Ethical individualism and social conflict
a study in agrarian discontent and irreconcilable world views
by David Heaf

Organic versus chemical farming
The clash of world views that underlies the agrarian discontent is nowhere more intense than between the organic farming movement and chemical farming interests. The government funded farm scale genetically mutilated crop trials currently under way in the UK are being undertaken primarily to study the effects of the crops on the biodiversity of insects, wild flowers and birds as one of the final steps before commercial planting goes ahead. The key point is that SCIMAC,7 the voluntary body formed by the seed industry to oversee these trials and eventual commercialization, and plant breeders cannot guarantee that transgenes will not escape from genetically mutilated (GM) crops and contaminate organic crops. Clearly we have two apparently irreconcilable standpoints. But the UK government has expressed its belief that organic farming and biotechnology based agriculture can coexist. What form will such coexistence take and how will it be reached?

Ethical individualism
Before attempting to begin to answer this question, it is worth considering the process whereby differing viewpoints become motivations to action. This necessitates looking at ethics, the science of morals. We hear calls for an improvement of public morality, but this overlooks the fact that moral action is a characteristic only of the free individual. Actions motivated by instincts, reflexes, dispositions, maxims, commandments, social and religious customs and even laws are not truly moral. A deed can only be described as moral in the truest sense when the individual has intuited the idea which he makes the moral principle for the particular situation concerned and brought into play the imagination needed to realize that principle in the deed. The idea and the love of the deed it engenders in the individual is all the motivation that is needed. And of course the idea may be identical with the idea which once inspired the passing of an existing law. There is a difference between reducing speed in a built up area because that is the law and doing so because one intuits it as right for the particular situation. If this seems like a recipe for anarchy, then in a certain sense it is, that is in the sense that no external governance prevails, only the free individuality. But the freedom meant here is an inner not an outer one. Until we are all so free inwardly that our actions are not governed by our personal inclinations, outer laws are needed to protect us from our own and other people’s selfishness. What I have outlined here is what Rudolf Steiner called ethical individualism. In some key respects it resembles what modern ethicists refer to as Aristotelian virtue ethics. Because of the seemingly anarchic element in a moral philosophy based on the individual it immediately begs the question as to how social life would be possible in a world where ethical individualism prevails. Steiner answers: "To live in love towards our actions, and to let live in the understanding of the other person's will, is the fundamental maxim of free men." No morally free individual would want to compel another person to agree with him, but he can legitimately hope eventually to find agreement because we all draw from a common world of ideas – we are one in spirit. This is evidenced by the fact that in most instances most of us can intuit the ideas behind, i.e. see the justification for, many of the laws of our state.

Living in love towards our own actions is a matter of individual responsibility and inner development, but to let live in the understanding of the other person’s will takes us into a social process for which there is no sustainable alternative other than dialogue in a context of mutual trust. It is easy to see that when chemical farmer and genetically mutilated crop grower William Brigham drove his JCB13 at organic farmer and Greenpeace director Peter Melchett’s tractor-mower as he cut a swathe through Brigham’s maize field this summer, dialogue had been dispensed with and the protagonists were well down the road that leads to Kosovo, Rwanda, Chechniya etc. Were these men acting out of ethical individualism? Here, Steiner gives a clue: "A moral misunderstanding, a clash, is impossible between men who are morally free." Obviously there was a clash, thus on this basis one or both must have been morally unfree. We need not speculate here about the pros and cons of genetically mutilated crops – for which there are many good arguments on both sides – or whether Brigham needed the money and Greenpeace needed another publicity stunt. What is clear is that the event symbolized in microcosm a blockage in a social process which on a wider scale is evidenced by the current irreconcilability of the polar positions of SCIMAC (group supporting genetically mutilated crops) and the organic movement. How this is to be overcome will depend as much on the quality of future dialogue as on the quality of the thinking on both sides. More...

