Towards a Biospheric Ethic

[Guest guest]

The Institute of Science in Society

Science Society Sustainability

http://www.i-sis.org.uk

 

General Enquiries sam

Website/Mailing List press-release

ISIS Director m.w.ho

===================================================

 

Towards a Biospheric Ethic

**************************

 

Modern moral philosophers have tended to study ethics in a void, ignoring the

insights of the natural and human sciences. Some eminent scholars have sought to

put this right; but they have based their ethical principles on a grossly

distorted view of nature and human society. The result is a ‘technospheric’

ethic that seeks to equate progress and the moral good with economic expansion

and the dominance of man over nature.

A new ‘biospheric’ ethic is required, says Edward Goldsmith, major author of

“The Blueprint for Survival” and founder-editor of The Ecologist that initiated

the environmental movement in Britain. We must place ethical values in their

appropriate context, that of mediating sustainable human behaviour in

relationship to society, the ecosystem, the biosphere and the cosmos itself.

 

Sources and references for this article are posted on ISIS Members’ website.

Details here.

 

Is there a principle for ethical behaviour?

*******************************************

 

One of the first questions to answer in a serious discussion on ethics is

whether there exists an acceptable criterion for determining whether or not an

action is ethical. Two eminent evolutionists took up opposing views. Theodore

Dobzhansky, Russian émigré to the US, thought that there could not be such a

criterion, because it would limit “the essential human faculty for the exercise

of freedom”. This is very close to what is being said by many scientists today

in debates over the ethics of genetic engineering and related applications, from

GM crops to human cloning.

Conrad Waddington, British born and bred, said that “it is possible to discuss,

and perhaps to discover a criterion which is not of an ethical nature, but is..

of a supra-ethical character: a criterion…which would make it possible to decide

whether a certain ethical system of values is in some definite and important

sense preferable to another.” The criterion he suggested, is “wisdom”. But who

possesses wisdom? Is it the educated, the scientific expert?

 

Two takes on ‘evolutionary ethics’

**********************************

 

We can consider ‘ethics’ as a set of instructions, whose implementation, in the

light of the model of one’s relationship with nature, enables human beings to

co-exist stably with one another and with the rest of nature.

It has been argued that the way we obtain information about nature has been

produced and validated by the process evolution, and hence evolution should be

our source of ethics.

The most notorious attempt to derive ethics from one’s model of how nature

evolves belongs to the social Darwinists. Herbert Spencer and his colleagues in

Victorian England preached an ethic of individualism, competition and

aggression, which they justified as being in accordance with “natural law”.

Spencer wrote, “Progress is not an accident but a necessity. Instead of

civilization being artificial, it is a part of nature, all apiece with the

development of an embryo or the unfolding of a flower”.

The social Darwinists painted a very distorted view of nature. They saw it as

random, chaotic, atomised, competitive and aggressive, totally ignoring its more

fundamental, cooperative aspects. For William Graham Sumner, the main prophet of

Social Darwinism in the United States, “competition was the law of nature which

could no more be done away with than gravitation”.

The stress on competition was an essential tenet of social Darwinism, for in

terms of Darwinism itself, and later of neo-Darwinism, competition provided the

very motor of evolution. For the same reason, it was essential to the course of

progress. The poor, the starving and the diseased, who were identified with the

‘unfit’, could thus be cast by the wayside without moral scruple.

“The whole effort of nature was to clear the world of the (unfit) and make room

for the better.” Spencer wrote. This was also the ethic of Adolph Hitler, for

whom, “the law of selection justifies this incessant struggle by allowing the

survival of the fittest. Christianity is a rebellion against natural laws, a

protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean

the systematic cult of human failure.”

Unlike the social Darwinists, Julian Huxley and Conrad Waddington did not see

their evolutionary ethic as implying that it had to be individualistic and

competitive. On the contrary, they were firm believers in co-operation and

harmony. Their position was a strangely inconsistent one, and their efforts to

eliminate this inconsistency unconvincing. They argued that both nature and

human nature were themselves subject to evolutionary change, which they

identified with progress and tending in the direction of increasing harmony and

co-operation.

Julian Huxley rejected his grandfather Thomas Huxley’s thesis that “there was a

fundamental contradiction between the ethical process and the cosmic process”.

