It may be tempting to believe that humans have become more just, and that any incidents of supremacy thinking will eventually disappear. Environmental threats like climate change present themselves as new problems that have little to do with our conventional concepts of morality. I argue that the belief in the supremacy of all or some of humanity has set us on a path towards environmental collapse much as it has enabled our accomplishments. Moral philosophy itself has systematically reinforced supremacist preconceptions and has arguably led us to accept unsustainable behavior as normal. Understanding the moral justifications that we have constructed for supremacist thinking and their impact on our biosphere may be central towards preventing environmental decline or collapse.

What do Leon Trotsky, Emma Goldman, Ralph Nader, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Carl Sandburg, Hugo Chavez, Adolf Hitler, Harry Truman, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have in common? They’re all socialists or at least have been “accused” of being socialists, along with Karl Marx, Henri de Sainte-Simon, Vladimir Lenin, Eugene V. Debs, Vachel Lindsay, Nicholas Maduro, and many, many others. In the US the label has frequently been a handy political insult, an often taboo but (paradoxically) close to meaningless label to apply to one’s opponent. Admittedly it’s rare if not unheard of to call a right-wing leader in the US a “socialist” even if s/he seems to have way too much in common with National Socialist leader Adolf Hitler, but it would make as much sense to do that as to call FDR a socialist, and his enemies lambasted him as one frequently.