The Presuppositions of Policy
Ecological economics is committed to policy relevance. It is not just a logical game for autistic academicians. Because of our commitments to policy, we must ask: What are the necessary presuppositions for policy to make sense, to be worth discussing? We see two.
First, we must believe that there are real alternatives to choose from. If there are no alternatives, if everything is predetermined, than it hardly makes sense to discuss policy – what will be, will be. If there are no options, then there is no responsibility, no need to think.
Second, even if these are real altenatives, policy diologue would still be make no sense unless there were a real criterion of value to use for choosing between the alternatives. Unless we can distingish better from worse states of the world, it makes no sense to try to acheive one state of the world irather than another. If there is no value criterion, then these is no responsibility, no need to think.
In sum, serious policy must presuppose (1) non-determinism – that the world is not totally determined, that there is an element of freedom that offers us real alternatives; and (2) non-nihilism – that there is a real criterion of value to guide our choices, however vaguely we may perceive it.
The fact that many people engaged in discussing and making policy reject one or both of these presuppositions is, in A. N. Whitehead’s term. “the lurking inconsistency,” a contradiction at the basis of the modern worldview that enfeebles thought and renders action halfhearted. If we even halfway believe that purpose is an illusion foisted on us by our genes to somehow make us more efficient at procreation,(17) or that one state of the world is as good as another, then it is hard to get serious about real issues. And ecological economics must be serious about real issues. As Whitehead noted, “scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study.”(18)
Determinism and Relativism
The preceding section may seem pretty obvious and consistent with common sense. What is the point in stating the obvious? The point is that many members of the intelligentsia deny non-determinism or non-nihilism, yet they want to engage in a policy dialogue. It is not just that we disagree about exactly what our alternatives are in a particular instance or about what our criterion implies for a concrete case – that’s part of thee reasonable policy dialogue. The point is that determinists who deny the effective existence of alternatives, and nihilists or relativists who deny the existence of a value criterion beyond the level of subjective personal tastes, have no logical basis for engaging in policy dialogue – and yet they do! We cordially and respectfully invite them to remember and reflect deeply upon their option of remaining silent – at least about policy.(19)
One may well agree with the logic of our position – that policy rules out determinism and nihilism – but argue that there are so few real determinists and nihilists around that in effect we are kicking at an open door or attacking a straw man. We hope this is true. However, one leading biologist, Paul R. Ehlich, who has contributed much to ecological economics, recently wrote a book with this stated purpose.(20) “to give an evolutionist’s antidote to the extreme hereditary determinism that infests much of the current discussion of human behavior – the idea that we are somehow simply captives of tiny, self-copying entities called genes” (p.x). In other words, Ehrlcih felt that the influence of the hard-line determinists is sufficiently toxic to require a 500-page antidote, even if a rather mild and general one.
A stronger and more specific antidote was thought necessary by Wendell Berry, who took particular aim at the influential writings of Edward O. Wilson, especially his recent book Consilience. Berry deserves to be quoted at some length.(21)
"A theoretical materialism as strictly principled as Mr. Wilson’s is inescapably deterministic. We and our works and acts, he holds, are determined by our genes, which are determined by the laws of biology, which are determined ultimately by the laws of physics. He sees that this directly contradicts the idea of free will, which even as a scientist he seems unwilling to give up, and which as a conservationist he cannot afford to give up. He deals with this dilemma oddly and inconsistently.
First, he says that we have, and need, “the illusion of free will”, which he says further, is “biologically adaptive”. I have read his sentences several times, hoping to find that I have misunderstood them, but I am afraid that I understand them. He is saying that there is an evolutionary advantage in illusion. The proposition that our ancestors survived because they were foolish enough to believe an illusion is certainly optimistic, but it does not seem very probable. And what are we to think of a materialism that can be used to validate an illusion? Mr. Wilson nevertheless insists upon his point; in another place he speaks of “self-deception” as granting to our species the ”adaptive edge”. Later, in discussing the need for conservation, Mr Wilson affirms the Enlightenment belief that we can “choose wisely”. How a wise choice can be made on the basis of an illusory freedom of the will is impossible to conceive, and Mr. Wilson wisely chooses not to try to conceive it.(p.26)"
We have learned from personal conversation with Wilson that he considers the question of how one squares scientific determinism with purposeful policy to be the “mother of all questions.” Mutual humility in the face of mystery and paradox is more easily expressed, and understood, in friendly conversation over wine and dinner than in dry academic print. No one can, in practice, live by the creeds of determinism or nihilism. In this sense, no one takes these creed seriously, not even the advocates themselves. So we tend to discount any effect on policy of these doctrines. However, may open-minded citizens halfway suspect that the learned scholars who publicly proclaim these views might know something that they do not. Maybe I really am just a robot controlled by my selfish genes; maybe purpose really is just an epiphenomenal illusion; maybe better and worse really are just meaningless terms for lending undue authority to subjective personal preferences to class-based, gender-based, or race-based interests. The fact that determinist or nihilist views cannot consistently be lived out in practice by individuals does not mean that their existence, lurking in the back of the collective mind, is not capable of disabling policy.
