You mean you would sign up for Elon's death trip to Mars? Or do you expect warp drive to exist in 20 years? :smile: — apokrisis

No, I think we need to consider this difference between internal change and external change when developing policy. Growth is inherently selfish as internal change. External change, as change in relations with others has moral value. So it might be a question of whether we want to prioritize a selfish policy (based on growth) or a moral policy (based on relations with others).

The "flat" 'equilibrium forever' goal is not a realistic alternative to growth because it does not reflect an organism's true nature as a active being. So if we remove priority from growth, as a goal which inevitably runs into restrictions (nothing grows forever), then we still find the need to be active in some other way. So we can assign priority to doing what is morally good instead, as a goal which begins where growth ends.

So we can assign priority to doing what is morally good instead, as a goal which begins where growth ends. — Metaphysician Undercover

But ecologically growth doesn’t have to end. The limits to growth are limits in terms of certain unchecked exponentials. Population. Atmospheric carbon. Ecosystem destruction.

Population is enough connected to everyday life that it has been self-correcting. The problem there is we still must add a few billion, and yet we are slowing reproductive rates so fast that a grey unbalance is it own new exponential problem. A coming glut of centenarians to worry about. A double whammy from having to adjust numbers too fast.

Also it is arguable that given time we could run civilisation much as we know it off the solar flux and a big investment in sensible green tech.

And while we were at, reinvent the world of work and community in ways more to our liking.

So somewhere between how we want to live and what a planet can sustain can be a political setting we seek to optimise. But can that be captured as a snappy slogan or ethical algorithm? That is where the work starts. That would be connecting the is and the ought in some meaningful dialectical way.

But ecologically growth doesn’t have to end. The limits to growth are limits in terms of certain unchecked exponentials. Population. Atmospheric carbon. Ecosystem destruction. — apokrisis

I don't see how you can say that growth doesn't have to end, then go on to list the restrictions which will necessitate an end to growth.

Also it is arguable that given time we could run civilisation much as we know it off the solar flux and a big investment in sensible green tech. — apokrisis

Maybe we have your catchy slogan right here: "time to start living off the solar flux". What is the solar flux?

I don't see how you can say that growth doesn't have to end, then go on to list the restrictions which will necessitate an end to growth. — Metaphysician Undercover

But I am accepting your distinction that there is internal growth and external growth in some useful sense. And one may be prioritised at the expense of the other. That seems the start of an ethical-strength algorithm.

You want "endless" growth. Well what if we stop a minute to let you define that as some sustainable balance over a long enough term. Let's hear what you really want out of "a life".

We all know that our current political settings are unbalanced. Unlimited junk food today in exchange for unlimited health costs tomorrow. Unlimited working hours today in exchange for the eternal death bed lament of "I wish I spent more time with family and friends, especially the kids."

So if everyone wants to vote for a life of high-entropy consumption, the answer has to be, well wait just a bit until green tech catches up with a world in drastic demographic decline.

Or if instead this is the moment to rewrite the script – in a way that is rationally believable – then let's see what that looks like as a social balancing act. Pragmatically it might mean 90% more time with the family, as you all dig the homestead dirt, and 90% less time consuming stuff so that wealth no longer has that demand side plughole to flush the global ecology down.

Maybe we have your catchy slogan right here: "time to start living off the solar flux". What is the solar flux? — Metaphysician Undercover

Your daily dose of sunshine. The energy that spins the wheels of the thin slick of protoplasm that constitutes the Earth's biosphere.

You want "endless" growth. Well what if we stop a minute to let you define that as some sustainable balance over a long enough term. Let's hear what you really want out of "a life". — apokrisis

Endless growth is the idea which I said we should give up on. It's like the idea of endless life, impossible and inherently selfish.

You want "endle — apokrisis

Or if instead this is the moment to rewrite the script – in a way that is rationally believable – then let's see what that looks like as a social balancing act. Pragmatically it might mean 90% more time with the family, as you all dig the homestead dirt, and 90% less time consuming stuff so that wealth no longer has that demand side plughole to flush the global ecology down. — apokrisis

My point was that a "balancing act" is not the appropriate alternative. We still need something with an upside, but with an upside which is other than growth, based on external changes rather then internal changes. And whether something is external or internal is dependent on how we define the fundamental unit.

Upon making "doing good" advantageous, the people seeking advantage will start doing good.

But then when "doing good" changes, because the world always changes, they'll insist that the old "doing good" is the new "doing good" — Moliere

I guess that's where politics and ethics comes in. We need everyone, or at least enough of us, to agree on what doing good means in this context. And then we're back where we started.

