2 How to Make the Environment Matter
2.4 The Appeal to Relationships
Among considerations that are inherently “relational,” reasons based on an appeal to self- interest, human interests, or human sentiment will often satisfy all of these necessary requirements and will sometimes afford good (enough) reasons for taking environmental action. But it is unlikely that any of them will prove sufficiently robust or will coincide with sufficient reliability with the environmentalist agenda to form the basis of what we are look- ing for. Others turn to virtue ethics in the belief that if we inculcate in ourselves and others dispositions to love, care for, respect, wonder at, and be humble before the natural world, we shall find reason enough to act appropriately toward it. The approach holds some promise though it is as yet in the early stages of development. Suffice it here to identify one or two of the challenges that it faces. One is how far the attitudes to which appeal is usually made are even appropriate attitudes to hold with respect to the natural world; and conversely, how far the natural world displays features toward which it is appropriate to hold these attitudes.
One thinks in particular of “love,” “care,” and similar attitudes. The phrase “friends of the Earth” is of course a familiar one. But if Aristotle is right, one cannot literally be a “friend”
of the Earth, any more than one can be friends with a bottle of wine (1925: 194 [1155b27]).
And it is surely a moot point, for example, how much of the natural world is lovable— as distinct from ugly, bleak, or downright hateful, as many artists ranging from Virgil (“lac- rimae rerum”— the tears of things) to the English composer Benjamin Britten (“the cruel beauty of nature”) have thought. Further, “care” is a term usually reserved for those who are perceived as in need of care, as vulnerable in some way, and hence it might not be univer- sally appropriate. This leads directly to a second challenge arising from doubts about how widely applicable these attitudes are— how much of the natural world can plausibly be per- ceived as lovable or needy, for example— which is whether they could come anywhere near
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supporting the environmentalist agenda as a whole. A third challenge echoes the difficulty that Dancy raises regarding the appeal to value, which is to specify what actions exactly flow from the exhortation that we should love, care for, respect, wonder at, and be humble before the natural world.
A rather different approach is recommended by John O’Neill, who suggests that we might look to the requirements for human flourishing to find the reasons that we seek. The sugges- tion is that “For a large number of, although not all, individual living things and biological collectives, we should recognise and promote their flourishing as an end in itself” because
“such care for the natural world is constitutive of a flourishing human life” (1992: 133). The appeal to human flourishing will tap into most people’s motivational repertoire and will readily be recognized as a worthwhile objective, while several “deliberative routes” might be devised to take us from that set of motivations toward actions and policies that are expres- sive of environmental commitment. But this approach, too, is open to challenge. One has to ask how the promotion of flourishing can constitute a clear objective in an arena where
“flourishing” is quite clearly a “competitive” good. In cases where A and B belong to the same species, for example, or cases where A is predator and B is prey, one often cannot promote the flourishing of A without at the same time demoting the flourishing of B. An associated difficulty arising from the fact that flourishing is a competitive good is that we can never be sure whether and how far the flourishing of non- humans might be inimical to, rather than constitutive of, the flourishing of humans. The so- called “pest” species come to mind— rats, mosquitoes, and the like. Perhaps we see here the basis of O’Neill’s parenthesis “although not all.” But in that case, it is less clear that we have found a basis for the environmentalist agenda, which would tend to frown on the proposal that we “play favorites” with species. A final dif- ficulty arises from the fact that flourishing is so rare a condition of creatures in the wild, most of whom meet their end long before they reach maturity. Because of this, if human flourish- ing were to depend for its sustenance on the flourishing of natural beings and collections of natural beings, as is held to be the case on this approach, there would be a risk of its becom- ing seriously malnourished.
There are, however, other ways of developing the appeal to relationships. Recall again, and finally, our earlier claim that a primary role of reasons is to make sense of our actions.
If this is true, then the very fact that we attach such significance to the giving of reasons for our actions— indeed the fact that, for some, the capacity to act for reasons is the very mark of what makes us human8— is testament, in turn, to the importance that we attach to hav- ing meaning in our lives, to engaging in and being witness to meaningful relationships.
