Accountability, Philosophy and the Natural Environment

Glen Lehman

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000294095
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Economics
• Thema: Sustainable Development

Using a philosophical and interdisciplinary approach, this book looks at how accountability can provide solutions to our current environmental and global political problems. When a social system has external elements imposed upon it, or presented to it, political problems are likely to emerge. This book demonstrates that what is needed are connecting social elements with a natural affinity to bring people together despite their differences.

This book is different from others in the field. It provides new insights by critiquing the extant understandings of accountability and expands the possibilities by building on Charles Taylor's philosophies. Central to the argument of the book are perspectives on authenticity and expressivism which are found to provide a radical reworking of our understanding of being in the world, and a starting point for rethinking the way individuals and communities ought to be dealing politically with accountability and ecological crises. The argument builds to an accountability perspective that utilises work from interpretivism, liberalism, and postmodern theory.

The book will be of interest to researchers in environmental philosophy, critical perspectives on accounting, corporate governance, corporate social reporting, and environmental accounting.

Part I

Critical accountability

1 Key themes in accountability research

Defining interpretivism

The complexity of accountability and ecological issues as they relate to business is well illustrated with recent pandemics and environmental catastrophes. The art of interpretation is used in this book to expose how bureaucratic and procedural logic ignores workers’ rights and environmental values, and potentially damages the corporation’s longevity. These issues are addressed critically through transformative action in the form of an evaluative framework embracing languages that reveal meaning and truth, enabling accountability to offer a different and moral sense-making. With the failure of socialist economics, it is useful to introduce ideas from MacIntyre (1984) and Taylor (2017a, 2020) as they apply to current environmental problems. Critical social theory and political interpretivism can be used to reveal the environmental implications of existing political dualisms that are dominant in Western philosophy. Drawing on Alisdair MacIntyre’s (1981, 1984) famous After Virtue which suggested that we have lost our moral compass and Charles Taylor’s (2016) work on The Language Animal.

Interpretation, as opposed to procedure, suggests that organisations are not simply profit mechanisms, but active and dynamic civil societies.¹ By better understanding the facilitating processes of accountability, administrative and management thinking, it is possible that we can develop alternative strategies that empower individuals to circumvent the negative consequences of instrumental rationality and enable them to act more responsibly in the public interest (Taylor, 2017a).

The interpretative and phenomenological locus classicus is Taylor’s work on Hegel (1970), Heidegger (1971), Merleau-Ponty (1964, 2013), and Rousseau (1762). His work provides a multifaceted understanding of the specificity of communal life, and the common purposes that exist for everyone as included within the natural environment. Using the interpretive approach of Taylor (2007), the chapter explores connections between environmental theory and liberal and neoliberal political theory. A framework is developed to outline the key contributions to critical accounting from these philosophical perspectives. These elements contain the components of my matrix which includes an ‘epistemological dimension’ and an ‘ontological dimension’. The ‘epistemological’ dimension classifies research on accounting ethics according to whether the underlying assumption of the research is that the ethical decision is made by an individual acting alone or whether the decision is made by a group. The ‘ontological’ dimension classifies accounting and accountability research according to whether the underlying assumption of the research is that the goal of the ethical decision is the welfare of society as a whole or whether the goal is the welfare of the individual.

This book explores four principal approaches to accountability: overviewing procedural, critical, subversive, and interpretivist research. Despite the increased emphasis on critical accounting and accountability research in recent years, there seems to be a lack of focus in this area of research. I offer a matrix (Table 1.1) that has two dimensions to explore the philosophical input to critical accounting. The first dimension of the matrix deals with what is referred to as epistemology which involves the subject in the ethical act. The second aspect relates to the ontology of the philosophical approach. This chapter attempts to bring a greater degree of focus into research on accounting ethics by looking at the relative degree of emphasis placed by different critical approaches to research on accounting on these two dimensions of my matrix.

Table 1.1 Prominent theorists used in accountability research

Epistemology	Ontology
Procedural (Kantian to liberalism)	Critical (Radical Critique of Marx)
Subversive (Postmodern and radical feminism)	Interpretivist (Qualitative and moral distinctions)

Of course, there are various types of interpretive theory which offer different ways to understand meanings in human communities. They can be expressions of various reasons, intentions, beliefs, or signs. Interpretation is used to explain meanings as expressed in language and how it develops appreciation of humanity’s place in the world (Bevir & Rhodes, 2000). In short, interpretive approaches study beliefs, ideas, or discourses in the context of human communities. Importantly, interpretation is used to study beliefs as they unfold within, and invariably frame, actions, practices, and institutions. Interpretive theory applies to all of political studies. Behind the different types of interpretive theory, there lies the shared assumption that we cannot understand human affairs properly unless we grasp the relevant meanings.

