Liberal&Nature Stephens2016 PDF

Environmental Political Theory and the Liberal Tradition
Oxford Handbooks Online

Environmental Political Theory and the Liberal
Tradition
Piers Stephens
The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Political Theory
Edited by Teena Gabrielson, Cheryl Hall, John M. Meyer, and David Schlosberg
Print Publication Date: Jan 2016

Subject: Political Science, Political Theory, Comparative Politics
Online Publication Date: Mar 2016 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199685271.013.22
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter discusses the history of environmental concern within the liberal tradition
from the latter’s roots onwards, moving from the private property orientated “old
liberalism” of John Locke into the self-development orientated “new liberalism” of John
Stuart Mill, then onwards into American pragmatism and the neutralist liberalism of John
Rawls and his contemporary followers. This leads into an overview of the current debate,
which started in the 1990s, over the possibilities of synthesizing environmentalist goals of
sustainability and nature protection with some variant of liberalism. The chapter
concludes with an argument that yokes the new liberal concern with self-development to
the environmentalist emphasis on nature protection, arguing that the continued existence
of relatively untransformed nonhuman nature is a vital precondition and assistance to
human imaginative development and thus freedom.
Keywords: old liberalism, new liberalism, neutralist liberalism, John Locke, John Stuart Mill, John Rawls,
sustainability, self-development, nature, freedom
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Liberalisms Old and New

“THE Green movement,” declared Andrew Dobson in 1990, “is in a position more akin to
that of the early liberals than that of the early socialists—it is self-consciously seeking to
call into question an entire world view rather than tinker with one that already
exists” (Dobson 1990: 8). Dobson’s view reflected the received wisdom of the time by
defining the green movement against the presuppositions of contemporary liberal
democratic societies, but more recent scholarship has examined both the oppositions and
the compatibilities, examining ways in which environmentalism may be consistent with at
least some liberal values and traditions. Accordingly, in this chapter I initially clarify key
terms and note aspects of the liberal tradition that might both prefigure green politics
and suggest possible points of fusion. With the historical material’s significance clarified,
I shall give an overview of positions in the current debate over the green–liberal
relationship. Finally, I shall sketch an argument of my own aimed at connecting a key
aspect of green politics to liberalism by invoking the significance of nature experience to
the core liberal value of individual freedom.
I begin by sketching liberalism’s scope, a loose exercise because there “is no definitively
bound ‘authentic liberalism’ constituting, as it does, a variety of ideas and conflicting
impulses” (Paton 2011: 9). However, the unifying ingredient is expressed by Maurice
Cranston, that “a liberal is a man [i.e. person] who believes in liberty” (Cranston 1967:
459), to which we must add that the liberty in question is primarily that of the individual
human agent, and that conceptions both of individual agency and of liberty itself are
disputed within liberalism. Liberal prioritization of liberty as a political value means
justifications are needed for restricting it, and in diverse ways liberals regard the (p. 58)
equal liberty and equal moral worth of citizens as foundational. Thus liberalism’s historic
origins intertwined with social contract theories, in that both attempted to explain
legitimate political authority in terms of consent; liberal assumptions about human liberty
and equality in the state of nature opposed theories which assumed valid political
authority arose through custom, natural hierarchy, or divine dispensation. Though not all
contractarians were liberal—the legislative absolutisms of both Hobbes and Rousseau
appear illiberal—one can reasonably see the first liberalism as being that of John Locke’s
Two Treatises of Government (1689), wherein pre-political natural rights to life, liberty,
and property constrain legitimate boundaries of government activity. These are negative
rights against interference, manifesting an emphasis on negative liberty in Berlin’s sense:
the absence of coercive interference by humans (Berlin 1969). This Lockean emphasis on
negative liberty is found throughout the “old” or “classical” liberalism of Francis
Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and their successors, through to contemporary figures such as
F. A. Hayek. It intertwines with an emphasis on private property rights and a market
order resultant from them as manifesting, protecting, and enabling liberty in various
respects. The boundaries, applications, and goals of particular private property regimes
may be constructed and interpreted in diverse ways, and the relationship between private
ownership and the public good can be variously conceived accordingly. But this Lockean
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line of thought emphasizes the importance of the individual’s relationship to their