Instead, he thought that the contradiction could be resolved, “on the one hand,

by extending the concept of evolution both backward into the inorganic and

forward into the human domain, and on the other by considering ethics not as a

body of fixed principles, but as the product of evolution, and itself evolving.”

Progress, an integral part of evolution, had made man less individualistic and

less competitive and more co-operative and altruistic.

Thus, although both Julian Huxley and Waddington regarded themselves as

proponents of the biospheric or naturalistic ethic, by insisting that progress

was part of evolution, and that the technosphere or world of human artefacts was

part of nature, they sought to justify the very process of economic development

that is leading inexorably to the destruction, indeed to the very annihilation

of nature.

This position had previously been articulated explicitly by Drummond, the

American theologian, who declared that “the path of progress and the path of

altruism are one”, evolution being “nothing but the Involution of Love, the

revelation of Infinite Spirit, the Eternal Life returning to itself.”

Nobel laureate Belgian physical chemist Ilya Prigogine justifies the latest

phase of technological progress - genetic engineering - in the same spirit. He

sees this technology as a means of achieving a new earthly paradise.

Thus, the stark choice of an evolutionary ethic appears to be between social

Darwinism, or one that embraces progress as defined by technological advance,

whatever that advance may mean for the biosphere, in effect, a kind of

technospheric ethic.

 

Anti-evolutionary ethics

************************

 

There were strong reactions against deriving ethics from evolution among the

most prominent biologists in Europe; but they all shared Herbert Spencer’s view

that the world is selfish, individualistic and aggressive, however.

Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s most celebrated disciple in Victorian Britain, wrote,

“from the point of view of the moralist, the animal world is on about the same

level as a gladiator’s show. The creatures are fairly well treated, and set to

fight - whereby the strongest, the swiftest and the cunningest live to fight

another day.”

Unlike Spencer, Thomas Huxley believed that “the ethical progress of society

depends not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it,

but in combating it.” Indeed “social progress means a checking of the cosmic

process at every step, and the substitution for it of another, which may be

called the ethical process; the end of which is not the survival of those who

may happen to be the fittest, in respect of the whole of the conditions which

obtain, but of those who are ethically the best.” This ethical process he

identified with material progress.

Sigmund Freud, the inventor of psychoanalysis, perpetrated the same

anti-naturalist doctrine, he saw the development of civilization as a systematic

battle against man’s natural instincts.

American evolutionist Gaylord Simpson put forward a broadly similar argument.

“Man is the result of a purposeless and materialistic process that did not have

him in mind. He was not planned,” Simpson wrote. “The discovery that the

universe, apart from man or before his coming, lacked any purpose or plan, has

the inevitable corollary that the workings of the universe cannot provide any

automatic universal, eternal, or absolute ethical criteria of right and wrong.”

French Nobel laureate geneticist, Jacques Monod, likewise, said, “Since man has

no role within the biosphere and is a stranger to it, the biosphere cannot

impose any values on man.”

The sociobiologists of the present-day see man by nature to be individualist, he

is an egoist whose over-riding preoccupation is the survival of his own genes.

But this does not mean we have to behave egotistically. Indeed, Richard Dawkins,

the most prominent proselytiser of neo-Darwinian theory in Britain today, wrote,

“We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the

selfish memes of our indoctrination. We can even discuss ways of deliberately

cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism - something that has no

place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of

the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we

have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel

against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.”

And again, “If you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals

co-operate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect

little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism,

because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up

to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs,

something which no other species has ever aspired to.”

Neither Dawkins, nor any of his predecessors tells us where this miraculous

power to “rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators” or against the

innate competitiveness and aggressiveness of human nature comes from.

This school of anti-evolutionary ethics is incoherent and indefensible, and

there is nothing that would distinguish it from utter anthropocentrism that can

see no wrong in whatever the human species choose to perpetrate on the natural

world. But it goes even further than that, for only the cream among the human

species can enjoy this privilege.

 

Morality and the ‘modern man’

*****************************

 

Indeed, the cardinal tenet of the ‘technospheric’ ethic - one that is perhaps

the most generally accepted by the scientific and scholarly communities - is

that morality begins with modern man and that one cannot talk of primitive man,

or of other forms of life, as being moral.

Thus, Thomas Huxley tell us that “society differs from nature in having a

definite moral object; whence it comes about that the course shaped by the

ethical man - the member of society or citizen - necessarily runs counter to

that which the non-ethical man - the primitive savage, or man as a mere member

of the animal kingdom - tends to adopt. The latter fights out the struggle for

existence to the bitter end, like any other animal: the former devotes his best

energies to the object of setting limits to the struggle.”

