Trumpism and the ethics of climate change denial

Dear Editor,

In recent years, President Donald Trump has used his Twitter account @realDonalTrump to share his thoughts on climate change. For example, in December 2013, he tweeted: “…global warming is a total, and very expensive hoax.” And in January 2014, Trump asked: “Is our country still spending money on the GLOBAL WARMING HOAX?”

In September 2016, Kellyanne Conway clarified the Administration’s position, suggesting that climate change exists but is “naturally occurring.” The Administration’s official position, however, does not avoid the epistemic and moral pitfalls in adopting a hypothesis against which the evidence overwhelmingly points.

Epistemology (or the theory of knowledge) is concerned with, among other things, what right we have to the beliefs we hold. In other words: it is a normative enterprise? It asks not merely the descriptive-psychological question of how people happen to come to acquire their beliefs, but rather how they should do so.

The mathematician and philosopher William Clifford, in “The Ethics of Belief”, famously argued that it is morally wrong to believe anything anywhere at any time on insufficient evidence. To make his point, Clifford used the example of a ship-owner who allows himself to believe that his vessel is seaworthy without giving it the proper inspection – thereby dooming all the passengers aboard.

“He knew that she was old and not over-well built at the first; that she had seen many seas and climes, and often had needed repairs. Doubts had been suggested to him that possibly she was not seaworthy… Before the ship sailed, however, he succeeded in overcoming these melancholy reflections … he acquired a sincere and comfortable conviction that his vessel was thoroughly safe and seaworthy. He watched her departure with a light heart and benevolent wishes for the exiles and their strange new home which was to-be. And he got his insurance money when she went down in mid-ocean and told no tales.”

First and foremost, Clifford contends that if a person is aware of evidence against a hypothesis and aware of no good evidence in support of it, but nevertheless allows himself to believe it because it provides him private satisfaction, he has done an epistemic and moral wrong. It is often pointed out that the philosopher William James attacked Clifford’s view (in his essay “The Will to Believe”), yet he agreed with this fundamental principle. What he rejected was Clifford’s secondary claim – namely, that if an individual has evidence neither for nor against a belief, it is wrong for him to either accept or reject it. Rather, his ‘epistemic duty’, so to speak, is to withhold judgment on the matter until further evidence comes to light; that is, to remain agnostic. In the second case, James thought that, with respect to religious belief, it was permissible to allow the passions (the will) to guide or determine belief.

Clifford’s ship-owner serves as an illustration for this Administration’s attitude to our current environmental situation. Whether man-made climate change is occurring is no longer an object of serious scientific contention. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that: “Human influence has been detected in warming of the atmosphere and ocean, in changes in the global water cycle, in reduction in snow and ice, in global mean sea level rise, and in changes in some climate extremes… It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.”

We must begin to ask ourselves whether we have any epistemic right to the belief that anthropogenic global warming is not a reality, when virtually all the scientific evidence points to the fact that this is a reality which has already begun to exact a devastating toll in terms of climate refugees, desertification, and the rapid loss of biodiversity. The bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef reveals the far-reaching impacts of climate change; it has led to rising ocean temperatures and an increase in its acidity.

The essence of Trumpism lies in its tendency to create the conditions under which we recklessly fail to give due weight to things like justification, evidence and warrant – we enable ourselves to act in ways that are epistemically wrong. Nowhere is this more evident than in Trump’s disregard for man-made climate change.

Presently, Trump is behaving like Clifford’s ship-owner: he permits himself to believe whatever he wants — that which he finds most convenient, expedient and desirable. The ultimate critique of Trumpism is not simply whether we still value basic principles, including what defines truth, but whether we are able to perceive objective reality at all.

Trumpism — with its readiness to cling to unsubstantiated claims, hearsay, rumours, and conspiracies — is in turn making it easier for all of us to behave, epistemically speaking, like Clifford’s ship-owner: we are becoming credulous for the sake of short-term economic self-interest. In the context of climate change, we should see Clifford’s doomed émigrés not simply as ourselves, but also our posterity. By not responding effectively and rapidly enough to address the looming threat of climate change, we may fail to prevent a geological tipping point, on the other side of which lies a vast unknown.

The real tragedy is not simply that Trump is not doing anything to combat climate change; the fact is that little was accomplished in this respect under the Obama Administration as well.

Sincerely,

Sam Ben-Meir, PhD