Abstract
The first part of this article offers a systemic comparison of Pope Francis’s “integral ecology” with the “technocratic paradigm.” The second part is devoted to an internal critique of the paradigm: (i) the primacy accorded instrumental causality in a “disenchanted world,” (ii) the technical reduction of prudence, and (iii) the consequent fragmentation of ethical systems. The critique supports key aspects of Francis’s ecological ethics: the option for the poor, intergenerational responsibility, and recognition of the intrinsic value of nonhuman nature. The third part shows how such an internal critique underwrites the uses of religious rhetoric in public reasoning: the re-enchantment of the world.
Keywords
“Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil.” 1 Gerard Manley Hopkins’s lament of 1877 proved to be prophetic; for trade and toil have seared our moral landscape, blearing and smearing the global commons. Unsustainable global warming, loss of biodiversity, and environmental degradation are in large part anthropogenic, as is the increasing phenomenon of “climate refugees”—those fleeing their homelands due to climate change.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that “in 2010–2019 average annual global greenhouse gas emissions were at their highest levels in human history, but the rate of growth has slowed. Without immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors, limiting global warming to 1.5°C [beyond which we risk ecosystem collapse] is beyond reach.” “We are at a crossroads,” says IPCC Chair Hoesung Lee. “The decisions we make now can secure a liveable future. We have the tools and know-how required to limit warming.” 2
Yet still “the soil is bare” and political will wanting.
3
Generations have trod, but not all have trod equally. “Poor people and their livelihoods,” reports the IPCC, are especially vulnerable to climate change because they usually have fewer assets and less access to funding, technologies and political influence. Combined, these constraints mean they have fewer resources to adapt to climate change impacts. Climate change impacts tend to worsen inequalities because they disproportionately affect disadvantaged groups. This in turn further increases their vulnerability to climate change impacts and reduces their ability to cope and recover.
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Life’s natural lottery seems rigged against those least responsible or able to adapt to ecological degradation. 5 The “cry of the poor,” says Pope Francis, has become the “cry of the earth.” 6 Indeed “the earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor; she ‘groans in travail’ (Rom 8:22).” 7 Yet under the sway of our “dominant technocratic paradigm,” the cry goes largely unheeded. Short-term “panaceas” so often proposed by the dominant economic powers give rise to “a false or superficial ecology which bolsters complacency.” 8
In his landmark encyclical, Laudato Si’ (2015) and subsequent apostolic exhortation, Laudate Deum (2023), Francis joins other religious leaders in inviting us to imagine otherwise. In the first part of this article, I will underscore the novelty of Francis’s critique by offering a systemic comparison of his “integral ecology” with the reductive “technocratic paradigm,” which, in the pope’s words, dominates our “ecological culture.” In the second part, I defend the logic of Francis’s integral ecology, offering an internal critique of three central prejudices underlying the technocratic paradigm. In the final part I conclude by showing how such an internal critique restores the place (rhetorical locus) of religious belief in the public realm: the re-enchantment of the world.
Rival Paradigms
We must, says Francis, “get to the roots of the present situation.” For “ecological culture cannot be reduced to a series of urgent and partial responses to the immediate problems of pollution, environmental decay and the depletion of natural resources.” On the contrary, “there needs to be a distinctive way of looking at things, a way of thinking, policies, an educational programme, a lifestyle and a spirituality which together generate resistance to the assault of the technocratic paradigm. Otherwise, even the best ecological initiatives can find themselves caught up in the same globalized logic.” 9
The roots of this globalized logic go deep, reflecting the dubious heritage of modernity. 10 As Max Weber foresaw, the rise of technocratic, instrumental rationality demystifies the world, displacing older unities. Indeed, precisely because it is, in Francis’s words, “undifferentiated and one-dimensional,” the technocratic paradigm dissolves the complex unity of traditional value spheres. 11 The totalizing logic of technocracy (the primacy of technē or instrumental reason) culminates in an undifferentiated differentiation of religion, aesthetics, ethics, and so forth—a “fragmentation of knowledge.” 12 Religion betrays its logos, traditional social bonds are severed, and our common home despoiled. 13
Others, to be sure, have rehearsed these themes, but Francis has worked his own variations upon them in Laudato Si’ and Laudate Deum. As befitting their pastoral genre, however, Francis’s critique of technocracy’s systemic “reductionism” is not itself systematically developed. 14 Rather Francis offers an alternative ethical “approach to ecology which respects our unique place as human beings in this world and our relationship to our surroundings.” 15 A systemic critique, then, must begin with the interplay of these rival paradigms and their differing accounts of (i) nature, (ii) our place within it, and (iii) the ethics of our place. Let me say a word about each.
The Nature of Nature
For Pope Francis, as for his namesake, Francis of Assisi, creation gives praise to God: “Laudato Si’.” Nature is first creation and bears the mark of the Creator.
