MAVE Dissertation,
Lancaster University 1998

Freedom, Environmentalism And The Liberal State

Michael Hannis

Supervisor: Dr John O'Neill

ABSTRACT
Attacks on environmentalism which accuse it of incompatibility with liberal ideals of freedom are misconceived. They rest on an empty and paradoxical conception of freedom whose origin can be traced to an excessively abstract and disembodied model of the autonomous person. This problematic version of autonomy, and of freedom, is contained within the tradition of liberal neutrality. Environmentalism supports a fuller conception of the person which arises from an ecologically informed understanding of the human situation. It is also an inescapably normative project which espouses a substantive conception of human flourishing and claims that it is the role of the state to protect and promote the good life so defined. Environmentalism thus has a strong affinity with perfectionist liberalism and a natural antipathy to the alternative neutrality-based conception of the liberal state.
The present environmental crisis is largely a crisis of overconsumption. Environmentalism is committed to at least a "minimally essentialist" normative conception of the levels of consumption necessary for human flourishing, which is lower than the levels presently common in the richer nations of the world. In practice, implementing this conception requires coercive action on the part of the state to restrict superfluous and environmentally damaging production. A perfectionist liberalism can justify such coercive action in a way that is entirely consistent with the protection of freedom. 

FREEDOM, ENVIRONMENTALISM AND THE LIBERAL STATE
"Everything that lives,
Lives not alone, nor for itself."
(William Blake, 1789)
The battleground of environmental politics in Britain is a rapidly shifting one. Throughout the 1970's and early 1980's environmentalists struggled to get their concerns onto the mainstream political agenda. Then in the late 1980's and early 1990's a flurry of repositioning saw the (by now undeniable) reality of environmental crisis hurriedly installed as a prominent concern of government, whose solution was fortuitously at hand in the form of the newly conceived doctrine of "sustainable development".
Well-known environmentalists were very publicly hired as government advisers, and "green" rhetoric was co-opted and applied to just about everything from political parties to nuclear power. A strange new species of "institutionalised" environmentalism was created which whispered respectfully in the corridors of power rather than shouting on the street. It attempted to divorce the solution of environmental problems from well-established analyses of their causes which were not acceptable to the political orthodoxy of the day.
In the mid 1990's disillusionment with the limited achievements of this institutionalised environmentalism grew rapidly as a new generation of young grass-roots activists appeared who trusted ineffectual be-suited "green" apologists as little as they trusted construction company managers. The mushrooming protest camps on the proposed sites of dozens of new roads became a focus of widespread public support for a newly reinvigorated radical environmentalism which was not afraid to express the views its institutionalised cousin could no longer afford to be associated with. Critiques of consumerism, of the ideology of constant economic growth, and particularly of the complicity of governments and transnational corporations in worldwide environmental destruction gained widespread currency, although their visibility in the mainstream media remained limited.
Now, as we approach the millennium, we are witnessing an orchestrated legal and ideological attack against this radical environmentalism. Both here and in America, government and, more particularly, industry is attempting to draw a "line in the sand" between the acceptable face of institutionalised environmentalism, (in the form of "sustainable development" strategies, technological fixes and market-oriented environmental economics) and the more "dangerous" politicised environmentalism which seeks to regain the initiative and demand more radical measures.
Companies which find themselves under sustained attack from environmental campaigners are increasingly procuring the services of specialised consultants who aggressively attempt to undermine the environmentalists' case by portraying them as undemocratic "extremists". Several recent studies (e.g. Rowell 1996, Beder 1997, Korten 1996) detail the emergence of new corporate strategies aimed at discrediting all but the most anaemic environmentalism on the grounds that it endangers hard-won prosperity and, more fundamentally, conflicts with cherished values of modern society, notably those of democracy and "freedom of choice". Such strategies seek to undermine not only the credibility of pressure groups but also the level of popular support for environmental legislation and regulation of all kinds.
The actual arguments advanced by this new breed of professional anti-environmentalists often contain little if any intellectual or academic substance. They do however serve to suggest that this might be an opportune moment for genuine environmentalism to consolidate its political legitimacy in order to combat the concerted efforts which are being made to marginalise its appeal. Part of this consolidation must be a presentation of the environmentalist case which situates it firmly within some recognisable framework of widely shared social values, specifically including a thorough defence of its compatibility with that most emotive and elusive touchstone of liberal values, freedom. This must, however, be done in such a way as not to obscure the fact that environmentalism, properly understood, does call for radical social and political reform. It is an attempt at such a presentation that I offer here.
The least sophisticated versions of these attacks on environmentalism, (exemplified by the recent controversial Channel 4 series "Against Nature"), rely simply on insinuating guilt by association; the Nazis, we are reminded, planted millions of trees and encouraged organic agriculture and herbalism. Hitler, in fact, was a vegetarian. What more proof could we need to show that concern for nature equals contempt for human rights? This of course is propagandist reasoning of the most simplistic kind. The fact, if fact it is, that some fascists have been environmentalists (although in reality this would hardly include the Nazis, given the larger picture of what they did and believed) is no argument for saying that all environmentalists are fascists. All it shows is that it is theoretically possible for environmental concern to coexist with a range of political viewpoints, including some which we find objectionable because of their lack of concern for individual human beings. It can also coexist (and arguably usually does) with a keen sense of the principles of freedom and social justice.
Indeed many of the more radical theoretical positions in environmentalism, which are in a sense most vulnerable to charges of illiberality because of the wide range of human behaviour they seek to constrain or curtail, are characterised precisely by attempts to extend the scope of such principles beyond the human species. Such positions tend, despite the caricatures, to retain ideals of freedom and inter-human justice as important, even central tenets. (e.g. Devall & Sessions 1985: for a concise overview of such positions and the concepts of justice they embody see Low & Gleeson 1998, ch. 6)
There are, however, more substantial points to be made about potential conflicts between environmentalism and the cluster of liberal values that centres on freedom; and these become most apparent when attention is focussed not on radical pressure groups but on policies and actions, actual or potential, of states and governments. For our contemporary situation is one in which "the environment" is no longer a minority or specialist interest but arguably constitutes a major factor in policy-making at all levels (albeit one that is at present all too often ignored). Any effective response to ecological crisis must be integrated with other areas of governance if its objectives are not to be undermined; it is not the sort of issue that can be quietly dealt with by one department while everything else continues as normal. It requires major changes in a wide range of human activities: if government is to attempt to bring these changes about it will inevitably have to legislate and regulate in many areas of life into which it has not previously intruded. This raises a number of questions, some new and some very old, about the role of the state and the freedom of the individual.
Many of the newer questions relate to the need to take account of global perspectives on the problems at hand. This is clearly essential in reaching an understanding of the ecological dimensions of our situation - it is simply not possible, for instance, to calculate the reductions in carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels needed to combat anthropogenic climate change from a purely local viewpoint. But global perspectives also transform our understanding of the human justice aspects of the predicament in which we find ourselves. Is it legitimate, for instance, to improve our local environment at the expense of a distant one - for instance by exporting toxic wastes? Or to continue to consume a disproportionate share of ever more scarce resources? Or to pump pollution into the air and seas which may end up causing local problems thousands of miles away?
Answering these new questions by proposing strong environmental and "sustainability" policies can seem in turn to throw into even sharper relief some older dilemmas about what constitutes a just society: to what extent should government tell citizens what is good for them? Should it be neutral between different conceptions of the good life? Which are the essential freedoms of the person which government is charged with protecting - and which other freedoms may it legitimately infringe? It is questions such as these I intend to focus on here.
I aim to show that the ecologically situated picture of humanity which is emerging in response to our current crisis points to a new understanding of freedom, and of the role of the state in safeguarding it, which are nevertheless entirely consistent with a coherent set of well-established liberal principles. These principles are those of the perfectionist strand of liberalism, which can be traced back to a classical conception of politics, according to which government is not only entitled but duty-bound to identify, protect and promote a substantive conception of human flourishing. Conversely the alternative neutrality-based conception of liberal democracy is shown not only to be incapable of supporting environmentalist objectives but to be directly opposed to them.
My argument largely takes the form of an exploration of the implications of policies aimed at reducing levels of consumption in the richer countries of the world. I take the demand for some such policies to be a central part of the environmentalist case, and also to be the part which is perhaps most likely to attract charges of incompatibility with liberal ideals of freedom1.
 
