Questions Mon31-Wed2

You don't have to answer my questions, if you have enough to say without them...  But I would like to know what you think. You can reply in the comments section below, or in your weekly essay. Get all your posts for each week in by Thursday midnight, but don't wait 'til the last minute... we need the benefit of your thoughts prior to class. You can always go back and edit earlier author posts, and add new comments as new thoughts arise.

And, I encourage everyone to suggest Discussion Questions of your own, so we can talk about what you want to talk about too.

W 2 - EE 5-6
LISTEN-Sustained (Wednesday @dawn)

• Do you think there are inherent "limits to growth" that should constrain cultural and personal behaviors that cannot be sustained indefinitely? What present practices of your own and of our culture do you think unsustainable? 
• Do you feel any obligation to "become the change you want to see in the world," to set sustainable examples for your peers and your children? Do you (for instance) drive a hybrid or e-vehicle? Do you have solar panels on your roof? Do you diligently recycle, consume "green" products, pay attention to your carbon footprint, etc.?
• Do you think it's more, less, or as important to live sustainably yourself, as to exert and support activist pressure against fossil fuel companies and their investors, etc.?
• Does Beckerman have a point, about some forms of "strong sustainability" being "morally repugnant"? 63
• Are wind turbines like those on p. 68 "ugly," as some of their opponents charge?
• How do you feel about the Trump administration's withdrawal from international climate agreements and general refusal to join cooperative global efforts to combat climate change?
• Is it possible to be a good global citizen, when your own nation has withdrawn support from global cooperation with regard to the environment?
• Is it possible to be a nationalist AND a good environmentalist?
• Do you like the Ehrlichs' rivet analogy? 73
• What do you think of the argument that human development often results in an increase in biodiversity, so we don't need to do anything else to promote it? 75
• Does the Deep Ecology emphasis on a feeling of deep identity with, and relatedness to, all of nature, necessarily undermine "other kinds of motivation" for being environmentally aware? 78
• Are you an Ecofeminist? (And can an Ecofeminist also be a Deep Ecologist?) 79
• Is atomistic individualism a big problem in America? 82
• Are you a Peter Singer fan? Do you support "animal liberation"? What does that mean to you? 83
• Have you read Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma, or his shorter essay "An Animal's Place"? (Or any of his other books, like Food Rules or How to Change Your Mind? Comments? Do you eat what you think you should? Do you feel bad about eating animals, processed "food" your grandmother wouldn't have recognized, or anything else?
• Does Tennessee's Environmental Justice candidate for the U.S. Senate stand a chance against her Trump-endorsed opponent?
• Are you partial to any of the four forms of Green opposition to growth? 88
• Are you an active advocate (or passive practitioner) of walking, cycling, public transport, etc.?  

Following up discussion last week...

The Case for Not Being BornThe anti-natalist philosopher David Benatar argues that it would be better if no one had children ever again.

By Joshua Rothman

David Benatar may be the world’s most pessimistic philosopher. An “anti-natalist,” he believes that life is so bad, so painful, that human beings should stop having children for reasons of compassion. “While good people go to great lengths to spare their children from suffering, few of them seem to notice that the one (and only) guaranteed way to prevent all the suffering of their children is not to bring those children into existence in the first place,” he writes, in a 2006 book called “Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence.” In Benatar’s view, reproducing is intrinsically cruel and irresponsible—not just because a horrible fate can befall anyone, but because life itself is “permeated by badness.” In part for this reason, he thinks that the world would be a better place if sentient life disappeared altogether.

