A Thinking Reed

Category: Social and ethical issues

  • Debating the bomb

    Apparently some people never get tired of arguing about whether the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified. Happily, though, there is a link there to G.E.M. Anscombe’s “Mr Truman’s Degree” in its entriety, which I don’t think I’ve been able to find on the web before now.

    I mean, look: in terms of traditional moral theology Anscombe is absolutely right. The bombings were murder plain and simple. The only way I can see to defeat this is by abandoning deontological considerations and making some kind of consequentialist argument that the bombings were justified, which is what defenders usually do. You also get the rare bird who actually denies that there were any “civilians” in the morally relevant sense at those targets, not seeming to realize that this repugnant doctrine would license virtually any act of terrorism since civilians can always plausibly be held to be “contributing to the war effort” if you define that broadly enough.

  • Libertarians and animal rights

    Jim Henley asked for a libertarian justification for animal cruelty laws here. Other libs have chimed in here and here.

    As it happens, I was recently reading an article by Stephen R. L. Clark called “Animals, Ecosystems, and the Liberal Ethic” (The Monist, Vol. 70:1, Jan. 1987) where he tries to articulate a rationale for protecting animals (and ecosystems) that arises out of liberal/libertarian ethic.

    We’ve already seen that Clark is something of an anarcho-conservative, and here he takes the tack of showing that a concern for libertarian style rights is by no means incompatible with concern for animal rights.

    What Clark suggests is, in essence, that we can’t assume that the differences between humans and animals are so great that the former always have a full complement of rights while the latter have none:

    First, it is implausible to claim that the only evil done in imprisoning, tormenting and killing even a rational agent is that we thereby interfere with her moral choices: much of the evil is simply that we do what she does not want done. That evil is also done if our victim is non-rational, not morally autonomous. What difference does it really make whether or not she has or could have a principled objection to our behaviour? If she has no will in the matter I do not violate her will, but I clearly violate her wishes.

    Secondly, what ground have we got to make so radical a distinction between wishes and the will, between the desires and projects of a nonhuman or sub-normal human and the principled will of a rational agent? Why should it be supposed that I make my claims upon the world as a carefully moral being, in some way that a non-rational being could not manage? “A cat who is being hurt will struggle, scratch and try to bite. Why is not this a claiming of its rights?” (Sprigge 1984 p. 442). Why isn’t a blackbird claiming his rights when he proclaims his territorial possession? What is lacking in too much discussion of these questions is any serious attention to what ‘animals’ are like, and what evidence there is for the vast difference in nature that humanists like [H.J.] McCloskey must conceive. It is quite inadequate to appeal to current English linguistic usage, as if that settled the question. If it is wrong (not merely imprudent) to batter human infants this may be partly because it seems likely to interfere with their future projects, but it is chiefly wrong because they do not like it, nor would they like its further consequences if they knew of them. The same wrong is done in battering baboons: who could imagine that baboons don’t mind?

    It follows, if the abstract argument for natural human rights must be extended to allow similar rights to other agents (even if not strictly ‘moral’ agents), that our property rights in non-human animals must often be suspect. A right that licenses the violation of a right is no right at all, and ‘self-owning’ is a category more widely extended than we had thought. A being ‘owns itself if its behaviour is the product of its own desires and beliefs, if it can locate itself within the physical and social world, and alter its behaviour to take account of other creature’s lives and policies (see Clark 1981). This, I take it, is [Tom] Regan’s concept of what it is to be ‘the subject of a life’, not merely living (1983 p. 243). Such self-owners are, in the relevant sense, equals, and a just, liberal society cannot allow them to be owned by others, even if it allows them to be employed on terms not strictly of their own making.

    The libertarian argument is that “self-owners” have the right not to be arbitrarily subjected to the will of another. Clark’s contention is that “self-owner” covers a wider range of creatures than just human beings. This is essentially a version of the so-called argument from marginal cases: it’s very difficult to specify a set of criteria for whatever morally important category you like (self-owner, person, rational agent, etc.) that includes all and only human beings. Either it will be drawn so narrowly as to exclude some classes of humans, or it will be drawn so widely that at least some non-human animals count.

