BRUCE JENNINGS
This new society … has only just begun to come into being. Time has not yet shaped its definite form. The great revolution which brought it about is still continuing, and of all that is taking place in our day, it is almost impossible to judge what will vanish with the revolution itself and what will survive thereafter. The world which is arising is still half buried in the ruins of the world falling into decay and in the vast confusion of all human affairs at present, no one can know which of the old institutions and former mores will continue to hold up their heads and which will in the end go under. … Working back through the centuries to the remotest antiquity, I see nothing at all similar to what is taking place before our eyes. The past throws no light on the future, and the spirit of man walks through the night.
—Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Culture is … a gamble played with nature, in the course of which, wittingly or unwittingly … the old names that are still on everyone’s lips acquire connotations that are far removed from their original meaning.
—Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History
We are coming to the end of an era. The place of humans within nature and the biophysical impacts of human activity on natural systems will have to change. To facilitate that change in actual behavior, our conceptual understanding and normative assessment of human activity will also have to change. I refer to the new system of human activity as an “ecological political economy” and the new conceptual and normative order as an “ecological public philosophy.” The field of ecological economics will play an important role in creating an ecological political economy. It can also play an important role in shaping a new public philosophy, if the normative assumptions and implications of ecological economics can be carefully developed and articulated.
This book as a whole is a contribution to that enterprise. In this chapter, I focus on one important component of that conceptual and normative analysis by discussing the concept of liberty. My critical goal is to scrutinize received conceptions of liberty that are too individualistic and atomistic to realistically and rationally guide human norms and self-understandings in the coming era. My constructive goal is to formulate an understanding of the liberty or freedom (I use the terms interchangeably)1 of human agents that is consonant with the demands of the new era. In the final analysis, I argue for a theory and practice of individual liberty that fits with an ecological political economy and an ecological public philosophy. It is a “relational” theory of liberty, which is subject to certain normative standards of acceptable relationship. Justice may be viewed as providing such a standard insofar as it is a normative theory of relationality. Here, however, I propose to focus on two other considerations, which may be aspects of an overall account of justice: membership (understood as equal respect and parity of social participation and voice) and mutuality (understood as equality of concern and care and as solidarity). I explore, in short, how liberty is to be conceived and lived if it is to find a home in the coming ecological age.
1. THE ECOLOGICAL IMPERATIVE
Our entire economic system is fundamentally dependent on the functional integrity of natural and living systems that are losing patience with us. That is to say, these systems have a limited capacity to tolerate human extraction from them and excretion of waste products and byproducts into them. Human economic activity worldwide is colliding with those limits.
Why? The reasons are many, but one key factor is our deep ontological misprision. A hallmark of the modern era is that we think of the human realm as set apart from the rest of the world; we think that we can manipulate it, engineer it, as we see fit in accordance with what we find meaningful and valuable. We are still wedded to that worldview and seem blithely—and blindly—determined to pursue it to its logical extremes. Biophysical systems, even when they are scientifically well understood, are mistakenly seen as things we live off of, not as places we live within.
1.1. Ecological Political Economy
It is essential to change the way we conduct economic activity. In the past, the main argument has been between those who emphasize efficiency and those who emphasize equity; between those who stress growth and those who stress just redistribution of existing wealth; or between those who own and control capital and those who own mainly their own labor and skills. These arguments are not passé, by any means; the struggle for fairness and equality has not been won.
However, a new struggle must be, and is being, added to it. New forms of right and action—ecological public philosophy and ecological political economy—are emerging to infuse and inform our normative discourse about economics, power, and justice. Ecological political economy is “ecological” in that it places economic activity in the context of the operation of physical and biological systems. It includes the important subfield of economics known as ecological economics, but is broader in the way it brings ethical and governance issues together with economic ones—hence the return to the traditional phrase, “political economy,” understood as a social system and not simply as “economics,” a social scientific discipline.
Ecological political economy calls us to take into account the fact that the planetary systems that support life in its most fundamental physical, chemical, and organic manifestations have boundaries, tolerances, and thresholds (Hansen et al. 2013; Rockström et al. 2009; Schlesinger 2009). These boundaries should—and ultimately will—constrain the extractive and the excretory activity of human individuals and societies. What individuals do one at a time is important, but the social, institutional level is a more essential focus here because the effects of human action are greatly magnified by the collective capacity of institutionally structured economies and technologies.
Ecological political economy offers a radical alternative to key assumptions that have informed virtually all of Western political and social thought in the modern era, beginning roughly in the seventeenth century (Brown 2001; Brown and Garver 2009; Ophuls 1998). The modern perspective sees economic activity as drawing on the material of nature, but not as being fundamentally dependent on the possibilities and limits of natural and living systems that have a functional integrity of their own. Ecological economics is distinctive in that it seeks to place economic activity (and the social scientific study of it) in the context of the operation of physical and biological systems (Costanza 1991; Daly and Farley 2011). This embraces a thermodynamic perspective having far-reaching policy and governance implications: economics must be treated as an open system, involving transfers of both energy and matter and operating within the tolerances of the planet, which is a closed material system.2
Other chapters in this volume attest to the importance of respecting planetary system boundaries and thresholds. These boundaries constrain the extractive and the excretory activity of human individuals and societies. It is essential that these constraints be recognized and obeyed. Biological and ecological systems can process the material waste and excess energy produced by economic activity, but only within certain scales and tolerances. As planetary boundaries are approached (or exceeded), ecosystem functions are undermined and overwhelmed, thereby rendering them—and the social systems that depend on them—less able to support either human or natural communities that are flourishing and healthy, diverse, and resilient. No longer are only justice and dignity at stake; now, minimally decent survival is in question.
What is true for the quality—indeed, the very possibility—of life generally is true for human life and living as well. We fully partake of, and depend on, the systemic preconditions of life for our own biological survival. However, perhaps an equally fundamental insight of this ecological perspective is that human beings also depend on the systemic preconditions of flourishing life for the concomitant flourishing of our own humanity. When Hans Jonas (1985) spoke of the “ontological imperative,” I think he should be taken to mean not only that the survival of life is at stake, but also that the survival of a particular form of living—our very humanity—is at stake. Our accelerating extractive assault on planetary resources and ecosystems and the unprecedented extensions of our technologic reach, especially in biotechnology (Habermas 2003; Lee 2005; Rose 2006; Sandel 2006), represent a departure from the normal human condition of the past. Jonas’ colleague and contemporary, Hannah Arendt, perceived the implications of this in the mid-twentieth century:
The human artifice of the world separates human existence from all mere animal environment, but life itself is outside this artificial world, and through life man remains related to all other living organisms. For some time now, a great many scientific endeavors have been directed toward making life also “artificial,” toward cutting the last tie through which even man belongs among the children of nature.
(Arendt 1958:2–3)
There can be only one conclusion. Our accelerating, global extractive assault on planetary resources and ecosystems, as well as the unprecedented extensions of our technologic reach, do not truly represent progress and the triumph of human freedom or the human destiny. Why not? For one thing, they are not sustainable or viable as a road to the future. No less important, but less often noted, is the fact that technological advance and extractive assault contain an inner contradiction. Although seeming to extend human freedom, they are laying the groundwork for its repression. Being at liberty to behave in ways that are ecological irresponsible and destructive is not to be liberated; it is to be dominated by technology and desire.3 While seemingly representing the advanced expression of human capability, technological advance and extractive assault are actually undermining what is most precious in humanness.
How then might we find a healed relationship between humans and nature, or at least conceptual tools with which to think about such a relationship? To point the way, I again turn to Arendt. In The Human Condition (1958), she developed an anatomy of our humanness, using a suggestive but rather idiosyncratic terminology. According to Arendt, human beings are creatures of “labor,” who are subject to the biological rhythms of their organic needs; practitioners of “work,” who are subject to the creative encounter between natural materials and imaginative form; and performers of “action,” especially speech acts or communicative acts, through participation in the deliberative process of shaping common meanings in the public, symbolic order.4
The failure to live within planetary boundaries and limits—thereby turning our back on our interdependence with the earth and our own earthly, creaturely condition—will fundamentally threaten and transform the dimensions of labor, work, and action. Labor will produce illness rather than health. Creative work will become increasingly unavailable and unavailing. Action will devolve into bargaining and positioning for strategic advantage. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, precisely those baleful transformations in the human condition, this hobbling of human possibility, seem well advanced.
Therefore, we would do well not to underestimate the task facing ecological political economy. It is both an ontological reorientation and an ethical innovation. It goes beyond the physical and life sciences in a descriptive sense and implicates the normative foundations of social order and human agency. All structures of organized human activity must give a sense of meaning to the purposive, self-conscious human agents who comprise them; thus, a new ecological political economy will need a new foundational story and a new conceptual framework of norms and ideals. This story is the narrative of a journey of discovery concerning how to imagine, construct, comprehend, and govern a new form of social order that will achieve justice and empower flourishing life and living. This new conceptual framework is a “public philosophy” suitable to the unprecedented challenges of our time.
1.2. Ecological Public Philosophy
A public philosophy provides normative guidance and a context for the legitimation of governance and public policy (Brown 1994; Jennings and Prewitt 1985; Sullivan 1986; Tully 2008–2009). It can also provide a framework for the development of democratic social intelligence and problem solving through participation and critical deliberation. Grounded in solid natural and social scientific knowledge, as it ideally should be, a public philosophy is emergent and dynamic, not dogmatic. It reflects an ethical vision of what the ends of economic agency and democratic citizenship should be. All economies, including a future ecological one, will appropriate natural matter and energy and, through work (in Arendt’s sense), transform them into products for human use and exchange. For this, the coordination and organization of very large numbers of people—a vast massing of human agency—will be required in agriculture, mining and manufacturing, science and technology, transportation, construction, and the like. Such coordination requires a sense of common purpose, and a public philosophy is essential in the imagination and discovery of what that purpose should be.