At first glance, it may appear that attempts to address ecological crisis are not necessarily connected with the pursuit of ideals of freedom and justice. For instance if the connection were to be abandoned, many of the present problems could perhaps be "solved"- for a lucky and /or ruthless few - by massive enforced reduction of the human population. But there are at least two good reasons to insist on the connection. Firstly, of course, we do in fact subscribe to these ideals; difficult and controversial to define and implement though they are, they are nevertheless close to the core of what we want from our societies. In principle at least, our actions are conditioned and where necessary constrained by them. Even if it were to be proven that they would have to be sacrificed in order to "save the planet", it is far from certain that we would choose to do so.
Secondly, there are good practical reasons why coercive "solutions" which violate these ideals will only be at best temporarily effective. Whereas publicly supported and demonstrably just legislation is reinforced by social pressure on the individual to conform to the shared values and priorities it embodies, unpopular coercive legislation is undermined by a climate of support for those who flout or circumvent it, and can be made to work only by ever-stricter enforcement measures. This need for policing not only makes it less effective, but has resource implications of its own; it may also in extreme cases result in or contribute to the downfall of the government that introduced it.
For practical as well as moral reasons, then, it is essential to devise and implement effective environmental policies which are not incompatible with existing principles of social justice. This incompatibility arises only if the measures required to make human society an ecologically sustainable part of the world are considered to conflict with justice by infringing freedoms which are constitutive of a just society. My contention will be that such measures, broadly characterised, do not in fact lead to such a conflict, since the view that they constrain freedom rests on a partial and misleading conception of what it is to be a free autonomous person.
THE FANTASY OF "SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT"
The Brundtland report (WCED 1987), and the voluminous and influential discourse of "sustainable development" which has followed it, has in fact already institutionalised the link between environmental policy and social justice. Unfortunately, however, it has done so by reinforcing the existing goal of "development" (understood as economic growth) against any attack mounted in the pursuit of ecological sustainability. The laudable objective of alleviating, or indeed eliminating, material poverty, rightly recognised as not only intrinsically objectionable but also a major contributory factor in environmental degradation, is seen as achievable only by continued growth in total economic activity:
"We see...the possibility of a new era of economic growth, one that must be based on policies that sustain and expand our environmental resource base. And we believe such growth to be absolutely essential to relieve the great poverty that is deepening in much of the developing world." (WCED 1987, p.1)
Giving more pie to the poor can only be done by creating a bigger pie; nobody's slice must ever get smaller in the process. The levels of consumer spending, production and consumption, misleadingly referred to as the "standard of living", of the richer nations (and of élites within poorer nations) are not considered negotiable. Conventional economic wisdom, indeed, considers a growing economy to be necessary even for the maintenance of existing "standards of living"; the growth required in order to produce a redistributable surplus is seen as additional to that required to "stand still". Reducing the undesired "side-effects" of human economic activity such as non-renewable resource exhaustion, chemical pollution, waste production, biodiversity loss and anthropogenic climate change thus becomes a question of continually trying to get more for less. More efficient management, (bio)technological improvements, and economies of scale are the tools of choice for achieving this continual miracle. Sustainable development, for all its rhetoric and hyperbole, essentially amounts to no more than an efficiency drive.
There is a simpler connection between social justice and environmental policy: both require an honest assessment of fundamental human needs, one in order to see that all have access to this minimum, and the other in order to set a level somewhere above it which constitutes an upper limit of socially acceptable consumption which is, in the words of Agenda 21, "achievable by all within the bounds of the ecologically possible" (UNCED 1992, 'introduction to overview'). Both, in fact, point in the unfashionable direction of interventionist, redistributive government. (see Benton 1997b)
 
THE REALITY OF OVERCONSUMPTION
For the global ecological crisis is in large measure a crisis of overconsumption, overproduction and overexploitation. Species, ecosystems and landscapes have been ruthlessly sacrificed on the altar of economic growth; the entire world, it seems, has been commodified into an inventory of raw materials to be processed into consumable products. Human beings, as well as being commodified themselves (as "labour", or worse) are reinvented as "consumers" whose well-being is measured by their consumption. The gospel of growth decrees, moreover, that this process must not only carry on but continually accelerate. In the process, as Vandana Shiva eloquently describes, the real meaning of "sustainability" has been distorted out of all recognition.
"There are, quite clearly, two different meanings of 'sustainability'. The real meaning refers to nature's and people's sustainability. It involves a recovery of the recognition that nature supports our lives and livelihoods and is the primary source of sustenance. Sustaining nature implies maintaining the integrity of nature's processes, cycles and rhythms. There is a second kind of 'sustainability' which refers to the market. [...] Sustainability in the market place involves ensuring the supplies of raw material, the flow of commodities, the accumulation of capital and returns on investment. It cannot provide the sustenance that we are losing by impairing nature's capacities to support life." (Shiva 1992, p. 192-3)
Making globalised industrial capitalism more efficient through "free trade", technological wizardry and corporate streamlining, while calling it "sustainable development", will not do anything for the excluded billions of the "developing" countries which provide the raw materials and cheap labour that have sustained Euro-American dominance. It will not make the air clean, the cities safe or the trees healthy, even in the most privileged of countries. And it certainly will not avert impending or actual environmental disasters such as deforestation, desertification, groundwater pollution, biodiversity loss or global warming, fear of which grips ever-growing numbers of people all over the world. Any genuine attempt to address these issues must include an acknowledgement of the need to bring consumption under control, to link it somehow to necessity rather than simply allowing, even encouraging it to grow without any limits other than those of "the market".
It is not only theorists on the left of the traditional political spectrum who call for such policies. John Gray, for instance, in the context of lamenting the hijacking of "traditional conservatism" by free market fundamentalism, states:
"I have argued elsewhere that a conception of satiable human needs has a central role in reasoned discourse about public policy. The idea of a satiable human need will be workable in public discourse, however, only if the ruling ideal of the unending proliferation of human wants is relinquished and replaced by a conception of sufficiency in which it is the quality of social life, rather than the quantity of goods and services, that is the central objective of public policy. [...] What is particularly important to note here is that the pursuit of sufficiency, in the context of providing people with opportunities for fulfilling livelihood...presupposes that market institutions be subject to political constraints."(Gray 1995, p. 116)
 
