Earth is a Finite resource
I think the limited size of the earth creates various ethical problems concerning things like work and ownership.
It means that if you own part of the earth you are depriving someone else of it.
People will say X deserves his wealth because he worked hard for it. But that wealth is part of a limited resource provided by the earth.
The equivalent is someone going to an orchard late at night and picking all the fruit. Just because they may have worked hard it doesn't make it right to monopolise this resource. It is really just theft.
It means that if you own part of the earth you are depriving someone else of it.
People will say X deserves his wealth because he worked hard for it. But that wealth is part of a limited resource provided by the earth.
The equivalent is someone going to an orchard late at night and picking all the fruit. Just because they may have worked hard it doesn't make it right to monopolise this resource. It is really just theft.
Comments (85)
That explains why it exists, but doesn't address the morality of it.
As you say, it is immoral.
You might like the anarchist Frenchman Pierre Proudhon's ideas. In his 1840 book he declared that "Property is theft!" (What he meant by 'property' is land, factories... not one's personal 'stuff' clothing, books, etc.)
Your orchard analogy is apt. No doubt the the capitalist mogul has worked very hard in his quest to accumulate as much wealth as possible, but it still amounts to a theft. In Value, Price, and Profit (and in other books) Karl Marx showed how capitalism steals the wealth workers create.
Some people have argued that the the size of the earth and man's ingenuity mean that resources are unlimited. This is, of course, a pipe dream, but it is put forward to justify the stupid notion that that everybody can have as much as they want.
I think everyone deserves a home, food and shelter but this becoming harder to achieve.
Also people inherit property and other people are born into poverty so it is far from a level playing field.
I so like the concept of stewardship and I am sure that was advocated in the bible but largely neglected by Christians in favour of "Go forth and Multiply."
We can reward peoples efforts with in reason especially if those efforts involve creative and ingenuity and not just exploitation.
Everything in moderation.
Yes.
If you cite Proudhon people claim you are a communist. I don't know much about communist theory but what I am talking about is rationality. Don't kill the planet that is feeding you.
How will take care of you in your old age if you get rid of the pesky humans? :worry:
"Unsurprisingly for a field that relies on calling happiness 'utility', economics students are the most likely to display evil personality traits, new research has suggested.
Budding economists, as well as business students, scored highest on the 'Dark Triad' set of personality traits – narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism – in the study conducted by two psychologists at Aarhus University in Denmark."
https://thetab.com/uk/2017/07/26/if-youre-evil-you-probably-study-economics-says-science-44013
A survey conductedby Gandal, Roccas, Sagiv, and Wrzesniewski (2005) ?nd that economics students valued personal achievement and power more than their peers while attributing less importance to social justice and equality.
Rubinstein (2006) reports that economics students were much more likely to favor pro?t maximization over promoting the welfare of workers when faced with a business dilemma.
Faravelli (2007) ?nds that economics students were signi?cantly less likely to favor egalitarian solutions to problems than their peers outside of economics.
Haucap and Just (2010) ?nd that a survey of economists revealed they were more likely than their peers to consider the allocation of scarce resources in accordance with who can a?ord to pay the price set by supply and demand to be a fair method of rationing and distributing resources.
And Bauman and Rose (2011) report that economics majors are less likely to donate to local social programs.
https://www.uv.es/sasece/docum2015/Etzioni-2015-Sociological_Forum.pdf
Right - we need a morality shift. Nobody should live without affording his or her own life - a simple question of justness. Suicide should be an open door without social stigma - a simple question of freedom.
So if I break my back and cannot pay my own living expense then......
Quoting Heiko
............nice.
Quoting Heiko
While I agree that life should be allowed to end if a person thinks their life has no worth and there is no dignity to it, I don't want to be asked to get rid of myself just because I cannot afford to pay my way.
And there are no simple questions.
You are ruining the joke: My thought was more of a redesign of public pension schemes. The question who would care for someone has some propositions. Not there wouldn't be enough people on the world that presumably would enjoy such a job in a first-world country. But yes, of course...
Quoting Sir2u
That's me. I am totally unaffected by irony. It pearls off like a drop of water on a Goretex jacket.
Are you registered as an organ donator?
Quoting Sir2u
Is that a condition you are talking about? Why this "if"?
Quoting Sir2u
Why should anyone ask? Your affairs are your own problem, aren't they? Maybe you have an insurance for things like this. Or you took the "sh*t happens" all-or-nothing-approach.
Quoting Sir2u
Of course there are. The moral bankrupcy is officially declared when thinking about how to obliterate people while on the other hand talking about freedom. It does not make sense.
They say that there will be more than 8,000,000 old age pensioners in England in the next couple of years. Add to that all of the people that for some medical reason cannot work and those that don't try to find work.
Who is going to pay for all of these people as the number keeps rising and the number of people working drops because no one can afford kids to replace the workers?
Quoting Heiko
No such thing where I live. And I cannot even donate blood for medical reasons.
If I have my way, when I die it will be on top of a mountain of firewood with a dead man's switch hooked up to a big tank of gas so that I can have my Viking funeral. Fuck funeral directors and coffin makers all.
Quoting Heiko
It is a common, everyday type of if, not IFF. The decision would, obviously, be theirs to take if the thought that their lives lacked those things
Then you should be paying rent to them, obviously. Let's call it 'tax'. In the case of real estate, it is very easy to allow the tax to accumulate as a charge on the land/house/factory if it is not paid, so that eventually the property becomes valueless on the market, and automatically reverts to the state.
Reality in Germany. The bitter irony about this is: They should have done themselves. From one point of view they did for sure, from the other they did not as they allowed politicians to spent all the money right away. One surely can call that aspect naive as you cannot simply put so much money aside without doing something with it. Only peasants think that way.
Quoting Sir2u
That's cool somehow. The reason why I asked is that in our society the right of a dead to itself is more valuable than any living being. I guess calling this fetishism only scratches the surface.
I was reading something about English law being changed to make organ donations the default for every dead person unless they have signed an "OPT OUT" form. I guess that when you are dead you don't need them anymore, so what difference does it make to the dead. If mine were any good to anyone I would give them, but that is not to be. So
Valhalla I am coming!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
But putting demands on resources by creating children that don't need to exist goes beyond survival to what I suppose you could call it colonisation.
As they say it takes a society to raise a child so then the dynamic becomes exploitative of other people. When you have to cooperate with others and share resources then the ethical questions become more prevalent.