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Our world, says Francis in Laudate Deum, is “imbued with [God’s] radiant presence.”
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Francis is hardly a pious Luddite; he acclaims the great achievements of modern science and technology.
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And yet the limits of technical reasoning are not the limits of our world. Rather, as Francis argues in Laudato Si’, our own transcendence rests in fitting care for nature, a nature that possesses intrinsic value as created. For Francis, “believing in one God who is Trinitarian communion suggests that the Trinity has left its mark on all creation. . . . St. Bonaventure . . . teaches us that each creature bears in itself a specifically Trinitarian structure, so real that it could be contemplated if only the human gaze were not so partial, dark and fragile.”
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The great Dominican theologian Thomas Aquinas argues in a similar vein. In Francis’s words: The universe as a whole, in all its manifold relationships, shows forth the inexhaustible riches of God. Saint Thomas Aquinas wisely noted that multiplicity and variety “come from the intention of the first agent” who willed that “what was wanting to one in the representation of the divine goodness might be supplied by another,” inasmuch as God’s goodness “could not be represented fittingly by any one creature.”
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In creation, “God has written a precious book ‘whose letters are the multitude of created things present in the universe.’” 21 In Pope Benedict XVI’s words, “the book of nature is one and indivisible.” 22 “Nature,” says Francis, citing Aquinas, “is God’s art”; we are kin to all creation. 23 As such, the goodness of creation, symbolized in the mythic abundance of Eden, is irreducible to merely human purposes. Rather, we participate in the divine blessing (Gn 1:31) as creature/creator—created imago Dei. One may speak, that is, of a divine Providence that encompasses and reaches fruition in our providential care (“dominion”) but at the same time stands in judgment upon it. 24
For Christians, Christ, the eternal Word fleshed in creation, is the epitome of such care. For in Christ, all creation is recapitulated: “In him,” says Colossians, “were created all things in heaven and on earth,” and “in him all things hold together” (Col 1:16–17, NABRE used throughout). “The New Testament,” writes Francis, does not only tell us of the earthly Jesus and his tangible and loving relationship with the world. It also shows him risen and glorious, present throughout creation by his universal Lordship: “For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross” (Col 1:19–20). This leads us to direct our gaze to the end of time, when the Son will deliver all things to the Father, so that “God may be everything to every one” (1 Cor 15:28).
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In Christ, creation itself is redeemed: Creation, says Paul, “set free from slavery to corruption” is to “share in the glorious freedom of the children of God” (Rom 8:21). 26
Yet Pope Francis’s critique plays out against a vastly different backdrop than that of his namesake. Hopkins’s lament, not Francis of Assisi’s Canticle of Creation, is the leitmotif of our “de-divinized” world, for Western modernity, wrote Max Weber, is disenchanted. 27 For Weber, the progressive retreat of the “ultimate and most sublime” notions of the good left in its wake a polytheism of fragmented values—what Francis decries as “practical relativism.” 28 Divested of formal and final causality, nature ceases to tell a moral, much less religious tale. “In the new cosmology developed by Galileo, Descartes, and Newton, the operative principle of causality,” writes Louis Dupré, “was the so-called efficient one. Soon modern philosophy with few exceptions (Leibniz) reduced all forms of causality to the efficient one conceived on the model of the mechanist theory of motion. Creation had always been interpreted in a causal way, but never as the exclusive effect of an efficient cause.” 29 In such a mechanistic worldview, God becomes ever more a supernumerary in creation.
