Self-validating reduction: Toward a theory of environmental devaluation

Environmental Ethics

Volumn 18, Issue 2, 1996, Pages 115-132

  Weston, Anthony ^a  

^a ELON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0000789793     PISSN: 01634275     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/enviroethics199618227     Document Type: Article

References (33)

1. Thomas Schelling, "Thermostats, Lemons, and Other Families of Models," in Micromotives and Macrobehavior (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), p. 115.
2. Marilyn Frye, "Male Chauvinism - A Conceptual Analysis," in Mary Vetterling-Braggin, ed., Sexist Language: A Modern Philosophical Analysis (Totowa, NJ: Littlefield, Adams, 1981), pp. 17-18.
3. Frederick Douglass, "The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered," inThe Frederick Douglass Papers, 1st series, vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 507. There are all too many examples. A North Carolina Native American historian once told me that the practice of scalping was probably introduced by Europeans, after they began to put bounties on Indian heads: the scalp was easier to take than the whole head. In time, however, the Indians started scalping too, and it came to figure in the horror stories about Indians that in turn were used to justify still more bounties, still more extermination. Similarly, white missionaries were horrified by the Indian practice of torturing their captives, and persuaded them to enslave their captives instead. Thus the Indians, at least in the Carolinas, got a reputation as slave traders, which again was used against them to great effect. Readers may also remember the poignantly understated scene in the Hollywood movie The Mission in which the Portuguese attempt to justify their enslavement of the Indians on the grounds that, among other things, the Indians kill some of their children, proving that they are no more than animals. Their Jesuit defender counters that the Indians only kill those children that they cannot carry when they have to flee. The threats from which they have to flee are primarily the slave traders. In effect, then, the slave traders themselves first reduced the Indians to killing their own children and then used this very behavior as a justification for further enslavement.
4. According to Schelling ("Thermostats, Lemons," p. 116), the term "self-fulfilling prophecy," originally referred to this kind of cycle. The term has since broadened quite a bit.
5. Ibid., p. 92.
6. Just as self-validating reduction is only one kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, self-fulfilling prophecy is only one instance of a still wider phenomenon of unintended or unexpected collective consequences of individual actions. In this sense, self-validating reduction is a remote cousin to some better-understood game-theoretic phenomena in which certain results can emerge, in Martin Hollis' words, as "the unintended sum of intended consequences." The summative effects are not necessarily bad. Adam Smith famously argued, for example, that individual egoism in a market system produces, collectively, the common good. The "Tragedy of the Commons," meanwhile, is an example of a negative result: here individual utility maximization produces dramatically lower utilities for everyone. (See Martin Hollis, The Cunning of Reason [Cambridge University Press, 1987], chap. 4.) All of these cases, however, involve strategic thinking: individual and intentional planning for certain consequences. Self-validating reduction is not at all so strategic or even self-conscious. Closer cousins might be some of the other unexpected downward-spiralling social phenomena Schelling describes in "Thermostats, Lemons, and Other Families of Models." Although game-theoretic analysis is fascinating, it also exemplifies our tendency to focus on the kinds of processes most easily quantified and (perhaps) most commodity-centered and competitive, leaving the larger, vaguer, and deeper processes still mostly in the dark. Self-validating reduction in the sense discussed here is still, as far as I know, mostly unexplored.
7. Bruno Bettleheim, The Informed Heart (New York: Free Press, 1960). Cf. R. A. Pois, National Socialism and the Religion of Nature (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986), p. 132: "The National Socialists had succeeded in creating that which they knew existed all along. Through degradation, humiliation, torture and total dehumanization they had created the nonhuman, in fact nonnatural Jewish enemy, seemingly incapable of feeling those normal, human emotions that were characteristic of those decent folk engaged in annihilating them."