Indeed it has, but it's the extreme that is the problem. Looked at in isolation, most of us would agree that, if you work twice as hard as me, you 'deserve' twice the reward. This is moderated when you also consider the limited size of the pool from which these rewards are drawn, but it still seems fair, which is something that matters a lot to many animals, humans included.
But the problem is when the richest person in the world owns around a million million dollars, while the poorest of us own less than one dollar. Now the extremes and the inequality are laid bare. There is not enough wealth in the world for everyone to have a trillion dollars, so we must redistribute what there is. Perhaps not to the point where everyone has exactly the same number of dollars, but so that the gap between the richest and the poorest is seen by most to be fair.
The status quo is not fair, whatever else it is. It must change.
So no one can be blamed for factors like these or praised for achievements based on luck or birth and genetic inheritance. (You could add free will debates in here)
A lot of millionaires and billionaires were already from wealthy backgrounds and or had access to resources others don't. I only found out recently that Richard Branson went to possibly the most expensive private school in the UK whereas he has often been portrayed as a self made man.
Another issue is quality of parenting and parental support, it can be very hard to overcome childhood adversity.
Governments are responsible for a lot of wealth creation because for example they invest in a lot of technology and infrastructure. So everyone's taxes are necessary to aid individual wealth creation.
I don't think you can find a logical relationship between effort/hard work and ownership. Ownership is usually created by force or by negotiation.
And you are not necessarily depriving someone of anything by using a resource. You may be, but only in very particular and rare circumstances. In fact by adding value to a resource (by processing it into a more useful form, with your particular specialized knowledge, know-how, skills, etc., that they don't have) you are usually enriching others' possibilities.
Essentially, your argument has limited viability, and only in the case of land as something to live on - but that's actually the least of humanity's problems, there's plenty enough land to live on for everyone. The real mystery, the real difficulty, is how to produce enough to keep everyone alive, happy and fulfilled.
The real cause of the confusion here is a misunderstanding (with the Left generally, but also with some liberals) of what property is: it relates to actual concrete ongoing use of something, a relationship of control, steering, shaping, marshalling, between a human being and a bit of matter: that's what's being protected by property rights.
I am not being deprived of the use of something on the other side of the world that I'm not using, that I'm not in a natural relationship of control with. Therefore someone else using it is not thieving from me; they are not snatching CONTROL of something FROM me (which is what theft actually is).
Again, the limited validity in what you're saying is that by taking control of something uncontrolled by me (or by anyone else - the limiting case of first use), they may be limiting my options for controlling things. For example, it's an old principle of English law that you can't "hem someone in" by owning all the land around them and preventing them getting to market with their produce. That would amount to a kind of harm. But in the vast majority of cases, it's as I said above: other people are usually adding tremendous amounts of value to the bits of matter that they control, which actually redounds to your benefit when they exchange the product of their activities with you for the the things you produce that are useful to them (you'd rather have an iPhone than a lump of silica in the ground, right?)
This seems implausible because we are the only creatures on earth that have technology. We must have survived on the land at one stage with no tools or technology.
I don't think you can justify ownership based on clever usage of resources. Would you allow someone to move into your house because they designed something clever for it? I don't see people giving up land just in order for someone to be innovative with it. Primarily land is for basic survival shelter or food.
Innovation doesn't justify polluting and overpopulating the environment in an unsustainable way.
There is rarely if ever just one person involved in innovation. It is not like someone found some rock and made an iphone unfortunately phones have an unethical dimension with some of material they consist of mined with slave labour in places like The Congo and assembled in oppressive regimes like China.
Well in a sense, yes, our more ape-like ancestors survived like that. But our recognizably human or human-like ancestors co-evolved with technology as far back as can be traced. There has never been a time when we didn't modify our environment extensively, to the limits of our capabilities.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
You're vastly underestimating how complex and intricate the society that's sustaining you is. The only sorts of people alive today who are in the kind of situation you're describing are undiscovered Amazonian tribes and the like.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Ownership doesn't need any "justification" in that sense; the argument I outlined justifies the utility of it, but ownership as such is a very basic human habit that, again, goes as far back as humanity. You let people keep control of whatever they control until and unless they do harm. This is because doing things with stuff is the most basic human function, and to interfere with humans harmlessly doing stuff is grossly immoral.
The main part of being sustained is having shelter. Technology is pretty useless if you are homeless.
I don't see why you can't have innovation and fair shared sustainable use of resources.
Your position seems somewhat colonialist and justifying controlling already settled territory because you feel your values and lifestyle are superior.
I think if people don't have somewhere decent to live and equal access to resources that would be adequate reason for protest, noncompliance and resistance.
Fortunately most of West has social welfare which is a reasonable redistribution of resources but still humans are leading highly unsustainable exploitation driven or exploited lives imo.
No, the classical liberal or propertarian position is against colonialism because the natives were there first, doing stuff with their environment, they are the ones with the "already settled territory."
Again, I'm not saying that what you're talking about is total nonsense, but like many on the Left, you are misconstruing what the problem actually is. The grain of truth in what you are saying is that people doing stuff with things limits the options of other people to do stuff with those things (IOW if something is already being used, you cannot take control of it without their consent, or without exchange). And under some (quite rare) circumstances, that may possibly be harmful if those are the only options available.
However, if it's harm, it's not harm because it's theft (taking control of something away from people who already control it without their consent - ex hypothesi, the people whose options are being limited have no control over the thing, if they did, control of the thing wouldn't be an option, but a realized fact).
Rather, it's potentially harm if and when two conditions are fulfilled: 1) that people's options for controlling x are being limited (by others' already-ongoing control of x), and 2) that they have no other options available (for survival, etc.).
But those conditions hardly ever hold in a developed capitalist society based on private property.
In sum, the trope "property is theft" is really, really stupid (or rather, not stupid, but merely a rhetorical trick to get the unwary riled up). More sophisticated Leftists, like Marx, understood this, and based their system on the labourer's property in their labour (i.e. it's the working class' surplus labour that's being expropriated - here the error is more sophisticated, and deeper, so I won't go into it now, but you get the general idea).
I like the image of dying on top of one's very own funeral pyre, composed of cardboard, household furniture, waste wood, sawdust, branches from diseased street trees, and the like. BUT Vikings didn't use gasoline in their funeral pyres. Even so, it was all their huge funeral pyres (them and Hindus) that started global warming.
