Home

Follow Countercurrents on Twitter 

Why Subscribe ?

Popularise CC

Join News Letter

Editor's Picks

Press Releases

Action Alert

Feed Burner

Read CC In Your
Own Language

Bradley Manning

India Burning

Mumbai Terror

Financial Crisis

Iraq

AfPak War

Peak Oil

Globalisation

Localism

Alternative Energy

Climate Change

US Imperialism

US Elections

Palestine

Latin America

Communalism

Gender/Feminism

Dalit

Humanrights

Economy

India-pakistan

Kashmir

Environment

Book Review

Gujarat Pogrom

Kandhamal Violence

WSF

Arts/Culture

India Elections

Archives

Links

Submission Policy

About CC

Disclaimer

Fair Use Notice

Contact Us

Search Our Archive

Subscribe To Our
News Letter



Our Site

Web

Name: E-mail:

 

Printer Friendly Version

Towards A Biospheric Ethic

By Edward Goldsmith

26 January, 2003
Edwardgoldsmith.org

Modern moral philosophers have tended to study ethics in a void, ignoring the insights of the natural and human sciences. Although several of our most noted and thoughtful biologists and sociologists have sought to correct this, they have based their ethical principles on a grossly distorted view of nature and human society.

The result has been 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: one that places ethical values in their appropriate context: that of mediating human behaviour in its relationship with society, the ecosystem, the biosphere and the Cosmos itself.

Written for the Institute of Science and Society, 26 January 2003. See also a slightly different version published on their website.

One of the first questions to answer in a serious discussion of ethics is whether there exists an acceptable criterion for determining whether or not an action is ethically right or wrong. Dobzhansky thinks that there cannot be, because it would limit “the essential human faculty for the exercise of freedom”. [1] Waddington, on the other hand, thinks that there can be.

“I wish to maintain that it is possible to discuss, and perhaps to discover a criterion which is not of an ethical nature, but is, if you wish, of a supra-ethical character; a criterion, that is to say, which would make it possible to decide whether a certain ethical system of values is in some definite and important sense preferable to another.” [2]

The criterion which he suggests is “wisdom”. Indeed the wise man rather than the educated man, let alone the scientific expert, is above all, he who can best distinguish what is right from what is wrong.

What are ethics?

I think one can consider all natural systems, including humans, to be endowed with a set of instructions whose implementation, in the light of the model of their relationship with their total spatio-temporal environment, has enabled them to achieve their goal of helping to maintain overall Gaian stability or homeostasis, and thereby their own stability or homeostasis.

These instructions are organized hierarchically, the more general – and hence those that determine the basic features of a system’s behaviour and which reflect the longest experience – being differentiated into more particular instructions which determine the system’s less basic features, those that it has acquired in the more recent past.

One of the most important, and indeed indispensable, features of the general instructions is that they should be non-plastic, and hence immutable in the short-term at least. This is the only way in which continuity, and thus stability, can be maintained. That is why genetic information is non-plastic. If it were not, then there would be nothing to prevent zebras from engendering baby wildebeeste and vice versa.

This is also why cultural information, that which mediates the behaviour of social groups, must be non-plastic. If it were not, then such social groups could display neither continuity nor stability. nor could their behaviour be homeotelic and thereby serve to maintain the order of the Cosmos. Such non-plastic instructions, at the cultural level, I regard as moral values.

The acceptance of authority

Waddington points out very explicitly that instructions are useless unless they are accepted and acted upon. For this to be possible, they must be regarded as authoritative. He considers that “the sociogenetic continuum” cannot be maintained “without the existence of the role of an authority acceptor”. For him,

“ethicizing is for man an integral part of the role of the taught or the authority acceptor – without the existence of which his cultural socio-genetic evolutionary system could not operate.” [3]

Piaget saw ethics in the same way:

“It seems to us an undeniable fact that in the course of the child’s mental development, unilateral respect or the respect felt by the small for the great, plays an essential part; it is what makes the child accept all the commands transmitted to him by his parents and is thus the great factor of continuity between different generations.” [4]

As the child grows up, this eventually generates co-operation and mutual respect. It could be argued that the acceptance of knowledge transmitted in this way is epistemologically unacceptable. But as Waddington noted:

“. . . a great deal of social transmission takes place at a time when the recipient is much too young to apply any verification procedures, which must be regarded as relatively sophisticated mechanisms for adjustment and rectification rather than as basic elements in the fundamental mechanism of transmitted information which is accepted, rather than on information which has been tested and verified.” [5]

One can go further than this. Propositions are clearly not accepted in the real world – no more by scientists than by children – because they have been verified, or because they are falsifiable (Popper’s proposed criterion), but because they fit in with a particular paradigm or worldview, which, in the case of children may be embryonic and hence in its formative stage. Indeed, ‘empirical’ verification, as Popper showed decades ago, is not a realistic concept.

