But first, a few words from Pope Francis:
Even as the quality of available water is constantly diminishing, in some places there is a growing tendency, despite its scarcity, to privatize this resource, turning it into a commodity subject to the laws of the market. Yet access to safe drinkable water is a basic and universal human right, since it is essential to human survival and, as such, is a condition for the exercise of other human rights. Our world has a grave social debt towards the poor who lack access to drinking water, because they are denied the right to a life consistent with their inalienable dignity. This debt can be paid partly by an increase...
The earth’s resources are also being plundered because of short-sighted approaches to the economy, commerce and production. The loss of forests and woodlands entails the loss of species which may constitute extremely important resources in the future, not only for food but also for curing disease and other uses.
We seem to think that we can substitute an irreplaceable and irretrievable beauty with something which we have created ourselves.
Now for some other voices:
The Pope’s encyclical about climate change is arguably the most important piece of intellectual criticism in our time. See Pope Francis, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home (London, 2015).
To understand their promptings, and the perils they pose, we have to examine the specific conditions – inequality, the sense of blocked horizons, the absence of mediating institutions, general political hopelessness – in which an experience of meaninglessness converted quickly into anarchist ideology; and we have to return to the man [Mikhail Bakunin] from a backward country [Russia] who gave political revolt its existential and international dimension.
The problem of truth, Montaigne hinted, is a social problem: a problem about reaching, or failing to reach, a working consensus. The knowledge problem centers not on what you know or what I know, but on what we know.
There’s nothing wrong with the economic principles behind the idea of internalizing costs. Still, when we come to implementing these principles, many devils haunt the details.
Aren’t some worldviews more “true”— more accurate reflections of the world’s underlying reality— than others? Undoubtedly, yes. But no worldview is true in any final sense. And many aspects of our worldviews are matters of judgment and value, about which there is, ultimately, no final truth.
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