There are green alternatives, however:
One type of green alternative is to self-compost your body; this is a pleasant, no-cost outdoor process which involves no chemicals or carbon emissions. It's NATURAL. You just find a pleasantly remote spot, make a deep bed of leaves and other plant material, lay your dying self down, pull a large amount of more green stuff over you, and die. If you live in a civilized part of the world with few large scavengers and nosey hikers running about, your bodies demise will be quite peaceful and private.
For a livelier physical demise, plan on dying in an area with lots of large scavengers (hyenas, vultures, beetles, etc.). The flora and fauna will have your body taken care of in just hours or days, at most.
For a more graceful physical disappearance, (it could be rigged up so that your deadman's switch could be used) plan on expiring in a large thick-walled plastic tank (just big enough for you). The deadman's switch will open a valve from a large tank of caustic potassium hydroxide which will dissolve your fatty/protein body leaving only bony material. It takes... less than a day. It's 72% more energy efficient than the bonfire approach.
You might like to know that the Mayo Clinic developed this method of "green cremation" to dispose of donated cadavers and other tissue from surgeries, etc. By the time the potassium hydroxide is done, what's left in the tank are bones and clear water.
Plastic tubs and potassium hydroxide are affordable and ready available.
Awe shucks, and I had my dreams of being a true viking. Being blonde and blue eyed meant so much to me.
OK, so plan B. My dead hand will drop a stone to cause a spark that will light up the tinder that will start the fire. No that wont work, it might be raining.
Plan C. I will pay the next door neighbor to light it up when the light goes off. No, that wont work. He smokes. Murphy's law says that there is never a match available when you need one.
Bollocks to it, I'm a modern viking and I have gasoline, or maybe enough pig fat to do the job.
Quoting Bitter Crank
Not a bad idea, around here it would be hours. The dog killed a possum the other night, there was not enough to bury a couple of hours later. And that was just the ants.
Quoting Bitter Crank
No, then I have to think about the disposal of that crap. What the hell can anyone do with a bunch of used caustic potassium hydroxide?
I found this and thought it was sort of funny
http://whatculture.com/science/10-ways-to-dispose-of-a-dead-body-if-you-really-needed-to
until I read the pages that followed.
I have heard about the quick freeze method, they put you into something, I think it is liquid nitrogen, and then drop you so that you turn into a million pieces. When it is dry it is a fine powder you have become. They then can use you as fertilizer for a tree or something. Sounds nice, but expensive.
So well maybe I'll go for a burning barge and sea burial(but I want the gasoline). Now where the fuck can I find a cheap barge?
Fairly expensive, but if you want to go in a blaze of glory, I think this size might be right.
The beauty of this system is that the potassium hydroxide is expended in the process. What's left is water and bone.
I've seen demonstrations of smaller objects like carnations being dipped in liquid N, and then being shattered. Impressive. Unfortunately, liquid nitrogen is expensive. But you know, you can fertilize a tree by just digging a hole, getting into it, and pulling a tree in after you. If you're on the edge of the grave at the time this might be too strenuous.
I have heard that if you use liquid oxygen as a charcoal starter and light it with a very very very long match that the result is incandescent. So, get some liquid O, use that instead of gasoline on your funeral pyre, and the flash will be truly magnificent.
If you aren't buried in a lead lined concrete box, eventually you'll end up fertilizing a tree, pretty much however you decide to rot.
Which came first Colonialism or capitalism?
How much evidence do you want me to provide about misappropriation of land and resources which already had a claim or occupancy on it?
There is Still beneficial Infrastructure in Europe was paid for by slavery. Piracy, war and colonialism led to wealth and artefacts being taken with no recompense.
Exploitation of other countries resources, politics and labour is a reoccurring theme in capitalism.
I am not sure what your original point was but you asked if I would prefer an iPhone or lump of silica implying that superior use of land justified ownership.
When there are finite resources cooperation is the only thing to prevent conflict, war and force.
I am attacking the ideologies that do not encourage stewardship of the land, fair usage and treat the world like an infinite resource and also the just world hypothesis that falsely believes reality is fair and we start from a level playing field.
Regardless of political or economic leanings I do not see a way to claim someone owns somethings which I think is actually a metaphysical claim. If there were infinite resources then we wouldn't need to worry about ownership because no one would be deprived.
If you live on a piece of land and own some great works of art and literature it would be vandalism to destroy the land so it became unlivable and to destroy the works of art that both could be enjoyed by future generations. You can't own something after your dead.
Children don't deserve to inherit poverty or wealth.
Look at the long conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians over land. The land is being thoroughly exploited and is overpopulated. Ownership claims are being propped up by deliberately having large families to dominate the land and increase perceived claim on the land.
Even if you could get an agreement on land ownership it wouldn't justify overpopulating and unsustainably exploiting the land.
Lets dwell on the history of the Ironically named Congo Free State "owned" by King Leopold II
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State#Humanitarian_disaster
"A Congolese man looking at the severed hand and foot of his five-year-old daughter who was killed, and allegedly cannibalized, by the members of Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company militia, 1904"
"(..)generally agree with the assessment of the 1919 Belgian government commission: roughly half the population perished during the Free State period. Hochshild points out that since the first official census by the Belgian authorities in 1924 put the population at about 10 million, these various approaches suggest a rough estimate of a total of 10 million dead.[16]:225-233"
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Contradicts this:-
Quoting Andrew4Handel
(My bolds) The claim of misappropriation rests on the idea that the natives were the original owners of their land.
Before you go hareing off into emotional appeals based on incidents that may or may not be based on facts, and may or may not be characteristic of colonialism and/or capitalism, please try and understand this basic philosophical point.
Which is fine in some circumstances. But stewardship needs a central authority to decide who gets to "steward" what when. The advantage of the system of private property is that it doesn't require that kind of central decision-making authority, it just requires everyone to follow certain abstract rules (grounded ultimately in the principle of the Golden Rule, or something like the Kantian Categorical Imperative).
I don't agree but I can word it differently if you like.
It can just mean to gain something in an underhand manner or by force.
It doesn't follow anyhow that if I don't own something you have equal right to it.
You seem to be making a classic mistake concerning nihilism. Moral nihilism for example says killing is neither right nor wrong so you can't justify anything under that framework, it doesn't make killing acceptable or excusable but it makes moral claims about it null.
Nihilism could entail cooperation and pragmatism. Because if you accept no one owns anything but you want to live in peace then this system would maximise your goals. Nihilism could lead to anarchy but it can't be entailed by it because it denies this kind of causal necessity.
