 We're going to the third number of talks on sustainability here at VCI. I just want to remind you that the next two talks, that's the next Tuesday to Tuesday afterwards, will not take place here but will take place in the Humanities Building. And if you go into our website, cusa.vci.edu, you'll find full information about where the talk is and how to get there. The next two talks are going to take place in the Humanities Building auditorium. The next talk is on the topic of ethics and sustainability. And I want to start off by giving you a little bit of an overview of what I'm going to cover in the next hour. I'm going to start off by talking about what we mean by ethics and then because people don't get a lot of instruction in ethics, although we think of ourselves as a fairly ethical society, we don't learn about it very much. So I'm going to do a very quick history of ethics in the western edition. And from that, I'll move on to the topic of environmental ethics and then conclude with some comments about the relationship between ethics and sustainability. When we talk about ethics, we're talking about moral philosophy, or I'm talking about moral philosophy. And let me tell you that given that the terms ethics, morality, justice, they're not very precise, people use them in different ways. But what I'm talking about here is understanding what is good versus bad, what is right, what is wrong, what is fair, what is just, what is virtuous behavior. And historically, we've grappled with these questions in three ways. We've asked where do our understandings of what is fair or what is good come from. We've asked how do we take these understandings and apply them to situations in the real world, situations that are sometimes very complicated and uncertain. And thirdly, we ask why should we bother doing all this? What's the point in doing this? Why do we want to be ethical? Do we want to be ethical? Apparently, according to a lot of survey information, America does want to be ethical. America sees itself as an ethical society, as a morally grounded society, as a leader on moral issues. And we've done so since our founding. The Center I direct does an annual survey and what we've discovered in this annual survey is that after 9-11, after the economic crisis, it doesn't matter what sort of calamity we experience, Americans overwhelmingly see people as good, they see themselves as good, they believe in doing good. No matter what proxy we use, and religion is a common one, this is from a Gallup poll, so it's a fairly good poll. No matter what proxy we use for moral behavior, ethical behavior, we discovered the overwhelming majority of Americans say this is an important part of their lives. Being moral is important. This is, in fact, more than three-quarters of Americans claim that a determinant of how they vote in any election is the moral character of the candidates. We believe that it's important to be moral in public life, we believe it's important to be ethical, it's impritable. We don't, however, we don't believe by an overwhelming majority that we do this. We look at the most recent polls, the most recent Gallup polls in America, over 80% of Americans would rate our country's state of moral values as poor or fair. And this number has remained really constant over the past decade. If we look at the direction in which people think we're going, again, the overwhelming majority feel that things are getting worse. So we believe in ethics, we believe that people are good, we believe that we should do good, we believe it's important to us and we make decisions on this basis, but for some reason we see a great gap between what we're doing and what our country is doing, what the other people in our country are doing. In fact, never before have our evaluations of political leaders and business leaders been as low as they are today. We see these people as morally ungrounded. We see them as making almost all of their decisions on the basis of personal gain. We see them looking for profit opportunities in everything they do. And Gallup poll after Gallup poll and many other polls confirm this. We believe in ethics, but we don't believe that our country acts differently and we certainly don't believe our business leaders or our politicians do. Now why is that? Why are we so pessimistic? How do we explain this big gap between what we believe in and what we think we're living in? There's lots of ways one could approach it, but here are a couple of reasons that have been discussed that have received a considerable amount of attention in recent years. And one is that our rules have become a very, very fast-paced, complicated place. And in this very, very complicated, fast-paced place, we find ourselves facing a lot of challenges that are at the can scale. What does it mean? What is the moral position on reproductive clothing or stem cell research? What are the moral implications of global warming or biodiversity loss? Are the species disappearing? These are huge questions and we sense that what we do or don't do has a transformative capacity. Our world is changing and it matters what we do, but we're not entirely sure what to do. When we look in the past, we don't see clear guidelines. Nobody wrote guidance notes on these issues 50 or 100 years ago. We can turn to them and say, ah, when they face the question of reproductive clothing, here's how they downgrade it. And we're worried that in any case a lot of things are over our control. We're not sure if we make this decision, will it have the consequences that we want it to have? We see a lot of effects as nonlinear these days. And all of these issues are challenging our ability to orient ourselves morally in a way in which we're confident. There's another layer of complication. We are much more complicated people as individuals than was ever the case in the past. Today, because of technology, very few people grow up in a small community, interact with that community more or less their entire lives, rarely leave that community. One role, one major economic role that they play for their entire lives. Today, people will live here for a few months, over there for a couple of years, over here for a few years. They'll move from one job to another job to a third job. They'll live a long time, they'll be in many relationships with many communities. And it's not always easy to reconcile their moral obligations as a community member, they've lived for maybe six months or a year here, versus as a father, versus as a professor, versus as a consumer, versus as an environmentalist. There's a lot going on. And the easiest thing of course, the path of least resistance, is to sort of just allow the status quo to reproduce itself. Or to do the things for which there are big incentives, like consumers. Big incentives to watch TV, big incentives to buy stuff. And that's sort of an easy thing to do, and so a lot of us spend a lot of time buying stuff and watching TV. The result, according to Curtis White, for the controversial figures, we have now a society that sees itself as very moral, but is actually fairly mediocre in terms of when it comes to morality. A society that has much bigger aspirations than its practices seem to deserve or want. Is that true? I'm not sure if it's true. One thing I am sure about is that we've spent an awful long time, 25 centuries at least, trying to figure out the issue of ethics. I'm going to talk about it from principally a Western perspective, just because of time constraints. And in many ways the Western debates are quite unique, and they're certainly influential in our lives and the lives that we're living here. So let me give you a quick, brief history of ethical thinking. You may recognize this painting. A lot of our historians would call this one of the highlights of the Renaissance. Raphael painted it in 1509, 1510, for the Apostolic Church of Vatican. And it's called The Greek School. Up there in the sort of article I'll point out, Sovereignty is in the ground. The two central figures, the one in red and a sort of clear-colored, long bearded playtongue beside him, more youthful, brown hair, earth tones