A few years ago when I needed to fly across the country to attend to some urgent family matters, I spotted an older woman at the airport wearing a button that said "I'm With Greta." The irony is that if she really were with Greta and believed, in the marrow of her bones, that human activity is causing a climate emergency, she wouldn't have been about to board an airplane, since jet travel is just about the worst thing you can do to generate greenhouse gases. In a similar vein, I've heard friends say how much they want to fly to Italy so that they can visit Venice before it is inundated by rising sea levels (caused in no small part by so many people flying to Italy so that they can visit Venice before it is inundated by rising sea levels). And don't get me started on the thousands of activists and bureaucrats who fly around the world to attend climate conferences.
To be clear, my observation is not limited to climate catastrophists: it applies equally well to Christian ministers who pontificate about traditional values while cheating on their wives, to economics professors who espouse anarcho-capitalism while teaching at state universities, to politicians who agitate for gun control while employing armed bodyguards, and so on. There's no monopoly on hypocrisy!
My favorite recent example is Peter Singer, Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. Singer is famous for, among other things, his academic paper "Famine, Affluence, and Morality", in which he argued that "if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it." Inspired by Singer's doctrine, an effective altruist organization called GiveWell determined that if you donate $5,000 to prevent malaria infection, you will save the life of one child in the developing world. So let's do the math. Singer teaches at Princeton, where the cost of tuition, room, and board for one year is almost $80,000 (granted, many students don't pay that much, but we'll go with the sticker price). Thus a student who attends Princeton for 4 years could have saved the lives of 65 children instead of obtaining a college diploma. Because Princeton has about 5,300 undergraduates, if all those students decided to forego a Princeton education, they could save almost 340,000 lives for each (non-)graduating class. Thus we can conclude that, since joining Princeton in 1999, Singer is complicit in the deaths of an astounding 8+ million children!
Yes, I am exaggerating, perhaps even unfairly. Maybe one could argue that, from his powerful position at Princeton, Singer is able to save even more than 8 million lives through the reach of his teachings and writings. But it's unclear to me if Singer's academic sinecure is really of "comparable moral importance" to less prestigious career paths he might have taken in order to "prevent something bad from happening."
Snarky examples aside, my broader question is this: can we really say that you believe something in the marrow of your bones if you don't behave in a way that's consistent with the belief you profess?
I grant that there are degrees of inconsistency; not every divergence between what you say and what you do rises to the level of hypocrisy, which is a serious charge of moral failing. Yet, to my mind, belief necessitates behavior; going far beyond Kant's dictum "ought implies can", we could posit that "say implies do."
In Walden, Thoreau wrote:
To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.
In the end it comes down to philosophy in its original sense: do you so love wisdom as to live according to its dictates? All else is sound and fury, signifying nothing.
(Cross-posted at philosopher.coach.)
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