A public philosophy also holds a moral mirror up to each one of us. This mirror helps us discover not only a new form of social order, but also a new self-identity and a new way to live. In the market-oriented public philosophy of neoliberalism dominant in the world today, the individual must live out the following narrative, the selfhood of homo economicus: To survive and flourish, as an economic self you must fulfill (biological and psychological) needs. To meet your needs, you must compete successfully to extract value from the labor of others or to secure access to positions in which your own labor can provide the necessary income. To compete, you must understand and come to dominate the natural and social systems you inhabit.
In this narrative, the desire to acquire and consume is taken to be psychologically unlimited. The individual then is compelled by inner nature and external circumstances to appropriate and strive to dominate both the social and natural environment. As a result, growth in the activities of extraction and excretion knows no bounds and perforce overcomes all other considerations. We hurtle toward barriers ahead and apply the accelerator rather than the brakes. In this we have been taught to understand ourselves as free and responsible members of society. We provide for ourselves and our families. We pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and stand on our own two feet. This story of selfhood is hollow and self-defeating. It is a cathedral with no altar.
In contrast, the kind of self called forth by an ecological public philosophy to dwell in an ecological political economy has a quite different narrative, a counternarrative to that of homo economicus: To survive and flourish, as an ecological self you must fulfill (biological and psychological) needs. To meet your needs, you must compete and cooperate successfully with others to link your work (again in Arendt’s sense) to that of others in respectful and accommodating designs. These designs will take advantage of the value and energy produced and reproduced by cyclic geophysical resources and counterentropic living systems. Social arrangements must be such that you will receive just sustenance and provision in return for your work. In this way, your needs will be met, and you will have the wherewithal to develop and pursue multiple human capabilities and courses of personal self-realization. To coordinate your work with others in such a social arrangement (an ecological political economy), you must understand, care for, and respect the natural systems in which you reside, and you must critically and constructively participate in the cultural and social systems you inhabit.
In this counternarrative, the desire to acquire and consume is not taken to be biologically impelled, psychologically imperative, or ethically unlimited. The individual then is not compelled by inner nature and external circumstance to strive to dominate either the social or the natural environment. As a result, growth in the activities of economic extraction and excretion will be bridled. They will be much more efficiently and intelligently designed with nature, not against it. They will be kept within safe ecological operating margins and normatively reasonable bounds.
We do not quite know yet how to foster the psychosocial development of such ecological selves or write their collective biography on a large scale. However, we desperately need to learn.
2. THE LIBERTY OF LIBERALISM
A fateful hallmark of the modern era is that we have based our political economy, our law and governance, and much of our moral philosophy on a distorted and self-defeating understanding of liberty. This notion of freedom as the unimpeded individualistic pursuit of limitless need and desire, which is often called “negative liberty,” is fully consonant with our blindness concerning our true ontological place in nature.
This limited understanding of liberty goes back a long way. Already in the early modern period, economic thought was arising to challenge the western medieval worldview with its purposive, hierarchical cosmology (the Great Chain of Being), its normative order of natural law doctrines constraining economic activity (e.g., the prohibition of usury or money lending at interest), and its Christian theocratic and monarchical state. Out of this challenge (essentially the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment), a new understanding of human social and natural relationships—a new sense of human being and doing in the world—emerged (Hirschman 1977; Lovejoy 1961; Nelson 1969; Polanyi 1944; Taylor 1989). Then in the eighteenth century, the idea of homo economicus arose as a psychological benchmark and an anthropological ideal, and it grew in strength with the rise of industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century (Halévy 1966).
By the mid-twentieth century, with the political ascendency of social democracy and the welfare state, negative liberty was challenged and seemed to be temporarily on the wane. However, it has experienced a striking recrudescence in the past generation. In the 1970s, throughout the developed world, the perceived failure of national fiscal policy and neo-Keynesian institutional economics to address falling rates of profit and stagflation gave new currency to negative liberty. In the aftermath of the collapse of communism in 1989, the emphasis on negative liberty in neoliberalism took on a virtually unchallenged ideological hegemony (Harvey 2005; Jones 2012; Peck 2010). There has been a return to antiregulatory price theory and free-market orthodoxy in economics and public policy. In the social sciences, mainstream discourse legitimates the norm of the self-interested rational actor of game theory modeling (Marglin 2010; Rodgers 2011). Also, new forms of finance capital and corporate management have brought about the complex structural transformations and power shifts often referred to as globalization (Duménil and Lévy 2011).
2.1. The Economic Interpretation of Liberty
Liberty is often used to designate a condition (or a potentiality) of mind and agency that inheres in individuals as a matter of right. Specifically, liberty as negative liberty is self-directed individual agency free from interference by others in the pursuit of the subjective satisfaction of needs and desires that are ontologically and psychologically limitless and insatiable.5 The right to freedom so understood is a moral claim that can be made by a person against others who are in a position to impede, impel, or coerce the person’s behaviour in ways that conflict with the person’s own purposes or interests. Private individuals may fall into this category, but the right to be free quintessentially applies against those who wield corporate institutional power or the legal police power of the state. The most potent source of the individual’s security and protection can also be the most dangerous threat to his or her freedom. This is a paradox that liberalism has struggled to solve, yet it is also a paradox of liberalism’s own creation.
The public philosophy of neoliberal political economy esteems the right of individual freedom very highly, often above all else. It is ambivalent, however, about how far that right to liberty extends. One interpretation holds that the freedom of the individual creates a negative obligation of forbearance (noninterference) on the part of others only. A contrasting interpretation maintains that the individual right to liberty sets up a positive obligation of assistance by others to aid the individual in obtaining the resources and capacities that will make his or her freedom productive. The libertarian face of political economy in the modern age, and neoliberal political economy today, wants to protect individuals against the exercise of power by others. The egalitarian face wants to enable individuals, with the assistance of others, to exercise power for themselves. This is the distinction (roughly) between libertarians and market liberals, on the one hand, and egalitarians and social liberals, on the other.
These nuances, although very important, are not at the root of the problem today. A more fundamental question for the ethical foundations of ecological economics concerns the moral justification for limiting or overriding the individual moral claim to noninterference by others, especially the state. One way to do this is to assign other principles or values a higher moral priority than liberty and subordinate it when it comes into conflict with those values. Another is to seek internal self-limiting conditions within the logic and meaning of the concept of liberty itself. Does the concept of individual liberty, in anything like the form that we have inherited it from the liberal political tradition, contain within itself the basis for its own moral limitation?
In fact, as was just noted, the liberal tradition does not speak with a single voice on the proper way to understand liberty. Historically, it was not liberalism, but anarchism, that held out an almost unrestricted libertarian philosophy of individual freedom (Wolff 1970). Liberalism has always been about reconciling individual subjectivity and self-determination with more constraining norms that are required for the social order and cooperation necessary for the security and well-being of each and all. Here, the modern liberal tradition splits into two streams. One stream, much influenced by the philosopher Immanuel Kant, seeks the reconciliation of liberty with the objective constraints of reason and duty. Kant solves the problem with his notion of autonomy and the acceptance of moral duty for its own sake. The other stream, influenced by John Stuart Mill, wants to reconcile individual liberty with the constraining norm of the general welfare, or the greatest good of the greatest number. Mill solves the problem by using the standard of preventing harm to others, which he viewed as justified by the principle of utility but which might also be interpreted as pitting the liberty of one person to do something against the liberty of another person not to be harmed. For him, the prevention of involuntary harm to another is the principal (even the sole) justification for curtailing the individual’s unimpeded discretion in the pursuit of his or her subjective interests or desires.
Mill’s solution has come to be called the “harm principle” or the “liberty principle.” In On Liberty, he formulated it as follows:
The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant. … The only part of the conduct of anyone for which he is amenable to society is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.
(Mill [1859] 1956:13)
In other words, your freedom ends where my nose begins. If social or state power is to be used to curtail individual freedom for any purpose of communal well-being, common good, or public interest—including environmental conservation and protection—that provides the logic of a justifying argument with which to do it. But, what if something more is at stake than the protection of the interests of affected others, or the prevention of harm to my nose?
To be sure, it is very tempting for ecological economics to rely on the harm principle in order to justify controls on economic activity that threaten the planet; surely if harm means anything morally at all, it means the undercutting of the ecosystemic basis for biodiversity and for human and animal life and health on regional and planetary scales. Nonetheless, it is a mistake to settle for an ethical justification of limiting individual liberty on the grounds of harm prevention alone. Doing so effectively shields extractive power under the protection of the right to negative liberty. Extractive power, which I shall consider more fully below, expropriates value (useful energy) from natural and human resources up to, but not beyond, the point of collapse. It does not “harm” nature or workers—extractive power drains, it degrades, it wrongs. If we broaden our moral lens beyond harming to encompass wronging, then the ethical justification of constraining individual liberty can be much more than merely defensive and preventive; it can be transformative, enabling, and empowering. It can appeal beyond protection and the prevention of harm to the promotion of justice, greater equality, and the achievement of currently stifled and unrealized possibility inherent in the evolution of our human capabilities.
Shall the state in an ecological political economy embrace some standard of natural or rational duty—such as Jonas’s imperative of responsibility or a notion of right relationship or the land ethic—and permit individual liberty to expand only to the point of wrong-doing? Or, should it expand liberty further to the boundary of involuntary harm and indeed direct harm to humans only, which is a standard that permits unfettered exploitation and depletion of the biosphere? This question lives on in elite intellectual circles. In mainstream political culture, it is liberty expanded to the point of harm that has carried the day.6 The Millian stream of liberalism (supplemented, at least in the United States, by an occasionally influential libertarian anarchist fringe) is predominant. Fatefully, it has been the economic branch of liberalism that has provided much of the impetus for this. Mill, and most liberal economists before and after him, did not turn to right reason as a check on freedom or as a solution to the dilemma of liberty. Reason for Mill, as for Hobbes and Hume before him, is a strategic faculty for determining effective and efficient conduct, not a standard for justice. It presides over the choice of means to promote individual interests and desires.
Hence, with economic liberalism one finds a version of subjectivity introduced into the notion of freedom, because each person is the most reasonable custodian and definer of his or her own interests and objectives. If the power to determine those interests is exercised by others, especially by officials of the state, a person is deprived of liberty and is hampered in the development of independent mindedness, skill, and self-reliance. Mill considered these capacities to be some of the hallmarks of human flourishing, and economic liberals have viewed them as essential for economic efficiency and growth under capitalism. (Mill [1859] 1956; Schumpeter 1950).