The process by which we build up information has, in any case been validated by the evolutionary process itself – of which it is the product. As Waddington wrote:

“like all other products of evolution, information has been moulded by the necessity to fit in with – or rather, to put it more actively, to cope – with the rest of the natural world. The intellect is an instrument forged for the specific purpose of coming to terms with things.” [6]

This is an essential point that is rarely made and whose acceptance is alone sufficient to validate knowledge acquired subjectively by intuition by members of societies that have learned “to cope with the rest of the natural world”.

What, we might ask, makes the “authority acceptor” accept the instructions and adopt them as the ethical principles underlying his code of conduct? The answer is that they must be sanctioned, authenticated, validated, indeed sanctified, by something more important than himself which he regarded as embodying wisdom, authority and sanctity. Matthew Arnold referred to this as “something, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness”. [7]

It makes sense to suppose that that “something not ourselves” should be the natural world of which we are an integral part -and whose laws we must clearly observe if we are to survive Significantly, it seems probable that we are cognitively adjusted’ by our geneto-cultural inheritance to regarding nature as the ultimate authority. As Worster writes: “Few ideas have been recycled as often as the belief that the ‘is’ of nature must become the ‘ought’ of man”. [8]

Even in the nineteenth century – a period which saw the development of technospheric euphoria and the revolt against nature which helped to rationalize this euphoria – sociologists still lookedto nature as the ultimate sanction for our ethical system. As Greta Jones writes,

“The search for a social theory was, for the vast majority of nineteenth century sociologists, a search for a ‘natural’ underpinning to social order and, in addition, for atheory of the individual’s obligation to respect that order.” [9]

Even those who explicitly rejected thenotion that our ethics cannot be derived from nature could not, in spite of themselves, avoid doing just that. Thus Lester Ward, who saw nature as evil and preached state-controlled economic development as a means of creating a paradise on earth, stated that his programme (“collective telesis”) could alone “place society once more in the free current of natural law”. [10]

Even Edward O. Wilson, the father of twentieth century sociobiology, who strenuously denies that our ethics can be derived from nature, cannot avoid telling us, in an unguarded moment, that our ethical values are the product of the evolutionary process:

“The biologist, who is concerned with questions of physiology and evolutionary history, realizes that self-knowledge is constrained and shaped by the emotional control centres in the hypothalamusand limbic system of the brain. . . What, we are then compelled to ask, made the hypothalamus and limbic system? They evolved by natural selection. That simple biological statement must be pursued to explain ethics and ethical philosophers,if not epistemology and epistemologists, at all depths.” [11]

Evolution: the source of ethics

If nature is that “something not ourselves” that makes for righteousness, this means that ethical behaviour must be that behaviour which enables a living thing to fit into the natural world, to behave as part of it and, hence, to observe its laws or constraints. In particular. it means that the evolutionary process that brought about the natural world. that all encompassing life process, must provide the best guide to ethical behaviour.

This was the view of both C. H. Waddington and Julian Huxley. “We must accept”, Waddington wrote, “the direction of evolution as ‘good’ simply because it is ‘good’ according to any realist definition of that concept”. [12] This must be sound common sense. Indeed,

“. . . if any individual approaches a nutritionist and says that he prefers to grow in an abnormal and unhealthy I manner, the nutritionist can do no more than tell him that if he I does so he will be out of step with nature. The criteria of biological wisdom in the case of ethics, or healthy growth in the case of eating. which can be derived in this way, are immanent in nature as we find it, not superimposed on it from outside. . . The criterion we are applying here is one of general accordance with the nature of the world as we observe it.” [13]

Julian Huxley felt the same way. In his Romanes Lecture of 1944, he stated that there was an overall direction in evolution. This direction he took to be “good” and suggested that it provided a yardstick against which to measure ethical values about which we may be in doubt.

This point was made even more strongly by Ralph Gerard, one of the leading holistic biologists at the University of Chicago in the early 1940s, who contended that “a pronounced pattern of observed direction in nature provides man with all the guidance he needs for ‘shouldness’. If nature is found to be a world of interdependence, then man is obliged toconsider that characteristic a moral dictum”. [14] The evolutionary trend towards closer integration was, he argued, “like a straight path through a dense wood, requiring of the pathfinder that he remain on the track and follow it through”. [15]

Unfortunately however, all these scholars were imbued with what might be referred to as “the world-view of modernism”, whose principal role is to rationalize,and hence legitimize, economic development – that enterprise to which our society is entirely committed and which leads to the development of the ‘technosphere’ or the surrogate world of human artefacts.

