Green Liberalism

The Free And The Green Society

Marcel Wissenburg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134228294
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This is an agenda-setting exploration of the relationship between green politics and liberal ideology. Ecological problems provide unique challenges for liberal democracies.; This challenge is examined by the author who aims to fill the gap between short-term ecological modernization and the politically infeasible longer term utopian approaches.

1

Liberal democracy

1.1 Introduction

Since it is my intention to design a ‘green’ liberalism, a liberal democratic view on nature, the environment and environmental problems, the first thing to ask is: where to start? What precisely is liberal democracy about? The aim of this chapter is to develop a relatively formal model of criteria of liberal democracy. The criteria I formulate define a stringent but minimal version of liberal democracy; stringent in that the conditions are quite strict, but minimal in the sense that adapting them would either change nothing about our conclusions or would disfigure liberal democracy beyond recognition.

The first thing to note about liberal democracy is that it can be represented, like (to some degree) any other political system, as a system designed to translate preferences into rights. More precisely: it can be represented as the existence, on a collective level, of mediating and reconciliatory mechanisms (state, market, education, etc.), transforming the claims of individuals to benefits and the reduction of burdens into formal rights via the recognition of valid claims by means of principles of social justice. Claims can be seen as based on preferences and metadesires, and these in turn are intrinsically related to the individuals’ plans of life and views of the good. Despite the diversity of conceptions of the good life we may assume the existence of a rough consensus on the need for these mechanisms – that is, a rough consensus on the institutions defining liberal democracy.

This is, obviously, a very one-dimensional view of liberal democracy and of politics in general. In real life, the decisions to translate some preferences of some citizens for, say, the conservation of a forest into a specific type of right for all, i.e. the obligation not to destroy the forest, in fact shapes or rearranges preferences. In this case, the lives, possibilities and perspectives of building constructors, businessmen and women, investors, nature lovers etc. are changed, hence their respective sets of (feasible) preferences are altered. Ideally, even the public debate on whether or not to protect a forest can change preferences: opponents may actually convince one another of their views or influence them just enough to build a compromise. In short, it is not realistic to take preferences as a given. Yet this is precisely what I shall do, for the most part.

It is important to make a distinction here between the sphere of the political and the (super)sphere of civil society. Imagine an individual as taking part in dozens of types of interaction: as a citizen, she makes up her mind about political issues (or not) and votes (or not); as a member of a family, she is a parent, a child, single or not; as a consumer, she buys this or that here or there; as a producer, she works in a specific place and function or not. Each of these types of interaction between individuals has its rules and functions; they constitute ‘spheres’ of interaction. Interaction in one sphere can influence interaction in and even the rules of other spheres. In many societies, it is the business of the political sphere to authoritatively determine the rules and borders of all other spheres, loosely described as civil society. It ‘overrules’ the authority or capacity of any second sphere to determine the rules of a third. In liberal democratic societies, the task of the political sphere is further specified as that of protecting, as much as possible, (the spheres of) civil society against interference even from the political sphere itself. Exceptions are possible, thanks to the ‘as much as possible’ proviso.

The interactions within civil society, the views and preferences which are formulated there and which function as the input of the political sphere, can be seen as a second dimension of liberal democracy. The combination of both, the political input–output machine and the process of preference formation in civil society, creates a chain of reactions, a never ending dialogue between politics and civil society: the deliberative society. (There is a close link between this concept and that of ‘deliberative democracy’ (Doherty and De Geus 1996): if the deliberative society meets certain criteria of formal and actual intensity, it becomes a deliberative democracy. See Chapter 9.) Nevertheless, an analytical distinction can be made between the formation of preferences in civil society and the input of preferences in the political sphere for each specific instance of political decision-making, for each ‘issue’. Now whether liberal democracy is compatible with green concerns depends first and foremost on whether the rules of this political sphere itself allow green politics to be considered, designed and implemented. If the rules do not allow this, green preferences are irrelevant because they simply cannot be translated into the appropriate rights. In that case, the rules of the political system may well be adapted to create the desired room for green concerns – but then it is no longer liberal democracy, at least not as we knew it before. To determine whether liberal democracy and environmentalism are compatible, we must therefore assume that preferences are given. Only after this issue has been settled, for better or for worse, can we talk about the desirability of changes in the liberal democratic political system and about the degree to which this would transform liberal democracy into something else.