“Natural” theology plays out in a perverse dialectic as the existence of an ultimate efficient cause becomes an increasingly dispensable hypothesis. Indeed, the roots of modern atheism, argues Michael Buckley, lie precisely in rationalistic proofs of divinity beholden to the mundane logic of technical (instrumental) reasoning. 30 In succumbing to the rationalization of the lifeworld, theology, in effect, built atheism into its premises. Religion is itself demystified and confined to the private sphere, assimilated, at best, to the realm of personal taste. 31 For our disenchanted world, there is little place for St. Francis’s cosmic Canticle. 32
Our Place in Nature
Such rival views of nature determine our place in it. For Francis, we are created creators, participating in the divinely bestowed goodness of creation as subjects. We realize our objective nature as created in the imago Dei in expressing our subjective creativity or transcendence. But this subjective transcendence (self-realization) is within nature and expressive of nature rather than instrumentally opposed to nature. Human dignity, as our participation, par excellence, in God’s “eternal law,” is realized in our providential care for the common good of all creation. In Laudate Deum, Francis writes, “responsibility for God’s earth means that human beings, endowed with intelligence, must respect the laws of nature and the delicate equilibria existing between the creatures of this world.” 33 And hence Francis’s lament. For we have betrayed the biblical charge of “tilling and keeping” the garden of our world, our earthly “paradise” (Gn 2:15), so disfiguring the divine representation, not only in the human subject but, as Aquinas reminds us, in the “inexhaustible goodness” of creation itself. 34
For Francis, then, it is their very share in this “transcendent fullness” that draws “human beings, endowed with intelligence and love” to “lead all creatures back to their Creator.” 35 And here, Francis works variations on his Aristotelian/Thomistic heritage, for practical intelligence (phronēsis/prudentia) for Aquinas, following Aristotle, is ordered to the ethical ideal of the common good. Flourishing, that is, is not only tempered by the virtue of “particular justice.” It has as its natural harmonic the ideal fruition of the common good in the formation of the just polis (the koinōnia teleios/communitas perfecta). Practical intelligence implies a common perception of “sublimity” and a common “seeking what is right” (sunesis), even as the sublimity of the perfect community is expressed in the blessedness (eudaimonia) of its members—in the sublimity of the perfect community all share singly, not en masse. 36 And yet today, Francis urges, we must weave a larger web; for flourishing looks beyond the political community, however broadly conceived. Indeed, our prudential orientation to the common good necessarily extends to care for our common home. The “natural environment,” says Francis, “is a collective good, the patrimony of all humanity and the responsibility of everyone.” 37 For Francis, our common seeking “what is right” (flourishing) entails our respecting the “sublimity” of creation itself: integral humanism presumes integral ecology.
But now “the soil is bare.” The divine cosmology espoused in St. Francis’s Canticle is disenchanted in modernity. The “book of nature,” we saw, is closed; there is no place for Francis’s poetry or “the ancestral wisdom” of “poets, contemplatives and prophets.” 38 A purely contingent relation now obtains between the subject and nature as object. 39 As Michael Sandel observes, “For the empiricist philosophers, including the utilitarians, reason is wholly instrumental. It enables us to identify means for the pursuit of certain ends—ends that reason itself does not provide.” 40 With the reduction of prudence to technē (instrumental reasoning), the value of nature is imputed, relative only to our purposes and aims, which are now themselves mere expressions of passion and preferences. 41 And if the dignity of a rational will survives, it does so precisely in its separation from nonhuman nature. The world is what we make of it—a mechanism to be exploited here and now. 42 “This [technocratic] paradigm,” says Francis, “exalts the concept of a subject who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an external object. This subject makes every effort to establish the scientific and experimental method, which in itself is already a technique of possession, mastery and transformation.” 43 Indeed, says Weber, “one can, in principle, master all things by calculation.” 44
In the words of Laudate Deum, such unbridled human power treats “nonhuman reality” as “a mere resource at its disposal.” 45 And as Francis reminds us, such mastery extends to the human reality of Indigenous peoples “steeped in the surrounding nature.” Their “way of life,” too, falls victim to technocratic “colonizing mentalities.” 46 Yet in this very mastery, Reason’s final disenchantment is of itself. For with the attenuation of Aristotelian rational will (boulēsis) to mere appetite (epithumia), prudence becomes, in Hume’s memorable words, “the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” 47 “Prudent,” accordingly, becomes a commendation of Hume’s “sensible knave,” whose cleverness is devoted to the pursuit of “self-love and private interest.” Multiple variations are wrung upon this technical reduction of prudence, but modern moral theorists such as Rawls and R. M. Hare typically follow Kant in assuming that the perfection of prudence (Klugheit) is not “practical wisdom” in the service of the perfect community but rather sagacity in pursuing one’s own lasting advantage.
The Ethics of Our Place
Our consideration of nature and our place in it brings us to our third question; for what we say of nature and our place within it will determine the ethics of our place. Under the sway of the technocratic paradigm, we saw, the “cry of the poor” across generations goes unheeded, while the intrinsic value of nonhuman nature is denied. Drawing upon the rich heritage of Catholic social teaching, Francis’s “integral ecology,” conversely, not only upholds the rights of the poor but grounds them in an intergenerational conception of the common good that extends to nonhuman nature. For Francis, then, the “cry of the poor” becomes the “cry of the earth”: rights, intergenerational responsibility, and the intrinsic value of nonhuman nature are intimately related in Francis’s ecological ethics. Let us briefly consider his argument.
