Putting Morality Back into Politics by Richard D. Ryder

Author:Richard D. Ryder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Politics, Machiavelli, morality, public policy, moral objectives, politicians, political philosophy, Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Jefferson, Rawls, Singer, Nozickhappiness, liberty, equality, justice, democracy, utilitarianism, rights theory, contractarianism, painism, Iraq war
ISBN: 9781845405038
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2016
Published: 2016-09-14T00:00:00+00:00

In order to survive we need an enjoyable and useful environment. If our environment cannot provide what we need and desire then our happiness will be affected.

The 1960s saw a resurgence of awareness of the importance of the environment in our daily lives. Pollution, human overpopulation and resource shortages became political issues. Moderate reformers were dubbed environmentalists while radicals were sometimes called ecologists. Whereas shallow ecologism is anthropocentric in outlook, deep ecologism accords value and priority to the planet itself and to the ecosystem which links the whole of the inanimate and animate worlds. Various strains of ecologism emerged, such as eco-feminism (which sees the male sex as the chief origin of environmental damage), eco-anarchism (promoting the idea that the environment, if unmolested, will reach its own equilibrium) and eco-socialism (which ascribes most environmental destruction to capitalism). What can be called heritage ecologism harks back to nationalistic roots such as in the Nazi ideas of ‘blood and soil’, promoting the destruction of what are considered to be foreign plants, animals and artifacts. Because all forms of environmentalism and ecologism seem to imply restrictions on economic growth they have enjoyed only limited governmental support in affluent democracies and outright opposition from some governments of developing nations. Nevertheless, environmentalism and ecologism continue to raise political discourse a little above the immediate and monotonous concerns of materialism and have encouraged the consideration of a more global and long term perspective.

I have elsewhere described seven main forms of environmentalism and ecologism based upon their principal motivations (Ryder 1992). These are the thrifty, the aesthetic, the scientific, the historic, the health-conscious, the compassionate and the mystical forms of environmentalism. Each is driven by a typical concern, respectively, to conserve resources (e.g. the claims of biodiversity), to protect beauty, to protect items of scientific or historic interest, to protect health, to avoid causing suffering to any painient being and to respect the integrity of the whole eco-system. The first five of these positions are clearly anthropocentric. That is to say, human benefits are being sought. The sixth, the compassionate, extends the moral circle to include all painient individuals, nonhuman as well as human (Ryder 1992) whereas the last, the mystical, gives priority to the eco-system of the whole planet, whether painient or not, and even to the whole cosmos. Aldo Leopold, for example, exemplified this deep ecological position when he emphasised the paramount significance of the biotic community, as he called it, and the need to preserve its ‘integrity, stability and beauty’ (Leopold 1949). For Leopold, parts of nature have a value independent of their human (or even nonhuman) usefulness.

Some of the confusions in environmental and ecology theory stem from this plethora of moral priorities. Often the theories have been poorly thought out. Sometimes they conflict one with another. These problems have not facilitated the adoption of environmental principles and policies by the political community. Perhaps it would help to define clearly which of the four underlying moral theories is being advocated, whether it is the

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