Towards a biospheric ethic

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.

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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]

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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.

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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.

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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.

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