property, so it may loosely be associated with the tradition C. B. Macpherson critically
names “possessive individualism” (Macpherson 1962), and I shall accordingly refer to it
as “old liberalism” or “neo-Lockean liberalism” in what follows.
A second strand, the “social liberalism” or (as I shall call it) “new liberalism” that
emerged in the nineteenth century, contests both the negative liberty emphasis and the
neo-Lockean stress on private property rights. Though earlier inspirations are present in
Romanticism, “new liberalism” most clearly emerges into the tradition through John
Stuart Mill’s work, especially On Liberty. Here we see a conception of positive liberty—
that is, liberty as self-rule, in which the freedom of an agent’s actions is manifested
through the individual being able to exercise her will authentically, attaining goals and
demonstrating command of her own life rather than obedience to custom or compulsion—
emerge to sit alongside negative liberty. Mill’s new liberalism, as Wendy Donner
observes, “does not embrace possessive individualism” and does not “assume isolated
individuals lacking social bonds” but rather is “centered around the value he places on
the individual as the generator, focus, and appraiser of value,” is “developmental to its
core,” and shows an emphasis on being “in control or possession of one’s own life and
powers” and having “one’s ideas and activities and projects be an expression of one’s own
particularity” (Donner 1991: 148–9). Mill’s innovations, both in On Liberty and elsewhere,
helped initiate new emphases on autonomy and a new liberal awareness of the ways in
which market inequality and private property might undermine liberty instead of promote
it. These new emphases, which increasingly extended towards countenancing increased
state regulation, economic planning, and redistribution, were steadily developed through
the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Whilst Mill’s initial moves were inspired by
ancient Greek and Romantic notions of (p. 59) agency, his resultant rethinking was so
influential that John Skorupski sees this “notion of human good as the balanced
development of human powers of both rational will and feeling, together with a wish to
give all human beings equitable access to this good” as being “liberalism’s ethical idea” in
this period (Skorupski 1999: 215). The emphasis on autonomy was developed by T. H.
Green and others in the late nineteenth century, and was sometimes later blended with
the socialist idea that freedom means an effective power to act (Tawney 1931). This
created a fuzzy boundary between the new liberalism and democratic socialism, as both
espoused welfare state measures and economic interventionism in the first half of the
twentieth century in Western Europe. In the United States, Deweyan pragmatism and
social experimentation—America’s home grown new liberalism—served a similar function
during the New Deal era.
It is from these developments that our last components emerge, the emphases on social
justice and state neutrality. Though distributive justice was part of new liberalism’s
lexicon, it was thrust into the forefront of liberal discourse with publication of John Rawls’
A Theory of Justice (1971), which in turn strongly influenced contemporary new liberals
such as Ronald Dworkin and Bruce Ackerman. (In contrast, contemporary representatives
of old liberalism, such as F. A. Hayek (1976) and Robert Nozick (1974), have argued that
such a focus on distributive patterns represents an illusion or even a threat to individual
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liberties.) State neutrality, the idea that the liberal state may be defined by its being
neutral between competing conceptions of the good, is more contentious in its
significance and emergence within liberal political thought. Several figures in the green–
liberal debate, most prominently Marcel Wissenburg (1998) and Simon Hailwood (2004),
characterize liberalism paradigmatically along these lines, but whilst some liberals (such
as Dworkin (1985)) espouse this definition, it is dubious whether this neutralism can be
applied to the full tradition without distortion. Jeremy Waldron sees no formulation in
these terms before 1974 (Waldron 1989: 62), and historically minded critics such as
Skorupski (1999: 220–4) and John Zvesper (1993) reject both the historical accuracy and
political desirability of contemporary neutralist accounts of liberalism. I support their
repudiations (Stephens 1996, 2001), but awareness of neutralism’s current pervasiveness
is necessary to understand contemporary liberal political philosophy.
Defining environmental political theory is also thorny and I shall not attempt a
comprehensive definition here. Rather I espouse an inclusive approach that sees the
divisions within environmental political theory most relevant to this discussion as
themselves emanating from green politics and environmental ethics, and am here
explaining my conception of those divisions. Green politics and environmental ethics are
haunted by dichotomies between reformism, usually anthropocentric, and radicalism,
usually non-anthropocentric. One can easily draw a division like Dobson’s between
environmentalism, taken as a human-centered piecemeal reformist approach, and
ecologism, which demands radical moral, political, and economic changes (Dobson 1990:
13–36). I believe, however, that green politics is better viewed on a spectrum ranging
from reformism to ecological radicalism, and moreover that the division may be less
straightforward than Dobson believes: as Bryan Norton argues, an enlightened
anthropocentrism might converge with non-anthropocentrism in practical policy terms
(Norton 1991). (p. 60) Adopting an inclusive approach also enables us to see historic
linkages between green politics and liberalism in a way that is impossible if one focuses
on ecologism as a post-1960s phenomenon, and whilst Dobson’s more recent assertion
that “environmentalism and liberalism are compatible but ecologism and liberalism are
not” (Dobson 2000: 165) contains some truth, I shall later conclude by suggesting how a
key value of ecologism, the stress on nature experience, can actually enrich the liberal
focus on freedom. But first we turn to historic aspects of the liberal tradition that can be
seen as connecting to current environmental politics.
Liberalism’s Environmental Heritage