HUMAN NEEDS: A NORMATIVE APPROACH TO CONSUMPTION
Formulating and implementing such a conception of sufficiency requires some universalisable concept of what a human being's resource needs actually are; not necessarily a definitive answer, but at least some formula to generate an answer to the question "how much do we each need to consume?" Furthermore, if this formula is ever to be legitimately able to play the normative role envisaged for it, clearly it must explicitly aim at defining a level of consumption commensurate not only with individuals' mere survival, but also with their emotional, intellectual and spiritual fulfilment; in short, the aim is to define the physical conditions necessary for human flourishing. This need not, on the face of it, involve any reference to how these physical needs are to be met, that is, any assessment of the social, cultural, economic or religious conditions for flourishing. However, it will quickly become apparent that such a neat separation is not actually possible after all.
Ivan Illich's trenchant criticism of the systematic misuse of the term "needs" in development discourse (Illich 1992) sounds a valid note of caution here. Real needs are not defined in terms of economic activity or measured by GNP. Traditional cultures, subsistence lifestyles and low-intensity agriculture can satisfy real human needs perfectly well, as they have for most of human history, although they are invisible to economic measures of income and "welfare". This is not to deny that there are indigenous peoples in the world whose urgent needs cannot be met by a return to traditional practices, whether because such a return is impossible or for other reasons. The point is to emphasise the absence of any necessary connection between the condition of human flourishing and the levels of material affluence seen in the "developed" countries.
Real needs include firstly minimum levels of basic physical requirements for survival; clean air and water, wholesome food, shelter, and fuel. Defining these levels, with all their regional variations, is a complex but thoroughly achievable task; in fact such information is readily available. In order to flourish rather than survive, however, humans will usually need some excess of these "commodities" over and above these minima. The size of this excess is less easy to determine, not least because it will vary for each individual; and it is undeniably true that this variation is a function not only of idiosyncracies of personality but of social and cultural factors. The attempt to define the physical consumption levels necessary for human flourishing independently of consideration of social conditions thus looks like falling at the first hurdle.
But as well as raw materials for the maintenance of the physical body, a flourishing human being is likely to have needs of a different kind to be met by the natural world; not only recreation but the vital experiences of aesthetic appreciation, contemplation and spiritual renewal all require, for many of us, some measure of access to non-human nature. It seems inappropriate to refer to such access as "consumption of resources", both because nothing is being either metabolised or otherwise "used up", and more fundamentally because it is precisely what Ted Benton has referred to as "the opportunity for non-instrumental appreciation of nature" (Benton 1997a, pp. 35-37) that is at issue here. Yet such opportunity constitutes a real physical requirement of a flourishing person, and certainly has very real physical resource implications in terms of land-use policy, nature conservation and so forth. These requirements, evidently, are at least as difficult to quantify, and just as dependent on social and cultural conditions, as those identified above.
As Kate Soper points out, there is also a conceptual difficulty, as well as these practical ones, with the project of establishing any normative level of resource consumption. Such a project has as its aim the promotion of an adjustment in present concepts of the level of consumption necessary for human flourishing, in order to accommodate ecological limitations. An "imaginative shift" is being promoted and is therefore presumably considered possible. This implies that this level is not immovable and "fixed by nature":
"A naturalist approach to our position in the ecosystem which implies that human beings are possessed by nature of a set of needs whose satisfaction is a condition of their flourishing and of which we could in principle gain an objective knowledge, does not necessarily encourage this form of imaginative shift. In other words, to assume too much fixity in what is required as a condition of flourishing would in the end be to undermine the demand that consumption should be accommodated to the limits imposed by nature." (Soper 1997, p.48)
 
Nonetheless, Soper defends her position of "minimal essentialism on needs" against charges of paternalism and "anti-democratic tendencies":
"...the project of ecological justice requires us to eschew a wholly relativist and conventionalist position on needs. It cannot be squared with the arguments of those who would insist that there can be no truly just or democratic politics other than through an unlimited respect for cultural plurality and difference.[...] Indeed, if 'democracy' is conceived as demanding indefinite respect for the cultural plurality of needs, forms of welfare and conceptions of the 'good' life, it commits us to the absurdity of defending those patterns of consumption which have been most destructive of cultural diversity and are least compatible with its promotion" (ibid., p.47)
 
Social and cultural determinants of the consumption levels perceived as necessary for flourishing, as well as biological and geographical factors, must be recognised, although not allowed to undermine the basic project of adjusting human consumption to fit real definable ecological limits. Indeed it is precisely these social and cultural determinants which constitute the only mechanisms by which these perceived levels may be deliberately reduced.
On reflection this is hardly a surprising conclusion, since it was social and cultural forces that caused them to rise in the first place. To even explore ways of encouraging them to fall is to take up a political position in opposition to these forces, which are still attempting to raise them yet further. It is to advance a conception of the good life which is in direct conflict with that defended by the political mainstream of the day.
This conflict is further polarised by the fact that this mainstream conception not only centres on consumption itself as one of the principal joys of human life, but defends itself vigorously in terms of "freedom of choice", which often translates as freedom to consume without limit. More generally, the sacred freedom of choice is also invoked in the context of individuals' freedom to "pursue happiness" in whatever way they choose without anybody trying to impose a different way of life on them. This is one of the main ways in which environmentalists and environmental regulators come to be portrayed as enemies of freedom. I will later argue that this is a baseless allegation founded on an ill-conceived notion of freedom.
 
CONSUMPTION, PRODUCTION AND THE ACME WIDGET COMPANY
However first I propose to follow this brief consideration of what might be involved in a reassessment of consumption levels with an (equally brief) examination of the possibility of successfully implementing policies aimed at actually reducing them. I assume, for the reasons given above, that the tactic of simply mandating specific levels of individual consumption of all scarce goods is neither practical nor a politically acceptable option, even if a desired level could be agreed upon. If consumption is to be reduced at the point of the consumer, then, the only other option is that of voluntary action, in which the role of government is simply to urge restraint, emphasise the need for ecological awareness, and perhaps offer incentives for frugality.
It might at first appear that such tactics could succeed by appealing to individuals to "be green", to moderate their consumption habits and adjust their lifestyles to take account of ecological limitations. Indeed this is precisely the focus of many existing worthy bodies and campaigns, both independent and government-sponsored. But such appeals are very effectively undermined and subverted by the better-funded and longer-established psychological onslaught of the mainstream marketing industry, and also by the fact that no government that remains committed to growth really wants consumption levels to do anything other than continue to rise.
In any event, consumption, in the sense of what "consumers" do, is merely a stage in a chain of events: mining or farming of raw materials is followed by processing into "product", then by marketing and distribution, and finally by consumption and ultimately disposal. Environmental impact occurs at every stage; by the time a product is on sale, most of the damage has been done. Seen in this light, policies which attempt to reduce consumption by persuading individual consumers not to buy something which is easily available and expertly advertised are revealed as absurdly ineffectual.
Ultimately, any realistic environmental policy which aims at a significant reduction in consumption cannot operate solely at the point of influencing or even coercing the consumer. It must involve tight control, and sometimes absolute prohibition, of inessential environmentally destructive industries. Evidently this will involve freeing government from the powerful influence of such industries' lobbyists; the magnitude and difficulty of this crucial political reform must not be allowed to obscure its vital importance. However the creation of such a policy also faces an apparently formidable array of more abstract conceptual, ethical and legal problems. Who is to decide what is essential? How? Can the government legitimately tell the Acme Widget Company that its activities have been deemed inessential and environmentally destructive, and must cease forthwith? The short and practical answer would be to simply pass a bill explicitly giving the government such powers. But this would be to avoid debating these issues, and thereby to invite charges of totalitarianism.
And yet to allow Acme to continue to produce and market its superfluous and environmentally destructive widgets, while encouraging people not to buy them, is still to avoid the debate, while also allowing the damage to be done; but this is what present day policy often amounts to. Desperately necessary environmental regulation and legislation is already routinely frustrated and weakened not only by vested interests and economic dogma but also by genuine concern over its potentially authoritarian implications. The more radical approach I am suggesting here, beginning with an assessment of genuine human needs, with a view to discouraging inessential and profligate production and consumption above a reasonable maximum, would certainly risk raising such concerns.
A defence of this approach will therefore require a defence of coercive environmental policies which explains why the curtailment of Acme's "freedom to produce widgets" or indeed of my "freedom to consume" them, does not constitute an unjustifiable infringement of freedom. Obviously it will be fruitless to argue that no significant courses of action are prohibited by such policies; they are, and it will be necessary to show that their prohibition can be justified within a moral framework which values freedom.
FREEDOM, THE HARM PRINCIPLE, AND THE CONDITIONS OF AUTONOMY
In fact the principle of prohibiting certain courses of action within such a framework is well established in our society; only the occasional extremist would claim that everything ought to be permitted. In a "liberal democracy" such as modern Britain, most of us are broadly content to be constrained by a complex evolving web of laws and conventions proscribing dishonest, exploitative or violent actions towards our fellow citizens. We tend to accept these laws, and their enforcement, as protective of freedom rather than destructive of it: we want to be free to live our lives without being killed, deliberately injured or enslaved. The unfortunately very limited prohibition of cruelty to animals also enjoys fairly universal public support; to some extent, we include (some) animals within the scope of the generally uncontroversial principle that causing physical harm to others is wrong.
Many other laws and regulations, however, are widely resented, and often flouted; taxation, land use planning, the Highway Code and the like, although arguably necessary, tend to be tolerated rather than celebrated as great achievements of our society. We like to believe, with J.S. Mill, that we ought to be free to do as we like, as long as we are not doing anybody any harm.
"That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant." ( J.S. Mill, "On Liberty")
 