in skype and water tones at a subtle, lounging on the front stairs, diogenes to his right, Pythagoras. We're not sure who most of the figures are. We know, we have pretty good ideas of many of them, but we don't have photographs, so it was pretty hard to figure out who the artist intended to be who. But we do know that the idea was to capture the richness of philosophy. This was one of four frescoes painted for the Church. And the focus of this one was philosophy. It was wisdom. It was about ethical discourse. And things start in our tradition largely with Socrates and Plato. Because Plato was the person who made the argument that life is about ethics. Life is about justice. Politics is rightly about applied ethics. About creating conditions in which people will do the right thing. The good thing, the just thing. Plato argued, one of his most famous arguments was that, what's your most trusted source? Parathical discourse? It's philosophy. He said, religious people may tell you that you should do this or you should do that. And they may or may not be right. But they can't prove it to you. And you have no way of knowing whether they interpreted things correctly. He said, philosophers alone lead you step by step through their reasoning. And they say, this is what you should do and hear the reason. And you can challenge them at any point. You can say, I don't agree with that because of this, this, and that. He said, philosophers ultimately are your most trusted source for ethical discussion. Therefore countries, states should be led by philosophers. Philosophers should rule the world. They're the ones who understand what a just society should look like. And it turns out what a just society should look like is a society in which people do what they are best suited to do. Some people rule because they're best suited to rule. Other people produce because they're best suited to produce. Some people guard because they're best suited to guard. And in the Republican Plato's discussion of this, he's challenged by a cynic through a cynicist who says, you know what? He said, I'll tell you what ethics is. Ethics is about people who are rich and powerful saying, this is what you should do. And they do it for one reason, to stay rich and powerful. And if the weak agree with that, say, OK, you want me to do this, you want me to obey, you want me to hand over some of my money, then they're just stupid. And for the past 2,500 years, people have debated, is ethics just sort of rich and powerful? Constructing a world which keeps them in place? Or is it something more than that? Is it something that is objective? Something that we can all determine in some way or other? What is ethics really about? Plato's the most famous student, and here you have an interesting picture. Plato on your left with his finger pointing to the air and colors of fire and air. People think about him having this philosophical posture. Aristotle in a world of colors and watercolors, more grounded, pointing at people, the empiricist. Aristotle was uncomfortable with the idea of a sort of strict society that had philosophy or a design in which each of us was assigned a specific role. In Plato's world, we had no children because children create effective bonds with parents, parents create effective bonds with children. This sort of leads people to do things which aren't good and right. So all children would be raised communally in his world. And those who were smart would do this, and those who were fast would do this, and those who were good with music would do that. Aristotle said this is not really what humans are about. Humans are about things like friendship. He decided that what we're really about as people is happiness or well-being. You don't get it. And a way to achieve a state of well-being of happiness was to live a virtuous life, a good life, an ethical life. And it wasn't always clear what that was. So we had to learn through experience. We had to learn through observation. We had to learn through discussion. And the goal was, he said we have a general sense of what it is. It means to be courageous. It means to be wise. It means to be fair. It means to be altruistic. It means to be temperate. Those were virtues. But he said exactly what it requires us to do is not clear. He gave us one indicator. He said somewhere between extremes is where is the sweet spot of ethical behavior. Between recklessness and cowardice is courage. And we're trying to find those sweet spots. And we're trying to live in accordance with that. Now, a lot of people said that this sort of set the platform for our thinking about ethics. Here we had the cynics. We had the people who thought it was sort of about society and roles in society. And people thought it was sort of about virtue and cultivating our own virtuous characters. Over time, lots of people would respond to us. The students would argue that similar inscribed in nature is a set of laws, which are universal. And if we can access them, we'll know what's good and what's right and what's just. And they're written perhaps by God. And they're accessible to everybody if they know how to find them. Epicureans focused on moderation. The person is the person who's moderate in all things. A radical sea shift came when Christianity displaced antiquity. A movement that began around the beginning of the 5th century and was completed sometime around the year 800 in showing us the crown as a Christian, as a leader of Christianity. Christianity took us in a very different direction, or at least the beginnings in a very different direction. And the early Christians said, what is the good life? What is the moral life? It's a life of withdrawal, of disengagement, auto-excusia, a life of self-rule. The most virtuous person was the person who disengaged from everything, who didn't need to consume, didn't need relationships, but instead focused on his or her personal relationship with something greater, something bigger with God. Many early Christians moved into the desert. They distanced themselves from people. They started to attach tremendous value to things like celibacy, to abstinence. The New Testament, there were three important books that sort of defined moral thinking for about a thousand years in Western history, from about 200 to about 1200. The first was the New Testament, and it's simple message probably. It's obviously a huge book with lots of complexity and nuance. But one of the simple messages that everybody apprehends is the notion of reciprocity. You do one to others as you would have one to run to here, and many people feel that is the core of our ethical understanding. We do think that we would expect other people, intrigued people of the way we would like to be treated, and that is the core of what moral behavior is. A second important influential work was St. Benedict's rules, in which he stressed the importance of obedience. The ethical life was a life of obedience, a life where you did what you were told by somebody who was in a position to tell you what was good or right. You have to be honest or you're a priest. But perhaps the most dramatic departure from classical thinking was written by St. Augustine in the city of God. We tried to understand how could Rome, this eternal city which once had a million inhabitants, which brought wealth from the surrounding countryside for miles and miles into the surrounding countryside. It brought in slaves and it brought in food, it brought in water, it brought in wool. It built incredibly, incredibly beautiful and complicated architectural infrastructure. Water conduits and roads called Sien. How could it have collapsed so dramatically under the pressure of the barbarian invaders? And he decided the real answer was that we lived in a state of sin. We lived in a state of sin when people were sinful. And he developed a notion of two worlds. One, the world we're living in, where people were imperfect and sinful. And the other one, which he called the second life, the eternal life, which if we were lucky we would get where people were perfect. He said, life is punishment. Life is a punishment. It's a punishment for