The radical character of most 1970s and 1980s’ ecological activism, much of it based
around the idea of natural limits to economic growth, alongside the political resurgence
of a neo-Lockean liberalism aimed at increasing such growth, served to minimize
scholarly interest in the possibilities of green–liberal compatibility. In particular, the
confusion of liberalism with so called neo-liberalism, an ideology which actually “derives,
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in part, from radical nineteenth century libertarianism on the one hand and a resurgent
socio-political conservatism on the other” (Paton 2011: 6) and which draws from the old
liberal tradition merely in terms of economic anti-statism, has caused much reflexive
rejection of liberalism. As a result, interest in green–liberal rapprochement did not really
take off until the later 1990s. Most such interest before then came from philosophers
rather than political theorists; in particular, various attempts were made to rescue
Lockean property theory from the charge that it manifested a destructive Christian
dominion orientation (Squadrito 1979; Attfield 1983: 107–10; Shrader-Frechette 1993).
All of these represented attempts to excavate environmental positives from liberalism’s
history and anticipated later disputes, but as the backdrop was the debate over
Christianity’s role in environmental destruction, a wider examination of liberalism’s
environmental credentials was not triggered. Still, these efforts point to potentialities
within the tradition, and I shall now develop the picture further.
To begin at the beginning, it is indeed possible to read elements of Lockean property

theory as mandating some intergenerationally orientated restriction upon economic
exploitation of nature. Though Locke notoriously claims that 99 percent of the value of
goods made from natural resources comes from the human labor deployed in production,
Kristin Shrader-Frechette suggests that the remaining 1 percent of value attributed by
Locke to nature could be used to suggest an idea of moral restraint on human dealings
with the natural world. But Shrader-Frechette’s idea has had little support, perhaps
because a better explanation of the 1 percent value might be that Locke was trying to
avoid the implication that God’s creation was valueless without human input. Attfield’s
invocation of the restrictive provisos in Locke’s property theory has proved more fertile.
At least one great liberal, Jefferson, may have read Locke this way, and some scholarship
has attempted to create accounts of environmental liberalism on neo-Lockean (p. 61)
lines. There are in fact two provisos in Locke’s property theory in Chapter V of the
Second Treatise, both of which are portrayed as operating in the state of nature. The first
is the spoilage proviso in Section 31 whereby “nothing was made by God for man to spoil
or destroy” and the second occurs in Section 33, where private property is gained from
the commons by mixing one’s labor with the item “at least where there is enough, and as
good, left in common for others” (Locke 1988: 290–1). Both of these provisos may restrain
the legitimate extent of acquisition rights. However, significant controversy exists over
whether or not the arrival of imperishable money, which could enable surpluses of
perishable goods to be built up for sale without violating the spoilage proviso, actually
renders the first proviso inoperative; indeed, it might join with the increased productivity
generated by private land ownership to also obviate the second proviso if one accepts
Macpherson’s portrait of Locke as a proto-capitalist, or even if one simply reads such
expansion as mandated by God having “bid Mankind increase and multiply” as “the main
intention of Nature” according to Locke’s words in the First Treatise (Macpherson 1962:
203–20; Locke 1988: 169, 183). It seems likely, however, that Locke’s admirer Thomas
Jefferson did not regard either proviso as being transcended by the arrival of money or
civil government, as these provisos could explain Jefferson’s apparent suggestion of
usufruct (that is, without rights of destruction) land ownership in his 1789 letter to James
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Madison on intergenerational obligations. For as Luigi Marco Bassani maintains, ongoing

