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  • Ethics of Scale
  • Angus Fletcher (bio)

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The primary ethical question besetting our present global perspective is to discover a way of determining value in the practices of international finance capitalism. Nothing is more common in the second decade of the twenty-first century than the well-worn complaint that the rich are “super-rich, which is a moral disgrace”—many will say that twenty-year-old billionaires are an absurdity. Similarly people will say that, given the immediate and long-term human costs, to oppose birth control in an era of global population explosion is an even greater absurdity, a crime against the future health and survival of human, not to say humane, life.

These behavior patterns may be judged self-evidently unethical in a loose sense, but only so long as the negative judgment is linked to a persistent idea of what is considered natural. What if nature is a term for the whole earthly planetary system? Then financial binges of various kinds may be individually practiced, while their networking side effects if multiplied a million-fold might lead to a worldwide epidemic, so that “the natural” is at best only a vague source of principles. These days we encounter intelligent resistance to Nature as Norm, so much so that we risk throwing away one of our most valuable terms for living environments, for the biosphere as first described in detail by Vladimir Vernadsky, the great Soviet geochemist. Nature may no longer provide a guiding norm, but it does remain the interactive scene where, in fact, humans and other living creatures live and breathe and have their being—to quote an ancient source. More recent thought suggests that [End Page 86] our planet has become almost a creature that desires, as it were, to calculate all aspects of its natural living and breathing, to mathematize its quality. This quality, which we call “life,” virtually analyzes itself with a feedback system of “computable numbers,” to quote from the title of Alan Turing’s 1936 article, where Turing provided the essential theory for virtually all digital counting and computation, thus effectively changing the world.

While counting our blessings is a very old story, at the end of the eighteenth century the English metaphysician and semiotician Jeremy Bentham proposed that we consider political and personal ethics in the context of a “hedonic calculus,” whereby we calculate the amount of “happiness” any society affords its participants, a Benthamite idea that led in mid-nineteenth century to John Stuart Mill’s celebrated work, Utilitarianism (1861), and together these two authors generated a method of literally counting happiness. At once I wish to emphasize the subtlety and complexity of utilitarian views, while noting that modern ideas of liberalism are radically influenced by Mill and his commentators. My interest lies in questioning what we might call the life-system underlying any global picture of the idea of happiness. Where, we may ask, is happiness to be found? There is a pressing need today to discern its place, its placement, its sphere of existence, however much, on a narrower personal basis, we seek to define its logic and psychology.

To locate this scene of happiness or lack of it an ecologist will rightly prefer the term biosphere, instead of Nature, and yet this cannot be left as a mere squabble over terms. We ask rather what is the shape of discovery, for description and demonstration (to use Galileo’s word), and above all in framing our imaginative vision of where and how we live. I prefer to call this a matter of shape and form, of the larger topology of global questions. Topology gives a special approach to the larger issues, where so often we find a systemic preference among scientists to rely upon counting up the separate pieces and sets of carefully accumulated data. This latter approach produces a digital simulacrum of larger global conditions and, statistically analyzed, its picturing gains [End Page 87] enormous informative power, while it reinforces the prestige of computer technology as used to compute very large numbers.

In order to estimate the effects of extreme global inequalities, as with our rapid global climate change, economists say that fundamentally we need...

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