What would an essentialist account of optimism look like? It would have to demonstrate in what way or ways the optimizer is identical with what one is optimistic about. And identity is usually conceived in two ways: qualitative, which is loose identity on basis of predicate association (obtained by varying degrees of precision), and quantitative, which is strict identity on basis of self-association of the subject. Even if this latter can not be established to the exclusion of alternates, it holds categorically by subjective presupposition for purposes of internal coherence. The essential optimist is by this someone who doesn't fall apart when everything around him/her does. Therefore the essentialist account of optimism is Stoicism in its classical form.

But as indicated above, quantitative identity is in truth just the strictest form of qualitative identity, and is not categorically distinct from it. This implies that the essentialist view, in this case anyway, can not be correct. And that's another way of saying that the true Stoic's not really an optimist. Rather a coherentist account is required, where one person's optimism is another person's pessimism. And if this is the case, it can refer to nothing which is in itself substantial, but must derive from something which does so refer. But this "something" turns out to be what one is optimistic about, and not the state of mind which optimism constitutes.

The coherentist account is therefore a vicious circle. One is optimistic about something because something better is possible or it's not that bad; and it's not that bad and something better is possible because one is optimistic about it. Note that this merely describes a combination of an attitude or state of mind with the context of its contents and associations. As a description of a part of the world rather than a correspondence with it, to describe the coherentist view as a self fulfilling prophecy would be highly over-zealous and inaccurate. It's something that's found in particular situations, variously describable.

It appears, then, that the distinction between optimism and pessimism is a superficial one, referring rather to topical responses to particular states of affairs, and playing no detectable role in their outcome. A better terminology to refer to their objects would therefore be sensibility and irritability, as that would more fully indicate the situation to which one or the other is a response. Sensitivity is associated with information-input, and therefore sufficiency of judgement-relationship to truth-contents; whereas irritability precludes given categories of stimulation, and therefore does not contribute to analysis of more complex levels of experience contents.

It turns out then that optimism can be given neither an essentialist nor a coherentist reading, but rather a veridical one. It refers to an anthropological approximation to what in a comprehensive context is describable as cosmological knowledge or knowledge of the universe, divisible into various situations where the relationship of sensitivity to the truth of what can be said of a situation, and the irritability to what one doesn't want to hear said about it, can be observed.

Further implied here is that there is no indifference to this distinction, which is formally bi-valent, once the veridical view is assumed. Regardless of the circumstances, one or the other more or less predominates. So how can the present forum-participant express appropriate sensitivity to the relevant state of affairs? Perhaps this would be best expressed by taking note of the fact that participation in the public utility of an intellectual exchange-venue is in principle universal, so that it must be considered a defect where its use lacks a high number of contributors. So can a consideration of the possibility of many future contributors, rather that the current actuality of the paltry few, constitute a true sensitivity to the forum's situation as a public utility, and therefore be not incorrectly describable as "optimistic" in the traditional sense?

As the question of optimism has to do with expectations, it can be posed in the most basic of ways, e.g. as to whether or not the human species will survive another thirty years. As such, optimism is the counter-valence to likelihood of catastrophe-proximity. By emphasizing the practical aspect, optimism is not solely reduceable to the sensibility of epistemic accommodation of corresponding elements, as it was put above, but also what would be classified as irritability by the above distinction: an explicit denial of knowledge-justification in practical decisions under conditions insufficient for continued or sustainable existence. The goal of continued existence overrides confirmation-requirements for grounds of agency. Optimism in its purely practical aspect is therefore a bet that things won't turn out as bad as it looks like they're going to. If nothing is done where nothing can be known, the catastrophe is sure to follow. But if something is done where nothing can be known, it just might do the trick. If it does, you've won the bet. If it doesn't, what have you really lost? This therefore I would describe as the non-superficial view for Optimism, as an axiomatic assumption for a practical operator.

Hence as a practical matter, erosion of human life-sustainability on the earth's crust and an unwieldiness of destructive technical capacity furnish together the sufficient condition for deployment of the Optimism-principle, deemed as practically necessary while underdetermined by sufficient theoretical grounds. What might such a deployment look like? At the risk of false-dichotomy, would we be talking about a new society, or just tinkering with the effects of the old one?

