Emergencies and Range of Tolerance
May 3, 2008
I find it quite interesting to try to understand what an emergency situation is by means of a biological approach. In German, there is a word called “Toleranzbereich”. I do not know what the technical term is in English, but it could be roughly translated as “range of tolerance”. This concept denotes the physical or environmental circumstances in which an organism, given its particular physiological and psychological needs and its particular capacities for fulfilling these needs, is able to function and thrive. For example, a fish, by its nature, needs to live in water. It cannot survive on land because it does not have the capacities to adapt itself to the conditions on land so that it can still fulfill its needs. Man, too, is an organism with a specific range of tolerance. His environment must be structured in a specific way for him to be able to function properly.
An emergency is a situation where the conditions under which an organism, e.g. man, can live and flourish are no longer the case. Therefore, I would argue that what an emergency is can be best understand by reference to the concept of “range of tolerance”: Everything that falls into this range of tolerance are an organism’s normal conditions of living; everything that falls outside of this range would constitute an emergency.
The interesting thing about man is that he has the power to reshape the world according to his needs, i.e. he has the power to bring the world/his environment into his specific range of tolerance. However, this also means that he can do the opposite: He can reshape the world so that it will be inimical to his needs, that it falls outside of his range of tolerance. Man can create “artificial” emergencies, such as totalitarian dictatorships or wars.
The primary purpose of the science of ethics is to define principles according to which the volitional being “man” has to use his capacities for action in order to satisfy his needs under normal conditions, because he, by definition, is unable to survive (at least in the long-range) under any other circumstances. This is (1) why ethical guidance in emerency situations is difficult, if not outright impossible, because man’s capacities for action are wholly inadequate for such situations, and (2) why the only proper ethical principle applicable in an emergency situation is: restore normal conditions, i.e. do everything to return into your specific range of tolerance, as soon as possible.
It is, as a concluding sidenote, pretty interesting that man’s mode of life/survival — a mode of life/survival is an organism’s application of its specific capacities for action to satisfying its specific physiological and psychological needs — includes the expansion of the actual existence (or prevalence) of the normal conditions of his survival. Which means: Reshaping his environment so that it falls into his specific range of tolerance is not something man somehow does along the way, as a secondary issue besides surviving, but it forms a core part of his specific mode of life.
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It must be added, however, that this is a relatevely new approach for me; and thus my position is still preliminary. There is still some thinking to do, e.g. concerning the status of things like heart-attacks which, too, pose an emergency to the organism, but arguably not due to environmental or outside circumstances where the organism’s capacities for satisfying its needs prove inadequate, but rather because the organism loses some of these capacities and therefore can no longer satisfy its needs/pursue its specific mode of life.
Entry Filed under: Ethics. Tags: capacity, emergency, environment, Ethics, life, man, mode of life, mode of survival, need, normal conditions, normalcy, organism, range of tolerance, toleranzbereich.
1.
objektivisten | May 5, 2008 at 10:40 am
Some interesting remarks by Indian blogger ergosum: http://ergosum.wordpress.com/2008/04/02/the-nature-of-emergencies/#comments
2.
Ergo | May 5, 2008 at 11:06 am
Very interesting perspective. I like your point in the conclusion about our act of survival being precisely the moulding of environment to suit our requirements. It’s consistent with “nature to be commanded must be obeyed.”
However, some things to think about:
1) A range of tolerance indicates some optimum conditions of living and some ill-suited conditions. But what about borderline cases–situations that fall at the fringe of the bell curve range of tolerance?
2) My own post is more inclined the hold the view of emergency as an aberration from normality–normality being defined as the mode in which things in reality exist and function by necessity of their identity.
3) Emergencies are only relevant within the context of life–for living organisms. For example, I would argue that there would be no such thing as emergencies if there was no life in this universe. Thus, stars coming in and out of existence through cataclysmic changes are not emergencies as they are outside the context of living organisms that we know of. I would assume range of tolerance also maintains its relevance only within the context of life.
3.
Sascha Settegast | May 7, 2008 at 12:29 am
Ergo; thank you for your comments!
1.) That’s a good question. I guess that those are situations where you still can survive physically somehow, but not on fully human terms, or on the terms proper for the relevant organism. Perhaps trying to identify concrete examples would be helpful.
2.) That surely is an interesting aspect, too. However, even after reading your blog post on it, I am still not entirely sure what this means in terms of concretes.
In a certain sense, normalcy is also an issue for a “range of tolerance” approach. Because, after all, what are “normal conditions” for any given organism? Its range of tolerance!
Range of tolerance is to be understood as a certain range of measurements on quantitative axes each representing one physical/environmental characteristic, such as temperature, moisture (is that the right word?), chemical composition of the soil, presence of other useful or harmful organisms, or whatever. And it should be possible, for every given organism, to specify a certain range of measurements on these axes that is its specific range of tolerance. The particular range of measurements is determined by the organism’s identity, i.e. by the kind of needs for survival and capacities for action it has, by the way it _normally_ functions.