Moreover, for economic liberalism, there is no independent standard of reason to determine if one person’s use of freedom is inherently superior to another’s. There is no intrinsic right or intrinsic wrong: the free person is not subject to such elitist and arbitrary value judgments imposed from above or outside. In the modern ideology of neoliberal capitalist political economics, the individual need or desire to acquire and consume is taken to be psychologically and ethically unlimited (Macpherson 1973:18–19). Absent tangible and serious harm to others resulting from an action, individuals should be allowed to make their own choices and life courses. If individuals are permitted by social and political arrangements to have this liberty, Mill thought, the society as a whole will prosper, and this social arrangement of well-ordered, but not stiflingly conventional, liberty will be justified from a utilitarian point of view. For the neoclassical political economists, the thought experiment of the ideal competitive market was the mechanism whereby the self-defining morality of each person could be reconciled with welfare or the common good, at least when the good is hedonistically defined in terms of economic growth, consumption, and the satisfaction of subjective, material wants.
During the heyday of industrial capitalism at the end of the nineteenth century, and particularly with the neoliberal market revival of recent decades, this influential line of thinking has taken on a much more one-dimensional and morally impoverished character than it had in Mill’s own thought. When liberty is based on self-defining or market-defined utility alone, the distinction between liberty and license withers away, and liberty ceases to be answerable to anything higher than itself (Gaylin and Jennings 2003; Taylor 1985b:211–229, 1991). Preventing harm—at least in the fairly narrow sense in which liberalism has defined it—does not constitute the entire range of ethics in individual life or in public policy and governance. The absence of harm does not entail the absence of wrong or injustice. Protection from harm may preserve and promote life, but it is not sufficient for achieving a good life.
In sum, ecological economics must morally indict neoliberal political economy on several counts besides harm to the planet. It should press contemporary science and charge the current political economy with an erroneous view of knowledge and a false cosmology. It should also press on the promise of a new era of human freedom inherent within a different way of structuring human productive economic agency and governing it.
2.2. A Farewell to Economic Liberty
This volume has identified three fundamental normative concepts around which an ethical foundation for ecological economics should be built: membership, householding, and entropic thrift. These tenets hold that humans are members, not masters, of the community of life; that we maintain our own life from other living systems, which must be respected and cared for; and that natural systems contain entropic limits and scarcities that require wise use and just sharing. These norms are profoundly at odds with negative liberty and neoliberalism. They demand that we ask what liberty would look like if it were reconciled with, and served to reinforce, these norms. That is what I seek here: liberty in the context of a responsible and just human–nature relationship; individual agency and responsible self-direction with an ecological face.
There is no gainsaying the fact that the scope and degree of negative liberty currently afforded to individuals and corporations in the political economy of neoliberalism and global capitalism, and now vigilantly protected by both parliamentary (representative) government and the courts, will have to be curtailed considerably if planetary limits and ecological constraints on energy usage and economic activity are to be respected (Klein 2011, 2014). Negative liberty recognizes only voluntary or contractual obligation—grounded on the rational self-interest of each person to live in a society of mutual security and protection from involuntary harm—as a restraining norm on individual will. Therefore, it is not compatible with the principles of membership, householding, and entropic thrift, which are written in the key of natural, not contractual, duty and obligation, and from an other-regarding, not a self-regarding, moral point of view.
These principles capture well many of the fundamental moral imperatives of future conduct and modes of life in societies that can endure. We must move beyond the contractual morality of negative liberty and of much of the liberal political tradition of the past three centuries. But in so doing, we should also undertake the corrective work that needs to be done to reclaim the concept of liberty, to move toward a more adequate philosophy of freedom for an ecological political economy and its public philosophy.
However, why should we even attempt to put new ideas into an old word that has been so deeply molded by the historical era we are now leaving behind? As Marshall Sahlins (1985) puts it, why take the gamble that culture plays with nature at times such as these? There are three reasons. First, we should make this effort because a human notion that is as fundamental as liberty should not be conceded to a historically peculiar libertarian or negative interpretation without a contest. Second, we must reclaim the concept of liberty because any ecological ethic will rely on some conception of human free agency and any ecological democracy will depend on a conception of citizenship in the service of liberty, as well as in the service of life and the common good. This is because the concept of moral and legal responsibility, to which an ecological ethics and politics must appeal, is grounded on some notion of free agency and individual liberty (Pettit 2001). The contradiction between liberty and obligation or responsibility (as understood by the notions of membership, householding, and thrift) cannot be taken as given or inevitable. That seeming contradiction is an illusion of liberal market ideology and an artifact of societies that rest on cheap fossil carbon energy and have not yet filled biophysical sinks with the waste products of their activity. Only in such an age and such a world could one seriously take oneself to be free while blithely and blindly destroying the very preconditions of that freedom.
Third, and finally, if the inadequacy of a negative, individualistic concept of liberty makes it philosophically and ethically necessary to replace it with a more adequate relational conception, the cultural and political power of the concept of negative liberty make it culturally and politically essential to do so. As a normative ideal, freedom is a genie out of the bottle in the world today. For us in the advanced technological economies—who are the most ecologically destructive economic agents on the planet today—erasing liberty from our personal and social self-conceptions would be culturally catastrophic, as it has been in other societies that have suddenly lost fundamental aspects of their way of life. If many of the ways we currently use our freedom are becoming ecologically untenable—and no doubt they are—then it is far more desirable to reconceptualize freedom so that it is more in tune with natural reality than to accept the idea that freedom is no longer available in our lives at all as a meaningful concept, aspiration, or ideal.
When a society loses the concepts through which it has traditionally made sense of itself, it experiences a debilitating disorientation (Diamond 1988). Jonathan Lear’s remarkable study of the experience of cultural devastation among the Crow people starting in the late nineteenth century provides a cautionary tale for any society facing a fundamental shift from one way of life to another in the span of one or two generations:
If a people genuinely are at the historical limit of their way of life, there is precious little they can do to “peek over to the other side.” Precisely because they are about to endure a historical rupture, the detailed texture of life on the other side has to be beyond their ken. In the face of such a cultural challenge, … there is ever more pressure to explain things in the traditional ways, yet there is an inchoate sense that the old ways of explaining are leaving something unsaid. And yet one doesn’t yet have the concepts with which to say it.
(Lear 2006:76, 78)
There is much still to be said about social arrangements that provide the space for self-directing individual agency and the flourishing of individuated human capabilities, if we can find a new concept of liberty with which to say them. This new concept will have an important place in the ethical framework that will allow ecological economics to finish its journey and contribute to a new ecological political economy and public philosophy. It will be a concept of liberty that is symbiotic with—and indeed, perhaps tacitly embedded in—the principles of membership, householding, and entropic thrift. Moreover, because any conception of liberty inherently rests on a background conception of human agency and the human condition, a new conception of liberty will go hand in hand with a new conception of the person or the self.
How can we regain contact with the dimension of the human condition that Arendt called “labor”—namely, our fundamental being as biological creatures, subject to the rhythms and requirements of life? How, in short, can we reconnect with our own animality and materiality, which we seem to have forgotten?
How can we rediscover our humanity in “work”? How may homo economicus (the self as a gaming, calculating maximizer of personal utility) be transformed into homo faber (the self as a craftsman, responsible for and respectful of his materials)?
Finally, how can we regain contact with “action” as the expression of our civic capabilities? How can privatized selves—trained to think only of a politics of who gets what, when, and how—be nurtured so as to become deliberative democratic citizens attentive to the common good and obligations of trusteeship for the natural world?
I believe that these questions are bound up inextricably with the future of liberty. The rediscovery of these dimensions of our human condition requires the transformation of the current neoliberal world of extractive liberty and possessive individualism into a world of relational liberty exercised through the practices of justice or parity of social membership and solidarity.
3. LIBERTY BEYOND LIBERALISM
The time has come to inquire more deeply into the concept of liberty. I eventually will offer a notion of relational liberty as a promising theory of freedom for our time. However, the force of that notion cannot be appreciated unless we first look closely at, and work our way through, prior conceptions of liberty from which relational liberty emerges as a corrective. I propose to do this by focusing briefly on the work of two of the most important political theorists of the twentieth century, Sir Isaiah Berlin, the liberal tradition’s most humanistic revisionist, and C. B. Macpherson, one of its most powerful and humane democratic critics.
3.1. The Liberal Revisionism of Isaiah Berlin
Berlin set up an opposition between what he called negative and positive liberty (freedom from and freedom to), and he thereby reconstructed an account of what was most important about social arrangements that permit individual liberty. He exposed a crucial ambiguity in the liberal tradition (its embrace of a developmental idea, the cultivation of a more perfect self), which fatefully weakened it as a bulwark against totalitarianism. (He was writing at the height of the Cold War.)
Berlin drove a sharp wedge between the warrant for the freedom from interference in an attempt to live one’s life in one’s own way (negative liberty) and the warrant for the freedom to live in accordance with one’s highest and best, most rational, ideals (positive liberty). In positive liberty, there is a paradox because we tend to see liberty as antithetical to duty or obligation. Yet the freedom to live in accordance with one’s best self is very close to the idea of a duty to obey the rules laid down by one’s best self; one is really free when you listen to the angel perched on your right shoulder and ignore the devil perched on your left. As I will discuss further, Berlin read the positive conception of liberty in light of twentieth-century experience, and viewed it as a philosophical route to a unitary or totalizing ideology. As such, it is politically dangerous and profoundly at odds with the pluralism and openness of society that he so deeply embraced. That pluralism was, for Berlin, the essence of liberalism.
