Rawls and the Environmental Crisis

Dominic Welburn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Economics
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317938453
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

The liberal political theorist John Rawls, despite remaining largely silent on 'green concerns', was writing during a time of increasing awareness that the ecological stability of the earth is being compromised by human activity. Rawls's reluctance to engage with such concerns, however, has not stopped several scholars attempting to 'extend', or 'expand', his works to incorporate this newfound fear for the ecosystems that support human life. But why Rawls? What is to be gained from developing the ideas of a theorist whose primary aim was to establish a system of justice for contemporaneous, rational, and reasonable citizens of a liberal polity?

This research monograph offers a critical consideration of the contextual framework within John Rawls's Political Liberalism and considers its compatibility with the conceptual process of 'greening'. Rawls and the Environmental Crisis argues that Rawls's perceived neutrality on green concerns is representative of a widespread societal indifference to environmental degradation and describes the plurality of methodological and ethical approaches undertaken by green political theorists in analyzing the contribution Rawls's theory makes to environmental concerns.

Addressing a series of key debates within contemporary political philosophy regarding a wider frustration with liberal theory in general, Rawls and the Environmental Crisis will be of great interest to researchers in contemporary political philosophy, environmental ethics, green political theory, stewardship theory, and those interested in renewing existing conceptions of deliberative democracy.

1
Rawls and political liberalism

The introduction has identified the perceived incompatibility between liberal thought and green concerns and the origins of the green critique that has sought to further explore this incongruity with reference to Rawls’s unrivalled contribution to liberalism in the second half of the twentieth century. Rawls has clearly come to be seen as a figurehead for liberal thought, and so it would seem that his theory is taken to be a legitimation – and even a post-hoc explanation – of how liberal societies operate in both theory and practice. Yet this link, that his theory represents an extended apologia for liberalism, and indeed potentially for the epoch of modernity itself, becomes more tenuous if it can be shown that there is a real tension between his argument for liberal principles of justice (an equal scheme of liberties for all, and the equality of opportunity) and the conservative implications of his intergenerational ‘well-ordered society’, which emerges once green concerns are introduced. As such, this chapter seeks to highlight the central, perennial question that has dogged theories of political liberalism since the European Reformations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; namely, how can first principles of justice, capable of motivating citizens towards unity, be found in societies that are characterized by a deep-rooted, yet reasonable, plurality of comprehensive and doctrinal visions of the good life? Given that this is the question Rawls’s mature political thought sought to answer, it is necessary to explain in greater detail the significance of his move from a partially comprehensive Kantian liberalism to a much more limited notion of political liberalism. It will then be possible to not only investigate how the ‘separation argument’ manifests itself in his heuristic ‘original position’, but to again highlight the uneasy relationship between a classical liberal commitment to the inviolability of individual liberties and the more conservative idea of citizens as stewards of the well-ordered society that is central to his mature works on political liberalism. We are thus faced with the question as to what room there is left for green concerns given the importance of the separation argument to Rawls’s notion of ‘justice as fairness’.

Rawls’s political liberalism

What is so political about Rawls’s mature liberalism? Rawls initially set out to construct a means of assessing the extent to which the institutions of a society’s basic structure could be considered just, hence his opening claim in TJ that ‘justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought’ (TJ: 3). The aim was to establish an Archimedean point – a view of ideal objectivity – to be then used to determine the principles of justice that will come to govern the main political, social, and economic institutions of a well-ordered society. In order to construct such principles, according to Rawls, we must mediate between the model-conceptions of the well-ordered society (a society which is ‘effectively regulated by public principles of justice’; Rawls, 2005: 66) and the notion of society as being composed of the free and equal ‘moral person’ so as to ‘depict certain general features of what a society would look like if its members publicly viewed themselves and their social ties with one another in a certain way’ (Rawls, 1980: 308). As such Rawls presents us with his original position (the OP, hereafter), ‘a thought-experiment for the purpose of public- and self-clarification’ (Rawls, 2001: 17). Rawls elaborates:

Thus if the original position suitably models our convictions about these two things (namely, fair conditions of agreement between citizens as free and equal, and appropriate restrictions on reasons), we conjecture that the principles of justice the parties would agree to (could we properly work them out) would specify the terms of cooperation that we regard – here and now – as fair supported by the best reasons.

