Why ‘commonwealth of virtue’ instead of, say, ‘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 define that along ecological lines, then successful living takes shape as sustainable living along ecological lines. 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.
Plenty 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.
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 reality 35
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 personality 163
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 division 170
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 context 356
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 universe 495
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 system 621
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-interest 639
Social movement and interconnections among ecological, economic and equity issues 639
A bond that recognizes the sanctity of the Earth 642
Principles for a common moral and institutional framework 646
A common ethic and inner orientation 646
A common ethic as a guide 647
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 world 727
[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