BEING AT ONE:

MAKING A HOME IN EARTH’S COMMONWEALTH OF VIRTUE

2015

Peter Critchley

This is a brief description of Being at One, a book I am in

the process of writing. Below is a Table of Contents of the

first draft. At something like 900 pages in length, there is a

need for drastic editing. Writing, real writing, is in large

part rewriting. This I am now doing.

Why refer to the ‘commonwealth of virtue’ instead of,

say, the ‘commonwealth of life’ (the title of Peter Brown’s

book)? I refer to virtue for a specific reason. If talk of

virtue seems archaic, there’s no need to mystify here. The

virtues are qualities for successful living. When we conceive

these qualities along ecological lines, then ‘successful

living’ takes shape as sustainable living in the ecological

society. At this point it becomes possible to call back the

old eudaimonistic notion of flourishing well. And that is

precisely what I propose to do. I’ve just been reading Owen

Flanagan’s book The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World

(2007), and he writes of ‘eudaimonistic scientia’, or ‘eudaimonics’

for short, which he defines as the "empirical-normative

inquiry into the nature, causes, and conditions of human

flourishing." And the institutions, structures, practices and

relations in which human and planetary flourishing go hand in

hand. I therefore seek to recover the ancient unity of ethics

and politics in an ecological context, outlining the contours

of the Ecopolis of the future. And make no mistake, the future

city will be the eco-city, if we are to have a future at all.

Plenty of the arguments in Being at One comes from MacIntyre

and Nussbaum in philosophy, Flannery in ecology, Wilson in

biology, Robert Wright on the non-zero sum society, (The

nonzero-sum moment - our welfare is crucially correlated with

the welfare of the other etc.), Stuart Kauffman on the self-

organising creative universe, and many more. The originality

of this thesis lies in the way these sources are brought

together in an integral framework concerning the dialectic of

natural dependency, moral independence and social and

ecological interdependence.

Selected Passages from Being at One by way of introduction

If we have learned anything from the crisis in the climate

system, it is that increasing knowledge of encroaching

environmental threats has proven insufficient to mobilise the

action we require to head off the catastrophe we face. This

book concerns virtue as the willingness and capacity to act,

as a moral disposition.

In this book, I address the problem of resolving

potential conflict arising from clashes of interest, so as

to reconcile individual self-interest with the common good

we need. I examine ‘the logic of collective action’, with its

related conflicts such as the ‘tragedy of the commons’, and

‘the prisoner's dilemma’. More than this, however, need to

ask who we are, what our place in the wider scheme of things

is, what meaning our lives have.

Answering the question of how to achieve the common good on

the common ground must go further than institutional

arrangements. The crisis in the climate system is an

existential crisis. The environmental crisis points to a need

to address the metaphysical, spiritual and cosmological

dimensions of our existence. In the process, we come to

develop an overall system of values by which to make sense of

our lives, guiding our choices and giving direction.

New approaches creating a grand overall way of life are

certainly possible. We live in a world of free-flowing

information, escaping old patterns of control and

continually evading constant attempts by authorities to

recover that control. That freedom of information in a

network society enables us to take spirituality, education

and development back into our own hands. Such self-management

requires that we develop a psychological literacy, becoming

able to supply and live by shared moral values without

reverting to fundamentalist or authoritarian certainty. And

this requires also that we develop an ecological literacy

so that we may come to generate the ecological sensibility

that enables us to respect and care for the whole web of

life in which we live and upon which we depend.

Any relevant ethics must, by definition, address the

pressing social issues of our times, indicating the character

traits appropriate to the new forms of action and relations

required to move society towards a more harmonious order. The

looming environmental crisis highlights the importance of

developing an ethics of nature concerning how we incorporate

the principles of ecology into our social practices and thus

come to relate respectfully to the ecology of the planet.

Such an ethics would also have a place for a conception of

human nature, taking a view of human potentiality, the forms

of life which enable human flourishing, the development of

capabilities enabling human development, and the acquisition

of virtues. The end in view is to create a habitus which

consists of channels capable of connecting the

predispositions we are born with to the dispositions we

develop and which allow and enable us to act in order to

realise our potentials.

The book traverses science, political philosophy, democratic

theory and environmental ethics in order to shed light on the

question of how we can constitute and live the common good on

common ground. What emerges is an environmentalism that places

political and moral motives alongside the recognition of

ecological constraints.

The idea of the Ecopolis expands the boundaries of the

‘political’. The idea of an ecological society thus becomes

practicable in an actively democratic society which is

scaled to human dimensions and proportions, makes extensive

participatory structures available, and fosters a sense of

ownership of, and commitment to, place. Such a society

learns to fit itself to natural boundaries and reorganise

economic activity and technological use and innovation along

ecological contours. A civic environmentalism seeks to

integrate place and person, intertwining the social,

political, cultural, aesthetic and ecological aspects of

life in a seamless whole. The approach combines institutions

of governance, policy frameworks, planning and technologies

within a moral and social ecology that is committed to place

and person. The result is an integration of social and

natural ecology through a public sphere that cultivates a

moral sense of place.

