Harm, Wellbeing and the myth of sustainable growth

There is a humanist / liberal rule of thumb for determining if an activity should be accepted or prohibited, by using the notion of “harm done”, where if research or study of the activity's consequences shows that no particular harm is caused by the activity, then there is no particular reason why we should not allow that activity to occur. Of course this approach conflicts with religious ideals which hold that certain activities are just plain wrong and unacceptable. The fact that religion has no good reasons for these ideals apart from the tired old “it says so in this book” argument is what brings it into conflict with liberalism so often. Therefore I submit that there will eventually come a time in religious liberal's lives when they have to make a choice between these two approaches – they are fairly mutually exclusive at an intrinsic level.

Sam Harris expounds the idea of using the “wellbeing of conscious creatures” in his excellent book “The Moral Landscape” in a similar way.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Moral-Landscape-Sam-Harris/dp/0552776386/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1362873129&sr=8-1 .

Here he describes actions that increase this wellbeing as commendable, and conversely actions that decrease it, reprehensible. This approach leads to a lessening of moral relativism, and leads to some degree of moral absolutism, which is not to diminish consequentialism. As soon as one concedes that there are certain scenarios that represent a valley on the moral landscape, certain types of behaviour become associated with bad practice, and vice versa: moral peaks mark desirable situations and behaviours. For example, there is no way in which it could be reasonably argued that the following does not represent a universal moral low: A father condones and participates in the stoning to death of his own daughter for the “crime” of “letting herself” be raped. How does anyone involved in this horrific episode take anything positive from it?

A question I sometimes employ, in deciding what course of action to take in a given situation, is “what would happen if many other people, faced with the same choice, took the action you are considering?” This often gives valuable insight into the sustainability of an action we may take. For example, dropping litter and wasting electricity would be a big mistake according to this approach. If everyone dropped litter, we would be swimming in a sea of our own filth. If everyone wasted electricity, power cuts and environmental pollution would be an even bigger problem. The reason asking this question works, is that it applies one's actions to the scale of the whole population; and the bigger the population the greater the degree to which any harm caused at an individual level is magnified upwards.

Asking this question for other moralistic issues also leads to the same general moral conclusions: murder, rape, stealing and lying are wrong. And so I do see a strong connection between morals, benefit/harm, and sustainability.

Unfortunately, because we do not necessarily see the effect of sustainability at a personal level every day, it is often overlooked by individuals and governments. There are relatively few organisations who actively promote sustainability as a principle: Population Matters (formerly The Optimum Population Trust) are one such organisation. I support their work, and I would recommend that you think about it too.

http://www.populationmatters.org/issues-solutions/sustainability-ipat/

Take for example the logical fallacy of Sustainable Growth. Although some growth could be sustained over a short period, no growth is ultimately sustainable on a finite Earth. Increasing population puts a strain on all the resources we use: Power, water, fuel, land, housing and food to name but a few. It is generally accepted that current efforts to increase resource gathering are struggling to keep up with population growth, and that means we will all have to accept lower or more modest standards of living in the future. Advances in technology must constantly be made to offset impact to the environment from population growth. This does not even consider the possibility that one or more of our resources may some day become exhausted. This reasoning is the basis of the Ehrlich equation (I =PAT) which attempts to quantify sustainability by measuring human impact on the environment.

It is a sad fact that almost any problem you can care to think of in the real world could be solved, or at least alleviated to some degree, by lowering population growth. From demand for housing, to school places, hospital beds, prison cells, to immigration, Government cuts, pollution, traffic, broadband speed, biodiversity, weather affected by climate change, all these things and many more are directly influenced by one particular thing: our numbers. How many of us there are.

And I cannot escape from the fact that there is a finite sustainable capacity for this – the exact number is in dispute, but we approach closer to it everyday. And saddest of all for us liberals, the living standards of everyone in existence are almost imperceptibly, by the tiniest amount, lowered with each new human birth. The moral landscape is very slowly falling into a deep valley, from which only our own determination and innovation can drag us out.