In his fascinating talk at TED, Jonathon Haidt discusses five components of moral reasoning. His context is liberalism vs. conservatism, but this same paradigm can help us think about climate change issues.

Haidt's scheme may not be complete, and certainly there are other ways to look at morality (Lakoff's idea of conceptual metaphor, as explicated in the book Moral Politics, comes to mind). But Haidt's ideas can be helpful. He traces five main criteria for the moral choices we make. We make moral decisions based on:

1. Harm (or harm-reduction--preventing innocent people from getting hurt; reducing the damage our actions cause to our fellow creatures or the environment)
2. Fairness (justice in the broad and narrow senses of the word--criminals should pay, and you should share your cookies with me 'cause I shared my coke with you)
3. Ingroup membership and preservation (everything from nationalism and church membership to race. Applying a label like "green" to oneself is probably an example of ingroup judgment)
4. Deference to authority (assenting to the judgments of someone we consider a moral touch-stone, whether that be our pastor, the president, or Plato)
5. The maintenance of Purity (preserving our precious bodily fluids, our virginity, our honor, or culture)

Interestingly, Haidt finds that liberals put harm-reduction and fairness right at the top of their priority list, and tend to discount the other three criteria almost entirely. Conservatives give them all more or less equal weight. But nobody can avoid them all entirely; even liberals adopt the criterion of purity when, for instance, they argue against artificial food-dyes or preservatives. Liberals and conservatives just apply the criterion of maintaining purity to different things.

Now, people get very emotional about environmental issues. Climate change in particular engages people's emotions strongly. This means it also engages their moral judgment. Haidt's work implies that when we think or argue about climate change and its surrounding issues, we will probably do so through the filters of harm-reduction, fairness, in-group membership, authority and purity.

And indeed, we find arguments about reducing the harm we're doing to the environment; we also find arguments about preserving the purity of the natural world—which is slightly different. We hear arguments about North/South fairness in dividing the pie of greenhouse gas reductions. We encourage one another to vote green and to declare our greenness, and to put signs on our lawns ("I use Bullfrog Power") or windshield stickers that indicate we've bought a carbon offset for our car. We pick and choose which authority we'll pay attention to, and having an authority (such as Al Gore) is important to us. And we try to remain pure by rejecting behaviours and products that go against our green ethos.

This is very interesting, especially considering that the actual problem of climate change really boils down to a single physical variable: the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as measured in parts-per-million. It's hard to see how an argument over fairness or purity translates into ppm reduction. In fact, our moral reasoning may lead us away from actual solutions and into supporting actions that do more harm than good.

For instance, let's apply the idea of moral purity to nuclear power. There are sound arguments against nuclear power that are based on harm-reduction. Nuclear power can be dangerous, both to the environment and to human beings. Still, in the physical calculus of climate change, coal plants turn out to be doing more damage than nuclear stations. Using the moral criterion of harm-reduction, therefore, the balance tips in favour of nuclear power as an option to consider in solving the climate change problem.

Some people will, however, go into a state of blind moralistic fury at the mere suggestion that nuclear power might help. This seems odd, if the moral metric you're expecting them to use is harm-reduction. (Next-generation pebble-bed thorium reactors, for instance, stand to be intrinsically safe and can burn radioactive waste from the previous generation of reactors while producing almost none of their own. They would make waste repositories like Yucca Mountain unnecessary, and could substantially reduce the size and environmental impact of the uranium mining industry. In harm-reduction terms, it's a win-win proposition.) The reason that some will reject nuclear power even if it can be proven to reduce harm, may be that they have come to associate all things nuclear with impurity.

We would be sullying ourselves by accepting a nuclear solution; this is the implicit reasoning. And there's no use trying to argue someone out of such a stance rationally, because as Haidt points out, all our moral criteria have equal validity, in a strictly objective sense. To someone for whom nuclear power is impure, arguments of harm-reduction, fairness etc. seem beside the point. And they are.

