William Blake - Affluence, Morality and Climate Change
I recently wrote a book entitled William Blake, the Single Vision and Newton's Sleep in which I discuss the nature of progress and, the other day by chance, I came across Jeffery Kaplan’s video on Peter Singer’s paper on Famine, Affluence and Morality. This YouTube video by Kaplan makes the radical claim that “ordinary people are evil.” In the original article published in 1972, Singer takes a somewhat puritanical view that we must forego luxuries and give the money we save to charities in order to mitigate famine. In an attempt to bring this argument into the present context, my blog suggests that Singer’s moralistic stance on the nature of famine relief could also be applied to climate change, i.e. we should all put on the hairshirts of penitents and be morally virtuous in order to mitigate climate change. Here I explore this approach and see if it is compatible with Blake’s view of progress.
The Sick Rose - William Blake (Wikipedia)
Many who have studied Blake argue that one of his views about the human condition is that without contraries there is no progress. His poem The Sick Rose published in his Songs of Innocence and Experience exemplifies this view. The rose with its beautiful inflorescences also contains thorns to protect itself, but even so, it can still be parasitised by the worm, and the worm itself has its own love for the rose. Good and evil are two sides of the same coin; life itself is a nested series of hierarchies each with their contrary conflicts through which progress occurs. To quote Blake again, “To be in Error and Caste out is part of God’s Design” and as a biological scientist I can see this at the level of DNA replication; if DNA replicated itself perfectly there could be no evolution, for evolution can be viewed as a form of progress. Can this then be applied at the ecological level, as ecological progress, and where does this lead in regard to planetary climate change?
The last few days has seen COP 28 all over the news, and various reports focus on the tensions between the affluent highly developed materialistic world, the so-called Global North, and the relatively underdeveloped world of the Global South. This distinction is naturally a simplistic generalisation as there are communities in the Global South which are highly developed and vice versa (a point that will come up later). However, returning to the end of my last blog, and my decision to change my motorcycle, I came across the YouTube video by Jeffery Kaplan entitled, “Peter Singer - ordinary people are evil”, which, as an ordinary person, provided me with some food for thought. Namely, was I evil? Peter Singer is an Australian philosopher who wrote an article published in 1972 on Famine, Affluence and Morality and the most recent edition, in book form, brings together several of his writings in applied ethics and contains a foreword by Bill and Melinda Gates. According to Kaplan, Singer’s argument rests on four premises:
1) If it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without sacrificing anything of moral significance, then we must morally do it.
2) Hunger, disease and other sources of suffering, disability and death are very bad.
3) The luxuries, on which we spend money, are not of moral significance.
4) By donating money to relief agencies, like Oxfam, we could prevent hunger, disease, and other sources of suffering, disability and death.
Therefore, we must, morally, donate the money that we spend on luxuries to relief agencies that mitigate the effects of famine. This is a pretty radical argument and was somewhat brought into relief by my change of motorcycle. My previous motorcycle did everything I wanted, why change it?
Firstly, I will unpack Kaplan’s view of Singer’s position and secondly apply it to climate change. Thirdly, I will then conclude whether or not this is compatible with Blake’s notion of progress.
According to Kaplan, Singer’s paper seems to be correct and that you, me and everyone who lives in today’s society needs to radically change, and this means that each of us needs to radically change the way we live. Each of us needs to rework the way we live. Is this correct? Can it be correct if we are going to live morally? Kaplan states that there are two distinctions we need to acknowledge: 1) the “supererogatory” and 2) the “obligatory”. The “supererogatory” is something that we do that we are not obliged to do but we do it anyway. For example, I ask my work colleagues to an early morning meeting that they are obligated (contracted) to attend and I, because it is early in the morning, provide everyone with tea and coffee. I do not have to provide them with tea or coffee, but I do as a gesture. As I did not have to provide them with tea and coffee, this was extra, it was supererogatory”. It was not obligatory!
Let me give a further example that Kaplan uses, and this happened to me a few days ago. I was on a road trip across the country, and I pulled into a MacDonald’s and ordered a Big Mac meal using their computer app as I had not eaten and was hungry. When I paid, the computer app asked me whether or not I would like to round up the cost of my meal from £6.89 to £7.00 and the balance 11 p would go to charity. The £6.89 was obligatory, this was the cost of the meal I bought, the 12 p was a nice gesture it was supererogatory. And there are organisations, Oxfam, Save the Children etc., that collect this money from the more affluent and give it to the poor less affluent. Now, Singer’s paper makes the point that to act morally such an act is not, “supererogatory” but “obligatory”, and because the majority of us think it is “supererogatory”, we are not acting as moral agents and therefore most of us are evil. Now interestingly, from my perspective of purchasing a new motorcycle and the perspective of COP, can a similar argument be applied? And if so, what are the implications?