I am not trying to justify land ownership.But if you intend to justify ownership I can point out that land is not owned or justified by the means you claim.
If you imply resources were claimed fairly I can refute that. My point is that once you put claims on land you get into dodgy territory.
In the Congo as far as I am aware the locals were not using rubber widely however they could have been paid to harvest this resource. It wasn't just resources taken but labour.
It is not hard to understand stewardship without a central authority. People have historically prepared food for the winter months by preservation methods and storage and so on.
To me you can tell by looking at your environment what might become excessive exploitation.
It seems to me tribal societies with traditional methods are less prone to starvation and over population , live within there means and understand their land. Notorious famines have occurred as consider, in British India and Ireland whilst resources are being shipped elsewhere and local means of subsistence have been undermined by turning crops into cash.
Private property is far more in need of a central authority than stewardship. You need a government and army to enforce property rights and a legal system in the past there was the divine rights of kings now there is inheritance law.
Can you link me to counter evidence?
Fair and sustainable allocation of resources does not rule out rewards for innovation etc Personally I think peoples consciences should be the strongest force in them with rationality. I chose not to ruin my living space because I know when I move someone else will want to live here, I recycle everything possible out of concern for the environment because I don't see the point in ruining the environs other people will need and inherit. I don't want to have millions whilst children starve or have ten children when there is clear over population.
Bill Gates seems a good role model in some respects. Not every wealthy person is unconcerned about poverty, inequality and the environment.
How about the failure of the Marxist-Leninist experiment?
Wouldn't that be apt to say being close to "stewardship"? Quite much central authority with central planning. It's called history, you know.
And furthermore, the idea that tribal societies are less prone to starvation and over population is simply incorrect. Tribal societies with antiquated farming methods and substance farming have always been prone starvation due to bad years. Substance farming can sound something romantic, but it's totally incompatible to feed the modern world. With all it's negative sides (which I assume people here will eagerly point out), modern industrial agriculture is the solution that we don't have famines in the West.
And furthermore, the reason for the Irish famine was potatoe blight (and potatoe was the cheapest thing to cultivate with usually the biggest crops, hence it became the main food for the poor). My country (Finland) suffered one of the most latest famines ever to happen in Western Europe, and that was because of weather causes. Not because of capitalism or land ownership issues.
And the increase in affluence of the population brings population growth down. Overpopulation is a problem in the poorest countries where the simple reason for having more children is that they can work for the family and take care of you later.
Without the concept of ownership, there is no theft.
You are not depriving someone else of it, because he has no inherent right to it.
Without people creating, agreeing upon rights, there are none.
So then it just becomes a matter of being the first, or wielding the biggest stick.
Again, you are completely missing the point that there's no there there, unless there's some sort of ongoing relationship of use or control between person and thing. There's nothing there to have rights or not have rights about, unless there's an actual relationship between person and thing that you can either let be or interfere with.
Rights are not some mystical halo that stretches from a given individual or group through some kind of rights-ether across the whole known and unknown universe.
You have no right to a thing at the other side of the world that you've never seen or come into contact with, you have rights only in relation to things that you have some sort of ongoing control/use interaction with. The right to private property is simply an obligation the rest of us take on, to let you keep control of whatever you control, until and unless you do harm. Why do we do that? Because we know how horrible it is to have things taken away at random by others, and we extend to others the same consideration that we would wish for ourselves.
The outrage you feel against (e.g.) colonialism depends on the very same intuition. There they were, the natives, happily using their shit, until the big bad colonialists came along and took it from them without so much as a by your leave (or so the story goes - it's largely a myth, but let's run with it for the sake of the argument).
The outrage is that some people took control of things from others without their consent. But that just is breaching the rule of private property, that just is theft. Theft is not breaching your supposed etherial "right" to things you've never seen or entered into a relationship with, it's breaking an actual thing, an actual ongoing relationship between person and thing.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Private property is a system of co-operation and pragmatism - just one that doesn't require central direction. It's certainly not the only possible system of social order, but it's the most basic because it deals with individuals first, and individuals are the active units, the things that have hands and brains, the things that can do things, either individually or in groups.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
That's central authority, but it's not central direction. As it happens, the question of whether central authority is necessary for governance is still open. Obviously, historically, systems of private property have developed out of the central authority of kings and governments; but (albeit more rarely), they've also arisen as spontaneous orders - e.g. the Law Merchant, the legal system of mediaeval Iceland, etc. - so it's a moot point whether the historical path that was actually taken is the only path that can be taken.
But at any rate, again you're missing a crucial distinction. If you don't have a system where the question of who gets to control what when is decided by an abstract rule that applies equally to all (whether enforced by a central authority, or as a spontaneous social order), then the only possible alternative is that someone has to ACTIVELY DECIDE who gets to control what, when. Names have to be named: Bob (or Bob's Tribe) gets to control x for A duration, Alice (or Alice's Tribe) gets to control y for B duration. IOW unless you simply want chaos, then absent a social order run on abstract principles that apply equally to all, someone or some group has to assign control/use of things directly to other human beings (whether it's done in their name, by delegates or representatives or whatever, is another issue, but also, it turns out, largely irrelevant).
But it's not just that: not only does the question of who gets to control what when have to be decided centrally, the question of what they do with what they control has also got to be decided centrally.
So where has freedom gone?
Quoting Andrew4Handel
This is a fantasy, known as the fantasy of the "noble savage," and it's been a fantasy since Rousseau first popularized it among intellectuals it in the 18th century. Most tribal societies are extremely violent compared to ours, and full of continuous inter-tribal strife. Evidence that's been presented by ideologues to the contrary has invariably been found out to be bogus (e.g. cf. the foofaraw around Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa).
You've got a very distorted view of history. I don't blame you though, current State "education" systems are terrible, and they've been captured by an insane ideology that pumps its tendentious drivel into the soft heads of children from kindergarten through childhood to university, and continues reinforcing it via media and "entertainment" systems through adulthood.