(ibid.)

Although the significance of the OP would change slightly in later writings, parties (who represent individuals) within this hypothetical situation are always to be placed behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ that prevents them from knowing ‘the social position of those they represent, or the particular comprehensive doctrine of the person each represents’ (Rawls, 2005: 24). For Rawls, this ensures that no citizen, or comprehensive doctrine for that matter, can monopolize political power so as to promote their own social standing or natural talents. These conditions of fairness represent a philosophical view of impartiality, leading to his central conception of justice as fairness. Crucially, parties in the OP are ‘artificial’ representatives of citizens who ‘ignore persons’ inclinations to be envious or spiteful, or to have a will to dominate or a tendency to be submissive, or to be peculiarly averse to uncertainty and risk’ (180), and such parties represent both the reasonable and rational citizen (reasonable in their capacity to possess a sense of justice, and rational in their ability to hold a conception of the good life).

The principles chosen behind a veil of ignorance, and under conditions of ideal fairness as modelled by the OP, can then be used to establish a constitution, whilst at the same time assessing the justice of social institutions. According to Rawls, rational parties representing rational persons in his heuristic OP, ignorant of their life plans and conceptions of the good, would agree to his two well-known principles of justice:

(a) Each person has the same indefeasible claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme of liberties for all; and (b) Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: first, they are to be attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality and opportunity; and second, they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society (the difference principle).

(2001: 42–3)

The ideal conditions of deliberative fairness within the OP result in a corresponding sense of justice within the well-ordered society, hence Rawls’s notion of justice as fairness (see Rawls, 2001: §13).

Rawls would, however, come to describe his earlier efforts, those of TJ, as ‘a comprehensive doctrine of liberalism designed to set out a certain classical theory of Justice – the theory of a social contract – so as to make it immune to various traditional objections’ (Rawls, in Freeman, 1999: 617). Simply put, Rawls recognized that such principles were unsustainable given that they would lead ‘reasonable’ persons to confirm a specific liberal comprehensive doctrine. The right, as the saying goes, became congruent with the good. By the mid-1980s, he would attempt to avoid such ‘claims to universal truth, or claims about the essential nature and identity of persons’ and instead, ‘apply the principle of toleration to philosophy itself: the public conception of justice is to be political, not metaphysical’ (Rawls, 1985, in Freeman, 1999: 223). Rawls now sought a much more limited and freestanding political agreement on the above principles, or at least a shared conception of justice (an ‘overlapping consensus’), supported by citizens deeply divided by reasonable pluralism – a conception adhered to by competing comprehensive doctrines for reasons specific to their code of beliefs (Rawls, 2005: xxx). The feasibility of this project relied on the formation of a stronger – yet less contingent – principle of toleration that would transcend a mere modus vivendi. Simply put, such a concept must be thin enough to motivate most citizens who view themselves as both free and equal, but not so thick that it would border on the comprehensive, thus making it unpalatable to the majority of reasonable citizens. Simultaneously, it must not become too thin so as to lack meaning and coherence.

It was Book III of TJ that would lead to a breakdown of Rawls’s early work. The central problem was again that justice as fairness became synonymous with the good, or at least his own version of the good. The arguments are well known and there will be no attempt to add to this understanding of TJ, but it is important to stress that Rawls’s later, refined political liberalism acknowledged the instability of basing first principles of justice on both a Kantian and Aristotelian view of the self. The Kantian influence (that the individual is subordinate to the supreme good of justice and the moral law) is clear enough, but it was in §§64–5 of TJ that would prove the most controversial as this was where the Aristotelian notion of human flourishing came to the fore. If the higher good of flourishing encased in a unified, planned, and rational conception of the good life, imported from Aristotle’s writings, was to be the apotheosis of human existence, then it would require the formation of a stable and just society, governed by Rawls’s above two principles. The good of human life (to adhere to a rational and unified plan as a vehicle of human flourishing) would be protected, and even nurtured, by the right of a Rawlsian well-ordered society. Combined with a capacity for a sense of justice, individuals would recognize that their only chance for a life of meaning and personal development would lie in loyalty to the shared, cooperative endeavour offered by a just liberal polity. Rawls had originally hoped that the stability of these arrangements would lay in individuals’ deferral to the initial agreement of the OP: the conditions of perfect fairness that would remind them that the resultant justice as fairness was the most appropriate moral arrangement compared to other major systems of political thought. Justice as fairness, if one valued the liberal good of rights and opportunities to flourish, would be the most reasonable option. The good of human flourishing was enshrined in a system of justice – a system that would best reflect the telos of human life.