Not surprisingly they sought above all to persuade themselves, and everybody else, that the Promethean enterprise to which they were committed was a fundamentally moral one. Sadly, neither C. H. Waddington nor J. S. Huxley, for all their insights, were exceptions to the rule.

But before we consider their position, let us first consider that of Herbert Spencer and the social Darwinists who preceded them.

Social Darwinists

Herbert Spencer and his colleagues preached an ethic of individualism, competition and aggression, an ethic which they justified as being in accordance with ‘natural law’. As Spencer wrote, “Progress is not an accident but a necessity. Instead of civilisation being artificial, it is a part of nature, all a piece with the development of an embryo or the unfolding of a flower”. [16]

The social Darwinists painted a very distorted view of nature, however. They saw it as random, chaotic, atomised, competitive and aggressive, ignoring its more fundamental co-operative aspects. For William Graham Sumner, the main prophet of social Darwinism in the USA, “competition”, in the words of Richard Hofstadter, “was the law of nature which could no more be done away with than gravitation”. [17]

The stress on competition was an essential tenet of social Darwinism, for in terms of Darwinism itself, then the established theory of evolution, 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. As Spencer wrote, “The whole effort of nature was to clear the world of the (unfit) and make room for the better”. [18] This is still the ethic of our modem market society.

It is to be noted that it was also the ethic of Adolf Hitler, who wrote:

“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.” [19]

The ethic of progress – in effect, the ethic of perpetual technospheric expansion – is in reality no more than an ethic of biospheric destruction. It is not an evolutionary ethic. On the contrary, it is an anti-evolutionary ethic.

The reaction against Nature

Like Spencer, T. H. Huxley in the 1890s, Gaylord Simpson and Jacques Monod in the 1950s, and Edward O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins and the other sociobiologists of today, also view the world as selfish, individualistic and aggressive. Thus T. H. Huxley, Darwin’s most celebrated disciple, wrote that

“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. The spectator has no need to turn his thumbs down, as no quarter is given”. [20]

But unlike Spencer, 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”. [21] 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”. [21]

This ethical process he identifies with material progress. The same anti-naturalistic view was expressed by Sigmund Freud, who saw the development of civilization as a systematic battle against man’s natural instincts. It was also that of Lester Ward. As Donald Worster notes,

“Ward saw the way to progress and moral redemption in a systematic war with nature. which above all meant ‘changing the competitive egoism that all men have inherited from their animal ancestors’.” [22]

This is also very much the position of the sociobiologists who are particularly in vogue today. For them (like all modern neoDarwinists) manis by nature an individualist and an egoist, his overriding preoccupation being the survival of his own genes. But this does not mean that we have to behave egotistically. Indeed, as Dawkins tells us:

“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.” [23]

Elsewhere Dawkins tells us:

“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.” [24]

Gaylord Simpson and Jacques Monod put forward a broadly similar argument. For them, the most relevant aspect of nature is its randomness and purposelessness. “Man”, Gaylord Simpson tells us, “is the result of a purposeless and materialistic process that did not have him in mind. He was not planned”. [25] For Simpson, this has dramatic ethical implications:

“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. This discovery has completely undermined all older attempts to find an intuitive ethic or to accept such an ethic as revelation. It equally undermines attempts to find a naturalistic ethic which will flow with absolute validity from the workings of nature or of evolution as a new revelation.” [26]

Jacques Monod said much the same thing. “Since man has no role within the biosphere and is a stranger to it” he wrote, “the biosphere cannot impose any values on man”. [27] What then is to provide us with an ethical inspiration? Presumably the technosphere or world of human artefacts – the product of economic development or progress.

The evolutionists

This brings us back to Julian Huxley and C. H. Waddington who, as we saw earlier, went a long way towards developing a biosphericethic. If they did not, it is because they accepted the ‘gladiatorial’ view of nature that was prevalent at the time. They probably could not have done otherwise for this view was, and still is, at least among mainstream scientists, extremely firmly entrenched. Among other things, it underlies the Darwinist (and indeed the neo-Darwinist) theory of evolution, whose main features no scientist could thenquestion without losing credibility among his peers.

Unlike T. H. Huxley, however, Julian Huxley and C. H. Waddington nevertheless believed, as we have seen, that it was only from nature that our ethical system could be derived. Furthermore, unlike the social Darwinists, they did not see this as implying that it had to be an individualistic and competitive ethic. On the contrary, they were firm believers in co-operation and harmony.

Their position was thus a strangely inconsistent one, and their efforts to eliminate this inconsistency somewhat unconvincing. It involved arguing that both nature and human nature were themselves subject to evolutionary change, which they identified with progress and which they saw as tending in the direction of increasing harmony and co-operation.

