Interview With Ethics Author Travis N. Rieder, Ph.D.

 

1. There are competing sets of ethics circulating out there. Assuming one wants to do “the right thing,” or at least not do “the wrong thing,” How should one go about living an ethical life? 

This is a very big question! Many moral philosophers would recommend that you try to determine the correct moral theory, so that you can apply it to difficult situations in your life. So, for instance, some people think that the right action is the one that produces the most happiness, so all they need to do when they are uncertain is try to calculate how much happiness each action produces (these folks are called utilitarians). However, I don’t think this is a realistic or helpful approach to being a good person. Not only do most people not have the time, interest, or willingness to wade through millennia of moral philosophy, but not even professional philosophers agree on which theories are most plausible. Thus, in my book, I suggest rather that people should develop a moral toolbox, in which they keep lots of different moral concepts and ideas, which can be employed when they seem most appropriate. This toolbox includes not only principles like beneficence, which tells us to promote people’s welfare; but also concepts like respect for autonomy, dignity, fairness, complicity, and much else. In our actual, day-to-day lives, then, I think that the best we can do is to try to reason carefully using all the tools at our disposal, and this effort is helped if we do it with others, who can help us expand our moral insight. It is not an algorithm, and it is not easy. But we shouldn’t expect it to be.  

2. What do you feel are the biggest ethical challenges today? 

There are many, but I think climate change must rank somewhere near the top of any reasonable list. We are at a point in human history where the decisions we make today will determine how many people suffer and die for decades to come. And we do not need to do anything glaringly evil to lock in massive amounts of suffering—we just need to keep living like we are now, extracting every last resource from the planet. 

Living in the United States, I also think a lot about how much preventable suffering we allow, when we have the tools and ability to prevent it. A prime example of this from my own research is the drug overdose crisis, which kills more than 100,000 every year. We have the tools to save those people, but we’ve made policy decisions to allow them.    

3. What is your book, Catastrophe Ethics, about?  

The central puzzle of the book is that we live in an era defined by problems that are so large and complex that no one of us, as an individual, can have a meaningful impact on the outcome; but many of us feel a moral responsibility to do something anyway. So how are we to act? 

The paradigm case here is climate change. Virtually everything I do in my life contributes in a tiny way to climate change, because energy used in a fossil-fuel dependent society results in greenhouse gas emissions. So I, like many people, feel like I should reduce my carbon footprint. But dangerous climate change is the result of trillions of tons of CO2, and my individual actions result in mere grams or kilograms of CO2. So if I can’t make a difference, should I do anything? If so, what? These are the questions I try to address in the book.  

4. When looking at a big issue, such as climate change, does an individual’s actions really mean much, or do we need to get big government institutions and corporations to take action? 

The question here is what we mean by “mean much.” If we simply mean, “does an individual action have a meaningful causal impact on climate change,” then the answer is straightforwardly “no.” For most of us private citizens, nothing we do can have a meaningful impact. But the moral question is precisely whether that lack of causal influence means that one’s action doesn’t morally mean much. And here, I think the question is still open. If you are a flagrant emitter, you might not be making any hurricane or wildfire worse, but you are living a less temperate lifestyle; you may be lacking integrity or moral fortitude; you may be complicit in harms in some sense; and in general, you are choosing to be a part of the problem when you could be part of the solution instead. These seem like moral failings.  

5. Could you use a certain ethical standard to justify death, destruction, and mayhem? 

Of course one could, and many have. Wars have been waged for religious and idealistic reasons. And one could use a utilitarian calculus (remember: utilitarianism is the view that says we must promote the most happiness) to trade off lives, one against another. Consider the United States dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of WWII: the justification was allegedly about saving lives—yes, tens of thousands were killed by the bombs, but millions would have died in a land invasion of Japan. In general, my own view is that if one is justifying death, destruction, or mayhem, we should be very suspicious that their reasoning has gone awry at some point. Yes, there are likely real, very tragic cases in which lives must be traded off against one another. But in general, if we are appealing to an “ends justify the means” or a retributivist justification, we are likely letting careful moral reasoning give way to something else.  

6. What challenges confronted you in writing your book — and how did you navigate them? 

I’d say the biggest challenge is that the problem is deeply, deeply difficult, and people (understandably) want a simple solution. They want to know: so what should I do? And how do we stop climate change? But the answer is both harder and darker than that. We aren’t stopping climate change, and so whatever we do will not be enough. Part of the answer, then, is coming to terms with how we can live justifiable lives in a time where we have all, already failed in our collective duties. And while that doesn’t sound like a good time, it is, I think, very important. Because if we just give up on the standard of moral justifiability as soon as we have failed in some of our duties, then we start to embrace a kind of moral nihilism: the world is on fire, so we should just eat, drink, and be merry. But here’s the thing: it can always be worse. Climate change isn’t linear, it is scalar: the longer we go without meaningful action the worse things will get. So allowing the earth to warm by 2.5 degrees Celsius is a massive moral failure; but it’s vastly better than allowing it to warm by 3 degrees Celsius. This means that we cannot give up, and we must continue to wrestle with the morality of living amidst catastrophe. 

