Richard Routley - Is There a Need for a New, an Environmental, Ethic?

In this famous 1973 paper, Routley attacks anthropocentrism and argues that ethics should recognize the intrinsic value of various nonhuman or even nonsentient items. ("Intrinsic" is intended to contrast with "instrumental".)

Anthropocentrism, the standard Western ethic

First, Routley discusses the traditional anthropocentric ethical tradition, and identifies three different strands of this tradition: (1) despotism: this views humans as the rulers of nature, so that humans have dominion over nature and can with it whatever they please; (2) stewardship: humans are the custodians or protectors of nature; (3) cooperation: humans are the perfectors of nature, with a duty to transform it into a more perfect state.

(1) is clearly unacceptable, but (2) or (3) prima facie seem better suited to an environmental perspective. However, Routley objects that both (2) and (3) "imply policies of complete interference", and hence are incompatible with environmentalism. I'm not convinced of this, especially with the notion of stewardship. Whether or not stewardship implies interference depends on what we take to be valuable; it depends on what exactly it is that we're trying to protect. I assume it's true that historically, stewardship views have called for a transformation of nature: nature is wild, having been put there by God to be perfected and developed by man, and ideally all of nature will be so developed. Seen in this way, the stewardship view and the environmental view will come into conflict. But nothing in the basic idea of stewardship implies anything like this.

Stewardship emphasizes responsible use. Even if our only concern is humans, there's obviously nothing responsible in pursuing a policy of "complete interference". Complete interference is clearly a bad move because interfering with ecosystems, even with a goal to "improving" them, has all sorts of unforeseeable consequences. There are substantial parts of the natural world that should be protected and, importantly, largely left alone. So Routley's objection to (2) misses the mark (as we'll see in the next section, he later offers a more powerful objection to (2), and all other anthropocentric approaches).

We can identify the core principles of an ethic. Any ethic that rejects one or more of the core principles of the standard Western ethic is a new ethic. Routley suggests that one of the core principles of the standard Western ethic is the "liberal principle":

The liberal principle: "One should be able to do what he wishes, providing (1) that he does not harm others and (2) that he is not likely to harm himself irreparably" (where "other" is of course intended to mean "other human" or, on recent animal rights ethics, perhaps "other sentient being").

Routley thinks that our moral judgements concerning the environment outstrip what can supported by the liberal principle. The liberal principle should be rejected, and that means that a new ethic is required.

Against anthropocentrism

Routley gives a number of examples that he takes to demonstrate the failure of the liberal principle:

(1) The last man: Imagine a man who has survived the collapse of society and the death of all other people. For some reason, perhaps just to pass the time until he dies or to take his mind off the loss of all his friends, he decides to go about destroying, as far as possible, every living thing and every item of value. On an environmental ethic such destructive behaviour is deplorable, but it's totally permissible on an anthropocentric ethic. Indeed, an anthropocentric ethic might even recommend it - for instance, if the Last Man finds his behaviour very satisfying and pleasurable, then an anthropocentric utilitarianism would recommend that he continue (since his pleasure is all that matters).

(2) The last people: Imagine a society who know that they're the last people, for instance because the effects of radiation have prevented any chance of reproduction. Since they're the last people, there's no longer any need to protect the environment for future generations, so they vastly accelerate production and consumption, putting all land under intensive cultivation, stripping away all the rainforests, farming all the fish out the seas, etc. Again, on an environmental ethic this destructive behaviour is deplorable, but it's totally permissible, perhaps even recommended, on an anthropocentric ethic. After all, they're simply doing what they can to improve their own lives before their inevitable extinction. If this vastly increased consumption spells disaster for the environment - well, who cares? No future people will be around to be negatively affected by it.

Routley also gives the examples of (3) the last man is an entrepreneur who damages the environment in pursuit of greater productivity and (4) the extermination of the blue whale to extract its oil and meat. I won't discuss these cases as (3) is a minor variation of (1) and (4) can, I think, be quite easily accommodated by standard ethical views. Even from an anthropocentric perspective the destruction of species is a bad idea for various reasons, including that they might be of significant scientific value, that they might play important roles in the ecosystems on which humans depend for their resources, etc. Also note that animal rights views would similarly condemn (4), but Routley wants to extend moral considerability not just to animals but also to nonsentient or even nonliving things. Scenarios (1) and (2) present the best case for this. Of course, animal rights views would similarly condemn the killing of sentient beings in (1) and (2), but we can simply modify the scenarios so that in (1) all other sentient beings save the Last Man are dead, and in (2) all other sentient species save humans are dead.

It's worth considering more carefully the structure of Routley's argument. First he identifies a moral principle that he takes to be at the core of Western ethics - the liberal principle. Then he offers a scenario in which this principle permits certain environmentally damaging actions that intuitively we consider morally impermissible on environmental grounds. Routley thinks that this necessitates the development of a new ethic that rejects the liberal principle and assigns intrinsic moral worth to various nonsentient or nonliving items. Let's try to formalize the argument:

(P1) The liberal principle is a core principle of standard Western ethics.
(P2) If the liberal principle is true, then forests have no intrinsic moral value.
(P3) If forests have no intrinsic moral value, then the Last Man's actions are morally permissible.
(P4) The Last Man's actions are not morally permissible.
(C1) Forests have intrinsic moral value.
(C2) The liberal principle is false.
(C3) Standard Western ethics must be rejected.

(Readers who, like myself, hold that moral claims aren't truth-apt can simply substitute e.g. "acceptable" and "unnacceptable" for "true" and "false".)

Responses

I will now consider three ways of defending the standard ethic. The first accepts Routley's conclusion about the worth of nature but rejects (P1), challenging his characterization of the standard Western ethic; the second attempts to show, contra (P3), that our condemnation of the Last Man's actions is compatible with an anthropocentric ethic; the third challenges (P4) and the underlying methodology of Routley's argument.

Reject (P1)
Routley claims to be offering a new ethic. But how new is it really? (We have already seen one form of this objection in my discussion of the stewardship position. Arguably, stewardship is not as inimical to environmentalism as Routley suggests. However, I think it would struggle to account for the judgement that the actions of the Last Man and the Last People are wrong.) According to Routley, one of the core principles of the Western ethic is the liberal principle: reject the liberal principle, and you reject Western ethics.

However, it's very questionable whether the liberal principle is in fact a core principle. Consider the traditional objections to homosexuality. For most of the history of Western society, homosexuals have been imprisoned or worse. This seems very much at odds with a principle allowing us to do as we wish providing we don't harm ourselves or others. Of course, perhaps some of the objections to homosexuality were based on this principle, since many people argued, indeed many people still argue, that homosexuality is harmful. There are physical harms of spreading disease (the association of homosexuality with AIDS) and "spiritual" harms in that God disapproves and will perhaps send you to a place of eternal punishment. However, I doubt that the persecution of homosexuals really had much to do with a worry that they might be harming themselves or others.

For a more modern example, consider incest. Incest is punishable by imprisonment in many enlightened Western nations. As with the persecution of homosexuals, this seems very difficult to reconcile with the liberal principle. Again, people do suggest that incest is harmful in various ways, but such arguments are clearly weak, ad hoc rationalizations. The real objection to incest, just like the real objection to homosexuality, has nothing to do with concerns about harm. The real objection is "ewwww, that's gross" (see this video for my arguments that incest is morally permissible).

