Subject: DISCUSSION: Sustainable Agriculture and Ethics

From: Greg McIsaac <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 31 Mar 1994 10:33:19 CST

Johathan Haskett writes:

> 
> 
>  One of the problems which has plagued many definitions
>  of sustainable agriculture is the tendency to conflate
>  moral and ethical judgments and ideas with questions
>  of practice. Sustainability of agriculture depends on the
>  physical/biological constraints on actual production, and
>  the social/cultural constraints which define what kinds
>  of production will be acceptable. What we judge to be
>  ethically desirable in our society is a distinct set of
>  concerns which do not necessarily affect sustainability.
>  For example it is quite possible to have a sustainable
>  agricultural system, which includes long-distance trade,
>  reduces species diversity, degrades habitat, is in many
>  aspects a monoculture, and is embedded in a hierarchical,
>  centralized, bureaucrat, xenophobic, system which
>  oppresses minorities and features huge disparities of
>  wealth. Imperial China being a notable example.
> 
>  It is therefore quite dangerous to conflate issues of
>  sustainability with those of social morality or societal
>  ethics. I can see how the justification for an extremely
>  coercive system could be based on the necessity of
>  sustainability, with examples to demonstrate that it
>  works.

This stikes me as an arguement for considering the ethical and 
technical questions together, not subdivided as you suggest below.   

> 
>  The discussion of sustainability therefore needs to be
>  subdivided into its constituent parts, with the ethical and
>  other concerns confined to the appropriate context.
> 
> Jonathan Haskett
> [email-masked]
> 
> 

What is the approriate context and who decides that?  Johnathan, you 
make some good points.  There are biological/technical issues which 
can indeed be answered independently of the social/moral/ethical 
questions.  It seems thats what has been going on in the US for most 
of this century and the results have not been all good.  
    I highly recommend the books of Donald Schon, a practical 
philosopher at MIT who critiques the notion of technical rationality, 
which seems to be part of what you are suggesting, and has been the 
ruling philosophy for much of the higher education system in the US.  
My field, engineering, promoted a notion of itself of that of an 
applied science, objectively applying science to solve technical 
problems.  
    The problem with this approach is that the problems that 
engineers and scientist attempt to address are fundamentally value 
laden (otherwise they wouldn't bother to address them if there was no 
value to them).  So the value laden dimension of the problem 
definition and proposed solutions need to be addressed together 
with the technical/scientific.  At every step of a technical and 
scientific project there are choices to make.  Those choices can be 
guided by ethics, convenience,  self interest, tradition, etc..  I 
think a large part of the sustainable agriculture movement is to make 
those choices explicit, ethical, and ecological.

Respectfully,  

Gregory McIsaac

PS: Schon argues that the notion of technical rationality which has 
guided higher education in the US was founded on a positivist 
philosophy which has been largely discredited.  It attempts to 
separate the questions of truth from questions of goodness.  The 
philosopher Bruce Wilshire in his book "The Moral Collapse of the 
University" observes that this separation leads to a "tedious breeze 
of words and formula."  Questions of truth are important, but are 
dangerous when divorced of questions of goodness.