What do I mean by moral challenges? Well, defining morality is a sticky business even if you’re a full-time philosopher, which I’m not, or a believer in God, which I’m also not. The definition I’m favoring these days goes something like this: morality means making decisions that benefit the most number of people in the long run, and by extension the human race as a whole.

So what, in my opinion, are the greatest moral quandaries currently facing the species? Thinking from the long view, and trying not to get bogged down in short-term issues (e.g. the Iraq War), I’d argue that they are these five:

1. We need a sustainable way to live on the planet. As I’ve written before on my post about Global Warming Skepticism, I don’t particularly care about the Earth, except inasmuch as we can’t live without it. Right now, letting the Earth die means letting us die. So it’s imperative for the species’ survival that we either a) learn to conserve the planet’s natural resources, b) figure out how to keep the species going using renewable resources, or c) invest heavily in survivalism science that will let us live without them. (Or, more likely, a combination of a, b, and c.) Personally, I’d be happy living in a funky sci-fi dome city, but making something like that sustainable is much harder than it looks. Ergo: investing heavily in alternative energy is a moral imperative.

2. We need to divorce morality from religion. I don’t think anything good comes from the belief that we should refrain from murder, theft, and rape because someone wrote it down in a book five thousand years ago. Those of us who don’t believe in an all-powerful Being In The Clouds are just as capable of defining principles of morality and sticking to them — in fact, I’d argue that we’re more capable. If you want to continue to believe in God, great; but we can agree on moral principles regardless without the intervention of priests, pastors, rabbis, popes, ayatollahs, imams, or prophets. What I’m saying is that the species needs to be able to think moralistically in a way that’s inclusive of both religious and non-religious people.

3. We need to figure out how to balance personal freedom with equitable division of wealth. Westerners are inclined to see the political landscape as a spectrum between hard-core loony socialism (all the world’s wealth should be divided equally among its population, regardless of merit) and equally loony hard-core capitalism (everyone go grab your share of the pie, and if that results in radically uneven distribution of wealth, so be it). In Infoquake and MultiReal, I called these two poles governmentalism and libertarianism. Somewhere in the middle, theoretically, is a society where nobody’s starving and everyone can afford basic medical care, yet we still have ample freedom to make our own individual choices without governments taxing us to death. We’ve got to find that place, and figure out how to sustain it long-term.

4. We need to take the nuclear option out of the picture. Once upon a time, two countries were idiotic enough to play a high-stakes game of chess where the stakes were the survival of the human race. You don’t like my way of governing? Fine, then let’s blow the whole place to hell and you can’t govern any of it. Figuring out how to get rid of these weapons so that nobody has the power to scour the planet clean is one heck of a challenge. There’s no Cold War anymore, but the odds of a nuclear war breaking out in either the Middle East or the Indian subcontinent are still much too high for us to ignore. (Personally, I don’t think the threat is going anywhere until some theoretical point in the future when we’re living so much of our lives virtually that physical threats just don’t make sense anymore.)

5. We need to get serious about global human rights. The United States pays a lot of lip service to the idea of global human rights — and compared to much of the rest of the world, we’re willing to do something about it more of the time — but too often we back down from the ideals of democracy when it suits us. The way we’ve helped Israel shunt aside the results of free, democratic elections in Palestine is shameful, and the way we turn a blind eye to similar human rights abuses in our allies like Egypt and Saudi Arabia is equally ludicrous. But compared to much of the rest of the world, we’re light-years ahead. We’ve ditched slavery, worked hard to put all races on an equal footing, and we’re in the long, slow process of recognizing alternative sexual orientations. Until the whole planet works the same way, we’re going to have a hard time moving forward as a species.

Okay, so these are my five long-term moral challenges for the species. What did I miss?

Update 1/16/08: Some interesting commentary on this article by S. M. Duke here, here, and here.

The pertinent points in Joel’s rather brief piece are these:

• There’s a big difference between a global warming skeptic and a global warming denier
• Many environmentalists are trying to stifle argument about global warming by stating that skepticism is dangerous
• Skepticism is a much more valuable tool in uncovering truth than belief
• The truth about global warming might be inconvenient, but it’s by no means obvious and almost certainly not settled

In the comments, Joel further points out:

• Global warming skeptics are in the unenviable position of trying to prove a negative, which is pretty much impossible
• There are a gajillion factlets out there that don’t quite square up with the theory that human beings are the sole (or overwhelming) cause of climate change
• Even if the climate is changing, most of the ideas for combating it (e.g. driving Toyotas, turning down your AC, signing on to Kyoto) are pretty lame and ineffectual

For another lucid and brief article along the same lines, see this Straight Dope column on global warming from last April. And also read SF author Charles Stross’ take on “Why I Am [Not] an Environmentalist.”

My personal belief about what’s happening with the planet? If I had to put money on it, I’d say that a) the Earth is warming, perhaps dangerously so; b) we contribute to the warming effect, but on a much smaller scale than the alarmists are stating; and c) there’s not a hell of a lot we can do about it anyway, especially not by limiting consumption, because developing nations in Asia will soon swamp any efforts we make at conservation with their own increasing consumption.

That doesn’t mean I think we should sit around and do nothing. But I think clearly we need more skepticism in the debate and more scientific research. Research into whether the climate is changing and how much and why; but also research into what homo sapiens can do to survive this whole mess if the worst turns out to be true and conservation efforts prove useless. If Al Gore’s right about what’s happening, our best bet might be to invest in some hard-core survivalism science.

Here’s something else that’s going to sound incredibly caustic but I need to get off my chest anyway: I don’t really give a shit about the Earth. I only care about whether we can continue to live on it. If we could accomplish that by setting up big climate-controlled science fiction domes and letting the rest of the globe rot, on an emotional level I’d be just fine with that. (On a more practical level, of course, I’m guessing that the rainforests and the wildlife and the amoebuses and all the rest make it a lot easier for us to live here, and there’s really no point trying to invent a livable human environment from scratch when we have one already.)

Can you tell I’m cranky today?

(Oh, hey, and before I forget, Joel’s got a new book out — in the States at least — called Breakaway, the sequel to Crossover. Go buy it.)