A number of similar examples can be found in the work of Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues (e.g. Haidt, Koller, and Dias's article "Affect, Culture, and Morality"). Consider the following scenarios: (a) a woman cuts up her country's national flag and uses it to clean her bathroom; (b) a family's dog is killed in a car accident; the family hear that dog meat is tasty so decide to eat it; (c) a man who is about to hold a dinner party has sex with a dead chicken, which he then cleans thoroughly, cooks, and serves to his guests. Most people hold that these actions are morally wrong and perhaps even should be prevented if possible. Yet the scenarios are constructed to rule out the possibility of harm, and indeed people have great difficulty identifying a source of harm.

On the other hand, one notable thing about subjects who are then asked to justify their judgements is that they tend to search for harms (e.g., abusing the flag might erode respect for one's country, threatening social harmony; having sex with a dead chicken involves risks of disease; etc). This suggests that people's moral reasoning, if not their immediate moral intuitions, is guided by the liberal principle. But the point here is that our actual judgements, however we might try to justify those judgements, don't seem to conform to the liberal principle. In which case, it's very questionable whether this principle should be considered an essential core of Western ethics.

Reject (P3)
Can standard Western ethics condemn the Last Man? Must we attribute intrinsic moral value to e.g. forests to conclude that the Last Man's destruction of the forests is morally wrong? Here's an obvious response: what makes it wrong to destroy all life is that this destroys the potential for future sentient or rational life. There's nothing intrinsically valuable about a forest. But on a planet rich in life there's far more potential for a new sentient or rational species to emerge than there is on a barren planet. This kind of response would be especially attractive to classical utilitarians. If moral behaviour is simply a matter of doing what we can to maximize happiness or pleasure, it's easy to explain the wrongness of the Last Man's actions. The Last Man should try to promote the emergence of new sentient beings, or if there's nothing he can actively do to promote this, he should at least refrain from preventing it.

Our scenario can however be modified. Consider:

(1a) Imagine a man who has survived the death of all sentient beings. He decides to go about destroying, as far as possible, every living thing and every item of value. Furthermore, in 100,000 years, the Sun will die, so there's not enough time for new sentient life to evolve.

If we hold that the Last Man's actions are morally wrong in this case, we rule out the suggested response. Of course, one worry here is that with the scenario modified in this way, I expect that fewer people will be inclined to judge that his actions are wrong (we will return to this point when we consider rejecting (P4)).

A second response is to argue that the Last Man is in some sense harming himself. Virtue ethics might provide a basis for this. On traditional Aristotelian virtue ethics, for instance, the goal of human life is eudaimonia, which translates essentially to happiness or fulfillment or well-being, and we achieve eudaimonia by cultivating a virtuous character (classically, a virtuous character involves the virtues of temperance, practical wisdom, justice, and courage). Importantly for this context, virtues directly benefit the individual: the virtuous person has a better life, a more fulfilling life, than the vicious one, even if the virtuous has fewer possessions, fewer friends, achieves fewer goals, etc. Although ethics is usually taken to concern our behaviour towards others, on virtue ethics the good life is entirely in line with your own self-interest. Just because the Last Man is alone, it doesn't mean that no ethical questions arise for him.

Against this background, we might argue that the destructive behaviour of the Last Man evinces a vicious character. Following Robert Sparrow (see his "The Ethics of Terraforming"), two possible vices in the Last Man's character are: (1) aesthetic insensitivity, a kind of blindness to beauty; and (2) hubris, an excessive pride/arrogance or glorying in one's own powers, often exhibited when a person ignores their proper limits. The Last Man is both blind to the elegance and beauty in the world, and has a vastly inflated view of his own importance. He doesn't evince the appropriate respect and humility towards nature. From the perspective of virtue ethics, he's only harming himself; the wrongness of his actions lies in the fact that they evince a vicious character, a character incompatible with his achieving eudaimonia. Ask yourself: would you want to be the Last Man? Would you want to be the sort of person who chooses to spend his last days vandalizing everything of beauty? Regarding these points, I'm reminded of this lovely quote from Simon Blackburn:

If we visit the Grand Canyon and I am overawed by its grandeur, while you see it just as a good place for tourist concessions, then I may well think less of you. And if I learn that one day I shall become like you, I would be depressed and ashamed, just as I would if I learned that one day I might lose my love of my children, or my concern for truth. I may voice this by saying that the canyon demands the reaction of wonder. But of course it doesn't issue any demands - indeed its ageless, implacable, indifferent silence is part of what makes it sublime. It is we who demand these reactions from ourselves and others, and rightly so.

However, I'm not convinced that this response works in the present context, for two reasons. First, arguably virtue ethics itself is simply incompatible with the liberal principle, which emerged out of deontological and consequentialist approaches to ethics (indeed, virtue ethics is often seen as providing an "anti-theoretical" approach to ethics, emphasizing the messiness and imprecision of our ethical lives and hence resistant to any strict ethical principles). So even if this response undermines Routley's argument against the liberal principle, it's far from clear that it's consistent with a defence of the liberal principle. Virtue ethics may itself represent a "new ethic".

Second, recall that the point of this response is to show how even if the natural world has no intrinsic value, the Last Man's behaviour might still be morally wrong. The problem is that I very much doubt that negative evaluations of the Last Man's character really make much sense without supposing the natural world to be of intrinsic value. Why, exactly, does his destruction of the forests exhibit an insensitivity to beauty, and an inappropriate hubris? If the natural world is only valuable insofar as it has uses for humans, the Last Man may well object that he's simply doing what any of us would: using the natural world in the ways he thinks are best. In his view, he says, barren landscapes are far more beautiful than lush rainforests. And there are no more humans to answer to, so what's the problem?

Reject (P4)
(P4) says that the Last Man's actions are not morally permissible. Routley doesn't bother to defend this claim; evidently, he assumes it's simply obvious that we should condemn the Last Man's actions. But is this obvious? Well, I suspect that such pointlessly destructive behaviour would make most people rather uneasy, although as far as I know no empirical studies testing the common person's reaction to Last Man scenarios have ever been done. But let's grant that, at least intuitively, the Last Man's behaviour is wrong.

Recall the broad structure of Routley's argument. It has essentially three parts: (a) the liberal principle permits action X; (b) but intuitively, X is impermissible; (c) so the liberal principle must be rejected. This kind of argument - attempting to demonstrate that particular moral principles entail unacceptable conclusions - is fairly standard in moral philosophy. But as the famous phrase goes, one man's modus ponens is another's modus tollens. Rather than rejecting the principle, we may reason as follows: (a) the liberal principle permits X; (b) intuitively, X is impermissible; (c) so, our intuitions about X are wrong.

What we have here is a clash of intuitions. Intuitively, X is wrong. But intuitively, the liberal principle is right, and the liberal principle permits X. From this point of view, it's at least as reasonable to reject (P4) as it is to accept it. In fact, the problem for Routley is even more serious than this, for two reasons. First, the liberal principle arguably has more to recommend it than mere intuitive support. It's part of the core of much of our moral reasoning (Routley surely wouldn't deny that; after all, he identifies the liberal principle as the core of Western ethics). It has the virtue of simplicity, and it provides us with a straightforward way of resolving moral and legal dilemmas. Furthermore, if we reject it, we face the question of what exactly we replace it with, and note that Routley doesn't offer any specific proposals in his article.