For Francis, as we saw, practical wisdom (prudence) plays out in our common seeking what is right. And in modern Catholic social teaching, our seeking what is right in the political order is itself parsed in terms of human rights. Like Matthew’s steward (Mt 13:52), the postconciliar church draws from what is old and new, grafting the modern morality of rights onto the traditional ethics of the common good. The semantic shift is significant, for invoking our “common faith” in dignity and rights permits the church to address what Rawls calls the “fact of reasonable pluralism”—our differing comprehensive conceptions of the good, including religious conceptions. 48
In our day, says Pope John XXIII in his seminal encyclical, Pacem in Terris, the “common good is chiefly guaranteed when personal rights and duties are maintained.” 49 Yet the converse is likewise true. Maintaining personal rights entails promoting the common good of an integral and comprehensive rights regime. 50 Where philosophical liberalism emphasizes negative liberties of sovereign selves and correlative duties of forbearance, Catholic social teaching underscores the positive social duties of protecting and preserving basic rights through suitable institutional guarantees. Such rights, moreover, comprise not only civil liberties but the basic agential conditions or capabilities implied in respecting persons as agents, for example, security, nutritional well-being, shelter, and education. And it is precisely this modern appeal to a rights-based common good that underwrites the church’s “option for the poor.” For, as Francis urges, the central political question becomes whose equal dignity and rights are unequally threatened or denied by ecological degradation. 51 In the pope’s words, “every ecological approach needs to incorporate a social perspective which takes into account the fundamental rights of the poor and the underprivileged.” 52 Among the foremost of such rights is the effective participation of those most affected, such as Indigenous peoples. 53
In a new millennium marked by massive displacement, systemic deprivation, and degrading inequalities in new forms of colonialism, Francis, like his immediate predecessors, seeks to safeguard the vulnerable through effective regulative and redistributive mechanisms. No less than the norms of contractual fidelity (commutative justice), the norms of distributive justice and social justice are internal to a well-ordered market. Economic integration—for example, the transnational mobility of capital, finance, and labor—calls for ethical integration, through both state actors and civil society. Solidarity must accordingly be expressed within market transactions, as norm and end, lest excessive inequalities imperil the common good of what Francis, following Benedict XVI, called “integral humanism.” 54
Moreover, precisely because rights are ordered to the common good, especially of the most vulnerable, Francis can speak not only of “intergenerational solidarity” but of our responsibility to care for our common home (“integral ecology”). 55 As we saw above, natural law (now glossed in terms of natural or human rights) is our imperfect participation in God’s “eternal law”—our dignity realized precisely in our care for the common good of all creation, for we are trustees of a sacred heritage in preserving the global commons. Francis’s integral ecology thus avoids the twin extremes of “an excessive anthropocentrism” that “sees no intrinsic value in lesser beings” and a reductive “biocentrism” that “sees no special value in human beings.” An integral ecology, for Francis, presumes an integral humanism—that is, an integral and comprehensive ethical ecology linking the demands of justice with care for our common home. For “one cannot prescind from humanity. There can be no renewal of our relationship with nature without a renewal of humanity itself.” 56
Such a “situated anthropocentrism,” Francis insists, requires ecumenical and interfaith collaboration, 57 for though grounded in Christian faith, the ethical implications of Laudato Si’ are irenic in scope. Francis’s appeal to ecumenical and interfaith dialogue allows for multiple variations on a common theme—that is, a morality of the depths, now extended to care for our common home. Drawing upon the wellsprings of their distinctive traditions, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, adherents of Indigenous religions, and others are invited to take up the ethical motifs of Laudato Si’: the option for the poor, intergenerational responsibility, and the intrinsic value of nonhuman nature.
But such an irenic gambit stands in stark contrast with the ethics of disenchantment bequeathed to us by modernity. Not surprisingly, Francis laments the dearth of “genuine ethical horizons to which one can appeal” in global fora addressing climate change; 58 for once prudence is unmoored from its “natural” teleological foundations, technē prevails. The making of a self becomes indistinguishable from the making of a thing—a producible end, marked by price not worth. 59 In “mastering all things,” the subject is itself “mastered by calculation.” Social, economic, and political relations are governed by instrumental reason and ethics itself becomes fragmented. 60 De-divinized, the self-made self becomes, in Nietzsche’s words, “a small soul.” 61
For some, ethics becomes merely the cultural production of technē. Divested of natural finality, the self must produce/construct its own value in the marketplace of desires. For modern and postmodern communitarians, appeals to the common good remain “local and ethnocentric,” relative, says Rorty, to “the body of shared belief which determines the reference of the word ‘we.’” 62 The thicker our notion of the good (our ethics or mores, what Hegel called Sittlichkeit), the less common its scope. 63 For others, the self is diffused in nature or value imputed to a collective, suprapersonal entity—for example, the biotic community, to which the individual is instrumentally subordinated. 64 And for still others, in a Kantian vein, morality arises only in the formal constraint of prudence.
