Introduction

The question is: how can the political culture of a liberal landscape be more than instrumentally respectful of external nature? If it is purely instrumentalist, committed to the sole value assumption, or at least to normative individualism, how could it ensure reasonable landscaping, including respect for nature as other? Must it not see external nature only as a resource? For a brief introductory sketch of how this can be answered, consider the following anti-liberal line of thought. Liberals tend not to really believe in very much, at least nothing very substantial, which is why they can satisfy themselves with thinking that the state should not be the coercive expression of a conception of the good life, and why they emphasize merely procedural values and talk of “thin” (another word for bland or vacuous) goods such as toleration of diverse ways of life. They ignore the fact that a proper, red-blooded engagement with politics requires a full identification of one's value commitments with the political. Anything less than this is to condone political feebleness, a listless disengagement or alienation from politics, which is the last thing we want to encourage.

This line of thought contains various mistakes. For example, one important aspect of liberalism involves distinguishing non-public conceptions of the good life from “reasonable” public values. Both kinds of values may be held as strongly as you like; the fact that they are distinguished, and said to apply to different areas of life, does not alter this. Liberals can denounce “unreasonable” ways of life, those inconsistent with accepting reasonable political values, as strongly as anyone can denounce anything.