The inner life of the planet: Earth system science in moral time

Abstract

This paper stages a dialectic between natural science and moral responsibility by considering the idea that deep time and planetary causality exceed moral thought in various ways. The view has been offered by the influential historian Dipesh Chakrabarty reporting on the views of Earth system scientists. Yet it seems to rest on some confusion about what moral relatedness involves. Considering how moral time can internalize planetary time, I take up how the time of the Earth can pertain to one's inner life when facing mortality and one's own integrity as a human being. For the sake of having lived with some integrity, it makes sense for people to confront the historical injustice that has led to the planetary disintegration that all beings on Earth currently face. Moral time is then historical time, the time of living in the wake of injustice for a world with planetary justice in it. Overall, the paper argues for a soulful sense of time against a socially alienated and purportedly objective sense of deep, geologic time.