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Posts Tagged ‘disorder’

Conventions, Knowledge and Politics

August 3, 2019

I want to discuss the connection of conventions and knowledge by consideration of a political speculation.

The speculation is Could US President Trump declare a third term, or even become president for life?

If you don’t like speculating that Trump is able to violate existing convention, then substitute the name of your favourite political villain, who has power, whenever you read the word ‘Trump’, or just delete the word Trump. Cut and paste if necessary.

To begin to answer this question we have to ask “What is a constitution?” “What kind of power does a constitution have, and how does it get it?” and “how do people know about the constitution?”

I will suggest that constitutions have power because of the way they are interpreted, and the web of institutions and conventions that grow up around that constitution. This web of conventions and interpretations, sets up people’s knowledge about the constitution. Most people will not know the constitution in detail, they will only know it by what they are told, or how they are told to read it. As the interpretations change and the web of institutions change, or the conventions around those institutions change or weaken, then the interpretations of the constitution, knowledge of the constitution, and the role of the constitution can change. No constitution has power in itself alone, outside of this dynamic and complex context.

Constitutions are, like most laws, to a large extent decided by argument and by what people find they can get away with.

To return to the initial question about President Trump. This is of course a difficult question to predict the answer to, because the answer precisely depends on the interactions in complex web of institutions, conventions and interpretations, which will inevitably be involved in political struggle. Victory in that struggle is hard, perhaps impossible, to predict.

The simple answer to the question about President Trump, is that ‘constitutionally’ “no, it can’t happen” because of constitutional amendment XXII.

The status of an amendment is, again, not set in stone, but in convention. That the term limit is set by an amendment, may suggest the Constitution could be amended again to remove that clause. There is also a debate as to whether the framers of the constitution would have supported such an amendment, or whether they may have intended the President to be an elected king. If so, people could argue that the amendment is unconstitutional in itself and should be revoked, subject to further debate, repealed, or de-ratified in some way. If the institutions, or some of them, could be persuaded, or commanded, to be considerate of this view then the struggle is partly over. Yes there will likely be dispute, but the result depends on the strength of conventional institutions, their interpretations and the ruthlessness of the politics supporting or challenging these conventions.

To repeat, constitutions are matters of struggle, interpretation and precedents which are not certain – the knowledge of the precedents and what the constitution means is tied up with the interpretation of the Constitution. Words are always ambiguous, and their meaning can alter as the context (political or otherwise) alters. Even knowledge of the past can be interpreted in different ways and become a different history, which then gives different meanings to the present, and can be used to justify the argument the presenter wishes to justify. So the supposed constitutional framework of politics, and knowledge of that framework, is affected by the politics that is conducted within it.

President Trump and his party have to be admired for the skill with which they have undermined convention, interpretation, precedent and knowledge, and have set up new modes of interpretation and knowledge which favour them. It is no longer apparently disapproved for the President and his family to profit financially from the presidency. It is no longer disapproved for the President to accept help from a foreign power to boost his electoral chances. The President can apparently seek to obstruct the course of justice and it is not a problem.

President Trump has been explicitly attacking standard conventions of the US constitution. He has claimed that Article II gives him powers which no one has previously realized. He says it means he can do whatever he likes. People who are experts in the Law, say this is not true, but he has made the point, and his followers are more likely to believe him, than the experts. He has not been condemned for making these claims about the lack of limits on his power, by many people on his side of politics.

He has also claimed on two separate occasions that he can easily overthrow the 14th Amendment which says:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

Initially he claimed he could change it by executive order, and later by somewhat vague method. However, it is being asserted that the Constitution is not immutable and that he can suspend it, and those who say he can’t are wrong. Importantly Republican members of Congress seem to be largely not protesting against these claims, which suggests tacit support for Constitutional fragility, as long as it benefits them.

If any of this is disturbing to supporters, they can also deny it is true quite easily because of the mess of information, and because any position can be supported in information society – including positions which support any presidential overthrow of term limits. Likewise, as I have argued elsewhere on this blog, the information groups we belong to limit our access to disapproved-of-information and tie the information we accept to those we identify with so that information received and accepted becomes a matter of identity. In this situation, people who support, or oppose the President are less likely to have the full arguments of the ‘other group’ presented to them, and most likely dismiss them without understanding them. This is part of the way we come to know things.