There are many examples of anarchist organizations, — Moliere

Are there examples of large scale, politically effective anarchist organizations. It seems almost like a contradiction in terms.

Meanwhile other more ecologically-savvy agricultural practices – permaculture and regenerative farming – haven't scaled as they too directly challenge the Big Business status quo. — apokrisis

Could they scale economically and technologically without that resistance? Could they close those gaps in food production factors you identified previously?

And then this. The US choose to continue growth at all costs. It had only propped up world trade and Middle East oil deliveries to get the world out of its cycles of European and Asian wars. US was its own well-resourced and well-populated continental market. It did not need world trade itself. It is uniquely blessed in its geostrategic position. — apokrisis

There's a lot of talk these days about the gap between the very rich and the rest of us. Worker's pay hasn't really risen since the 1970s while the richest gather a larger and larger percentage of the wealth. How much of that has to do with globalization? To what extent does globalization lead to improvement in the standard of living for people in Asia, Africa, and South American at the expense of those in North America and Europe? If the only path to a new golden age is the dilution of the western way of life by spreading it around to the rest of the world, what realistic political strategy will lead us in that direction? As you note, the US has a viable alternative - fuck em all.

A really big game is being played by the US that no-one ever seems to talk about openly. Under Trump, Biden and whoever is allowed to follow them. The idea is that is scaling is it is time to bunker down as a nation. Canada comes along for its resources, Mexico for its cheap labour. Japan, Taiwan and Korea get to pay to stay in the club. The UK and Australia are useful to a point. — apokrisis

We'll save Australia, wouldn't want to hurt no kangaroos.

Could they scale economically and technologically without that resistance? Could they close those gaps in food production factors you identified previously? — T Clark

Imagine your community if there were no Kentucky Fried outlets or supermarkets selling industrial food. And people just had to start digging up their suburban back gardens and running a few sheep in the nearest park or football grounds.

This wouldn't be impossible with the right knowledge and social licence. Just as your friends and neighbours would all be riding around on solar powered electrical bicycles.

It is a stretch to say that a planet of 10 billion could support itself like this. I think the estimates are more about a billion as, especially with climate change, too many people live in the wrong places.

Phoenix is the fastest-growing US city isn't it? But not going to be liveable without its air-conditioning. Or once other states start asserting their rights to the water extraction that grows all those pecans and pistachios.

So what is theoretically doable is different from what is pragmatically doable. As communities close in on themselves, this re-localisation of food production is going to create a lot more losers than winners across the world.

What I'm saying is that permaculture and regenerative agriculture are the eco-smart answers that you would want to know about now that the tech-smart promises don't look like scaling in the way that would save our current globalising world-system demands.

There's a lot of talk these days about the gap between the very rich and the rest of us. Worker's pay hasn't really risen since the 1970s while the richest gather a larger and larger percentage of the wealth. How much of that has to do with globalization? To what extent does globalization lead to improvement in the standard of living for people in Asia, Africa, and South American at the expense of those in North America and Europe? If the only path to a new golden age is the dilution of the western way of life by spreading it around to the rest of the world, what realistic political strategy will lead us in that direction? — T Clark

You have to understand wealth in the context of powerlaw growth. The "fat tail" story. We naturally want to apply a Gaussian bell curve to wealth distribution – everyone bunched in the middle. But a powerlaw is a flat line with no mean. The distribution tends towards what we have been seeing. Most people down at the minimum wage end of the spectrum and a handful ending up owning the larger chunk of everything.

This isn't an inequality story in the sense of unbalanced growth. It is just the statistics of any powerlaw growth. It is the fair outcome of a growth based system. The Matthew Effect.

Political solutions of course can be applied to this reality. That is why social security was needed in the past – to stop the impoverished mob from storming the parliament. Just enough can be allowed to trickle down to put some kind of minimum wage under the whole deal.

Those who understand this wealth dynamic as a scaling issue have been championing a Universal Basic Income for this reason. But that is predicated on Big Tech creating so much efficiency that the world economic system is more at risk of crashing from deflation.

Big Tech is patting itself on the back that it will make all goods and services so cheap across the whole globe that it is imperative to start pushing money into the hands of consumers so as to keep the historical growth trajectory going.

Are there examples of large scale, politically effective anarchist organizations. It seems almost like a contradiction in terms. — T Clark

How large scale are you thinking here? At a certain point I already admitted that the answer is simply no: states are larger than functioning anarchist organizations.

