In last week’s Green Focus column, I asked why, when so many of us think that the environment is important, we see so little evidence of changing lifestyles, writes Henry Haslam.
One possible answer, which deserves to be knocked on the head from the start, lies in the thinking that you can’t expect people to take the environment seriously as a moral issue.
“People don’t believe in morality,” they say.
“Nobody cares about doing the right thing.”
This view became surprisingly widespread during the last century.
It seemed like it was smart to be cynical.
However, it runs contrary to human nature as we know it.
People do want to do the right thing: we see it all around us.
It is a defining characteristic of our species that we know that there is a difference between right and wrong.
Charles Darwin wrote that of all the differences between humans and other animals, “the moral sense or conscience is by far the most important.”
This does not mean that we all act in good and virtuous ways all the time.
We certainly don’t.
It’s more about the judgments we make than our ability to live up to them.
But we do know that words like morality, ethics, right and wrong have meaning, and it matters.
Read more
Green Focus: Why can’t we see people proving the environment is important?
Green Focus: Why you should see this important film on the climate crisis
Green Focus: ‘Greenwashing’ jingles mask the dangers of oil production
When we disagree about moral issues, our disagreement is about something important, worthy of serious debate.
Morality is something to be taken seriously, then, but how does it apply to the environment?
Some of the issues that concern us today, like climate change, have only recently been recognised, but the general principle of looking after the land, with future generations in mind, has long been part of human thinking.
This has to contend, these days, with the recent Western idea that it is right to exploit the Earth’s resources in order, so it is thought, to improve our living standards.
This human capacity to recognise right and wrong is a cause for celebration.
It should be valued as a great strength of our species, not mocked, belittled and written off.
Perhaps we shall need it more than ever, in today’s challenging and uncertain world, imperilled by AI and other threats as well as by environmental destruction.
Lack of a moral sense, then, cannot be used to explain the mismatch between saying that the environment is important and actually taking it into account in our lives.
I shall consider other possible explanations in future columns.