The codification and proclamation of justice through

laws, prescriptions and conventions establishes a framework

for rather than a guarantee of justice. The realization of

justice depends on the capacity and the willingness on the

part of individuals to act justly. Knowledge in itself is

not a virtue; to be a virtue it would need to be appetitive.

Action on the part of individuals in favour of justice

presumes a consciousness of justice as a moral duty, and a

willingness and a capacity to act on that awareness. For

this reason, both reason and emotion must be addressed, and

the cognitive and the affective aspects of human action

integrated.

The development of the moral, intellectual, political and

organisational capacities of the subjective factor in

history – human agents – is also a condition of

transformation. There is nothing inevitable about this,

hence the emphasis I place on the creative role of politics

and ethics in the context of the acquisition of the virtues

as qualities for right living.

We are involved in relations of dependence and so cannot

live well by just looking inside ourselves. Flourishing is

a complex idea which involves a whole range of factors.

Plenty of the things we need to flourish well are not

wholly within our control and require certain social and

material conditions. To be good, as social beings, we need

a good society. But to be good, society needs to recognise

its natural foundations.

With the intertwining of ethics and politics in the

acquisition and exercise of the virtues, morality ceases to

be about formulating and following rules and instead is

constitutive of flourishing as the enjoyment and abundance

of life.

There is a need for a universal planetary ethic, a

partnership ethic that recognises the interdependence of

the human and the natural community, the importance of

biodiversity and cultural diversity. This points to the

need for institutional change. However, the most

fundamental aspect of this transformation is the demand for

changes to our values and to our ways of living. And this

demand points to the centrality of moral character, to the

need to develop our moral and psychic ability to respond to

the warnings of environmental crisis, to strengthen our

will to act accordingly, and to build our capability to

sustain the society of ecological well-being.

In the argument I present in this book, the idea of a

commonwealth of virtue involves more than the ceaseless

unfolding of nature: it implies the evolved moral sense of

human beings, and raises questions of what it means to live

virtuously within nature. It involves, in short, a moral

and a spiritual dimension. And it involves a political and

institutional dimension. The idea that we are citizens in

the commonwealth of life/virtue implies a biospheric

politics.

In the conception I develop in this book, politics and

ethics are about shaping and canalising behaviour in order

to attain particular individual and collective ends.

Politics does this through a system of external incentives

and sanctions, through social, economic and environmental

policies; ethics does this through internal incentives and

sanctions, through conscience and the internalisation of

moral norms. Together, both seek to prevent violence,

fraud, and the destruction of ecosystems.

When politics and ethics are separated we lose the

integral conception, both lose their power and legitimacy,

and the more technical or instrumental disciplines of

science and economics become surrogates, imposing the

universal in an impersonal and external way. This

dissolution of the world of practical reason and value

spells trouble not only for democratic society but also for

environmental protection.

The notion of commonwealth of life and virtue recognises

that no society can flourish on the basis of exclusion and

separation. As Emerson wrote, ‘It needs a whole society to

give the symmetry we seek.’ We need to recognise the unity

of each and all in order to achieve symmetry. We become one

by forming a chain of similar communities across

boundaries, expanding the moral circle by extensive

networks of proximity. The eco-community/good life depends

upon scale and intimacy, it achieves universality through

valuing and preserving particularity. But the symmetry of

the whole society now embraces the global community. No

society can flourish alone, however united within it may

be.

Action needs to be taken not just at the top level of

government, but at all levels, running through the whole of

society as a self-socialisation and re-empowerment from

below. Exerting that power entails creating mechanisms of

collective control. We live in a world in which the

incremental action of individuals and groups is generating

supra-individual forces and consequences which increasingly

impinge on our behavour, encroach on our communities and

threaten our future. These forces are collective forces

requring collective mechanisms of control. In the absence

of these mechanisms, our societies fracture into a

conjeries of independent agents, each pursuing self-

interested strategies. Without constraint and coordination

between individuals and groups, individual freedom is

generating a collective unfreedom. By developing collective

mechanisms of control and coordination, the

transformational power of human agency, which now has such

a destructive impact on the environment, will come to be

channelled in the direction of human and planetary

flourishing.

There is such a thing as human nature; how it is

expressed and developed depends upon social arrangements,

codes and norms, culture. In other words, a cooperative

ethic works not as a rational and cultural invention and

imposition, but because it is part of our innate moral

grammar, which reason and culture develop creatively. My

argument can be described as nature via nurture, turning

predispositions for cooperative behaviour into actual

behaviours through the teaching of dispositions.