usufruct restraints would embody the Lockean provisos so as to grant each generation
“the right to receive a world in which the present has not been mortgaged by the
ancestors” and to do so because “their relations are regulated by the law of nature”
which demands “to leave land enough and as good for the following
generations” (Bassani 2004: 74). Jefferson’s proposals, which attempted to calculate each
generation’s longevity to help evaluate their obligations to each other, were convincingly
refuted by Madison’s reply and Jefferson never raised the question again, but it may
stand as an early liberal effort to grapple with intergenerational justice. The core
principle is that “an earlier generation cannot bind or obligate a later one” but “each
generation is obligated or bound to leave succeeding generations free to act as they
decide” (Ball 2000: 72), a view with recent echoes. These echoes include attempts to
interpret Locke’s intentions along Jeffersonian lines, and a division exists between greens
who regard Locke’s philosophy as offering means to a reformist liberal environmentalism
as against those who see Locke as legitimating proto-capitalist economic expansionism
and thus as anti-green.
Our next liberal call, however, is to utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s work (1748–
1832). Bentham’s significance is threefold. First, and least environmentally
acknowledged, he inspired his supporter Edwin Chadwick to promote the greater
happiness through such measures as improving sanitation and minimizing waste disposal
problems. Chadwick’s 1842 report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population
led to Britain’s 1848 Public Health Act and the creation of the Central Board of Health,
with powers to ensure clean streets and improve water and sewage systems—arguably
the first big modern environmental health initiative (Lewis 1952). Secondly, Bentham’s
utilitarianism has inspired the animal liberation movement to (p. 62) advocate rethinking
our relationship to non-human animals, thanks greatly to Peter Singer’s work
emphasizing sentience as the proper boundary line for moral considerability (Singer
1975). Bentham’s comment from his 1789 Introduction to the Principles of Morals and
Legislation that “the question is not Can they reason? nor Can they talk? But Can they
suffer?” was popularized as a vegetarian slogan by Singer, though as Warwick Fox notes,
Singer takes the quotation out of context since Bentham actually “argues that nonhuman
animals are generally better off being killed and eaten . . . by us” in traditional agriculture
than they would have been facing a more painful and difficult life in nature (Bentham
1970: 283; Fox 2006: 286). However, Singer’s utilitarian adoption of liberation language
beyond the species barrier illustrates a common environmentalist motif that draws on
liberal precedents: the idea that consistency may require us to expand the circle of moral
considerability beyond its present boundaries, just as it was previously extended to other
oppressed groups such as slaves, women, and people of color. The attempt to extend such
consideration to diverse natural items—animals, living things, ecosystems, etc—is a vital
element in green thought, but using liberal reformist extensionism is problematic for
more radical ends. Though rights theory can plausibly be extended to animals, some
efforts have been made to extend animal rights into liberal justice theory (Regan 1983;
Garner 2013), and it is at least possible to indirectly argue for strong systemic
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environmental protections on such individualist lines (Varner 1998), moral extensionism

moves beyond the gamut of the existing liberal tradition once it goes past the sentience
criterion for considerability. Similarly, extending considerability to collectivities per se, as
with species, ecosystems or Leopold’s “land community” (Leopold 1987: 204), is
problematic given liberalism’s individualism and the difficulties of ascribing interests to
these groupings. Accordingly, though environmentalist efforts to extend moral
considerability’s boundaries follow a liberal strategy, they often do so in ways that are of
questionable compatibility with liberalism itself.
The third area of Benthamite liberal influence exists via intellectual cross-pollination. The
English clergyman Thomas Malthus’ work An Essay on the Principle of Population
(Malthus 1992), which went through six editions between 1798 and 1826, attempted to
argue that unchecked population increases geometrically (for example, 1, 2, 4, 8)
whereas food supply increases only arithmetically (for example, 1, 2, 3, 4) and so there is
a continuous tendency for demand to outstrip the supply of necessities when population
rises, as well as a permanent likelihood of poverty for some section of the populace.
Malthus intended his arguments as a conservative refutation of perfectibility doctrines,
but utilitarian liberal reformists accepted some of his ideas and modified them for more
optimistic ends. The most significant such reformer was John Stuart Mill. Mill accepted
Malthus’ notion of tense disparity between rapid population growth and a crawling
resource base, but supported the use of working class birth control to reduce the spare
labor pool, thus increasing wages and social improvement opportunities. As against
Malthus’ population emphasis, Mill also recognized the roles of wealth differentials and
consumption, arguing in the Principles of Political Economy (1848) that a future
“stationary state” of zero economic growth was both inevitable and compatible (p. 63)
with progress; indeed, he even suggested that a more egalitarian wealth distribution and
a reduction in economic competition could promote general intellectual improvement and
improve human moral and emotional progress. Accordingly, Mill was the first philosopher
to advocate a sustainable economy of the type contemporary greens support. Moreover,
he embedded his political economy within terrestrial nature and connected it to social
dynamics of improvement, praising Wordsworthian peasant agriculture, and argued for
his views partly on Romantic grounds, namely the effect of immersion in nature on human
character, thus purging Malthusian joylessness. Mill later connected such peasant
agriculture to his support for local collective cooperationism in a perspective that John
Parham maintains “broadly corresponds to the emphasis on sustainable, decentralized
governance in contemporary ecological social philosophy” (Parham 2007: 46–7). To this
we should add that Mill, on liberal grounds, repudiated Comte’s call for eliminating all
animals and plants without a human use, protesting that the “power of the whole human
race cannot reproduce a species once eradicated” and condemning the “rule of one who
assumes that he knows all there is to be known” (Mill 1969: 357–8; Winch 2004: 116).
Mill also supported the new Commons Preservation Society in 1865 and made three
separate parliamentary interventions from 1866 to 1868 to protect urban trees in London
(Capaldi 2004: 325)—a significant use of time for an MP who served for only three years,
and before the word “environmentalism” existed. For these reasons, amongst others, I
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have argued that Millian new liberalism is the variant best suited to synthesis with
environmentalist goals and values (Stephens 1996, 2001, 2014), and it is to such
contemporary debates I now turn.
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Liberalism and Environmental Political Theory:

