Kathleen Dean Moore's Blog, page 2

Four Fallacies and a Big Mistake

In their arguments against divesting from fossil fuels, Ivy League presidents offer a lesson in sophistry.

It pains this old logic professor to read university officials’ arguments against divesting from fossil fuels — not because their refusal to divest is wrong-headed, although I believe it is, but because their logic is so awful.

A sample of Ivy League universities’ anti-divestment statements offers a primer in the fallacies that students are warned against in Logic 101:

1. The ad hominem argument: “I find a troubling inconsistency in the notion that, as an investor, we should boycott [the oil and gas industry, while we] are extensively relying on those companies’ products and services,” writes Drew Faust, President of Harvard. [i]

The assumption is that those who rely on fossil fuels do not have the moral authority to take a stand against them. This is an ad hominem (to the man) attack, which turns the focus from the argument itself to the person or institution making the argument. The attack might be fair if the university had freely chosen fossil fuels from an array of options. It did not. Over generations, fossil fuels have been built into the structure of our lives, our buildings, our cities. Big Oil works hard to perpetuate that dependency and radically constrict choices, as they lobby against renewable energies, influence the election of officials who will vote against alternative transportation, hire hacks to confuse the public about the scientific consensus on climate change — in every way they can, making sure that universities (and all the rest of us) are forced to use fossil fuels. It’s the ultimate triumph of the fossil fuel industry, that even as they are externalizing their environmental costs, they are externalizing also their shame. And university officials making this argument haplessly cooperate to disempower their own moral voices and those of their students.

2. The Straw Argument: “Brown’s holdings are much too small for divestiture to reduce corporate profits,” writes Christina Paxson, President of Brown University. [ii]

Of course Brown’s divestment, or anyone else’s, will not cripple the fossil fuel industry. Divestment leader Bill McKibben publicly affirms that it will not. Divestment isn’t designed to destroy. It is designed to save, and what is imperiled here is the integrity of the university. A university has an overriding responsibility to advance the well-being of its students, which means that it is flat wrong to profit from industries that will devastate their future.

The Ivy League response is a classic straw argument, a cynical or careless misconstruing of the divestment argument. Instead of addressing the real issue of moral integrity, the president substitutes a scarecrow so flimsy it might be made of straw. Easy enough to knock down the bogus argument, but the serious one remains.

3. The false dichotomy: “Yale will have its greatest impact in meeting the climate challenges through its core mission: research, scholarship, and education,” claims the Yale Corporation Committee on Investor Responsibility. [iii]

Maybe so. But that doesn’t mean that Yale should not study, educate, and at the same time divest from fossil fuels. Divest or educate? — This is not a forced choice between alternatives. In fact, divestment may be a university’s greatest opportunity for moral education, for instruction in the foundational moral imperative to let your values guide your decisions.

“Climate change is a grave threat to human welfare,” Yale goes on to say. If so, then Yale should throw everything it’s got at the threat. Research? Yes. Scholarship? Yes. Education? Beyond a doubt. Divestment? Absolutely, and anything else they can pull out of the hat. Addressing climate change is going to require the greatest exercise of the moral and technological imagination the world has ever seen. The future is no place for slackers.

4. The hasty generalization. “Logic and experience indicate that barring investments in [fossil fuels] would . . . come at a substantial economic cost.” Harvard again. [iv]

It’s sometimes logical to make predictions about the future on the basis of past experience, but only if you can assume that the future will resemble the past. When the future threatens to be staggeringly different from the past, reliance on experience is a hasty, often expensive mistake in reasoning.

Never before has life on the planet been so deeply threatened by a single energy technology – burning fossil fuels. And never before have there been so many alternative ways to generate energy. Never have the costs of alternatives fallen so rapidly. It’s a new world. Whether because of new technologies, new regulations, a global crisis of conscience, a global economy utterly devastated by climate change, or who knows what, the world will divest from the fossil fuel economy, and probably sooner rather than later. The investors who quickly respond to a changing world have the best chance to prosper; the laggards will be left holding the bag.

And so we come to the big mistake: “The [university] endowment is . . . not an instrument to impel social or political change.” [v] Harvard.

Oh yes it is. By profiting from Big Oil, the university endowment casts a very public vote for short-term, short-sighted profit and against the victims of that business plan – future generations, plants and animals, the world’s poor and displaced – and their own young people. The shame.