Political order is organic rather than abstractly

rational, emerging from within real society rather than

being deduced from first principles. The reciprocal

community requires a change in the location of control from

outside to inside; responsibility for regulating common

affairs and conflicts thus falls to the people involved,

who learn through experience how to resolve issues without

requiring recourse to an external body. In time,

spontaneous cooperation is something that emerges from

within a social order that now practises solidarity within

reciprocal relationships, a solidarity which activates the

deep rooted social and communal instinct amongst human

beings. We need to identify the forms of common life that

enable the healthy growth of reciprocal relations between

individuals, societies in which cooperation could come to

ourish; we need to create common forms that are capable offl

continuous rejuvenation from the base upwards.

The problem with game theory, I argue, is that it

assumes the very thing that needs to be challenged and

changed – the motives of the players. In poker, the

assumption of rational self-interest is unproblematic. But

with respect to the looming social, economic and ecological

crises, the whole point is to forge new motives.

We require a common ethic which emphasises what we have

in common, ethical bonds that are forged not within the

abstract community of the state but within social

relationships, making possible a richer conception of

morality than is present in the modern world. The task

before us is to forge public bonds within social

relationships so that exchange and interaction between

individuals in the everyday social world proceeds in such

a way as to bring about the common good of all.

Only a recovery of close interpersonal relations in the

context of community and of close human-nature relations in

the context of a biocentric ethic would be sufficient to

resolve the social and environmental crises we face.

The actions we need to take in order to address

climate change and adapt are so extensive and intensive

that all individuals must be involved, their efforts

organised and canalised through the whole community. For

that to happen, we need to create this ‘whole’ community.

We need to develop policies and practices that are capable

of drawing individuals together in communities, and which

are capable of drawing these communities together,

ultimately constituting a global civil society, united by a

global ethic.

I outline the contours of a ‘civic environmentalism’

which values the contribution of local, community-based

movements to democratic politics and identifies the citizen

members of the ecopolis as environmental stakeholders.

Civic environmentalism therefore conceives the virtues

integral to living well as ecological virtues.

This places the emphasis upon an active citizenship and

points in the direction of a society with extensive public

spaces and participatory structures. This public sphere is

constituted by a civic mindedness that is attentive to

ecological constraints and responsibilities as well as to

relations to others.

This agenda entails a shift away from increasingly

sterile foundational value debates and questions of moral

worth towards a renewed focus on environmental practice and

policy and a more democratic approach to environmental

values and ethical decision making. We are active

participants in this world, we come to know and value the

world from the inside rather than the outside.

Rather than focus on defining a set of metaphysical

principles, the practical approach emphasises actions over

words, with actions investing words with meanings. The

praxis approach is sceptical of justifications that are

based upon principles known independently of experience, a

priori. In our practical lives, we simply assume nature as a

background, without which nothing could happen. Nature is

irreducible in this sense of being axiomatic, a self-

evident truth requiring no further proof.

I would refer to what John Dewey called ‘natural piety’

to infuse pragmatic instrumentalism with the ethical

intuitions of the biocentric or ecocentric view, without

requiring problematic and controversial metaphysical

commitments to the intrinsic worth of nature.

We should stop seeing the issue of environmental crisis

and policy failure as a failure of moral principle - a

failure to adopt the singular, correct moral attitude

toward nature – and instead focus on the failure of – and

the required development of - moral and social

intelligence.

Being at One links a number of purposes – proceeding

from the role played by science in yielding objective

knowledge about the world (particularly with respect to

climate change and the ecological crisis that is

unfolding), and the role that scientific expertise plays in

politics and decision making, and the way this impacts on

our everyday lives, going on to review blockages preventing

the translation of knowledge into public policy, action and

practice. Here is where the ‘objective’ world of natural

science meets the loaded world of interests, perspectives,

meanings, the all too human world that does not

automatically respond to truth claims, a world where fact

and value may agree, but not necessarily so. It’s a world

where hundreds of thousands of research papers on climate

science are not necessarily acted upon. A world of human

motivations, wills, purposes is shaped by more than fact. I

go on to consider practical initiatives aimed at bringing

science and the social world into closer relation, paying

particular attention to developing the character traits

that raise possibilities for a more active, informed

'ecological citizenship', linking all these issues together

within a conception of public life and public policy in an

age of environmental threat.

My point is that any science that ignores the knowledges

held by citizens will find its practical possibilities

unduly restricted. At the same time, any citizenship that

fails to incorporate the knowledge yielded by science will

lack a critical purchase upon reality. I seek to develop a

conception of environmental citizenship which joins the

natural and social worlds and fosters a 'social learning'

between science, technology, politics and public life.

Such a conception, I argue, is crucial to the continuing

development of processes of sustainable development.

'Sustainability' is a meaningful concept only in terms of

activating the potential for citizens to assume

responsibility for their actions and take control of their

social relations. Achieving such conscious awareness

amounts to reconfiguring sustainable development as

sustainable living, replacing a growth promoted by

external goals and imperatives with an internal growth, a

natural process of self-realisation.