The Contemporary Situation
Though the liberal tradition furnishes some inspiration to environmentalism, the modern
green movement’s Western genesis is usually tracked to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring
(1962) and subsequent concerns over pesticides and overpopulation, followed by the
defining moment of the Limits to Growth report in 1972 (Carson 1962; Meadows and
Meadows 1972) and the forming of various green political parties. The only theorist to
seriously examine the green–liberal interface immediately after this period was John
Rodman. As early as 1973, Rodman suggested that T. H. Green’s new liberalism might
lend itself to ethical extensionism toward nature, and explored liberalism’s connections to
ecological concern in path-breaking papers that drew little initial attention but
anticipated today’s discussion (Rodman 1973, 1977, 1979).
The wider political theory debate, however, began only in the 1990s, as a few scholars
began to examine the issues involved, culminating in the first book attempting a full
synthesis, Marcel Wissenburg’s Green Liberalism (Achterberg 1993; diZerega 1996;
Eckersley (p. 64) 1996; Stephens 1996; Dobson 1998; Vincent 1998; Wissenburg 1998).
Wissenburg, like most advocates of greening liberalism, accepts the neutralist
characterization of liberalism and argues that much of the green agenda can be captured
in a liberal democratic setting. Rejecting intrinsic value arguments, Wissenburg’s project
is weakly anthropocentric and develops a variant of Rawls’ just savings principle of
intergenerational justice, the “restraint principle,” a liberal side-constraint aimed at
sustainability by protecting nature against needless destruction. Wissenburg’s Rawlsian
credentials anticipated much subsequent green liberal work, but the primary questions
asked in the most sustained discussion of the book, the Environmental Politics debate that
he and I had in 2001, were of whether neutralism was an accurate or helpful
representation of liberalism and whether Wissenburg’s model of human agency, value,
and motivation could practically generate room for liberalism to be greened (Stephens
2001a, 2001b; Wissenburg 2001). The criticism that a neutralist liberalism cannot in
practice motivate green change or oppose runaway instrumentalization because of its
refusal to examine preference formation mechanisms does not seem to me to have yet
been adequately answered, whilst my view that Millian liberalism offers better grounds
for green liberal synthesis has sympathizers yet remains a minority perspective (de Geus
2001, 2003; Winch 2004; Parham 2007; Donner 2009, 2014). The suspicion that a non-
neutralist liberalism would better suit environmentalism is probably more widely held
than the relatively small number of these sources would suggest, but no full monograph
treatment of such a green liberalism has been produced. Some worries were tackled by
Derek Bell’s invocation of Rawls’ later works to argue that “neutralist liberalism . . . is able
to accommodate more of environmentalists’ concerns than might have been supposed,”
but arguments over neutralism and motivating green change are largely ignored in Bell’s
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treatment, and even after demonstrating the validity of sustainability on neutralist

grounds, he admits that “Rawlsian liberalism is a ‘contingently green liberalism’ rather than
an ‘intrinsically green liberalism’ ” (Bell 2002: 705, 721).
Bell’s defense, however, indicates the debate’s direction in the early 2000s, with Rawlsian
neutralist styles of liberalism being extensively mined for potential to encapsulate core
green concerns, especially sustainability. Indeed, so quickly did this idea of liberalism
capturing environmentalism’s core goals become prominent that talk of the “end of
environmentalism” emerged by 2004 (Wissenburg and Levy 2004), alongside
development of two more syntheses, Simon Hailwood’s How to Be A Green Liberal (2004)
and Brian Baxter’s A Theory of Ecological Justice (2005). Hailwood’s work takes Rawls as
its representative liberal and argues for respect for nature precisely on neutralist
grounds whilst espousing a non-instrumental view of nature’s value. For Hailwood, the
value of nature’s “otherness”—its being “not the expression of any prior human purpose,
design or conception of the good”—should be appreciated non-instrumentally by
neutralist liberals because it resonates with a repudiation of expressivism on the part of
the state, that a liberal government should not express a comprehensive moral ideal. As
such, “there is a deep congruence between reasonable respect for nature as other, and
the stance of political ‘reasonableness’ ” (Hailwood 2004: 22, 90) which liberals should
recognize. Similarly, Baxter adopts Brian Barry’s theory of justice as impartiality and
(p. 65) attempts to expand its primary constituency to argue that “the liberal theory of
justice . . . is capable of encompassing justice towards the non-human and of justifying

