A Decent Life Read online

  In this case we seem to find ourselves in an awkward, in fact ironic, moral position. It’s as though the girl turned a morally inadvisable act (getting pregnant at a young age) into a morally good act simply by going ahead with it. On the one hand, it would have been better for the girl to wait. On the other hand, having not waited, it would seem, looking back on it, that it was better not to wait. After all, everyone who was affected by the girl’s decision—the mother and the child—preferred that she acted in the way she did. So why should she have waited?

  Having seen the dilemma in an individual case, let’s widen it out to an environmental situation (as Parfit himself does, although he uses pollution rather than climate change as his example). Let’s suppose that we decide not to care about our environmental impact. We drive large, gas-guzzling cars. We continue to rely on coal for a lot of our energy needs. We demand large quantities of inexpensive meat, thereby supporting the factory-scale production of animals that release high amounts of methane into the atmosphere. We fly around the country without concern for the amount of fuel that planes use. And, of course, we don’t make any attempt to offset our carbon use. If we do so we will contribute to climate change. And those who come after us will have to suffer the deleterious consequences.

  However, and here is the rub again, if we do that then those who come after us will be different people from those who would have come after us if we had been more attentive to the effects of climate change. Why? Because in acting differently we would have given birth to different people. A particular child, with its particular genetic makeup and prenatal environment, is the product of a particular sexual encounter at a particular time. If one doesn’t get pregnant at a certain time—as the case of the girl has shown—then the child one has will be different from the child one would have had if one got pregnant then. So if we act carelessly toward the environment rather than solicitously, we will produce different offspring.

  Suppose those offspring, however difficult their lives are because of our environmental negligence, nevertheless consider their lives worth living. They would rather have been born than not. After all, as difficult as life is for many people, most folks would rather have lived than not. Would we then find ourselves in the position of having justified our environmental carelessness by going ahead with it? Since the only people affected by our disregard for the environment are those who exist, and they would prefer having existed to not existing, and the only way they came into existence was through our environmental negligence, does that somehow justify our heedlessness?

  Parfit has a partial answer to this problem. It requires us to think less about the particular people who exist in these different scenarios and more about the good that is generated for different people (and potential people) in them.9 What strikes me about the puzzle, however, is not only the question of how to solve it but also what it means for us to think about how our actions affect the lives of those who will follow us. Everything we do has the potential to affect them, even to the very question of who will exist. Our actions are deeply bound to those who proceed us. We are bound to them through what we do. In this sense we are more tied to those who are distant in time than to those distant in space.

  But those who are distant in space share the planet with us now; they already exist. Those who come later do not exist yet. In fact, it is odd even to say that there are “those” who do not exist yet. It is not as though there are people waiting to exist. Rather, it is that there will be people who come to life, who will come to inhabit the world, but there isn’t anybody at this moment who is one of them. In this sense we are more connected to those who are distant in space than to those who are in time.

  Yet our effect on those who are distant in time might be more profound. What we do can determine not only how they live but even who they are. While they cannot reciprocate our actions toward them (after all, they don’t exist yet), those actions of ours are deeply related to the lives that will be lived.

  Our attitudes and behavior regarding climate change should be seen in this light. What we do will affect who is there and what being there is like for them. Those who would not be born if we act responsibly toward the environment will have no complaint; they will not be there to complain. Alternatively, those who are born if we are responsible will benefit from our current concern for the environment, and their existence will in part be the product of that concern.

  And there is more. Climate change, perhaps more than any other issue, is an urgent one for those who will follow us. It has the potential to affect them catastrophically, with effects we are beginning to see now in the form of droughts, storms, rising sea levels, heat waves, and the destruction of natural habitats like the Great Barrier Reef. It is possible that in several generations the world will be far less habitable than it is now. This urgency brings with it a moral responsibility that opens up a new dimension to our reflections on how to live decently.

  In thinking about decency, we have tried to avoid the rigors of extreme altruism. Rather than casting the view in terms of obligations and duties, we have sought to ask what we are called to do in our moral relationships with others, both those we circulate among and those we will never encounter. We have focused on opportunity and relationship rather than constraint and guilt. However, there are situations of urgency that may require us to return to the traditional ideas of obligation and duty. Urgency, if it is acute enough, may press us to reintroduce elements of the history of moral philosophy that thinking in terms of decency has so far allowed us to keep at least partially at bay.

  To my mind, climate change has precisely that sense of urgency. It requires us to act, and to act decisively. Much of the action that would be effective is political, and we will save our political reflections for a couple of chapters. But some of it is a matter of individual morality. There are things we can do in our daily lives to mitigate the problem of climate change and therefore help ensure the well-being of those whose lives our actions will contribute to the existence of in the first place. And, to the extent that we reasonably can, we should do those things; we are obliged to; it is our duty.

