KEY WORDS: SUPREMACY, MICHAEL SHERMER, STANDING ROCK, GREEN REVOLUTION, DAVID ABRAM, JUSTICE, ENVIRONMENTAL FOOTPRINTS, CLIMATE CHANGE, JOHN RAWLS

We may like to believe that the world is becoming more inclusive and tolerant, and that everybody will be more prosperous as that happens. Michael Shermer’s The Moral Arc (Shermer 2016) captures the mindset that, unless fundamentalism resurges, our morality is on a trajectory towards becoming ever more just. While his “principle of interchangeable perspectives” is credible as such, Shermer’s application is not. Climate change, ecosystem destruction, and species extinction are growing threats to Earth’s biosphere and are tied to humanity’s increasing use of resources. In “Environmental footprints as methods of moral reasoning” (Denton 2017), I have argued that measures for quantifying our resource overuse have to be a part of our moral reasoning, and that they reflect a consistent representation of future perspectives.

The idea of humanity’s ever-increasing justice fails to hold up not only with regard to future perspectives but also nonhuman ones. While we may believe that our moral sphere is expanding (Shermer 2016, Figure 1-1), and that we increasingly care about those unlike us, quantitative data do not support this claim. The Living Planet Index, a measure of vertebrate diversity and abundance, has declined by 60% since 1970 (WWF 2018). It does not matter what moral status we attribute to pandas or whales if we don’t protect their habitats. To conserve ecosystems, we would have to return land that is directly or indirectly used by humans and refrain from cultivating new areas, but few countries have the political will to do so. Claiming that we increasingly care about other species when our actions say otherwise is disingenuous.

When I attended the Fargo Climate March in 2014, I was struck by the differences in how presenters framed the concerns of a changing climate. Some thought that the problem was so new that we really could not yet even know how to approach it. In contrast, a member of a tribal community, Bob Shimek, placed it into a centuries-old context that reflected his traditional values (Shimek 2014). History is on Shimek’s side: Alexander von Humboldt already suggested in 1829 that modifications to the land could have an impact on Earth’s climate and proposed that nations should communicate about that (Rich 2015). Humboldt also noted that the colonizers’ focus on exploiting resources was associated with harm done to the indigenous population and with ecological devastation.

For native communities environmental and social abuses have historically gone hand in hand and still often do so. Consider the case of the Standing Rock pipeline protest in North Dakota in 2016. The protest was organized by Sioux who wanted to protect their water supply. They were joined not only by other tribes but also by environmentalists who saw the risks associated with pipelines and the climate impacts of unfettered oil exploration (Januchowski-Hartley 2016). When the Dakota Access Pipeline was eventually built, the reasons were not that it was scientifically defensible. Climate science has long established that our oil consumption has to be curbed. The treatment of the protesters at Standing Rock rather resembled a centuries-old pattern, by which the interests of white people determine the outcomes of conflicts. Deliberate efforts to rob the regional Native communities of their culture and values have extended into the recent past and have impacts into the present (Lagimodiere 2020).

Among the most compelling arguments to support the notion that our morality has improved may be the Green Revolution of the 1960s that dramatically reduced world hunger. At that time, agricultural productivity was increased globally through plant breeding and the use of modern farming techniques, including artificial fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation. Unfortunately, none of the accomplishments solved the problem of feeding a growing population indefinitely. Furthermore, atmospheric and environmental impacts of industrial agriculture techniques contribute to climate change and species extinction. Normal Borlaug, who is credited with initiating the Green Revolution, and as a consequence saving over a billion lives, was well aware of these challenges (Hesser 2006).

When it comes to the major accomplishments of the Industrial Revolution, the most lifesaving can be almost indistinguishable from the most destructive. Normal Borlaug would have accomplished much less without the nitrogen fertilizer that was made possible by the work of Fritz Haber. Haber proposed that hydrogen and atmospheric nitrogen could be used to produce ammonia under conditions of high pressure and temperature and in the presence of a catalyst. Together with Carl Bosch at BASF, he developed the process that initiated the industrial production of synthetic fertilizers and contributed substantially to the large reduction in deaths from starvation as part of the Green Revolution.

Few people laud Haber for his ethics. Besides his invention of the process for synthesizing ammonia, he was instrumental in the development of poison gas. His wife, also a chemist, committed suicide around the time that Haber went to observe the application of chemical weapons on battlefields in World War I (Carty 2012). Scientists like to argue that discoveries can be used for good or bad purposes. While many people object to the use of poison gas on the battlefield, fewer are concerned about pesticides. After all, it is in the nature of pesticides that they kill what we consider to be “pests.” Pests are not normally afforded the same moral protection as humans or pets, even though some species considered pests, such as mice, have a genome so similar to ours that human medications can be tested on them.

Humans used to care about nonhuman species at a much deeper level than they do today. In The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram (1996) examined indigenous communities that have not yet lost their ability to relate to nonhuman life. With his own experience as a sleight-of-hand magician, he was able to converse with Shamans in more meaningful ways than most people could. He learned to understand the relationship of indigenous communities to the natural world, viewing themselves as a part of all life. Abram hypothesized that alphabet-based languages constituted an important step towards the loss of our ability to understand nonhuman life.

Our ability to communicate using language and various forms of writing is clearly among the most influential skills that lead us to perceive ourselves as superior to animals. In addition to doing things that animals cannot, we create narratives that shape human culture. Elements of culture, or “memes” as Richard Dawkins (1976) termed them, underlie similar evolutionary mechanisms as genes do. Like genes, the survival of memes depends on the fitness they endow on individuals or groups. The concept of meaning is one important cultural concept that affects the survival of communities. It is centrally discussed in religious contexts, and religious texts offer us insights into the justifications for respecting some forms of life more than others. Among the most prominent religious texts is the Judeo-Christian Bible that influenced the three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and thereby affected the concept of meaning of more than half of the world’s population (Pew Research Center 2012).