some constitutional provisions to secure the claims of the non-human to their fair share of
environmental resources” (Baxter 2005: 126). Yet these works attracted relatively little
commentary, perhaps because the debate shifted focus to the importance of citizenship
and justice concerns: with arguments made for broadly naturalist Millian perfectionist
liberalism and for a non-naturalist neutralist liberalism, two camps exist for synthesizing
environmentalism with new liberalism, but both acknowledge the importance of
citizenship and justice concerns and subsequent scholarship has moved in these
directions (Dobson 2003; Dobson and Bell 2006; Nussbaum 2006; Gabrielson 2008).
Meanwhile, efforts to repudiate environmentalist criticism of neo-Lockean old liberalism
and to resurrect a Jeffersonian green liberalism have generated little environmentalist
support and may be misguided (Peter 2007; Liebell 2011; Thompson 2014).
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Concluding Thoughts: Nature as Stimulus to

Liberty
As should now be clear, some notion of sustainability is present in all the greened
liberalisms discussed—Lockean/Jeffersonian, Millian, and neutralist—but details vary as
to what this means. In contemporary discussions sustainability has multiple forms, but as
Norton explains, two basic defining options are available: weak sustainability, defined by
intergenerational utility comparison (UC) over time whereby sustainability is defined by a
steady non-declining standard of welfare (utility), and strong sustainability, his variant of
which is defined by listing stuff (LS) that should be saved for future generations. The
“stuff” in the latter consists of natural items whose loss would “result in the diminution of
the quality of future lives, regardless of the amount of compensation/wealth that is
provided as a substitute for the lost features (emphasis in the original).” Norton argues
that we may be obliged “not to unduly narrow the range of options and opportunities
open to future people” (Norton 1999: 130–1) and makes the analogy with a rich sexist
widower who bequeathes his daughters an excellent income for life on condition that they
not seek an education: though they are financially affluent, harm is done through
narrowing the range of developmental opportunities. With its view that “what is valueable
for human enrichment, has to be expanded. . . . in terms of a greatly extended notion of
human interest” (Rosenthal and Buchholz 1996: 43), Norton’s suggestion resonates with
ideals of development in both Millian liberalism and American pragmatism, for he then
argues that strong sustainability should specify certain features of the natural world,
associate them with measurable indicators, and protect them as representing options and
opportunities that future people would be worse off without. Drawing on the notion of
natural areas representing human developmental opportunities, I now want to argue for
nature’s significance in enabling and expanding (p. 66) human liberty. The question “why
should liberals protect nature?” will be answered by saying “because they protect
developmental liberties by doing so.”
To initially give ontological grip, I here invoke earlier work arguing that nature should be
defined across a tripartite spectrum in which naturalness is defined by the extent to
which an item or area is untransformed and not instrumentalized according to the
dictates of particular historically specific types of anti-naturalistic instrumental
rationality, with the spectrum itself derived from William James’ model of the human
cognitive faculties in their perceptual operations of truth-seeking (Stephens 2000).1
Briefly, the types of instrumental rationality that I have in mind derive from the
Enlightenment and reject earlier traditions of thought in which nature was thought of as
a guide to ethical reflection and a touchstone of liberty. These modern types of
instrumental rationality are anti-naturalistic in that they (i) primordially separate subject
from object in felt epistemological relationship, (ii) are informed by a clear duality
between reason and the passions that associates nature with the latter and with impurity,
and (iii) regard the technological conquest and reduction of nature to mere economic
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resource as a paradigmatically rational activity. Accordingly, it is the processes of

instrumentalization and artifacticity that are the antitheses of the natural; the mere
presence of human input, as with a ship in the ocean deeps, does not of itself eliminate
naturalness unless we wrongly assume an absolutistic dualism in which any human input
is seen as utterly transformative.
The absence of these instrumentalizing elements is critical for what is vital in nature
experiences: the extent to which they grant possibilities of new perception through non-
instrumentalized immediate experience. As known since William James’s pragmatism,
consciousness is selective and instrumental, reinforcing attention to already existing
interests, goals, and associations, building up habitual patterns and excluding extraneous
information. But as these patterns of awareness guide us in our customary orientations,
they are necessarily committed to the existing framework of ends, functioning to
streamline our awareness and edit out novelty as irrelevant unless it impacts existing
goals and interests. What is reduced in such instrumentally dominated awareness, and
reduced ever more strongly as habitual thinking grows over a lifetime, is the capacity to
step outside the existing framework of priorities, to question the existing instrumental
framework so as to view issues afresh, to gain openness, to perceive novelties that might
make us revise our views. We thus steadily build a shell of habitual perceptions and pre-
set means-end reasoning, but at the cost of flexibility, sensory vividness, the capacity to
learn afresh, and some restriction of the imagination.
However, as I have argued elsewhere (Stephens 2009), there is a pragmatic naturalist

