Freedom and Environment

Autonomy, Human Flourishing and the Political Philosophy of Sustainability

Michael Hannis

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138777279
• eBook ISBN: 9781317679394
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Must freedom be sacrificed to achieve ecological sustainability - or vice versa? Can we be genuinely free and live in sustainable societies? This book argues that we can, if we recognise and celebrate our ecological embeddedness, rather than seeking to transcend it.

But this does not mean freedom can simply be redefined to fit within ecological limits. Addressing current unsustainability will involve significant restrictions, and hence will require political justification, not just scientific evidence.

Drawing on material from perfectionist liberalism, capabilities approaches, human rights, relational ethics and virtue theory, Michael Hannis explores the relationship between freedom and sustainability, considering how each contributes to human flourishing. He argues that a substantive and ecologically literate conception of human flourishing can underpin both capability-based environmental rights and a eudaimonist ecological virtue ethics. With such a foundation in place, public authorities can act both to facilitate ecological virtue, and to remove structural incentives to ecological vice.

Freedom and Environment is a lucid addition to existing literature in environmental politics and virtue ethics, and will be an excellent resource to those studying debates about freedom with debates about ecological sustainability.

1
Sustainability of What?

Widespread concern with the idea of sustainability is a relatively recent phenomenon. It increased dramatically from 1987, in the wake of the Brundtland Report’s call for ‘sustainable development’, famously defined as ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (WCED 1987).

The word ‘development’, of course, changes the focus of debate. As used in ‘sustainable development’ it does not simply denote social organisation or human activity, but has a very specific (and question-begging) meaning. This usage can be traced back to the 1949 inaugural speech of US president Harry Truman, which called for ‘a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas’ (Truman 1949, cited in Esteva 1992). The assumed end point of human social and economic ‘development’ was henceforth defined as industrialised, growth-oriented, market-economy societies on the US model, redefining the majority of the world, with its prodigious variety of other social and economic traditions, as ‘underdeveloped’. The powerful organic metaphor of ‘development’ lent an air of irresistible teleology to this highly ideological picture.¹

However, while far from irrelevant to this book, the historical and political contexts of Truman’s – and Brundtland’s – words go well beyond its scope. The focus here will be specifically on the philosophical and ethical implications of striving for ecological sustainability, not on the political economy of ‘sustainable development’, or indeed on other ‘sustainabilities’ such as economic or financial.

Still, Brundtland’s definition remains a good place to start, not just because of its historical significance, but because it contains an implicit ethical appeal which is hard to resist. Surely present people should be able to meet their needs – and surely this should not be achieved in such a way as to make it impossible for future people to meet theirs? The ethical force derives in large part from the fact that the definition talks not about wants, desires or preferences but about needs. It appeals to fundamental notions of respect for the dignity and autonomy of persons, to support a strong ethical claim that genuine human needs should, in principle at least, not go unmet. As John O’Neill (2011) points out, such claims are much more compelling when they refer to needs, rather than preferences.

A tricky question immediately arises though – what will future people’s needs be? How, indeed, could anyone in the present know the answer to such a question? One possible response is to say that the ethical imperative that needs be met applies in fact only to ‘basic’ needs. Though these are still notoriously difficult to define, it is tempting to think that this reduced task should nonetheless not be impossible, even in respect of future people.² This response will not solve the problem though. Both reason and compassion militate against seeing present obligations to future generations as limited to safeguarding the provision of their basic needs. The bare minimum is certainly a good starting point for identifying what to pass on, but a starting point is surely all it should be. Present actions should aim at maximising the chances that future people not only survive, but flourish.

Needs, Options and Decisions: Choosing Sustainability

The Brundtland definition, of course, leaves present people’s needs equally undefined; but present people can (at least in principle) be consulted about their needs. No one can find out what future people will need by asking them. It seems then that taking Brundtland seriously implies an ethical obligation to reflect now on what future people’s needs will be, and then act so as to ensure, as far as possible, that these needs will be able to be met.

