Catastrophe Ethics: Doing Good in a World Gone Bad

Find your place on the planet, dig in and take responsibility from there.

Gary Snyder in the Netflix series Landman, a brash, whip smart attorney transplanted from New York City, is suddenly tasked with negotiating drilling leases in Midland, Texas, the heart of the Permian Basin, colloquially known as the Patch.

She's a killer lawyer, but out of place in a roughneck region where civilization's sausage is made.

It rankles her urban east coast sensibilities and leaves a fine mist of sand on her thousand dollar bespoke blazer.

Her new oil man boss, played by Billy Bob Thornton, has little patience for her reticence.

Standing in the hot sun next to a grinding pump jack, he drives home a dose of reality.

You can ride a horse and live in a tent if you want, but you'll be the only one, and it won't make a bit of difference.

This is what the world runs on until it runs on something else.

When this stops, the world stops.

Landman captures the fundamental ethical dilemma of our time, our polycrisis era.

The challenges seem intractable and existential.

Our response is at best inadequate.

At least that's how it looks.

Gazing out over the panorama of human human affairs, we are deeply embedded in a system over which we have little control.

The consequences of so much of what we do are opaque, hidden behind the curtain.

Burning fossil fuels is a losing proposition in the long run.

But not burning fossil fuels will bring the world to a halt right now.

And so the pump jacks grind on, the fracking persists, and the demand to buy more does not yield.

There's not much you and I can do about it, nor is there.

Few of us can genuinely disengage from all sources of potential harm in the modern world.

Living in a tent and riding a horse, that's not an excuse for abject pessimism or abandonment of responsibility to the future, to other living creatures sharing the planet.

How, then, do we respond?

How can we live ethically in a world full of bad choices?

For millennia, thinkers, philosophers, theologians and poets have expounded on the moral and ethical imperatives of their respective times and places.

How well do these traditional moral admonitions serve us today?

How do we translate the ancient Golden Rule to our current circumstance?

It may sound a little cheeky, but to loosely paraphrase Jesus Christ Superstar, there was no wi fi in 4 BC today, depending on the algorithm feeding our daily scroll, we either live in the dawn of a new golden age, at least for straight white male wealthy Americans, or we're hurtling headlong into a new dark age.

The digital infosphere enveloping the planet offers no coherent consensus on how or why to act ethically.

On the contrary, the noise, the deafening noise buries what little wisdom there is in the ceaseless d demand for our attention.

Even before AI seeped into our screens and eyeballs, the post truth world has left us angry, distracted, confused, manipulated, and powerless.

At least that's how it feels.

So we try not to think about it too much.

There's no shortage of distractions.

How about that new Netflix series that the algorithm thinks I'll like and I pass the time for a while?

But we do think about it, as humans always have.

And so we have a puzzle.

We have what author and philosopher Thomas Reader calls the puzzle.

In his book Catastrophe how to choose well in a World of Tough Choices, Reeder addresses the ethical disconnect between our professed morality and the insignificance of our actions in service to those ideals.

In the cacophony and confusion of the 21st century polycrisis, how do we claim moral certainty in our ethical choices?

This is the puzzle, as Reader defines it, of individual action in the face of collective threats.

He writes, in a complex globalized society of some 8 billion people acting in uncoordinated ways, the structure of the puzzle is reproduced everywhere.

That doesn't mean it will look precisely the same in every context.

But we should expect to find many instances of a general problem that has the following 1 There is a massive and urgent threat.

The moral stakes in response to this threat are high 2 Despite this urgency, individuals are mainly powerless to effect meaningful change and 3 this lack of personal impact leads to passionate disagreement about what individuals are morally required to do.

If anything, a person's influence on massive collective threats like climate change is so insignificant that it is statistically meaningless.

The scale and complexity of the carbon cycle radical render any individual action lost behind a veil of probabilities.

The carbon molecules we tease from the ground and burn disperse enigmatically, settling into the ocean, a stand of trees, or the atmosphere.

We can't account for every carbon atom any better than we can trace a single action to a result.

Yet climate change permeates a broader public consciousness, Reeder says.

Regardless of one's viewpoint, the accelerating threat is global, and the moral stakes of preserving a livable planet and thriving human civilization are, to say the least, enormous.

Despite the growing urgency to take action, we're bogged down by a profound stuckness, inaction, denial, short termism, and greed.

It's tempting to give in to cynicism, denial, or resignation if nothing we do makes a difference, what's the point of trying?

Nonetheless, many of us feel some moral responsibility to do something about it.

Climate change is a collective problem, reader writes, and so it will be solved by collectives or not at all.

Most individuals alone can't do anything meaningful to address the problem, so it's difficult to understand on what grounds one might be obligated to to work to address it.

Indeed, argues Reader, acting solely out of a sense of duty or obligation serves us poorly when considering catastrophe ethics the wind whips through the grassy savannah.

A pit of vulnerability weighs on each advancing step in the hot sun, out in the open, our brains are tightly tuned for fight or flight, live or die, eat or be eaten.

What's that?

This is all my dramatic way of saying that we aren't built for the world we live in.

Traditional ethical frameworks are wired for lifeways long past.

From those hot, dry, and long forgotten primordial savannas, we have invented gods, roles, duties, and obligations meant to channel human behavior into right ways of living.

Reader argues that meeting the moment obliges a new set of moral tools to reason through these unfamiliar ethical quandaries of modern life.

What does this mean on a practical level?

How do we make our way in the world when there are jobs to do, bills to pay, and families to feed?

Well, those are good questions.

Here are some of my takeaways which don't do catastrophe ethics justice, but my hope is to spark interest in reading the book.

Instead of a duty bound sense of obligation, Reader suggests that our actions derive from an authentic, value centered ethical foundation.

This requires ongoing reflection and adaptation to evolving challenges.

Which may sound obvious, but duty bound ethics often dictate a largely predetermined and sometimes ill considered path.

We can reflect on daily choices, our consumption habits and energy use.

When is enough enough?

Beware the algorithm Combating misinformation and content slop is more urgent in this dawning era of artificial intelligence.

To make good decisions, we must be well informed and not ill informed.

If individual action is statistically meaningless, collective action is not.

It is the organization and alignment of many individual acts from which change can and does happen.

Reader's thoughtful and accessible writing helps answer the question of how we can make good choices in bad times and we end where we started.

Find your place in the world, dig in and take responsibility from there.

Visit travisreader.com or the show Notes for more information and thanks for listening.

And this, my friends, are the thoughts of a simple man.

There's always more we can do to stop climate change.

No amount of engagement is too little.

And now more than ever, your involvement matters.

To learn more and do more, visit globalwarmingisreal.com thanks for listening.

I'm your host, Tom Schueneman.

We'll see you next time on Global Warming is Real.