President Trump also intensifies the patterns employed by previous Presidents to bolster power-concentrating conventions and precedents. He is part of a trend which helps him. He has continued deepening ‘the swamp’ of corporate interest, and governing according to those financial interests. He openly encourages corporations to pollute and poison people in the name of economic prosperity. He breaks treaties, and threatens war, by himself without consultation with Congress. His followers do not appear to expect him to tell the truth to the people, to conduct a remotely civil debate, or to refrain from multiple adultery and sexual assault. And so on.

The conventions have changed, and the sources of information the President’s supporters are repeatedly exposed to, have changed as part of this change. The lack of civility which the President encourages, also encourages the sharp separation of information groups, and the unlikelihood of his supporters or opponents getting information presented to them neutrally.

Within this kind of context, can we assume that if Trump did declare martial law, or claim a third term (perhaps because a winning Democrat had accepted help from Russia, had a sex scandal, or committed massive financial fraud that disqualified them from office), can we guarantee that fellow Republicans, judges and officials would not support him and would not denounce those opposed to this move as traitors, communists, or even terrorists? Would they absolutely not talk about armed insurrection if they were losing, or using the army to suppress dissent if they were winning? Would they not have the support of large swathes of the generally pro-Republican media? Especially after a few well placed threats? Would they not claim that violent neo-fascists who might go around beating up opponents were innocent, patriots, or just people fed up with the ‘deep state’? Would the institutions which support the conventional meaning and knowledge of the constitution, stand up for those meanings and knowledges against the direct instruction of politically appointed directors? Could they organize themselves effectively, or would they collapse in confusion and multi-directional impulses or internal dispute, which have resulted from the political discourse that splits the country?

I’m not sure whether any of this is possible or not. It would be nice to think it is all rubbish, but events suggest the US would not have that much further to go before it became possible, and then possible and acceptable, almost no matter who was President, and that the country and its institutions are heading in that direction, slowly and almost imperceptibly to most US citizens.

People can acclimatize to anything, given enough time, and the argument that President Trump is stupid, misses the fact that ignorance is not stupidity, and he has years of successful self-promotion behind him. He may have a limited set of skills, but they may be exactly what is needed for him to gain a third term if it is possible. He also has incentive to go for a third term because it protects him from prosecution…

There are plenty of occasions in which people have said that something could not happen, or would not happen again, just before it happened. Historically dictators have ignored convention, re-interpreted laws, declared states of emergency, got support from other interested factions, conducted massive misinformation campaigns, suppressed dissent, changed the status of knowledge or whatever. It has happened.

It would not seem impossible that Trump could suspend a Constitutional amendment, and that he would received support, rather than face immediate and compelled dismissal. Especially if he and his supporters were prepared to use violence to support their position.

Overconfidence in procedure, convention or knowledge, remains a great way to remain unprepared.

Tags:complexity, Disinformation, disorder, knowledge
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On business confidence

July 7, 2019

Scott Morrison is following the Trump pattern attacking worker’s rights and wages, and removing environmental ‘red tape’.

Odd how business confidence nowadays seems to depend on scrapping worker’s protections and environmental care.

Is capitalism that desperate that it can no longer function without the ability to destroy everything?

Tags:disorder, economics, free markets
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Climate justice is not the answer

May 26, 2019

Climate justice is a framework that is commonly used to conduct political campaigns for reform which are trying to help people adapt to, and mitigate, climate change.

The problem for me, is that the framing is not clear, and that I suspect it is not constructive.

Firstly, it appears that nearly all contemporary refusals to act on the ecological crisis depend on ‘justice’ or ‘fairness’ arguments.

For example, people often say that Australia issues just over 1% of all emissions, therefore we have negligible effect on the world and it is not ‘just’ nor fair to ask us to do anything. People can also say this will put up the cost of electricity, cause social processes to collapse and so on. why should ordinary Australians pay all the cost? Sure we can answer that Australia has much less than 1% of the world’s population, that it has a very high emissions rate per head, and that it exports lots of fossil fuels which are not counted in this total, but the argument can still stand: it’s not ‘just’ to act, especially given the bad consequences of action are not known in detail.