Please try not to chime in all at once, --there is plenty of space for everyone to be heard. Certainly no one could assail discussion participants here with protestations of triviality or irrelevance, as the topic involves human survival in general and whether the educated classes are capable of supplying an adequate remedy for its potential unlikelihood. For those sharing the condition of viewing the notion of the existence of such a remedy in any form sufficient for its comprehensive accommodation by those to whom it would be prescribed, however, it must appear singularly underdeveloped.

In the first instance it should take the form of protective measures. In a broad ecological sense, the organic health of the earth's crust should be protected. Because this occurs not as a preference for something that can be dispensed with, but as binding upon a survival criterion, grounds of volition are not sufficient, but ought rather to be of the "right", so to speak, to stay alive, or for another generation to do the same. As human beings are not ecologically isolated, though, it's not only animals that also assert this right, but vegetables as well. In self assertion of such rights it would not be an unheard of event for example if a vegetable, through its lawyer, could sue a government or multi-national corporation. The pejorative connotation which this point is likely to produce must be immediately waived, since it is by just such a vegetable self-assertion where entire groups of plants not normally protected can have access to court systems and therefore be protected by law. And only through such legal protections are the main terrestrial regions of forestation preservable. (The state is another issue, and it is uncontroversial that the functional legal standards of a society derive from different sources than does any structural arrangement of state power.)

Amendment IX of the U.S. Constitution should be interpreted in this way, as protecting all the pre-supposed rights that don't need to be written down. For this is the body of law which gets the name of human rights later on, and from which the vegetable inherits its fundamental legal credibility. So is there something here? Ought a major part of an adequate approach to the likelihood of imminent terrestrial catastrophe be the confederated enlistment of international vegetative legal self-assertion?

I'm looking forward to this episode. I haven't thought much about different ways of conceiving optimism. I need more time. But I like the idea of treating it as a bet on the future. To add to the mix, I have long held on to the view that Hope is different than Optimism. I learned this from Cornel West. I want to say I first read about it in American Evasion of Philosophy, but know he's talked about it recently. Can one have hope even while being uncommitted to any expectations about the future? Can one have hope even while expecting matters to worsen? Sometimes I even hope for one outcome, while betting on a different outcome. Thanks for this timely and important topic.

It seems to depend on what's being hoped for or optimistic about. Say someone says "it looks like it's going to rain, but I hope it doesn't". Here hope constitutes an emotive response to a perceived likelihood of an undesirable object, but the hoping can't affect the object of the probability-judgement. But say someone else says "I don't see any jobs in my field but I hope I get one". Here the hope can have a constructive effect on a future probability judgement about the same object, so that they together reciprocally help to determine it. The problem in my view with this dichotomy is that optimism is described as a passive rational assessment, whereas hope is an active emotional identification, so that lack of the former must precondition the latter, and therefore a lack of optimism seems to be just a way to describe a generic predicate of that to which hope is a response. How might a common or collective hope be related to an unlikely yet necessary object? Does it make sense to talk about irrational emotional grounds for collective action rather than rational ones when these latter are not available?

Is the problem a distinction between Hope and Optimism, or treating that distinction without regard for other factors? For example, I think there's a meaningful distinction between baseless hope and optimism with some (strong or weak) basis. But there are other factors. Yes, sometimes hope may be an emotional reaction. But sometimes it may be an evaluative preference. For example, I hope for a sustainable future. Even if I couldn't find a basis to be optimistic about a human sustainable future, I hope for it and that hope can be a product of my evaluative judgments rather than an emotional response. Is this speaking to your account? Or did I misunderstand? To my thinking, in such cases, I wouldn't accept that Hope is irrational. Indeed, under those conditions, I'd see Optimism as irrational. I suspect there are some cases when hope would be irrational. If nothing else, there can be situations when a majority of people are hopeful about, say, democracy, because they've been taught to prefer it, but they don't understand it well. And, yes, I suspect their irrational hope can make a difference, helping us become more democratic. As a longtime Critical Thinking teacher, I may be biased here; but I'm inclined to treat such irrational cases as vulnerable. When hope (or optimism) is irrational I fear it can make a negative difference as well as a positive difference. For example, if a group doesn't have a clear understanding of democracy, their democratic hopes might, in the end, promote an undemocratic future. I vaguely remember a Star Trek episode that touched on that subject. But, I'd resist the claim that hope always is irrational and emotional. I'd also resist the claim that optimism is passive, though it can take that form. Maybe this is a way to think about it: Hope risks irrationality and Optimism risks passivity.