"Davis argues that "Millions died, not outside the 'modern world system', but in the very process of being forcibly incorporated into its economic and political structures. They died in the golden age of Liberal Capitalism; indeed, many were murdered ... by the theological application of the sacred principles of Smith, Bentham and Mill."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Victorian_Holocausts
"In part, the Great Famine may have been caused by an intense drought resulting in crop failure in the Deccan Plateau.[1] But, the regular export of grain by the colonial government; during the famine the viceroy, Lord Lytton, oversaw the export to England of a record 6.4 million hundredweight (320,000 ton) of wheat, made the region more vulnerable. However, the cultivation of alternate cash crops, in addition to the commodification of grain, played a significant role in the events."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1876%E2%80%9378
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bengal_famine_of_1770
"The famine is one of the many famines and famine-triggered epidemics that devastated the Indian subcontinent during the 18th and 19th century.[4][5][6] It is usually attributed to a combination of reasons and the policies of the British East India Company. In The Medieval History Journal Vinita Damodaran cites Mike Davies who argues that colonized territories, such as India and Ireland, were used as experiments to understand the impacts of free market economics. The results were famine and devastation for the people"
What is the origin of the need to work? Hint: it is a very simple answer.
I am the only one presenting actual historical evidence.
What knowledge do you have of the Congo under Leopold and what explanation do you have for the ten million deaths and the chopping off of peoples hands and slave labour?
I can present tons of evidence here.
I am not idealising tribal societies, however if you see the list of famines involving mutli-millions of deaths how many can you attribute to people living primitive lifestyles and how many were alleviated by capitalism or land exploitation?
You can analyse this list for the trajectory and causes of famine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines
I wasn't talking about violence levels but sustainability of life style and population sizes and famine.
I think our economic system is violent and destructive etc and unsustainable. Allowing people to starve under gross inequality is a form of violence. Also lets not forget the trillion pound arms industry.
Obviously there is a vast amount of information that could be studied but it seems to me that some interpretations of history are purely ideologically. How can tribal societies be more violent than two world wars, the holocaust and trans Atlantic and Arab slave trades?
None of this anyhow justifies ownership or excessive unsustainable exploitation of resources.
I am not sure how to add photos here but I can easily link to you to images of massive pollution around the world. Dying rivers, deforestation, dramatic climate change and so on.
I don't see how stewardship entails communism or is a central plank in its doctrines.
Like I have said stewardship is a simple assessment of the impact of your activity on your environs like not defecating in the water you are going to drink from.
I don't see evidence that communist regimes took extra care to preserve their environs, more the reverse. It is not like they tried sustainable practises and failed rather the reverse.
It would be bizarre if we were the only species that could not live in a natural states and survive. Apparently we alone are culpable for an unprecedented, rapid rate of extinction in other species. I am not saying we should live in a state of nature but I don't think completely ignoring nature makes sense either.
I am happy for a multi millionaire to posses x amount of land if he or she does not destroy it or stop others accessing it when they need to. Sustainability and stewardship does not imply everyone should be equal at any cost and that resources should be all divided equally at any cost. Rather it implies that people who are best skilled to preserve and sustainably use and distribute resources would be favoured
And overall I am not advocating any system just criticising the rationale of the ideology I outlined in my opening post.
No, apart from the wiki list (which actually partly contradicts some of your points) you're presenting tendentious, biased, ideologically-motivated propaganda. It's a distraction. I'm not interested in getting into the weeds re. famine, I'm interested in the philosophical question you opened with.
Again, please don't misunderstand me. You seem to be a gentle, well-meaning soul who's disturbed by and concerned about suffering, and I'm not saying your analysis is entirely without merit (cf. the points I made above about how limiting options can constitute harm). What I am saying is that you are looking in the wrong direction for solutions because you are misdiagnosing the root philosophical aspects of the problem. If you are concerned about people starving, suffering, etc., private property and capitalism are your friends, not your enemies, and if you think otherwise then you've been bamboozled by ideology.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Because there are obviously going to be more people killed for various reasons in absolute terms when there are more people. What's important is the percentages, because shifts in percentages reflect the effects of political and economic measures over time.
A society with 10,000 people of which 3,000 die violent or theoretically avoidable deaths each year is more violent and less well run than a society of 10 million people of which a million die violent or theoretically avoidable deaths each year, regardless of the fact that a million is a much larger number of dead people than 3,000.
Quoting gurugeorge
The examples I cited of food being exported from Ireland and India during famines are counter examples to this.
Quoting gurugeorge
The point I am making about depriving is that once you claim to own something then you are saying no one else is entitled to it. This would be fine if the world was infinite in size but because it isn't and the population has grown hugely then there is less to be owned by more people.
Even if there were less people, owning a resource can mean preventing others from accessing it, so for example you might on the only source of clean water in area.
Anyway as I showed with the Congo example often other countries and peoples are exploited to benefit someone living thousands of miles away. It is no longer the case and hasn't been for centuries that your lifestyle will have a limited impact.
I oppose the idea that we can do what we want with the earth and exploit it how we like which is really anarchy.
I am not claiming capitalism is to blame for famine but rather excessive exploitation, but that does seem to be encouraged under capitalism
If this was true then why are there so many, many paragraphs about exceptions that seemingly need to be imposed on what may be "done" with money? What may or may not be sold etc.? The only aspect that makes your statement somewhat true is, how Marx put it, that the burgeoise society developed a huge production-force to stay on top in the somewhat Darwinistic selection process inherent to the capitalistic mode of production. Like was said in some film by some ultra-liberal lobbyist: "corruption is the regulation of free markets". Seems this is needed: Minimum wages imposed by the state, threats to move factories somewhere cheap countered by threats to impose tarifs, protectionism vs. free trade.
What is reflected in those examples is the contradiction of capital-interest and the human society.
I have notice that this analysis of tribal societies is controversial in anthropology. Nevertheless I have not used tribal societies as a model for non violent societies.
I think a million deaths Over 3,000 is a more violent world. You just need to have loads more children create millions of new people each year to dilute the percentage rate of suffering. We are living in a time of excess and not just in the positive sense. Not a time of moderation.
I do appreciate your point about making innovative use of resources. But that doesn't justify excess.
I don't think ownership/private property can be logically or scientifically justified even if you would like it to exist as a thing. It is like I mentioned with moral nihilism, where killing is neither right or wrong regardless of preferences but we treat certain things as wrong because we want a stable society.
So as I see this means our claims should be weaker and more pragmatic.
220 bloody feet long!! I think I need one about 200 feet shorter. And the price is about 5 zeros too long as well.
Quoting Bitter Crank
That might not be a good idea. But I do have several oxygen and acetylene bottles I could get filled and used them to get the party going. Got to think about that.
