Monday, January 03, 2005
What should we have done?...
DarkSyde has written a lengthy post over at Unscrewing the Inscrutable titled A Midwinter Night’s Mare (there must be a joke I’m missing here, but why isn’t it titled A Midwinter’s Nightmare?).
Dark, essentially, describes how we have greedily devoured the world’s petrochemical reserves to a point in which all probable outcomes are bleak, to say the least. Due to our misguided management of the earth’s natural resources, we have positioned ourselves for impending wars, pestilence, and famine.
And, according Dark, this is not a good thing.
The question he cannot address, within a natural evolutionary framework, is… Why is it not a good thing?
Indeed, to be consistent within the Methodological / Philosophical Naturalism worldview, one must conclude that there is no should. Dark wonders what future generations of humans will think of our greedy ways. Will they condemn us or will they learn from our mistakes, and forgive us? Yet, given the there is no should parameter established by M/PN, Dark’s concern is just as valid as those of the fellow who sucks the earth dry of oil and, with regards to future generations, simply shrugs his shoulders and says, “screw ‘em!”
I’m not quite sure why, but this blog is listed as one of the architects of the nightmare, and is linked to at the end of Dark’s post.
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2 comments:
In the framework of philosophical naturalism, the only reason we might care about the world's oil reserves is that we personally might be caused some sort of pain or emotional turmoil over them. But there is no "should" there, no moral imperative -- there is only a preference to avoid pain. That preference carries with it *NO MORAL OR ETHICAL FORCE* under philosophical naturalism. Running out of oil might cause pain, but pain is just the firing of certain neurons, and the only "should" that applies there is that the neurons should fire when they recieve the proper electrochemical signal. Under philosophical naturalism, as long as the laws of physics are satisfied, it doesn't matter how much pain is involved; there's no ethical or moral reason to prefer less pain over more pain, and therefore, the argument has no force.
Of course, the argument that we've mismanaged oil is, itself, pretty stupid. Here's the thing -- oil industry experts and oil company owners aren't fools. They're not going to let oil run out in a catastrophic way, because that doesn't help their bottom line or their lifestyle. What's best for their bottom line is having another energy product lined up and ready to go as soon as oil prices get high enough, so that they can corner a new market and reap the profits. While various articles often hint at a conspiracy to silence those who claim the oil industry is nearing collapse (as if the complaints haven't been public for at least 20 years) and they often cite mysterious unnamed experts, the people whose money is on the line if the oil industry collapses don't seem interested in moving their money elsewhere. If there's any expert testimony you should listen to, it's the testimony of where people put their money.
Okay, I see the joke now (as Foghorn Leghorn would say, "I keep pitching 'em, but you keep missing 'em!"). I've never heard of "mare" as a reference to a nightmare... as far as I know, "mare" either refers to a horse, or to a "sea" on the Moon.
I agree regarding the potentiality of alternative fuel sources for the future. I think Dark's concern is that we might not make it far enough to utilize said sources before we obliterate ourselves.
Of course, I remember a professor from a City & Regional Planning course I took in college (back in the '70s) predict that by the '90s we'd have so depleted our petrochemical reserves that automobile travel as we then knew it would be forbidden. One of my co-workers remembers taking a field trip as a kid and hearing that his grandchildren wouldn't know what a tree was. The Trans-Alaska Oil Pipeline was supposed to wipe out the caribou population and only transport oil for about 10 years before it ran dry. The caribou are still there and it's been over 25 years since the pipeline started production. The company I work for is actively involved in the petrochemical field around the world and I have never heard any of the process engineers comment on the potential lack of supply (in the near term).
Michael Crichton gave a talk on this topic a few years ago and lamented that if we can't trust our weather forecasts for the next 10 days, how can we trust predictions for the next 100 years?
I traverse a tangent though as the point of my post was to highlight the simple fact that a truly consistent naturalist cannot explain why he cares about such matters.
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