Waddington adopted the same position: “It is only when we pass on from the

sub-human world to deal with the evolution of man that ethics must, in its own

right, enter the picture.” Simpson, likewise, wrote, “There is no ethics but

human ethics and a search that ignores the necessity that ethics be human,

relative to man, is bound to fail.”

Not just ethics, but purpose is unique to modern man. Most scholars see

evolution as a random, purposeless process, due to ‘blind’ chance, until, that

is, modern man appeared on the scene. The American philosopher Lester Ward made

this explicit, “If there is no cosmic purpose, there is at least human purpose,

which has already given man a special place in nature and may yet, if he wills

it, give organization and direction to his social life. Purposeful activity must

henceforth be recognised as a proper function not only of the individual but of

a whole society.” Ward distinguished between man-made phenomena that are the

result of human purpose, which he called “telic” (from the Greek word telos,

meaning goal) and natural or “genetic” phenomena, the result of blind natural

forces.

And knowledge also begins with the human species; the best of knowledge, with

‘modern man’. In non-human species and presumably among primitive people, there

is only “experience”, whilst with modern man there is “education”, and hence

true knowledge. This makes all the difference, according to Ward, “the knowledge

of experience is, so to speak, a genetic product, that of education is a

teleogical product.”

Monod and Simpson attach so much importance to knowledge that they actually

preach an “ethic of knowledge”. Monod saw that as being the only ethic possible

for modern man. This ethic would distinguish modern man from “animalistic” man,

because the latter believes in teleology - that nature is inherently purposeful

- which Monod regards as a hideous failing. For him, that is the opposite of

‘objectivity’, which alone gives rise to “authentic” knowledge.

Monod’s “ethic of knowledge” is clearly an essential part of the ethic of the

technosphere, since it is only through the type of “authentic” knowledge that he

promotes as ethical that the technosphere is built up.

Julian Huxley is explicit on that score. “Knowledge is not merely an end in

itself, but the only satisfactory means for controlling our future evolution.”

The unspoken assumption is that all knowledge, even if not every technology

produced as a result, must be good. That is why any attempt to make scientists

accountable to society in their research is automatically rejected as a curb on

the scientist’s “freedom” and “imagination”. In “objective” knowledge, there can

be no wrong.

Indeed, it is only on account of consciousness, purpose, knowledge, and all the

other unique endowments of modern man, that reason and choice can emerge,

without which there can be no morality.

As knowledge builds up, our rational choices will change or rather “evolve”.

That means our ethics must be flexible: they cannot be absolute or, for that

matter, universal.

Change, Simpson insists, is “the essence” of evolution and for that reason

alone, “there can be no absolute standard of ethics”. Waddington said the same.

Evolutionary ethic “cannot be expected to be absolute but must be subject to

evolution itself and must be the result of responsible and rational choice in

the full light of such knowledge of man and of life as we have.”

This has resulted in a dangerous combination of scientific fundamentalism

coupled with total moral relativism. While scientists insists on doing any

research they like from GM crops to creating human embryos for harvesting

embryonic stem cells, the role of ‘bioethicists’ is becoming little more than

manufacturing spurious arguments to make the morally unacceptable acceptable to

the public.

 

Individualism rules

*******************

 

The ‘technospheric’ ethic is fundamentally individualistic. Simpson argued that

even if we wished to derive ethics from nature, they would still be

individualistic, for evolution tends towards individualization (as opposed to

higher integration as ecologists once maintained). This individualization,

Simpson regarded as “good”. Man must be aware of “the goodness of maintenance of

this individualization” and he must promote “the integrity and dignity of the

individual…Socialization may be good or bad. When ethically good, it is based

on, and in turn gives maximum total possibility for, ethically good

individualization.”

The individual has no duty to the community, or to the state. Individualism is

associated with democracy. Democratic society is the product of the “social

contract”. As American scholar William Graham Sumner wrote, “Contract …is

rational - even rationalistic. It is also realistic, cold and matter of fact. A

contract-relation is based on a sufficient reason, not on custom or

prescription. It is not permanent. It endures only so long as the reason for it

endures. In a state based on contract, sentiment is out of place in any public

or common affairs. It is relegated to the sphere of private and personal

relations.”