For a work of academic philosophy, “Better Never to Have Been” has found an unusually wide audience. It has 3.9 stars on GoodReads, where one reviewer calls it “required reading for folks who believe that procreation is justified.” A few years ago, Nic Pizzolatto, the screenwriter behind “True Detective,” read the book and made Rust Cohle, Matthew McConaughey’s character, a nihilistic anti-natalist. (“I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution,” Cohle says.) When Pizzolatto mentioned the book to the press, Benatar, who sees his own views as more thoughtful and humane than Cohle’s, emerged from an otherwise reclusive life to clarify them in interviews. Now he has published “The Human Predicament: A Candid Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions,” a refinement, expansion, and contextualization of his anti-natalist thinking. The book begins with an epigraph from T. S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets”—“Humankind cannot bear very much reality”—and promises to provide “grim” answers to questions such as “Do our lives have meaning?,” and “Would it be better if we could live forever?”

Benatar was born in South Africa in 1966. He is the head of the philosophy department at the University of Cape Town, where he also directs the university’s Bioethics Centre, which was founded by his father, Solomon Benatar, a global-health expert. (Benatar dedicated “Better Never to Have Been” “to my parents, even though they brought me into existence.”) Beyond these bare facts, little information about him is available online. There are no pictures of Benatar on the Internet; YouTube videos of his lectures consist only of PowerPoint slides. One video, titled “What Does David Benatar Look Like?,” zooms in on a grainy photograph taken from the back of a lecture hall until an arrow labelled “David Benatar” appears, indicating the abstract, pixellated head of a man in a baseball cap.

After finishing “The Human Predicament,” I wrote to Benatar to ask if we could meet. He readily agreed, then, after reading a few of my other pieces, followed up with a note. “I see that you aim to portray the person you interview, in addition to his or her work,” he wrote:

One pertinent fact about me is that I am a very private person who would be mortified to be written about in the kind of detail I’ve seen in the other interviews. I would thus decline to answer questions I would find too personal. (I would be similarly uncomfortable with a photograph of me being used.) I understand entirely if you would rather not proceed with the interview under these circumstances. If, however, you would be happy to conduct an interview that recognized this aspect of me, I would be delighted.

Undoubtedly, Benatar is a private person by nature. But his anonymity also serves a purpose: it prevents readers from psychologizing him and attributing his views to depression, trauma, or some other aspect of his personality. He wants his arguments to be confronted in themselves. “Sometimes people ask, ‘Do you have children?’ ” he told me later. (He speaks calmly and evenly, in a South African accent.) “And I say, ‘I don’t see why that’s relevant. If I do, I’m a hypocrite—but my arguments could still be right.’ ” When he told me that he’s had anti-natalist views since he was “very young,” I asked how young. “A child,” he said, after a pause. He smiled uncomfortably. This was exactly the kind of personal question he preferred not to answer... (continues)

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M 31 - EE 3-4
LISTEN [But, CORRECTION re: William Blake--Bull Durham, not Field of Dreams]...Moving forward (my Monday dawn post)

• Do you agree that when people say they don't care about the long-term future of humanity they're effectively declaring that their death obliterates the moral universe? (29)
• Is Derek Parfit right, do we have future-related duties extending to whoever lives then? (32)
• Do you personally have a harder time caring about your great-grandchildren (etc.) than your children and grandchildren? If so, do you see that as a deficiency, a failure of imagination, or just human nature?
• What should we be doing to promote "widespread environmental education" (40) that we're not doing?
• Is concern for theaters, museums, and libraries an environmental issue? (41)
• Who should appoint an environmental ombudsman? (42) Should that individual be subject to executive dismissal, removal by plebiscite, or what other form of accountability?
• Would anyone but a professional philosopher ever deny that "it must sometimes be possible for moral claims to be true or correct"? (44)
• Do you imagine you'd support strong environmental protections if you were to participate in a Rawls-style deliberation behind a "veil of ignorance"? (46) Would most people?
• Are Benhabib's criticisms of Rawls's approach as "disembedded and disembodied" fair and on target? (47)
• How can a democracy increase the likelihood that virtuous people who were "well brought up" will succeed in attaining and effectively discharging positions of leadership? 
• Is there any reason why a Kantian wouldn't also value the well-being of non-human animals? (52)
• Are eco-pragmatists the best consequentialists? (55) Are they right to resist theorizing?
• Add yours