For effective action on climate change, planners and

policy-makers need to pay attention to moral and

psychological factors. The call for a change in behaviour

has been made numerous times, but such a change amounts to

more than informing and educating the public and then

engaging in moral persuasion. Human beings possess

characters that have been formed in society and these

characters are expressed in patterns of behaviour. It makes

no sense to ask individuals to be unselfish when the social

identity connecting egoism and altruism does not exist. All

plans, programmes and policies need to take into account

beliefs and values if they are to be effective. Since the

support and involvement of the public is essential to the

enduring success of any environmental initiative, it makes

sense to relate knowledge and objectives to psychological,

moral and social factors such as perceptions, attitudes,

culture, values, beliefs, the patterns of behaviour and

identities which shape the character of the individual

actors and the way that this character shapes the actions

that take place in society.

This is an issue for ‘everyone’; ‘all’ must play a

part. This requires more than political organisation and

activism in the conventional sense and must make available

extensive spaces so that ‘all’ can participate as a matter

of everyday interaction. To be part of the fight, we need

some way of putting the macro and the micro together,

having a universal conception but also giving incentives

and developing motivations to inspire actions within new

patterns of behaviour.

The conception of ecological virtue embraces a mixed

conception that joins the human to the natural community so

that we experience our essential humanity not in terms of

separation from each other and from the world around us,

but as ‘participation in the whole order of being’ (Proctor

1988: 166). In this way, virtue is about being active

members of a human community that is embedded in a larger

natural order, pursuing and fulfilling ends that are proper

to both realms as one.

My argument is that without the qualities of virtue, we

will not do the difficult things that we need to do to

survive and live well within planetary boundaries.

We need to recover the sense of community as a place

that undergirds the practice of virtue as a condition of

earthcare, appreciating the affect our actions have on the

larger world and modifying our behaviour in accordance with

right living.

Here, we move beyond game theoretic calculations, beyond

rational restraint as an enlightened self-interest codified

by an authoritarian state. Self-maximizers who discount the

future interests of members of their own species, their own

children and grandchildren even, are hardly likely to be

moved by notions of kinship to bugs and biota, however much

human life depends on the health of both.

We need more than rational calculations and rules, and

more than scientific knowledge. We need the activation of

our innate moral knowledge through the cultivation of the

virtues, and its exercise in community. We can call this a

moral and a social ecology, a recognition of our condition

of mutual dependence. Individuals who understand their

welfare in terms of self-interest will not involve

themselves in any large-scale social change that costs them

something in the short-run in order to gain them something

in the long-run.

To be part of the transition toward the ecological

society of the future, we need to develop a sense of the

oneness of our being within a web of relationships in order

to be moved deeply enough to act for the long term common

good. We need a virtuous eco-public which exhibits the

qualities of earthcare and is composed of members who are

concerned to act to ensure the protection and enhancement

of life on earth.

What I term the Ecopolis is premised upon a productive

orientation to the world as central to self-realization, a

way of being-in-the-world. Self-reliance in community

cultivates a subjectivity grounded in the functional

relationships and ecological realities of place. The

cultivation of public life therefore spans the larger world

of the ecological community and the inner world of self.

The approach therefore joins both place and person, valuing

not only the natural ecology of the region but also the

interior space of the person.

The Ecopolis is the organic vision expressed as polity, a

place-based ecological democracy based on the reciprocal

relations between the built and the natural environments

and sustained by civic structures enabling and fostering

participation.

There is a need to rework patterns of behaviour that have

been cultivated for generations and which are reinforced by

prevailing social relations, relations that make individual

self-interest more rational than altruistic behaviour. To be

effective, any appeal that is made to securing the common

good on common ground will have to touch the motivations and

appetites of people and express their basic yearnings in

lives lived appropriately to social and ecological reality.

James Lovelock calls humanity Gaia’s intelligent elite.

The key point that Lovelock identifies here is that human

intelligence confers a degree of independence. We need to

take full account of human intelligence and how this this

gives us a cultural capacity involving a degree of

autonomy. The problems we face are ones of an unmastered

practice, not lack of intelligence or knowledge. We are

embroiled within social relations that have escaped our

control, with the result that our social practices and

decisions come to be governed by supra-individual forces.

As individuals, we are locked within destructive patterns

of behaviour, and an increasing knowledge of environmental

destruction alone does nothing alter those patterns in any

significant way. Human beings may have the intelligence

that Lovelock writes of but, at the moment, that

intelligence is locked up within destructive cycles of

behaviour.