antidote to this limiting tendency, a way in which we may continue to protect and grow
our freedom. It lies in types of experiences in which we are more receptive to direct
sensation with minimal overlay from ready-made descriptions and pre-set instrumental
purposes: quiet attention to snowflakes falling outside, the sudden glimpse of a kestrel
above, calm perception of a spider’s web-work bridging two shrubs. These experiences
draw us out of habitual instrumentalizing consciousness because they are radically non-
instrumental, being neither means nor ends. They require from us a certain (p. 67)
willingness to receive attentively without rushing to judgment and to engage reflectively
with the impression thereafter, thus demanding a certain posture from the agent. But
availability of such possibilities for growth also has a significant external component, for
they are noted to occur in one context especially often: nature experience.
Both Mill and William James found value in nature experience of the type described,
James noting “the intense interest that life can assume when brought down to the . . . level
of pure sensorial experience” and that such interest “starts upon us often from non-
human natural things” (James 1929: 18–19, 9). There is, one might infer, a resonance
between our primal inner nature—relatively unverbalized direct sensation—and the outer
nature we encounter, a resonance that gives novelty and freshness to experience and thus
allows new perspectives to be developed. I suggest that this is indeed the case, and
supporting argument comes from the implications of certain creativity tests. In these, a
person is shown artifacts and asked to think of as many possible uses for them beyond
their design function, with highest creativity given to the largest number of alternative
Page 12 of 19

uses. This is a test precisely because artifacts contain embedded purposes that
immediately spring to mind, and they thus encourage thinking instrumentally but against
originality of application. The point of the test is that constant association of items with
pre-set goals makes it hard to envision the items otherwise, and taking this logic to its
conclusion, an individual surrounded wholly by instrumental reasoning and its products
comes to lack the capacity to see outside such a framework, to engage with spontaneous
experience and learn. We are already seeing something like this in the internet
phenomenon of epistemic closure, whereby people become both enframed by screen
technology and unwilling to look outside a small range of goals, sites, and values as they
need not be exposed to novelty or disagreement. Similarly, the dystopias of Zamyatin,
Orwell, and Huxley feature inhabitants enframed by instrumentality, the politics and
technology of management excluding natural novelty.
Nature experience contrasts with this because it lacks such pre-set human ends.
Paradoxically, the “usefulness” of nature thus lies partly in its lying outside predefined
use categories and thus its capacity to evoke open possibilities, stimulating wonder,
spontaneity, and non-instrumental relationship. Evidence for my claim that nature
experience psychologically assists freedom by countering internalized instrumentalism is
culturally abundant in the traditions that counterpose natural vitality to urban artifice:
the classical notion of kosmos as a spontaneous, unfolding, and beautifully harmonious
process distinct from the manipulations of city life, the associations of virtue with
agrarian life from antiquity to Wendell Berry, the tales of sylvan liberty involving
persistent association of forests with freedom, wildness, and corrective transformation
(Harrison 1992). I suggest that the historic persistence of such associations indicates
their deep significance. The repudiation of instrumentalism, politicking, and fashion in
favor of nature’s spontaneous novelty and authenticity suggests a further move: the
highlighting of imagination as stimulated by nature experience and as a transformative
agent in actualizing liberalism’s core value, liberty. For imagination can operate not
merely to envision alternatives but to concretize freedom by doing so. It can, for instance,
shift an agent from possessing negative freedom, an absence of coercive (p. 68) blockage,
to manifesting positive freedom—actually attaining what was previously only a
potentiality—through coming to possess the ability to envision. Imagination is thus
connected to practical liberty, rendering abstract freedom into concreteness, and is
psychologically fostered and encouraged by the continued presence and experience of
maximally natural environments. A natureless world, like the life lived by Norton’s
uneducated affluent heiresses, would be one in which we had been deprived of vital
options for transformative growth.
Thus it is, I suggest, that liberalism’s core value of liberty is protected through nature
experience, and thus also why non-human nature should be protected by liberalism.
Though my argument bridges the Millian and Jamesian pragmatist traditions, eschewing
Rawls, my suggestion is that non-human nature should be viewed like a Rawlsian liberal’s
primary good—something that we must sensibly want, whatever else we may come to
want. In this respect, my argument supports my fellow contributor Jason Lambacher’s
view that greens have to show themselves to favor liberty, but also builds upon the
Page 13 of 19