Thanks again. I'm thinking I need to find a way to address this topic in my classes. I already touched on it a little when we cover Stoicism in my Ancient class (i.e. when we discuss Epictetus's account of expectations and Fate). But I think many of my students are understandably wrestling with these issues. It'd be an interesting way to end my Critical Thinking classes. But I'm mostly thinking about covering it in Intro to Philosophy. Thanks again,

So the pair are defined by the opposite of what they're risking, by your account. Optimism should be active and hope should be rational, and when one or the other is undertaken, there's a good chance, that is, a risk, that they won't be. If the claim is of an active principle which can become passive if executant, it is self-contradictory and therefore senseless. But if one considers it as a much weaker claim that it's a mere "way to think about it", as stated above, it's hard to disagree with, even if taking up the suggested way of thinking has already seemed to preclude to it any attribution of logical validity. The problem with expressing the pair as a dichotomy, inquired about at the beginning, is narrowly defined as two sides of the same coin, --that negation of one is affirmation of the other. Your commentary thereupon however covers several different points, and is worth reviewing below:

Your argument, while complex, can be paraphrased in my view as follows:
1) There's a distinction between bases of one's relation to expectations: lacking and not lacking (Second sentence).
2) Hope is both an emotional reaction and an evaluative preference (a preference which is preceded by deliberation).
3) Hope is rational where its preference-contents are evaluated, as in the example of a hope for continued human survival. (Your question here (ninth sentence) about whether this is "speaking to my account" can not be answered, since the use of the preposition "to" is unclear as to whether it applies to an indirect or direct object).
4) Preference contents (--for absent objects, it should be noted, as one can't hope for what one already has) are evaluated, therefore hope is (in more than one but not in all cases) rational.

--This is where by my reading the main argument concludes. The second argument challenges the claim that hope and optimism can work together, by showing how irrational hopes, described as those whose object is not well understood, cause more harm than good. In the provided example of hope for democracy, the evidence of its truth as an inductive claim is irrefutable. This challenge from content-deficient hopes however can certainly be accommodated by content-sufficient hopes, as in the example of those based on vocationally based employment, showing both to be compatible with the original assertion of probability-assessment's unidirectionality with preferred absent-object selectivity.

With regards to the main argument though the question can still be asked: Where does hope-rationality stand with respect to objects of collective hopes for unlikely objects? Might one be limited to aesthetic criteria as grounds for action where not enough scientific grounds can be found?

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is an excellent place to start going into these shows when I'm unfamiliar with the topic, which is the case here.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hope/

There is a standard model of hope, definitions, and several contemporary takes. The nature of hope seems to be ever-changing, and climate is a great example. Still, it might be too big to define what is seemingly overly familiar, steeped in history, and dependent on your personal philosophical view. A Stoic, a Christian, and Richard Rorty walk into a bar… has many different punchlines.

I did pick up Jeniffer Morton's book 'Moving Up without Losing Your Way: The Ethical Costs of Upward Mobility.' This book has little to do with optimism directly, but there has been quite a bit written on it elsewhere. I would say a few critical words about her book, but it would go off-topic here.

Disambiguating Hope and Optimism, as Michael is suggesting, is a good start for me, and it would come down to affective engagement with the outcome. Hope implies a personal stake in some if not all outcomes. Optimism is largely inductive and not necessarily forward-looking, though optimism and hope can contribute to one's attitude.

Whether or not optimism is rational, rational is not optimistic all the time. Talk of pessimism and irrationality also seem off track, but those are just first impressions. It is easy to paint the world black and white with opposing concepts, but the question is not black and white. Is optimism rational? - seems grey to me given the many different takes on hope.

Kids should be given opportunities to safely fail, encouraged, and given considerable leeway to find their attitudes and path. The less rational that path is, the better.

There doesn't seem to be much common ground here. Hope, despair, identity, intention, expectation, and power must all be disambiguated and understood, along with good old, and new evil, to speak on whether optimism is rational or not. If one believes in external forces, identifies with larger social movements, or owns their agency in the world, that view will dictate whether optimism is possible. The validity of these forces, movements, or agencies will determine if the optimism is rational. It can be irrational and optimistic due to failure in any of these criteria.

Recently Matt Ridley and Hans Rosling wrote books about Rational Optimism and Factfulness. Those words are still prophetic in terms of overall human welfare. We are better off, in human terms, than we used to be. However, human terms are short-lived when attitude drives action and success instead of focusing on the overall impacts of our self-centered projects. In retrospect, I'm not sure just how rational Ridley and Rosling were. The challenge in the future does not call for optimism and rationality so much as realism.

