I received an email recently detailing a series of lectures on the ethical issue of saving the human race from extinction, which interested me greatly. I was half amused by how something that is programmed into a species and as instinctive as eating, drinking, sleeping, and procreating (which are of course all part of an ingrained survival instinct) could be something that academics would discuss in detail. Half amused naturally because there’s absolutely nothing stupid about that being an ethical issue, just as with most ethics I found it to be one of the most bleeding obvious ideas ever raised, it isn’t exactly as though we’re talking about anything new here but hey! What’s just and what ain’t has been a discussion knocking around for two and half thousand years so what’s wrong about raising ideas of extinction?
My view? Survival is an indifferent matter and species are programmed to keep on going no matter what and ideas as to whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing are, I believe, largely irrelevant. You see there’s the largely cynical view that we don’t deserve to survive, which is hilarious if you’re approaching it from a moral perspective because so what if we’re a species that rapes, kill, slaughters its own and extends that slaughters to other species? So what if we’re so cruel that we invented the whole concept of cruelty and with our abstracted monkey brains came up with the most barbaric of tortures and executions? Unless you believe that there is a God or gods, which unless you don’t know me you know I don’t, what the hell has the moral got to do with anything when we’re talking about survival? You check the rape of the Sabine women as a point in hand because one civilization realized it didn’t have enough women and so effectively raped a whole state in order to keep itself going, did they deserve to be destroyed because of their imposition of suffering upon others? If they did then it was a while in the making and quite frankly the only people going around saying they either did deserve destruction or not happens to none other than us, no God, no flying monkeys in the sky, no omnipotent dolphins call the shots on this one, what matters is survival. No, if we’re talking purely morally here then if our species commits gross acts of immorality and inflicts suffering on all and sundry, and hell on fire just take a look at the century in which I was born if you’re looking for examples, there’s nothing in all of that to say that we don’t deserve to survive except the poetic justice that failing writers like me rejoice in. Conversely if we’re a species that comes up with beautiful music, art and poetry, if we come up with systems of government like democracy or socialism, if we’re a species that looks after its sick, disabled, and dying, if we’re a species that educates its young and feels love for others so the hell what? Does that mean we deserve to survive, because who’s keeping score here really?
Is this a cynical piece detailing my irreverent care for mankind? If you think that’s the case then in all seriousness keep reading because my oft used line that a cynic is what optimists call a realist hits home here. Let’s cut the bullshit on this one and talk about what we really deserve, and boy isn’t that a word fraught with all manner of preconceptions? What we deserve is a logical consequence of our actions in context of the world around us, if I inject myself with a lethal strain of the flu then I deserve to die, not because of anything fluffy here but because that’s a logical consequence of my action and it doesn’t matter if I was some lovely guy who gave the world light and laughter, the effect follows the cause and that’s the only thing I deserve, all else is us and our moral sense of good and bad. Because, my frowning friend, dessert in a moral sense is something we’ve made up and it very rarely makes any sense as such. People die in a miserable fashion, people contract cancer for no particular reason, people get hit on the head by falling stars, it happens and then we make sense of it later, we say ‘he was such a nice guy and he didn’t deserve that’ but let’s put it this way, if you walk down a pavement next to a busy road then you do deserve to get hit by a drunk driver who decides to tie his shoe laces at the moment he passes you. Why? Because it’s a possible consequence of walking next to busy traffic; now odds are that you won’t get hit by a drunk driver but if you do then it isn’t because you were a wicked, evil person who upset God and got struck down for your heinous hubris it is simply because it could happen. We then try and make sense of it with our funny little monkey brains and we say you did deserve it in moral sense or you didn’t deserve it in a moral sense but it’s entirely irrelevant to the cause and effect that got you killed.
However, and it’s a big however.