    What’s noteworthy is that a lot of libertarians seem to want to maintain the traditional status of human beings as sole rights-bearers without the metaphysics to back it up. An Aristotelian worldview that insisted on big bright distinctions between natural kinds might be able to provide support for this view, as might some religious views. But a world of evolutionary development where living things exist along a continuum without sharp breaks seems to sit more comfortably with the idea of a continuum of moral rights.

    Clark’s distinction between animals being “owned” and being “employed on terms not strictly of their own making” injects some fuzziness into thinking about what might actually be entailed by all this. Is there a sense in which animals could be said to “consent” to at least some of the relationships that have evolved between them and human beings? Could domestication be understood as somehow analogous to the entering into of a partnership? Wherever we draw that line, though, some forms of wanton cruelty would seem to be easily ruled out. Also, I might add, would things like factory farming: an arrangement which is extremely difficult to see any animal “consenting” to in however attenuated a sense we can come up with.

  • Liberation, human and animal

    (This post actually started out short. Honest!)

    Christopher (at his new blog) directs our attention to this article by Andrew Linzey on the connection between violence against animals and violence against humans.

    Clearly it’s not a matter of cruelty to animals causing violence against human beings in a straightforward way. Rather, as Linzey says, “cruelty to animals is one of a cluster of potential or actual characteristics held in common by those who commit violence or seriously anti-social acts.”

    This raises the question of how animal liberation and human liberation might be connected. Animal liberationists are often faced with the objection that human oppression is so severe and widespread that to divert efforts and resources to injustices against animals would be irresponsible at best and misanthropic at worst.

    In this article philosopher Stephen R.L. Clark suggests, however, that while some proponents of animal welfare and liberation have neglected issues of human oppression, the two causes are actually integrally connected. In his words, “[a]s long as we live, as human beings, in hierarchical, class and caste-divided societies, we must expect us to be cruel,” and a “genuinely humane endeavour on behalf of the non-human cannot be separated from a similarly humane endeavour on behalf of humans.” The idea being, I think, that as long as we have the mindset which takes domination and exploitation as natural and inevitable, neither animals nor weaker and more vulnerable humans are safe.

    At the level of our general view of the world, at least, there is a significant connection between our view of other human beings and our view of other animals. If God creates all this is out of love, then, to the extent that we share in or imitate the divine love, we will see other beings as having a value and integrity and mystery that is independent of whatever benefits we might get from them. As Clark says “[i]n love, we attend to things as being beautiful. Willing their good, we come to know what ‘good’ is in their case. False love imposes burdens, fantasizes, and grows angry when the ‘beloved’ is not as we wish. True love puts aside concupiscence.”

    Love isn’t just a sentiment; it’s the most truthful and accurate perception of reality there is. Our typical perception of reality is in terms of how things affect us. This is natural and probably inevitable to a great degree, but moral progress largely consists in moving beyond this egocentric perspective and recognizing the independent reality and value of beings other than ourselves. “Love is the recognition, the realization, of a creature chosen from eternity by God, who ‘hates nothing that He has made (why else would He have made it?)’…What God has chosen is not only what is, literally, human: every thing is a message of love, which we misread or miss entirely as long as we suppose that we are ourselves the only centre of the universe.”

    Consequently, when we perpetrate violence against others, or exploit them for our own gain, we are denying their independent reality and treating them as mere means to our ends. Humanism and most traditional forms of Christianity agree in holding that only human beings are genuinely ends-in-themselves. But unlike humanism, Christianity has a certain built in trajectory toward a wider apprehension of the value of all created being.