In the introduction, we referred briefly to the difficulty some ecologists have in dealing with policy, the messy world of human affairs. To the extent that the ecologist , like some biologists, is a determinist, policy of any kind kind would be silly. Such an ecologist would necessarily be more laissez-faire that the most extreme free market economist. Hence our view that ecological economics is not simply a matter of bringing the light of ecology to dispel the darkness of economics. There is that to be sure, but the is also some darkness within ecology that economists do not need to import.
Perhaps we should take some cues from modern physics, just as traditional economics takes cues from nineteenth-century mechanical physics. Quantum indeterminacy and chaos theory have upset the “scientific “ foundations of determinacy. And many of our greatest modern physicists, those who have best come to understand the physical matter underlying the scientific materialism paradigm, increasingly question its ability to provide any ultimate truths. For example, Einstein points out that scientific knowledge “of what is does not open the door directly to what should be.” He goes on the ask, “What should be the goal of our human aspirations? The ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source.”(22) In Schrodinger’s words, “The scientific picture of the real world around me is very deficient. It gives a lot of factual information, puts our experience in a magnificently consistent order, bu it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near our heart, that really matters to us – we do not belong to the material world the science constructs for us.”(23)
Policy students, including the economists, implicitly assume that the world offers more than one possibility to choose from and that some choices really are better than others. This is also true of course, for ecological economists, who, while continuing to take biology and ecology seriously, must not fall into the traps of determinism or nihilism that seem to have ensnared some in those disciplines.
To be sure, not every conceivable alternative is a real alternative. Many things really are impossible. But the number of viable possibilities permitted by physical law and past history is seldom reduced to only one. Through our choices, value and purpose lure the physical world in one direction rather than the other. Purpose is independently causative in the world.
Sidebox 3-1: Determinism in the History of Philosophy
Materialism, determinism and mechanism are closely related metaphyical doctrines about the basic nature of reality. If you study the history of philosophy, you will see that they go back to Epicurus, Democritus and Lucretius, over 2,000 years ago, and these doctrines are still very much with us today. It would be arrogant for two economists to think that they can resolve this ancient puzzle but also naive to think that we can sidestep it, since economics is unavoidably about choice. If choice is an illusion, what does that say about economics?
Because humans are part of reality, it follows that if matter in motion is all there is to reality, then that is all there is to humans as well. Since the motions of matter are determined by mechanical laws, it follows that the same laws ultimately determine human action. This ‘Determinism’ rules out free will – it means that our purposes are not independently causative in the world. Only mechanical motion of matter is causative. Purposes, intentions, values, choices are all dreams or subjective hallucinations. They are effects, not causes.
‘Nihilism’, the rejection of all moral values, is the ethical consequence of of the materialist, determinist cosmology. Things are what they are, and you can do nothing about it because your will and purpose have no power to change things. You can have no responsibility for what cannot be otherwise. For Epicurus this was a great relief – much better than worrying about the gods anger and retribution, about responsibility and guilt and punishment. Relax, don’t worry, do your best to enjoy life. Nothing can really hurt you, because when you are dead, that’s the end of you no longer suffer. This view is still very much alive in the modern secular world, although it has a long history of conflict with Christianity, Judaism and Islam, as well as other philosophies that reject materialism as an adequate view of reality. They insist that good and evil are as real in our experience as matter and that humans have at least some capacity for choice between them. To ignore our direct experience of good, evil and freedom is considered anti-empirical and against the deeper spirit of science.
