Justice, Property and the Environment

Social and Legal Perspectives

Tim Hayward, John O'Neill

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138322769
• eBook ISBN: 9780429837791
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1997, this book discusses the interplaying factors environmental issues have on justice and property and other social problems. Endeavouring create a discourse on what sustainability means in implementation, each of the contributors to this book approaches this via different theoretical viewpoints.

Part One
Austin Lecture

1 Ecology, community and justice

Ted Benton

Introduction

Some advocates of Green politics make the strong claim that it transcends the old divisions between Left and Right. Other social theorists, such as Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck, who have attempted to give a central place to social movements and, especially, environmental issues in their work, have come to similar conclusions – most notably in Giddens's Beyond Left and Right (1994). For Giddens, reflexivity, detraditionalisation and globalization are three processes whose operation in contemporary societies displaces class politics in favour of what he calls 'life-polities', associated with progressive social movements. In similar vein, Beck (1992) argues that the 'risk' society which has come to replace classical industrial modernity disrupts connections between structures of social inequality and class identifies and leads to a reflexive politics concerned with the distribution of 'bads' rather than goods. The lines of cleavage in the risk society do not correspond to the class divisions of industrial capitalism, in part because the scale and scope of the ecological hazards of contemporary societies are universally threatening. The widespread scepticism about science and technology, combined with the growing role of technical expertise in identifying and informing policy-responses to these hazards, gives knowledge a high priority in the new politics.

Few people who seriously reflect on these arguments will deny that the rise of Green social movements and the issues to which they draw attention have important implications for how we construe the political landscape at the end of the twentieth century. My aim here is to think about just how deep those implications go. To anticipate somewhat, I think that the challenge goes very deep indeed, and does require us radically to rethink the established concepts and values of political discourse. However, this is not the same thing as to say that the old rivalries of Left and Right have been superseded. On the contrary, my argument is that in important respects the issues which are posed by contemporary Green and environmental politics confirm and add both force and urgency to traditional diagnoses from the Left. Vast concentrations of unaccountable economic, military, cultural and political power intensify the divisions of wealth and poverty within and between societies and regions, transform and fragment local cultural forms, redistribute the ecological costs of Northern affluence across the globe and threaten military conflict in the scramble for key material resources. Writers from the Left have taken the lead in developing a critical analysis of all this, but in the field of practice, all the traditional vehicles and strategies for radical change on the Left are in deep trouble. What follows is a small part of a wider attempt to do the rethinking which is required of the Left if it is to recover its proper role in giving voice to and mobilising popular resistance. Of course, I hope it will also be of interest to readers who do not share this project: the diagnosis I offer of the implications of the 'Green challenge' is in many respects one which applies across the political spectrum.

The focus of this paper is oil the implications of the new Green agenda for one concept in particular: that of social justice. Historically, of course, there has been no essential connection between a concern for justice and the political Left. Pre-modern concepts of justice, indeed, required allocation of goods on the basis of antecedent entitlements, confirming or restoring the status quo. In modern times, too, the Left has no monopoly on the use of the term justice. However, the centrality of questions of distributive justice has come to define the Left in our century to the extent (hat any challenge to the concept or value of justice must also call into question the continuation of arecognisably Leftist politics. Similarly, any radical transformation in our ideas about justice must call forth a transformation of the Left: and it is to that process of selftransformation that these arguments are addressed.

Of course, the idea of justice is a contested one and this contest itself is one field of contemporary political dispute. Because my aim is a wide and programmatic one, I shall not engage in detailed analytical treatment of rival philosophical positions on justice. Instead I will draw upon and comment upon several views of justice, both as they have been articulated in political philosophy and as they exist in 'common sense' political thought and institutional politics. One important 'broad brush' contrast I shall draw upon is that between formal theories of justice, generally derived from 'first principles' (often associated with liberalism, but sometimes yielding unmistakably socialist implications) and views of justice which at least claim the status of articulations of the normative commitments of actual moral communities. Where I mention names, Rawls will be the main exemplar of the former. Though both of these methods for arriving at concepts of justice may yield socialist conclusions, socialist views of social justice may be further distinguished by the moral priority they accord to the meeting of need (as against 'wants' or 'preferences' as such), and by their sensitivity to the social relational and other contextual conditions for living well.

So, in what follows, I shall begin with four features of the social and political thought which has arisen in association with the Green movement. For my purposes in this context, it makes sense to include the thinking of the animal rights and welfare movements as integral to the 'Green challenge', though in other respects these movements are quite distinct from each other. I then go on to explore how each of these four features of Green thought poses problems for ways of thinking about justice developed (largely) independently of and prior to the rise of contemporary Green movements. The main drift of the argument in each case will be that Green issues do pose deep and serious questions for established views of justice. However, it will also be noted that considerations of justice also pose a challenge to at least some versions of Green social and political thought. In important respects, however, the critical revision required by this encounter between views of justice and Green thought will be seen to confirm, perhaps even intensify, the divisions of Left and Right.