    The worry, of course, is that a greater appreciation of the value of non-human creatures will somehow downgrade the moral status of human beings. Though rarely is actual evidence offered to back this up, critics can point to thinkers like Peter Singer who simultaneously advocate for better treatment of animals and argue for the permissibility of killing “defective” or “unwanted” infants. Thus in the minds of the critics any blurring of the line between the value of human and non-human life seems inextricably tied to a diminished appreciation of the dignity of human beings.

    But I don’t see why this has to be the case. Singer is a bit of a unique case because, as an ultra-consistent consequentialist, he is willing to follow the premises of his arguments to the bitter end where someone else might balk at his conclusions, many of which are highly counterintuitive to say the least! But it by no means follows that someone arriving at similar conclusions about our treatment of animals by a different route needs to embrace the same conclusions as Singer regarding, e.g. abortion or infanticide. Andrew Linzey, for instance, not only argues for a paradigm shift in the way we look at animals, he has also argued against using human embryos as experimental subjects on the similar grounds that life is not simply ours to do with what we will as long as it seems to serve our interests.

    In other words, concern for animals isn’t properly understood as an attempt to downgrade the moral status of human beings but as an attempt to upgrade the status of other animals. No one (well not no one) thinks that feminism must necessarily result in downgrading the moral worth of men. As the somewhat sardonic bumper sticker puts it, “Feminism is the radical idea that women are people.” We might say, less pithily, that animal liberation is the radical idea that living, sentient creatures are more than mere objects or material to be used in whatever way we see fit. Human beings should feel threatened by that assertion only to the extent that our present lifestyles are premised upon its denial.

    This doesn’t mean that genuine human and animal interests won’t ever conflict (though I’d argue far less so than some anti-animal liberation polemicists would lead you to believe). But to the extent that the moral life is about learning to see others as independent realities having their own worth and goods proper to their nature, I don’t think we can, at least on religious grounds, set the limits of our moral concern at the boundary of the human kingdom.

    But even if that’s right it doesn’t resolve the question of priorities. Even if we agree in principle that animals are beings whose welfare and dignity ought, in an ideal world, to be safeguarded and that concern for animal well-being and human well-being is part of the same view of created being as intrinsically valuable, how can we justify attending to animals when there is so much human misery in the world? Shouldn’t we focus on the most important issues first?

    I think the response to this objection has at least three parts. First, much of our mistreatment of animals would be abated merely by ceasing to do certain things. This doesn’t require us to dedicate new resources to the well-being of animals, but merely to stop harming them. I’m not going to claim that, say, vegetarianism is morally obligatory, but the greatest source of human-inflicted animal suffering, both quantitatively and qualitatively, is almost certainly animal agriculture. Virtually all of us (meaning those of us in the industrialized West, the kind of people with reliable internet connections. ;-)) have it in our power to stop contributing to this by, at least, seeking alternatives to factory farmed meat.

    Secondly, in allocating our resources dedicated to alleviating suffering or improving the lot of others, very few of us adhere to a strict utilitarian ordering by focusing all our efforts on the single most serious problem currently facing the world. For instance, you could argue that nuclear disarmament is the most serious moral problem there is because it alone has the potential to result in the utter destruction of the human race (and most other life for that matter). By this standard, pretty much every other problem pales in comparison. And yet many people feel eminently justified in dedicating time and resources to causes other than nuclear disarmament.

    Why is this? I think it’s partly because we don’t order our priorities in quite that rationalistic a fashion. Different people feel drawn to different issues or causes for a variety of reasons that often have more to do with personal experience than a dispassionate ordering of priorities. And this applies to people who’ve dedicated part of their lives to working toward improving the lot of animals. Is someone who works on behalf of animals to be criticized for spending that much less time working to alleviate poverty or fight illiteracy if the person who has taken up those causes isn’t to be criticized for failing to dedicate all their efforts toward eradicating war or disease? There is properly a kind of division of labor, it seems, based on interest, personality, experience, and sympathy that doesn’t admit of a simple hirearchical ordering.

