Charles Taylor’s Ecological Conversations

Politics, Commonalities and the Natural Environment

Glen Lehman

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781349555598
  9781137524775
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137524782
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Management

The author uses the work of the eminent Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor, to develop a critique of those political perspectives that are based on instrumental ways to reason about the world, claiming that such perspectives invariably sever the connections between the social and natural worlds.

Part II

6

Taylor’s Environmentalism and Critique of Utilitarianism and Instrumental Reason

This chapter outlines Taylor’s critique of utilitarianism in an environmental context by returning to some important ideas developed independently by Robert Goodin, Lawrence Johnson, Noah Lemos and Peter Singer. I also examine Taylor’s critique of utilitarianism and animal liberation. The key aim is to set out the issues that are needed if we are to improve our understanding of the natural environment.

6.1 Taylor’s environmental contribution

Like postmodernists, Taylor is critical of the Enlightenment view of the natural environment, but he comes to very different conclusions about our relationships with it.¹ Taylor helps us unite considerations of the social and the ecological in a manner more fruitful than the theorists who propose adopting utilitarian approaches to environmental ethics.² This chapter examines Taylor’s criticisms of utilitarianism by focusing on Peter Singer’s work on animal liberation and returning to Lawrence Johnson’s morally deep world. There is also a growing body of literature that attempts to reinvigorate utilitarianism using Derek Parfit’s famous work on population and how to choose which world is the best one to live in.³

Like many of these theorists, he is critical of the Enlightenment’s instrumental reason and, more particularly, the focus on a procedural modus vivendi which characterises Enlightenment-inspired liberalism and utilitarianism.⁴ According to Taylor, the Enlightenment emphasised a punctual understanding of the human subject,⁵ defined in abstraction from any constitutive concerns – in isolation from its community and significant attachments. It endorsed disengagement, seeing people as free if they were independent from external interference. It looked inward rather than to external things – to the polis or republic and even less the environment. Morality, therefore, was seen as either self-interest or a de-contextualised ‘right’. In eighteenth-century terms, which many philosophers have now forgotten, the Enlightenment collapsed ethics into morality.⁶ Morality (moralis) – being true to a role – was personal, whereas ethics was about objective value structures (as in Hegel’s Sittlichkeit). Enlightenment thinkers such as Immanuel Kant reduced ethics (ethicus), where the focus was on what I should be, to morality where the focus was what I should do. Kant’s categorical imperative acted as a yardstick for what I ought to do rather than what it was good to be.⁷ Considerations of good structures (which might be environmentally embedded) were displaced by considerations of principles of right behaviour.⁸

The Enlightenment celebrated autonomy rather than authenticity, which affirms self-determination but not in isolation. Autonomy centred on a negative conception of freedom based on an atomistic conception of human nature.⁹ People, therefore, were free when they stood apart from nature. That separation could easily turn into an affirmation of domination of both the natural environment and other people. Alisdair McIntyre criticises the fact that the modern citizen ‘is a citizen of nowhere, an internal exile wherever he lives ... modern liberal society can appear only as a collection of citizens of nowhere who have banded together for their common protection’.¹⁰ Rootless associations are hardly likely to be ecologically aware.

Interpretivists, Taylor feels, must back-track a little, consider how people reflect on environmental issues and appreciate the extent to which nature may be seen as a source of the self,¹¹ submerged by atomistic, pre-social and ahistorical conceptions of humanity. Taylor’s aim is to show that nature is not just a constraint on freedom but helps to structure freedom. In this chapter I return to Taylor’s work on the old argument that classical liberalism and utilitarianism connect with free-market arguments. These arguments assume that, through incentive structures, humanity can rectify ecological damage. An interpretivist-designed and inspired environmental ethic, on the other hand, must go further in charting the way that collective institutions may show how an appreciation of nature is necessary for the attainment of the good life. To this point I have argued that an interpretivist approach can embrace the idea of nature’s intrinsic value, and this chapter examines key political issues emanating from utilitarian quarters.