In the following first two sections, I shall describe the input and output of liberal democratic systems, i.e. preferences (Section 1.2) and rights (Section 1.3). I shall give (more) special attention to the question why individual preferences would be so important as to make them the basis of political systems, to the genesis of preferences and to their incorporation in plans of life. Section 1.3 introduces a formal conception of rights that allows us to represent all sorts of plans of life, views of the good and measures of just distribution. In Sections 1.4, 1.5 and 1.6, the criteria describing the liberal–democratic understanding of respectively liberty, equality and democracy will be introduced. Some of these sections, the ones marked with an asterisk (*), are of a rather formal and technical nature. For the reader who does not feel qualified to read them or who could not care less, I have provided a hopefully more legible summary at the beginning of these sections, so that they can skip the rest without serious discomfort.

With the three sets of criteria from Sections 1.4 to 1.6 in hand, we should be able to assess ethical and political theories of the environment and environmental policies themselves, provided that we have reason to believe that liberal eyes are at all fit to see environmental problems. Whether this is the case will be discussed in the seventh and final section.

1.2 Preferences

As explained in the previous section, liberal democracy can be represented as a particular type of input–output machine, transforming the preferences of individuals into rights for individuals. Now ‘preference’ is quite an ambiguous concept: a preference can be informed or uninformed, it can be interpreted as a desire for a certain mental state or for an actual state of affairs and so forth (cf. Kymlicka 1990: 12 ff. on the notion of utility). Each interpretation presupposes a different view of the individual and of what matters about the individual. In other words, the exact nature of the input of liberal democracy depends on the reason(s) why liberal democrats believe the individual human being to be so all-important.

The fact that the individual matters more than anything else in liberal democratic thought is obvious. Even if individuals are sacrificed in a greater cause, liberals believe in that cause because of what it ultimately means to other individuals. It is individuals who are either the vehicles of whatever is good or the good in itself, and it is precisely because they believe something like this that they find a principle like fiat justitia pereat mundus (roughly: let justice prevail even if the world must perish in the cause) perverse. This feeling is not an exclusive prerogative of liberal democrats. There is a more general justification for it, which starts with the intuitive notion that we, individuals, are conscious of our individual existence and attach a certain value to our existence. We find ourselves (individually) important. In other beings we recognize the same distinctive trait of individuality; if we care about ourselves for this reason, then rationality bids us to do the same for them. Yet all that this primitive notion of self-importance establishes is that individuals matter universally. If other things matter less, why does the individual count for so much?

The history of philosophy has given us many reasons to place the individual at the centre of moral thinking. In Aristotelian thought, for example, human beings have a specific telos, an aim to strive for, a nature to realize, an inborn manifest destiny. It is the human’s task or even calling to realize its potential, hence to cultivate its inborn capacities to the best of its abilities. From a moral point of view, this leaves humans with very little freedom to act. The measure for right and wrong is one that is in a way external to them: their nature. The woman who lacks any talent as an artist but still tries to become a painter because that is what she wants to be, rather than the brilliant rocket scientist inside her, fails the test of life. If liberal democrats were Aristotelians, the kind of preferences they would take into account would be ‘natural’, that is, not the (actual) preferences of the painter but the (potential) preferences of the rocket scientist.

Liberal thought assumes that humans are born free – at the very least metaphysically, and in one of three senses. It assumes that we can consciously deviate from the path of life that our inborn nature prescribes, if there is such a thing; it assumes that if we cannot deviate from that path, there is no sense in distinguishing between the actual and the potential because the two are then identical; and it assumes that if there is no such thing as an inborn nature, the whole category of the potential disappears. Hence, individuals are the makers of their own fate, or – since they may be metaphysically but not physically free – at least of their own plans.

Liberal thought assumes that man is born free and equal: all humans are equally free, no one makes another’s plans or dreams or hopes. Again, there are ordinary physical limits to this. In everyday life, we communicate and interact and so change and shape one another’s life. Yet basically, we all remain equally free to create, and equally responsible for, our plans.

In liberal democratic thought, then, the individual counts for more than anything else because she is the source of acknowledgment of all values, including the reason why one single individual x feels she matters. There is no external standard to judge that fundamental reason by, except the reasons other individuals have for valuing their own individual existences – but these cannot overrule x’s own standard since x is assumed to be free.