Fearing the ethical (eudaimonistic) relativism presaged by the technical reduction of prudence, Kant proposes a morality that is entirely sui generis: The boundaries between prudential self-love and morality become distinct and sharp. In a disenchanted world, governed by technical reasoning, the “invention” of morality (Moralität) rests not in natural teleology but in the apodictic deliverances of pure reason alone. 65 In Kantian morality, only the rationally autonomous will is “good in itself” without qualification, whereas beings without reason possess only relative worth, as means. 66 Duties to nonhuman nature are, then, self-regarding or anthropocentric. 67
Finally, we may note a distinctively modern rapprochement of prudential ethics and moral universality. Utilitarianism in its various stripes defines the common good as the maximum total or average utility, where utility is measured by an impartial aggregation of individual welfare (interests or preferences). The common good thus represents a “benevolent reduction,” says Bernard Williams, of “all interests, ideals, aspirations and desires” of disparate agents to the representative preferences, differing only in degree, of a common ascriptive subject, be it R. M. Hare’s critically informed “archangel” or a thoroughly rational egoist. 68 In the “objective” utilitarian calculus, the distinctiveness of subjects is lost. Bereft of intrinsic value, human rights bear only a contingent relation to the common good and may be sacrificed if the sums so dictate. Utilitarianism may support animal rights—for example, Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation—but as Francis notes, the underlying utilitarian appeal to cost-benefit analysis threatens not only human rights but the extension of the common good to nonhuman nature. 69
We are left with the supreme irony that the very science that gives us the “the tools and know-how required to limit warming” gives way to the rationalized “scientism” conspiring against our using them. 70 In the words of Laudate Deum, “We stand naked and exposed in the face of our ever-increasing power, lacking the wherewithal to control it.” 71 Disenchantment and the technical reduction of prudence it presages leaves us a fragmented ethics, a choice between liberal morality privileging the “thin” negative liberty rights of sovereign selves and ethics working variations on the common good—whether of “thick” local and ethnocentric polities, a suprapersonal biotic community, or aggregated preferences.
An Immanent Critique
In the first part, I argued that our rival paradigms betray differing, seemingly incommensurable interpretations of nature, our place within the world, and the ethics of our place. And just this incommensurability renders comparisons problematic; for there is no common categorial framework, no third overarching paradigm, to which we can perspicuously appeal. We must, says Weber, choose which is “god” for us—and as Francis reminds us, we moderns have made our choice with the triumph of technē. 72
Yet the soil is not entirely bare. In their eloquent critiques, Elizabeth Johnson, Celia Deane-Drummond, Gaël Giraud, Christopher Steck, Bénézet Bujo, Laurenti Magesa, and others have given us grounds for belief in integral ecology. But if we are to find a “hearing, today” (Lk 4:21), we must follow their lead and question the prejudices that, as Nietzsche foretold, make the Christian God “unbelievable”: 73 the taken-for-granted disenchantment of the nature, the technical reduction of prudence defining our “place,” and the fragmentation of ethics to which we are heir. We must stake our claims in a disenchanted world, creating a place (rhetorical locus) for belief. That is the critical, deconstructive task before us here and we are not without recourse. Weberian relativism is not the final word, for the “choice” of paradigms itself is subject to immanent critique. We may, that is, question the internal coherence and adequacy of the prevailing agnostic pieties.
We begin with the technical reduction of prudence, for it is this “choice” or prejudice that defines our place in the world. 74 As we shall see, the prejudice (the reduction of Aristotelian phronēnis to technē) is less perspicuous than Hume or Kant imagined. As we noted above, for such moderns, prudence signifies rational coherence in the willing of means: in willing an end, that is, I will the means necessary for realizing it. We behave irrationally, conversely, when we act so as to defeat our purposes or ends—whatever these might be. And yet, this general formula for technical (problematical) imperatives cannot suffice for the objective determination of action.
Since technical imperatives do not justify an action per se, but only relative to a contingent, merely possible purpose, my intention to perform an action would be justified even though my end failed to enjoy deliberative priority. As the modal conclusion “one ought to perform ‘A’ under the description ‘d’” is detached from the ensemble of beliefs and attitudes comprising one’s best reason(s) for acting, even the incontinent agent might be said to deliberate in this “technical” sense. 75 Indeed, inasmuch as the ambivalence (semantic opacity) of intentional action descriptions implies that an action may be variously characterized with respect to the reasons that rationalize it, it may be that I ought to perform action “A” under one description yet ought to refrain from performing “A” under another, for there is nothing inconsistent in attributing implicitly conflicting desires. Like Catullus, it may be that “I hate and I love. And if you ask me how, I do not know: I only feel it, and I’m torn in two.” 76 A mere recitation of desires as possible, prima facie reasons implied in alternative action descriptions fails to resolve Catullus’s dilemma.