Second, basic moral principles tend to be fairly resistant to counterexamples. Consider the resistance of utilitarianism to apparently outrageous conclusions. Utilitarianism seems to entail that we must give enormous amounts of money to charity, perhaps even to the extent that we won't be able to afford any luxuries for ourselves. The good that would be done by buying yourself a luxury, say a Grateful Dead t-shirt or a nice meal restaurant, is vastly outweighed by the good that would be done by using that money to help save starving children. So, it's morally wrong to buy a Grateful Dead t-shirt. You should only buy clothes you really need, and send the money you save away. This conclusion is outrageous. But many people who are attracted to utilitarianism simply bite the bullet and reject the intuition that there's nothing wrong with spending your money on luxuries.

Why shouldn't the defender of the liberal principle simply reject the Last Man intuition? Indeed, this response seems especially plausible in the present case. The Last Man scenario is outlandish. It's an extreme case, totally removed from the normal context of moral judgement. How much weight should we place on our intuitions about a case like this? It's not surprising that we can develop extreme scenarios in which there's a mismatch between our general principles and our specific judgements. Bear in mind that Routley is, by his own admission, pushing for a radical change in our moral attitudes - not just a modification of existing ethics, but a wholesale revolution. A few troublesome intuitions about strange scenarios that are almost certainly never going to happen is a rather weak basis for such a lofty goal.

I should note that despite my critical comments, I largely agree with Routley. I think that forests, salt marshes, mountains, oceans, etc are intrinsically valuable; I completely reject human chauvinism. However, I'm not so sure about how to argue for this. These "deep green" commitments are simply part of the foundations, the core, of my worldview. There may be rhetorical value in Last Man examples, and if you're inclined to think that the Last Man's behaviour is morally wrong, then I'd encourage you to consider deep green ethics. But ultimately, for committed human chauvinists, I think there are very plausible responses to Last Man cases.

This concludes the main parts of the paper. I'll also make some comments about Routley's discussion of rights.

Rights

If we accept an environmental ethic, must we say that e.g. trees have rights? No, says Routley: the mere fact that there are moral prohibitions against acting a certain way towards an object doesn't entail that the object has rights; i.e. just because it's morally wrong to clear-cut a forest, doesn't entail that the forest has a right not to be clear-cut.

Of course, this depends on just how we're using the term "rights". But I agree with Routley that on many uses of that term, there's no reason why assigning intrinsic value to natural items would entail assigning rights to them. On one popular view of rights, noted by Routley, rights are coupled to responsibilities and obligations; obviously, it would be absurd to hold that trees, salt marshes, mountains etc have any responsibilities or obligations. It's clear that on this view, moral prohibitions extend beyond objects to which rights are assigned. For instance, there is a moral prohibitions against killing babies, but if rights entail responsibilities then babies don't strictly speaking have rights.

Another popular view is that rights are in some sense inviolable. If P has a right not to be killed, it would be wrong to kill P even if killing P would e.g. improve the general utility. Now evidently, we also have plenty of duties towards others that aren't inviolable. I should return the money you lent me, unless I discover that you intend to use the money to finance terrorism. I should not steal, unless my children are literally starving. It's easy to proliferate examples like this.

So it can be perfectly reasonable to say that it's morally wrong to clear-cut a forest, that we have certain obligations towards the forest, without the forest thereby having rights (perhaps because if the circumstances were different, it would be acceptable to clear-cut the forest).

Beckerman and Pasek - In Defense of Anthropocentrism

One of the central projects of environmental ethics is to displace anthropocentrism, the view that only humans are intrinsically valuable, and legitimize the attribution of intrinsic value to the natural environment. B&P take "intrinsic" to contrast with "instrumental". An object is intrumentally valuable if it's valued for its contribution to some other objective; an object is intrinsically valuable if it's valued for its own sake, for no further reason. On an anthropocentric ethic, then, the environment is valuable only instrumentally, only for the uses that humans can make of it.

B&P note that there are two ways of understanding value. On the objectivist view, value exists independently of the judgements of valuers. Value inheres in the world in a similar way to e.g. mass or charge. The subjectivist, by contrast, holds that values can't exist without a valuer. Things are right or wrong, good or bad, because we interpret them that way.

B&P's concern in this paper, they say, is with the question: can the environment bear intrinsic value? Given their title, one would expect that their answer is "no". I'm not sure that this is their answer, however. Their arguments are directed towards denying objective intrinsic value. As B&P themselves note, nothing stops a subjectivist from holding that certain natural items are intrinsically valuable. It's worth being clear about the distinctions involved as in my experience this often causes confusion. Ethics is concerned with what objects have value; an anthropocentric ethic claims that humans are the only objects of value, or at least the only objects of intrinsic value (things that are of use to humans may be valuable instrumentally). Metaethics is concerned with the source of value (what is value? how is value realized in the world? etc); an anthropocentric metaethic claims that humans are the only source of value, i.e. to say that something is valuable is to say that it's valued by some human.

Importantly, an anthropocentric metaethic doesn't entail an anthropocentric ethic. Consider, for instance, crude emotivism, according to which value judgements don't describe the world but simply express feelings. "Abortion is wrong" means something along the lines of "boo to abortion!"; "charity is good" means something along the lines of "yay for charity!" This is clearly anthropocentric about the source of value, i.e. it's an anthropocentric metaethic. Is an emotivist committed to an anthropocentric ethic? Of course not. The emotivist may value e.g. biodiversity just for its own sake. She may, that is, attribute intrinsic value to biodiversity.

What B&P are attacking, then, is not the view that parts of environment are intrinsically valuable, but rather the view that this intrinsic value is objective. They are concerned with metaethics, not ethics. This makes some of their arguments rather odd, since they attack arguments for nonanthropocentric ethics.


They first consider the Last Man Argument proposed by Richard Routley, later Richard Sylvan. Routley imagines a man, the last man on the planet, who has survived the total collapse of civilization and the death of all other people. This man decides to destroy, as far as he can, all living things and all beautiful natural items. Routley thinks it's clear that the Last Man's actions are deplorable, but on an anthropocentric ethic, it's hard to explain why this is so. After all, if only humans matter, the only reason why destroying non-human things is a problem is that other humans might object, and obviously no other humans are objecting to the Last Man's actions. Routley takes his thought experiment to show that the natural environment is also of intrinsic value.

B&P's objection to the Last Man Argument is bizarre:

Suppose that after the last man has departed, leaving behind the mountains and trees, and so on, perhaps in due deference to their intrinsic value and beauty, some aliens from outer space arrive on earth one day who have very different tastes from ours. They much prefer flat surfaces and find all these mountains and trees sticking up all over the place to be very ugly. Any philosophers among them who had previously espoused the "last man" argument would be looking rather silly.

First, it's unclear what this is supposed to show. The aliens don't share our environmentalist orientation. So what? Perhaps the aliens have all sorts of repugnant beliefs. They might support slavery, for instance. Would this show anything about our views of slavery? In any case, there are already plenty of people on this very planet who reject the environmentalist attitude, preferring a world wholly transformed by technology (the sensible ones would grant that it's not a good idea in practice, at least not currently, given that we depend on various processes in the environment for our survival, but they'd have no objection in principle to e.g. completely stripping away the forests and replacing them with plastic trees). All this tells us is that people have different moral and aesthetic attitudes, something that's already perfectly obvious to everyone.