Among the narratives of the Judeo-Christian Bible, the story of Noah (The Bible, Genesis 9:3) stands out for its explicit guidance on the treatment of nonhuman life. God tells Noah “Every living creature will be food for you; just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you all things.” Respect for nonhuman life was clearly not something believers were expected to overly indulge in. It is plausible that by the time this text was written, humans had reached a level of civilization that allowed them to rarely fear nonhuman species. Being able to treat them as property and food would have been convenient. With our modern understanding of genetics, this may appear odd. Cows, for example, share about 80% of genes with us (Chessa et al. 2009). It is difficult to imagine that anybody would “give” us our close relatives. More likely those who wrote down the story of Noah backed up their own sense of supremacy by attributing to a deity the words that would justify their actions.

The Abrahamic religions not only promote beliefs in supremacy over other species but also as a means of distinguishing the ingroup from the outgroup. As one example, consider the concept of “God’s chosen people” (Clements 1968) that elevates those who are part of the Jewish community above others. Similar thoughts apply to the Catholic Communion that makes those who receive it a part of the divine being of Jesus (Catechism, Part 2 Section 2, Chapter 1, Article 3), and to the communion in most Protestant religions, albeit in somewhat more abstract ways. All three Abrahamic religions also tie their religious documents to specific languages, Hebrew, Latin, and Arabic, respectively, thereby creating a distinguished circle of the most knowledgeable. Other religions differ in their specific beliefs, but most maintain the notion of an ingroup in contrast to the outgroup.

It is in the nature of secular moralities that they do not normally tie moral reasoning to explicit groups. That does not have to mean that their moral sphere encompasses all people equally. Consider, for example, Kant’s notion of “duty.” A person who is struggling to survive is unlikely to have the flexibility or time to reason about duty. In The Dollhouse Ibsen (1879) beautifully captured the difference in moral understanding between Nora, whose actions are driven by protecting her family, and her husband, to whom his honor is above all else. One could hypothesize that the notion of judging people by their ability to eloquently articulate their vision of duty would have been attractive to those who were educated and had power at the time that Kant proposed his philosophy, and that it reinforced their sense of supremacy.

The arguably clearest attempt of developing a philosophy around the goal of achieving consistency across perspectives is Rawls’ veil of ignorance, according to which anyone proposing a law or policy is expected to examine it from any other station in society (Rawls 1971). Rawls also understood the need for considering future perspectives, although he could not be aware of the newer and more science-centric tools that have become available more recently (Wackernagel & Rees 1996). Unfortunately, nonhuman perspectives are fundamentally out of the scope of Rawls’ theory of justice. Except for explicitly biocentric viewpoints (Taylor 1996), most philosophical arguments assume the capacity of using language for reasoning, which does not translate easily to nonhuman species. As such, secular philosophy has maintained the hard barrier between human and nonhuman species much like religious moralities have.

Some people may question whether humanity should make an attempt to broaden the scope of morality to nonhuman species. After all, even some nonhuman species defend those of their kind more than others. In addition, one may point to humanity’s innumerable feats of technology and art. No other species on our planet has come even close to travelling to space. Countless philosophical arguments place a higher value on human than nonhuman existence by virtue of a presumed human soul, our intelligence, or our capacity for grammar-based language. Even within this viewpoint, destroying our environment may not be defensible. Humanity depends on nonhuman species in ways that we sometimes fail to appreciate. The theory of ecosystems services captures the monetary value of natural environments and their value to humans (Daily 1997).

Maybe more importantly, we are related to all other life on our planet. Just because other species cannot verbalize their philosophical objections towards us, does not mean that our actions are defensible. Arguing that humans only have the moral obligation to consider other humans is not compelling from the perspectives of those other species. Imagine an extraterrestrial species invading and arguing that their souls, intelligence, or language justify murdering, enslaving, or even eradicating us. We have not had to debate our values with extraterrestrials or other species. Neither has climate change or ecosystems collapse forced us to change our lifestyle. Climate scientists tell us that this is bound to change, but once we feel the impact it may be too late to prevent collapse (Oreskes and Conway 2014).

The justice that we experience within our moral sphere may have increased, and we may have moved the boundaries of that sphere so far away from us that we no longer see it. At the same time those boundaries have become more impenetrable than they ever were. Thousands of years ago, humans did not consume orders of magnitude more resources than their fellow nonhuman species. They did not poison large portions of Earth’s land area with chemicals that eradicated any species of plant or animal that did not have human approval. They did not pump such quantities of climate-changing gases into the atmosphere that the future of all species, human and nonhuman, was in peril.

When we see ourselves as moral, it says more about our morality than it says about our behavior. Shermer’s suggestion of constructing an objective morality based on the “principle of interchangeable perspectives” would be laudable if he included the perspectives of those who suffer from our actions, the nonhuman species, the future generations. Objectively, we do not do that, and existing tools like environmental footprints and wildlife indices quantify the inadequacy of our efforts to be just. Our moral concepts were shaped over millennia to ensure our survival in the presence of other human groups and nonhuman species. Earth’s biosphere was not a concern that significantly affected our survival during that evolution. Our moral reasoning evolved to serve us above all others. Towards addressing our environmental challenges, we would be well-advised to recognize that supremacy thinking is at the core of our morality.

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