disobedience. We disobeyed God. We were punished for a kicked out of Eden and subjected to hunger, to disease, to lust, to growing old, to being tired, to having to work. So life was largely about sin. To talk about ethics, morality, and justice in this rule, for Saint Augustine was a bit of a stretch. A bit of a stretch, because we couldn't have it here. We don't really lost that. This was a smart choice for Christianity, it turned out, because he basically said to the rulers who were not Christian, we don't care what you do. We do not care what you do. Rule how you want. Take our money. Do what you want. We don't care. Just leave our churches alone. So that we can educate people. So that we can, and what will give you in return for peace is immediate subjects. Now as we know what happened, the rulers looked at the seal and said, that's not a bad deal. You'll let us collect taxes. You'll let us rule. And all we have to do is leave your churches un-molested. Over the course of the next few hundred years, churches from all through Europe, from Northern Africa into the UK, and all of a sudden one day, the churches stopped being secular authorities. They had become so powerful. Nobody knows if St. Augustine had a master plan to be, if he saw this as a way to displace secular authority, but it worked that way in the end. In the Middle Ages, the late Middle Ages, the end of the Middle Ages, when the church had reached its peak, people began to look at it and said, Sir, where is this celibacy? Where is this disengagement from lust and sin, from theft? People were more civilized, but the church was a very powerful entity which was acting a lot like the secular rulers that it displaced. And so he began to say, you know what, St. Augustine got it right the first time around. Morality and ethics are about the world up there, the world down here. In fact, the church has no authority in the world down here. The world down here is about something else. It's about commerce, it's about security, it's about building houses, it's about farming. You can have morality and ethics, but it has nothing to do with secular rule. He began to separate what we now think of as church and state. In the early Renaissance, the early Italian statesmen from Florence took this and said, this is exactly right. Social life, political life isn't about ethics. There's very little to do with ethics. It's not about virtue, at least not in the sense of, not in that Christian sense, not in that classical grief sense. It's about power. Thracymachus was right. St. Augustine was right. It's about power. It's about gaining power, holding on to power. That's what life is about. And you're either in charge, driving the cart, or you're inserved, and you're pulling the cart. Those are the options that we have. Now, St. Augustine was a pretty complicated finger. And a lot of people have written friends in the discourses and said, actually, when you read them carefully, he was looking at these tough guys, commentary, people were taking over Venice, taking over Florence. And he was saying to them, ah, I understand you. It's all about power. It's all about rules. It's all about running things. It's all about extracting wealth from people. It's all about enlarging your domains. It's all about having your way. That's what life is really and truly about. And people who adopt a Christian attitude, they're weak. They're easy prey. They're the ones to plunder. They'll turn to the other cheek. They're fools. Life goes, the good things of life go to the people who have occurred to crap and to take them. And then he said, but if you want to stay in power, if you want to stay in power, you've got to supplement your strong arm tactics with good thoughts. It's easier to go that strong one. It's easier in the long run if you have your subjects have their property and have their wives, have their farms, unless they're out of touch. They'll be easier to rule. And a lot of people think that what he was trying to do was to introduce ethics in the back door. We don't know for sure what his goal was. We do know he was only the beginning of a long trajectory. I wonder whether moral life was even possible. Thomas Holmes said, you know what morality really is? Morality, for me, is what I want. What gives me pleasure? And for you it's what you want. What gives you pleasure. That's what morality is. There's no objective up there. He said if there was, people would have figured it out. They'd been arguing about it for 2,000 years. They've been debating what's good and what's right and what's just for 2,000 years and nobody has come to a complete agreement. And the reason is because there isn't any answer. There's no answer to that question. Yes, we had this long, fancy debate going five centuries. We've had it because they're asking a question that cannot be answered. We share one thing in common that none of us want to die of premature violent death. That's what we start. That's the starting point of building a strong society is to assume that none of us want to die of premature violent death. Life is so secure. That's what it's about. And if you live in a society that allows you to live more years rather than less years, then that's a success. That's a success story. You should be happy with it. And it shouldn't matter to you what the leaders claim to be ethical behavior. As long as you can live as many years as possible. Now, Bufendorf Law began to challenge them. They said, this can't be all life's about. It can't just be about the strong, the powerful, getting your way. Is that all life is really about? Do all the good things just go to the greedy, the grasping, the strategic? Would only fools turn the other cheek? Only fools altruistic? Bufendorf Law began to argue, no, there's got to be something more than that. To be human is somehow to be moral. There's a natural law out there and that natural law, and this was the radical move, that natural law is accessible to everyone. And what it really does is it gives all of us the capacity to challenge those rulers, to challenge those leaders, to challenge kings, to challenge popes, to challenge anyone who says, we ought to obey them because they're the king, they're the pope, they're the hell, they're the ones with the inside knowledge of what is right and what is good and what is just. Locke said, everyone has that. We all know what is right and what is good and what is just. And that gives us not just the capacity to challenge authority, but it gives us the obligation to challenge authority when it misbehaves. Now this was an inspiring and also dangerous doctrine. It was a doctrine which ultimately would be picked up by the United States in the use of the foundation for the constitution of our country, the right to revolution. This notion that you could challenge authority and you could challenge it on moral grounds. You could say to people you are not behaving morally, you have no right to rule our country. And you could rise up against them, unseat them, put somebody else in place. Rousseau agreed that life was largely no morality. He said, and interestingly enough these days, scientists, many scientists have worked to confirm Rousseau's notion that we are by nature compassionate. And we have a level of understanding which is qualitatively different than any other species. And there's that combination of understanding and compassion which gives us the ability to be moral beings. Unfortunately, according to Rousseau we can make such bad decisions that we would probably never find our way back to a moral lifestyle. Kant also agreed life ultimately is about being moral. This isn't such a mystery. We can figure out what we need to do. We should ask ourselves some simple questions. Would we accept our behavior to be turned into a law and ourselves subject to it? Are we thinking of people as ends rather than as means to get something? Would our behavior fit into a world in which there are multiple ends? If you answer those questions then you're on the track, you're on the right track to moral behavior. Kant Bentham said let's recover ourself's notion of happiness if you're the