Second, an obvious problem for B&P, given that they're concerned with denying that the natural world has objective intrinsic value, is that Routley's argument isn't supposed to establish objective intrinsic value. Routley is simply arguing that the natural world is intrinsically valuable; his paper is completely tangential to the question of whether this value is objective or subjective. Indeed, Routley wasn't an objectivist. (He wasn't quite a subjectivist either. He developed a rather bizarre metaethical position, inspired by his Meinongian metaphysics, according to which to say that some state of affairs X has value is to say that X is valued by a person at some possible world; this person may or may not exist in the actual world. In other words, things can have value because they are valued by a non-existent, merely possible person. Yet another way to put it is to say: X is valuable because X would be valued by a person if that person were to exist.)

B&P haven't paid sufficient attention to the distinction, discussed above, between the source of value (metaethics) and the object of value (ethics). As I explained, we can hold that the source of value is wholly anthropocentric without holding that the only objects of value are humans. B&P's oversight in this respect is odd given that they draw attention to the distinction earlier in the paper.


B&P also charge that prominent defenders of the objective intrinsic value of nature are in fact beholden to human interests and values. First they consider Arne Naess's statement as part of the deep ecology platform that "Richness and diversity of life forms ... are also values in themselves. Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy vital needs." B&P point out that these vital needs are, of course, the vital needs of humans. How this is supposed to be an objection to Naess is a mystery. After all, Naess doesn't deny that humans have a right to flourish; indeed he explicitly affirms that they do. He simply holds that other species and ecosystems have that right as well. This is completely consistent with also holding that sometimes, in conflicts of interest between humans and nonhumans, the humans win. Naess's statement is therefore analogous to "individuals have no right to harm others except in self-defense." Affirming that humans have the right to flourish, that the good of non-humans can be sometimes sacrificed for humans, doesn't entail that one is really a disguised anthropocentrist - just like how affirming that each individual has the right to flourish, that the good of other people can sometimes be sacrificed for the good of the individual, doesn't entail that one is really a disguised egoist.

Next they quote Sylvan & Bennett (1994): "there should be no substantially differential treatment of items outside any favoured class or species of a discriminatory sort that lacks sufficient justification." B&P object that it is humans, of course, who must decide what counts as sufficient justification. So again, the attempt to attribute objective intrinsic value to nature just leads us back to humans as the basis of value. B&P say: "we are once again relying on humans to weigh up competing claims on resources. In that case the concept of objective values outside the valuations made by humans can have no place." We have an argument along the lines of:

(P1) If only humans can weigh competing claims, then values are not independent of human judgement.
(P2) Only humans can weigh competing claims.
(C) Values are not independent of human judgement.

Again, this objection just silly. First, compare babies and the severely mentally retarded. Just as there are conflicts of interest between humans and non-human nature, there are conflicts of interest between rational humans and nonrational humans. Most people hold that babies and severely mentally retarded have intrinsic moral value; an objectivist would, of course, hold that this value is objective. Is it an argument against the objective moral value of nonrational humans to point out that only rational humans can weigh up competing claims? This is just a non-sequitur. Clearly, (P1) is mistaken. The reason why only humans can weigh competing claims is that humans are the only beings who have evolved the cognitive capacities to do so. In the same way, only humans can discover subatomic particles. It hardly follows from this that subatomic particles don't exist independently of human judgement.

Second, Sylvan and Bennett's claim is ethical, not metaethical. They aren't saying anything about objective values. Sylvan is Richard Routley, who as I noted isn't an objectivist. Again, B&P have confused ethical claims with metaethical claims. Similarly, while I don't know anything about Naess's metaethical views, his statement also clearly has nothing to do with objectivism.


In the last part of their paper, B&P present two arguments for the inevitability of human-centred values:

First we have this piece of sophistry: "it is inevitable that, to whatever view we subscribe about the value of nature, it will always be our human view. There is no other perspective available to us and there is no other perspective that can be adopted in our treatment of the non-human world."

We might compare the following argument: "it is inevitable that, to whatever view we subscribe about the value of women, it will always be our male view. There is no other perspective available to us and there is no other perspective that can be adopted in our treatment of women."

Perhaps this is unfair. B&P would presumably object that male humans aren't limited to a purely male view, since they can converse with female humans and come to understand their perspectives. We can't however understand the perspective of much of the nonhuman world, a fortiori because the vast majority of nonhuman things have no perspective whatsoever. But what can we conclude from this? All this tell us is that, if there are objective values, we will only ever be able to comprehend them from a human perspective. It certainly doesn't tell us that there are no objective values. What is true here of values is true of everything else: everything we will ever know is known only from a human perspective - mountains, rivers, cars, quarks, clothes. Presumably B&P wouldn't deny that any of these things objectively exist.

Second, B&P suggest that there is a tension in the environmentalist injunction, found for instance in the statements by Naess and by Sylvan & Bennett that we saw above, to treat all species equally. Equal treatment for all species requires extending rights or consideration to other species. But if all species are to be treated equally, why shouldn't humans act as other species do, in their own self-interest, and hence limit rights and consideration merely to humans? No other species cares about environmentalism. Ultimately, B&P suggest, our concern for the environment is really an example of human superiority.

There are several points to note about this argument. First, no environmentalist denies that humans are allowed to act in their own self-interest. Of course, environmentalists do deny that humans should act purely in their own self-interest, and presumably this is what B&P mean to suggest is entailed by the notion of treating all species equally. Second, do environmentalists really claim that all species should be treated equally? I suppose that's one way of reading the statements by Naess and Sylvan & Bennett, although it depends on what B&P have in mind by "equal treatment". As I recall Sylvan & Bennett's book (I can't cite any pages since I don't have it on me at the moment), they hold that different kinds of objects generate different kinds of obligations. Bear in mind also that many environmentalists will value species differently depending on their rarity, their importance to ecological processes, etc.

Third, B&P's argument is clearly seen to be sophistical if we consider again babies and the mentally retarded. Most people hold that babies and the severely mentally retarded should, in some important sense, be treated equally to adult humans. Or at any rate, we should hold them to be of equal moral value. But babies and the severely mentally retarded do not, of course, care at all about moral behaviour. They don't have any concept of moral behaviour. So if we are consider them morally equal to normal adult humans, why shouldn't normal adult humans act just like babies do, in their own self-interest? In this context, of course, the argument is easily seen to be silly.


B&P's paper is very frustrating. Many of their arguments are quite weak, not helped by the fact that they don't seem to be clear what exactly their target is. They claim to be attacking the view that the natural world has objective intrinsic value. Yet they address arguments only designed to show that the natural world has intrinsic value, which are neutral on the metaphysical status of this value.

I agree with B&P that the natural world has no objective value. In my view, there are no objective values period. Values are nothing more than human judgements (at least this is the case for moral values: presumably other animals value things in the sense that they enjoy or dislike them, but animals have no moral attitudes). This is a metaethical claim, and is entirely compatible with a robustly nonanthropocentric normative ethic. Indeed, I agree with Routley that the Last Man's behaviour is evil. When I say that the Last Man's behaviour is evil, I'm simply expressing my strong disapproval and disgust towards his behaviour.