It is not our intent to convert you either to or from Epicurism, Christianity, or any other position. Maybe you do not yet have any position on this question. But logic does have its demands, and no doctrine is exempt from them. Even the early materialists recognized the contradictions involved in a doctrine that ruled out freedom, novelty and choice. Epicurus tried to restore a modicum of freedom in an ad hoc manner by introducing the notion of the ‘clinamen’ – the idea that atoms swerved from their determined motions for unexplained reasons and that this was the source of novelty, and perhaps some degree of freedom. Our advice is to be skeptical of any easy answer to a problem that has been around for 2500 years and also to be humble in the face of any logical contradictions that you cannot resolve.
The Ends-Means Spectrum:
Ultimate means and the ultimate ends are two extremes of an ‘ends-means spectrum’ in the middle of which economic value is determined. In everyday life, it is our mid-range ends and means that interact, not their ultimate origins in the realms of the spirit or the electron. We wi9ll discuss this intermediate, mid-spectrum interaction in our consideration of the function of markets and relative prices (see Chapter 8). But for now it is useful to think of the entire ends-means spectrum depicted in Figure 3.1. The economic choices that exist in the mid-range of the spectrum are not illusory. They are not totally determined by material causes from below, nor are they rendered meaningless by an absence of final cause from above or the presence of a predestining final cause. As we shall discuss later, prices, relative values, are determined by supply and demand. But supply reflects alternative conditions of relative possibility, of the reality of ultimate means, while demand reflects independent conditions of relative desirability, rooted in perceptions of the ultimate end.
In it’s largest sense, humanity’s ultimate economic problem is to use ultimate means efficiently and wisely in the service of the ultimate end. Stated in this way, the problem is overwhelming in its inclusiveness. Therefore, it’s not hard to understand why in practice it has been broken up into a series of sub-problems, each dealt with by a different discipline, as indicated on the right side of the ends-means spectrum [diagram].
At the top of the spectrum, we have the ultimate end, studied by religion and philosophy. It is that which is intrinsically good and does not derive its goodness from any other instrumental relation to some other or higher derivative. Needless to say, it is not well-defined. As noted earlier, there are unacceptable consequences from denying its existence, but the dimness of our vision of the ultimate end is part of the human condition and requires a great deal of mutual tolerance. Th error of treating as ultimate that which is not is, in theological terms, idolatry.
At the bottom of the spectrum is ultimate means, the useful stuff of the world – low-entropy matter-energy, which we can only use up and cannot create or replenish, and whose net production cannot possibly be the end result of any human activity. The ultimate end is much harder to define than the ultimate means our current approximation to the ultimate end, unfortunately, seems to be economic growth, and part of the critique of economic growth is that our devotion to it has become idolatrous, worshiping a false god, so to speak, because it is not really ultimate. But it is not easy to formulate a central organizing principle of society that does not border of idolatry.
To reiterate, since we are forced by scarcity to choose which of our many intermediate ends will be satisfied and which will be sacrificed, we must rank our intermediate ends. Ranking means establishing priority. Priority means that something goes in first place. That holder of first place is our operational estimate of the ultimate end. It provides the ordering criterion for ranking other intermediate ends. Second place goes to whatever is nearest to or best serves first place, and so on. This ranking of intermediate ends relative to our vision of the ultimate end is the problem of ethics. Economists traditionally take the solution to the ethical problem as given and start their analysis with a given ranking of intermediate ends, or with the assumption that one person’s ranking is as good as another’s, so that ethics is indistinguishable from personal tastes.
At the bottom of the spectrum, physics studies ultimate means, and technics studies the problem of turning ultimate means into artifacts specifically designed to satisfy each of our intermediate ends. Economists also habitually assume the technical problem to have been solved; that is, technology is taken as given. Thus, the remaining segment of the spectrum is the middle one of allocating given intermediate means to the service of a given hierarchy of intermediate ends. This is the significant and important economic problem, or rather political economic problem, quite distinct from the ethical or technical problems.
The middle-range nature of the problem of political economy is significant. It means that, form the perspective of the entire spectrum, economics is, in a sense, both too materialistic and not materialistic enough. In abstracting from the ethical and religious problem it is too materialistic, and in abstracting from the technical and biophysical problem it is not materialistic enough. Economic value has both physical and moral roots. Neither can be ignored. Yet many thinkers are attracted to a monistic philosophy that focuses only on the biophysical or only on the psychic root of value. Ecological economics adopts a kind of practical dualism. Dualism is not as simple as monism, and it entails the mysterious problem of how the material and the spiritual interact. That is indeed a large and enduring mystery. But on the positive side, dualism is more radically empirical than either monism, refusing to deny or ride roughshod over the inconvenient facts just to avoid confronting a mystery.(24)
