As mentioned below, John Graham took the time to respond to some of the points I raise in the Worldview. He said he was largely in agreement, but had four areas where his views different to mine. I quote from John’s email to me.

1) “I am not sure I agree with ‘No species is, morally, more important than any other species’. This is the sort of proposition we discussed at length in the moral philosophy part of ‘Greats’ at Oxford, without necessarily coming to clear conclusions. But most of us would accept some species have a moral sense and some don’t, which would seem to suggest different levels of importance.”

If I understand John correctly here, he is suggesting that the possession of a moral sense puts certain creatures (surely humans only, since I cannot see that the social structures of even our closest primate relatives truly equate to the disinterested and sometimes self-sacrificial behaviour patterns provoked by the human moral sense in pursuit of the good) in a different category to those without a moral sense. But I would argue that (human) moral behaviour needs to be moral on behalf not merely of those already endowed with understanding but on behalf of the amoral too. Disinterested moral behaviour should not come to an end with a species boundary. That would be immoral.

I would also suggest that our own understanding of the world is locked inside the human; we cannot know what it is like to be a shark lunging through the dark waters of the night, or a slug lurching from the earth towards the bliss of a lettuce leaf. Given this, can we ever truly say that there is no sort of sharkiness or slugginess that equates to human morality? Of course not, in the sense of it being an intelligent faculty, but the gulf of unknowing between species behoves us to proceed with caution when considering the being of other creatures. We do not know; we cannot know; we will never know. Their being is beyond us.

For me, the key point here is that it is the whole of creation which triggers my wonder and amazement, not merely humankind and human culture, magnificent (and terrible) though this is. I therefore cannot see any moral justice in privileging our species over all others. If we wish our acts to be informed by a moral sensibility, it seems to be that we need to consider the needs of the whole of creation, and in particular of all of those very different sorts of being with whom we share this planet. It is theirs as much as it is ours.

(In the end, too, there is human self-interest at work here, since the web of creation is connected with threads of infinite subtlety. We have already discovered how costly to our own species breaking these can be, and such discoveries seem likely to accelerate fast as the disasters consequent on global warming steadily overcome us.)

2) “‘Homo sapiens sapiens’ is technically more correct than Homo sapiens. Having to ascertain this for myself some years ago, I entered into a correspondence with Richard Dawkins who illuminated for me the difference between binomial and trinomial notation.”

I stand corrected, and will update!

3) “I am less anxious than you about population growth. In theory, the planet can provide more than enough food and water for a population even greater than that to which we will grow in the next 50 years. There is, of course, a huge political problem about providing it, financing the providers and distributing it. But, per se, growth as projected is not a problem.”

I find it hard to contemplate this subject with any equanimity. There were 1 billion humans crowded onto our planet in 1900; 3 billion in 1961; 6 billion in 2001 (a sixfold increase in the C20); there will be 9 billion in 2050, after which the population may then stabilise … but even 6 billion means a 20% sustainability deficit in terms of resource consumption. And if you compare our population to that of other primates, it would be impossible to express by visual means, so greatly do we outnumber all the rest — all the other primates in the world equate to the population of Bedfordshire, a single county in the UK. There are, admittedly, more insects on earth than humans, but their footprint on the planet is feather-light, whereas every dying human (and particularly those in the developed economies of the west) leaves the planet changed and, usually, impoverished.

It’s not just a question of food and water but of genetic seemliness. Morally, once again, our teeming numbers and the impact we have on the planet seems difficult to justify to our fellow occupants. We are poor sharers of the earth. We have the means to reduce our population by peaceful means, and we should struggle to do this. I feel a sense of outrage when religious leaders suggest otherwise. It seems to me to be an obvious example of how religion can be a force for evil as well as good.

4) “I disagree with you about overseas aids budgets. Third World economic transformations of the past 60 years have mostly not happened because of economic aid; the countries which have received the greatest amounts of aid are among the worst striken in the world. I wrote about international aid during all those years in which I was in Washington as US Editor of the Financial Times, and I attended a seminar on the subject a few years ago, also in Washington. The statistic I remember most clearly from the seminar was that in the previous year the World Bank (IBRD) had disbursed c.$25 billion to the Third World but the private sector had invested $300 billion.”

There is much to what John says, and I agree that the record of overseas aid has been a spotty one. But because something was done badly in the past does not mean that it will always be done badly, nor is it necessarily a reason for not doing it at all. My understanding, too, is that the problems which overseas aid tries to address are those which the private sector finds unremunerative, though I applaud the role of the private sector in achieving what it does achieve. Above all, though, it seems to me that the inequalities in the world are so dramatic, and the suffering consequent on these so great, that some effort on the part of rich nations to help less fortunate nations is a moral imperative. By all means rethink and refine the stratagems of foreign aid, but do not abandon it; intensify it. Admittedly the misgovernment of some impoverished nations makes them almost unaidable, or means that a grotesque percentage of that aid will be squandered, but given the level of suffering in those nations this is not an adequate reason for withdrawing the very small sums we are at present disbursing.

Thanks for your comments, John.