I'm curious about this show as well. I don't have a handle on my attitudes here and less and less elsewhere.

Because it can be safely assumed that a substantial measure of anticipatory forecast accompanies broadcast expectations with regards to the program-topic under discussion, it could be said that sufficient conditions have been set up, once key terms are defined, to conduct an experiment in the phenomenon of Optimism which holds the promise of determining whether it makes sense to talk about it as a human reality which produces verifiable results, or is just a manner of speaking and has no bearing on potential effects of collaborative work and constructive behaviors. In limiting the conditions for result-verification to the least possible number, it is useful to limit the question asked to one between two incompatible views. If one assumes conditions of impending approach of undesirable objects, Optimism is either comfort or axiom, and does not indicate a capacity for determining the probability of existence of hoped-for objects. The question should rather be limited to a relation of the subject to the reference-content, to determine whether it is based on comfort as space for reflection, or on axiom as time for concentrated activity. As the design is to determine whether its truest existence or best reference is one or the other, the notion of rationality is not necessary.

Twice above have participants expressed anticipation of the broadcast outcome, and these can be seen as expressions which contain elements and ingredients of what is called optimism. The question regarding these and other such expressions is whether they are based on comfort or on axiom. And this can be determined by experiment, which in this case is where each portion of participatory activity constituting what is called a "post" constitutes a contribution to a quantification of the result. On some specified date near the broadcast they can be tallied up so that a majority is determined, and by extension whether it is a strong or weak majority. This can then be checked against the eventual broadcast's contents, to see if the majority view appears. Only in the case of it both doing so and being the tallied majority can one say, with reliability confirmed by experiment, that it's the case.

Optimism has to do with desired objects in future time. And one can be disposed towards the future in at least two distinct ways: anticipating it by active preparation, or awaiting it in passive inaction. As such, optimism has to be about something important. Its use in language indicates that it's always a matter of collective or generic import, and subsequently reflects the social conditions of its relevant context. I've argued above that optimism is a passive relation to an awaited object in future time. Hence it constitutes a comfort-concept with respect to relevant conditions of social control, and expresses confidence in their arrangement with regards to the respective desired object. That's one vote for optimism's predication by sociological comfort in reassurance of other's efforts besides one's own. Are there plausible alternates for optimism which assert an axiomatic characteristic actively anticipating its object?

Was Caesar optimistic about victory over Pompey before crossing the Rubicon? If so, he was confident, and this confidence acted as an axiom for his decision. But if he was not confident about future victory, but nevertheless crossed, this indicates that he really didn't want to, and his generals (or centurions) had to give him a push, being themselves optimistic about high positions in a Caesarian government. So can optimism be described, as this example suggests, as an epiphenomenon of historical events where to whom it belongs remains hidden? Was Plato for example optimistic about his Syracuse adventure or was it Tyrant Dionysius's optimism about learning mathematics that was the key inspiration to Plato's excursion? And if this arose from confidence in the truth of Plato's theories, was it on the part of both participants, or just one? On the occasion of Heidegger's 80'th birthday Arendt describes his support for German fascism in its early years in a similar way, so that optimism equates to apologetics. Here optimism is just a way to express a positive valence for an imposed adverse situation, and as such is a classical tool of repression. There's a line in a song from the 1980's that runs "I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free". The second clause is the optimistic one, expressed in epistemic terms. It takes the form of finding something good in a bad situation, expressed as willful ignorance of the given non-optimistic.

In the forthcoming article "Resisting Pessimism Traps; The Limits of Believing in One's Self" in the journal Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Professor Morton describes a pessimism phenomenon which in aggregate constitutes a set of aspiration-hobbling snares called "pessimism traps", whose evidence-confirmation mechanism is defective because the countervailing decision, the optimistic one, involving greater risk but more comprehensive achievement, can't be tested. In consequence, uncritical presuppositions are automatically imported into post-decision evaluation as having been confirmed, since the lesser goal is nevertheless a valuable one.

By my reading of the article four ways of avoiding these snares are outlined: an unconditional one, where goals are decided independently of evidence of potential success; a sociological one, deriving from obligation to others in similar situations of disadvantage; an epistemic one, where risk-acceptability is precluded only by the boundary beyond which disagreement with its non-acceptability is unreasonable; and the Stoical way, where teleological considerations are indefinitely suspendible in the furtherance of condition-totality acceptance.

