Kant's views on No Impact living

Now I am no expert on philosophy, but my friend Eden tells me that Kant considered the best test of morality to be the Formula of Universal Law. He wrote, “act only on that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should be a universal law." Or to translate, each of us should live our lives in such a way that would allow for the possibility of everyone one else living the same way.

Assuming I was like the average American before the No Impact experiment began, my ecological footprint was 24 acres. But worldwide, there exist only 4.5 biologically productive acres per person. In other words, if everyone were to live like the former me, we would need more than five planet earths. So, there was no possibility of everyone else in the world living the same way as me. Kant would have thought I was immoral. He would have smiled upon the No Impact project, however, Eden says.

Does anyone else know anything about Kant’s Principle of Universality--or indeed any other philosopher's ideas--and how they apply to the things we discuss here at the No Impact Man blog? I’d love to hear.

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By the way, after a great deal of thought, I have decided not to accept ads on this site, but that I will accept reader support. Of course, the greatest help you can give is to visit often, click on the comments link, and contribute your wisdom and practical knowledge. Participation is this blog’s lifeblood. But if you feel inspired to support my work financially, please click here. And if you are looking for non-financial ways to support the work, click here. Thank you so much.

[I have changed my mind about accepting donations, but thanks all the same. NIM 6/17/07]

This post also appears in my green parenting column for Time Out Kids New York, appearing every Wednesday. For resources on eco-friendly stores and restaurants, or simply to plan a weekend outing, visit them at tonykids.com.

Comments

[Weiers]

When I discovered your blog I actually thought of Kant! But not because of his philosophy (which is very compelling, but does not stand under the critique of postmodernism.)

My understanding is that Kant lived his whole life in the district that he was born in, and that he never moved out of it, not even for a vacation.

When I first heard about this I was quite puzzled by it. In the light of the environmental crisis and the economic realities of our world, it is beginning to sound like a very ethical thing to do.

[Jono]

What you're describing is Kant's Categorical Imperative. His Practical Imperative also speaks to the intentions of a low-impact life. "Act to treat humanity, whether yourself or another, as an end-in-itself and never as a means."

To treat others as ends-in-themselves and not as a mere means, you must respect their will. You must treat them in a way that doesn't use them as a means in order to obtain your own goals or an unfair advantage.

To live a life with a footprint any larger than your fair share of available sources/sinks is to place your own ends before all others, and to therefore not afford them equal access, opportunity, or respect.

[Tony]

When I first discovered your blog and project, Henry David Thoreau was the philosopher that came to mind. For me, he was a minimalist and maximumist at the same time. He lived life large by living it simply. I get the idea you are discovering the largeness of life by living it well and by living simply.

Good on you!

[Leslie]

It kind of sounds like the Golden Rule, no? Doing unto others as you would have others do unto you is very similar to living as you would have others live.

About the ads. I would like to see ads. Even though much of the idea is to not buy things, one of the most exciting aspects of the project is a shift in the economic model. Our purchasing choices have been dictated by multi-national mega corporations for too long. The more websites that show what the new choices are, the better. It's so interesting seeing who is out there starting businesses and what they are making. It's fun to know who I'm giving my money to.

[Brian M]

There is lots to say here.
Kant had 3 formulations for his imperative, which he thought all wound up giving equivalent results, but the injunctions were easier to see on some formulas than others. There is the universal law version you cited, the treat people as ends-not-means version Jono mentions (which BTW also explains why you need to buy posters of your kids and put them up with sticky tape sometimes, the rules are not JUST rules, they are there to help you treat people as people). The third version is to act like your actions were passing laws in the ideal kingdom the kingdom of ends. This means that your rules must not be too strict for humans to live happily as well as not being too loose to protect humans from each other.
Kant had interesting things to say about the relation between aethetics and ethics too, and about politics and world peace for that matter.
For more on Kant, I recommend Roger Scruton's Kant: A very Short Introduction, by Oxford University Press, next time you are at the library.

