Question How immoral (amoral?) is it that, despite rising awareness over the past few decades of "Spaceship Earth's" limited resources and carrying capacity, we continue to pursue a growth-dependent economy and grossly materialistic lifestyles that are clearly unsustainable and must have catastrophic consequences, if not for ourselves, probably for our own children and certainly for coming generations. Since we are all participating in the plundering and spoiling of our planet, with whom does responsibility lie? And does the fact, that we are in "collective denial" of the consequences in any way reduce or excuse our culpability? Roger Hicks

Accepted:
November 4, 2005

Comments

It is not quite right to say that we are all participating in the spoiling of our planet. While the 16 percent of world population residing in the high-income countries live on around $30,000 annually on average, the bottom half of humankind live on less (often very much less) than $1,300 annually at purchasing power parity (corresponding to roughly $300 at market exchange rates). The bottom half are consuming and burdening the environment, but not excessively so. Nearly all the harms the question highlights are produced by their wealthier compatriots in the poorer countries and (especially) by the populations of the high-income countries.

This point heightens our responsibility. We are plundering our planet and also appropriating the spoils of this plunder so lopsidedly that half of the human population still lives in dire poverty, which exposes 850 million people to hunger and malnutrition (UNDP) and causes millions of deaths (including annually 10.6 million children under age 5) from poverty-related causes (UNICEF).

Responsibility falls on political leaders of industrialized and industrializing countries. Though some governments are doing much better than others in restraining the contributions their corporations and citizens make to environmental degradation and the persistence of severe poverty, nearly all societies are contributing far too much to these harms. In reasonably free and democratic societies at least, responsibility for these contributions is shared by ordinary adult citizens who can organize themselves to change the legal rules and policies of their government and can also make personal efforts to mitigate the harms their society is contributing to. Here greater responsibility falls on citizens who are more privileged and influential, and also on those who profit more from the injustice. They ought to make greater efforts at social reforms or mitigation of harms.

Collective denial may render some such citizens less blameworthy -- those who really never had reason to doubt that the environment is in good shape and that globalization is reducing poverty just as quickly as possible. But most adult citizens in the high-income countries and most affluent citizens in the industrializing countries do not fit this description. They have reason to think, and decide not to. Each of them bears some share of responsibility for the ongoing harms of global poverty as well as for the present and foreseeable harms of resource depletion and environmental degradation. Given the magnitude of the harms at stake, this responsibility is quite substantial.