Again, by the mid-1980s, Rawls would drop the excessively Kantian and Aristotelian foundations of his theory and seek instead to develop a freestanding and independent meta-political ideal (note, not good) as the basis for a well-ordered and just society. This, he argued, was the key aim of political liberalism and culminated in his second great work of the same title Political Liberalism (1993/2005, PL hereafter). Proponents of this version of liberalism, of which Rawls is the most prominent figurehead after his abandonment of a comprehensive and doctrinal theory, represents a thoroughly modern search for a unifying political ideal built on agreement. Political liberals seek consensus on ideals to be found within inherent notions of the free and equal self rather than in controversial philosophical or religious comprehensive doctrines that came before the modern period. As Shaun Young (2004) observes, it hopes to ‘achieve something that has not been achieved’, but it is here where the uncomfortable concept of neutrality enters the arena, as various thinkers, beyond Rawls, offer subtly different political variations on a theme. For Young, political liberalism treads a normative ground between two extremes of liberalism: somewhere between a Hobbesian modus vivendi on one hand, and pure moral neutrality on the other.

Although political liberalism is firmly rooted in the idea of toleration, its key break is from a sole reliance on the Enlightenment ideal of individual autonomy and flourishing, a phenomenon encapsulated in Rawls’s own break from comprehensive liberalism in the period between the publication of TJ and PL. Charles Larmore (1990) notes that individualism, neutrality, and autonomy, as characterized by Lockean or Millean classical liberalism, have all ‘piggybacked’ onto political liberalism’s search for freestanding, non-doctrinal first principles of justice. Yet the concept, as Bruce Ackerman reminds us, ‘is not merely the name of a book by John Rawls’ (2004: 79). Rather, it has been described as a ‘normative framework’ or a ‘strategy’ (Moon, 2004) that makes political cooperation possible. The aim, then, is to achieve political unity around a normative ideal of enduring human cooperation that comprehensive, doctrinal, and classical liberalism has failed to achieve. Herein lies the key to political liberalism: it seeks a non-doctrinal agreement on publicly shared values. Despite this political optimism, there is a clear sense of reality on the conditions of disagreement in society, hence Rawls’s claim that it is to be ‘realistically utopian’ (Rawls, 2001: 4–5). Political liberalism, in its most recognizable form, aims at ‘finally solving the great problem of e pluribus unum, of presenting a “freestanding” political doctrine both independent and yet acceptable from the point of view of a plurality of incompatible comprehensive doctrines’ (Forst, in Young, 2004: x).

So, political liberalism sets itself two important tasks. The first is to remain freestanding and independent between competing religious, spiritual, and political conceptions (comprehensive, doctrinal, or otherwise) of the good. The second task results from a successful completion of the first: how can an ideal, freestanding political conception of justice, agreed upon by a significant number of both rational and reasonable individuals, come into being? Can it remain suitably thin so as to gain adherents but not too thick so as to border on being doctrinal? Simultaneously, how will it avoid becoming too thin so as to render it a hollow, meaningless concept of ‘anything-goes’ neutrality? The question, then, is what will be agreed upon by a diverse and incompatible array of competing visions of the good? Put in the language of political liberalism: what will the e pluribus unum be? Chapter 2 will begin an assessment of Rawls’s own answer to this last question, in the form of the relationship between the value of liberty and the notion of the well-ordered society.

