethical proposition, that ethics is about ‘protection’, and ‘well being’, of ‘sentient entities’.

There is no non ethical reason why this should be the case. It is already value laden. Thus a person with a different ethical position might argue that not everyone should be protected, only particular special people (this is common in ethical systems – foetuses cannot be killed by surgery, but enemy mothers and foetuses can be killed by bombs). They might object to “well-being” saying that was the decadent ethics of bourgeois society and ‘hardiness’ or ‘spiritual discipline’ should be the end of ethics as it was ethically superior, etc. Finally a non-humanist eco-philosopher could argue that that ethics has to be directed to the environment, as there are no singly existing sentient entities, everything exists together, or that sentience is not that important ethically speaking; it is an “unethical” form of exclusion, structurally comparable to racist ethics, and so on…

If so, and if this makes sense, yet again we have an illustration of it appearing not to be the case that we can have an ethical proposition/axiom which is not already ethical, or value laden…

Tags:complexity, ethics
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