[i] Drew Faust, Fossil Fuel Divestment Statement, 10-3-13. http://www.harvard.edu/president/foss.... Accessed 5/25/2015.
[ii] Christina Paxson, 10-27-2013: Coal Divestment Update. http://www.brown.edu/about/administra... update. Accessed 5/25/2015.
[iii] Statement of the Yale Corporation Committee on Investor Responsibility.
[iv] Faust, Fossil Fuel Divestment Statement.
[v] Faust, Fossil Fuel Divestment Statement.

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The Pope Plays His Trump Card

When Pope Francis framed climate change as a moral problem and issued a call to conscience, he played a powerful card. That’s because a moral argument trumps – that is, negates the power of — the usual, self-serving responses, like “reducing carbon emissions will cut into my profits” or “addressing climate change requires sacrifices.”

The fossil-fuel economy creates injustice on a global scale, the Pope wrote in his recent Encyclical, an authoritative statement of moral principle. It irredeemably harms the blameless – the poor, the children, plants and animals, future generations. And so, it is morally wrong. What does “wrong” mean? It means you should wash your hands of it. That’s it. No excuses. From now on, those who want out of the obligation to do what’s right on climate will have to give reasons, reasons more powerful than moral principle. That may not be possible. The fossil-fuel economy now joins the slave economy as moral poison.

In the Encyclical, Pope Francis played an entire hand of reasons why we must turn away from the greed-driven extractive economy based on fossil fuels. It’s a brilliant display of science- and values-based reasoning.

First and repeatedly, he excoriates the injustice of global warming: “We can be silent witnesses to terrible injustices if we think that we can obtain significant benefits by making the rest of humanity, present and future, pay the extremely high costs of environmental deterioration.” He appeals to our love of children: “What kind of world do we want to leave to those who come after us?” He calls us to honor our duty to care for creation: “The natural environment is a collective good, the patrimony of all humanity, and the responsibility of everyone.” He speaks of the consequences of failing to act: “Our concern cannot be limited merely to the threat of extreme weather events, but must also extend to the catastrophic consequences of social unrest.” And he bluntly calls out greed and selfishness, praying God to “enlighten those who possess power and money, that they may avoid the sin of indifference.”

Pope Francis spreads his arms to link social and ecological wrongs, the desperate instability of the poor and the fragility of the planet. We have to “integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.” The wholeness of the planet, the interdependence of all beings, calls us to a personal wholeness as well. It is “no longer enough to speak only of the integrity of ecosystems,” Pope Francis declared. “We have to dare to speak of the integrity of human life.”

A life guided by a moral vision is a life of integrity, of wholeness, of consistency between what we believe to be true and just, and what we do. People lead lives of integrity when their moral principles are the source of their power and the ground of their decisions. To live justly, because you believe in justice. To live simply, because you don’t believe in taking more than your fair share. To live gratefully, because you believe that life is a gift. That said, what does the Papal Encyclical mean for you and me – not just for Catholics, but for all people who aspire to lead a life they believe in?

From a commitment to integrity, at least two things follow, a refusal and an affirmation: First, we must refuse to allow ourselves to be made into agents of harm and destruction in the extractive economy’s war against the world. This requires acts of conscientious refusal, turning away from “the constant flood of consumer goods that can baffle the mind.” This requires finding, creating, insisting on our right to alternatives to fossil fuels and life-destroying practices.

Some of this is individual effort. The Pope calls these “little daily actions” and praises them. “We must not think that these efforts are not going to change the world. They benefit society, often unbeknownst to us, for they call forth a goodness which, albeit unseen, inevitably tends to spread.” But social problems must be addressed by social action, not by the sum of individual acts, and so we are called to create community networks of resistance and action. And we are called to press our leaders to fulfill their responsibilities.

Second, we must creatively and collectively re-imagine who we are, we human beings, and how we ought to live. In the dominant culture’s worldview of “tyrannical anthropocentrism,” we imagine ourselves to be essentially “masters, consumers, ruthless exploiters, unable to set limits on [our] immediate needs.” So it’s easy to imagine only a grey and dystopic future, peopled with walking zombies. But the Pope has something far more beautiful in mind, something far more difficult to achieve. He calls it a “civilization of love.”

Imagine that the world has been given to us as a gift “which we have freely received and must share with others.” Then, “intergenerational solidarity is not an option, but rather a basic question of justice, since the world we have received also belongs to those who will follow us.” This changes everything. It allows us to begin the great work of “planning a sustainable and diversified agriculture, developing renewable and less polluting forms of energy, encouraging a more efficient use of energy, promoting a better management of marine and forest resources, and ensuring universal access to drinking water.” Let it begin.