    Third, it can be argued that we have, by our assertion of dominion over other living creatures, incurred special obligations toward them. Our obligations, for instance, to animals in the wild may largely be to “do no harm,” but our obligations toward domesticated animals may well be stronger precisely in light of the fact that we have taken them into our service. Just as a man has obligations to his own children that he doesn’t have to the children of strangers, we may well have special duties of care to “our” animals as a consequence of the rights we have asserted over them and the use we make of them.

    We also often recognize special duties to the weak and vulnerable; contrary to some theories of morality, moral considerability isn’t directly dependent to one’s abilities as a free, independent agent capable of discharging duties and entering into agreements. In fact, our moral sentiments often point in quite the opposite direction: those who are weak and unable to fend for themselves call for greater care just because they are at our mercy.

    It’s also worth pointing out that some of the most important efforts on behalf of animals were undertaken by those with impressive humanitarian records. William Wilberforce, not exactly a slouch in the area of human rights, co-founded the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. It may be that widening the circle of moral concern, far from being some kind of zero-sum game where some can benefit only at the expense of others, actually reinforces benign attitudes, making people more sensitive to suffering and injustice wherever it’s found. And it may even be that proper attention to the rightful claims of humans and animals will only be acheived together.

    [Note: this post has been slightly edited for clarity.]

  • McKibbon, Roepke, and John Paul II

    Caleb Stegall reviews Bill McKibbon’s Deep Economy (which I still haven’t read) in a recent issue of The American Conservative. In the course of the review he mentions this great exchange between economists Wilhelm Roepke and Ludwig von Mises:

    In 1947, two titans of 20th-century economic theory, Ludwig von Mises and Wilhelm Röpke, met in Röpke’s home of Geneva, Switzerland. During the war, the Genevan fathers coped with shortages by providing citizens with small garden allotments outside the city for growing vegtables. These citizen gardens became so popular with the people of Geneva that the practice was continued even after the war and the return to abundance. Röpke was particularly proud of these citizen farmers, and so he took Mises on a tour of the gardens. “A very inefficient way of producing foodstuffs!” Mises noted disapprovingly. “Perhaps so, but a very efficient way of producing human happiness” was Röpke’s rejoinder.

    Roepke was a free market economist, widely credited with Germany’s post-war economic recovery. He was also a deeply conservative thinker in the best sense who recognized that life is more than the market. His A Humane Economy argues that the market requires strong social, cultural and legal frameworks in order to function as it should without reducing social values to market values.

    Here’s a snippet:

    The questionable things of this world come to grief on their nature, the good ones on their own excesses. Conservative respect for the past and its preservation are indispensable conditions of a sound society, but to cling exclusively to tradition, history, and established customs is an exaggeration leading to intolerable rigidity. The liberal predilection for movement and progress is an equally indispensable counterweight, but if it sets no limits and recognizes nothing as lasting and worth preserving, it ends in disintegration and destruction. The rights of the community are no less imperative than those of the individual, but exaggeration of the rights of the community in the form of collectivism is just as dangerous as exaggerated individualism and its extreme form, anarchism. Ownership ends up in plutocracy, authority in bondage and despotism, democracy in arbitrariness and demagogy. Whatever political tendencies or currents we choose as examples, it will be found that they always sow the seed of their own destruction when they lose their sense of proportion and overstep their limits. In this field, suicide is the normal cause of death.

    The market economy is no exception to the rule. Indeed, its advocates, in so far as they are at all intellectually fastidious, have always recognized that the sphere of the market, of competition, of the system where supply and demand move prices and thereby govern production, may be regarded and defended only as part of a wider general order encompassing ethics, law, the natural conditions of life and happiness, the state, politics, and power. Society as a whole cannot be ruled by the laws of supply and demand, and the state is more than a sort of business company, as has been the conviction of the best conservative opinion since the time of Burke. Individuals who compete on the market and there pursue their own advantage stand all the more in need of the social and moral bonds of community, without which competition degenerates most grievously. As we have said before, the market economy is not everything. It must find its place in a higher order of things which is not ruled by supply and demand, free prices, and competition. It must be firmly contained within an all-embracing order of society in which the imperfections and harshness of economic freedom are corrected by law and in which man is not denied conditions of life appropriate to his nature. Man can wholly fulfill his nature only by freely becoming part of a community and having a sense of solidarity with it. Otherwise he leads a miserable existence and he knows it. (A Humane Economy, pp. 90-91)