But anyway, I think I will get back to that later. I hope I have a few more years to go. Being a very healthy 65 I think that I could quite easily get to a cool 110. So I'm just gonna sleep on the problem for now. :cool:
Overpopulation is a fairly recent problem. These countries became poorer and exploited under colonialism and inherited the colonialists religious beliefs in fertility and contraceptives etc.
It is ironic that the western countries which consume the most of the earth resources become complacent about their luxury and can boast of responsible breeding. It is not clear that all these others people can conceivably share our lifestyle and consume the same amount of resources.
No, they are examples of "particular and rare circumstances." Vast, vast amounts of commerce have been going on successfully for the past few centuries under capitalism, supporting an ever-increasing populationin absolute terms, and not just supporting it at subsistence level, but always incrementally more and more in fairly comfortable lifestyles.
An increasing global population, living in incrementally improving comfort,directly contradicts your point. If capitalism and private property were peculiarly conducive to famine, we would have already reverted to a tribal situation. And it would actually also be more violent in percentage terms (since tribal society is more violent in percentage terms, and more prone to famine, diebacks as a result of natural disasters, etc.).
Again, related to the other point, the thing to focus on is percentages. When you say:-
Quoting Andrew4Handel
That's true in a sense - yes, there is more violence in absolute terms, but that's just what you'd expect when there's more people, even if the political arrangements were idyllic in your terms, and the number of deaths was relatively small, and remained at the same percentage as the population increased, the world would still be "more violent" in the sense you're using here.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Yes, that's exactly the point I've been making: CAN. But not invariably, not inevitably, and actually only rarely. The rule of private property is subject to the harm proviso or harm condition. The limit of private property is where ownership could be construed as limiting others options in a harmful way. Harm justifies interference, and it's the only thing that justifies interference. IOW while private property is an absolute principle, there's plenty of room for reasonable people to disagree on what constitutes the condition, harm, under given circumstances (it's not always obvious).
Again, it's really quite simple: allow others to keep control of whatever they're controlling, until and unless they cede control to you voluntarily, or until you can justify interference with their control on the basis that they're doing harm in some way. That's it, that's the rule of several property in a nutshell, and it already covers all the things you're concerned about, without any need for centralized control of society. It's not perfect, market failure does occasionally occur, but it's the best we can do short of having a benevolent AI with perfect information and perfect oversight, to order us around.
Minimum wages cause unemployment, they are entirely counter-productive. Most especially, they prevent young people from getting a foot on the ladder of economic progress. They are usually supported by entrenched interests, such as unions.
This is paralleled at the other end of the scale by various forms of corporate welfare. In reality, all legislation that goes against laissez-faire is the product of collusion between big business and the state, or between organized labour and the state, in both cases purely for the purpose of maintaining those interests in their entrenched positions, as against the interests of society as a whole (for corporations especially, maintaining their market share against competitors - the very last thing big business is interested in is a genuinely free market, which is why big business heavily supports Left-wing parties and institutions financially; the more people believe in the fiction that the State can and ought to control the economy, the more levers banking and big business have to influence the State, it's a complete con-game).
The idea that fiat law related to economic matters benefits society as a whole is totally bogus, propaganda for useful idiots. It's politicians buying the votes of the ignorant with promises they cannot possibly keep, at the behest of special interests.
The end result isn't robbing Peter to pay Paul, it's robbing Peter to pay Peter - IOW a useless churning that's a leech on the economy and the main reason we can't have nice things.
As Frederic Bastiat said: "the State is that great fiction whereby everybody seeks to live at the expense of everybody else." ;)
Quoting Heiko
Which has yet to be demonstrated, for all the reams of Marxian twaddle that have been written.
No, unemployment is caused either by people not trying to get employed or by firms not employing them. You have to be deep into some ideological thoughts/justifications to come to other conclusions. What hinders them is the potential loss of profit. And now say that unemployment - this - is not caused by "capitalism".
The reason is obvious: if you make labour cost more than it's worth, the demand for it will be less. Employers will simply not employ people at the higher rate - they will use substitutes, re-organize the business, employ more automation, etc.
Some labour just isn't worth very much - the labour of young, inexperienced people, the labour of relatively stupid people, the labour of immigrants who can't speak the language, etc., etc. But in a free market such people will be employed at the not-very-great value of their labour. However, if their labour is artificially priced higher than its value to employers, they won't be employed at all.
That's handy for entrenched union interests, who don't want the competition (IOW they don't want new blood getting on the bottom rung of the employment ladder, gaining skills and work experience, and eventually competing with them), but it's a miserable deal for those who now have no job prospects at all.
Another example of the maxim: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."
And I meant there cannot ever be another cause of unemployment but the two mentioned.
Quoting gurugeorge
Which underlines the above statement.
Quoting gurugeorge
How would you define what the labour is worth?
Quoting gurugeorge
But the unions do not make the decisions to employ or not, do they?
Agreed. We need to be working at reducing the extremes. We might call a solution "socialism at the extremes, and capitalism in the middle".
SOCIALISM: The top 20% percent should be more heavily taxed with the funds redirected towards creating education and job opportunities for the lowest 20%.
CAPITALISM: For the middle 60% things should work much as they already do, so that everybody has an incentive to produce and improve their situation.
The overall goal should be to create a middle class society.
And now here's the catch. On a global scale, we are the top 20%. On a global scale the "middle class" would likely be a lifestyle unacceptable to most of us. Pointing being, heavily taxing the rich sounds great, until we realize that we are the rich.
Yes, I rather think that's why this issue has never been satisfactorily addressed, because those who have the power to do so are those who would lose out the most. A thorny problem.... :chin: :yikes:
Just read your profile. Wow, we have a lot in common. I particularly enjoyed your favorite quote.
To further respond, I think what's happening is that progress is shoving everybody closer together so that the boundary between "their problems" and "our problems" is being steadily erased.
As example, in most Western cities at least, the sewer system is provided not just to the rich neighborhoods, but the poor neighborhoods too, out of the realization that when it comes to communicable disease we are all in this together.
This evolving mindset would likely solve the problem over the long run, but there's a pretty good chance we won't make it to the long run.
This is silly semantic quibbling. It's legitimate in ordinary language, to call a government policy the cause of a statistical trend, even though everyone knows perfectly well that the efficient/necessary causes involved are the millions of individual decisions that go to make up the trend. Newspaper/media articles and scientific papers do it all the time.
Quoting Heiko
I don't have to define it, the employers do. They are the ones who have to weigh up the costs and benefits to them, of employing such people.
Strange how free will suddenly can become irrelevant, huh?