Not convinced? Well, what about the recent debate over geoengineering? There's a lot of very strong passion on both sides of this debate, and once again while some of it is about harm-reduction, much of it is clearly about purity. Why try to block research into ocean iron fertilization, for instance, as some have done, if your goal is to reduce CO2 ppm? Research simply adds to our knowledge of what will or won't work, it doesn't harm anything. But if you see geoengineering as inherently impure, then researching a potential geoengineering technology will also be impure--and therefore, morally wrong.

My understanding of the visceral impurity reaction to geoengineering is that for some people, it stands for all that's wrong with humanity's relationship to nature. Many people seem to believe that the only acceptable solution to climate change must be one that involves the mass conversion of humanity to a more frugal, sustainable... and humble lifestyle. Geoengineering is arrogant, it elevates industrial and artificial solutions over natural ones, it runs roughshod over the normal processes of the environment, and it's yet another initiative of the guys in the lab coats and the guys in the suits to control everything. It's one more attempt to control everything--to, as Heidegger would put it, reduce the entire natural world to "standing reserve"--that is, raw material for human consumption.

...And all of these arguments are arguments from purity.

Thus does the moral calculus of climate change play out. Meanwhile, the physical calculus remains unaffected: success = less than 350 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere or an equivalent climate stabilization from some other intervention. As far as the physical climate is concerned, how the stabilization is attained is not a moral question.

So what am I suggesting here? I'm suggesting that certain kinds of moral reasoning are inappropriate when it comes to reducing physical harm to the environment. In particular, we should be deeply suspicious of arguments from purity. The notion of purity has been extremely useful for creating the in-group ethos of the environmental movement. It's an attractive tool in the toolkit of climate-change argument. But... If the robber barons turn out to be the ones to solve the climate change problem, we need to get on board with them and applaud their results--not reject them as the "impure" authors of the problem. More generally, if somebody we hate has a solution, we should be willing to deal with them; if a real solution involves something we consider impure (like nuclear power) we need to set aside our prurient distaste and be willing to embrace it. The notion of purity has some use in the climate debate, but it also stands to get in the way if we're not careful.

Nobody's going to like me for saying this, because everybody has some group or other that they don't want to see benefit from reducing climate change. Everybody has some technology, industry, pressure group, lobby, movement or philosophy that—if it turned out to be the solution to the problem—would make them feel like the devil had won.

But the fact is, the enemy here is the parts-per-million—not the oil companies, not the nuclear lobby, not the treehuggers or Greenpeace or the Great Climate-Science Conspiracy or whatever.

Remaining pure may just be something you have to give up if we're all going to cooperate together to combat the ppm.

Photo: Rick LaMesa

I really like this series Karl, but I think you have reduced too far here.

Disliking geoengineering may be a moral issue of purity for some, but that doesn't mean it is the only issue. For me it centers around stabilization. I have no reason to believe we can apply some technology to stabilize the climate without it having unintended consequences.

I would say climate chaos itself is a product of believing scientists when they tell us there are no problems and everything is fine. No, no really, we can burn all this stuff--it won't hurt a thing.

The climate system is too complex for us to control; we have shown our ineptness at understanding complex systems over and over again. That is not a moral judgement, it is a managerial judgement. The human staff are simply not up to the task. The only thing to do is leave it to the natural systems that have handled it recently, and hope things go our way. So, reduce CO2, yes, but don't think we can steer the ship.

Posted by: ruben on July 2, 2009 8:58 PM

Oh, I certainly never said that the moral issue was the only one for geo! After all, I'd constructed that argument in parallel to the argument about nuclear, and in that argument I said "There are sound arguments against nuclear power that are based on harm-reduction..." In the geo section of the argument I said, "There's a lot of very strong passion on both sides of this debate, and once again while some of it is about harm-reduction..." So I intended the parallel nature of the two arguments to be clear--and for it to be clear that I was only addressing the moral purity side of the arguments against geo.

Posted by: Karl Schroeder on July 3, 2009 5:29 AM

Please note that, while disagreement is fine, insults and abuse are not, and will result in the comment being deleted and a likely ban from commenting.

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