I don't see what is wrong with doing things that you want to do in a case like this. One is not perpetually obliged to think of whether one could be doing more for people. Right now instead of responding to this query I might be more suitably employed doling out food for the homeless and the computer on which I am now typing could be sold to provide water for villages in the developing world which require it. I could right now be doing things that save lives, yet here I am selfishly typing away unnecessarily and satisfying my desire to make my opinions public.

To allow all my personal interests to be submerged under the interests of others, though, is to dissolve one's personality. For some of course taking this step is in fact a reflection of their personality, but in the example you say you want to bring your children up in a house with a yard. We are not under the obligation to be saints and there is no reason why you should feel guilty about the reasonable ambition to own a yard.

I don't know about other philosophers, but their reluctance may be motivated by thoughts such as those Gerald Gaus expresses in his essay "Should Philosophers Apply Ethics?" in Think (2005), pp. 63-67, available at

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=THI&tab=mostdownloaded

I am involved in a new organization called ASAP -- Academics Stand Against Poverty -- which (in a soon-to-be-posted essay) has examined and argued against Gaus's arguments and is now very actively doing the kinds of things that Gaus warns against. You can find some relevant material on our website www.academicsstand.org. You will there also find that one of our current projects is "Climate Voices", a project that focuses on global warming and its effects on people whose home environment is made uninhabitable thereby. This project is, by the way, essentially run by students.

I let others answer the hypothetical. The key point to stress in response to such comments is that the assumption on which they are based is empirically false (see my answer to question 2459 at www.askphilosophers.org/question/2459). We are fortunate that the moral imperative to eradicate the massive incidence of hunger, severe poverty and trivial diseases is in harmony with the moral imperative to bequeath a sustainable world, with a sustainable human population, to future generations. It is very unfortunate that this fact is not widely known. It should be stressed in any discussion of your hypothetical: a morally attractive and highly cost-effective way of slowing human population growth is to fight hunger, severe poverty and trivial diseases and to promote education, especiaally for girls and women.

While Oliver Leaman's aesthetic justification of efforts to preserve endangered species is certainly one consideration that might be advanced in support of such efforts--as well as efforts to preserve plants and other living organisms, such as coral reefs and rainforests (conceiving of the forest as a whole, an ecosystem, as an organism), and even inanimate natural features of the environment, such as icebergs--it's not clear to me that it's the most satisfactory or compelling consideration. Absent some justification for a principle of plenitude--of maximizing the variety of beings in the world--there is no reason to accept such a justification of efforts to preserve anything.

It seems to me, however, that other considerations might be advanced in support of conservation. First, it might be argued that given the interrelationship of species, the elimination of any species, especially a predator like the wolf, which plays an important role in keeping the population of other species in check, might lead to the growth of the population of certain animals that could have significant repercussions in the long-term on the environment as a whole, and hence have significant ecological repercussions for the suitability of the environment as a home for human beings. Moreover, if one thinks that human beings are the 'stewards' of the Earth, who are responsible for preserving it for future generations, then one might think that human beings thereby have a responsibility to preserve the environment as much as it is possible for them to do so.

Certainly other considerations could be advanced: in general, however, it seems to me that whenever when considers such 'applied' questions, one should seek to advance arguments that rest, as much as possible, on considerations that are as uncontentious as possible and hence can appeal to as many people as possible, in order that the consideration can help to effect change. (This is not, of course, to assume that the considerations advanced above are as uncontentious as possible!)

We are harmed if species disappear, even if they are rather disagreeable to us on occasion, since the variety that exists in the world is diminished. The reasoning is not moral but aesthetic. Is it not better to live in an environment with more difference in it as compared to something that is uniform?

Part of the problem is to decide what counts as "tampering with the natural order." In at least some senses, we "tamper with the natural order" all the time. Modern medicine is a clear example, but you could even make the case that selective breeding of the sort that farmers and gardeners have practiced for centuries is another case. Most of us don't see these as wrong.

It may be useful to step back and look at the phrase "playing God." If there is a God, and if that God has designed a providential plan that works to our benefit and if some sort of intervention would amount to thwarting that plan, then that would be a reason for not making the intervention. Those, needless to say, are big "ifs." However, even if we grant them, we're left with the problem of deciding which sorts of interventions would count. God's plan -- even if there is one -- isn't as clear as some would like to claim.

But let's leave the theological issue aside. You ask whether tampering with the natural order is acceptable if we understand the consequences and know what we're doing. Let's grant for argument's sake that it is. The moral that some "don't play God" stories suggest is that these "ifs" about consequences are also very big. The worry is that some interventions might have large, unintended and undesired effects. On that reading, such stories are cautionary tales about arrogance and lack of due regard for what we don't know.

It's hard to deny that there's some good sense here. Large, sudden disruptions of complicated systems often produce unintended consequences. And indeed, in some cases one might reliably predict that our predictions will be unreliable. Stripped of debatable theological overtones, there's something to the worry about "playing God." The practical problem, of course, is to sort out the cases. Not all interventions are as risky as some would claim, and sometimes taking chances pays big dividends. But turning those platitudes into detailed advice would take this philosopher, at least, well beyond the realm of what he knows.

Good question! Usually we label as "artificial" that which is an artifact of intentional, purposive activity. I am inclined to think that beavers and birds are purposive and they seem to have desires but perhaps we should be reluctant to attribute to them the full blown power of deliberation and intentionality. In any case, it may (as you suggest) seem arbitrary to see the beaver dam as natural and a simple log cabin as artificial even if the latter (unlike the dam) is the result of deliberate planning and creative intelligence. But perhaps there might be some point to arguing that some human artifacts are more natural or, using a related concept, ecological than others. Insofar as I build a log cabin that does not involve laying waste an entire forest, diverting streams, destroying the habitat of significant animals, and so on, perhaps we might see that as more natural insofar as it is more in keeping with the ecology of the region than if I destroy the forest and put up a parking lot that (let us imagine) no one uses. Perhaps the latter is "artificial" not just in the sense that it is an artifact but in the other sense of the word "artificial": there is something shallow (from an ecological point of view) about the parking lot construction.