Julian Huxley and Waddington also accepted the ethic of individualism, but it

was tempered with their knowledge that, in Huxley’s words, “the individual is

…meaningless in isolation”, and in Waddington’s, “a fully developed human being

is inconceivable in isolation from society.” Nevertheless, Huxley regarded “the

fully developed individual” as “the highest product of evolution, the

experiences which alone have high intrinsic value, such as those of love and

beauty and knowledge and mystical union, are accessible only to human

individuals”, but he recognized that, “a certain right organization of society

is necessary before those ends can be achieved.”

It goes without saying that for sociobiologists, the only ethic conceivable is

individualistic. The individual’s overriding goal is to proliferate his own

genes. The notion that this goal may, in the natural world, be subordinated to

the more sensible goal of serving the interests of the community or the species

or the ecosystem is considered unscientific, and those who suggest it, like

British biologist, Wynne Edwards, are mercilessly derided.

Since the modern ethic is the product of conscious choice, based on ‘objective’

and hence ‘scientific’ knowledge, it is authenticated by no other authority but

that of modern man himself, endowed as he supposedly is, with all his unique

intellectual and moral gifts, and armed with the unique potentialities offered

by scientific knowledge. Simpson said, “Man can cherish values if he wishes to”,

but they are his own, self-imposed values. No absolute ethics can be found

“outside of man’s own nature”. Monod is of the same mind, “The ethic of

knowledge would not be imposed on man. It is he on the contrary who would impose

it on himself.” That’s essentially the line taken by scientists today when told

they should be socially accountable. No one should have any say on what

scientists can do, it is against their ethics of knowledge.

Ilya Prigogine and his disciple Erich Jantsch go even further. For them, the

key determinants of progress are “consciousness” and “mind”, which they consider

the unique endowments of man. According to Jantsch, “mankind is not redeemed by

God but redeems himself.” He identified the evolution of consciousness with the

evolution of the universe, which is in turn identified with “self-organisation”.

Prigogine, Jantsch and their followers in France Belgium and elsewhere have

built up an extraordinary cosmology for rationalizing super-star technologies

that are to achieve the latest progress in evolution, all the products of the

deified modern man.

 

The anthropocentric modernist fallacies

***************************************

 

The technospheric ethic has led to the systematic substitution of the man-made

world for the biosphere or natural world, to fill it with ever more toxic waste

products that have brought the earth to the brink of extinction. It is driving

the economic globalisation that sanctions exploitation of the poor and weak by

the rich and powerful.

It is clear that the technospheric ethic is based on numerous assumptions

ranging from the debatable to the fallacious and abhorrent.

Many will argue that consciousness, and purposive behaviour begins much further

down the evolutionary tree, with some biologists who spend a lifetime studying

single-celled animals asserting that even those creatures are purposive, if not

conscious.

Examples abound in nature of animals behaving altruistically, if not morally.

Biologists such as the Russian prince, Kropotkin and Amercan naturalist Allee

have argued convincingly that sociality, rather than competition, is the

defining feature of the living world. The falsehoods perpetrated about the lack

of morality in so-called ‘primitive’ societies are utterly reprehensible.

The emphasis on individualisation and equating it with individualism is

fallacious. Individualisation is a term in embryology that describes the

processes whereby definite organs take shape within the embryo in the course of

development. It has more to do with differentiation of the whole than with

individualism. The natural world is highly differentiated and organised. It is a

vast co-operative enterprise, capable of maintaining its homeostasis under wide

ranges of variation in its environment, as Jim Lovelock has shown. An atomised,

individualistic biophere is a sick biosphere, one that has disintegrated, as

ours is, under the impact of economic development defined as ‘progress’. The

same is true of an atomised or individualistic society. The alienated members of

such a society have lost the power to govern themselves and must be run by a

government with a vast bureaucracy. The ethic of individualism is the ethic of

ecological and social disintegration.

The neo-Darwinian paradigm, on which the doctrine of competition and

individualism is based, has been under ever more serious attack across a wide

front, and is increasingly difficult to reconcile with our knowledge of living

processes within the biosphere.

 

Biospheric morality

*******************

 

A biospheric ethic, one compatible with the ecological view of the world we live

in, would be very different. It would involve human beings in helping to sustain

the earth’s biosphere. And unethical behaviour would be that which disrupts and

destroy the biosphere.

