Eric Katz

The Nazi engineers: reflections on technological ethics in hell.

Engineers, architects, and other technological professionals designed the genocidal death machines of the Third Reich. The death camp operations were highly efficient, so these technological professionals knew what they were doing: they were, so to speak, good engineers. As an educator at a technological university, I need to explain to my students—future engineers and architects—the motivations and ethical reasoning of the technological professionals of the Third Reich. I need to educate my students in the ethical practices of this hellish regime so that they can avoid the kind of ethical justifications used by the Nazi engineers. In their own professional lives, my former students should not only be good engineers in a technical sense, but good engineers in a moral sense. In this essay, I examine several arguments about the ethical judgments of professionals in Nazi Germany, and attempt a synthesis that can provide a lesson for contemporary engineers and other technological professionals. How does an engineer avoid the error of the Nazi engineers in their embrace of an evil ideology underlying their technological creations? How does an engineer know that the values he embodies through his technological products are good values that will lead to a better world? This last question, I believe, is the fundamental issue for the understanding of engineering ethics.

Envisioning a De-Anthropocentrised World: Critical Comments on Anthony Weston's ‘The Incompleat Eco-Philosopher’

Weston and I will be forever linked in the field of environmental philosophy because of an exchange of essays that were published in the journal Environmental Ethics in 1985 and 1987 on the subject of pragmatism and intrinsic value in the field of environmental ethics (Katz, 1987; Weston, 1985; both essays reprinted in Light and Katz, 1996). That connection may have been what prompted Jason Kawall, the organiser of this session, to invite me in as a so-called ‘critic’ of Weston. But I am a strange critic, for Weston and I share, I believe, a fundamental orientation in philosophy: we both consider ourselves pragmatists in the classic American tradition of Pierce, James, and Dewey. So our debate of 25 years ago had all the hallmarks of an in-house affair; perhaps each of us was trying to establish what exactly a pragmatic environmental ethic would look like. And it would be odd if that debate were to be repeated here. Surely our positions must have evolved over the last quarter century! So let me use the occasion of commenting on this new book as an opportunity to review my agreements and disagreements with Weston’s version of environmental pragmatism. Our destination may be the same, but I believe that we are traveling by different routes.

Anthropocentric Indirect Arguments: Return of the Plastic-tree Zombies

Forget Aldo Leopold. Or Holmes Rolston, III, or Baird Callicott. Forget Arne Naess. I vote for Martin H. Krieger as the most influential environmental philosopher of all time. It has been over 40 years since he published ‘What’s wrong with plastic trees?’ and it has been over 30 years since we killed and buried that argument—or so I thought. (I can still hear the sound of the clods of dirt, thrown by Mark Sagoff and me, on the coffin.) Yet I guess the appeal to human interest arguments is like a zombie that never really dies, always returning to wreak havoc on the civilized world. Krieger claimed that a policy of preserving trees (nature) was not the summum bonum of public policy; rather the proper goal of ethics and politics was the promotion of social justice (Krieger, 1973, p. 453). Kevin Elliott has revived this argument, but now urges it upon us as a new pragmatic means to advance environmental policy. Elliot is serious in his belief that the promotion of properly vetted indirect human interests and benefits will help protect the environment. (At least Krieger knew that he was gutting environmental protections in advocating the creation of ‘artificial wildernesses.’) Elliott’s argument fails for the same reason Krieger’s did: the contingency of the connection between human interests and the preservation of environmental goods. The promotion of human interests—whether direct or indirect—will lead to a world of plastic trees, risen from the dead: plastic-tree zombies. Thirty-five years ago, I made the argument that there is only a contingent relationship between the existence of any human good and the preservation of the natural environment (Katz, 1979, pp. 357–364). Given the appropriate technological advances, humans would not need a ‘natural’ environment to satisfy their interests. Polluted water could be made pure enough to drink, for example, or agricultural crops could be engineered to resist the effects of climate change. The fact that our science and technology is not yet capable of achieving these results is only an accident of human history—thus leaving the need or obligation to protect the natural environment open to the current state of affairs in the realm of practical science (Sagoff, 1974, pp. 212, 225). The philosophical point is what I call here ‘the contingency problem:’ there is no necessary connection between the preservation of nature and the promotion of human interests. Krieger, of course, goes even further, for he argued that given the proper ‘education’ of the public through mass media

Anne Frank's Tree: Thoughts on Domination and the Paradox of Progress

Consider the significance of Anne Franks horse chestnut tree. During her years of hiding in the secret annex, Anne thought of the tree as a symbol of freedom, happiness, and peace. As a stand-in for all of Nature, Anne saw the tree as that part of the universe that could not be destroyed by human evil. In this essay, I use Annes tree as a starting point for a discussion of the domination of both nature and humanity. I connect the concept of domination to the policy of ecological restoration, to national and historical narratives of the connection to forest landscapes, and to the environmental policies of the Third Reich, the specific evil entity that confronted Anne Frank. Domination is also intertwined with the idea of the “paradox of progress,” viz., that human progress cannot be separated from acts and policies of domination.