moment of that. Moral behaviors and the behavior which creates the largest amount of happiness put the most people on the side. That's how we measure it. Over the past couple of centuries there's been lots and lots of takes but they use the same vocabulary. Sinful views, there's no such thing as moral life as a behavior. It's for the leak. It's for the foolish. It's for the people who are going to be on the losing end of every stick of every pile of every presentation. Life is a lonely place all the way to people who make the argument that moral behavior is natural. It's normal. It's rough. It's what humans do. It's what distinguishes us from other species our capacity to care about others to be altruistic. The 20th century, the last century, there have been lots and lots of animated debates between people trying to figure out does ethics matter at all? Is it all working? Is it all a mask? What are really sort of ruthless people getting their way in society making themselves rich and powerful the expenses of all those dummies who obey the rules? Is that really the best way to understand life? Are you either a dummy obeying the rules or you're a rich and powerful person disregarding them? Is it something that defines the character of the communities we live in having to allocate everything from education to health care? Is it something very individual? We have to figure out ourselves what moral life requires us to do. There have been lots of interesting developments in the past 30 or 40 years as we've come into greater contact with other cultures and tried to figure out is moral behavior in one culture as authentic and right as it is in the other culture? Are they basically saying the same thing? Have they seen anything something radically different can one trump the other? Is it both the issue of gender and does it matter? Are there differences between men and women that are more or less significant? And introduce the question of the natural environment. What I want you to take out of this are just a few key terms that define the whole discussion of ethics. Key terms. Is ethics deontological? Is it about rules thou shalt not kill as the rule? Doesn't matter what the conditions are as the rule and moral behavior requires you to obey the rule. Is it about consequences? Is it thou shalt not kill unless killing saves a whole lot of lives, protects your family? Or is it about personal character and worship? Or are you aspiring to be a particular type of person? Is that what moral life is all about? Is it driven by the individual? Is it driven by the community? Where, ultimately, do our moral intuitions and values come from? Do we figure them out through deliberation? Do we come from God or are they inscribed in some holy text or in nature? Are there artifacts of cultural production? Or is it just to avail of raw power relationships? Is it just a language which takes the edge of the fact that life is largely due to coercion? That life is largely from any perspective unfair? It's about hows and how nots, powerful and weak, rich and poor. However we understand ethics, how do we apply it to real-world situations? Let's say we believe that something should be allocated, job should be allocated on the basis of merit. You should get a job because you deserve it. Somebody should use a group of people and they say, well, give it to this person because she is the best looking. Is that fair? She might say, you know why I'm the best looking? Because personal hygiene, I watch my diet, I work at it all the time. Somebody at a consultant who advises me on how to dress, I deserve this job. What we discover is that simple things like merit are hard to fully understand and look at. They're not self-evident always. And finally, what's our motivation? Do we obey? Do we think we should be ethical because we're afraid of the consequences of not being ethical? Do we think we'll be happier somehow more fulfilled than we are? Or as people, some scientists today argue, is a really survival mechanism home by evolution. It's a smart strategy to care for the people. This is the background for discussions of environmental ethics which have taken shape over the past 30 or 40 years. You may be familiar with Thoreau in his famous book where he talks about going into disengaging for society and going into nature. And in the 19th century, sometime in the 19th century, a whole lot of forces converged to amplify the interest many people had in nature. There were tales about exotic lands that had become more and more authentic for a couple of hundred years as the world was explored. People probing further into uncharted territories. There was a belief that if we could contemplate nature, we could understand the mind of God. There was a sense that nature was renewal. If we moved into nature, we got out of the dirty city, the bleak city, the polluted city. There was something invaluable about standing there with just the sky above us. No people. It was a transcendent moment surrounded by trees, big, powerful things, the powerful forces that put everything into perspective that helped us make sense of the world we're in. There was also a growing concern for how people treated animals. It's interesting. French historian Robert Darwin writes a word about the great cat massacre in which he described how in the Middle Ages one of the things many towns did because they had problems with cats and other vermin was they would have these festivals where they would creatively kill as many as possible. They would chop off their legs and chop off their heads. They would skin them alive. They'd throw them into boiling water. They'd toss them into fires. The whole town would go crazy killing cats, rounding cats up and killing them. They would do everything imaginable to get rid of all these cats. They suggested nobody thought for a second that this was cruel. This was funny. It was a break from day to day life. Let's round up a whole bunch of cats and do horrifying things to them for the next two or three days. Because cats don't have feelings. Cats don't have memories. Slowly, for a variety of reasons, probably largely due to scientific studies of animals, people began to say maybe there's a little more there. And so we started to see movements to prevent cruelty to animals. All of these things converge and they converge into what we now call environmental ethics. Environmental ethics, I should tell you, there's not a field which is universally applauded. In fact, there's actually a field that's invited a lot of hostility. A lot of people around the world see it as very elitist. Who cares about the environment? There's this rich kids who want to preserve wilderness. That's what environmental ethics is all about. Rich kids who have the time to go out to the assembly with Joshua Tree with their families. There's nothing to do with the real world. It's a neo-colonial attitude. It's an American attitude. It's the US, it's Canada, it's Australia trying to protect big areas of our land in Africa or Asia. Land we can't afford to put aside and protect. Because we have a lot of people who are poor and hungry. It's just another way of colonialism. Trying to force us to protect areas and keep people out of them. People think of their famous stories of Richard Leakey going to Africa to protect megafauna and hiring guards to keep the poor local people out of his area. An expanding area that got bigger and bigger as he struggled to protect with the support of environmentalists in North America, elephants and zebras. From protecting the people who lived there for millennia, it's culturally insensitive people parading up in their Gore-Tex gear to stop in and away from an animal seal. That's something that's gone on for hundreds, thousands of years something they don't understand. It's uninformed. People just asserting GMOs or badly without any real scientific basis for making the assertion. It fails to appreciate how special people are. We are a special species. We do something that no other species does. We produce culture. We have produced the great Gothic cathedrals, the great mosques, the great temples, the great buildings, the