But Mill here is much misunderstood. He is often taken (see e.g. Coglianese 1998) to be expressing a robust condemnation of any form of coercion which aims either at the enforcement of morality or at the imposition of any particular conception of the good life, in short to be advocating a policy of "liberal neutrality". This is, as John O'Neill shows (O'Neill, forthcoming), a complete misrepresentation of Mill's perfectionist position on the role of government.
The interesting thing about the harm principle, in the contemporary context, is not so much what it prohibits as what it allows. A closer examination of the principle shows why simplistic appeals to it in support of the supposed freedom to engage in environmentally destructive activities are very much mistaken. I aim to show that it can in fact provide a powerful justification of environmental policies, even those with a radically and deliberately redistributive effect: this justification is not only entirely consistent with the value of freedom, but could be said to be founded on it.
This line of argument draws on the sophisticated interpretation of the harm principle and its implications which is offered by Joseph Raz. Raz is concerned to establish the compatibility of the harm principle with an "autonomy-based doctrine of freedom". He begins by establishing that reducing a person's autonomy constitutes doing them harm:
"Respect for the autonomy of others largely consists in securing for them adequate options, i.e. opportunities and the ability to use them. Depriving a person of opportunities or of the ability to use them is a way of causing him [sic] harm." (Raz 1986, p. 413)
Raz makes it clear that on his account the harm principle is "not to be seen as the whole but merely as a part of a doctrine of freedom, the core of which is the promotion of the conditions of autonomy." (ibid., p. 420) To deprive any person or persons, known or unknown, of the conditions of autonomy is to do them harm and thus constitutes an act (or omission) which may legitimately be discouraged, by coercion if necessary. Persons have "autonomy-based duties" or obligations to respect and promote the autonomy of others, and correspondingly "the state has the duty not merely to prevent denial of freedom, but also to promote it by creating the conditions of autonomy." (p. 425)
What constitutes harm, of course, is no longer a simple and clear-cut issue, if indeed it ever was. As members of a complex society, we stand to be harmed not only by direct personal attack, but also indirectly by actions of others, often unknown to us, which undermine the functioning of that society in ways which cause us harm. Thus it might be said that the enforcement of tax collection, for instance, can be reconciled with the harm principle by reference to the harm done to those deprived of services such as healthcare by those others whose unpaid taxes create shortfalls in the public accounts.
Raz agrees that the harm principle legitimises the enforcement of taxation, but for subtly different reasons. He considers the harm whose avoidance legitimises coercive measures to be that which would be done to the citizens by the government if it failed in its duty to protect the conditions of their autonomy (which are threatened by the lack of services caused by the financial problems arising from unpaid taxes).
"A person who fails to discharge his autonomy-based obligations towards others is harming them, even if those obligations are designed to promote the others' autonomy rather than to prevent its deterioration. It follows that a government whose responsibility is to promote the autonomy of its citizens is entitled to redistribute resources, to provide public goods and to engage in the provision of other services on a compulsory basis, provided its laws merely reflect and make concrete autonomy-based duties of its citizens. Coercion is used to ensure compliance with the law. If the law reflects autonomy-based duties then failure to comply harms others and the harm principle is satisfied." ( p. 417: emphasis added)
According to Raz, the conditions of autonomy "consist of three distinct components: appropriate mental abilities, an adequate range of options, and independence."(p. 372). An autonomous person's "life is their own"; they are both mentally capable and sufficiently independent of mind to freely choose a course of action from an existing range of genuinely varied options. The range of options, in fact, must be such as to:
"...enable him to sustain throughout his life activities which, taken together, exercise all the capacities human beings have an innate drive to exercise, as well as to decline to develop any of them." (p. 375)
The state is thus entitled to act, coercively if necessary, in pursuit of social conditions which secure and safeguard such a range of options for all its citizens. As quoted above, Raz explicitly includes both the redistribution of resources and "the provision of public goods" as examples of such action. Equally clearly, he states that:
"The provision of many collective goods is constitutive of the very possibility of autonomy and it cannot be relegated to a subordinate role, compared with some alleged right against coercion, in the name of autonomy." (p. 207)
Although Raz has little to say directly about making or enforcing environmental legislation, it seems clear that this would count as action by the state aimed at the provision of public or collective goods. Certainly a healthy and pleasant environment, both in a wide sense and in a more specifically ecological sense, is a necessary condition for human beings to be able to "sustain activities which exercise all the capacities they have an innate drive to exercise", and thus, on Raz's definition, a necessary condition for autonomy.
What is emerging here is a position giving a strong defence against attacks on environmentalism which appeal to human freedom as a fundamental value which overrides environmental objectives. The defence is strong not least because it relies not on opposing other values against that of freedom, but on promoting a fuller conception of freedom which includes the requirement to maintain a healthy and pleasant environment for human life. This requirement is portrayed not as a constraint on freedom but as an essential part of its maintenance.
The maintenance of identity as a condition of autonomy
The position may be further strengthened by a closer examination of the conditions for autonomy. Raz is a perfectionist liberal, firmly in the tradition of J.S. Mill, and it is once again to Mill that John O'Neill turns for another insight into what it is to be an autonomous person. Taking up the point that autonomy amounts to more than the absence of coercion, O'Neill explores the connection between "having a life of one's own" and the possession of an identity. For Mill, O'Neill suggests, "to have an identity is to have a character":
"A person whose desires and impulses are his own - are the expressions of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture - is said to have a character. One whose desires and impulses are not his own, has no character." (J.S. Mill, quoted in O'Neill 1998, p.73)
 
O'Neill's point here is similar to that of MacIntyre who, citing the influence of Derek Parfit (1984), claims that:
"There is no way of founding my identity - or lack of it - on the psychological continuity or discontinuity of the self. The self inhabits a character whose unity is given as the unity of a character." (MacIntyre 1985, p. 217)
 
To have a character, and thus an identity, implies being "the subject of a life that has some narrative unity, which is such that it is possible to tell a coherent story of its unfolding" (O'Neill 1998 p. 79). This cannot necessarily be said of all lives:
"To have an identity involves moving in a mean between two conditions: on the one hand, allowing oneself to live a life for and defined by others, without reflection: on the other, of living a life as if it consisted of endless choices, in which one could in the post-modern jargon 'play' with different identities. To live that second life would no more be to live a life of one's own at all, than would an unreflective life bequeathed to one by some tradition and lived entirely for others. There is a real danger that the liberal, in attempting to properly reject the life undetermined by oneself, celebrates a life that lacks any determinate form at all." (ibid., p. 77)
 