The Green challenge

There are four aspects of the social thought associated with the Green and animal liberation movements which seem to me to be especially challenging. These include both cognitive claims and innovative value-orientations. They are:

1 Natural limits

Humans are held to be dependent on ecological 'life-support systems' which impose outer limits on the scope and scale of human activity in relation to the rest of nature. This is often supplemented by a second claim: that extrapolation of current growth trends (in population and/or resource use, pollution, etc.) into the future predicts the exceeding of natural limits and consequent catastrophic collapse.

2 Human/animal continuity

Since Darwin, this has been the ruling orthodoxy in the life-sciences. The claim is that our species evolved from some apelike ancestor as a result of the operation of broadly similar mechanisms to those which gave rise to other species. It follows that other animal species are our more-or less distant kin. This basic evolutionary claim can be complemented by subsequent ecological and etiological research to yield two further, but more scientifically contentious, general claims: a) that (many) other animal species have a range of capacities for social interaction, emotional expression, communication and puzzle-solving, and are vulnerable to associated sources of suffering in ways which differ from but are comparable with those experienced by humans; b) that the first claim under (1) above is but a special case of the ecological 'embedding' of all animal species.

3 Non-anthropocentric values

Greens proclaim an innovation in values which marks a qualitative break from all previous Western thought. This innovation is expressed through a variety of different polarities (ecocentric/technocentric; deep/shallow; biocentric/anthropocentric and others), but the core claim is that the nonhuman world, or parts of it, have value in themselves, independently of their capacity to serve some human purpose. Green thinkers also sometimes claim that substantive normative principles can be derived from nature, or from ecological characterisations of it. A separate but related move is made by animal liberationists who use human/animal continuity to justify extending the scope of received anthropocentxic moral theories (mainly rights theory and utilitarianism) beyond the boundaries of the human species.

4 Ecotopia

Distinctively Green visions of the 'good life' are rarely spelled out in terms of detailed institutional forms, but from such speculations as exist, from attempts at actual communal living inspired by Green ideas and from the various 'platforms' and statements of principles issued by radical ecologists we can reconstruct a cluster of widely shared themes and preferences. The Green society would be one in which:

1. humans would live in ways which minimally disrupted the rest of the natural environment;
2. decision-making would be decentralised to small, self sufficient and selfgoverning communities;
3. self-government would take the form of active, or participatory democracy;
4. either as a separate principle, or as a consequence of the above, these self-governing communities would be radically egalitarian, or 'nonhierarchical';
5. the purposes of individual and collective life would give priority to aesthetic, spiritual and convivial sources of fulfilment, as against the 'materialist' pursuit of material acquisition and competitive advantage;
6. work to meet basic physical needs would be intrinsically fulfilling and employ tools appropriate to small scale egalitarian communities and to ecologically sustainable production.

Social justice and the Green challenge

In what follows, I shall explore some of the implications of these features of Green thinking for views of justice which have been for the most part developed independently of, and prior to, Green thought in its present form. The aim will be to develop a view of justice adequate to the challenge of informing debate about the institutional structures of a just and sustainable society. Although this goes beyond the limits of this paper, such a concept could play a part in the critical evaluation of Green 'ecotopian' thought. I conclude with some very provisional comments which point in this direction.

1 Natural limits and social justice

Taken together, the claims that there are natural limits and that current growth trends are carrying us beyond them towards catastrophe can be used to justify 'going beyond' or displacing concern with social justice in two distinct ways. One argument is that urgent action to secure human (and natural) survival overrides other values. Implicit in this is a widely shared notion of a hierarchy of needs or values, in which survival is the first priority, followed by emotional security and then 'higher' considerations of aesthetics and ' sejf-actuali sation' (important sources in the contemporary environmental debate are A.H. Maslow (1954) and R. Inglehart (1977) – but these writers do not, of course, advocate a 'survivalist' ethic themselves). On the 'survivalist' view it may be necessary to assign authoritarian powers to governments to secure reductions in population growth, or to restrict the ecologically significant uses of certain private as well as common-property and open-access resources in order to protect the environment.

A powerful objection to this way of thinking is to ask why survival is accorded such a high priority. Clearly, there are widely praised and widely condemned acts of self-sacrifice in which war heroes or terrorists willingly die for values or purposes which they presumably set higher than their own survival. It may be retorted that such cases are in one way or another exceptional and inappropriate to set standards for the rest of humanity, for whom survival is the overriding consideration. However, it still seems relevant to ask what, for the great majority of us not given to ultimate acts of supererogation, is the point of 'bare' survival? Survival, I submit, is of value to us solely in virtue of the purposes and experiences it makes possible. Recent public discussion of euthanasia seems to settle upon this as a consensual 'reflective intuition', among secular opinion, at any rate. So, to override all other values in order to secure survival would be perverse. It would be to destroy whatever made survival a valued aim in the first place,