The Reformations as the birth of political liberalism

So far we have offered a preliminary sketch of Rawls’s work that has focussed on his own break from an earlier classical form of liberalism, and its commitment to autonomy, as mirroring the wider project of political liberalism. Yet it is important to look to the historical narrative of post-Reformation modernity, as Rawls himself did, so as to set the scene for his own unrivalled contribution to political thought. By the late seventeenth century the religious unity of the Middle Ages was all but lost. Religious authority, perhaps, is the more appropriate term as the Renaissance and the Reformation(s) had dismantled the self-declared universal influence of the Catholic Church and the papacy in Western Europe. Such leadership, however, had not been confined to spiritual or religious realms: advances in politics, science, geography, metaphysics, and astronomy could all be corroborated through knowledge of the Scriptures. The political fallout of this process, as Reinhart Koselleck aptly states, was that ‘the subsequent split in religious authority had thrown man back upon his conscience, and a conscience lacking outside support degenerates into the idol of self-righteousness’ (1988: 28). The ‘outside support’, the overarching belief in the salvation of mankind through the worship of Christ, and the divine knowledge of humanity’s place in the world, would never return to Western intellectual thought.

Koselleck’s words are pertinent here insomuch as his diagnosis of modernity’s ills is that it is an age of perpetual crisis (and critique, of course). He argued that in a world devoid of religious authority, and thus outside support, humanity has come to rely on the very term ‘crisis’ so as to denote the arrival of a critical time in human history requiring urgent action. The notion of an environmental crisis, according to Koselleck, is just one such crisis that potentially ‘illustrates a widespread manner of speech rather than contributing to the diagnosis of our plight’ (2002: 12). Yet interestingly, Koselleck himself would later recognize that if ever there was to be a point of genuine crisis it is indeed now. Our own period of modernity, given ‘the potential of autonomous humanity for self-destruction has multiplied many times’ and the fact that ‘a kind of final resolution of conflict, has retained a better chance of realization than at any time previously’ (22). This ‘resolution’ as either a Christian term for final judgement, the catechism, or in its non-Christian meaning, ‘indicates an increasingly urgent set of circumstances, the meaning of which mankind seems unable to escape’. Clearly, this meaning is the possible extinction of humanity due to overpopulation and ecological degradation.

Rawls, however, believed it possible to replace this long-lost ‘outside support’ and religious authority with a moral and, later, a specifically political, agreement salvaged from the ensuing post-Reformation degeneration into the ‘self-righteousness’ of the individual. In the decades prior to the publication of Rawls’s TJ in 1971, the stultification of any such ‘grand’ theories of politics had featured heavily in the discourse of political thought (Skinner, 1985: 4). It was widely believed that due to the dramatic events of the European Reformations, any quest to uncover a unity or systematic truth in morality and politics was at best nonsensical and, at worst, dangerous. Theories in the period immediately prior to Rawls’s magnum opus had further suffered as a result of a wider hostility to politics brought about by the horrors of the two World Wars and the ensuing Cold War. As Judith Shklar at the time declared: ‘[p]olitics, in short, have become futile’ (1957: viii). Faith had been lost in politics and associated theories of politics. Such attitudes also lead to near-famous proclamations such as ‘[f]or the moment, anyway, political philosophy is dead’ (Laslett, 1967: vii). Laslett, for one, did not particularly share Shklar’s pessimism regarding general politics as a practice, or an art form, but instead argued that politics was too serious a business for the likes of philosophers and other associated gadflies. So it was during this period that political philosophy was at risk of becoming a second-order, excessively naval-gazing sub-discipline of ethics. With Rawls, however, would come the rebirth of a grand and systematic slant to political thought and, later, the search for agreement in the form of a philosophical basis for consensus in deeply divided societies.¹

Yet the sheer ambition of the early Rawlsian project, which endured in some form in his later works, means it has also been placed within a much older timeline of political thought that articulates a traditional search for a summum bonum of morality in Western philosophy. The following introd...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Rawls and political liberalism
• 2 Rawls on green concerns
• 3 A green critique of Rawls
• 4 A second green critique
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index