This was undoubtedly what ethical behaviour was taken to be by many so-called

primitive societies of the past. The laws or customs of such societies were

observed not only because they had the moral force of having been promulgated by

the ancestors in the “Dawn Period”, but also because the behaviour that

conformed to them was seen as maintaining the cosmic order. So long as that

order was maintained, human beings prospered. If it became perturbed, if, in

fact, “the balance of Nature” was upset, then disaster inevitably followed.

The indigenous person’s fundamental role in life was thus to maintain the

cosmic order, which is done by performing the prescribed rituals, taking part in

the prescribed ceremonies and in general by observing the traditional laws of

the community. This law is taken to be a moral law, one that applied not only to

humans and the society to which they belong, but also to nature, and indeed, to

the Cosmos.

The French Catholic Priest, Father Placide Tempels, in his celebrated book on

Bantu philosophy, noted, “Moral behaviour for the Bantu is behaviour that serves

to maintain the order of the Cosmos and hence that maximizes human welfare.

Immoral behaviour is that which reduces its order, thereby threatening human

welfare.”

This statement could apply to all indigenous societies in all parts of the

world. In many of these societies, the pattern of behaviour that is judged to be

ethical, is referred to by a word that both denotes the order of the cosmos and,

at the same time, the ‘path’ or ‘way’ that must be followed in order to maintain

it.

Among the ancient Greeks, the word used was ‘Dike’, which also meant

‘righteousness’ or ‘justice’. The Chinese ‘Tao’ is a very similar concept which

refers to the daily and yearly “revolution of the heavens”. According to de

Groot, Tao “represents all that is correct, normal or right in the universe, it

does indeed never deviate from its course. It consequently includes all correct

and righteous dealings of men and spirits, which alone promote universal

happiness and life.” All other acts, as they oppose the Tao, are “incorrect,

abnormal, unnatural” and they must “bring misfortune on the bad”.

The Buddhist notion of “Dharma”, the Persian “Asha” and the Vedic “Rita” are

very similar concepts: all refer to the Way that must be followed, to maintain

the order of the Cosmos, to assure the welfare of the world of living things. To

divert from it can only cause disasters like floods, droughts, epidemics and

wars.

Although many indigenous peoples may not have formulated the explicit notion of

the Way, their idea of morality remains the same. Moral behaviour is still that

which conforms to the traditional law and which, at the same time, serves to

maintain cosmic order; immoral behaviour is “taboo”. “An act is taboo,” the

French philosopher Roger Caillois wrote, “if it disrupts the universal order

which is at once that of nature and society….as a result the Earth might no

longer yield a harvest, the cattle might be struck with infertility, the stars

might no longer follow their appointed course, death and disease would stalk the

land.”

 

Conclusion

**********

 

There can be no more truly immoral enterprise than that to which our modern

society is so totally committed: namely, economic development or ‘progress’,

which involves the systematic substitution of the technosphere for the

biosphere. Such “progress” must inevitably lead to the destruction, indeed the

annihilation, of the world of living things. Indeed, the floods, droughts,

epidemics and other massive discontinuities, whose seriousness is increasingly

every year, are but the symptoms of this destruction: they are the price to be

paid for the immorality of the economic policies to which we are committed by

institutions like the World Trade Organisation, the World Bank and the

International Monetary Fund.

We must abandon these policies and seek to reconstitute, to the extent that

this is still possible, the natural world that we have so irresponsibly

destroyed. Indeed, if we want to survive on this planet for more than a few

decades, we have no alternative but to return to the Way - and hence adopt once

more the biospheric ethic that it so faithfully reflects.

 

 

 

 

===================================================

This article can be found on the I-SIS website at http://www.i-sis.org.uk/

If you would like to be added to our mailing list - please send a blank

email to press-release with the word in the subject

field

 

===================================================

CONTACT DETAILS

The Institute of Science in Society, PO Box 32097, London NW1 OXR

telephone: [44 20 8731 7714] [44 20 7383 3376] [44 20 7272 5636]

 

General Enquiries sam

Website/Mailing List press-release

ISIS Director m.w.ho

 

MATERIAL IN THIS EMAIL MAY BE REPRODUCED IN ANY FORM WITHOUT PERMISSION, ON

CONDITION THAT IT IS ACCREDITED ACCORDINGLY AND CONTAINS A LINK TO

http://www.i-sis.org.uk/