And this is a question of psychology and social

arrangements. The problem of motive can be addressed in

terms of incentives. All the moral exhortation in the world

is powerless to alter the structure of incentives which

leads individuals to put their rational self-interest

first, even if this involves them in patterns of behaviour

which are destructive of whole resources and societies. The

individual actions which are irrational collectively are,

individually, eminently rational. We need an approach that

is able to combine practical and psychological insight with

respect to the logical structure of the problem of

reconciling individual and collective rationality.

For effective action on climate change, planners and

policy-makers need to pay attention to moral and

psychological factors. The call for a change in behaviour

has been made numerous times, but such a change amounts to

more than informing and educating the public and then

engaging in moral persuasion. Human beings possess

characters that have been formed in society and these

characters are expressed in patterns of behaviour. It makes

no sense to ask individuals to be unselfish when the social

identity connecting egoism and altruism does not exist. All

plans, programmes and policies need to take into account

beliefs and values if they are to be effective. Since the

support and involvement of the public is essential to the

enduring success of any environmental initiative, it makes

sense to relate knowledge and objectives to psychological,

moral and social factors such as perceptions, attitudes,

culture, values, beliefs, the patterns of behaviour and

identities which shape the character of the individual

actors and the way that this character shapes the actions

that take place in society.

We can reduce our vulnerability to climate change by

taking collective action within our communities. Many

examples may be given here, but the key point is that there

is safety in numbers and in connections. New associations

can be formed within the community to spread the risk

associated with new practices and technologies. The

communities that will be most able to cope with the demands

to face and adapt to climate change will be those which

possess the most entrenched cooperative patterns of

behaviour, the strongest social institutions and the most

extensive social networks.

At some point, we need to address the practical

questions surrounding the division of labour and the way

that this is involved in specific patterns of behaviour. We

need to address institutional and structural questions so

as to encourage some forms of behaviour and inhibit others.

And that points to the need to specify the forms of the

common life which foster and sustain ecological behaviour

and suppress destructive behaviour. A spiritual concern is

part of coming to address the question of social control,

organisation and order, an important part; but it is no

alternative to that question. Sooner or later, we have to

examine character, social identity, the social metabolism,

and patterns of behaviour, and see how we can not only

encourage human beings to act in an ecologically benign

way, (and discourage them from acting in a destructive

way), but actually enable them to live right. The problem

with the current system is that individuals find it more

difficult to do the right thing than to remain complicit in

the destructive behavioural patterns of the prevailing

social system. In fine, we need to look at character

formation, social identity and social relations. And this

means connecting spiritual awareness to social organisation

via the virtues.

Table of Contents

BEING AT ONE:

MAKING A HOME IN EARTH’S COMMONWEALTH OF VIRTUE

Contents

Preface 15

1 INTRODUCTION 19

The Ethic of Ends 23

Holism, awareness and the web of life 24

A Transformation of Consciousness 27

The call for a new ethical vision 34

Lives lived appropriately to reality35

The Ecopolis 36

Civic Environmentalism 38

The Ecopolis as an Urban/Ecological Public 43

Person, Place and ‘the Political’ 49

A common ethic and practice and the need for a social identity

53

A common ethic as binding 57

The need to create context for the common good 58

The integration of reason and emotion 58

2 ONE EARTH, MANY WORLDS 59

We are One 59

Oneness and Ethics 62

Oneness and connectedness 63

The need to find common ground 64

Two worlds 64

The separation of the social world from the natural world 69

Worlds in collision – human and biotic 70

Making the one world 71

Purposeless materialism and the recovery of purpose 72

Social evolution - the interrelatedness of people and all

other life-forms 77

The critique of Radical Environmentalism 80

The premodern world was not benign 81

The rejection of foundational authority 83

Ecology as religion 84

3 AUTONOMY AND DEPENDENCY 105

Dependent rational animals – whether reason can rule 105

The ideal of rational self-sufficiency and the facts of natural dependency

106

Capabilities and the form of human life 109

Animal resemblances and commonality 110

Facts of dependence as central to the human condition 111

Human animality 113

The virtues of acknowledged dependence 115

4 COMMON GROUND 117

The Earth and human well-being 117

Oneness – rootedness and interdependency 117

The connection to land, landscapes and associated ecosystems 118

Underlying sense of spiritual connection to the Earth 118

The commonwealth of life 121

The constant cooperation of all the forces of nature and history 121

Oneness with the natural world 121

The ecological partnership with the earth 123

The community of life 126

Biospheric politics 127

Interlocking web of life 128

Re-envisioning our place in the world 128

The commonwealth of virtue 130

Living organisms constantly co-operate to remake the whole environment for

the benefit of life 131

The commonwealth of life 132

A common ancestry 132

Biophilia 135

The threats to our existence 137

The genetic unity of life 140

Biophilia and ethics 142

Gaia 145

Gaia’s intelligent elite 148

The Partnership Ethic 157

The cooperation of human and nonhuman nature as active agents 160

The need for a standpoint – an ethical framework 161

Experience and personality163

5 ETHICS AND POLITICS 165

Morality - canalising behaviour 165

Intertwining of ethics and politics 165

Flourishing 166

Social being and virtue 167

Normative judgements 170

Culture and division170

Essentialism 171

Our participation in culture 178

Aristotle and flourishing - an active, positive form of co-operation 180

6 THE COMMON GOOD 182

Rational Freedom 182

Rational Freedom vs Libertarian Freedom 185

Privatisation as the corporatisation of public life 189

Rational freedom and the common good 193

Aristotle, the good city and the community of all 194

City, scale and symmetry 195

Ethics, universality and proximity 196

The biological basis - reciprocity 196

Proximity and eco-patriotism 198

7 REASON, FREEDOM AND THE COMMONS 201

Ecological crisis requires collective action 202

Recovering common benefits 206

Rational constraint and freedom 207

The tragedy of the commons 208

Free rational collective action 209

Rethinking our approach to climate change 211

Rational thinking and collective action – markets, individuals and public

goods 215

Individual and collective action problems 216

Managing the global commons 217

8 GAMES THEORY AND THE COOPERATIVE SOCIETY 219

Egoism and altruism – competition and cooperation 219

Nature via Nurture 223

Games theory and the cooperative society 225

The Prisoners’ Dilemma: introduction 227

The cooperative society 243

The innate disposition to evolve co-operative strategies

246

Altruistic behavior as behavior which benefits others 248

The Parable of the Tribes 249

9 COMMONING – RECLAIMING THE COMMONS 264

Community and commoning – the recovery of close interpersonal

relations 266

Community action – policies that can draw communities together 266

Managing the commons 268

The recovery of close interpersonal relations 268

Toward a Culture of Solidarity and a Just Economic Order

269

The social and moral matrix 270

Socially embedded markets 271

Sharing and managing common resources 276

The institutions of government and property 278

10 DEMOCRACY AND RESTRAINT 278

Being in the environment – politics and the claims of nature

278

The Ecopolis and Ecological Regionalism 279

Environmental stakeholding 279

Environmental Politics 290

Problem of liberal democracy 291

A constrained freedom 291

Democracy and limits 292

The Problem Defined 293

Cooperating with the future 300

The strong state and strong democracy 305

Politics and Practical Reasoning 310

Truth and the need to be practical 310

Democracy is judicious 312

Democracy, truth and judicious reasoning 313

11 ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS 314

Green spirituality and ecological virtues 314

Environmental ethics and politics – against anthropocentrism

317

Environmentalism and moral monism 317

Interests, values and priorities 318

Monism and ethical pluralism and political pragmatism 319

Epistemology and ethics – one earth and a plurality of values

322

Pragmatism – rejection of foundationalism 326

Refounding ethics 328

Need for practical philosophy - escaping academic confines 329

Actions and values 330

Environmentalism and plural values 330

Politics and decision making 330

Pragmatism over philosophical purity 331

Pragmatism, truth and real world problems 331

Integrating democratic values and processes 332

Beyond anthropocentrism and ecocentrism 332

Pragmatism and weak anthropocentrism 333

Pragmatism and intrinsic value 334

A public mode of deliberation and reasoning 335

All types of knowing and valuing 336

The pluralist model of environmental value and action embedded in natural

systems 336

Public commitments and the civic spirit 337