People in India and China, or other developing countries can argue that while it is true their emissions are likely to tilt the globe over the edge, it is ‘just’ to let them continue. The West had years of unconstrained growth, so should the developing nations so they can catch up. Attempts to stop them from polluting are evidently attempts to stop poverty reduction, and attempts by the West to maintain their world domination. Allowing this pollution is a matter of justice. The West should cut back to zero first, otherwise it is unfair.

Given that China and India are not cutting back, then people can argue that the US should not cut back, because where is the justice or fairness in crippling their economy and hurting their people, to allow others to pollute massively?

‘Justice’ means finding someone to blame, and people will reject the blame when it hits them: “we are not criminal, we are just acting as we have always done. Other people are worse than us.” People will usually deny there is a problem long before they will admit that they are the problem, and so it delays their action even further if they think they might actually be behaving badly, and others they don’t like disapprove.

Justice, as it is normally practiced, depends on a system of violence. People who are ‘convicted’ are forced to accept punishment, and there is enough respect for the violence deployed that sympathetic people will not actively object to the sentence. There is no ideal to justice that does not depend on this kind of violence. There is no international violence that is respected in that way. If Country x is convicted of climate injustice by other countries, then we have no way of enforcing the decision except for war, or possibly trade sanctions, but given history, it is unlikely that either will work, and they will disrupt the apparent virtue of the justice format.

In other words, justice does not motivate people to act, leads to people providing excuses for not acting, and for waiting until others act and acting becomes fair. It primarily implies a rhetoric for keeping things as they are and very few countries do anything.

Wanting a purely ‘equitable’ and ‘just’ situation to arise will take for ever. It is a mode of exchange which does not work while people do not trust each other.

However, there are other ways of proceeding.

It might be better to agitate for “Climate Generosity”. This is the idea that we give to others, we act without waiting for fairness, we act because it is the way we do things to get things done.

This is pretty standard human behaviour. Parents give to children without demanding equal return immediately. People in many societies give generously to others in order to persuade the others to give in return. Sometimes the deal does not work; sometimes no obligation is built up, sometimes people break the deal, but mostly it works and works well.

In seeing others acting, people come to think they can act themselves. Generosity is usually defined as good, hence people may tend to emulate those being generous, and add to the climate gifts that are becoming available and solving the problem.

Yes some people will attempt to take advantage of generosity, but if you are in a generous frame of mind this does not stop you, or bother you that much – things are happening. You might give more carefully in future, but you keep giving, keep getting the emulation, keep getting the status, and keep getting the results you are aiming for.

With justice you have to wait for a framework for justice, but with generosity you just go out and do what you need to fulfil the aim. If you give solar panels or wind turbines, nobody loses, everybody benefits including yourself. The idea we don’t need harmful pollution to live becomes more common and acceptable, and eventually it seems odd not to support it.

Climate justice digs a pit, climate generosity builds a way out.

Tags:disorder, ethics
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Outline for the first chapter of an unwritten book on approaches to disorder

May 9, 2019

Classical Chinese thought tended to treat the world as process rather than as fixed thing. Taosim, for example, constantly suggests that there are at least two orders: the flow of tao, and the order that humans create through effort. The second order can always be disrupted by the first, and by the unintended consequences of human effort.

Humans are themselves part of this flow of the world, and human conception which feeds into action is, in many ways, a distortion of the world, as the flow is not easily broken into discrete categories, or ‘things’. Therefore, taoists suggest that right action, either ecological or political, involves learning to live and work with the flow of tao moving with constant correction, towards an ‘acceptable’ or ‘close to desired’ result. The main technique is encapsulated in the idea of wu wei, often translated as ‘action without doing’ or ‘action without exertion’. It points to a gentle action, which allows the flow of reality to manifest itself without being blocked. It is sensitive to, and accepting of, what might appear to be disorder.

Taoist action does not have to be peaceable. Sun tzu in his Bīngfǎ (Art of War) suggests many ways of increasing disorder in the enemy, allowing their deliberations and actions to disrupt their own tao, while taking advantage of this process of disruption. Again the principle is to be guided by actions without exertion, deceive the enemy, and to take advantage of the situation as it arises.

