I know it’s got to be done. Even so, I still feel bad about it. If it were up to me, we would cancel the whole thing. Fortunately, it’s not. It’s up to Mother, and Mother knows best.
It all started when we finally realised that climate change was real and that the consequences were going to be pretty bad. If we didn’t act right away and completely changed the way we lived, we would see more and more deadly heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, landslides, devastating storms and floods, and they would soon become much worse than they already were. Air pollution would rise to levels never seen before, making it difficult to breathe, and we would be hit by new diseases that would spread more easily. Large areas of the planet would turn into deserts and become inhabitable, resulting in mass migration, civil unrest and further bloodshed. Many would starve.
Scientists told us that this was definitely going to happen if we didn’t act and that we had to drastically cut fossil fuel emissions to stand any chance of preventing it. And although we had no good reason not to believe those predictions and warnings, governments found it hard to convince people to radically change their behaviour and to put up with policies that demanded considerable sacrifices from them. In theory we knew the situation was serious and what we had to do, but since it was likely going to affect mostly other people (those living in poorer countries and those succeeding us), we weren’t bothered all that much and largely ignored the problem. Attempts by various well-meaning parties to make people care enough to do what was needed failed repeatedly, until it finally became clear that we just couldn’t do it.
The problem, you see, was human nature, our atavistic stone age moral psychology that evolved many thousands of years ago when we still lived in small groups and didn’t have to worry about future generations or people living in other parts of the world. We had been mentally shaped by evolution for a world that no longer existed, a world in which all that mattered basically happened here and now. We were not made to deal with global problems because we weren’t made to take any serious interest in them. Yet since our very survival depended on it, we knew this had to change, meaning that we had to change, that we had to become something new, something that was better equipped to protect itself from ultimate harm. And because desperate times call for desperate measures, the governments of the most powerful nations joined forces and launched a comprehensive programme of moral bio-enhancement that used a clever combination of hormone treatments, electromodulation and genetic engineering to change people’s moral outlook, making us all more willing to do the right thing even when doing so required considerable personal sacrifice. Obviously, not everyone liked the idea of being morally upgraded in that way, but people were given no choice. There was simply too much at stake to allow anyone to opt …
Read the full article which is published on Daily Philosophy (external link)
