EXTINCTION! A Mortality Tale

We have been warned – repeatedly.  We are headed toward the self-destruction of humankind as a species.  Indeed, all the other aerobic (oxygen consuming) species on Earth may also be in jeopardy.

 Charles Darwin memorably called it the “struggle for existence.”  Living organisms are contingent thermodynamic systems that are embedded in, and dependent upon, variable and sometimes changing environments.  It’s a fragile system.

The latest threat to our species is the rapidly melting permafrost in the Arctic, and the rise there in lethal methane producing sinkholes.  Meanwhile, we are all in thrall to a deluded egotist who is surrounded by sycophants. And our international system of independent nation states and the “rule of law” is breaking down as we face the prospect of mass migrations and “eco-wars” between increasingly desperate human societies. It’s a formula for massive self-destruction.

There have been several major course changes in living systems over evolutionary history, from the emergence of the first aerobic bacteria to the rise of multicellular organisms, task specialization and a division of labor. Now, with more than 8 billion Homo sapiens inhabiting every corner of our planet and polluting/distorting our environment in many different ways, we have become our own greatest survival threat. And the biggest threat of all is human-caused climate change.

To echo the title of Vladimir Lenin’s incendiary pamphlet just before the Russian Revolution, “What is to be done?”  The answer is that the global community must come together (perhaps through the U.N.) and make a drastic course change starting now – or else.  Here is a brief “recipe”.    

As discussed at length in my 2011 book, The Fair Society: The Science of Human Nature and the Pursuit of Social Justice (University of Chicago Press), a new global contract would encompass three distinct normative (and policy) precepts that must be bundled together and balanced in order to approximate the Platonic ideal of social justice.  These precepts are as follows:

1. Goods and services must be distributed to each according to his or her basic needs (in this, there must be equality);

2. Surpluses beyond the provisioning of our basic needs must be distributed according to “merit” (there must also be equity);

3. In return, each of us is obligated to contribute to the collective survival enterprise proportionately in accordance with our ability (there must be reciprocity)

The first of these precepts involves a collective obligation to provide for the common needs of all of humankind.  To borrow a term from the TV series Star Trek, this is our “prime directive.”  Although this precept may sound socialistic -- an echo of Karl Marx’s famous dictum -- it is at once far more specific and more limited.  It refers to the fourteen basic biological needs domains that are detailed in my book.  Our basic needs are not a vague, open-ended abstraction, nor a matter of personal preference.  They constitute a concrete but ultimately limited agenda, with measurable indicators for assessing outcomes.

These fourteen basic needs domains include a number of obvious items, like adequate nutrition, fresh water, physical safety, physical and mental health, and waste elimination, as well as some items that we may take for granted like thermoregulation (which may entail many different technologies, from clothing to solar panels and air conditioning), adequate sleep (about one-third of our lives), mobility, and even healthy respiration, which can’t always be assured.  Perhaps least obvious but most important are the requisites for reproduction and the nurturance of the next generation. 

From this perspective, our basic needs cut a very broad swath through our economy and our society.  And the idea that there is a “social right” to the necessities of life is not as radical as it may sound.  It is implicit in the Golden Rule, the great moral precept that is recognized by every major religion and culture.  Furthermore, numerous public opinion surveys over the years have consistently shown that people are far more willing to provide support for the genuinely needy than the Scrooges among us would lead one to believe.  (Some of these surveys are cited in my book.) 

Even more compelling, I believe, are the results of an extensive series of social experiments regarding distributive justice by political scientists Norman Frohlich and Joe Oppenheimer and their colleagues, as detailed in their 1992 book Choosing Justice.  What Frohlich and Oppenheimer set out to test was whether or not ad hoc groups of “impartial” decision-makers behind a Rawlsian “veil of ignorance” about their own personal stakes would be able to reach a consensus on how to distribute the income of a hypothetical society. Frohlich and Oppenheimer found that the experimental groups consistently opted for striking a balance between maximizing income (providing incentives and rewards for “the fruits of one’s labors,” in the authors’ words) and ensuring that there is an economic minimum for everyone (what they called a “floor constraint”). The overall results were stunning: 77.8 percent of the groups chose to assure a minimum income for everyones’ basic needs. 

The results of these important experiments also lend strong support to the second of the three fairness precepts listed above concerning equity (or merit).  How can we also be fair-minded about rewarding our many individual differences in talents, performance, and achievement.  Merit, like the term fairness itself, has an elusive quality; it does not denote some absolute standard.  It is relational, and context-specific, and subject to all manner of cultural norms and practices.  But, in general, it implies that the rewards a person receives should be proportionate to his or her effort, or investment, or contribution. 

A crucial corollary of our first two precepts is that the collective survival enterprise in human societies has always been based on mutualism and reciprocity, with altruism being limited (typically) to special circumstances under a distinct moral claim -- what could be referred to as “no-fault needs.”  So, to close the loop, a third principle must be added to the biosocial contract, one that puts it squarely at odds with the utopian socialists, and perhaps even with some modern social democrats as well.   In any voluntary contractual arrangement, there is always reciprocity -- obligations or costs as well as benefits.  As I noted earlier, reciprocity is a deeply rooted part of our social psychology and an indispensable mechanism for balancing our relationships with one another.  Without reciprocity, the first two fairness precepts might look like nothing more than a one-way scheme for redistributing wealth.

As detailed in my book, a greater emphasis on reciprocity in American society would include such things as a more equitable tax code, higher taxes as necessary to support the basic needs of the 30 million (plus) Americans who suffer from extreme poverty, and a lifelong public service obligation beginning with a year of national service for everyone who is able to do so, or two years for those who receive special benefits like educational assistance.  

Some critics might object to such incursions on their freedom, but philosopher John Rawls’s definition of fairness under a social contract provides a definitive rebuttal, in my view:  He wrote: “The main idea is that when a number of persons engage in a mutually advantageous cooperative venture according to rules, and thus restrict their liberty in ways necessary to yield advantages for all, those who have submitted to these restrictions have a right to a similar acquiescence on the part of those who have benefited from their submission.”   

To conclude, then, what the biosocial contract adds to the ancient philosopher Plato’s great social justice vision is the recognition that there are in fact three distinct categories, or types of substantive fairness and that these must be combined and balanced in appropriate ways.  The substantive content of social justice consists of providing for the basic needs of the population, along with equitably rewarding merit and insisting on reciprocity. The biosocial contract paradigm also enlists the growing power of modern evolutionary biology and the human sciences to shed light on the matter, and it identifies an explicit set of criteria for reconciling (if not harmonizing) the competing claims that have been promoted by political ideologues of the Left and the Right.

I believe that this framework offers our best hope for achieving and maintaining that elusive state of voluntary consent that is the key to a harmonious society – a mathematical “Nash equilibrium” writ large.  This is an ideal worth striving for, because our own survival, and more certainly that of our descendants, may well depend upon it.  As the great public park designer Frederick Law Olmstead put it, “The rights of posterity take precedence over the desires of the present.”  Nothing less than our evolutionary future is at stake.