The argument is best expressed by Julian Huxley himself. He formally rejected his grandfather T. H. Huxley’s thesis that there was “a fundamental contradiction between the ethical process and the cosmic process”. [28] If the older Huxley believed this, “it was that he saw the former as absolute and universal and the latter as occurring at a purely biological level”. [29] As Julian Huxley wrote,

“Today that contradiction, can, I believe 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.” [30]

Progress, an integral part of evolution, had made man less individualistic and less competitive and more cooperative and altruistic, and it was this co-operative and altruistic ethic that itself mediated “human evolution” or progress.

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.

Such a position had previously been expressed very explicitly by Drummond the American theologian, who insisted 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”. [31] This is also the position of the Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine, which he uses to justify the latest phase of technological progress – genetic engineering – which he sees as providing a means of achieving a new earthly paradise.

Thus, regardless of their differences, all the scholars I have referred to formulated an ethic that serves above all to rationalize and hence validate that Promethean enterprise which we popularly refer to as ‘progress’ and which gives rise to the ‘technosphere’ or surrogate world of human artefacts. One could refer to such an ethic as a ‘technospheric’ ethic and contrast it to what we might call a ‘biospheric’ ethic, an ethic whose role, in sharp contrast, is to rationalise and hence validate the preservation of the natural world on which we must ultimately depend for our survival.

Before we go further, it is worth considering the main features of the ‘technospheric’ ethic in some detail.

Morality begins with Man

A cardinal tenet of the ‘technospheric’ ethic – one accepted by all the scholars we have discussed so far – is that morality begins with modern man and that once cannot talk of primitive man, or of other forms of life, as being ‘moral’. Thus T. H. Huxley tells 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 of 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 later 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.” [32]

Although Julian Huxley, as already noted, saw progress as part of evolution, he insisted that it was an ethical process, which previous evolution was not:

“The existence of man on earth introduced morality into the Cosmos in the same sort of was as it later introduced the so-called Laws of Nature. . . Moral law does not exist until man appears, with his capacity for perceiving badness and goodness and for generalizing about right and wrong.” [33]

The laws or customs of vernacular societies were observed not only because they had the moral force of having been promulgated by the ancestors. . . but also because they were seen as maintaining the order of the Cosmos.

Waddington took 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”. [34]

In a similar vein, Simpson, who as we have seen saw progress as very distinct from evolution, writes:

“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.” [35]

Purpose

Most of these scholars (Simpson and Monod, in particular) agree that evolution is a random, blind and purposeless process but insist that this is only true until man, or more precisely modern man, appears. Lester Ward also made explicit this belief that it is only with the appearance of man that there can be purpose:

“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.” [36]

Ward made a distinction between man-made phenomena that are the result of human purpose, which he called “telic” (from the Greek world telos = ‘goal’) and natural or ‘genetic’ phenomena, the result of blind natural forces.

Significantly Sir Peter Medawar also considered that there was no purpose without consciousness and that because only man was conscious, only his behaviour was truly purposive.

Knowledge

All those who share the technospheric ethic are agreed that knowledge begins with man, or modern man. In non-human forms of life, and presumably among primitive people, there is only ‘experience’, whilst with modern man there is ‘education’. This makes all the difference, for according to Ward, “the knowledge of experience is, so to speak, a genetic product, that of education is a teleological product”. [37]

Monod and Simpson attach so much importance to knowledge that they actually preach an “ethic of knowledge” (Monod’s “ethique de Ia connaissance”). Monod sees this as being the only ethic possible for modem man. This ethical knowledge would differ from that of ‘animistic’ man, by which he means primitive man, because the latter believes in teleology – a belief which, for Monod, is a hideous failing, since he sees it as the opposite of objectivity, which alone embodies what he refers to as “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 which he promotes as ethical that the technosphere canbe built up. Julian Huxley is explicit on this score:

“Knowledge is not merely an end in itself, but the only satisfactory means for controlling our future evolution.” [38]

If knowledge is good, and its acquisition essential for assuring the march of progress, then it must follow that

“social morality is seen to include the duty of providing an immense extension of research, and its integrated planning to provide the basis for desirable change.” [39]

Reason and choice

A third feature of the technospheric ethic is that it is only with consciousness, purpose, knowledge, and all the other supposedly unique endowments of modern man, that reason and choice emerge, without which there can be no morality.

Monod tells us that his ethic of knowledge would differ from all other previous ethics in that it would have been adopted by an act of conscious choice. Simpson tells us that choice is morally good. “Blind faith” on the other hand, “is morally wrong”. [40]

As knowledge builds up, our rational choices will change or rather ‘evolve’. This means that 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”. [41]

Waddington also considered that the evolutionary ethic, as he saw it,

“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.” [42]

As already pointed out, this was also essentially the view of Julian Huxley.