As a counter to liberty defined by objective reason, however, Berlin did not wish to adopt a libertarian subjectivism or voluntarism, which both Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Weber had done in their own ways when they encountered the totalizing aspect of reason (rationalization) in history. Instead, Berlin adopted an ethical pluralism for which individual negative liberty (freedom from interference and domination by others or the state) is the keystone. He also rejected any notion that history should be viewed teleologically as the story of the growth of liberty over time and its eventual triumph—a view sometimes called the Whig interpretation of history (Gray 1996, 2000). Most important for the question at issue here about the relationship between ecological economics and liberty, Berlin held that freedom must be embraced for its own sake, not for its instrumental relation to social utility. We honor the freedom of another when we forbear interference and give space for his or her agency, even when—and especially when—we have a moral objection to the acts and the consequences that will result.
Berlin would regard ideals such as membership, householding, and entropic thrift as alternative competing values alongside (and perhaps in conflict with) liberty, and he would hold that the ethical priorities among these different, incommensurate values is a problem that moral philosophy cannot solve.7 For pluralistic liberalism, there is no final condition of human flourishing or the good toward which any political practice or moral value will lead because the good is necessarily plural and necessarily evolving, open ended, and incomplete. Historical attempts to impose a hegemonic conception of the good lead, all too often, not to the greater realization of our humanity but to its degradation. This includes conceptions of the individual or the common good that are seemingly warranted by the science of the time and by arguments of necessity and survival made by those in authority. Thus, as Berlin wrote, employing the spatial metaphor of freedom that Mill characteristically used, “there are frontiers, not artificially drawn, within which men should be inviolable, these frontiers being defined in terms of rules so long and widely accepted that their observance has entered into the very conception of what it is to be a normal human being” (Berlin 1969:165).8
As Berlin used the term, negative liberty has to do with establishing a zone of privacy and noninterference around each person—a zone within which individuals can exercise their own faculties and pursue their own lives in their own ways. It rests on a conflict-ridden and antagonistic picture of social existence, in which each individual struggles with everyone else to control his or her own patch of ground.9
Positive liberty, by contrast, is a form of self-mastery.10 One is free in the positive sense when one’s reason—one’s higher self—is in charge of one’s conduct. Negative liberty is the absence of control by others; positive liberty is the presence of control by one’s self so long as—and here is the rub—it is an ideal (i.e., rational and autonomous) self. Berlin was suspicious of positive liberty as a manifestation of a dangerous, dogmatic conception of the fully human person and the fully human life. In the name of attaining this ideal, individuals have been asked, or required, to subordinate their personal freedoms and interests to other people’s causes. This is the dark side that Berlin saw not only in various romantic and irrationalist modes of thought, but also in the legacy of Kantian rationalism and other forms of objectivist, deontological ethics.
3.2. C. B. Macpherson’s Liberationist Critique
An important critique of Berlin’s defense of negative liberty as the bulwark of moral and political pluralism and his assimilation of positive liberty to the totalitarian temptation was offered by the Canadian political theorist C. B. Macpherson. Macpherson deconstructed Berlin’s theory by showing, much as he had done in his reading of John Locke (Macpherson 1962), that embedded within a seemingly abstract and universal philosophical conception of freedom was actually an ontological and ethical legitimation of a very specific form of governance, political economy, and social power. Such a critique opens the door to an alternative, democratic practice of freedom and ideal of the self (Macpherson 1977).
Macpherson was concerned with showing that negative liberty in Berlin’s interpretation is too narrow and does not offer a general philosophy of freedom. Instead, it is historically and ideologically bounded. As such, it reproduces—albeit perhaps not intentionally—a sophisticated version of the traditional capitalistic concept of freedom as the right of appropriation and of the notion of free agency as the agency of the possessively individualistic self, which at the structural level of society and personality is actually quite unfree.
Macpherson argued that Berlin’s account of negative liberty is based on an overly literal understanding of the exercise of power over an individual such that liberty is violated (1973:97–104). It is also based on misleading spatial metaphors, such as zones of privacy and noninterference, within which the individual is free to choose and act. As a result, Berlin’s understanding of domination or unfreedom is limited to coercion and the use of physical force, as well as to other nonconsensual courses of action, without considering adequately the phenomenon of the ideological or circumstantial prestructuring of perceived possibilities of choice and consent as such.
For Macpherson, the types of power that curtail liberty are various, indirect, and in some societies pervasive. Berlin was concerned about the situation in which a person has only one road to follow, only one door to go through, or in which no doors lead to any desirable destination. What should be of equal or greater concern, said Macpherson, is the power to compel the choice or the journey itself—to prestructure the very perception of choice in a certain direction and in the service of interests other than the individual’s own. Macpherson referred to this as “extractive power,” and it is actually facilitated by Berlin’s concept of negative liberty, especially under conditions of a market society and a capitalist political economy. What an adequate concept of liberty requires is not noninterference in a narrow sense, but a form of life within institutional activities and power relationships that afford each person “immunity from the extractive power of others” (1973:118). Macpherson referred to individual freedom within this social condition as a state of “counterextractive liberty.”
Turning to the other dimension of Berlin’s theory of freedom, Macpherson distinguished three different conceptions that are conflated in Berlin’s critique of positive liberty (1973:108–109). First, there is the idea that the individual should be a self-directing agent and that such agency often requires the active cooperation (and not merely the forbearance and noninterference) of others. In any complex society, positive liberty for the individual typically also requires certain forms of social arrangements, such as access to various services and resources that enable individuals to effectively implement projects to achieve their goals. Second, there is the idea that an individual may be positively forced to be free either by his or her own “higher,” more rational, alter ego or by others who have attained the rationality and objectivity that the individual lacks. This is the notion that Berlin mainly feared and that Macpherson also roundly rejected. Third, positive liberty contains the democratic idea that each individual should be free to take an active part in shared decision-making and collective governance.
Having made these distinctions, Macpherson then argued that there is no inherent logic that should transform the notion of cooperation in the service of self-directed living and agency into the authoritarian notion of paternalistic direction by a superior intelligence or expertise (1973:111–114). The logic of moving from the first conception to the second is entirely a matter of social context and historical circumstance. Indeed, this is not simply a conceptual shift but also a transfer of social and economic power. Positive liberty, the freedom to engage in self-determining forms of activity, is itself a type of power, which Macpherson called “developmental power.” The move from authentic cooperative self-determination to what Berlin had called “self-mastery” (i.e., the paternalism of the higher self, particularly in the context of a market society) is a surrendering of the developmental power of the self to the extractive power of others—and that, not positive liberty or cooperative agency per se, is the root of the problem of unfreedom for Macpherson. If that is correct, and if uncontrolled and ecologically careless extractive power is an important part of the problem that ecological economics is trying to solve, then there is an important connection between the ethics of ecological economics and the ethics of liberty.
No less than Berlin, Macpherson was a philosopher of freedom, and he was centrally concerned with liberty construed as a democratic and liberationist ideal (Carens 1993). However, he regarded Berlin’s theory of freedom as an impediment to the emergence of a more egalitarian mode of democratic society in the future. Unfortunately, Macpherson’s work did not engage directly with the ecological aspects of the problem of how freedom and agency are distorted and unjustly shaped by the economic system of property and power. At times, like others on the left, Macpherson (1973:36–38) seemed attracted to a technological utopianism.
Although Macpherson did not take his critique in an ecological direction, there seems to be no reason in principle why we cannot do so. By placing the problem of liberty squarely in the context of the tradition of liberalism and liberal political economy, Macpherson did illuminate aspects of the task of developing a conception of liberty for an ecological political economy. I attempt to take up that task here, with a notion of relational liberty and the structuring norms of its practice. I argue that the structuring norms of relational liberty are membership (parity of participation and voice and equality of civic respect) and mutuality (equality of civic care and concern, as well as solidarity).
3.3. Extractive Power
We can now step back into the domain of political economy and the challenge of crafting the enabling acts of mind that are necessary for the emergence of a new and ecologically viable society, which fosters individual agency and freedom.
The liberty enshrined in mainstream economics and protected in neoliberal political economy is basically negative liberty that permits the exercise of extractive power. All economic activity involves the appropriation of natural matter and energy from geological sources and biological energy systems (and the disposal of waste back into those systems). Necessary to this appropriation are two elements: (1) the social organization of human productive agency—labor and work; and (2) the control and use of technology to supplement, extend, and often to replace the labor of the human body in the exercise of agency by the human person. These social conditions of appropriative economic activity can take many forms that are compatible with a society’s cycle of production and reproduction over time. In the modern era, initially national capitalist, then colonial, and now global capitalist modes of organization have produced a distinctive set of human relationships (and cultural meanings) that mediate the exercise of individual agency and the practice of individual freedom. These relationships in the neoliberal political economy have several dimensions—structural (corporate management), financial (wages, liquidity, debt), and legal (property, contract, securities, rights).
It is within these structured relationships of the political economy (and its corresponding cultural significations and normative justifications) that the exercise of extractive power comes to the fore. In the social domain, Macpherson’s analysis of the exercise of extractive power harkens back to Marx’s account of the creation and appropriation of surplus value (Harvey 2010; Marx [1867] 1990). Those who own or control land and capital (the means of economic production) exercise extractive power over those who only own their labor and are compelled by their place in the economic system to sell it in order to live (the “relations” of economic production). In a capitalist market society, negative liberty—in the form of private property and other legal entitlements in land and capital—puts some individuals in a structural position to exercise extractive power over others. In spite of this, negative liberty is perceived as a precious benefit and is jealously guarded by all.
John Lanchester provided an insightful synopsis of surplus value in an article on Marx:
Marx’s model works like this: competition pressures will always force down the cost of labour, so that workers are employed for the minimum price, always paid just enough to keep themselves going, and no more. The employer then sells the commodity not for what it cost to make, but for the best price he can get: a price which in turn is subject to competition pressures, and therefore will always tend over time to go down. In the meantime, however, there is a gap between what the labourer sells his labour for, and the price the employer gets for the commodity, and that difference is the money which accumulates to the employer and which Marx called surplus value. In Marx’s judgment surplus value is the entire basis of capitalism: all value in capitalism is the surplus value created by labour. That’s what makes up the cost of the thing; as Marx put it, “price is the money-name of the labour objectified in a commodity.” And in examining that question he creates a model which allows us to see deeply into the structure of the world, and see the labour hidden in the things all around us. He makes labour legible in objects and relationships.