    Here Roepke sounds a bit like John Paul II, who recognized the value and importance of markets for production and exchange, but the equal or greater importance of maintaining the value of things, especially human life, that cannot be reduced to exchange value. As he wrote in the encyclical Centesimus annus:

    It would appear that, on the level of individual nations and of international relations, the free market is the most efficient instrument for utilizing resources and effectively responding to needs. But this is true only for those needs which are “solvent”, insofar as they are endowed with purchasing power, and for those resources which are “marketable”, insofar as they are capable of obtaining a satisfactory price. But there are many human needs which find no place on the market. It is a strict duty of justice and truth not to allow fundamental human needs to remain unsatisfied, and not to allow those burdened by such needs to perish. It is also necessary to help these needy people to acquire expertise, to enter the circle of exchange, and to develop their skills in order to make the best use of their capacities and resources. Even prior to the logic of a fair exchange of goods and the forms of justice appropriate to it, there exists something which is due to man because he is man, by reason of his lofty dignity. Inseparable from that required “something” is the possibility to survive and, at the same time, to make an active contribution to the common good of humanity. (Para. 34)

    It’s probably no coincidence that Roepke, the son of a Lutheran pastor, enunciated a similar kind of Christian Democratic vision. American conservatism has, unfortunately, tended toward a kind of “vulgar libertarianism” in theory, which valorizes “the market” as the solution to all social problems. And in practice it has ironically tended toward corporatism – favors for big business that actually end up shielding them from the vicissitudes of the market.

    The interesting question to me is whether there is a space for Roepke-style “humane conservatism” to join with McKibbon-style grass-roots progressivism in offering an alternative to the kind of neoliberal version of globalization that many would argue threatens the social, moral, political, and ecological health of our society.

  • Asking the right questions

    “Eco-economist” Herman Daly tries to inject some clarity into the debate on climate change. Even if some of the details are up in the air, he says, the trajectory is clear and we need to ask if this is the direction we want to be going in.

    It seems to me that a lot of the climate change “skepticism” (which I put in scarequotes because much of it is an industry-funded attempt to muddy the waters, not a good faith pursuit of the truth; see the chapter on climate change skepticism/denial in George Monbiot’s Heat for some damning details) is about pouncing on uncertainty at the level of detail, whereas the big picture remains pretty clear. Take for instance the way that skeptics jumped on some recent minor revision by NASA of some temperature rankings for the US (see this post for some clarification, via Confessing Evangelical).

    As Daly says, if the big picture is clear, then by asking the right questions, like “can we systematically continue to emit increasing amounts of CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere without eventually provoking unacceptable climate changes?” or “what is it that is causing us to systematically emit ever more CO2 into the atmosphere?” or “does growth in GDP at the current margin and scale in the U.S. really make us richer? Might it not be increasing environmental and social costs faster than it increases production benefits, thereby making us poorer?” can yield a fairly definitive answer to the question of what direction we should be going in.

    As he puts it:

    Setting policy in accord with first principles allows us to act now without getting mired in endless delays caused by the uncertainties of complex empirical measurements and predictions. Of course, the uncertainties do not disappear. We will experience them as surprising consequences, both agreeable and disagreeable, necessitating mid-course correction to the policies enacted on the basis of first principles. But at least we will have begun moving in the right direction.

    I discussed Daly and theologian John Cobb’s book For the Common Good a bit here and here.

    In a similar vein, D.W. Congdon is asking some questions for churches about consumerism, which is surely relevant to this topic.

