Mr. Benavides whimsical trip into an antique curiosity shop raises a raft of compelling issues. Are unintentional “evils” really no less reprehensible? When does a person become complicit in an immoral transaction? Can material possessions acquire a permanent moral taint?
I will defer these questions for the time being, though I hope to return to them after other contributors weigh in. For the moment, I’ll address a much narrower point: what has he done wrong?
I will happily grant the assumption that humanity is the disproportionate cause of global warming. I will also concede the claim that global warming will cause harms to large numbers of people (island nations may vanish under rising seas, droughts will ravage the tropics, and every incident of inclement weather will hitherto indiscriminately be labeled the inevitable consequence of climate change). And I will even walk on some distant shore, tiptoeing through the bloated corpses of islanders, orcas, and trillions of coral polyps…yet the question will still intrude on my mournful stroll, “how has Jefferson sinned?”
It is insufficient to merely say, the activity of logging led to the deaths of those islanders, those seahorses, those phytoplankton. We engage in countless activities knowing full well the inevitable consequences include environmental degradation, harm to specific species, and even the deaths of human beings. I’m sure Jefferson occasionally clambers into a car. Driving, even a Prius, kills thousands of birds annually, contributes to habitat destruction, generates greenhouse gases, and yes, will result in tens of thousands of human deaths a year, in the United States alone. Worse yet, driving an SUV exacerbates all of those effects, particularly the potential to kill someone else.
Nonetheless, though some cast a baleful eye at the Hummer in the compact spot, few (though perhaps it’s a vocal minority) would say that driving a large SUV is inherently immoral. My own wife recently suffered a collision (not her fault) that totaled her enviro-friendly Honda Fit. She replaced it with an eight seat SUV, almost exclusively for safety reasons. If I wagged a finger, she’d probably tear it off, and rightly so.
Consider this hypothetical that Jefferson may find more apropos: A factory produces Twinkies. The incredibly artificial process, however, creates a radioactive effluent that runs into a nearby lake, harming cattail farmers, who are now faced with squishy, if delicious, marsh plants no longer suitable for placing in tall porcelain vases to decorate the displays of Pottery Barn.
In this case, every Twinkie consumer would be contributing, in some way, to the destruction of the cattail industry. Yet we would not really say that Twinkie consumers, absent any other knowledge, were acting wrongly. And even after discovering the evils of Twinkie production, would we hold them liable? Should we pursue a reverse class action lawsuit, as the company, now forced to pay for past harms, levies retroactive price increases on Twinkies sold in the past?
Worse yet, this analogy benefits from having a clear relationship between the cattail harvesters and the Twinkie factory. In our real life example, the weeping sea turtles and vanishing tree frogs may cry out with every falling Indonesian teak. But they will do so equally with every human breath, every stomp on the accelerator, every strike of flint and steel. There is nothing innately wrong with cutting down a tree, any more than the yawn that just escaped me. It’s the aggregate production of greenhouse gases that’s to blame, not any one actor.
To make matters worse for the Twinkie-ites, in our case, it’s the impoverished member of the third world who is profiting from the purportedly evil activity. Even if it’s some evil boogeyma-er, corporation is doing the logging, they are still providing jobs for otherwise unemployed Indonesians, a country with hardly the highest standard of living.
To demonstrate that Jefferson has actually done something wrong, it seems we would need to evaluate all GHG producing activities, establish a hierarchy of their costs and benefits, and determine which activities should be banned/discouraged because they provide the least value relative to the harm caused by global warming as a whole. This exercise is fraught with complexity and certainly doesn’t make it clear why we would decide that the less valuable activities were “wrong” and not simply insufficiently valuable relative to the greater goal of combating global warming.
Enjoy the heads, Jefferson, guilt-free.
No Comments