12 CITIZEN SCIENCE, PRAXIS AND PUBLIC LIFE 339

Methodology - against constructivism 340

Environmentalism, postmodernism and social constructionism 348

Science, truth and values 351

Science as social construct – reality and context356

The defence of objective truth against praxis/pragmatism 360

Citizen science and eco-praxis 361

Social knowledge 366

Joining scientific and social rationality 369

The New Ecological Paradigm 370

The experiment 375

Intersubjective and relational notions 376

The need to bridge the worlds of theoretical reason and practical reason

377

Civic Science 378

Science and the public domain 380

Critical and contextual science 381

Knowledgeable agency 383

The human impact 384

Environmentalism and naturalism 386

Ecology supplemented with ethics – beyond objectivity and positivism

386

A world laden with values 386

Fact and value 387

Environmentalism and ethical naturalism 388

The naturalistic fallacy 388

13 ECO-PRAGMATISM 395

The future as unknowable 396

Altering constraints 397

Practical motivations in ethics 398

Pragmatism, policy and environmental ethics 400

The rejection of foundationalism - experience over mirroring

402

A public mode of deliberation and reasoning 403

Pluralism requires second order principles – integrated worldview 406

Environmental knowledge and values and priorities 407

The limitations of knowledge 408

The limits of our knowledge of environmental problems 409

The transition from theory to practice 412

The need for embodiment 412

Eco-community 414

The epistemic, moral and political worth of the community 414

Human scaled communal life 415

Place 415

14 ETHICS 416

The failure of ethical theory 416

Innate and Universal Moral Grammar 419

Reason and the emotions 419

Innatists and culturalists 420

Innate moral grammar and the natural law 425

The overarching moral framework 429

15 MORAL THEORY 436

Aristotle and virtue theory 436

Virtue, character, the nature of the human good 440

Beyond morality as duty, obligation, rightness 440

The grounding of morality in human nature 441

What Is Virtue? 442

Why Are the Virtues Important? 442

Character and the social process 445

Some Advantages of Virtue Ethics 449

Feminism, virtue ethics and revaluing the private sphere 450

The Incompleteness of Virtue Ethics 452

16 ECOLOGICAL VIRTUE 452

Ecological Virtue and Dependence 453

eudaimonia stands in need of good things from outside 453

Integrating moral philosophy 453

Virtue as an exercise in participation in the whole order of

being 454

The exercise of reason to restrain the passions 456

Participation in the civic life of the community 456

Virtues to live in equilibrium with the world 456

Moral ecology and the sense of eco-community 457

17 THE CAPABILITIES APPROACH 461

What are people actually able to do and to be? 461

Participation and flourishing 463

From alienation or anomie to creativity and spontaneity 465

Power and Flourishing 465

Flourishing as wholeness – being in place 465

18 ECOLOGICAL CITIZENSHIP AS A MORAL EDUCATION 466

Ecological citizenship 467

The greening of political theory 467

Habits as an ecological moral education 469

Habits to check materialism and individualism 469

After Virtue – rationality, means and ends 472

Moral Truth vs Moral relativism 473

Truth and objective reality 479

Ecological virtue and citizenship 481

Ethical naturalism – the natural virtues 482

Character, virtue and eco-citizenship 484

19 POLITICAL COMMUNITY 485

Against economic abstraction, for community commitments

485

The habits of the heart 486

Township democracy – civic engagement 486

Community collaboration 487

Collective action and cooperation 489

Decentralism – bioregionalism and localism 490

The need for a global politics 494

The Public Good: The conception of a just society 494

Social and moral ecology in the participatory universe495

Conceptions of the Public Order 495

Sustainability and Livable Communities 496

Community and Place 498

Common assumptions, conceptual frameworks, and movement-building

strategies 500

Linking movements and constructing a vision 500

Place-based focus 502

The construction of a common vision 503

20 GREEN SPIRITUALITY 506

The holistic mileu 506

Mechanicism - nature as a purely quantitative phenomenon

509

Rational calculation 510

Capitalism undermines a sense of mutual interdependence by its

overemphasis on rational principles of control and utility 511

Earth-centred spirituality focused on the immanent divine

514

Earth community - law of the integral functioning of the Earth

519

Bounds of balance, order and harmony in the natural world 520

Ethos of the Cosmos 522

Directly experienced reality over disconnected abstract theories 522

Beyond the dualism of human and biotic worlds 523

Spiritual reality 529

Participation in the flow of creation 531

The relationship between our ethical norms and the world of nature

531

Taoism 531

Hinduism 541

Buddhism and ecological virtue 542

An ethic of interconnectedness and mutual responsibility 544

Non-destructiveness or harmlessness 544

Christianity - beyond anthropocentrism and man's metaphysical uniqueness

545

Beyond Life-As and Subjective Life 546

The virtuous life and the embedded life 546

The unfolding, evolving cosmos within progressive spirituality 550

Partners in the process of creation 550

The sacralization of nature - a renewed vision of the divine

presence within the natural order 554

The self and the evolutionary unfolding of the cosmos 556

21 HOLISM 556

Organic holism and planning 556

That the underlying dynamic of the cosmos is benevolent, that everything is

connected and that there is meaning 560

The moral imperative of the global village 560

Holism and emergence 562

The whole picture – patterns over pieces 564

Connected and ever changing 564

Emergence and interplay of natural systems 565

Ecological morality is holistic 566

We are developmental beings – the human journey 566

22 ECOLOGICAL HEALTH AND HAPPINESS 569

Community and the breakdown of collective feeling 569

The lack of common identity and involvement 570

Housing the sacred, housing mystery 571

Letting the object in 573

The ethical and the emotional 574

A common Weltanschauung 574