7. You fret heavily in your book about one’s choice to have kids, due to fears the planet won’t be able to sustain the raping of its resources due to overpopulation. Do you think people should not have kids and let humanity die out? 

Absolutely not. I’ve written on procreative ethics for years, and have never argued for “antinatalism,” or the view that having kids is bad or wrong. In fact, I have a daughter, and she’s the center of my world. I’m a big fan of kids. That does not mean, however, that there is no moral cost to having kids. And so one of the things I discuss is the environmental cost of procreating, and whether that means that people like me—a middle class American—should limit our family size, since our children will likely be very environmentally expensive. And while the argument of that chapter is quite nuanced, with no simple, pithy answer, I do believe that it’s a serious moral consideration.  

8.  What was your TED Talk that garnered 2.5 million views about? 

In 2015, I was in a serious motorcycle accident and nearly lost my foot. While undergoing weeks of reconstruction surgeries, I was on lots of opioids, and I was then sent home with no advice or follow-up about my pain management. After two months, I was told to stop taking the pills and went into severe opioid withdrawal. The TED Talk describes the four weeks of withdrawal, and what I learned from it. The result of this experience is that I went on to become an expert on the ethics and policy questions surrounding pain, opioids, addiction, and North America’s drug overdose crisis. These questions (and my story) were the foundation of my first book, In Pain: A Bioethicist’s Personal Struggle with Opioids (2019).  

9. You direct the Master of Bioethics program at Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics. Tell the truth (a good ethic): Did all that happened during the pandemic, from the disease’s origination and masking, to lockdowns and vaccines make you nuts? Did it expose to you how conflicted, ignorant, and angry people can get, from professionals to lay people, when both life and quality of life are on the line? 

The pandemic was a really hard time to be a bioethicist. Being at Johns Hopkins, working at one of the premier bioethics institutes in the country, a lot of my colleagues and I felt a lot of responsibility to drop everything we were working on and focus on the public health issues that were causing so much chaos. So I, and we, did. I worked with several teams, and we published lots of papers. We offered guidance to governors and other policymakers. And my own view of that experience is that most of our work mattered…not at all. Something about the level of public health crisis and the politicization of everything led to a sense that policy and politics were suddenly immune from careful public health ethics reasoning. I did learn a lot from the experience, however, and some of those lessons made it into Catastrophe Ethics. One of the most important things I learned is that people, in general, seem to be getting less willing and able to do careful moral reasoning; but I don’t think we’re past the point of no return. And that’s part of why I write ethics for the general public and not just for my colleagues.

For more information about Travis N. Rieder, PhD, Director of Education Initiatives and Associate Research Professor at Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, please consult:  www.travisrieder.com

Do You Need Book Marketing & PR Help?

Brian Feinblum, the founder of this award-winning blog, with over 3.9 million page views, can be reached at brianfeinblum@gmail.com  He is available to help authors like you to promote your story, sell your book, and grow your brand. He has over 30 years of experience in successfully helping thousands of authors in all genres. Let him be your advocate, teacher, and motivator!

 

About Brian Feinblum

Brian Feinblum should be followed on www.linkedin.com/in/brianfeinblum. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog ©2024. Born and raised in Brooklyn, he now resides in Westchester with his wife, two kids, and Ferris, a black lab rescue dog, and El Chapo, a pug rescue dog. His writings are often featured in The Writer and IBPA’s The Independent (https://pubspot.ibpa-online.org/article/whats-needed-to-promote-a-book-successfully).  This award-winning blog has generated over 3.9 million pageviews. With 5,000+ posts over the past dozen years, it was named one of the best book marketing blogs by BookBaby  http://blog.bookbaby.com/2013/09/the-best-book-marketing-blogs  and recognized by Feedspot in 2021 and 2018 as one of the top book marketing blogs. It was also named by www.WinningWriters.com as a "best resource.” For the past three decades, including 21 years as the head of marketing for the nation’s largest book publicity firm, and director of publicity positions at two independent presses, Brian has worked with many first-time, self-published, authors of all genres, right along with best-selling authors and celebrities such as: Dr. Ruth, Mark Victor Hansen, Joseph Finder, Katherine Spurway, Neil Rackham, Harvey Mackay, Ken Blanchard, Stephen Covey, Warren Adler, Cindy Adams, Todd Duncan, Susan RoAne, John C. Maxwell, Jeff Foxworthy, Seth Godin, and Henry Winkler. He hosted a panel on book publicity for Book Expo America several years ago, and has spoken at ASJA, BookCAMP, Independent Book Publishers Association Sarah Lawrence College, Nonfiction Writers Association, Cape Cod Writers Association, Willamette (Portland) Writers Association, APEX, Morgan James Publishing, and Connecticut Authors and Publishers Association. His letters-to-the-editor have been published in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, New York Post, NY Daily News, Newsday, The Journal News (Westchester) and The Washington Post. His first published book was The Florida Homeowner, Condo, & Co-Op Association Handbook.  It was featured in The Sun Sentinel and Miami Herald.