Flush Rush?: or, how to make moral decisions in the face of uncertainty

(an exercise in critical thinking and values analysis)

Copyright 1996, Dr. Charles Ess, Philosophy and Religion Department Drury University: no use beyond citation for scholarly purposes may be made of these materials without explicit permission in writing from the author. Send queries to: cmess@lib.drury.edu

Outline:

General approach:

A) I enter this discussion from several standpoints: as a historian of ideas, including the histories of science and technology, a philosopher with interests in critical thinking, values analysis, and philosophy of science, and as a religious person.

I will approach the three elements of tonight's discussion from the common philosophical framework of worldview:

One's philosophy or worldview: defines our basic assumptions regarding

• epistemology - what can we know, how can we know it?
• ontology - what is real, what is not really real?
• identity - in light of what we know about reality, what can we say about who we are as human beings?
• ethics/politics - what is the good (if any)? how are we to know it? how are to pursue/do the good in our individual and corporate lives?
• what does it mean to be a good man? a good woman? a good human being?

What I will do is examine the three topics we have before us in these terms.  More particularly, I will approach the issues before us especially in these terms:

epistemological - what can we know about environmental problems? how complete and certain can our knowledge be? Since none of us can be "experts" whom should we rely upon for the knowledge we need to make our decisions?

ethics/politics - given that knowledge about the environment is indeed incomplete and uncertain, what ought we do? What moral conclusions can we draw from incomplete and uncertain knowledge?

In this, I will stress especially critical thinking approaches, so as to offer critical analyses of claims made by Rush Limbaugh and Gregg Easterbrook regarding global warming and U.S. forests, respectively.

I.  Global warming?  Is there a problem?