Putting reason and emotion together 575

Existential needs – rootedness, relations, power 578

Housing and belonging 578

The community of the soul 579

Housing our egos - belief as the ground we stand upon 579

Relationships and good health 580

Human health in the context of the total human environment 580

Health and well-being 585

The need for a central ethical framework 586

23 THE EVOLUTION OF UNIVERSAL COMMUNITY 587

The obligation to join with others 587

The nonzero-sum moment - our welfare is crucially correlated

with the welfare of the other 588

Emergence of a global civil society and global governance

590

A fully networked global community 616

The Global Human Superorganism 619

Gaia’s intelligent elite 619

Humans as indispensible elements in the Earth system621

The global human superorganism 622

Planetary politics and ethics – strategies for survival – the need for knowledge

624

The green enlightenment 625

The Gaian future 631

24 UNIVERSAL PLANETARY ETHIC 635

Universal responsibility, identifying ourselves with the whole

Earth community as well as our local communities 637

Recognition of our environmental interdependence - a wider

rationale of unity 638

Planetary interdependence demands that the functions are now seen to be

world-wide and supported with as rational a concept of self-interest639

Social movement and interconnections among ecological, economic and

equity issues 639

A bond that recognizes the sanctity of the Earth642

Principles for a common moral and institutional framework

646

A common ethic and inner orientation 646

A common ethic as a guide647

The Principles of a Global Ethic 647

The need for new mentalities and modalities 647

The Need for an Appropriate Ethical Framework 649

The overarching ethical system 649

Construction of a global ethic 652

Common ground across our diverse traditions 652

Ethical frameworks 653

Common ethic and tribal loyalty 654

Explanatory Remarks Concerning a Common Ethic 655

A shared global ethic 655

A common, uniting framework 655

Avoiding cultural imperialism 657

25 THE POETRY OF EARTH 658

The Unfolding Cosmos 661

Felicity as the goal and natural term of all life 661

The visionary materialism of William Blake 662

26 THE CREATIVE UNIVERSE 667

The self-organizing universe 667

The participatory universe 667

Self-organisation, emergent properties, and the creative and participatory

universe 668

Spontaneous self-organizing dynamics of the world 671

The co-production of the world 671

The emergent creativity in the universe 673

The self-organising universe beyond positivism 673

Metaphysical reconstruction – the creative universe 674

The creative processes of nature as energy flows up the biotic pyramid

675

The participatory universe 677

Ceaseless creativity in the natural universe, biosphere, and human cultures

684

God as the natural creativity in the universe 685

Spiritual Revolution 686

[metaphysical reconstruction - lives lived appropriately to reality] 686

Beyond technical fixes and natural self-regulation 687

Living into mystery 691

One as the whole - purpose and meaning – mystery and unanswerable

questions 691

[knowledge and loss of meaning] 692

Ultimate questions and the need to picture 694

Need for the integral approach 699

The ever building of ourselves as fully human 703

[be-ing as the persistent becoming of culture, science, the economy, knowing,

doing, and inventing] 703

The human personality emerges out of the matrix of communal functions and

activities 712

Unity and meaningfulness of all life 713

[the outer world and the inner self are one] 713

Participation in the commonwealth of life 713

The limits of reason and the need to reunite our full humanity

714

Prometheus and Orpheus 715

The spiritual underpinning to our ecological consciousness 719

[intuitive awareness of our relationship to the environment - ethical

obligation to our planetary home] 719

Partially knowing and understanding, but flowing 722

[be-ing as the persistent - the ever building of ourselves as full humans]

723

27 BEING AND BELONGING 724

The emergence of a new understanding of the Earth 724

[futures - After a long period of psychological disruption stability will return

only with the emergence of a new understanding of the Earth 724

The inner and the outer 725

[the holiness of life - membership one of another - community of soil, soul and

society] 725

[to stimulate a change of 'psychology, status and motivation – fostering an

ecological citizenship] 725

Mode of being in the world727

[a radically desacralised cosmos – to be an avid participant in an animate

universe] 727

Making community - setting virtuous cycles in motion 728

Community as being, doing and having together 729

[being as the ever-deepening beauty that transcends ego - the great work of

humanisation] 729

Ontological connection 730

[life, faith, hope] 732

Self-realisation 733

Community of soil and soul 733

John O’Donohue on belonging and virtue 733

Transpersonal community 737

In fine, consciously or otherwise, we are bound up with and in one another at

the most profound level of reality.737

Cycle of belonging – becoming alive to the aliveness of life 737

Responsibility 738

A sense of place is our grounding on Earth 740

The roots of life and what gives it meaning 740

28 PROPHECY AND HOPE 743

Reason and hope 743

The essential grammar of harmony 753

A more balanced way of looking at the world, and more harmonious ways of

living. 753

Grounds for pessimism 755

Against the ecology of fear 758

Reclaiming the Ground of Hope 762

Prophecy and Hope 762

The emerging future is not predestined 763

The collapse scenario - abandoning hope 764

29 HOPE BEYOND PROGRESS 781

Abandoning utopias and avoiding dystopias 781

The end of the foundational assumptions of modernity 782

Honesty, resilience, appreciation of beauty and scale, and stability 783

Mystery, psychic depths and reason 797

Regrounding the human condition 797

Metaphysical reconstruction and the world of politics, economics and

technology 798

Being receptive to a new mind and a new heart 800

Imagining the future 800

Soulcare and grounding the human condition 805

30 CONCLUSION 806

31 PAN AND LOVE 809