Being green

If or when man-made environmental calamities bite more deeply it is likely that so will the tendency to blame liberalism as the dominant tradition of Western political philosophy. Therefore it is politically and culturally important, as well as philosophically interesting, to identify and emphasize any green resources latent within that tradition. In this book I shall argue for a green form of liberal political philosophy, and seek to show how a green perspective can and should be developed within liberal political theory.

An important preliminary question is this: what should we take “green” to mean in this context? First of all I take being green to involve the denial of a purely instrumentalist view of non-human nature. To be green in this sense is to reject what John Gray has called “normative individualism”: the view that “nothing has ultimate value except states of mind or feeling, or aspects of the lives of human individuals”. So, again, to say that a green liberalism is possible is to claim, contrary to much prevailing wisdom, that liberalism need not be saddled with what Richard Sylvan called the “sole value assumption”:

There is, however, a bit more to being green, as I understand it here, than rejecting a purely instrumental attitude towards the non-human.