You’re dead because of the drunk driver, it was a risk you took walking by the road and it’s unfortunate that it happened, we could credibly say it wasn’t really your fault, I mean what else were you going to do? Hide under your bed for the rest of your life? Then when some rogue state drops a nuclear weapon on your head would we say you deserved it? Well in a sense yes, we all deserved it because having one of those things go off is just a potential consequence of us all letting them exist in the first place, which is something of a moral choice so we begin to see ethics sneaking back in through the back door here. The drunk driver, let’s just say he feels remorse for what he’s done and has to live with the awful knowledge he knocked down and killed another human being, does he deserve to feel that? Well yes he does because it was a potential consequence of drinking and driving, so his ethical decision has real relevance to what he deserved. Nonetheless you both equally deserved to not be run down and killed and to get away with drinking and driving and just have it as a shameful story you occasionally tell when you get drunk, again because both outcomes could potentially follow from your respective decisions.
Now if no one in the world was to drink and drive then we could legitimately state that no one in the world deserves to get hit by a drunk driver, the reason obviously being that it cannot happen but you’d still deserve to get run down and killed by a senior citizen who couldn’t see properly and suffered a stroke as he was driving past you, because that could happen. We’d again say morally that you didn’t deserve it but again we’d be making some very high minded claims about universal dessert, what matters here is that
1
P1: You made a decision to walk by the road
P2: There is a very slight possibility that you may be struck down and killed by a senior citizen.
P3: You are aware of this possibility
C1: You actively and knowingly took the risk of being struck down and killed by a senior citizen; in a sense therefore you deserve to be struck down and killed.
Compare that with our wonderful world where nobody drink-drives.
2
P1: You made a decision to walk by the road
P2: It is not possible to be knocked down and killed by a drunk driver, because they do not exist.
P3: You are aware that this is the case
C2: You actively and knowingly did not take a risk of being struck down and killed by a drunk-driver; you really don’t deserve to have that happen.
In the case of the first argument you’re figuring your chances of being hit are infinitesimally small, and additionally you are far less responsible for the outcome of your action than is the drunk driver, but you’re not completely irresponsible for the outcome; let’s look at the drunk driver calculation given that we don’t live in a wonderful world in which people don’t drive whilst under the influence.
3
P1: You made a decision to drive whilst shitfaced
P2: It is a strong possibility that you will be unable to fully control your vehicle
P3: It is therefore a strong possibility that you will have an accident
P4: It is a strong possibility that someone other than yourself will be hurt as a result
C3: Therefore you actively and knowingly took the risk that you would likely as not hurt another person; you deserve[1] to feel the shame, guilt and remorse that could result.
Okay I’m sure there’s plenty to disagree with here but let’s keep this rolling, what seems to be emerging about what we deserve or don’t is something about possibility, awareness, and responsibility. When I say possibility I mean those things that can possibly happen, this includes having a satellite fall on your head, when I say awareness I mean your knowledge that this possibility exists, and when I say responsibility I mean your personal involvement as an active agent in any given situation. Right! In our particular scenario we’re going to quickly conclude that responsibility is mostly with the drunk driver, we could also say that he was more aware of the possible risks of what he was doing and we could even go as far as to say that this was because the apparent risk was much greater. In the case of the victim we can conclude that he was responsible for what happened only inasmuch as he was walking down the street, that he was far less aware of the possible risks (unless he was a very strange and fearful chap indeed) and that the reason for this is because the apparent risk was much less.
BUT!
In both cases we have all three factors albeit in differing quantities, both victim and perpetrator were (arguably, okay?) aware of a possible outcome and were responsible for taking the risk all the same. As such both people deserve to have this happen to them if we define ‘dessert’ as the outcome of a personal decision. Note that I’m not going to talk about apportioning blame, or pity, or getting bogged down regarding issues of fairness or justice, I’m talking purely about cause and effect here[2].