(Lanchester 2012:8, emphasis added)
Macpherson (like Marx before him for the most part) kept to the social, interhuman dimension of this logic of extractive power; however, there is no good reason not to extend it to the relationship with nature. The normative, critical force of the notion of extractive power underscores the important difference between seeing nature as the intrinsically valuable physical and chemical context of life, rather than as simply an instrumental source of raw material (a stock) to extract and as a disposal site (a sink) within which to excrete economic waste.
All human work appropriates energy and value from nature or from the capabilities of other humans.11 As noted earlier, all economies, including a future ecological one, will appropriate natural matter and energy and, through human work and technology, transform them into products for human use and exchange. However, only in certain types of economic system will this appropriation turn into insatiable extraction and excretion. Historically, this transformation has been associated with wage labor, the division of labor, and the concentration of extractive power in the hands of an elite who owns or controls the means of production. Under such conditions, the logic of extractive power pushes the application of this labor, this managed human agency, toward a scale and pace of extraction and excretion that threatens to exceed planetary tolerances, deplete nonreplenishable stocks, and overwhelm ecosystemic capacities. The remedy lies in curtailing extractive power and its exercise over those vulnerable to it by dint of class inequality of wealth and power. This remedy is blocked by the blanket protection of extractive power and extractive liberty that the liberal defense of individual negative liberty (e.g., property rights) provides.
At the dawn of the Anthropocene age, the liberal philosophy of freedom has reached an aporia—a political and economic dead end and a form of cognitive dissonance from which it seemingly cannot escape. Yet, the way out for liberalism may in fact be the same as the way out for the planet. Ecological political economy demands a regime of social control that is not compatible with the life narrative of homo economicus or with the wide scope of individual and corporate freedom from (state) interference in the use of extractive power, which has been widespread among the affluent of the developed world in the last century (Jennings 2010a, 2010b). What is the best way to frame this issue: As a balancing or trade-off of conflicting values? As a regrettable but necessary contraction of the sphere of individual freedom of choice made necessary by ecosystemic limits? Or perhaps, as I believe to be the case, our task is to reclaim and reconstruct the concept of liberty so that, in our moral imagination and our public philosophy, ecologically destructive behavior would not be seen as a manifestation of freedom at all; rather, it would come to be repudiated as a manifestation of ignorance, irresponsibility, and alienation that negates freedom.12 If we frame this problem as one of balancing values, then who controls the scales? If we frame it as a devolution of freedom for the sake of survival, then what level of coercion will be used against the recalcitrantly self-destructive among us?
Reclaiming our understanding of freedom, taking it back from the destructive market ideology of neoliberalism that has colonized our political culture today, could tap into and rechannel in ecologically constructive ways the powerful motivational psychology that valorization of individual freedom has established. If we could pull this off culturally, it might minimize the need for repressive forms of behavioral control legally and politically. Self-directing ecological citizens who use their freedom and agency in the service of a sense of ecological trusteeship and responsibility are the democratic hope of the future.
4. RELATIONAL LIBERTY
I contend that the absence of outside interference (individualistic negative liberty) and the presence of active self-development (individualistic positive liberty) are insufficient for a robust ecological public philosophy and a resilient ecological political economy in the twenty-first century. They are lacking because they fail to convey adequately that free agency relies on modes of relationality that have a particular ethical structure: the experience and exercise of freedom is a social practice. A conception of relational liberty explains how such a practice works and what it involves. I believe that such a conception is necessary in order to give a full interpretation of the notions of ecological membership, householding, and entropic thrift.
Relational liberty is freedom in and through relationships of interdependence. More specifically, my notion of relational liberty can be defined as freedom through transactions and relationships with others that exemplify just membership (parity of respect, participation, and voice) and just mutuality (parity of care, concern, and solidarity). The essence of the philosophical strategy I propose is to internalize freedom into responsibility; independence into interdependence; and the common good into the individual good, to read the We into each I.13 More specifically, my approach is to internalize the freedom and well-being of all (both human and nonhuman creatures and systems of life) into the freedom and well-being of each. Only in this way, I believe, can we break out of the cultural trap and dead end of pitting individual freedom and collective restraint and limitation in opposition to one another. Only in this way can we counter the moral license that economic liberalism has given to self-centered liberty, extractive power, and insatiable desire—market-oriented economic progress and growth. I believe this will provide an essential lynchpin for an ecological public philosophy.
Relational liberty resists the nihilistic “creative destruction” that the neoliberal political economy has institutionalized and that is so socially disruptive and environmentally rapacious. Relational liberty—freedom through interdependence—is a warrant to live one’s own life in one’s own way that results from embedding that way of life in a tradition, a civic life of shared purpose, and rooting that life in a sense of ecological place and in a sensibility of care for place and care for Earth’s life-support systems. Just as there are certain kinds of practice or activity that by their very nature cannot be done alone, so there is a kind of freedom that subsists not in separation from others but through connection with them. Not in protections but in pacts of association; not in locked futures but in open ones; not in fences but in circles; not in extraction but in conserving; not in artificing but in accommodating.
Relational liberty rejects two constitutive features that have characterized theories of freedom in the liberal tradition. I have alluded to these features already, but it is useful to reiterate them here. One is the privileging of individualistic values over communal ones—individual liberty trumps community solidarity (Mulhall and Swift 1996; Marglin 2010). The other is setting up a conflict or antithesis between the individual and the community in the first place.
These two features make liberal theories of freedom remarkably devoid of the web of interdependencies—that is, culturally meaningful roles, styles, and self-identities; shared values, rituals, and practices. These theories, particularly when applied to the realm of economic agency, tend to portray an idiotic world of atomistic individuals, each with their own self-regarding interests and life-plans. This requires, at most, a modus vivendi of bare toleration and opportunistic cooperation—a social existence of peaceful and predictable transactions for mutual advantage. A thicker sort of mutuality or solidarity based on care, compassion, and empathy is rarely, if ever, deemed necessary, and is readily disposable if it leads to inefficiency. Furthermore, it is this feature of atomistic abstraction that makes such philosophical accounts ideologically functional for a political economy founded on the logic of extractive power. Interestingly, and paradoxically, atomistic individualism both conceals and normatively justifies extractive power at the same time.
Again, on a relational conception of liberty, freedom is constituted not in spite of connections and commitments linking self to others, but in and through these connections and commitments. Enacting relational freedom in one’s life develops a self-identity built out of ongoing practices that exemplify the creative and aesthetic dimensions of a humanity naturally flourishing. Such relationships involve not only social interactions with other human beings but also—and crucially—meaningful connections between the person and his or her own activity on and in the world of fellow creatures, living systems, and material objects. A relational conception of freedom and of the person contains a countervision to notions of alienation, commodification, and the objectification of the human or the natural other. Such a vision leads away from the control of natural material as a source of “wealth” defined as material accumulation, relative social status, and utility maximization. It leads toward a notion of artistry, craftsmanship, and the accommodation of the inherent properties of natural form (Schor 2010; Sennett 2009).14
One central task of an ecological public philosophy is to reconcile individual liberty with interdependence, community, and the common good (Daly and Cobb 1994). The theory of relational liberty is designed to do that, and the task is not nearly as philosophically difficult as liberal thinkers have made it appear. The fact of the matter is that individual agency (and individual self-identity and motivation) is already thoroughly social and relational in character (Giddens 1984; Habermas 1984; Taylor 1985a). Moreover, and without contradiction, social, structural change is nothing other than a change in the ways in which individuals experience and live their own social being.15
Planetary thermodynamic processes may be systems that operate impersonally without a locus of intention, control, or responsibility. However, I contend that economies, societies, and political communities are not systems in that sense but rather are structures of purposive human agency. Moreover, adopting an agent-centered rather than a systems theoretic approach, as I do in this chapter, does not entail an ontological or atomistic individualism. Human acts are intentional, purposive, and meaningful both to the actors and to others who share in the rule-governed forms of life and communication within a society and culture. The ethical norms that fit into human agency therefore are not limited to self-referential states of interest or desire. To understand ethical conduct—or to engage in ethical discourses of justification and other forms of argument—one must have recourse to concepts and categories that reflect the relational nature of the human self and the contextual, socially and symbolically mediated nature of the self’s interactions with others (Harré 1998; Taylor 1989).
The implication of this for ecological economics is quite important.16 An ecological political economy will come about only through change at both the level of individual behavior and the level of social norms and institutions. In practice, this means that we must learn to articulate the values and ideals that the members of these societies would express if they thought and acted like interdependent and relational selves—ecological selves, or ecological citizens and trustees. Part of the task of ecological economics as a public philosophy is to shape this self-identity and to foster a moral imagination that can see the good and freedom in relational terms. Mainstream economics over the years has helped to build a population of possessive individualists through its doctrines and through the institutions it has legitimated (Marglin 2010). Ecological economics must be no less intentional about the task of educating a new generation of social people. The time has come for economic knowledge and discourse to show all of us—specialists and ordinary citizens alike—that our personal flourishing is inextricably linked to the flourishing of others and to the flourishing of the natural world. Ecological economics does not abandon the concept of economic self-interest but transforms it.
For this task, ecological public philosophy needs the vocabulary of solidarity, mutuality, reciprocity, community, and the common good—norms that are certainly contained, or at least alluded to, in the principles of membership, householding, and entropic thrift. The pioneers of the field have already begun to develop this vocabulary (Daly and Cobb 1994). Beyond the notion of moral obligations that are correlative to the individual rights and interests of others and the obligation to do no harm, Ecological economics also needs to appeal to a motivational structure that is informed by ecological trusteeship. Ecological trusteeship is not so much a role, or a legal status, as it is an orientation and a disposition of living that is grounded in a sense of responsibility for promoting and sustaining the common good of the community as a whole and its natural context.17 People who have this sense are, in Aldo Leopold’s words, “plain members and citizens” of the biotic community (Leopold 1989:204). Ecological economists can be the teachers and counselors of just plain citizens; an ecological public philosophy can be their creed; and an ecological political economy is their focus of study, their vision, and their goal.