Following this introduction is Section 6.2 which outlines Taylor’s critique of utilitarianism to introduce his work on practical reason and the natural environment. Section 6.3 explores whether higher-order goods exist using some ideas from Derek Parfit and Noam Lemos. Section 6.4 outlines Taylor’s critique of utilitarianism and animal liberation. In Section 6.5 I review Taylor’s key environmental visions. In Section 6.6 I conclude the chapter with some extensions to interpretivism to incorporate the insights of other political orientations be they Post-Hegelians, Earth Firsters and counter-culturalists who advocate the preservation of the diversity of life on earth.

6.2 Sources of value in nature: Taylor’s critique of utilitarianism

It is necessary to explore utilitarianism because it has been used to justify a number of influential environmental and animal rights perspectives.¹² For example, the utilitarian thinkers that were inspired by the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century likened the processes of nature to the workings of a machine. They assumed that humanity had the technological capacity to solve the problems confronting it. Human beings were considered to be at the centre of the world which was explained by Collingwood in his nineteenth-century Hegel-inspired Idea of Nature, which held that mind makes nature; ‘nature is…a by-product of the autonomous and self-existing activity of mind’.¹³ Instrumentalism was also evident in John Stuart Mill’s 1854 essay ‘Nature’.¹⁴ For Collingwood and Mill, the maxim to ‘follow nature’ sounded like a return to an animistic ethic. Mill argued that it is ambiguous because humanity has the capacity to master it:

Everybody professes to approve and admire many great triumphs of Art over Nature: the junction by bridges of shores which Nature had made separate, the draining of Nature’s marshes, the excavation of her wells, the dragging to light of what she has buried at immense depths in the earth; the turning away of her thunderbolts by lightning rods, of her inundations by embankments, of her ocean by breakwaters. But to commend these and similar feats, is to acknowledge that the ways of Nature are to be conquered, not obeyed: that her powers are often towards men in the position of enemies, from whom he must wrest, by force and ingenuity, what little he can do for his own use, and deserves to be applauded when that little is rather more than might be expected from his physical weakness in comparison to those gigantic powers.¹⁵

According to Mill nature is not only a barrier but is humanity’s antagonist.¹⁶ Though modern environmental theorists are more aware of the dangers of instrumentalism and anthropocentrism, but one can still find echoes of Mill’s views among modern ‘shallow green’ theorists who are sceptical of radical and Deep-green Ecology.¹⁷ It is easier to talk about the interests of nonhumans; and the question of interests which is the stock in trade of utilitarian theorists. Indeed, Peter Singer, one of the most famous exponents of animal liberation, uses utilitarian reasoning¹⁸ and so does Robert Goodin, who is prominent among philosophers who have studied the environment.¹⁹ It is very difficult to consider the rights of nonhumans when these rights clash with policies designed to alleviate inequality and suffering in human communities. Nevertheless, a few notable works adopt a rights-based approach to animal liberation²⁰ and Deep ecologists sometimes talk about the rights of ecosystems.²¹ Lawrence Johnson has argued that if ecosystem interests can be identified then it becomes possible to extend rights to them. In effect, Johnson’s utilitarianism is used to make an argument for the extension of rights to environmental ethics. Moreover, it remains problematic whether ecosystems have rights in the classical liberal sense, because rights are a human-centred construct as language theorists have pointed out.²²

Lawrence Johnson’s A Morally Deep World, for example, offers a philosophical investigation into the moral worth of ecosystems. Living systems, he argues, are entities in a persistent state of low entropy. They are sustained by metabolic processes which accumulate energy. Their organic unity and self-identity are maintained in equilibrium by homeostatic feedback systems.²³ Johnson essentially offers utilitarian means to rank interests. Starting from the view that ‘what we value…expresses what we are’, he extends his purview to the moral consideration of other entities.²⁴ It is in those depths that our well-being interests have their roots. Even among humans, neither rationality nor sentience is a necessary condition for the moral significance of an interest. For us to recognise the moral standing of only those beings who are like us in being human, rational, or sentient would be arbitrary and morally unjustifiable.²⁵ In effect, Johnson’s utilitarianism is used to make an argument for the extension of rights to environmental ethics.