[Nellie]

Colin, what a wonderful post and right up my alley!
I'm so glad that all three formulations of Kant's Categorical Imperative have been mentioned because now we can see how much richer they are than, for instance, the Golden Rule (which doesn't survive an agent having no interest in something).

I have long thought Kant's moral theory is one of the most enduring and relevant to a project like this. But when it comes to my more personal environmental philosophy I have been attracted to Peter Singer-style utilitarian arguments to explain our moral obligations to non-human animals and even to Naess-style arguments for "Deep Ecology" which argues for the moral status of whole ecosystems. I have found it helpful to think of the rational agency of human animals as compelling me to try to live within a kingdom of ends (where this would include your example of living on a footprint that's the size that all humans could live on) while the utilitarian moral status of non-human animals and, sometimes, larger ecosystems, compells me to do what I can to promote their interests by not eating them, subdividing them, etc. given that I have plenty of alternatives as a first-worlder.

What's most interesting about this post for me, though, is that Colin has most often promoted this project in amoral terms. This is something I've been wondering about lately. Aren't I behaving immorally to other moral agents when I consume resources in a way that is unsustainable for others? Colin has consistently maintained that this project is not about pointing (moral) fingers. But why not? Why aren't the kinds of moral transgressions that will make life maximally unlivable for so many people not considered on a par with other kinds of morally-charged actions?

Great stuff as usual Colin!

[Megan]

I would think Utilitarianism as a school of thought would have a lot of positive things to say about this project. From my understanding, the goal in Peter Singer's framework (and Jeremy Benthem's?) is the creation of the largest total sum of happiness in the world; he extends the capacity for happiness to animals as well as people and, as such, our treating the environment in a way that would allow for not just ourselves but other species as well to live productively would be a very large positive. I'm an anthropologist, not a philosopher, by trade so I may not have this entirely right. :)

In any event, I enjoy reading the blog in the morning. Keep up the inspirational work.

[Megan]

I would think Utilitarianism as a school of thought would have a lot of positive things to say about this project. From my understanding, the goal in Peter Singer's framework (and Jeremy Benthem's?) is the creation of the largest total sum of happiness in the world; he extends the capacity for happiness to animals as well as people and, as such, our treating the environment in a way that would allow for not just ourselves but other species as well to live productively would be a very large positive. I'm an anthropologist, not a philosopher, by trade so I may not have this entirely right. :)

In any event, I enjoy reading the blog in the morning. Keep up the inspirational work.

[Leslie]

Nellie,

That's so true. It does seem like many people try to leave ethics or morality out of the equation. Pointing fingers, however, will not persuade people to change. What will work best? Gentle, persistent education? Setting an example? Media coverage? Political activism? Hitting people where it hurts, i.e., the pocketbook?

[tinyinkling]

With a nod to the debate about whether Ayn Rand does or does not qualify as a philosopher, I'm going to argue she does for the sake of this discussion. I think Rand in some ways defined one of the frameworks our society runs on: "The talented man (and to a lesser extend woman) is the way forward and it it immoral to limit him (or her) by laws or expectations." This is how we end up with a thousand business owners (even if their business is managing a stock portfolio in their 401K) each driving an empty SUV around. Can you argue from Rand that Rand's followers -- both the ideological ones and the practical ones -- ought to be self limiting? I don't know. But I have a hunch that we are happier and more creative when our lives aren't so crammed full with other people's creations.

[Sharon Astyk]

The philosopher I think of most often lately is Wittgenstein, and the contemporary commentator on him, Stanley Cavell. Cavell discusses skepticism and language, and comes to the conclusion that most of the work of being human is trying to believe that other people are genuinely as real as you are - and thus to believe that your actions towards them have real consequences.

I think that's a good way to think of the problem we have with the way we treat, for example, the poor of the world. We may know that our driving warms up the planet, but we say "Oh, I'm busy and tired and cranky and I just can't think of them as real like me - so I decline to recognize them while I go off and get some take out."

