if only clocks were toys, and time an exercise in being, and all the world were set up right so daffodils were poetry and stars were things you ate at night to grow up straight and strong, wrong and right would not exist and i could still be young again, and all the things i never did i’d never do again. –andre gregory
i seem to be on a bit of an environmental theory kick at the moment – pshow’s comment on the (red) stuff got me thinking. i’m in the midst of reading The New Economy of Nature (gretchen daily + katherine ellison) – which is about how a handful of folk are trying to turn ‘environmental services,’ like carbon sequestration and biodiversity maintenance, into functional bits of the market economy. its sort of an expanded version of the cap and trade song and dance that companies do with wetlands – ie, company x wants to buil big box store on freshwater marsh/heron habitat, gov’t says ok, as long as you shell out the dough to preserve an equivalent amount of similar ecosystem elsewhere. gd and ke go through a number of different examples of trying to make this kind of economic shenagling work, and include an overly exhaustive account of the katoomba group, but generally do an interesting job of presenting their case, which seems to be the following:
1. ‘we think of conservation as something we do for moral and aesthetic reasons, not for survival and certainly not for profit.’ this is wrong-headed and bad – not the inclusion of the first two rationales per se, but the exclusion of the latter definitely.
2. though gov’t regulation is needed and unreplaceable in the fight for conservation, the use of market mechanisms and financial incentives are ‘glaringy underemployed’ and can create a necessary and profound economic transformation.
3. financial motives and markets will not disappear. whether they are appealing or not, finding market values for ecosystem srvices are already underway. understanding them is key to making the best of them and ‘giving adam smith’s invisible hand a green thumb.’*
ie, in the words of one of the chaps they interview “we can say let’s change the world, or we can say we’ve evolved the way we are and we’re a lot of bastards, so lets work with that.”
lots of this argument i think is inevitable and important. i am at base, however, an idealist cloaked in reluctant pragmatism. i will agree that enlightened self-interest is a very healthy thing, but i have difficulty with the notion that the end matters more than the means.
in addition to the environmental hoohaery, i have been rereading my heidegger. his lecture series on the essence of human freedom, and his interpretation of kant’s arguments is fascinating (if written somewhat pedantically.)
absolute spontaneity is the faculty of the self-origination of a state; autonomy is the self-legislation of a rational will. [...]autonomy is a kind of absolute spontaneity, ie the latter delimits the universal essence of the former. only the on the basis of this essence as absolute spontaneity is autonomy possible. were there no absolute spontaneity, there would be no autonomy. the possibility of autonomy is grounded in spontaneity, and practical freedom is grounded in transcendental freedom.
in plain english, that means we have the ability to choose our actions if and only if there exists the pure possibility of choice. We have to recognize on some level that pure possibility, in order to rationally assume that we are free – in fact, we have to recognize it in order to assume rationality at all. this for me has always been a soild foundation for ethical decision making, because it translates easily for me into a conversation about the real versus ideal.
we make choices. those choices have effects on our behavior - causing us to either act or not act. these actions affect the world external to ourselves. because there is a concrete difference between the real (the world as we experience it) and the ideal (the world as we wish it to be), and there is the ultimate possibility of choice, it is a failure of belief in that ultimate possibility if we make decisions and act as though we cannot change the real into the ideal. follow? so because i am a true believer in free will,** i can’t see my way to futzing about with the pessimistic crap people insist on calling “the realities” of life and instead prefer to use my time and energy setting higher standards and will assume that they are capable of being met with a little extra effort.
what does this mean for means and ends? in an ideal world, the means are always more important, and the correct ends follow naturally for correct means. no matter how much one might think short cuts, bargaining, etc., are necessary in the moment to acheive a desired goal, the goal is always better caught and kept if it is acheived through appropriate means. sometimes you just have to look harder for means that work.
so read the book if you’re so inclined, especially the chapters on australia and costa rica, try not to be dismayed by the references to Kyoto, and take it with a grain of salt.
*isn’t that a crazy image. they attribute it to eo wilson, who’s a smart dude in any case – there is a poster coalescing in the deep parts of my brain…
** what kant actually says is that we can’t know whether absolute spontaneity exists, whether we are free, but for us to act as rational and moral beings, we must assume this is the case. its his argument for belief in god, essentially. extremely clever chap, that one.