It is a commonplace to say that the things we find important about ourselves vary from individual to individual. We care about who we are, what we are, where we are, we care about our values and ideas, our thoughts, our products, the whereto of our lives. In liberal political theories, all this is caught under one heading: the individual’s plan of life. It describes what an individual defines as her idea of a good life (technically known as ‘the theory of the good’), how she wants to achieve this, and how she wants the rest of the world to accommodate to her plans. Plans of life vary not only from individual to individual but also in stability. They develop and change in the course of a life, becoming more or less internally consistent, more or less realistic, or simply different. They also vary in completeness. They can be limited to basic ideas about how we want our lives to go or our situation to change, or they can be extended further to include ideas about how we want our children to be and behave, our neighbours, our community, the world, the future of the world.

A plan of life can be represented or expressed in many ways: as a series of values and norms, as desires, as elections or in the form of preferences. The last may involve ‘summarizing’ a plan of life into comparisons between two or more alternatives; ultimately, a plan of life can also be represented, albeit in an inhumanly extensive form, as an ordering of preferences over all possible worlds. The choice for any specific way of representation is purely a matter of circumstances. In the context of a moral debate, norms and values are probably the most appropriate currency to work with; in an attempt to sympathize with a person, a novel or autobiography may also do; and on the psychoanalyst’s sofa desires can be a good starting point. In liberal democratic politics, as I shall argue, we can talk in terms of preferences.

Let me first elucidate the concept of preferences. To translate human plans of life and the theories of the good from which they are derived into preferences, we must offer choices between alternatives, in a more technical than everyday sense of the word. Alternatives can be (sets of) two or more simple things x₁, x₂, . . . x_n, like acts (cutting down a tree or not), goods (two distinct trees), even states of mind (anger or joy, etc.). They can also be sets of sets, as when we compare one nation’s forests with those of another. At the most complex level, x₁, x₂, . . . x_n stand for complete social states: that is, complete descriptions of the world including its history. In the last case, we could, for instance, compare two identical worlds that differ only with respect to the origins of Yellowstone Park: in one version of the history of the world it would have been planted by humans, in another grown naturally. The one thing that distinguishes technical alternatives from everyday alternatives is that the former must be of the same order. An act is no alternative to a social state; the two are incomparable. We do not choose between cutting down a tree and a world where that tree still grows, we choose either between two worlds with and without the tree, or between cutting the tree down and not cutting it down.

Preferences are expressed i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Liberal democracy
• 1.1 Introduction
• 1.2 Preferences
• 1.3 Rights
• 1.4 Democracy
• 1.5 Equality
• 1.6 Liberty
• 1.7 An overview
• 2 Green political theory
• 2.1 Introduction
• 2.2 Metaphysics – nature and the universe
• 2.3 Ethics – humans in nature
• 2.4 Politics – the shape of a green society
• 2.5 Policies
• 2.6 Compatibility
• 3 The possibility of green liberalism
• 3.1 Introduction
• 3.2 Classical and sensualist liberalism
• 3.3 The greening of liberalism
• 3.4 The green problems of liberalism
• 3.5 AIDS, women and deforestation
• 3.6 Intermezzo
• 4 On value
• 4.1 Intrinsic and external value
• 4.2 In the eyes of the beholder
• 4.3 Substitutability
• 4.4 Inclusion and exclusion
• 5 The distribution of rights
• 5.1 Spheres of rights
• 5.2 The restraint principle
• 5.3 The savings principle and the restraint principle
• 6 Population policies
• 6.1 Strategies of sustainability
• 6.2 The idea of a sustainable population
• 6.3 Procreative rights
• 6.4 The attribution of procreative rights
• 6.5 Alternative strategies and parameters
• 7 Distributive solutions
• 7.1 Introduction
• 7.2 Internal justice
• 7.3 ‘International’ justice
• 7.4 Intergenerational justice
• 7.5 Interspecies justice
• 7.6 Dynamics and uncertainty
• 8 Supply-side politics
• 8.1 Tactics
• 8.2 Green technology
• 8.3 Biodiversity and policy diversity
• 8.4 The shape of things to come
• 9 Beyond sustainability
• 9.1 The limits of sustainability
• 9.2 Relaxing conditions, strengthening ties
• 9.3 Economic liberalism
• 9.4 Deliberative democracy and the last taboo
• 9.5 Concluding remarks
• Notes
• References
• Index