Individualism

The technospheric ethic is fundamentally an individualistic one. Simpson argues that even if we wished to derive ethics from nature, they would still be individualistic, for evolution tends towards individualisation (as opposed to higher integration as ecologists once maintained). This individualisation, Simpson regards as “good”. Man must be aware of “the goodness of maintenance of this individualisation”, and he must promote

“the integrity and dignity of the individual . . . Socialisation may be good or bad. When ethically good, it is based on, and in turn gives maximum total possibility for, ethically good individualization.” [43]

Man has no duty to the state (which Simpson does not distinguish from ‘society’). Those who suggest that he does are but the proponents of the “organic State”, a notion used “to support authoritarian and totalitarian ideologies”. [44]

Individualism, on the other hand, Simpson associates with democracy. Democratic society, for all those who espouse the technospheric ethic, is the product of the “social contract”, that is, of purposive, conscious, rational choice based on scientific knowledge. Therefore it is “good”. As 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.” [45]

The individual’s duty to the state thereby ends when the contract is rescinded.

Julian Huxley and Waddington also accepted the ethic of individualisation, but it was tempered with their knowledge that, in Huxley’s words, “the individual is . . . meaningless in isolation”, and, in Waddington’s, that “a fully developed human being is inconceivable in isolation from society”. [46] Nevertheless, according to Huxley,

“fuller individualisation is an evolutionary end; the developed human individual is 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 . . . yet a certain right organization of society is necessary as a means before those ends can be achieved.” [47]

This society, needless to say, Huxley sees as a man-made political unit. It is the United Nations that impresses him, since it may lead to the single world society.

For the sociobiologists only an individualistic ethic is even conceivable.The individual’s overriding goal, for them, and indeed for those who have accepted the latest variants of neoDarwinism, is the proliferation of 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, as does Professor Wynne Edwards, are mercilessly derided.

The occurrence of altruistic behaviour, by which they mean all behaviour that tends towards satisfying the needs of any unit larger than the individual, is acknowledged, but is explained simply in terms of short term cost-benefit analyses, based on the principle that, on certain occasions, altruism provides the means of satisfying the individual’s overriding goal of maximum gene-proliferation.

There is a terrifying consistency to such arguments, since, for ‘conscious’ and ‘rational’ modem man, supposedly bereft of a subconscious, of emotions, of feelings, of faith, and allowed no attachments save of a rational and contractual nature, no identity in a random, goal less world, or alternatively one immersed in an anonymous megasociety committed to perpetual growth, there can be no alternative to the individualistic ethic.

Man as the only source of values

Since the modem ethic is the product of conscious choice, based on ‘objective’ and hence ‘scientific’ knowledge, it is sanctioned or authenticated by no external authority but that of modern man himself, endowed as hesupposedly is with all his unique intellectual and moral gifts, and armed with the unique potentialities offered by scientific knowledge.

Simpson tells us that “Man can cherish values if he wishes to”, [48] but they are his own, self-imposed values. No absolute ethics can be found “outside of man’s own nature”. [49] Monod is of the same mind. He writes,

“The ethic of knowledge would not be imposed on man. It is he on the contrary who would impose it on himself.” [50]

The evolutionists (Julian Huxley and C. H. Waddington) would of course only partly agree with this, but their differences would be minor ones. For them, progress or “human evolution”, the latest phase of evolution, is principally the product of the development of mind, consciousness and reason and is a largely manmade process too.

Modern man thus authenticates his own moral choices although these are further authenticated, it is claimed, by being ‘natural’ and because they reflect the fundamental direction of the evolutionary process.

All (except for Ward) agree that man must be subject to no constraints. He is free to do what he likes. Being equipped, what is more, with the limitless powers conferred on him by his intelligence, his consciousness, his mind, his reason and his scientific knowledge, man is now seen as being in the unique position of being able to influence – some go so far as to say determine – his own evolution. As Simpson writes,

“Man for the first time in the history of life has increasing power to choose his course and to influence his own future evolution.” [51]

Julian Huxley came to the same conclusion from a very different position.

“In the light of evolutionary biology, man can now see himself as the sole agent of further evolutionary advance on this planet, and one of the few possible instruments of progress in the universe at large. He finds himself in the unexpected position of business manager for the cosmic process of evolution.” [52]

llya Prigogine and his disciple Erich Jantsch go even further. For them, the key determinants of progress are “consciousness” and “mind”, which needless to say only man is endowed with. It is because man possesses consciousness, Jantsch tells us that “mankind is not redeemed by God but redeems himself”. The evolution of consciousness he then identifies with the evolution of the universe itself, which in turn he identifies with “self-organization”.

