Shadowing Practice: Massimo Pigliucci - Philosophy of Ecology & the Environment - Learn English Speaking with Video

Massimo, everybody's talking about the environment, particularly climate change.

We have diversity of species.

That's a concern.

What can a philosopher of biology bring to this social debate?

Yes, everybody's talking about the environment, but not many people are doing something about the environment.

That's the problem.

Philosophical approaches to the issue of the environment, preservation of the environment, or the relationship that we should have toward environment can take a number of forms.

In philosophy of science, for instance, you could ask the question of whenever scientists propose a approach to, let's say, climate change, to ameliorate climate change,

is that approach sound in terms of the relationship between the theory and the data?

This is a typical thing that philosophers do, right?

That's important because some people disagree.

Correct.

So, a philosopher can come in and help clarifying the conceptual underpinnings of

that whole approach before you even actually get to the empirical evidence per se.

The other thing that a philosopher can contribute is a clarification of, a conceptual clarification of the entire issue of,

you know, what do we care about the environment in the first place?

What kind of values should we be considering?

For instance, sometimes you hear people saying that planet Earth would be better off without human beings.

Right?

That strikes me as somewhat bizarre kind of thinking, not only because it's self-destructive in a sense,

and it doesn't seem to take seriously the amount of suffering that that sort of outcome would imply, but also because without human beings, as far as we know,

there is no concept of value and the environment doesn't have value.

When you say the environment is better off or the planet will be better off, the planet is not the kind of thing that is better off or worse off.

We are better off or worse off if we do certain things as opposed to other things.

So there is sometimes even just basic levels of confusion about

what does it mean to have this debate in the first place.

And then of course the third The third one is the issue of ethics.

That's not really philosophy of science.

It's more moral philosophy.

But when it comes to how much interference with the environment is going to cost in terms of suffering,

in terms of resources, in terms of how should we prioritize things, who is going to benefit from what kind of course of action,

those are all ethical questions that don't have an obvious empirical answer.

You can't do the experiment and figure it out.

So climate in general and the environment in general are really,

I would think, the kind of problems that is ideally situated for a positive, constructive interaction between different parties.

And some of those parties, I would think, would have to be philosophers of science and ethicists.

One theory that has been gaining at least public attention is so-called long-termism,

says that in our allocation of resources in our considerations, we need to now weight future generations,

not the ones that are 50 and 100 years, but the ones that might be a million or 10 million years.

And so even if you use whatever discounted weighted average of the value of a future generation to now,

you have a great preponderance of responsibility.

So if you're really thinking ethically and morally, you really should think of those future generations.

Other people criticize that because that could lead to various either excuses

or real decisions to impoverish people today because of some long-term thinking.

But these are hard questions.

Perhaps they are.

My take on long-termism is the one that Jeremy Bentham,

the founder of utilitarianism, famously had used in different contexts, and that's it.

Nonsense on stilts.

There's a very high level of nonsense.

Why?

Because the problem with long-termism is precisely that we have no idea what's going to happen that many generations down the road.

And anybody who claims that they do, it's either fooling themselves or trying to fool others.

That's a general problem, I think, ironically, with the utilitarian approach to ethics.

So the utilitarian approach is based on this notion

that we need to look at the consequences and only at the consequences of our actions.

Not your intentions, not general kind of rules like a deontologist would do, but only at the consequences.

Well, yes, but the problem is what is the stopping rule?

Consequences up until what?

One generation, two, five, ten, a million?

And there is no answer to that question.

No utilitarian that I know of has ever actually come up with an answer with a stopping rule of some sort.

So technically you want to go on an infinitum at least until the the end of the universe.

Well, good luck with that, first of all.

Second of all, it becomes an issue of epistemology.

Human systems are chaotic systems in the technical sense of the term.

That is, they are highly dependent on initial conditions, which means that even if you think of human societies as deterministic systems, which they probably are,

there is no way to tell with any precision what's going to happen just even a few generations

or a few cycles down the road, let alone tens of thousands or millions of cycles?

So in theory, it may be good in practicality.

It has no value.

It's entirely impractical.

And therefore, it seems to me that ethics is nothing if not practical or should be nothing if not practical.

So if we're talking about things that are in theory valuable, but in fact, you cannot do anything about it, I really don't think we should be wasting our time.

So how do you then allocate the different kinds of philosophical approaches to weigh on the issue of ecology and the environment?

What are the different categories?

You said ethical, but ethical limited to our generation and our children's generation?

Yeah, I think that from an ethical perspective,

we should act in pretty much the way in which we act at a level of personal decision making.

When you make decisions that have ethical import, who do you have in mind?

Usually your own generation and the next one.

Maybe two generations that are about.

And the reason for that, again, is not because you don't care about potential human beings in the distant future.

It's just because you don't know.

You have no idea what's going to happen there.

And therefore, it's useless to sort of worry yourself with that sort of stuff.

In a sense, we are Markov chain kinds of systems.

It's one step at a time.

And we're not going to be able to look more than two or three steps down the road.

And therefore, we should be focused on what we can look at

and then hope

that the next generation who is going to be able to extend the chain by another one

or two steps is going to try to do the same or try to do their best.

The one or two steps we have right now are really serious ones.

They're very serious.

So it's enough to worry about that one.

We already don't have much of an idea of how to solve the problem now in the immediate.

So I would really not waste much time thinking 10,000 generations down the road.

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Shadowing Practice: Massimo Pigliucci - Philosophy of Ecology & the Environment - Learn English Speaking with Video

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