Perhaps though, given the inevitable uncertainty under which such reflection takes place, we present-day humans should not impose our present-day expectations on future people, but simply aim to maximise the range of options that will be available in the future, enabling them to fulfil their autonomously defined needs in the widest possible range of ways. This seems at first sight a plausible and even attractive position. However, this book will argue that such agnosticism about what will be valued by future people is neither ethically tenable, politically defensible, nor practically viable. One simple ethical argument to this effect, expanded below and in Chapter 2, has already been alluded to: it seems clearly wrong to knowingly deny future people options which we value now. In practice, at least in the environmental context, this is where such agnosticism leads.

Present decisions to create or preserve some options will always close off other options, but not always significantly so. Some decisions taken in the present can effectively be reversed in the future; and in some cases the diminution of future options will be of only trivial consequence. Decisions to take actions involving significant anthropogenic changes to the non-human environment, however, rarely fall into either of these two categories. They tend rather to inescapably involve depriving future (and often also present) people of significant options. There are thus also formidable practical difficulties in maintaining an agnostic position on future needs. We cannot for instance pass on both the option to live in a world free of radioactive waste, and the option to live in a world equipped with nuclear power plants.³ We cannot pass on both the option to live in a world with Yangtze River dolphins, and the option to live in a world in which that river serves as a major freight shipping route. In both of these cases the choice has already been made, and only one of each pair of options will be passed on. Whether the choice was conscious or deliberate is now largely immaterial. The nuclear waste is here, and the dolphins are extinct. Humanity’s current trajectory is closing off options at an accelerating rate, multiplying the choices we are required to make about what we leave for future generations. Do we want to pass on rainforests, or biofuel plantations? An increased supply of oil, or intact Arctic ecosystems? An expanding global economy, or a stable climate?

Contemporary environmental policy-making increasingly seeks ‘win–win solutions’ to such dilemmas, which do not require attitudinal or political change. The problems with this approach are well illustrated by the idea of ‘offsetting’, which is spreading rapidly from carbon markets into biodiversity conservation. An offsetting mindset sees no ethical or ontological problems with the claim that ecological degradation arising from overexploitation, overproduction and overconsumption can be cancelled out by additional conservation efforts elsewhere, leaving ‘no net loss’. The calculative utilitarianism which legitimises such approaches assumes, and enforces, an unjustifiably extreme commensurability of value (Hannis and Sullivan 2012; Sullivan and Hannis 2015). Creative solutions to particular problems may reconcile ecological sustainability with other objectives, perhaps even in some contexts with economic growth. But the possibility of such reconciliation cannot be assumed, and certainly cannot avoid the need for choices.

Simply seeking to maximise the options available to future people, in order to allow them to define and meet their needs in whatever way they choose (rather than seeking to reach conclusions now about what they will need, and acting accordingly) will not therefore remove the need to evaluate those options and somehow weigh them against one another. From an option-maximising perspective it could be the case in a given instance that the options opened up by changing the non-human environment, even changing it irreversibly, might be so valuable as to outweigh or compensate for those other options closed off by the change. But even for agnostics this would somehow need to have been calculated and demonstrated in advance, if they are to meet their obligations to future people.

The position is of course further complicated by the fact that such calculations are by definition made in conditions of radical uncertainty. For instance, the impact of this year’s catch on North Sea cod stocks in ten years’ time is impossible to calculate without knowing whether quotas in the intervening years will be set to allow recovery or to maximise yield. A meaningful calculation of the ecological impact of cutting down a square mile of forest requires precise knowledge not only of how large the whole forest is now, and of how much intact forest is needed for it to remain a viable self-sustaining ecosystem, but also of how likely the remaining forest is to be left intact in the future. Further uncertainty arises regarding counterfactuals, both in the context of assessing unintended degradation and that of planning deliberate conservation efforts (Maron et al. 2013). In the case of proposed forest clearance, for instance, it matters not only what species are present now, but also what species might have been present in the future had the current trajectory continued. This is of course in addition to all the other impacts on livelihoods, climate and so forth which must also be factored in to arrive at any realistic assessment of what future options are being closed off.

