Environmental Ethics meets Political Philosophy: New Developments

Markku Oksane (University of Eastern Finland, Finland), and Anna Wienhues (University of Oslo, Norway)

Humanities Bridgeford Street Building: Room G.33

The aim of this workshop is to bring together different perspectives on – and examine the linkages and tensions between – politics, political theory and ethics with respect to the environment. In the overlap between these different discourses that share many core concepts, new theoretical frameworks have arisen and are made visible in new developments in environmental thought. These draw, for example, on scholarship from other areas of philosophy such as environmental ethics and legal theory, such as providing non-anthropocentric reformulations of core political philosophy concepts such as rights, equality or justice. Some of these discussions are, in turn, picked up in political discourses and policies, such as the developments regarding rights of nature.

Yet, these different domains – of political thought, environmental ethics and democratic political practice – do not necessarily reinforce each other, as shared concepts are also contested and can lead to considerable differing (normative and practical) outcomes. For example, the competition between frameworks is well recognized regarding human rights where moral and legal-political or practice-based approaches are rivalling each other. A similar development can be recognised in the emergence of the rights of nature. Such rights are either understood as policy/legal instruments with a specific function in environmental policy and law or they function as normative expressions of non-anthropocentric values. Thus, a range of concepts central to political theory (such as rights) are engaged differently in the domains of political and legal practice concerning environmental concerns, which points towards further-reaching questions concerning the links and tensions between the domains of political ethics and politics. 

At the same time, some tensions also remain between some new developments in environmental political thought and other areas of scholarship such as other areas of philosophy like environmental ethics (as well as other disciplines like ecology, human geography, ecological economics etc.) from which concepts emerged that have been reinterpreted and (newly) integrated into political thought, such as sustainability and biodiversity. That, in turn, points to a second set of further-reaching questions about how (and which) of these concepts are integrated into environmental thought.

Against this background, presentations part of this workshop can broadly fall into one of the following three major topics (including their critique etc.):

1. Theoretical developments in the form of (re)conceptualising long-standing political/legal philosophical concepts such as rights, territory or political authority in the light of environmental change.
2. Theoretical developments in the form of (re)conceptualising and integrating core environmental concepts such as sustainability or biodiversity into political thought.
3. The relationship between the political and ethics concerning these reformulated concepts or concerning a specific current environmental policy area. E.g., how does the framing of a problem as ethical or political determine attempts to address the problem? One such a specific area is ecological restoration which was a minor topic of political and environmental ethical debate (in Europe) until the drafting of the EU Biodiversity Strategy that includes obligatory legislation on ecological restoration and rewilding.