Where the matter gets confusing is where you do act in a moral or amoral manner and that directly leads to a consequence, for instance let’s say you spend your life being mean-spirited, rude, and exploitative then we might say you deserved to be sad and alone and maybe we’ve got something approaching a substantial basis on which to build an argument. If you’re a nasty piece of work then a possible, indeed probable consequence of your ethical decision to fuck people over is that people get sick and tired of you and you end up embittered and alone but again it isn’t because that is what the universe dishes out to you per se but instead a weighting of the odds in favor of you being a lonely git. The truth of the matter is that a lot of mean-spirited, exploitative people don’t end up embittered and alone, indeed it seems that a great deal of truly nasty people lead pretty happy lives and die with more toys than they were born with and again you can try and make sense of that through some theological or spiritual paradigm but fact of the matter is: it’s just a possible consequence of being a ruthless, exploitative person because maybe you’re so good at it that your ‘just dessert’ never comes up.
Again if we take this step by step we could say that
P1: You make a decision to be rude, obnoxious and exploitative
P2: It is entirely possible that you can be all three and yet still not alienate everybody around you; you’ve just got to be canny about it.
P3: You are aware of this fact
C4: You actively and knowingly take the risk of alienating everybody around you; you deserve to be happy and successful just as much as you deserve to be miserable and alone, what matters is how good you are at fooling others.
This might be something of a long winded conclusion but if you’re getting the idea then something is going right. What matters is our big three, possibility, awareness, responsibility and as you can see from this example our fellow is aware that it is possible to be a cunt and get away with it and he makes a personal decision to run the risk, we’d say it would be horribly unfair if he does get away with it but I’m not interested in issues of fairness here, I’m interested in what is and what is not possible and what people deserve.
So where are we when it comes to the destruction of the planet or the extinction of our species? Where’s the ethical side of that one? If you want to go down the Hobbes route and say we’re a bunch of wretched savages and we deserve to be destroyed because we’re a nasty bunch and nasty people shouldn’t survive then personally I think you’re making a redundant argument, however fashionably dystopian it might be[3]. If on the other hand you say that a nasty, squabbling bunch of exploitative savages that carry such an ethic through to their natural environment, plundering the earth of its resources and utilizing its mastery of self-destruction to build masses of atomic weapons whilst merrily burying its collective head in the sand regarding the gradual death of the biosphere, deserves to perish then I think you’re more on the right track. It depends where you see ethics coming into the issue because I don’t think it is so much an ethical matter but a simple logical one.
If survival is an indifferent matter then you’ve got to figure out what role ethics might play and whether it is important or not. When it comes to whether we deserve to die or not we shouldn’t run about preaching fire and brimstone because of Man’s many, many sins, we should talk about the logic of survival because until the world turns into the collective suicidal consensus of Logan’s Last Symphony[4] we will, by and large, attempt to survive no matter what. We deserve to continue existing or perish in the attempt largely due to what safeguards we put in place against possible threats, so getting the hell off this planet and colonizing space is a big one because come one day something’s going to happen to this cooling ball of rock and if we haven’t had the foresight to start hedging our collective bets then we can all kiss our precious arses goodbye. Would we deserve this because we were selfish, greedy, hostile, overgrown apes, well maybe we would because that nature in us prevented us from pulling together and building a couple of spaceships before either an errant meteorite or the entropy of our own self destructive capacity caught up with us.
I’ll go over it again using something similar to my previous attempts at forging a cogent argument.
P1: We, as a species, make a decision to not colonize space (for whatever reason) or develop anti-meteorite missiles, or keep Bruce Willis on standby, whatever!
P2: It is a possibility that a meteorite will strike the earth and destroy our environment
P3: We, as a species, are aware of this fact.
C5: We actively and knowingly decide to take the risk of being annihilated by a meteor strike therefore we do deserve to be destroyed.
If we know it’s a risk, if we don’t decide to deal with it then we almost certainly deserve to become extinct and I’ll say this now, it doesn’t matter if we didn’t colonize space, develop missiles whatever because we were busy feeding, clothing and educating the entire planet regardless of age, sex, colour, creed, or religion[5], it doesn’t matter if we’ve laid down our weapons, joined hands in peace and stopped raping the earth. Such highly commendable activities would certainly reduce the risk of us becoming extinct through nuclear Armageddon or the sudden Malthusian hangover of centuries’ worth of resource depletion granted but if the possibility remains for sudden cosmic catastrophe and we do sweet fuck all about it even though we know it could happen then it’s just tough shit and we would deserve it.