B&P argue for an anthropocentric metaethic, and on this point we're in agreement. But anthropocentric metaethics is tangential to the concerns of environmentalism.


Beckerman, W. and Pasek, J. (2010) "In Defense of Anthropocentrism", in Keller, D. R. (ed.) Environmental Ethics: The Big Questions, Malden, Massachusetts: Wiley-Blackwell.

Sylvan, R. and Bennett, D. (1994) The Greening of Ethics, Cambridge: White Horse Press.

Robert Elliot - Faking Nature

In his article "Faking Nature", Robert Elliot attacks the restoration thesis, a thesis that plays an important role in debates concerning conservation:

Restoration thesis (RT): "the destruction of what has value is compensated for by the later creation (recreation) of something with equal value."

Suppose a company proposes a mining project on an especially striking area of forest. Large areas of forest will be cleared and the land destroyed. Not surprisingly, this project is met with a great deal of resistance from environmentalists, who charge that short-term economic benefits don't justify the destruction of such a valuable area. However, the company promises that once the mining project has been completed, they will consult with various biologists, ecological, landscape architects etc and work to restore the area: the soil will be replaced, trees replanted, species reintroduced, rivers will be recreated; and all of this will be designed with the irregularity and randomness that one is often confronted with in natural landscapes. Even to a trained eye, the forest will look just as it would as if humans had never interfered with it. The values that are destroyed by the mining project will be fully restored. Hence, it's unreasonable for environmentalists to continue to resist the project.

The restoration argument doesn't address some concerns we might have about the project, for instance, animal rights objections appealing to the rights of the individual animals whose habitats are destroyed. But it does hope to assuage the environmentalist concern. Of course, the basic objection to the restoration argument is that restoration projects are rarely successful. Indeed, companies rarely follow up on promises to restore the area to the best of their ability; often restoration projects are half-hearted, or fail to secure enough funding, with the resulting "restored" area very clearly impoverished relative to its original condition.

However, there's no reason in principle why restoration projects should not be carried out successfully. If, in our imaginary example, we could know without any question that the restoration would be successful, would environmentalists have any grounds for continuing to resist the mining company's proposal? Elliot argues they would. He rejects RT. He argues that there is an important kind of value that can't be restored.

Contra the RT, Elliot suggests that "an area is valuable, partly, because it is a natural area, one that has not been modified by human hand, one that is undeveloped, unspoiled, or even unsullied." Part of the reason we value wilderness areas is because they're untouched. They have developed entirely on their own terms without human interference. We value wilderness areas not simply for their intrinsic properties, but also because they have a special kind of history, a special kind of origin. This is a value that can't possibly be realized by a human artifact, and a restored landscape is ultimately an artifact, a human creation, however much it may resemble nature.

Elliot thinks we can make this argument more precise by appealing to the notion from aesthetics of art forgery. The RT essentially asks that we accept a fake or forgery of nature as a substitute for the real thing. Elliot takes it as uncontroversial that forged artworks are less aesthetically valuable than the originals they copy, no matter how alike they are; similarly then, forged nature is less valuable than the original, even if the restoration is perfect. We have an argument along the lines of:

(P1) Original artworks have an aesthetic value that forgeries lack, even if the original and the forgery are identical.
(P2) Restored environments are analogous in relevant respects to forged artworks.
(P3) Original environments have a value that the restored environment lacks, even if the original and restored environment are identical.


Elliot then considers various objections:

1. The argument will rest on an unworkable distinction between natural and unnatural. In fact, I'm not sure why it would need to rest on this distinction. Obviously, the argument regarding forged artworks doesn't appeal to any such distinction. So why would an argument based on analogy between forgeries and restored environments need to appeal to it? However, it does seem to be true that many environmentalists use the notion of "natural value" and this is the approach that Elliot takes. Elliot defines "natural" to mean "unmodified by human activity", and accepts that this is a spectrum rather than a strict line: some areas are more or less natural, i.e. more or less modified by human activity, than others. People value nature not just for its beauty, but because it is has developed independently of human interference. The value of the wilderness lies in that it's untouched.

I tend to agree with Elliot that the natural/unnatural distinction, at least as he's defined it, makes sense, even if there are vague cases. Still, some worries remain. First, how do we quantify the degree of modification by human activity? No areas in the modern world are free of human interference. Nowhere on the surface of the planet is free of the impacts of anthropogenic climate change. Furthermore, almost all areas on the planet have been altered by humans in the past; many apparently natural places look how they do due to extensive human modification. A good example of his is Dartmoor, a barren and haunting moorland that is often promoted as one of England's few remaining wilderness areas (see here, here, and here for instance). But Dartmoor, like almost everywhere else in England, used to be completely covered with forest. It looks how it does today thanks to the activity of prehistoric farmers: their farming methods lead to severe soil acidification and the development of extensive peat bogs that to this day remain central to Dartmoor's ecology. Dartmoor is, in a sense, a testament to the power of human transformation of nature.

Second, there are various moral difficulties with the notion of "untouched landscapes". Callicott (2008) discusses a number of these. I will note two. First, Callicott notes that the concept of untouched wilderness erases a history of genocide and imperialism. For example, Europeans did not discover the Americas as "virgin lands" free of people; they were heavily populated by peoples who had significantly transformed their environments - peoples who were subsequently murdered, raped, and enslaved by the European invaders (Stannard 1992 provides a powerful account of the genocide of Native Americans). Second, the wilderness concept is used as a tool for the continued oppression of indigenous people. Callicott cites a number of examples of indigenous peoples forcefully evicted from land on which they have lived for centuries in order to create wilderness areas in line with the "no human interference" ideal. So, it's questionable whether Elliot is on the right track in emphasizing the importance of completely untouched natural landscapes.

2. If the original area and the restored area are exactly alike, they must have the same value. There can be no grounds for assigning different value to them. Elliot responds that this simply begs the question. The claim for which the environmentalist is arguing is that the value of an area isn't determined merely by its intrinsic properties, but also by its history. Elliot gives a number of other examples to motivate this view. Suppose I'm promised a Vermeer painting for my birthday. When the day arrives, however, I'm given not a genuine Vermeer, but an exact replica of a Vermeer that was destroyed. Because of this painting's history - because it wasn't painted by Vermeer - I value it less. Or suppose I'm given a particularly beautiful and elegant sculpture. It's one of my prized possessions... until I discover that it was made from the bone of a person who was murdered to create it. Because of the sculpture's history, I value it less. Elliot is quite right, I think, that people can value or disvalue things for their history. Indeed, this is actually quite common, and we don't need to appeal to such arcane examples to make the point. Suppose that on his deathbed, my grandfather gives me a watch. If this watch is then destroyed, it would hardly be compensated for by giving me an exactly identical watch.

3. By placing boundaries around certain areas, by designating certain areas to be wilderness areas deserving of protection, we transform the wilderness into an artifact, hence removing its naturalness. The point is that preservation of wilderness can only be achieved by active, deliberate policies. We have to place boundaries around certain areas, we have to perhaps prevent overgrazing by animals, we have to keep a watch for illegal uses of the land, etc. But given this, it seems that the wilderness area has in some sense been positively created by humans. It's not simply that the land has been left alone; we've actively worked to preserve it in a certain state.