And I would agree that anytime someone claims, implicitly or explicitly, that life on earth is a constant state of emergency, he is rewriting the metaphysically given. He either rewrites the organism’s identity or the nature of reality, claiming in effect that the organism has needs that by the nature of reality cannot be satisfied, or that its capacities for action, by the nature of reality, are not suited to satisfying its needs–that the organism is, after all, not suited to reality, but fundamentally disconnected from it. This, obviously, is absurd, not only in the light of evolutionary theory.
(3) Yes, most definetly. If there were no life in the universe, then there could not be emergencies. To paraphrase Ayn Rand: It is only life that makes the concept of emergency possible — since an emergency is always an emergency _for_ a living organism in regard to its life and survival. The whole determination of what constitutes any given organism’s range of tolerance is highly dependend on the context of its survival needs and survival capacities, and without living organisms the whole concept would make no sense. “Range of Tolerance” is a concept describing or pertaining to a particular class of phenomena, namely: living things.
The dependency upon life also opens up an interesting perspective on the concept of normalcy. Because normalcy seems to be relative to the thing you consider. For living organisms, their particular ranges of tolerance diverge. What are normal conditions for some organisms are not normal conditions for others. It is normal for fish to live in water; it is not normal for cats, elephants or man. The sea is the normal environment of fish; not man’s. And disasters, of course, whether they be man-made or natural, are not normal conditions of life for man.
So far, I only considered living things. But what does it mean to speak of normalcy in regard to the universe? You could argue that normalcy is a thing acting in accordance with its identity. In this case, everything happening in the universe is normal–from a metaphysical perspective–, even living things remaining in or going out of existence, according to their particular identity.
In regard to living things, again, you could argue that normalcy is acting in accordance with their identity (i.e. appliying their capacities for action to satisfying their survival needs), in a certain range of environmental characteristics suitable to them.
You see, the problem here is that although, from a metaphysical perspective, everything happening in the universe is normal (i.e. existents acting in accordance with their identity), we speak of some states as not being normal and even as being emergencies from the perspective of particular organisms. I guess, we are dealing with an equivocation on the concept “normalcy” which most probably is used here in two different ways, or on two different levels.
Sorry, this got rather long.
4.
Burgess Laughlin | August 20, 2008 at 2:37 pm
A technique I have been learning from Ayn Rand and Leonard Peikoff is to be sure to list a wide range of examples of the concept I am wrestling with. For “emergency” my list would include these, among others:
- A fire in my apartment.
- An assault on me while I am walking for exercise.
- The river (I live one block away) is about to overflow its banks and destroy the condominiums that have been built there.
- Russia has invaded Georgia and bombed residential areas of the city in which I am visiting.
- Islamo-fascists are breaking down doors of my neighbors’ apartments and killing couples who are not married.
- I am in a lifeboat with two other people, but we have food for only two.
- I am having a heart attack.
An emergency, in my terms, is a threatening situation (in nature, society, or my own body) that is arising (”emerging”) at a rate so rapid that I cannot rely on established procedures to solve the problem.
For example, if I could prove that I would be assaulted on a certain day next week, I could go to the police for some protection. But if the assault emerges with no prior notice and I cannot expect the police to respond quickly enough to save me from injury, then I must take action myself–by retailiating, a function I normally delegate to the government.
Your range-of-tolerance approach is intriguing. It helps determine what is a threat. I would suggest, however, that one distinguishing characteristic of an emergency is that there are no regular, established procedures for dealing with the threat–because of the rapidity with which the threat is emerging. So, in summary, there are two factors: threat and rapidity of emergency.
5.
Burgess Laughlin | August 20, 2008 at 2:40 pm
In my comment, I don’t know where the smiley-face came from. And the last word of my comment should have been “emergence.”
6.
Sascha Settegast | August 26, 2008 at 11:34 pm
Burgess; thank you for your comment. The method of listing concretes is a very good and useful one, which I still need to train. I tend to be a bit rationalistic in my methods, which is fatal given the kind of things I want to achieve.
I am not sure, however, whether the rapidity of emergence of a threat really is essential or constitutive for an emergency situation. It might well be the case that such rapidity is present in many cases of emergency where you cannot foresee the threat and your range of tolerance shrinks to almost nil in very short time. But I believe that there can be cases of _foreseeable emergencies_. Take for example the city of Venice. It is known that this city is, due to its way of being constructed, slowing sinking into the ocean. Of course, since the results of continuous sinking are foreseeable, it is possible to take action in time. But suppose these measure were to fail, or that people sat by idly and did nothing. The result would not be the fast emergence of a threat, but the creeping emergence; not a fast shrinking of the range of tolerance, but a very slow one. The result, however, would be the same: sooner or later, the range of tolerance has shrunk so much that proper survival qua man would be impossible, i.e. people would find themselves in an emergency situation. I believe that one could find similar cases, e.g. someone living in a house on a cliff slowly washed out and eroded by the waves, or the slow erosion of the rule of law and rise of dictatorship in the country where I live.
Thus, I would conclude that the essential, most fundamental, and therefore distinguising characteristic is the shrinking of the range of tolerance to nil, and not how fast this shrinking occurs.