great painting, the great user. That's what people do. And nature is part of our means of doing this. And there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with focus on human culture. It's inherent in patronage. What does it mean to assign animal rights? What does it mean to talk about animal rights? Are they deliberating? Are they in agreement with us? Or is it just some hopeless act of arrogance to say these animals have these rights? It's offensive. Peter Sinner, the famous philosopher has argued the taboos on sexual behavior are slowly eroding bit by bit. We're allowing a larger and larger sexual behavior. What is this artificial border between one species and the next? For genetics similar to monkeys and other animals, what's the taboo? Why shouldn't we push past that one as well? A lot of people, of course, have found his famous article heavy-peding to be deeply offensive. Well, as we would say, the whole thing is superfluous anyways. We've already figured out that we shouldn't be cruel to animals. We already know that. We don't need a special branch of ethics to instruct us in these things. But there may be something there, and I want to quickly review what it might be. There's sort of two general approaches to environmental ethics. One that looks at it from a human perspective in which we are the key players in the world and makes the argument that thinking about adding nature into our moral deliberation is a prudent thing to do. It's an enlightened thing to do. And then there's a biocentric set of approaches which say, look, we are part of a great web of life. We are part of something much bigger than ourselves. This web of life goes back billions of years, 3.8 billion years, and it will continue long after we are gone. We're just a little... We're just one of millions, hundreds of millions of species that have been on this earth. We've got to put ourselves into a much broader perspective, a perspective that you do get when you walk out into the desert, when you're hiking to Sanity, when you look at the splendor of nature, when you see what's available out there. And when we understand that, we'll start to realize that things have value that we can't appreciate. They have what's called a intrinsic value. And the system fits together, the world fits together in ways which we're only beginning to touch upon. It's amazing that this world has been created, that life took shape, that it's evolved. We've got to put ourselves in perspective here. Those mosques and those churches, those Gothic cathedrals are wonderful. But take a look at nature before we start claiming that our cultural productions are the most impressive things. There's a whole lot of perspectives there's a whole lot of perspectives a multiplicity of perspectives and I'm going to just touch upon a couple of them to give you a sense. I'm going to start with some of the anthropocentric ones. This image, this famous image on two of the fields is striking. Garrett Hardin Garrett Hardin argued that what we need to do to protect nature is turn it into private property. That was the good and right thing to do. We need to privatize nature. Because if we don't if we claim to this belief this whole belief that nature is that nature is something bigger than ourselves that it should be accessible to everybody and what happens is nobody has an incentive to protect we call this the tragedy of the Collins and he said look what's happening look what's happening to the oceans nobody owns them so they'll be no proficient they'll be downtown they'll be destroyed we want to protect the oceans and privatize them Remember John Law, Chapter 5 of the Second Treatise of Government on property how do we acquire property we mix our labor with nature it's the good thing to do it's the right thing to do it's not only God's injunction be fruitful and multiply which law interpreted as turning it into something of a greater value but according to Gary Arden it was the right solution to our environmental laws privatize nature and stop reproducing if you want to know what is good and just from the perspective of that world of trees and rocks and flowers it was fairly simple slow down population growth and privatize things other people focused on sustainable generations I'm sure you're all familiar with the definition of sustainable development satisfying the needs of the president they're compromising the ability of future generations to satisfy our own needs some people focused on the aesthetic value of nature we should preserve it because it's beautiful but we should preserve it because we don't fully understand it yet it may have a cure to cancer it's a famous example there are medical therapies which we have never discovered and if we destroy things if we transform them too quickly into suburbs and malls and roads we lose beauty and we lose value we need to preserve nature what is good and right to do is to protect nature it's valuable to us some people say if we look at all the world's religions look at Christianity for example in San Francisco who discovered that there's an injunction there to preserve nature is the creation of something divine and as San Francis was famous for thinking nothing God created could be bad or could be improved so we should be very very modest and humble and going up there and changing everything around we should protect this it's in creation social ecology and this is a different social ecology than we might have here at the university but social ecology is famous for the idea that really environmental ethics questions about our relationship to the natural world what is good and right to do to nature to the ocean to the forests it's only a problem because our social relationships we've got to drill down in the other direction stop exploiting people because of gender or ethnicity culture and when we start getting our own act of order we'll discover that it becomes much harder to exploit the nature on which we all depend the conformism have a tendency in the western tradition to simplify the world to simplify the world into a set of dualisms reason versus emotion nature versus civilization and to imply that one of them is superior to the other a reason superior to emotion a civilization superior to nature they ask us not to simplify this rule to look at the continuities and differences across things that we don't fully understand to imply we're some sort of ontological reverence for difference for a principle of difference to appreciate continuities across differences but also to have reverence for things that are different biocentric perspectives biocentric perspectives are much more aggressive they say throw out all that way of thinking get internet move beyond it's largely responsible for the dilemma that we find ourselves in today our world is a mess and if we think we can solve it by tinkering with a philosophy that has allowed us to destroy the virtual environment if we're wrong we need to reorient ourselves in a much more dramatic way one of the most famous examples of this was Aldo Leopold's Land Ethic composed 60 years ago they argued that we need to think of ourselves as part of this community a bigger community a community we need to understand by through science and what was good and right was to do the things that would make this a broader community including not just us but also the forests and the grasslands and the marine areas that would make this larger community healthy and flourishing things that we did that would lead to the flourishing of this broader community in which we depended on the good they were right, they were just things that diminished this ability to flourish and be healthy were wrong and for Leopold the key was science science would help us understand what was good and what was right to do science would help us understand how to be more okay because science was our entry point into nature Peter Singer building on Jeremy Bentham the utilitarian thinker said I don't care what their animals can think I don't care if they have memories I don't care if they can deliberate I don't care if they can talk I look at an animal that's being