Quoting gurugeorge
On the other hand you say
Quoting gurugeorge
This sound like you had an idea what was worth how much.
Free choices are influenced by conditions, including political conditions (a free choice takes into account as many factors and conditions as possible, and then makes a decision based on that information). Market conditions incline, but do not necessitate. For example, one given employer might find the kid with his baseball cap on backwards pretty useless compared to the more skilled, experienced worker that he could employ, but he might like the kid and think he has promise and has other good qualities like loyalty and good timekeeping, and notice that he's been at least trying to conscientiously learn the trade, so for his particular case, he might be willing to make the trade-off. There's a myriad of possible responses, as I said. The higher unemployment rate that's caused by minimum wage laws is the aggregate result of all those many varied individual decisions, or one might say a mean around which all those varied decisions tend to cluster. (Just like prices.)
Quoting Heiko
No, it's just a general observation explaining the economic logic of the situation and making a prediction, based on economic theory, which has been borne out by the facts again and again and again. But people look at the visible beneficial result of minimum wage laws (a few people employed at a higher rate) and proceed to pat themselves on the back while remaining blissfully unaware of the damage that's not seen and is not obvious, and only shows up after policy's been implemented for a while (higher unemployment) - until it shows up in statistics, whereupon of course they blame capitalism ;)
This makes the proposition that one is willing to understand the decisions made. One does not have to and hence: why should I? Just invest less in abstract "growth" and employ them right away.
Quoting gurugeorge
I see. Than it is just a sloppy formulation not pointing out the factum in the right way:
Quoting gurugeorge
It is not about how much their work would be worth objectively but how much a potential employer could profit from it.
I think division of labour is problematic because it forces people into menial jobs and creates hierarchies
So people are less free. Someone has to sort odd peas, or clean toilets and not everyone can reach the higher positions or more lucrative jobs.
It is not clear that the people in menial labour are the least capable in general or best at this kind of work rather the reverse because you meet graduates and all sorts of people in cleaning, caring and retail.
It is a bit late to be against colonialism when it already happened, apparently the term Propertarianism was coined in 1963.
It is too late to claim we are starting on a level playing field. It is the same problem with the notion of a Meritocracy. These things need a level playing field to be an honest reflection of ability and just desert.
Do propertarians believe in taxation and social services?
Well, they didn't.
And even if cooperatives can be quite successfull in the West, the soviet style agriculture and economy wasn't. And here with the history of the multitude of Marxist-Leninist experiments we can see that what on paper looks just, logical and reasonable in reality can end quite poorly. And this is one of things that has to be in consideration: we might talk about philosophical constructs on how to improve the World we live in on some theoretical level, yet there is the actual political World we live in where benevolent ideas might come out as not being so good. Property rights as an institution is actually very important. To have somebody (usually a government official) then deciding who is eligible for "stewardship" and who isn't creates a vast mountain of problems in my view.
[quote="Andrew4Handle"]Quoting Andrew4Handel
Responsible breeding? What are you talking about?
You should actually look at the present fertility rates around the World to notice how dubious the idea that the West can boast of "responsible breeding" is. The World's average total fertility rate has dropped from 5 in the 1960's below 2,5 at the present. And notice that a rate below 2 means a decreasing population, which is reality to many, many countries, rich and poor today. Now only something like 14 countries in the World have a fertility rate of 5 or more.
And the idea that other people cannot share our lifestyle sounds to me as a static view of the World where there is no increase in productivity and technology. Or that we can take into account the environment. As if it would be impossible for others to enjoy the quality of life that we do. Luckily reality has shown otherwise as we have seen a huge increase in affluence around the World and a similar vast drop in global povetry in our lifetime. That tells something different.
Decreasing the population is responsible breeding.
Unfortunately the worlds population is increasing.
A country can easily increase its population overnight by taking in immigrants, refugees and so on. there are plenty of those.
Based on the rates of resource domination and depletion by the west to support our current lifestyles we would have to come up with some dramatic new technology to give everyone as similar lifestyle quality and not completely wreck the planet.
Are saying you think everyone can have a car, washing machine, microwave, computer and so on?
Even if it were possible I still think it would be irresponsible use of resources.
Here is a relevant article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollution_in_China
"According to the Chinese Ministry of Health, industrial pollution has made cancer China’s leading cause of death."
"500 million people in China are without safe and clean drinking water."
"Lead poisoning or other types of local pollution continue to kill many Chinese children."
"The pollution has spread internationally: sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides fall as acid rain on Seoul, South Korea, and Tokyo; and according to the Journal of Geophysical Research, the pollution even reaches Los Angeles in the USA."
This is what is fuelling our affluent lifestyle.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Contradicts this:-
Quoting Andrew4Handel
But you seem oblivious - it's like you have two hermetically-sealed compartments in your thought that aren't sparking together. It parallels your not noticing that a claim of dispossession implicitly affirms the principle of private property, or that a claim of theft implicitly affirms the principle of private property.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
That's not the "claim," the recommendation is that we ought to be maintaining a level playing field now, and now, and now, and now ...
No it doesn't
I was giving an example of the division of labour and how it creates menial tasks.
There may always be some division of labour under any system but not to the extent and rigidity of a highly exploitative society.
I think we should interfere to improve the quality of peoples live as much as possible.
And unless are you saying that there will be no necessity to sort peas or clean toilets in your ideal society, then you're implicitly admitting that your ideal society will also have division of labour and have menial tasks to do, so it's not something you can be against in principle.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
I'd rather leave them be to improve their lot by their own efforts, or not, as they choose. I'm not prepared to impose some pretty pattern that's arisen in my head, on their lives.
Labour is divided because there are menial tasks, if all jobs were equal then there would be no need to divide the labor force.
Labor is divided because there are menial tasks, if all jobs were equal then there would be no need to divide the labor force.
I am not putting forth an ideal society.
I think the main reason for the division of labour is to speed up or streamline the exploitation of resources.
But is possible for a doctor to grow her own peas and clean her own toilet and play in an amateur orchestra. Some businesses make employees do a variety of tasks including cleaning to share the burden of menial tasks.
It is possible for a family to live on a small holding to milk their own cow, grow some of their own food and so on.
Nowadays a lot of doctors do some care work as part of their training, to practise interacting with patients and experience a different aspect of healthcare.
It is possible to make work less monotonous.. but the bigger the population, the more focus on exploiting resources and producing stuff the less likely that will occur.
