Some Presuppositions of Humanity
“As members of the human species, future generations will be essentially the same as we are.” That is, they will have the same basic need and seek the same basic rights. By basic needs I am referring, as a minimum, to those things necessary for human survival: food, water, air, etc. I also include, negatively protection from life-destroying conditions, such as extreme temperatures, a poisoned environment, or damaging levels of radioactivity. These needs derive directly from the most basic human right, the right to exist. There are other rights and other needs, too, but the claim to them is less powerful than the claims directly associated with life itself.
“Future generations will seek their own pleasure, just as we do.” Utilitarian call this the only motivating force of human activity on the grounds that all other motives can be reduced to it. They have, therefore, proposed the general ethical principle that we should always seek to maximize human happiness and minimize human pain. Since persons born in future generations will still be part of our species, we can presume that this principle will describe their ethics as well. So the principle applies intergenerationally. We are morally obliged to seek the maximum happiness of all people, present and future.
4 Kinds of Sustainability
The word ‘sustainability’ is flung about a lot these days – as in ‘sustainable development’ or ‘sustainable economy’. But what does it really mean and is it really a good thing? Sustainability concerns the relationship between humans and their natural environment over time. But there are various understandings of that relationship with quite different implications. Two popular definitions actually repudiate human interdependence with nature by either making human interests completely subservient to a sacred nature, or by making nature completely subservient to human interests. Gro Brundtland’s famous definition points in the right direction by focussing on the goal of sustainably meeting humanitarian needs, but his picture of human interests seems too narrow and technocratic. What we need is a definition that is humanistic without being human centred.
1. Perhaps most commonly, sustainability means do no harm. i.e. human activities should be structured in such a way that they do no harm. The strong point of this definition is in pointing out that human activity does do a lot of harm. E.g. the entire sub-discipline of ‘ecological economics’ has been inspired by this perspective to analyse the ways in which human activities impact on the environment, and on how much human activities depend on ‘ecological services’ (such as wetlands providing sea defences, forests as carbon sinks, etc). They point out, quite rightly, that the so-called New Economy that is supposed to be all about weightless services and information, actually retains an enormous physical industrial sector. They also point out that doing harm to the environment can come back to bite us, with estimates that China’s GDP growth, if adjusted for the damage caused by air and water pollution to human health and ecological services, might actually be negative.
This makes possible a distinction between 2 forms of anthropocentricism. Man is the measure of all things – we can never leave our human perspective behind – but that doesn’t mean that human evaluation of environments is limited to asking “what’s in it for us?”. We can bring a range of other perspectives to bear, such as asking “what do polar bears need to flourish” or admiring the intricate co-ordination of a bee colony independently of their use-value for human interests.
Kopitiam in Singapore
“Hello. Boss, what you want to eat, boss? We have nasi goreng, mee goreng, roti prata?”
“Give me one nasi goreng…ah…with pork.”
“Hello Sir, very sorry to tell you we never sell any pork here. No pork at all.”
“No pork? Eh…you order first.”
“Murtabak…you got what murtabak ar?”