beaten I say that animal can suffer therefore it's wrong to be there Peter Singer takes this argument much more primitive he says to us we just want to listen somebody's in a coma a coma that they're not like they are to recover from they can't reciprocate they can't communicate they can't deliberate they can't do things that are altruistic probably can't feel can we do anything we want to them can we do anything we want to that body? he says we can't, we know we can't we may not be able to fully articulate we can't, but we know it's wrong he said animals are much the same they may not be able to communicate they may not be able to deliberate but we can't do anything we want to do they have some intrinsic value they have a tealose of purpose we don't understand it very well we should leave them alone we should give them their autonomy we should let them be what they are by nature supposed to be we go out to be animals walking through the woods doing animal things and that means that we need to think very carefully about agriculture and scientific experiments and so on and so forth deep ecologists take us even further this is our next famous Norwegian married to Diana Ross of the Supremes not in Elf possibly Norway's most famous person certainly one of the most widely cited thinkers and what he wanted to argue is that society has distanced us from nature we've got all these technologies that mediate between us and nature we don't know where our food comes from we don't know where our energy comes from we don't understand, we don't have to live according to night and day we've got the weather under control because our cars and our homes can be air conditioned and heated we've lost all touch with nature and guess what, we're unhappy we're stressed out, we're tired all the time we're lonely we're a mess we're unhappy people and we've lost touch with nature and those two things are related those two things are related we need to put our lives back into some sort of synchronization with this larger world around us this world that we've tried to disengage from is completely as possible turn off the air conditioning stop being afraid of a little bit of heat or a little bit of cold or a little bit of snow start to understand the rhythms of nature as we do that we get better sleep we eat better we understand things better we understand the implications of eating this we're doing that because we would see it in this grand sense in this sense of this incredible thing we take that function in a whole lot of amazing ways around us day after day to support us which we have turned our backs on so we've got to plug back into those rhythms, those processes we've got to understand we have to strive for a biocentric identity not an identity that's disengaged from nature but one that is fully engaged with nature and he called this Ecosity I've heard of Fritz Kappers' notion of eco-literacy he said we will not be happy we will not solve our dilemmas of stress and fatigue and the sense of a meaningless life as we purchase one more commodity as we watch one more hour of TV as we watch one more hour of TV and he said this for these Korean guys nobody sits on their deathbed nobody sits there at the age of 85 or 90 looking back at their life and saying I wish I had been a little more disengaged I wish I had watched a little more TV wish I had had a little more fast food wish I had bought a few more things at Walmart when we examine our lives those are not going to be those are the things that we spend our time on those are not going to be the things we look back on and wish we had done more of we may wish we had spent more time hiking more time with family more time with friends more time playing music more time finding God more time doing a whole lot of things but we're not going to wish we had spent more time at the mall more time watching three rounds of our favorite TV show at least that's what these guys said Guy and Theory James Love Luck wants to argue that we think of Earth as an organism as a living thing that regulates itself that makes life possible all of these notions the anthropocentric ones the life-centric ones they're all a response to this growing mounting concern that we are destroying a natural environment day by day we are putting more and more intense pressure on the natural environment our behavior is not sustainable you have seen in earlier lectures people are arguing our problems are this big our solution set is this small we play around at the edges we play around at the edges carrying around cups so that we can fill them with coffee but we don't attack the meat of that life the big issues which we need to attack to reduce the pace of the global warming by our diversity loss and what all these people suggested is that this destruction of the environment is a moral dilemma it's a moral challenge it's a moral problem for us it may be a moral problem because we have over the centuries created a false division between ourselves and the rest of nature or it may be because the harm that we're doing to nature is made possible is made possible because nature has become a convenient medium for exploiting people especially people in the future we can take actions now which impose penalties in 20, 30, 50, 100 years and we don't have to pay the costs we can move polluting factories into the weakest parts of the world into the weakest civilizations we can take away their water we can take away their forest cover we can't do anything to us all we know is we have nice furniture nice clothes and good food and we don't have to see the costs we've found very convenient ways to shelter ourselves from the costs of our behavior it displaces them to the poor and the weak the distant, the remote we project it into the future and we don't have to worry about it now, however you look at it you'll be familiar with this however you look at it all of these different perspectives these different ideas are telling us that we need to have a sustainable world we need to think of our relationship to nature either from an environmental perspective as something that's morally considerable or from a human perspective as immediately used to exploit and harm other people we need to think of these things that we need to correct them and if we don't we need sustainability now I said at the beginning of this lecture that here we are a country which prides itself on our deep belief that people are good and we're good on our deep commitment to doing what is good and right and just and yet we have the sense that this isn't the world that we live in anymore that our world is not doing the things that are good and right and just there's this huge gap between the world we live in the world we see ourselves living in and the world we claim to believe in and no doubt the complexity of our problems who can fully understand the implications of if somebody says to you you can't allow a stem cell research because stem cell research immediately relates to reproductive cloning reproductive cloning would be horrible are they right? who knows whether that argument is persuasive or not complicated things to understand we have massive debates in our country about virtual images on the internet and what's for status to be do we care about we're not sure is it right or wrong to use performance enhancing things what would be wrong with that it gives you an edge at the Olympics what's wrong with performance enhancing drugs we're not quite sure how to answer all these questions some people are complicated some people of course feel they've got them all figured out but a lot of people are not sure about them the natural environment however might just give us a platform to lead moral lives might be a basis for a type of renewal for closing the circle between the world we live in and the world we believe we should be living in we may be familiar with Pareto's 80-20 rule he said here he makes this argument which has been widely validated 20%, 80% of the effects can be linked to 20% of the causes in other words if this is the realm of behavior of the air change 20% of it and you'll get 80% of the outcome you want we know