The field of ecological economics thus both relies on and has the potential to instill in people the capacity to comprehend the meaning of a common danger or a common good. If the people around the world, and especially in those nations whose economic behavior has to change most drastically, have lost the capacity to comprehend these ideas, then it will not be possible either to coerce or to empower them to undertake the kind of collective institutional and behavioral change that creating an ecological political economy will require (Honneth 1996).
5. THE NORMATIVE STRUCTURE OF RELATIONAL LIBERTY
I define relational liberty as freedom through transactions and relationships with others that exemplify just membership and mutuality. In the preceding discussion, I have been using the notion of “relationship” as a term of art with a specific and deliberate normative meaning. Now, I should try to explicate the internal normative structure of the concept of relational liberty more fully and explicitly. My intention is to build standards of justice, dignity, membership, and mutuality into the concept of relational liberty as constitutive and functional aspects of it.
Not any form of human interaction or transaction constitutes a relationship through which ethically valuable human liberty is constituted. Interactions of domination, exploitation, coercion, violence, seduction, or duplicity—each of which effectively reduces human beings from the status of subjects to the status of objects—do not count as “relationships” in the requisite sense of the term. When it comes to relationships with nonhuman beings, such interactions may be ruled out ethically for the same reasons insofar as the nonhuman organisms possess agency—as clearly many animal species do (Burghardt 2006)—and thus are subjects to be respected and not simply objects to be used. Nonhuman beings that cannot be understood as purposive agents are still subject to norms and restraints on human action that follow from intelligent, experience-based, and evidence-based recognition of ontological interdependence within the web of life and existence. In short, neither in relationship with other subjects nor when using natural objects are human beings completely at liberty to do what they will. Relational liberty does not give us license to behave as if we were living in the moral equivalent of a frictionless surface—an atomized, nonrelational world of particles in motion.
5.1. Just Membership: Parity of Respect and Participation
The social philosopher Nancy Fraser argued for a notion of justice that centers on what she referred to as “participatory parity.” This captures much of what I am trying to get at with my notion of membership as a component of relational liberty:
Justice requires social arrangements that permit all (adult) members of society to interact with one another as peers. For participatory parity to be possible, I claim, at least two conditions must be satisfied. First the distribution of material resources must be such as to ensure participants’ independence and “voice.” … The second condition requires that institutionalized patterns of cultural value express equal respect for all participants and ensure equal opportunity for achieving social esteem.
(Fraser and Honneth 2003:36)
To be free is to be in certain kinds of relationships with others. The moral point of those relationships is the individual flourishing of each participant. Therefore, it follows that liberty requires parity of participation, engagement, and capacity for creative agency. The denial of parity in relational participation—disenfranchisement, exclusion, marginalization, oppression, exploitation, violence—is the denial of freedom. Relational liberty cannot exist within the context of unjust structures of “voice”—power that silences, wealth that dominates, institutions that deny social opportunity to some, and cultural meanings that efface individual self-esteem—any more than effective human economic activity can exist amid the degradation and breakdown of geophysical and bioenergetic systems. This provides a criterion for evaluating which types of relationships (transactions/interactions) are to be nurtured, facilitated, and promoted by common rules and public policy, and which are to be discouraged or prohibited.
Accustomed as we are to a negative and individualistic notion of liberty, this connection between community and liberty will seem naïve and dangerous. It is not. The reason lies in the difference among various sociological types of communal organization. Different implications for liberty exist in hegemonic and pluralistic communities—or in what the sociologist Robert Putnam (2000) referred to as “bonding” and “bridging” communities, or what the philosopher Seyla Benhabib (1992) calls “integrationist” and “participationist” orientations. The former types of communal formation impose on its members a convergence of patterns of belief and agency; the latter types are open-textured, dynamic, and fully open to cultural and personal differences. They allow community to arise from an interaction of difference and a diversity of patterns of belief and agency, as long as a second-order commitment to justice and solidarity is also present and shared by all members. This is not implausible. Cultural plurality or diversity and the expression of individual meaning are not inherently incompatible with solidarity and consensus or a shared sense of goods and purposes held in common (Walzer 2004).
Only the integrationist orientation need conflict with the concept of individual liberty inasmuch as it enjoins a closed circle of group membership and a tightly constituted self-identity. A participationist orientation is the type of community conducive to relational liberty structured by parity of membership and participation and by modes of solidarity amid plurality. (This will be discussed more fully in the next section.) Respect for difference bespeaks humility and an avoidance of the arrogance of certainty and control—a kind of moral technocracy that integrationist forms of community often espouse. Solidarity develops the moral imagination toward empathy and the embrace of individual lifeworlds that are different and yet symbiotic with one’s own.
5.2. Just Mutuality: Relational Liberty and Solidarity
A student in the United States once wrote that “Abraham Lincoln became America’s greatest Precedent [sic]. Lincoln’s mother died in infancy, and he was born in a log cabin which he built with his own hands” (Lederer 1989:18). Solidarity is essential in order to prevent the story we tell ourselves about our own agency from becoming a fantasy of control and self-absorption—one in which we think that we can build, like Lincoln, our great precedent, the place of our own birth. Whenever it is evoked, mutuality counters that narrative of independence with one of interdependence. Mutuality recalls the structural context of individual agency and the functional integration that is necessary to that agency. It has to do with the social glue that gives stability to the creativity of action and agency. It has to do with the cultural and symbolic order that gives the originality of action and agency meaning. Also, it has to do with the historical memory and tradition that give continuity to innovative action and agency, thereby binding past, present, and future (Jennings 1981).
One of the most powerful facets of mutuality is the social stance and practice of solidarity. Given its history, its role in social movements, and its semantic resonance, solidarity is a concept that inherently leads us to view moral action in particular social, cultural, and institutional contexts (Benhabib 1987; Fraser 1986).
In considering solidarity and relational liberty, we should remember that both notions point toward the processes through which intentions are formed, possibilities are defined, and moral principles and ideals themselves are made meaningful. This occurs in the social perceptions and self-understandings of individuals precisely through the types and networks of social action in which they engage. Solidarity is a form of active engagement, not simply passive support. It is an intentional, engaged form of agency that is purposive and is motivated by a public commitment that exposes the agent to social visibility and potentially to risk and harmful consequences.
For our purposes here, I want to explicate the concept of solidarity in the following way. Solidarity’s characteristic gesture and stance as a moral action is standing up beside. This stance then has three relational dimensions: standing up for, standing up with, and standing up as. These formulations stress the function of prepositions as markers for nuances of relationality. As in my preceding discussion of liberty as freedom from, freedom to, and freedom through, prepositions are central to the grammar of relational and positional connections, as well as to interpreting their meaning.
Standing up beside. Solidarity requires both taking a stand and standing up. When you stand up beside a person, a group, an organization, a species, a habitat, or even an idea or ideal, you make yourself visible. It is a public gesture—a communication in which saying and doing merge. This public posture also carries with it a sense of urgency and moral importance to both the agent being seen and to those who are looking. You stand up beside because you have something of importance to say, so that you can be seen and heard. The force of this comes from the fact that you are elevating your moral and social awareness and commitment: you are moving upward toward justice, such as the redress of the oppression or denigration of others or the protection of a watershed, a forest, or an endangered species. You are moving laterally from where you are (apart) to a place (beside) where you ought to be and are needed by others.
Standing up for. The first relational dimension of solidarity is standing up for. This suggests an intention to assist or to advocate for the “other” (oftentimes a stranger, and again not necessarily a human individual—one can stand up for other species, an ecosystem, or a cultural way of life). The other for whom you stand up in solidarity is someone whose situation presumably is vulnerable or represents a valid moral claim. One limitation of this mode of solidarity is that it falls short of establishing a relationship of intrinsic value to both parties. It is clearly possible to engage in a practice of solidarity as standing up for in an instrumental way, on the basis of enlightened self-interest. However, it is moral commitment, not strategic advantage, that lies at the motivational core of solidarity as such, including the solidarity of standing up for. At least as a first step, the act of standing up for begins to establish mutuality and reciprocity in a common struggle against injustice and in opposition to the abusive use of arbitrary and extractive power.
Standing up with. The second dimension is solidarity as standing up with. It takes another step in the direction of mutuality and recognition of shared moral standing. Moving from a mode of relationality for to relationality with in the practice of solidarity is meant to signal further entry into the lifeworld of the other. Doing so entails changes in your initial prejudgments and perspectives, and solidarity as standing with requires an openness to this possibility.
To put this point slightly differently, there is something in the imaginative dynamic of moving from for to with that is transformative of the solidarity relationship so that a (supportive) stranger-to-stranger relationship begins to develop—perhaps not all the way to a relationship that should be called friendship but at least to a stronger kind of fellowship and mutual recognition of one’s self in the face of the other (“mon semblable, mon frère,” as Baudelaire put it). Relating to other people or groups in the specificity of their values and vocabularies of self-interpretation simultaneously develops respect for the specific standpoints of others (Dean 1995, 1996). Being with in this sense also reveals a level of commonality between the parties to this kind of solidarity which resides in the capacity for intercultural and transpersonal interpretive understanding (Forst 1992). The difference created by the specificity of lifeworlds resides within the commonality of the ability to understand lifeworlds other than one’s own. Solidarity contains the possibility of being common readers of the diverse and distinct lives we each author.
Standing up as. The third dimension is solidarity as standing up as. Obviously, this suggests an even stronger degree of identification between the agents of solidaristic support and the recipients of such support. For agents engaged in the practice of solidarity who reach this mode of relationship, it is not a question of denying diversity or doing away with the continuing obligation to recognize and respect difference. Solidarity as standing up as operates at a higher level of ethical and legal abstraction, where the concepts of solidarity and justice converge (Calhoun 2002, 2005; Habermas 2005). The solidarity of standing up as involves finding a kind of covering connection that does not negate diversity at all; rather, it establishes the grounds of its respect, protection, and perpetuation. Ontologically, it amounts to saying that I stand here both as a human person, dependent on the integrity of a complex human community, and as a human organism, a creature dependent on the integrity of a complex natural ecosystem. Politically, the solidarity of standing up as is the solidarity of the civic and of citizenship, fostered by spaces of democratic deliberation and discourse, upon which the law and ethics of human rights and equal concern and respect depend for their vitality in the lifeworld of contemporary society.
