Ethics in the Anthropocene
In a previous essay, I introduced factory farming as the great moral crisis of our current era. In that essay, I juxtaposed factory farming with climate change (the two are related, with factory farming being one of the greatest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions). In this essay, I am going to dig deeper into the relationship between moral and material conditions. Does a specific form of energy use come with a moral calculus? Does it come with a metaphysics? I believe so, and my beliefs are stated right at the beginning and repeated once again towards the end of this article:
Now for the main story....
Our moral condition is intimately tied to social and technological conditions. There was a time — perhaps in prehistory, perhaps as recently as three hundred years ago — when we could afford to neglect the nonhuman world entirely — the human impact on the rest of the earth was small enough that we can treat it as a rounding error. It was possible to define the human as a stand-alone species, a disinterested witness admiring the spectacle of nature.
That condition has changed. Today, to be human is to be more than human. Now that human freedom is accepted the world over as a desirable outcome, it’s time we set our sights on other freedoms, freedoms that aren’t human freedoms even if they will eventually help us flourish as well. One freedom in particular: the end of factory farming, which, I will argue is deeply connected to another freedom: the end of fossil fuels.
I use the term “FFreedom” to denote these two moral demands, demands that expand our traditional conception of human freedom into the nonhuman world. We often hear that the underlying problem is greed, especially organized capitalist greed. Greed is surely destructive, but in this article and in subsequent articles, I want to argue that it’s not just the negative side of humanity that’s the problem. It’s the positive side too.
The problem lies in our self-understanding of humanity itself and what it means to have a good (human) life. What it means to be free.Our fossil-fueled, factory-farmed world is like a giant sacrifice at the altar of humanity. While our violence on the nonhuman may not matter, it should, for it destabilizes our uber-humanity. On the flip side, a factory farm free and fossil free world will contribute to human as well as nonhuman flourishing. That’s why there are two F’s in FFreedom: fossil free; factory farm free.
From Marx onward, we know that the reign of capital is doubly unstable:
The anthropocene intensifies those two instabilities and adds a third:
Here's the main premise of planetarity: The anthropocene and its instabilities won't go away until we replace discussions of the "human condition," i.e., the circumstances in which only human beings exist and flourish with the "organic condition," i.e., the circumstances under which all beings on this planet exist and flourish. Further, it's clear that the nonhuman is beating down the social doors anyway - whether it's ocean surges that flood cities, designer microbiomes or the streams of data that connect our insides and outsides together, our fate as a species is now directly connected to the wellbeing of the earth. Politics has never been more important than it's today.
Industrial Life
Let’s start with the foundational transformation of the modern era: the industrial revolution. Was it a good thing or a bad thing?
Before we answer that question, we have to ask: good for whom? We can argue for eternity about whether the industrial revolution was good for people or not. Those who are for the revolution will talk about the ease of our modern lives, the advances in health and education and the vast plethora of gizmos that make our lives safer, faster and more interesting..