Abstract
We want to start by thanking Professors Ferkany, Ahlberg, Macleod and Ruitenberg for their probing and helpful comments on our book, Living Well. It is a privilege to have such talented interlocutors and to receive such perceptive stimulation to continue our work, understanding more clearly how we can best advance it.
Jaime Ahlberg poses questions about the applicability of our principles of sustainability in non-ideal circumstances and whether further principles must be introduced. Matt Ferkany and Colin Macleod both challenge the hybrid character of our theory of justice, our ‘marriage of naturalism and constructivism’, as the latter puts it. Macleod also has concerns about our references to the idea of negotiating fair terms of cooperation and about the strength and scope of our commitment to equal opportunity. Claudia Ruitenberg is meanwhile concerned about our valuing of ‘rational autonomy’, arguing that it has several disadvantages. Finally, Ferkany provides a very helpful overview of the landscape of arguments pertaining to the legitimacy of education in sustainability (EiS), notes how little we say about the experiential and ethical aspects of EE, and argues that we should fully embrace these aspects of EE.
We will respond to each of these lines of commentary as space permits. A preliminary observation we should make is that our aim in writing Living Well was not to provide a comprehensive ideal theory of justice that would illuminate matters of sustainability but to provide a widely accessible and ethically clarifying account of the nature and pursuit of sustainability. Our assessment of the concept of sustainability is that it is an immensely important idea but that it is not in itself a comprehensive ideal of justice. We argue that sustainability concerns the long-term preservation of opportunity to live well in the face of excessive and damaging human demands on the natural systems on which opportunity to live well depend. Our central concern in the sphere of justice is thus to conceptualize what it means to preserve opportunity to live well across generations, and a fundamental point of departure for our account is our argument that a Rawlsian conceptualization of equal opportunity (fair equality of opportunity) does not support comparisons across multiple decades, let alone multiple generations. We identify principles of sustainability that have implications for what could constitute legitimate global agreements governing the pursuit of sustainability, but the formulation of an ideal theory of global justice is not essential to our project as we have conceived it.
Applicability in non-ideal circumstances
We find Ahlberg’s comments very helpful in suggesting the need for further principles of sustainability ethics and further guidance on how the principles we have identified would apply in non-ideal circumstances. The principles that are designed to provide guidance in non-ideal circumstances could begin with principles of corrective justice that call upon those who cause environmental damage and consequent harms to engage in corrective environmental restoration and redress of harms done. Noting that the Global North has imposed immense asymmetrical risk on the Global South, while largely failing to cooperate in negotiating fair terms of cooperation to stabilize the climate and other earth systems, Ahlberg asks whether countries of the Global South may be less obligated to cooperate in solving or managing problems of sustainability and whether our principle calling for such cooperation may need to be modified to accommodate non-ideal conditions like the ones that now exist.
The answer, especially from the non-ideal perspective of actual global climate negotiations, may be that the obligation to cooperate remains universal but countries of the Global North bear a distinct responsibility to make compensatory investments in climate stabilization and climate adaptation and development in the Global South. One form that the compensation might take would be temporarily granting residents of the Global South larger per capita emissions allowances (and analogous other environmental usage allowances) than residents of the Global North (p. 87).
The marriage of naturalism and constructivism
Ferkany suggests that our skeletal theory of justice may be an inconsistent combination of constructivism and ‘a kind of eudaimonic consequentialism’, but he does not press the point. As one of us (Curren) has explained elsewhere, there are aspects of Aristotelian political theory that make a constructivist reconstruction of its deontological aspects less unnatural than might be expected, and there are aspects of Rawls’ methodology that make room for psychological findings about human nature admissible behind the veil of ignorance (Curren, 2013). Moreover, we see no way to construct an account of cross-generational preservation of opportunity within a broadly Rawlsian approach without incorporating psychologically justified claims about what is naturally good and bad for people.
All we can add here is that we are puzzled by Ferkany’s reference to ‘consequentialism’, since we aim to identify principles of justice much as Rawls does, while also identifying the roles of certain key institutions in providing necessities for living well. Exercises in measuring the performance of these institutions are no doubt sensitive to the consequences of how they function, but this would be true whatever the shape of the background normative theory. As we conceive it, the fundamental idea of a hybrid of constructivism and naturalism is that naturalism supplies claims about what is naturally good and bad for human beings and constructivism warrants claims about what we should accept as obligatory, right and wrong.
Macleod argues that our constructivist methodology is superfluous because we could simply assert that ‘as beings with equal dignity’, all existing and future persons have an equal ‘claim on accessing’ the objective human goods we say exist – presumably an equal right of access to these goods, a natural right of all persons. This line of critique is a refreshing departure from the scepticism about moral objectivity that social scientists so often bring to these debates, and one that warrants further thought, but in writing for scientists, science educators and other non-philosophers, we believed it would be more fruitful to provide introductory explanations of the constructivist and naturalist elements of our approach than to rely on a bare form of moral realism that offers no account of what grounds moral claims.