  • Sex, marriage, and false dichotomies

    Marvin has a terrific post on same-sex marriage in the church, pointing out the silliness of some of the slippery slope arguments (Next it’ll be group marriages! Marriage to animals!) made against churches blessing these relationships. Far from being part of some hedonistic collapse in moral standards, the movement for recognition of gay relationships is in many ways a conservative one, with same sex couples seeking to reap the benefits of stable, committed, monogomous relationships.

    I don’t post on this much, because it’s amply covered elsewhere, but one of the reasons I support same-sex marriage (as well as civil marriage or unions or whatever they end up being called) is because I’m conservative about sex. Eros is a powerful and dangerous force, one that is best channeled into a stable, faithful relationship that is enabled to contribute to the well-being of the surrounding community. Both Paul and Luther seem admirably pragmatic about marriage, seeing it as a way of taming our sinful impulses. And Jesus says that it is a penultimate institution, intended for this world, but not the world to come. To me this suggests a certain flexibility in approaching marriage: it’s intended to contribute to human flourishing here and now, not necessarily to mirror some eternal archetype. I’d add, of course, that it can be a kind of school of virtue where we learn to love by committing ourselves to loving one particular other person (a bit more on that here).

    Maybe I’m unusual, but I had no objections same-sex relationships before I became a practicing, adult Christian, so I didn’t really go through some process of “overcoming” ingrained objections to them. I was raised in a conservative small town, but pretty much as soon as I came into contact with gay people I couldn’t discern any reason to object to two people of the same sex being in a romantic relationship. Maybe it was partly due to the fact that I was routinely accused of being a “fag” by other kids in school (it seemed to be a generalized term of abuse for bookish, awkward, or otherwise anomolous kids, which is not to trivialize the torment that actual gay kids often undergo, mind you), but I found myself rather instinctively sympathizing with gay classmates.

    As someone who leans to the traditional side in matters theological I’ve tried to understand and sympathize with the traditionalist position here, but, in my judgment, the biblical evidence is too ambiguous (a useful overview here) and the arguments from natural law, etc. too unconvincing to sustain that position in the face of my experience of gay folks (and I would now add gay Christians). And I’d add that the fact that this has become a “debate” over an “issue” that often takes place at a very abstract level far removed from people’s actual lives and relationships seems to me to be quite wrongheaded.

    So, in the church I find myself in the awkward position of agreeing with the “liberals” about this but not about certain theological matters, while being out of sync with a the “conservatives” on what for many has become the sin qua non of faithfulness. However, I do think that a lot of people “on the ground,” especially younger ones, are less likely to line up in quite the way that the most vocal people on both sides would have it. So I’m hopeful that there’s a possibility of a “third way” that isn’t just in the mushy middle but rejects what I think are the false choices being presented to us.

  • Transhumanism

    The fact that some people’s idea of utopia involves “uploading” your personality into a computer and living forever frankly gives me the creeps. (I also am not sure it’s even a coherent idea. In what sense would that be me rather than just a Max Headroom-style copy of me?)

    I have no idea how many people actually adhere to this “transhumanist” ideal. I’ve never met any in real life. But the fact that they can put on conferences suggests there are a few.

    The transhumanist idea of the “Singularity” has been called “the Rapture for nerds,” but it’s really gnosticism for nerds. It’s the idea that material things like our bodies and the Earth are icky death-traps that need to be left behind.

