Green Political Theory by Goodin Robert E.;

Author:Goodin, Robert E.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Polity Press

A Separate Issue?

To say that theories of value and of agency are logically separate issues, however, is not necessarily to deny that arguments that bear on the one issue might also bear on the other as well. And if they do, then our answers to those two genuinely separate questions might, in such ways, be indirectly connected. Both might derive from some deeper common theories of humanity and society, for example. The same thing that makes us think that certain outcomes are valuable and to be desired might lead us to prefer certain sorts of human agent and certain sorts of social structure, as well. The fact that the two are logically separate issues, philosophically, ought not automatically to preclude us from giving one and the same style of answer to both sorts of questions.

Green theorists seem to think – or hope or imagine or pretend or presume – that this is the case. They themselves draw no sharp distinction between the arguments that they offer for their theory of agency and those that they offer for their theory of value. That is in part because they rarely appreciate the difference between the two sorts of theory, supposing both are part and parcel of one and the same larger theory. Or if they do see that there is a separate theory of agency at work within their larger theory at all, they do not see the need to offer any separate defence of it. They seem just to presume that whatever they say in defence of their theory of value will apply, mutatis mutandis, as a defence of their theory of agency.

I can see only one plausible way to justify this traditionally unargued-for conflation of green theories of agency and green theories of value. That would involve a further unstated premise, postulating the uniquely natural status of small-scale primitive (prototypically, hunter-gatherer) human societies. Suppose it were true that those, and those alone, were the uniquely natural forms of human organization. Then the green theory of value would accord value to those, and only those, forms of human agency which are characteristically embodied in such societies. We would thereby be led to praise, among other things: simple living and plain dealing; societies that are small in scale, modest in material possessions and broadly egalitarian in character; loose authority structures internally, and even looser links between communities.

Greens are of course sensitive to the charge that they are essentially involved in romanticizing a primitive past. They are quick to deny that they are doing any such thing. But there is much to suggest that, for many greens, some such Rousseauian vision is indeed what bridges the gap between their theories of value and their theories of agency. It is not only that green recommendations hauntingly echo Rousseau’s discourses.6 Among the more distinguished green writers, commentaries on ideal green social forms followed from – and one can only presume were at least partly inspired by – studies of primitive societies.7

If that is the argument,

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