To be autonomous is not to be free to experiment with different identities, it is to be free to fully express one's own identity over time, to continue one's existing life in some meaningful way that is determined neither by coercion nor by merely arbitrary choice but by who one is. To be genuinely free, I must be free to be myself. This is a telling point against the same unlimited cultural relativism attacked above by Kate Soper; but it also allows some elaboration of Raz's notion of the "adequate range of options" which must be available as one of the conditions of autonomy.
To be adequate, the range must include options which satisfy the requirements of a person's maintenance of their identity. This gives a way of understanding what is wrong in cases of "substitution" of one option by another, seemingly equivalent but in fact dramatically inferior simply because as a substitute it loses the principal valued characteristic of the previous option, which had to do with its history or continuity.
An example of this would be where a valued but not exceptionally beautiful landscape is threatened with destruction by "development" of one sort or another and "compensation" is offered in the form of a new park or nature reserve nearby. For a person who had no experience of the existing landscape, the substitution might seem reasonable, if it offered the same "amenity value" in terms of recreational activities and so forth: the option to visit one place is roughly equivalent to the option of visiting the other. Hence her range of options in life is not significantly reduced and her autonomy is not affected. But for a local resident familiar with the place, who has perhaps been walking there since childhood, the whole idea of substitution misses the point. Her visits to the existing place are in some meaningful way part of her identity; they are part of what makes up the continuity of her life. The substitute park does not offer the option to continue this meaningful part of her life. In a small but significant way, the conditions of her autonomy will be infringed.
If this is the case then on Raz's terms the local resident stands to be harmed by the development, and thus some exercise of power by (national or local) government is justified to stop the development. Of course this is not to prejudge the case for or against the development: this will be only one of many arguments on both sides.
THE SUBSTITUTION OF OPTIONS
Indeed it is important to note that these identity-based limits on the acceptable substitutability of options can also sometimes ground arguments against environmental policies. Farmers, fishermen or foresters, whose inherited way of life is threatened by the contraction of their "industry" which sustainability demands, sometimes appeal to exactly these notions to explain why offers of alternative employment or financial compensation cannot persuade them to give up doing what they have always done. Such dilemmas are not easily resolved, and often call for gradual transitions rather than abrupt change: for instance, transitional measures may be introduced under which an environmentally damaging practice or profession is "phased out" in a way that allows those working within it to complete their working lives with dignity, while precluding new entrants.
Raz in fact argues for gradual change on precisely this basis.
"The longer and the more deeply one is committed to one's projects the less able one is to abandon them (before completion) and pick up some others as substitutes. But even if such change is possible, denying a person the possibility of carrying on with his projects, commitments and relationships is preventing him from having the life he has chosen. A person who may but has not yet chosen the eliminated option is much less seriously affected. Since all he is entitled to is an adequate range of options the eliminated option can, from his point of view, be replaced with another without loss of autonomy. This accounts for the importance of changes being gradual so that they will not affect committed persons." (Raz 1986, p. 411)
 