While Confucius seems devoted to creating a rigorous order, the book usually given the title Doctrine of the Mean strongly implies that the best the sage can do is, by constant attention, create islands of order in the flow, through attention to ritual and the right behaviour and right speech for that situation. While Confucian thought, does not completely oppose violent imposition of order, the wise leader should primarily lead by example. The leader will be emulated, and if the leader is virtuous then the populace will tend that way. Imposition of general order is not the first step, but the last.

While it seems clear that Taoism is not suggesting the world is without order, Taoists imply that this is not a static order; it has patterns but they change, human’s cannot conceive correct order and human action easily disrupts the most powerful and stable flow. Classical Chinese thought suggests that working gently with the flow of reality with attention to the unintended consequences of our actions should be normal. It suggests that if disorder appears we are not working with the real flow of things, or we have mistaken ambitions. It implies real knowledge is tacit, rather than explicit, and comes from careful and attentive interaction with the world.

However, this rather obvious practice and understanding is not common in the contemporary world.

Tags:complexity, disorder, mentalities
Posted in complexity | 1 Comment »

A good idea is not enough….

April 9, 2019

Thinking about the way that things could go wrong is useful when we start thinking ecologically in terms of systems and complexity; unsuspected connections and feedbacks, interaction of supposedly separate systems, and so on.

Linear thinking, with understood and simple causal connections, is helpful but its not always enough. In recognizing complexity, we can recognize that ‘things’ frequently get out of control.

So let us suppose we have a solution to a problem. This is a list to point us to what may happen, if we don’t think about it. The list is almost certainly incomplete.

“that something is a good idea is not enough…”

It can be feasible, but we don’t put enough energy into it to do it in time needed or avaiable.

It can be feasible but it’s much harder than we think.

It may be feasible and succeeds, but it does not do enough.

It may be feasible and succeeds, but disrupts other systems we think are not connected to it

It can be feasible but powerful people and institutions attempt to undermine its possibility, so we have a political problem as well as an ‘engineering’ problem.

It can be feasible but normally non-powerful people unite against it as it disturbs them, or they have not been consulted, or they face problems you are ignoring.

It may be feasible, but fighting for it distracts our attention from significant problems, either to do with it, or to do with the rest of the world. (As when fighting against climate change distracts us from other ecological challenges.)

It could be feasible if we knew about, or involved, other factors that we currently either don’t know or think are irrelevant.

It could be feasible but the way we are organising it’s implementation is not helpful or destructive to its aims.

It can be infeasible to begin with.

It may not be compatible with our expectations of what it will do.

It can have unintended effects which make the situation worse, but we don’t know about them until its deployed.

It can be successful at first and then fail.

It can succeed.

Tags:'nature', complexity, disorder, knowledge, technology
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The world will end in 12 years???

April 9, 2019

Another meme that seems to circulate around the net is that climate scientists are saying the world will end in 12 years. This would appear to be ridiculous, and therefore is intended to discredit the whole idea of climate change.

I personally don’t know of, nor have I read of, any scientists who warn that the world will end in 12 years due to climate change. As usual, I’m welcome to correction, but I doubt this will happen.

However, what plenty of people have warned is that we have about 12 years left in which to seriously diminish the causes of climate change. If we don’t, the weather conditions are likely to move into greater degrees of instability and tumultuousness, and sea level rises will be significant.

With only a warming of one degree, it appears that areas of the USA seem to be on the edge of failing to cope with the stresses of fires, floods and storms, and areas like Puerto Rico seem to have largely been abandoned by the current US government. The same is becoming true in Australia; areas are getting too hot for habitation, and water supplies seem to be diminishing (sometimes because of mining as well as climate change).

As chaotic weather gets worse, it will cost billions in destroyed property, and distract from other economic activity. It will probably also mean massive people movements, food shortages and so on.

I quote here from the LA times

By the end of the century, the manifold consequences of unchecked climate change will cost the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars per year, according to a new study by scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency. (emphasis added)

Cynically, this is probably a reason why EPA research is being cut back; it gives results some people might not want to hear, and might not want other people to hear.

However, while climate change could well begin the end of the civilizations we know and live in, and lead to lots of people dying, it won’t end the world. The world will carry on and some humans, those who have learnt to co-operate and have farming or hunting and gathering skills, will probably survive. With some luck, relatively large scale societies in more fortunate parts of the world may well survive. The scale and prosperity of social life we have now in the developed world and are aiming at elsewhere, will probably end.

