I want to talk about two ethical modes that my correspondence has danced around, but never fully dealt with. They are both long-termist, and taken seriously, they both threaten to make ethics obsolete, or subordinate to strategy. The first I call “persistence ethics”; the second I refer to as “ecological ethics.” I make no claim to their originality—only their novelty to me. Perhaps others can help situate these views within existing frameworks.

Persistence ethics goes back to Machiavelli, when he wrote: “The first duty of the Prince is to persist.” Persistence ethics says that if an organism’s—or superorganism’s—apparently ethical behavior drives said organism to extinction, then the behavior is not actually ethical. Why? Because it is self-defeating. It is not sustainable. It cannot establish itself as a persistent pattern. By failing to persist, it cedes the stage to other behaviors, other strategies.

Concretely, persistence ethics challenges the ethical claims of movements such as antinatalism, degrowth, or radical pacifism. If a country or culture ceases to reproduce, or halts its technological progress, or fails to defend itself military, then it will eventually be overtaken by whatever polities do not partake in pacifism or degrowth. The end state will not, therefore, be a deindustrialized world, or a smaller population, or world peace. Instead, industrializing, pronatalist, and militaristic cultures will simply replace deindustrializing, antinatalist, and pacifistic cultures. Persistence ethics casts certain forms of liberal progressivism as suicide cults: the freedom to be eaten.

Persistence ethics threatens to dramatically refactor—or even replace—standard accounts of ethics as a distinct field of inquiry. Taken to its logical conclusion, persistence ethics claims that strategically rational (roughly, fitness-maximizing) behavior just is ethical behavior, since any less-than-optimal play will be selected out in the longue durée. There is no need for “ethics” anymore; ethics is made redundant; it is equivalent to self-interested rationality (construed at individual, cultural, and national scales). “Ethics” becomes something like the recognition of the self-interested potential latent in all cooperative play, a subset of strategy. There is certainly no metaphysical dimension; moreover, there is no tenable notion of systematic ethical self-sacrifice, or true altruism. This latter argument, at least, is by now well-established in evolutionary theory.

“Ecological ethics” is something like an ethic of long-time-horizon stability. It is already the reigning ethical framework in many bio-environmental interventions: systemic stability and diversity are prized (diverse systems being, on the whole, more stable) over and above the well-being of particular organisms. “You of all people should know: There are no sides, Reverend Mother.” Equilibrium is the greatest good, insofar as well-adapted organisms suffer minimally.

There is complexity, lurking here: there are nasty equilibria à la boom-and-bust cycles of foxes and hares. For simplicity’s sake, I set these complexities aside—perhaps you will wish to re-center them. I welcome any and all criticism that can help us advance our understanding.

A player who subscribes to ecological ethics sees himself not in a one-off game, but in an iterated game. His intuitions around “mercy” and “pity” are greatly troubled. Punishment can be a merciful act. (On this basis, we deny young children certain pleasures and indulgences. We spare them by refusing to spoil them.) Such a player may wipe out an ant colony with a clear conscience, deciding that the genocide is a form of genealogical training, moving the universe into greater stability. Pests must learn to live among man, and to spare a generation now would come at the cost of future generations’ pain. Our mercy slows their process of adaptation. Pain is inflicted as a learning tool. Long-termist tough-love meets accelerationism. (NB: Integral to ecological ethics is a theory of types and perceptual interchangeability, since it is on the basis of type that social consequences are enacted.)

I personally have renounced meat-eating for ethical reasons, and would search hard for a non-fatal solution to an ant incursion. Instinctively, I find these ideas repugnant. But I do not have an answer for them. I do not have a ready rebuttal.

Like persistence ethics (PE), ecological ethics (EE) threatens our standing intuitions concerning the good and the just. We can imagine situations of “integrity”—situations in which a person can get away antisocial behavior, but chooses not too out of moral considerations. EE says that if an ecological agent can get away with antisocial but strategically rational behavior, then he ought to do it, insofar as his exploitation will make the inefficiencies efficient. If he—and sufficient others—shoplift, say, then the store will install security cameras, and the hole is patched.