The aim of this approach is to use interpretation as a meta-narrative in analysing, combining, and exploring the various meanings that shape human actions and political institutions. Traditionally, interpretation has been about how epistemology poses the question of ‘how do we know what we know about environmental and political science’. Traditional interpretive theories constitute one set of answers to questions about how I know things in the world. The interpretivism used in this book goes further in challenging the over-reliance on an epistemological approach to knowledge. The approach offered here uses Dreyfus and Taylor (2015) interpretivist phenomenology to explore humanity’s basic interactions in the world. This takes interpretation in an ‘anti-epistemological’ direction concerned with how humans are part of the natural environment.

Applying interpretation

Overcoming the damage unleashed by technical ways to manage human communities, the argument utilises MacIntyre’s (1981, p. 263) quest to construct local forms of community. Forms of community must be constructed within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained. MacIntyre argues that we are in the grips of a new dark age where we have lost sight of the common bonds needed for societies to function. These common bonds and goods are needed to create strong environmental policies.

If the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. Using MacIntyre’s work on virtue ethics and Taylor’s (1971b) analysis of interpretation, this book considers humanity’s being-in-the-world. I argue that how we remember and think about what a good society leads to the construction of policies to handle the relationships between people and with Nature. In this book, interpretation is about creating, developing, and remembering how ideas and imaginaries shape communities (Chabrak, Haslam, & Oakes, 2019).

Objections and contrary opinions

A useful way to deepen the argument for the interpretation of environmental and management accountability is to suggest a contrary opinion. Many theorists have made the point that the environment is in crisis and urgent solutions are needed (Scranton, 2015). For example, some people have argued that the coronavirus is part of an impending environmental catastrophe. But some conservative commentators have argued that humankind does not face a serious environmental crisis and we do not need environmental constraints or regulations. Examining this assertion implies questioning whether such environmental awareness must be accompanied by the conviction that we will perish unless changes are made in how we live, then whether the solution is interpretivist, liberal, socialist, or does not seem irrelevant; imminent extinction may necessitate drastic responses.

This chapter is based on the assertion that society is at a point of bifurcation. One route points towards proceeding with present neoliberal market-based solutions to economic and accounting problems using techniques such as ‘decision-usefulness’ and ‘neoliberal procedure’. However, an alternative approach is possible which posits an interpretivist solution developed via accountability based on social and moral obligations that then can go some way to rectifying justly the damage already exacted on the environment.

Aims and objectives

Accordingly, we have lost our moral compass, we have lost sight of how contemporary ecological debates must be explored against the strongest accounts of liberal, libertarian, socialist, feminist, and deep ecological approaches to environmental politics. A viable interpretivist approach must illustrate how ecological-interpretivism compares with them, showing along the way how this approach can correct the weaknesses of these rival theories. Of course, there are no ultimate panaceas for solving the dilemmas between humanity and Nature but new approaches must be developed in civil society.

Interpreters begin their analysis by explaining how our current accountability and social science practices have ignored, how we are related to and shaped by the world we live in. They emphasise feeling and perception as having a valid role in the experience of embodied agents making their way in the world. Taylor continues that political theory relies excessively on adapting a model of the natural sciences without full consideration of mind and world dualisms. It is for this reason that interpretation is referred to as an ‘anti-epistemology’. Taylor defines anti-epistemology by stating the problems with the dominant ideology:

There is a big mistake operating in our culture, a (mis)understanding of what it is to know, which has had dire effects on both theory and practice in a host of domains. To sum it up in a pithy formula, we might say that we (mis)understand knowledge as ‘mediational’. In its original form, this emerged in the idea that we grasp external reality through internal representations. Descartes in one of his letters, declared himself ‘assure, que je ne puis avoir aucune connaissance de ce qui est hors de moi, que par l’entremise des idees que j’ai eu en moi’.² When states of minds correctly and reliably represent what is out there, there is knowledge.

(Taylor as quoted in Dreyfus (2004), ‘Taylor’s (Anti-) Epistemology’, p. 53)

Taylor criticises Descartes’ mediational picture of the world and offers a different theory that the mind is in the world and not separate from it. He argues that Descartes’ picture was part of a scientific revolution that had a predilection for measurement, procedure, and technique. This framework has been applied to the humanities without fully addressing its applicability; more fundamentally, Taylor’s concern is that scientific approaches to governance might not be the best means to order human differences and affairs. From this observation, interpreters argue that a scientific approach treats the natural environment as a simple commodity and submerges other ways to value the natural environment. The application of a technical method to the humanities can submerge an appreciation of the moral frameworks more applicable to human sciences. Taylor explains the dilemmas confronting humanity:

For the two powerful aspirations – to expressive unity and to radical autonomy – have remained central to preoccupations of modern man; and hope to combine them cannot but recur in one form or another, be it in Marxism or integral to anarchism, technological Utopianism or the return to nature. The Romantic rebellion continues undiminished, returning ever in unpredictable new forms – Dadaism, Surrealism, the yearning of the ‘hippy’, the contemporary cult o...