  Before turning to what we might do, however, it is worth asking a question that returns us to the vocabulary of traditional rigorous morality. Isn’t the problem of hunger among those with whom we currently share the planet urgent? Aren’t we just as morally required to address extreme poverty among those who currently exist as we are to address those who do not even exist yet? Why might we be obliged to sacrifice ourselves for those who will come after us and not do so for those who are among us now?

  We can respond to this challenge in two ways. First, the enormity of the effects of climate change lend it an urgency that extreme altruism can’t claim for most other issues. I should be clear here, lest I sound callous. Of course poverty and starvation are urgent, and it would be important for any of us to contribute to ending them. That is the point of benevolence. However, there is in at least one way a far greater urgency when what is at stake is the state of much of human life as we know it. Climate change threatens to wipe out entire coastal cities and to lay waste to large swaths of our current environment, making much of the earth far less inhabitable for us and forcing mass starvation and poverty along the way. If storms like Hurricane Katrina are any example, we have seen this kind of devastation already. The scale of threat from climate change is daunting; recognizing this should give us a sense of urgency that places it in a separate moral category from many other kinds of benevolence.

  If I am wrong about this—or rather, if the scientific consensus is wrong about this—then, as a philosophical matter, responding to climate change would assume a status more like benevolence, and our response to it would more nearly parallel that of our moral relationships with those distant from us in space. However, I think it likely that most of the readers of this book feel as I do that the scientific consensus is worth heeding, and so conclude that there is an obligatory character to responding to it as an urgent mat
ter.

  This leads to the second response. It is in fact possible at an individual level to respond morally within the limits of decency without having to embrace extreme altruism. There is, of course, much that can be done. We can drive smaller and more efficient cars. We can make an effort to eat less meat from factory farms, which, as mentioned, generate enormous amounts of methane. (We can also, on separate grounds, refrain from buying meat from places that treat animals so egregiously. We’ll return to that issue in the following chapter.) Those who can afford to do so can also seek to mitigate the effects of our carbon footprint by buying carbon offsets.

  Carbon offsets are monetary contributions that a person makes to environmental causes to compensate for personal actions that result in greenhouse gas emissions. Several years ago, I became convinced that I needed to offset the greenhouse gas emissions stemming from my business air travel10 I got online to figure out how much I needed to offset and where I could find a reputable place to buy those offsets. As a result, I now contribute to a group that works with people in Mali who build stoves that use less wood (saving forests) and emit far less smoke (reducing carbon dioxide emissions as well as reducing the risk of lung disease for those in the home).

  I am not alone in this effort. An increasing number of people who recognize that they cannot or will not reduce their contributions to greenhouse gas emissions are calculating their carbon footprints and contributing in one way or another to carbon offsetting.

  If I were an extreme altruist, I might refrain from flying altogether. That would be a severe strain on my job and my life. I like traveling, and the people I meet contribute to my flourishing in a significant way. But that is not all. If I were an extreme altruist, not only would I have to refrain from flying but I would also have to buy carbon offsets to make the world a more habitable place. As it stands, I do the latter but not the former, and so I at least come out (depending on the accuracy of my calculations) even on carbon emissions. I would rather spend the money elsewhere, but I feel obliged to do that much. For me it is a requirement of decency.

  There will always be those who cannot afford to buy, and therefore should not buy, carbon offsets to match their contribution to emissions. This is where the importance of political change enters in. Although many of us contribute individually to climate change, the structure of our economy—with gas-emitting businesses, factory farming, fuel-inefficient car production, use of coal (although this is declining), and so on—makes it difficult for individuals to steer clear of contributions to climate change. If that structure does not change, individual efforts will not be enough to stem the flow of greenhouse gasses into our atmosphere. And so the onus for climate change should not be placed upon those who cannot afford to mitigate its effects. This is especially true for people who find themselves more impoverished because of their disproportionately greater exposure to the negative effects of climate change. Those who gain from climate change are usually more comfortably placed—and therefore have greater individual obligation to address it.

  This leaves us with a final question before we widen the circle still further. We have discussed two issues here, benevolence toward those who are distant from us in space and obligations to those who are distant from us in time. One might ask how we should go about balancing the two. It might seem difficult to do both to a great degree, especially within the bounds of decency. If I’m paying for carbon offsets, that leaves me with less money to contribute to the eradication of malaria or river blindness or the effects of a tsunami or an earthquake or even building shelters for orphaned children in impoverished areas. And yet these are also important causes with their own urgency. How should I think about the balance between the needs of those who come after us with the needs of those who are currently with us?