While not getting into Morton's conclusion, it seems to me that of the four, only the Stoical way allows itself to tinker with a goal's decision-preconditions as a way of avoiding the trap of the choice of a lesser goal without sufficient evidence for rejecting the greater. For this the example of college application may be useful. Insofar as this can involve the risk of post-graduate default on loans taken out to cover the cost of what is called "tuition", the unconditionalist is either confident in the abstract that it can be repaid or doesn't care about defaulting, the sociologicalist will strive to repay it on behalf of the example it sets for others, the epistemicist can calculate repayment-likelihood by determining that it's not unreasonable to disagree with the chorus of advisories saying that it's unlikely, but only the Stoic can suspend the goal without abandoning it until that one condition is removed, so that associated risks no longer factor into any decision to pursue such a goal, and economic disadvantage as a factor in the trap to be avoided is precluded. The goal is the same, and only its acceptability under certain conditions has changed. Collective interest is appealed to prior to the individual's interest and related topical aspirations. A strike in discussions of collective labor action employs similar reasoning, where the goal of changing conditions in the workplace overrides individual interests for short-term compensation. The stoic approach could then be renamed the collectivist approach, so that pessimism-trap avoidance is assisted by the elimination of economic conditions for their occurrence. If a scenario is considered where many enrolled college-level students could take up a stoical attitude about graduation dates, the example could be carried a little further to ask: does the most rational optimism for avoiding the pessimism trap of assuming failure of student-loan repayment most readily take the form of a student strike against the sale of accredited education, i.e. tuition?

I will try again: there are those now saying consciousness is illusion. Others claim rationality meets that description. Optimism? Well, if optimism is also an illusion, then, hope; love; aspiration; and therefore beliefs, in themselves, are illusions. Did Davidson intend to say this when he called such things propositional attidudes? I don't think so. Nor do I think he might have imagined them to be re-interpreted in that frame. Some forms of truth and reality are time-sensitive. Many others are not.

Reply to participant Neuman's analysis of time-sensitivity and illusion in the 7/26/22-post above: The claim is that some truths are time-sensitive, such as whether or not person x is optimistic about situation y at time t, and some are not, such as the truth that two beans added to two pebbles amount to four items. But does the former apply to time with regards to what's sensed, or to change? If person x is optimistic about situation y at time t but not about situation y at time t' , the optimism becomes of the past but the situation has not changed. But if person x is no longer optimistic about situation y' at time t', the situation has changed, so that the duration of situation y is an illusion, but not the optimism, which disappears accordingly as the situation becomes a new situation. Time sensitivity is by this described, then, as a measure of situation-duration, or a change-barometer which therefore could be with good reason called a "temporometer". Mathematical truths do not show up on the temporometer, indicating no change for the duration of the measure. But a truth such as "the planet is getting warmer" would by contrast show a high measure of change, altered as it is with further conditions which can be identified. So is participant Neuman here suggesting that optimism and the other qualities associated with human consciousness can be determined with respect to their ontological status by the mere application of a well constructed temporometer?

The discussion ranged over three areas: psychological, rational, and collective. Study of optimism as a psychological property of a person is paired with pessimism, for which evidence can be gathered as to the causes of each, e.g. a particular kind of upbringing, et al. Falling outside of emphasis on predication of the subject however is the question of whether one set of objects is appropriate or not.

The philosophical study of optimism in my view can account for the question of the existence of such domains, for which Morton offers two cases for consideration: a rational choice model on the case of terminal medical diagnosis, and a collective action model based on the necessity of pessimism-resistance for collective response in the climate change case. The first shows how optimism is destructive of rational choice, where neglect of getting one's effects in order, which would be the rational choice, is produced by an active hope in an outcome so unlikely as to be unreasonable, and derives from a bias towards one's own biological duration over the concerns of others and one's posthumous reception. Indifferent to any observed psychological properties, then, the terminal diagnosis case furnishes an example of optimism's irrationality as based on having the wrong object.