As I have said, this is a painful way of thinking about the world, and I suspect it is half-wrong. But I suspect it is also half-right.

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And though all this seems ground for tremendous pessimism. Perhaps it shouldn’t be. Perhaps we can look back at what is typically called ethical progress, and reframe it as strategic progress. As a better understanding of our own self-interest. A “neoliberal” case for American ethical progress (traditionally conceived) is that each ethical step also created long-term economic and geopolitical growth. Each increased the overall power of the polity, rather than decreasing it. And this is true the reason for its widespread adoption.

From this vantage, we might say that over the long-run, it is economically and geopolitically self-defeating to keep a significant percentage of the population illiterate, uneducated, and in bondage. We might say that it is self-defeating for a polity to keep half its population, by gender, out of the workforce. That it is no coincidence women join the public sphere under the economic pressures of WW2. We might say that it is self-defeating to put American children to work in factories, performing menial labor, when that labor can be automated or performed overseas, and the children educated, increasing their longterm economic value.

An interesting test of PE/EE would be to find ethical progress (traditionally conceived) that meaningfully decreases a polity’s strength. Are there such cases? What has happened to polities which adopted them?

A second test may come in the future prospects of Peter Singer’s expanding circle concept. It has been a long time since I read Singer’s writings, but my memory is that Singer claims (commonsensically, and uncontroversially) that over time, man has gradually extended his unit of moral worth from family to tribe to nation to species—that is, to all mankind, or “all God’s children.” What follows next, Singer claims, is the extension of moral worth to life itself—to other non-human species.

There’s a different way to tell Singer’s story. It says that groups which manage to coordinate in ever-more intricate networks will outcompete rival groups. That the expanding circle has so far been economically and militarily advantageous for all who adopt it. (Robert Wright’s NonZero makes this claim quite convincingly.) What Singer calls ethical progress is really an expansion of the scale of coordination for ultimately selfish and evolutionary purposes. A friend, Ari Holtzman, has argued that non-human animals will never gain full ethical recognition, as Singer’s model predicts, because they cannot negotiate with us. They cannot enter into coordinative contracts, or make demands like a union—and that it is silly to think there is any other force compels  

I think this argument may be incomplete and flawed, but it’s a provocative and useful starting place. We find lambs cute, but most of us still eat them—so why do we think our empathy's expanding, and not just our wealth? Will we only give up factory farming when it is cheaper to grow meat in lab-vats? .

One qualification of Holtzman’s argument is that explicit linguistic contracts are not the only kind of contracts which exist. Nature forms evolutionary contracts constantly; we have entered into one with our pets, and all domesticated animals. There is a kind of bargaining that happens evolutionarily—an equilibrium must be found—but it’s not clear that a dairy cow has any leverage in this predator-prey relationship. Can it throw its weight around and say, I demand better treatment? Can it say, If you treat me better, you’ll be better off yourself? Human beings can do that, they do it constantly, and it’s a big part of why we all get along. A state or individual or union will demonstrate its resolve and its power through protest, tariff, or strike, and secure demands. This is a major driver of ethical progress: a group demands a level of respect and status, and has the leverage to secure it. Perhaps moral value is never freely given—perhaps it is always demanded at cost.

The hope—or cope—for perseverance ethics, taken seriously, is that what we think of as “justice” and what we know to be power are one and the same. This view looks at the expansion of rights as an economically dominant move, as well as an ethical. What PE suggests is that ethical moves are always win-wins, or global victories: forms of coordination which benefit both parties. Hence the parasite and its host, over the long-term, became symbiotes. And blood feud—an extreme case of local victory as global defeat—eventually extinguishes the feuding lines.

I have my skepticisms. But these ideas have tempted me greatly, in recent months, and I wanted to set them down to start a conversation—or else to be pointed to existing conversations which touch on these themes.