Such self-organization is marked by increasing “fluctuations” or discontinuities which are “good” because they give rise to “dissipative structures” which, roughly speaking, are the organized systems that make up the biosphere, but which, needless to say, are not distinguished from those that make up the technosphere (see The Ecologist, Vol. 11 No. 5).

To subject man’s conscious activities, in particular his super-star technologies such as genetic engineering, which Prigogine particularly favours, to any biological, social or ecological constraints would, it is argued, be distinctly immoral, since it would be interfering with the development of the very “dissipative structures” on which not only our material welfare but the very evolution of the biosphere is held ultimately to depend.

This may sound like a caricature of Prigogine’s thesis but it is not. Indeed, Prigogine, Jantsch and their main followers in France, Belgium and elsewhere have built up an extraordinary cosmology for rationalising progress and the super-star technologies that are to achieve its latest stages. These are legitimised by making them out to be natural processes that play a key role in the “self-organisation” of the universe, and of course, by seeing them as the product of the consciousness, reason, choice and knowledge of a deified modern man.

Progress

Above all, the technospheric ethic is an ethic of progress. As Julian Huxley writes,

“Social organization should be planned, not to prevent change, nor merely to permit it, but to encourage it.” [54]

Progress is seen as a purposive process, inspired by conscious and rational considerations, based on what is taken to be objective knowledge. Certainly progress is viewed as the exclusive work of modemman. Whether progress is to be allowed free rein to satisfy the interests of commerce, as Spencer, Sumner and more recently Prigogine, Jantsch and others believed, or tightly controlled, as Ward maintained, so as to protect the individual from the worst abuses of the market, is neither here nor there.

What is important is that all benefits are implicitly assumed to derive from the technosphere rather than the biosphere, and that ethical behaviour is thereby taken to be that which leads to the maximum technospheric development or economic growth.

A biospheric ethic

The technospheric features which have been put forward as fundamental to a valid ethical system can be shown to be unacceptable. To begin with, we must reject utterly the notion that only modem man is capable of moral behaviour. This is just part of the myth that progress has somehow put modern man above nature. This is a pure dogma based on no serious considerations of any kind. Indeed, if by moral behaviour, we mean merciful, kindand altruistic behaviour, then there is absolutely no evidence that non-human animals do not behave morally.

Conrad Lorenz describes in great detail how all sorts of non-human animals are capable of behaving in this way, although he too seems to accept the scientific dogma that only humans are moral, regarding such behaviour in non-human animals as “analogous to true morality”. [55] Nevertheless he writes:

“Nobody with a real appreciation of the phenomena under discussion can fail to have an ever recurring sense of admiration for those physiological mechanisms which are in force in animals, (producing) selfless behaviour, aimed towards the good of the community and which work in the same way as a moral law in human beings.” [56]

We must reject too the preposterous view that only modern man is capable of purposive behaviour, which is one of the justifications for the dogma that he alone is moral. This is yet another device for rationalising the dogma of progress, which is seen as transforming a random, chaotic world into an orderly and purposeful one. Indeed, the more we learn about the biosphere,

“the more orderly and purposeful it appears to be and the more difficult the dogma of randomness is to sustain.” [57]

We must also reject the notion that only modern man’s behaviour is based on conscious choice rather than on belief or faith. Again, this is simply another means of rationalising the dogma of progress. There is no reason of any sort for suggesting that non-human forms of life are incapable of conscious choice.

In any case such choices are, in both human and non-human animals, largely illusory. Motivation research, largely undertaken by the advertising industry, has revealed that the reasons advanced by people for explaining a behavioural act are largely rationalisations designed to make the act appear to be based on conscious and rational considerations.

Moreover, to maintain that behaviour is only truly ethical if it is based on conscious choices is irreconcilable with the view of ethics as providing the general non-plastic instructions that will assure the continuity or stability of a society’s behaviour pattern. For, if these instructions are to be non-plastic, they must be believed in, indeed, regarded as self-evident, not just derived from ad hoc conscious choices. If they were, then they would give rise to a highly unstable social behaviour pattern, and hence a society with no continuity or stability.

As we have seen, Waddington sees such basic instructions as accepted without question, as an act of faith rather than by the conscious or rational choice of an “authority acceptor”. This he saw as essential for maintaining what he calls the “socio-genetic continuum”. Clearly too Matthew Arnold’s “something not ourselves that makes for righteousness” must be a faith of some sort – faith in the sanctity of something we regard as holy and from which we can alone derive our ethical system.

We must reject too the associated idea of an ‘ethic of objective knowledge’. Objective knowledge is seen by science as being above all knowledge that has been insulated from subjective values, but as we know today there can be no such thing.