Kantian constructivism supplies a view of what the existence of a right or duty amounts to and it provides an abstract characterization of the circumstances of natural persons that can be appealed to in determining what can and cannot be asserted as a duty or (by extension) right. Duties are self-imposed, which is to say they are accepted by individuals as authoritative on the basis of reasons arising from the general circumstances of natural persons – that we have aims, vulnerabilities, limited capacity to achieve our ends and stand a better chance of achieving our ends if we accept the burdens (duties) of cooperation, along with the corresponding rights.
In the sphere of justice, impartiality similarly requires that only general truths be relied on, and in our eudaimonic constructivism, we derive an account of just institutions from a thin but psychologically robust naturalism about the requirements of living well. Macleod is right that the derivations we provide, especially of our Eudaimonic Principle, could be more detailed, but the point for us is to bridge the divide between the good, conceived as what is good for creatures of specific kinds, and judgements in the domain of the right.
Negotiating fair terms of cooperation
With regard to Macleod’s concern that intergenerational justice cannot be framed as a matter of negotiating fair terms of cooperation, we could not agree more. In describing Rawls’ theory of justice and outlining our own eudaimonic constructivism, we refer to determining, finding and endorsing principles and we intentionally avoid any reference to negotiation (pp. 72, 73 and 75). The confusion may arise from the fact that Macleod was expecting to find a comprehensive theory of justice and it was not our goal to provide one.
Following Kant, we argue that when one person’s acts impinge upon another’s interests, they are morally obligated to face each other and negotiate mutually acceptable specifications of the details of property rights, limits to the imposition of risk and so on. Hence, the third of our five principles of sustainability ethics: ‘Seek fair terms of cooperation conducive to sustainability. Actors whose actions affect each other have an obligation to cooperate in negotiating fair terms of cooperation in living in a manner that is collectively sustainable’ (p. 61).
The product of such a negotiation is not a principle of natural moral law or ideal justice, however, but a human law – a law that could not have been derived as a moral law but is nonetheless essential to making the moral relations between the specific actors subject to it precise, according to Kant. When we address the terms of global cooperation conducive to sustainability at the end of Chapter 3, we similarly regard the obligation to negotiate fair terms as fundamental; and drawing on our accounts of the nature of legitimacy and sustainability, we identify constraints on what could count as fair terms of cooperation in the pursuit of sustainability. What we offer in the sphere of global justice with respect to sustainability is implicitly an exercise in non-ideal theory. True justice may indeed be more demanding than this, as Macleod insists.
Turning to equal opportunity, we must point out that when Macleod writes that we fail to endorse equal opportunity to flourish, he overlooks our framing of the Eudaimonic Principle as defining the purpose of just institutions (p. 80). We defer the formulation of a principle of distributive justice until we have clarified some institutional realities concerning the relationships between education and work in Chapter 4. The distributive principle we ultimately formulate requires equal prospects of living well or flourishing, which is indistinguishable from Macleod’s call for equal opportunity to flourish.
Autonomy, anthropocentrism, and the role of EE
Ruitenberg is quite right to think that a focus on respect for persons as autonomous agents might limit the scope of moral consideration to rational beings and might encourage excessive regard for autonomy at the expense of responsibility. Commenting on our reliance on Self-Determination Theory research in particular, she offers an interesting piece of anecdotal evidence for the claim that context weighs heavily in people’s sense of well-being and autonomy.
Taking the last of these concerns first, it is certainly true that context makes a difference, but it does not make a difference in a way that undermines the findings about a basic psychological need for autonomy on which we rely. Interested readers may want to consult Rich Ryan and Ed Deci’s (2017) definitive synthesis, published almost simultaneously with our own book, and a previous attempt by one of us (Curren) to explain the relationships between the psychological case for autonomy as an aspect of living well and conventional defences of autonomy in the literature of philosophy of education (Curren, 2014). Turning to Ruitenberg’s second point, we see no grounds for concern that a basic psychological need for autonomy is inconsistent with a great deal of responsibility and restriction of choice in the interest of sustainability. Indeed, it is a merit of Basic Psychological Needs Theory that it enables us to see how human flourishing can be compatible with sharp reductions in material consumption.
Finally, both Ruitenberg and Ferkany take us to task for sidestepping the limitations of an anthropocentric perspective. We adopted an approach that avoided ethically controversial matters as much as possible, in the interest of making the most irresistible case possible to the widest audience possible. It is not exactly true that we exclude non-humans and ecosystems from the sphere of moral concern, but we take the point that a more philosophically and morally comprehensive approach would devote more attention to the non-instrumental value of nature. We regard Ferkany’s defence of the value of environmental educators’ focus on experience and valuing of nature as both important and compelling.