To move through these dimensions of solidarity is to enhance one’s liberty in a relational sense. To move through the trajectory of solidarity is to move in the direction of greater imaginative creativity and range in the moral life. Standing up for depends on a kind of abstract moral commitment to support the application of general norms to the life situation of the other as a creature with a certain moral status. Standing up with involves adopting a perspective that is more internal to the lifeworld and the contextually meaningful agency of the other. Standing up as is the solidarity of a common ontology or, more fully expressed, the solidarity of being embodied, vulnerable, metabolic, and social organisms.
As the moral recognition of the other is altered by this interpretive journey, so is the moral imagination of the self. Strong bonds of attachment and identification and empathy may not be the destination of this journey. However, arguably, a growth in one’s capacity to project oneself imaginatively into the perspective and viewpoint of the other person or creature, and a growth in moral awareness or the ability to see connections previously unseen, are plausible outcomes of the interpretive transformation affected by the trajectory of solidarity. This is also the trajectory of liberty.
6. THICK FREEDOM, RICH LIVES
The individualism of liberal theories of freedom subtly reinforces the assumption that relationality, membership, mutuality, and solidarity are inherently confining and restrictive; that individuals require an expansive and unencumbered environment within which to grow and flourish, as if it is somehow more in keeping with the human good to have thin, instrumental, and strategic relationships only and to eschew thick, morally engaging ones (Bellah et al. 1985; Putnam 2000, Sandel 1998).
Today, the chasm is growing between the vision of ecological economics and the worldview of both laborers and consumers in the contemporary West—and indeed throughout much of the developing world as well. The everyday lifeworld of individuals is permeated by mass consumer culture. The vocabularies that people use to define a self-identity and to comprehend their situation are growing increasingly thin and impoverished from both an ecological and a humanist point of view. People with a consumer’s sense of relationship and a tourist’s sense of place cannot grasp that our well-being depends on healthy natural and social systems; that we have responsibility for preserving and restoring them; or that our freedom is threatened by those very same institutions and practices that undermine the natural world.
Jonathan Lear’s (2006) reflections on the history of the Crow people and Alexis de Tocqueville’s striking image of an old world dying and a new world gradually being born are not to be ignored in our present situation. We need not feel that our lifeworld of meaningful agency has disappeared or that we are wandering in darkness, however, for there is much constructive intellectual (and political) work to do. The most urgent need, no doubt, is to stem the tide of thermodynamic degradation to our natural world. A second imperative task, nearly as urgent, is to stem the onslaught leading to the degradation of our conceptual world, to prevent further conceptual loss and the erosion of meaning. We have lived for some time now with a conceptual vocabulary for describing our moral lives that is much sparser and less articulate than our actual lives themselves. Despite expressing ourselves for the most part individualistically, we nonetheless manage to tap into an underlying moral resiliency and thereby preserve pockets—no, actually rather expansive landscapes—of life lived relationally and caringly, justly, and solidaristically (Bellah et al. 1985).
There are signs, however, that this fund of moral resiliency is becoming depleted, even as its natural counterpart of ecological resiliency is also being stressed beyond its tolerances. On the surface of our lives, most especially in institutional spaces of impersonality and market mores, we behave with instrumental rationality, self-referential interest, and the stratagems of insatiable desire and extractive power. Can we reclaim a vital core beneath this surface? Can we win through to the promise of a richer kind of freedom, meaning, and flourishing?
This promise is within our grasp. Beneath the surface of possessive individualism lies a deep relationality that endures in a psychological disposition and a symbolic cultural order of attachment, character, and care. What sociologist Robert Bellah called the “disposition to nurture” (2011:191–192)is the fundamental imperative of a creature whose evolutionary destiny is premature birth, neurological and cultural codetermination, and a prolonged period of dependency on relational others.18 The public philosophy of the coming ecological political economy needs to tap into that deep motivational structure.
If it can do so, then the message of planetary boundaries and the end of the liberal era of cheap fossil carbon is not the bad news of lost liberty but the promise of a newfound freedom—a more humanly fulfilling kind of liberty. The ethics of relational liberty can justify and motivate the kinds of economic and social change needed nationally and globally in the next generation.19 This is a recipe for rich lives in a socially and naturally thick and interdependent world. This sense has not been extinguished; this meaning is not lost. It remains the perennial possibility of humankind, even if thus far it has been fugitive and fleeting.
NOTES
1. For certain purposes, it is useful to differentiate the concepts of freedom and liberty. Freedom often has a more private or personal connotation, while liberty has a resonance that links it more specifically to the political realm. Moreover, the idea of freedom is often associated with the philosophical issues of determinism and freedom of the will in a metaphysical sense. Here, my focus is on moral and political liberty and the relationship between these normative ideals and the conditions of human agency and responsibility. If one is free or at liberty in this sense, one can reasonably be said to be the author of one’s own actions and to bear responsibility for them. Liberty therefore has to do both with the will and motivation of an individual and with the social capacities and relationships available to an individual as they bear on the reasonable preconditions and ascription of moral responsibility for action. In this, I follow Pettit (2001). For a discussion of the differences between the two concepts, see Pitkin (1988).
2. The ecological economist Peter Victor formulated this perspective in the following terms: “One definition is that an economy is ‘the system of production and distribution and consumption.’ … A different conception of an economy … is as an ‘open system’ with biophysical dimensions. An open system is any complex arrangement that maintains itself through an inflow and outflow of energy and material from and to its environment. … Ecosystems are open systems. … Planet Earth is a closed system, or virtually so. A closed system exchanges energy with its environment but not material. … And here is the rub. Economies are open systems but they exist within and depend upon planet Earth which is a closed system. All of the materials used by economies come from the planet and end up as wastes disposed of back in the environment. … As a result of [the physical laws of thermodynamics], open systems that depend upon their environment for material and energy must keep going back for more and must keep finding places to deposit their wastes. … Natural systems can be very effective in breaking down many of the wastes produced by people and machines, but often local environments are overloaded causing polluted land, water and air. … [T]he scale and complexity of environmental problems have increased. Now we are confronted by broad regional problems…and global problems” (Victor 2008:27–29, 32).
3. Domination is a state of such narrow and thoroughgoing closure in one’s life that it negates the purposive agency of the subject, and, at an extreme, the underlying capability to exercise agency that could be deemed the person’s own or to even conceive of oneself as a subject of agency. Domination must be distinguished from determination. Freedom from domination is compatible with the scientific theories and explanations that identify the determining conditions of human behavior, to which ecological economics appeals. Freedom from domination is freedom from arbitrary and contingent social and psychological determinants of behavior (and also of thought). This aspiration, which is in the modern world a moral imperative, does not require the abstract fantasy of an organically disembodied and socially disembedded individual.
4. For Arendt, action was the facet of the human condition associated with political life, the polis or public realm, while labor and work were at home in the household, the oikos or the private economic and reproductive realm. In my view, her dualism in this regard is problematic and need not be accepted in order to gain insight from her account of the three dimensions of humanness. Indeed, ecological economics suggests that labor, work, and action are dimensions of all realms of social life and that the differentiation between public and private—politics and economics, polis and oikos—is not the ethically desirable ideal that Arendt sometimes made it out to be (cf. Benhabib 1996:89–120).
5. It is worth emphasizing that the idea and ideal of negative liberty is inseparable from an atomistic conception of the unencumbered self and from a form of agency that involves the exercise of extractive power in the interactions between the self and others and between human beings and the natural world. This conception of liberty is deeply ingrained in the public philosophy of contemporary political culture, quintessentially in the United States, but increasingly throughout the global North as a whole.
My discussion of liberty could take place on the level of general social interpretation and criticism. It could be illustrated by numerous instances and indices drawn from popular culture and political discourse. Elsewhere, indeed, I have explored some of these sources (Gaylin and Jennings 2003). For the purposes of this chapter, however, it is most useful to examine particular thinkers who have constructed systematic and philosophically well-articulated conceptions of liberty. I begin with a brief orientation through a contrast between duty limited ideas of liberty understood as the manifestation of reason (Kant); and harm limited views of liberty understood as the manifestation of subjective self-assertion (Mill and liberal political economists). I then turn to a more detailed consideration of important twentieth century accounts of liberty in Isaiah Berlin and C. B. Macpherson. To be sure, it is the concepts and categories—the norms and ideals—of the broader culture, and not the works of particular philosophers per se, that concern me here. For it is political culture more broadly that influences the structure of economic and political behavior and that is what affects the planet. Still, individual thinkers can reveal ambiguities and tensions in fundamental ideas, such as liberty, that are glossed over and rendered invisible in more general modes of political and ethical discourse.
6. It should be noted that there has been a revival of interest in contractarian, deontological, and neo-Kantian approaches in moral philosophy and political theory owing to the work of Rawls (1971, 1993); Habermas (1996); and Scanlon (1998) among others. For a cogent historical and philosophical overview of the liberal tradition, see Plamenatz (1973).
7. In my view, this type of liberal value pluralism is a dead end formulation that ecological ethics must eschew. The goal is to internalize norms of right relationship among humans and for humans in nature within the concept of liberty itself, not as something to be balanced and traded off with liberty. The key to internalizing these norms within freedom itself without recourse to totalitarian elitism is to ground these norms of right relationship within the concepts of agency and self-realization of the human individual.
8. Berlin went on to flesh out at least one of the underlying conceptualizations of human agency and the self that travels with this idea of liberty: “Man differs from animals primarily neither as the possessor of reason, nor as an inventor of tools and methods, but as a being capable of choice, one who is most himself in choosing and not being chosen for; the rider and not the horse; the seeker of ends, and not merely of means, ends that he pursues, each in his own fashion: with the corollary that the more various these fashions, the richer the lives of men become; the larger the field of interplay between individuals, the greater the opportunities of the new and the unexpected; the more numerous the possibilities for altering his own character in some fresh or unexplored direction, the more paths open before each individual, and the wider will be his freedom of action and thought” (1969:178).