Clearly, we must look beyond the merely analytical relation of willing an end and willing the necessary means. For the practically exclusive sense of ought (Sollen) implies that it cannot be the case that under one description I ought to do “A” but under another I ought not. Rather, the conclusion of the apodosis (that I ought to perform “A”) presumes that no further pertinent reasons tell decisively against my performing “A.” In short, we must say that an agent acts rationally only if she acts in accordance with her best reasons, all things considered. Our remarks, thus far, require considerable elaboration, but what I wish to underscore for our purposes here is that prudence introduces a formal maxim not immediately derivable from instrumental reasoning. For just as for Carl Hempel, the “requirement of ‘total evidence’” is not a postulate of a theory of inductive logic, but, in Donald Davidson’s words, a maxim for its application, so reason is applied in the practical realm as the intentions of a practically rational agent are conformed to her best judgment. 77
In an Aristotelian vein, we might discern the emergence of formal causality inasmuch as acting in accordance with one’s best reasons is irreducible to mere instrumental or technical rationality. The deliberative requirement, to be sure, remains semantically indeterminate—we do not assume Aristotle’s or Aquinas’s metaphysical premise of a univocal “highest good.” Rather, prudence operates against the hermeneutical backdrop of our differing systems of belief (Sittlichkeit)—the streams of life and thought in which not only words but desires have meaning. 78 Yet if satisfying the formal maxim (acting in accordance with one’s best reasons) is, in Wittgenstein’s words, “simply what I do” as a practically rational agent, it is not without practical significance. For if here “explanations run out,” it is not that I act without reason but rather that no further reasons are necessary. 79 Satisfying the formal maxim suffices to determine my will tout court: this is simply what I (as a practically rational agent) do.
Much more must be said, but our arguments regarding formal causality might likewise be understood with Aristotle and Aquinas to adumbrate a final causality. For if the formal maxim suffices to determine the will, then we may say not only that practically rational agents will act in accordance with their best reasons but that they ought to do so, if tempted otherwise. When we play the language game of practical reason, we commend prudential action, exhibiting a pro-attitude or interest in agents satisfying the formal maxim. To say, “you ought to do ‘A,’” implies my practical interest in your acting in accordance with your best reasons, all things considered. Again, these reasons remain formally indeterminate, but it follows that the interpretation of reasons proper to me must be consistent with the (higher-order) interest exhibited in my practical legislation: my particular interests, that is, must be consistent with my generalized interest in agents acting rationally—or eo ipso, my respect for practically rational agents. This is, I recognize, no more than sketching the lineaments of an argument, but perhaps it will suffice to show that a modest reconstruction of Aristotelian/Thomistic prudence underwrites a precept of respect for persons—a precept calling us to the things of this world—not the noumenal realm separating us from nature.
We must, then, allow for at least the partial enchantment of our world. For prudence, we have seen, is not the slave of atomistic passions or interests, “producing” value in a mechanistic construal of nature. Rather, for prudential agents, the lifeworld is given as always, already interpreted; custom (ethos) emerges as “second nature” in providing an interpretative repertory of our best judgments. To say, moreover, that prudential agents are worthy of respect (where dignity is supervenient upon agency) is to value what it means for them to form, revise, and act upon their best judgments. Fulfilling the maxim of respect is not a matter of formal, axiomatic inference but of interpretation—I respect you only if I respect your self-knowledge (reflective apperception) as an agent, that is, your sense of worth or dignity. Not only, then, are our best judgments, but the generalized maxim of respect, interpretatively specified (or schematized) in our particular traditions. For dignity always appears in local garb, as “given” against the backdrop of tradition. 80
Ethical Implications
I have argued thus far that prudence cannot be reduced to technical reasoning (technē), the making of things. The Aristotelian/Thomistic difference prevails. The making of self (phronēsis/prudentia) requires not only the instrumental (analytic) relation of means and ends but the deliberative determination of ends in accordance with one’s best reasons, all things considered. Playing the language game of practical reason, moreover, presumes not only complex systems of belief but a second-order interest in agents acting rationally (autonomously) so that we respect agents as rationally autonomous. Prudential judgments (ethics/Sittlichkeit) are thus themselves tempered by the maxim of respect (morality/Moralität), that is, a generalized respect for concrete others. The emergence of formal and final causality (intrinsic value) in nature does not itself imply a univocal, comprehensive conception of the good (a perfectionist teleology). We need not presume the rich metaphysical claims of Bonaventure and Aquinas—although as we shall see, our critique leaves a place for them. There are many mansions in our common home. Still, modest as it is, our reconstruction of prudence is sufficiently robust to belie Rorty’s ethical relativism, the benevolent reduction of utilitarianism, and the Kantian supposition of a noumenal moral realm.