‘Natural Capital’ – Strong and Weak Sustainability

Thinking about the world and human impacts upon it in this way leads onto the territory of environmental economics, where talk about things like fish and forests is translated first into talk about natural resources, then into talk about natural capital, and then into talk about the substitutability of different forms of capital. The validity and accuracy of such translations is by no means uncontested, but nonetheless it is in these terms that the concept of sustainability has arguably been most comprehensively analysed. In the wake of Brundtland, mainstream economists framed sustainability as an economic problem, best addressed (like other economic problems) by ensuring the most efficient allocation of scarce resources. Sustainability was generically defined by Pearce et al. (1989) as ‘non-declining capital’. This entailed the inclusion of ‘natural resources’, alongside other human and financial resources, as another form of capital. A series of debates ensued about the relationships between these forms of capital, centring on the distinction between ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ sustainability.⁴

Advocates of weak sustainability such as Pearce (Pearce et al. 1989; Pearce and Atkinson 1993), Solow (1993) and Beckerman (1994, 1995; see also 2003) essentially held that sustainability should simply be seen as a matter of sustaining over time the total stock of capital required for the continuance of human civilisation. What form this capital took was in effect largely immaterial, since its economic value derived not from any of its intrinsic properties, but from the human welfare its consumption produced. On this view a great deal of ‘natural capital’ could in principle be substituted by human or financial capital, and properly operating markets would ensure that this happened as and when it became economically efficient. From a weak sustainability perspective, therefore, only those natural resources which are both indispensable for human survival and impossible to substitute for, could constitute the critical natural capital which must be sustained intact into the future if a non-diminishing total stock of capital is to be maintained.

Even this narrow category of ‘critical natural capital’, of course, is susceptible to radically divergent interpretations. However, it is generally taken to mandate the preservation of considerably less ‘natural capital’ than does strong sustainability, which while not denying that some parts of the non-human world might indeed be substitutable by the technological fruits of human ingenuity, claims that this applies in only a much more limited range of cases. On the strong sustainability view, to the (limited) extent that natural resources can be meaningfully treated as capital, natural and human capital should be seen as qualitatively different, and should therefore be conserved separately. They are complementary rather than substitutable: in economic terms, any production of goods capable of giving rise to human welfare will generally require both, and hence scarcity of one cannot necessarily be compensated for by abundance of the other. As Herman Daly puts it:

To economists, resources are a form of capital, or wealth, that ranges from stocks of raw materials to finished products and factories. Two broad types of capital existߞnatural and man-made. Most neoclassical economists believe that man-made capital is a good substitute for natural capital and therefore advocate maintaining the sum of the two, an approach called weak sustainability. Most ecological economists, myself included, believe that natural and manmade capital are more often complements than substitutes and that natural capital should be maintained on its own, because it has become the limiting factor. That goal is called strong sustainability. … For example, the annual fish catch is now limited by the natural capital of fish populations in the sea and no longer by the man-made capital of fishing boats. Weak sustainability would suggest that the lack of fish can be dealt with by building more fishing boats. Strong sustainability recognizes that more fishing boats are useless if there are too few fish in the ocean and insists that catches must be limited to ensure maintenance of adequate fish populations for tomorrow’s fishers.

(Daly 2005:103; see also 1995)

Furthermore, from the perspective of strong sustainability, the limited possible substitutions of one form of capital for another are also not symmetrical. Natura...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Sustainability of What?
• 2 Neutrality or Sustainability?
• 3 Freedom and Flourishing
• 4 Capabilities, Consumption and Environmental Rights
• 5 Autonomy, Interdependence and Virtue
• 6 The Virtues of Acknowledged Ecological Dependence
• 7 Facilitating Ecological Virtue
• Index