Abstract
On a cursory internet search, it would be easy to assume that Toby Svoboda's recent work constituted a quest to philosophically justify the intuitions of a curmudgeon. After volumes espousing a Kantian environmental ethic (2015) and examining the ethics of climate engineering (2017), in 2022, he published A Philosophical Defence of Misanthropy, and now, presumably still keen to avoid a good time, he offers us A Philosophical Case for Ecological Pessimism. But this assumption would be an unfair one. For if a cynic is what an idealist calls a realist (as the old Yes Minister joke has it), one gets a better understanding of Svoboda's projects: just as an unflinching examination of humanity's history of moral evils can make misanthropy a persuasive position in terms of accurate description, so a long cold look at humanity's prospects of avoiding ecological disaster leads one to see pessimism as being the orientation best justified by the evidence so far. It should also be added that although Svoboda's ecological pessimism here is compatible with his earlier position on misanthropy, it is not necessarily philosophically dependent upon it and only marginally intersects.
What exactly, then, is the ‘ecological pessimism’ for which Svoboda is arguing? At base, it is ‘the expectation that the future will involve ecological catastrophes of some kind’ (p. 3), and as such it ‘refers to a general state of mind or, more specifically, a kind of attitude’ (p. 23), as he explains in detail in Chapter 2. This is a cognitive attitude, which is helpful in that we ‘can ask whether it is true and evaluate the degree to which it is justified’ (p. 27), thus meaning that we can get reasonably clear on what we should be pessimistic about and the extent of the evils involved. For Svoboda, ‘the genuine ecological pessimist expects very bad things on a global scale’ (p. 32), with such things including enormous harms caused to sentient beings by climate change, including mass extinctions, highly numerous human and nonhuman deaths brought about through ecological injustice, and the destruction of much that is most fascinating and beautiful in nonhuman nature. While he admits to being a moral pessimist (in a sense that should not be conflated with misanthropy) and denies that he is offering anything like a morally causal model, he nonetheless sees persistent human moral failings as showing a correlation between moral badness and ecological evils – a correlation that is in principle reversible, but that is nonetheless persistent.
So much for clarity on the core terms. In terms of the book's structure and organisation, it consists of a context-giving introduction followed straightforwardly by seven chapters. Chapter 1 deals with the empirical essentials, explaining the facts around looming or possible ecological catastrophes, primarily climate change, mass extinction, nuclear war, and ocean acidification, and concluding with some brief axiological observations to the effect that these changes can only be regarded as good or bad in relation to beings for whom they matter. However, he avoids any firm commitments in the familiar debates over moral standing, accepting that humans have it while remaining agnostic about its application elsewhere, instead distinguishing the broadly axiological realm from the explicitly moral one. In this regard, geophysical disasters can be bad either by harming experiencing beings (an axiological point) or by entailing moral ills for humans (a moral point). Chapter 2 moves on to defining the meaning and significance of ecological pessimism, a discussion that I have already summarised, while Chapter 3 moves on to a striking concern, the nature of evil in environmental matters. This sounds dramatic, but Svoboda tries to avoid moral hyperbole: the effort is merely ‘to offer a plausible account of what generally counts as evil’ (p. 37), acknowledging occasional exceptions, and then uses this to argue that certain sorts of human (anti) environmental actions may reasonably be said to qualify as evil. Having then maintained that actions are typically evil if (though not only if) ‘(1) it causes extensive, unjust harm to a large group of persons and (2) this effect is reasonably foreseeable by the acting party’ (pp. 40–41). The definition is not meant to be exhaustive and remains deliberately psychologically thin in that it focuses on foreseeable harm rather than on internal motivational dynamics. On these grounds, Svoboda then classifies the familiar forms of organised climate obstructionism as being evil and anticipates a number of objections, both to the idea of invoking evil and to the concept of evil itself. A rather sad acknowledgment that even the recognition of real evil in collective actions has frequently failed to stop human beings from engaging in those actions then prepares the way to Chapter 4, which discusses objections to ecological pessimism. Here Svoboda deals systematically with a range of complaints made against environmentalists around the general accusation of being doomsters, though these have most often been made about particular issues rather than in the philosophically general terms he examines here: complaints about alarmism, uncertainty, insufficient attention to good news and the possibility that pessimism is motivationally unhelpful to attending to real threats are all addressed with some care.
For me, however, it was the final three chapters of the book that were the most interesting. In Chapter 5, Svoboda tries to mobilise his pessimism into something constructive, namely, resurrecting the ancient idea of philosophy as a way of life in a modern environmental context. Arguing both that ‘philosophy as a way of life is a tradition worth reviving and that environmental philosophy is a promising branch of philosophy to enact this revival’ (p. 75), he regards the tradition as a way to bridge the theory–action gap in environmental philosophy. Regarding its two key components in this formulation as being a conception of the environmental good life allied to a set of ‘spiritual exercises’ (p. 77) to help one lead it, he adds the requirement that it be engaged with in a rationally reflective manner that allows and enables the practice of the virtues and integration of the moral character. Suggested practices to manifest this include journal writing and Thoreauvian manual labour, both operating ‘to effect a transformation in the practitioner’ to ‘craft or strengthen an attitude regarding nature’ (p. 88). These suggestions are, of course, compatible with a plurality of different environmental theories of the good, and so in Chapter 6, he adds a general orientation to his account, that of meliorism. This orientation, which holds the view that improvement of the world is possible but requires work and is far from inevitable, is associated with the pragmatist tradition of William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey; it is primarily Peirce whom Svoboda attends to, while at the same time acknowledging that he is ‘not advocating pragmatism in a global sense’ (p. 95) but merely adopting pragmatic meliorism. As he acknowledges, the association of Peirce with the tradition of philosophy as a way of life is in some respects odd, given that Peirce was hostile to at least certain versions of that tradition, but some spadework is put in to indicate that the variant Svoboda advances does not fall foul of Peirce's critiques. As a pragmatist myself, I confess that I found the treatment here engaging even if the choice of Peirce as the primary advocate seemed a little surprising: perhaps Svoboda would have found the optimistic aspects of a Jamesian view to be too hard to integrate, but I should still have thought of Dewey as a more likely natural ally. In any case, Svoboda's invocation of meliorism is meant to apply both at the personal and political levels of transformation, leading into the concluding Chapter 7, in which he argues in more detail that empirical evidence cannot justify the alternative of ecological optimism, and moreover that his case for ecological pessimism does not translate to requiring any broader global pessimism of the sort espoused by Schopenhauer or his ilk.
Though my major interest was in the concluding chapters, I suspect that most readers will be more intrigued by the arguments for the superior rationality of ecological pessimism, especially as these are seldom advanced in such general terms and thus have wide potential applicability. Similarly, the arguments that climate change denialism and its effects might legitimately be seen as genuinely morally evil are striking and articulate what many environmentalists probably feel but express more moderately. There is certainly plenty that is provocative here, and it will be interesting to see if any eco-optimists respond to the challenge.