In "Brains in a Vat," the first essay of his book, Reason, Truth, and History, the philosopher Hilary Putnam considers a thought experiment, according to which an ant crawling along the sand produces what would appear to be an image of Winston Churchill. He asks whether this image would count as a depiction of Churchill, and claims that it would not: it would not count as a depiction or representation of Churchill, because the ant has never seen Churchill, and therefore could not have the intention to depict Churchill. The image, therefore, is not intrinsically meaningful: it would take an observer to notice that the ant's tracings resemble Churchill, and to conclude that s/he has seen a representation of Churchill traced in the sand, thereby endowing the ant's tracings with meaning. Nature as a whole, like the ant, does not seem capable of producing meaning: in order to produce meaningful representations (including pictures or words), there must be an agent who knows how to manipulate those signs. Whereas astrologists consider the order of nature to be meaningful, this seems to be an instance of what the philosopher Gilbert Ryle called a 'category mistake': the ascription of meaning to the wrong sort of thing to be a producer of meaning. If this is correct, then it should be concluded that nature itself doesn't have meaning. Now what distinguishes astronomy from astrology is that in astronomy, the study of the heavens is undertaken in order to explain the nature of the heavens, whereas astrology seeks to interpret the heavens. The astrologer's investigation thus seems to presuppose that the heavens themselves are meaningful, whereas the astronomer's investigation presupposes no such thing. While the astrologer need not--anymore than the astronomer--believe that there is any kind of ultimate purpose to be found in nature--in this case, in the heavens--the astrologer's attribution of meaning to the heavens does seem to presuppose that there is some kind of meaning-producing entity behind their configurations, and thus may--although I think it need not--lead naturally to the view that there is some source of purposiveness, of intention, of meaning, behind the stars that endows them with their significance. The astronomer makes no such assumptions, and so the astronomer's investigation, unlike that of the astronomer, does not attribute any meaning to the heavenly phenomena that s/he studies, and, therefore, does not presuppose that nature itself has any ultimate purpose. This need not imply, of course, that the working astronomer cannot share with the astrologer the belief that there is some ultimate purpose to nature, but only that such beliefs do not figure crucially in the astronomer's (or, for that matter, any contemporary scientist's) investigation of nature itself, quâ scientist.

I agree with Thomas that it would be nice if we could identify multiple forms of government that can handle these ecological issues -- it would be much better to be able to make comparative assessments of those forms of governments and their capacities and legitimacies than to contemplate, say, the prospect that no existing form of government may be able to handle these crises or that no combination of current governments may be able to work effectively together to tackle them in concert.

But does our ability to assess the impact, if any, of those crises no the legitimacy of our government depends on knowing that "another, non-democratic form of government" has the capacity and realistic prospects to address those issues?

On the one hand, knowledge of that sort could cause us to create a comparative assessment on which the urgency and significance of those crises makes that non-democratic form of government preferable to our own. Whether or not that sort of comparison could also motivate an argument that our democratic government has less legitimacy than we think it does, I'm unsure.

On the other hand, I think there is some plausibility in thinking that a strong case that our form of government lacks the capacity to handle those issues--and has little realistic prospect to reform itself to be able to address them in time to help prevent global catastrophe--may lessen its legitimacy. At least, I agree with the questioner that the existence of ecological catastrophes on a global scale would represent a fundamental challenge to governments, and having in hand a strong case that (1) there is a strong case that such global castrophes will occur unless there is effective governmental action and (2) the prospects for democratic reform of the sort that Thomas discusses are dim might well motivate an argument that would threaten the legitimacy of our form of government.

I don't know whether those two points can be strongly defended, but those are the two issues that I would address to investigate whether these prospective crises do effect the legitimacy of democratic governments, and I think we can do this without having already identified a different form of government that is able to handle those crises.

There is a hidden assumption in your questions, namely that we know another, non-democratic form of government under which distant ecological threats and intergenerational injustice would be adequately tackled. In my view, this assumption is false. Any government is run by human beings, and human beings have more to gain by making decisions favorable to the living than by making decisions favorable to future populations.

But if you disagree, and know of a non-democratic form of government that would do the trick, I would like to know which this is and, more eagerly, what evidence you have for your view.

For the time being, I would then look elsewhere to a solution to the very serious problems you highlight. I would think hard about reforms of the present systems of democracy to make them more likely to take the more distant future into account.

How can this be done? First, we might institute an independent agency that, for any major piece of legislation, prepares a future impact assessment of it and of any plausible alternatives to it. This way legislators and the general public have a reasonably objective source of information about how much harm particular decisions we now take are likely to cause to the environment and future human beings. Second, we might try to impose some constitutional constraints upon cost-shifting into the future. (BTW, 2010 is a big cost-shifting year in the US, because this year people with high incomes can convert their traditional IRAs into Roth IRAs, which gains a few billion in revenues in the short term and loses hugely more in the long term.) Third, we should try to collaborate internationally on solving such problems. The reason is that collaboration can greatly improve the cost/benefit ratio. Each population is far more willing to reduce its excessive CO2 emissions by 15%, say, if this is part of a global effort that will result in a 10% reduction in global emissions than if this is merely a national effort that will result in a much smaller reduction in global emissions. Fourth, we should curtail political lobbying and legalized bribery of our elected politicians by well-heeled corporations and individuals, which tend to shift the political balance in favor of particularistic, short-term interests and against more widely shareable long-term interests.