there are serious environmental problems and what Pareto's rule says is if we do as good and right on the 20% that we can agree on well we have real leverage we have unity because we see things the same way we don't have to worry about the 80% where we disagree and where there's uncertainty because if we act if we commit ourselves to that area where we feel we're on solid ground we will get 80% of the effect we want and it's probably true it's probably true and in that sense it doesn't really matter whether we act to protect nature, to preserve nature to develop a sustainable relationship with nature because we think this is good from a spiritual type of perspective whether we see ourselves belonging to something bigger than just human society whether we believe that the parts out there the snow leopards and the algae have intrinsic value have tears of purpose and deserve to be left alone to extend possible deserve to be allowed to flourish in their worlds, unmolested by us doesn't matter if we have a much more anthropocentric view and we're just worried about the way in which what we do to nature affects other people living in different countries living who will live in the years ahead however we move into this space it looks like there's a very large area in which we could all be making better decisions but we could all be doing things which we generally see as good and right and fair and just and just like we traded if we change subsidies, unfair subsidies and things like energy we probably have a lot of leverage to move towards alternative forms of energy just as if just as if we use information technology effectively to make big complex issues more manageable if we committed ourselves not just to talking about how normal we are how ethical we are and how much we'd like to live in a normal world unfortunately our business leaders and our politicians have made it more or less impossible for us and therefore the best thing to do is to throw in the towel and give up if we made that same commitment and we probably would be able to have a dramatic impact once we just were far too early in this process of environmental rescue around the world to be stymied by areas where people disagree environmental ethics has largely been caricatured as the realm of eco-terrorists and animal rights and animal liberationists and people who were ungrounded and never touched and elitist there's a whole lot of reasons people have criticized the notion of thinking about nature from a moral perspective but those are very compelling in the end in the end the choices are pretty stark we may not agree with Peter Singer's argument but there's no obvious reason there's no obvious moral boundary between species that should stop us from having sexual relationship with other animals we may find that ridiculous but then devoting a huge amount of attention that has been devoted to that issue sort of a waste of time because really it's a small squeaky wheel what we all can agree on is that we should have clean water everybody in the world can pretty much agree that we should have clean water that we should protect water from the world to turn to that we shouldn't be deterred and sidetracked by the things which move us into realms with our animal answers where there are loud voices but not real solutions to the question of sustainability and we should focus on the areas in which we can make a considerable difference I think that in the end in that little video I invite you to watch by running out of time however you cut into it these days however you cut into the issue of the link between the good life the fair life, the just life and the way we interact the world not even the world around us however you cut into it if your aspiration is sustainability then you cannot escape the fact that at some point we have tough moral decisions to make and these are not going to be easy moral life is not easy moral life is not handed to you moral life does not come without any requirement for sacrifice, for change for commitment moral life is a tough life it's like learning to be an accomplished musician or an artist it's a tough life but it's almost certainly a project of sustainability as rethinking some of our economic arrangements rethinking some of our technological innovations rethinking how we handle the cascade of science which is sending into our lives so ethics environmental ethics has gotten a bad name over the past 10 or 20 years but I think it's a bad name because it's largely been caricatured I think that it is impossible to promote sustainability with ever thinking through our behavior in terms of whether it's good right and just we have a couple minutes for questions that you guys have a question except that today I see a lot of problems I would do a few useful examples that have just come up one is we want to build renewable solar power in the desert and the other hand the Sierra Club says we found three sheep in this one canyon we found 20 turtles here we want them to be located this is one example the other example is the Sierra Club on one side we may have once you accept the environmental ethics we have four questions how do you solve these problems when it's just I even said how do you weigh the one against it there's a couple of things one is of course I think one of the sad things that's happened in our country is that the conservation community has often tried to slow down development has been through that that is where it has been able to get the most leverage to slow down development and to say we're going to this can't proceed because it puts this species into danger and that does become often a type of process which keeps you from seeing the bigger picture so I think it's unfortunate that it's become a popular tool for using because you're exactly right we need to look at the bigger picture and we need to make informed decisions about where we're going to get more leverage for promoting sustainability and it may be that moral choices would not be a problem if there was uncertainty something to be said about both sides of the equation that's exactly that's what moral deliberation is all about trying to say okay we need to move it's not going to help the tools very much if the temperature increases by a few more degrees in the desert so we've got to think about alternative energy and we have to be able to have that discussion I think one of the things I like the environment of this year and so I'm sure they're fine but you know they're really in a lot of ways they sort of miss the big issues they're inviting us to make contributions and they send us junk backpacks and coffee cups and all the glossy magazines which probably take a larger tool in the environment and the contribution will never offset so you have to be very skeptical they've gotten themselves into a place which you know what they do they probably do well but they're not looking at the big picture and what we need to do is we need to develop a generation that isn't going to get locked into routines and patterns that ultimately are taking us nowhere we've got to get people who can look at the big picture and say you know I don't want to give you $25 and get it back I don't want to solve the energy crisis and so I think that you know I'm not discouraging people from signing up with these organizations but what I would do want to point out is that they've gotten locked into routines which I think are no longer moving the agenda forward any other questions? this man probably from the Sierra Club I think that clearly there's a very very close linkage here and everywhere else between religion and ethics I wasn't trying to suggest there wasn't what I was trying to suggest was that one of the dilemmas that Christianity introduced which would continue to debate is whether this world is sort of basically a corrupt place driven by power as a particular notion that really ultimately through Semicist was right Seneb Gassin was right this world is largely sort of a corrupt place and you've got to focus on the next world your moral focus has to be now Christianity is much more complex than that and that's not as I tried to