The challenge of really and truly believing in the realness of others preceeds the categorical imperative in a sense, or the Golden Rule, or even utilitarianism. Because we all deny that we have trouble perceiving others as fully real, sometimes we don't get this, but before we go to living our lives as though our policies were universal, we have to somehow get to the deep point that other people's pain is as real as our own.

BTW, Colin, I'm curious - why are you looking for monetary support from your readers, other than buying your book? Michelle wrote about how satisfying it was to watch money piling up in your account - is this creating financial demands that are different than that, or is it just that so many people are dying to give you wads of cash ;-)? Curious.

Sharon

[julie]

Fascinating discussion. The philosopher who guides many of my environmental actions is Aldo Leopold, the pioneering wildlife ecologist who wrote A Sand County Almanac.

Leopold argued that progress in ethics historically has occurred when we extend the boundaries of moral concern to more individuals--e.g., not just landed white men, but also poor men, women, non-whites. Peter Singer and others have urged us to extend our moral concerns to sentient nonhumans, to act in consideration of the well-being of any organism capable of suffering. But Leopold, as an ecologist, saw that we need to include ecological communities as well. After all, individual organisms can't be "happy" if our ecological communities and systems are collapsing.
This insight led Leopold to a summary of his land ethic: "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise."

I think Leopold's land ethic, or ecological imperative, is a step forward from utilitarian approaches because it moves beyond concern for individuals to communities as functioning entities. That means we must be concerned about the healthy survival of whole ecosystems and the earth into the future, not just the current happiness of humans or sentient organisms. How you balance the rights of individual humans (and animals) against the need and moral imperative to protect the ecological community is the question that Leopold and all of us must struggle with in our daily choices.

To read more about Leopold's ideas and work, visit the Leopld Foundation website.

http://www.aldoleopold.org/

[Victor]

Several comments regarding the underlying assumptions of your post: As I understand it, your initial reasoning went like this - Average American lifestyle requires x acres. The world has y total people, and z acres. x*y > z. From this you conclude that it is morally imperative to find a new lifestyle x' s.t. x'*y <= z.

First, you assume that there are only so many acres available. This ignores the possibility of expanding the biologically productive area of the Earth - for example, through aquaculture.

Secondly, you neglect to consider the possibility that the extractable productivity from an acre is variable - that with the right technology, you could after ten years get as much production from one acre as from two right now.

The assumption that rankles the most though, is that which assumes the population of the Earth as a constant. To put it simply, what if the problem is too many people? And, to be quite blunt, people should not be limited to the maximal amount of resources sustainable for everyone equally. If a person does something worthwhile, something of benefir worth the expenditure, then by all means - let them have ten, twenty, thirty acres if they need. Hundreds' or thousands' worth. Resource usage should be governed by the expected value and utility derived, not from some simplistic averaging over a whole (possibly over-large) population.

[Leslie]

Colin,

Does No Impact Man have a P.O. Box? PayPal is too much like a credit card. I'd rather contribute by check.

[Leslie]

Victor,

About your "something worthwhile" comment. You do mean something worthwhile and sustainable, don't you?

[Victor]

Leslie -

No.

Without getting into specific practical considerations, if something is worthwhile then - by definition - it doesn't matter whether or not it is sustainable; it is still worth doing. Sustainability is a diversionary subset of the main issue - doing the best we can with what we have. There are many things that are worthwhile and not sustainable, just as there are many things that are worthwhile and sustainable. There are of course also things that aren't worth doing and unsustainable - which obviously shouldn't be done - as well as things that are sustainable that shouldn't be done.

Sustainability, while important perhaps in the first approximation, is decidedly not the end-all be-all of any rational environmentalism.

[Victor]

Quick typo - "sustainable that shouldn't be done." ought to read "sustainable and not worthwhile that again, shouldn't be done."

[Leslie]

"Sustainability is a diversionary subset of the main issue - doing the best we can with what we have."

Victor, This sounds like an opinion. For instance, in my opinion, sustainability means doing the best we can with what we have. I'm not sure what you mean by diversionary.