But I'm familiar with some non-state scale success such as: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/10/village-against-world-dan-hancox-review or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapatista_Army_of_National_Liberation . and the form that I think of as a synthetic blend is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-syndicalism

But, really, what you say here is true regardless of these examples:

I guess that's where politics and ethics comes in. We need everyone, or at least enough of us, to agree on what doing good means in this context. And then we're back where we started. — T Clark

If enough people agree then they can pursue it -- I'm not sure if we're back where we started with that, though. Recognizing that agreement is allows collective action makes agreement a worthwhile pursuit, which gets along generally with how I think: It's more about building relationships regardless of the philosophical ideas we might be thinking about in doing politics that orient us when it comes to the doing of politics.

Are there examples of large scale, politically effective anarchist organizations. It seems almost like a contradiction in terms.
— T Clark

How large scale are you thinking here? At a certain point I already admitted that the answer is simply no: states are larger than functioning anarchist organizations. — Moliere

Earlier in this thread, @apokrisis wrote about sustainable agriculture and estimated it might work with a world population of about a billion. It strikes me that the kind of anarchist system you are talking about might work at a similar scale. That means that both are post-apocalyptic scenarios.

If enough people agree then they can pursue it -- I'm not sure if we're back where we started with that, though. Recognizing that agreement is allows collective action makes agreement a worthwhile pursuit, which gets along generally with how I think: It's more about building relationships regardless of the philosophical ideas we might be thinking about in doing politics that orient us when it comes to the doing of politics. — Moliere

Yes, this is the way democratic politics is supposed to work, but is certainly not how it is working now.

As I just commented to @Moliere, the only potentially workable solutions we've come up with are post-apocalyptic. Looking at the choices, the old hunkering down in the US of A and only letting enough immigrants in to keep our economy growing option seems like, not the best choice, but the inevitable one.

Earlier in this thread, apokrisis wrote about sustainable agriculture and estimated it might work with a world population of about a billion. It strikes me that the kind of anarchist system you are talking about might work at a similar scale. That means that both are post-apocalyptic scenarios. — T Clark

How many do you think the present system will support when the oil is gone?

Talking of scaling, consider migration:

2023 showed us, in countries all around the world, the deeply damaging impacts of climate change today. By 2050, those 2023 extremes will be seen as mild, with an increasing number of scientists warning that future impacts could lead to as many as 1 billion people being forcibly displaced.

Yes, 1 billion! — Migration In Hotter Times: Humanity At Risk

Notice again that understanding what is the case does not tell us what you ought do about it.

Notice again that understanding what is the case does not tell us what you ought do about it. — Banno

And also that the real issue is what can be done about it. Which returns us to the “is” rather neatly. Our range of views on the oughts is pragmatically constrained by what could be the collectively scaled choice. The futurised “is” of the situation.

If the future is fixed as you suggest, there is no point to this thread, or any discourse about what to do. It will happen regardless.

Which, of course, is not the case.

But as moral philosophy, we would soon have the anti-natalists hammering on the door. — apokrisis

Entering the chat...

Yes, one positive outcome of antinatalism is preventing resource strain.

If the future is fixed as you suggest, there is no point to this thread, or any discourse about what to do. It will happen regardless. — Banno

I said the future is pragmatically constrained. I really don’t understand how you keep failing to understand what is simply obvious.

What should Tasmania do when the climate refugee boats come hunting as an unsustainable flux with uncertain intentions? Ought it extend the humanitarian hand or thank goodness if had prepared its counter fleet of sea drones?

The future is open. The question becomes how we can expect the predictable state of the world to reshape our social values at a fundamental level.

The OP indeed was premised on exploring two quite distinct futures so as to elicit sharper thought on how these things work.

If you can’t even figure out how this argument has been set out, there is no place here for your belligerent presence.

I said the future is pragmatically constrained. — apokrisis

There are limits on our choices, sure, obviously. But our choices are not fixed. We have options.

My "belligerent presence" is simply pointing out that the despite the physics being settled (if that is indeed the case), there remains the question of what we ought do.

Perhaps is correct, and it's time for humanity to bow out. How do you reply? Why ought we survive?...

...and if you can address that, you might move from physics to ethics.

There are limits on our choices, sure, obviously. But our choices are not fixed. We have options. — Banno

We have options. The OP says that. Time now to give your answer on the option that scales.

Time now to agree that the question of what we ought do remains unaddressed.

Time now to agree that the question of what we ought do remains unaddressed. — Banno

By you.

Are you sure you’re feeling quite well this morning? You seem to be in some kind of psychic crisis.