It may entail making sacrifices. Another solution is machines and robots doing as much menial labour as possible.
Your basic assumption is wrong, resources are not finite. We are not restricted to earth. It's perfectly possible even with current technology to start collecting resources from the rest of our solar system... only including earths resources is an arbitrary limitation.
You are inventing moral rules, based on incorrect assumptions, that go against human nature, and would never work anyway because of that. Please stop the naysaying, and start thinking of ways to actually move forward.
Well, that is happening. And it can happen in the future.
Just to give an example of the "dwindling" resources take what is called Peak Oil. It has already happened: that is the peaking of conventional oil production. Happened some years ago actually in the timeline the inventor of the term had forecasted in the 1970's (if I remember correctly).
So has the World fallen into chaos and anarchy? No. Not only has production methods changed, but also alternative energy production has emerged. For example solar power has made dramatic advances in few years. And finally it seems that electric and hybrid cars are truly cornering the market. There is your example how that adaption through technology happens in the real World.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Unfortunately?
A stable population could perhaps work, but a decreasing population creates a lot of problems. The most simple fact is that an increase in population is the most natural reason for economic growth. A decreasing population is a reason for stagnant growth or a long economic downturn. This then hampers down technological innovation and advancement as companies do not see incentives for R&D. Also this naturally makes changes in the demography of the population as there are far fewer younger people than older people. This in turn creates huge problems for our pension systems, but it also creates other problems too.
And basically economic stagnation and recessions create political upheaval, crisis and problems. In poorer countries this leads to conflict and war.
Rise in the wealth of the population has been historically the biggest reason for population growth to decrease. Hence if the poorest countries which have the highest population growth would get richer, the problem would go away. Also economic growth would then give these young populations work, which then would solve a lot of their internal problems. Also, usually more affluent societies do take care more of their envinronment where in the poorest countries where people have to fight against starvation their basic needs go understandably in front of things like preserving the environment.
Hence your idea of decreasing population being a good thing will in fact create huge problems and a lot of suffering.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
So you having those appliances isn't irresponsible, but some African having them would be?
And what is so irresponsible in having them in the first place? After all, for you and me to discuss this thing here on the Philosophy Forum means that both have a device to enter the internet. What is irresponsible in that? We'd be better off without Computers, the net, cars etc?
The employees do too. They offer their labour in return for a wage. And they too must "weigh up the costs and benefits to them, of" being employed by "such people". There are (at least) two parties to every contract. :up:
What is irresponsible is to exhaust environmental resources rather than reduce the worlds population.
Yes our lifestyles are wasteful. I try to be as environmentally friendly as possible. I don't have a car, I have never used a plane, I recycle everything possible.
I don't think it is possible for every country to have America and Europe's level of consumption so what is irresponsible is to just try and make everyone equally prolific consumers.
Quoting ssu
I don't think this is true at all. I already linked you to the problem of pollution in China and that is where a lot of things we use in the West is manufactured. Britain became very polluted when we did our own manufacturing.
Personally I don't think we should create children, to be wage slaves, care for the elderly and save the economy. If decreasing population leads to stagnant growth and wealth leads to decrease in population then it seems like you are advocating poverty.
Our reliance on oil is a key player in the problems in the Middle East.
What was all that stuff about "stewardship" then, if not a rough sketch of your ideal?
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Yes, it's possible, but there's an opportunity cost to everything - the more peas, the more toilet cleaning, the less doctoring, and/or the less leisure for the doctor.
Sort of, but your list is incomplete. Sometimes there are more people needing jobs than there are jobs for them. At other times, there are jobs, but they just don't pay enough to meet the needs of the prospective employee. And so on.
People don't get jobs because they love work. They get jobs because they need a means of supporting themselves and their families. And it is soul-destroying for them to see the owners of companies sporting ocean-going yachts when their employees, the people who earn their money for them, need to claim benefits to subsidise their piss-poor wages.
When it comes to employment, and the lack of it, the main problem is inequality. When the Earth has finite resources, as the topic informs us, it seems silly of us all to allow such inequality. :chin: Jeff Bezos has close to a million million dollars, while the poorest of us own less than a dollar. We need to fix that. It's not that everyone MUST have the same, but that such gross inequalities are moderated. Drastically. :up:
[My highlighting.] No, but the planet, and all the living things that live here, would be. Better off, that is. It's humans that are the problem. Both in terms of our rapacious demands on the resources of our Earth, and the sheer number of us making those demands.
The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement - “May we live long and die out”
For example I don't think that Christianity is true because of its successes, because of the great Cathedrals, music and the foundation of Universities and so on.
Likewise I don't think that the success of capitalism or any human endeavour makes it valid.
As with the example of religion you can build some great things, impressive feats of the imagination and persuasive social ideals on a fantasy.
This is one way you can view economics as soulless if it is not concerned with ethics, meaning, purpose and truth. If It is only concerned with profit and growth.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Perhaps you don't notice, but pollution in China actually does make my point: even if it has grown, it's still a poor country compared to West as the per capita isn't so high. Other places with huge pollution problems in urban areas are Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Egypt, Mongolia, India. The least polluted urban areas you find in Australia, New Zealand, Estonia, Finland, Canada, Iceland. The comparison tells it all.
It's no wonder you have the least pollution, tough environmental laws and a working environmental policies in wealthy industrialized democracies. And btw, you in Britain are still making a lot manufacturing, very likely far more than earlier, even if it doesn't employ as much people as before thanks to automation.
This idea starts from the thinking that we humans are somehow separate from the life on the planet, that were are not a species as others and part of those living things. We surely are the dominant species and mold a lot the planet to our benefit, but that doesn't make us totally separate. In my view this is just the extreme hubris of humans who think that they are absolutely different from anything else. Life hasn't been harmonious even before us with mass extincion events happening before our time. The truth is that if a large asteroid hit the planet and would wipe out the human race, there still would millions of years for life to recover on Earth and prosper before the Sun burns the planet. So life on this planet isn't going to be erased away by us.
Caring for the environment is one thing, saying that humans are just a problem is something else. It's just self-criticism stretched out to the extreme and to the absurd.
Comes to my mind (from a totally different field) certain Americans who are convinced that all the problems and crisis in the World happen because of the actions of the US government and simply don't understand how hubristic, self-centered and truly condescending their viewpoint is. As if everything evolves around the US and other people couldn't be able stir up problems without it.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jul/23/uks-plastic-waste-may-be-dumped-overseas-instead-of-recycled