Elizabeth Anderson, for one, suggests that people are apt to set more store by meaningful relationships than welfare or flourishing. “People want their welfare to be achieved in the context of meaningful relationships with others,” she writes (1993: 75); and again “People care about living meaningful lives, even at the cost of their welfare” (1993: 76). The sug- gestion is, then, that we have reason to embrace the deepest form of environmental com- mitment insofar as we seek to live meaningful lives, since some of the richest and most meaningful engagements are to be found both within and in our relationships with the natural world.
As before, the appeal to meaningful relationships is likely to tap into most people’s motiva- tional repertoire, and it will readily be recognized as a worthwhile objective; but in this case, it is less clear perhaps what “deliberative routes” might be devised to take us from that set of motivations toward actions and policies that are expressive of environmental commitment.
Practical Reasons and Environmental Commitment 159 We conclude, therefore, with some suggestions about how the quest to sustain meaningful relations might be expected to yield environmental dividends:
1. The natural world provides both the context and framework of our lives: it is indeed the precondition of our being able to enjoy any meaningful relationships at all.
2. The natural world supplies the beat and rhythm of our lives through the succession of the seasons and the exchange of night and day.
3. It is through the responses of living organisms to this beat and rhythm that the inor- ganic natural world has this effect.9
4. It is the natural world rather than “man” (as Protagoras thought) that is the measure of all things— that affords the backdrop against which we can gauge the meaningful- ness of our lives.
5. It is through the history of the biosphere— its temporal narrative— that we under- stand and can make sense of how we have come to be where we are (cf. Holland, 2011).
6. The natural world is where we dwell, which is therefore the ultimate source of our attachments to place and of our sense of belonging.
7. The meaningful engagements that are afforded by our interactions with the natu- ral world and with the indefinite number and variety of its life forms are central to our lives.
8. More soberly, we must note that the natural world is not only a source of joy, but also of sadness, suffering, and cruelty; not only a source of beauty, but also of ugliness and bleakness; not only a source of variety, but also of monotony.
Hence, and finally, the real and underlying point of appealing to meaning as the robust and reliable source of environmental commitment is this: that, unlike many of the approaches previously canvassed, it is capable of withstanding some of the bleakest visions of the natural world to which, from time to time, mankind is capable of giving expression. If our commit- ment is to the natural world as such, then we cannot pick and choose. Leopold did not refer to his essays as the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot live without some wild things.
Notes
1. For more detailed argument, see Raz (1997: 113– 115).
2. S is perhaps better articulated by Peter Railton as an “agent’s actual or potential moti- vational repertoire,” because this does not suggest, nor is it Williams’s intention that it should, something given or determinate (Williams, 1981, cf. 1995: 35; Railton, 2006: 270).
3. John McDowell’s “Might There Be External Reasons?” (1995) is the starting point for the following reflections.
4. Recent empirical work to which Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir draw attention, for example (Scarcity, 2013), demonstrates the extent to which scarcity (in a variety of dimensions— time, money, friends, and so forth) enters our mindset and compromises our ability to make good decisions.
5. If she is a deeply moral person she may indeed herself believe that she has no good reason for her action. She simply acts in desperation. Nevertheless, the external judgment still stands.
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6. But note that in doing so it is not at odds with Williams’s internalism requirement; indeed, one might argue that it rather presupposes it. For it is based on the assumption that the need to survive is indeed part of the agent’s motivational set, notwithstanding its coexis- tence with strong moral scruples (cf. Williams’s remarks about needs, 1981: 105– 106).
7. The issue of scale is important here. I am not personally inclined to dispute Erasmus’s charmingly argued case for the importance— indeed the value— of “practical folly” in human affairs, at least at the individual level (2004). But folly does become dangerous if practiced on a planetary scale, for example in the burning of fossil fuels, “as if there were no tomorrow,” which indeed there might not be, if we persist.
8. On one interpretation of Aristotle’s characterization of humans as “rational animals.”
9. Understandably perhaps, it is to nature writers rather than philosophers that we must look for articulation of these meanings— thus: “Trees that you have known all your life become, to those who love them, invested with the same individuality as the household gods … You have wintered and summered them, known them through long years in frost and snow, in sun, wind and rain. You know which branch comes earliest into leaf in spring … and which tree, intolerant of cold, first casts its flaming raiment down … Each tree has its great moment in the year” (Haggard, 1985: 140).
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