August 8, 2021

Scientific Detachment and the Human Perspective How (not) to deal with climate anxiety

Content Notifications: Climate crisis, the prospect of human extinction

“Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

— Dylan Thomas

If you have been following the news, you are most likely aware of the fact that the consequences of fossil fuel-driven consumerism are rapidly closing in on us and that the future looks rather bleak at this point. Besides the question of how to tackle the giant challenges lying ahead—preparing for the 415+ ppm future as well as preventing the global ecosystem from spiraling further towards collapse—there is also the question of how to mentally adjust for the fact that earth will be a lot less comfortable than we used to know it and that the survival of mankind is not guaranteed.

In today’s post I want to consider a certain kind of response to the latter issue that I am going to call the biological inevitability argument. The biological inevitability argument amounts to stating the fact that so far every species in earth’s history has had a certain lifespan and eventually went extinct once its time had come. In that case it seems futile to experience emotional turmoil about something one cannot change. Instead of lamenting the inevitable one should just make peace with it. I do not know how common this reasoning is; I myself have come across it a couple of times when I discussed the climate crisis. In any case, it might be appealing to some people. I always felt there was something wrong about it although I never could determine what exactly. In the conversations I had, the consequences of this reply as well as its presuppositions were never pointed out explicitly. The idea seems to be that evolutionarily successful species can eventually deplete the possibilities that their ecological niche provides for them so that their overpopulation as a result of their evolutionary success is precisely the cause for their extinction because it brings about the collapse of their natural habitat. The point, then, seems to be that fossil-fuel driven consumerism is a reproductive strategy that guarantees mankind’s evolutionary success in such a way that it ultimately undermines the causes for said success. This means that the imminent global-scale ecological disaster we are facing is an event in mankind’s natural history and an immediate consequence of our reproductive strategy. It is, therefore, a manifestation of a natural law which we all know to be unchangeable, similar to the flight of migrant birds or the hunting of wolves. Since there is nothing to do about it, we should just settle with the fact that mankind’s days are coming to an end rather than trying to fight the inevitable result of the iron laws of evolution.

I think this is a bad argument in two ways. It is bad in the sense that, as an argument, it is not sound because it rests on a number of misconceptions but I also think it is morally bad trying to make this kind of point. I will attempt to unpack the presuppositions of the argument and show how their faultiness relates to its moral badness.

The first thing to be noted about the biological inevitability argument is that it is made from a scientific viewpoint. The speaker’s attitude towards mankind is the attitude of an evolutionary biologist who studies the natural history of, say, mammoths. From such a viewpoint one would say that mammoths lived on earth over such-and-such a number of millennia under such-and-such ecological conditions, and when those conditions eventually changed due to the natural cycles of global ecology, they went extinct. This viewpoint is characterized by an attitude I call scientific detachment. The scientist is detached from their object of study, both observationally and evaluatively. The paleontologist who studies mammoths is not a mammoth. The behavioral biologist who studies lions is not a lion and neither do they engage with the lions they study. This is what I mean by observational detachment. Evaluative detachment means that any evaluative attitude that might be adopted towards an object of study is not entailed by the scientific viewpoint. Of course, the paleontologist might pity the mammoths for their fate, and the behavioral biologist can be driven to understand lions by an awe for these majestic creatures, but saying that it is a pity that mammoths do not longer walk the earth is not a scientific statement.

Here we can see the first misconception of the biological inevitability argument. It is obviously not possible to be observationally detached from mankind and its natural history. Whoever makes a statement about the natural history of the human species is a member of said species. So, such statements are involved in the object they are about in a way that statements about the natural history of lions and mammoths are not.

The proponent of the biological inevitability argument could reply that in order to accept the fact that the natural lifespan of the human species is coming to an end, one does not need to be observationally detached but only evaluatively. One could still be a member of the human species and accept the fact that its days are counted. However, I do not think that this argument works. In fact, the very presuppositions of the biological inevitability argument make it impossible to be evaluatively detached from the prospect of human extinction.

The biological inevitability argument rests on the assumption that mankind is continuous with the rest of animated nature (call it the natural continuum hypothesis) and that human behavior is ultimately driven by the same evolutionary imperatives as non-human animals and plants. This assumption makes possible the idea that our current mode of living is a way of securing reproductive success. But, as we know, one of the evolutionary imperatives is securing reproductive success. So, if we are evolutionarily hard-wired to aim at reproductive success, we cannot help but care about mankind’s survival which means that the natural continuum hypothesis makes it impossible to be evaluatively detached from mankind’s natural history. So, if the premises of the biological inevitability argument are true, it cannot the support its conclusion.

Furthermore I think we should not accept the idea that our behavior is governed by evolutionary dynamics in the same way they govern the behavior of non-human animals. Of course, we are products of evolution. But our capacity for rationality is not simply a supplement of our animalic nature that allows us to pursue evolutionary success, it transforms every aspect of the human life-form because the demands of reason are normative demands. Our biological constitution establishes certain facts that provide us with apparent reasons to act in a certain way but our rationality allows us to step back from those facts and ask whether they are good reasons to act in this way. As I have pointed out elsewhere, there is a crucial difference between how we think and how we ought to think.

If we accept such a “transformative” concept of rationality, we can reject the argument that we have to accept the possibility of human extinction as a manifestation of the iron law of evolution on two levels. First, we can say that, even if it is the case that the collapse of the global ecosphere is a natural event in the history of the human race, this is in itself not a good reason to accept it. More importantly, we can reject the premise that said collapse is a natural event.

If rationality transforms every aspect of our life-form, the emergence of fossil fuel-driven consumerism is categorically distinct from the building of a termite colony or the dam that a beaver has built.1 It might be the case that it is a way of securing reproductive success but the question whether or not it is is irrelevant because we can step back from it and ask whether it is a good way of securing reproductive success. In fact, we can even ask whether or not reproductive success is a value.2

I think that it is in the light of these latter considerations that the immorality of the biological inevitability argument becomes apparent. If the fact that human extinction is “natural” in the way that the proponents of the argument presuppose is in itself not a good reason to accept it, the argument trivializes valid emotional responses in a condescending “facts don't care about your feelings”-manner.

Moreover, since we have seen that the fossil fuel-driven consumerism that drives the ecological crisis is not a natural event in the sense the biological inevitability argument presupposes it is also immoral because it passes off events as inevitable that are not. It is not the iron law of evolution that has brought us into this situation it is a certain conception of how to organize the production and distribution of goods. The argument therefore relieves those who are responsible for the current situations from their responsibility.

Lastly, he biological inevitability argument is also immoral in a very fundamental way because it demands to denounce what it means to be human. Following Aristotle, Michael Thompson has argued that our actions are guided by a conception of what it means to be human which is constituted by the acknowledgement of the fact that the human life-form is essentially characterized by rationality.3 In passing off the destructive way of life and its consequences as natural, one denounces the very thing that characterizes the human life-form which guides our action. Since by the very act of making this argument, one asks others to accept it and its presuppositions, one is not only denouncing one’s own humanity but also demanding that others do so as well.

Given all these considerations we can see that the biological inevitability argument is quite literally an inhumane way of thinking. It requires those who make it and those to whom it is addressed to abandon their human point of view. As we have seen, this is conceptually impossible as well as morally wrong. The future of the human race should still be a concern to us all.