Even if there were, as Popper has pointed out, we are not designed by our evolution to entertain such knowledge. It has no role to play in the strategy of nature. Even if it had, how could we possibly be imbued with the ethic of value-free or ethic-free knowledge – the ethic, in fact, of not having an ethic?

We must reject too the notion that ethical behaviour must favour ‘individualization’. The natural world, as already noted, is highly organised. It is a vast co-operative enterprise, capable as Jim Lovelock has shown, of maintaining its homeostasis in the face of environmental challenges. An atomised or individualised biosphere is a sick biosphere, one that has disintegrated, as ours is doing under the impact of economic development or progress.

The same is true of an atomised or individualised society. The alienated members of such a society have lost the power to govern themselves and must be run by a government and a vast associated bureaucracy, for which, when living in a healthy and structured society, they have no possible need. The ethic of individualization is thereby the ethic of ecological and social disintegration.

We must reject too the notion that ethics must be purely our own and not derived from anything larger than ourselves – such as our society or nature itself – and hence that man is free to determine his own evolution and need submit to no social or ecological constraints. This view may be consistent with Simpson and Monod’s view of man as a stranger in a random world in which he has no role of any kind to fulfil.

It may be consistent too with the neo-Darwinian, and hence the socio-biologist’s, view of man as the supreme egoist, whose only role is to assure the proliferation of his own genes. But this paradigm is now under ever more serious attack across a wide front, and is increasingly difficult to reconcile with our knowledge of life processes within the biosphere. [58]

Finally, we must reject the ethic of scientific, technological and industrial progress, an ethic which all the values we have considered serve above all to rationalise and hence to legitimise. Progress, or the economic development with which it is equated, involves the systematic substitution of the technosphere or man-made world for the biosphere or natural world or living world from which it derives its resources and to which it consigns its ever more voluminous and ever more toxic waste products. As the technosphere expands so must the biosphere disintegrate and contract.

Economic growth, in fact, is a measure of biospheric disintegration and contraction. The two processes are but different sides of the same coin. This means that the ethic of progress – in effect, the ethic of perpetual technospheric expansion – is in reality no more than an ethic of biospheric destruction. It is not an “evolutionary ethic”, as Waddington and Huxley saw it. On the contrary, it is an anti-evolutionary ethic. It serves to sanctify the reversal of the evolutionary process.

Gaian morality

A biospheric ethic, an ethic compatible with the ecological view of the world we live in, would be very different from that proposed bythe scholars whose writings we have considered. It would above all be one which enables man to assist in the achievement of Gaia’s overall goal of maintaining the biosphere’s stability or homeostasis in the face of change whereas immoral behaviour would be that which reduced Gaian homeostasis and hence that which disrupted the basic structure of the Cosmos.

This was undoubtedly what ethical behaviour was taken to be by thevernacular 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”, as Radcliffe Brown refers to it, [59] but also because the behaviour that conformed to them was seen as maintaining the order of the Cosmos. So long as that order was maintained, then man prospered: if it were perturbed, if, in fact, the ‘balance of nature’ were upset, then disaster inevitably followed.

Vernacular man’s fundamental role in life was thus to maintain the order of the Cosmos,which he saw himself as doing by performing the prescribed rituals, taking part in the prescribed ceremonies and in general by observing the traditional law of his society. This law he took to be a moral law and one which applied not only to man and the society to which he belonged but also to nature and, indeed, to the Cosmos itself.

Father Placide Tempels in his celebrated book Bantu Philosophy notes:

“Moral behaviour for the Bantu is behaviour that serves to maintain the order of the Cosmos and hence that maximises human welfare. Immoral behaviour is that which educes its order, thereby threatening human welfare.” [60]

This statement could apply equally well to vernacular societies in all parts of the world. In many of these societies, the pattern of behaviour that is judged to be ethical was 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.” [61]

All other acts, as they oppose the Tao, are “incorrect, abnormal, unnatural”, and they must “bring misfortune on the bad”.

The Buddhist notion of Dhanna, the Persian Asha and the Vedic Ri’ta are very similar concepts: all refer to the Way that man must follow if he is to maintain the order of the Cosmos, the only Way that is truly moral since to maintain it is to assure the welfare of the world of living things, while to divert from it can only cause disasters like floods, droughts, epidemics and wars.

Although many tribal peoples do not appear to have formulated the notion of the Way in so explicit a manner, their notion 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 the order of the Cosmos; immoral behaviour on the other hand, is that which is taboo. Roger Caillois writes:

“An act is taboo 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 could stalk the land.” [62]

Conclusion

Clearly in terms of this criterion, 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 flood, droughts, epidemics and other massive discontinuities whose seriousness is increasing 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.