Now I think I missed out the idea of being able to prevent something terrible from taking place, which is of some real importance when we’re talking about emigrating from the planet but let’s just say that we’re busy building our rocket ships and doing the head count for the first colonizers of the moon and all of a sudden we get blind-sided by a planetary body the size of Mercury and wiped out, say we haven’t even got as far as building rocket ships and we’re trying to figure out how we could possibly survive on another planet or satellite and we get wiped out. Do we deserve it then? I mean we were actively doing something about the risk of extinction from that particular threat it’s just we were too late. I think in such cases we could think about collective responsibility I mean I’ve been using the 1st person plural pretty liberally here so you could ask questions about who ‘we’ might be? Do we apportion the responsibility for our survival to the current generation as well as the previous ones, what if a future generation happens to figure out what’s going on and tries to make amends but it’s all just too late; you could say the human race as an historical whole would deserve it’s destruction but could you say the poor sods who were trying to make things better deserved it, that is, in my cold way of talking about dessert?
In the first example where the human race is busy trying to save itself from a possible threat and then in an ironic display of timing gets taken out by that particular threat then maybe you could say it wasn’t deserved, after all the responsibility was largely (scrub that, it would have to be entirely if my theory is to work) out of our collective hands; the same applies if all of a sudden a giant Black Hole opened up and snuffed out the entire universe but now we’re just getting silly. The point I think I might be trying to make in such instances is that what we deserve and what we don’t would be all rather irrelevant if we got totaled by such bizarre or untimely mishaps. It’d be small comfort if we let ourselves off the hook and said ‘well we really didn’t deserve that’ just as the meteor hit home, especially as I’d be dead and my theories on what we did and didn’t deserve would be destroyed with the rest of the planet. No I’ve speculated enough and no one wants to read more from my ‘Ladybird Book of Astrophysics’ perspective on the universe.
Ultimately I think it is an ethical issue but not because of God, or the soul, or what’s good or bad; people are perfectly entitled to ask the question of ‘why’ we deserve to survive but I hope I’ve made it clear that the final arbiter of that one is on whether the human race takes responsibility to combat the risks to its continued survival. Why we’d continue to survive if we commit murder, go to war, and punish our children with our own mistakes should simply be looked at as a logical issue in that the longer we continue to act in such a manner the more we push our luck as to whether one day we’ll destroy ourselves, and we’d deserve it wholly but not because it was right or wrong but simply probable. This is no counsel of despair and I hope I’ve avoided the trap of bitterly thinking ‘of course we deserve to be destroyed because we’re bastards’ and I’ve already stated that I think that’s just redundant, poetic fancy. What matters as always are the facts on the ground, which are simply that we’re a species like any other and threats to our survival are credible and real, we do as a whole wish to continue to exist and I firmly hope and believe that we’d like to continue to exist safely, happily, and fairly[6]and that this desire should be treated as the ethical issue that it is and seen in conjunction with the wholly accordant issues of war, cruelty, environment, social and economic justice, care, and cooperation. Because I’m pretty sure that if you want to start colonizing space you’re going to have to start working with others and goddamn but I won’t be happy until I’ve got my own Battlestar.
[1] Presuming of course that you are not an out and out sociopath, in which case you’re not going to feel guilt so you don’t deserve to feel it since it isn’t possible to do so.
[2] Or at least trying to.
[3] And I even like unfashionable dystopias too so you get how strongly I feel about this.
[4] Dark City, yes I’m quoting myself, don’t like it? Go write a fucking book and quote yourself instead.
[5] And I am hugely in favour of us doing this
[6] And with a flourish Carless throws what little logic he has right out of the window