point out that's not as only argument that's just one of the arguments that it introduces and it was quite powerful during the Middle Ages so Seneb Gassin City of God received an enormous amount of attention for a very long period of time now what basically happened was somewhere around the 12th, 13th century people started to say to ask is the church really a source of moral leadership and guidance or is it reflecting the corruption that Seneb Gassin talked about because look at how these people live their lives they own vast lands they own a whole lot of stuff they don't really obey the rules and what we're seeing in the church is just that old argument that they're rich and powerful do whatever they want and they sort of tell the poor to pay for it to pay for their lifestyles and so it was this challenge does that mean that everybody in the Christian church was sort of living to highlight? Not at all but it was a very distinct challenge because it was a very visible part of that world and so the church had to read Gassin and I said you know what? there's a certain amount of truth to this we have given ourselves an awful lot of privileges we are getting poor people to pay for these privileges we forgot about poverty and that it was sacrifice we forgot about this thing and it was called a Gregorian reform movement which said we've got to return to those values those are the values that are much more authentic and we've lost them so I didn't have time to go into clearly there's always been this tension that continues to be this tension people continue to sort of look at at with ambivalence towards organized religion is it our best bet for moral life or is it not our best bet or something else I don't think that there are it doesn't have a lot of competition here or anywhere else so it isn't that there are other moral leaders out there that we can turn to but it's not obviously an uncontested source of moral authority people are more aware these are to like transform behavior but there's no like okay so we're going to get this formulation and we're going to change the environment and impose penalties and the needs of like reinforcement but is there like a very enthusiastic and like drum hole I'm not sure if I should the first part of your question but I think but there's a there's a famous essay by in which he argues that Christianity could have gone in one of two directions the sort of stewards of the earth direction which he links to St. Francis and the sort of be fruitful and multiply direction that Locke is most closely identified with which one is saying go out there and turn those useless forests into a pasture and farmland and the other is saying no respect this creation and the integrity of it and so what he says is unfortunately that image of transforming the forest cover into farmland combined with sort of powerful technologies to allow us to do it at this rate where the damage took place before we fully appreciate it over and over so what can we do now I think there's several obvious things one is it's really shocking that we don't introduce some consistent and serious environment component to our educational system I am shocked that year after year we have students who are hearing this for the first time this has been a mainstream top of the agenda item for 20 years and yet it's not invested in our school schools should be places where we are learning about this from kindergarten all the way out but instead our schools sort of reinforce this disengagement that they sort of heavily paved areas with little green space where kids go in and they learn how to do rapid math so that they get high test scores so the school gets an allocation of funds and they don't really learn anything about nature I think that's a lost opportunity because I think what happens is they get to the university and I never you know shocked by the stories that they started here I think that there's no reason why our government can't move more aggressively towards green procurement policies you know I was at a I work quite a lot with the US military and the US military has decided that because of its enormous power as a purchaser it wants to try to move towards green procurement policy and start to completely change how it purchases materials and how it uses them how it operates them will it be able to do so I don't know but there's nothing that stops the government from mandating this across the board so I think that the other thing is we have to get over these myths these ridiculous myths that turning off your life switch is going to save the planet carrying a recycled bag a lot of this stuff ends up just sort of allowing us to purchase more and more goods but it is endless purchasing frenzy to save the planet with recycled materials so if recycled materials means you just buy more and more and more stuff it's sort of missing the point I think we need to start to take seriously the scale of the challenges that we face and we have to start pretending that you know you can just that there are easy little sort of 30 second solutions to the problem and if we sort of do them but we've got this sort of very short term simple 30 second fixes I think all those books 20 ways to save the environment each one takes 30 seconds to do I think there's sort of we should sort of start shutting those we should start focusing on the fact that we're probably going to need to make deeper changes I think a university should be leading I think that campuses should be sustainable I think students should demand it these places should be obligated to adopt clean water and clean water out of solar power and so it should be models to the community that's possible to do instead they sort of reaffirm there's no real problem because we're I think that what we recognize is we can displace the problems and we can project them into the future but ultimately you're just going to come back on a larger scale on a less manageable scale so we need to find ways to stop sort of putting the problems into another space or time and starting to recognize their scale I think there's lots of things we can do ultimately 18 to 25 year olds are the group of people who determine the decisions that businesses make about the commodities they're going to sell and businesses mostly say there's no demand there's no demand for acceptable alternative energy there's no demand for these things I think we should give every single person when they graduate a green started package I think that they should say here's your started package you can use it for better housing for better energy more efficient appliances for public transportation for whatever and you should start off your life mind the right things I'll buy the higher quality appliance the more efficient scooter or car we should start we should give green retirement packages we should say to people when you're 65 or 70 whatever it is and you retire what you're going to get is you're going to get some support so that you can live the last 20 years of your life in an ecologically sound way and we're going to help you do it because we know we're going to have a lot of Americans who are retiring over the next 10 or 20 years we should help them lead green lives I think we should give people green started packages, green retirement packages we should give people green education we should demand that our government that our government procures using the best green principles that it can I think that if we continue to pretend that if we walk around with a bag from Sierra Club that's going to make a difference and in 10 or 20 years we're all going to be terribly unhappy people any other questions? I mean there's lots of more things I think there's an endless set of things to make a difference but I think it requires just like this generation this young generation best understands information technology it best understands it moves deeply in its bones is an awareness of climate change and environmental change that earlier generations struggle to achieve and we need to activate this we need to author give this this next generation the authority to change things thank you very much