9. Berlin explained the concept this way: “The defence of liberty consists in the ‘negative’ goal of warding off interference. To threaten a man with persecution unless he submits to a life in which he exercises no choices of his goals; to block before him every door but one, no matter how noble the prospect upon which it opens, or how benevolent the motives of those who arrange this, is to sin against the truth that he is a man, a being with a life of his own to live” (1969:127).
10. Berlin explicated positive liberty this way: “The ‘positive’ sense of the word ‘liberty’ derives from the wish on the part of the individual to be his own master. I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself, not on external forces of whatever kind. I wish to be the instrument of my own, not of other men’s, acts of will. I wish to be a subject, not an object; to be moved by reasons, by conscious purposes, which are my own, not by causes which affect me, as it were, from outside. I wish to be somebody, not nobody; a doer—deciding, not being decided for, self-directed and not acted upon by external nature or by other men as if I were a thing, or an animal, or a slave incapable of playing a human role, that is, of conceiving goals and policies of my own and realizing them” (1969:131).
11. Again I am using the term “work” here in Arendt’s sense of creative transformation of natural matter into humanly useful or expressive form. Today, ordinary parlance does not make a distinction between “work” and “labor” as Arendt did, and she disapprovingly accused Marx of conflating the two ideas, which in her view is to equate all craftsmanship and artisanship with slavery. But for the purposes of discussion here, registering this distinction is important for a somewhat different reason. I am not pursuing the Marxist argument that the capitalist system of wage labor is essentially a mode of slavery (the class domination of the proletariat) and that it necessarily entails the reduction of these human beings (subjects) to mindless bodies (objects). Instead, I am interested in the point that the highly inegalitarian and competitive forms that the neoliberal economic system takes reinforce and perpetuate the culture and behavior of homo economicus. This self and the norms characteristic of this type of political economy are blind to the integrity and limits of natural materials and to the value that they inherently possess. Such a political economy regularly and systematically fails to seek value from nature via accommodation and ecologically informed appropriation rather than via ultimately disruptive and nonresilient extraction.
12. Recall in Utopia Thomas More’s account of the disdain shown by the Utopians toward gold and precious stones. Hythloday, the narrator, was amazed that such a radical transvaluation of values could occur (More [1516] 1975:50–52).
13. In this chapter, I am drawing on and developing a view that I have elsewhere explored in the context of related issues in the field of public health. Compare Jennings (2007, 2009, 2015). On this topic, generally see Honneth (2014).
14. My notion of relational liberty draws upon a neo-Aristotelian, civic republican tradition of political theory in a way that underscores its departure from liberalism. Historically, liberalism has been predominantly concerned to protect the self as an independent locus of private self-regarding (although not necessarily selfish) agency to a large extent. Civic republicanism has regarded human beings as “political animals” (zōon politikon). By this is meant that humans selves, far from being constrained or “de-natured” by political communities, must live in them if they are to flourish in accordance with their nature (Jennings 2011). Moreover, liberalism has defined politics in terms of an instrumental expedient designed to protect individuals from harm and to foster the progressive growth and just distribution of individual utility (variously and sometimes broadly defined). For its part, republicanism has defined politics in terms of creating a culture and social organization of individuals with a special kind of moral self-identity as citizens (politēs, cives), ruling themselves in common with equitable and just laws (isonomia), and seeking to achieve the human good together and the common good for all (politia or res publica). Citizenship in the republican tradition is active, not passive. It consists of ruling and being ruled in turn. Any notion of liberty or autonomy that is incompatible with being ruled, being limited and directed for the common good, is not in keeping with republican liberty. The negation of republican liberty is arbitrary power (Pettit 1997, 2012). For the individual citizen, this notion suggests a rhythm of alternating actions—autonomy and deference, doing and forbearing to do, innovation and accommodation, the assertion and denial of the will. Finding harmony and proportion in this rhythm of political and moral life was the work of maturity and judgment in individual human beings. For the polis as a whole, this conception of citizenship ran counter to Plato’s political theory and critique of democracy. Shared and distributed power, mobile and not fixed within a segment of the people, is what citizenship in a politia or republic requires, not an exclusive concentration vested among the permanently wise. However, it also is not a distributed type of power like the liberal market that supposedly achieves an automatic harmony of interests via the mechanism of individual self-interested action and decisions. From the republican perspective, the common good does not emerge automatically from the competitive work of many private minds and behind the back of individuals who never aim at it. The common good emerges intentionally from the cooperative work of the public minds of individual citizens and through the deliberative efforts of individuals who purposively aim at it.
15. The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins expressed this dialectical view of the interaction between the cultural context or scheme of meaning and the enactment of meaning in individual agency as follows: “History is culturally ordered, differently so in different societies, according to meaningful schemes of things. The converse is also true: cultural schemes are historically ordered, since to a greater or lesser extent the meanings are revalued as they are practically enacted. The synthesis of these contraries unfolds in the creative action of the historic subjects, the people concerned. For on the one hand, people organize their projects and give significance to their objects from the existing understandings of the cultural order. … On the other hand … as the contingent circumstances of action need not conform to the significance some group might assign them, people are known to creatively reconsider their conventional schemes” (1985:vii).
16. It is unfortunate that ecological economists, like virtually all economists, have either ignored this dialectical perspective on meaningful, intentional agency or have rejected it in favor of models of strategic action, rational gaming and choice that are actually not supported by historical and social scientific evidence. (cf. Green and Shapiro 1994).
17. In my view, citizenship does not have some external state of affairs called the “common good” as its instrumental objective. The common good is constituted by the proper institutionalization and functioning of citizenship and by the proper embedding of communal and ecological responsibility in the lifeworld. The common good is not a notion that sets up a test for particular policies or particular actions to meet (as does the parallel concept of “the public interest” in utilitarianism or liberal welfarism). It is not an outcome or an effect. However, the notion of the common good does provide a touchstone for judging and appraising a particular policy or decision. It appraises policy against criteria such as nondomination, nonarbitrariness, reasonable authority, mutual respect, reciprocity, and equity.
Contemporary utilitarianism tends to define interests or “utilities” abstractly across a population of individuals who have, as it were, only external or instrumental relationships to those interests. Utilitarianism also tends to ignore the distributional patterns in which these interests are fulfilled or their impact on discrete individual persons as such; it focuses instead on the net maximization of satisfaction or interest fulfillment in the aggregate (Robbins 1962; Walsh 1996). By contrast, the judgments that make up civic republican policy appraisal are judgments of fittingness, character, and appropriateness. They must take into consideration the conditions of power and meaning that constitute the identity and interests of each person as a unique individual. They are at the political boundary between moral and aesthetic judgment. As such, they cannot be the only means of policy appraisal, in economic policy, regulation, or law. However, neither should they be left out altogether (Günther 1993; Nussbaum 1995).
Shared purposes or problems are not the same as individual purposes or problems that happen to overlap for large numbers of people. Of course, they do affect persons as individuals and as members of smaller groups, but they also affect the constitution of a “people,” a population of individuals as a structured social whole. An aggregation of individuals becomes a people, a public, a political community when it is capable of recognizing common purposes and problems in this way; when it achieves a certain kind of political imagination (Anderson 1991).
18. For an important discussion and review of the literature on this from an evolutionary theory perspective, see Bellah (2011:60–97, 175–182, 191–192). It should be said that in addition to the disposition to nurture, Bellah also found a second aspect in the deep evolutionary history of our species, which he called the “disposition to dominance”—namely, hierarchical social ordering with a resulting competitive aspect of purposive agency. However, the manifestation of this competitive ordering of status and position within a social hierarchy does not necessarily have to result in what I (following Macpherson following Marx) have called extractive power. In other words, the drive toward hierarchical differentiation in our deep evolutionary past does not provide an argument for the necessity of, let alone the justification for, capitalism. The alternative pathway for deep hierarchy to express itself in cultural and social order is provided by the capacity for play.
In Bellah’s work and in the work of Burghardt (2006), play has many complex facets; suffice to say that in essence it is a relational, not an extractive, form of agency and activity. Most significant for our purposes here is the argument that play agency emerges under environmental and evolutionary conditions of a “relaxed field,” meaning a state of relaxed competitive pressures from the point of view of natural selection. This suggests a certain kind of economy that meets the criteria of householding. It is a sustained interaction between human groups and their surrounding ecosystems that does not undercut the materials and services offered by those ecosystems. The relaxed conditions of householding in past cultures, and of ecological political economy in the future, make play possible. Play, in turn, satisfies the human propensity toward hierarchical differentiation (which sits alongside the propensity to nurture and to give care) in a way that staves off domination, the institutionalization of extractive power transactions, and the rest. Play is a kind of competition that sublimates domination into relationality.
Here is the kind of liberty I seek: a relational liberty that avoids domination and expresses the deep impulses of care and play. Such freedom is symbiotic with a social and natural condition of relaxation of competitive selective and hierarchical pressure. If the achievement in theory and practice—thought, word, and deed—of relational liberty has ecological preconditions, so too can it have ecological effects.
We are now on course to undermine planetary boundaries in such a way as to exacerbate circumstances antithetical to relational liberty—namely, an increasingly unveiled Hobbesian situation condition of sauve qui peut (every man for himself). We are doing this at least in part because we have taught ourselves to believe that the institutional (and personal) expression of extractive power is a condition of freedom. Yet, this is precisely what will bring about unfreedom, as that has been known in societies of domination in history and from an evolutionary point of view.
19. Foremost among these social changes are (1) institutional transformations in the economy and polity to achieve equitable access to power and social participation, (2) community renewal and engagement, (3) a broader base of ecological literacy, (4) changes in the direction of less hierarchy and relative social inequality that will reduce chronic stress and enhance individual dignity and self-esteem, (5) a renewed moral imagination and sensibility for the human responsibilities of trusteeship for a healthy and resilient natural world, and (6) a renewed political imagination—“democratic will formation,” to borrow a term from Habermas (1996:295–302)—to create the governance and public policies that can bring these changes about.
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