This is a common argument, and one that has always struck me as very silly. As Elliot says: "What is significant about wilderness is its causal continuity with the past. ... There is a distinction between the "naturalness" of the wilderness itself and the means used to maintain and protect it." There's an obvious and important distinction between simply preventing people from spoiling a landscape and activiely transforming a landscape e.g. through farming or building houses or roads or whatever.

4. The analogy between forgery and restored nature fails. An important feature of our reactions of artworks is that they are judged as as artifacts, as things designed for particular reasons. When we judge the aesthetic value of an artwork, we consider the goals and intentions of its creator. This is what accounts for the relative disvalue of forgeries. But this can't be appealed to in nature: nature has no author. So there are no grounds for valuing the original landscape over the restored one.

Elliot responds that our judgements can be informed by knowledge of many kinds, not just knowledge of intentions and goals. What we see and what we value in nature is partially informed by our understanding of its ecology and history. Indeed, with this knowledge, seemingly barren and uninteresting landscapes can be rendered unique, complex, compelling. An ecologist who has spent his life studying a particular area will see more in it, and hence see more to value in it, than an ecologically illiterate tourist.


I will now consider two objections that Elliot doesn't raise.

5. Notice that the argument must be about restored areas that are identical to original areas. Elliot doesn't actually state his argument this way, but a little analysis shows that this is an oversight. For, as Elliot himself notes, a landscape can have many other sources of value beyond naturalness (naturalness in the sense of "unmodified by human activity"). Here are some that Elliot notes: "diversity of animal and plant life, stability of complex ecosystems, tall trees". Now if we were to perform a mining operation on some very barren part of the land, say Dungeness, and then afterwards restore it by producing a lush forest, then the restored area would surely be more valuable than the original.

The problem for Elliot's argument is that restoration never produces an identical area. This makes it rather unclear what exactly Elliot's argument actually achieves. Most of the time, of course, a restored area is simply much worse than the original, but this just brings us back to the standard pragmatic argument against restoration proposals: contrary to the promises of the company, the area won't really be restored. Elliot's argument is superfluous in this case. And if the company can persuade that they will restore the area properly, and thus dislodge the pragmatic argument, it shouldn't be too difficult also to persuade us that they'll add various other sources of value to compensate for the naturalness that's lost. If we can restore Dungeness, we can surely improve its ecological value as well (just import better soils, plant various trees, etc).

6. More seriously, (P2) is questionable. Are restored areas analogous to forgeries in a way that's relevant to our valuation of them? One way to approach this question is to ask why exactly we consider forgeries to be aesthetically deficient. An intuitive and popular response, discussed in Stalnaker (2001: 514), is that forgeries are aesthetically deficient because they lack originality. Evidently, originality is something we value highly in the arts; many artworks are famous for pretty much nothing more than having innovative, original features. Also evidently, a forgery won't be remotely original, at least in terms of its intrinsic properties; indeed, the more effective a forgery is at fooling people, the less original it will be. This kind of explanation is simply not applicable to restoration projects. Nobody wants the restored area to look original: ideally, it should be indistinguishable from its former state. 

I think there are some fatal problems with appealing to originality to explain the aesthetic deficiency of forgeries. I won't go into these problems here (I'll do another post about forgery sometime), but obviously, I think Elliot can resist this objection. There is however a second difference between environmental restoration and art forgery, pointed out by Sylvan (1994), that I think is more damaging to (P2): while art forgery necessarily involves deception, there's no deception involved in restoration proposals, at least not in principle. No doubt many restoration proposals are deceptive in that they suggest that more effort and more care will be expended on restoration than anybody in fact intends to offer. But whereas a fake or forgery involves passing off a copy as an original, restoration doesn't involve pretending that the restored environment has been untouched. Restored landscapes are thus nothing like forgeries; they are more analogous to mere copies of artworks.

Would an exact copy of an artwork be less aesthetically valuable than the original artwork? To me, the answer is obvious: it depends. Most of the time, an exact copy would be of equal value. In certain special cases, a copy would be of less value, e.g. where the original has some special historical significance. In other special cases, the copy may be of more value, e.g. a copy produced in some special way: consider a not especially remarkable painting copied exactly by a robot. We may value the copy more than the original, because of the special history of the copy (first painting made by a robot!).

Elliot may respond that this is just what he's been arguing: the history of an object makes a difference to its value. A landscape can be valuable for its naturalness, for its history of developing without human interference. I accept this point. But then what is the purpose of the analogy to forgeries? We can make the same point more accurately by drawing an analogy between restored landscapes and mere copies of artworks. Indeed, Elliot himself draws this analogy in his example of being promised a Vermeer painting for a birthday present (in the example as Elliot gives it, the receiver of the gift is explicitly told that the painting is not an original Vermeer). The appeal to forgeries is at best superfluous and at worst misleading.


To conclude, while I find Elliot's conclusion quite attractive - that a restored landscape may be of less value than the original, even if they're nearly identical - his argument suffers from some serious problems (points 1 and 6), and in any case, given the very specific circumstances in which the argument applies (point 5), it's questionable whether it really has much force against restoration proposals.


Callicott, J. B. (2008) "Contemporary Criticisms of the Received Wilderness Idea", in Nelson, M. P. and Callicott, J. B. (eds.) The Wilderness Debate Rages On, Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, pp. 355-378.

Elliot, R. (1982) "Faking Nature", Inquiry, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 81-93.

Stalnaker, N. (2005) "Fakes and Forgeries", in Gaut, B. and Lopes, D. M. (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, 2nd edition, London: Routledge, pp. 513-525.

Stannard, D. (1992) American Holocaust, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sylvan, R. (1994) "Mucking With Nature", in Sylvan, R. Against the Main Stream: Critical Environmental Essayes, Canberra: Research School of the Social Sciences, pp. 48-78.

Could we communicate with extraterrestrials?

Today I'm going to examine André Kukla's paper "One World, One Science", which is concerned with the question of whether, if we were ever to come into contact with an extraterrestrial civilization, we could learn to communicate with them. (Kukla calls this hypothetical alien race the "Aldebaranians"; I will follow him on this.)

The central worry about human-Aldebaranian communication is that their biology, culture, geography, developmental history, etc, will be radically different from ours, and this presents an obstacle to our ever developing an understanding of their language. How could we begin to learn the language of a society with which we share no common ground?

A popular response to this problem is what Kukla calls the "one world, one science argument" (OWOS). Whatever the differences between humans and Aldebaranians in culture, geography, biology, morality, etc, we both inhabit the same universe, and hence the basic laws of physics, chemistry and mathematics will be the same in both places. Hence, we can expect that human science and Aldebaranian science will have the same or at least similar content with respect to these areas. Kukla quotes Carl Sagan:

[H]ow could we possibly decode such a[n extraterrestrial] message? [...] The message will be based upon commonalities between the transmitting and receiving civilizations. Those commonalities are [...] what we truly share in common - the universe around us, science and mathematics.

To lay out the argument explicitly:

(1) OW: The laws of nature are the same everywhere. So:
(2) OS: Human science and Aldebaranian science will share at least some content, i.e. human science and Aldebaranian science will overlap.
(3) Finally, we conclude that this overlap will provide a common ground that will make communication possible.