  I have argued that there is a seriousness and imminence to climate change that lends it a greater urgency than many other problems. However, there might be those who disagree with me, even without denying the importance of the issue. They might, for instance, find themselves gripped by the impoverishment of so many millions of people or the necessity of responding to a natural disaster, thinking that such catastrophes override the more distant effects of the warming of the planet. Or, while conceding the urgency of climate change, they may just find themselves moved by one or another current emergency and so be more likely to contribute resources to the latter than to the former.

  Alternatively, certain people may be better placed to do something for people who are currently suffering than those who will suffer in the future. A doctor might be able to contribute skills or knowledge to those subject to a medical disaster, which would compete with their ability to contribute to other issues. Or an engineer might have knowledge to offer regarding a nuclear accident, like the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster of 2011 caused by an earthquake followed by a tsunami. Or again, relatedly, one might live in a country where the refusal to confront climate change is so entrenched that it would be more effective to contribute one’s money or skills to alleviating current miseries. (At the time of this writing, the United States may stand as a shining example of a country that steadfastly refuses to recognize the effects of climate change and its own enormous contribution to it, exemplifying Stephen Gardiner’s claim that those who benefit from the warming of the planet are less likely to address it.)

  For reasons of disagreement or emotional engagement or practical obstacles, then, many people may be better positioned to practice one or another form of benevolence than to address climate change. And indeed, there is certainly a need for benevolence. The urgency of climate change does not entail that everyone should drop all forms of benevolence to address it. Whether to adopt a practice of benevolence or seek to stem the effects of climate change will depend on factors individual to a person’s history, orientation, geographical location, and resources.

  However we decide to devote our time and resources, what needs to be recognized—and what most of us do recognize to one extent or another—is that beyond our face-to-face interactions with one another we are also citizens of the world. We share the planet with others we will never meet and still others who will come into existence after we pass from our own. Our moral circle extends beyond what we encounter as we go through our daily lives. This fact offers us opportunities to form bonds with others and occasionally places obligations upon us that take us outside our normal run of activities. We have moral relationships with people we will never see, indeed with people we will never be able to see.

  This is not a bad thing. If we approach our lives in terms of moral decency rather than that of an onerous weight of altruism, we can see ourselves as making a contribution to the world, removing ourselves from the pettiness that often attends to quotidian living. Although for most of us Singer’s endorsement of “effective altruism” is a bridge too far (or perhaps even in the wrong direction), his insight that contributing to the world can furnish us with a particular sense of meaningfulness is well taken. We need not be altruists to be citizens of the world, and our participation in this citizenry is not only beneficial to others. It might be a source of joy or meaning that cannot be had through the channels of living we find immediately around us.

  So far our widening of the moral circle has taken us from those around us to those we will not meet. But all those in the circle so far have been humans. In addition to our fellow humans, however, we also share the world with other creatures, many of them sentient and even, to one degree or another, cognizant. Some of what we have discussed here—for instance, refraining from contributing to climate change through avoiding meat from factory farming where possible—would be beneficial to many of those creatures. But the terms in which we have discussed it are in regard to human flourishing and suffering. In the next chapter we widen the moral circle in another direction, asking what decency toward nonhuman animals might consist in and how we might think and practice it.

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  Widening the Circle: Nonhuman Animals
r />   We have a cat that lives with us. To put the matter in the traditional way, we own a cat. The idea that one should claim to “own” a living animal, and a fairly intelligent one at that, has come under some scrutiny recently, and justly so. There were humans who were once considered property, and now in most parts of the world that practice is considered barbaric. For analogous although obviously not exactly the same reasons, associating the idea of ownership with intelligent animals is receiving its fair share of scrutiny. So let me just say this: we have a cat that lives with us.

  Putting it this way is not exactly right, though. It implies that the cat lives in the house with us, sharing our living quarters. But he doesn’t do that. The cat, Sammy by name, lives outside our house. Well, outside and often under it. He hangs around the abandoned tree house in the backyard, sunbathes on our little deck, comes inside twice a day for breakfast and dinner before whining to return to his spacious abode outside, and generally makes himself at home in the local neighborhood.

  Sammy lives outside because I am allergic to cats. Not wildly so. I can have him wandering in and out of the house at meal time without difficulties. But if he were to live inside with us then I would spend much of the day wiping my nose and eyes and perhaps scratching myself in much the same way Sammy does. So his living outside suits both of us.

  You might wonder why a family with a member who is allergic to cats ever got one in the first place. I wonder the same thing. One day the rest of my family went out to a shelter and arrived home with a kitten whose name I was informed was Sammy. This was a surprise to me, since not only am I allergic to cats, I don’t really like them. In fact, in general I don’t like pets. I’m fine with things like fish as long as they’re in small fish tanks and I don’t have any responsibility for feeding them or cleaning the tank. Anything that lives outside a small contained area away from where I’m likely to sit, however, is something I would generally rather not be around. So I share any puzzlement you might have about how Sammy showed up in my house one day.