  • The conservatism of Ray Davies

    Apropos of yesterday’s post, the lyrics from The Kinks’ “God’s Children”:

    Man made the buildings that reach for the sky
    And man made the motorcar and learned how to fly
    But he didn’t make the flowers and he didn’t make the trees
    And he didn’t make you and he didn’t make me
    And he got no right to turn us into machines
    He’s got no right at all
    ‘Cause we are all God’s children
    And he got no right to change us
    Oh, we gotta go back the way the Good Lord made us all

    Don’t want this world to change me
    I wanna go back the way the Good Lord made me
    Same lungs that he gave me to breath with
    Same eyes he gave me to see with

    Oh, the rich man, the poor man, the saint and the sinner
    The wise man, the simpleton, the loser and the winner
    We are all the same to Him
    Stripped of our clothes and all the things we own
    The day that we are born
    We are all God’s children
    And they got no right to change us
    Oh, we gotta go back the way the Good Lord made
    Oh, the Good Lord made us all
    And we are all his children
    And they got no right to change us
    Oh, we gotta go back the way the Good Lord made us all
    Yeah, we gotta go back the way the Good Lord made us all

    The Kinks are probably the only great reactionary rock band. Not reactionary in some kind of mean-spirited sense, mind you. But in the sense of writing wistful songs about the English countryside getting chewed up by sprawl and the drab conformity engendered by the welfare state. And in this case a quasi-Luddite opposition to the mechanization of modern society. The albums Muswell Hillbillies and The Village Green Preservation Society are the loci classici here.

  • Humans as GMOs

    This article at The Nation makes the case that even progressives who take the ultra anti-restrictionist line on abortion should support regulation of new reproductive technologies. These technologies have the potential for very serious unintended social consequences and therefore shouldn’t be left solely to individual choice. This seems like a place where progressives and cultural conservatives could make common cause if they can put aside mutual suspicion over abortion politics.

    I think this is a place where a Murray Jardine-style analysis is illuminating: we have a very hard time as a society limiting things that appear on their face to be simply matters of individual preference. But the author of this piece shows that the consequences of those choices have the potential to create social patterns that will have consequences for other individuals who had no part in making that choice. This requires us to deliberate about what kind of a society we want to live in. For instance: do we want to live in a society where access to new technologies results in an extreme genetic stratification between rich and poor?

  • “Green consumerism” vs. consuming less

    A couple of weeks ago the New York Times ran a story on the new “green consumerism.” Today George Monbiot writes that it’s not good enough to “buy green”; we have to buy less. His contention is that “green” consumption is at this point a supplement to rather than a replacement of conventional consumption and that people have started to by flashy “green” items more as a sign of social status than as concrete contributions to the problem. The result is that individual consumption ends up being seen as a replacement for political action.

    Ethical shopping is in danger of becoming another signifier of social status. I have met people who have bought solar panels and mini-wind turbines before they have insulated their lofts: partly because they love gadgets, but partly, I suspect, because everyone can then see how conscientious (and how rich) they are. We are often told that buying such products encourages us to think more widely about environmental challenges, but it is just as likely to be depoliticising. Green consumerism is another form of atomisation – a substitute for collective action. No political challenge can be met by shopping.

    […]

    Challenge the new green consumerism and you become a prig and a party pooper, the spectre at the feast, the ghost of Christmas yet to come. Against the shiny new world of organic aspirations you are forced to raise drab and boringly equitable restraints: carbon rationing, contraction and convergence, tougher building regulations, coach lanes on motorways. No colour supplement will carry an article about that. No rock star could live comfortably within his carbon ration.

    It does make you start to wonder if consumption is the only response we know how to make to any social problem. Hip articles associated with a particular cause become status signifiers, especially when they’re expensive. You can’t ostentatiously show off buying less stuff.

    In theory Christianity should be able to provide resources for dealing with this. Theologically we deny that our identity is grounded in what we buy and consume. And the tradition of living simply as part of the path of virtue goes back at least to the Desert Fathers. But how many churches have addressed this? And how many have encouraged being virtuous consumers instead?

    Not that the two should be seen as inevitably opposed. After all, we need to consume things! Things are good! And it’s probably better to drink organic fair trade coffee than conventional coffee. A lot of churches have been good at promoting things like that. But we’re probably less good at evaluating whether we really need the things we find ourselves wanting (I know I am!). What kinds of practices and resources do we have for making those distinctions? (By the way, yes I do need coffee, so don’t ask.)