This takes us to the second 'survivalist' position. This is the 'delayed gratification' argument. It relies on the same hierarchy of values and needs as does the first survivalist argument, but the urgency of the ecological crisis is held to be such that if we fail to address it now, we will lose the opportunity to realise other values. This was the core of Rudolf Rahro's early (1982) call for socialists to give priority to the ecological question: there could be no prospect for socialism unless urgent action were taken to secure survival! Although, in Bahro's case, there was a convenient complementary argument to the effect that the objectives of the Greens could only be met by the overthrow of capitalism (which Bahro at that time took to be equivalent to a transition to socialism), there remains a certain echo of earlier postponements until 'after the revolution'. A more recent example is the Campaign for Political Ecology's Manifesto for a Couserver Society (ECO, 1996):

The struggle to build an ecologically sustainable order must come first, otherwise all other worthwhile goals are doomed. 'Development', be it social or economic, must be subordinated to the overriding priority of protecting the health and integrity of the Earth's life-giving ecosystems.

Despite its considerable polemical appeal, the objections to this sort of approach are also strong. The key problem is that the forms of power relation which are tolerated to address what is seen as an emergency have a habit of persisting as a long term obstacle to the realisation of the promised values. This is commonly acknowledged as an objection to 'vanguardist' strategies on the Left, but it applies equally well to a certain style of ecological alarmist politics which is prepared to countenance extensions of state power without serious consideration of the consequences for other social and political values.

So, even if we take as true the limits/catastrophe claim, it doesn't give us good reasons for either abandoning or delaying the quest to realise other social and political values. However, there are also good reasons for scepticism about the limits/catastrophe claim itself, I have argued elsewhere (Benton, 1989) that ecological limits are a function of the specific articulation of socioeconomic forms with their ecological conditions and media. If this argument is right, we cannot establish 'limits' in abstraction from social relations and processes. It follows from this that the kinds of 'physicalist' modelling which grounded the 'limits to growth' argument are inappropriate. New technologies and forms of social organisation, some of which may be in principle unpredictable, may enable continued growth in agricultural production, industrialisation, population and so on without global catastrophe. This counter-argument to the strong 'limits' position is the basis for more moderate forms of environmentalism which go by such names as 'sustainable development' and 'environmental modernisation'. Of course, it does not follow that such positions are either coherent or feasible. The argument that 'limits' should be theorised in ways which take account of the relationship of social practices to their material conditions and consequences does not do away with the concept of ecological limits as such – it rather relati vises them to specific socioeconomic and technical relations and dynamics. Whether currently prevailing power relations and economic structures are capable of being reformed to render them ecologically 'sustainable', and what would be the consequences of such reforms for other values and purposes, remain very much open to question (see, for example, O'Connor, 1994).

Nevertheless, the notion of sustainable development, in almost all its versions, is sharply opposed to 'survivalism'. Considerations of social justice, especially, are integral to virtually all influential definitions. There are two reasons for this. One is that an empirical case can be made out that distributional inequalities are causally responsible for a great deal of environmental degradation. Reducing inequalities, especially by empowering women and reducing rural poverty in the 'Third World' is often held to be a necessary means of achieving sustainability. The second reason is that most advocates of sustainable development include sociopolitical objectives in their view of 'development'–it is held to mean more than mere continued or accelerated economic growth. So justice is a part of the content of 'sustainable development' as a social, economic and political strategy.

However, giving weight to considerations of justice in the context of sustainability poses a significant challenge to established ways of thinking in several respects. The first is the practical challenge that the global context in which the concept of sustainable development has emerged is one in which the agencies charged with developing strategies for implementing it generally lack either the will or the power and resources to do so. But also at the level of national government policy, established ways of legitimating economic inequalities which are invariably associated with capitalist economies are rendered more problematic by the demands of sustainable development. Economic growth – albeit unevenly distributed in both time and space – seems to be intrinsic to capitalist forms of economic organisation. There is also now a widespread acknowledgement that deregulated capitalist growth tends to widen the gap between rich and poor. There are two basic ways in which toleration, even encouragement, of such continuing inequalities can be legitimated in terms of the Rawlsian 'difference principle' (Rawls, 1971). The first is the 'trickle down' model associated with the New Right: unrestrained growth may widen the gap between rich and poor, but the poor are still made better off in absolute terms by the success of the rich. In fact, there is growing empirical evidence that the effects of economic deregulation bring about a reverse redistribution away from the poorest and in favour of the richest. However, the point here is that sustainable development requires re-regulation of capitalist growth, so that both the rate and the character of economic development are brought back within the sphere of economic planning (even if this is done indirectly through fiscal policies). The presumed link between unrestrained growth and rising absolute standards of the poorest can no longer be deployed even as ideology, if sustainability is taken seriously as an objective of economic policy, since support for unrestrained growth is now not itself a legitimate economic ideology.

The other way in which the difference principle can be used to reconcile capitalist growth with justice is the social democratic project of promoting economic growth so as to enhance the tax base for redistributive public provision. Again, how far the poorest actually gain from these redistributive activities is open to empirical question, but for us, the poi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: social and legal perspectives on environmental problems
• Part One: Austin Lecture
• Part Two
• Contributors