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PROGRESS, DESTRUCTION, AND THE ANTHROPOCENE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2017

Darrel Moellendorf
Darrel Moellendorf*
Affiliation:
Political Science and Philosophy, Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main
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Abstract:

Enlightenment era optimism that technological and educational developments offer a progressive path to plenty and liberation supports a hope that human toil may be progressively reduced. The Development Thesis defended by G. A. Cohen is a piece of that Enlightenment optimism. The Development Thesis holds that productive forces tend to develop throughout history. The tendency for such an increase in productive forces to occur is, according to Cohen’s argument, due to persistent facts about human nature. If Cohen is correct, there is a tendency toward progress of an important sort, and this progress is due in significant part to human nature. But the development of productive forces also destroys nonhuman natural value. In the era of the Anthropocene this is occurring on a planetary scale. The simultaneous development and destruction entails that claims of progress must rely on an all-things-considered judgment. But due to the plurality of the relevant values, which cannot be compared according to a common metric, rational disagreement about the existence of progress and our progressive nature can be expected to persist.

Keywords

The AnthropocenedestructionDevelopment Thesisforces of productioninstrumental valueintrinsic valuenonhuman natural valuepluralismprogress
Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 34 , Issue 2 , Winter 2017 , pp. 66 - 88
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2017 

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References

1 I would like to thank the participants of a Liberty Fund workshop on progress for comments on an earlier version of this essay, and the organizers of the workshop. I am also grateful for the comments from an editor of this journal and an anonymous reviewer. A version of the essay was also presented at a workshop on “What is so Disturbing about Climate Change” at the Universität Duisburg-Essen and the University of California, San Diego. I am grateful to the organizers for the opportunity for discussion and to the participants for feedback. I benefited from feedback from Simon Caney, Kok-Chor Tan, Allen Thompson, and Patrick Tomlin.

2 For the de-alienation view see Vogel, Steven, Thinking Like a Mall (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 88–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Additionally, Bloch, Ernst speaks of the “naturalization of man, humanization of nature” as the concrete utopia, the realm of freedom, the ultimate object of hope. See his The Principle of Hope, Vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 204–5Google Scholar.

3 Cohen, G. A., Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence, expanded edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 134.Google Scholar

4 Ibid., 32.

5 Ibid., 57.

6 Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History, 152.

7 Ibid., 152–53.

8 My thanks to thank Simon Caney for a discussion about how to formulate this idea.

9 I owe the thought to Patrick Tomlin.

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13 See ibid., 26.

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15 Patrick Tomlin helped with the distinction between overall and continual progress.

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19 There are some parallels between destroying natural items and harming persons, but an analysis of harm in the latter case applies only imperfectly to destruction in the former. We needn’t worry about questions of degree, absolute versus relative, or multiplication, and so on. These are discussed in Hasner, Matthew, “The Metaphysics of Harm,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 77 (2008): 421–50Google Scholar. I’m grateful to Patrick Tomlin for discussing these issues with me.

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25 See also Elliott, Robert, Faking Nature (New York: Routledge, 1997)Google Scholar. Reiterating the point of the previous paragraph, however, unlike Elliot I do not claim that nonhuman natural value is a source of moral obligation to nature.

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35 See Nordhaus, Balance and Nicholas Stern, The Economics of Climate Change, The Stern Review (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

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37 Leopold, Aldo, A Sand County Almanac, with Essays on Conservation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 85Google Scholar.