Strangely, attempting to prevent this collapse seems relatively easy. People can disagree about what action is needed to diminish climate change, but it usually comes down to phasing out fossil fuels as quickly as possible, lowering other forms of pollution and poisoning coming from productive processes, and not taking more fish and trees than can be grown back.

If we would like long term survival, this would seem sensible anyhow.

Tags:'nature', climate change, disorder
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Further reflections on energy and entropy in economics – Jancovici again

February 25, 2019

In the previous post, I suggested that Jean-Marc Jancovici insists that economists ignore problems of energy availability, and this distorts their (and our) economic expectations.

As previously implied, we can add that life and economics exist on this planet because of the slow self-destruction of our Sun. If the Sun emitted too much radiation (or the planet received too much radiation) it is doubtful that sophisticated life could exist anywhere on the planet – although possibly some life could survive deep underground or near vents in the deep oceans. If we received too little radiation, life might be similarly constrained. Eventually in the far distant future the sun will die, but this is way too far in the future for us to bother about at the moment.

In this sense solar energy is fundamental to life and society. Manual labour (the basis of many economic theories) and human thought, experiment or design only exist because of the energy humans and creatures extract from food, and that ultimately depends upon the Sun’s radiation and self-destruction. Energy from the sun is stored by, amongst other things, coal and oil, and is released in fire.

As we know, forms of organisation can massively magnify the power of human thought and labour (and massively disorganise them, or waste then, as well). Putting these points together, Jancovici’s argument declares that the energy we can extract through the ways we organise burning fossil fuels massively overshadows the power of human labour in creating social ‘value’ and material goods.

To restate:
Energy consumption and its organisation and implementation through social organisations and other technologies (the social aspects) is fundamental for the kind of economies we have today.

We should note that we also adapt our economies to the kinds of availabilities of energy that we have to deal with. Power is currently cheap at night because coal fueled electricity has not been ‘dispatchable,’ or particularly variable, and much energy is wasted.

Changes in energy supply and availability will have economic and organisational consequences, and we currently need to change energy supplies because an unintended consequence of fossil fuel based energy supplies is climate change. There are other forms of ecological destruction happening which are as important, and which reinforce climate change, but I’m currently putting them to onside – not, I hope, ignoring them. The prime cause of climate change reintroduces the importance of entropy.

Entropy is one of those scientific concepts over which there seems a fair bit of dispute, and a relative ease of misunderstanding. I’m warning any readers that this may be all be wrong. Please let me know if you know better. ‘Entropy’ is a description of a process, rather than a thing, so it is possibly better to talk about ‘entropic processes’ rather than ‘entropy’. The point of entropy is that any use of energy, any ‘work,’ engages entropic processes alongside that usage. These entropic processes are usually dissipated as heat (random molecular movement) and/or through reduction of what appears to be constructive order or demarcation.

It is often postulated that entropic processes will lead to “universal heat death.” This is a state in which there is no more energy in one part of the universe than in another. Particles are completely randomly distributed. Whether this state is a state of total order or total disorder is up to you – the paradox is obvious and implies life is a ‘mess’ (or ‘balance’ if you prefer) of order and disorder.

At the extreme, this idea also implies that too much work will generate too many entropic processes and the planet will warm independently of what precautions we take. The use of air-conditioners in some Cities is supposed to increase the heat of those cities (as the heat involved in producing the cooling dissipates outside the area of cooling), and thus encourages more air-conditioning and more heating. The same may be true of automobiles (engines moving people around get hot, and dissipate that heat). An economy necessarily produces (semi-organized forms of?) dissipated heat.

We all hope that this extreme fate is ultimately avoidable or far off, or avoidable because we have spare energy to do something about it. We could develop more efficient engines or ways of cooling, or better ways of organising those processes (but this can never stop excess heat being dissipated). Ordering processes can always create disordering processes – and we should not ignore the disordering, or entropic, processes simply because we like, or are impressed by, the order. What we define as order and disorder come together. Another problem here is that the more complex the processes we use to prevent the entropy we generate from overwhelming our order, then the more energy the order may take to keep going, and the more prone the system may be to accident or collapse.