8. Bruno Bettleheim, The Informed Heart (New York: Free Press, 1960). Cf. R. A. Pois, National Socialism and the Religion of Nature (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986), p. 132: "The National Socialists had succeeded in creating that which they knew existed all along. Through degradation, humiliation, torture and total dehumanization they had created the nonhuman, in fact nonnatural Jewish enemy, seemingly incapable of feeling those normal, human emotions that were characteristic of those decent folk engaged in annihilating them."
9. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation, 2d ed. (New York: Avon, 1991), chap. 3.
10. James Serpell, In the Company of Animals (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 9-10.
11. D. Wise and A. Jennings, "Dyschondroplasia in Domestic Poultry," Veterinary Record 91 (1972): 285-86. Cited in Singer, Animal Liberation, p. 104. I have the citation from Singer.
12. D. Wise and A. Jennings, "Dyschondroplasia in Domestic Poultry," Veterinary Record 91 (1972): 285-86. Cited in Singer, Animal Liberation, p. 104. I have the citation from Singer.
13. Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Random House, 1989), p. 165.
14. Singer, Animal Liberation, pp. 99, 104.
15. Jim Nollman, Dolphin Dreamtime (New York: Bantam Books, 1987), pp. 94-97.
16. Singer, Animal Liberation, pp. 67-68.
17. Parley Mowat, Sea of Slaughter (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1982), pp. 97-98.
18. Diane Ackerman, The Moon by Whalelight (New York: Random House, 1991), p. 117.
19. Charles Doria, "The Dolphin Rider," in Joan McIntyre, ed., Mind in the Waters (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1974), p. 38.
20. Barry Lopez, Of Wolves and Men (New York: Scribner's, 1978), p. 81.
21. Exodus 34:13-14.
22. J. Donald Hughes, Ecology in Ancient Civilizations (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1975), pp. 1-2, 61, 68-70, 75-76, 101, 116.
23. William Strauss, "If It's East of the Mississippi, It's Blanketed in Pollution's Haze," New York Times, 16 July 1990, p. C4.
24. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983).
25. Jack Turner, "The Abstract Wild," Witness 3, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 89.
26. Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 56.
27. Lance Morrow, "Trashing Mount Sinai," Time, 19 March 1990, p. 92.
28. Paul Shepard, Nature and Madness (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1982), p. 38.
29. Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 3rd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 30.
30. Thomas H. Birch, "The Incarceration of Wilderness," Environmental Ethics 12 (1990): 3-26.
31. Both points are important. On the one hand, ideas do have consequences. Disvaluation is half of the cycle of self-validating reduction, and its effect is genuine, real-world devaluation. On the other hand, consequences also have ideas, as it were. Devaluation naturally produces more disvaluation. This is the point that I argued for in the text. There is no reason to think that social causation only runs in one direction. Recognizing the cycle of self-validating reduction suggests a more "ecological" model of social processes.
32. Although in note 6 above I claimed that game-theoretic analysis is only remotely applicable to the phenomenon of self-validating reduction, there is a fairly tight parallel here. In situations such as the Prisoner's Dilemma or the "Tragedy of the Commons," each move of each individual actor is entirely rational, at any rate in the economic sense, even though the net result (and foreseeable result) is disaster for all. Each farmer who adds a cow, further overgrazing the commons, at least gains that cow's output, marginal though it may be, whereas if the farmer refrains, he or she gains nothing, and the marginal benefit goes to his or her competitors. The competitors, meanwhile, think in just the same way, their sense of urgency in fact compounded by their evident willingness to squeeze every last ounce of marginal benefit out of the commons while it lasts. This is why these situations pose such difficulties for ethical argument. So here: once the cycle of self-validating reduction is underway, each step has its rationale. Nature devalued to degree x justifies disvaluation to degree x+1; nature disvalued to degree x+1 justifies devaluation to degree x+2; etc.; and the sense that the game is lost may well be created and intensified by the evident direction in which the whole process is going.
33. Along these lines, I am at work on a companion paper to this one, tentatively titled "Self-Validating Invitation: Toward a Theory of Environmental Revaluation."