Information and Virtue in the Anthropocene

ABSTRACT

To reliably choose morally sound policies, whether as a society or as an individual, will typically require a deep and wide-ranging base of relevant knowledge. In this paper I consider the epistemic demands for morally sound action and policy in the Anthropocene. I argue that these demands are likely to be unsatisfied, leading to a potential downward spiral of ineffective action in the face of worsening conditions; this seems a strong possibility both for individual lives, and for societies as a whole. Given the likely scale of ignorance in the face of rapid, poorly-understood change, the best efforts of future generations to act morally may often be little more than guesses, with a far lower chance of asuccess than in more stable conditions. As moral failures mount, and conditions continue to deteriorate, our epistemic efforts seem likely to be pressured and subject to various biases, leading to further errors and failures. Our ability to live virtuously and to act rightly is likely to be put under severe strain in the Anthropocene. Our approach to ethics will likely need to change to the extent that, for a wide range of cases, we will not know what the right action to perform will be; we will typically be acting without such moral knowledge. The final section of my paper addresses ways in which we might attempt to address or mitigate these worries.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We can understand acting effectively as a matter of performing an action that would be rational, given near full information relevant to a given issue.

2. According to Carmichael et al. (2012), in 2000 there were over 6000 national and regional environmental movement organizations, and over 20,000 local such organizations in the United States.

3. For example, a recent National Science Bureau (NSB) report remarks that ‘The 2016 GSS [General Social Survey] continues to show that many Americans provide multiple incorrect answers to basic questions about scientific facts and do not apply appropriate reasoning strategies to questions about selected scientific issues. Residents of other countries, including highly developed ones, rarely appear to perform better when asked similar questions.’ (National Science Board, 2018, ch. 7: 34).

4. See Hart and Nisbet (2012). See also Hoffarth and Hodson (2016).

5. Of course, those living in difficult circumstances will often have particularly strong insight into a range of important social and environmental issues; the environmental justice movement is grounded in such experiences. The point here is simply that we would not typically severely blame someone in such circumstances for not, e.g. devoting himself to reading about the Anthropocene in his few spare moments.

6. See, for example, Ho et al. (2020), and Jenni (2003).

7. For more detailed discussion, see Kawall (2010).

8. See, for example, Jamieson (1996), and Ferkany and Whyte (2012).

9. See Erman et al. (2020).

10. See Teirstein (2020).

11. For more on patience as a virtue in contexts of sustainability, see Kawall (2021).

12. An early version of this paper was presented at a mini-conference on environmental ethics at the University of Calgary. Many thanks to Justin Caouette, Jeremy Fantl, Chris Framarin, Allen Habib, Vlad Vladikoff, and the other participants and audience members for many helpful comments and suggestions.