It almost sounds as if you agree with the status quo where people use up resources without consideration of the impacts and without regard to what kind of mess is left behind.

[Victor]

What if the best option is one that is unsustainable? For instance - fossil fuels. Given the time needed to form significant reserves, any nontrivial use is unsustainable. However, in order to achieve power-generating technologies that have less of a negative impact on the environment, you have to reach a certain 'tech level' first, so to speak. You can't build nuclear reactors, solar cells, geothermal stations, etc. without first having a solid industrial base - which in turn is only achievable through unsustainable use of readily available short-term energy supplies. When one is seeking a global (or any sufficiently large scale) maximum, there will almost always be places where you have to pass through a minimum. If you never go downhill, you'll always be stuck in the foothills, never gaining the summit.

Simply put, the best thing to do with available resources isn't always the most sustainable choice, or even sustainable at all.

By diversionary, I mean that while it is sometimes best to act sustainably, that is not always the case. Fixating on sustainability often times distracts from other, more important considerations. If an asteroid was on course with Earth, and the only way to stop it was a massive industrial build-up to a space program capable of intercepting it, then obviously stopping the asteroid would be the most important consideration. Would the steps needing to be taken be sustainable? Of course not. Would they, perhaps irreparably, damage the environment? Quite likely. Destroy large ecosystems? Possibly. But, all things considered, it would still be the best thing to do.

Re: the last paragraph:

No.

Just because I disagree with you doesn't mean I agree with the status quo. I didn't say that one should consume mindlessly without regard for the future; I said that there are larger issues to consider beyond just whether or not your lifestyle is sustainable. In a larger sense, I'm arguing against a sort of knee-jerk reactionism to current trends. Deleterious dogma is best combated with critical thinking and, as much as possible, an objective viewpoint, rather than more and different dogma.

[SKG]

According to a book I'm reading, _Swimming in Circles_, aquaculture so far has been regulated (read: not regulated) according to the same "The Market Self-Corrects" tenet that depleted the fisheries and rendered cod commercially extinct. This has resulted in the destruction of coastal economies and cultures from Maine to Mexico and is fast leading us to a saltwater protein desert to match the planted pine deserts where our old growth forests used to be. (No problem! We'll move inland and switch to tilapia and catfish! And after they all die in a confinement-farm epidemic, we can hunker down to a big plate of those plentiful and crispy Blattodea: Blattellidae. Call 'em land shrimp.)

The notion that our fat brains can save us from our disasterously successful reproductive systems is seductive, but it won't get us anywhere if our fat brains cannot conceive that physics and biology are hard sciences where economics is nothing but a icky, gooshy art.

[Leslie]

Yeah, I thought that was what Blattodea were...yuck.

[Growthbuster]

I'm assuming the 24 acre average ecological footprint is not just for production of what we consume, but also for processing our waste. Are the 4.5 biologically productive acres per capita on Earth the only ones that contribute to processing our waste? Just wondering - I love the calculation so I want to be sure we have it right!

Excellent comments here, by the way, including Victor - who gives us a great example of the hurdles we face.

[Snarky]

All this talk of "worthwhile" vs "sustainable," and of Arne Naess gives me pause. Who decides what is "worthwhile"? Arne Naess makes veiled remarks about 100 million people being the maximum carrying capacity for the planet, and while he doesn't give any proposals as to how to achieve that goal, he belittles those who hesitate: "...many more do not really answer, but brush the question away as 'academic,' 'utopian.' They immediately think of the difficulties of reduction in a humane way." --Arne Naess, "Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle" 1989, Cambridge University Press, p.141.

Deep Ecologist Theo Grutter claims to have no such compunctions: "Why is it that we now try harder than ever to collectively bail out any individual who has spent his own resources and is coming to an end -- when we could nicely exchange her for a freshly baked child? ...Death seems to me such a wise and invigorating population control. Does (sic) not also the health and life span extension industries producing personal eternity need themselves now some 'birth control'?" Theo Grutter, "Dancing with Mosquitoes," 2000, Vantage Press, p. 39. This comment is even more chilling/comic (take your pick) when you realize the author has five kids! I'm glad Aldo Leopold at least puts in a good word for poor and other disenfranchised people. If Grutter and Naess had their way, they would probably reintroduce smallpox and (after making sure they and their families were properly protected) ban vaccination! After all, the poor virus has a place in the ecosystem, too!