Kukla first considers a couple of responses to OWOS that he doesn't develop. First, he notes that one response is to deny OW. In fact, humans and Aldebaranians don't share the same world; the laws of nature aren't the same everywhere. This response he attributes to those who hold extreme social constructivist views of science. Like Kukla, I don't find extreme social constructivism remotely plausible, though contra Kukla, it's not clear to me that social constructivists actually do deny OW. A more charitable interpretation of social constructivism is that it's just another way of denying OS.

Second, we can block the inference from OW to OS by appealing to conceptual relativism. As Kukla says, our science "depends not only on the nature of the mind-independent world, but also on the concepts and categories we employ for talking about the world." Notice that this is not to deny, as the social constructivists do, that science reveals facts about the world. Rather the point is that there may be many legitimate ways of describing the world, of "carving nature at its joints". The debate concerning different species concepts in biology is a good example of this; see my videos on the species problem (first; second). If the Aldebaranians don't share our concepts and categories, there's no reason why their science would be the same as ours, even if their science is also accurate. And why should we expect the Aldebaranians to have developed the same concepts and categories as us?

I'm not sure that this is really much of a problem. Other cultures conceptualize the world differently, yet this poses no significant threat to communication. See for instance Nisbett & Miyamoto's "The Influence of Culture": Western and Asian cultures perceive the world differently, with Westerners tending to perceive the world in an "atomistic" manner, viewing it as containing independent objects that are detachable from their context; and Asians perceiving it in a "holistic" manner, viewing objects as embedded in wider contexts and relationships. There is significant conceptual change over history; the ancient Greeks viewed the world in very different terms to us. We even find different conceptual schemes emerging in one and the same science: the example of different species concepts in biology has already been noted. In none of these cases do conceptual differences pose any problems to communicate. In general, humans are remarkably capable of adopting different conceptual schemes.

Of course, Kukla may object that for all we know, the concepts and categories possessed by the Aldebaranians would be radically different to our own, different to the extent that their overall science would be radically different - but then why should we believe that such radically different concepts would correctly describe the world? It's one thing to claim that two different conceptual schemes could both be accurate. Reflection on the many species concepts in biology confirms this. That two radically different conceptual schemes could both be accurate is a far stronger claim, and requires positive argumentation that Kukla doesn't provide.

There's another way to block the inference from OW to OS that Kukla doesn't discuss but is worth mentioning. At the very least, the move from OW to OS seems to require scientific realism: basically, the view that science correctly describes the world. We've already mentioned social constructivism, a particularly controversial alternative to realism. There are plenty of other alternatives.

Let's turn to Kukla's own arguments. He offers two arguments against OWOS: the selection problem and the superfluity problem. Most of his paper is concerned with the former.


The selection problem

Even granting OW, and granting that the Aldebaranians would have a similar conceptual scheme, Kukla thinks that the inference to OS fails. The problem is that neither of us will know all the scientific truths, and the scientific truths that we possess may not overlap with the scientific truths the Aldebaranians possess. Kukla dubs this the selection problem.

Is it acceptable to infer from OW to OS? Consider some proposition X that, if true, would falsify OS. At this point we have a mere logical possibility. (This of course means that OW doesn't logically entail OS, but nobody denies that.) The problem arises when we ask what probability to assign to X. The probability of X and the probability of OS are constrained with respect to each other. Putting it formally:

p(X) + p(OS) ≤ 1

The probability of X plus the probability of OS must be less than or equal to 1. It can't be the case that X is very likely and that OS is very likely. This point should be quite intuitive. X and OS are incompatible: if one is true, the other can't be true. So to say that X is very likely entails that OS is very unlikely. (Note: if X is false, this doesn't entail that OS is true. X's falsity simply places no constraints on the probability of OS. Even if X is false, OS might also be false for some other reason.)

X is the hypothesis that there is no overlap (or at least very, very little overlap) between human science and Aldebaranian science. If our sciences don't overlap, OS is false. So if X is likely, OS is unlikely. What, then, is the probability of X? Kukla suggests that we simply don't know. We have no good reasons for supposing that X is likely, and no good reasons for supposing that X is unlikely.

It follows that we also can't assign a probability to OS. Remember, p(X) + p(OS) ≤ 1. So if we assign a probability of e.g. 0.8 to OS, the probability of X can't be greater than 0.2. To be agnostic towards X means that we must be agnostic towards OS. And this means that the OWOS argument must be rejected. Now as Kukla points out, this isn't a decisive refutation. New evidence may arise that shows the probability of X to be low. This would put OS back on the rails. (Of course, new evidence might also show that the probability of X is high, which would refute OS decisively.) But it does show us that at present, we can't accept OS.

To summarize: Kukla's basic strategy against OWOS is to cite a proposition X that is inconsistent with OS and has an unknown probability. Since we must be agnostic about X's probability, and since X is incompatible with OS, we can't assign a high probability to OS (if OS has a high probability, this entails that X has a low probability, contradicting our agnosticism). Kukla's candidate for X is the proposition that human science and Aldebaranian science don't overlap.


Should we be agnostic about the probability of X? The defender of the OWOS argument will object that in fact, we have good reason to suppose that X has low probability. Kukla considers a number of such objections.

The fundamental laws solution: While we can't know all scientific truths, there are far fewer fundamental laws. So we can expect overlap on the fundamental laws. Kukla raises a number of objections: (A) Why should we believe there are fundamental laws? There might be no fundamental laws, but instead an infinite regress of laws, each explaining the other. A similar point here is that many philosophers tend to assume that there's a "bottom level" of reality, but perhaps it just goes on forever. Indeed, that would seem to be what induction on the past history of physics suggests; to quote Schaffer:

The history of science is a history of finding ever-deeper structure. We have gone from "the elements" to "the atoms" (etymology is revealing), to the subatomic electrons, protons, and neutrons, and now we are sometimes promised that these entities are really strings, while some hypothesize that the quarks are built out of preons (in order to explain why quarks come in families). Should one not expect the future to be like the past?

(B) Even if there are fundamental laws, there might be a huge number of them. (C) There's no reason to believe that we have attained the fundamental laws. Why assume that the Aldebaranians have?

I agree with Kukla that the fundamental laws argument doesn't work, but there's a very similar argument that he doesn't discuess and that I think has more potential. The argument rests on two claims. First, Aldebaranian science must, at the very least, deal with objects and processes on a scale that's also dealt with in our science. This follows from the fact that modern physics is applied at all scales: it deals not just with medium-sized objects, but also with the extremely large to the vanishingly small. Second, there is an objective structure to the world and science tracks this objective structure. This is a statement of a limited kind of scientific realism. The point here is that even if the goal of science isn't truth, in order for science to be successful enough to make accurate predictions and form the basis for technological development, in must in some ways latch onto how the world really is. (Aristotelian physics may have been wrong in many ways, but it wasn't completely wrong, and some of the claims of Aristotelian physics are preserved, or at least "imaged", in modern physics.) If these two claims are correct, we can expect some overlap between human and Aldebaranian science. This of course is only a sketch of an argument, but it provides a suggestion for how we might justify assigning a low probability to X.