Our immanent critique likewise supports key aspects of Francis’s integral ecology that go well beyond short-term panaceas. For in grounding our generalized respect for agents, prudence obliges us to recognize and respect the conditions/capabilities of exercising agency, that is, basic rights claims. We seek, in other words, a common good or state of affairs in which persons flourish as agents (their rights are preserved and protected). 81 And it is precisely in redeeming the common good that we make our option for the poor—those whose equal basic rights are unequally threatened or denied by climate change and worsening inequality. Such a rights-based common good, moreover, extends across generations; for we are obligated, not by the putative claim-rights of future persons but rather by our responsibility to secure a future in which personal claim rights are preserved and protected. 82
Finally, if our critique does not compel belief in the “greatness and beauty of creatures (Wis 13:5),” it nonetheless shows such belief to be believable. 83 Indeed, it is not unreasonable to assume that intrinsic value emerges in nature, not once for all in the “good will” but in an evolutionary continuum where we share in the common good of the ecosystem: just as the flourishing of the whole (the ecosystem) is realized in the flourishing of its members, so our flourishing (qua rational agents) presumes the flourishing of the whole—a flourishing irreducible to instrumental relations. “Respect for the most elementary human rights”—agential flourishing thus entails “providing for” the conditions of their possibility—ecological flourishing of “our common home.” As Francis reminds us in Laudate Deum, “‘we are part of nature, included in it and thus in constant interaction with it,’ and thus ‘we [do] not look at the world from without but from within.’” 84 Indeed, “as part of the universe . . . all of us are linked by unseen bonds and together form a kind of universal family, a sublime communion which fills us with a sacred, affectionate and humble respect.” 85
In such a “sublime communion,” our relation to other entities in the ecosystem is thus never merely instrumental. Their well-being/intrinsic value is no less constitutive of eco-systemic flourishing, even if the value is not absolute. 86 The regulative ideal of the common good thus extends not only to future generations but to sustainable ecosystems—our common home—in which intrinsic value, absolute and relative, is recognized and respected. In Francis’s “situated anthropocentrism,” we thus steer a middle path between anthropocentrism and biocentrism inasmuch as our rights-based common good (integral humanism) is realized in care for our common home (integral ecology). 87 “Human life, intelligence and freedom,” says Francis in Laudate Deum, “are elements of the nature that enriches our planet, part of its internal workings and its equilibrium.” 88
Now my critique falls short of the “logical and rational procedures” of technē. Yet such procedures, Gadamer reminds us, are hardly self-vindicating. We need not assume that truth is exhausted by method (empirical verification). To say that “X is intrinsically valuable” signifies that there is a good of X (e.g., flourishing) that has reason-giving force. And this, we saw, is a question of hermeneutics, of prudential judgment against the backdrop of our pre-interpreted lifeworld. What we say of emergent value in nature, flourishing ecosystems, or natural evil will be determined by our cultural/religious systems of belief, informed, to be sure, by environmental science and evolutionary biology and so forth. The reductive technocratic paradigm has no privileged epistemic status. Rather, as we have seen, in failing to account for its own operations, it is technocracy we must question. As Celia Deane-Drummond argues, “To suppose so-called objective truth claims, themselves subject of human interpretation and revision, are superior to other forms of truth, including religious truth, demonstrates not so much insight as hubris.” 89
Rejecting technocratic panaceas as “homicidal pragmatism” in Laudate Deum, Francis invites us to get “to the roots of the present situation” by heeding our intergenerational responsibility for the “cry of the poor” in the “cry of the earth.” His recommendations follow suit. In Laudate Deum, Francis argues for systemic redress for those least responsible yet most vulnerable—for example, through effective “loss and damage” provisions in multilateral compacts. 90 Exigent multilateral initiatives must “be efficient, obligatory and readily monitored.” 91 Such initiatives, moreover, must be “global-local” in accordance with “the principle of subsidiarity,” so that “multilateralism” emerges democratically “from below” and is “not simply one determined by the elites of power.” 92 And such effective participation necessarily extends to Indigenous peoples so often consigned to the margins of history.
Pope Francis’s Ecological Spirituality
Our rival paradigms (the first part) are thus not entirely incommensurable. For an immanent critique of technocracy (the second part) reveals the aporiae of our regnant prejudices: the disenchantment of the world, the technical reduction of prudence, and the fragmentation of morality. In integrating rights (Moralität) and the common good (Sittlichkeit), our reconstruction of prudence, moreover, gave us reason to support key elements of Francis’s “humanistic” ecology: the option for the poor, intergenerational responsibility, and respect for intrinsic value in nonhuman nature. Yet if our deconstructive critique makes belief believable, it says little of religious belief itself. Indeed, for many postmodern critics, public reason remains thoroughly demystified. Rawls’s magisterial A Theory of Justice confines religious belief to the vestibule of public, political reasoning, while Jürgen Habermas’s discourse ethics divests “higher or deeper” doctrines of “any logical force on their own.” 93 For Habermas, the “secular sublation (Aufhebung) of ontotheology by the philosophy of history” demystifies the public sphere. 94 And Richard Rorty’s “post-modernist bourgeois liberalism” abjures every “trace of divinity,” either “in the form of a divinized world or a divinized self.” 95
The Enlightenment may “be driven away,” but the thoroughly modern “prejudice against [religious] prejudice” remains. 96 Now Francis’s irenic pleas for dialogue offer an eloquent riposte to such agnostic pieties; for Francis is not arguing that we must believe but rather for the place of religious belief in public argument. Far from imposing religious belief, Francis insists that “no form of wisdom . . . be left out, including religion and the language particular to it.” 97 And it is practical wisdom itself, as adumbrated in the second part, that leaves a “place” for religion and the language particular to it. What the Universal Declaration affirms as our common “faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person,” is finally just that: an emergent con-sensus of particular religious and secular worldviews. 98 And such faith not only tempers religious views but is itself funded by them. Religious belief, that is, plays a threefold hermeneutic role in justifying, motivating (explaining), and interpreting our common faith.
Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice might say, that postmodern skepticism regarding foundationalist validity claims provides a clearing for staking such religious claims. Once, that is, we forsake Kant’s belief in the apodictic claims of pure reason and look rather to discursive practices (Rawls and Habermas), we implicitly allow for the ultimate religious grounding of such practices. 99 If it suffices, as we argued in the second part, that what we do in playing the language game of practical reasoning is apply the maxim of respect, then what is “given” (respect for dignity) may itself be taken as “gift” (divinely bestowed). A proximate, practical justification of morality permits an ultimate religious grounding, for example, in the religiously inspired teleology of Bonaventure and Aquinas. And such a teleology, we saw, allows for the analogical predication of the imago Dei in creation, a theological gloss of intrinsic value in a flourishing ecosystem. Here, as Wittgenstein said, we reach bedrock.
Such religious justificatory grounds, moreover, motivate us to play the game. Significantly, even avowed agnostics like Habermas have come to recognize that significant social reform must be underwritten by our deepest, religious motivations. 100 Thus Habermas, in his most recent “post-secular” writings, acknowledges that the “liberal state depends in the long run on mentalities which it is unable to generate from its own resources.” 101 The ultimate religious/metaphysical grounds backing our overlapping consensus thus constitute reasons/warrants explaining or motivating what we do—for example, in seeking ecological justice. The chain of explanation/motivation proceeds from gift to given and given to practice—so that our practice of justice exhibits its religious grounding.
Rights and duties, after all, are not self-interpreting; they must be inscribed or schematized in narrative. Our religious repertory plays a critical, hermeneutical role in composing our moral “imaginary.” Not only is our overlapping consensus grounded in distinctive religious beliefs, interpreting our best reasons/judgments is funded by religious stories, parables, and symbols, for example, our kinship with creation. And here, says Francis, “indigenous communities and their cultural traditions” play a critical role. 102 The practice of environmental justice thus reflects a concrete universality—our generalized respect for concrete others linking our common faith in human dignity and rights with “cultural ecology” and care for our common home. 103 We need not, then, believe in the doctrine of creation (God, in Bonaventure’s words, as “the primary source of all things”) to recognize the value of such belief in public reasoning. Our religious wisdom, says Francis, “cannot be written off as naive romanticism, for it affects the choices which determine our behaviour.” 104 The divine cosmologies of Bonaventure, Aquinas, and St. Francis ground our integral ecology (nature as first creation), inspire care for our common home, and bequeath us a rich religious repertory tutoring our ecological imagination.
Disputes will, of course, arise and religious beliefs need not necessarily prevail. But we cannot simply dismiss “the various cultural riches of different peoples, their art and poetry, their interior life and spirituality” in a technocratic reduction of the lifeworld. 105 Public reason is storied, and our differing traditions—Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Indigenous, and so forth—will have their say. We need not trim St. Francis’s Canticle of religious reference. Neither can we consign its poetry to the vestibule of public reasoning. 106 For the reductionism of a thoroughly disenchanted world, we have seen, is itself belied by our place within it. Pace Nietzsche, in caring for our common home, it is technocratic unbelief that that has become unbelievable.
Conclusions
There is a place, then, for the necessary poetry of Laudato Si’. A purely vacuous, liberal tolerance of religious difference will not do; for if we are to preserve our common faith—our overlapping moral consensus—we must respect the concrete systems of ethical belief that underwrite it. Our precept of generalized respect, dignity in local garb, implies no less. Our tolerance must be deliberative, versed in the threefold hermeneutic at play in justifying, explaining, and interpreting integral humanism as integral ecology.
Laudato Si’ is no panacea but a paradigm, a way of imagining otherwise as we seek to “secure a liveable future.” Francis has given us an ultimate grounding for dignity and rights that recognizes “fraternity and beauty in our relationship with the world,” critical motivation in redressing ecological degradation, and a rich, interpretative repertory in caring for our common home. 107 Finally, “know-how” is not enough. Knowledge must be leavened by wisdom and wisdom by hope—even hoping against hope (Rom 4:18). “For all this,” in Hopkins’s words “nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” Laudato Si’! 108
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur,” Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Catherine Philipps (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 128.