[Liz]

Sharon asks an excellent question... if No Impact is all about not buying and reducing your needs, why are you accepting donations?

Doesn't quite seem in the spirit of No Impact to me (especially since one would think you received an advance to write your book).

[Victor]

"Excellent comments here, by the way, including Victor - who gives us a great example of the hurdles we face."
-Growthbuster

I'm unsure as to which way this is intended to parse - do my comments contain examples of such hurdles, or am I myself to be considered such a hurdle?

"Who decides what is "worthwhile"?"
-Snarky

Exactly. That's the question at the root of everything. More topically, before we rush headlong into a purely sustainable mindset, we have to consider why that is the best route, if in fact it is. It is easy enough to say that any number of things are worthwhile; the greater difficulty comes with choosing which is the most worthwhile. Complete sustainability would have such wide-reaching effects that it deserves a sober examination of all the facets of the problem before throwing full support behind it. If an elderly patient comes in with a gunshot wound, it's reasonable to go ahead and treat that right away. If it turns out that they then need a heart transplant, then a slew of other factors come in to play that must be considered.

I have not read Grutter or Naess, so I am basing the next part simply on the provided quotes. I see nothing comic or chilling at all about Grutter's position on death and life extension as laid out above. Simply put, if you are given a choice of saving either a young child with their life ahead of them or an elderly person with their life behind them, the vast bulk of the moral justification falls to saving the child. This includes evolutionary, economic, and to a less rigorous extent everyday moral considerations. Say that, as in the example above, you had one heart available for transplant. One patient was a ninety year old man, long retired, who will surely be dead in twenty years, thirty if the gods smile, if he receives the heart. The other is a ten year old boy, with at least forty years ahead of him, if he receives the transplant. Given these limited resources, whom would you choose, and how would you justify your choice? I'm curious as to on what grounds you oppose Grutter's thesis.

As for Naess, I think that his point that you mentioned about the world having a maximum sustainable population is perfectly valid. Using the original land-use equation from this post, you're faced with the hard realities - given a set amount of land, or at least, set within certain maximum limits, then to live sustainably you must either reduce per capita usage or reduce the number of heads. Simply put, from an ecological and moral perspective, why shouldn't there be a maximum population that we accept for the planet? If resources are distributed uniformly, then every new person decreases the resources available for everyone else.

Furthermore, from my reading of the passage presented, he is completely correct when saying that many dismiss the idea out of hand. Ignoring and/or dismissing the underlying issues because of difficulties in implementing a possible solution to such issues is just as short-sighted and dangerous as ignoring global warming because 'even if it were true, it would be too hard to deal with it.'

"If Grutter and Naess had their way, they would probably reintroduce smallpox and (after making sure they and their families were properly protected) ban vaccination! After all, the poor virus has a place in the ecosystem, too!"
-Ibid

So what if they favor their families over strangers? If you have ten dollars, are you morally remiss for feeding your two children instead of ten children in some Third World country? To flip that around, is it morally justifiable to kill your family in order to save a greater number of strangers? Lastly, from what you posted, it appears that neither philosopher advocates what you say that they do. The Naess passage simply suggests that people dismiss the possibility of a maximum reasonable human population for the Earth out of hand, while Grutter argues that we spend a dispoportionate amount of resources on prolonging the lives of the old instead of ensuring the lives of the young.

The comment about the virus's place in the ecosystem seems disconnected from the rest of the argument, and the mention of them protecting their families, apart from the question above, seems an unneeded ad hominem attack.

If I am contradicted in any way by other passages in the works of either author, please, post the relevant extracts invalidating my arguments or further supporting yours.