And so you revert back to spitting.

FIne.

If I read this correctly, is asking you to explain what the ethical course would be knowing that our resources might be constrained by a certain impending year.

I am guessing you are laying out Scenario A and B as a choice. Is there one you think is the correct path, and why? If you choose one, what is the reasoning?

Bye bye. :grin:

Is there one you think is the correct path, — schopenhauer1

I hoped the world would wake up and change. But that moment was already missed in the 1990s if not the 1970s. So Model B is the world as it is likely to be.

And what I argued is that this would look like a deglobalising pluralism. Everyone will locally be inventing whatever way of life seems to work across the scale at which they can hope to construct some fabric of social and economic relations.

So to address the planet at a global ethical scale, we might all have agreed on one common political slogan that could be implemented as a win-win proposal across all of humanity. Then accepting this hope will fail - and might always have been impossible - now is a good time for thought to turn to other options.

If everyone will wind up having to relocalise, then doing that in Sudan is going to be different from doing that in Switzerland or Tasmania. Time to look around your immediate community and see how well it is prepared to make the best of the situation it will likely find itself in.

For the US, does it need to take alway people’s guns or is having those guns the stabilising political choice? Should Elon Musk be stopped in his tracks right now for his silly diversionary stunts or does everyone want to join in scaling his Mars colony so US citizens of even more modest incomes have a new planet to escape too.

I may joke, but really, we need to be aware that the geoengineering response is a live possibility. Why wouldn’t a rich nation try to fix climate change by tinkering with the world’s weather patterns when things get desperate. What ethical ought is going to apply even if they shift the rains off their more vulnerable neighbours.

As banjo’s comments show, moral philosophy has surprisingly little to say about a future that is outside its regular scope of operations. It is locked into the Enlightenment humanisation project as it’s moralising ought.

One should not kick puppies. Fact! But it is also a fact that my neighbours next door when I was a child had fat little puppies delivered for the weekend barbecue. In a deglobalising world, we will be faced with this human variety again.

So I simply argue for a better understanding of how human societies do pragmatically self-organise according to ethical algorithms. We can’t just desire any future as our collective “is”. Nature falls into its stubborn patterns for perfectly comprehensible and predictable reasons.

...according to ethical algorithms... — apokrisis

What are they?

How is deciding what we ought do algorithmic?

How is deciding what we ought do algorithmic? — Banno

As the OP said. Dialectically. As a rationalising balance of the competition~cooperation dynamic by which all natural systems – from ecologies to societies – self-organise.

So singalong now .... "flush me one more time baby!"

Dialectical algorithms.

And these supposedly tell you what you ought to do.

But no detail.

If the future is fixed as you suggest, there is no point to this thread, or any discourse about what to do. It will happen regardless.

Which, of course, is not the case. — Banno

"Bob, bob, bobbing along, joyfully singing its song"

Underlying this line of thinking is a determinism already set out "globally" (as you might frame it), even if we can't predict the local variations that lead there. The underlying principle is "entropic heat death", and we are just staving it off on various short or shorter timescales. That is the gist at least, I am getting from apokrisis.

However, is this not descriptive and not prescriptive? For example, a deontologist might believe as a rule that it might be wrong to harm someone unnecessarily, for example. Would you agree that this is an ethical principle worth holding? If not, why not?

I can't see how this is grounded in global determinism, even if it arises from it. There are ethics I am interested in for example. How are ethical dilemmas to be solved and why?

Here's an example I am interested in for example. How would you answer it?

Let's say that several men were fishing off a bridge. That bridge led to the parking lot where my car is so I can leave the park. The men are blocking the bridge, too enraptured with fishing off the side to catch the biggest fish of their life. They don't pay attention to you that you would like to pass to get to your car. They say, "Sorry mate, you gotta wait, fish this big don't just come here all the time".

I frame this dilemma as such:
They have a positive project, (fishing). You have a negative right (not to be blocked to get back to your car to leave the park). I would say in a completely just scenario, someone's positive projects should not interfere with someone's negative rights. In other words, in a fair world, negative rights always have a priority over positive projects when those two things come into conflict. This would be contrary perhaps to a strictly act utilitarian view whereby the most satisfaction brings the most moral outcome. In that line of thinking, the fishermen would have priority because they might have the most satisfaction of catching the fish, even if it is supposedly my "right" to not be blocked access to leave the park.

So here we have a clear (even if very minor) ethical scenario, and a certain heuristic to answer it. I guess, this might be the question here. Not what is happening, but what ought to happen.