While this argument may indeed sometimes legitimately ground calls for a gradualist approach to environmental policies which have an impact on long-standing and culturally important practices, there is an interesting corollary to this which works very much in environmentalism's favour. Many battles in environmentalism are in fact about resisting rather than imposing change. Firstly, where an environmentally undesirable change is inevitable, this need to respect the autonomy of those who the change will affect can support a demand to slow it down or "phase it in".
But secondly, and more promisingly, arguments in favour of introducing new environmentally damaging products and practices which appeal to increased "freedom of choice" can be shown to be weak or fallacious by reference to the conditions under which options can be denied to people while still leaving open an "adequate range" and thus not interfering with their autonomy or freedom to any significant degree. Freedom of choice does not give anybody an inalienable right to bring a new product onto the market. If, for instance, a new model of "executive saloon car" or toilet cleaner is prevented from becoming available, no potential purchaser is deprived of the option to continue with a project to which they are committed, or indeed of any option they have already chosen. This is true even if the new product is a genuine innovation: but when, as is usually the case with cars and toilet cleaners, it is substantially equivalent to existing alternatives, then it is doubly clear that no option whose availability has any significant role in maintaining freedom has been denied to anybody.
I have attempted to establish that the notion of the conditions of autonomy can be usefully and plausibly extended to include considerations of identity, and that this, on balance, makes the "autonomy-based doctrine of freedom" an even stronger potential ally of environmentalism. Issues relating to the maintenance of not only a safe, healthy and pleasant environment, but also of one which embodies meaning and continuity, are all capable of being legitimately represented as issues of maintaining the conditions of people's autonomy. Action to defend such environments can thus be justified under the harm principle in a way which is entirely consistent with the defence of freedom.
The position thus identified is perhaps stretching Raz's ideas to their limit, in terms of how much interventionist government action in support of environmental objectives they can support. I do not mean to claim that he would necessarily agree that I have not gone beyond that limit. But I think this is still a recognisably liberal position. Within the broad range of environmentalist thought it seems a fairly moderate one.
Its moderate character is evident in that it is a position that still allows the possibility that the opponents of environmental action and legislation may have valid arguments from freedom on their side as well. A more radical development of these lines of thought would deny that this can be the case.
A RADICAL DEPARTURE: THE IMPLICATIONS OF THE ECOLOGICALLY SITUATED SUBJECT
This radical development proposes a deeper level of understanding of what it is to have a human identity. A crucial part of a person's identity is their existence, not as a disembodied abstract site of experience but as a unique physical body, an ecologically situated subject, inescapably connected by their every breath to the real physical world. We all have, as already discussed, not only direct physical needs for "natural resources" but also emotional and spiritual needs for the "opportunity for non-instrumental appreciation of nature". The experience of interconnection with the non-human world, as well as that of separation from it, is an indispensable part of what it is to be human, and thus to have a human identity. Autonomy, then, requires conditions which allow a person to maintain their identity intact over time: part of that identity is maintained only by the continuing experience of fully physical humanity, which in turn requires that the non-human world on which our very existence depends remain in a state capable of sustaining that humanity.
This way of reasoning ultimately implies that no action which significantly diminishes the capacity of any part of our environment to sustain fully flourishing human life may be legitimately defended on the grounds of protecting or furthering human freedom. This is not to say that no justification for such an action could ever exist, but simply that considerations of freedom could not meaningfully be claimed to provide one. To claim that they could, on this view, is a misunderstanding of the nature of human freedom, arising out of a misunderstanding of the nature of humanity.
This radical position is one with which I have considerable sympathy. However its political usefulness in the contemporary climate is limited, largely because it draws on a holistic view of humanity which goes well beyond what liberals (including perfectionist ones such as Raz) would allow. It thus loses the primary advantage of the more moderate position identified above, that of providing a defence for environmentalism against attacks mounted in the name of freedom which is firmly rooted in the same liberal values to which such attacks appeal. In practical terms, most of the ends advanced by the more radical position may be better served by the use of arguments within the general framework of liberal politics.
LIBERALISM, UNCERTAINTY AND ARGUMENTS ABOUT FREEDOM
To fall back to the more moderate position is to abandon hope of simply ruling out of court all freedom-based attacks on environmentalism. It is instead to accept the challenge to justify environmentalism within a liberal philosophical framework which holds the preservation of freedom as a primary value, modified only by the harm principle. The keys to successfully meeting this challenge are firstly the identification of the restriction of autonomy as harmful, and secondly the identification of environmental goods as prerequisites for autonomy. The strategy, essentially, is to strengthen and elucidate the "freedom-enhancing" credentials of environmentalism, and of the policies it seeks to support, and to proceed, thus fortified, with some process of "weighing" freedom gained against freedom lost on a case by case basis.
These freedom-enhancing credentials are established by arguing that since environmental degradation of all kinds restricts freedom by interfering with the conditions necessary for true personal autonomy, measures which prevent or remedy such degradation facilitate autonomy and therefore protect or increase freedom. Such measures are justified by the harm principle, since to restrict a person's freedom is to do them harm.
It may be objected at this point that this formulation is unnecessarily complex and adds nothing to the original version of the harm principle. Why not simply say that environmental degradation harms people (in all sorts of ways) and measures preventing it are therefore justified? What is gained by the detour into presenting that harm as an interference with the conditions for autonomy?
The answer is that what is gained is some measure of commensurability between the arguments being advanced on both sides. For justifying a coercive environmental policy on the grounds of avoiding harm is relatively easy; the hard part of overcoming freedom-based opposition to its introduction is showing that the harm avoided outweighs the freedom lost. Cashing out the harm in like terms of freedom makes this weighing exercise at least conceptually feasible; while measuring one person's freedom, or one aspect of freedom, against another is not always easy, or even possible, it does arguably make more sense than trying to measure freedom against, say, pollution or deforestation.
Strategically this limited commensurability is of enormous importance. To be able to answer emotive appeals to the inalienable value of freedom on their own terms is to level the playing field, to counter the "trump card" in the hand of the opponents of environmentalism. This trump card of an appeal to freedom is standardly played to press home the advantage when factual evidence of environmental harm is inconclusive; and such conditions of uncertainty are a normal feature of debates about action on environmental issues. (see e.g. Beck 1995)
Environmental legislation, to be of any use, must play a preventative role as well as a curative one; this means that action is often necessary at a stage before conclusive proof of existing damage is available. The furious controversy over climate change illustrates this perfectly; the opponents of drastic reductions in fossil fuel use (such as the oil and car companies represented in the "Global Climate Coalition") still argue that the scientific case is not yet proven, that we should wait not only until the global temperature is definitively shown to be rising, but until this rise is definitively shown to be the result of human activity. Environmentalists, advocating some form of precautionary principle, point out that by that time it may be too late; that indeed it may already be too late and we should act now. Similar arguments about unproven risks and damages bedevil attempts to stop the environmental and medical recklessness of the nuclear and chemical industries, or to ban genetically modified material from our food.
Measures to preserve fish "stocks" are useless once the species at issue are extinct, or depleted beyond the point of recovery. Yet the fisherman whose livelihood or entire way of life is destroyed by having his quota slashed, or by being ordered not to put to sea at all, while he knows there are still catchable fish out there, may well feel hard done by. He may also consider his local knowledge superior to that of the government specialists, and dispute their analysis of the problem.
In such cases, the absence both of definite proof of harm, and of a socially or legally entrenched precautionary principle, often conspire to undermine the implementation of well-founded environmental policy; indeed the anticipation of such a situation prevents policies even being adopted, where legal challenges or political lobbying are likely to make them unworkable. Hence government, all too often, does not act; and where only governmental action will be effective (as for instance in the case of constraining the activities of multinational oil companies), the problems persist.
In addition to debates over the facts of whether harm has occurred at all, and if so how much, (not to mention how it should be measured, or different harms compared), there is in practice a further question to be considered: how much harm is too much? To adhere absolutely to a principle that any action that harms anybody by degrading their environment at all is a candidate for prohibition would require banning most human activities immediately. Inevitably there must be some element of balancing harms against benefits, of proportionality; this raises difficult issues of commensurability, not to mention giving further scope for differences of opinion.
Under such conditions of multi-layered uncertainty, the promoters of environmentally unsound practices are often able to publicly win the argument by presenting their position as a defence of freedom; their freedom to go about their chosen business, consumers' freedom to choose their products, the freedom of fishermen, foresters and miners to pursue the only career that has ever existed in their town... only the most scientifically watertight and well-argued case proving dramatic environmental damage can defeat emotive arguments such as these. For freedom, the foundational value of our post-Enlightenment society, understandably serves as a beacon; in the fog of uncertainty as to how to proceed, it is easy to persuade people to follow its ill-defined light.
ENVIRONMENTALISM AND PERFECTIONISM: PROMOTING HUMAN FLOURISHING
Clearly then, the ability to counter this tactic by emphasising the freedom-defending aspect of environmental activism, policy and legislation is an important resource. It does not magically dispose of all freedom-based attacks on environmentalism; nor should it do so, since there is undeniably real tension even between ideals of freedom and ideals of ecological sustainability, and even more so between ideals of freedom and attempts to preserve culturally constructed aesthetically ideal environments. What it can do, however, is to ease this tension somewhat by reassuring defenders of freedom that environmentalists share their concerns, while pointing the way towards a revised conception of freedom that by assimilating the ecological realities of contemporary life becomes both fuller and more widely achievable.
For our ideals of freedom are no more cast in stone than are the goals of environmentalism. Both are elements in a much larger and continually shifting debate about the conditions for human flourishing, which is at least as important today as it has ever been. In so far as mainstream modern political and social practice embody attempts to answer the question of what these conditions are, none of these attempts has so far succeeded in satisfactorily integrating the ecological and environmental conditions for human flourishing with other more abstract concepts such as freedom, equality and justice. The urgency of our present situation should not blind us to the fact that this is hardly surprising, given the length of time the debate has been going on and the comparatively short time for which we have been aware of our ecological predicament. Nevertheless we must achieve some such integration and put it into practice, within a time-scale that is equally short, if we are to avoid a very considerable worsening of our situation; the ecological inadequacy of our present conceptions of the good life are legitimising the conditions in which life for many of us, and for most other species, is getting worse fast.
I have attempted to show that an environmentally literate version of a perfectionist liberalism such as Raz's may be able to accommodate such an integration. Raz's "autonomy-based doctrine of freedom" is able to resolve the apparent conflict with freedom involved in the coercive redistribution of resources which will almost certainly be required in order to achieve what Kate Soper (see above) refers to as ecological justice2. It could in theory be capable of providing a coherent justification for shutting down the Acme Widget Company in terms which could persuade its customers and perhaps even its employees that on balance their freedom, and that of others, was actually protected by doing so. It is entirely compatible with the ecologically essential project of establishing and enforcing normative guidelines about the levels of consumption necessary for human flourishing.
Such a liberalism is compatible with this project precisely because of its perfectionist character. Raz, like Mill and Aristotle, holds "the state to be duty-bound to promote the good life" (Raz 1986 p.426). He defends this conception of the state against the charge of infringing freedom partly on the grounds that personal autonomy, properly understood, is in fact a central component of the good life which the state is charged with promoting. Promoting autonomy, and thus freedom, is not a matter of refraining from imposing any conception of the good life. It requires the promotion and protection of the conditions for autonomy, which are not only moral and social but also physical. Maintaining these conditions thus become part of the wider requirement to protect and promote, coercively if necessary, the conditions necessary for the good life to be available to all. Even fairly radical environmental legislation sits quite comfortably within this classical framework when it can be shown to be necessary for the protection of these conditions.
ENVIRONMENTALISM AND NEUTRALITY
Conversely, a position of "liberal neutrality", which expressly forbids in the name of freedom any imposition of a state-sponsored conception of the good life, cannot use these arguments to justify environmental legislation. It has no such effective response to those who claim that environmentalists, inside and outside government, are attacking freedom by illegitimately seeking to impose their own ideas about how people should live on others. For any meaningful environmentalism does indeed seek to bring about a situation in which people are at least encouraged to live their lives in a way which is consistent with its aims, whether these are presented in terms of sustainability, respect for nature or biospherical egalitarianism. The range of positions within environmentalism is broad, but all of them involve promoting changes in present human behaviour, many of which could arguably interfere with the pursuit of certain conceptions of the good life.
A neutrality-based liberalism still, in principle, allows some such interference, since it can still call on the harm principle; but the principle is much weaker in the context of neutrality than in the perfectionist case. This is because a neutral state cannot interpret the harm principle as routinely legitimising coercive action to protect a particular defined set of conditions necessary for human flourishing. It must always be even-handed in considering different parties' alternative conceptions of human flourishing, never privileging one over another; this means it has to constantly reinvent the wheel, and is likely to make it err excessively on the side of caution in implementing environmental policies. As Coglianese, an advocate of "neutral environmental policy" puts it:
"...even though some environmental problems are potentially catastrophic, a neutral environmental policy requires strong evidence of impending destruction to justify drastic governmental intervention in individual lives." (Coglianese 1998, p.59)
 