In the climate change case on the other hand Morton offers an example for the rationality of optimism as having the right object, but as unattainable by the wrong subjects. I read her argument in two parts:
1) In cases where collective action is assumed as necessary, justified judgements of probability are precluded to individuals, since only in concert can such judgements be supplied with sufficient evidence. The rational object determines the conditions for the judging subject by excluding individuals.
2) Because individuals in isolation can only irrationally judge the positive likelihood of an object which requires collective action, the individual is left nevertheless to make a negative judgement of a collective object's unlikelihood in cases of individual pessimism. If non-collective positive optimism is rejected, pro-individual pessimism-resistance is accepted, so that objects of collective optimism are rational just in cases where they are conditioned by non-pessimistic subjects. On this is based my reading of Professor Landy's parody as regarding the climate change case, as "great expectations for little thinkers", --that is, only where enough are convinced that it can't be done on their own or by someone else, like a CEO of an energy corporation, do the larger expectations for greater objects become possible. Self-denial of the individual equates to common affirmation of collective.

In should be noted however that both examples beg the question of why and whether something like optimism exists in the first place, but it can be gathered from the quality of emergency which is shared by both that it consists in or emerges from a sense of threat, and not from aspiration unconditioned by acute urgency.

After all the foregoing, and admitting I have not read most of the comments, I wonder if whether or not optimism is a requirement is merely academic. Moreover, the notion of rationality (reason) does not seem reliant on a reasoning person being, or need be, optimistic about potentials/outcomes of that faculty. One state of being does not appear to require the other. What am I not getting here?

Hi, Tim. Been awhile. My attention has been on other questions, not addressed herein. Other sources of information are not at all all-knowing---some, downright crazy. As implied, if not explicit, my view holds that optimism and rationality are non-overlapping magisteria. You can have one without the other. So, again, in my humble opinion, the question is not the right one. I may return to PT, if permitted. But not right now. Look for Kauffman, Little, Messner and others. Not advertising the venue here. Do not wish to burn bridges.
Always, warmest regards,
HGN.

Rationality is the quality which something has when it is predicated by Reason, or determination by concepts alone. The question of the rationality of optimism itself is therefore abstract and almost nonsensical. But one can inquire into the rationality of certain courses of action which are considered as optimistic. In the terminal diagnosis case, for example, the concepts themselves, both empirical, as e.g. the results of a blood test, and non-empirical, as with the presupposition that biological necropsy is an inevitability for the living individual, determine the rationality of one course of action over another, without the aid of experience associated with the internal reasonableness of the decision which is made by the patient. For this reason Rationality is a kind of objectivity, and contains a claim of validity which is not dependent on individual experience. Similarly with the climate change example, just putting the concepts together which are gathered from induction generates recommendations for a rational course of action without having to refer to associated experiences of inhalation of smoke from wildfires or suffering heat stroke. The question of optimism's rationality as a general concept on the other hand only makes sense if one is asking whether or not optimism and rationality are the same thing. If so, participant Neuman's condition of not overlapping with each other would be fulfilled.

In the interest of summary, and to assist in providing some exportable form to the meandering forgoing, corrections and notation of deficiencies are welcomed from the forum's coauthors and interested others.

The page begins with the premise of optional objective form and the notion that some object or combination of objects is already the best it can be, so that one's future in respect to it/them is a theoretical matter, depending on what one knows about it/them. Sensibility and irritability with regards to noticeable and anticipated characteristics describes a correspondence between a theoretical disposition and an epistemic accommodation, rather than a desired object and an estimate of its likelihood.

Where the range of anticipatable objects however is reduced to only those which threaten the individual or collectivity with annihilation, a favorable or unfavorable disposition becomes a practical matter, the choice of which is underdetermined by theoretical grounds. In practical terms, the unfavorable disposition is excluded even if achievement-probability is miniscule, because one still bets on it in rejection of the alternative. Climate change turns out to be just such a case, and suggestion is made that human rights be expanded to include vegetables, which would have the effect of protecting forested areas which are needed as a component of a solution.

Kant makes a similar distinction in section II of "The Canon of Pure Reason" with the questions of what can be known (theoretical), what ought to be done (practical), and what can be hoped for (both theoretical and practical). If one grants that human survival under terrestrial conditions into the near future is commendably advocated in a practical sense so that theoretical grounds sufficient for the exclusion of alternates can be forgone, then it appears that the third question contains the promise of practical legislation of the domain of theoretical reason, but only insofar as risk of extinction is not avoided.

Getting through all the comments here was time-consuming. The question still begs answers. And raises more questions. What is optimism? An answer to that could give a clue. If optimism is a feature of desire or belief, then rationality takes a hit. People can (and do) believe in and desire irrational ideas, notions and physical things. I once wanted a particular, high-end automoblle. A car that made an M5 BMW seem cheap by comparison.. My desire was irrational, on its' face. Ergo, my optimism for owning one of those cars.