The mathematics solution: Instead of appealing to science, the defender of OWOS might appeal to mathematics. We can expect humans and Aldebaranians to share mathematics, or at least certain parts of it. Elementary arithmetic, for instance, would surely be shared between two intelligent civilizations. However, Kukla objects that the selection problems applies to mathematics as well: there's no reason to think that there's any overlap in our mathematics. Even if we all have some mathematics, there's no reason to believe that we have the same mathematics.

I don't find Kukla's objection here very plausible. Bear in mind that humans have developed a great variety of mathematical systems, including extremely abstract ones and even inconsistent ones. We clearly have a very great flexibility with regard to the kinds of formal systems that we're able to understand and manipulate. Is it really plausible that the Aldebaranians use a form of mathematics that we could get no handle on? Indeed, that we could understand none of their mathematics and that they could understand none of our mathematics? Kukla thinks we must be agnostic about this since there's no evidence either way. But this strikes me as a fairly extraordinary claim, and hence one that demands some positive evidence. In fact, I think there might be some clear evidence against it. After all, any mathematics must involve patterns. We know how to distinguish between random noise and patterns, and we're also very good at decoding patterns.

The radio solution: If we can communicate with the Aldebaranians via radio, which appears to be the only option, they must at least have the ability to construct and use radio transceivers. We must share technology. Hence we must share some science. Kukla raises two objections to this: (A) He points out that no knowledge is required in order to develop radio communication; indeed, no intelligence whatsoever is required: organisms that perceive and emit radio transmissions could arise by natural selection. (B) More importantly, there's no reason to suppose that the Aldebaranians use radio.

The common conditions solution: This solution appeals to two hypotheses. First, "adaptive pressures instil a propensity to adopt certain ideas." In other words, natural selection has built in us innate tendencies to adopt certain beliefs about the world. If green berries are poisonous to us, it will promote survival and reproduction for us to be wary of green berries, for us to think that eating green berries is dangerous. Second, "there are conditions for survival that can be expected to obtain wherever intelligent life evolves." Kukla doesn't accept either of these hyptheses, but is prepared to grant them for the sake of argument (I will return to the latter hypothesis later). The defender of OWOS then argues as follows: Since both we and the Aldebaranians evolved in common conditions, we are likely to have faced similar evolutionary challenges. These similar challanges would have lead to similar solutions. In some cases, these solutions will take the form of certain true beliefs about the world. So, there are certain truths that both humans and Aldebaranians are likely to be innately disposed to accept. These truths are likely to be used in both human and Aldebaranian science.

This strikes me as an extremely silly, wildly speculative argument, leaping from premise to premise without any adequate justification. The appeal to common conditions can, I think, furnish a defense of the plausibility of human-Aldebaranian communication (again, I'll return to this later), but this particular defence is obviously inadequate. I won't deal with Kukla's discussion since I agree with him that argument doesn't work, and some of the problems are simply obvious. First, why believe that we face similar evolutionary challenges? Of course, at a very abstract level, all life forms must face similar challenges: how to find food, how to stay alive, etc. But at a finer grain, even species that evolve on in the same areas on the same planet don't share the same challenges; the lion doesn't face the same evolutionary challenges as the capybara. Second, why believe that similar challenges lead to similar solutions? Third, even if the argument is right that humans and Aldebaranians are innately disposed to accept the same beliefs about certain things, it's worth noting that the history of science is one of a constant violation of our intuitive beliefs. There's no reason to think that intuitive beliefs are likely to be preserved in scientific theories.


Finally, Kukla gives a transcendental argument for the selection problem: he argues that there's good reason to believe that the selection problem can't be solved; we can't ever show that X has a low probability. The reason is that we have no good reason to believe that the Aldebaranians have any science or mathematics whatsoever; and if they have no science or mathematics, a fortiori our science and mathematics have no overlap with theirs. All we know about the Aldebaranians is that they're intelligent beings. Intelligent beings need not have developed science and mathematics. Humans have always been intelligent, but we didn't develop science and mathematics until relatively recently.

Kukla is of course right about this. But I think defenders of the OWOS argument could argue that he's simply changing the subject. Is the only thing we know about the Aldebaranians that they're intelligent beings? No: we also know (because we've stipulated) that they've reached a high level of technological development. (Recall the passage from Sagan that Kukla quoted. We are to imagine a civilization that can transmit and receive interstellar messages. Of course, Kukla will point out, re his response to the "radio solution", that organisms need not have any technology or even intelligence to develop radio communication. While he's right that the basic elements of radio communication could arise by natural selection, reception and transmission of interstellar signals is another matter.) Surely nobody who's proposed the OWOS argument has in mind communication with extremely primitive extraterrestrials. Obviously "one world" doesn't entail "one science" if the extraterrestrials in question have no science whatsoever, just as "one world" doesn't entail "one science" if the extraterrestrials in question are merely simple microbes.


The superfluity of OWOS

Kukla's second objection to OWOS is that it's superfluous. Recall that the point of OWOS is to explain how we would be able to communicate with the Aldebaranians despite the apparent lack of any "common ground" between us. OWOS is supposed to show that actually, we do have common ground: namely in our basic science and mathematics. However, Kukla points out that we don't need to share any common ground in order to learn another person's language: "Babies do it all the time: they learn the language of beings with whom they share no prior topics of discussion, and they do it in a few years' time without expending any extraordinary effort." The correct response to the communication problem is not to demonstrate that we would share common ground with the Aldebaranians, but instead to reject that any common ground is required.

In a sense, of course, Kukla is right that babies don't share any "topics of discussion" with adults, just in virtue of the fact that babies aren't capable of discussing anything with adults. This however is completely trivial. In the same sense, the man who can only speak English shares no topics of discussion with a person who can only speak Japanese. So Kukla is just equivocating on the notion of "common ground". In the sense of "common ground" that people debating the OWOS argument are interested in - the sense that allows me to say that the English speaker shares a lot of common ground withh the Japanese speaker, but possibly no common ground with the Aldebaranian speaker - babies share substantial common ground with adults. They live in the same culture, they will experience the same geography, they have very similar biology, etc. They may even share a kind of innate "language module", as Chomsky has suggested with his theory of language acquisition.


Ultimately then, I think that Kukla's objections to OWOS are inconclusive. Before ending this post, I'd like to note a couple of points about the debate. First, one notable assumption by all parties in this debate is that communication would have to be linguistic. But why couldn't we, for instance, use pictures?

Second, defenders of OWOS grant that the only thing we could have in common is science and mathematics. I think this concedes too much to their opponents. Humans and Aldebaranians will probably have much more in common; I list three points. First, on any world, objects will have to move in much the same ways as they move on this one. The basic facts of mechanics and gravity are going to be same, no matter what world you live on. Second, there are strict limits on the kinds of chemistry that could be the basis for life, especially any life that could reach the complexity required for intelligence. Third, we can expect that humans and Aldebaranians will exhibit similar behaviours on a very abstract level. The Aldebaranians must have developed the capacity for experiencing something like pain, for instance, which will evince itself in withdrawal from harmful stimuli. Kukla is wrong to reject that we can expect common conditions for humans and Aldebaranians.

This is the real basis for the superfluity of the OWOS argument. In order to have good reason to believe that there's significant overlap between human science and Aldebaranian science, we must believe that there's some sort of overlap in the conditions in which we live. But this already provides the common ground needed for communication.