While the dangers of over-zealous environmental legislation are no doubt real (although rarely if ever seen in practice), I think most environmentalists would argue that "drastic governmental intervention", even if it does affect individual lives, is often needed well before the availability of "strong evidence of impending destruction". Some might further argue that Coglianese's view is in fact either naïve or disingenuous, ignoring as it does the contested and politicised nature of "evidence" in such contexts. (see e.g. Beck 1985) It seems unlikely that a neutrality-based liberalism could ever successfully defend or even make a decision to shut down the Acme Widget Company; it could not ground any attempt to curb profligate consumption, not only because it could never defend any one interpretation of what profligacy is, but because it could never allow itself to say that there was anything wrong with it.
NEUTRALITY AND ANTI-ENVIRONMENTALISM
In fact arguments appealing to the neutrality of the state between different conceptions of the good life are more often advanced against environmental policies than for them. The sort of position I have been arguing against, which views environmentalism as opposed to freedom, can be seen as founded on precisely such an appeal.
Consider the position of the owners of the Acme Widget Company. Environmentalists are publicly campaigning against the company on the grounds that its activities are environmentally damaging, and unjustifiable since nobody needs widgets anyway. Suppose that it is true that widgets are not actually necessary for anybody's survival; they are marketed, and bought, as goods whose possession and use is pleasurable rather than essential.
A first line of defence for Acme is to question the judgement that its activities are actually environmentally damaging. It may do this by challenging the environmentalists' evidence of the damage, or their assessment of its significance. If this fails to relieve the pressure, or if the company wants to retain people with environmentalist leanings as customers, its next step may be to bring out a new range of "environmentally friendly" widgets, whose environmental impact is either genuinely reduced or can be plausibly presented as such. It might even invest in a new state-of-the-art resource-efficient widget factory, and rename itself Acme Green Widgets Ltd.
But even this will not necessarily get the company out of trouble. The "greening" strategy is a compromise rather than a defence of Acme's "freedom" to make and sell widgets. The environmentalists may insist that a "green" widget still has a considerable environmental impact, and that it is still a widget that no-one needs. Their original argument is, in principle, undiminished; say they continue to pressurise the government to shut Acme down.
At this point, seeing the very existence of the company threatened, its owners may well decide that attack is the best form of defence. One such attack, only slightly caricatured, runs as follows.
"Who says we don't need widgets? Not only do our employees depend on us, but millions of satisfied customers get great pleasure from their widgets; they consider their lives to be improved by our products. If people want a little luxury and frivolity in their lives, why shouldn't they have it? We have gone to great lengths to minimise the environmental impact of our products, but it will never be possible to reduce it to zero. What impact there is, is justified simply by the fact that people want widgets. These puritanical environmentalists have gone too far and the government should not be swayed by their extremist argument. In a liberal democracy such as ours, people must be free to decide for themselves whether they want to buy widgets, and we must be free to supply them."
There are several arguments here, and I do not propose to examine them all in detail. The point I want to make is that the essence of the company's position is the claim that it is not the place of government to privilege a conception of the good life that does not include widgets (held by the environmentalists) over one that does (held by Acme's employees and customers). The government should therefore resist attempts by the environmentalists to persuade it to depart from a position of neutrality. This appeal to the doctrine of liberal neutrality does not arise out of convictions about abstract political or ethical theory, but is made, apparently, in the name of freedom.
NEUTRALITY AND FREEDOM
But the notion of freedom appealed to here, and that protected by a government which adopts a position of strict liberal neutrality, is an abstract and ultimately useless construct. It is a "thin" concept of freedom that contrasts starkly with the "thick" concept defended by a perfectionist account. It cannot explicitly protect a definable and extendable list of physical and social "conditions for autonomy", for in the absence of any substantive conception of the good life its notion of the autonomous individual can only be a purely formal one, essentially captured by Rawls' paraphrase of Kant:
"Kant held, I believe, that a person is acting autonomously when the principles of his action are chosen by him as the most adequate possible expression of his nature as a free and rational being. The principles he acts upon are not adopted because of his social position or natural endowments, or in view of the particular kind of society in which he lives or the specific things he happens to want. To act on such principles is to act heteronomously." (Rawls 1972, p. 252)
In order to respect persons' autonomy, so understood, a government must ensure that the principles by which it governs, and in accordance with which its citizens must act, approximate as closely as possible to principles of this kind. They must, therefore, be equally acceptable to any rational person, irrespective of their values (apart from rationality), desires, physical situation or social position. In short, they must be neutral between conceptions of the good life. Furthermore, the obligation to respect autonomy by holding to a doctrine of neutrality is more fundamental than any conflicting obligation to implement a conception of the good life. This is the basis of the idea of the primacy of justice, or of "the priority of the right over the good". As Michael Sandel explains:
"On the Kantian view, the priority of right is both moral and foundational. It is grounded in the concept of a subject given prior to its ends, a concept held indispensable to our understanding ourselves as freely choosing, autonomous beings. Society is best arranged when it is governed by principles that do not presuppose any particular conception of the good, for any other arrangement would fail to respect persons as beings capable of choice; it would treat them as objects rather than subjects, as means rather than ends." (Sandel 1998, p. 9)
Sandel shows that, although it was eventually abandoned by Rawls in his later work, this Kantian conception of the autonomous person still underpins the recent tradition of "deontological liberalism" which embraces the ideal of neutrality. He argues that attempts to support the priority of the right over the good, and thus neutrality, fail, essentially because of the inaccuracy and inadequacy of this concept of the person. Such a "radically disembodied subject" bears no relation to a real human agent, and indeed has no genuinely unique identity or any basis for making decisions about morality or anything else. It is "dissociated from those ends and desires which, woven gradually together into a coherent whole, provide a fixity of purpose, form a plan of life, and so account for the continuity of the self with its ends". (ibid. p. 57). Furthermore it specifically discounts the important part of our identity which is constituted by our membership of and obligations to human communities of all kinds. "It rules out the possibility that common purposes and ends could inspire more or less expansive self-understandings and so define a community in the constitutive sense, a community describing the subject and not just the objects of shared aspirations." (p. 62).
It similarly rules out any "self-understanding" which considers any part of the self to be constituted or defined in any way by any relationships with any part of the non-human world. A notion of identity and of the autonomous subject which is consistent with the evident realities of relationship and community in human life needs to be a fuller, less pared-down picture, such as those referred to above suggested by MacIntyre and O'Neill.
There are other good arguments against the ideal of neutrality, not least those which point out that the whole notion is incoherent in that it undermines itself by embodying some liberal conception of the good life (see Raz 1986; MacIntyre 1988). Here, however, I want to remain focussed on its view of the autonomous person.
In practice, the consequence of neutrality's excessively abstract concept of the person is that it is unable to ground any principled defence of any of the things that genuinely matter to real people; it is precluded from agreeing with anybody that they do actually matter. These things include not only the social but also the environmental conditions for a society of flourishing individuals embedded in stable and meaningful communities. This is not mere speculation but is borne out by recent history.
Although as John O'Neill (1998) shows there are also perfectionist arguments in favour of market-based economic policies (which in his view are equally unsound), there is at least a strong affinity between what John Gray (1995, p. 136) calls the "indefensible" doctrine of neutrality and the radical free market ideology which constitutes the principal threat to environmental regulation, indeed to any regulation, of production and consumption.3
The fundamentalist doctrine that expects blind faith in unfettered market forces to bring an improved life for all requires an amoral "neutral" system of government that does not obstruct the markets by imposing any conception of the good life. It requires a state which allows the destruction of communities and natural environments in the pursuit of economic growth and efficiency. Its narrow economistic view of human beings as uniform "rational" preference-satisfying agents, as homo economicus, implies a decontextualised and abstract "thin" notion of autonomy, and thus of freedom, which coincides neatly with that supported by liberal neutrality. On this model any activity for which anyone has, or might have, a preference can be defended in the name of "freedom", even if its effect is to undermine what on a fuller perfectionist account constitute necessary conditions for autonomy. Paradoxically, by attempting to put freedom first liberal neutrality ends up unable to defend any freedom worthy of the name.
CONCLUSIONS
The Acme Widget Company is right to point out that the question of whether it may legitimately continue operating hinges on whether the government is entitled to declare that widgets are superfluous, and that their production cannot therefore justify environmental damage. Its claim that the government is not so entitled expresses a neutrality-based view. Many environmentalists want to claim that in at least some such cases government is entitled, even obliged, to get off the fence and make such declarations. This claim commits them to some version of a perfectionist position on the role of the state, in that it requires government to adopt and implement at least a minimal conception of what is and is not necessary for human flourishing.
Candidly adopting a perfectionist position allows environmentalists not only to support their demand for government intervention, but also to convincingly rebut objections to such intervention that appeal to freedom. The perfectionist environmentalist's response to Acme's freedom-based defence of its environmentally damaging activities is that it is invalid because it appeals to a notion of freedom which is paradoxical and ultimately empty.
Such a position could lead on to the development an alternative, ecologically informed conception of freedom to set against the empty abstractions of free marketeers and neutrality theorists, which would more securely capture the elusive intuition that environmental destruction and freedom are somehow incompatible. This would require the development of a fully-fledged philosophical concept of the person as an ecologically situated subject, whose flourishing and autonomous life is explicitly conceived to require an intact and complex web of interdependencies with many other species and features of the natural world. This conception of the autonomous person could in turn ground a revised characterisation of the conditions for autonomy on which basis any significantly ecologically destructive action whatsoever might be seen as (among other things) inimical to human freedom.
I have not attempted to fully develop this concept of the ecologically situated autonomous subject here, partly because I believe that any serious attempt to do so would require input not only from philosophy and politics, but also from perspectives drawing on empirical knowledge provided by (at least) ecology and psychology. More particularly, however, I have not done so precisely because the concept does not (unfortunately) exist within the philosophical framework of modern liberal politics, and I have been attempting to explore arguments about environmentalism and freedom which are practically usable within this framework.
Environmentalism would, I suggest, be well served by the development of a theory of the ecologically situated subject, if it aims to develop a distinctive environmental politics which values both human freedom and ecological integrity. In the short term, however, the environmental problems facing humanity require activists to work with existing political parties and institutions, and thus to be able to support the policies they seek to establish by reference to some recognisable and "respectable" existing political tradition. The most promising candidate for such a tradition is that stemming from the classical conception of politics wherein it is the role of the state to identify, protect and promote the good life for all its citizens.
 