I imagine the scientists reporting to the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) clearly advocate a view that climate change is very bad (see premises above) and that we all have a moral obligation (must) to change our behaviour to mitigate its effects. Looking at the four premises above I guess Singer’s argument hinges around two major issues, when does something become very bad and when does something become so morally significant that we must change our behaviour. The way that Kaplan presents Singer’s argument is very categorical, and he gives an example of a baby falling into a pond with a possibility of drowning (very bad) versus you rescuing the baby costing you only time and possibly getting your clothes wet and muddy which would be, according to Singer, of minimal significance. Therefore, there is only one moral course of action and that is to rescue the baby. However, most moral choices are usually not so cut and dried. Let’s take a look at our individual actions, like buying a new motorcycle or car for example, in the context of climate change.
Singer’s paper is entitled, Famine, Affluence and Morality, and at COP 28 the Global South were making the argument that the Global North should help the Global South by paying for the cost of technological change needed in the face of reducing their carbon footprint to zero. Indeed, following Singer’s argument, you could make the case that the rich Global North are obligated to pay for it; it is more than just a supererogatory gesture. But from the news reports I distinctly get the feeling this is a contentious issue between the Global North and the Global South, and it would now be very easy to get into a minefield about recompense in the aftermath of the Global North’s colonial past. No, I don’t want to go there, but I want to try and stick to Singer’s case around the very bad and the notion of moral significance.
It strikes me that Singer has taken two extremes and made his argument very black and white. Indeed, in reality when it comes to human behaviour there are certainly more than fifty shades of grey. Each of our individual behaviours, whether we feel obligated to forego luxuries and give our savings to charity and are evil if we don’t, are driven from a complex set of perceptions that have evolved over time and to some extent become hard wired into our consciousness. A philosopher of biology who has written much on the nature of consciousness, religion and free will, is Daniel Dennett and his Doctoral supervisor was Gilbert Ryle. Ryle wrote a book entitled The Concept of Mind in which he developed, amongst other things like The Ghost in the Machine, the notion of a categorical error, or categorical mistake. It seems to me, I might be totally wrong here, that Kaplan has conflated the several things in Singer’s argument, the very bad, affluence and moral significance, but first, let me explain what Ryle thinks a categorical error is. Ryle was an academic based in Oxford and he takes as his example of a categorical error as a visitor who has come to Oxford and asks to see the University of Oxford. Ryle, the good host, takes his visitor to various collages, takes him to the Sheldonian Theatre, shows him the Bodleian Library, walks him past various departments, Physics, Chemistry, Zoology and takes him to the Botanic Garden etc. But during this visit Ryle notices his visitor is becoming increasingly anxious and asks him, “What is the matter?”. His visitor replies that, “yes”, he’s seen all these buildings, departments and even meet some students and professors, but, “Where is the University of Oxford?” According to Ryle he has made a “categorical error”, the University of Oxford”, is a meta-concept, it contains all the various things our visitor has seen, and more, that Ryle has shown his visitor. To me Kaplan has polarised Singer’s position by forcing it into two extremes, when in fact they represent two ends of a continuum and thereby he makes a categorical mistake.
Singer’s argument, as outlined by Kaplan and stated above, is very black and white, binary in its overall result, the very bad, equating as evil, and it’s opposite the very good equated with moral obligation. In his title, Famine, Affluence, and Morality Singer makes the point that if we can stop something bad from happening without harming ourselves in any morally significant way, we are obliged to do it. I think most of use would agree with this, but Kaplan in his video takes Singer’s position and, to my view, over emphasises the argument by forcing it into two categorical morally charged outcomes, the very good versus the very bad, when in fact all three words in the title run along a spectrum. Famine, Affluence, and Morality are indeed relative concepts. Not everyone in a country suffering from famine is starving to death, affluence in any country is relative, as is morality. We as individuals have to make our own choices and our decisions are part of the dilemma as to what it is to be human. Each of us sees the world slightly differently and there is no God-like view of reality on which we can all agree. When it comes to the issues of climate change and the moral question about what we ought to do, this also lies on a continuum.
Ultra Low Emission Zone - London Transport
These choices and the decisions that we all make are a question of politics – the members of Extinction Rebellion would be on one extreme, and the climate change deniers on the other extreme. There is here a creative tension that Blake was well aware of and which he so exquisitely articulated in his poem The Sick Rose. We are caught here between the two extremes and to complete Blake’s quotation:
Without contraries there is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion,
Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.
From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil.
Good is the passive that obeys Reason.