The only way of reducing the severity of these discontinuities is to abandon these policies and seek instead 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.

Acknowledgement

This essay formed the substance of a talk given at the Centre for Human Ecology at the University of Edinburgh as part of its 2003 Ecology and Moral Choice lecture series.

Note: Edinburgh University has since then closed this centre, but it survives independently – website: www.che.ac.uk

Edward Goldsmith was an Anglo-French environmentalist, writer and philosopher. He passed away on August 21, 2009. He co-authored the influential Blueprint for Survival with Robert Prescott-Allen, becoming a founding member of the political party "People" (later renamed the Green Party), itself largely inspired by the Blueprint. A deep ecologist and systems theorist, Goldsmith was an early proponent of the Gaia hypothesis. He was also the founder of The Ecologist

References

1. T. Dobzhansky, The Biological Basis of Human Freedom. Columbia University Press, New York.
2. C. H. Waddington, The Ethical Animal. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1960.
3. Ibid.
4. Jean Piaget, The Moral Judgement of a Child. Hardcourt Brace and Smith, New York, 1932.
5. C. H. Waddington, op. cit., supra 2.
6. Ibid.
7. Quoted in Antony Flew, Evolutionary Ethics. Macmillan. London, 1968.
8. Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy. Cambridge University Press, 1977.
9. Greta Jones, Social Darwinism and English Thought. Harvester, 1980.
10. Lester Ward. Quoted by Richard Hofstadter in Social Darwinism in American Thought. Beacon Press, Boston, 1955.
11. Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: the New Synthesis. Belknap, Cambridge, Mass.
12. C. H. Waddington, op.cit., supra 2.
13. Ibid.
14. Ralph Gerard, “Biological Basis for Ethics”. In Philosophy of Science; pp.92-120. 1942; .
15. Ibid.
16. Herbert Spencer, First Principles. Williams and Norgate, London, 1904.
17. Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought. Beacon Press, Boston, 1955.
18. Herbert Spencer, op.cit., supra 16.
19. Adolf Hitler. Quoted by Flew, op.cit., supra 7.
20. T. H. Huxley, “The Struggle for Existence”. In T. H. Huxley and J. S. Huxley (1893-1943), Touchstones for Ethics. Harper and Bros, New York, 1947.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene. Paladin Books, London, 1978.
24. Ibid.
25. Gaylord Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution. Yale University, 1950.
26. Ibid.
27. Jacques Monod, Le Hazard et la necessité. Seuil, Paris 1970.
28. Julian liux Icy, Touchstones for Ethics.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Drummond. Quoted by Hofstadter, op.cit., supra 7
32. T. H. Huxley, op.cit., supra 20.
33. Ibid.
34. C. H. Waddington, op.cit., supra 2.
35. Gaylord Simpson, op.cit., supra 25.
36. Lester Ward, op.cit., supra 10.
37. Ibid.
38. J. S. Huxley, op.cit., supra 28.
39. Ibid.
40. Gaylord Simpson, op.cit., supra 25.
41. Ibid.
42. C. H. Waddington. op.cit., supra 2.
43. Gaylord Simpson, op.cit., supra 25.
44. Ibid.
45. William Graham Sumner, Social Darwinism – Selected Essays. Prentice Hall, 1963.
46. C. H. Waddington, op.cit., supra 2.
47. J. S.Huxley, op.cit., supra 28.
48. Gaylord Simpson, op.cit., supra 25.
49. Ibid.
50. Jacques Monod, op.cit., supra 27.
51. Gaylord Simpson, op.cit., supra 25.
52. J. S. Huxley, Evolution in Action. Chatto and Windus, London, 1953.
53. Erich Jantsch, The Self Organizing Universe. Penguin, London, 1980.
54. J. S. Huxley, op.cit., supra 28.
55. Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression. Harcourt Brace and World, New York, 1963.
56. Ibid.
57. Edward Goldsmith, “Gaia and Evolution – Introduction”. In Proceedings of the Second Camelford Symposium on the Implications of the Gaia Thesis.
58. Ibid.
59. A. R. Radcliffe Brown, Structure and Function in Primitive Societies. Cohen and West, London, 1965.
60. Father Placide Tempels, La Philosophie Bantoue. Presence Africaine, Paris, 1948.
61. H. de Groot, The Religion of the Chinese. London, 1910.
62. Roger Caillois, L’Homme et Ie Sacré. Gallimard, Paris, 1952.

Copyright © 2011 The Estate of Edward Goldsmith

 

 



 


Comments are not moderated. Please be responsible and civil in your postings and stay within the topic discussed in the article too. If you find inappropriate comments, just Flag (Report) them and they will move into moderation que.