The affinity suggested here between environmentalism and perfectionist liberalism is not to be taken as implying that either implies or contains the other. Certainly not all perfectionist liberals are environmentalists, and equally certainly not all environmentalists are perfectionist liberals. What I have attempted to sketch is a path of least resistance whereby environmentalist goals, particularly those relating to a reduction in consumption levels in the richer countries of the world, may be legitimised and argued for within the broad spectrum of the European and American tradition of liberal politics, which arguably values freedom above all.
It is entirely open to environmentalists to reject this tradition altogether and argue, for instance, for a radically decentralised society in which the role of the state is minimised (e.g. Bookchin 1982). At the other extreme it is possible to imagine a position (deeply mistaken in my view) which claimed that sustainability could be achieved only by some form of benevolent despotism. No arguments for or against any such positions, which have no interest in maintaining compatibility with the ideals of contemporary liberalism, is advanced here.
Perhaps more to the point, many in the broad "environmental movement" are entirely disillusioned with our contemporary political institutions and the liberal traditions which legitimise them. They see liberal states either as effectively powerless puppets of corrupt capitalism or as irrevocably committed to continuing the processes of environmental degradation which they presently oversee so efficiently. They believe that real change will simply never come through government action, but must be brought about directly by conscientious individual and collective action and persuasion. For those who take such quite justifiable views, the usefulness of arguments such as those advanced here is purely as pragmatic campaigning tools, as ways of getting environmental points across to liberals and assuaging their worries about freedom by appealing to principles they may be expected to hold dear, much as a well-read but agnostic speaker might attempt to influence a Christian audience by quoting scripture without claiming it as authoritative.
But for those (equally numerous) environmentalists who still see in the ideal of some form of liberal democratic state both a desirable form of human organisation and an effective agent of change, the challenge is to define a political position which both respects that ideal and can consistently create and implement effective environmental policies. That position is in my view likely to be a perfectionist one. The compatibility of the environmentalist agenda with the perfectionist strand of liberalism, and its incompatibility with the antithetical notion of the neutral state, stem quite simply from the fact that any meaningful environmentalism is in the business of promoting at least a partial conception of the good life: it claims not only that we are not living as well as we could be but that there is a better way.
Specifically, the crucial project of reducing consumption levels requires the adoption of an explicitly normative and at least "minimally essentialist" conception of the level of consumption necessary for human flourishing. Any government which adopts such a conception is inescapably abandoning neutrality and promoting a version of the good life which, at least, stresses the value of ideals of sufficiency and plenitude, and discourages profligacy and the unlimited accumulation of wealth. This may indeed be a radical position, but it is far from new and outlandish; its roots go at least as far back as Aristotle, and it finds an echo in the vast majority of the world's spiritual traditions, including most varieties of Christianity.
Real environmentalism, as opposed to the institutionalised variety, requires real changes in the way we organise our human societies. Inevitably this means it supports the restriction of certain environmentally destructive activities. But this does not mean it is in any way opposed to freedom. It is in fact the only route we have from here to a state of real freedom: a state in which we are all free to live a fulfilled and flourishing life as part of a genuinely rich, beautiful and self-renewing world.
FOOTNOTES
1) It may be objected that environmentalism is much more than this, and that in focussing on its prescriptions for interhuman behaviour I neglect to acknowledge its advocacy (in some of its varieties) of some form of "non-anthropocentric values". I have attempted, following Ted Benton (1997a), to include some acknowledgement of such values by defending the "opportunity for non-instrumental appreciation of nature" as a precondition of human flourishing. However I deliberately do not use any arguments that rely on appeals to non-anthropocentric values since I am specifically concerned to establish the viability of environmentalism as a practical project of political and social change: part of this viability is its acceptability to those who do not espouse overtly non-anthropocentric values.
In fact my personal belief is that it is entirely possible to describe and justify a fully-developed vision of an ecologically sustainable and spiritually fulfilling human life, which would be acceptable to the most radical of environmentalists, without recourse to anything as metaphysically problematic as a non-anthropocentric value.
2) I understand Soper here to be using the term "ecological justice" to refer to a situation of fair distribution of goods and opportunities between human beings within an ecologically sustainable context. This contrasts with the usage of Low & Gleeson (1998) who use the same term to refer to a notion of inter-species justice between humans on the one hand and other species (and perhaps nature in general) on the other. While I do not dismiss such notions I do not make any use of them here.
3) This connection between neutrality and radical free market doctrines is probably not one that would be supported or acknowledged by John Rawls. Although his formulation of the difference principle betrays a certain adhesion to some idea of "trickle-down" economics, it also undeniably expresses an egalitarian redistributive instinct which fundamentally contradicts the modern neoliberal antipathy to the welfare state, redistribution and indeed taxation of any kind.
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Michael Hannis
Copyright 1998

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