Perfection and Disaster

Abstract Academic essays typically and quite rightly advance theses and defend them with arguments. In this essay, I do not propose or defend a thesis. Instead, I try to ask, in a sustained way, a straightforward question: what’s the sense in talking about ethical or political perfectionism in a world facing cataclysmic environmental collapse? At what kind of perfection might one aim in a world fundamentally out of balance: a world of mass extinction and dwindling biodiversity, collapsing ecosystems, super-sized droughts and storms, extreme heatwaves, rising and rapidly warming and acidifying oceans and seas, massive displaced populations, increasingly limited access to clean water and adequate food, spreading pandemic disease, and the economic collapse and political chaos that such cascading disasters will bring in their wake? In such a world, is the good life even conceivable?