overview given. As we have seen, significant attempts have been made to demonstrate
the compatibility of environmentalist ideals with liberalism, and two types of new
liberalism especially—Millian and neutralist—have shown promise. Just as new liberalism
sought to go beyond old liberalism, in part by recognizing the value of self-development
to meaningful human freedom, so my argument here tries to show that such new liberal
freedom may itself require nature experience as a background condition. As such, the
argument suggests not merely that liberal political theory may be greened, but that in an
increasingly technologized world, the green ideals of nature experience may be precisely
what fulfilling the liberal value of liberty demands.
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Environmental Politics 10(3): 1–22.
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Notes:
(1.) The basic threefold categories are (i) untransformed nature, (ii) borderline places
(e.g. farms and cultural products as “cultus,” produced with respect for existing natural
dynamics), and (iii) artifacts, themselves further subdivided into completed “cultus”
artifacts and artificial products.
Piers Stephens
Piers H. G. Stephens is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy,

University of Georgia.
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Environmental Political Theory and the Liberal Tradition

Oxford Handbooks Online

Print Publication Date: Jan 2016

Abstract and Keywords

Subscriber: University of Michigan; date: 03 June 2018

Liberalisms Old and New

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line of thought emphasizes the importance of the individual’s relationship to their

Subscriber: University of Michigan; date: 03 June 2018

Liberalism’s Environmental Heritage

Subscriber: University of Michigan; date: 03 June 2018

To begin at the beginning, it is indeed possible to read elements of Lockean property

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Madison on intergenerational obligations. For as Luigi Marco Bassani maintains, ongoing

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environmental protections on such individualist lines (Varner 1998), moral extensionism

Subscriber: University of Michigan; date: 03 June 2018

Subscriber: University of Michigan; date: 03 June 2018

Liberalism and Environmental Political Theory:

Subscriber: University of Michigan; date: 03 June 2018

treatment, and even after demonstrating the validity of sustainability on neutralist

justice . . . is capable of encompassing justice towards the non-human and of justifying

Subscriber: University of Michigan; date: 03 June 2018

Concluding Thoughts: Nature as Stimulus to

Subscriber: University of Michigan; date: 03 June 2018

resource as a paradigmatically rational activity. Accordingly, it is the processes of

However, as I have argued elsewhere (Stephens 2009), there is a pragmatic naturalist

Subscriber: University of Michigan; date: 03 June 2018

Subscriber: University of Michigan; date: 03 June 2018

Bentham, Jeremy. (1970). An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation

Carson, Rachel. (1962). Silent Spring (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin).

Cranston, Maurice. (1967). “Liberalism.” In The Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, edited by

Subscriber: University of Michigan; date: 03 June 2018

Dobson, Andrew. (1998). Justice and the Environment: Conceptions of Environmental

Dworkin, Ronald. (1985). A Matter of Principle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Gabrielson, Teena. (2008). “Green Citizenship: A Review and Critique.” Citizenship

de Geus, Marius. (2001). “Sustainability, Liberal Democracy, Liberalism.” In Sustaining

de Geus, Marius. (2003). The End of Overconsumption: Towards a Lifestyle of Moderation

Subscriber: University of Michigan; date: 03 June 2018

Locke, John. (1988). Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Macpherson, C. B. (1962). The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: From Hobbes

Malthus, Thomas. (1992). Essay on the Principle of Population (Cambridge: Cambridge

Norton, Bryan G. (1991). Toward Unity Among Environmentalists (Oxford: Oxford

Norton, Bryan G. (1999). “Ecology and Opportunity: Intergenerational Equity and

Nussbaum, Martha C. (2006). Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species

Subscriber: University of Michigan; date: 03 June 2018

Paton, G. J. (2011). Seeking Sustainability: On the Prospects of an Ecological Liberalism

Peter, Kenneth P. (2007). “Jefferson and the Independence of Generations.”

Rodman, John. (1977). “The Liberation of Nature?” Inquiry 20: 83–145.

Rosenthal, Sandra B. and Buchholz, Rogene A. (1996). “How Pragmatism is An

Singer, Peter. (1975). Animal Liberation (London: HarperCollins).

Skorupski, John. (1999). Ethical Explanations (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Squadrito, Kathleen M. (1979). “Locke’s View of Dominion.” Environmental Ethics 1(3):

Stephens, Piers H. G. (2009). “Toward a Jamesian Environmental Philosophy.”

Tawney, R. H. (1931). Equality (New York: Harcourt, Brace).

Subscriber: University of Michigan; date: 03 June 2018

Zvesper, John. (1993). Nature and Liberty (London: Routledge).

Piers H. G. Stephens is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy,

Subscriber: University of Michigan; date: 03 June 2018

Subscriber: University of Michigan; date: 03 June 2018

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justice . . . is capable of encompassing justice towards the non-human and of justifying