By Kathleen Dean Moore and Michael Paul Nelson, the co-editors of Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril.

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The World’s Only Three-Minute Commencement Speech

Breaking all records for brevity, Kathleen gave a rousing three-minute commencement speech, when she accepted an Honorary Degree in Humane Letters from SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry last weekend. Here is what she said: www.esf.edu/communications/view.asp?newsID=3503.

The post The World’s Only Three-Minute Commencement Speech appeared first on Riverwalking.

Barn’s Burnt Down: After the Paris Accords, Ten Things We Can See Clearly

The morning after Donald Trump pulled the US out of the Paris Climate Accords, this old climate warrior climbed out of bed feeling better about the chances of the sizzling, souring world than I have for months. Not just feeling better, feeling positively energized. The worst climate policy news had broken, and suddenly the sense of possibility and power was overwhelming.

Climate Change Calls "All Hands"

When a fearsome storm is bearing down on a great ship - the first winds shuddering in the sails, the first waves burying the bowsprit, sullen clouds obscuring the horizon - the captain shouts the order. "All hands on deck." Every sailor knows what that means. Each person on board, no matter their rank or watch, has an absolute duty to rush from their gambling tables or bunks to their stations, to do whatever has to be done to save the ship.

The Moral Urgency of Action to Protect the World’s Megafauna

Concerned ecologists recently made the case for the ecological urgency of action to save the world’s terrestrial megafauna (Ripple et al. 2016). These large mammals, desperately endangered by human depredation and habitat destruction, are critical to the functioning of the world’s ecosystems, and thus critical to human survival. To the extent that we value human survival, then, we ought to value the survival of the great beasts.

A Blog in Which I Do What I Seldom Do: Share My Speaking Notes

"The Moral Case for Divestment from Fossil Fuels"

I’ve just returned from Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota.

Gustavus is a pretty campus in the rain, with blue and yellow banners flapping to celebrate their MAYDAY! Symposium on divestment from fossil fuels.

Can Really Bad Poetry Save the Prairie?

I’ve just returned from northern Illinois, where the highways roll past endless fields of genetically modified, pesticide-drenched corn and soybeans. It’s a monotonous landscape - dried, carcinogenic cornstalks, clacking in a light wind. But it may soon get more interesting.

What if Burma Shave-style signs sprouted overnight from the ditches along the poisoned fields? Picture early-morning sun shining on four little home-made signs. On the signs? Really bad poetry that unfolds line by line, sign by sign, jovially informing passing motorists about what they are seeing in the fields, and what they are not. Something like this:

To plant this corn,
What did he bury?
Butterflies, flowers,
The singing prairie.

Ack, I admit. But poetic quality is not the point here. The point is to make sure that people understand the costs that toxic chemical-based agriculture is imposing on them and on the Earth. I sat in my motel room in Illinois, writing doggerel on the little pad of paper that a motel always provides.

Spraying fields
With deadly Round-up
Brings us cancer
From the ground up.

He would be
A good deal wiser
Not to spray
Poison fertilizer.

The words flew off my motel ball-point pen. One stanza per sign, four signs, one after another along the edge of the field - what writer could resist this challenge?

Fertilizers
On these peas
Kill fish and krill
In distant seas.

Please don’t trade
Bird-song in the morn
To fuel your car
With Round-up corn.

No copyrights here. I give these verses free to anybody who thinks it’s wrong to destroy rich soils, introduce carcinogens into the air and water, pollute rivers and create dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico, all the while increasing the carbon load in the atmosphere and making a ton of money. Use these verses, or better yet, write your own. Write hundreds of them. Let bad poetry bloom in every ditch.

Four Fallacies and a Big Mistake

In their arguments against divesting from fossil fuels, Ivy League presidents offer a lesson in sophistry.

It pains this old logic professor to read university officials' arguments against divesting from fossil fuels -- not because their refusal to divest is wrong-headed, although I believe it is, but because their logic is so awful.

The Pope Plays His Trump Card

When Pope Francis framed climate change as a moral problem and issued a call to conscience, he played a powerful card. That’s because a moral argument trumps - that is, negates the power of -- the usual, self-serving responses, like "reducing carbon emissions will cut into my profits" or "addressing climate change requires sacrifices."