Furthermore, if John Stuart Mill’s essay ‘Nature’ deprecated the notion of ‘following nature’ and advocated humans dominating it, humans also possessed the ability improve it.²⁶ Here Robert Goodin agrees with the irrelevance of the maxim ‘follow nature’, but he is less sanguine than Mill about the consequences.²⁷ Seeing nature’s intrinsic role, Goodin notes that value in nature is created by processes which are larger than, and thereby necessarily beyond, humanity’s comprehension. Human intervention may detract from nature’s value with the effect that an object loses ‘that value-imparting property once it has been restored, replicated or recreated through human interventions’. It is no longer authentic.²⁸

Goodin’s argument is an interesting departure from a classical liberal view on the natural environment. Yet, utilitarian reasoning limits practical reasoning to instrumental considerations and has had little to say about ‘intrinsic value’, much less authenticity. That is not the case with Goodin. His view, however, gives rise to an instrumental conception of authenticity where it is important that we assign weights to the different options that confront us. Nature, according to Goodin, has intrinsic value which affects the weight humans apply to it. Humans are constantly balancing their own interests against nature’s interests. Thus, we are presented with a system of trade-offs where nature’s gain is humanity’s loss, and vice-versa.²⁹ It is a zero-sum picture in which public policy advocates cannot pick or choose between parts of the theory.³⁰ His opinion, moreover, that utilitarianism is simply a valid public policy which does not correlate with personal morality,³¹ leads to the view that, one can affirm the value of nature while not having to adopt a different lifestyle. He advocates:

(a)pursuing green public policies, to secure the larger natural contexts in which we want to see our own projects set; but,

(b)refusing to adopt green personal lifestyle recommendations aiming to deprive us of the distinctively personal stance from which harmony with nature would be satisfying or even meaningful.³²

We are left with little analysis of the structural and social causes of environmental problems and an endorsement of current liberal-democratic institutions. Goodin’s cost-benefit analysis, therefore, tends to absolve citizens from personal responsibility for environmental problems.

Goodin’s approach, which remains within the framework of instrumental reason, is clearly different from that of Taylor who is an advocate of new social relations and is also extremely critical of utilitarianism. Consider Taylor’s discussion of authenticity that was defined earlier as autonomy within context. But the context is not an instrumental one.³³ Authenticity is not something which may be weighed or traded. It is about people being-in-the-world and is something different from economic notions of choosing how to maximise the options which confront us. Of course it is important to remember that it is very difficult to consider the rights of nonhumans and ecosystems when these rights clash with policies designed to alleviate inequality and suffering in human communities.³⁴ Nevertheless, a few notable works adopt a rights-based approach to animal liberation³⁵ and Deep ecologists sometimes talk about the rights of ecosystems.³⁶ For example, I have already mentioned how Lawrence Johnson developed an argument that if ecosystem interests can be identified then it becomes possible to extend rights to them.

As stated, ecosystems do not have rights in the classical liberal sense and this is because they are a human-centred construct.³⁷ Moreover, authenticity is not something which may be weighed or traded. It is about people being-in-the-world and is something different from economic notions of choosing how to maximise the options which confront us. Long ago Mark Sagoff put it well:

These values we cherish as citizens express not just what we want collectively but what we think we are: We use them to reveal to ourselves and to others what we stand for and how we perceive ourselves as a nation. These values are not merely chosen; rather they constitute and identify we who choose; Wilderness, rivers, estuaries, bays, forests, and farms have voices. They express our shared values and transmi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part  I
• Part  II
• Notes
• Index