Entropy also suggests that, while we use energy to produce useful transformations, we also produce waste or pollution by breaking things down. This is furthered by forms of social organisation which make it acceptable to create waste, or allow waste and poisons to be allocated to ‘unimportant’ areas, and onto relatively powerless people, where the effects can be ignored. If you like, blockage of information (in this case about pollution) is as important a part of current economic life as is accurate and resolvable transmission of information.

Just as wealth gets allocated by patterns and processes of ‘social class’, so does waste, probably in an inverse form; waste and risk of harm gets distributed away from wealth. However, as waste tends to randomness, this distribution may not be quite as rigorous. Few will totally escape climate change.

So we may say that the implications of Jancovici’s argument suggests orthodox economists not only ignore the availability and organisation of energy as important to economy (other than as labour), they also ignore entropic processes and waste and their forms of organisation and disorganistion.

It therefore appears we need a new orthodox economics which deal with these things. So part of the next stage is to look at some criticisms of Jancovici and the work that has been done to factor energy and entropy into economics.

To restate, yet again:

Energy availability, its capacities, organisation, distribution, implementation and consumption through social organisations and other technologies, and the effects (both intended and unintended, such as entropy waste and pollutions etc) of its production and organisation (etc.) is fundamental for understanding the kind of economies we have today.

Energy cannot be ignored

Tags:climate change, Disinformation, disorder, economics, Energy, technology
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Civilisation extinction

January 2, 2019

Not original but worth reminding people….

There are a number of technological and lifestyle challenges we might assume were universal and culture destroying, that in our experience come right after each other.

1) Nuclear extermination.

2) Pollution and over-consumption lead to massive eco-system crisis.

3) Nanotech wars.

4) Biowar, or escaped engineered bio-constructs with harmful plague effects. Ease, and mass of travel, spreads deadly disease.

5) Putting decisions in the hands of AI or models and not noticing the problems that arise until too late. Independent AI warfare is a possibility. An AI could conclude human population was a major problem, and aim to eliminate that problem.

6) Climate engineering goes wrong, massive droughts, cyclones etc.

7) Physics experiment that could generate a small black hole, that grows.

8) Doctrinally fueled extermination.

9) Fake news epidemics so no one knows what is going on.

10) Ignore impending large asteroid collisions, because of politics, or role back of astronomical research. Maybe a space flight knocks an asteroid out of orbit.

I’m sure people can think of other things, and then there are the dangers we can’t even dream of yet

So one possible reason why we have not detected alien civilisations is that they all may hit a zone of possible self destruction and don’t go through it successfully. Will we be different…?

Tags:Anthropocene, disorder, technology
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Complexity again

November 27, 2018

Another summary

A complex system is a system in which ‘participants’ and their contexts are either modified by other participants and events in the system or self-modify in response to those participants and events. All living ecologies are complex systems, including social systems. Complexity has several important, and routine, implications including:

Complex systems are dynamic and fluxing, producing patterns rather than lasting structures.

Systems are rarely lone systems. Patterns tend to overlap having fuzzy boundaries with other systems. This can involve nesting and hierarchies, which may provide temporary limits on variation, but also makes ‘interference’ (both within the system and from ‘external’ systems) normal.

Actions taken will frequently produce unintended consequences. Even simple conversations may go in completely unexpected directions with lasting unintended consequences.

We cannot understand the world completely due to the numbers of linkages, the variety of effects and the possible changes in participants. Consequently, there will always be gaps in knowledge and expectation, which add to uncertainties and unexpectedness. We can call this unknown a social ‘unconscious’, and explore its dynamics and effects.

Large-scale transitions can arise from quite small events. Greater accuracy of measurement may not give greater certainty, but give completely different predictions, as actions do not always cancel each other out statistically. Similarly, statistical ‘long tails’ can have large effects.

While systems are unpredictable in specific, they can sometimes be predictable by trend and pattern. For example, we can predict a continuing rise in global temperature and climate turmoil if we do not change various activities, but we cannot predict weather patterns at a particular time, and our accuracy decreases the further into the future we go.

Despite this variability, there seem to be patterns of transition which can be used to postulate, or interpret, the type of course events may take.

Tags:complexity, disorder
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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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