Pluralism is the cultural manifestation of ethical individualism
In his 'chairman's remarks' at The Future of DNA conference in 1996 Dr Henk Verhoog, member of the Ifgene team in Holland, had the following to say:

"The processes of coming to (moral) judgment are considered to be more important than the judgment itself. Ethical judgment can take place at different levels. Most important is the personal judgment of individuals in a particular social situation (ethical individualism in real life decisions). Important aspects in this connection are the person’s biography and the tension between individual moral responsibility and social constraints (especially economic and political constraints). In the philosophy of Ifgene it is of the utmost importance to show a sincere interest in the life history of each individual, keeping back any moral judgments about the person in question. For the realization of a power free dialogue it is important to strive after value-clarification: what is the person aiming at and why, what are the constraints under which she/he is working, why are certain choices made or not made? etc. An attitude of respect for the individual human being is required.

Two other levels of ethical judgment are the cultural and the political. Ifgene is mainly active at the cultural level of social life, not at the political one. At the cultural level, freedom and pluralism are important requirements; persons taking part in processes of ethical judgment should feel free to express their feelings and to give their personal opinion, free from any ideological, political or economic constraints. It is important to rise above the level of personal, economic or political interests and create a climate in which a power free dialogue can take place. What counts are the arguments used, not the person (or any authority) who argues. Arguments can be one-sided, biased, etc. and can be criticized because of this. Criticism is welcomed at the cultural level. Fundamental concepts such as truth and justice are necessary as regulative ideals. At the cultural level the equivalent of ethical individualism is pluralism. Personally I may be convinced that I know what is true or good with respect to a particular problem, but in a dialogue with others I must respect the freedom of the other participants to have their views. No dialogue is possible when participants claim that there is only one truth and that they possess it. This is not pluralism, but fundamentalism (absolutism). The other extreme is relativism, where the ideal of truth is given up, and the views of people are seen as relative to their social position. In extreme relativism dialogue is useless because people are believed to be unable to escape from the situation in which they are imprisoned. The cultural ideal of pluralism requires a fundamental openness to the ideas of others, willingness to listen to others and to revise one’s own ideas if this is believed to be necessary in the search for truth or justice. Every idea can be questioned; dogmas are not accepted at this level. Pluralism is the cultural manifestation of ethical individualism; it is implied by the respect for the human being, for what it means to be human.

It is an important aspect of processes of ethical judgment that, although they are fully dependent on individual persons, the ethical intuitions arising in this process increasingly come from a level which goes beyond the individual. This may be compared with what in philosophical ethics is called the ‘universalizability’ of normative statements. When you are convinced of an injustice in society, it is very natural that you speak up against this injustice. The reason behind this is that in spite of, or perhaps because of, our individuality we are human and we want our society to be ‘humane’."

In a conference set up by Greenpeace UK in October 1999, Robert Shapiro, head of Monsanto expressed his faith in the promises of biotechnology and reached out to Peter Melchett with an offer of dialogue, which the latter accepted, but not without imposing stringent conditions. Clearly both sides are not yet ready for the quality of process outlined by Verhoog: i.e. mutual value clarification, pluralism and openness to the ideas of others. But a social process of some kind has to take place and is taking place. Maybe the outcome means that the proponents of organic agriculture will have to accept the unthinkable: i.e. that chemical agriculture with its new weapons from the gene lab is here to stay. Perhaps, as with other technologies – for instance nuclear power, which was supposed to make electricity too cheap to be worth metering –, mankind will have to learn by its mistakes. If so, one can only hope that in the event of the worst predicted outcomes of introducing GM crops, countries like Thailand, which has pledged to set up GM-free zones as an interim stage towards becoming a GM-free country, will be curators of seed stocks of traditional crop varieties that have escaped the attentions of the molecular biologists.

David Heaf is a biochemist and UK coordinator for Ifgene
The URL of this page is http://www.heaf.freeuk.com/rebecca.htm